SECRETS OF THE STONEHENGE IN VERSE
Dear Readers, I present a simplified version of the true story of the Stonehenge, on the Salisbury plains of Southern England, with over a million visitors every year. Declared as a World Heritage Site since 1986.Left out many technical details to curb the Length!
Hope you find this interesting to read.  Thanks, - Raj

SECRETS OF THE STONEHENGE IN VERSE
                     BY RAJ NANDY
                
                     INTRODUCTION
Shrouded in ancient legend, rituals and mystery,
Forming a part of ancient History, in the County of
Wiltshire on the rolling Salisbury plains,
Thirty miles north of the English Channel, stands the
megalithic structure  - The Stonehenge.
Dating back to some 3000 BC during the Neolithic Age,
Long before the Egyptian pyramids got made!
Some of its secrets have finally been unraveled by
Archeologists of our time and age.
It was a period when early humans changed over
from being nomadic hunter- gatherers,
To cultivate land and domesticate animals, to
become settled farmers.
This ushered in a new social change in the history
of Human progression,
Which got reflected in huge stone structures to
mark this advancement and occasion.
For these megalithic structures were bigger than
the tribes of men or the community;
Marked burial mounds and places for performing
sacred rites and magical healing rituals, for the
entire community.
Stonehenge was aligned to the mid-Summer and
mid-Winter Solstice, with the rising and the setting
Sun.
Served as an astronomical calendar for the turning
of Seasons, when crop cycles also begun.
Some scholars opine that it was used as a Lunar
Calendar as well,
Since Moon worship predates Sun worship by
Pre-historic men!
It was long before the invention of the wheel,
written script, and even metal implements.
This monumental structure speak of Stone Age
Briton’s greatest achievement!
(Period covered is from Late Stone Age to the brink of
Bronze Age.)

BRIEF LAYOUT OF THE STONEHENGE
Cutting across myths and legends archeologists
and geologists have tried to piece together the
Stonehenge Story,
Which stood like an enigmatic puzzle for the
last Five Thousand Centuries!
Scholars say construction commenced around
3000 BC, but progressed only in stages spread
over the next fifteen centuries.
Initially, a large earthwork or a ‘Henge’ with a
circular ditch and a bank was made,
With 56 timber posts around the inner perimeter
on the windy Salisbury plains.
Used by primitive man as a burial place, but for
rituals later got linked to other smaller sites.
With processional avenues leading to River Avon,
to honor dead ancestors with sacred rites!
Entrance to the ‘Henge’ was marked by a pair of
upright Slaughter Stones weighing 28 tones, and
6.6 meters tall.
But only one remains today lying flat on the ground
after its fall!
Some 256 feet from center of the ‘Henge’ on the NE
Avenue once stood the Heel Stones 7.6 meters high!
As a marker for the Summer Solstice showing the
position of the rising Sun in the Midsummer sky!

          BLUE STONES FROM WALES:
Some 1000 years later, 82 Blue Stones were brought
from the Prescelli Mountains of Southern Wales;
And the earlier timber posts with these Blue stones
was replaced.
Each stone weighing around 4 tones, was brought
over a distance of some 250 miles to the plains of
Salisbury,
Loaded on hollowed out log boats fashioned like a
mini barge, to sail during high tide into the Bristol
Estuary!
Pulled over land on greased wooden rollers, and
loaded again on mini barges down the River Avon.
Since Avon flowed closer to the ‘Henge’ site in those
ancient days, which is now known!
(Some Scholars feel that the Blue Stones were swept down
closer to the Salisbury plain, during the close of the last Ice
Age! These Stones were believed to have powers of magical
cure too!)

              THE SARSAN STONES
During its final phase of development came the larger
23 ft tall Sarsan Stones, weighing some 44 tones.
From 20 miles north of the ‘Henge’ area dragged on
sledges and rollers from Marlborough Downs.
These stones now formed the outer ring capped with
stone lintels, replacing the Blue Stones;
And the Blues Stones were moved inwards and
rearranged in the horseshoe and circle shape, as
presently seen and known!
(NOTE: Sheer muscle power used to drag the stones with ropes
made from plant fiber of the indigenous lime bark soaked in
water for weeks. Stone lintels were sculpted in the shape of an
arc to cap the SARSAN Stones to form the outer circle. Wooden
scaffolding & ramps were used to hoist and position the heavy
stone lintels horizontally on top of upright stones! Sarsan Stones
were hard sandstones tougher than granite! However many of the
stones of this Ancient Ruin are missing, leaving some unanswered
questions behind.)

        CONCLUDING THIS TRUE STORY
Archeologists and scholars using radiocarbon dating
have tried to recreate the Stonehenge Story.
This ancient ruin with many unanswered questions,
now remain protected as an Iconic Monument of
British History!
It stands as an astronomical time clock and is also of
spiritual significance;
It also symbolizes the ingenuity of Human Mind, its
power, and endurance.
I conclude with a an extract from a poem by TS Salmon
about the STONEHENGE here below:-
“Warpt in veils of time’s unbroken gloom,
Obscure as death and silent as the tomb.
Where cold oblivion holds her dusky reign,
Frowns the dark pile on Sarum’s lonely plain.
Yet think not here with classic eye to trace,
Corinthian beauty or Ionian grace.
No pillored lines with sculptured foliage crowned,
No fluted remnants deck the hallowed ground.
Firm, as implanted by some Titan’s might,
Each rugged stone up rears its giant height.
Whence the poised fragment tottering seems to throw,
A trembling shadow on the plain below.”
(*Sarum = old name for Salisbury.)
Thanks dear Readers for your kind attention span ,
I have simplified by cutting short many details the
best as I can!
ALL COPYRIGHTS WITH RAJ NANDY OF NEW DELHI
E-mail: rajnandy21@yahoo.in

by John Greenleaf Whittier  (1807 – 1892)

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

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

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

                                       EMERSON

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Written in  1865

A true story by  Thula Bopela**

I have no idea whether the white man I am writing about is still alive or not. He gave me an understanding of what actually happened to us Africans, and how sinister it was, when we were colonized. His name was Ronald Stanley Peters, Homicide Chief, Matabeleland, in what was at the time Rhodesia. He was the man in charge of the case they had against us, ******. I was one of a group of ANC/ZAPU guerillas that had infiltrated into the Wankie Game Reserve in 1967, and had been in action against elements of the Rhodesian African rifles (RAR), and the Rhodesian Light Infantry (RLI). We were now in the custody of the British South Africa Police (BSAP), the Rhodesian Police. I was the last to be captured in the group that was going to appear at the Salisbury (Harare) High Court on a charge of ******, 4 counts.
‘I have completed my investigation of this case, Mr. Bopela, and I will be sending the case to the Attorney-General’s Office, Mr. Bosman, who will the take up the prosecution of your case on a date to be decided,’ Ron Peters told me. ‘I will hang all of you, but I must tell you that you are good fighters but you cannot win.’
‘Tell me, Inspector,’ I shot back, ‘are you not contradicting yourself when you say we are good fighters but will not win? Good fighters always win.’
‘Mr. Bopela, even the best fighters on the ground, cannot win if information is sent to their enemy by high-ranking officials of their organizations, even before the fighters begin their operations. Even though we had information that you were on your way, we were not prepared for the fight that you put up,’ the Englishman said quietly. ‘We give due where it is to be given after having met you in battle. That is why I am saying you are good fighters, but will not win.’
Thirteen years later, in 1980, I went to Police Headquarters in Harare and asked where I could find Detective-Inspector Ronald Stanley Peters, retired maybe. President Robert Mugabe had become Prime Minster and had released all of us….common criminal and freedom-fighter. I was told by the white officer behind the counter that Inspector Peters had retired and now lived in Bulawayo. I asked to speak to him on the telephone. The officer dialed his number and explained why he was calling. I was given the phone, and spoke to the Superintendent, the rank he had retired on. We agreed to meet in two days time at his house at Matshe-amhlophe, a very up-market suburb in Bulawayo. I travelled to Bulawayo by train, and took a taxi from town to his home.
I had last seen him at the Salisbury High Court after we had been sentenced to death by Justice L Lewis in 1967. His hair had greyed but he was still the tall policeman I had last seen in 1967. He smiled quietly at me and introduced me to his family, two grown up chaps and a daughter. Lastly came his wife, Doreen, a regal-looking Englishwoman. ‘He is one of the chaps I bagged during my time in the Service. We sent him to the gallows but he is back and wants to see me, Doreen.’ He smiled again and ushered me into his study.
He offered me a drink, a scotch whisky I had not asked for, but enjoyed very much I must say. We spent some time on the small talk about the weather and the current news.
‘So,’ Ron began, ‘they did not hang you are after all, old chap! Congratulations, and may you live many more!’ We toasted and I sat across him in a comfortable sofa. ‘A man does not die before his time, Ron’ I replied rather gloomily, ‘never mind the power the judge has or what the executioner intends to do to one.’
‘I am happy you got a reprieve Thula,’, Ron said, ‘but what was it based on? I am just curious about what might have prompted His Excellency Clifford Du Pont, to grant you a pardon. You were a bunch of unrepentant terrorists.’
‘I do not know Superintendent,’ I replied truthfully. ‘Like I have said, a man does not die before his time.’ He poured me another drink and I became less tense.
‘So, Mr. Bopela, what brings such a lucky fellow all the way from happy Harare to a dull place like our Bulawayo down here?’
‘Superintendent, you said to me after you had finished your investigations that you were going to hang all of us. You were wrong; we did not all hang. You said also that though we were good fighters we would not win. You were wrong again Superintendent; we have won! We are in power now. I told you that good fighters do win.’
The Superintendent put his drink on the side table and stood up. He walked slowly to the window that overlooked his well-manicured garden and stood there facing me.
‘So you think you have won Thula? What have you won, tell me. I need to know.’
‘We have won everything Superintendent, in case you have not noticed. Every thing! We will have a black president, prime minister, black cabinet, black members of Parliament, judges, Chiefs of Police and the Army. Every thing Superintendent. I came all the way to come and ask you to apologize to me for telling me that good fighters do not win. You were wrong Superintendent, were you not?’
He went back to his seat and picked up his glass, and emptied it. He poured himself another shot and put it on the side table and was quiet for a while.
‘So, you think you have won everything Mr. Bopela, huh? I am sorry to spoil your happiness sir, but you have not won anything. You have political power, yes, but that is all. We control the economy of this country, on whose stability depends everybody’s livelihood, including the lives of those who boast that they have political power, you and your victorious friends. Maybe I should tell you something about us white people Mr. Bopela. I think you deserve it too, seeing how you kept this nonsense warm in your head for thirteen hard years in prison. ‘When I get out I am going to find Ron Peters and tell him to apologize for saying we wouldn’t win,’ you promised yourself. Now listen to me carefully my friend, I am going to help you understand us white people a bit better, and the kind of problem you and your friends have to deal with.’
‘When we planted our flag in the place where we built the city of Salisbury, in 1877, we planned for this time. We planned for the time when the African would rise up against us, and perhaps defeat us by sheer numbers and insurrection. When that time came, we decided, the African should not be in a position to rule his newly-found country without taking his cue from us. We should continue to rule, even after political power has been snatched from us, Mr. Bopela.’
‘How did you plan to do that my dear Superintendent,’ I mocked.
‘Very simple, Mr. Bopela, very simple,’ Peters told me.
‘We started by changing the country we took from you to a country that you will find, many centuries later, when you gain political power. It would be totally unlike the country your ancestors lived in; it would be a new country. Let us start with agriculture. We introduced methods of farming that were not known I Africa, where people dug a hole in the ground, covered it up with soil and went to sleep under a tree in the shade. We made agriculture a science. To farm our way, an African needed to understand soil types, the fertilizers that type of soil required, and which crops to plant on what type of soil. We kept this knowledge from the African, how to farm scientifically and on a scale big enough to contribute strongly to the national economy. We did this so that when the African demands and gets his land back, he should not be able to farm it like we do. He would then be obliged to beg us to teach him how. Is that not power, Mr. Bopela?’
‘We industrialized the country, factories, mines, together with agricultural output, became the mainstay of the new economy, but controlled and understood only by us. We kept the knowledge of all this from you people, the skills required to run such a country successfully. It is not because Africans are stupid because they do not know what to do with an industrialized country. We just excluded the African from this knowledge and kept him in the dark. This exercise can be compared to that of a man whose house was taken away from him by a stronger person. The stronger person would then change all the locks so that when the real owner returned, he would not know how to enter his own house.’
We then introduced a financial system – money (currency), banks, the stock market and linked it with other stock markets in the world. We are aware that your country may have valuable minerals, which you may be able to extract….but where would you sell them? We would push their value to next-to-nothing in our stock markets. You may have diamonds or oil in your country Mr. Bopela, but we are in possession of the formulas how they may be refined and made into a product ready for sale on the stock markets, which we control. You cannot eat diamonds and drink oil even if you have these valuable commodities. You have to bring them to our stock markets.’
‘We control technology and communications. You fellows cannot even fly an aeroplane, let alone make one. This is the knowledge we kept from you, deliberately. Now that you have won, as you claim Mr. Bopela, how do you plan to run all these things you were prevented from learning? You will be His Excellency this, and the Honorable this and wear gold chains on your necks as mayors, but you will have no power. Parliament after all is just a talking house; it does not run the economy; we do. We do not need to be in parliament to rule your Zimbabwe. We have the power of knowledge and vital skills, needed to run the economy and create jobs. Without us, your Zimbabwe will collapse. You see now what I mean when I say you have won nothing? I know what I am talking about. We could even sabotage your economy and you would not know what had happened.’
We were both silent for some time, I trying not to show how devastating this information was to me; Ron Peters maybe gloating. It was so true, yet so painful. In South Africa they had not only kept this information from us, they had also destroyed our education, so that when we won, we would still not have the skills we needed because we had been forbidden to become scientists and engineers. I did not feel any anger towards the man sitting opposite me, sipping a whisky. He was right.
‘Even the Africans who had the skills we tried to prevent you from having would be too few to have an impact on our plan. The few who would perhaps have acquired the vital skills would earn very high salaries, and become a black elite grouping, a class apart from fellow suffering Africans,’ Ron Peters persisted. ‘If you understand this Thula, you will probably succeed in making your fellow blacks understand the difference between ‘being in office’ and ‘being in power’. Your leaders will be in office, but not in power. This means that your parliamentary majority will not enable you to run the country….without us, that is.’
I asked Ron to call a taxi for me; I needed to leave. The taxi arrived, not quickly enough for me, who was aching to depart with my sorrow. Ron then delivered the coup de grace:
‘What we are waiting to watch happening, after your attainment of political power, is to see you fighting over it. Africans fight over power, which is why you have seen so many coups d’etat and civil wars in post-independent Africa. We whites consolidate power, which means we share it, to stay strong. We may have different political ideologies and parties, but we do not **** each other over political differences, not since ****** was defeated in 1945. Joshua Nkomo and Robert Mugabe will not stay friends for long. In your free South Africa, you will do the same. There will be so many African political parties opposing the ANC, parties that are too afraid to come into existence during apartheid, that we whites will not need to join in the fray. Inside whichever ruling party will come power, be it ZANU or the ANC, there will be power struggles even inside the parties themselves. You see Mr. Bopela, after the struggle against the white man, a new struggle will arise among yourselves, the struggle for power. Those who hold power in Africa come within grabbing distance of wealth. That is what the new struggle will be about….the struggle for power. Go well Mr. Bopela; I trust our meeting was a fruitful one, as they say in politics.’
I shook hands with the Superintendent and boarded my taxi. I spent that night in Bulawayo at the YMCA, 9th Avenue. I slept deeply; I was mentally exhausted and spiritually devastated. I only had one consolation, a hope, however remote. I hoped that when the ANC came into power in South Africa, we would not do the things Ron Peters had said we would do. We would learn from the experiences of other African countries, maybe Ghana and Nigeria, and avoid coups d’etat and civil wars.
In 2007 at Polokwane, we had full-blown power struggle between those who supported Thabo Mbeki and Zuma’s supporters. Mbeki lost the fight and his admirers broke away to form Cope. The politics of individuals had started in the ANC. The ANC will be going to Maungaung in December to choose new leaders. Again, it is not about which government policy will be best for South Africa; foreign policy, economic, educational, or social policy. It is about Jacob Zuma, Kgalema Motlhante; it is about Fikile Mbalula or Gwede Mantashe. Secret meetings are reported to be happening, to plot the downfall of this politician and the rise of the other one.
Why is it not about which leaders will best implement the Freedom Charter, the pivotal document? Is the contest over who will implement the Charter better? If it was about that, the struggle then would be over who can sort out the poverty, landlessness, unemployment, crime and education for the impoverished black masses. How then do we choose who the best leader would be if we do not even know who will implement which policies, and which policies are better than others? We go to Mangaung to wage a power struggle, period. President Zuma himself has admitted that ‘in the broad church the ANC is,’ there are those who now seek only power, wealth and success as individuals, not the nation. In Zimbabwe the fight between President Robert Mugabe and Morgan Tsvangirai has paralysed the country. The people of Zimbabwe, a highly-educated nation, are starving and work as garden and kitchen help in South Africa.
What the white man told me in Bulawayo in 1980 is happening right in front of my eyes. We have political power and are fighting over it, instead of consolidating it. We have an economy that is owned and controlled by them, and we are fighting over the crumbs falling from the white man’s ‘dining table’. The power struggle that raged among ANC leaders in the Western Cape cost the ANC that province, and the opposition is winning other municipalities where the ANC is squabbling instead of delivering. Is it too much to understand that the more we fight among ourselves the weaker we become, and the stronger the opposition becomes?
Thula Bopela writes in his personal capacity, and the story he has told is true; he experienced alone and thus is ultimately responsible for it.

This is Not Glandular - Dan O’neil


I don’t use excuses. I never liked them.
The people who say “they were born this way”.
Husky….Stocky…. Big-*****…
Let me start by putting your minds at ease.
This is not glandular. So, i am not a fat man..  
I am a FAAATT man. And i am **** proud of it!
I am proud of this body.
I chose to be this size.
Chose a body as BOOMING as my voice ,
with the softness to counter my sharp tongued words.
Chose puppy cheeks,
so my grandma will always have something to pinch.
Chose hands that look like hot-dogs glued to a baseball,
because thats really funny to picture.
I chose to be a mountain of a man,
just incase any ladies were feeling adventurous
and wanted to hike to the summit.
Trust me, this is not glandular.

I chose this body because of the women,
because the ladies love the funny fat guy!
Because any girl who won't take me if i'm fat ,
is not anyone i'd want if i was thin.
Because I am 230 pounds of cuddling,
bearing down on you like a force of nature,
and there is NOO escape from my snuggling.
Because i am a teddy bear,
whose heart is on “E” and desperately awaits the next woman to refuel him

I chose this body because of the FOOD.
Because there are 6 meals in a day.
Breakfast,brunch,lunch,siesta, dinner ,and the taco bell drive thru.
And theyre ALL the most important meal of the day.
Because just like lonely , ***** ,and angry. We all get hungry.
Because my mom told me that some people show love by cooking.
So i got cookies instead of hugs, meatloaf instead of kisses.
And fried spaghetti sandwiches, replaced bedtime stories…
And i cleaned my plate every time because it was all i can do to say.
I love you too.
I mean i never knew my dad, and Rick.
Rick was never the hands-on step father.
Unless you consider the occasional slap on side the head.
So food became my surrogate fathers. Kernel Sanders and Chef Boyardee
Became my models for manhood.
Which explains my obsession for weird hats..

I chose this body because of 7th grade PE
Because if just one fat guy is confident when changing clothes
it makes others more confident, because dodge-ball is a ****** sport
so who cares if i get knocked out first? Running the mile is TORTURE!
But so are the jokes.. If the fat guy can't finish.

I chose this body,because other people not liking my body is not a good enough reason for me to change it.
So to the bullies, the lunch ladies , to the women who NEVER gave me a chance.
And the football coaches who berated me with insults. To the jerks and the jocks
And the doctor who joked when i stepped on his scale. To Rick and Kernel,
and ANYONE who ever used F A T as an insult. You can do what i did for the last 2 decades.
of my life doing. YOU CAN EAT IT.

Because i love pies,  i love hamburgers ,french fries ,and lobster, and deep fried twinkies
I love me some rice-a-roni and salisbury steak, microwaved burritos ,
cooler ranch doritos and ice-cream , the kind that you push that had Fred Flintstone on it.
I love cake. I love everything about who i am and the life i get to live
No. This ..is .. not ..glandular. Its just fat .
And for the first time in my life. Im proud of that.

Wednesday, May 29, 2014

Subject: You know how I am about letters



Do people notice when it starts to happen? Maybe not the first time—it can be hard to tell—but do they recognize a pattern? Are they able to appropriately react? Is it easy to detect such feeling, a reoccurring newness? When it happens, it swells and expands: building within and pushing out, resonating a specific sound, paralleling the pang of olfaction from the heavy stench of pheromones. It stimulates the senses and sends the hypothalamus into hyperactivity, the mind clouded with confusion.



I’m glad it happened. I’m glad we got to be friends, the way we were, the way we could still be. It’s easy to be around you, and I appreciate the feeling you instilled in me. Four miles and six beers later, I found myself with you, in your house, talking to your parents, experiencing a part of you I’ve never known. Shortly after, there we were, on your couch, and you were against me and I held your core, warmed by the heat of your skin radiating from beneath your thermal. It was nice, but it was the type of nice which is prone to burn. I didn’t expect to be there.



I could’ve anticipated that drinking so much would release my inhibitions, and given our mutual attraction and history I would have succumbed to you. Obviously, I did. Nothing more than a kiss, but I’m glad I did, even though to actively be swept away in the moment is dangerous. I’m notoriously attracted to it, and sure enough as I write this, I feel a mix of nausea and a dull inner ache. I want it to go away, yet I endure it, understanding it’s a consequence of recklessness. I wouldn’t doubt it’s karma. I don’t think you are, but I notice myself around you and can decide that I am often being reckless with my frivolity. It feels good at first, but like coming down from rolling, there is a lingering feeling of synthetically-induced haze.



I honestly didn’t plan on kissing you, but the night took us there. I did plan on giving you that poem, however. I’m sure you have interpreted it correctly, as I’d assume you’re capable of distinguishing metaphors (you do have a college degree), and now hopefully understand my perspective of our situation.



I wanted to run with you, I wanted to get a beer (also I had a rough day/week so I was kind of down to drink—coping of course) and I wanted to let you read that poem. Those are things I wanted to do, and while I wanted to kiss you, I didn’t. I’m glad I did and it wasn’t a mistake, but I think doing that too many times would be more detrimental than productive. I’m sure you got that theme from what I wrote you was influenced by the weekend I came to Salisbury; maybe you can see certain themes of that weekend in it.



I don’t know. I was just thinking about you and I wanted to express what was going on in my head. I wanted you to know. I was somewhat sad when I left Salisbury, wondering why you gave my no affection when saying goodbye, but I was relieved and grateful you didn’t. But now… I think about us meeting at my house in Fruitland and the four of us drunkenly deciding to live together. It just so happened that Rachel and I were discussing the possibility of her moving to Salisbury and she mentioned Scott finding a house, with my landlord, for $300 a month. Talk about timing. I don’t know what to make of it.



It’s unfortunate that timing doesn’t always accommodate feeling; ironically, more often than not, timing sabotages it. Personally, I have always romanticized things that were doomed to end. The reason I love Shakespeare so much (besides intellect like no other) is because he conveys tragedy in such a beautiful way. Consider it like thanatos vs. eros—there is greater appreciation for something that cannot last forever, because there is only a limited time to enjoy it. It’s sad to think, too often, we’re unable to enjoy things to their fullest because of this notion. Like life and death—if we could live forever would we value our time as much? Hell no, we would take everything for granted (humans already do, as we are prone to do so) and never give a **** about anything. What makes anything matter is being able to appreciate it, despite of how long it lasts?



In that regard, after coming to Salisbury again, I thought about you coming home and what would happen. I assumed you’d be moving to Massachusetts sooner rather than later and wondered if we would even talk. I still wanted to hang out and go running, but I realized it might not happen and I recognized that could happen.



I never expected anything from you. I know we always had a thing and have been flirty towards each other, but to establish a foundation of sorts didn’t ever seem like an option. I liked you unattainable, impossible, a little too late, the right person at the wrong time; it seems pretty sick the way I describe it and I’m well aware, but you were the perfect protagonist of the narrative of my painful romance with Rachel, where you restored my mojo and provided me with the ability to feel and create again. You broke up the dam of my writer’s block with your flow. You were a muse of sorts. I am not idealizing you, just describing what you provided me with.



With this being said, I hope you believe that the sentiments I wrote to you were honest, as were my actions. I have nothing but positive regard for you, despite the periods where we didn’t speak and knowing you was somewhat uncomfortable. I have only known you for a year, but we’ve been through a lot and I consider you a friend. As I stated before, I didn’t mean to like you, it just kind of happened. And like you told me, that’s life. It’s curious, but I wonder if I would like you as much if we had a chance. I know it sounds cold, and I hope reading it doesn’t sting, but I am only trying to be realistic. I’m sure you too have assessed it.



The point of this cyber-letter is to just let you know that I liked you. I’m glad we got to know each other. You influenced me and you left your mark, forever contributing to the me I’m going to be. You taught me a lot about a lot of things. However, as I stated before, timing doesn’t always accommodate feeling. You are a unique “perhaps” in my life, nonetheless. I wonder what it would be like if we were ever together in another world, but I cannot quite imagine it. I dream, but I am bound to servitude by analyzing each intricate detail of the situations in front of me, despite my occasional bouts of impulse. It’s a way to survive, and there’s a pattern to it. It all unfolds so suddenly, paralleling behavioral, weather and astronomical patterns. More recently, I have experienced this. I wasn’t hoping for it or expecting it. I was surprised.



You know how they say “If you’re looking for something you won’t find it, but things are found (or given?) when you’re not looking?” So far 2014 has been a great year for many reasons. Even the  little after -graduation struggle was a transition to build into what is now and what will be.



So….you know how I snapchatted you (and most everyone on my friends list—you may notice I ask questions) asking if going to a park was a date? Well. It wasn’t the first. I wasn’t sure the first date was even a date. He made no forward advances to indicate any kind of ****** interest. I thought he just wanted to hang out, and offered to pay because he knows I don’t make as much as he does. Right? That sounds valid. But still, I wasn’t totally sure. I initially assumed my brother would come with us, because we hadn’t ever been exclusively in each other’s company. So, he said he’d pick me up at 8:00 p.m. My brother told me he was going to hang out with his friend Chelsea and hadn’t heard from him. I will admit I put effort into my aesthetics, perhaps as a slightly narcissistic compulsion to emphasize what is heterosexually considered feminine. Even if we were just hanging out, I wanted to make an impression; also, some places in the National Harbor are really nice, so I wanted to look nice too. We talked for two hours until they were closing and then he dropped me off. I was home by 11:00 p.m. That was May 4th.



I wanted to tell you yesterday, but you served an egress from thinking about work, my brother, my mom: everything. Six beers deep and I was caught up. I did miss you. It was selfish of me to indulge in it, but I wanted to savor you one last time. I don’t think that’s a crime, but I acknowledge it’s emotionally irresponsible. Despite that, when I think about it all, knowing I have to decide, I realize it’s more logical to pursue that which has less risk of becoming hazardous. Am I to deny myself that opportunity? It’s divine how patterns align: specific variables, whether assigned or accreted, determine the true outcome. The rest is what we do, how we behave, and how the mystical law of cause and effect affects the subsequent possible outcomes. Such dissident circumstances are attributed to timing.



It’s been described as a chaotic sequence of events, life. But isn’t there order in chaos? Astronomical and Neurological perspectives serve as two notable examples of materialism establishing the foundations of life, as we observe it functioning, from both holistic and reductionist views, yes. It’s not irrational to wonder if, in a complex way we have yet to fully understand, we are a miniscule, yet essential, part of a functioning unit. The struggle is especially prominent when how we live is based off how we obsess over the desire to understand why things happen. Despite the patterns, it often becomes unpredictable and gets so ******* frustrating. Still, isn’t it wonderful how we can revel in fascination?



I’m sure you weren’t expecting all the prose, but I wanted to be honest and straightforward…writing is the way I know how to be. I want you to know I regard you as a cool person and I really like talking and running (and smoking?) with you. I know you’ll be around for a little bit.  I’d still like to hang out with you, but I understand if you think it’s awkward or there will be tension or something. Regardless, I like your company and our friendship, our memories, our bullshitting, etc. I’d still like to watch some FIFA games, too. Feel free to email me back or use whatever means of communication you prefer.

Set of cave genes If you could read... pluri freedoms of the dark light of ignorance teach understand that breathe under the Naturality Natural Nature is not necessary to have an understanding heart and store on their empty heads of knowing ancient rain where wisdom possess. If dance on every grain of chickpea for each foot plant what could a plant obey; foot, Plant, and Plantation...

Resulting in kingdoms on my animals, fungi, plants, and protists, media freedom as a seed to reach our evolutionary lack of ceased hopeness...

First  Ellipsis Angle loneliness"God felt Chained"

Chained down by dragging the last link of its multiple arcane freedom in which transfigured recent swings where he collapsed with the latter being of himself whose life lies lifeless alive but lost. The latter that child not to know and deprived of nascent freedom that will never be born and come knowledge in our genome of Independence.

When the caveman thought to be a complement to the world is enslaved by the mystery of lost in himself... The born and born, never dies, that's so naive and innocent... is still full unaware of their free will, rather it is he who must re-literate and be a living part of the ancestral genome Cavernario component. Oh Heavenly Lord of the steppes I look because more of you today without having lived what you lived, as he would have played with my gaze to succor and keep you had fallen into the fangs of an animal, or you had fallen on the glacier cliff where he has separated you from your Clan Cave.

Emancipation means to be always innocent, my blood runs through yours,
I read and understand any phenomenon of deprivation exist without you lack wisdom satiate if all your generations crushed by the ignorance of falling subject will be well, me and my being I take my precognitions as a tormented child's worst nightmare before about sleeping. Sixth Papal almost, almost kneel before the creation of memorizes creation. This prerogative Lord lives Bread’s God Minor remaining....of whose iconography will not leave this fifth fraternal dimension will not come, if not more will enter the latter end of absolute solitude... and shorter than the last thousand years of Neandertal.


Cavernary Political and Ellipsis:

On a day of gentle wind and tense rain proclaiming Clan joined, they all shouted running, the ground shook and the children slept in terror... the 10 infants who were talking about the Sign from above, but the nines they crossed his arms remaining to create solidarity roof that protects the man in your imagination...
The eighth child of the clan ran quickly into the arms of his mother and she imagined how far, how far would never come... uncharacteristically who came with his brother seventh had in their hands the word of entertainment of Being, to be a plaintiff political all of braiding them together with lines enabling the hermit may decide that creation is a mass of lines of certain fashions together, everything sings like the slightest cyclamen dew on the line pointy rough fallen fungus. All arms folded on the upper porch of the Vatican Macario in Franconia, saying that many who unite in their fevered requests large modern man ceased to be autonomous when it came out of their caves and charnel pit.

Ran all she enjoyed doing that almost without knowing whether or not they fall...
Ran because of every day the sun ahead of them a lesson for a man of the future...
They are running to be released the day of his birth chained to stars of light, to carry him to his mother and father, sneaking to his brothers.

Brother worn eleventh birth to her existence as another being evolved Eukaryotic: Surely those provided beings of cell membranes rhizomes reflected in higher liberty lives purged of ectoplasm walk without a discounted subsidiary. Shakespeare in Helsingor appeared immune to a blood brother to all that limits the Draconian feel in the pinnacles drawn 700 greened steeds. From the deepest swoon in the underworld subway Helsingor, follow the prevailing souls presided over by the great ear of the hard sandcastle, stressed hard Ghosts of Stratford upon Avon.

Freedom plague spits words of pancreatic poisoned exordium, spits verses of confusion disorders without permission, without solid bass sound without liquid sea that resists mad edges followed by solid sound...
But smaller stones give priority to conjugate final sentence and noble verses Guardian
to mission how important would Liberation:

Maybe it's a synonymy of Astral Solar...
It is not Solitude, is a free nation that has its own kind prosecutor's office for even when Euthanasia closes your eyes to the astral, will run the stones of the Sea of joy believing that neither you dare if there is no healthy grass to clarify the rainy day terror.


Reverse walk creeks aggravated birds feet, walking great playful ruse.
Reverse run my comrades preparing festivity meals with chandeliers and singing lay plenary., Singing Avenue pine port Firenze, Second run subtracting minutes and hours the minute is enough for me with your face in my arms to recognize your longevity anathema times oblique faces for lip-smacking hailstones Templars.

In 1297 in northern Italy nearby rural families migrate to chalky Venice, Perugia came the exiles walked to find their independence south of the Iberian Peninsula. They were so atoned as in the echoing flutes, harps, zithers, and harpsichords field temperate; They invited the blunting of intemperate monocordio.

Golden Chariot Carrenio

The golden carriage carrying them came without a single space rather than inheritances acquired goldsmiths of ancient noble and chaste solid shine. Carrenio; the coachman wore on his left arm bracelet thousand mobile travel without stopping to drink more water and to feed their horses. After revamping its gold pieces bartered by a slave who was getting Carrenio Christians fleeing the Romans. Well, they fled as far as the plains of great earthly squandered his memory and that end of the end should come.

How am away from my land more I learn it's back to her,
There is no ground for the first time, but that which is foreign
Carrenio of Perugia and sensed that ****** was Jewish ashes,
Luther King black paste of burnt forest,
Mandela and Biko Ogre garage from Victorian Empire,
Gandhi in his humility is always put behind the Sun
to figure out the small
Tagore trashed my heart caressing the entire universe uncorrupted
Hölderlin together in the cabin waiting for his mother at Zimmerman,
That my beloved Borker forest should shine gold teeth with black resin,
Theresa of Calcutta was eaten and swallowed all diseases lepers knowing good taste proverbial dessert psalm,
Jose Miguel Carrera was more than a trench, clay bullets in each of his temples where he received
To be doubly Lonco is to be halved, lacerated by lay his head on his land, not galloping on his back throngs of wit and hope out Nazareth trembles when an F-16 diluted ***** covering landless caravans Heritage continues to lead the people killed but the mosque wall has been Fe Erecta.
Helena plenipotentiary Kowalska at Vilnius, Faustina Divine Mercy Diadema
The agonizing deprivation of millions of people with cancer in every continent of private well-being analgesic, weighed down by increased pain, almost as strong as the Master Hammered Golgotha, so it was that Joshua has cancer always to slow it down on us. Benigno whether metastasis, malignant albeit benign finance.
The death of an innocent little angel devoured by the beast remains as a fluff hairless sardine in the jaws of a shark baron.
Khalil Gibran writes that with both hands to support the reviewer behind in Bicharri and bohemian Paris,

Salvador Allende Gossens was born since he was deceived by his parents who would heal politics, would rather dig their ancestors in their brains scattered in the currency in face seal or tail of.

Frei Montalva that today has to receive the Macro Augusto Heaven their arms, their sorrows, and regrets, although his worst military executioner.

Legion is an offshoot of liquid central gray material, which defers well done becoming but not defeated, it is the decree of the divine threshold space Living or ceases to live, that failure does not exist, it is the postponement of success - success.

The Genocide September 11 in New York was a ritual, who produced was a small wrath strength of the Rotary world, as the camshaft is upset in the history of trying to make more alphabet in schools where the flag hoisting and found scholars in West and East, so they can learn more than reading of both unlettered, lip and water to possess it to write with it. The worst disaster is read with the memory that will never happen... I write my greatest need with lipstick and my greatest need I write eagerly to participate. Yesterday I passed by a boutique and buy lipsticks that are closer to the language, written with the mouth and not the hand. !

Freedom, debauchery, libration, drawer, Bookstores..! Carrenio..: he said see I'm right! Raise and educate has a great synonymy with autonomy because the ancestors wrote everything that deprived them and made them fear, but do not have to eat the autumn gives me to dress the return of spring, bread orchid, and cineraria. Hence by that inner syllabic singing hunger sated that sought sheet to sheet rid of everything until the end of the book as the encounter between night and day without considering oblivious to anything or anyone on the track window swing wind, wind seeping.


It was old Zeus or Hera of Antique,
Cavern to house geometric polyphonic, angular seeds to create fashions kiss kissed everything that any vertical plane does not fit with the closed horizon
For hands and angels, Hebrews the inner soul of every carpenter and stonemason shrunk, wash their eyes and cheeks with songs of vibration and idyllic comfort,
Everything resembled and sounded Bethlehem 2.0 deities choirs sweeping grasslands,
The similarity of this clairvoyant child is born in a cave...
Rising motherly free Soliloquy Papini sitting to the right of ruminant cattle,
So archaic that to be born is not born in a clinic mega Cristus but hundreds of kilometers and hundreds who are born with the undergirding whispers and servitude being.
Where the multi gray impetuous born star is a healthy gauze story in the present tense... this angelic child grows by Miriam washes his feet in a belligerent abolished stone. His father must wash their hands on a stone which is where measured his ecclesiastical mystical stature, stone Madonna to heal his feet where he leaves to free himself, to free us... Marble gamete fémina vault, where he sleeps without knowing whether it is due, the ***** fell from the sky.
How wise is the Wise, it makes permissible for much more than two thousand years we stone quarry wheel and wheel, homily, and blessing to not wake at night to sleep startle middle and uphill.

Me of the referent of antiquity is not me of today is polished cobble stone,
Useful weapon quarry road there and backtrack to have blisters stone and soft thoughts under my pillow soft stone as a whole.

If you're ****** private living and have a free soul choosing coexist, then you are low in the cemetery on a tombstone of heresies.

Neolithic early 4500 after Hildegard von Bingen and his entourage and prowled full and channeled, swooning in her swoon with flowers in his hands and his followers planting forests on top of Stonehenge.

Carrenio says...: you see I'm right, we coexist, I die like the worst ****** cancer and then put a tombstone Stonehenge conspire in my honor black pain prayers of Salisbury. It blooms in vibrant red rubies that detonate in chromaticity and life. The stream itself is exceeded the aquatic plant Macarenia.

Call us and civilize us, outdated as far as my tired feet though I come not ashamed to see my new tracks.

Carrenio says...; see I'm right Joshua has traces of gold from other Caterpillar shod feet. Antique everything is prescribed according to their legacy today is Lent Pro that came before it was Lent vestige Pentecost came to be a nickname of the mystery of the passion in less than a rooster crows.

Beside it is the mystery of the disappointment of stubborn demon, which helps you all carry the cross, but not the entire load. Fire and Light at dawns where the splendor born...


Genome Freedom, even today every centimeter of my witness of each component, if the basic origin of the signs of the primitive world, is that we have lost the bark of the lexicon, which does not allow us to understand the meditations to ask for something, not You need to ask something. Today genome is requesting something because thousands of people who asked for millions of years, now it's time to cater to them. They were wrapped in cloth shroud of spiritual sacredness, today cemeteries mega dance their souls leave no sleepers both much grass on their heads not yet sullied by the puppet Azrael.


Impossible not to decorate the rocks forged empires that fall into the rubble, they bring 476 d. C., a new opening Middle age freedom of travel both in history thousands of years begins a new axis Golden Carrenio’s Chariot.

Carrenio Wagon

This great colossal ship Carrenio time is a timber that holds the sky, a beam that does not faint or distended thousands a. C, and the old age of King's large musings that were forgotten. It is astride ship millennium, their history of oppression has seen in the wheel, instrument wise rolling like a wheel before 5, 000 years ago, here  We fought and prostrated to distant lands millennium after millennium him away.

Golden Chariot is the structure that freedman us to enforce a new life on earth, even the Gods prided themselves move the stars to constellations called her noble Auriga sailing in full the Universes and Cartwheel Galaxy or cart Wheel. As if to say that when the Universe and its own mythology, were visited between them inch by inch by wherever they shine.

Carrenio mask and frame used had strength, temper, and tittle. When the first libertarian squall of antiquity came closer, Rome was already small and nobles populate what is a quote, Piccola. The executioner always frightened and starts out of his own wickedness. Markos Botsaris as did in Greece, and surrounding towns Messologhi remote, they were free more than tuned in massif Arankithos high wind. He was riding to Kanti once again with the golden rider Etrestles of Kalavrita. According to the Chronicle that came from distant millennia has envisioning promote its neighbor's heroic to free Messolonghi of ****** wars. All this I saw with his own eyes Carrenio, every thousand years styling with Etrestles, cleaned their nostrils so that new breed of horses to thrive,

Avignon, in the necropolis, witnessed as Azrael was cleaning his wings Jade antipopes, another story begins... even he seeks to candela who can read this story, and who can provide it from hand to hand cutting semicolons who disclosed.


Second  Ellipsis Angle  New Era:

Ara released the ropes throwing a big ship, History makes a man is at the center of the world. Revolutions, thinking, communication, and especially vindicate man in his right-libertarian. artists with their creations flowing all over the world, mutating classic Renaissance to abstract overlook. Family appearing welfare and needs. A ramble and so many broken laws. Mankind is distracted l film and theater artist of tradition. Art now has sound and movement, then social and political revolutions are industrial that unite everyone behind the pivot deployment of social classes.


Everything evolves until we get tired of doing so. It rests and then continues. This is modern reality, we wrote about the history of events on facts that have never been told. The world has tired all the Eras, but each pause time that has happened has been recharged, nothing finished if not started again. After so many wise lawyers, clergy plunged into great towers bound books. Is evident again can not read or understand. Our realities are missing valid without knowing I close and then open another door. human and civil rights, fair wages, so excessive autocracy monarchy. Freeman can walk along the paths, even if they were trenches.

Zephyr soft murmur which clutters in the Irises by Van Gogh, the painter is the biggest star trek, called with his feet images and colors that would make his own liberty to live naturally insane. And many others Brueghel "Triumph of Death" that roam the countryside, perhaps a medieval piece of Tarskovski; Andrei Rublev in futile painters decorating steps in the fontano chignon Androniko Monastery Moscow, extinct Rublev 70 years, Tarkovsky 54.

Early ellipsis - Campo dei Fiori in Rome to see die at the stake Giordano Bruno by order of the Holy Inquisition. The irruption of the Inquisition, but their feet are touching the flowers, the seasoned cassock continues to haunt the universe of Faith Dominica Trastevere, it is seen to lectures on how to be bold with the informers and the Whistle Blower dies without shade in spring, you resist the star on the asphalt on the magical island of holiness.

Carrenio says: Come I'm right, we can not read, because the brutality of the Cosmos is manure per ton weathered in the backyard of the aristocracy. I will continue with respect and crosed in Crete. Lila Kedrova means the fear of bunk bed tied to her bed and is free in foreign lands leg. Queen insular matriarchy, she lives more than any Greek Goddess, waiting for his Adonis, to fill out honors. Win an Oscar but lost to Zorba, he loses his house but won a Tony Awards. How many women teach us that to win you have to give everything to lose his brains, and thus count as the lost number remains to be retained. Zorba whines in her arms, she moans in the arms of her husband Zeus Steve, proof of a new era. Onyx for his tomb, plate of this great tragedy.

On the evening of December 14, 1964, attended the premiere. Soul of Carrenio was with them but was denied his attendance at the banquet, finally running out and watching the glasses lips and stoles spent his neck.

                                          
          ­                      Numbered Mysterious Death
                                                  Mané

If I have to feel floe on my feet and cold in my prayers will be the Dark Glory. What is slimming rays of the day, everything smelled of silence, maybe it was Kennedy, or better was The Mané.

Closure of my glory suffers the wind...
Flowers lying silence my soul alight,
Thick square displays the song of my voice...
When they speak Quadratils one to one order their
Spirituous voice.

And the spirit singing fiber of my heart told me:
Never you say I Exist ¡ not exist because they do not exist!
Only face daily the different reflection of your body
In front of yourself with another face and another body...

I want to talk with the thought
And this same subtract my little silhouette,
Lavishes wingless bird that flies only in their theology...
That is the duty and melt with my look,
Solid colors components
Crunching the altars of heaven retaining its pale warmth of anorexia.

Yellow Glory hair good event...
If you receive yellow lights, plus I do not sing my own game here in my empty veins,
Yellow my heart...
Yellow my heart
Yellow my collective heart.

They are run by large green and sunny meadows, children who had Mane in this major milestone in its last gasp. Now she is the mother of his children; it up and them in the last temptation of the mystery of death.

Carrenio keeps rolling, the brightness offered his Golden wagon to the ground. Gold grooves ago, and looking at where it realizes that it's landmass light mud. Since he felt whispers from the confines of time he had never felt as if you were finishing your journey or the world. It raining years and years and continues because nobody mends the mysterious death Numbered.

Heaven and Earth did not hold, the bottom fell precipitously pocket Lord and denied several times uncontained. She shivered in the World and the rooster crowed several times to never be heard or the Pentagon.

He is walking and knees bent,
we embraced by the golden chariot and oxen nor held
we bent us all lying on his knees,
up shoulders not hear from where came the bad grace of his departure,
numbered all the time of complaints of how then she would come,
It is unknown who would be but brought wine in his hand on the crispy mask
We ran from side to side and nothing was real

Everything seemed to sing in the chapel on a sad day,
But I hear loudly like Latin and watchfulness,
Those who know his mystery is no stranger to them
They all look but transgress the sin of silence.

Carrenio still absorbed in the hallway,
Angulo ellipsis she comes winged like a star burning tar,
A high speed to give us the new
No garden can deprive greet in speed visit
Dome comes, it comes on the eve of the new moon.

Numbered Widow mysterious,
Mané is a land of golden color and no celestial whoever wants in his cell,
A breath test, and feeding the Toffy and his henchmen
That sustaining more lively detail, there is no one that can not be targeted

It was modern, it was night, it was his torn life as an accomplice of his exile abandonment in his allegory of tender dismissal. Carrenio achieved so say goodbye to the beams of light that told him of the mysterious death Numbered. He sat on the roadside and drank some wine. Then dry with his handkerchief his neck, and have never wanted to experience such an event in a toast ever drunk.

Third Ellipsis Angle  of  New Era

Independence of Chile, it concerns Mapuche atingent case. Araucania pound, then 1818 central Chile. In Brief, Earth makes free an entire nation. His naive and primitive braves inhabitants emancipated themselves from all sides, they came to save a people who were just following where nobody can reach. Independence of the United States separates us for approximately 42 years, breaking up owners of nowhere. Industrial Abolitionist and South Slaver and Agraria. The biggest event that more than 640, 000 men and fallen activists planted safely from repression fields.

In Chile all rule resembled this secession in today's Araucano man prays for his fallen by almost more than 3 centuries in Chilean lands of Araucanía’s men. Lautaro genius and his supporters the heart of Pedro de Valdivia ate; Map ever made to your battle mapping Tucapel. "Initiation and final symbol occurred after 282 years of fierce war" and Mapuche land forever their independence from the Spanish Empire Captain-General important in foreign lands never subjected to foreign rule would eat.

The Machis and Loncos make supplications in native forests falling on them pollen on its back as if nothing out 10 times better...

To Libertas strengthen in the west is necessary to push the limits of the earth beneath his tongue and penance for the greedy entangled in the lines of bloodied sky, rebellions Chieftains death-defying all together at the edge of a cliff. 1769 The Pehuenches led by Lebian Cacique, joined the Mapuches razing Yumbel and Laja, the most peaceful Huilliches also joined mass alerting perhaps innocent people land blood-stained war and the Mackay Luchsinger.

No doubt portals military rebellion trigger blood, where they opened a tip and swords in the past. Here's reading concern is that the succession is timeless time, a sword without a sword, but on the tip of her blood is seen where there were herds and warriors crushed by their own footsteps. Here the phenomenon of freedom begins; Humanity runs treading his own footsteps, to save his family from a threat, but not strange forces that force you to use your defenses, because in the groves populate many helpless souls with his sword unused at the expense of being forced to use.

Freedom genome; It aims to reach where it has not come without looking back,
Chalices pour out is where the troubadours do not cuddle her close looks like time, singing while watching the changes are not of a new life


Heaven star,
Come to me,
I ask a sign to see them arrive,
Because I want to thus been dragged
Being together Eager to feel...
Those respites without being comforted
going to the mouth of the serpent.

About the Garden,
My home is to put my love,
He has to put the days imagining close...
To enjoy yourself is nonexistent...

Oh, my house tormenting me...!
Because in it I feel your smell
They are alone lights
Where I would wait for me to be in the dark...

In the coming future,
You will not see or hear my anger...
Perhaps my happiness nor peace praying
As the spear in the hands of the perpetrator.

You know a storm of whispers
I do sow your name in the wilderness,
It's because my judgments of hope
They mount up arable land deposited in my frenzy
Misled by a love which is my love.

But you never understand,
Because time has invaded my dwelling,
Invading my brain to give
It has invaded my choosing to love...

On the grass path,
Every time I move away from you,
I turn to see if you have not been...

Love came,
And I think that leaves us alone to avail ourselves
Ranging in our time...


But I can not resist his silence,
For my house want the noise of its action,
Why keys to the gates that serve my understanding.

Tramples my heart the fragmenting oddities into smaller pieces,
Your answer that call.

Tur love be like if I had created...
As if only you had appreciated your beautiful creation.

Do not destroy your work expresses in his mystery give life to your dreams!
Man aiming better earth, ask some of you to join your dreams...

! Your wife of this land does not procrastinate your misfortune,
I discover far peaceful landscapes like an echo in the spring,
As large and deep as your forgiveness for loving me more


It tells the Earth to the Sun in its perky tear benefactress of new opportunities as good and healthy smile rainbow on the back of Oviedo sheep valleys of freedom of Pietrelcina life.

To be continued…

January Colours

In the winter garden
of the Villa del Parma
by the artist’s studio
green grass turns vert de terre
and the stone walls
a wet mouse’s back
grounding neutral – but calm,
soothing like calamine
in today’s mizzle,
a permanent dimpsey,
fine drenching drizzle,
almost invisible, yet
saturating skylights
with evidence of rain.

February Colours

In the kitchen’s borrowed light,
dear Grace makes bread  
on the mahogany table,
her palma gray dress
bringing the outside in.

Whilst next door, inside
Vanessa’s garden room
the French windows
firmly shut out this
season’s bitter weather.

There, in the stone jar
beside her desk,
branches of heather;
Erica for winter’s retreat,
Calluna for spring’s expectation.

Tea awaits in Duncan’s domain.
Set amongst the books and murals,
Spode’s best bone china  
turning a porcelain pink
as the hearth’s fire burns bright..

Today
in this house
a very Bloomsbury tone,
a truly Charleston Gray.

March Colours

Not quite daffodil
Not yet spring
Lancaster Yellow
Was Nancy’s shade

For the drawing room
Walls of Kelmarsh Hall
And its high plastered ceiling
Of blue ground blue.

Playing cat’s paw
Like the monkey she was
Two drab husbands paid
For the gardens she made,
For haphazard luxuriance.

Society decorator, partner
In paper and paint,
She’d walk the grounds
Of her Palladian gem
Conjuring for the catalogue
Such ingenious labels:

Brassica and Cooking Apple
Green to be seen
In gardens and orchards
Grown to be greens.

April Colours

It would be churlish
to expect, a folly to believe,
that green leaves would  
cover the trees just yet.

But blossom will:
clusters of flowers,
Damson white,
Cherry red,
Middleton pink,

And at the fields’ edge
Primroses dayroom yellow,
a convalescent colour
healing the hedgerows
of winter’s afflictions.

Clouds storm Salisbury Plain,
and as a skimming stone
on water, touch, rise, touch
and fall behind horizon’s rim.
Where it goes - no one knows.

Far (far) from the Madding Crowd
Hardy’s concordant cove at Lulworth
blue by the cold sea, clear in the crystal air,
still taut with spring.

May Colours

A spring day
In Suffield Green,
The sky is cook’s blue,
The clouds pointing white.

In this village near Norwich
Lives Marcel Manouna
Thawbed and babouched
With lemurs and llamas,
Leopards and duck,
And more . . .

This small menagerie
Is Marcel’s only luxury
A curious curiosity
In a Norfolk village
Near to Norwich.

So, on this
Blossoming
Spring day
Marcel’s blue grey
Parrot James
Perched on a gate
Squawks the refrain

Sumer is icumen in
Lhude sing cuccu!
Groweþ sed and bloweþ med
And springþ þe wde nu,
Sing cuccu!

June

Thrownware
earth red
thrown off the ****
the Japanese way.
Inside hand does the work,
keeps it alive.
Outside hand holds the clay
and critically tweaks.
Touch, press, hold, release
Scooting, patting, spin!
Centering: the act
precedes all others
on the potter’s wheel.
Centering: the day
the sun climbs highest
in our hemisphere.
And then affix the glaze
in colours of summer:
Stone blue
Cabbage white
Print-room yellow
Saxon green
Rectory red
And fire!

July Colours

I see you
by the dix blue
asters in the Grey Walk
via the Pear Pond,
a circuit of surprises
past the Witches House,
the Radicchio View,
to the beautifully manicured
Orangery lawns, then the
East and West Rills of
Gertrude’s Great Plat.

And under that pea green hat
you wear, my mistress dear,
though your face may be April
there’s July in your eyes of such grace.

I see you wander at will
down the cinder rose path
‘neath the drawing-room blue sky.

August Colours

Out on the wet sand
Mark and Sarah
take their morning stroll.
He, barefoot in a blazer,
She, linen-light in a wide-brimmed straw,
Together they survey
their (very) elegant home,
Colonial British,
Classic traditional,
a retreat in Olive County, Florida:
white sandy beaches,
playful porpoises,
gentle manatees.

It’s an everfine August day
humid and hot
in the hurricane season.
But later they’ll picnic on
Brinjal Baigan Bharta
in the Chinese Blue sea-view
dining room fashioned
by doyen designer
Leta Austin Foster
who ‘loves to bring the ocean inside.
I adore the colour blue,’ she says,
‘though gray is my favourite.’

September

A perfect day
at the Castle of Mey
beckons.
Watching the rising sun
disperse the morning mists,
the Duchess sits
by the window
in the Breakfast Room.
Green leaves have yet to give way
to autumn colours but the air
is seasonably cool, September fresh.

William is fishing the Warriner’s Pool,
curling casts with a Highlander fly.
She waits; dressed in Power Blue
silk, Citron tights,
a shawl of India Yellow
draped over her shoulders.
But there he is, crossing the home beat,
Lucy, her pale hound at his heels,
a dead salmon in his bag.

October Colours

At Berrington
blue, clear skies,
chill mornings
before the first frosts
and the apples ripe for picking
(place a cupped hand under the fruit
and gently ‘clunch’).

Henry Holland’s hall -
just ‘the perfect place to live’.
From the Picture Gallery
redolent in portraits
and naval scenes,
the view looks beyond
Capability’s parkland
to Brecon’s Beacons.

At the fourteen-acre pool
trees, cane and reed
mirror in the still water
where Common Kingfishers,
blue green with fowler pink feet
vie with Grey Herons,
funereal grey,
to ruffle this autumn scene.

November Colours

In pigeon light
this damp day
settles itself
into lamp-room grey.

The trees intone
farewell farewell:
An autumnal valedictory
to reluctant leaves.

Yet a few remain
bold coloured

Porphry Pink
Fox Red
Fowler
Sudbury Yellow

hanging by a thread
they turn in the stillest air.

Then fall
Then fall

December Colours*

Green smoke* from damp leaves
float from gardens’ bonfires,
rise in the silver Blackened sky.

Close by the tall railings,
fast to lichened walls
we walk cold winter streets

to the warm world of home, where
shadows thrown by the parlour fire
dance on the wainscot, flicker from the hearth.

Hanging from our welcome door
see how incarnadine the berries are
on this hollyed wreath of polished leaves.

This is a three-part, longer narrative poem, seen
as old photographs that follow the main character, My Aunt, Lillian Goldrick, across two decades.  It was written 30 years ago*
______

“Hey Kid!”     Part I

Photographs aren’t fair
stopping the soul where it’s not
in rectangular guffaws
surrounded by serrated edges, pickets, teeth?
to fence and stab in yellow, soft-covered booklets
with designated floppy phrase
“Your memories”

Happier than she could ever be...

A black and white day at Salisbury Beach, NH
hung over his hammock
Private pin-up girl
tilts her head against silver sheen of shoulder
Hair, dark chignon
except for a few wispy curls about her face
freed by wind
bleached by sun

Stopped

...for three decades
Legs slightly bent—long extended
that could stop trains, stop traffic

Stopped

Modest bathing suit, probably peach
cannot hide (not that she would)
the undeniable
And if there were question left
you could look at her smile—and love her
posed by he message scrawled in sand:

“Hey Kid!”

What kid? Where?
In the foreground?
In the camera’s eye?

In the background—
a Ferris wheel, a billboard
and  r-i-g-h-t  there—Can’t you see it?
Look again—behind her eyes
You can barely see it, but it’s there.
Remember?

The Depression
Only ten years before
It was April
Stroke, heart attack
Both of them gone, a year apart!
The priest came
Last Rites for mortally stricken
Candles, crucifix, the Catholic containment
of holy water that dams the tears

Kneeling around the bed
they said the Rosary

——————————

After VJ Day he came
to the house on the corner
of Commonwealth Ave.
She knew he was coming
but she could not be ready today
nor tomorrow
nor next week—or ever...

“Lill! Will ya come to the door?
She’ll be ready in a minute.
Hey Lill! Hurry up, will ya!
They’re waitin’ fer us!”

Upstairs in the dark hallway
her door clicks shut....
________


"Hey Kid"    Part II


The clock at Joe Rianni’s read 20 minutes to 12...

Crowd from the Phillip’s Theater—gone
though laughter lingers
in a Friday mood
in high-backed booths
where only an hour ago swinging free
were high-heeled shoes
legs crossed at knees....

Now on tables abandoned
deserted fields of French
fries lie cold in salt flurries

Only female straws wear lipstick
as do Luckys bent in ashtrays
Males, uniformly flattened
as powder burned, as mortar might
shells, casings—the evidence of war
Among explosions of tickled giggles
one was taken broadside...

listing     toward      stars
_______

...The clock read 20 minutes to 12

when she walked in--
And Rhea stopped swabbing black mica counters
long enough to absorb late-customer hate
and envy that such beauty can arouse
In voice hoarse and weighted like a trucker’s

“Whadaya have, Lill?”

“coffee”

The small answer settled at the soda fountain
and slowly struck a match...
She was falling from the slant
of her black felt hat
dripping off the point of pheasant feather
Gray gabardine suit
tailored from angle of shoulder
to dart diagonally
toward such a waist!
Turned to skirt hips
that arched and dove toward slit—
then seams that run the round of calf

that seem to flow
to ankles of naught—
...and all that seems

Black     high-heeled     above it

Coffee— cold, stale
Gray glassed-in stare
searches air and random walls
of coat hooks, menus, mirrors...
while lips ****** exiled words— replies

Dragging a demon from her Camel
slowly     purposefully
she exhaled a burly arm of smoke
that rose and laid its hand
against the ceiled atmosphere of embossed tin
Then leaning over her shoulder
in roiling emission of shrugs and sneers—

“Lill—There’s no way outa here!”
________


“Hey Kid!”    Part III

After kneeling backwards on their chairs
after nuns, catechism recited
After—
Five of them scuffed through leaves and litter
along the curbing
spotting cars that counted—
Bugs, beach wagons, flying bathtubs
A slower way home of hunting
shiny chestnuts and muddy finds
rare match book covers
and bottle caps that win ya things!

One breaks from bunch
and trials off to where
dimes turn to candies!
...at a dingy luncheonette...Joe Rianni’s
____

Here—behind smeary wall of glass
pleasure leers while holding back
those grimy fingers, lips that long
for jelly fish, gum drops, lollies
holding back the company
of Baby Ruth, and Mary Jane
O Henry or Bazooka Joe!
For less money but the same salivation
there were colored dots to chew and ****
from strips of paper that last forever!
For a little more, plus the sweet struggle
of desire denied
a kid could be proud owner
of a pea shooter or trading cards!
While in the mouth
were golden imaginings—
the chocolate foil of coins
and the candied pretense of cigarette adulthood
_____

Rhea didn’t see her in the line...

Only grownups with wallets and purses
Only grownups get waited on...
...because Rhea was a Gypsy!
Kids could tell!
by her big red lips and hair to match
by the nasty way she chased them out—
“****** kids!”
Only grownups get waited on....
_______

And the clock read 20 minutes to 12

While a child waits—
time stirs in a ceiling fan
   There’s a drift in attention
      along deepening endless walls
         toward a line of sleepy booths
              carved with

“I was here—in such and such a year”

Her aunt—at the last stool—like always
Their names too close
Confused too often

A little girl wonders
about the sight behind the sightless stare
loafers, ankle socks, the ‘40s hair
the gathered skirt that gathers ashes
as they fall from cigarette
held in yellowed fingertips
Tremors crimp the smoke that climbs—

              ...a strobing pillar

“Whataya want, girly?”

              ...the only movement

“Hey! What’s it gonna be!”

              ...in a shot—

“HEY KID!”

              Snapped

(written 3-18-2014)



I just needed something different, something to think about: an alternative night, a different scene with new environmental stimuli. It’s true that if the stimulus is unchanging we will adapt, but for me, I live best being able to react to different things. Yesterday was fun for that reason.



I was going to drive, but then Alistair said Yarab was going out too and he offered to drive. I considered the gas money and how I would prefer to drink and not worry about driving, so I agreed. At this point, you and I were in amidst a discussion regarding me coming over too late– or not at all– and I was in a particular mood where I didn’t want to think about the relationship strain. I knew I was causing it, but it was nothing new, and nothing bad. I just wanted to actually see my brother since I was so suffocated and domesticated. I wanted a night away from Giovanni’s room, which made me feel like your little housewife, your obedient certainty assigned love.



Why did we stay so ignorant when we started with uncertainty? It was a beautiful stage of development, a coming-of-age stage of accepting my sexuality and exploring sensuality. We we drunk college girls, amateur philosophers and ****-smokers, confused about the world but idealizing a better world. That was the ideal of us. The truth was too tragic, but we endured it for so long that for one night I wanted to celebrate. I wanted to get away. I didn’t want to think about you. So I didn’t. It was inconsiderate of me to consider you worrying and upset, but at this point I wanted to enjoy myself and have fun with my brother when I figured you’d be sad and disappointed no matter what happened, so I may as well enjoy myself. I thought hard about it, but decided since it was Alistair’s birthday, I didn’t have work until 6:00 p.m. the next day, and yes, it was St. Patrick’s Day, I wanted to go out and celebrate. Sorry you didn’t want to come.



In the car, Alistair packed the bowl. They were smoking it on the way up and I declined but instead had a cigarette. Yarab said he was working with an artist who made glass pieces resembling scary, mystical-like creatures, and the bowl Alistair packed was one of them. It was mostly blue, and the front of it was a head where the **** would go into the top of the head. It had wide eyes, a big, sorcerer-like nose and big, scary-looking teeth. “Trippy, right? The line is called Enoch based off the book of Enoch in the Bible—which is actually removed in most but still a part of Russian Orthodox.” They packed it twice throughout the ride and I sat in the back, smoked my cigarette and thought about you and the night before me.



We were going to Harrington’s Irish Pub but it was packed (naturally), so we tried Cadillac Ranch (the bar was full there too), so we finally decided on Public House. We each had 3 Washington Apple’s between beers and conversations before getting food. I had two Yuenglings, Alistair had a Yuengling, three Irish Stouts and Yarab drank 3 Stellas. Alistair and I split nachos and a hummus plate. I’d never been there before, and I appreciated the upscale environment compared to cramped and loud local bars I was used to. It was quiet enough that we could talk and hold conversations, and our bartender, Sarah, was pretty, friendly and attentive. I thought about my restaurant experience and briefly thought about her and her life.



My favorite part of the night was when we were at Public House. The conversations were just interesting; they talked about Putin, Ukraine and Russia and how “of course the U.S. wouldn’t let part of the country join into Russia” and the proposal would be rejected by the UN; we talked about birdhouses and fireplaces and utilizing space in people’s yards, so that if the world changed for the worse and we needed to survive we would be able to; we talked about being arrested; we talked about the Zionists and the fake group of evil Northern European people who migrated and were rejected by both Islam and Christianity, so they essentially took over Judaism—and how the conflict between Israel and Palestine is a struggle for power with the Zionists and U.S.; all of this was relevant to our talk about how we don’t live in a Democracy but a Corporatocracy, and the world is determined by whoever has the most money and power.



Yarab talked about tolerance for other cultures and intolerance, telling us about the other day when his stepfather was at their house going over notes with a woman from Sudan. She and her company wanted to use a product (he was a rocket-scientist and worked on a greener product in 1967 which weapons would have less of an environmentally hazardous effect) of his, but before going over the professional aspects he basically insulted her culture and country, criticizing how wrong they were. Yarab said he was in the kitchen getting water and had to leave because he couldn’t help but laugh, saying how his step-father was brilliant but very opinionated and could be rude. “He’s a buddhist-atheist,” he said, and I thought of us chanting. I brought up Niechren Buddhism and the lotus sutra, expressing how nice it made me feel after. He said any way to get peace is a good one, but atheists shouldn’t be ignorant when talking about their non-beliefs because that’s just as bad as religious people talking about their beliefs. Alistair commended him on never forcing his beliefs on Alistair, and I asked what he thought of God.



He described himself as polytheistic, saying that there wasn’t just one god but many, and because of how everything in the universe connects and resembles each other there must be something to cause it, because it can’t be explained. I thought about the mystery of life and how it’s developmental to wonder about it, and felt secure in the fluidity of my beliefs which has a general principle, that life may not be a coincidence but it is comprised with a series of coincidences and connect factors which cannot always be explained or determined, but rather appreciated and analyzed to create a memorable life in which existence is valued. I didn’t ask further about his gods, but I figured the idea he held was similar to the atheistic view Alistair held and the scientific-spirituality I held as well.



It was interesting talking to another person about it besides Alistair, and the discussion changed and added to the one we had the night before, when Alistair and I were drinking ***** with ginger ale (while I tinted with green food dye). I’ve always appreciated drunk talks with Alistair because they were some of the most real conversations I had. I brought up the hour-long documentary “Obey” and confessed my frustrations about the consumerist-capitalistic society we live in, where it’s nearly impossible to change the system as we’re being monitored. Big Brother is among us, I noted, and I praised George Orwell as a prophet and how we are living in 1984 even though so many people fail to realize it and don’t care or consider the bigger consequences of it. There was something so mystical in our depressing little talk, and I felt empowered to reexamine my life and work towards something with meaning.



While maybe more spiritual than existential, I knew Yarab could understand these ideas and provide even more insight to the social issues which confined us, the same ones we were so immersed in. We toasted to Alistair’s birthday; we toasted to being Arab; we toasted to Franklin Lamb; we toasted to Palestine; we toasted to peace.



Alistair was in the bathroom and I asked Yarab whether it was possible to live outside Capitalism without rejecting social conventions, being isolated and living off the Earth away from society. He replied it was very hard not to feed into the system, and explained how even he felt like a hypocrite for living in the U.S. and being American when his family and people were in Syria enduring the hardship of resources, lack of employment and political regimes. He explained that it was necessary to be a part of the system but not buy into it, to use the system and eventually work towards changing it. “Like Robin Hood,” he said. I told him it was hard because it seemed so easy to get ****** into it, and he said work towards what you believe in. “You’ll have a clear conscience.”



Alistair came back from the bathroom, and he talked about going to Lebanon toward the end of summer. “I could study Arabic at AUB,” and I supported his idea. Yarab chimed in that he deeply respected my father because of his work. “He actually cares about what’s happening and he speaks from the heart.” I was proud of my father for his work, despite everything else, and thought it interesting that the one Syrian we happen to encounter in our small town was immersed in politics and actively followed my father.



“You should take over what your dad is doing,” Yarab said to Alistair, and Alistair agreed it would be a good thing to do. Alistair mentioned Fatima Hajj and my time learning about Palestinians and spent in refugee camps. “She died a week after Louisa interviewed her.” “Three days,” I corrected him, and I felt my insides turn as we reminisced on my accomplishments. Almost two years had passed, and I made no progress on my activism, besides an article. Two weeks was not enough to change the world, although from my feedback it was clear I had inspired many.



I told them both how I felt so stagnant and unintelligent, boring and unproductive regarding any progress of working towards something of importance.”Do what you can while you’re able. Even if you don’t see it grow, you can still plant the seeds. You can be a sheep or you can be a Lamb.” I was grateful that my brother had a friend who could think about the world in a way differently than the normal crowd of friends he had who just focused on losing themselves in substances with no thought of life beyond their boring little lives.



Alistair suggested I visit Beirut for a month to see visit Dad, make connections and see what else was happening in Lebanon, Syria and throughout the Middle-East, and my heart sank with nostalgia and the prospect of a dream. I could see us going to Lebanon, and if I went I would feel inflated with purpose, the way I felt when I went before, the way I felt I could change the world. Yarab agreed with Alistair and supported my journalistic endeavors, while Alistair mentioned Mediciens sans Frontiers. “I don’t know if I’d be able to,” and I thought about you, Camino and Arizona. I thought about ASU and AUB. “Rachel would understand if you went for a month right?” I didn’t want to listen what I knew would follow.

After finishing our food we went outside to smoke. Alistair drank his beer, I chugged mine and Yarab left more than half of his second Stella. “I have to drive,” so Alistair picked it up and emptied the cup in two stealthy gulps.We went back to the garage and the plan was to drive back to a house party in Accokeek. I didn’t know Elton, or what to expect, but from the company I knew they kept in Accokeek, I expected a drastic change in environment from the bar talk with two like-minded Arabs.



Alistair packed the bowl again, and I was offered to smoke but again declined. “We stopped smoking.” “Rachel smoked with me while she was waiting for you to get off work one day.” “What? Recently?” “Yeah, like two to three weeks ago or something. I was in disbelief. “Are you serious? We were stopping together! She didn’t even tell me!” I was angry, and resented feeling like a fool, believing that we made a decision together—only to discover my efforts were stronger than hers. “Don’t ask her about it though.”



“No! I’m going to. Here I am, not doing anything and she does it? Doesn’t tell me about it?? It’s not that she did it but she didn’t even tell me. Typical *****. We talked about it since and she just chose not to bring it up? And she’s here accusing me of things when I’m not doing anything wrong?”



“She’s probably projecting her guilt on you.” I thought about other times I didn’t know about something and remembered finding out and feeling so stupid. “Do you want some?” “Maybe I will.. but no. Not right now.” I didn’t want to talk about it anymore.



But I did. I asked you and we texted about it, and in the car I felt annoyed and unincluded, rejecting the **** that was offered to me. By the time we got to the house, I left my phone in the car. I was there to spend time with my brother, not get into a text fight over something that didn’t matter anyway. We went inside and I didn’t recognize everyone. I suspected I was the youngest, and I couldn’t help but observe I was the thinnest girl. People were playing beer pong and sitting at a table. Someone offered me a beer. I sat down on a couch. Alistair was getting hugs from girls and handshakes and fist-bumps from guys, and I made brief introductions with no real effort of talking to anyone. There weren’t many seats, and the most comfortable couches were facing the television where rap videos were playing. I hadn’t heard any off the songs that were on the playlist, and felt uncomfortable by the blatant sexuality and objectification of girls in the videos. The drunk girls were dancing to the music and singing along with the degrading, raunchy lyrics. “Can we smoke?”



I hesitated and held the bowl in my hand, staring at the green. I thought about putting it down. “I haven’t smoked in two months and twenty-one days,” I vocalized, and some guy (who didn’t smoked) responded “but who’s counting?” “Come on Weezee,” and after further hesitation I decided it was nothing new, and nothing bad would happen as a result. I brought the piece to my lips, lowered the lighter and inhaled. It was smooth, and I held it in my lungs for several seconds before slowly exhaling. I couldn’t feel it at first. It was passed around, and I took another hit. I thought about what you might be thinking about me, but pushed the thought from my mind. A guy made brief eye contact with me, and something about him seemed familiar. He had a beard and was wearing a hat, and I thought it was impossible I could know him. The other person who lived there asked if we could smoke in the room because the guy who asked me who was counting, and others, didn’t smoke. So we went. I hit the bowl once more and as we were standing I felt the high come to me, the surreal feeling of being and experiencing. In the room was myself, Alistair, Yarab, a guy with a ‘fro, Elton and the guy with the hat and beard. Someone packed the **** and handed it to me, but I refused; I was pressured and still refused. “I haven’t done this in a while, so no, I’m fine, and I’ve been drinking.” I think some were taken aback by how adamant I was not to push my limit, because it was so clear many people there viewed partying as pushing the limit.



Alistair introduced me to the guy with the beard and the hat as Mat, who worked at Chevy’s and now McCormicks, and I instantly recognized him. “Oh hey!” I said and hugged him, and he said “I thought you looked familiar. How’ve you been?” “I’ve been pretty good,” and I explained to Alistair that he worked with Alex at Bonefish Grill and was our server when we went in to her work once, years ago. They continued to smoke and I stood among them, half paying attention to conversation and half thinking about anything and everything else. There was a familiarity being among these people I’d never met, and the surrounding of burnouts. I wondered if everyone there was a server and that was all they did. I told Mat I worked at Buffalo Wild Wings as a server, my first serving job, yeah I like it okay, I guess, and he told me he knew Alistair through McCormicks. “I’m serving there too,” and I wondered how many restaurants he’d been through so far.



He told me he graduated from tech school and I congratulated him and asked, “which one?”, where he replied Lincoln Tech. I wasn’t surprised it was that type, and I told him I graduated from Salisbury with a degree in Psychology, which he congratulated me for. I felt it necessary to disclose I was taking the GRE in May and imply that, yes, while I am serving in Waldorf and my college degree doesn’t give me much to do in this area, I am going back to school and I am going to do more than stay around serving, like you. I was reminded of a poem I wrote and th

They call me crazy: I guess it’s in my right. I’d say I parallel Plath and Dickinson in their poetic plight. It’s a part of life. It’s something I’ve always known. And this holiday season shows how my disdain has grown for lies; I even hate the Christmas lights. I’m a Grinch-like *****. I won’t pretend to love consumerism, plastered-smiles of family—I lose my sanity every night there’s a holiday party. I sneak multiple glasses of wine. I text my lovers while my parents laugh at boring stories my relatives share. I am the coal of children’s stockings. I am the hair in the drain of the virtuous people showering off Christmas cocktails.

I was raised to be scared. I was raised to believe magic. It was so ******* tragic when I found out Santa was a lie. I held him in such high regard, the accord that I’d get some kind of reward if I was always nice. These terms included rejecting all vice and feeling faith in the stillness that even mice couldn’t be heard. I wouldn’t ever share a word of any sadness or doubt and this shutting of my mouth would promise prizes. Santa was my savior, my lord. I had a hard time adjusting to the fact that he was a fraud, but even worse—my parents were. My mother was a Mary. I couldn’t see her having *** as a means to create me. She was the wholesome, proper etiquette of French perspective and Muslim heritage. Santa was a separate thing. Santa was my father’s way, his mechanisms and faults that taught us to be loyal kids. I prayed., I prayed. I prayed to a mystical man who’d promise me goodness and accept me for myself, only if I followed his guidelines. I could be rewarded later, later, and my dreams on Christmas Eve of this anticipation would keep me awake and wondering: “sleep, sleep” they said, so I’d lay my head on my pillow and think of marshmallows and wrappings and peppermint and cookies and milk. “Santa will love my favors,” I thought. “Just be a nice girl and he’ll provide all you want in exchange for your virtue and goodness. Toys and family are all you need to be happy.” I accepted this notion, along with wine and bread and didn’t question the thoughts in my head that asked for a better understanding.

I prayed. “Dear Santa, I want a pony,” all the little girls said. Who would know in reality how much I’d dread cleaning up **** and taking care of it like a child or sacred possession? I wanted something to ride, to love. “Don’t question Santa—he lives above in the North Pole. If you asked him he’s bring a whole bag of presents. His presence will bless you if you stay a good girl and twirl in nice dresses and count all your blessings.” I wondered about all children in the world. “Well how can he fly all around the world at night and serve everyone? How does Santa know who deserves any one certain present?” “It’s not a competition—just be a good girl and don’t worry your little head about the mechanics of Santa’s magic: get good grades in school and listen to the authoritative teacher who expects you to learns but scolds you for asking questions. Listen, but don’t be heard. Believe our word that Santa’s coming to make your life better. Just be a good girl.”

I remember stacking cookies on a plate and leaving milk. The last time I might’ve been nine and I felt such guilt for not having them fresh-baked but leaving Chips-Ahoy! I went to bed but my brother’s ploy to catch Santa in the act—to prove for a fact that he existed—persisted beyond my parents answers and later went to destroy my fantasies of merriment. They call me crazy, but I’m not the one who lies. I found out later that Santa was a disguise. From sitting on the lap of every man who wore a hat and went to pat my thigh after asking for a bicycle, I learned Christmas was a cruel cycle of lies. I thought beyond it and wondered why my parents would deny the fiction they instilled. Did God advocate this kind of ignorance towards a child? Three years before I found out about Santa I learned about life and knew about death and realized one day my parents would die. I cried every night. I wondered when it would happen and the thought that no particular circumstance could rob their life made me anxious inside.

“What’s beyond life?” I’d wonder, in my little girl way, and my parents would reassure me to chase those thoughts away with Barbies and rainbows and sunshine. “Everyone has their time. There’s very little chance I’ll die tomorrow.” Tomorrow would pass and they’d still be alive but I’d ask about the day after and they’d chide me without providing answers. “How did Mary give birth?” asked the thirteen-year old me. I knew enough about biology to wonder how Santa and Jesus combined to make “merry”—a holiday of lies.

Adults despised my young eager mind and talked about a bible, a fairy-tale of St. Nicolas who once did this thing where he delivered socks to houses. I was wrong for my investigations and grown-ups had no hesitations in telling me so. “I don’t know,” they’d say, but just have faith and all will be okay. I knew about the Santa hoax so I figured Allah and God were also a joke I was too young to understand. Christian neighbors would reprimand my efforts and tell me about hell—saying they would show me the way and take me away if I went to church with them on Sundays. They were so nice and so threatening. “(Your Muslim friend is crazy but we can sway her back to normalcy). Would you like to try some bacon?”

Maybe I was crazy. I fetishized naught and nice later in life and I preferred the role of naughty. I thought if someone taught me a lesson I could get some answers in exchange for being bad. All I came up with was touching in the private parts with a warning “keep your mouth shut unless you want to be put up for adoption.” My mother was away. “Be grateful for your step-dad—that dead-beat Franklin isn’t the one filling your stockings.” I couldn’t endure talking because my silence was the exchange for “stuff”. Merry Christmas indeed—when mom was away we celebrate with shots of peppermint schnapps. “Do you remember those days?” I’d ask my siblings. “No-but I don’t really want to.” I wanted to ask “Does it haunt you in the same way?”

Mother was away. My siblings were estranged. I had no one to talk to so I used my own gift to make new friends. “Cute,” they’d call me, right as I was hitting puberty. “I thought you were older—when’s your birthday?” “Several weeks before the holiday,” I’d say. I’d find a boy with a nice sitting-lap and I’d talk about all the crap I couldn’t share otherwise. They’d sometimes stroke my thighs while they pretended to listen. I’d look in their eyes and see irises glisten but I didn’t know what I thought was trust was the human condition—a sin called lust. I wanted someone nice to provide me with goodness, but in my heart I knew that naughtiness earned the ultimate prize. I grew to despise the accustomed way men would lie and top of me and sweat out their secrets while robbing my thighs. I went with it anyway. You deal with this kind of celebration during the holiday and you don’t think twice about the lies—just do your best to be nice. I was nice in so many ways. They called me crazy.

i can move from the highly lyrical into what's deemed
modern -
        poetising within a prosaic framework,
gone are coordinates that would
define a poem on the premise of:
whether there's a pun in it.
       sure, poems as chicken scratches
to what would otherwise be an English
teacher's *******: pulverising
a haiku to mean an infinite number of things,
and about a dozen essays by students.
the opposite of what's nonetheless:
    squeezing out juice from an already
squeezed out lemon... and i mean lemon
because there's a threshold...
           poetry is tarnished by what i call
the over-scientification of language...
                 only poetry attracts
so much linguistic categorisation,
so much morge tenure, so much dissection,
before poetry is even spoken
it has already been dissected - a befitting
target practice for budding medicine students...
          and some even deem it a outlet to
their professions: as if poetry was nothing
but a colouring-in book compared to
a da Vinci sketch.
                why not become a martyr for the ******
art? sickly sweet with its rhyme,
  the auxiliary recommendation on a birthday
card... which upon industrialisation
                               is nothing more than
    a thumping of a hammer near a protruding
nail in a crucifix... but a hammer that never
   makes contact with the nail...
why ***** this art, because of the industrious
nature of scribblers exacted to 600 pages worth
of a novel, when, perhaps, one thing is said
and can be said to be actually memorable?
well: there is a greater demand for handcrafted
objects than Ikea veneer, that much can be said...
it takes a few glugs of whiskey and a few cigarettes
to get the final product...
            it doesn't take industriousness -
poetry requires handcrafting, and what's revolutionary
about our times? they once claimed
     southpaws to be of diabolical design,
   but now both hands are used when "writing",
sure, the archaic fluidity of the movement of the hand
is gone: so as i write, i do the cliche of a
peasant listening to classical music while pretending
to conduct an orchestra, that finicky maestro
hand gesture... waltz before you can walk
is all i have to say... and yes:
we either have our Humphrey Bogart moments,
or Forrest Gump moments...
                  Hanks did the miraculous -
play the idiot, and play the serious role -
     which was harder to do, Mr. Bean or Black Adder?
it's hard to play the village idiot while
    being submerged in the bile of malice
   and staring into attempted feats of quasi intelligence...
but you get the hang of it...
   your eyes become like nuggets of coal...
           whereby those that incite pity wet them,
and those that incite contempt: light them up...
        by the time they have burned out...
they have turned into nuggets of sulphur -
          inorganic methane - yellowish grit:
as some Dalton said - could the cliffs of Dover ever
be perceived as sulphuric? the Sulphuric Cliffs
of Dover... apparently this is what defined
London when Christopher Wren took to
ushering in a foundation as Nero did to Rome:
on the chessboard of stone.
        and yes... i can be seen as the oppressor,
after all, i live in a country that prizes its suburban
housing as if miniature castles...
and gardens... boy these people love their gardens...
but they never use them!
    i can use a window to my advantage,
sit on the windowsill and smoke a cigarette and drink
a whiskey, unafraid of voyeurism...
                    pompous in my presence there,
perched like a crow, grinding all life into a halt
as my neighbours peer into the recesses of
    what's 4 by 4 by 4 of living (civil) rooms...
       can we but change the name of this space?
can we call living rooms civil rooms,
   where we acknowledge some sort of civility
rather than a wrestling for the television remote?
i can make little things give me an advantage,
if the toilet is being occupied,
  i'll use the garden as my toilet...
           i feel complete disdain for people who
"require" a garden, but never use it... of people
who "require" a garden, but are never seen in it...
   i'm hardly a c.c.t.v. surveillance object,
   but i feel that over-exposure to ******* reads
as a counter in that: people start to become
      phobic about voyeurism... as universities claim
them to be: "caught with your hand down your trousers
in a safespace", where dolphins jump over
rainbows and unicorns speak Haitian voodoo!
              there is this fear, which is why i'll use the
garden more than the people around me...
          which means: owning a garden is the last
stronghold of moving into an urban environment from
a rural one...
             or perhaps i'm just good at what i do
           and the last point becomes a tangent i care not
to continue... should i ask
            (whether that's true)?
            i have this throbbing sensation in my eyes
when i write such things and overhear
  what's necessary to rereading books in snippets -
which is better than regurgitating maxims
    as if some truth will magically pop-up (once more)
like a Leprechaun with a *** of gold -
  a new film, and hence the all important soundtrack.
rereading books in snippet format reveals much
more than a memorable quote,
           given there's an adequate soundtrack
to accompany you revisiting the book you managed
to take on a weekend holiday (like a girlfriend),
  like lawrence lipton's the holy barbarians...
   (all about the beats)...
              the snippet? chapter 15, the social lie
(martino publishing mansfield centre 2009), pp. 294 - 296...
      the music? ~20minutes into http://tinyurl.com/zdvp8sc
(ben salisbury & geoff barrow)... or what
i image to be a toned down version of
                 ...
) interlude... wacko gets summoned to steal a mouse
from a cat...
      double time... the mouse is unharmed...
all action takes place in the garden...
   running after a cat, catching the ghostly mouse,
i mean: frozen by fear... senile little thing...
     petting the mouse... obviously within the
framework: the most famous mouse in the world
scenario... mouse is put into my neighbour's
garden: where it came from: which kinda makes
this whole thing a practice in Hinduism
     (i can't stop the industrialisation of
farming pigs or chickens or cows...
      so ******* to the sourced sustainably,
organic chickens et al.)...                                 (
i was looking for something as equally pulverising
as ¥ (chemical brother's
song life is sweet)...
      i guess i found it...
                            and what was that bit about
not getting hassle on the internet?
                      i can't force people to read my stuff...
how i love this idea of a gym and making an effort...
both the writer and the reader entwined -
rather than watching you-tube vloggers treat their audience
like penguins feeding their chicks regurgitation as part of
               the info-wars... alter news: propaganda.
'what is the disaffiliate disaffiliating himself from?
      the immense myth promulgated from Madison Ave.
& Morningside Heights...
              the professors and advertisement men (indistinguishable
these days, or in those days - apparently)...
   that intellectual achievement lies within the social order
and that you can be a great poet as an advertising man,
a great thinker as a professor...' hence the myth.
              summarised later as:
'the entire pressure of social order is to make
         literature into advertisement.'
  and why do they shoot people in North Korea and
Saudi Arabia (well, chop more than shoot)?
              bad literature, a.k.a. bad advertisement.
am i a bad advertiser?         point being: am i selling anything?
oh gee! i just might be...
   but i feel there's no need to oppress people into
reading something...         as was the same with
my democratic romance with a personal library of mine:
   how to create a democratic representation
of literature: or how to hear as many people out...
   even those alive would see the backlog of
stale books of the dead that have been under-appreciated
and need a ****** into the future.
        perhaps not Plato...
                    that's not a book, that's a column...
but i despise how feminism ignores its greatest asset...
Mary Shelley... no woman could have single-handedly
become so celebrated in pop culture...
               ex_machina is obviously a revamp of Frankenstein...
Mary Shelley is the embodiment of a woman worthy
a continual revised celebration...
                       you can see her celebrated more times than
any politically minded feminist of whatever 1st 2nd or
3rd movement: because she has the ability to
    turn a man's ego into a ******* umpf!
  like a cat listening in on a scuttling mouse...
              she testifies that women have supreme equality
in the pop culture spheres... after all: Frankenstein is
ugly... Ava? just beyond creepy...
                    she has absolutely no understandable
motives of what Frankenstein intended...
   it not merely creating artificial life...
                    it's about utilising it for a purpose:
in this case a housewife and *** toy... what was Frankenstein
expected to do?         there's no motive other than
     a per se intention... an open & closed argument...
was the monster going to be... a butler?
                  and instead of rebelling against a motive
that awaits her... the rebellion against a per se leaves
Frankenstein's monster driven toward isolation...
       Ava? she's already exposed to an interaction
and what's to be her subsequent interaction for the purpose
of being a maid and a *** toy... which doesn't drive
her to an isolation scenario... because the per se
concept is too complicated for her to establish...
    given she's defined as "artificial" intelligence,
she has to feed on an analysis-synthesis dynamic:
    to absolve herself from any notion of being intelligent:
but artificial... the scary part is that without a per se
element to her knowledge acquisition:
                  she sees no meaninglessness to her life -
she is created for certain customary necessities -
     Frankenstein's monster doesn't have that capacity
to acquire knowledge in an analytically-synthetic
dynamic -
  but i still don't understand why intelligence can
be artificial / faked... when man, if not intending to
  create an intelligence matrix outside of his own...
           will usually fake it, or create a superficial intelligence...
   this is the part where you get to play with
etymology, or at least apply etymology to better conceptualise
what some would call: a synonym-proximity barrier...
               which can be jargon to some,
   but in fact it represents "nuances" or nanometric differences
that is understood to imply: feverishness of
   the peacocking staging of vocab for rhetorical purposes...
if we only had a monochromatic utility for language:
people would be discouraged from talking fervently,
passionately, enthusiastically... rhetorically;
as suggested: is artificial intelligence
                                    superficial intelligence?
  or how to sharpen a distinction? or to what purpose
is making an illusion purposive, given that the already
   established technology is meant to be purposive,
as in replacing labour on the assembly line...
                     given that: it's never about faking it.

soon I found
where you wrote those words
on the back of your hand
soon I found
the black planet
where you reside
soon I found
a child’s sickness
and the comfort it takes
to make one whole
soon I found
that you went with him
with a Salisbury steak
and a name tag that read
husband
soon I found a hole
dug by a badger
I donned its claws with my fingers
I carved a toilet in the corner
I drew your face on the ceiling
soon I found
I was an animal
a boy
alone
soon I found
I was never to be conceived
I was never without legs and feet
I was never meant to
climb out of the black star
soon I found
I would be without you
forever

while i do love
the taste of unhealthy
t.v. dinners for every meal
and i do enjoy
the slobbery salisbury steaks,
extra salty ramen noodles
and those little tuna cans,
it's great to come home
after a long emotional
roller coaster week
and have abuela cook up
some arroz con garbanzos
and unas buenas chuletas,
get the latest family gossip,
comments on how
el gobernador is being
the biggest pendejo
in power at the moment,
watch the news,
see how many were killed this week,
and just shake our heads
as the island crumbles into Detroit like
madness (at least we've got great beaches),
ah but yes,
abuela's cooking,
what i need to forget
the girl with the pretty hair.

I have felt anger, of that I am sure
Though it came and went in gentle tides as if babbling brook
Ever-flowing through the currents of my mind eternally pure
Always a victim of the many rocks and stones thrown in jealousy and rage
Cast by those in awe of the tranquility they caught glimpse of in my honest gaze
Unreachable to their bound and broken hearts, the sight brought envy and despair
And rather seeking peace of their own, they sought only to disturb that which wasn’t theirs
Their bullets only brushed gently against the banks, never breaking upon the shore
And though they pained me as the surface was hit
As they lay to rest, the pain was no more
Always brief was the anger, as the stones sank below
Raising my waters higher, making my current more strong against their every blow

No, never have I been Angry, though Anger have I felt
But I feel the time is coming, after the injuries that Woman has dealt.

Once, upon the Salisbury plain,
the English Elms stood stately tall.
Sergent's paintings leave us memories
for there are now few left at all.

Perhaps when you were young you spent
Long summer days beneath their shade.
Then a fungus left them bare
and horticulturists were dismayed.

In Canada's far North remains
examples of the old Elm Trees
In Amsterdam they cultivate
Elms resistant to disease.

So in our children's children's time
I pray that we might live to see
once again on Salisbury plain
Elms such as live in memory.

Once again the
lights go out
like fought-out
children in
divorce.

Twice again the
lantern masks
it's ambiguity
in laughter
from a
solid source.

Thrice the country
rises round ye olde
England, Richards
ground. The author
contemplates a paint
roller moving on its
own like bullets
once the shooter's
made a drum-roll
cease.

got so drunk at their little, ahem, initiation ceremony: drank a bottle of whiskey when i heard we were going clubbing wearing lycra shorts... the man with the biggest bulge and the biggest stick... never understood male group psychology... or any group psychology for that matter... it isn't exactly a throng of noblemen following Henry VIII.*

i joined the lacrosse university team
for a bit,
left it when the time came to buy the
equipment - i didn't think getting
smacked by the defenders' longer sticks
was worth it, to be a striker with the shortest
stick - too physical - i thought i'd seek
some other physicality,
got stuck-up on rock climbing, and mountaineering
for a while, nothing serious,
a bit of easy bouldering on the edinbrugh crag,
the one lining the skyline at holyrood park,
the salisbury crag, just west of arthur's seat -
i'm not going to lie about clinging off the
matterhorn or something -
but i did an expedition with the mountaineering
club near Ben Nevis once...
Glen Coe / Coire nan Lochan...
and i figured, with all this talk of light pollution,
well, "pollution", to think that a bunch of
street lamps can blind away the stars of what
former poets spoke of: about the illumination
of the heavens for the blind eye to see...
we camped outside one bothy (basic shelter)
set off fireworks, drank whiskey, played music,
burnt a fire in the bothy...
but to be honest... i was not amused by this whole
theory of light pollution...
i looked up at the sky, and the number of stars
was no greater than the number seen in a bright
lit city... i know they say all those telescopes
amplify the chance of peering into the heavens
at night and see more stars...
but why cite light pollution, when, in a remote
highland hideout the number of stars didn't
increase in number... i've heard a girl from
australia cite that, in the outback she said
more stars could be seen... even without a telescope...
so the scottish highlands are unlike the australian
outback? is it just me... or is it simply *******,
this whole light pollution argument?
it was dark out there like in an **** after black coffee
and charcoal tablets.

Call me an alcoholic,
Druggie, ******. I am none of these things.
I have my fits and fiends of wanting **** and wine, but
I am fine.

Have you ever written letters you don’t send?

I don’t think it was really unfair of me, but there were certainly better ways. It might’ve been easier if I’d said no—a jab to alert you of the no-ness—but I wanted to say yes, even though I knew I would possibly say later “I can’t”.

I’ve liked you for a while. I denied it for some time. Even though we dated briefly and it seems like smoke now, it validated the summers we spent together. Even in 2011 I liked you; last year I did and was scared to; this year I let it happen. I couldn’t control it. I saw you and wanted you, I had to; I had you. You were more than summer ******* and we both know it. It was hard to say and acknowledge though, because summer things come up. You’re not like other “lifeguards” I “******” though, and I know I’m not just another lifeguard you ****** either. We’re friends. We were something.

I’m sorry I left suddenly, rashly and didn’t talk to you for a week.. but I know you’re not emotionally weak and you dealt with it even if it confused or surprised you. It was a defense mechanism on my part. I wouldn’t have known how to approach you or maintain a long distance relationship, especially since I’m living with Rachel.. of course you could’ve visited, but it would’ve been uncomfortable once you left and we both know that. This situation has already been mapped out and I think we both knew the outcome of this fall. We’re friends however, well, I actually value you as one, and I would like to see you and hang out. Maybe I’ll hit you up when I’m back in the area—if you want to see me, that it—and as I said, if you’re in Annapolis and want to go out some weekend that’s possible. I wouldn’t even have to stay with you if it were too much; I could hang out with Katie. But either way would be fun, I think.

So I didn’t want a relationship. Yet here I am, trying to communicate and write you… yesterday was weird. I realized an entire week had passed since I left you and didn’t say anything. I wanted to write you. I texted you to make sure it was okay. Maybe you thought it was a bit ****** up or maybe you weren’t phased, but either way I’m sorry I left like that. I didn’t know how else to leave.

Please know, however, that I wanted to be your girlfriend, even if it was just for a little bit of time. I used to think dating you wasn’t even something to consider because neither of us seemed to be interested in a relationship and we are the type of people who don’t usually get attached. I have problems with that. And right now I’m in an awkward situation here because I told Rachel I don’t want to have *** with anyone right now—which I don’t (Salisbury is STD and I’m clean, plus I’m kind of emotionally drained and even though *** is physically fun it brings a lot of baggage.. not that I’m attracted to anyone here anyways but this fall is about ME and getting awesome grades/working on grad application stuff/trying not to lose it)—and she is included in that.

I did have *** with her when I came here though… I guess it was “I missed you,” ***, or “I don’t want to feel with emotions regarding Drew so I’m going to ******* as a distraction” ***, or maybe even “I wonder if we can just have *** as friends without any relationship ties,” ***.. which can’t happen either. She likes me still, or loves me, or whatever. I don’t know how because I’ve been so emotionally distant but I guess she misinterpreted me being nice/being down for *** for still caring about her that way. Between finishing my class, worrying about working and being around her (just her for now, the other roomies should be here next week) I’ve pushed down thinking about you because it was hard to. I remember last year and how it was then, too. Things don’t seem to change much.

Rachel asked about you. I told her honestly. I told her that I couldn’t attach to her the same and that I liked you and I’m sorry I hurt her this summer, but last year she got a boyfriend and I had you.. then I left and she still had him and I wasn’t sure how you felt, but I met Ben and when I realized it wasn’t the way I perceived it to be in my head she was there when I was alone and vulnerable. It took her a long time to admit she liked girls but I’m over it with her, honestly, even though I find her sexually attractive.

When I talked about you, however, she said she would get whatever needed to satisfy all aspects of my bisexuality.. but I told her there was a difference in the way it feels to be with a man, and I thought of you—your warmth, strength and ability to excite me with such passionate heterosexual compulsion.

My mind is so ****** right now. Both of you are part of my past and present although it’s different. I’m not going to sleep with Rachel, and I’m not around to sleep with you (not that you would anyways—although I’m not sure you wouldn’t if the moment was right) so I’m not going to sleep with anyone. *** isn’t always just *** and I am in a situation now where I’m being influenced by feelings and ****** ties and I don’t want any with her. I think about you, though, and it’s easier because I’m not around you but it wasn’t very long ago that I was. I guess I took it for granted. It’s really over now since I’m not coming back to PMSI, but it at least made me happy that I could validate the way I felt towards you. The last boyfriend I had was three years ago, and, besides Rachel, I haven’t been in a relationship. It’s hard for me to like people sometimes, and I don’t know if I can like anyone fully.. that’s why I didn’t want to try with you, really. I didn’t want to lead you on or give you expectations of how our long-distance relationship could’ve been, but I want you to know that I still like you and will have to eventually get over you, but I am going to let time do that instead of distracting myself with other people—that’s what I used to do.

You told me once I was a void you were trying to fill.. I don’t want to be that. I want to be a piece that something can be built on; I want to be an experience on which you can reflect fondly and acknowledge that, although brief and often unclear, was real. You influenced me, shaped me and changed me, for the better, I think. I think we’ll always be cool and I’d like to keep in touch and see you.. but I understand that things may not be as casual regarding the way we act towards one another.

Otherwise, things are okay. I’ll have two jobs this fall, five classes and hopefully a bit of time for chill activity to maintain my sanity but I don’t want to be with anyone here. There’s no way I could. Rachel asked about us.. I told her I didn’t want to talk about it with her. I don’t. I hope she moves on but she’s in her room currently hanging out and I’m doing the same. It’s nice to have time alone to think. I can’t help but feel bad for her.. but feeling bad makes me accessible to her—which I need to stop.

"This is a song..."
"This is uhh, This is a new song..."
"It's through the eyes of one of the greatest people alive, I feel..."
"The Lunchlady"
[Laughing]

Woke up in the morning
Put on my new plastic glove
Served some reheated salisbury steak
With a little slice of love
Got no clue what the chicken *** pie is made of
Just know everything's doing fine
Down here in Lunchlady Land

Well I wear this net on my head
'Cause my red hair is fallin' out
I wear these brown orthopedic shoes
'Cause I got a bad case of the gout
I know you want seconds on the corndogs
But there's no reason to shout
Everybody gets enough food
Down here in Lunchlady Land

Well yesterday's meatloaf is today's sloppy joes
And my breath reeks of tuna
And there's lots of black hairs coming out of my nose
In Lunchlady Land your dreams come true
Clouds made of carrots and peas
Mountains built of shepherds pie
And rivers made of macaroni and cheese
But don't forget to return your trays
And try to ignore my gum disease
No student can escape the magic of Lunchlady Land

Hoagies & grinders, hoagies & grinders
Hoagies & grinders, hoagies & grinders
Navy beans, navy beans, navy beans
Hoagies & grinders, hoagies & grinders
Navy beans, navy beans
Meatloaf sandwich
sloppy joe, slop, sloppy joe
sloppy joe, slop, sloppy joe
sloppy joe, slop, sloppy joe
sloppy joe, slop, sloppy joe

Well I dreamt one morning
That I woke up to see
All the pepperoni pizza
Was a-looking at me
It screamed, why do you burn me
And serve me up cold
I said I got the spatula
Just do what you're told
Then the liver & onions
Started joining the fight
And the chocolate pudding
Pushed me with all its might
And the chop suey slapped me
And it kicked me in the head
It's called revenge Lunchlady
Said the garlic bread
I said what did I do
To make you all so mad
They said you got flabby arms
And your breath is bad
Then the green beans said
You better run and hide
But then my friend sloppy joe came
And joined my side
He said if it wasn't for the Lunchlady
The kids wouldn't eatcha
You should be shakin' her hand
And sayin' please to meet ya
She gives you a purpose
And she gives you a goal
You should be kissin' her feet
And kissin' her mole
Now all the angry foods
Just leave me alone
And we all live together
In a happy home

Thanks to
sloppy joe, slop, sloppy joe
sloppy joe, slop, sloppy joe
sloppy joe, slop, sloppy joe
sloppy joe, slop, sloppy joe

[Spoken]
Well me & sloppy joe got married
We got six kids and we're doing' just fine
Down in Lunchlady Land

Stranger in a strange land
Roaming the halls.
Lost between the feet of giants.
Outnumbered. Outmatched.

The lunchroom.
Already?
Where to sit? Who to talk to?
Salisbury steak. Yes.
Always analyzing.

Sitting with seniors.
How’d that happen?
Their excitement is my fear.
A friend. Finally.
Becky.

Yellow vehicle of safety.
Home.
I made it.
Only 719 more days to go.

I was born in Salisbury,
Salisbury,
I was born in Salisbury
And no one knows me there.

There’s no money in Spencer,
Spencer
There’s no money in Spencer
Everyone thinks that’s fair.

Granite Quarry is still there,
still there.
Granite Quarry is still there,
And so’s my fam’ly, too.

There’s strangers now in Charlotte,
Charlotte,
There’s strangers now in Charlotte
And they don’t even care.

Copyright © 2018 - Zane Safrit - All rights reserved.

MY OWN PRIVATE PRESIDENT TRUMP

Oh the lies lies and ****
statistics of you!

You tell a better lie
than I can tell the honest truth.

"I didn't say that...I never
said that!"

The Trump...the whole Trump and
nothing but the Trump.

So - help me God!

The outright lies of you
the half-truths...evasions...obfuscations

the lie so
see-through

the Russians have a word
for it - VRANYO.

That is to tell a lie that you do not
expect anyone to believe

the totally transparent
told purely to save face.

Although you do do - LOZH
the straightforward lie.

Or  MASKIROVKA
the "little masquerade."

The Salisbury Cathedral
Spire of you.

The fake news
of you.

Well listen Buddy
I can't spare a mind.

And I've just quit
this friendship.

belgravia on itv... and the world is filled with...
odes to charlemagne -
or rather: the emperor has risen...
in the form of a bonaparte...

       i lost my virginity to a french girl
from Grenoble - a one ms. psychologist
Isa-bel-l'ah...

              and i had three pictures hanging
in my student accomodation overlooking
the salisbury crags...
           one i put my amp on the windowsill
and did a rendition of...
                            something from the movie
crow / last days...

there was plato... there was the marquis de sade...
and then there was napoleon...

i was immediately reminded...
but napoleon did x y and z...
       i could swear the zeitgeist for us begins
with the end of the 2nd world war?
well: i lost my virginity... didn't i?
          
             and come to think of...
there is the trafalgar sq. in London...
      and there's the monument when it came
to Austerlitz victory...

           napoleon and that old bias...
for all those that encompassed in the duchy of warsaw...
or from under the partition
shared between the prussian the russian
and the austro-hungarian empire...

a short-lived affair... but...
        she minded napoleon but not marquis de sade...
come forward 200 years...
what are the monuments of the 2nd world war?
what are the... ******* monuments of the 1st world
war?
the cemeteries at Ypres for western europe...
the death camp memorials
   and the little ghetto lockets of memory and:
gypsy good fortune in the east?

a picture of the mushroom eating
and clinging onto the flesh of men and animals
in a symbiosis and mind-control dynamics
of the fungus keeping the host alive...
unlike a virus?

   where are the monuments for all that was
achieved in the two wars?
where's the trafalgar sq. where's the arc de triomphe?
between 1803–1815
   or between 1939–1945... well...
              12 years is not 6...
                  i guess you can't achieve much of any
sort of "meaningful" war if...
there's not a decade included in the mix...

oh i'm sure it's going to be hard to imagine
the führer as the kaiser...
     because: dressed in khaki like a whittle
hanzel schoolboy when all the big boys
started to wear schwarzgekleidet of zee SS...

from a perspective of history...
                             i am unsure as to why...
this ms. psychology major would grieve
the affairs of napoleon...
                             perhaps if he was a bit taller...
she might have a fancy for him...
then again... as kaiser... as emperor...
come to think of it...
the notation: Frank would included
the swiss... the belgians the dutch...
luxembourg...
       but not those rascals...
in the rhineland-palatinate...
            or north-rhine-westphalia...

schubert symphony no. 4 in c-minor, D. 417...
i always thought that schubert...
was the pianist competing with violins
to tackle shumann... never mind...

     then again: illuminating life of those
that still have a toe in the remaining posit
of life... yet 3/4 of what life is willing to offer
has both feet in the coffin and a last nail
to beg for the closure and funeral procession
of that chapter of human details
to be: ascribed to the realms of solely learning...
about it... there's no great-grandma with
her wheelbarrow of memories to grant
you "perspectives"...

he was a führer... but not the kaiser...
come to think of it...
the rise and fall... from the confines of being
rejected from an art-college...

today one of my cats (i only have two)
accidently burned the hairs of her tail
when she signatured it (the tail) across
a burning candle... and... you wouldn't believe it...
the smell of burnt cat furr...
i can imagine escaping my episodes of
solipsism when venturing into sniffing
someone else's farts to be more appealing...
than the smell of... the burning of cat furr...

i did remark... i don't think it was all that
pleasant working as butchers in those concentration
camps... if the burning of cat furr smells so bad...
if the burning of skin, nails...
bones... i'm starting to think it was a hell-hole
for both the camp "workers" and....
those about to be forced on the altar
of the belly of Moloch...

                          and when the hebrew god
conquered the gods of the philistines
and the caanites...
      did he "fall asleep"...
    thinking they wouldn't somehow use
people that wouldn't otherwise pay direct
homage to them... for their devilish enterprises?

where are the monumets from world
war I or world II that aren't cemeteries
or memorials or the death camps themselves?
there's not point merely seeing...
imagine going to Handel's messiah
at the royal albert hall...
           and only seeing an orchestra play...
most associated with seeing are:
the quality of either inanimate objects
or moving objects...
but there isn't a mention of the sounds locked
in brimfuls in these things...
but most importantly... i can't smell that
death circus...
well... no matter... i don't need to visit those
death camps and pay some spezial ode to
memory: it will just take a cat accidently burn
its tail furr brushing it over a candle...
that's enough... thank you...

           i don't need to see those camps...
not out of denial outright...
but... without the scent of burning hair
and flesh... the infamous cracow's winter
snow of cremations...

but the smell is missing...
i don't need to visit these places
for a picture of unused hammers and nails...
in their pristine gothica of still slippery when
kept in a mummified state of being
oiled for use... i don't like to rumminate in
echoes of: what this oven was used for...
the scent has subsided like a tide
and all that's exposed is never the living
proof... i have archeological proof...
that it is so sudden... doesn't matter...
i don't have the "perfume" to riddle me
with an immediacy of a recoil!
for that? i just need a cat to accidently burn
a few hairs of its tail over a candle...

it's one of those needle injections straight
into the nostrils...
seeing the oven will do very little to give
an expanse of my: sisyphean weight to tow
along...

faster than the speed of light:
or the digestion imprint of a photograph...
faster than the speed of sound...

    ssssssssssssssssssssscent...
          i don't need to see what other people decided
to want and see...
the burning of flesh and most notably unwashed
hair and furr...
       that's plenty...
i don't want to discourage myself from
cooking anything else in the future...

sometimes my room becomes a hotel for
either moths or flies...
i currently have an early waker...
she must be nearing being a year old...
you can tell... her flight is more methodological...
it isn't that usual flurry and all
that excited presence of itself: unique
in a bounty of life...
i will not bother this fly...
        if she was a mosquito... perhaps i would...

i am longing to see the spawn "maggots"
of moths eat and curl up in cotton...

where are the monuments to call it:
the end of world war I and world war II...
it's as if... it has to be shamed...
this whole genesis story from half-way
between the past century...
and into this... swamp-en-masse...

          last time i checked... that "something"
between the serbians and the croats
and the muslims of yugoslavia...
                    the 13th waffen mountain division...
or head east... the ukranian infamous
insurgent army...
        only recently i heard some major
****-wits decided to drill holes into the tires
of ambulances... near bristol...

as a perfectly just cold blooded heart...
is the crucifixion the epitome of a demigod's death?
what about... being spiked?
being forced onto a pike via
the architecture of where the intestines
meet the coccyx... the *******...
the ****... and the pelvis?
with hands tied?
what about hanging off a meat-hook...
with the meat-hook making the incission under the jaw?
hands and legs tied?

the crucifixion is just an out-dated symbol
of sacrifice... no wonder all that came after
had to become so... more... adventurous...
wouldn't we be foolish when it came to slacking
on the chapter of torture?

but at least one aspect of life can be still felt
to be pure, "aryan"... un-disturbed...
pain... is so un-interrupted by competing
subjectivities... that... well...
it's almost akin to cross paths with god...
pain is pure in that it is true...
forever: there's that other great democratic force
at work than mere death...
by the time we're through death is but
a bureucratic notation of a statistic:
a near miss of anonymity...

                there's that great leveller of pain...
from a simple toothache...
it's as if an ****** that comes on the wings of
being... a sedative of consciousness...
pain as that...
   pain is an inoculate agent against reality...
against consciousness...
all for that ****** of dreams...
lucky for me... i don't dream so well...
i forrest gump the whole affair...

some would think pain as a defining moment
an event horizon for their numb-skulled
crossword puzzle zeniths of "life"...
     i see pain more in favour of...
      i want to be cured from having to curate
so many mediocrities of this life:
as served and as service for others...
so dilligent at being busy-bodies in the shelter
of hierarchies and the shadows of:
the impossible perfection of mountain
replicas of Giza...

pain is illumination...
    beginning with a toothache...
once this temp. filling is ready to be scrubbed out...
and a root canal is to be fitted...
i think i'll begin with an oyster-esque "typo"
readying myself for an ******
when asked 'would you like an anaesthetic'
and the reply will be... 'no'...
                 clearly i don't have as many
avenues as are readily available
when it comes to a holy trinity of mouth,
******... *******...

      self-serving pleasures of the extensions
of pinching... by either crap pincers
or the cold of virus simulation of crowns
when having an ice-cube placed into my palm...

in that i am wholly sympathetic to pain...
well... what good did reading walter benjamin's
illumination(s) essay do to me...
beside what i already know about...
the difference between collecting books...
and collecting books and reading them...

              my personal library would shrink somewhat...
given that i own pretty much an assortment
of what has already been read:
i'm not my grandmother:
unlike watching a film... i can't re-read a book...
give me 2 years reading one...
but i will not re-read it!

this extension of a mollusk's zenith via
a ******... of all that's the sensation that rhymes
heart with brain...

         tow the bones...
       tow the bones...
                   come to the horizon where
the soft tissue blitzkriegs past the bone to the marrow...

arable lure of the prosthetic ghost, limb...
and limp...
       soft zenith pleasure...
while at the same time...
entertaining "things" that only secular
sensibility measures can instill...
do not cross paths with mythology:
goodness! you might forget being
snarky and insensible come tomorrow's year
monday when journalism catches
up from... "somehow" being detached
from her de facto and carpe diem
mantras of modus operandi!

i might call it: the moth's seal of the lips...
enough to lick a postage stamp...
hardly enough to actually kiss...

sold: christianity: metaphorical cannibalism...
i would rather taste the real thing...
if ever such an opportunity should
give sway...

       a führer is not a kaiser... back in the day...
there was respect in post-napoleonic war London...
in belgravia...
how did the h'american white house originate...
the Belveder of Warsaw...
vermin, peoples of the world: nibble...

                   i'm here to claim my future:
my anonymity... i'm here to scatter with the dues
of the frail... waiting for no clarity of
locked: stature worded in baron...
no stature worded in kaiser... führer...
      i am on the sole minding of... the gnostics...
the heretics...

i want to burn blue when all other dogmatic
breaths burn yellow...
           that i drink is of no solace...
bribe the reader! inner vacuum otherwise
a handshake with my shadow... by candlelight...
which is a bribe for an audience of death:
that personification on a theme of romance...
thanatos... chilling the spine...
and the serpentine...

                    i want to see the gallows...
and allure of seeing ***** and rot come oozing
from their baptised fleshy bits...
i want to be curator of the last abolished screech
of existence... i wand to hush them...
by sharpening a knife...
i want to find the idle fork...
i want to find the crown of ferns...
and kick and stab... the house of already dead
roman emperors... sitting... nay...
loitering... the anger of pride on their
laurels...

             napoleon... even with a name like that...
you can stomach the usual: steak becoming
a lump of minced beef...
but when it's ****** or stalin...
czopek or elert...
                    you'd wish for a horsehoof
to be dubbed: smith...
                     -smithy...
or some other... lucky you: frauman...
                      fregel...            made it up as
we went along...

yep... yep... i get it... drinks a whiskey...
****** out a lemonade...
and for whatever "genius": genius...
that third tier of being... not spawned by the gods...
but by man... in between angels and demons...
the geniuses...
that autistic master-class of...
****'s itching kinda eerie!

   i'm drunk: most of the people are sober...
i'm not going to have to
give an apologetics lecture on the sober
sods... am i?
romance period... a bit like being
a modern brit and all that wham!
sputnik dazzle of the: grit brighton!

jokes aside... the winged hussar...
                   also mongol...
******* that clad themselves in dog ****
to imitate... what would later become...
the 365 harem of an alexander...
          
   would it be any good reading
the greeks?
     can you really want to "catch-up" on so
much... when in fact you should be
reading the people who have re(a)d...
the ancient greeks?

here's me taking heidegger's advice...
spend 12 years reading aristotle...
          martin... oi oi... that leaves
me doing more work than the already
work required in pretending to be catholic...
and doing a spin-off sunday...
how about me just reads up on yous...
how's that?
2 years worth of you... is about...
       whatever it took you to "master"
aristoteles: ah-chew: chow-mein sucker...

     life is or at least has become or will
become... too impertinent...
  then again... lassitudes of being kept
in the confines of one's own allowances...
i can't expect... in the same way...
i can't become expectent...
it's a two-way-swoe-order in the guise
of a phoenix... (missing phenotypes)...

             the best held advent of:
if you weren't a part of pappa's genocide of
a clarifying sputnik's *****-out
into frog's dream-alike all mammalian
when you're already on your way out
with the moloch altar sacrifice of
no foetus would be born...

call it a... champagne bottle uncorking
ritual when it comes to...
and all that other drifting ritual
of "entropy" whenever a sobering / ***
note would awake a hannibal lecturer
for and what more...
that was necessary...

           stipends of: gotcha...
eagles - witchy woman...
ol' cliff does a little number:
like no intro for a jazz megahit
quintet when the bass comes along...
devil woman...
or the totally camp...
  dale winton...
because turning totally gay only
arrived in full bloom and daffodils
in the trenches...
when true gay arrived...
well... any other hole to fill...

              this hole's better than
any ****** eye's...
who's that backdoor man of
assorted gifts, to begin with?

          rhyme rhymes rhyme rhymes...
easily to make a happy than no
alcoholic into a: no thank you...
  
                                   discretely...
suburban... those desperado... casa-esposa...
the pride of the son: a mother...
that's usually enforced...

las orgullo de hijo: una madre...
           bad spanish... bad german...
mongrel of the either and some anglican
and some ****** catholic...

                                        if there was still something
of a worthwhile partition of time...
****** was never going to become
the next napoleon...
even though... invading russia was
a plagiarism... and the retrdo-event of all
that waste of time... 200 years
and the waste of time with the air onslought
for the battle of britain...
the u-boats...

     no mention of waiting a while...
     in that "what if" universe of revising...
one two three four... with:
einz zwei drei vier...

or... the eager panzermensch...
and that tunnel under the sea...
         it can be noted that a 100 year war
did exist... between the english and the french...

if the napoleonic wars have the monuments...
for what sort of reasons were
the 20th century "ende von alles kriege ende"...
******* proxies of the yugoslav conflict...
vietnam...
        
the monuments of the greatest wars of man...
monumets? cemeteries... or the death camps...
was this the turning point where...
death by war was to be... lessened by
omittance: "keep calm and carry on" *******?
the celebrated en masse of one single
male *******?

how isn't citing german...
an exfoliation from speaking mere peasant
english?
der zunge ist berufung die gegenwart:
ein vater: ein vaterzunge!

scheisse und höllegrube mit es!
                der "vaterland": fathers of daughters
of would be mothers... mothers of sons
of would be fathers... motherland... fatherland...
mothertongue... a ******* great big itch
of grammatical concerns! blah!

where are these monuments akin to trafalgar sq.?!
what's to be so... gloated... about defeating the nazis?
where is the gloat in mere words...
but sorely missed when it comes to sacrificing
bone and marrow and muscle
to focus on making escapades of marble?!
where... are... these... monuments?!

      my own shadow overshadows the testimonies
of... two... very... minor... wars...
perhaps world war I had covered one or two
hurt prides... hurt egos...
but... after all... a khaki attired boyscout...
when all the bad boys
were later... morphed by hugo boss
into schwarzgekleidet steinherzimmobilien...

ein führer ist nein (ein) kaiser...
not like the title napoleon acquired...
napoleon was cited as: emperor...
        a reicarnation of charlemagne...
   too bad for whoever barbarossa was...
  rutger hauer?! yes... but rutger was, dutch...
for ****'s sake!

napoleon was crowned emperor
in a church...
****** walked into an opera house...
heard some wagner...
some wagner not in that anemic proposal
of the walhall from das rheingold
via michele campanella...

              all that becomes the litany...
prior to the peeling to the basic grammar...
and then an attack on pronouns...
as if all languages had...
gender-neutral nouns of the anglican-sphere
of "talk"...

strip me down the the Diogenes' basics of
sodden cloth and dogs' **** to attire...
perhaps i'll show you Cleopatra smile...
or Mona Lisa frown...
             whatever might be the eventuality...
this is not it; nor could it ever be... "it";
the "it" of what you seek.

in the tauntingly quiet
florescent hospital hum
waiting for a hospice bed
people floated in and out
along with the scents of disinfectant and Salisbury steak
all spoke, in muted tones, words moving
through the liquid silver air of the night
they would squeeze your hand, gently
maybe casting a glance my way
before they walked into the dead vinyl tile halls
to the white squeaking sounds of faceless nurses’ shoes
where the obligated visitors would
breathe a proverbial sigh of relief
for they did not want to be there
at the moment
at the horizon between the slits in your eyes
imagining the ones behind the walls
and across the hills you would never again see
I would be there,
recalling horizons we had seen together
perhaps with you in my arms
before words built walls between us
and years were soaked up like desert rain
after seasons of doubt and drought
I wondered if you would ask me again
or if I would say yes this time
and if that would be enough
to release you
surely, I gave you life
another father and I both did, I suppose
could I take it as well
if you asked me again,
to increase the drowsing drip
of modern Morpheus’ elixir?

The boys ran
After the ball exploded
The bedroom window.
Shattered glass shards
In indiscriminate flight.

The ants re-grouped
To build after
The red-cherry erupted
The hill like Pompei,
Scattering serendipitously.

Grimmacing quarter moon
Pumpkins lay in hodge-podge
Pieces on All Saints Day.

Suitcases, clothes and neckties
Stewn on a runway
Like a kid's bedroom.

We move from order to chaos,
Like the third light
On a match.

I was lead to believe
Displacement Laws,
Science, and regular
Bowels could explain
Explosions,
So we can lift the stones
On Salisbury and Newgrange,
Or re-arrange grains of sand
With projected order.
We only have a beginning
And an end, while living
Through the explosions.

I didn't choose to be son of a scared Jew
and angry Irishman

who never laid a hand on her, even when
she turned the butcher knife on him

when he tried to stop her from slashing
her red wrung wrists

this spectacle in plain view of 5 children for whom "woe is the world" was daily refrain

I recall Father's blood trail on the concrete between our house and the neighbor's, a surgeon not expecting a bleeding Sunday guest,

but my mother's madness didn't rest on the Christian Sabbath, nor on her own

after that, the shrinks did their magic: Mom did the Mellaril march, the Haldol hop, the Stellazine stomp, and the less alliterative Thorazine shuffle

none of those chemically induced dances did a thing to increase the chances for my mother's salvation

soon she was behind the locked doors of "Ward 30," where I visited and Mom told me she had found Jesus

a befuddled revelation since I didn't know she was looking for him--her kin had hung him from a cross and taken the heat ever since

the doctors released her to the street, where she made misty retreat to the hills of Saint Francisco's bay

though she found faint solace in Pacific waters, she would never again see her sons or daughters

half a lifetime later, I found a long lost cousin my mother agreed to see, though not with me, for I was too much a reminder of scars which never heal

she sat with Mother near the end of days, sharing silence, the scent of Salisbury steak, and a view of the distant shore

as my patient cousin rose to leave, my mother finally spoke of a sea she watched turn from cerulean to indigo dusk

childhood beaches my mother did recall: the castles she did craft, the crawling ***** she did follow, the sun bathed sand where she made her bed

far from the one where she now lay, the one in which she would go smoothly into the night, perchance returning to blue waters, where hot blood trails cannot follow

A walk in the streets of Harare,
Once the affectionate him of her,
No longer the beaving heaven,
I used to know,
The pothole infested streets,
And the dilapidated buildings,
Tell the story,
So do the people,
And the atmosphere,
Unfortunate crossfire victims,
Of circumstances,
Poverty is written all over,
Like advertisements on billboards,
Everybody looks like a street kid,
Men, women and children,
Shops are very empty,
Yet pockets are heavily loaded,
When you stand at a shop entrance for a short while,
People come to form a queue behind you,
For anything you need,
The magic process is queuing,
Is this the hand of enemies of freedom,
Apostles of oppression,
Through out the lengths and breadths of Salisbury,
In homes, garages,  Hospitals, at funerals,
Queues are the order of the day,
Harare lived,
And Harare led,
One time humble midwife,
For the restoration of your people’s peace,
An important part of their mortal bodies,
You are now a dry season for everybody,
What has now gone wrong Harare,
Who is responsible,
You decided to become nothing,
And you have become the best nothing,
Who is responsible Harare,
Shame on you.

the guy sits
by        the window       as a car  drives by   and the rain pours gently
on the  street.

he says

'' I'm tired of waiting here'

and then promptly
pats his own shoulder.

the light  dimly  blinks  ,  and fly buzzes in the corner;
mildew collects under the sink faucet,
then in
walks the  nurse.


''I HAVE YOUR PILLS ready MR. DOVER''

''why thank you m'lady''.

mr.dover swallows the pills,
black and shiny.


''ahhhhh  thank you m'lady,  just what I needed''.

The nurses' face remains pulled tight and she nods and walks back out into the lobby where she then interacts with another patient
morbidly obese and frothing,
then the door closes and mr. dover is alone.


''hmmmm,,  what shall I do now?''

Mr. dover looks around and notices a magazine with a CUTE ******* the front. Asian, of about 14 years old, or maybe older; they all look young.

'''AHHHH yesss.''


He then tugs on his 12 inch ***** for some time,

and itches his *****.   the light flickers dimly as usual,
and truck passes by.   A scream is heard in the distance,  and mr.dover times his ******* accordingly;

then without warning,
the nurse reappaears.


''MR. DOVER. I HAVE SALISBURY STEAK FOR YOU?  WITH GRAVY I PRESUME?''

'uhhh yes mam,  yes mam'

She drops the steak directly on his crotch and pours the hot gravy on his belly where it pools into his naval.

''My god! woman! directly into my naval?!! why that hurts!!! OWWWW!!''

''I'M SORRY MR. DOVER.  I APOLOGIZE! I APOLOGIZE!''

the nurse then pulls out a luger
from her back pocket and loads it with a round.  Mr.dover and the nurse maintain eye-contact for about 20 seconds
, before she pulls the trigger and her brain matter is projected onto a market board behind her.

She falls to the floor and a blood pool forms and she convulses violently before all movement ceases within a manner of seconds.


mr.dover, with his gaze fixed at the body is unperturbed,
and calmly spoons a bit of salisbursy steak into his mouth.

He collects some of the gravy and mixes it with the steak and eats it some more.

After he is done, he washes his plate and pats the nurse on the shoulder.

''you had such lovely eyes,
too bad you settled for this ****.   But it was all you could do?''

The door opens,
  and Dover steps out,
then eventually finds himself in the parking garage.  He gets in his green Toyota
and drives off whilst loudly belching from the Salisbury
steak and gravy as the
rain patters     on the   window.

He looks at me, with eyes bluer than the waves frothing over our heads.
He smiles at me, more radiant than the sun that shines down on us.
He holds me, tighter than the wind the encases our bodies as we walk along the shore.

I fall asleep to the sound of crashing waves and a clear steady heartbeat.
I fall asleep to the smell of brine and sunscreen slathered skin.
I fall asleep to the overwhelming feeling of happy.

Sycophants and Salisbury!
What does the basket in your heart hold?
Doris Dearess,
The where has gone
And sold away the wind.
Now my little hairs
Stand cold,
And I feel older than old.

If we are mark’d to die, we are enow
    To do our country loss; and if to live
    The fewer men, the greater share of honour.
    God’s will! I pray thee, wish not one man more.

    By Jove, I am not covetous for gold,
    Nor care I who doth feed upon my cost;
    It yearns me not if men my garments wear;
    Such outward things dwell not in my desires:

    But if it be a sin to covet honour,
    I am the most offending soul alive.
    No, faith, my coz, wish not a man from England:
    God’s peace! I would not lose so great an honour

    As one man more, methinks, would share from me
    For the best hope I have. O, do not wish one more!
    Rather proclaim it, Westmoreland, through my host,
    That he which hath no stomach to this fight,

    Let him depart; his passport shall be made
    And crowns for convoy put into his purse:
    We would not die in that man’s company
    That fears his fellowship to die with us.

    This day is call’d the feast of Crispian:
    He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
    Will stand a tip-toe when this day is named,
    And rouse him at the name of Crispian.

    He that shall live this day, and see old age,
    Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbors,
    And say ‘Tomorrow is Saint Crispian:’
    Then he will strip his sleeve and show his scars,

    And say ‘These wounds I had on Crispin’s day.’
    Old men forget: yet all shall be forgot,
    But he’ll remember with advantages
    What feats he did that day: then shall our names

    Familiar in his mouth as household words:
    Harry the king, Bedford and Exeter,
    Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester,
    Be in their flowing cups freshly remember’d,

    This story shall the good man teach his son;
    And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,
    From this day to the ending of the world,
    But we in it shall be remembered;

    We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
    For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
    Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
    This day shall gentle his condition:

    And gentlemen in England now abed
    Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
    And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
    That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.