Flicker Shimmer Glow

The brightest star can shine even with thick black velvet draped over it.  
Quartz, lime and salt crystals formed a glass ball.
The dark womb held me, warm and soft.  
My mom called my cries when I was born the most sorrowful sound she had ever heard.  
She said she’d never heard a baby make a sound like that.    
I’d open my eyes in low light until the world’s light healed rather than hurt.  
The summer before eighth grade, July 1992,
I watched a shooting star burn by at 100,000 miles per hour as I stood on the balcony  
while my family celebrated my birthday inside.  
It made it into the earth’s atmosphere
but it didn’t look like it was coming down;
I know it didn’t hit the ground but it burned something in the time it was here.  
The glass ball of my life cracked inside.  
Light reflected off the salt crystal cracks.  
I saw the beauty of the light within.  
Nacre from my shell kept those cracks from getting worse,
a wild pearl as defense mechanism.  
In 2001, I quit my job after they melted and poured tar all over my life.  
All summer literature class bathtubs filled with rose hip oil cleaned the tar.  
That fall logic and epistemology classes spewed black ink all over my philosophy
written over ten years then.  
Tar turned to asphalt when I met someone from my old job for a drink in November
and it paved a road for my life that went to the hospital I was in that December
where it sealed the roof on my life
when I was almost murdered there
and in February after meeting her for another drink.  
They lit a fire at the top of the glacier and pushed the burning pile of black coal off the edge,
burnt red, looking like flames falling into the valley.  
While that blazed the side of the cliff something lit an incandescent light.  
The electricity from the metal lightbulb ***** went through wires and heated the filament between until it glowed.  
I began putting more work into emotional balance from things I learned at AA meetings.  
In Spring 2003, the damage that the doctors at the hospital in 2001 had done
made it harder for light to reflect from the cracks in the glass ball.
I’d been eating healthy and trying to get regular exercises since 1994
but in Spring 2003 I began swimming for an hour every morning .  
The water washed the pollution from the burning coals off
And then I escaped in July.  
I moved to London to study English Language and Linguistics.  
I would’ve studied English Language and Literature.  
I did well until Spring 2004 when I thought I was being stalked.  
I thought I was manic.  
I thought I was being stalked.  
I went home and didn’t go back for my exams after spring holiday.  
Because I felt traumatized and couldn’t write poetry anymore,
I used black ink to write my notes for my book on trauma and the Russian Revolution.
I started teaching myself German.  
I stayed healthy.  
In 2005, my parents went to visit my mom’s family in Malaysia for two weeks.
I thought I was being stalked.  
I knew I wasn’t manic.  
I thought I was being stalked.  
I told my parents when they came home.  
They thought I was manic.  
I showed them the shoe prints in the snow of different sizes from the woods to the windows.  
They thought I was manic.  
I was outside of my comfort zone.  
I moved to California. I found light.  
I made light,
the light reflected off the salt crystals I used to heal the violence inflicted on me from then on.  
The light turned the traffic lights to not just green from red
but amber and blue.  
The light turned the car signals left and right.  
The light reflected off of salt crystals, light emitting diodes,
electrical energy turned directly to light,
electroluminescence.  
The electrical currents flowed through,
illuminating.  
Alone in the world, I moved to California in July 2005
but in August  I called the person I escaped in 2003,
the sulfur and nitrogen that I hated.  
He didn’t think I was manic but I never said anything.
I never told him why I asked him to move out to California.  
When his coal seemed like only pollution,
I asked him to leave.  
He threatened me.  
I called the authorities.  
They left me there.
He laughed.  
Then the violence came.  
****:  stabbed and punched, my ****** bruised, purple and swollen.  
The light barely reflected from the glass ball wIth cracks through all the acid rain, smoke and haze.
It would take me half an hour to get my body to do what my mind told it to after.  
My dad told me my mom had her cancer removed.
The next day, the coal said if I wanted him to leave he’d leave.  
I booked his ticket.
I drove him to the airport.  
Black clouds gushed the night before for the first time in months,
the sky clear after the rain.  
He was gone and I was free,
melted glass, heated up and poured—
looked like fire,
looked like the Snow Moon in February
with Mercury in the morning sky.  
I worked through ****.  
I worked to overcome trauma.  
Electricity between touch and love caused acid rain, smoke, haze, and mercury
to light the discharge lamps, streetlights and parking lot lights.
Then I changed the direction of the light waves.  
Like lead glass breaks up the light,
lead from the coal, cleaned and replaced by potassium,
glass cut clearly, refracting the light,
electrolytes,
electrical signals lit through my body,
thick black velvet drapes gone.  





















Lava

I think that someone wrote into some palm leaf a manuscript, a gift, a contract.  
After my parents wedding, while they were still in India,
they found out that my dad’s father and my mom’s grandfather worked for kings administering temples and collecting money for their king from the farmers that worked the rice paddies each king owned.  They both left their homes before they left for college.  
My dad, a son of a brahmin’s son,
grew up in his grandmother’s house.  
His mother was not a Brahmin.  
My mother grew up in Malaysia where she saw the children from the rubber plantation
when she walked to school.  
She doesn’t say what caste she is.  
He went to his father’s house, then college.  
He worked, then went to England, then Canada.  
She went to India then Canada.  
They moved to the United States around Christmas 1978
with my brother while she was pregnant with me.  
My father signed a contract with my mother.  
My parents took ashes and formed rock,
the residue left in brass pots in India,
the rocks, so hot, they turned back to lava miles away before turning back to ash again,
then back to rock,
the lava from a super volcano,
the ash purple and red.  


















Circles on a Moss Covered Volcano

The eruption beatifies the magma.  
It becomes obsidian,
only breaks with a fracture,
smooth circles where it breaks.  

My mom was born on the grass
on a lawn
in a moss covered canyon at the top of a volcanic island.  
My grandfather lived in Malaysia before the Japanese occupied.  
When the volcano erupted,
the lava dried at the ocean into black sand.  
The British allied with the Communist Party of Malaysia—
after they organized.  
After the Americans defeated the Japanese at Pearl Harbor,
the British took over Malaysia again.  
They kept different groups apart claiming they were helping them.  
The black sand had smooth pebbles and sharp rocks.  
Ethnic Malay farmers lived in Kampongs, villages.  
Indians lived on plantations.  
The Chinese lived in towns and urban areas.  
Ethnic Malays wanted independence.
In 1946, after strikes, demonstrations, and boycotts
the British agreed to work with them.  
The predominantly Chinese Communist Party of Malaysia went underground,
guerrilla warfare against the British,
claiming their fight was for independence.  
For the British, that emergency required vast powers
of arrest, detention without trial and deportation to defeat terrorism.  
The Emergency became less unpopular as the terrorism became worse.  
The British were the iron that brought oxygen through my mom’s body.  
She loved riding on her father’s motorcycle with him
by the plantations,
through the Kampongs
and to the city, half an hour away.  
The British left Malaysia independent in 1957
with Malaysian nationalists holding most state and federal government offices.  
As the black sand stretches towards the ocean,
it becomes big stones of dried lava, flat and smooth.  

My mom thought her father and her uncle were subservient to the British.  
She thought all things, all people were equal.  
When her father died when she was 16, 1965,
they moved to India,
my mother,
a foreigner in India, though she’s Indian.  
She loved rock and roll and mini skirts
and didn’t speak the local language.  
On the dried black lava,
it can be hard to know the molten lava flickers underneath there.  
Before the Korean War,
though Britain and the United States wanted
an aggressive resolution
condemning North Korea,
they were happy
that India supported a draft resolution
condemning North Korea
for breach of the peace.  
During the Korean War,
India, supported by Third World and other Commonwealth nations,
opposed United States’ proposals.
They were able to change the U.S. resolution
to include the proposals they wanted
and helped end the war.  
China wanted the respect of Third World nations
and saw the United States as imperialist.  
China thought India was a threat to the Third World
by taking aid from the United States and the Soviets.  
Pakistan could help with that and a seat at the United Nations.  
China wanted Taiwan’s seat at the UN.
My mother went to live with her uncle,
a communist negotiator for a corporation,
in India.  
A poet,
he threw parties and invited other artists, musicians and writers.  
I have the same brown hyperpigmentation at my joints that he had.  
During the day, only the steam from the hot lava can be seen.  
In 1965, Pakistani forces went into Jammu and Kashmir with China’s support.  
China threatened India after India sent its troops in.  
Then they threatened again before sending their troops to the Indian border.  
The United States stopped aid to Pakistan and India.
Pakistan agreed to the UN ceasefire agreement.  
Pakistan helped China get a seat at the UN
and tried to keep the west from escalating in Vietnam.  
The smoldering sound of the lava sizzles underneath the dried lava.  
When West Pakistan refused to allow East Pakistan independence,
violence between Bengalis and Biharis developed into upheaval.  
Bengalis moved to India
and India went into East Pakistan.  
Pakistan surrendered in December 1971.  
East Pakistan became independent Bangladesh

The warm light of the melted lava radiates underneath but burns.  
In 1974, India tested the Smiling Buddha,
a nuclear bomb.  
After Indira Gandhi’s conviction for election fraud in 1973,
Marxist Professor Narayan called for total revolution
and students protested all over India.  
With food shortages, inflation and regional disputes
like Sikh separatists training in Pakistan for an independent Punjab,
peasants and laborers joined the protests.  
Railway strikes stopped the economy.  
In 1975, Indira Gandhi, the Iron Lady,
declared an Emergency,
imprisoning political opponents, restricting freedoms and restricting the press,
claiming threats to national security
because the war with Pakistan had just ended.  
The federal government took over Kerala’s communist dominated government and others.  

My mom could’ve been a dandelion, but she’s more like thistle.  
She has the center that dries and flutters in the wind,
beautiful and silky,
spiny and prickly,
but still fluffy, downy,
A daisy.
They say thistle saved Scotland from the Norse.  
Magma from the volcano explodes
and the streams of magma fly into the air.  
In the late 60s,
the civil rights movement rose
against the state in Northern Ireland
for depriving Catholics
of influence and opportunity.
The Northern Irish police,
Protestant and unionist, anti-catholic,
responded violently to the protests and it got worse.  
In 1969, the British placed Arthur Young,
who had worked at the Federation of Malaya
at the time of their Emergency
at the head of the British military in Northern Ireland.
The British military took control over the police,
a counter insurgency rather than a police force,
crowd control, house searches, interrogation, and street patrols,
use of force against suspects and uncooperative citizens.  
Political crimes were tolerated by Protestants but not Catholics.  
The lava burns the rock off the edge of the volcano.  

On January 30, 1972, ****** Sunday,  
British Army policing killed 13 unarmed protesters
fighting for their rights over their neighborhood,
protesting the internment of suspected nationalists.
That led to protests across Ireland.  
When banana leaves are warmed,
oil from the banana leaves flavors the food.  
My dad flew from Canada to India in February 1972.  
On February 4, my dad met my mom.  
On February 11, 1972,
my dad married my mom.  
They went to Canada,
a quartz singing bowl and a wooden mallet wrapped in suede.  
The rock goes down with the lava, breaking through the rocks as it goes down.  
In March 1972, the British government took over
because they considered the Royal Ulster Police and the Ulster Special Constabulary
to be causing most of the violence.  
The lava blocks and reroutes streams,
melts snow and ice,
flooding.  
Days later, there’s still smoke, red.  
My mom could wear the clothes she liked
without being judged
with my dad in Canada.  
She didn’t like asking my dad for money.
My dad, the copper helping my mother use that iron,
wanted her to go to college and finish her bachelors degree.
She got a job.  
In 1976, the police took over again in Northern Ireland
but they were a paramilitary force—
armored SUVs, bullet proof jackets, combat ready
with the largest computerized surveillance system in the UK,
high powered weapons,
trained in counter insurgency.  
Many people were murdered by the police
and few were held accountable.  
Most of the murdered people were not involved in violence or crime.  
People were arrested under special emergency powers
for interrogation and intelligence gathering.  
People tried were tried in non-jury courts.  
My mom learned Malayalam in India
but didn’t speak well until living with my dad.  
She also learned to cook after getting married.  
Her mother sent her recipes; my dad cooked for her—
turmeric, cumin, coriander, cayenne and green chiles.  
Having lived in different countries,
my mom’s food was exposed to many cultures,
Chinese and French.
Ground rock, minerals and glass
covered the ground
from the ash plume.  
She liked working.  

A volcano erupted for 192 years,
an ice age,
disordered ices, deformed under pressure
and ordered ice crystals, brittle in the ice core records.  
My mother liked working.  
Though Khomeini was in exile by the 1970s in Iran,
more people, working and poor,
turned to him and the ****-i-Ulama for help.
My mom didn’t want kids though my dad did.
She agreed and in 1978 my brother was born.
Iran modernized but agriculture and industry changed so quickly.  
In January 1978, students protested—
censorship, surveillance, harassment, illegal detention and torture.  
Young people and the unemployed joined.  
My parents moved to the United States in December 1978.  
The regime used a lot of violence against the protesters,
and in September 1978 declared martial law in Iran.  
Troops were shooting demonstrators.
In January 1979, the Shah and his family fled.  
On February 11, 1979, my parents’ anniversary,
the Iranian army declared neutrality.  
I was born in July 1979.
The chromium in emeralds and rubies colors them.
My brother was born in May and I was born in July.

Obsidian—
iron, copper and chromium—
isn’t a gas
but it isn’t a crystal;
it’s between the two,
the ordered crystal and the disordered gas.  
They made swords out of obsidian.  





Warm Light Shatters

The eruption beatifies the magma.  
It becomes obsidian,
only breaks with a fracture,
smooth circles where it breaks.  

My dad was born on a large flat rock on the edge of the top
of a hill,
Molasses, sweet and dark, the potent flavor dominates,
His father, the son of a Brahmin,
His mother from a lower caste.
His father’s family wouldn’t touch him,
He grew up in his mother’s mother’s house on a farm.  
I have the same brown hyperpigmentation spot on my right hand that he has.

In 1901, D’Arcy bought a 60 year concession for oil exploration In Iran.
The Iranian government extended it for another 32 years in 1933.
At that time oil was Iran’s “main source of income.”
In 1917’s Balfour Declaration, the British government proclaimed that they favored a national home for the Jews in Palestine and their “best endeavors to facilitate the achievement” of that.

The British police were in charge of policing in the mandate of Palestine.  A lot of the policemen they hired were people who had served in the British army before, during the Irish War for Independence.  
The army tried to stop how violent the police were, police used torture and brutality, some that had been used during the Irish War for Independence, like having prisoners tied to armored cars and locomotives and razing the homes of people in prison or people they thought were related to people thought to be rebels.
The police hired Arab police and Jewish police for lower level policing,
Making local people part of the management.
“Let Arab police beat up Arabs and Jewish police beat up Jews.”

The lava blocks and reroutes streams, melts snow and ice, flooding.
In 1922, there were 83,000 Jews, 71,000 Christians, and 589,000 Muslims.
The League If Nations endorsed the British Mandate.
During an emergency, in the 1930s, British regulations allowed collective punishment, punishing villages for incidents.
Local officers in riots often deserted and also shared intelligence with their own people.
The police often stole, destroyed property, tortured and killed people.  
Arab revolts sapped the police power over Palestinians by 1939.

My father’s mother was from a matrilineal family.
My dad remembers tall men lining up on pay day to respectfully wait for her, 5 feet tall.  
She married again after her husband died.
A manager from a tile factory,
He spoke English so he supervised finances and correspondence.
My dad, a sunflower, loved her: she scared all the workers but exuded warmth to the people she loved.

Obsidian shields people from negative energy.
David Cargill founded the Burmah Oil Co. in 1886.
If there were problems with oil exploration in Burma and Indian government licenses, Persian oil would protect the company.  
In July 1906, many European oil companies, BP, Royal Dutch Shell and others, allied to protect against the American oil company, Standard Oil.
D’Arcy needed money because “Persian oil took three times as long to come on stream as anticipated.”
Burmah Oil Co. began the Anglo-Persian Oil Co. as a subsidiary.
Ninety-seven percent of British Petroleum was owned by Burmah Oil Co.
By 1914, the British government owned 51% of the Anglo-Persian Oil Co.  
Anglo-Persian acquired independence from Burmah Oil and Royal Dutch Shell with two million pounds from the British government.

The lava burns the rock off the edge of the volcano.
In 1942, after the Japanese took Burma,
the British destroyed their refineries before leaving.
The United Nations had to find other sources of oil.
In 1943, Japan built the Burma-Thailand Railroad with forced labor from the Malay peninsula who were mostly from the rubber plantations.

The rock goes down with the lava, breaking through the rocks as it goes down.
In 1945. Japan destroyed their refineries before leaving Burma.
Cargill, Watson and Whigham were on the Burmah Oil Co. Board and then the Anglo Iranian Oil Co. Board.  

In 1936 Palestine, boycotts, work stoppages, and violence against British police officials and soldiers compelled the government to appoint an investigatory commission.  
Leaders of Egypt, Trans Jordan, Syria and Iraq helped end the work stoppages.
The British government had the Peel Commission read letters, memoranda, and petitions and speak with British officials, Jews and Arabs.  
The Commission didn’t believe that Arabs and Jews could live together in a single Jewish state.
Because of administrative and financial difficulties the Colonial Secretary stated that to split Palestine into Arab and Jewish states was impracticable.  
The Commission recommended transitioning 250,000 Arabs and 1500 Jews with British control over their oil pipeline, their naval base and Jerusalem.  
The League of Nations approved.
“It will not remove the grievance nor prevent the recurrence,” Lord Peel stated after.
The Arab uprising was much more militant after Peel.  Thousands of Arabs were wounded, ten thousand were detained.  
In Sykes-Picot and the Husain McMahon agreements, the British promised the Arabs an independent state but they did not keep that promise.  
Representatives from the Arab states rejected the Peel recommendations.
United Nations General Assembly Resolution181 partitioned Palestine into Arab and Jewish states with an international regime for the city of Jerusalem backed by the United States and the Soviet Union.  

The Israeli Yishuv had strong military and intelligence organization —-  
the British recognized that their interest was with the Arabs and abstained from the vote.  
In 1948, Israel declared the establishment of its state.  
Ground rock, minerals, and gas covered the ground from the ash plume.
The Palestinian police force was disbanded and the British gave officers the option of serving in Malaya.

Though Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy supported snd tried to get Israel to offer the Arabs concessions, it wasn’t a major priority and didn’t always approve of Israel’s plans.
Arabs that had supported the British to end Turkish rule stopped supporting the West.  
Many Palestinians joined left wing groups and violent third world movements.  
Seventy-eight percent of the territory of former Palestine was under Israel’s control.  

My dad left for college in 1957 and lived in an apartment above the United States Information services office.
Because he graduated at the top of his class, he was given a job with the public works department of the government on the electricity board.  
“Once in, you’ll never leave.”
When he wanted a job where he could do real work, his father was upset.
He broke the chains with bells for vespers.
He got a job in Calcutta at Kusum Products and left the government, though it was prestigious to work there.
In the chemical engineering division, one of the projects he worked on was to design a *** distillery, bells controlled by hammers, hammers controlled by a keyboard.
His boss worked in the United Kingdom for. 20 years before the company he worked at, part of Power Gas Corporation, asked him to open a branch in Calcutta.
He opened the branch and convinced an Industrialist to open a company doing the same work with him.  The branch he opened closed after that.  
My dad applied for labor certification to work abroad and was selected.  
His boss wrote a reference letter for my him to the company he left in the UK.  My dad sent it telling the company when he was leaving for the UK.  
The day he left for London, he got the letter they sent in the mail telling him to take the train to Sheffield the next day and someone from the firm would meet him at the station.  
His dad didn’t know he left, he didn’t tell him.
He broke the chains with chimes for schisms.


Anglo-Persian Oil became Anglo-Iranian Oil in 1935.
The British government used oil and Anglo-Persian oil to fight communism, have a stronger relationship with the United States and make the United Kingdom more powerful.  
The National Secularists, the Tudeh, and the Communists wanted to nationalize Iran’s oil and mobilized the Iranian people.
The British feared nationalization in Iran would incite political parties like the Secular Nationalists all over the world.  
In 1947, the Iranian government passed the Single Article Law that “[increased] investment In welfare benefits, health, housing, education, and implementation of Iranianization through substitution of foreigners” at Anglo-Iranian Oil Co.
“Anglo-Iranian Oil Company made more profit in 1950 than it paid to the Iranian government in royalties over the previous half century.”
The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company tried to negotiate a new concession and claimed they’d hire more Iranian people into jobs held by British and people from other nationalities at the company.
Their hospitals had segregated wards.  
On May 1, 1951, the Iranian government passed a bill that nationalized Anglo- Iranian Oil Co.’s holdings.  
During the day, only the steam from the hot lava can be seen.
In August 1953, the Iranian people elected Mossadegh from the Secular Nationalist Party as prime minister.
The British government with the CIA overthrew Mossadegh using the Iranian military after inducing protests and violent demonstrations.  
Anglo-Iranian Oil changed its name to British Petroleum in 1954.
Iranians believe that America destroyed Iran’s “last chance for democracy” and blamed America for Iran’s autocracy, its human rights abuses, and secret police.

The smoldering sound of the lava sizzles underneath the dried lava.  
In 1946, Executive Yuan wanted control over 4 groups of Islands in the South China Sea to have a stronger presence there:  the Paracels, the Spratlys, Macclesfield Bank, and the Pratas.
The French forces in the South China Sea would have been stronger than the Chinese Navy then.
French Naval forces were in the Gulf of Tonkin, U.S. forces were in the Taiwan Strait, the British were in Hong Kong, and the Portuguese were in Macao.
In the 1950s, British snd U.S. oil companies thought there might be oil in the Spratlys.  
By 1957, French presence in the South China Sea was hardly there.  

When the volcano erupted, the lava dried at the ocean into black sand.
By 1954, the Tudeh Party’s communist movement and  intelligence organization had been destroyed.  
Because of the Shah and his government’s westernization policies and disrespectful treatment of the Ulama, Iranians began identifying with the Ulama and Khomeini rather than their government.  
Those people joined with secular movements to overthrow the Shah.  

In 1966, Ne Win seized power from U Nu in Burma.
“Soldiers ruled Burma as soldiers.”
Ne Win thought that western political
Institutions “encouraged divisions.”
Minority groups found foreign support for their separatist goals.
The Karens and the Mons supported U Nu in Bangkok.  


Rare copper, a heavy metal, no alloys,
a rock in groundwater,
conducts electricity and heat.
In 1965, my Dad’s cousin met him at Heathrow, gave him a coat and £10 and brought him to a bed and breakfast across from Charing Cross Station where he’d get the train to Sheffield the next morning.
He took the train and someone met him at the train station.  
At the interview they asked him to design a grandry girder, the main weight bearing steel girder as a test.
Iron in the inner and outer core of the earth,
He’d designed many of those.  
He was hired and lived at the YMCA for 2 1/2 years.  
He took his mother’s family name, Menon, instead of his father’s, Varma.
In 1967, he left for Canada and interviewed at Bechtel before getting hired at Seagrams.  
Iron enables blood to carry oxygen.
His boss recommended him for Dale Carnegie’s leadership training classes and my dad joined the National Instrument Society and became President.
He designed a still In Jamaica,
Ordered all the parts, nuts and bolts,
Had all the parts shipped to Jamaica and made sure they got there.
His boss supervised the construction, installation and commission in Jamaica.
Quartz, heat and fade resistant, though he was an engineer and did the work of an engineer, my dad only had the title, technician so my dad’s boss thought he wasn’t getting paid enough but couldn’t get his boss to offer more than an extra $100/week or the title of engineer; he told my dad he thought he should leave.
In 1969, he got a job at Celanese, which made rayon.
He quit Celanese to work at McGill University and they allowed him to take classes to earn his MBA while working.  

The United States and Israel’s alliance was strong by 1967.
United Nations Security Council Resolution 242 at the end of the Third Arab Israeli War didn’t mention the Palestinians but mentioned the refugee problem.
After 1967, the Palestinians weren’t often mentioned and when mentioned only as terrorists.  
Palestinians’ faith in the “American sponsored peace process” diminished, they felt the world community ignored and neglected them also.
Groups like MAN that stopped expecting anything from Arab regimes began hijacking airplanes.
By 1972, the Palestine Liberation Organization had enough international support to get by the United States’ veto in the United Nations Security Council and Arab League recognition as representative of the Palestinian people.
The Palestinians knew the United States stated its support, as the British had, but they weren’t able to accomplish anything.  
The force Israel exerted in Johnson’s United States policy delivered no equilibrium for the Palestinians.  

In 1969, all political parties submitted to the BSPP, Burma Socialist Programme Party.
Ne Win nationalized banks and oil and deprived minorities of opportunities.
Ne Win became U Nu Win, civilian leader of Burma in 1972 and stopped the active role that U Nu defined for Burma internationally
He put military people in power even when they didn’t have experience which triggered “maldistribution of goods and chronic shortages.”  
Resources were located in areas where separatist minorities had control.

The British presence in the South China Sea ended in 1968.  
The United States left Vietnam in 1974 and China went into the Western Paracels.
The U.S. didn’t intervene and Vietnam took the Spratlys.
China wanted to claim the continental shelf In the central part of the South China Sea and needed the Spratlys.
The United States mostly disregarded the Ulama In Iran and bewildered the Iranian people by not supporting their revolution.

Obsidian—
iron, copper and chromium—
isn’t a gas
but it isn’t a crystal;
it’s between the two,
the ordered crystal and the disordered gas.  
They made swords out of obsidian.


Edelweiss

I laid out in my backyard in my bikini.  
I love the feeling of my body in the sun.  
I’d be dark from the end of spring until winter.
The snow froze my bare feet through winter ,
my skin pale.
American towns in 1984,
Free, below glaciers the sunlight melted the snow,
a sea of green and the edelweiss on the edge of the  limestone,
frosted but still strong.    
When the spring warmed the grass,
the grass warmed my feet. 
The whole field looked cold and white from the glacier but in the meadow,
the bright yellow centers of those flowers float free in the center of the white petals.
The bright yellow center of those edelweiss scared the people my parents ran to America from India to get away from.  
On a sidewalk in Queens, New York in 1991, the men stared and yelled comments at me in short shorts and a fitted top in the summer.  
I grabbed my dad’s arm.

























The Bread and Coconut Butter of Aparigraha

Twelve year old flowerhead,
Marigold, yarrow and nettle,
I’d be all emotion
If not for all my work
From the time I was a teenager.
I got depressed a lot.
I related to people I read about
In my weather balloon,
Grasping, ignorant, and desperate,
But couldn’t relate to other twelve year olds.
After school I read Dali’s autobiography,
Young ****** Autosodomized by Her Own Chastity.
Fresh, green nettle with fresh and dried yarrow for purity.
Dead souls enticed to the altar by orange marigolds,
passion and creativity,
Coax sleep and rouse dreams.
Satellites measure indirectly with wave lengths of light.
My weather balloon measures the lower and middle levels of the atmosphere directly,
Fifty thousand feet high,
Metal rod thermometer,
Slide humidity sensor,
Canister for air pressure.

I enjoy rye bread and cold coconut butter in my weather balloon,
But I want Dali, and all the artists and writers.
Rye grows at high altitudes
But papyrus grows in soil and shallow water,
Strips of papyrus pith shucked from their stems.
When an anchor’s weighed, a ship sails,
But when grounded we sail.
Marigolds, yarrow and nettle,
Flowerhead,
I use the marigold for sleep,
The yarrow for endurance and intensity,
toiling for love and truth,
And the nettle for healing.
Strong rye bread needs equally strong flavors.
By the beginning of high school,
I read a lot of Beat literature
And found Buddhism.
I loved what I read
But I didn’t like some things.
I liked attachment.  
I got to the ground.
Mushrooms grow in dry soil.
Attachment to beauty is Buddha activity.
Not being attached to things I don’t find beautiful is Buddha activity.  
I fried mushrooms in a single layer in oil, fleshy.
I roasted mushrooms at high temperatures in the oven, crisp.
I simmered mushrooms in stock with kombu.
Rye bread with cold coconut butter and cremini mushrooms,
raw, soft and firm.  
Life continues, life changes,
Attachments, losses, mourning and suffering,
But change lures growth.
I find stream beds and wet soil.
I lay the strips of papyrus next to each other.
I cross papyrus strips over the first,
Then wet the crossed papyrus strips,
Press and cement them into a sheet.
I hammer it and dry it in the sun,
With no thought of achievement or self,
Flowerhead,
Hands filled with my past,
Head filled with the future,
Dali, artists poets,
Wishes and desires aligned with nature,
Abundance,
Cocoa, caraway, and molasses.

If I ever really like someone,
I’ll be wearing the dress he chooses,
Fresh green nettle and yarrow, the seeds take two years to grow strong,
Lasting love.
Marigolds steer dead souls from the altar to the afterlife,
Antiseptic, healing wounds,
Soothing sore throats and headaches.
Imperturbable, stable flowerhead,
I empty my mind.
When desires are aligned with nature, desire flows.
Papyrus makes paper and cloth.
Papyrus makes sails.
Charcoal from the ash of pulverized papyrus heals wounds.
Without attachment to the fruit of action
There is continuation of life,
Rye bread and melted coconut butter,
The coconut tree in the coconut butter,
The seed comes from the ground out of nothing,
Naturalness.
It has form.
As the seed grows the seed expresses the tree,
The seed expresses the coconut,
The seed expresses the coconut butter.
Rye bread, large open hollows, chambers,
Immersed in melted coconut butter,
Desire for expansion and creation,
No grasping, not desperate.
When the mind is compassion, the mind is boundless.
Every moment,
only that,
Every moment,
a scythe to the papyrus in the stream bed of the past.  

































Sound on Powdery Blue

Potter’s clay, nymph, plum unplumbed, 1993.
Dahlia, ice, powder, musk and rose,
my source of life emerged in darkness, blackness.
Seashell fragments in the sand,
The glass ball of my life cracked inside,
Light reflected off the salt crystal cracks,
Nacre kept those cracks from getting worse.
Young ****** Autosodomized By Her Own Chastity,
Nymph, I didn’t want to give my body,
Torn, *****, ballgown,
To people who wouldn’t understand me,
Piquant.

Outside on the salt flats,
Aphrodite, goddess of beauty, pleasure and fertility and
Asexual Artemis, goddess of animals, and the hunt,
Mistress of nymphs,
Punish with ruthless savagery.

In my bedroom, blue caribou moss covered rocks, pine, and yew trees,
The heartwood writhes as hurricane gales, twisters and whirlwinds
Contort their bark,
Roots strong in the soil.
Orris root dried in the sun, bulbs like wood.
Dahlia runs to baritone soundbath radio waves.
Light has frequencies,
Violet between blue and invisible ultraviolet,
Flame, slate and flint.
Every night is cold.

Torii gates, pain secured as sacred.
An assignation, frost hardy dahlia and a plangent resonant echo.
High frequency sound waves convert to electrical signals,
Breathe from someone I want,
Silt.
Beam, radiate, ensorcel.
I break the bark,
Sap flows and dries,
Resin seals over the tear.
I distill pine,
Resin and oil for turpentine, a solvent.
Quiver, bemired,
I lead sound into my darkness,
Orris butter resin, sweet and warm,
Hot jam drops on snow drops,
Orange ash on smoke,
Balm on lava,
The problem with cotton candy.

Electrical signals give off radiation or light waves,
The narrow frequency range where
The crest of a radio wave and the crest of a light wave overlap,
Infrared.
Glaciers flow, sunlight melts the upper layers of the snow when strong,
A wet snow avalanche,
A torrent, healing.
Brown sugar and whiskey,
Undulant, lavender.
Pine pitch, crystalline, sticky, rich and golden,
And dried pine rosin polishes glass smooth
Like the smell of powdery orris after years.
Softness, flush, worthy/not worthy,
Rich rays thunder,
Intensify my pulse,
Frenzied red,
Violet between blue and invisible ultraviolet.
Babylon—flutter, glow.
Unquenchable cathartic orris.  

















Pink Graphite

Camellias, winter shrubs,
Their shallow roots grow beneath the spongy caribou moss,
Robins egg blue.
After writing a play with my gifted students program in 1991,
I stopped spending all my free time writing short stories,
But the caribou moss was still soft.

In the cold Arctic of that town,
The evergreen protected the camellias from the afternoon sun and storms.
They branded hardy camellias with a brass molded embossing iron;
I had paper and graphite for my pencils.

After my ninth grade honors English teacher asked us to write poems in 1994,
It began raining.
We lived on an overhang.
A vertical rise to the top of the rock.
The rainstorm caused a metamorphic change in the snowpack,
A wet snow avalanche drifted slowly down the moss covered rock,
The snow already destabilized by exposure to the sunlight.

The avalanche formed lakes,
rock basins washed away with rainwater and melted snow,
Streams dammed by the rocks.  
My pencils washed away in the avalanche,
My clothes heavy and cold.
I wove one side of each warp fiber through the eye of the needle and one side through each slot,
Salves, ointments, serums and tinctures.
I was mining for graphite.
They were mining me,
The only winch, the sound through the water.

A steep staircase to the red Torii gates,
I broke the chains with bells for vespers
And chimes for schisms,
And wove the weft across at right angles to the warp.  

On a rocky ledge at the end of winter,
The pink moon, bitters and body butter,
They tried to get  me to want absinthe,
Wormwood for bitterness and regret.
Heat and pressure formed carbon for flakes of graphite.
Heat and pressure,
I made bitters,
Brandy, grapefruit, chocolate, mandarin rind, tamarind and sugar.
I grounded my feet in the pink moss,
paper dried in one hand,
and graphite for my pencils in the other.  



































Flakes

I don’t let people that put me down be part of my life.  
Gardens and trees,
My shadow sunk in the grass in my yard
As I ate bread, turmeric and lemon.
Carbon crystallizes into graphite flakes.
I write to see well,
Graphite on paper.  
A shadow on rock tiles with a shield, a diamond and a bell
Had me ***** to humiliate me.
Though I don’t let people that put me down near me,
A lot of people putting me down seemed like they were following me,
A platform to jump from
While she had her temple.  

There was a pink door to the platform.
I ate bread with caramelized crusts and
Drank turmeric lemonade
Before I opened that door,
Jumped and
Descended into blankets and feathers.
I found matches and rosin
For turpentine to clean,
Dried plums and licorice.  

In the temple,
In diamonds, leather, wool and silk,
She had her shield and bells,
Drugs and technology,
Thermovision 210 and Minox,
And an offering box where people believed
That if their coins went in
Their wishes would come true.

Hollyhock and smudging charcoal for work,  
Belled,
I ground grain in the mill for the bread I baked for breakfast.
The bells are now communal bells
With a watchtower and a prison,
Her shield, a blowtorch and flux,
Her ex rays, my makeshift records
Because Stalin didn’t like people dancing,
He liked them divebombing.
Impurities in the carbon prevent diamonds from forming,
Measured,
The most hard, the most expensive,
But graphite’s soft delocalized electrons move.  






































OCEAN BED

The loneliness of going to sleep by myself.  
I want a bed that’s high off the ground,
a mattress, an ocean.
I want a crush and that  person in my bed.  
Only that,
a crush in my bed,
an ocean in my bed.  
Just love.  
But I sleep with my thumbs sealed.  
I sleep with my hands, palms up.  
I sleep with my hands at my heart.  
They sear my compassion with their noise.  
They hold their iron over their fire and try to carve their noise into my love,
scored by the violence of voices, dark and lurid,  
but not burned.  
I want a man in my bed.  
When I wake up in an earthquake
I want to be held through the aftershocks.  
I like men,
the waves come in and go out
but the ocean was part of my every day.  
I don’t mind being fetishized in the ocean.  
I ran by the ocean every morning.  
I surfed in the ocean.  
I should’ve gone into the ocean that afternoon at Trestles,
holding my water jugs, kneeling at the edge.  














Morning

I want to fall asleep in the warm arms of a fireman.  
I want to wake up to the smell of coffee in my kitchen.  

Morning—the molten lava in the outer core of the earth embeds the iron from the inner core into the earth’s magnetic field.  
The magnetic field flips.  
The sun, so strong, where it gets through the trees it burns everything but the pine.  
The winds change direction.  
Storms cast lightening and rain.  
Iron conducts solar flares and the heavy wind.  
In that pine forest, I shudder every time I see a speck of light for fear of neon and fluorescents.  The eucalyptus cleanses congestion.  
And Kerouac’s stream ululates, crystal bowl sound baths.  
I follow the sound to the water.  
The stream ends at a bluff with a thin rocky beach below.  
The green water turns black not far from the shore.  
Before diving into the ocean, I eat globe mallow from the trees, stems and leaves, the viscous flesh, red, soft and nutty.  
I distill the pine from one of the tree’s bark and smudge the charcoal over my skin.  

Death, the palo santo’s lit, cleansing negative energy.  
It’s been so long since I’ve smelled a man, woodsmoke, citrus and tobacco.  
Jasmine, plum, lime and tuberose oil on the base of my neck comforts.  
Parabolic chambers heal, sound waves through water travel four times faster.  
The sound of the open sea recalibrates.  
I dissolve into the midnight blue of the ocean.  

I want to fall asleep in the warm arms of a fireman.  
I want to wake up to the smell of coffee in my kitchen.  
I want hot water with coconut oil when I get up.  
We’d lay out on the lawn, surrounded by high trees that block the wind.  
Embers flying through the air won’t land in my yard, on my grass, or near my trees.  





Blue Paper

Haze scatters blue light on a planet.  
Frought women, livid, made into peonies by Aphrodites that caught their men flirting and blamed the women, flushed red.
and blamed the women, flushed red.
Frought women, livid, chrysanthemums, dimmed until the end of the season, exchanged and retained like property.  
Blue women enter along the sides of her red Torii gates, belayed, branded and belled, a plangent sound.  
By candles, colored lights and dried flowers she’s sitting inside on a concrete floor, punctures and ruin burnished with paper, making burnt lime from lime mortar.  
Glass ***** on the ceiling, she moves the beads of a Palestinian glass bead bracelet she holds in her hands.  
She bends light to make shadows against  thin wooden slats curbed along the wall, and straight across the ceiling.
A metier, she makes tinctures, juniper berries and cotton *****.
Loamy soil in the center of the room,
A hawthorn tree stands alone,
A gateway for fairies.
large stones at the base protecting,
It’s branches a barrier.  
It’s leaves and shoots make bread and cheese.
It’s berries, red skin and yellow flesh, make jam.
Green bamboo stakes for the peonies when they whither from the weight of their petals.
And lime in the soil.  
She adds wood chips to the burnt lime in the kiln,
Unrolled paper, spools, and wire hanging.
Wood prayer beads connect her to the earth,
The tassels on the end of the beads connect her to spirit, to higher truth.
Minerals, marine mud and warm basins of seawater on a flower covered desk.  
She adds slaked lime to the burnt lime and wood chips.  
The lime converts to paper,
Trauma victims speak,
Light through butterfly wings.  
She’s plumeria with curved petals, thick, holding water

SCHISMS.

I woke up with Lennon on my brain,
I read the news in the usual way,
Turbulence and schisms over isms,
Society's  deep divisive chasms,
Why are we all such lemmings?
Bigotry and phobias ever forming--
Imagine a world of informal religions,
Only peace and tolerance in our visions,
For churches, we revere the universe,
Star trekking our young deserve,
Imagine our brave new Planet Earth,
In a century's time, what would it be worth?
All children learning together beautifully,
None taught hatred or hostility,

Imagine no schisms over isms today,
I woke up with Lennon on my brain.

Isms are schisms, that’s just what they are
They look at what’s near to get to what’s far
Of Capital, Commune, Social, or Nihil
They all help to guide us toward ideas on trial
Isms are schisms, they condense and divide
Bonds get tight and chasms get wide
By thinking together, we develop our culture
Whatever we make, we devour like vultures
Isms are schisms, they put us into classes
They keep us in boxes and make us all act like *****
Whatever your ism, you’ve got to go deeper
Beyond all of our differences and all our agreements
Isms are schisms, ideas are ideals
Words are just symbols and emotions are feels
They are all just tools to help us become who we are
We can use them to create and we can use them to spar
If you use an ism to carve out your ego
It could be a help, a hindrance, or even placebo
The question’s not really which ism is right
and will prove to the world who has the most might
Beyond all our isms and the ways they divide us
The question’s who you are and how you’ll inspire us

christianity is, in part,
                               ontologically based, to behave like
hinduism...              
   in that its root is a polytheism,
focusing on              
              the opposite of a theology,
  or its particularness...  
                 it's poly-schismatic.
catholicism can lie all it wants away,
but the fact is simple:
  christianity was based upon a focus
of an impeding schism...
   so i can't see a way out of
shouting:        shotgun!
              as you rarely do, take the seat
in a non-black-cabbie next to the driver...
since there isn't one...
                  add to it an innumerable
cohort of saints... and you're done...
at least islam is "schizophrenic",
in that the schism took to representing
two factions of belief systems...
    me? if i were muslim?
                 ****'a(h) islam... all the way...
christianity just has a messiah complex
imbedded in it... and therefore it has
so many splinters (schisms) waiting for it,
to be reduced to.
               orthodox, catholic, protestant,
and then all the -isms...
luthernism, calvinism, baptism -ism- -ists...
   em, second day adventists?
            it's like darwinism in a theological sense:
look! look at all the theo-diversity!
     only now, would you associate
the (g)nostic movement in islam (sufism)
with ****'a(h) islam...
but come on! how can you make poetry
     a capitalist "thing"?
     you can't compete when writing poetry...
you can't compete on an universal basis for
a uniform stance of "incompetent" expression...
   that **** ain't happening...
      i feel with my intensity, and with my intensity alone...
you can't compete with what you feel,
and then scribble down...
       the **** is this "comprehension" / realisation?
poetry is not some potato-sack / egg on a spoon race!
  in terms of language...
     english has already won the culture war...
  but chinese, or hindi, as written in sanskrit?
   well... that's won the existential war...
   a billion here... and a billion over there...
       mind you, i'll repeat myself...
the polytheistic aspect of christianity is that
christianity has a tendency to agitate schisms;
it's really a religion of the obelus (÷),
or as some might suggest: the obelisk of washington d.c.
thank **** it wasn't a giant **** of
masonry, with only one / two rooms in it.
the ****** religion just implodes,
   and schizophrenics itself into a poly-diadem
that then tries to resolve some primitive geometric
form (square, triangle, a straight line, a dot)
   of "respectability";
but reducing the tetragrammaton (yhwh) into a
   dangling piece of metal, i.e. a † (crux)?
                           that! that's truly barbaric!

Pain, pain.
Shame, shame.
Why can't we all be friends?
Sorrow, sorrow.
Fear, fear.
Why am I so afraid?
A people hating its own
So much hate, pain, fear.
Why?
Why can't we just be at peace?
You can never truly win.
Your negatives will always outweigh
The positives.
True happiness is nonexistent.
Why? Why?
Why can't  we reason together?
Sit and drink tea together?
Why all the schisms and hypocrisy
And hatred? Bias?
Why am I here?
What is my purpose?
What is my existence?
Do I mean anything to anyone?
What?
Why?

Hell is like waiting in a long line for the zoo
So this must be limbo...

Time stretches / skeleton skin skeins
The tock the tick / the clock
Sketches
Schizophrenic melancholia
Mockingly sickening
Traffic of panic / deafening
Time stales / takes Forever
A long while - in limbo
Zombie shock / mind akimbo

And loneliness is a box
This corpse sits in
As existence / outside frightful / persisting
***** and spritz-ing
Our vibrant thangs
Songs shouts to gang sign slangs
Even when the lyrics
Go deep
Six feet sorrow
Hip hopping to defeat

But we gots to love it
The life we have
The Flava and the savor this last dance .
Makes me wanna Dougie
Percolating / jump / criss cross
Vanilla bean / jump jump

But what is a song to a diminished bird
No cage more cruel than the loss of worth
Hearts depart from its soul
Jester / fools / without cheer
No cartwheels glee or clue
Happy days adieu
High times zero new
Birds to the sky / fist pump / guns
This is for the Razza
End what's done begun

Waiting to get thru
Theme parks colorfully masking
Reality's streets and truth
Inmates as we are forced to wait
Hate is quicker to arrive
Behind bars hollows Time
Takes our forever
Even waking up
Still in limbo / thirsty without a cup
Same ole system
Who's business makes slaves
Kept blind and silently afraid
Kept
In a state / of mindlessness
Now worse than before

Schitzo screaming schisms
Crazy IS the war
Fear wreaks havoc
Boom boom back to a room
In your head goes the bomb
Shrapnel wounded / half none...

Are we there yet?
Just farts in the wind
Waiting is hell / how does life begin?
Just passing by / passed away / a passerby
Yelling and complaining
Let me in ? Get me out ?
Ghost to life's boo hoo / poor you
What happens to dreams wasted
In the zoo
Eyes turned frozen
Cold uncaring
Dying and lying / lifeless stories to share
As beauty within is in despair
As beasts overcrowd the fair
Flotsam in limbo float
Alone in its killer cold
Time still passing / parole / on hold
Much hope

Where are we
If there is nothing
No penny for fairy tale wells

Wishes are dead in fountains
Rich and heavy to the bottom
With tossed currencies. Fell.
How will a coin speak
Who will ever know
If we do not paint out loud
The masterpiece of the dream?

Tell me dreamer what time do you have
Still waiting?

In this zoo...

When it always was and is
And always will be

Up to you.

Part I*

It’s hot tonight,
Boiled tonight.
And I’m drunk tonight
So I scatter tonight
As opposed to
Sleeping tonight; so
Alone’d pave my way.
I speak to parchment,
And with dehydrated
Tongue.
So stack the syllables,
So ebb the songs,
And if words could be
Bricks,
I’d end the stares
And disallow
The gentle breeze,
My window;
Not quite frigid yet,
But like her breath
With a hint of ice,
If only enough,
To coerce my hair,
Specifically
The strands on the
Back of my neck.
And so, we’d shiver.

To be continued…

The old man said to me "son, timing is key"
I said, "old dude you look like a man who heard about rythym".
Old felines  like you come a dime  for a dozen, always poppin of yang about isms and schisms .

Naw fresh meat. This buds for you, If I really knew then what I thought that I knew
I wouldn't be grading your papers with exes and checks but I see in your eyes that your vision is short.
You think you hot **** but aint all that smart.

FYI pops I think that you reading me wrong.
You cant see my dimensions nor fade my intentions.

So you think they broke the mold. you have this thing down cold.
This has never been done before you.
Here ,wipe your nose.

Hey Senor senior if your so informed,then please pass along a few high value pearls.
How bout the one telling about what women want cause you really cleaned up in
the female department .

The old man just smiled and said "pearls before swine.
Just drop a few breadcrumbs to find your way back".

Off is the direction I want you to truck he said.
Don't  forget Wonder is the best kind of bread he said
You must be slow or just light in the head he said.

Yeah, whatever.

You subtly strum soft passionate symphonies of pathos
and are wordless in casual relapse
to canals of bliss
and carnal bane-
Schisms of cannibalism eat at my soft humanity
with cries of animalism-
that are ****, animated in oil.

I consume you on dull nights
because you are there no matter what
And I hate the way you purse your lips
a stenosis of encapsulated disapproval
even pursed in pleasure
Your closed eyes give away more than
any assuming part of fleshy eyelids
slits of white shine as unfaithful mirrors
reflecting my own narcissism.

Afterward in comfortable silence-
two quotation marks still hang naked
trapped in the smell of sweat,
wrapped elaborately around
            "I love you"
standing like an alabaster sentinel
but acting more as a crossing guard,
dictating my need

A night as dark
as dark can be
a wind to chill
the bone
And peering
out into the void
I feel so all alone
But then I feel
you next to me
a comfort through
my fear
And even though
you don't exist
I'm really glad
you're here

I keep fondling dreams as I  
flip through FOX, CNN and MSNBC networks.

An electric lady land fantasy
of revolutions where over and over and
under and through inconsistent gibberish of
conservative conversationalists’ and
liberal libel is taken for truth.

My heart is pumping out toxic fiber optic
editorial journalistic pollution like kidneys
                        secrete the habit of alcohol and
                                             cigarette poisons.
  
Our dependence on government help is
broken glass shards ruining the
veins of society

while Limbaugh, and spring chicken heads with a
View are enslaving our voices and
limiting the truth of our choices using
eminent domain for our minds as they spit out  
their opinions through television and radio
frequencies into our brain waves as truth.

How some American hearts stay warm with
nightly news schisms, burning intolerance,
unreal realism, religious sincerity posed
and limp **** ****** commercials
is amazing.  But still a paradox hoax.

"Death's gaze ever present on it's tentacles
A weight of power unformidable
Crashing down upon its victims"


Beware the Kraken! A monster of seas
The one sung about in many shanties
Marauding, ripping, and crushing its victims
This a myth by which the crew schisms
But the unsteady seas beneath the hull
Bubbling and boiling, the ocean calls
Unleashing from the bowels of the deep
A beast of lost worlds, oceans it reaps
The Kraken, awaken, outstretches it limbs
The skies are blackened, the heavens dim
With tyrannical force he unfurls his power
The mast snaps, wood shards and splinters shower
Fearful men aboard are pulled to a watery grave
Oceanic law, for this crew of knaves
The last aboard the teetering deck
A captain standing tall within the wreck
Howling at the beast below
Again tentacles high above the sea grow
Dragging the wreckage into the water
Appeasing the beast, the great destroyer

i think i chose the wrong artistic medium
to express myself,
i'm expressing, that's undoubted,
but as we all know success in the marketplace
needs you to be tacky, cheap,
ready for the tourist memorabilia,
too many professions attacked poetry,
first the philosophers, then the psychiatrists,
it became a beehive of femininity and teaching;
no, i definitely chose the wrong medium,
there's no raw product, the un-popularity
of poetry is due to the memory-market of
vocabulary, there are no raw materials used,
no paints or brushes, just backward experiences
used for the banking of investment,
poetry is either cheap or priceless,
a poet can confuse someone like a tarantula
what a philosopher must do in dialogue or paragraph.
my father was never taught german,
i rekindle the strangeness of germany on the autobahns,
eerie feelings feed the warmth of former home;
and they do, every winter i remember travelling east
from west germany always appealed to me for its
melancholia unforced where rome's light never shone,
britain is the perfect historical satellite,
it's moaning like a ***** when rome ***** her
and she becomes nostalgic... the ideal ***** i say,
she wishes rome's return like a boomerang.
'killed the wallaby?'
'aye and koala too.'
'**** the Tasmanian devil?'
'if only there was an angel to counter
freckled ****-in-boots readied dodo.'
capitalism is really heavy on poetic shoulders,
given that poetry doesn't sell, it's a near-identity of
dodo, near extinction, what will remain of poetry
in terms of language expressing poetic technique is rhyme,
the other rhetoric, rhyme the other rhetoric, sounds good,
nothing like couplets making you speak more, or more
persuasively: and all will be song, and no volatile
singled-out voice in the wilderness speaking,
whether actual with honey and locust diet
or homed wilderness of click click pixel algorithm.
poetry is almost like classical music these days,
with bach's wedding cake layering: there's a difference
concerning poetry and classical music:
classical music is almost non-vox, whereas poetry
is almost pure vox,
polyphony must be translated - the layering,
poetry must listen to bach, instead of sounds it
must be a poly- of subject matters, after all polyphony
is impossible given symbiotic otherwise chiral
resemblance: cat, kettle, knife (silent k),
                        psychology (silent p), gnostic (silent g)
                        pseudo (silent p), wrath (silent w), etc.
πολoιθεμα (many subjects, rather than sounds if poetry
was music, but it isn't): anecdote,
in england your ability to engage many subjects in
a conversation (the only antidote to engage with dialectics)
is summarised and thanked for by: you need a girlfriend;
good to be appreciated.
poetry has to change, it can't be as monochromatic and scarce
as it allowed itself to be, it has become akin to atlas
holding up the globe of the monochromatic theme of love,
modern poetry idealises too much, itself not the ideal medium,
after all, poets don't invest in oil paint, canvases,
brushes, studios, these compact artists need to escape
the sheered sheep laziness when engaging with the world,
first of all, they need the shield of honesty,
and a sword cutting through their comfort zone of scarceness
duping them into an adequacy of expected productivity.
and what will keep πολoιθεμα sustained?
the once famous enemy and murderer of poets, kant,
and the concept that fuels this poetic project:
per se, poetry has to become a relief, tentacles of an octopus,
range beyond the vector of safe coordination,
the only subject of relevance of poets is poetry in itself,
make poetry scarce in terms of aesthetics... but make
it distracting, distracting enough to be engaging.
what i mean by the poetic aesthetic is that
it's written with scarceness in my - but so much
blank space is left for so little wording,
it's almost like a telescope enlarging a needle-head,
of course you can keep it terse, keep it neat,
but will you vouch to keep it remotely relevant?
prose is far more economically sound in terms
of ink use and two-dimensional wood compressed,
it's economic to write prose, and less economic
to write poetry, and due to a forced interaction
with poetry, many more songs are heard
by impasse of laziness than poems are uvula coupled
for a sunday feast: where sabbath laziness was replaced
with a need for prayer; odd.
see these gesticulating lunatics before a non-existent
subject they poured so much attention at,
so many subjects appear so the non-existent object
can be gratified in the mimic or mute fluency:
not a sound mind among them, yet still the need to
assert some direction worthy of both prayer and
sacrifice... their salah is like a whirlwind of
cognitive contraception: put a ****** on your head
and be safeguarded against the thought of
refrigerators / frozen meats... and with prayer
all hope withstanding cancer; ******* lunatics;
islam is the best example of prayer, i could handle
the christian need for ******* at the stump of the crucifix,
but muslims mumble when raising their *****
to be ****** by shadow satans, and it's peculiar
to see them in their psychiatric asylum known as the mosque
freely going about their daily business
(personal reasons for criticism - given the pervasive
spirit of a few that tried to convert me, one that
almost killed me - and this need to be literate from
only one book, rather than many - this inherent
perception of a superiority of any monotheism,
which evidently implodes and provides schisms,
a bit like a w. b. yeats poem: things fall apart;
                                            the centre cannot hold).

                                                         *θ = φ.

I imagine the Egyptians felt about deaths of loved ones a lot like we think about autumn
It isn’t a passing
It isn’t a loss
They are just waiting for them to bloom again.
Plants are a fragile thing but maybe they aren’t as fragile as we think they are
Just as we are often not as strong as we think we are

It is easy to break a person
Especially one who does not want to be broken
Because they are the ones who will fight the hardest and tire quickly
It is much harder to shatter apathy than passion

Then there are the people who want to be broken
People who drink their own pain like water
Or maybe something more toxic like bad wine or good coffee
The people who look at their bruised arms and see lace
Instead of burst blood vessels

Some people need the pain to know they can still feel
They would rather feel agony than feel nothing at all
Some people need pain to create
Pain can be the paint in an artist’s brush, the keystrokes of a writer’s fingers

Some people feel pain because they are afraid to feel anything else
Happiness fades, contentment stagnates, but sorrow is a constant companion
Sometimes I worry
That I am one of these people

I spend my time reading, writing, inhabiting the minds of others
The stories of others
Because I am afraid to look my own story in the face
And see if I like the direction it has taken
Sometimes I live vicariously through the stories of others
Because I am afraid of what will happen in my own

I am trying to be passionate without being breakable
And I am trying to enjoy my water as well as my coffee
And I am slowly learning that I cannot write my story, it must write itself

Inevitably pain is part of every story
Including mine
There will be heartbreak and there will be bruises and there will be hairline fractures, cracks, fissures, schisms
People will leave, be it by death or by simply walking away
But every moment of pain is simply an autumn
A winter
And in time everything will bloom again
Stronger and more resplendent than ever before

I knock on doors
that refract light
as sketched shapes of hope.
That chimera of real and illusion.

I remember that in hospitals,
maternity wards and hospice,
doors are to be opened and shut
with gloved hands,
elbows or leaning hips.

I hold myself to a few words:
I needed to go
and so I do,
"one-step at a time,"
when fortitude warms the path
And otherwise,
I remember a red light in the dark
at 6 am in February,
chortling engine
with two hundred miles to traverse -
I was sleepy and restless
and beneath my hums on coffee breath
a seed sprouted
barbs and blossoms.

I doubled down on heartbreak
and the fertility of schisms,
because the world is shaped
by twisting plates that ****** and slide
into one another in dumb collision,
and for all we glean of how,
it may as well be on stone rafts of fate
we built our hopes.

In the schisms of light changes,
Between the honking horns of crying babies
And angry mothers,
The cars hunched in anticipation
Like the smoker’s tongue rolling
Against the teeth for that nicotine speed.
A starry-eyed woman blinked with no destination
In her husband’s Bentley.
The rumbling is the crunching grind of helmets
In a pigskin scrimmage.
I can barely stand the
            Stop-Go
            Inch-Worming
Of brake-lights.
Car’s trembling is the twitching squirrel
Panic-caught in a lightsocket.
Even if the slim traffic-conductor
That burns like plastic on the fire
Yields us through like a coaxing father,
Hollow eyes don’t yield the lethargic feet.
Remnants of the second millenium’s gas-scorn,
Our can-do attitudes goad our chariots to
            Hack
And
            Spit
Dust-Sludge in gridlocked gossip.

He drops his bomb and calls it a feather
Gripping tightly to his rugged leather
A king of his castle, of north and of south
The worst of intentions crease a dour mouth
He sips at his courage and spits from the parapet
His voice echoes through halls like a blaring trumpet
The queen cowls, tears veil her soft face
A palisade of loathing separates their space
Absolute power drips from his brow
Eyes like lightning, striking a bough
Creaks, cracks, defiance, and spite
The king does not pardon, in black or in white
She braces, erases, knights herself with adrenaline
The spear finds its mark like a dose of medicine
Impaled, curtailed, the king gasps a breath of contrition
The reign falls to its knees, Hell's latest acquisition

You claim I came from beneath the surface to your undoing. Yet you were the conservative one who told me to cease what we were doing. So assertively, who do you think you're fooling? You're like a needle weaving around in interstitial fluid. But my veins have been filled with tryptophan. You might playfully say they very well may have been ruined.

  You said to slow down and look around and check the pace of the beat because stepping stones are unknown
when made with cold feet. And in turn I took a step back to retreat so that I wouldn't confuse nor subdue the impudent snooze to my heartbeat.

  And darlin', not to be too explicit but I stepped to the side to abide when you began acting so tactfully complicit. Eliciting emotions as readily as waves of the ocean emitting their violent rhythms. But the notions tender returned to sender have now gone and split schisms exploding causing utter commotion like somehow I slipped or stuttered while muttering my notions to churn you like butter lotion.

  And while this isn't to spurn you, you're requesting my devotion when you barely know my name. So in the mirror what's crystal clear is the thin and whimsical veneer of reciprocity.

  I was adamant to prevent my vile extravagant fragments from implementing collateral damage dispensed towards anyone while I can be so relentless. It was never my intention to hang you up on a wall or leave you otherwise stranded landing nowhere near where I'm standing at all. Rather than bawl or try to break the Berlin Wall, may I suggest we take a rest before the hammer falls?

So that when I don't answer a call you don't wallow growing suspicious of my convictions convinced they aren't there or I've listed restrictions. The difference is that you decide not to believe it. Wow. So I'm not surprised your alibi won't allow you to see it now.

  I can't perceive it for you though I'm not deceiving you
if you could possibly conceive it to be true then maybe next time around you could receive it too. I'll leave that to you
for I can only say my piece. We can maybe slow down
before the throw down or we'll cyst and decease.

  Don't look at me like that last line was mischeviously written or you didn't see it correctly. I'm not an obsequious sycophant but I mean quite simply that we'll become diseased and die if we stick to projecting. Rather than rant planting seeds bitterly reflecting let's make a promise to be honest and say it directly.

That's all I ask of you KC.

Respectfully,
Chris P.

well, ain't that an oklahoma sing-along sounding title; pretentious *** gives me all the jitters.*

the parody of pronouns, Walt Whitman's
and Jack Spicer's collected poetry - both
are always the front-running jokes
with someone else's selected compilation -
the parody of pronouns:
the father the son the holy spirit -
me, myself and i -
philosopher practice the same parody -
deluded ******* think they're kings -
the royal we - the royal we meaning
the entourage included -
the clown juggling both the philosopher
and the king and himself (reflexive compound,
not a reflective compound - oddly enough
the Oxford dictionary has a time period
where new compound nouns are in
purgatory of hyphen usage, before
being admitted to the heaven of no red line
underlining a "spelling mistake") -
it's the profanity of pronoun usage -
poets ease in and out of pronoun variations
almost unconsciously - prose writers tend to
get lost in creating characters / puppets -
no out of body experience in fiction -
just truths that are supposed to be lies.
but you know what? schoolchildren
are taught that poetry exists, sure as **** they're
taught it exists - but they're taught it
with too much emphasis on a scientific approach
to it: spot a metaphor... spot a pun!
are bird-watching or something? is there an app
on your phone that might recognise a type of
flower or a type of bird? (snigger) - but you
caught your Pokemon, haven't you?!
cultures that respect poetry are caustic -
if they take it to their heart - like Iranian schism
early on with Islam - no ultimate truth with
a schism, just do it like the Blue Indians,
allow more and more schisms, give it all,
you have a ruler, on it 12 inches or 30 centimetres...
for it to be effective you can't have division
according two one judo chop, down the middle -
**** it, let's go down to a sensible division,
i'm not talking nano-metres, but centimetres -
we won't get any Pisan anomalies that way;
but are those scientists really telling as that
the mystery of life is how far we can divide things up?
sub-atomic clever are they? really?!
you see what happens when civilisations undermine
art - make fun of it... the dementia epidemic -
oh sure... don't read a poem, instead play
cognitive games, do a crossword, get mindful,
complete a su doku - but don't read a poem,
don't even try to make conversation interesting -
poems ought to stimulate involving conversation -
the way the art sees it? we're living under a
dictatorship - swear to god, the poet sees it like that -
we're not living in a democracy -
you have charities concerned with gross
negligence of dogs - gross negligence of poets?
you 'avin a laugh - which means many are
put off it, they write 10 or 20 and then fade away -
they think the ease of writing a few words
because they're from the generation where universal
education was permitted can make a buck from
a few ooh ah repercussions when a piano fell
from the sky and they had to crab-walk two metres
into the gutter - then walk on.
you neglect something precious it bites back -
the dementia epidemic is one such example,
the current problem: premature depression
in your people is another - the 21st century
sandwich; but the ease that poetry handles pronoun
usage is akin to kings - technically mistaken
for personas - fake - we write like we walk on airs
and superstitions of the gnawing paranoia of
power and subsequent respectability of the power's
authority up-kept and constantly implemented
for proof of its effectiveness -
getting a trained monkey is one thing,
but getting a monkey that can train itself is another -
as it stands, Oxford treats nibbling on
Germanic with unease - the Oxford hyphen
is the purgatory of necessarily compounded words -
an optical loon brigade loop of adding necessary
complexity to a language and making mathematics
simpler, more atomic, we don't need an atomic
shrapnel language construction -
and yes, this is an old attachment of mine:
reflective pronoun compounds - e.g. my self -
and reflexive pronoun compounds - i.e. myself.

Bustling:
The morph of bodies
of viscous crowds,
of pulsing sounds,
indulging mouths
in conversation and conversation
and the traction of
sheets of breath
on teeth;
everywhere, the room
breathes in unison.

And as buoyed stones
the water schisms and unfolds
around and leaves me
to face new currents,
unsure how to gauge
my own tenor against
the choral undertow.

(NaPoWriMo Challenge: April 7, 2016)

“I don’t care for a man’s religion
whose dog and cat are not the better for it.”
-- Abraham Lincoln


Poll the polecat for I don’t have, to say, a dog
in this fray, in this tussle of quicksand policy.
No kibble in the bowl of faithful-isms,

the ticks and slugs of sham prisms.
As the maxim goes—if you lie with dogs,
you wake up with fleas and fated policy.

You wake up as compromised as policy
uncompromised, orchestrating schisms
and foul offensives. Beware of the dog

policy, bird ******* and false Emersonian-
                                                                        isms.

The last romantic...

Briefly departs his Shakespeare

Pages serenading sublimity

Juxtaposing the beauty of the stars

To the abyssal depth in lover's eyes

Lost in sonnet sunset

And the pentameter of lonesome sighs...

His heart must surely be a fish

Lovelorn wanting such oceans of wish.

To feel alive from being torn

Into madness A tumultuous storm....

The last romantic far from paths

And roads leading home,

Far from metropole and reality

In solitude a garden gnome...

Deformed from lack of society's

Influential propriety

Of hurry get married, of monogamy,

Grooms bride for every norm...but no.

Oh how aloof and naively blind

Dismissing the tutors' lessons in mundane life

The logic of lovelife like reasoning

These days of mail order brides,

Milfs and Latin ***** seasonings,

Are now for bid to buy (at auction price)

How is this decency or poetic

The Geometry of a fit sound mind?

(High on cloud nine, in line for a hookers time?)

Oh dear King Lear, what's happened here?

Sign of our times slow demise

Yet no one questions such schisms

Or ask why?

The illness of the romantic was once floral

It sickens with sweetness and aww

A dreamers pox deluded flight

Psychedelic was the high

(just stop all that effing rhyme time)



Perhaps it's self inflicted

Conditioned poetic days

To view all the world with love

Fauning eyes awake

Maybe in his idolatry of medieval adultery

There is a sort of peace

Of mind, of truth

Maybe accidentally it is found

Far from the madness of the heartless,

Mindless Crowds

Murdering muse and moody blues

By the numbers we color refuse and defuse

These digital days that pass in fog

Diminished worth

From fears' poison smog,

An unlived unloved life askew

Dead to chances made aloud

Tho' The perfect time is now...


Perhaps the last romantic chooses to go without

Shedding a painful tear

Detours introverted meekly feels

Avoiding any meaningful kiss

With every passion

petite mort...             a tiny death my dears

Some cannot handle such tragedy

Star crossed youth I hear are

                     All fools for love

And Still will / surely must

Die hard

Whether from wounds of doubts

Drowning in Lies of ties that bind...

Yet true love with imperfect hearts

Revere

Our Immortal beloveds

And the last romantic

Near or far away from here

Romancing whispers

Oh the lovely

Untouched years

                    Heavy as a hollow bone

Broken in perpetual wish,

His alone

A soul yet to atone a life of fear

Bewitched by drama's

*Magic Shakespeare.

Leonard Cohen, gone the night before we recited Flanders Field,
And our memory was still fresh with poetic inspiration,
The artistic suppression of dread.

Famous Blue Raincoat,
The feelings of despair and isolation abound.
I felt the cold New York traffic that I was separate from all the bustle
And all the life.

Chelsea Hotel with its twists in compassion,
It's all too human and vulnerable to admit your schisms,
The plight of life when it slips away from us,
Into the city and falls off the roof.

Hallelujah resonates most,
The sound of pure emotion
The feeling of triumph with your chest bare to the Earth.
Let the raw expression engulf you, spread the ashes.

The flow of the water is harsh
When it gains speed
It's soft when it's stagnant on marsh
It's changed when the trees are burning as we speak
But, the water might drown us out and so will our mistakes
So, I'm precarious about cynicism
About time I find the right piece of me
In these broken places
Where there schisms and facsimiles of the same problems
My responsibilities are resonant with their yeses
But, my passions keep telling me to change-up
My pursuit is somewhere in between this mess

Honestly I feel on a deep level, subtle schisms of my surroundings

In a dimension where I'm opposite, I know everything, but nothing at all

and if you think everything in this second matters you are wrong

Invincibility, perfection, idealism is how I was as a child

but those barriers of honesty disintegrated, seeing the world and what it projects

realities not a honey coated dream, but one of realization

hearing the lies and cries of what became our generation

you would think change is bad but it keeps life going

self-criticism deteriorates your dreams, dreams your soul sar

so stop, stop, stop, letting the deceased thoughts of yesterday

harm you.

Umbridging the gap

and the platitudes of word-******

     as well as the Encyclopedic pimps of posh

spiced with lingual ice...



          Because I am a simpleton

with a thirst for the Beloved

             and its discriptive meanings, I am

                       scholarly lacking

    Juxtaposing my script to refer

to references Grecian or urn,

                     enflagrante artisan

                            spurts with superlatives and

personified iambics of rhetorical lines

       limned with deep shagrin

              because my verbs are linear

even when my chicken scratch

                          struck midnight a match stick

flame to illuminate

         my poetic fluffer's formulae

              schisms from my own mind's magician hat...

Not to be-little or slight those hands walking

        that yellow the pages

                     with slothly seeking rote

              for meandering bibliographies

a librarian's histology fingers for Captain

Cook / exploration's verbose

           exploitation if at most

                   connecting dots treasured maps

of purposeful / placement for imagery

                         in the textiles

              of poetry's destined and enlightening

       cloak & dagger or a Throw

                        or a goose-down warmth

of Love / to blanket the night away

                           just as would a mother's / tucking in

                from the day's overwhelming

lack of reverances, referenced

             oh how to closely listen   / or live

                        beyond the history

to be in the moment

              comparing and sharing

     our joys and the power of now . . . keep it simple

because I am a simpleton with a thirst

                         with a thirst for the Beloved,

        the Truth of a promise / endowed Tao of Us. . .