GREAT ARTISTS & THEIR IMMORTAL WORKS :
CONCLUDING ITALIAN RENAISSANCE IN
VERSE.  -  By Raj Nandy, New Delhi.

Dear Readers, continuing my Story of Western Art in Verse chronologically, I had covered an Introduction to the Italian Renaissance previously. That background story was necessary to appreciate Renaissance Art fully. Now, I cover the Art of that period in a summarized form, mentioning mainly the salient features to curb the length. The cream here lies in the 'Art of the High Renaissance Period'! Hope you like it. Thanks, - Raj.

                          INTRODUCTION
“Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, &
  Poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen.”
                                                        – Leonardo Da Vinci
In the domain of Renaissance Art, we notice the
enduring influence of the Classical touch!
Ancient Greek statues and Roman architectures,
Inspired the Renaissance artists in their innovative
ventures!
The pervasive spirit of Humanism influenced
creation of life-like human forms;
Adding ****** expressions and depth, deviating
from the earlier stiff Medieval norms.
While religious subjects continued to get depicted
in three-dimensional Renaissance Art;
Portraits, **** figures, and secular subjects, also
began to appear during this great ‘Re-birth’!
The artists of the Early and High Renaissance Era
are many who deserve our adoration and artistic
due.
Yet for the sake of brevity, I mention only the
Great Masters, who are handful and few.

EARLY RENAISSANCE ARTISTS & THEIR ART

GITTO THE PIONEER:
During early 13th Century we find, Dante’s
contemporary Gitto di Bondone the Florentine,
Painting human figures in all its beauty and form
for the first time!
His masterwork being the 40 fresco cycle in the
Arena Chapel in Padua, depicting the life of the
****** and Christ, completed in 1305.
Giotto made the symbolic Medieval spiritual art
appear more natural and realistic,
By depicting human emotion, depth with an
artistic perspective!
Art Scholars consider him to be the trailblazer
inspiring the later painters of the Renaissance;
They also refer to Giorgio Vasari’s “Lives Of
The Eminent Artists,” - as their main source.
Giotto had dared to break the shackles of earlier
Medieval two-dimensional art style,
By drawing lines which head towards a certain
focal point behind;
Like an illusionary vanishing point in space,
- opening up a 3-D ‘window into space’!
This ‘window technique’ got adopted by the
later artists with grace.
(Giorgio Vasari, a 16th Century painter, architect & Art
historian, was born in 1511 in Arezzy, a city under the
Florentine Republic, and painted during the High
Renaissance Period.)

VASARI’s book published in 1550 in Florence
was dedicated to Cosimo de Medici.
Forms an important document of Italian Art
History.
This valuable book covers a 250 year’s span.
Commencing with Cimabue the tutor of Giotto,
right up to Tizian, - better known as Titan!
Vasari also mentions four lesser known Female
Renaissance Artists; Sister Plantilla, Madonna
Lucrezia, Sofonista Anguissola, and Properzia
de Rossi;
And Rossi’s painting “Joseph and Potiphar’s
Wife”,
An impressive panel art which parallels the
unrequited love Rossi experienced in her own
life !
(Joseph the elder son of Jacob, taken captive by Potiphar
the Captain of Pharaoh’s guard, was desired by Potiphar’s
wife, whose advances Joseph repulsed. Rossi’s painting
of 1520s inspired later artists to paint their own versions
of this same Old Testament Story.)

Next I briefly mention architects Brunelleschi
and Ghiberti, and the sculptor Donatello;
Not forgetting the painters like Masaccio,
Verrocchio and Botticelli;
Those Early Renaissance Artists are known to
us today thanks to the Art historian Giorgio
Vasari .

BRUNELLESCHI has been mentioned in Section
One of my Renaissance Story.
His 114 meter high dome of Florence Cathedral
created artistic history!
This dome was constructed without supporting
buttresses with a double egg shaped structure;
Stands out as an unique feat of Florentine
Architecture!
The dome is larger than St Paul’s in London,
the Capitol Building of Washington DC, and
also the St Peters in the Vatican City!

GILBERTI is remembered for his massive
15 feet high gilded bronze doors for the
Baptistery of Florence,
Containing twenty carved panels with themes
from the Old Testament.
Which took a quarter century to complete,
working at his own convenience.
His exquisite naturalistic carved figures in the
true spirit of the Renaissance won him a prize;
And his gilded doors were renamed by Michel
Angelo as ‘The Gates of Paradise’!
(At the age of 23 yrs Lorenzo Ghiberti had won the
competition beating other Architects for craving the
doors of the Baptistery of Florence!)

DONATELLO’S full size bronze David was
commissioned by its patron Cosimo de’ Medici.
With its sensual contrapposto stance in the
classical Greek style with its torso bent slightly.
Is known as the first free standing **** statue
since the days of Classical Art history!
The Old Testament relates the story of David
the shepherd boy, who killed the giant Goliath
with a single sling shot;
Cutting off his head with Goliath’s own sword!
Thus saving the Israelites from Philistine’s wrath.
This unique statue inspired all later sculptors to
strive for similar artistic excellence;
Culminating in Michael Angelo’s **** statue of
David, known for its sculptured brilliance!

MASSACCIO (1401- 1428) joined Florentine
Artist’s Guild at the age of 21 years.
A talented artist who abandoned the old Gothic
Style, experimenting without fears!
Influenced by Giotto, he mastered the use of
perspective in art.
Introduced the vanishing point and the horizon
line, - while planning his artistic works.
In his paintings ‘The Expulsion from Eden’
and ‘The Temptation’,
He introduced the initial **** figures in Italian
Art without any inhibition!
Though up North in Flanders, Van Eyck the
painter had already made an artistic innovation,
By painting ‘Adam and Eve’ displaying their
****** in his artistic creation;
Thereby creating the first **** painting in Art
History!
But such figures greatly annoyed the Church,
Since nudes formed a part of pagan art!
So these Northern artists to pacify the Church
and pass its censorship,
Cleverly under a fig leaf cover made their art to
appear moralistic!
Van Eyck was also the innovator of oil-based paints,
Which later replaced the Medieval tempera, used to
paint angles and saints.

Masaccio’s fresco ‘The Tribute Money’ requires
here a special mention,
For his use of perspective with light and shade,
Where the blithe figure of the Roman tax collector
is artistically made.
Christ is painted with stern nobility, Peter in angry
majesty;
And every Apostle with individualized features,
attire, and pose;
With light coming from a single identifiable source!
“Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s,
and unto God things that are God’s”, said Christ;
Narrated in Mathew chapter 22 verse 21, which
cannot be denied.
Unfortunately, Masaccio died at an early age of
27 years.
Said to have been killed by a jealous rival artist,
who had shed no tears!

BOTTICELLI the Florentine was born half a
century after the Dutch Van Eyck;
Remembered even to this day for his painting
the ‘Birth of Venus’, an icon of Art History
making him famous.
This painting depicts goddess Venus rising out
of the sea on a conch shell,
And the glorious path of female **** painting
commenced in Italy, - casting a spell!
His full scale **** Venus shattered the Medieval
taboo on ******.
With a subject shift from religious art to Classical
Mythology;
Removing the ‘fig-leaf cover’ over Art permanently!

I end this Early Period with VERROCCHIO, born
in Florence in fourteen hundred and thirty five.
A trained goldsmith proficient in the skills of both
painting and sculpture;
Who under the patronage of the Medici family
had thrived.
He had set up his workshop in Florence were he
trained Leonardo Da Vinci, Botticelli, and other
famous Renaissance artists alike!

FOUR CANONICAL PAINTING MODES OF
THE RENAISSANCE:
During the Renaissance the four canonical painting
modes we get to see;
Are Chiaroscuro, Sfumato, Cangiante and Unione.
‘Chiaroscuro’ comes from an Italian word meaning
‘light and dark’, a painting technique of Leonardo,
Creating a three dimensional dramatic effect to
steal the show.
Later also used with great excellence by Rubens
and the Dutch Rembrandt as we know.
‘Sfumato’ from Italian ‘sfumare’, meaning to tone
down or evaporate like a smoke;
As seen in Leonardo’s ‘Mona Lisa’ where the
colors blend seamlessly like smoke!
‘Cangiante’ means to ‘change’, where a painter
changed to a lighter or a darker hue, when the
original hue could not be made light enough;
As seen in the transformation from green to
yellow in Prophet Daniel’s robe,
On the ceiling of Sistine Chapel in Rome.
‘Unione’ followed the ‘sfumato’ quality, but
maintained vibrant colors as we get to see;
In Raphael’s ‘Alba Madonna’ in Washington’s
National Gallery.

ART OF HIGH RENAISSANCE ERA - THE
GOLDEN AGE.

“Where the spirit does not work with the
hand there is no art.”- Leonardo

With Giotto during the Trecento period of the
14th century,
Painting dominated sculpture in the artistic
endeavor of Italy.
During the 15th century the Quattrocento, with
Donetello and Giberti,
Sculpture certainly dominated painting as we get to
see!
But during the 16th century or the Cinquecento,
Painting again took the lead commencing with
the great Leonardo!
This Era was cut short by the death of Lorenzo the
Magnificent to less than half a century; (Died in 1493)
But gifted great masterpieces to the world enriching
the world of Art tremendously!
The Medieval ‘halo’ was now replaced by a fresh
naturalness;
And both Madonna and Christ acquired a more
human likeness!
Portrait paintings began to be commissioned by
many rich patrons.
While artists acquired both recognition and a status
of their own.
But the artistic focus during this Era had shifted from
Florence,  - to Venice and Rome!
In the Vatican City, Pope Julius-II was followed by
Pope Leo the Tenth,
He commissioned many works of art which are
still cherished and maintained!
Now cutting short my story let me mention the
famous Italian Renaissance Superstar Trio;
Leonardo, Raphael, and Michael Angelo.

LEONARDO DA VINCI was born in 1452 in
the village of Vinci near the City of Florence,
Was deprived of a formal education being born
illegitimate!
He was left-handed, and wrote from right to left!
He soon excelled his teacher Varrocchio, by
introduced oil based paints into Italy;
Whose translucent colors with his innovative
techniques, enhanced his painting artistically.
Sigmund Freud had said, “Leonardo was like a
man who awoke too early in the darkness while
others were all still asleep,” - he was awake!
Leonardo’s  historic ‘Note Book’ has sketches of a
battle tank, a flying machine, a parachute, and many
other anatomical and technical sketches and designs;
Reflecting the ever probing mind of this versatile
genius who was far ahead of his time!
His ‘Vituvian Man’, ‘The Last Supper’, and ‘Mona Lisa’,
Remain as his enduring works of art and more popular
than the Leaning Tower of Pisa!
Pen and ink sketch of the ‘Vitruvian Man’ with arms
and leg apart inside a square and a circle, also known
as the ‘Proportion of Man’;
Where his height correspondence to the length
of his outstretched hands;
Became symbolic of the true Renaissance spirit
of Man.
‘The Last Supper’ a 15ft by 29ft fresco work on
the refectory wall of Santa Maria, commissioned
by Duke of Milan Ludovic,
Is the most reproduced religious painting which
took three years to complete!
Leonardo searched the streets of Milan before
painting Judas’ face;
And individualized each figure with competence!
‘Mona Lisa’ with her enigmatic smile continues
to inspire artists, poets, and her viewers alike,
since its creation;
Which Leonardo took four years to complete
with utmost devotion.
Leonardo used oil on poplar wood panel, unique
during those days,
With ‘sfumato’ blending of translucent colors with
light and shade;
Creating depth, volume, and form, with a timeless
expression on Mona Lisa’s countenance!
Art Historian George Varasi says that it is the face
of one Lisa Gherardini,
Wife of a wealthy Florentine merchant of Italy.
Insurance Companies failed to make any estimation
of this portrait, declaring its value as priceless!
Today it remains housed inside an air-conditioned,
de-humidified chamber, within a triple bullet-proof
glass, in Louvre France.
“It is the ultimate symbol of human civilization”,
- exclaimed President Kennedy;
And with this I pay my humble tribute to our
Leonardo da Vinci!

MICHEL ANGELO BUONARROTI (1475-1564):
This Tuscan born sculptor, painter, architect, and
poet, was a versatile man,
Worthy to be called the archetype of the true
‘Renaissance Man’!
At the age of twelve was placed under the famous
painter Ghirlandio,
Where his inclination for sculpting began to show.
Under the liberal patronage of Lorenzo de Medici,
He developed his talent as a sculptor as we get
to see.
In the Medici Palace, he was struck by his rival
Torregiano on the nose with a mallet;
Disfiguring permanently his handsome face!
His statue of ‘Bacchus’ of 1497 and the very
beauty of the figure,
Earned him the commission for the ‘PIETA’ in
St Peter’s Basilica;
Where from a single piece of Carrara marble he
carved out the figure of ****** Mary grieving
over the dead body of Christ;
This iconic piece of sculpture which along with
his ‘David’ earned him the ‘Superstar rights’!

Michel Angelo’s **** ‘DAVID’ weighed 6.4 tons
and stood 17 feet in height;
Unlike the bronze David of Donatello, which
shows him victorious after the fight!
Michel’s David an epitome of strength and
youthful vigour with a Classical Greek touch;
Displayed an uncircumcised ***** which had
shocked the viewers very much!
But it was consistent with the Mannerism in Art,
in keeping with the Renaissance spirit as such!
David displays an attitude of placid calm with
his knitted eyebrows and sidelong glance;
With his left hand over the left shoulder
holding a sling,
Coolly surveys the giant Goliath before his
single sling shot fatally stings!
This iconic sculpture has a timeless appeal even
after 500 years, depicting the ‘Renaissance Man’
at his best;
Vigorous, healthy, beautiful, rational and fully
competent!
Finally we come to the Ceiling of the Sistine
Chapel of Rome,
Where Pope Julius-II’s persistence resulted in the
creation of world’s greatest single fresco that was
ever known!
Covering some 5000 square feet, took five years
to complete.
Special scaffoldings had to be erected for painting
scenes from ‘The Creation’ till the ‘Day of Judgment’
on a 20 meter’s high ceiling;
Where the Central portion had nine scenes from
the ‘Book of Genesis’,
With ‘Creation of Adam’ having an iconic significance!
Like Leonardo, Michel Angelo was left-handed and died
a bachelor - pursuing his art with devotion;
A man with caustic wit, proud reserve, and sublimity
of imagination!

RAFFAELLO SANZIO (1483-1520):
This last of the famous High Renaissance trio was
born in 1483 in Urbino,
Some eight years after Michel Angelo.
His Madonna series and decorative frescos
glorified the Library of Pope Julius the Second;
Who was impressed by his fresco ‘The School
of Athens’;
And commissioned Raphael to decorate his
Study in the Vatican.
Raphael painted this large fresco between 1510
and 1511, initially named as the ‘Knowledge of
Causes’,
But the 17th century guide books referred to it
as ‘The School of Athens’.
Here Plato and Aristotle are the central figures
surrounded by a host of ancient Greek scholars
and philosophers.
The bare footed Plato is seen pointing skywards,
In his left hand holds his book ‘Timaeus’;
His upward hand gesture indicating his ‘World
of Forms’ and transcendental ideas!
Aristotle is seen pointing downwards, his left
hand holds his famous book the ‘Ethics’;
His blue dress symbolizes water and earth
with an earthly fix.
The painting illustrates the historic continuance
of Platonic thoughts,
In keeping with the spirit of the Renaissance!
Raphael’s last masterpiece ‘Transfiguration’
depicts the resurrected Christ,
Flanked by prophets

With great recollection, there were a few things in life that Ivy Jankauskas would always remember—always.

She would never forget where she was when 9/11 happened; she was in her algebra class, doodling a picture on a piece of notebook paper of her dog, Zoey—bored out of her mind by Mr. Zabbo’s lecture—when she first heard the shocking news. Certainly, she could remember when she first properly fell in love; she was fresh into college when she knew that she loved Trevor Littlefield—the day after they agreed to get back together, right after the day they decided to split up—after she finally realized that she really loved him, much more than she ever, really, consciously thought. She would forever remember when her parents first took her to Disneyland; she was seven and got her picture taken with Snow White and Mickey Mouse, and she instantly decided that she wanted to become a professional Tinkerbelle when she grew up.

And, like it or not, she could remember her very first kiss. She had just turned five, and it was at her birthday party. How could she ever forget those silly paper hats, and all her little playmates wearing them? They were a good sized group of children, mostly from the neighborhood and her kindergarten class, which watched her open present after present. Ivy remembered her cherry cake, with white frosting, and the stain she had when she dropped a piece on her pretty, new dress that her mother had bought her just for the occasion.  

It was later that day, behind her garage, that Gordon Zachary Durand, the Third, a boy her same age, planted one on her. It was a strange sensation, she recalled—icky, wet and sloppy, and Gordon nearly missed her mouth. Not expecting it, Ivy made a face, puckering up her lips—but not for another kiss—as if she had just ****** on a spoiled lemon. Ever since then, it was the beginning of the dislike she had for Gordon Zachary Durand, the Third. She didn’t exactly know why—there was just something about him that bugged her from then on.

There grew to be several reasons why Ivy knew that Gordon was a ****, something she first sensed at her birthday party behind the garage. Since about third grade, children picked on Ivy’s name, teasing her by calling her “Poison Ivy”.  And the one who seemed to be the loudest and most obnoxious of the name callers, chiming in with the other bullies, was Gordon Zachary Durand, the Third.  Ivy was proud of her name up until then, but the taunts made her self conscious. Her mother told her to be proud of her name, for it was unique and different, as she was unique and an individual. Still, Ivy felt uncomfortable with her name for quite a while. Only in adulthood, did she feel somewhat better about it.

A bit of a tomboy back then in school, she would have loved to punch Gordon right in the nose. If only she could get away with it! What a joke! Who would name their child Gordon anyway? She had thought it was far worse than hers.

So to counter his verbal assaults to her name, Ivy called Gordon, “Flash Gordon”, after the science fiction hero from TV and the comics. But Gordon was no hero to her. He was more of a villain, creepy, vile, and just plain mean!

Soon, new name of him caught on, and other kids were joining her. She had a smug sense of satisfaction that Gordon grew furious of the title, for it stuck to him like glue.

Gordon’s family lived right around the block, just minutes away from where Ivy lived. Ivy’s mom, Gail, and Gordon’s mom, Lucy, both went to the same Lithuanian club, and both encouraged their children to take up Lithuanian folk dancing. Ivy remembered she was eight-years-old when she began dancing. It was three years of Hell, she had thought, wearing those costumes, with long, flowery skirts, frilly blouses, aprons, caps and laced vests, and performing for all the parents and families in attendance. Worst of all, she often had to dance with Gordon, and he was one of only three boys that was dragged into taking up folk dancing by their mothers. Probably all of those boys went into it kicking and screaming, so Ivy had thought.

Many years have came and gone since those days. Ivy was now a lovely, young woman, tall and dark blonde, and with a Master’s degree in sociology, working as a social worker in the prison system. Ivy’s parents would never have imagined that she would work in a field, in such places, but she found it quite rewarding, helping those who often wished for or were in need of redemption.    

When Ivy came over to visit her mom one day, her mother had told her some news. “Gordon Durand’s mother passed away”, Gail announced. It was quite disturbing.

“What? When?” Ivy replied, her face full of shock.

“Well, it must have been a few days ago. I saw the obituary in the paper, and a couple of people from the Lithuanian club called me to tell me. The funeral will be Friday. Why, I didn’t even know she was sick! She must have hid from just about everyone. If only I knew, I would have gone to see her and make sure she know I cared”.

It had been a long time since Ivy saw Gordon, ever since high school. Now, they were both twenty-six-years-old. It never occurred to her to ever think of Gordon, to have him fixed in her mind like a fond memory from the past.

“Could of, would of, should of—don’t beat yourself up, Mom” Ivy told her "I guess I should go pay my respects”. But Ivy was not sure if she really should do it, or really if she wanted to do it. “Mrs. Durand was a nice lady. Sometimes, it is the nice ones that die young. What did she die of anyway?”

Ivy’s mom was pouring herself and her daughter a cup of coffee. “I believe it was leukemia. In the obituary, it asks for donations to be made to the Leukemia Society of America”.

Ivy shook her head in disbelief.  As she was sitting down with her mother at the kitchen table, drinking her coffee, her mom shocked her even more. Gail said, “Only twenty-six, same as you, and now Gordon has no mother or father! How tragic to lose your parents at such a young age! It breaks my heart to think of him without his parents, even though he is a grown up man now!”

“What?!” Ivy shouted in disbelief. “When did Gordon’s dad die?!”

Gail sipped on her coffee mug. “Oh, a few years ago, I believe. Time sure flies, so maybe it was longer than I think”. Gail had a far away look on her face like she was earnestly calculating the time in her mind.

“He died? You never told me that! How come you never told me?”

Under normal circumstances, the thought of Gordon Zachary Durand, the Third, would almost want to make Ivy cringe. But now Ivy was feeling very sad for him.  

“I did!” Gail defended herself. “You just don’t remember, or you weren’t listening. I am sure I told you!”

Gail was a round faced woman, with light, crystal blue eyes that always seemed warm in spite of their icy color. Ivy was quite close to her mother, her parents’ only child. She was grateful that her dad, Max, was still around, too, unlike the thought of Gordon’s dad dying. She felt that she could not have asked for better parents. They loved her and built her up to be who she was, and she felt that they could be proud of how she turned out, not the stereotypically spoiled, only child, not entitled to have everything, but one who was willing to do her share in life.  

“I would have remembered, Mom!” Ivy insisted. “I would remember a thing like that! What happened to him? Did you go to the funeral home?”

“I think he had a heart attack”, Gail replied, tapping her finger on her temple to indicate that she remembered. “I did go…oh, wait a minute. You were in Europe with your friends. It was the year after you graduated from high school, I believe. You couldn’t possibly have gone to the funeral home at that time”.

Since Gail did not want to go to Daytona Beach, in Florida, for her senior trip, her parents saved up the money for her to go to Germany and Italy. Ivy wasn’t into being a bikini clad sun goddess, nor was she thrilled by the rowdy behavior of crowds of *** craved teens—a choice that her parents were quite grateful that she chose, level headed as she was.

Since she was a little girl, Ivy dreamed of going to Europe. Her parents, both grandchildren of Lithuanian immigrants, would have loved for her to go to Lithuania, but Ivy and two of her friends had found a safe, escorted trip to go elsewhere,  on to where Ivy always dreamed of going—to see the Sistine Chapel and to visit her pen pal of eleven years, Ursula Friedrich, in Munich.  

Now, Ivy was available to visit the funeral home for Gordon’s mother, and she had decided to go with her mother. Not seeing Gordon in years, Ivy had her misgivings, not knowing what to expect when encountering him. Perhaps, he would be different now, but maybe he would prove to be quite the ****.

As she came, she noticed Gordon’s sister, Deirdre, and she gave her a hug. “I’m so sorry to hear about your mom. She was so nice”, Ivy told Deirdre. She felt uncomfortable talking to Deirdre, for she did not know what to say other than the usual, I am sorry for your loss. It was “sympathy card” talk, and Ivy felt like she was quoting something contrived from a Hallmark store.    

Deirdre was two years older than Gordon. She slightly smiled at Ivy and sighed. She must have said just about the same thing all day long, “It is good of you to come. Thank you for your kind support. Mom would appreciate it”.

Ivy looked around the room. There were many flowers, in vases and baskets, and people surrounding the casket. Ivy could not see Mrs. Durand in the coffin, for people were in the way, her mother included. She was glad she couldn’t see the body from her view.

Funeral homes gave her the creeps, ever since she was thirteen years old and her grandmother died, her father’s mother, and she had to stay at the funeral home all day long. Even a whiff of some, certain flowers was not pleasant to smell. They reminded her of being at a place like this, certainly not evoking thoughts of joy.          

Ivy looked around the room. “Where is Gordon?” she asked Deirdre.

Deirdre sighed again. “Gordon cannot handle death very well”, she admitted. “Go outside and look. He has been hanging around the building outside, getting some fresh air and insisting he needs a big break from all this.”

Ivy shook her head and smirked. “That sounds like Gordon, I must say”  

“Yeah”, Deirdre agreed, as she looked like Gordon’s help to her was a lost cause. “And he’s leaving me to do all the important work—talking to people who come in while he goes away and escapes from reality”.

Ivy went outside to search for Gordon. Sure enough, she found him by the side of the building, under a broad, shady tree. He was having a cigarette, standing all by himself, when he saw her approach.

Gordon looked the same—wavy brown hair and freckles, but much more grown up and sophisticated, his suit jacked off and his tie loosened up. Ivy knew that he always hated wearing ties. She knew that when both her mom and his mom convinced them to go out with each other—a huge twist of their arms—to the Fall Fest Dance in ninth grade and in junior high school. Gordon’s mom bribed him to go with her by promising to double his allowance for the month, and Ivy actually had a silly crush on Gordon’s cousin, Ben, hoping that she might get to talk to him if she went with Gordon to the dance.

Ivy glanced at Gordon’s cigarette, and he noticed. “Been trying to quit”, Gordon told her as she approached. He dropped it on the sidewalk and stepped on it to put it out. His face was somber as he added without any emotion, as if parroting his own voice, “Ivy Jankauskas—how the hell have you been?” It sounded like he had just seen her in a matter of months instead of years.

Well, at least he had no problem identifying her or remembering her name. She must not have changed that drastically—and hopefully for the better.

Ivy stood there before him, as he looked her down from head to toe. Same old Gordon! She thought he was probably giving her “the inspection”. She thought he almost looked handsome in his brown suit vest and pants—almost—with a sharp look of sophistication that Gordon probably wasn’t accustomed to. Surely, Ivy had no real respect for him.

“I’m well”, she responded. “But the question is more like…how are you doing?” Ivy studied Gordon’s blank expression. “No—really. I’d like to know how you are coping”.

Gordon stood there looking at the ground, his hands in his pants pockets, like he never heard her. “Come on. Let’s go for a walk”

“Here? Now?”

“Just a short work, around the block”, he told her. He already started walking, and Ivy contemplated what to do before she decided to follow up with him to join him.

They walked together in silence for a while. From anyone passing by, they surely would have looked like a couple, a well-paired couple that truly enjoyed each other’s company. Ivy could not believe she was actually walking with him. Gordon Zachary Durand, the Third? Of all people!

“You haven’t answered my question”, Ivy said. “How are you coping? You know I really liked your mom a lot. She always was pleasant to me”.

She wanted to add, “Unlike you”, but it certainly was not the right time or the right place. She felt a twinge of guilt for thinking such a thing. Under more pleasant circumstances, she would have jabbed him a little. That was just how they always communicated, not necessarily in a mean-spirited way, but in a brotherly and sisterly way that involved plenty of teasing.

Gordon thought a moment before he answered. “Yeah, it’s hard. But what can I do? I lost my dad. I lost my mom. Period. End of discussion. I’m too old to be an orphan…but I kind of feel like one anyhow. That’s my answer, in a nutshell”.

“And I wish I knew about your dad”, Ivy said, with a great tone of remorse. “I was in Europe at the time, and I couldn’t have possibly gone to the funeral”.

“Europe? Wow! Aren’t you the jet setter? Who else gets to do that kind of stuff but you, Ivy?”

Now that was the Gordon she always knew! It did not take long for the true Gordon to come forth and show himself.

“No! I don’t have all kinds of money!” she quickly defended herself. “I actually helped pay for some of that trip by working all summer after we graduated from high school. Plus, it was the trip of a lifetime. I may never get the chance to go again on a trip like that again”.  

Ivy was a bit perturbed that Gordon seemed to imply that she was pampered by her parents. He accused her of that before, just because she was an only child.

Autumn was approaching, but summer was still in the air. It was Ivy’s favorite time of year, with the late summer and early autumn, all at the same time.  The trees were just starting to turn colors, but the sun felt nice and warm upon her as Ivy walked along. It was surely an Indian summer day, one that wouldn’t last forever. She wore a light sweater over her sleeveless, cotton dress, and took it off to experience more of the sun.

“It has been ages since I’ve seen you”, Gordon admitted. “Since high school. So what became of you? Did you ever go to college?”

“I did and I work as a social worker…I work in various prisons”

Gordon laughed out loud, and Ivy gave him a stern look. “What’s so funny?” she demanded.

“I just can’t picture you going in the slammer, even if you aren’t wearing an orange suit”, he said in between laughing. He looked at Ivy, and she had quite a frown on her face. He changed his tune. “I was only joking, Ivy. I think you’d probably do good work at your job”.  

“And where do you work?” she asked, a devilish expression on her face. “At the circus?”

Ivy caught herself becoming snarky to Gordon. It did not take long. She opened her mouth to apologize, but Gordon, sensing her need to be sorry, stopped her.

Laughing even more, he said, “Good one! You are sharp and fast on your feet! You always have been! I work for an insurance agency. I work for Triple A”.

“Oh, really? Do you like your job?” Ivy asked. Her interest was genuine.

“It pays the bills. But, hey! I am going back to college in January. I just have an Associate’s degree right now. I am not sure what I want to take up, but I want to go back and at least get a Bachelor’s”.

“That’s great!” Ivy exclaimed. “I think you should keep on learning and keep on moving forward. That is a great goa

**** me in the sistine chapel
with your lips against my neck
and your breath still hot and lingering
"at least she died happy," they'll say
"or least, 'happy' for being...her"

when i take my last breath,
it is't michelangelo's masterpieces
on the ceiling i'll be focused on
*it's you i want to see before i go

This is for the soul searchers
This is for the song writer who feels like who he is doesn’t fill the space

of who he was meant to be. This is for the depressed cigarette smoking chain smokers.
This is for the poet who writes a thousand lines and keeps them all to
herself, because nobody else deserves to hear them.
This is to fight the starless sky of every midnight wanderer who looks up
wondering, cause if there were more like you the night time streets wouldn’t be so empty.
This is for the traveler who never got a chance and lies below a rock with
his name.
I don’t even know if I’m old enough to say it, but it’s for the generations
of baby boomers of old women and men whose ideas and values are shushed by an obnoxious generation.
This is for the wedding planners whose weddings never seem to come.
This is for the beautiful girls that somebody told otherwise.
This is for the 15 year old gang member who can’t leave.
This is for the second place finishers and the C students.
This is for the guitar strings never threaded and the scripts never
written and the thrill voices that never cried hallelujah because they didn’t believe they could.
This is for the incapable,
Because you and me both are incapable.
This is so you can look at me differently like I was an amputee.
And what I’ve had cut away was my expectations.
I was supposed to be huge—
I was supposed to be the first rose ever planted in the desert—
I was supposed to be the first paint on the ceiling in the Sistine chapel—
I was supposed to be either Axel Rose or Frodo Baggins, and whether
you’re cool or not you understand that line.
I was supposed to be the first pope with a full body tattoo—
I was supposed to be Neil Armstrong—
I was supposed to be the first life on another planet—
I was supposed to be bleeding iron and nails—
If you saw me as I was supposed to be the contrast between me and the
rest of the world would be unbearable, but I’m incapable.
‘Cause nobody ever pushed me,
Nobody ever pushed me,
Nobody ever pushed me and said:
Be something bigger,
Be something bigger,
Be something!

Nobody ever told me I had the power to leave a hole when I withdraw
my hand from water or move a crowd with mere words or play notes on a piano like bullets to your eardrums.
And in all of this, I wonder if the big things know how important they
are, because I’m a mustard seed and nobody expects me to move a mountain,
Or even cover its slopes in yellow.
But I still feel vastly important, so what then?
So this is my push, my push that you may never get from another person, ever. So, listen carefully:

I EXPECT A LOT OUT OF YOU.

Don’t be discouraged when you can’t cross one line, ‘cause you’ll pass a
hundred others learning you can’t go over one.
This is a dare: go to your fridge and get out all your eggs and put them in
one basket and tell me if you’re still incapable.
And if you are, go back to your fridge and get all your egg based
products, ‘cause you missed them, you missed them and you need them and the neighbors not lending any ingredients.
And when you get there, wherever it is that I pushed you to, don’t worry
about telling me—
Cause I
Will notice
And most of all remember that if you’ve been pushed, if you’ve really
been pushed, you’ll be dearly missed when you’re gone.

                                                         -Marty Schoenleber III

the best way for you
and I is as one
we are art
like the sistine chapel
and our love is bright as the new moon in libra
but darling I'm growing scared for us
and I'm accidentally detaching myself
because I don't want to feel pain again
like I did for many years
except this time
it's going to feel like cupids arrow shooting me through my lungs

This was once all that we knew.

A world in parts before we knew

     it

as such subdivisions as this, that and

more beneath that still: there was

once good and evil, god and them,

the rest of us, and

Jesus, simply looking upwards after

he flung himself forth from the dust

to the sky and the light was bleached

off and the colours leaked from our

eyes to our canvases. What more

can I say before we take more

of ourselves away from each other? What more

before you implant me into some other's

body, and the prayer completed,

and I am finally a computer? In

the meanwhile my eyes will look and

my neck will strain as the sun sets and

so does my little life: how long have I

wanted to see you again, o lord, since

my first scream of myself all so long

ago when I left my mother's salt

and was flashed into the flood of your

      world?

How long, o lord, will you have me here

to see your work through these ceiling

songs, such sonorous ringings, fleshy

twists and turns of paint as muscle

and what's that behind the cloud?

     Your finger

appareled in such golden rays?

Endless. When your ships brought such

dark skin as mine across these

times and spaces, what?, where you

surprised of my dreams to see it,

     this,

all engulfed in flames?  And

yet here you are and here I am and

here is the quiet my birth your

glory your joy the brushstrokes

the colours and the full fleshy taste

of my non-belief, leaking into my fingers,

sticky, frisk, and always.


    When I leave these, they will fall

and crumble. It will all go. In the hallways,

as I walk away: several big windows:

     Rome, sunset.

    When I leave these, they will go

and disappear. Into salt. Those large windows:

blue-shadowed branches begin some small slow dance.

     When I leave these temples they will dust

and return to dust the soil of our hands.

And the trees remain beautiful.

Nay, Lord, not thus! white lilies in the spring,
Sad olive-groves, or silver-breasted dove,
Teach me more clearly of Thy life and love
Than terrors of red flame and thundering.
The hillside vines dear memories of Thee bring:
A bird at evening flying to its nest
Tells me of One who had no place of rest:
I think it is of Thee the sparrows sing.
Come rather on some autumn afternoon,
When red and brown are burnished on the leaves,
And the fields echo to the gleaner’s song,
Come when the splendid fulness of the moon
Looks down upon the rows of golden sheaves,
And reap Thy harvest:  we have waited long.

Today I went kayaking
I glided across the cool waters
Brackish and so devoid of life
This time of year

As I drifted underneath the bridge
I imagined it painted like the Sistine chapel
A choir of angels hidden beneath the barnacle encrusted concrete
For only the fish to see

I had almost forgotten that the river existed
Five minutes away
And all I wanted to do was paddle
Out into the ocean

I don't write lyrics, but I do have flow
I don't write music, but I do have soul
I'm not an artist, but a picture I'll paint
  Sistine Chapel leaves you thinking I'm a saint
I don't play sports, but I do play minds
I'm not a catcher, but I still show signs
I'm not a racer, but I still cross lines

I'm not a witch, but I'll still cast doom
Not the undertaker, but I'll set up your tomb
Not a fortune teller, but I can spell your demise
I'm not a magician, but I can see your surprise
I'm not a gardener, but I can plant you in the ground
I'm not a devil, but hellish is my sound
  Demons in the room have come to stomp you down

I flow freely, 'cuz I'm a bad-*** poet
But I'm not all bad. Here, let me show it
I can make your heart beat to the sound of my melody
  Make you love-sick; I'm sorry, there is no remedy
I'm like soldiers in the dirt, always brave
I'm strong, and I'm bold, and I'm a slight knave
Always protecting innocence with the tip of a glaive
*  Now this time I must remember to hit save

I’d hazard a guess there aren’t many folk who don’t know the tales of Harry, Hermione and Ron
and how with a cast of a multitude of friends they defeated Voldemort with aplomb,
rightly these heroic adventures are held in the highest regard,
and will be told forever by musicians, singers and bards,
these stories will be remembered, people will talk of those courageous and brave
and how they turned the evil tide of The Dark Lord with everything they gave,
how they dispelled the magic of horror with the strength of the Gryffindor lion,
but less well known than this wonder is the fable of Tayrn and her Ryan.
R and T arrived to Hogwarts  10  years after He Who Can Not Be Named was vanquished in the great struggle,
Tayrn was pure wizard born whereas Ryan was pure muggle,
both took to wizarding school easily and did well in all their classes,
of course Tayrn was a hit with the lads and Ryan a swoon with the lasses,
but it didn’t matter they gave all folk in their year at Hogwarts an involuntary love shudder
because ace Tayrn and Ryan only had eyes for each other!
Their wonderful sweet love was easy and went without a hitch,
spent Saturdays gazing at each other when they should have been watching Quidditch,
hand in hand they skipped around The Forbidden Forest, their romance knowing no rift,
saying hello to a friendly centur or a flying hippogriff,
they galloped around Diagon Alley, their souls full of cheer,
or sat relaxed and tranquil in The Leaky Cauldron sipping butter beer.
T and R were ace at spells, Tayrn’s best was with a wand swish creating healing
and Ryan’s wonderful arty prowess was painting The Sistine Chapel on any ceiling;
yes they were each other’s equal in the way they weaved the magic from above
and this is one of the reasons they were very much in love.
One night T and R were going on one of their romantic walks
and decided to have a jaunt to a wonderful clearing just near Hogwarts,
they sauntered through the darkening evening with a song on their lips,
swaggered along the green with the music of love on their hips,
as they got to the secluded clearing they were anticipating with glee each other’s hold
but then all of a sudden they started feeling very cold.
They both noticed that the summer grass was covered in a blanket of frost,
the trees were looking pale, freezing, withdrawn and lost,
the air was filled with frigidity and held the hints of scare,
the flowers were wilting with chilled terror, bloom given way to despair,
as Tayrn and Ryan wondered what was the cause of such floral bad health
just a few yards away  the answer revealed itself;
over a hill came a hooded figure that immediately brought fright to the fore
as Tayrn and Ryan paid attention in Defence Against The Dark Arts they instantly recognised it as a dementor,
but they noticed something different about this one, it was nearly trebled in size,
and had a deeper blackness where should have been it’s eyes.
Being skilled at magic they knew what they had to do to avoid any harm
so both quickly fired off their best Patronus Charm,
but these spells had no effect, the huge dementor merely shrugged them off
and they could have sworn beneath it’s hood it let out a derisive scoff.
The enormous dementor hovered over Tayrn and Ryan and from its mouth emerged a hiss,
as it prepared to give the two lovers their final goodbye kiss,
but as it stooped over them with it’s awful deathly hue
T and R looked into each other’s eyes and figured out what they were going to do;
they remembered in one class learning about the bravest man Hogwarts had ever knew
and how he was able to hoodwink The Dark Lord with a love strong, solid and true,
how Snape drew on his love of Lilly to ride through any storm,
even on his darkest night it was what kept him warm,
so Tayrn and Ryan pushed their wands together and thought of beautiful Severus
and how they both too shared the romantic love buzz,
and channelling the wonder of that special feeling thus
they both pointed their wands in unison and screamed Expelliarmus!
Emitted from the tip of each wand was the half of a love heart projected from each soul
that both came together to create the fantastic whole,
in the shine of such love the vast dementor instantly recoiled,
knowing that it’s draining wish was in no doubt foiled,
it writhed around and in the glare of joy did it’s nefarious purpose erode,
every bleak and blank about it started to corrode,
the dementor slowly ebbed away until all of it did go
and in it’s place was left a striking brown young doe,
it bowed it’s head to Tayrn and Ryan and then it flew into the trees,
gliding with majesty on the sweet night breeze.
Awed by what had happened Ryan and Tayrn turned and started to walk back to the dorm,
aware of what occurred was special and not the norm,
but then they stopped in their tracks and at the same time both did say,
“oh my beautiful love, I know  I’m going to marry you someday!”

Hands held and submissive breathing, walls taking, walls caving. No translation needed
Pride taken, tap left unopened

Here i am making the most of a something i can never have for myself.
Sistine chaples made on a canvas i might never touch again.

his smile more intriguing than that depicted in the mona lisa.

his hair so golden it puts van gogh's sunflowers to shame.

his eyes pop brighter than lichtenstein's art.

eat your heart out, monet, for my man is far more beautiful than impressionist landscapes.

and why did michelangelo not paint my darling on the sistine chapel?
for he is an angel on earth.

for he is a work of art.

Vernarth sequence

Prophecy I -  “Eighth month of sailing in systemic plenitude”

“Since they will not hunt us down in all our Itheoi cycles…
nor in other lapses from where the fine eye could have sewn the buttonholes of the shroud, where there will be life and if there will be a short time without life...
dragged by you for a long time where the sun is melted over the word, staying stored and locked in your pocket to collect it blushing,
tomorrow's jump without a yesterday declining..., without a tomorrow in the heat of a bonfire...
lamb in bait handled being the portal of those who have been slapped inside their cheeks… who will not shorten the cycle that transcends all the oblong sepulchral vaults or who abound in the nonsense of sanitizing nights of ***** despot life having to measure themselves in your flourishing duel by Aiónius of the cleanest dew of its solid stroke and announced delineation of the new one that has been retraced again being more than a brief syllable created again fertile, in the biosphere mouth so as not to see you omnipresent mist, meditating not having you and that dares to meditate on your future that will have to be reserved for yourself by professing it when you are cold in front of you and insinuating if in living followed by letters to be flooded pondering like a paralyzed sleeping part that wants not to be covered with feigned warmth and that does not fit in all the parts of me being who wants to be consul of some shelter with all those who sleep also half dreaming in the company of the lost afternoon that never ends serving Saint John in Katapausis here, perhaps Aiónius del Ibico 1 as a magnificent and net unit that sees the luminous truth when we all come out of a prophecy alive even if it's dark ".

"What a reckless job of losing value,
I am already in Katapausis in the eighth month...,
I entered as the light opened with my hand turned into the light...
being already a katapausis meaning in Sabbatarianism.
Quasi-unit method exhibiting cohesion to the rest motif
With levers in my hands and intra-sabbatism in his dissertation...
of an exegetical and theological nature that has transpired soft insomniac light, We are a people who do not have to fear or air to deposit for a future warehouse above the Sycamore or birds that guard all the Gold above my hands on the Sycamore…”

"Stay in my house, if I don't come back it will be yours
stay at home, it will belong to everyone even in the apocalypse...
that more reckless will be silent as a work of losing value,
Katapausis is the threshold where my life enters and leaves at once,
stay at my house, if I don't come back it will be yours...
Open windows by meekly closing them to that confronted obverse to you...

He comes from a den relativized on reliefs in weathered beads...
they will be soluble mineral beings convened moving away from the most distant and closest to the least distant…, from waters of underground siphons… there we will all be floating… like vertebrate invertebrate animals”

Vernarth, after not entering the grotto not having found Saint John, goes outside where he goes on a campaign for three months before he can be received by God's law. Here he meets with Reader and his pelican, as well as Eurydice.


Prophecy II -  “Seventh, Inter-synergy energy”

“Three months I have waited in the middle of this mountain,
symmetrically arranging the steps to be taken, not going backward
prana of life walking in oceans of life walking…
us and them… how much must separate us to reach us?
what I have not tried to separate…, what I have not been able to achieve…

I think I died early in the worlds that haven't risen yet,
I think I was reborn late among dense curves that overwhelm us with straight lines
soul, principle, matter, and material distinctive ontology
Ghost god of parallelisms beings and activities in affinity...
starvation body of low energy ceasing creatures in embryo
incessant firstborn to infuse other confining souls
trails demons slip where my ashes hands are sore
wounded doctrines to engender and doctrines to ulcerate...

As the prophecy uses the sea carrying messages resolved from shore to shore
close to a Virtual why in the twilight your Faith that must be glandular… matter of soul and body exposed to predisposing theological and chemical, in pursuit of the corruptible whole in vice versa if he does not burst with atheistic impatience.”

Eurydice takes a zither and sings tempting stormy actions to Vernarth, Raeder and Petrobus put their souls in line in the first linear principle, Together with the matter of corporeal fire proceeding to the definition where all the parts are confirmed without distinction dancing next to them creating the greatest bond of faith in body and soul, thus spending the three months in a few words of light of the sated fire.

"In the eighth-month katapausis, eight times your permanent peace must rest in
cited state; once it is translated into Sabbathisms and it will be the same state… When everyone finishes their dance in the cave and enters believing they have the courage to enter eight times in connection with rest…, plus eight times in connection without rest.
In some verses, the urgency of the entrance will be accentuated. The main issue “is that history will be repeating itself exactly where the Israelites were at Kadesh-Barnea. A related term either synonymous with Kadesh or referring to one of two sites, is Kadesh (or Qadesh) Barnea. Various etymologies for Barnea have been proposed, including 'wilderness of travel' but none have produced a broad consensus. What is the consensus? will we stop believing or lean on the shores of a preacher rain of Jehovah or lean on the shores of a preacher sinful waterfall or lean on the shores of a preacher confessing rain or lean on the shores of a preacher wet wind inquisitor...? where ever the aromas of its faithful winds served will go sacred to everything named before and many before the confessing rainy…, waterfalls in favor of the temperamental inquisitor wind”.

Astheneiais”, in Greek is and will be a weakness, in Hebrews a moral connotation and will mean not only physical weakness but a conscious weakness and trembling in temptation. Our Lord also understands us in this weakness because he was tempted in every way as we are. Since he himself was tempted he knows from experience what it means for us to be tempted. He was not tempted in all the particulars of our life, for example, He was not tempted as a husband or father, owner or employer or soldier, because he was none of these things. But he was tempted in all three areas of human susceptibility: body, soul, and spirit.

Prophecy III -  “Sixth, Resilience…”

“They were on the perimeter trying to keep me together at his command,
I go every day for its pantry, food, groceries, bookstore supplies and ink, oils, and other essences for the environment in continuous handwritten obedience, I have to leave for Skalá where some residents are waiting for me who have ordered to bring materials from Gricos and Psili Ammos to project your home,
If this has been written like this, it is because my pleasure in walking has written it, in the company of the one, he has written for the one who walks next to me the god Ibicus!

They always asked me why to mention why I have to do this for them… I will tell you that I used to serve leaders who consolidate the Hellenic geography,
without them, everything would have been invaded by unled foreign hands… in that rest, I have to attend to the verse that precedes it...
which says that we have already entered where I already intend to argue the following…

Resilience and exhortation that from the beginning I have taken since it began... now I will abide by and present your messages in a very predominant note, I was Hoplite Commander of the Falange and Hetairoi, now a Christian who does not dispute living a life of obedience to those who are not and are not without his martyrs...
like those people to whom God swore they will not enter my rest
whose amen will be preached in the passive voice verse!

Remain as the verb indicates with the real facts, the word
independent of the present, independent of who and when…
Saint Gabriel my Abrahamic angel will give me white strength and frolicking lilies like baskets of hermaphroditic lilies procreating only-begotten forests at the altar.

Stand tall over the Abrahamic fire without knuckles or shields,
rethink your beloved woman and take a sudden step to heal your wounds there is so much grass to cut and so much poetry to chew...
up the mountain towards Skalá at night after drinking wine
Epitrapezios Inos setting fire with innocuous saffron atmosphere
lips of fire and bread, for a good offensive fight.
Greek fire naphtha, cinnabar, and anthracite.

Wake up united with the deep disorder
Grant the color that deserves to have your day as a constellation
with the image that rests on your angular and calloused hands.
stopping spaces of loss more than all the centuries that waited for the minimum incense to a good warrior, sweet wine for open bleeding wound not his… the thunder that hides baptisms in all hearts empty of blood...

“While Vernarth was praying in the oracle he felt a thunderous supra sound As if the gates of hell had opened...
As if millions of seconds of angels were to be dispersed from the sky
To reduce more seconds of silence to the thinnest pleading eardrum

A few days ago I saw a ghost that was chopping wood...
I couldn't realize that he was really Him...,
I also saw him cutting thousands of volumes from a library...
Also, not realizing it, I saw several, like more than eighty manuscripts..., of breaths that still did not prosper in the hands of San Marcos...

A gigantic door slam is felt again...!
again it was the angels that came
at the wrong time in his return..., but now in his repatriation
they climbed through and into the Garden of Eden.”

Vernarth, evicted from the habit of the unknown, was apprehended by his craftsmanship of him, he was still attentive to be received by San Juan. The longer he waited to be arranged for an audience, he did not postpone what his memory pointed out to be more than an experience plotting capacities in the face of his own limitations. From that moment on, a gigantic gate slam is felt again! the angels who went back one after another with their polished golden-white cloaks relapsed..., but now making the Garden of Eden their own,... being theirs in what was theirs, that they would be in the house of a wise gardener of Eden perhaps being the same Katapausis manger at once!

Raeder says: hugging him profusely! time has to fly like little angels, having them by your side as companions of the time that is leftover on their wings, giving it all to your enjoyment of living and feeling it lost in you without finding it. ! khaire mi Vernarth!, I have some karidopitas with nuts and yogurt accompanied by baklava with nuts in delicious syrup from Kalymnos. Petrobus jumped for joy and fluttered like a hummingbird to steal a few pieces! Eurydice and Vernarth did the same. That night they told militia stories while they ate the morsels, so they fell asleep as if it had been the first time they had fought such a great menu. Euridice assists in the same with his fresh clean face, creating an atmosphere of conciliation to renew the dream of a day that will dawn close to his waking up far from the criminals. Vernarth takes the staff from him from then on and divides books and manuscripts into two portions so that he has time to take steps to really feel that he can walk close to Saint John.

Prophecy IV -  "Fifth, Nature, Manuscripts and Jophiel"

“Zeus wakes up trembling, full of headaches saturated with Herbs for headaches Jophiel speaking this time with the Kabbalistic language of the Torah...with golden commoner super zone of the Organikon Sorousliston Papadikon….age-old music that supplies Zeus with protein albumin, to make him more human…Zeus accepts Jophiel by placing his head about the house of Jophiel; a divine island to throw cards…brings the second ray to the Sahasrara at the crown of your head, pacifying love that is the suspicious and risky loser of everything risk in the head especially when a feeling is born!

Zeus turns his head and Jophiel twists it to the opposite side
about the ruined zeros that he did not count from the plasma of his dependency, Zeus feared having albumin at risk of human transmutation... happy to be able to cry he imagines slipping into the middle of a lake and he sees that he falls on Hera's poultry harming none, Zeus pours brimstone from his mouth and milks inelegant prose from the scythe…

Trina flame whose son bears glorious her bearer,
thousands of lives being clumsy for the wisest destitute
being what in the present you were more than past trine
when you harbor from Hanael's Blue Sodalite quarry
the imperfect perfects when you listen to your
body how it beats, how it breathes... you realize that it is perfect
as is Jophiel and discerns repairing the wisdom in the decisive punt
where gum rosin myrrh and multi urban frankincense go
towards the soul plane architecture of the human plane.
Hardened Zeus overflows glazed sallow emulsion of war
coagulated exhausting guarantor of everything is well,
books of the silent world of nails that do not sound sheets,
Hanael in massive books divides sounding with her iris gel-colored nails encrypted library manuscript of a thousand years, the voluptuous organism of a thousand years…
flapping unpredictable millennia and wiry hands,
colossal capstans…, annihilated with a thousand years…
a silly propeller that spins like a sickle rolling over a certain holistic tabernacle of the small portion of the next day when Zeus awoke to the diaphanous threatening light with sunless cloud waistband…
His face is seen with frowns and he looks at his face as well
without seeing folds…but in front of the Aiónius.

The geranium appears in the representation of the natural whole kicking the Sickle, much more here lost of our spiritual being
Zeus Jophiel's hardened shoulder heats up only to lean on Him...
light on his shoulders fires on both of them…
how long it takes to save us perhaps twenty times what supports us even tired and much more unwrapped than the treachery of him alone and without being followed without knowing
nothing more than a thousand-year-old shell through which he would drain…perhaps a tortoise-like millennial angel walked up to the omega! joy preparing to give you live hopeful,
that if it would be timely to give you more life...
Here is Aiónius reordering the world together with Zefian…
He shares everything eternal of all your life that floats in the sea,
miserable mix space where capo dastro separates the end
where all the wheres cannonade the hoarse fire...
cement that joins brick wall and plenary adobes
love without nature that castrates your beautiful woman
that hides her face without mascara looking for it...
let's go outside says Vernarth..., we still have a few seconds in his solvent... sensible, full, and arc well-being...
as if you were floating in the air floating more
also needed me to teach you before your limits limit you,
and make you angry from the miserable sense,... Don't listen to me anymore...!!”

Vernarth puts his first three fingers on the capo dastro roosters crow with his skin vibrating beyond the sleep of Raeder and Petrobus. Reader wakes up and says…; My Vernarth I will make fire and heat water. Petrobus runs with his wings to look for sacred wood. Eurydice comments…, I will prepare the praiseworthy sacred breakfast.

When they were preparing to do all this, Jophiel and Hanael appeared to him, joining in the breakfast that would feed all the days and millennia of the world. Unleavened fruit, honey, and milk multiply above all, satiating hunger with satiated satisfaction.

Prophecy V – Fourth, Limbus Necropolis

“From so far away…, so far away that I listen to your sacrosanct cries…!
from the Koumeterium of Messolonghi…, rocking my elbows and hurting myself
moving in rare pleasant crypt upon crypts disconsolate stones
not so far away..., keys held in the eighth cemetery...
Who is to open the heavy door now...?
I come from Messolonghi 555 km in linear figures to Patmos...,
narrowing concave… doubtful in extension, passion princess cloud
He must welcome me benevolently in the night nymph consort...
Limbus N cloud, Cloud Cemetery lofty lofty hypogeum
soul of Limbo, before seeing the nut that girds the face in the graceful Grim Reaper resurrecting restless…, sinning… grail sacrament without Being or being…?
Necropolis Cloud, expectant mortuary technology...
amaze me if there is a byte for me...
narrow conscience, unseemly to amaze me?

Here the lost mist of the Nothofagus God phoneme-photon vanishes with divine mass light to build the Áullos Kósmos. The Sacrament of Limbus will provide spaces and assemblages of meters for thousands of areas of infamous wandering the Ouranos, approaching the Áullos Kósmos to host him and rescue the children of the meter that was missing in the numeral rule of the Megaron acroteria before going up to the Necropolis Cloud. Vernarth, mere body formalizing principle...
extinct delicate evocation of the shadow of Elpenor;
Achaean warrior of Ulysses grandiloquent who even has otitis
and verse where flu spreads influenza
heartbreak from far away reverberating in the elite of lexicons…
arriving equidistant ... the last one arrives threatening with his Kantabroi staying neither divided nor captured, taking refuge in outright failure twilight of megahertz, farce propaganda surrendered fear will not fall even after …

Vernarth falls from the Koumeterium Mesolonghi in the Necropolis cloud privileging his status, he falls from this gloomy digital platform with a high alcoholic degree! from the high heaven after drinking hours he came in the carriage that was from Zilos, with the passion of heaven depriving his understanding stunned on some branches of will of Ziziphus…, stunned on branches of mercy….

Vernarth in a contrite accident with Elpenor, his psyche flies to the realm of the dead, Hades was remaining prisoner in that world taking the form of a Homeric icon or shadow. Vernarth was asleep after his binge, and Elpenor asks him if he wanted to join him with some concoctions. He was with blurred vision, a headache, and still lying down. But in the passionate horror of his drunkenness, he gets up quickly, saying to Elpenor: For me, it was one less pain to drink after having fallen from such a distance without being able to request and have had the grace of my mother's lullaby. For this reason, I hug you! They went together to the Cloud Necropolis to continue in the Limbus trying to alternate their physical body to gaseous liquid. At that moment Eurídice hits her with a piece of wood on her legs so that she wakes up from the bite of that nightmare that overwhelmed her to finally be able to wake up. Raeder had gone with Petrobus to Skalá to seek inputs of gnosis and his own inspiration for accents before the welcome in Katapausis to come in the blink of an eye of San Juan, necessary redaction for licenses and to be admitted to his library.

Prophecy VI - “Third, Rethymnon City and State”

“Vernarth heard the sound of a bouzouki, spoke of a 40-day fast that Greece celebrates before Easter, at the Rethymnon carnival they come from all over Greece to attend as a family during the week with animations, evenings and concerts, dances…theatre, floats with Venetian art in the picturesque old town and modern city, in this ancient city …

Rethymnon Political Ellipsis

“Like territorial extension, past-future organized infamous scene…Vernarth imagines being with Etréstles in immediate predictions
with years and thousands…, clan hobbies, Rethymnon manuscript…
while he thus deliberated…, thus rejoicing in the immaculate extramural grotto thus being as if it were comparable to a Neolithic village; being together lost with eagerness to appear from political power... palaces, kings, pro-organized religions..., rancorous superlative temple, priestly-eucharistic, nationalized sovereign citizen... commanding Parliament of the Hellenic politai people
the competent anti-value entity of the substratum political state…
sedentary-agricultural or nomadic-livestock culture…, vertical Hoplite culture!”

In Thessaloniki street, he would meet his brother head-on...Imagining how he would be...? Well-dressed-shiny, he would be in a passing tavern usually naming himself tradition and terms of questionable validity rather than those of a retro-linguistic family, in the remarkable urban-city dialogue called seditious inns with networks of political territorial extension, reaching the colossal size of multinational ideals of a complex stratification, social meeting place, future ministries to whom to delegate?. They would arrive at the tavern in Rethymnon in Crete, they order coffee, biscuits, and Mosaikó chocolates. In an unexpected moment, he suddenly wakes up from this deep, hallucinating, and futuristic imagination! His brother appears immediately, not in Rethymnon but in Katapausis with the goddess Lepidoptera!

End Ellipsis Rethymnon

“At the moment his imagination breaks just when they were preparing to toast… Etréstles in this same interval appear in Katapausis Reader and Petrobus coming in a singular pilgrimage from Skalá…this is how the syllabic song of the arcane ***** is heard emitting from the grotto…, yellow lights and saffron…. Saint John and the Gospel celebrating the Eucharist…Vernarth would believe for the first time that the hermit would come, but No…!
his brother was to be in the intervening yellow-white light
in front of him nothing more than Etréstles visiting him”

Likewise, they would no longer be in Rethymnon,
but the carnival would already begin in the region of Patmos...
eating delicacies, and the Sousta towards the circle of the Sun in the hands…They have been two months with the sweetened Moon and the Sun posing its mass of light in her… soft palm next to her waiting for him in the proximity of a Hebrew silence

Estretles says Khaire Vernarth! from Piacenza who did not see your joyous lux! I can see now to the sound of yourself the stoic zither...
countenance light, the orbit of your eyes, pale asthenia without photon without light, expectorant suppuration of your sacred Lynothorax, Absent in front of the long and fatal transverse lapse!
Raeder makes a speech to Zeus Photon Child Lux
Fulminant spends time where it remains greater than the minimum...
Patmos is the time of the Messiah…, retrograde years…
polis Helennic city-states.

Culture-state… state time chorus in tune
Philosophical poetic-epic Olympian Aiónius global leader
Homeric poems..., Raeder I am..., a naughty Politai...
you Vernarth are Politai Hetairoi militia
candy wasted by me Raeder… sweetened in my memory
polytheistic, cultured and declined…
theocratic referendum or democratic right,
Exciting porridge of my Kourabiedes cookies
butter, icing sugar, flour, eggs from the icy cliff
vanilla or Mastica resin, ***, Ouzo, mastica liquor…
or other alcoholic beverages…, which bubble on the underside of Aiónius soaked in my mouth with water from petal buds
coated for you with sugar on the tip of my tongue…
reflective cops in a wonderful dialogue of a tasty recipe...
It's time for everyone else to snack too!!

In that second Raerder was choking on a Kourabiede biscuit,
but there was the guardian of the Petrobus who piloted the
throwing hieratic water on the inside of his mouth,
forcing him to take heart from the buttress of his speech
shooing thick crumbs from his skinny dialogue spitted...
Gerakis, ray, tabletop oak bull, scepter for those who rule with him and not...My Zeus friend I invite you to play marbles,
I invite you to tell us that we are friends...
we're both fine… only Space-separated us…?

Raeder runs towards Zeus' thunderbolt from his right hand.
he jumps up and takes it from her, in exchange for this she gives him his marbles...The entire earth tilts over the Aegean..., the earth's axis tilts eight degrees, altering the cerebrospinal fluid of the Hellenic geopolitical conception..., with Zeus poly infarcted over descending magnitudes of inter-politics, millennia and headless governments...

“Apokalypsis lightning restarted, emerged from a New World”
Prophecy VII -. “Second, Alikanto Aion, Quantum”
"Kalymnos, golden tetra steed Alikanto was grazing under the metallic moon...
transiting its quantum physics…, golden legs…, four golden domes
the super host being in Apoika Andros next to the villagers,
commemorating troupe and advent…, Heraklion next period
celebrant anniversary, progeny bearer of Kanti Cretense,
close cycles of the sacred fire, domestic environment, and private zeal...
funerary hidden cult… streets in the hieratic family dwelling
fertile women… totalized and lustful ****…
productive longevity and harvests…, family Apoika
next successor belligerence…, funerary plexus…
culty predecessor…, treatise and imprecation of law, theme and legible religion domestic scene, family civic servant ceremony

Goddess Hestia austere, head with eight sacred candles dressed
Olympus lacking without gods…, only Goddesses embargo!
Feminine Hestia Domestic Goddess, an emanation of the female oval to ovulating…Pritaneo, the central decree of the political harvests… foreign exchange grains to be minted monetary stock exchange of Athens… Pritaneo ford on the rise, ford on increase Aion... hesitant dart swoop into eternity,
Alikanto Perpetual Aion…Speaks with both hands
synchronized and tilted tongue…
stutters and swallows, in six paranasal sinuses
saturated with fiery saliva..., and an Internal voice saying say...
what makes sense to feel and what does not turn off...
sleeping waves in the poison of love igniting
intra-Vernarth love…, billing infected holy blood
methodical coupled time…, Gaugamela the bronze extremity,
of a lost leader…, won leader!

If I had to run to rewrite retro Adhoc poems and chosen trova,
With a shy Trojan verse, I would dare today if I kissed her in front of me… she!
she would jump from the hyperesthetic-Ouranos…, inhuman to the Aion world
aurora celestina, bleeds big and defiant today in your star
In herself Ella…, pestiferous condemnation sweetness and aura between her…she just be, she herself be supported be…, Oh… Goddess Hestia on your opposite leg unbraced arm, meadow and vein braid… assaulted by lost and thirsty love written everything if she tempts…, everything wields darkly if it took you to our Olympus… at night loving you whole..., emptying everything with no inappropriate hand singing don vine fissure and intimate company, may it be exterminated... passion outside with nailed stake..., iron embedding..., nails wounding...exhausted supra lips supra yours…, mid sand writing full to her…
tip of my Xiphos… blood made written with written maiden mythology,
letter sword Spatha…, cyclamen balm made whole if I had you!

“To the loves of the world I say…, cover your ears fungus of boredom, your torn ears squander ignoring more than sordid saying...my blood kills, my blood revives! I **** my blood and I **** everyone, with your blood scattered, ***** blood scattered…!
do not leave me alone until nightfall… I only ask for holy water,
emptied from your mouth goddess Hestia who flies tons over me...
I only ask for a spatha romantic blood sharp, ******, and scattered...
to write to the love wars that I have lost...
to the wars of love that I have won, slicing the jugular of the
treacherous and wicked emperor"

“… Alikantus, he remembered the Hoplite commander in Gaugamela, he remembered when he dodged arrows with his head so that they would not hit his body or his pectoral. From such a present moment falling by surrendering to the evocation of him. He goes down to a stream and confines himself to the vanity quagmire, continues on his path reaching a suspicious lagoon, drinks sacred water, drinking again manages to perceive the effigy of Vernarth in the mirror of Aion's Hydor... calling him from Patmos! Law reminded his master how he died for everyone in the world just as the world would not let him bring more than agonizing for him because there was no more space said Aionius ... "

Alikantus then clenched his jaws too hard, falling out all his molars, he asked the Gods in front of Hestia to restore them fifteen days before arriving at the Ekadashi in Patmos where his master, thus loving all the lives of the world, as well as the hidden cries behind the Dypilons hiding the power of God… or laugh at gagged iris flashes and mummified sighs with lives that subsist!

Vernarth from Patmos called to him so that his eyes looked invigorated like the swarms of green and gray vanadium fire, of mood in the predictive table and close prediction. AlIkantus bids farewell to Kalymnos spraying sorrel and hyper-odoriferous flowers of the Apoika in Kalymnos loving from above, very close, flying, loving everything so much that he forgot to fly. He sometimes fell hard but recovered retried as a baby steed in the womb of a mother new species to be born again in Apoika!


Prophecy VIII -  "First of Aionius, "Eleusis Prophecy of Hamor"
“Aiónius received news of Hamor's prophecy; cosmic orgiastic order
tyrannical snake victim throwing herself into her abyss and purpose..., banishment as an objective void to be decreed, even so ending the world from another world,
discontinuous terse march, slurred arpeggio, speech by Aiónius
there is no world left but if extermination…, undone threshold…, provoke in delicate chaos…!

As a child, I ran to the supreme world herding lions... I called them and they ran to me..., they came alone, some didn't...! Being young, one day Aionius went to the farm and counted the lions... Some came others No... Aionius..., in such a hamorio he was locking an earring from his ears, he hung them again, which happened the next day relaxed..., he saw a maiden who laughed hypnotized…, he sighed when she turned around saying with her poor gestures… Destroy it! The afflicted turned away not knowing what was coming… destroying the desolate world vilifying silky physiognomies, chipped and dandruff face slipping from yours being captive and arid…, tempts to flow libertarian imprint in foreign praxis, origin, and end,
me from the slime being born in my eighth life in nothingness ataxia…

The beloved Victim surrounded by snakes moved the stump of her arms
eaten away by the serpent that took refuge in thorns of forged steel...
she kept walking…, Aiónius pointed at her and kissed her gestures escaping frightened towards the valley in farewells... not fitting itself in valleys that were never anything she paraded with the current of her last word, the beloved again moved her arms following her in front of her the beast was on her, Aiónius buried from fleeing and coming… with fiery phenotype, abrupt vocabulary, says: “Strapping and interludes, after beings of impiety, the world of impiety, Hamor of the first wit… towards other refuges I will depart about a Yes devouring bare ring on it…”
escape curve that cuts the pelvis of my beloved
destructive be your curved world that before had to destroy me...
ultra pre-hellenic nymph Harpé passion spread on me…
Hailed libertarian praise, aristocratic vermilion accent, minority ruling? Overwhelming rigor expended, prophetic Hamor, prophetic expansive arsenal! It must come from all the supreme worlds with strokes and silhouettes conquering...true dream, confused hypothetical oscillate sweeping imploring and contracting popular decision, management and space of my Sickle…, sometimes uncontained… worse avenues in its radius and dark mourning badly wounded shadow! The vertex that finally launches opens the dawn and his Hamada flees... Leaving with the untidy serpent, about touching and causing rangers in the stuck earth.

Demeter and Persephone; based on Eleusis in ancient Greece
mystery myth of the abduction of Persephone daughter of Demeter…
by the king of the underworld of Hades, Abrahamanica's offspring
cabal, life in the descent, the search and the ascent…
Ascent of Indra lightning Vahana and lightning from her right eye,
Persephone to the reunion with her beloved daughter ascending.

Zodiac and mysteries involved, visions and sleight of hand
that of an afterlife, rain of seven trunks, long-lived Airavata
elephant, Eleusis jump psychedelic mystery, incision, and coherent rites, ceremonies and experiences of cold winters and life on earth
plants in gestation under the gift of Elitíaen and beings that
they are about to germinate and be born, beings in a chain of genes...
vegetable running on the earth, vegetable in March in its glory
September in the jaws of the purified phrase and inaccurate acropolis I…

Sacred obscenities, deadly tributes with the death penalty...,
wandering nights without clothes with obese and badly fragrant meats point and taco dances praising the harvest in honor of a dead Thracian bull, libating priestly vessels and bullfighting heads in a deliberately defined and improper triweekly ritual, revealed in Demeter and Persephone.

Only Hamor in his venerable pyx lies locked up knowing he is unable to open inside this lustful bewitching sparkles, the mystery of emancipated disenchantment that awakens from his slow consciousness without knowing how to go on passing in the sum of all happenings of Aiónius. ”

This is how he defined himself from the syncretism of Indra and the mystery of Eleusis, from Demeter and his daughter Persephone from the vile kidnapped underworld. Of the divine Goddess Elitia and the annual records of children born within a year in the germinating seed of the mystery of love that would begin with this prophecy with the initial "H" of the underworld exclaimed Hades and Greek heritage in this event. Vernarth and his companions listened to this prophecy, almost falling asleep, it seemed to them sweet pallor-bitter, love-heartbreak in the previous day before diagnosing having a presence in the hermitage of San Juan Apóstol for the superior company of a later day that was approaching as the greatest daring of all up in the mountains while disposing of Vernarth's Apologist obverse of Aiónius's.

Epilogue Prophecies - “Eleusis, Isadora Duncan to the Parthenon”

“Vernarth and Eurydice indulged in the jargon of agitated diasporas
of inhabitants fleeing the Rite of Eleusis, crossed hands and feet
They dueled on olive trunks with Theban thunder, vague Insurrection of the ancient world, and consonants of barbarian Pleiades,
acclaiming predilection of the Eremita San Juan to appear...
in a breath of peace resurfacing... but seeing that Vernarth was accompanied of Eurydice hid in front of them leaving only her aura near from the stream of a chrysalis!
In the dizzying succession of myths, good news reaches her sacred ears, waking up her trend and her high quarterly price outside the walls... being later received in the grotto of the hermitage in growing expectation and a link of longing that weaves to remind him of being a crusade piece.

The kidnapping of his reverie feared and timid frivolous crushing blizzard, he was walking surrounded by Falangists on horseback pointing at him and threatening him, scrutinizing in the distance loneliness of his past lives,
his regressive life, concerning key to origins of his illustrative Existence, stranded at this moment..., Vernarth makes a pact with himself to detach himself..., of his spirit, detach from their lives under a hypnotic and compelling law..., like a suspended index in the Sistine Chapel, homologous ship Ave Maria Messiah!

From Eleusis Vernarth vanished in aerial horse-dreaming,
he crossed through the pavilions with himself persevering some wake
riding his Alikantus ******* and standing with him to pillage the Empyrium niche Persephone's trace of herself and her ******* ******* them...
with devoted passion, milky way, and milky syrup chin howling...
Vanishing dancer, Athenian acropolis, Dionysian sanctuary of the acropolis… Stepdaughter-patron in the dance of Zeus and Themis lopsided frame of the season's wildness of all creation and defiance of Eleusis looking for her daughter and her children, priestesses safely taking off their corset and their pictures…
raging chastity, oligo blood, Itheoi music, outraged dance complaining, Possessed expressing being seductive but also a native *******... the underworld in darkness, free daughter, and iconoclastic Greek mythologist
inconvenient Victorian mania, a courtesan from Olympus, courtesan undressed! Isadora, Demeter, and Persephone… flooded with Aphrodite foam!

She “prayed songs with plexus and feet, plotting gardens around the world… full of baseboard feet where everything created in brief Apokálypsis was dying! By desolate Parthenons dancing in Muscovite ruins, maenades sweaty enclave and also throwing back his head as if possessed by ecstasy in her Bugatti and Leonidas…, enchanted by Aiónius! intoxicated and exorbitant with beautiful rosy placebo eyes... Hair with headbands vine petioles, her Nebris tight skin was wearing... in her hand's bunches of barberries to Dionysus with torches and live snakes a chaste crook naming Thirsus; rod topped with Kashmar branches wrapped in borders, vines and ivy, allusive link…, morbid ecosystem! covering her crotch in the Temple of her Kopanos dancing from the eternal fire cremated and in a romantic dimension remembering Byron's meritorious…
Hellenic passionate, and of Hölderlin poeticizing together with Aiónius.

Rudiment wound … ruinous on value exciting in those
of the imagined and creative in her perdition, Sicalipsis e impudicias
torn fire in the Metelmi and her ***** we are twisted,
epic worthy of greek tragedy dancing like waves of fire
in the forge in terrifying death of her children Deirdre and Patrick,
submerged and injured in the Seine in Paris in 1913, falling into the
water in the car that was traveling with her wet nurse… before…!
saying goodbye to them in urgent social commitments,
I Aiónius take you to the Empyrium.

What a dire tribulation in the prevailing misfortunes by not postponing it, retain the fate of whose children is quite a story with the kidnapping of theirs and merits of fulfilling commitments committed to solicitous artists... support, crestfallen inside a dresser or Bolshoi dancing statue, dancing empty with bare feet, frigid anemone, frigid Sea…

Arriving at the dawn of her last prophecy, Isadora Duncan accompanies her in full life beyond all limiting borders with the borders of her dance, the flat field of Eleusis receives her presumptuously associating in around for the dressings...
And left-handed dalliance self-indulging…, advanced barefoot to the Parthenon…!naked towards the world and the orb dug out of her before her undressed.

Reader and Petrobus jumped on this steep stone, emulating the meteorites that shone in the sky of Patmos such a party of nocturnal lights, such emery detached from a fleeting planet in the largest Hellenic scene saying: "Well-being to the Hellenic World all calm, dance and immunity to the firmament where Isidora rests in the Kantabroi of Aionius”

I.
Identity?
For so long, I've felt like I had none.
I am a piece of college-ruled paper
ripped, torn, taped to a back alley wall
with names and dates and places
all written in a rainbow of Sharpies
by people with faces I cannot remember;
my handwriting with the cursive "f"s
nowhere to be seen,
words I'd written so long ago
buried beneath the influence of everyone else.

Who are you, when you're no one
except everyone?

II.
I'm sick.
I am years of not getting out of bed.
I am missed school days, late-passes,
a truant.
I am doctor's notes.
I am a pile of handwritten prescriptions.
I am one white
two orange
one pink
and two multi-vitamins.
Misdiagnoses,
tests,
exams.

My feet melt into the blue and grey carpeting,
my arms turn brown like the worn-down stain of the armrests,
the receptionist knew me by name
until "next week's appointment" slipped off the calendar.

I am episodes of crying in crowds
or crying alone.
I'm haunted by mistakes remembered only by me.
I am up or I'm down
without knowing what's between.
My brain leaves my body and I can't feel my hands
so the bottle of Advil moves up one more shelf.

I am told to lie on my medical forms
so I won't be held at arms length,
or treated like someone who's different or strange;
but that's just how I'm treated at home.

III.
I am nothing more
than the result of years of torture.
Two bra sizes too small.
Four dress sizes too big.

I am nothing more than a waistline,
which would be fine
if I had one.

I am not pretty enough.
I am not beautiful enough.
I am not good enough.

And I will not be joining you for dinner.

IV.
I push people away
but long for them to come closer.
I run, keep my distance
but, when you're not looking, lean in a bit closer.

I text boys 300 miles away
but pretend he's right there beside me.

I'm gullible, I'm weak.
I fall for anything, I fall for everything.
I forgive too quickly and I love too much,
I set myself up for the fall.

V.
I'm a disappointment.
I'm wrong.
I'm wrong.
I'm wrong.

I forget my chores.
I forget responsibilities.
I forget rules, I forget deadlines, I forget lines in the play.

I forget numbers and facts and formulas.
And when the grades come back
I remember
what a parents' giving up looks like.

VI.
I'm difficult.
I'm needy.
I can't drive,
can't make my own appointments.
Can't sign my own papers, can't run my own errands,
can't buy my own dinner,
can't call my own shots.
I'm difficult.
I hear myself say that I don't have a choice
But the sigh in reply says,
I'm difficult.

VII.
I love the wrong gender.
I swing the wrong way.
"I always imagined my daughter walking down the aisle
with a man who reminded her of her father," he says.
"I'm just disappointed," he says.
So I bring home a boy
and Mom says,
"Thank you -
I promise, it's easier this way."

Some girls tell their families when they find their first love,
but mine will stay hidden
in the box with the K
filled with letters and gifts and "thinking of you"'s
collecting dust between the wall and my bed.

VIII.
I am numbers, and numbers, and numbers.
Weights, heights, exes, mistakes -
too high.
Grades, standardized tests, word counts and successes -
too low.

IX.
I'm deluded.
Always telling myself that if Mom really loved me
she'd put me before the glass of wine.
Convincing myself that it's my fault
and that I'm selfish, petty, judgmental.
I'm hurt.

I'm hopeful.
Waking up to the overhead light in my room at 10
when Dad comes home from work -
asking me how my day went
and closing the door before I can reply.
I'm silent.

I'm lonely.
Clinging to the siblings of friends and partners
desperately wanting a family.
Constantly jumping from partner to partner
desperately needing a hug.
I'm alone.

X.
With all my shortcomings
with all I do wrong
it's hard for me to find when I do something right.

But of all the things I'll never know,
I know how to feel, I know how to care.

I'll show you passion like you've never seen passion before.
I've seen gods in mortals and mortals in gods,
I've felt fire inside me when it's icy around me,
I've painted the Sistine Chapel with the notes of F. Doppler,
I've sculpted the moon and the stars and the sun with my heart,
I've loved with the urgency of the wind of a hurricane
and I've forgiven like the sand did the Atlantic high tide.

XI.
I forget so much,
but there's so much more to remember.

I'll remember your dreams, your hopes, your ambitions,
I'll remember your tears on the sleeve of my shirt.
I'll remember the days of the sweet uncertainties,
bus rides and text messages and scarves and "good morning"s.
I'll remember the day my heart fell for yours
(ticking, ticking, like the bomb in the birdcage).

I'll remember the album with the songs named after planets,
and I'll remember when you couldn't meet my eyes to the lyrics.
I'll remember the confessions from the football field bleachers,
even next year, when there's an empty chair in the orchestra.

I'll forget all our fights, even the ones you never will,
and I might lose some of our laughs,
but I'll never forget passion at 4 in the morning,
or slow-dancing like middle schoolers at high-school dances,
or your body against mine to old SNL re-runs.
I'll always remember the times you let me in
and I'll be here in silence for the times you still can't.

I'll remember our promises
of dreams and forever -
plantations in Greece, Italy, Spain.
Love letters and presents hidden around our camp cabins,
four years of love, friendship, promises
dissolved in a haze of disdain.

I may not remember the quadratic formula,
I may not remember Newton's third law,
but I'll never forget how you make my heart hammer,
even when you forget me.

XII.
I am
forgettable, only wishing to be remembered by someone, someday,
sad, looking for joy in things big and small.
A hypocrite, begging for proximity then crawling far, far away.
I am miserable, but passionate.
I am identical, but a glaring mistake.
I am what-if's, maybe's, and might-have-been's.
I am quoting Jethro Tull songs in my confessions.
I am words in my head that will never escape my lips,
I am words on my lips that should never have escaped my head.
I am things I'll never say and stories I'll never write,
I am singing in the shower, dancing in the halls,
I am running across busy streets in April
and sleeping in screened-in porches in June.

XIII.
And every time I wake up alone,
I'll stand in the yard, look up to the sky
and remind myself that the sun, too, is alone
but can still warm the earth with its love.

Hellenic
Flesh and marrow
Raphaelite form
painted into life.

Honey hair
slipping through the vees between my fingers like
sand
conch-white skin
You blind me
like the noonday sun.
Enveloping—
body wrapped in body—
ocean and sky
meet
at the horizon.

Peel my skin from me
like an orange.
Apple.

Heal me
with hands upon thighs
Stitch my ragdoll body together with the sutures of your kisses
Stuck
by the glue of lips

Raise me like Lazarus
from the valley of death
from the orchard in Eden and the shame of skin

Reupholster me
like a dinette chair.

Vivid as the Sistine Chapel
your hand
outs t r e t c h e d
toward God

I find you in
pumpkin seeds
scattered
like tears
on the floor of my car.
They were yours.

I look at her and
I close my eyes,
And oh where my imagination,
Send my eager mind,
The wiles versus my wills,
oh those hills they bind,
Men like me, like demons versus the Lion,
Exorcized, exorcized,
Yeah, but I am Legion,
if they beat me one time,
Oh, next time, time,
They'll be mine.

And those mountains of lust,
That once seemed unclaimable,
Unclimbable like Everest before
Edmund Hillary, like the Sistine Chapel,
Before Michelangelo, oh I will persist,
I will pursue, with the littlest smile,
And the darkest hue,
Where after many days fight,
Suddenly. Then, in the night,
when alas my victory is won!
My prize I will take,
And her pleasure I will reign.

Once I took one of those blot tests, the ones that that Rorschach guy invented.
Or maybe it's Rorscarch.
I don't know, but I call him Roar-shark.
Anyhow.
The ones with blots of black paint that you're supposed to find pictures in.
There was this one blot, and I saw the profile of a lady's face, with long windblown-looking hair.
I was supposed to find a butterfly.

I've always had a different take on things, a weird memory association.
Well, I guess I can't call it memory. As far as I can recall, I've never seen that Roar-shark blot lady in my life, or anyone like her. At least, anyone that I can remember. And I only remember the truly remarkable.

I had these really great microwave burritos that I would eat after school, before rehearsal so I could just pop them in and go.
They were warm and gooey and really realllly bad for me, but hey.
I'm in a hurry. I'm allowed to be fat.
They were soft and I could eat them in the car on the way to the theatre without spilling things on my rehearsal skirts.
But then my grandad got throat cancer.
I was house-sitting my Nana's house one day and opened the fridge to get myself a glass of milk while I fed her cats.
Those very same burritos were in their freezer.
The other day I shoved one of them in the microwave so I could grab it and go,
and I hopped in the car and took a bite
But I couldn't eat anymore.
I looked at it and my stomach turned and for some reason I could not eat that burrito.
My mind had decided that if I were to take another bite out of that food,
I would be eating cancer.
I told myself that I was being ridiculous and stupid and I was hungry, so eat it.
But I couldn't shake it.
So I threw it out the window.

My mind's ALWAYS doing stuff like that, playing tricks on me.
I can't touch the page numbers on the pages of a book. I think they're spiders.
Sometimes I think my oboe reed blades are actual blade blades
and I'm afraid to put them in my mouth.
Weirdness doesn't go away.

So now I've switched my before-rehearsal food.
Tortilla. And milk.
I don't know why this strikes me as appealing, but it does.
My mind equates tortillas and milk-- warm and cool-- with happiness,
just like it equates my face wash to orange and honeysuckle.
(Though it smells like neither.)
and Christmas angels to pillows.
Rugs remind me of Egyptians.
Theatre seats are associated with a certain animated clownfish.
Leaves are reminiscent of the Sistine CHapel.
Pleas don't tell Roar-shark.

Once my English teacher told my class to write everything important in ink,
which brings us back to that one guy,
in pen.
Since everything I write is important, I write everything in pen.
Of course, you can see everything I scratch out, too.
The unimportant of the always important.
I like to think I'm not afraid of mistakes.

But sometimes, when my iPod is on shuffle,
it decides to get inside my head and play that song
that reminds me of you--
back when I bit my lip,
back when you owed me a slow dance,
back when I actually LIKED the scent of apples and pine trees.
And my mind does this "freeze" thing that
makes me stop breathing for a second.
and I hit the next button really really fast and then
fly off to the kitchen to find a glass of milk
because nothing can go wrong when I've got happiness in my hands.
But it's no use.
The thought gets to me before I can stop it.
About
my
our
YOUR mistake.
And then I just get angry and the milk quivers in my glass and I have to set it down before I throw it at the wall or something drastic like that.
Because I am dramatic, maybe.
Because even though I have played it over in my head
because even though I try to think it's my fault
because even though I try to blame it on myself
I can't.
Because it's not.
Because I'm not afraid to make mistake.
But I'm afraid to remember you.
Because
Even if you were remarkable.
You aren't.
Roar-shark would have a field day.

Cracked vinyl bus seats
Windows that have heard the stories of every passanger smeared with truth
The spit of the elderly woman who fell asleep while reminiscing about the son whom she's visiting that she hasn't seen in 35 years
The stubbled cheeks of the older gentleman who is counting the pennies in his pocket on his way to the store to get food for his daughter
The knitted scarf of the middle-aged woman who is slowly pulling her coat closer to her in an attempt to warm herself because it was the only article of clothing she could afford that year
The ponytail of the teenaged girl who is tracing the scars on her wrist from the last time she tried to end her life
They congregate for a common purpose, but
The doors to their hearts open like the hinged door, letting anyone haphazardly stumble in for a moment,
And
Their souls are brighter than the lights of the megabus as they are honest with themselves for even just a minute
And their walls are temporarily demolished because who would ever have to lie about who they are on a greyhound bus?

Smooth polished church pews
Floors that have been tread upon by every saint stained with lies
The flats of the elderly woman who is nodding off while pretending to pray for the son whom she hasn't spoken to in 35 years
The loafers of the older gentleman who is calculating the amount of money he can sneak from the spagetti dinner fund without getting caught
The high heels of the middle-aged woman who is slowly pulling up her skirt on one side in an attempt to catch the attention of the younger men further down the pew, while her husband holds her hand on the other
The tennis shoes of the teenaged girl who is tracing the bruises under her blouse from the last time she started a fight with her boyfriend
They congregate for a common purpose, but
Their masks are painted on more elaborately than the Sistine Chapel
And
Their lies are built up more intricately than the stained-glass windows that surround them
As they read their words to live by from a book collecting dust in drawers throughout America because who could be anything but holy in a church?

I repaint the Sistine Chapel with only my tongue
just to see your face again.
Oh, your holy chocolate covered soul,
holy bird bone finger tips.
How you snap like a star and then burn again.

we are angels
with cathedrals,
prophets, and poems
to prove it  

other species  
are not endowed
with such gifts:

the ceiling
of the Sistine Chapel
the pyramids, loosing
the bounds of earth
to walk on a moon...
psychoanalysis
the atomic bomb
Anthrax, dioxin
and gunfire
gunfire  

we are maggots
on rotting fruit, sated now
looking for a place to hop off,
to escape before the fruit falls fast  
to the ground

before the oceans rise
and the skies fill with ash
surely we can fly away

but we are wingless
angels, killer angels  
killer angels

How dare society make us women feel like
Our very own bodies is a prison,
To be locked up behind the metal bars of our *******,
******* by the chains of our curvy figures
And the sentence lying between our thighs.

And the sentence is brutal.
Consent is no longer existent
When the *** is too tempting for a man to say no
And for you to say no.

Our butts slapped,
Chests groped,
Cheeks pinched,
Thighs squeezed,
In this prison we had the decency to call our own body
We are handcuffed to the degrading appetite of a man.

Women are not a display of things to touch
We are not a dessert menu for a man’s hunger
To be ordered by catcalling:
Want a taste of a woman’s behind?
**** that ***-!
A taste of ****-
Oh, baby, put on a show for us!
Or just the full course meal-
Hey girl, ow ow owwww!

It is about time we strong women break free.
The jailor of men- I stole the key.
It is about time we change out of our prison uniforms of
Bikinis and mini skirts and stilettos
And break down the locks that confined us.

Our prison sentence is just about up,
And when we are let loose,
Us women will no longer stand for such debasing behaviors.
And when we’re free,
It’ll be time to teach the men a little lesson

This cage of our body does not define us, boys,
Maybe try finding the prisoner behind the bars-
Her personality,
Charming smile,
And brilliant intellect,
Instead of demeaning our existence,
Objectifying our importance-
We are not your tools, your toys.

We are humans, too, you know,
With- get this- feelings.
Try manners and kindness rather than
Feeling and groping your way to a woman’s heart.

We are not a play museum- we are the artifact,
The masterpiece- Mona Lisa, Starry Night, the Sistine Chapel-
You must stand behind the red velvet ropes and perform
What the English language calls respect,
With a thing also known as consent.

This- my body- is also known as my body,
It is not his, it is not hers, and most importantly,
It is not yours.
Please try to understand this- I know, it’s super complicated.
And if you gain anything from this, let it be this:

We are not here to satisfy you-
Women are not prisoners to a man’s every need.
We are not objects- no-
And we deserve to be heard.

There is another mikeˈlandʒelo
on his back
somewhere in Bow,
painting skies which shine and glow,
I know
because
I've seen him.

On my right thigh is the most honest piece of art I have ever created.
You may call it my masterpiece,
Because the finished product
was created from years and years of major and minor additions.
****** brushstrokes that mark each time the phrase “not good enough” rang too heavy in my ears. 
Sick, faded tallies of scars that tell the story of my life the way some parents tally the heights of their children on the kitchen wall. 
But instead of growth these lines mark failure and unlike a child impatient to mature,
Each line makes me sick to my stomach for the regression it represents.
Lines and lines of railroad track designs left in the indelible ink of imperfection.
An autobiography written in the hieroglyphics of my sorrow,
Wounds sealed like an ancient tomb but with a map of scars proving that once these grounds were holy,
Governing my life like a pharaoh with a birthright.
A visual representation of a feeling constantly fought and lost
An unavoidable reminder that yes, sometimes the scariest enemy I have to face is myself and here are the marks left behind when the demons of my past manage to claim a brief but ferocious victory over my self control.

Now, I am a perfectionist.

This means by the time I was old enough to understand my shortcomings I had figured out that no lesson stings in your memory quite as much as when you start using blood instead of ink
When you let heartache become your muse and self loathing your mistress, 
and suddenly you’re imprisoned by the adrenaline of freeing warm red paint from behind a soft **** canvas.
The first time I felt the release of a razor on my skin, I was gripped with an infatuation strong enough to break the programming of nature and turn my own body against itself as my skin became the victim of my own hands. 
Heartache after heartache I eased the pain,
Becoming michael angelo with a thin metal paintbrush and a sistine chapel that burned when the shower was too hot.
Hiding my latest work of art under long pants and excuses.
Finding love only in the dark because what if he sees my skin and realizes that some days I can’t even love myself?
On my right thigh is the most devastating piece of art I’ve ever created. 
You may call it my Achilles heel,
Because the finished product, which I shamefully admit,I do still edit occasionally,
was created from years and years of marveling over the beauty of the world but never learning how to see the beauty in a blank canvas.
Cherish your beautiful blank canvas.

It was easy to love him. Maybe because his heart sounded honest when I pressed my ear against his chest. Kah-thump. Kah-thump. I will never leave you. Kah-thump. Kah-thump. We could lay here forever. Kah-thump. Kah-thump. We can turn into a pile of entangled bones and dust. Kah-thump. Kah-thump.

Maybe it was because I have always believed in happy endings. I like to shut off Titanic right in the middle and pretend it never sank; pretend Rose and Jack got off that ship and had ten cute, artistic, red-headed babies and spent their lives laughing and drinking beer and reminiscing of the time they met on that great big boat. I never let myself watch the end. The romantic in me won’t allow it.

Or it could have just been the fact that he was the first boy I ever loved, and there’s something really intoxicating about the first time you fall in love. It’s like chugging a whole bottle of whiskey – it burns and it tingles and you feel kind of sick and the world becomes a huge blur of laughter and inhibition.

I remember the exact moment I realized I loved him. We were laying in his bed and a song by George Barnett came on. The one about Thor, angles and heaven above. I loved this song, and he knew that so he started to sing. He started to sing and it sounded like a cat that was being slowly strangled and I laughed and pressed my palms against my ears and he just sang louder. When I went to escape the awful droning of his off-key melody, he pressed me tightly against himself and nibbled lightly on my ear and I knew in that moment that if I could be anywhere with anyone – if I could stand on the Eiffel Tower with Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley and lightly sip champagne as we discussed the good ol’ days of Hollywood-- I wouldn’t. I would be right there in that tiny twin sized bed that just barely had room enough for both of us as long as he held me close, listening to this gangly boy sing this wonderful song.

It was in that moment I knew I was in love. I knew I was ******.

After that all I wanted to do was say it. We would be ordering chinese food and I’d think “I feel like having something other than seseame chicken. I love you.” We’d be driving down the road and he’d be ******* about construction and I’d think “Yeah, it is annoying that it takes thirty minutes just to get down 33rd but I love you.” My love for him infected everything I did. He was the most beautiful virus I had ever been plagued by.

Relatively speaking, it was barely a blimp on the vast radar of a lifetime. I can’t remember the start and end dates exactly. I don’t remember much about that year at all, actually, except that it was filled with breathless kisses and nervous firsts. I remember that he always smelled of laundry detergent. He lived in the basement, which was also where the washer and dryer was kept. and the smell of fresh clean clothes and Tide stayed embedded in his skin. I still breathe in deeply when I walk into the detergent isle at smiths. Habit, I suppose. It always transports me back to then. It was one of the best years of my life.

We broke up eventually. He never told me why. But in the end it was really just life. Life has a way of changing the most permanent things into temporary ones. Thankfully, it can do the same with a broken heart.

I’d like to know he ended up happy.

I plan on falling in love again, too. Each time its own masterpiece. My heart is my romantic Michelangelo. Every time it beats it produces a new and beautiful Sistine Chapel, but instead of paint, it is pain and pleasure that spatters against the ceiling.

He is still my favorite piece, though. Our love is my most treasured creation, even if it only lives through memories. It lives in a young girl’s laughter, in an awkward boy’s terrible singing voice, in the innocence of two teenage lovers between the sheets, who haven’t yet experienced the pain that echoes within the terrible truth that love is sometimes not enough.

Every now and then when I’m feeling old or unoriginal or just depressed, I pull out the memory of my first love and his strong, honest heart. I replay my favorite parts in my head. I smile at what I see. I’d like to think he does too.

on the crowded quai of inception
   gilded minutes ornately revolve
time is measured in tranches of soul
   transporting moments of his essence

never versed in the outside world
   an innocent daughter of imagination
boarding a train of transfixed reverie
   her departure held fast in sistine release

such a private exhibition on public display
   their affection left open to interpretation
a tearfully expressive and inspired farewell
   within a shrine devoted to the art of the muse

Hex Birthright in Hellenika

The Celestial Spirit of Vernarth began to walk through the Castellum del Horcodising, after the parapsychological regression in the conclusive auction and purge of him. He was looming at the Horcondising Keep; here all toilet modules, food, and medicines were well equipped, except for the inks and writing papers that were totally exhausted. Here you can see his mother Luccica, who was in a position to scribble and write on an upstairs deck, and in the other hand, she had a rosary of liberation, which anonymously appears before her purging in the presence of the protervative spellings that still wander through the cells and bedrooms of the Castellum del Horcondising. Her mother is seen twisted over the voices that polished the eight moons that she had designed for her son Vernarth from the very machicolations of the Castellum, but now with a rosary of liberation. It was clearly seen in the leaves written by her, which said that “My son abandoned his weapons, now in fluids of holy water, symbolizing real chimeras by the projections, to those who read his life verses in our Castellum, in Gaugamela and Patmos ”. Vernarth, mostly Hellenic, awaits to manifest healings for all creation, dumping water from moon storms on Rhodes, and lighting Matacan wall light at the door of the Messiah stand.

Vernart says: “my adolescent look, she has to be reborn with that of my father Bernardolipo; a whole Chamberlain, making himself free and a supporter of the baronies that were part of the servants of my servants…! Although now to climb his cabinet I have to raise my knees higher before his amplified step, calling us all and trying to be closer to a new bell to call us to dinner, as an entity of pride of architecture defined by his pen, ink, and white sheet that I mention. The mother I have to mention; My mother Luccica, rests not condemned or corrupted before her flesh, rather perfectly united to her spirit that envelops her free of sin, so that her company would be of complete solitude in our Castellum, we will continue to be in conformity with the spirit because our mansion is a beautiful spirit of vicissitudes, life, and peace, that our esplanade holds hunger and coldly indifferent to loneliness, cooling and pleasing the company of its own cold, rising from the first rays of the day, as well as rising from the first pinches of graduated ink, agreeing in the corrals where my father already lived according to his life among debtors, mortifying what he has not been able to mount on his steeds that inhabit his senses, leaving not so far to greet them in the mornings free of errors of not greeting, even When the minimum space is left to think of him as a joint-heir. Because the laments sob and others are born in the virginity of the light of the world with other lines Luccica can scarcely write, writing her co-age spirit, manifesting itself foolishly in suffering perfection; manifesting itself as everyone's delight, although ringing with anger at not freeing itself from glorious freedom. Not all sing to the tune of the disability of putting the strength of the grapheme of posterity, rather we blind ourselves by putting hope, but of patience that we arm ourselves by losing our courage to have it. Our will is of the magnitude of saints when doubt and fear entertain us, according to all the things and purposes that irreversibly will surprise us. I do not know where I have to walk here in this tower ?, because I know that myths of the unknown will fall according to the fact that I am his son, being the first-born of all men in the world, speaking of who among many intercede before tribulation or anguish, that strips me of all spirit still asking for it and justifying that I keep talking about them, but that I have been gone for a long time. For this reason, venerated mother, wake up from this frozen cell of the courtesy tower, because I am jealous and I believe that neither death nor life will fill the dead suspended in your room, which support more lives with their angels adorning their bindings and paragraphs, with principalities that are increasingly so distant more than imminent to come to please you. When your name is tried in real vices to increase, they are being stripped of the sons of the principality in which they shine from afar, but with our feet dancing on despotic brilliance, and not of the hollow that still does not fill my heart for you”

Emerging from the last lights of the Castellum del Horcondising, Vernarth bids farewell to his reign, leaving his mother Luccica in the company of three Angels who mined him with the amber mistletoe, of sallow light. However, she will remain frosted on her desk with ink at night and by day, so that when the day ceases, she will draw ink from the darkest night to continue writing that she can already be without Him! Near the Halleniká Necropolis in Rhodes, a statue of Peltasts stood, shielding the site where the “Vas Auric” Auric Medallion would sporadically rest, which came between the bilges, now inside the Eurydice. It came predestined with sacred amber garments alloyed, to make up for the between Peltast mediators who guarded them, to deliver it to its Commander Vernarth.

The Apostle Saint John says: “The Sephardim like us in exile did not see reasons restored in our union and tradition, we resembled a diaspora that did not derive voluntarily, according to events that occurred in my case in Judah at the hands of the Romans. The Alexandrian Jews form on my part certain Israelites dispersed in my prayers, leaving us where the radiance of our faith makes sense and dispensed power to us. My economy is to create the furniture that will inhabit laborious houses in the Staurós histos, even among those Jews and mercenary soldiers, freeing themselves from prejudices and clothing that represented them alone and fragile, being sensible by the diaspora. The world separates itself from the matter cell, clinging to the consciousness of the unity of dispersed Mosaicism as a sacrificial cult, to cater to those who write history more distant than a synagogue without a Rabbi. When bad winds blew there, they often made the situation worse for those scattered in a foreign land. At the end of the Hellenistic era, we had Jews in Persia, Mesopotamia, Syria, Phenicia, Pontus, north of the Black Sea, Cappadocia, the rest of Asia Minor, Egypt, and Cyrenaica, Carthage, Greece, Macedonia, and Italy. Now I in Rhodes with the Vas Auric, to trace the true effigy of Judas Thaddeus, my co-religious in pursuit of an intellectual and theological religious activity of edifying centers of prayer and universal unification, here in the Necropolis of Hallenikka, where some Davidian Psalm will be in more regions of here documented in precession, and as a reciprocal religion to Hellenic situationism. Its religiosity is felt, it even remains open in proselytism that causes the indefiniteness of the half-convert and that implies a risk for the identity of the Jewish religion as the support of a people with not a little original conscience "

He sings The Delphic Sibyl: “He bears the crown of thorns of the Coronation of Jesus, which also happened in the Praetorium, and as in previous cases to the scene represented in the corresponding neutral. In Eritrea Stauros, rather Herophile, if chaste and Delphic clairvoyant and apologetic, her vernacular artery made her a native of Marpeso, Troyana-Troade. As in fantasies of being the daughter of a Nymph and a Shepherd. Her elegy was escorting her to the Duodecim Evangelii, from Samos she is docking towards Patmos at the foundations of the Megaron. With the same polygon of the Sistine Chapel, in the quattrocento, where Vernarth had assistance in the parapsychological Regression of the Quattrocento Duodecim Evangelii, announcing that Vernolatry would be part of his Apologetic life, inspiring prophecies with the Iaspis Parables, commending scholarship after the grave that He was in the forest of Apollo Smintheus, returning to his origins in a sinkhole in Mount Coric. The idiomatic cross was its interlaced fractal, with threads and kashmar pole, surrounding the crossed palisades with linen threads, and Koiné to display the cross in the hestion or towards the Staurós or cross, in the capital event of the material instrument of execution for the man who falls into no man's land "

I
ON the grey rock of Cashel the mind's eye
Has called up the cold spirits that are born
When the old moon is vanished from the sky
And the new still hides her horn.
Under blank eyes and fingers never still
The particular is pounded till it is man.
When had I my own will?
O not since life began.
Constrained, arraigned, baffled, bent and unbent
By these wire-jointed jaws and limbs of wood,
Themselves obedient,
Knowing not evil and good;
Obedient to some hidden magical breath.
They do not even feel, so abstract are they.
So dead beyond our death,
Triumph that we obey.
On the grey rock of Cashel I suddenly saw
A Sphinx with woman breast and lion paw.
A Buddha, hand at rest,
Hand lifted up that blest;
And right between these two a girl at play
That, it may be, had danced her life away,
For now being dead it seemed
That she of dancing dreamed.
Although I saw it all in the mind's eye
There can be nothing solider till I die;
I saw by the moon's light
Now at its fifteenth night.
One lashed her tail; her eyes lit by the moon
Gazed upon all things known, all things unknown,
In triumph of intellect
With motionless head *****.
That other's moonlit eyeballs never moved,
Being fixed on all things loved, all things unloved.
Yet little peace he had,
For those that love are sad.  
Little did they care who danced between,
And little she by whom her dance was seen
So she had outdanced thought.
Body perfection brought,
For what but eye and ear silence the mind
With the minute particulars of mankind?
Mind moved yet seemed to stop
As 'twere a spinning-top.
In contemplation had those three so wrought
Upon a moment, and so stretched it out
That they, time overthrown,
Were dead yet flesh and bone.
I knew that I had seen, had seen at last
That girl my unremembering nights hold fast
Or else my dreams that fly
If I should rub an eye,
And yet in flying fling into my meat
A crazy juice that makes the pulses beat
As though I had been undone
By Homer's Paragon
Who never gave the burning town a thought;
To such a pitch of folly I am brought,
Being caught between the pull
Of the dark moon and the full,
The commonness of thought and images
That have the frenzy of our western seas.
Thereon I made my moan,
And after kissed a stone,
And after that arranged it in a song
Seeing that I, ignorant for So long,
Had been rewarded thus
In Cormac's ruined house.

MICHAEL ROBARTES AND THE DANCER

He. Opinion is not worth a rush;
In this altar-piece the knight,
Who grips his long spear so to push
That dragon through the fading light,
Loved the lady; and it's plain
The half-dead dragon was her thought,
That every morning rose again
And dug its claws and shrieked and fought.
Could the impossible come to pass
She would have time to turn her eyes,
Her lover thought, upon the glass
And on the instant would grow wise.
She. You mean they argued.
He. Put it so;
But bear in mind your lover's wage
Is what your looking-glass can show,
And that he will turn green with rage
At all that is not pictured there.
She. May I not put myself to college?
He. Go pluck Athene by the hair;
For what mere book can grant a knowledge
With an impassioned gravity
Appropriate to that beating breast,
That vigorous thigh, that dreaming eye?
And may the Devil take the rest.
She. And must no beautiful woman be
Learned like a man?
He. Paul Veronese
And all his sacred company
Imagined bodies all their days
By the lagoon you love so much,
For proud, soft, ceremonious proof
That all must come to sight and touch;
While Michael Angelo's Sistine roof,
His "Morning' and his "Night' disclose
How sinew that has been pulled tight,
Or it may be loosened in repose,
Can rule by supernatural right
Yet be but sinew.
She. I have heard said
There is great danger in the body.
He. Did God in portioning wine and bread
Give man His thought or His mere body?
She. My wretched dragon is perplexed.
Hec. I have principles to prove me right.
It follows from this Latin text
That blest souls are not composite,
And that all beautiful women may
Live in uncomposite blessedness,
And lead us to the like -- if they
Will banish every thought, unless
The lineaments that please their view
When the long looking-glass is full,
Even from the foot-sole think it too.
She. They say such different things at school.

Where the sun sets
just for you

Where even the tiniest apartment
can compare to the Sistine

Where you can't say it's picturesque
for you are in it

Beauty not found in reality
yet a reflection of it

I

SWEAR by what the sages spoke
Round the Mareotic Lake
That the Witch of Atlas knew,
Spoke and set the ***** a-crow.

Swear by those horsemen, by those women
Complexion and form prove superhuman,
That pale, long-visaged company
That air in immortality
Completeness of their passions won;
Now they ride the wintry dawn
Where Ben Bulben sets the scene.

Here s the gist of what they mean.

II
Many times man lives and dies
Between his two eternities,
That of race and that of soul,
And ancient Ireland knew it all.
Whether man die in his bed
Or the rifle knocks him dead,
A brief parting from those dear
Is the worst man has to fear.
Though grave-diggers' toil is long,
Sharp their spades, their muscles strong.
They but ****** their buried men
Back in the human mind again.

III
You that Mitchel's prayer have heard,
"Send war in our time, O Lord!'
Know that when all words are said
And a man is fighting mad,
Something drops from eyes long blind,
He completes his partial mind,
For an instant stands at ease,
Laughs aloud, his heart at peace.
Even the wisest man grows tense
With some sort of violence
Before he can accomplish fate,
Know his work or choose his mate.

IV
Poet and sculptor, do the work,
Nor let the modish painter shirk
What his great forefathers did.
Bring the soul of man to God,
Make him fill the cradles right.

Measurement began our might:
Forms a stark Egyptian thought,
Forms that gentler phidias wrought.
Michael Angelo left a proof
On the Sistine Chapel roof,
Where but half-awakened Adam
Can disturb globe-trotting Madam
Till her bowels are in heat,
proof that there's a purpose set
Before the secret working mind:
Profane perfection of mankind.

Quattrocento put in paint
On backgrounds for a God or Saint
Gardens where a soul's at ease;
Where everything that meets the eye,
Flowers and grass and cloudless sky,
Resemble forms that are or seem
When sleepers wake and yet still dream.
And when it's vanished still declare,
With only bed and bedstead there,
That heavens had opened.
Gyres run on;
When that greater dream had gone
Calvert and Wilson, Blake and Claude,
Prepared a rest for the people of God,
Palmer's phrase, but after that
Confusion fell upon our thought.
V
Irish poets, earn your trade,
Sing whatever is well made,
Scorn the sort now growing up
All out of shape from toe to top,
Their unremembering hearts and heads
Base-born products of base beds.
Sing the peasantry, and then
Hard-riding country gentlemen,
The holiness of monks, and after
Porter-drinkers' randy laughter;
Sing the lords and ladies gay
That were beaten into the clay
Through seven heroic centuries;
Cast your mind on other days
That we in coming days may be
Still the indomitable Irishry.

VI
Under bare Ben Bulben's head
In Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid.
An ancestor was rector there
Long years ago, a church stands near,
By the road an ancient cross.

No marble, no conventional phrase;
On limestone quarried near the spot
By his command these words are cut:
Cast a cold eye
On life, on death.
Horseman, pass by!

among the lean and
narrow hours
when the brutal minutes
aggrieve
like the protruding ribs
of an emaciated animal

abandoned things shuffle
into dark unkempt little rooms
littered
with the manifested debris
of a life

unspoken thoughts
in rusted cans
stacked heedlessly
on overused shelving
bowing perilously under the weight

mangled hopes
kicked into the corners
stuck to the floor
foul and fetid
vitiated with wasted time

black mold
leaking from dilapidated hearts
creating pointillism art
across the sagging plaster
overhead

consuming an ersatz
Sistine Chapel ceiling

saints and angels
prophets and devils
sepia toned
in their water stain media
disappearing
into corruptions artistic virtuosity

only God remains visible
reaching out
to give life

if any are left
to receive it

I can't help but wonder
Why
Owning
The civilized lifestyle
Is so unbearably difficult for me
I'll co-work with my adrenaline
And take flight in experience
I'll take on the occupation
Of people watching,
Backpacking country to country
Indulging in culture
Surely I would be promoted,
"Employee of the year"
I could do that  forty hours a week,
Even sixty
My whole life
Now that is a career.
I could marry Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel
And hold hands with the Louvre
And make love to a portrait created at Montmarte
Now that is a vow I could make.
I could hold music in my womb
Lyrical flesh and formation
I would allow notes and rhythmic sensation to feed off of my nutrients
Pushing my body into stretch mark melody.
I could birth an entire album
Now that is motherhood.
But alas,
I do not live in the city that resides in my mind.
I am told to marry a man,
Birth a baby,
Own an occupation,
And dismiss
The yearnings of my heart,
Cursing civilization as I go.

symphony arrangement for poetry - personae distinctions of hidden violins and woodwinds, somewhere along the way brass - leaving Cabaret Voltaire (Zurich), moving to the Beat Hotel (9 Rue Gît-le-Cœur, Paris), ending up on the Cowgate (Edinburgh).

when you read newspapers you realise that dinosaurs roam
the land, the fortress of printing press, unlike the printing press
(which was taken seriously from the word go!)
the internet has been largely squandered; you read these
things in newspapers, the evolutionary reaction - ensuring that
among these dinosaurs are also opinion pieces, dinosaurs write accounts of what's happening, batrachotoxin amphibians write
opinions: i.e. what isn't happening: opinions go forward unchecked
and undisputed, added that there are many potions in the cauldron
it's hard to pick one out and dig deeper until both parties are in no position to hold such and such opinion, given the missing
muscle of implementing change or the skeleton to keep
the status quo - but this is a slight deviation from what i
was intending to convey - the old guard of printing is worried
sick that it might be usurped in the long run - it prints damaging
reports about the existence of the internet, looking at it as not
a niche environment, which it technically is - but cats, ****, cats,
****, apparently we all log on to meow and moan -
as a tool of entertainment it's the least thrilling source of
the desired "entertainment", the unscripted nature of this niche environment is what's actually good about it, in that a single
person can become both writer, editor and publisher -
but indeed, the internet has been squandered,
although it improved from what used to be a wholly anonymous
environment peppered with dangers of random encounters -
the infamous chat rooms changed even more to infamous
phone-books: you heard it, stories of cyber bullying - the internet
has been squandered, by all means, trying to save it is a bit like
trying to save the world, or as one Tao principle suggested to me
early on forged in me: the best way you can aid the world
is to forget the world, and let the world forget you.
a film director would say, well, i'm stuck in the house,
i'm thinking of shooting a biopic of Lawrence of Arabia...
i see a desert, a man riding a camel through it...
but you have to then start muling over the facts: you'll have to get funding, get the casting right,  but no one likes shooting in
the desert, you have to get  the catering sorted, you start shooting,
but the camera track ruins the desert, so you have to move
to another part of the desert that's pristine with wind parallel
ridges in the sand, then the studio calls you and says you're
spending too much money, then peter o'toole stumbles
out from the trailer hungover almost everyday; sure, you need inspiration and ideas, but that's only 1% or the whole,
99% is working with people - as a director you're not actually
playing god, you're helping other people, De Niro preferred
mumbling something prior to a scene, but Seymour Hoffman
went into a scene like a crocodile quickly snapping
to the shout of cut! and the clapperboard.
i suppose poetry could be like that too,
99% being the audience and the necessary oration,
that would work - unless of course you'd do the same with
painting - but whereas with painting you're invited to critical
thinking, see an artist next to his painting elaborating on
the themes and use of colours? i don't want to assert common sense
wisdom from one profession and apply the same wisdom
                                      to another with a trans-occupational
relativism: that red           is relative to               crimson -
              but we'll have to do away with lighting,
              darkening and what not, so yes,
red is relative to crimson insofar as we forget lighting
and Edward Hopper. anyone can appreciate the
lazy approach, but i took to some mammoths without the help
of audio books, a reasoning man, not a mob gob emotive conjurer worth a tonne of heckles and haggles - but i guess the dream
through this gamble would be the monetary reward...
you know... after so many years writing for peanuts i have lost
all appetite for spending money beyond what i consider
to be a workable cure for insomnia - i don't have to buy music
any more since i can stream it, i have more privacy without
a mobile phone, all i have is this little brick wall that's stationary
in this virtual jungle on which i scribble - with the radius from
this point being anything ranging from 1 to 6 sensible miles,
beyond 6 and we're talking blisters on feet; can you imagine what
our predecessors could endure in terms of walking? they had hoofs
instead of feet, while we have skin as smooth as a baby's buttock
cheeks on the soles of our feet. the strangeness of modernity:
1. a man drives a car with with a bicycle on the roof, just so he can    
    peddle down a scenic route...
2. the volume of skimmed milk bottle is the same as full fat milk,
    but if you bought full fat milk and added water to it the volume
    would triple (via semi, so yes, triple)...
3. healthy diets - 350% increase in vegan population
   in Britain over the past 10 years - the protein problem
   (once it was the fat problem, low fat yoghurt came about,
    turned everything into a sugar problem), i.e. women aged
    between 19 & 24 requiring to hit the 58 gram daily
    recommendation of protein would have to eat:

everyday foods
chicken breast (251g = 276Kcal)
eggs x4 (460g = 658Kcal)
salmon fillet (291g = 533Kcal)                                 v.

clean-eating foods
quinoa (1,318g = 1,582Kcal)
chia seeds (371g = 1,818Kcal)
                              goji berries (405g = 1,504Kcal)
                              kimchi (3,222g = 863Kcal)
                              tofu (707g = 70Kcal)
                              ******* (384g = 632Kcal)
                              coconut yoghurt (3,422g = 6,844Kcal)
almond milk (14,500ml = 3,625Kcal)
avocado (2,900g = 4,843Kcal)

  as healthy as stuffing turkeys for Thanksgiving, can you imagine
  drinking fourteen, fourteen litres of almond milk?! i don't even
  have to imagine drinking 700ml of whiskey to get the point
  and reach the threshold of the effectiveness of sleeping pills...
  no alcohol, no sleeping pills, better sit it out than take so near  
  ineffective buggers; although as a warning: you might end up
  sleeping for *12 hours - variations on the BMI and previous habits
  of drinking - socially? not so much, medically? primarily -
  not in favour of the anti-alcohol lobby being part of the "safety"  
  guidelines given to the public...
4. charities' costs eat up 78% of donations,
    another 21st century anomaly, effectively dismissed
    by the church's alms giving history depicted in Sistine opulence,
    so no wonder whether in cardinal robes or suited and booted for
    the near-invisible secular religiosity, such poverty of symbolism
    compared with the predecessors, at least back then you'd
    know who to send to the guillotine - and this is how Louis XIV
    treated his courtesans, he made a certain type of clothing
    mandatory, a Versailles school uniform as it were,
    most the the courtesans went bankrupt having to buy the
    clothes, some pieces would be equivalent of a sports car,
    they went bankrupt to remain in the club,
    so they borrowed monkey from Louis, and so Louis kept
    them in his pocket: poor rich people, or necessary
    leeches (as once used in medicine, Louis' absolutism
    being the sole malady, abuse of power necessitates
    paranoia); or to quote Lisolette about the royal *******
    'mouse droppings in pepper.' Philippe (Duc d'Orléans)
    was the transvestite who charged into battle
    and conquered the Dutch, much to his brother's
    shame at having only made conquests in the bed - well
money here, money there, shoving a piano into a concert hall accompanied by an orchestra, something Chopin would never
do not wishing to leave the comforts of salons - although
Metallica dared to.
                                                             ­           welcome to
the age of silica and chameleons (cha cha cha champ a camcorder anyone? well, imagine what scrutiny Narcissus would pay a photograph, imagine giving a photograph to Narcissus and
wonder would he change his behaviour), get fooled by
the adverts once, second time you'll eventually see needing to feed
a charity's bureaucracy rather than an African, hence the migrant
                                                                                                    crisis...
sometimes there are no surprises as to where certain things
originate, Marxism and England, zenith of the empire,
or as historians claim, the decadence of the Romans was their fascination with food prior to the end: ready-meals and
microwaves among cooking shows, currently the daily program
of channels, esp. that of 4 is culinary and horse racing,
all the interesting programs are broadcast when everyone
is about to fall asleep... Saville bankrupted the B.B.C.
posthumously: a game show, "jackpot" of one grand.
- advertisement didn't expect live T.V., the mute button,
the pause button and the fast forward button...
but in a 100 years time if not more they'll look back at us as
having finally exhausted Groundhog Day (starring Bill Murray) -
sure, the technological breakthroughs were great, magical,
but the content? 20th century most probably,
the ideal time of fluid and at ease plagiarism - obviously
exceptions were made, but this walking nightmare
of the exhausted second half of the 20th century caught up
in the 21st century - dialogue replaced by visuals,
clash of the titans (1981) v. clash of the titans (2010) -
the only good bit of the latter is the inclusion of Hades -
it's beautiful, i'm nostalgic to a history i was born in and
belonged to, i'm not a nostalgic Nietzsche or Hölderlin
bumming about singing praises of the Ancient Greeks -
you see, it's close-at-heart nostalgia because i belonged to it,
the infant of it - a peculiar circumstance to be in; or coming
to terms with the first signs of decay: cartoon network's
cow & chicken with i r baboon - have you seen the horrors
of modern cartoons compared with computer graphics?
readies them to  pick up gaming soon after,
given gaming graphics. in summary - some say sitting behind
a computer screen is a sign of a lack of self-assurance,
or confidence, self- anything you want to suffix with, well,
that could be true, but you have a photograph included,
and the days of the typewriter are over - but i could also say
the same about certain brands or shops, are they too lacking
self-confidence to stop their existence on  the high street?
the royal mail delivers junk, you might get 100 junk envelopes
and a christmas  card... o.k. make that 1000 to 10,000 envelopes
of junk and one letter directly addressing you that hasn't been
written using an analogue like

dear mr. / mrs. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

we would like to inform you that your insurance
claim has expired.            etc.

the infancy of this century is what's deceptive, the greatest
deception i can think of - the great health scares and subsequent
over-usage of antibiotics breeding super-bugs in hospitals
anything and everything under the sun - including
that damnable idea that the planet Mars employs people whom
it's attracting into its orbit - earthly geologists must be bewildered
that the only subject of learning from all of man's
capacity to send into space is geology: and on the return flight
home we realised that we'd only be bringing back some arenite
(sandstone); that quote about about painting being 50 years
ahead of writing, the same is true with science fiction and
actual science.

the full moon is out, prime orb ever changing,
no talk here of grit and mundane,
i never speak of myself as a genius,
more like a plumber, i am, a plumber,
and poetry is like fixing a pipe,
i go in... and as quickly get the **** out,
it's painful to brood over volumes of excuses,
poetry is just as mundane as any other job,
it's a nasty affair of the heart,
whereas philosophy can build the Trojan wall
of systematisation akin to ever other sunrise or
sunset, poetry's wall is honesty and spontaneity,
divorce the two and you're writing poetry in
your spare time... ever wonder why Hegel etc.
didn't write their works in spare time?
it's because they were wholly engrossed, so that you
could speak about their "improper" jobs in your
salon spare time like a Pavlov experiment:
salivating drool to the knee like Rapunzel growing her hair;
there is no such thing as a failed artist,
unless his failures are best expressed by a woman
not having a hairdresser, i.e. the Assisi oath
of the Renaissance pundits - drunk stare twice,
carousel approach, master the spider-eye-effect
and you'll paint the Sistine chapel eventually,
catching Beelzebub eventually in colour.

i wrote an A-level essay on the counter-reformation,
apparently i was awarded the resulting grade with
much esteem from the post-graduate OCR...
hence the title... versus Cabaret Voltaire...
hence Cabaret Loyola... the former became a shadowy
version of the cure mixing with depeche mode anyway,
a mediocre club of cowgate in Edinburgh (cowgate
the origin of Heart of Midlothian football club, begun by
tango dancers or caleigh dancers or something)...
but in spirit of the cabaret as a makeshift church,
in guise of a priest, albeit spy-like plain clothes no uniform
no marching orders, the grand union, a marriage;
i know i didn't do the proper arithmetic on this example,
but how a marriage works when two poets collide,
Sylvia Plath's *new year at dartmoor (1962) a
and Ted Hughes' crow's vanity (circa 1972) b, i.e.:

this is newness: every little ****** (excuse),
looking close in the evil mirror crow saw
obstacle glass-wrapped and peculiar,
mistings of civilizations  (,)   towers   (,)   gardens
glinting and clinking in a saint's falsetto.
(with) battles he wiped the glass   (,)    but there came
only you, not knowing what to make of the sudden slippiness,
(a) spread of swampferns fronded on the mistings
the blind, white, awful, inaccessible slant.
a trickling spider   (,)   he wiped the glass   (,)   he peered
there's no getting up it by the words you know.
for a glimpse of the usual grinning face
no getting up by elephant or wheel or shoe.
but it was no good he was breathing too heavy
we have only come to look.
and too hot    (,)   and space was too cold
you are too new to want the world in a glass hat.
and here came the misty ballerinas
the burning gulfs    (,) the hanging gardens (;) it was eerie.

(as the priest added: dear children of the word / of words,
you have come to this blank piece of paper
so that the ink might seal your fingerprints
over one another in the presence of punctuation
and the literate community. literate union is
sacred in that it enriches others, but robs you.
it binds those who enter it to be faithful only unto
themselves and unfaithful unto others.
etc. etc. - and whereas some pinpoint the event:
afar in articulation the two horrid articles:
i do does not necessarily mean i will -
and with what ******* are you to write a prenupital?
the bets are off... the priest has gone mad,
because he can't be bothered revising the vows with
a secular consent)...

         yes, i did pair up the poems with one
arithmetic coming short and the other exceeding the potential
of interaction... after all, he lived much longer,
and she was baking cranium & cartilage pie in an open
oven.

looked at you for too long
and then i realized
you are human, too

fallible
uncertain
flawed

piously pined for
palatial splendor i
placed in my dreams of you,
imperfect you

and it's no ones fault
a figure headed facade
fabricated by figments
of my frivolous imagination

put you on a pedestal
made you divine
made you holy

you, the ceiling
high above my head
and i, looking up
in the sistine chapel

untouchable
untarnished

couldn't see the cracks
beneath the varnish

then, close enough to study
a faint fresco with critical eyes
fantasy faded in the fault lines
of your frowning face

looked for too long
until i realized
you were just as broken as me

a collection of shattered pieces
shrouded and shy
once a shrine
now a shriek

wide eyes on you
a sinner, still
i called you sacred

ignoring the nature of
the irreverent, the profane

liked the luster
of longing lingering
on my lips
when i breathed your name

the veil torn
the truth beheld
and you are not god

gambling grief and
gleaming gloom
thought i could be
the sun to your moon

majesty to malignancy
momentarily merciful
moreover cruel

monstrous mr monsoon
after all, human, too

He. Opinion is not worth a rush;
In this altar-piece the knight,
Who grips his long spear so to push
That dragon through the fading light,
Loved the lady; and it's plain
The half-dead dragon was her thought,
That every morning rose again
And dug its claws and shrieked and fought.
Could the impossible come to pass
She would have time to turn her eyes,
Her lover thought, upon the glass
And on the instant would grow wise.

She. You mean they argued.

He.                         Put it so;
But bear in mind your lover's wage
Is what your looking-glass can show,
And that he will turn green with rage
At all that is not pictured there.

She. May I not put myself to college?

He. Go pluck Athene by the hair;
For what mere book can grant a knowledge
With an impassioned gravity
Appropriate to that beating breast,
That vigorous thigh, that dreaming eye?
And may the Devil take the rest.

She. And must no beautiful woman be
Learned like a man?

He.               Paul Veronese
And all his sacred company
Imagined bodies all their days
By the lagoon you love so much,
For proud, soft, ceremonious proof
That all must come to sight and touch;
While Michael Angelo's Sistine roof,
His "Morning' and his "Night' disclose
How sinew that has been pulled tight,
Or it may be loosened in repose,
Can rule by supernatural right
Yet be but sinew.

She.              I have heard said
There is great danger in the body.

He. Did God in portioning wine and bread
Give man His thought or His mere body?

She. My wretched dragon is perplexed.

Hec. I have principles to prove me right.
It follows from this Latin text
That blest souls are not composite,
And that all beautiful women may
Live in uncomposite blessedness,
And lead us to the like--if they
Will banish every thought, unless
The lineaments that please their view
When the long looking-glass is full,
Even from the foot-sole think it too.

She. They say such different things at school.