Luke sat in the dead center of the couch eating a bowl of cereal while Spongebob’s loud, obnoxious voice played loudly over the T.V. His abandoned Thomas the Train play set pieces lay scattered on the floor and I was rushing around the house trying to find all the ***** laundry from the past week.

“Luke, where did you put your black t-shirt?”

He sat unmoving, his eyes glued to Spongebob. He reminded me of one of those green zombies from his favorite ******-Doo movie that I’d seen too many times.

“Luke.” I said, and he looked at me. “Where did you put your black shirt?”

“What black shirt, daddy?” he asked in his small, seemingly innocent voice.

“The ‘army’ one that Mommy got you when she came home last time,” I explained. “If you want me to wash it, I have to know where it is.”

He looked around the living room, “I don’t know, Daddy.”

Letting out a sigh, I went walking about the house, grabbing mismatched socks, and other clothes that he’d thrown while getting ready for bed the last few nights. Tossing the clothes in the hamper sitting on the table, waiting to be taken downstairs to the washer, I went to look down the hallway.

The black t-shirt in question was one of Luke’s absolute favorites. He tended to throw a sort of tantrum when he wanted to wear it and couldn’t find it. At the moment it seemed to be hiding. Looking around the cluttered house, I noticed something balled up in a corner of the hallway. Thrown against the wall, laying on the floor, was the missing t-shirt. I bent over and picked it up. The doorbell rang.

“Daddy!” Luke yelled from the other room, “the door.”

“Don’t answer it,” I said, coming back into the living room, still carrying the black keepsake. “I found your shirt by the way.”

His face lit up with a smile that seemed to say he’d known all along where it had been. I smiled and opened the door. My face quickly fell when I saw the two officers standing in their dress blue uniforms, presenting a soldierly appearance outside on the front step. I dropped Luke’s shirt.

“May we come in Mr. Reynolds?” one asked.

I swallowed hard, and shook my head.

“Luke, can you go play in your room for a little bit?”

I watched him scoot off the couch, taking a couple trains from his play set and head down the hallway. The stoic look set across the soldier’s faces said everything that needed to be said. It only took ten minutes of awkward mumbling and they left, closing the door behind them. I sat on the couch and buried my head in my hands. Luke came into the living room.

“Daddy?” Luke asked. “Is Mommy coming home?”

I wiped some tears from my eyes, took him in my arms and hugged him tight.

“It’s okay, Daddy. Mommy’s a hero. Right?” he asked.

“Right.”

Stage Design/American Drama


Down front on America’s stage—
awash in a universe
of light arranged by
the ultimate technician.
Come closer.  Anticipate
spectacle.

First sun-splash
on these shores fashions
fool’s gold of surf that heaves against
foam-smoothed, lobster black,
slick rock beaches of northern Maine/
bubbles about black rubber boots of men in boats—
another day, another dime,
shivered away in ancient rime—
adrift in fog on the black
                                          glass
                                                   harbor
                                                               surface.

Grand Canyon sunrise
          EXPLODES
               copper and white/
                    orange and green/
                          blood red/
over many thousand pounds
of brash brown
        dirt—
in every direction/especially down.
       Soldierly shadows armed with swords
       of slivered sunlight hack through scrub
       like so much meat, to each day’s final
       battle at the canyon’s rim/
while a mile below the torment
called the Colorado
turns silver and gold,
black, blue, and
thundering
mud.

Louisiana bayous trickle chlorophyll caramel over twisted hickory sentinels, monumental elms and sycamores—even the alligators.  More mystery here than far-flung nebulae—and everything fighting back ***** green kudzu.

The Badlands of South Dakota, striped like the surface of a ***** peppermint planet—sizzling in the sun, bone cold in the shade—knobby tan canyons wrapped in ribbons of rust that dribble sounds one can neither recall nor reproduce.

Same phenomenon frames dawn over spongy folds of tall green cilia ocean called simply The Plains.
Kansas, Nebraska, horizons so far away thunderstorms creep along like dark, threatening slugs.
Distant night fireworks laden with punishing hail hide tornadoes and winged farmhouses in the horizontal gloom.  In the morning—those sounds again.  Critters?  Wind.  Ghosts, maybe.

Spectral mists of the Great Northwest cloak clear-cut sores on Nature’s sacred,
fragrant, deep green shores, falling steep to the creamy Pacific.
Light's a plaything here.  Big Sur
renders color to gem, sparkles
down the coast
to rusty Golden Gate and grimy LA,
where the sun goes down brown
and the rain shines
like gun metal.

Georgia soil—
homicidal redheaded cousin running loose, looking for trouble—
grows swampy hardwood groves/
leaves hung limp from humidity/
masking antebellum secrets/
offering sanctuary to voodoo practitioners and moonshiners alike.
Magic, danger, ******, and ghosts
of slaughtered slaves wander tight-packed old-growth forests.
Some say the soil is red from ancient conflict,
unanswered pleas for mercy drowned
in the drenching rains
of hurricanes
strayed north from the Gulf of Mexico.
Others claim tears of countless mothers will never leave
Civil War blood completely dry.

Northern New England foliage--
master maples drunk on fresh cider/
psychedelic finger-paint exhibitionists high on
the year’s last harvest,
intoxicated by Nature’s largess/
symphonies of scarlet, tangerine, lemon, even purple--
regal birds migrate over lakes so blue
you could chip your teeth on them,
and a diehard hemlock conducts its final green opus to a sea of primary colors.

Iowa is quiet and corn, obscuring whole towns and the lives held captive therein.  All the green on Earth is planted here; all the sun, all the sapphire sky feeding knee-high-by-July crops, bleaching spare white churches, white picket fences, white-on-white generations and all their vanilla dreams.

Linger beneath Montana’s cobalt crystal canopy to know why it’s called Big Sky.
Stark, Crazy Mountains chase stuttering clouds above treeless, tumbleweed towns,
bathed in the same blues as Wyoming, blown through a wild man’s horn.

A wink of sunlight
mirrored in unseen peaks
perhaps hundreds of miles away—
snow so white/Rocky Mountains so hard and gray—
behind a universe of wheat flatness beckoning the eye to infinity, slowly,
slowly, the Continental Divide rises
from the horizon like a monster parade balloon filling with gas on another continent.
The Flat Irons--majestic stone slabs lounging against Boulder's nearby foothills--
were cursed by ancient observers.
One peek at their precarious slopes compels you to return.
Been back three times and I’m still not sure I believe it.

Southwestern deserts’ blaze,
haze, and halo—spotlights hot,
focused on towering sandstone totems.
Deep gashes of flowering canyon, adrift in the flat and barren,
rage water, mud, and death during summer storms.
Scrub and sand, dust and desolation, land unfit for demons.
Get thee behind me, Arizona.

Endless, straight, lonely two-lanes
carve the lunar landscape of west Texas
into parcels of wasteland, miles marked by
bleached carcasses of ranch animals
and their predators, some hung
on fences as a warning
that people really do
live there.

Cities have their place,
                    their places,
                    their placement--
but my heart can’t pound to the beat of traffic
like it does to waterfall spray.

Turn your back to the fire in sufficient twilight and a mountain range sharpens into a line—
coyotes prowling, howling on the perimeter.
To spy on a wild animal lost in thought.
The sight--and sound--as swans alight or leave a hidden pond.
Northern lights and swamp gas,
everywhere the stench
of Earth.

This
is what matters—
all around us—
this alone.

Not politics,
not religion,
not countries.

Just this—
stage.

Hail in peace wherever you abode now, dear Nadine Gordimer
You white daughter of Africa, the pen-mistress of July’s people,
You are the lover of July, your holy months of literature
That similarly gave a ****** grave marriage to Maziz Kunene
The African saint of orature; And Okot P’ Bitek, the lion of Gulu,
July have wedded you to the sombre grave in the Jo’burg,
As its apparatchik, the menacing jaws of death feel humdinger!
O! Dear little daughter, cursed are the jaws of death
They have kept on wooing and wooing you relentlessly
They have yearned for your betrothal with mad jealous,
For your iconic position in white African literature,
In which you stand with soldierly embrace a Nobelite,
They have now taken you to their inner chamber nuptials in death,
Before anything; let them now pay dowry to your bothers;
J M Coetzee, Alex La Guma and Dennis Brutus,
For there’s is a competent herds boy, a black shepherd;
Ezekia Mphalele, his living soul will keep the cows
Off down Corner B of the troubled African Image.
Say hello for those you are with in the current realm,
Say hello to foremen and fore daughters of Africa
Those that chose to visit the realm of ancestor precociously;
Say hello to them; Angelo Maya and Doris Lessing,
Let their caged birds and blooming grass sing uproariously,
Marriama Ba and Margaret Ogola, African girls,
They had a long letter and the source of the river from black dialectics,
O! Dear old baby Nadine Gordimer, stand firm in face to face with nothing
Other than the present time you’re in; the Africa’s realm of living dead
To sing the ballads of anti-apartheid both in heaven and on earth,
The only true testament of your footprints on the global sands of times
That Nadine Gordimer, July’s white-African daughter is deadly alive!

Sit on the bed. I'm blind, and three parts shell.
Be careful; can't shake hands now; never shall.
Both arms have mutinied against me, - brutes.
My fingers fidget like ten idle brats.


I tried to peg out soldierly, - no use!
One dies of war like any old disease.
This bandage feels like pennies on my eyes.
I have my medals? - Discs to meke eyes close.
My glorious ribbons? - Ripped from my own back
In scarlet shreds. (That's for your poetry book.)


A short life and a merry one, my buck!
We used to say we'd hate to live dead-old, -
Yet now... I'd willingly be puffy, bald,
And patriotic. Buffers catch from boys
At least the jokes hurled at them. I suppose
Little I'd ever teach a son, but hitting,
Shooting, war, hunting, all the arts of hurting.
Well that's what I learnt, - that, and making money.


Your fifty years ahead seem none too many?
Tell me how long I've got? God! For one year
To help myself to nothing more than air!
One Spring! Is one too good to spare, too long?
Spring wind would work its own way to my lung,
And grow me legs as quick as lilac-shoots.


My servant's lamed, but listen how he shouts!
When I'm lugged out, he'll still be good for that.
Here in this mummy-case, you know, I've thought
How well I might have swept his floors for ever.
I'd ask no nights off when the bustle's over,
Enjoying so the dirt. Who's prejudiced
Against a grimed hand when his own's quite dust,
Less live than specks that in the sun-shafts turn,
Less warm than dust that mixes with arms' tan?
I'd love to be a sweep, now, black as Town,
Yes, or a muckman. Must I be his load?


O Life, Life, let me breathe, - a dug-out rat!
Not worse than ours existences rats lead -
Nosing along at night down some safe rut,
They find a shell-proof home before they rot.
Dead men may envy living mites in cheese,
Or good germs even. Microbes have their joys,
And subdivide, and never come to death.
Certainly flowers have the easiest time on earth.
'I shall be one with nature, herb, and stone,'
Shelley would tell me. Shelley would be stunned:
The dullest Tommy hugs that fancy now.
'Pushing up daisies' is their creed, you know.


To grain, then, go my fat, to buds my sap,
For all the usefulness there is in soap.
D'you think the Boche will ever stew man-soup?
Some day, no doubt, if...


                                          Friend, be very sure
I shall be better off with plants that share
More peaceably the meadow and the shower.
Soft rains will touch me, - as they could touch once,
And nothing but the sun shall make me ware.
Your guns may crash around me. I'll not hear;
Or, if I wince, I shall not know I wince.


Don't take my soul's poor comfort for your jest.
Soldiers may grow a soul when turned to fronds,
But here the thing's best left at home with friends.


My soul's a little grief, grappling your chest,
To climb your throat on sobs; easily chased
On other sighs and wiped by fresher winds.


Carry my crying spirit till it's weaned
To do without what blood remained these wounds.

i find this mentioned success found and expressed in the parameters of life,
nothing more than a philistine’s interpretation
of why la traviata resonates more profoundly than madam butterfly
when a girl does not use rhetoric to see the latter opera
but bows to the former in a sort of cognitive neglige,
so why do i find this mention of existential “success” so unprivileged
as to require a deviation from it and complete the individual?
think of the existential “success” as nothing more than:
a zoological phenomenon, the one chance to zoo-keep the dodo not executed,
most people will live in this safeguard,
they will forever remain the one example of continuity undisputed,
they will be safeguarded by the fact that countless examples have & will follow
them, and they will be petrified into ranks in a soldierly fashion
without moaning, for they are indeed the ones who reaped
the safeguard in the first place, the continuity must persist,
individuation must known nothing of what individuation is -
that process of self-depreciation as a worth in the worth of isolation -
they do exist in this safeguard not for any amusing qualities,
it’s the quantity of the escapade that’s amusing, amusement
based upon its success!
there's mr. and mrs. with 2.4 children,
and there's mr. barney and mrs. barney née barnacle
with an only child and a ticket to jerusalem.
so i digress now on the whim - if i were a sufferer of a medical condition,
a psychiatric one at that... would i have great or no insight?
i find it hard to concentrate on the theoretical side of things
without giving a chemical idle wave of the hand giving full
trust to the chemical cure... rather than a theoretical cure...
if i were truly a sufferer of a condition... would i theorise?
i guess i’d button up do my trouser zip up and take the chemical answer
as the “cure,” instead i decided to “cure” myself theorising,
which can’t make me a sufferer for all reasons stated by
an abstinence from the hippocratic trust... which isn’t really there...
hence the need to translate all this as: a hippopotamus oath,
the nearest noun next to dinosaurs... hip oh oh...
for why would anyone being a sufferer of a diagnosed condition
suddenly decide to theorise the symptom as a cure
rather than accept the cures given?
no sufferer of a condition accepts theory as a cure...
most just take the force-fed mechanisation of excessive use of
chemistry as if it was a choice of a beauty product...
yellows olanzapine and blues some other anti psi psi...
in summary... if i truly suffered i’d suffer without theoretical escapades, i'd take the cure and not bother theorising:
but since i don’t suffer from a false diagnosis i theorise...
sober enough to do so... even though drunk enough to enjoy the silence
and the holy lack of conversation...
i guess in depth, the migrant's ambition in me to be content with
arbeit macht frei... translated from doing construction work
with my father, or my specialisation in chemistry into
industrious writing patterns... a poem a day... let's
you throw an apple at a psychiatrist every other day.

You must stay far away though
You would come in with a flourish.
Not knowing yet how it is becoming...
We see you and what you play with.

For you stood in your market place
Stood soldierly at attention has me
Mention your concepts of wealth...
I dont want to be ******* richer.

One step closer to spring,
but still bitter winter.
Deserted playgrounds
and parks are seas
of mud and slush.

An umbrella with
no guiding hand
circles across the street,
as oozing hail pounds
out its melody on its ribs.

Wind is invading the dreary quiet
with its voice of doom.
In a vacant lot stands
a crippled truck that lost
its footing on a patch of black ice.

Lucky ones are home,
roasting their limbs by a fireplace
with its yellow bundle of flames.
Soup in mugs - marshmallow
on burnt sticks.

A sudden downpour sends the rope
on the flagpole whipping discordant clangs.

Coats on racks drip puddles on the floor,
galoshes stand side by side in soldierly rows.

Soggy earth is a sponge that ***** shoes
into its void.

Nature weeping in the howling morass
finds no quiet moment.

One day there came into the club
a stranger causing a great hubbub
with his soldierly, swaggering, uniformed figure,
and short black hair and moustache a-quiver,
and with him aides and associates ten,
all muscular, military, mustachioed men,
and looking around with disdain he decried
not a table there was which was not occupied,
and noticing a nearby noisy group
of diners spooning up their soup
at a longish table seating twenty
and laden with food and drink a-plenty,
he called the captain with this demand,
“Give me that table, it’s my command.”

from The Adventures of George
©Blair Gowrie (Roderick Macdonald)

I was denied my authority to cut my way out by contraction.
Because there had to be a scar where I was born, something lasting.
I was born 10 minutes after and 6 weeks too soon.
The sun had not come up, I hoped it was a full moon.
The first month, but I missed being a New Year Day born.
I was crowned by Casearean section onto that belly torn.
They say crying forces air, but my air was by incubator.
I was in a hospital in the hospital and it was my Savior.
Doctors looks for twitches and other infant signs of life
One of them probably remarked, He looks like  a Mike.
Because he was a soldier who just marched out the womb.
He survived the battle of birth, and he seems to be soldierly groomed.
I looked at them and thought to myself, I will be well, and soon.
So when I speak everybody would heed that cry.
Because I was made to live in abundance and not die.

Hard Rain.

Spheric drops on the glum face of midnight.
Nightly drinks by self.
Self Destructing acidicly.
Dinning.
Dying soldierly.
Strict concentration.
By the tears.
Confused in mirrored shadows.
With a tint of peppermint.
Ease back thy silk collection from face.
Intimate gathered embrace.
Under liquid flow of haze.
Blue in thee.
Eyes in slumber casings.
Alieness mornings in caves.
Tavern moonlight from lamp.
Sideways blankets backwards.
On satin grass of upward walls.
Languid.
Sensitive.
Dreams on clear land.
A lone shelter sits.
Corner dimm’d ***.
Blue salted sands wandered coast.
Turquoise sadness.
Stand on crystal blackness beneath.
Lowest of low.
Valley.
Subatomic chaos.
Within chaos itself.
Ones self to end on a metaphorical sea of clarity.

Mama!
Undisputedly a child of God I am
Born of pain, sorrow and condemnation
Sired in His just and Godly features
Baptized in your ****’s maternal blood
But my thirst for vengeance duels with my heart’s virtues
To avenge the untimely demise of Adhiambo
The daughter that never saw the sun set
Camouflaged among the myriad heavenly souls
Singing with angels and saints


Oh mama!
Dawn wakes the sun from slumber
To condole with us in moaning the execution of either war or peace
For the enslaved have mastered the art of the enlightened
Armed with ammunition ready for the gruesome sabotage
Hard to fathom their motives
Of deprivation and starvation
Their untimely demise is enough allure for blood
For those who cease life by the sword
Indeed beckon for death by it
Mama a pledge I took
To dust they are homing

.........................................................­.....

My son!
Seek wisdom
And let it flow in you like the water lilies
Abide not to your perceptions
That stirs in you more abhorrence
For fellow mankind
But thy almighty load you with love
For His word decrees, your neighbor’s love
Surpasses your own


My son!
Refrain from your corrupted notions
Arousing the incessant devastating pangs of our hearts
Of settling of scores
For the prejudiced souls beseeching for freedom in their graves
To the unforeseen heroes sung to eternity
For in your quest for vengeance
Burrow two graves, they say

See Son!
Even though nights fog us with a blanket of sorrow
And reminiscence
Of unjust hearsay of our forlorn hope
Sang by our children
Retribution is the dark cloud that camouflages virtues

Son!
Remember your sister in the same quest
With a maimed heart yes I second
But son you no matador: this is no duel of the bulls
Envision the age of love and peace
With vehement prayers that are never in vain
To drive the demons of destruction to oblivion

The true path of a rebel soldier is obscure
Hence tread not on the path of your father
Soldierly yet unchaste with perverse longings
A *** slave to treacherous captor: notoriety
In as much as
Your obscenity masquerades your fragility
Professing you are the seed of their *****
Them like caged hounds that devoured my unsullied youth
In submission to their unrelenting sensual wants


Son, I dare not call you a child of sin


Hunt for the wisdom of your “father”
A peacemaker
My irrefutably hero
For he concerns himself less on the price he dearly paid
To salvage me from the gallows of infinite hell
But more on love, and my resilience

And son:
Acceptance
Love
Peace
And forgiveness
Equals longevity

My son.. my son.. thou plea…

Tribute To A Desire
My sweet innocent son wanted to donate
His plasma to some needy corona patient
I was astonished to his wild desire so great
Because till that moment he was not infect
Then he got corona and remained in pain
For very many days in hospital for treatment
I was disturbed for his soldierly spirit insane
Allah helped him to survive and to imprint
His innocent desire to donate contribute
Then I advised him to do so for a poor soul
I admire him for his courage and do salute
For wonderful service for sweet humanly goal
Colonel Muhammad Khalid Khan
Copyright June 2020 love Remains