i just remembered when it all began to fall apart i was in mid-thirties weary of taking advantage of women i wanted to change grow become better person more compassionate find loving respectful relationship maybe marriage i knew i needed to step away stop

chicago 1985 Odysseus is a stranger to himself living someone else’s life does he really want what Mom Dad Chris want? is he lying to everyone else or himself? he snorts another line of ******* moves on to next girl in dizzy way he is having time of his life so much occasion to waste doors to open slam rooms to pass through “In the room the women come and go, talking of Michelangelo, and time yet for a hundred indecisions, and for a hundred visions and revisions” thank you t.s. elliott his ****** liaisons carry on from several weeks to several months begin with him adoring some girl or she adoring him little fires that burn themselves out for his part infidelity is rarely in question instead typically he or she feels let down by some personal response or character trait and simply stops calling in actuality no girl ever bothers to stick around they follow his lead and evaporate his mind draws a blank he wonders what do girls want? Deep inside he knows nothing in life is greater than the love of a woman he would have liked all those girls to be just one girl but she is missing where is she? occasionally he will run into one of his ex-lovers on street she wears an expression that hints why didn’t you phone me back? why did you stop calling? he suspects she is playing victim in self-satisfying charade in fact Odysseus crosses into new territory it is difficult to go back he hones his edge no longer is he wonder-stuck child possessed by curiosity for girls he requires **** and kink longer buildups then urgent bursts of effort drawn out climaxes nameless girl wearing tight jeans cowboy boots braids whom he meets in drake hotel elevator pushes stop button she ***** him off he has **** *** with tan-skinned french-canadian female tourist in telephone booth on north avenue gorgeous longhaired creole girl from new orleans ***** him on fire escape stairs **** *** with skinny punk girl in dark alley dutch foreign exchange student gives him ******* between parked cars on clark street weird awkward *** with goth girl in graveyard ****** by older blond woman who positioning herself underneath table in ritzy restaurant he has *** with chatty college sorority girl in jet lavatory he goes down on nerd girl wearing thick glasses in criticism section of depaul’s library he gets ****** ****** by perfect stranger in lake michigan each evening before he goes out prowling he looks in mirror wonders what strange female he will have *** with tonight it always surprises him what a person might not admit to or accept but allow or give in to if the right moment or if the right person is there not that he is particularly the right person rather he stumbles onto an astonishing streak there is the paris/milantokyo fashion model with stylish french haircut who possesses astonishing beauty perfect ***** and haughty temper after night of too many ***** martinis and ******* she announces “you and your friends are going nowhere  you’re all second-rate artist losers! and your cousin and his group are obnoxious *******” she flips him the finger then shoves him he shoves back resulting in dual arrests and domestic violence charges there is the tall blond stripper who totally fulfills his ****** desires once she lets him insert garden hose up her **** laughs uproariously as stream of water shoots out on another occasion she requests he *** in her *** he begins to believe he will marry her she insists she is too low class for his family one night she drunkenly hurls champagne bottle gives him black eye drives away crashes her car there is blue-eyed sweetheart with divine ****** loving touch who after months of sleeping with Odysseus confesses she is ******* some other guy and swears she will be faithful in the future she begs for his forgiveness as he loses it pushes her out door throwing her clothes after her one girl lights candles gives him full body massage ******* another girl holds him tight cries pushes him away one girl writes confessions with permanent markers on walls of closet another girl slaps him yells why? why why why! one girl runs to toilet pukes passes out on floor another girl sits up all night talking teasing never relieving him another girl falls asleep snores while he is in conversation one girl makes fun of small left ******* later gossips to her girlfriends he meets girl who will do anything except allow him to enter her ****** he meets girl who is professional escort she offers to do him for free she has lots of toys videos he declines they mess around she gets him off with ******* he meets girl whose ***** hair grows to mid-thigh she incessantly calls for her dog Bertram! he meets girl who shivers moans furiously cries laughs when he climaxes he meets girl with self-inflicted scars on arms legs who only wants it up her **** he meets girl who likes gagging deep-******* him to skull-**** her harder the better he meets girl whose ******* are so fierce she loses complete control drenching him sheets with her fluids excrement he meets girl who wants ******* squeezed so tightly he fears he will draw blood he meets girl who likes to talk ***** slaps his face as he is reaching ****** he meets girl with gargantuan ***** ******* as large as thumb she gurgles hot breaths later tries to steal string of beads he meets girl who enjoys lactating on his thighs while she gives him head he meets girl who knows how to contract vaginal muscles so tightly all he does is sustain ******* inside her in order to reach ****** he meets girl who pees tiny squirts while he penetrates her **** she laughs wildly he meets girl with furry mound who requests he **** on her as she masturbates he declines she reproaches him accusing you’re not nearly as freethinking as you pretend to be in fact you’re full of ****! he meets girl who wants him to act out **** they struggle he meets girl who desires to be ******* whipped he is not into inflicting pain he meets large strong girl who forces him he never tells anyone about incident he becomes mindful many females are more depraved than him women remain puzzle to Odysseus he is repeatedly astounded shocked can never predict about girl what her ******* ****** will look like whether she has eager *** or what are her secret desires he is explorer women are vast mystery he wonders are females as sexually driven as males? are they as vulnerable? is their **** like tiny *****? he speculates if completely unknown attractive woman walks up to any average man grabs his crotch many possibly most men will willingly allow it are women that weak? more than anything what most excites Odysseus is female lust handjobs are test of adequacy distinguishing character having masturbated thousands of times he thrills in having girl do it he delights in watching her arousal just staring at his ******* is captivated by method of her fingers hands revitalized by degree of her determination throughout he needs to ****** her ******* ****** *** titillated as she licks lips after swallowing ***** he realizes if he were female he would be total nymphomaniac yet he finds it difficult to imagine desiring men are all so like him women are so strange fascinatingly different he craves their otherness Odysseus loves women more than they love themselves smell sight of them sends him into frenzy problem is he fears their power over him

it’s been 25 years since those days i live alone for many years in tucson arizona have not been with a woman for long long time last relationship 2001 with crack ***** i hang my head cry wish for love wonder do i deserve to be loved pray to be forgiven

Those who were marginalized by the braids and serpentine lights, devotions were made in San Juan allowing electromagnetic discharges from the imperceptible space-time of Vernarth's parapsychological quantum; alluding to clarities that achieved everything by having Patmia in the material and incorporeal from the start of the stained glass windows and archetypes by Transfer Quantum that burned the chins of hominids who believed to be immortal as if they were looking in this position for the direction between the eyebrows and the chin , for the Euclidean incidence crossing all the pools that are between quantum means of transfer of ions and cations. The oscillations of the sparkling field of consciousness of the containers were of ethical variables that became perpendicular to the space of draft or levitation of the designations that originated with accelerated electric charges on Patmos, developing albiceleste skylights over the harmonic equations as they elongated in proportions of quanta that They argued greater than those that circulated elliptically from Grikos to Skalá, and then to Profitis with assiduous progenitors of long-wave quanta. The magnificence of the halo became rectilinear up to the high altar that was atomized from the unskillful penumbra to reabsorb the inclinations of physical life in the Macedonians and the Achaemenides when they were trapped by the loss on the propagation of the Lux, which was imposed in hemicycles where they were they reclined to relax in the lux of rest of the path of the reasoning that made pederasty in the links with the minuscule obtuse lights, reeling from the clothing and its finite speed of what measures the ability to be undetermined in the margins of error of the antagonists when originating flow rates, greater in his dermis to regenerate towards any other that could be clothing of greater speed.

Thus was the scenario of dimensional magnitude between the powers that did not have contact, but their dimensionless energies on a surface that reached absorbent to the one that rectifies the concretive of the error that partially abused them. Their legacies would pass to a supplementary electromagnetic plane, separating their masses and retaking orientation from where they returned, where if the ideal of the final rational was refracted where everything would be vivid darkness. The obstacles classified them in the closure of the average height and the average surface, to then redirect to the maximum height and maximum surface propagating in irregularities of the Ego "Believing that they were never overcome in the diffuse perception of the metal mirror." The incident rays of the Lux would go to meet the multi-incident plane of the Mashiach, the wave angles were refracted throughout the sinuous law as radiosity passed over the greater mass that was normalized from the tangent that was projected 180 meters above the eyebrow. and Vernarth's chin, along with the recharged electromagnetic strengths of Alexander the Great's reactivation bezels, which at times seemed to levitate over the Lux's high frequencies and vary independently with its crowded functionalities, among scattered restraints that it presented to both weightless behind. from the decayed marble sawdust, separating from its phosphorescence that bounced between the rigging of solid surfaces and semi-solid ones, when realizing that the sea and the silica were confessed to the Pronoia of Delphi. Inducing Vernarth for the first time into a Pronoia versology on the Athena of Delphi, prompting them to separate from the world and it's holistic to divide into three portions of the dissociation of consciousness from the end of the Lux of Parapsychology, which had hosted them for centuries and centuries. . The Pronoia conspiracy systematized the reaction that would reunite them after this oracular parapsychology, making the adversaries believe that they were discrepancies of clinical parapsychology, equating warlike causes in the containment of Delphic neuroscience. From this quantification, the predominance of Vernarth's Lux de Pronoia was announced, linking peculiar segmentation of submit logical historicity in this work as a starting thesis, which speculates the same for those who have to make an analysis of historical dogmatic imperialism as a justification for mythological normality. The Lux thesis aimed to show that the dimensions of the mythology and the submitology, when exposed in physical quanta, made a tendency of irresolution in the abode of spiritual Tractatus reasoning and not in the instinctual one, which watches over recitals where history and its collective memory indicate outbursts of moderation. The role of the submithology  is to pretend that this normality is made close to the instruction after yours temporary for causes of your deep patrimonial, that makes them captives from the social complexity, with the disambiguation of certain criteria by maximizing the hidden truth of the ascending opposition forces that they have generated great conflagrations, intuition being the unreflective pseudo-reality with historical formalities that stumble into the terrified directionality of the myth that was to be reality. The tiny spaces of the verve left by the silent mechanics of the Persians became defensive when they saw their emissaries incoherently in the verticality of Allah when they saw that the confusing world with anxiety exaggerated predictions and failures invulnerability of a lineage that always had. been condemned to the desert.

Everything conspired with a Pronoia of siege, before the exegesis that sought purification and that was how they headed and misdirected their mistakes in the active train of the recess of their abstracted retreat, in a universe that also abandoned them after the subsequent train of Aurion waking them in their illusions with swords, and stealthy spears in dreams that specified safe rest. The ferocities of the proto-souls of assault carried away the translucent bodies of the Persians, and the Hellenes in acts of honor made such congenital paths of the understandable vocabulary that he did not speak. The prism was located in the cautious measure of its contractile dispersion with white separations of mantles, earth, and water scalded by dynamics that formed colorful activations with their withdrawal phenomena in the immaculate albino Lux that dissolved all of the facet optics that it made. Lux's great brain in the instant that the Thuellai airs transfigured the nuances of the Atros monastery, with objects that refused to be absorbed by the black hue, generating mechanical waves of equivalence in their identical interference that caused two opposing forces to distill the coherent differential that had to be overexposed in the category of historical Submitology. The two inverted waves separated, the Hellenes moaned and hiccupped for having to become identical when separating from their immaterial bodies, doing wonders that would house additional souls that would complement a transitory becoming towards the garden of the angels that provided them with identical beams of light, interfering in what animated the lights of pageantry, with the antithesis of interference where they resided in constancy knowing that they felt possessed of benefits of the eternal length of existence, but with pressures of mutable in some involuntary constancy and amplitude of having parallel directions with Saint John the Apostle and the Siblis. The phenomenon of polarization of both empires was denatured in a transverse way in all the electric fields after this feat, inciting unique fields of the pure and selective ascending ecosystem, which generated polaroid substances at the angle of ninety degrees above the browbones and chin of Vernarth, to approach the Pronoia of concatenation with Alexander the Great refracting unscathed hyper-vital and transcendent faces of infinity. Like any other phenomenon, the Lux crossed both bodies like two Xiphos swords that processed the electromagnetic valve, by iridium that converted with all the coarse Lux that crossed the succumbed immateriality and stopped the shaft and the nail that hang in the typology of electromagnetic radiation from the Hellenic world between them, making an ominous redemptive fire that was regimented to leave them both in the middle of a farm where there were farmyard animals, stockpiled pastures and a house that absorbed them as parents who would love them as beings of Lux. Thus, this primary parapsychological quantum network penetrated the level of the archangels that made them be together in planes of manumission, and that does not admit bi-quantum personality or bi-parapsychology that can cancel out the portent of the helmets and the lineage that does not dazzle if they are not made of iron.

The life of the other world began to be encompassed in all the Subtraigus beings that would correspond to the astral plane that was confirmed after the Kalidona Romantics deduced the Unicorn Uilef or Uilef Monókeros after Pronoia. Kalidona being an uninhabited island and the Uilef sleeps in between copulating with Spinalonga and Kolokythas along with other smaller islets, plus two hundred that will make up six islands of the twenty-six tetragram of Alef. Here Drestnia went with her consort of Etréstles from the Koumeterium of Messolonghi to find fateful encounters of Pantheism based on the majestic copulation of beauty, among twenty-six numbers that prevailed in virtuosos who took refuge in Kalydon or Kalidona, preparing for their rampage with grafted grotesque derived bodies of the Falangist Hellenes who were arranged of their musculature, so that they directed the finesse of the civility of Hesiod, Terpando, Archiloco, Baquílides, tragic like Etréstles, Aeschylus Sophocles, Euripides and comedian like Aristophanes.

"The question should not be in what ways writing and utterance trope each other, but how both are involved with number. Without relating the technology of writing to number (as opposed to sound or drawing), it is impossible to discuss it meaningfully as an aspect of versecraft."

          Courage to write and courage to not write. Read
          The great poets and highly accomplished letters
          Of leaders. Yet the war and the book have lives
          Of their own. Vacuum house, analyze mankind.
          His idea of himself. Ideas subsumed by
          Better ones unite people in melting pots.
          I watch from my little bowl of nuts. Watch
          The one red squirrel and the many gray.
          Watch the nuthatch pair, platoon of chickadees.
          Here is what I say: When we can go
          From planet to planet on nothing but air,
          Leaving behind a drop of water,
          No burger bags blowin’ in the sun,
          I’ll love my sons, and my dogs will be happy.

"What is needed is a way to pry apart the polar, mimetic fiction that undergirds discussions (even sympathetic ones) of writing and versification, and see how we can relate writing to measure. Roy Harris’ investigations into the origin of writing make this connection possible."

          Electronic millennium. A long silence
          Wouldn’t hurt. Not that the national debate
          Should cease, it should proceed, passionate
          And furious. Those who have studied the matter
          And have something to say should write cogent
          Opinion pieces on the totalitarian
          Tendencies of minaret Islamists,
          The terminal contradiction of advancing
          Democracy with the unitary military.
          George Washington would not have approved
          And even Lincoln vacillated between
          The practicalities of preserving union
          And the ideal of freeing slaves. The president
          Carries his burden of matter, the physics
          Of existence cannot change our aloneness
          Or the butterfly’s importance, the very
          Last insects at the screens of August.
          It is life we face and death we meet.

"He argues that the origin of writing did not lie in the drawing of figures, or attempts to imitate speech, but in the recording of number. According to Harris, the oldest ‘writing’ that we have, like that on the 11, 000-year-old Ishango bone, is in ‘lines.’ The surface is scored with rows of short, parallel strokes, which probably served a numerical function. We still use such scoring systems today on occasion."

          OK, different strokes. But reading North’s poems
          And his predecessors’ in which noun and verb
          Are so far separated by modifiers,
          Post-positioned prepositions, diversions
          Into ditches, gardens, heavens, I don’t know
          What to do laugh or put the book down and eat
          Several cookies. In other words, anything goes,
          There truth resides. 1/3 life in suburbs,
          1/3 on the subway, and the last third
          On the mountain. A fourth hallucinating
          In heaven. That’s how it goes. You get what you believe.
          Bones in mud. It’s always possible I suppose
          That for nine months analogous or symmetrical
          With gestation our souls wander call it limbo,
          Doing the limbo and harassing the living
          With unanswerable questions, finally accepting
          Free molecular rent in a cubic meter
          Of interstellar space, a rose hip.
         
"Harris speculates about counting by scoring:"
'What is relevant for our present purposes is the fact that counting is associated in many cultures with primitive forms of recording which have a graphically isomorphic basis... The iconic origin of such recording systems is hardly open to doubt: the notch or stroke corresponds to the human finger...'

          Partridgeberry, mugwort, mats of raspberry,
          Cranberry, bearberry, autumn eleagnus,
          Autumn Nocturne, Autumn Leaves, the changes
          To the tunes and the scientific names.
          When it doesn’t matter what you do
          You’re probably doing something new.
          That’s a woodpecker. That’s a moth. I’m bounded
          By my surroundings, I feel at home.
          Could be Schenectady. Could be Troy.
          One of many small cities in which to
          Await my anonymity. Be specific.
          Not asphalt but impermeable surface.
          Not trees but mature stems. Quercus rubrus—
          Quality veneer. Into such a garden
          Have a victor and a fool penetrated.

'In short, the rows of strokes are graphically isomorphic with just that subpart of the recorder’s oral language which comprises the corresponding words used for counting. It makes no difference whether we ‘read’ the sign pictorially as standing for so many fingers held up, or scriptorially as standing for a certain numeral.'

          In a crowded world every action results
          In an equal and overwrought reaction.
          Yet, all the energy recycles
          And there is not one thermal unit more or less
          When all is said and won. Even when the tribes
          Were isolated behind mountain ranges
          And rushing rivers, they sought each other out
          For trading and for taking. Humanity
          Is lonely. Humor is the only remedy
          And going to your daily discipline
          The only way past Monday. Join the torrential
          Flow of words, emotion, wit and erudition.
          It is embarrassing to see a good writer
          Work himself into a lather, having
          Something to say. A system of beliefs
          To illustrate, characters dressed accordingly.
          Gardens and wilderness in which to wander.
          A cave with a view. The plumbing problem never
          Resolves. But we will do what we can and
          Some things we shouldn't because that is human.

"Along with other evidence, this leads him to argue that the invention of writing–or the division of writing and drawing into separate functions–occurred when the graphic representation of number shifted from the token-iterative system that appears on the Ishango bone, to type-slotting."

          Electricity is occult enough for me.
          Excessive classifying could be fascist!
          Yet how else can one organize people
          Into contexts. By their associations.
          Family, work, habits, each assigned
          A day of the week, moon of the month.
          Poets rhyme, jazz musicians count time.
          There is more than one way to make war. By
          Declaration, by punishing offenses
          Against the law of nations, by granting letters
          Of mark and reprisal, by making rules
          Concerning captures on land and water, by
          Suppressing insurrections and repelling invasions,
          Erecting forts, magazines, arsenals,
          Dock yards and other needful buildings. Today
          I face the blank page between the finished pages.

"Harris gives the following example of what he means:"
'The progression from recording sixty sheep by means of one ‘sheep’ sign followed by sixty strokes to recording the same information by means of one ‘sheep’ sign followed by a second sign indicating ‘sixty’ is a progression which has already crossed the boundary between pictorial and scriptorial signs.'

          When my grandmother considered it favorable
          That I would be a writer, she had in mind
          Clear commentary from which many people
          Would derive meaning. No such luck. My writings
          Are like the flicking tail of that flycatcher,
          And I am the flycatcher, weighing but an ounce.
          My grandfather’s rough-hewn peasant chairs
          Are well known by my sons though they never knew him
          And the chairs were not hewn, just owned by him.
          One is in a corner of the room and two
          Are scrimmaged around a computer screen.
          Computers post-date him and cars post-date
          His father and so on. If the grid collapses,
          The crops fail and the roads close, some will be forced
          Across boundaries among boulders, naming snakes
          And stars according to memory.
          They will be hungry, mortal and strong.

'A token-iterative sign-system is in effect equivalent to a verbal sublanguage which is restricted to messages of the form ‘sheep, sheep, sheep, sheep...’, or ‘sheep, another, another, another...’, whereas an emblem-slotting system is equivalent to a sublanguage which can handle messages of the form ‘sheep, sixty’.Token-iterative lists are, in principle, lists as long as the number of individual items recorded. With a slot list, on the other hand, we get no information simply by counting the number of marks it contains.'
"When this change occurred it opened ‘a gap between the pictorial and scriptorial function of the emblematic sign’, which had been previously inseparable in the counting represented by rows of slashes."

          No book I know tells if blue cohosh
          Caulophyllum thalictroides—a barberry—
          Is edible. Other barberries are
          But that blue berry looks risky to me.
          And May-apple—Podophyllum—other
          Than the fruit itself which is definitely
          Sweet. So I read, not sure of myself.
          There is a patience with which to wait out anger,
          And a patience with which to endure ignorance.
          The job is everything. It is freedom
          And purpose and religion. It is acceptance
          And shelter and sustenance. Last night
          We were watching Tweet’s show: groveling before
          The rich pharisee’s judgements. I said no
          Amount of money could make me grovel
          Before that guy. His toupe’s gayer than his lisp.
          But who am I? You think bullets won’t ****?
          I’m the guy they put before a wall and shoot
          Then eat lunch. But that feeling passed quickly.

"This semiological gap, made writing possible because it meant that signs could be manipulated to ‘slot’, or identify, anything whatsoever. The open-ended quality of the scriptorial sign was a necessary precondition for the development of writing systems."

          Lately I’ve been copying wholesale
          From the great poems, lines and ideas not my own
          Or owned by all? It’s ok, I can be ignored
          Or appreciated in a future city,
          By a future shore. The honest man can
          Only recognize what he loves and point to it.
          That Borges poem called In Praise of Darkness.
          Emerson and snow. A meditation
          That bumps serenely, with acceptance,
          Between things and thoughts. It is said one should
          Know for whom, to whom one is writing.
          These are letters to those who love letter writing.

"As Harris points out, no writing system is accurately phonetic. Even the alphabet only highlights certain phenomena in the speech stream. The reason for this is that alphabetic writing did not begin as a simpler or more accurate way to record speech than other writing systems, but as an easier way to write."

          A possible cancer had taken me
          To the edge of my endurance. Pokeweed,
          Poisonous, became attractive. Red stems
          And juicy black berries. I had packed warm clothes
          And pain killers. Why the warm clothes if this
          Was to be my last walk? To die in comfort
          Without a fly’s buzz. Overlooking a ravine,
          Sea of mountains, dawn. But it proved a false alarm.
          Now Sunday will be a holy day of plant
          Identification. Nothing better
          Than lying in leaf litter, skin drying
          To a taut drum. Ravens stay away!
          Until cougar’s had his fill! Instead
          I showed the boys pokeweed growing among blackberries
          And taught them the differences and uses.

"Through a radical reduction in the number of signs, the alphabet simplified the scriptorial system in and of itself. The evolution of writing therefore may look like this: simple forms of counting preceded the complications of pictorial representation, which in turn led to simplification of the writing system in cultures that adopted the alphabet."

          I was running uphill, parallel to
          The Taconics extending northward into
          Vermont (I find Vermonters in their jalopies
          Annoying but admire them for planning
          To arrest the president for war crimes) when
          I happened upon a flock of cedar waxwings—
          Said to be a gentle and politic bird—
          Sharing—very orderly—dried frozen grapes
          On the vine. (Rose hips, buckthorn, ash, pokeweed.)
          I tried one, too, the two seeds in my mouth
          Keeping me company down the mountain.
          I see no downside whatsoever
          To compensating for global warming,
          Constructing the green energy economy.
          New inventions may facilitate
          Our transportation to other planets.
          Yesterday a young man, Barack Obama,
          Won Iowa. I’m hopeful he will
          Articulate an international vision,
          A world order in which each neighborhood’s
          Good as another. I have no particular
          Love for writers; they’re a dime a dozen.
          But so are chickadees and I love them!

"Discussing the power of inscriptions of number, Harris points out:"
'Counting is in its very essence magical, if any human practice at all is. For numbers are things no one has ever seen or heard or touched. Yet somehow they exist, and their existence can be confirmed in quite everyday terms by all kinds of humdrum procedures which allow mere mortals to agree beyond any shadow of a doubt as to ‘how many’ eggs there are in a basket or ‘how many’ loaves of bread on the table.'

          True, nature would be a stern, unforgiving
          Mistress too, and man is but her right hand
          Acting on her command. How cold! How hot!
          The individual doing what he loves or not.
          Trees and cities. Herons, hawks. What we fail
          To govern in ourselves, nature will.
          We caught the killer and his gorillas,
          Now let’s go home, let the “innocent” choose
          Up sides. A good thing was done but the tyrant
          Should’ve been undone through global governance.
          Writing is divination using rhymes
          And estimations. Words like mammals
          Come near your sleeping head. Last night I emerged
          From the hum of our refrigerator
          Under a hazy, phaseless moon. The peepers
          Were an exact expression of my happiness.

"Or, one might add, for how many stanzas there are in a poem, or lines in a stanza, or stresses, feet, or syllables in a line, or occurrences of particular syntactical or grammatical patterns, and so on. As every serious student of versification has always understood, versification is about counting language."

          5:30-6 write poetry,
          6-7 ****, shave and shower, stretch
          Then get dressed, 7-7:30
          Clean house, 7:30-8 drive to work
          8-6 work (except Monday and Friday
          Work 8-4, basketball 4-6)
          6-7 drive home, shop, help make dinner
          7-8 eat dinner, read paper,
          Watch McNeil-Lehrer News Hour,
          8-9 play trumpet, study plants, type poems
          9-10 watch TV Mon: Murphy, Cybil,
          Tues: Frazier, Grace, Wed: Roseanne, Ellen,
          Thurs: Seinfeld, Friends, Fri: go out to dinner,
          10-11 read, except Tues watch
          NYPD Blue, Fri: Friday Night Lights,
          11 sleep. I could send this to the networks,
          Get a gizmo in my box. I hope my
          Schedule won't be interrupted for war.
          My dentist asked had I seen this morning’s
          Press conference, didn’t it just scare the ****
          Out of you. I said your bill is what scares
          The **** out of me. But here I am, writing
          And the sphere’s still turning. Or should I say
          Burning. As long as you write one poem per day
          You’ve left a little litter in the world.

"The reason to write verse is less to score the voice than to imbue words with the magical quality of counting. That is why meter, or measure, is at the heart of debates over all verse forms, including free verse."

          Vigorous wind, voracious ocean,
          Many merciless hard frosts, hurricanes.
          The bed of a human, its smell and warmth
          36 teeth, 46 chromosomes, 2 feet, a loose dime,
          61 summers, some soot, some sand,
          Thunderstorms. I wake up to a lightning strike
          And my dream incinerates. When they say
          Life is but a dream, that’s what they mean.
          The writer working hard, telling the story
          Of what happened yesterday or yesteryear,
          A man’s born to a country not his choosing,
          Let labor flow like capital, of mere being!
          Pomegranate juice, broccoli, arugula,
          Brussel sprouts, cabbage, cauliflower,
          Collard greens, kale, radishes, turnips,
          Garlic, leeks, scallions, onions, 2 lbs
          Swordfish, tomatoes (8 medium),
          3 cups almonds, carrots, a sweet potato,
          Winter squash, cantaloupe, mangoes, watermelon.
          2 daily writing exercises,
          50 words on any subject: complaint, headache.
          The imagination applies a
          Countervailing pressure to reality.
          Writing badly is the best revenge.

"Number is one of the creative grounds of poetry, and the idea that writing grew out of counting is the missing link in studies of the graphic in versification. It is almost uncanny that lines of verse look exactly like the most primitive ways of counting–parallel scorings that can be numbered."

          What you do to one side of the equation
          You gotta do to the other. Isolate
          The variable. Combine like terms. Metaphors
          And analogs are reduced to least common
          Denominators. Multiply through (parentheses).
          Write a new equation after each operation.
          Inscribe neatly. Check your work. Imagine
          That if you’re wrong, the astronauts burn.
          Change the signs which will avoid going
          The wrong way down the number line. Zero
          Is the middle of your universe.
          There it is, calm, comfortable as an egg
          On a spoon. That is, before possibilities
          Become probabilities. This is just
          Another equation manipulated
          With opposable digits. For at the ends
          Of your guns is the earliest calculator
          A magical machine which converts
          Numbers to words and words to numbers,
          Measures the mists, frequency and wavelength,
          Of the material penumbra.

"Verses are countable in exactly the way that token-iterative digits are countable, from either end of the sequence. Each one indicates only its singularity, not a number. Every poem in lines effaces, or predates, the distinction between writing and drawing in the same way as the lines on the Ishango bone."

Mrs. Gabrielle Giovannitti comes along Peoria Street
     every morning at nine o'clock
With kindling wood piled on top of her head, her eyes
     looking straight ahead to find the way for her old feet.
Her daughter-in-law, Mrs. Pietro Giovannitti, whose
     husband was killed in a tunnel explosion through
     the negligence of a fellow-servant,
Works ten hours a day, sometimes twelve, picking onions
     for Jasper on the Bowmanville road.
She takes a street car at half-past five in the morning,
     Mrs. Pietro Giovannitti does,
And gets back from Jasper's with cash for her day's
     work, between nine and ten o'clock at night.
Last week she got eight cents a box, Mrs. Pietro
     Giovannitti, picking onions for Jasper,
But this week Jasper dropped the pay to six cents a
     box because so many women and girls were answering
     the ads in the Daily News.
Jasper belongs to an Episcopal church in Ravenswood
     and on certain Sundays
He enjoys chanting the Nicene creed with his daughters
     on each side of him joining their voices with his.
If the preacher repeats old sermons of a Sunday, Jasper's
     mind wanders to his 700-acre farm and how he
     can make it produce more efficiently
And sometimes he speculates on whether he could word
     an ad in the Daily News so it would bring more
     women and girls out to his farm and reduce operating
     costs.
Mrs. Pietro Giovannitti is far from desperate about life;
     her joy is in a child she knows will arrive to her in
     three months.
And now while these are the pictures for today there are
     other pictures of the Giovannitti people I could give
     you for to-morrow,
And how some of them go to the county agent on winter
     mornings with their baskets for beans and cornmeal
     and molasses.
I listen to fellows saying here's good stuff for a novel or
     it might be worked up into a good play.
I say there's no dramatist living can put old Mrs.
     Gabrielle Giovannitti into a play with that kindling
     wood piled on top of her head coming along Peoria
     Street nine o'clock in the morning.

From the depression of the distances with respect to the horizontal and the planes that separated them from the surface, below the references that came against, single sediment had been destined towards the high eminence, before the fossal of megatons of aldehyde below the bilges of the final base, where the seventh rings of the goat ibex were perforated, all in the antipode of the Constellation of Capricornus; where the goats were enraptured in the binary of Wonthelimar, behind the floods of absorption that took the Diadocos far from where they should never have left, in order to extrasolar wishes and never to come. From the node of the supreme and poked aldehyde of the horn of Amalthea, with the bizarre analogy of Zeus and Wonthelimar, both mammals with milk from goat's udders, one from goat from Mount Ida and the other from Aldaine in the Alps, with milk from ibex and In the face of Amalthea that appeared in the fossal, all the Seleucid generals had already vanished, starting from the Viper Typhon, who in the retracting sub-mythology of Capricornus was transmigrated to Wonthelimar, swollen with the aldehyde transmuted into this alcohol and into the udder milk of the Ibix that He lactored, while they were all carried away as in the chambers of Auschwitz, in distant lanterns and lamps of the Calypso that he dismissed them, leaving them with the escorts of the ibex or goatfish in laudable stratagems, which vanished them away from their desires from a new polis or Nostos Patrída, sprinkling them with goatskin and flourishing essences of the kashmar of Zeus' nurse; Amaltheum or Amalthea.

The Iberian rings from the medrones in advance reached the two final ring nodes, here Wonthelimar intimidated them with an accurate adjacent bleat of the kashmar that rubbed their back, before the newest and last lux of Amalthea that vanished into herbaceous fruits that always He carried the barefoot medron with him, to start with the antlers dumbbells and re-transport them defeated to the species of snake that frightened the pastoral god Pan who shepherded, and then he submerged in the water after becoming Capricornus Ibex Fish. Being aware of this and of those who refused to continue listening, Ibics rings were unleashed until the seventh medron, feeding back with Wonthelimar who ad libitum created Venus in triads of Zeus. Wonthelimar and Amalthea were remote in the eighth and ninth medron of the antlers, they appropriated to each the portion of the Parasha or Parashot of the Torah, and of the thirteenth Shemot so that their dualities and fumes from the unbreathable fossa would remain under the possessed surface of the pendular property balance and positive-negative gender correspondence. Right here Amalthea transmuted her mercy to save the world with her lactation of syrup and honey that was not in short supply, and that was extrapolated into a future abundance of food and nectar, making up for crusts that were uneven in average terms. From this bezel, both beings of the goat genome contributed to the pole of goodness for each one at the end of the benevolent cuirassiers of prospering, and not from the opposite that would lead them, even though they were dissimilar causes, towards a retrograde event that was not a consequence of the becoming of the plagues, and of the malignancy that does not flourish with the Shemot of the Parasha, to agree and lavish themselves on blessed virtues or deliberate wicked ones.

The meaning of a relative synchronic and factotum coexisting does not redeem the disintegration of an existential relativism in Skalá, the Hexagonal Primogeniture from one of its angular visions, metaphysically transfers from its temporary contingencies after its arrival on Patmos, while the temporary Seleucid temporality vanishes, It was affirmed from a contradiction since its truth was distended in the arena of Skalá not implying being welcomed, rather it was victimized by the absurd political dimorphism in a meta spiritual state, abdicating its dispersed retrospective, and now contemplating a compromise of the Hellenic genre, to gradually rebuke the virtues of their banners, twice as good for the purpose of reinforcing the will to accede, and not perish in the attempt to lead Alexander the Great. The criticism of founding the memories are of a revived past where it was not, marking the anthropological fact and false truth judgment, in meaning and contradiction in the polarity of both axiomatic genres, but that is saved when quantifying in who has to defend himself, if seeks to abrogate itself, in the entity that is characterized by induction and attraction of egonies and not of exo-egonies, thus describing it in the theme of "Do not support egos that recriminate other characters of frustration and empowerment of a Vernarthian logic split into Vern-narth. Vern has etymology of Bern or Bern olive tree of Gethsemane and narth of the ordinal scale that speculates its nickname in millions of northern sections of its origin, which subsumes the truth and the criterion of apocalyptic parapsychology, re-life of quantum historicity of the metaphysical and sub-block. -Mythological of Vernarth in his identical.

Everything seemed a strange self-annulment from a clear and understandable limit, but Wonthelimar rose to the surface of the Állos kósmos, finding himself in atmospheres of truth and reality of a Cantabile, who decided about the horse Kanti coming with him towing him from the Erebo de Chauvet Bilocated. As a musical and festive ending, he received them on the upper plate of the happened gestures, where a cabaletta rendered parts of a Cantabrian aria, in sulfurous and remorseful cavatina married with the cross emotions of a finale who sponsored expressions and festive Templar tales, with the descendants of Zeus or minor children, or grandchildren after this had to give him milk and honey but with báchkoi. Among the couplets that received him, some came about the smoke of terror that was confused with the dustbin of a Cavallo or horse acclaimed Kanti, with gasping bustling from a cardex, containing all the repertoires of a cantabile if this scene were to be repeated in The same epic allusion, and in random consequences, that go after a cavalcade that is not abstracted in real characters, but more in conformity with the well-deserved place of epic imaginative beings or in the operatic psychotropic of a duet, which would go flagellating in individuality and in each which is not content from another section of the Cantabrian.

The Universality of emotion and feeling is a tragic Parodo emulating voices of all those who sing from a cantabile galloping in their voices to the beat of the heart in some, and at the same time chanting stanzas and antistrophe in reverse epic and tragic lines, for the purposes of the coliseum that diametrically obstructs the Hellenic choir, which is attached to the intervention of the Hexagonal Primogeniture that was already beginning to rise in height, and in the prayers of Saint John, the Apostle and Prochorus from the captaincy and the ode that would begin to stanza, from the west to this and the antistrophe would follow with Vernarth, Wonthelimar and Alexander the Great from east to west. Ad libitum of their enjoyments, they were eating Greek snacks or Katogorias on the way in bases of Almonds, cinnamon, olive oil, sugar, and sweet wine that they carried on their backs in Rhytas shaped like the horns of Zeus and the Ibix of Wonthelimar, which the same Procorus carried on his golden back. The meaning is affirmed as a meaningless infringement of laws of temporality, and truthfulness at the expense of short evidence, and of facts that vanish in the light haze of causalism and not of effectism, when the adjective or noun is made of a strong verb in the Metabasis and in the imprecations that Vernarth gave.

Vernarth's metabasis: “the verse and the adjective will be subsidized by the noun in the construction of Állos Kosmo Megarón, from where mathematics will immaterially explain sap suckers under the noun in liquid milk of the color white and of the high nutritional value in female lactated, and of mammals to feed their goats or ibex. The soul of this prerogative implies that the verb will be to promote species rather than a nutritious milky elixir for Zeus, and the candor of his **** will tend to the bipedal or quadruped subject self-procreating from a Milky Specie. (Milky species).  Being ****** into milk by self-procreating snitches. Vernarth says (give me some milk, and I will be the son of Zeus, perhaps as a means in everything and not a whole of which I never thought...!)

Amalthea in rituals and relics from prospects of demigods was purposely cordoning them off in Mycenaean deities, from a contemporary Westerner comforting them near a hippocampus; with signs of ibex Capricornus, rapt at the nymph that spoke from Mount Ida in Crete and that she made congruent with the constellation of Capricornus, more precisely in the Cornucopia making this heraldry of Wonthelimar with Fortune, Abundance, Occasion, Liberality, Prudence and Joy. In a woman sitting on a throne, a young nymph with a flower crown, a naked woman with one foot on a wheel and the other unstable, a woman with sunken eyes and an aquiline nose dressed in white, two faces from the past and future, a woman happy with the exuberance of the Cornucopia with children and a palm leaf. Being the abundance that in serial Amalthea bordered all the ladies in different esoteric and Mycenaean prosperity, constantly shining with radiations on the present in the Unicorn Ibix, which Zeus left after breaking its antlers, unleashing kindness and plethora in fruit buds, and vegetables that were appropriated in the Fortune of Wonthelimar reissuing what in their domains they can do, and now in Patmos with its Cornupia being transferred from that liquefied shaft honey and milk cultivated with attributes of herbs contributing to the leisure, peace, and relaxation of the cosmic world that ascended in Wonthelimar as Ibix in advance of Capricornus, from where the Auriga always broke into his expeditions with a trajectory towards the eighth cemetery of Messolonghi, where he brought it from the Capella Star for the femurs of the Diplodocuses who seconded Drestnia to watch over the hydraulic pits of the Koumeterium from Messolonghi, before traveling to Tangier.

The entire herd went back to an ancient promontory that was halfway up the mound towards the black styes or abscesses, in the central intuition of the fossa that began to dissipate towards their backs. Amalthea extends into the Állos Kósmos, which came in zoomorphic receptacles collecting the announced blood of the animals that flowed in black planks from the vortex of the fossal, towards the liminal or transitory sleeper of the fossal that oozed acetosities of the Aldehyde to be transmigrated after the bilocation of the Chauvet cavern. All wore willow halos on the crowns or diadems of their caps, including the proliferation of phantasmagoric Allies that went in rows from 780 to 680 BC. C., with fortunes of the Cornucopia that arched in magical arches due to the dissociative changes of the universe, as well as the circumstantial creed of some omnipotence that will cause emotional transgenerational transgression, in the rain vessels that they made fall from the Ombrio de Zeus, in a daily latticework closing the spaces, and only leaving for some intruders and onlookers to see his flashing Astrepé. Right here the diádoc fossal vanished, when it rose above the horizontal that poured into the Chronic Vernagrams of parapsychological personalities of ingenuity classicism and in Astro-concomitance, which would rethink everything that is past and future from a Vernagram, which is more than a compression of a mere future of the quantum spaces and the sacred medrones of the Ibixes with their direct relationship with Capricornus. Diverse capital moments were treasured in the breeze of the Vas Auric that was traced from the opposing moraine that fell in lapse-time, through the labyrinth in storms and thunderings that became planetary with the Lynothorax cuirass that Alexander the Great accommodated in the festoon border of his Aspis Koilé, kicking copiously as a sign of shaking the head of the gods who deceived him to be alive, and who was now reborn in the faith of Saint John the Apostle, favorite of the Mashiach and where he will have to wipe his face with the shroud of Veronica Before entering the Állos Kósmos Megaron that everyone built, in favor of a Panagia or Temple, unlocking the majolica that seeped out from the rest of the transmigration, and his own in the configuration of a corpse with a tricolor gesture.

The presumptive eradicated the side of the forearm rots that was being restored in Wonthelimar's laps, which helped him get up and catch his breath while the Katogorias snack filled his mouth with nectar and almonds with Macedonian Psiloi combat tactics with serum and flames of Alcohol dripped from her nostrils and sinuses in the sweet wine, which in pompous dilemma defied the judges of her life in the choir of the Bilocated Epidary Theater on Patmos, and in the ***** dry Kashmar of the orchard with the pale faces of the grotesque, that rested in the memory or Mnmosyne and in the fauna of the Thracian and Thessalian helmets.

Alexander the Great says: “here I agonized and now in the fresh waters of the springs of the Lerna, I will also marry the glorious mystay and bákchoi, in the memories of Vernarth seeing him besieged by Achaemenides in the stooped position of Dario III, to come purifying and sustaining of my limbs, learning to walk and speak in Neolithic techniques, which extruded me from the Lerna by barriers of the moon that shone from the bronze of my Leonatus helmet. Thus I could see that Vernarth, fought alone against thousands throwing fire through his mouth and his eyes, separating the waters of the Falangists, who plowed like ships deforesting the Persians, and leaving them in their mud, imposing glorious Hypaspists who unbolted from their back some arrows with heads of snakes and Hydras.

Vernarth watched as everyone climbed the Profitis Ilias mound, two hundred and sixty-nine meters above sea level, where the monastery of San Juan is located; here he was suspended in his solitude after everything that happened at the end of the moat that definitely I would return without the Diádocos, with a hint and its functionalities. From here Helios became genealogical, who snatched him from the kingdom of dead flowers, which were to be assumed from the Olympian where he will join him to the essential of Aïdoneus; immaterializing in the darkness of dizzies and the flowers that died in the genealogy of a new species. The scenic swept its cognitive and ferns with more than three hundred frank species that frowned like the enemy of an evil friend, with seedlings that expectorated from the resonance of the bushes that invited to thrive in the salty ripples that made a dreamer fall asleep on top of the kerchiefs or brambles that memorialized Gethsemane, burning his face and hands with psalms, telling him about his Baba. For when it is a luminary by night and by day, they will compare it with the white grayish drupes and mops, like those of the Bern orchard of Olives, in aqueous and resinous colloidal, which was crowned in harmony and syntropia in Vernarth activating intellectual conscious plantations, which will restructure its balance of ultra Hoplite, in metabolism of the Lentiscus flowers, with great brotherhood in the Olives that each time exercised the gift of bending their oleaginous self-species, towards planes of the Cornicabra olives, with large branches and high tree altitude that fruit within of the Cornucopia that he now carried on his back, supported by an oiko spin, juxtaposed with the fibula on the right shoulder of his lymphoma, which with large branches and high tree altitude fruit within the Cornucopia that he now carried on his back, supported by an oiko line juxtaposed with the fibula on the right shoulder of his lymphoma, and with polyphenols in scale geothermal energy that still leveled the Ponto Sea towards the tectonic plate to give it the flavor that was owed from remote prehistoric times.

Patmos was aborted from an immanent consent and new force of the impending enemy in Pythagorean perorations and an offending thought. From this prerogative is born the generalized punishment of sub-mythological ethics in favor of legacies of allusions to reorder or defragment the enslaving and demolished bio culture, which would begin from the establishment of the Vas Auric found in Limassol, which took possession from Rhodes with clean scenes from Tsambika monastery. The epic ran like icy cold down the shoulders of all those who sweated for the generation of cops, and in domestic evasions in superior lordships to Hades or Wonthelimar itself, both sons of flocks and goats that nourished them by providing them with a mountain perspective, as a magnetic pole towards gothic energy that ruled more in the Magnetic North Pole, and the geographic oversize that reviled latitudes in riches that would dismiss Borker and Zefian, as masters distributors of the ethics of the Áullos Kósmos of Patmos, redeploying thousands of dead from pre-Hellenic times, so that they recirculate through the roots of the Kashmar, re-sulfurizing cinnabar saps as the germ of the subterranean Acheron, which consecrates the living and the dead in the eternity of the infinite Duoverse Universe. The order will lie in semi-shadows that even in the dark provide the pleasant warmth of camphor, with advanced Horcondising formulas, which will appeal to hungry souls by suppressing gifted energies, and by inseminating them with ovules without originally conceived organisms.

From Hylates, Cyprus; Zefian came by order of Vernarth, assisted with the extension of the earthly laborers of the Attic Calendar on the twenty-first of September, from the device of Apollo at the site of Boeotia, and especially of the Boedromion. The arrows that Zefian brought had an instant Boedromion crossing the lines from spring to winter, with seven arrows that Zefian threw into the sky and never fell, but if portentously received in the virginity of animals. The flora with seven golden arrows of the Chauvet de Wonthelmar cavern, condoned the exhaustive end of the fossal where they still remained, in a gesture of tenderness and relative Mycenaean genealogy, from Crete the contravention of Apollo and Artemis towards an olive tree was approaching, originating in the Zefian's arrows, to mark the new cardinal points, begin with the first two arrows that they put on the string of the bow, each one flying north and south trajectories and the other two that were once again attacked with the east bow, to shoot the arrows of east-west with southern magnetism limits. Zefian's imagination was of proportions that were not limited without wandering from their phalanxes when they pulled the string, like joys of a ghostly existence that pushed him in each bolt, presuming that where they fell would be the beginning of the storms that would originate the Állos Kósmos Megarón, for belated courts imposed from a cosmos, which he led by insisting on his will and from a doubtful Vestal god advocating the association of the hospitable Canephores, such as Vestal Virgins of Roman bilocation, and quantum parapsychological of the feared inter-tale alive that rebels in the arrows that they had not yet fallen and did not know their whereabouts. As plates or serial hosts, they were evoked from where the origin of the Universe was broken, to open towards the organic, vigorous, and anti-burn contravened Duoverse to the divine celestial origin as a parameter of *****-ovule, rather in aeonic instances in the fireplace of Hestia, running in eternities towards vast volumes of light-years, where eternity has no measure, let alone the existence that begins and ends born from a homozygous arising without a Universe, to hatch from the branch of the Heterozygous Duoverse, bringing different unions of eternal cells by universal divine decree, and not the union of disparate cells. The science of the Mashiach came in these divine arrows that marked the points of the cardinal in the numinous and exclamatory expansions of the exiled universe of Vernarth, towards the perenniality in itself, but being heterozygous for a world that would begin to live in non-organic cells, but yes of divine composition, over saturating the limits of the origin, and destiny of syntropy of the conscious actions of the metabolism of the Alma Mater and of the great doors when losing the bodyweight of the physical-ether, but yes from the platform of the Mashiach that will take them hands without leaving them abandoned, showing them that they were no longer children born of ovule-*****, but rather in the luminous matter, envisioning expansions of prayers beyond from the universe, where it will accompany them in a multidimensional plane..., and will have no end from a human scientific conception.

Wonthelimar says: “Since the omphalos was swallowed by Cronos, Hera's elegy was unleashed, for not raising her son Zeus in free clumps of goats and Ida's honey. I in the Alps went to the herd of the Ibix like a Zeus saved from the darkness of Chauvet in the mountains of Gaul. There are chisels that cut stones in beautiful whirlwinds, but I know that a lot of cosmology would not speak of the Mediterranean Cornicabra and its olive drupe, nor less of the Cornucopia that sinks with sumptuous and ephebian flavors in the fruit, and the greenish heraldry of the binominal that is disturbed in its phalanges eating and sipping honey, in antler pots with pride of the Ida and the Vercors massif”

When floating on down avenues of deep subconscious
remember to stare upwards for at least 10 minutes a day
and contemplate the life of a cloud;

To that transitory vapour,
project with your iris the world you wish to manifest
in passing minutes
towards that passing station-

internal vision dominates
the human mind speculates
and accommodates,
what it wants to see -

with each passing minute
with each wasted day

Life flashes before eyes
concrete and grass
lying down and getting lost
in a deep death that breeds
everything and nothing,
Dissipating contradictions in the sky.

It's a travesty to tolerate
The ugly mores of men,
When everyone's allowance
Condones release for them.
Where everywhere provision
Is made for man to shove,
And woe betide the meek
Who don the feathers of a dove


The world applauds the forceful,
Rewards are rich for he
Who tramples over daisies
And holds aloft the key.
Who forces his attentions
And speculates the win,
Despite the devastation wrought
In winning it for him.


It's a travesty to tolerate
This bovine charge of man
When all can be achieved
With an accommodating plan,
When compromise and levity
See consideration's way
Where success can be attained
With out bloodletting on the day.


I hear the snort of your derision,
Feel the snigger in your smile,
See the curl of lip descending
With your slit eyes of defile.
For this portraiture is global
The fighting man is King
And he who deviates
Is left bereft and vanquishing.


Sadness is the matador
Who casts his scarlet cloth,
To be shredded and impaled
By a maddened bullock's wrath.
To be tossed aside, asunder
Like a lifeless ragged doll,
Like mankind's brute tomorrow
When the final drums do roll.


Marshalg
@theBach
Mangere Bridge
29 November 2009

It’s nice to have some holiday downtime and not be all go-go-go. I’ve even gotten in some Animal Crossing play. After 40 minutes of picking up weeds, Bianca, one of my villagers, told me she’d heard I was dead.

Later, we’re in Lisa’s living room taking turns playing songs from Spotify.
Lisa just played “Woo”, by Rihanna. When the song ends, fading out, Leeza deadpan said, “That song is pure evil.”
“You guys, I forgot to mention it but that is my energy song, it makes me feel so HOT.” Lisa adds with a chuckle.
“It has an evil vibe,” I admit. “An evil vibe,” Leeza confirms.
“Don’t be judging,” Lisa reminds us.
“Your next,” Lisa said, nodding to Leeza, “What’ve you got for us,” she speculates, “some mental health rock?”

Leeza’s had this girl-punk-rock group called “Vancougar” playing on a loop in her room. At first, I wasn’t enthusiastic but now I think they slay. Her mom’s even gotten on board, dancing “the twist” to “Philadelphia” when it rolls around. Leeza has great taste in music although she leans a bit EMO (emotionally *******) for me. She makes me feel old by introducing us to all these new bands like “Youngest and only,” “Calling all Captains” and “Beatrice Dear.”

“I’ve got one song to play,” Leeza says, “Paparazzi, by Lady Gaga.”
“I’ve been listening to that song all WEEK!” I gasp, “I love that song, it may be her best - that’s so random,” I finish saying as the song starts.
As Paparazzi ends Lisa says, “That song has major Gwen Stefani vibes.”
“It DOES,” I agree, “It could be “Cool” or “Sweet Escape.”
“Yeah, for sure,” Leeza agreed, “shoutout to No Doubt.”

Leeza says, “I have a conversation topic: What’s something we all acknowledge is cheugy but we still do anyway?”  
“Being blonde,” I say, which gets stitches of laughter because it’s true and Lisa and I are.
“That’s true, that’s fair,” redheaded Leeza laughs. “Anyone blonde is dead to me,” which gets her a pillow in the face.
“Ok, I’m going to come for a lot of people,” Lisa says, “but yogurt, yogurt is cheugy.”
Leeza gasps, “You think yogurt.. It’s not cheugy!” she practically yells, “It gives MOM.”

The blue eagle and the demon of the steppes
in the last cab in Berlin
Legitimate defence
of lost souls
the red mill at the beggars' school
awaits the poor student
With the housemaid Know huntsmen how to hunt on pay-day
Know huntsmen how to hunt
as papa speculates
with the smile
By the dagger the dagger the dagger
the tiger of the seas dreams of happiness
Avenged
The vestal ****** of the Ganges cries out Vanity
when the flesh succumbs
Stop look and listen
the famous turkey spends a day of pleasure
turning round in an enchanted circle
with the pluck of a lion
M'sieur the major
My Paris
my uncle from America
my heart and my legs
slaves of beauty
admire the conquests of Nora
while someone asks for a typewriter
for the black pirate
It is not possible
that a woman dressed as the Merry Widow
could become the wind's prey
because the millionairess Madame Sans-Gene
leads a wild existence
in another's skin
Her son was right
Patrol-leader 129 who wears an Italian straw-hat
and is the ace of jockeys
is abandoning a little adventuress
for a woman
It is the April-Moon which chases the buffalo
to Notre-Dame of Paris
Oh what a bore the indomitable man
with clear eyes
wishes to judge him by the law of the desert
but the lovers with children's souls have gone away
Ah what a lovely voyage
- See more at: http://allpoetry.com/The-Staircase-With-A-Hundred-Steps#sthash.Ty7mN87W.dpuf

A text for five voices.

Note on text: For formatting reasons, this should be read on a full screen, or in landscape mode on a mobile.

i. Blank copy

I look out of the window at
the houses as they pass and they
don’t so much slide past
                                    or glide past
                                                the motion isn’t smooth.
They sort of click past.
They tick past, dit-dit-dit:
House after house after house after house
                                                dit-dit-dit­-dit-dit
My eyes don’t quite refresh the image fast enough
to keep up with all the houses
                                  as they pass.
It’s 10 o’clock when I arrive at my office
and no-one is there yet
and I turn on my computer.
I sort of just
                sit there
                for quite a long time. Then
at 10.37 I print a document I’ve been working on
and I pick up my mug and I go to the kitchen where the printer is
and I put the kettle on.
I log on to the printer but instead of pressing
                                                Print
  ­                                              I press
                                                        Cop­y
                                                        instead­.
The machine whirs
The light goes
                        across
And out comes this copy this
        Copy of
                nothing.
I pick it up from the cradle.
It’s warm.
And I hold it and I look at it and I think:
                                                This is a copy
                                                                ­of nothing.
And since it is no longer an empty piece of paper but now
                                                             ­   something more
                                                            ­    something
                                                   ­                                imbued
I don’t put it back in the paper tray
and I don’t put it in the bin.
I carry it carefully with my tea back
to my office and put it
                                Carefully
                    ­                            on my desk.
I close the door.
Usually when I arrive and no-one is there I keep the door open for a bit.
It’s my way of letting people know I’m here.
It also helps me get a sense of what’s going on in the building
which students are there and what they’re doing
and once I’ve got a decent enough idea
or if there’s someone around I don’t really feel like helping
                                                         ­                           I close the door.
Today it is quiet.
It is a Friday.
                     Fridays are quiet.
It is the seventh of March.
It is 2014.
              I’m looking out of the window as I recall
              without much interest
              that yesterday was my father’s sixty-first birthday.
The buses tick past the window.
Without really thinking I
roll down the blind
                            Until the window is as blank as my copy of
                                                              ­                                           nothing.
I look at it but I
don’t
              sit
                     down
                                   yet.
My computer makes a noise and a purple box
tells me I have a meeting in thirty minutes.
                                                        ­Oh shut up I tell it
                                                        out loud.
Now I realise that I never did print my document
so I go back to the printer and the file is still there waiting for me
and I press Print All
                     and out it comes
and the piece of paper looks
Obnoxious
                     scrawled over in heavy black print
                     and ****** coloured columns
                                                                ­      and smelling
                                                        ­              Smelling of toner.
For someone who claims to be conscious of the environment I
print excessively. But only at work.
It’s the combination of it being free
                                          (or at least, no cost to me)
and that feeling you get when you
swipe
your access card to log in to the printer
and tap the screen dit-dit-dit to choose this or that.
It feels
       to me
              like being a grown-up.
It’s intoxicating.
I don’t want to go to the meeting
and I’m suddenly annoyed by this ***** piece of paper
which
       I ***** up
                     and throw in the bin.
**** it.
Not even in the recycling.
**** it.
Who cares.
              What difference could it possibly make
              whether I throw this piece of paper
                                                 which I will now have to print again
              in the black part of the bin for waste
              or the green part of the bin for recycling.
I go back to my computer and press Print but
this time
I keep clicking my mouse
                                   ditditditditditditditditditditditditdit
                         ­          Yeah.
                                   ditditditditditditditditditditditditdit
                         ­          ditditditditditditditditditditditditdit
And I go back to the printer and the name of the document comes up on the built-in screen
dozens and dozens of times
the same name of the same document
and I tap
              Print All.
And as the machine spits out clone after clone I
mutter under my breath:
                                   **** it.
                                   Yeah.
Then out loud:
                                   **** it.
                                   Yeah.
And as I throw them in the bin and go back for more I think
I’m going to buy a car. Yeah.
And I’m going to drive my car to work and
when I finish work I’m going to drive it
to a big supermarket
                            a hypermarket
                            a super hyper mega market
where I will buy and buy and buy,
and on my way home I will buy petrol to put in my car
       And I will go on holiday
       I will book all those last minute deals on the internet
       And go to Turkey or Lanzarote or Corfu for a hundred
                                                         ­      or a couple of hundred
                                                         ­      pounds, every month maybe
And I’ll fly there on a big plane.
I’ll soar over the ocean on a big plane.
And when I come back
I’ll soar over all those people outside Stansted Airport
All those
people
With banners
Moaning and complaining and protesting
Banners saying things like
                                   I don’t know
                                                 “Down with planes”
And as the flight attendant smiles goodbye I’ll think
yeah.
       Down with planes.
                                   And I’ll drive my car home and I will
                                   stop
                                   worrying
                                   about
                                   everything.
I go back to my office.
I retrieve one copy of my document from the bin and I
put it on top of my copy of nothing.
Whereas before the document offended me
                            now I have difficulty
                            telling the difference between the two.
My colleague arrives and she tells me about the motorway.
She’s always telling me about the motorway.
I think about my car I’m going to buy and I
think about being on the motorway.
I think about being on that part of the M25
where the planes are so low you duck as they thunder over you
and they come
                     in rapid succession
                                          dit dit dit
                                                        rapid­ eye movement
                                                        ­radar.
I think about being stuck in traffic there and the air
thick with exhaust fumes
mixing with the air around Heathrow
and all those tons of jet fuel from the planes zooming over
Blink and you miss them
                                   but always another follows.
I go to my meeting.
I realise that I have picked up my blank copy
along with the document I printed for the meeting.
Someone says they wish I’d printed more than one copy
as it turns out it would be useful for everyone to have one
and I laugh in their face without explaining myself.
                                                         ­             I make notes on it.
                                                             ­         My copy of nothing.
                                                        ­              Without really realising
                                                       ­               I’ve scribbled notes on it
but as I look at my spidery black biro handwriting
and think with some real despair about how I have mindlessly
destroyed
something pure
the notes
              disappear
                                int­o the paper
and it is clean again.



ii. Ringing sea

My eyes don’t quite refresh the image fast enough.
What I’m looking at
my rational brain tells me
is a video of two people having ***.
I have seen that before.
But what I’m actually watching is a video of
my husband
                     having ***
                                          with another woman.
And my eyes don’t refresh the image fast enough
So I keep seeing his face.
The whole picture melts away and
I just see his face
                     Which belongs to me.
                                          It’s my face. I – own it.
                                                        It’s my- my- my-
                                                        And it freezes there
just his face is all I can see then the video continues for a
split second then freezes again
                                   His face
                                   His face
                                   His face       It’s him
                                                        It’s him
                                                        It’s him.
I stop the video and I put the phone down on the table
and I breathe very deeply and
every time I blink, between every saccade
there is his face
                            a face I know intimately
                                                      ­         and it’s looking away from me.
I turn on the television. It is Saturday.
He is flying back from Asia on Tuesday. I have until then to
                                                              ­        what?
The sound and light from the television
flicker over me
And I sort of just empty,
Quietly, like a balloon disappearing into the sky.
I don’t know what I’m going to do but
for now that’s
fine.
The brown armchair swallows me up
and I cry for two hours without really noticing.
The cookery programme I’m not watching finishes and I think
the news is about to come on so I turn off the TV
and I put on my shoes
and I go down the stairs and out of the house
and I get in my car.
It’s raining and I just sit there.
Without starting the engine I flick on the windscreen wipers:
                                                         ­      Dit / dit.
                                                            ­   Dit \ dit.
                                                            ­   Dit / dit.
It takes less than three seconds for them to pass
from one side of the windscreen to the other.
And I get this feeling this
unexplainable feeling
that I want to crawl inside that moment
when the wipers are moving from one side of the screen
                                                          ­                   to the other.
I flip down the sun shield and look at myself in the mirror.
There are two lipsticks in the glove compartment.
I pick the darker one
                            and apply it
                                                 carefully
                                                       ­          sensually.
I start the car.
West London ebbs away to the motorway
My car is silver and in the rain it feels invisible
I don’t know where I’m going
                                I follow words on signposts I recognise the shape of
                                without really reading them
and I keep driving
I let my eyes come away from the road and
watch the fields and trees tick past like cells of film
and I look at the cars on the other carriageway
and I notice they’re all silver like mine
                                                        (onl­y mine is invisible)
and I duck as a Boeing 777 soars over near the M4 interchange
and let myself scream soundlessly under the roar of its engines.
I wonder where it came from.
                                          I think about the people on board.
I think about their mobile phones and
all the ******* there must be on them
and I realise
how many videos there must be in the world
of people having ***.
I take the M23 past Gatwick Airport
                                          the motorway ends but I keep driving
until finally I come to the sea.
No-one is here because it’s March and it’s raining.
I have always loved the sea.
Not sailing or swimming or surfing
Just being near it, for me it’s
                                   a spiritual experience.
I’ll lie on the stones and gaze at the sky for hours
but not today.
                     There are some flowers tied to a railing
                     somebody has drowned.
Presumably they never found a body to bury.
The awfulness of that strikes me like a stone.
                                                        It­’s the not knowing.
                                                        ­The lack of 100% concrete total proof.
I take my phone out of my handbag.
                                                        ­But I know now.
The shingle crunches underneath my flat shoes.
                                                        No­w I know.
The cold burns my ears and the wind picks up as I get closer to the water
the tide slips serpentine up the stones
white-edged
                     beckoning me.
Without realising I’ve slipped
                                                 out of
                                                            my­ shoes
but the stones do not hurt my coarse feet
and the wind
                     howling now
                                          catches me behind my knees
quickening my stride.
The spit curls around my toes.
And then I catch myself wondering
                                          whether my husband will call me or
                                          text me when he lands
and I hurl
       my phone
              into the sea.
On the drive home I listen to the radio.
The news is dominated by the Crimean conflict
and the referendum that’s coming up there.
Florence Nightingale
                            is all I can think about when they talk about Crimea.
Until recently I never even knew where it was.
At school you only learn about Florence Nightingale
                                   not the geography
                                          not the conflicts
                                                 not Ukraine’s edges so charred by
                                                               invasion and,
                                                                ­             subsequently,
                                                                ­                                  explosion.
                    ­               We live in so many war zones.
and I’m wondering what else I never learned about when
the story changes and now they are talking about a plane.
A plane is missing
                                   between Kuala Lumpur and Beijing
                                          and the blood drains out of me.
It isn’t like floating away like a balloon this time
it’s like plunging off a cliff.
And at once I see
                            with brilliant, burning clarity
                                                        m­y phone, ringing, on the sea bed
The light from the screen illuminates the stormy water but
I can’t see the name:
                                   I can’t see who’s calling.
I need to know.
I need to know it’s him.
       I drive back at twice the speed limit.
In the dark the flowers look menacing and half-dead; my
shoes fall off in the same place
But the tide is in so the whole beach looks different.
I’m up to my waist but my
top half
       is as wet
              as my bottom half
                            because the rain
                                          is torrential
                                                      ­  and I can still hear the phone ringing
                                                        b­ut I can’t see the light in the sea.
and I howl
       his name
but the wind carries it away soundlessly
       and I can’t tell if I’m
              further out
              or if the tide’s further in
                            and the ringing grows louder
                            as the current takes me powerfully by the waist and
                                                             ­         the stars rush by overhead.



iii. Acid rain

Every time I blink, between every saccade I see
a brilliant but infinitesimally brief flash of colour.
       Purple
       or green
       I think.
                     One on top of the other.
It’s hard to tell for sure because they’re so brief.
It’s like when you look at a light bulb for too long
                                                            ­   or stare directly at the sun.
I see it sometimes when I’m on my bike
or on a really big rollercoaster
                                   going downhill at 100 miles an hour
                                   the wind blasting through me
                                   the screams whirling through the air.
But I’m not on a rollercoaster, I’m sat very still
it’s Monday afternoon and I’m at school.
I haven’t said a single word to a single person today.
I didn’t even answer my name in the register.
I feel a bit dizzy like
                                   everything is turning together
                                   but I’m on a different
                                                       ­                 axis?
I think the bell goes, I’m
not a hundred percent sure,
but I leave anyway and no-one stops me.
       Outside in the sunshine the flashes of colour are
       several thousand times brighter.
In the next lesson I slip in my earbuds and
it looks like the teacher is singing the words.
                                                 I put on the most obscene song I can find.
I must have it on too loud
because eventually she notices and
she forces me to give her the headphones. This is the first time
someone has spoken to me today
                                          it feels a bit surreal
                                                         ­      but the world stops spinning
                                                        ­       a bit.
After school I go into the supermarket on Wigmore Lane
the enormous white of it is tinged in green and purple
and all I want is to buy a drink
                            I have a feeling of exactly the kind of drink I want
                            but I can’t find the right one
                            even though the fridge must be longer than
                            the driveway of my house.
Racks of newspapers and magazines clamour for my attention
       the only real colour in this great white warehouse of a store
       red tops and blue spreads
       and green and purple and green and purple
              and green and purple…
They’re talking about that missing plane in the news
and they keep using the same phrase.
They’re talking about the people on board the missing plane
and they keep saying
                            Missing
                      ­      presumed dead.
Not dead dead. Presumed dead.
I start wondering what it’s like to be both dead and alive at the same time,
as if all the people on board that plane are like Schrödinger’s cat
              (cats)
and we won’t know whether they’re dead or alive until we find the plane
and pull it out of the sea
and look inside
                     so
                         until then
                     they’re both.
Out in the car park I count the planes as they descend onto
the runway less than a mile away.
       One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight,
       I figure about a hundred and eighty a plane maybe,
       which means fifteen hundred people just arrived in Luton.
Nobody comes to Luton for the scenery.
Soon they’ll be gone,
A town haunted by a ghost population of thousands an hour.
                                                 filtered onto the trains and buses
                                                 and out from the sprawling car parks
                                                 to the motorway, and
                                                 onto connecting flights back into Europe
              but none of them will stay in Luton
                                                           ­                  Missing
                                                         ­                    presumed dead.
As I bike through Luton I think it might not be so strange to be dead and alive at the same time.
I’ve lived here my whole life and the whole place
                                                           ­                         which is a *******
                                                 moves with the mundanity of machinery
                                                 like the big car factories by the airport
                                                 the lights on, the production lines rolling
                                                 but all a bit automatic and lifeless.
But in the airport, it’s different.
The air, with its artificial chill, hangs with a faint shimmer
and the people here move purposefully, and with charge
                                                          ­     excitedly
                                                       ­                      or dejectedly
                                                      ­         but not neutrally
heading for the gates where they are sealed two hundred a time into airtight tubes
like Schrödinger’s cat:
                            dead and alive in the air;
                            one or the other on the ground.
                                                         ­      My teachers say I have an
                                                              ­ “odd way of looking at things”.
I leave my bike outside without chaining it up and go into the terminal.
In a café in the check-in hall I find exactly the drink I want
and I pay £2.75 for it.
                            I look at the departure boards.
                            Edinburgh. Bonn. Marseilles.
                            A green light flashes next to each gate as it opens
                                                           ­                  green and purple
                                                          ­                   green and purple
                                                          ­                                 Missing
                                                         ­                                  presumed dead
The flashes of colour are growing brighter
every time I move my eyes a green and purple streak follows behind like a jet stream
but the bustle and activity of the airport is so much that I can’t keep my eyes still
       so they keep darting
                            this way and that
                                                 until my vision is painted over
                                                            ­                 green and purple.
The streaks roll over each other like clouds of acid rain.
       This is the final call for flight 370 to–
My bike is gone when I go back outside
The front of the terminal is a plateau of thousands upon thousands of cars
and it’s probably in one of them
                                          but I’ll never know which.
The car parks reach all the way back to the runway.
Green and purple acid rain from all the jet fuel mixed with the air
melts a hole in the fence and I slip through
moving purposefully
                            with charge
                                          across the green and purple grass
                                          scorched by a hundred thousand landings
                                          a hundred thousand people arriving in Luton
And there on the tarmac
                     glinting in the rain
                     surrounded by blinking amber
       there is my bike
       its black handlebars spread like the wings of a jet plane.
I duck as an Airbus screams in just a few feet over my head
the rush from the engine lifting the soles of my feet from the ground.
I pick up the bike and start pedalling
                                                 pedalling down the runway
                                                 pedalling towards the blinking amber.
It feels light, nimble, fast
the tyres take the asphalt with ease.
And the faster I go the lighter I feel
       the acid rain eats away at my clothes
       and they melt off my body and pool on the runway below,
                     Lighter
                            and lighter until…
                                                 The wheels lift away from the ground
                                                          ­     and in the air I am dead and alive
                                                 and maybe nobody will
                                                                ­                           ever
                                                            ­                               see me
                                                                ­                           again.



iv. Burning sky

The faster I go, the lighter I feel.
I’ve taken the night watch and the yacht
is cruising across the Indian Ocean
penetrating the black abyss like a white bullet
and the lights in the portholes send shimmering white bullet shapes
for miles across the endless ink.
                                                            ­                 What?
                     We’re not going very fast at all
                     But it feels like any minute
                                                 we might drop off the edge of the world.
I hope we do.
I feel light and dizzy and irrational
                                          and I feel aware of being
                                          light and dizzy and irrational
and I wonder if this is what going mad feels like.
Have you ever felt like you’re living in a corner of your own life?
I
       feel like that a lot lately.
Marc is sleeping.
We didn’t speak much today.
I can’t really remember how long it’s been
       since we left Victoria but the fight
       we had there
                            in a bistro by the port we
       said things we
       said things that
                            we can’t take back.
The Seychelles were stifling.
The heat was stifling.
He was stifling.
And the people were stifling
                                   the people kept talking about pirates.
                                   They kept warning us about pirates.
                                   You’re sailing where
                                                        the­y say
                                   You must be careful
                                                        t­hey say
                                   It’s notorious
                                                       ­ they say
I have fantasies about being kidnapped by pirates.
Not stupid Johnny Depp pirates with *** and parrots, no
       Real pirates.
                     Nasty pirates.
                     With dark snarls and AK-47s.
When we were at sea off the Horn I’d see things on the horizon
Dots or lights I couldn’t make out
And I’d imagine the rifle against my neck
Their hot breath
Chains and ransoms.
                          I’d wonder how much we’d be worth.
                          If we’d make national news.
                          Would it be David Cameron to announce,
                                                       ­        regrettably,
                                                    ­           we don’t negotiate with pirates,
                          or would it be someone less important?
                          Maybe just the foreign secretary.
                          What is the worth of my life at the end of a steel barrel?
But it would only be a buoy, or a plane on the horizon,
and I would get into bed with Marc
       disappearing under the covers like a different kind of hostage.
I
              oh
                                   I
                                                 Sorry
I’m crying.
                     I don’t know when I started crying.
The thing is I don’t know if it’s me breaking the marriage
or the marriage breaking me.
I’m watching everything literally fall to pieces and for all I know
it’s me with the detonator.
And then
              everything
literally falls to pieces
                            My mug of coffee falls from my hand
                            shatters on the deck
                                                            ­and the sea rears up nightmarishly.
Above me
a long orange **** of flame
is burned into the sky.
                            No, really.
                            That’s not a metaphor.
                                                       ­        There is fire in the sky.
It’s about a mile up and a mile away.
Look.
       There.
              ****.
                            **** **** ****.
What is that?
                                   Marc!
I call for Marc.
                                   Marc!
       There is fire in the sky.

–              Katherine.

       Fire in the sky.
       Fire in the
       Fire in

–              Katherine.

       Fire

–              Katherine.

       What
              Marc, what?

–              Are you awake?

       I think so.

–              You were calling out again.

       Calling

–              Calling out. You were shouting.

       What
       where
       What time is it?
                                   Where

–              Dubai. We’re in Dubai. It’s 7.
                They delayed again while you were sleeping.

       Dubai?

–              Katy I really think you should see a doctor.

       Don’t call me that.

–              Pardon?

       Katy.
       Don’t call me that.
                                          Like

–          ­                                       Like what?

       Everything’s okay.

–

       Everything’s not okay.

–               There’s
                 doctors. You’re not well. You’ve been confused since,
                 well actually since before it even happened.

       You think I’ve been confused.

–              Not right.
                Not you.

       You’re **** right.

–              Forget it.

       Thank you.

–              Go back to sleep. ****.



–              Are you still seeing it?
                The plane? On fire.
                                   You’re dreaming about it, aren’t you?

       Yes.

–              It’s affecting you?

       I’m
              just
                     unhappy,
       Marc.

–              That’s not just it though is it?

       What’s that supposed to mean?

–              Something about seeing that
                                                           ­   plane has scared you.

       We don’t know it was the plane.
       The one that –

–                            No. But, right place, right time.
              They said

       Maybe.

–              It’s still a coincidence.
                It’s not

                                   What

–                                   A sign.
                                     From god.
                                     Or
                                          whatever.

     ­                                     Whatever you think it means.



                            Katherine.

       The thing I don’t know, Marc
       is if I’m more scared that it was the plane
       or that it wasn’t.

–

       Imagine.
       Vanishing.
       Into thin air.

–              I know.

                            No, you don’t.
       Disappearing
                            into thin air
       Or falling
                            out of it.

–              Falling.

       You can’t imagine that.

–              I can.



–              I can, Katy.
                I ******* can
                                          Imagine.
       ­         Falling.
                Disappearing.
             ­   Into thin air.

                *******
                            i­nvisible.

                 I am
                           right
                          ­          ******* here,
                                                        K­atherine.

       I see you.
       I see you Marc.
       But you’re not
                            solid.

       I’m not
                            solid.
                          ­                              See?

                           ­                             It passes
                                                          ­     right through.

       Now you see me.
                                   Now yo–



v. 2015

Have you ever felt like you’re living in a corner of your own life?
The hotel room here in Singapore is almost identical
to the room I had in Mexico City.
The heat feels the same and it’s the same
nondescript decoration
which doesn’t really belong to any time or culture.
It gives me a headache. The neutrality of it.
As I check my messages I remember
                                                        ­       I’m not in Singapore.
I’m in Kuala Lumpur.
I haven’t been home for nearly three weeks now.
It’s ridiculously late
The IOC conference is at six thirty
              and I’ve been asleep all day.
                                   I get dressed and grab my camera
                                   and leave the hotel with a large, black coffee.
At the press call I see a man from Reuters I recognise.
       The coffee here is terrible.
I talk to him about his family
              his daughter is four now
              he’s shaved off his beard since I last saw him
              and he’s moving, he says,
                                                 near me apparently
                                                 to Southend.
                                                       ­               “London Southend” he jokes
                                                                ­      with a roll of his eye
                                                             ­         and inverted commas.
I say yeah that’s quite near me then move away to take a phone call.
Inside the press conference there are ten people at the table
       the women are all wearing identical powder blue suits which
       strikes me as idiosyncratically Asian for no good reason.
The men all wear simultaneous translation headphones
                                                      ­                but the women don’t.
I wonder if this is because they speak better English than the men
or if it just isn’t considered necessary to translate for them.
       They have given the Winter Olympics to Beijing.
              I wonder what is lost between the
              Mandarin spoken by the mayor of Beijing
              and the English spoken by the translator.
                                                     ­          The space between words.
                                                          ­     The space between looking left
                                                            ­                               and looking right.
It’s a nice atmosphere in the cool air-conditioned room.
I’m struck by how nice everyone is
       except for the British delegates
       including the man from Reuters who speculates
       that the voting was rigged.
A while later someone else calls it a “farce”.
              I get a photograph of the IOC President’s face
                                                            ­          as it falls
              and email it to my office from my seat.
Outside, the Petronas towers rise above the conference centre like
enormous empty silos.
This is my first time in Kuala Lumpur
                                          the last city I have to visit before I go home.
I get in a taxi and say the name of my hotel
                                          and the city flashes by.
I look out of the window at
the buildings as they pass and they
don’t so much slide past
                                   or glide past
                                                        the motion isn’t smooth.
They sort of click past.
They tick past, dit-dit-dit:
Building after building
                            dit-dit-dit-dit-dit
My eyes don’t quite refresh the image fast enough
to keep up with all the buildings
                            as they pass.
The taxi stops and I pay seventeen ringgit and get out:
it has gone by the time I realise this is not my hotel.
I don’t know where I am but I was in the taxi long enough to know that I
am some distance
                            from the centre of the city.
I look up at the name of the hotel the driver has taken me to
and the English transliteration is very similar to the name of the hotel I am staying in.
       I go inside.
There’s a nightclub in the hotel
I order Glenfiddich
                            double,
                 ­           cut with water.
              not because I like it but
              because there’s something about scotch that feels
                                                           ­                         moneyed
              heavy amber liquid in heavy-bottomed glasses
              it helps me buy into this idea of the travelling businessman
              even though that’s a lie.
                                                        I’m just a man who takes pictures.
                                                       ­ And I want to go home.
I sit at the bar which is as long as my driveway.
I swirl my glass and watch the amber legs trickle down the sides.
A moving light above it hits the gloss black surface
with an open white like the early morning sun on my gravel
                                                          ­                   as I get into my car.
A girl from here, young enough to be my daughter, is talking to me.
She points out her friends and I half-wave, uneasily
and she asks what I’m drinking.
                                          A news alert on my phone says a piece of
                                          plane wreckage
                                          washed up
                                                        on Réunion
                                                        i­n the Indian Ocean,
                                   east of Madagascar and south of the Seychelles.
The girl seems nice. She says her name is Dhia
                                                            ­                 it means “glowing”.
She doesn’t seem to want anything,
certainly not ***;
her friends have disappeared so
                                          I dance with her.
As we dance I see something in her eyes that is at once
both young and
                     endlessly wise.
She has deep brown eyes exactly the colour of earth
and a small mouth which smiles brilliantly.
In the half-light they open up to me like pools
                                                 and I imagine
                                                         ­             swimming
                                           ­      in them.
Even though she’s only nineteen, twenty-one at most,
there is something about her that’s
                                          maternal
       ­                                   spiritual
                    ­                      nourishing.
She asks me what I’m doing in Kuala Lumpur and I tell her
I don’t know.
She asks me what I did today and I tell her I
                                                               ­              slept
                                                           ­           then took some photographs.
You’re a photographer, she says, and I shrug
then she leans into my ear and says
                                                        don’­t tell anyone.
What
       I say
and she says
              I’m a princess.
And I look into her eyes and she isn’t lying.
She says no-one is going to recognise her
but
       just in case
                            she isn’t supposed to be seen drinking.
Who would I tell
I say to her.
She grins and finishes her beer and it’s true
                                   no-one is looking at her
                                   but she’s the most magnetic person in the room.
In the taxi I say the name of my hotel extremely slowly
and the driver replies in perfect English
                                                         ­      yes sir, I know where you mean.
Kuala Lumpur ticks by in electric darkness.
I flick through the news as we drive
                                                 I see the photo I took this evening about
                                                 a dozen times
                                                 or more.
There is something bitter about the tone in all the British press when they talk about the Olympics
as if:
Beijing get to do it twice?
                                   What about us?
I think about a country with a quarter of the world’s population
and I think about the tiny little island I’ve come from
                                                        and I feel smaller than I’ve ever felt.
The aircraft wing that washed up in Réunion is from a Boeing 777,
they say.
The same type of aircraft as the one that went down last year.
The one they never found.
                            It was going from here to Beijing.
                            Last communication at 1.19am.
And it’s at
                     that
                     time
                     precisely
                                   my phone rings.
It’s my boss in London
she says the Chinese Olympic Committee
are scheduling press conferences.
                                                    ­    It looks like I’m going to Beijing.

A guy awakes in the month of May,
his movement is languid, his thoughts full of fray,
he showers and dresses and then leaves his abode,
the spring sun doesn't warm him as he walks down the road.
He stands on the pavement and waits for the bus,
his fibre is calloused with collision and fuss.
He embarks on his journey with eyes facing down,
needing a break, and to get out of town.
He looks out the window as grey turns to green,
urban concrete to verdant serene.
He spies a large field and rings the bus bell to get off
hoping green grass will quell his bereavement cough.
He meanders through a meadow and parks himself under a tree
and speculates with veracity "what's happening to me?
she's gone and I miss her and i'm still alive
the answer to this tripe of mortality I do strive
why the stop, why a finite ride."
His words are peppered with anguish, seeking reason,
caught in turmoil in this springing season,
he slumps with head in hand against the bark,
no idea if it's light or dark,
or if he's she or me,
he slumps forlorn neath the tree.
Suddenly a voice is heard, soft and free,
the soft free voice of the tree.
"Hi, hope you're well and you don't mind my interject
and what follows isn't ferocious direct,
I know you're not waiting for epiphany."
said the tree.
"Or thoughts of gravity,
or eyeing me up for oars to power ships at sea,
I see you want to quell mortality.
Living isn't a simple thing I know,
leaves they leave and i'm covered in snow,
those nervous budding days that precede thundering green sat row by row
are lost  in kindle by the firework show,
burnt or brittle and toppled by go.
The tree pauses for a sec as the guy listens with a heart full of woe,
then the tree continues as the day starts to glow.
"It's transient and sad this life we have live,
some things are taken when we don't want to give,
and it hurts when we lose the things we love,
but for that there's a reason
and that reason is love.
It aches when their tangible space we can no longer share
and their dalliance as it stopped as their life was short and rare
but the loss is felt because of care
we wouldn't miss if we didn't love
every end would have the green of rub,
because love lasts for every season
in whatever weather whether or not,
so with love comes loss, i'm afraid and amazed to say,
loss comes with love i'm amazed and afraid to say,
if you're finding hard to deal or wanna express maybe say something to say,
I want to write about my leaves leaves now so at your leisure be on your way."
The guy breaths in and out slow for a couple of moments and into hence
and mulls on the tree's words as he moves  from to supple from tense,
and gets up ready
with something wanting to say
and as he bes on his way the guy opens his mouth and mouths into May...

"I'm missing you today and everyday since you went away,
Jan the 25th to precise,
I miss your kindness,
I miss your nice.
When we met in June tons of moons ago
we took our time from seed to grow,
watered with careful rush amid a loud hush,
slowly placing blocks while aware of the splendour of the finished build on the box,
germinating tender.
We grew up in each moment we spent smiling,
in every chat in every dialling.
We were kids eh, buying Kid A,
I held you in May and every other month I remember,
Laughs in December, hugs in September
the summer rush of August,
high fives in July.
We went to the cinema our close was abundant,
we had a handle on home and knew what fun meant,
going to concerts, exploring contours,
flying strong with the span of condors,
taking in breath, rising to soar,
moving together, using the force,
galloping free with the wildest horse,
we could talk in code, dabble in Morse,
our peace, our understanding a calming course.
Our strait newly furrowed no burrowing head in sand,
our relaxed eyes rest on promised land ;
It exists now, it exists right here,
the earth of Utopia burying fear,
it melds in the moment when you’re near,
I think I’ve found my lifetime career!
When you felt I was feeling depressed
you brushed off a burden and cleaned up my mess,
blocked those anxiety yelps,
knowing every little helps,
zapping away fear with your glorious medication,
here it is now, your standing ovation.
Then we didn’t see each other for ages,
as we ran through our own books on separate pages.
Then we bumped into each other and got back in touch,
not just a handshake and then a farewell wave
but shimmering convergence with all that you gave.
We got drunk and laughed as one turned into a few
knowing by now I’d go anywhere with you,
your witty jibes and blooming vernacular,
******* you’re blooming spectacular,
gulping fast, no little sips,
I loved your smile and your jiving hips.
You put the ancient in fossil,
the patience in tousle,
the strength in muscle,
the brave in bottle,
the brain in Aristotle,
the flame disparaged nozzle,
the fall in topple,
the tact in subtle,
the rain in puddle,
you stop the reign of muddle,
the pain and struggle,
the mazy puzzle,
the lazy shuffle,
the cake and truffle which I baked befuddled
after waking troubled and craving cuddles
then you came to me with heavenly huddles.
You’re the sunlight sweet sound of suggestion
And take the risk out of a game of Russian Roulette with a Smith and Wesson,
could never rue letting with you,
your moves define perfection with sublime projection.
You gently gild and made love a reality,
engaged me in present the future a fallacy.
But now you’re gone.
There are so many who loved you after you’d met
And they all miss you lots, especially your pets.
It's all the same without you on earth but different,
wise guys still get hints,
Polos are still mints,
sand castles still do best on the beach,
James still has the largest peach,
supercallifrilous
will still be expealidousis,
they'll still be osmosis,
my fake sibling will still be my faux sis.
They'll be dawn still & moonlight thrill
& silly cats on window sill, still, still.
They'll be puns on the hill & run of the mill,
they'll be hibernation curl to blossoming trill, chances missed & days to rue
& summer nights with joyful coo,
but still's not the same
without you;
because there is one less friend of cats & dogs,
this little world has one less cog.
I don’t know where you are,
you hit the end or the start?
And maybe when I end you’ll be starting my heart
and sat on my heart like a star
giving a light in the dark,
I love you Rebecca, wherever you are.”
The guy stops on the spot and mouths into May,
Rebecca my sweet, I’ve missed you today.

It's not easy speak
or a Speak Easy
when conversing with him,
dark'ling gremlin toothless grin
but he's your friend so I carry on
with Yoda in the corner of my mind
"judgmental you must be not"
and Comicon's collective excitement fading
as the light will do in the west...

We speak easy with the circling
of the communal pipe
crystal peace in mists of glass orbs
oil burner fog horns
piercingly in & between my ears
but its not so easy to ignore
the scent of death in his halitosis

We spoke of Superheroes
their idiosyncratic identities
His secret celebrity crushes  
envying Green Lantern’s ring finger
he speculates on Cyclop's orientation,

"Y don’t you make me an X man, professor?"

Informatively encyclopedic volubility,
Mike speaks queerly and toofless
yet well versed on oral
said he rims pacific beach boys
(And I can smell the white lies
wafting from his mouth)
as I color at his studly fairy tales
and his idolatry of prepubescent innocence
the hyper kind of *******
as he verbally recalls the taste of how sweet
the sweet untouched were...

"The most gorgeous boys I’ve ever seen
in **** or anyplace on the face of the planet
comes from and are probably ******* now
in Europe... Mmm, European boys...
I want to use my life’s savings to go there
enter the war zone and come back wounded..."

I can't even imagine
Shrapnel jacked backside, points and protrusions
grandiloquent mouths and holes full of
enunciations...

"Fourteen is the age of consent there..." he is smiling
a caricature of a wolf *** fang less
Such a pseudo wanna-be
possibly already
******* friend from the broken rainbow factory,
how I chuckle uncomfortably
shake my head disbelievingly

oh the humorous horror of it...

(I'm grinding my teeth, until I notice myself
doing so and get an image of him
with a gummy grin,
I preoccupy my thinking
nodding as I half-heartedly half listen)

Torrents of wind, strewn upon man and beast
an irradiant moment terses through the veins
howls bewilderment speculates, 
attempting to overthrow the instant,
home is a short shrift distance
her only resonance is a leitmotif
that hail the late seasons repentance.

His brown eyes open,
absorbing every experience
that has been his to know.
A looking back, sorting
mangled bolts of history.

His story. His remembering.

With dying hands he strokes
the threads that have
unraveled around him.

He blinks, and he lets
a single teardrop glisten
on his lived in face.

There are miracles and
there are no miracles.

Either way, the prognosis
is what it is. He knows
everything he knows
and yet he
knows almost nothing.

Tall buildings and concrete streets.
City traffic on major roads.
People. So many people
occupying the urban sprawl.
In the midst of all this he
speculates on any number
of significant resolutions.

How cold his heart feels!
How resigned and dark
are his thought patterns!

With gratitude, perhaps,
he reminds himself that
one thing often leads
to another. There is
neither rhyme nor reason
to what is to come.

And when the droning
that inhabits his thinking
becomes too loud to hear,
he can shut his eyes.
Close them tight.
Let his eyelids be
his entire world
and
sit
like
a
rubber
hammer
banging
nails
into
his
heart.

Translation of
Red faced misfortune
A tune for the muse
Who rests *** less yet
Smiling with satisfaction

A sad old feeling
Of realizations & regrets

Halloween wrinkles Her nose
And the grass turns brown as
The sun slowly starts to burn out

Locket of love
Golden hanging replica
Of truth & of lies
A tie painted by a ring
A kiss where behind
Lays the knife

Burn the pages
Memorize the words
Turn of the century
These wounds are turning green
Trademarked & sworn

Leaflets of one's
Own devices
A pressure cooker
Of a lover
Tonight eyes glance
Left to right
Nigh up & down

"So your the one
They keep talking about..."

Each minute presses on from
The palms of her hands
As the wax brown & purple wooden
Floor caked with bad dreams
Speculates no longer sober
While animals dressed in winged cobra suits
Rest inside the house made of faceless poker cards

Resting willow
Eyes in half slant
Blankets pulled up to the ears
She speaks of animals lost
A tarot card terror
Death & memories

My eyes did strain through out our
days, I saw beauty as I looked at you
each day, the world was a little blurry
a little more each and everyday.

The day had come, for two hearts to
be one, I was to pick up my lenses,
But I thought marriage of the heart
comes first, you are my number one.

So the I do and you do came to pass,
a life as husband and wife, it was time
to see the world clear as day, I had tried
them on while you were away.

So I put them on, and turned around
to find a woman laughing at the choose
of speculates that I had chose.

''WHAT  YOU LAUGHING AT UGLY"

And her face did drop,

"I'M YOUR WIFE",

My mouth wide open my heart nearly stopped.

That was the day glasses showed me a world  
in crystal blue, I love my wife, but I do wish I'd
gotten my glasses before I said "I DO" we made
up, I did grovel and beg, said I was mad for the
upset she caused I said.

The sun shines upon flesh,
bathes it in heat and cheerfulness,
lavishes upon it gifts of light and promise.
The sun shines upon a walking corpse,
skin but a display,
behaving as if alive for lack of alternative.

The wind moves among hair,
covers it in cooling whimsy,
carries it towards peace and frivolity.
The wind moves among exhalations,
each breath but a show,
in an out to pass the time.

The blade sits upon a shelf,
speculates on past and present,
mindless as a thing long dead.
The blade passes through the yielding skin,
each slice like a breath,
anything to feel alive.

Things Worth, Or Not, Remembering:
T.S. Eliot,  O.L. Poetry and the Passage of Time

<>

“Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present

All time is unredeemable.

What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden.”

T.S. Eliot
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

<>

Only in a world of speculation, but what if,
There was no such world, one speculates,
Where safely looking in both directions as
We cross the alleys and boulevards of now is
NOT required; living in series of moments,
a steady spasming of venturing, and always,
something gained, something lost, but never,
additive, cumulative and more sensational
than experiential and we have no memory,
and thus no prejudice for or against!

Living with constant aspiration, not reckoning what are
Things Worth Remembering, is that not more than
no footfalls, only footsteps, to new love, renewed love,
possibilities of all doors opened, and we take each day
as it is given, banishing longing, jailing regret,
believing round every turn is a new fragrant, radiant rose garden,
or not…but perhaps means eternal, forever looking.

O. L. Poetry

His brown eyes open,
absorbing every experience
that has been his to know.
A looking back, sorting
mangled bolts of history.

His story. His remembering.

With dying hands he strokes
the threads that have
unraveled around him.

He blinks, and he lets
a single teardrop glisten
on his lived in face.

There are miracles and
there are no miracles.

Either way, the prognosis
is what it is. He knows
everything he knows
and yet he
knows almost nothing.

Tall buildings and concrete streets.
City traffic on major roads.
People. So many people
occupying the urban sprawl.
In the midst of all this he
speculates on any number
of significant resolutions.

How cold his heart feels!
How resigned and dark
are his thought patterns!

With gratitude, perhaps,
he reminds himself that
one thing often leads
to another. There is
neither rhyme nor reason
to what is to come.

And when the droning
that inhabits his thinking
becomes too loud to hear,
he can shut his eyes.
Close them tight.
Let his eyelids be
his entire world
and
sit
like
a
rubber
hammer
banging
nails
into
his
heart.

On this day(February 14th), a man was ****** to death for the emotion that roams my heart at the thought of you. Legend speculates that the strength of his affection healed the blindness of his jailer’s daughter.



From this I was inspired. If I was to ever truly love, the magnitude of my love would have to have healing powers and perform miracles of some sort. My love would have to rid my lover of their fears and insecurities. It would have to wipe their tears and amplify their personalities. It would have to turn frowns into smiles and give them the courage to pick up their crown and place it on their majestic heads. When their tank is on empty, it’ll keep them going for miles. The affection would have to be incredible.



The love would have to give them eyesight and vision to help them see beyond their imperfections, help them see the true beauty of the being staring back in the mirror. My love would have to convince you that it is true and undying. When confessed, you’d have to shed tears. I swore to myself that all of the above would be minimum requirements for my affection to qualify and be worthy of the name love.



As for you, the one who my heart beats for, what I feel for you exceeds the requirements set above. So much so that I think a new word that explains a feeling greater than love should be invented.

What’s this that all around us we see…?
People strange but strangers cannot be!

The thief sows not, but consents to reap;
The watchman falls a victim to sleep.
The comforter, brings tears, not relief;
The youth, by glamour is oft deceived.
The gossip, loses in frank debate;
The punctual, cannot help being late.
The wise, in his proud conceit turns fool;
The taught, oft seems to be more unschool’d.
The tactful, by silence, oft does hurt;
The polite, being civil, sounds curt.
He loses who speculates to gain;
He thinks himself fit who is insane.

But then, who are we, others to judge,
When we, ourselves, may be among such?

There must be happiness
in the depth of this day's seeking..
Momentary satisfaction and contentment
in midst of participation in this annual
running frenzy..running of the..
So..appropriately named..looking for
happiness
in the darkness this Friday..
Some may sit on a restful bench
in a crowded mall..or observing
a sea of people in downtown
Manhattan (I did this!)
and there seems to be at times
a glow in the black..
Let's call it a black hole
as science speculates.. and
others remind of that
springtime black Friday:
a new creation bursts forth...

shadows surround in silent solitude
scattered thoughts scrutinise
as serpentine spirit speculates
a skewed sentiment of sorrow
– sensitivity and sympathy
sprinkled sequins of slanted light
– stir sentient sight
a spectre summoned

Downtown Mike’s Halitosis

It's not easy speak
or a Speak Easy
when conversing with him,
dark'ling gremlin toothless grin
but he's your friend so I carry on
with Yoda in the corner of my mind
"judgmental you must be not"
and Comicon's collective excitement fading
as the light will do in the west...

We speak easy with the circling
of the communal pipe
crystal peace in mists of glass orbs
oil burner fog horns
piercingly in & between my ears
but its not so easy to ignore
the scent of death in his halitosis

We spoke of Superheroes
their idiosyncratic identities
His secret celebrity crushes  
envying Green Lantern’s ring finger
he speculates on Cyclop's orientation,

"Y don’t you make me an X man, professor?"

Informatively encyclopedic volubility,
Mike speaks queerly and toofless
yet well versed on oral
said he rims pacific beach boys
(And I can smell the white lies
wafting from his mouth)
as I color at his studly fairy tales
and his idolatry of prepubescent innocence
the hyper kind of *******
as he verbally recalls the taste of how sweet
the sweet untouched were...

"The most gorgeous boys I’ve ever seen
in **** or anyplace on the face of the planet
comes from and are probably ******* now
in Europe... Mmm, European boys...
I want to use my life’s savings to go there
enter the war zone and come back wounded..."

I can't even imagine
Shrapnel jacked backside, points and protrusions
grandiloquent mouths and holes full of
enunciations...

"Fourteen is the age of consent there..." he is smiling
a caricature of a wolf *** fang less
Such a pseudo wanna-be
possibly already
******* friend from the broken rainbow factory,
how I chuckle uncomfortably
shake my head disbelievingly

oh the humorous horror of it...

(I'm grinding my teeth, until I notice myself
doing so and get an image of him
with a gummy grin,
I preoccupy my thinking
nodding as I half-heartedly half listen)

None has ever tried to address it.
More likely avoid the quest to address it.
Except, here we go again in the news.

Another black male down at the hands of quick draw white males cops.
Another black male, another quick to defend tale from the police force.

But why is it?
Why is it?
That you barely see trained to the tee black law officers blowing white males away.
What?
Is that difference in the rationale of sense and shoot mentality that has us wondering it?

We, know factually that any school shooting that goes down in America that statistics will pinpoint to a majority its a white youth with a twisted view.

So explain to many that asked, why white cops?
Is quick draw with black males?
White news don't ask?
Black press only speculates.

And any police union is a defense scheme cause they need union dues to be in existence.
And don't want to rock the boat of not defending their own.
Yes, even if the wrong.

So you surprised and shocked?
When a dedicated loyal officer is killed or shot.
When many honestly know this phase of here we go again?

A day of celebration
When one walks across the stage
and grabs a piece of paper

However, when faced with the same situation
I realize I am not the woman people expect
instead, I am a scared little girl
living in fear
and hiding in my room

Once again
counting days till I move
while living a hell
and putting on a pretty face, so no one speculates

Once more, I sit
numb to lifes situations
scarred of the unknown
and hiding to prevent fights

Once more
I graduate from hell

It's a state of mind-

the future

the person speculates:

what is there to secure?

The poet in my always wants to take apart everything

The shish in his pants as he slid them off and they hit my floor

How fur like, soft as thick, his inky hair was as I ran my fingers through it, caressing the scalp underneath gently with the tips

The beauty of the curves of the muscles in his back, how gorgeously proportioned every part of him is

The vibration of his laughter, the heaviness of his arms as he fell asleep wrapped around me

The way my heart squeezed when he woke up and cared gently for me

I haven't slept so well next to someone in so long

It all still hurts

So I see him, and we smile, and we both know
That this world existed between us
While everyone else speculates
And I pretend that
I don't have complicated feelings
And he pretends
He doesn't feel at all
And we pretend
We have only ever been friends