Vanity, saith the preacher, vanity!
Draw round my bed: is Anselm keeping back?
Nephews—sons mine—ah God, I know not! Well—
She, men would have to be your mother once,
Old Gandolf envied me, so fair she was!
What’s done is done, and she is dead beside,
Dead long ago, and I am Bishop since,
And as she died so must we die ourselves,
And thence ye may perceive the world’s a dream.
Life, how and what is it? As here I lie
In this state-chamber, dying by degrees,
Hours and long hours in the dead night, I ask
“Do I live, am I dead?” Peace, peace seems all.
Saint Praxed’s ever was the church for peace;
And so, about this tomb of mine. I fought
With tooth and nail to save my niche, ye know:
—Old Gandolf cozened me, despite my care;
Shrewd was that ****** from out the corner South
He graced his carrion with, God curse the same!
Yet still my niche is not so cramped but thence
One sees the pulpit o’ the epistle-side,
And somewhat of the choir, those silent seats,
And up into the very dome where live
The angels, and a sunbeam’s sure to lurk:
And I shall fill my slab of basalt there,
And ’neath my tabernacle take my rest,
With those nine columns round me, two and two,
The odd one at my feet where Anselm stands:
Peach-blossom marble all, the rare, the ripe
As fresh poured red wine of a mighty pulse
—Old Gandolf with his paltry onion-stone,
Put me where I may look at him! True peach,
Rosy and flawless: how I earned the prize!
Draw close: that conflagration of my church
—What then? So much was saved if aught were missed!
My sons, ye would not be my death? Go dig
The white-grape vineyard where the oil-press stood,
Drop water gently till the surface sink,
And if ye find—Ah God, I know not, I!—
Bedded in store of rotten fig-leaves soft,
And corded up in a tight olive-frail,
Some lump, ah God, of lapis lazuli,
Big as a Jew’s head cut off at the nape,
Blue as a vein o’er the Madonna’s breast
Sons, all have I bequeathed you, villas, all,
That brave Frascati villa with its bath,
So, let the blue lump poise between my knees,
Like God the Father’s globe on both his hands
Ye worship in the Jesu Church so gay,
For Gandolf shall not choose but see and burst!
Swift as a weaver’s shuttle fleet our years:
Man goeth to the grave, and where is he?
Did I say basalt for my slab, sons? Black—
’Twas ever antique-black I meant! How else
Shall ye contrast my frieze to come beneath?
The bas-relief in bronze ye promised me.
Those Pans and Nymphs ye wot of, and perchance
Some tripod, thyrsus, with a vase or so,
The Saviour at his sermon on the mount,
Saint Praxed in a glory, and one Pan
Ready to twitch the Nymph’s last garment off,
And Moses with the tables—but I know
Ye mark me not! What do they whisper thee,
Child of my bowels, Anselm? Ah, ye hope
To revel down my villas while I gasp
Bricked o’er with beggar’s mouldy travertine
Which Gandolf from his tomb-top chuckles at!
Nay, boys, ye love me—all of jasper, then!
’Tis jasper ye stand pledged to, lest I grieve.
My bath must needs be left behind, alas!
One block, pure green as a pistachio-nut,
There’s plenty jasper somewhere in the world—
And have I not Saint Praxed’s ear to pray
Horses for ye, and brown Greek manuscripts,
And mistresses with great smooth marbly limbs?
—That’s if ye carve my epitaph aright,
Choice Latin, picked phrase, Tully’s every word,
No gaudy ware like Gandolf’s second line—
Tully, my masters? Ulpian serves his need!
And then how I shall lie through centuries,
And hear the blessed mutter of the mass,
And see God made and eaten all day long,
And feel the steady candle-flame, and taste
Good strong thick stupefying incense-smoke!
For as I lie here, hours of the dead night,
Dying in state and by such slow degrees,
I fold my arms as if they clasped a crook,
And stretch my feet forth straight as stone can point,
And let the bedclothes, for a mortcloth, drop
Into great laps and folds of sculptor’s work:
And as yon tapers dwindle, and strange thoughts
Grow, with a certain humming in my ears,
About the life before I lived this life,
And this life too, popes, cardinals and priests,
Saint Praxed at his sermon on the mount,
Your tall pale mother with her talking eyes,
And new-found agate urns as fresh as day,
And marble’s language, Latin pure, discreet,
—Aha, ELUCESCEBAT quoth our friend?
No Tully, said I, Ulpian at the best!
Evil and brief hath been my pilgrimage.
All lapis, all, sons! Else I give the Pope
My villas! Will ye ever eat my heart?
Ever your eyes were as a lizard’s quick,
They glitter like your mother’s for my soul,
Or ye would heighten my impoverished frieze,
Piece out its starved design, and fill my vase
With grapes, and add a visor and a Term,
And to the tripod ye would tie a lynx
That in his struggle throws the thyrsus down,
To comfort me on my entablature
Whereon I am to lie till I must ask
“Do I live, am I dead?” There, leave me, there!
For ye have stabbed me with ingratitude
To death—ye wish it—God, ye wish it! Stone—
Gritstone, a crumble! Clammy squares which sweat
As if the corpse they keep were oozing through—
And no more lapis to delight the world!
Well, go! I bless ye. Fewer tapers there,
But in a row: and, going, turn your backs
—Ay, like departing altar-ministrants,
And leave me in my church, the church for peace,
That I may watch at leisure if he leers—
Old Gandolf—at me, from his onion-stone,
As still he envied me, so fair she was!

There’s a film by John Schlesinger called the Go-Between in which the main character, a boy on the cusp of adolescence staying with a school friend on his family’s Norfolk estate, discovers how passion and *** become intertwined with love and desire. As an elderly man he revisits the location of this discovery and the woman, who we learn changed his emotional world forever. At the start of the film we see him on a day of grey cloud and wild wind walking towards the estate cottage where this woman now lives. He glimpses her face at a window – and the film flashes back fifty years to a summer before the First War.
 
It’s a little like that for me. Only, I’m sitting at a desk early on a spring morning about to step back nearly forty years.*
 
It was a two-hour trip from Boston to Booth Bay. We’d flown from New York on the shuttle and met Larry’s dad at St Vincent’s. We waited in his office as he put away the week with his secretary. He’d been in theatre all afternoon. He kept up a two-sided conversation.
 
‘You boys have a good week? Did you get to hear Barenboim at the Tully? I heard him as 14-year old play in Paris. He played the Tempest -  Mary, let’s fit Mrs K in for Tuesday at 5.0 - I was learning that very Beethoven sonata right then. I couldn’t believe it - that one so young could sound –there’s that myocardial infarction to review early Wednesday. I want Jim and Susan there please -  and look so  . . . old, not just mature, but old. And now – Gloria and I went to his last Carnegie – he just looks so **** young.’
 
Down in the basement garage Larry took his dad’s keys and we roared out on to Storow drive heading for the Massachusetts Turnpike. I slept. Too many early mornings copying my teacher’s latest – a concerto for two pianos – all those notes to be placed under the fingers. There was even a third piano in the orchestra. Larry and his Dad talked incessantly. I woke as Dr Benson said ‘The sea at last’. And there we were, the sea a glazed blue shimmering in the July distance. It might be lobster on the beach tonight, Gloria’s clam chowder, the coldest apple juice I’d ever tasted (never tasted apple juice until I came to Maine), settling down to a pile of art books in my bedroom, listening to the bell buoy rocking too and fro in the bay, the beach just below the house, a house over 150 years old, very old they said, in the family all that time.
 
It was a house full that weekend,  4th of July weekend and there would be fireworks over Booth Bay and lots of what Gloria called necessary visiting. I was in love with Gloria from the moment she shook my hand after that first concert when my little cummings setting got a mention in the NYT. It was called forever is now and God knows where it is – scored for tenor and small ensemble (there was certainly a vibraphone and a double bass – I was in love from afar with a bassist at J.). Oh, this being in love at seventeen. It was so difficult not to be. No English reserve here. People talked to you, were interested in you and what you thought, had heard, had read. You only had to say you’d been looking at a book of Andrew Wyeth’s paintings and you’d be whisked off to some uptown gallery to see his early watercolours. And on the way you’d hear a life story or some intimate details of friend’s affair, or a great slice of family history. Lots of eye contact. Just keep the talk going. But Gloria, well, we would meet in the hallway and she’d grasp my hand and say – ‘You know, Larry says that you work too hard. I want you to do nothing this weekend except get some sun and swim. We can go to Johnson’s for tennis you know. I haven’t forgotten you beat me last time we played!’ I suppose she was mid-thirties, a shirt, shorts and sandals woman, not Larry’s mother but Dr Benson’s third. This was all very new to me.
 
Tim was Larry’s elder brother, an intern at Felix-Med in NYC. He had a new girl with him that weekend. Anne-Marie was tall, bespectacled, and supposed to be ferociously clever. Gloria said ‘She models herself on Susan Sontag’. I remember asking who Sontag was and was told she was a feminist writer into politics. I wondered if Anne-Marie was a feminist into politics. She certainly did not dress like anyone else I’d seen as part of the Benson circle. It was July yet she wore a long-sleeved shift buttoned up to the collar and a long linen skirt down to her ankles. She was pretty but shapeless, a long straight person with long straight hair, a clip on one side she fiddled with endlessly, purposefully sometimes. She ignored me but for an introductory ‘Good evening’, when everyone else said ‘Hi’.
 
The next day it was hot. I was about the house very early. The apple juice in the refrigerator came into its own at 6.0 am. The bay was in mist. It was so still the bell buoy stirred only occasionally. I sat on the step with this icy glass of fragrant apple watching the pearls of condensation form and dissolve. I walked the shore, discovering years later that Rachel Carson had walked these paths, combed these beaches. I remember being shocked then at the concern about the environment surfacing in the late sixties. This was a huge country: so much space. The Maine woods – when I first drove up to Quebec – seemed to go on forever.
 
It was later in the day, after tennis, after trying to lie on the beach, I sought my room and took out my latest score, or what little of it there currently was. It was a piano piece, a still piece, the kind of piece I haven’t written in years, but possibly should. Now it’s all movement and complication. Then, I used to write exactly what I heard, and I’d heard Feldman’s ‘still pieces’ in his Greenwich loft with the white Rauschenbergs on the wall. I had admired his writing desk and thought one day I’ll have a desk like that in an apartment like this with very large empty paintings on the wall. But, I went elsewhere . . .
 
I lay on the bed and listened to the buoy out in the bay. I thought of a book of my childhood, We Didn’t Mean to Go to Sea by Arthur Ransome. There’s a drawing of a Beach End Buoy in that book, and as the buoy I was listening to was too far out to see (sea?) I imagined it as the one Ransome drew from Lowestoft harbour. I dozed I suppose, to be woken suddenly by voices in the room next door. It was Tim and Anne-Marie. I had thought the house empty but for me. They were in Tim’s room next door. There was movement, whispering, almost speech, more movement.
 
I was curious suddenly. Anne-Marie was an enigma. Tim was a nice guy. Quiet, dedicated (Larry had said), worked hard, read a lot, came to Larry’s concerts, played the cello when he could, Bach was always on his record player. He and Anne-Marie seemed so close, just a wooden wall away. I stood by this wall to listen.
 
‘Why are we whispering’, said Anne-Marie firmly, ‘For goodness sake no one’s here. Look, you’re a doctor, you know what to do surely.’
 
‘Not yet.’
 
‘But people call you Doctor, I’ve heard them.’
 
‘Oh sure. But I’m not, I’m just a lousy intern.’
 
‘A lousy intern who doesn’t want to make love to me.’
 
Then, there was rustling, some heavy movement and Tim saying ‘Oh Anne, you mustn’t. You don’t need to do this.’
 
‘Yes I do. You’re hard and I’m wet between my legs. I want you all over me and inside me.  I wanted you last night so badly I lay on my bed quite naked and masturbated hoping you come to me. But you didn’t. I looked in on you and you were just fast asleep.’
 
‘You forget I did a 22-hour call on Thursday’.
 
“And the rest. Don’t you want me? Maybe your brother or that nice English boy next door?’
 
‘Is he next door? ‘
 
‘If he is, I don’t care. He looks at me you know. He can’t work me out. I’ve been ignoring him. But maybe I shouldn’t. He’s got beautiful eyes and lovely hands’.
 
There was almost silence for what seemed a long time. I could hear my own breathing and became very aware of my own body. I was shaking and suddenly cold. I could hear more breathing next door. There was a shaft of intense white sunlight burning across my bed. I imagined Anne-Marie sitting cross-legged on the floor next door, her hand cupping her right breast fingers touching the ******, waiting. There was a rustle of movement. And the door next door slammed.
 
Thirty seconds later Tim was striding across the garden and on to the beach and into the sea . . .
 
There was probably a naked young woman sitting on the floor next door I thought. Reading perhaps. I stayed quite still imagining she would get up, open her door and peek into my room. So I moved away from the wall and sat on the bed trying hard to look like a composer working on a score. And she did . . . but she had clothes on, though not her glasses or her hair clip, and she wore a bright smile – lovely teeth I recall.
 
‘Good afternoon’, she said. ‘You heard all that I suppose.’
 
I smiled my nicest English smile and said nothing.
 
‘Tell me about your girlfriend in England.’
 
She sat on the bed, cross-legged. I was suddenly overcome by her scent, something complex and earthy.
 
‘My girlfriend in England is called Anne’.
 
‘Really! Is she pretty? ‘
 
I didn’t answer, but looked at my hands, and her feet, her uncovered calves and knees. I could see the shape of her slight ******* beneath her shirt, now partly unbuttoned. I felt very uncomfortable.
 
‘Tell me. Have you been with this Anne in England?’
 
‘No.’ I said, ‘I ‘d like to, but she’s very shy.’
 
‘OK. I’m an Anne who’s not shy.’
 
‘I’ve yet to meet a shy American.’
 
‘They exist. I could find you a nice shy girl you could get to know.’
 
‘I’d quite like to know you, but you’re a good bit older than me.’
 
‘Oh that doesn’t matter. You’re quite a mature guy I think. I’d go out with you.’
 
‘Oh I doubt that.’
 
‘Would you go out with me?’
 
‘You’re interesting.  Gloria says you’re a bit like Susan Sontag. Yes, I would.’
 
‘Wow! did she really? Ok then, that’s a deal. You better read some Simone de Beauvoir pretty quick,’  and she bounced off the bed.
 
After supper  - lobster on the beach - Gloria cornered me and said. ‘I gather you heard all this afternoon.’
 
I remembered mumbling a ‘yes’.
 
‘It’s OK,’ she said, ‘Anne-Marie told me all. Girls do this you know – talk about what goes on in other people’s bedrooms. What could you do? I would have done the same. Tim’s not ready for an Anne-Marie just yet, and I’m not sure you are either. Not my business of course, but gentle advice from one who’s been there. ‘
 
‘Been where?’
 
‘Been with someone older and supposedly wiser. And remembering that wondering-what-to-do-about-those-feelings-around-*** and all that. There’s a right time and you’ll know it when it comes. ‘
 
She kissed me very lightly on my right ear, then got up and walked across the beach back to the house.

High in the midst, surrounded by his peers,
Magnus his ample front sublime uprears:
Plac’d on his chair of state, he seems a God,
While Sophs and Freshmen tremble at his nod;
As all around sit wrapt in speechless gloom,
His voice, in thunder, shakes the sounding dome;
Denouncing dire reproach to luckless fools,
Unskill’d to plod in mathematic rules.

Happy the youth! in Euclid’s axioms tried,
Though little vers’d in any art beside;
Who, scarcely skill’d an English line to pen,
Scans Attic metres with a critic’s ken.

What! though he knows not how his fathers bled,
When civil discord pil’d the fields with dead,
When Edward bade his conquering bands advance,
Or Henry trampled on the crest of France:
Though marvelling at the name of Magna Charta,
Yet well he recollects the laws of Sparta;
Can tell, what edicts sage Lycurgus made,
While Blackstone’s on the shelf, neglected laid;
Of Grecian dramas vaunts the deathless fame,
Of Avon’s bard, rememb’ring scarce the name.

Such is the youth whose scientific pate
Class-honours, medals, fellowships, await;
Or even, perhaps, the declamation prize,
If to such glorious height, he lifts his eyes.
But lo! no common orator can hope
The envied silver cup within his scope:
Not that our heads much eloquence require,
Th’ ATHENIAN’S glowing style, or TULLY’S fire.
A manner clear or warm is useless, since
We do not try by speaking to convince;
Be other orators of pleasing proud,—
We speak to please ourselves, not move the crowd:
Our gravity prefers the muttering tone,
A proper mixture of the squeak and groan:
No borrow’d grace of action must be seen,
The slightest motion would displease the Dean;
Whilst every staring Graduate would prate,
Against what—he could never imitate.

The man, who hopes t’ obtain the promis’d cup,
Must in one posture stand, and ne’er look up;
Nor stop, but rattle over every word—
No matter what, so it can not be heard:
Thus let him hurry on, nor think to rest:
Who speaks the fastest’s sure to speak the best;
Who utters most within the shortest space,
May, safely, hope to win the wordy race.

The Sons of Science these, who, thus repaid,
Linger in ease in Granta’s sluggish shade;
Where on Cam’s sedgy banks, supine, they lie,
Unknown, unhonour’d live—unwept for die:
Dull as the pictures, which adorn their halls,
They think all learning fix’d within their walls:
In manners rude, in foolish forms precise,
All modern arts affecting to despise;
Yet prizing Bentley’s, Brunck’s, or Porson’s note,
More than the verse on which the critic wrote:
Vain as their honours, heavy as their Ale,
Sad as their wit, and tedious as their tale;
To friendship dead, though not untaught to feel,
When Self and Church demand a Bigot zeal.
With eager haste they court the lord of power,
(Whether ’tis PITT or PETTY rules the hour;)
To him, with suppliant smiles, they bend the head,
While distant mitres to their eyes are spread;
But should a storm o’erwhelm him with disgrace,
They’d fly to seek the next, who fill’d his place.
Such are the men who learning’s treasures guard!
Such is their practice, such is their reward!
This much, at least, we may presume to say—
The premium can’t exceed the price they pay.

Bolt and bar the shutter,
For the foul winds blow:
Our minds are at their best this night,
And I seem to know
That everything outside us is
Mad as the mist and snow.

Horace there by Homer stands,
Plato stands below,
And here is Tully's open page.
How many years ago
Were you and I unlettered lads
Mad as the mist and snow?

You ask what makes me sigh, old friend,
What makes me shudder so?
I shudder and I sigh to think
That even Cicero
And many-minded Homer were
Mad as the mist and snow.

Not much happens in these parts, he would demur,
As if he’d be asked in the first place,
He one of the dwindling few remaining in this dwindling town.
Nevertheless, he has seen his share in four score and change years
From the vantage point of his place
Which sits just off the corner of the Penoyer Road:
Boom times and bust,
Snowdrifts threatening to lick the roof lines of houses,
Boys running through the embers of fallen leaves,
Shirtless and barefoot on improbably warm October days,
Young men in hay wagons and rattle-*** Chevy pickups
Laughing and singing, confident and carefree,
Making their way to the old train depot down at Apulia Station
First step on their way to show the jerries or the VC
Exactly how Upstate farm boys took care of business,
Windows adorned by placards with a gold star
Illuminated by a solitary light bulb at odd hours.
Here and there, younger types have begun to dot the landscape:
Professors with a romantic hankering to get back to the land,
Neo-hippies with their own reasons for embracing the rural life,
Each in their tune walking about their yards
Holding keyboarded and wi-fied replicas
Of that which Moses carried down the mountain,
Their fixer-uppers or double-wides adorned with small dishes
Pointed forlornly at the horizon in search of some satellite supplication.
While he has seen enough not to be too ******* sure about things,
He suspects that complexity and contentment
Rarely walk hand-in-hand,
So he keeps his needs simple enough
To be met by the ancient radio
(Huge, wood-cabineted shambling thing,
More attuned for Amos and Andy than All Things Considered)
The three-checkout grocery in Tully,
The Morton-building sheltered family practice over in Cazenovia
(The squalid, sooty skyline of Syracuse,
Split by six lanes of high-octane madness,
As remote and slightly terrifying to him as Mars itself)
As he has learned enough from thickets of trees
Which all but shriek with torrents of crows in September dusks,
The subtle changes of stream banks
Tinged by the stubbornness of frost on early May mornings
Or blanketed by the pig-iron forge heat of July afternoons,
To know that there are sufficient and possibly necessary limits
To the places where two legs or four wheels can carry a body.

I

in the dark starvation is real.
In dark, the emesis that fills my
cheeks is a currency I soak inside, animal
coinage, the fine
bulbous talons of Sepiidae.

Savagely, pelagically
starving made me rich when
Muskrat’s claws pull apart delicate meat.
Sad Spanish blood, I would like you
to panic about what has been lost.
No body, no crime—we are all cannibals; so the muskrat ate
flesh from the dugong-heavy remora

a parallax of sorts occurs
when I cannot find my own entrails—
perhaps they are ruminating in my gut—
boiling in my optic nerve.

But–I found little boys betting quarters for eating bowels
of goat. I was small enough to fit through
playground gates so I could swing
swing in earthquakes, and portents
ride out this day on the waves—to succeed

foothills, grasses, and bath salts
by the creek. I got my quarters.
They asked me who made me as Mountain
Dew dribbled down my chest.
Infant teeth shattered my infant

fists and I did not eat divvied livers and
Victim watchers.
I wrote on
my protruding
viscera
proverbs from my ancient days


–extraordinary porch things, depleted
Phosphorus, and, on bendable limbs
I catalogued my windscraped knees.

How does one so young
become
so fed up with
hunger.

II

Starving made me easier to tie.
easier to lift.
my ancient autopsy of starvation
made me feel gutted out
like Finished
ice-cream containers.
Made me able to hold my breath for
up to six minutes—starving
made me full of Household Gods and rickety
rosaries,

small brown globular clusters,
1 arcsecond of stress
capable of aligning me
with spring-loaded washers

I pop one nut—two—
Dental Work can be a rhizome,
ordering wee-soldiers from
its tethered nodes without
lactation, laceration, infection into
my sleep-deprived throat,
Choking on bird chirps
and x-ray bursts

below the cradle where
my android sleeps. I
have named him The Alabaster.
(Synching The Alabaster.)
The Alabaster–Allie–is a kind of boat
that I have hole-punched into; like
children of the deep I have hurled
nearby rocks into its lungs.
I have wrenched crumbs of my honeymoon
sidewalk, for a beast that panics.
I would trade
the last of the dugongs
for a muskrat’s smile–
now there exists a cult for Plastic
that the spotlights started,

and in the night it will not
end with the filter feeder sinking
to the depth of the imagined water column,
spinning in the Gyre disposal.
There isn’t a colander large enough
to sift through the pejorative waste.

I knew the night would be fraught.
It makes my fusiform body necessary for
transport. Makes Monophyletic solid consumption
trucks and ACE arms reach for
well-behaved spearfish bodies.
Makes days disappear and cold
seem like simmering.
Makes staying out of sight
a trim.

And I told them,
the Fusiforms and Balusters, that
the spearfish would devour the hero who comes
from afar bearing the gift of travel–
Tully-Fisher, with his cottonseed oil
“Manufactured in USA” in
compounding pharmacies.
He made me.
And I told him:

to Tell me to trawl for something less
plastic than my second
self–that I which exists
in Mary Poppins cannons, compact
intimacies, medical and portable–

to dig within my throat, discover a nurdle
that failed to photodegrade during the the day
the Sirenia sang,
the Muskrat gnawed off his leg and hand
fed it to the remora.
III

My mouth is parched
for diagnosis of rickets, for
my un-mineralized bones.
I need RR Lyrae, Statistical π,
population “II”s
to stand in for my night.
I need Sweetened,
Spoonfuls of BB pellets and
Spoonfuls of cepheids to help
the tetany go down,

myopathic infants and
ricket Rosary symbols only work
in sacrifice–In this sense,
I have constructed a panic
architecture–Craniotabes are too
vast. Prions and viroids have seeped
through,

Infections more than dreams,
for injured muskrats who yearn for
the last real mermaid’s smile,
or tears if that would smash open
the cluttered ocean and scatter
the unwanted hosts multiplying
in my spinal fluid.

In day there is no more starvation–
the remora bring me
Libations and admire
my six pack rings mobile.
My connective obligatory.

Under my fingernails are thin
crisps that may somehow create equilibrium.
Although I nibble them regularly
I can’t always swallow.
Surrounded by a dense fog of fleas
my tongue is itching.
My teeth are scratching, scraping
away the space that will always be there.


The antique aisle at the local international
superstore is handing out shriveled
heads of past didactic patients.
But I tell them it’s not what’s there that matters
it’s what’s not there. And in my case
there’s a surplus of nothing that
I can live without.

They hailed Robb of Houses Stark and Tully as the King in the North,
he marched to **** his father's killers
he marched to save his sisters
The Young Wolf,they called him
he'd never lost a battle
his howls echoed all over the North

aye,her son fought valiantly
but he lost
a sword pierced through his heart,
her name on his lips
'Mother.'
his first and last words
she screamed in agony
they took her husband's head,
her daughters' innocence,
her sons' hearts.
they made her watch the executioner take her son's head
they made her watch her daughter-in-law beg for help as the men took turns ****** her
when the lion's banners were hanged
and the wolves killed
they pulled her hair,
slit her throat,
threw her naked in the river
and no one forgot,
the Starks of Winterfell.
The North Remembers
The North Remembers

From the outset I was cynical
perceiving he feigned dominical.
Deceiving, he reigned as principal
of the high school- ordained invincible.
Father Tully, tall with a big belly
flocked to the jocks
“hungry for their *****”
we potheads did mock
Evading his attention, we outfoxed.
He openly patted their *****
boys from all the classes.

I at sixteen once again in trouble
was sent to his office on the double
- his sacrosanct bubble
just for me and him - an unlikely couple.
He pretended kindness bluffing pardon
but intended vengeance stuffing a hard-on.
His simulating a comforting smile
was just guile churning his bile.
His arm around me in a faux embrace
peering up to his face seeking his grace
I realized this wasn’t my place.
His hand lewdly moved to my buttocks
his countenance drowned to a treacherous frown
his tongue slivering - a lecherous clown.
With his mouth agape
thinking an easy ****
but oddly lulled
that I was expelled.

Jeffrey Schmitz

No one wants to be here
they’d all rather be
at home with their own dinner
or maybe setting up the tree

The turkey has gone dry
the stuffing’s burnt and crispy
Aunt Tully’s drunk and slurring
to avoid her daughters hissy

The gravy’s congealed and cold
just like Uncle Sam’s heart
Sally knew she shouldn’t have come
this was a disaster from the start

Words across the table
like bombs and laser beams
let’s hope the littles
have no idea what they mean

Thanksgiving is a disaster
it’s like a raging war
better prepare for Christmas
if you make it that far

Apart at me in a latitude
Cross with the seams
Nostrum of commands, chartered
Owning for tomorrow, quid ad
Tully portentous of penmanship, questioning
If I had more battlecry moratorium felt lighter than the sword, but, took to the ethicism, to write it with serried disabuse
The revival of the crimson tide pegged for the trident of sorts from Martian landmasses, criminal smooth as the craters
Please open, the probes to the ice of the closest countries first, make global anarcho stuff our moral precedent
Aiming for life, you tend to lose sight of it all, along with the opportunity to make amends.
Sorry, the germane nature went out of nature, this is specifically directed at the single simpletons in the simplicity of laying out
Words in the degree of simple logical statements, which can neither be passive or active
Passionate really isn't that our motives are both not driven by passion and ambition
Curious, isn't I look intolerable in the promising outlook
Carelessness isn't it that I know love is growing a par two with my liveliness
Comeliness, truantly nuanced underbellied, becoming or bellied or becoming in the transcendence of the existential crafty wiz of nihilism that feels like your
Furr it's relaxed by its poetry, somehow we die off too young like some poet at our age
Polymaths and opsimaths might be alike, in some time
I've hope I've found a place in the line
Clever and quick climbing through the snakes on the lazing sun of the ladder come from the tinted passive line
Sunset horizon mindful of your mindreading crimson tide
Placid of the mature of the maternal greed, beyond the, claiming the doors
Of the possibilities, probabilities of the fraught lives among the cosmos of the karmic lives
Of the obliqueness of the strychnine streets that can be moonlit in the daydream of the sonic youth