Dear Bri,

My therapist asked me if
I thought I should
Write you a letter for closure
I was confused and said no
I was done with us
Over it
That was a few months ago
I can see now
What she might have seen then
I am carrying a lot of anger
A lot of pain and resentment
Because of the way you treated me
And how victimized you painted yourself
As you shamed me publicly
All over social media
For "cheating" on you when
We definitely have different understandings
Of what constitutes cheating
And then you took it a step further
To spread your delusions about me
When we could've had a conversation

You shamed me so hard at the end
Because "you didn't even know me anymore"
When you clearly didn't know me at all
I told you when we first met
I do not want kids and
I never want to get married
And you were surprised
After year and a half
When you bring it up
And I tell you again
I do not want that life
You cried and said we would be nothing then
So I bought you a ring
I figured, whatever
If we were going to be forever
I might as will compromise
Something you didn't understand much at all
Especially when it came to ***

After we broke up
You wrote me a letter
In it you attacked me for
Never having *** when you wanted
Since you'd have it with me
When you didn't want to
(Something I was very unaware of
And extremely not ok with)
Apparently I should've done the same
But I didn't want *** if you didn't
I could've ******* myself if that were the case
I didn't ask you to do that for me
I wish you didn't
Because love isn't about *** frequency
It's more about communication
And honesty
And I'm not perfect at that
But I tried

When I sent you an article
About why I avoid ***
Due to a ****** assault
You got mad at me
"What am I supposed to do,
Just wait until you're ready?"
Yes.
If you respected me
Then you would

And when I talked to you about
My interest in polyamory
You didn't give me a chance
To even discuss it more
You immediately said no
And that was that
You said you wouldn't change your mind
Which I should have known since
When I became friends with
A member of the church do you dragged me to
(Even though I'm an atheist)
You were mad because they were poly
And you didn't want me "getting any ideas"
And when that approach didn't work
You claimed that my being friends with them
Conflicted with your friendship with another member
Because they were connected negatively through an ex
Because we can't have our own friends?

But that's exactly what I needed
Because you shamed me so hard
For the things I care about most
That I lost myself in us
I no longer existed
Because I was "too radical"

So you didn't really love me
Because you didn't know me
You loved who you made me
Or whoever you saw in your mind
And somehow you were surprised
When I decided to leave
Because of course you did nothing wrong
But I was suffocating
So I left to explore myself
And my potential polyamorous identity

But then you were willing to try it
You didn't want to lose me
So you said you'd try an open relationship
But
Only under strict guidelines
And if I didn't agree to them
You wouldn't try
You called it "compromise"
But there's a huge difference
Between boundaries
And rules
That's not how polyamory thrives
So I left.

And a few months later
We talked about it again
You gave me more rules
"No other romantic partners "
Which would've required me
To leave who I was presently seeing
Just to have *** with randoms
And commit emotionally
Only to you
But I also had to agree
To eventually move up north with you
Regardless of my own life aspirations
Because I never really mattered to you
Only the fake picture you had of me

And all of those rules
Occurred while you simultaneously
Shamed polyamory
And me for wanting it
Because "I just didn't want to commit"
It is "an abomination"
"Disgusting"
Just because you didn't understand it
Because you were afraid of it

You didn't understand me
But you "loved" me
And you were the victim
Right?
I'm not saying I'm not at fault
But you are too

When a white woman is victimized they'll scour the streets, fan out, stop,
harass, detain, arrest any black man. Any one they can finger for the crime.

They say things such as they all look alike or something to that effect.

A black woman is abused they'll look around, see white males everywhere but they cannot find any suspects? None of them fit the description.

Why is that?

Yeah, that's right, it is because they all look alike! Too many of 'em. Can't arrest everyone now can we? People have rights!

Yep,
          I suppose they do...



As long as you consider them,
                                                        "­people,"  
                                                    ­                           -they have rights.

[Verse 1]
Monster sized swag; not modest bout my splendor
Marvel at the flag and I'm the ultimate avenger
Buck Rodgers, D-Bird yep I'm the number one contender,
So I gotta uphold this rep of bein uncontrollable
so I'll take the lead, I hold the world beneath my feet
I'm a fiend, elite
Haze so cloudy cause I be blowin Swisher Sweets
Drug addiction is my disease
It's my expertise
See here's the masterpiece:
Raps lobotomize
I'm traumatized since 1993

[Verse 2]
Victimized by the lies
of this trifilin enterprise
You can front but you can't hide
There's no fault behind your eyes
So I hope this insult will suffice
It should come as no surprise
A grin will spread across my face
From side to side
My ***** mouth will mesmerize
hypnotized, memorize
the words that escape my lips
I'm a degenerate unabridged uncut
You're a ******* ****
Go hang yourself from a bridge
Here's a rope, I hope you choke

******* ******* smoochie smoochie
Only chains you got is Gucci
Y’all basic brothers rep that set
But fake like that 2chi

[Verse 3]
man I get so high,
Now watch me get higher
Watch me take flight
As my wings soar skyward
You know I'ma fighter
So watch me take my place
As I eat this rap game up
and then spit it in your face
Now pass me a lighter
see me rollin while I bake
I mean I'm not a pastry maker,
but I still bake for the sake
My rhymes are so ill
They're gonna make you sick
I be tweetin on my twitter
While Betty Crocker ***** my ****, uh

[Verse 4]
Reid between the lines son and please proceed with caution
Alien splittin kilos, I be one tweaked ****** martian
I'm five steps ahead and these haters ****** forfeit
You four feet tall and I'm so high I'm in ****** orbit
Make these snitches sleep with fishes
How ****** vicious spittin mischief
****** trippin out these hypocrites
Dishin out these disses which
Bein inconsiderate
in this fast paced game of chase
But if I wanted to catch your drama
I'd just go check my facebook page *****

Don’t use that word
that loveless, cheap hotel card with that sham of a fine print
don’t ignite my wrath
by devaluing it’s worth, or even giving it power
ignore it’s event like I do
a purity ring
a shackled serf
don’t cheapen my experience with your experience
of what is mine
don’t touch me
swallow me whole
engross me, emboss yourself into my body
don’t touch me
don’t even bring yourself to touch me
I've been rattled out of my lithe little girl's ribcage
child's innocence
shaken out of my hair
I've been mauled by foreign hands
I've been contained by religious crusaders
I've been trampled by meaning
I've been impaled by silence
I've been wretched from love
I've been stolen by hades
I've become the defining moment of your ego's shameless pride
my meaning has been baffled
it has been led
it has dived instead
to the groves of the underworld
divided in two parts for this equinox of existence
my child’s fingers
pried, wretched, from its golden enlightenment
pulled
by the untouch
and the wrong touch
the false meaning
and the absent truth
I am a survivor
I am my own caged victim
I keep her in my stomach
hidden behind my intestines
immersed in my guts
and my bruised pride
that is where I keep her
from you
and the sensations you evoke
the feeling that rattles my nerves
and twists them in confusion
I don’t want to hear your caricature
of my painful soul twisting experience
or HERS
I am enraged!
I am grieving!
I am rejecting!
I am pleading!
I am split from the genitalia up
and the heart down
DONT REMIND ME
please don’t send me into Vietnam
when I am simply relaxing my levied body into your bed
I haven’t the control
PUSH, PUSH, PUSH
PULL, PULL, PULL
SEVER, SEVER
they send me out
he pulls me in
I send me out
I hope to be tugged gently somewhere far away
different from here
in hopes of a real man
a saintly man, devoid of churchly meaning
and satanic undertaking
to embrace me while my fractures are filled
with porcelain
comfort me in my tears
with your humble arms, hands, thumbs
I’ve lived nightmares
that can’t even be rendered from medieval children’s stories
I am under constant running faucets of pain
I am the active participant in my own narcosis
the sound of screaming children sends me into rooms of interrogation
into a meaning of my own
the death of the world’s morality
sends me into spiraling questions of my own
I am sweating from my own polygraph
I am juggling an urge for a spiritual and triumphant out of place uproar
in a quiet, unassuming, un-related home
I am running barefoot after the stars
until my heart hemorrhages
until my lungs collapse
until my feet are caked with sharp rocks
until these rivers from my eyes run cracked dry
tears pooled from somewhere so deep and treacherous
I dont even know where the water is kept
even with my own fingers in the dam
I trust not the water of prisons
I cannot come within proximity of these wound
You slaughterer of divine innocence
You godless heathen
sacrificing the bodies of small celestial creatures
at the bonfire of your debauched and putrid humanity
you thief of love and light
of trust
and connection
I cannot bring myself into the inner reaches of love for fear of the inner reaches of you
I am reverted to the first thought to imprint upon my soft mind
the soft mind of a small and unsupervised animal
but I can only touch it with my lips and my imagination
unable to bring it behind my mouth
for what pain it has caused me
what paralysis it wrought into me
In my quiet, exhausted body
as it's administered to
in its aloofness
by my own lovely composure of compassion
in it's illuminated internal insight
flittering trust in cosmic righteousness
do I also come to bolster faith
that this baser nature will one day be sanctified
like a burning house, full of plagued infested linen
de-shelved like memories of pain on loop
so myself and all the other victimized creatures can find rest upon thier weary eyelids

Suffering
is the landscape
of life.

Hope is
the sustenance
of life.

To avoid suffering
is to avoid life.

Love yourself.

Love other's
even though
they don't
deserve it.

Be gentle
with yourself,
even when utterly
fatigued and
victimized.

Make you life
a poem that
you create
and hold it
close to your
heart.

The best
you can do
is all you can do.

  ~mce

1.

From our
safe windows,
we crane our necks,
rubbernecking
past the slow
motion wreckage
unfolding in Homs.

We remain
perfectly
perched
to marvel at
the elegant arc of
a mortar shell
framing tomorrows
deep horizon,
whistling through
the twilight to
find its fruitful
mark.

In the now
we keep
complicit time,
to the arrest
of beating hearts,
snapping fingers
to the pop
of rifle cracks,
swooning to
the delicious
intoxication of
curling smoke
lofting ever
upward;
yet
thankfully
remain
distant
enough to
recuse any
possibility
of an
intimate
nexus
with the
besieged.

2.

From our
safe windows,
we behold the
urgent arrivals of
The Friends of Syria
demanding
clean sheets
and 4 Star
room service at a
Tunisian Palace
recently cleaned
and under new
management
promising a
much needed
refurbishment.

The gathered,
a clique of
this epochs
movers and shakers,
a veritable
rouges gallery of
ambassadorial
prelates, Emirs and
state department
bureaucrats
summoned
with portfolio
from the
darkest corners
of the globe.

They are
eager to
sanctify
the misery
of Homs,
deflect and
lay blame
with realpolitik
rationalizations,
commencing
official commissions
of inquiry,
deliberating
grave considerations,
issuing indictments
of formal charges for
Crimes Against
Humanity
while
remaining
urgently
engrossed
in the fascination
of interviewing
potential
process servers
to deliver the bad news
to Bashar al-Assad
and his soulless
Baathist
confederates,
if papers
are to be
served.

Yes, the diplomats
are busy meeting
in closed rooms.

In hushed circles
they whisper
into aroused ears,
railing against
Russia’s
gun running
intransigence
and China’s
geopolitical
chess moves.

Statesmen
boast of the
intrepid justice
of tipping points
and the moving poetry
of self serving tales,
weighing the impact
of stern sanctions
amidst the historical
confusion of the
asymmetrical
symmetries
of civil war.

Caravans
of Arab League
envoys roll up
in silver Bentleys,
crossing deserts
of contradictory
obfuscations,
navigating the
endless dunes
with hand held
sextants of
hidden agendas.

The heroic
Bedouins are
eager to offload
their baggage
and share
on the ground
intelligence from
their recent soirées
across Syria.

They beg
a quick fix,
the triage of a
critical catharsis
to bleed their
brains dry
of heinous
recollections,
pleading
release from a
troubled conscience
victimized by
the unnerving paradox
of reconciling
discoveries of
perverse voyeurism
with the sanctioned
explanations
of their respective
ruling elites.

The bellies
of these
scopophiliacs
are distended;
grown queasy
from a steady diet
of malfeasance
an ulcerated
world parades
in continuous loop;
spewing the raw feeds
of real time misery;
forcibly fed
the grim
visions of
frantic
fathers
rushing
the mangled
carcases
of mortally
wounded
children
to crumpled
piles of smashed
concrete that were
once hospitals.

We despondently
ask how
much longer
must we
look into
the eyes
of starving
children
emaciated from
the wanton
indifference
of the world?


3.

From our
safe windows
we wonder
how much
longer can
the urgent
burning
ambivalence
continue
before it
consumes
our common
humanity in
a final
conflagration?

My hair already
singed by the
endless firestorms
sweeping the prairies
of the world.

How can we survive
the trampling hoards,
the marauding
plagues of acrimony
fed by a voracious
blood lust aspiring to
victimize the people
of Homs and a
thousand cities
like it?


4.

From my safe
window I stand in witness
to the state execution of
refugees fleeing the
living nightmare
of Baba Amr.

The ****** of innocents,
today's newly minted martyrs,
women and children
cornered, trapped
on treacherous roads,
mercilessly
slaughtered and
defiled in death
to mark the lesson
of a ruthless master
enthralled with the
power of his
sadistic fascist
lordship.

I cannot avert my eyes
marking sights
of pleading women
begging for the
lives of their children
in exchange for
the gratification
of a sadists
lust.

My heart
is impaled
on the sharp
spear of
outrage
beholding
careening
children mowed
down with the
serrated blades
protruding
from marauding
jeeps of laughing
soldiers.

I drop
to my knees
in lakes of
tears
reflecting
a grotesque
horror stricken
image of myself.

My eyes have
murdered my soul.

The ghastly images
of Homs have chased
away my Holy Ghost
to the safety of a child's
sandbox hidden away
in a long forgotten
revered memory.


5.

From my safe window
I seethe with anger
demanding vengeance,
debating how to rise
to meet the obscenity of
the Butcher of Damascus.

The sword of Damocles
dangles so tantalizingly close
to this tyrants throat.  

The covered women
of Homs scream prayers
“may Allah bring Bashar to ruin”

Dare I pray
that Allah trip the
horsehair trigger
that holds the
sword at bay?

Do I pick up
the sword
a wield it
as an
avenging
angel?

Am I the
John Brown
of our time?

Do I organize
a Lincoln Brigade
and join the growing
leagues of jihadists
amassing at the
Gates of Damascus?

Will my righteous
indignation fit well
in a confederacy
with Hamas and
al-Qaeda as my
comrades in arms?

Do I succumb to
the passion of hate
and become just
another murderous
partisan, or do I
commend the power
of love and marshal
truth to speak with
the force of
satyagraha?

I lift a fervent prayer
to claim the justice
of Allah’s ear,
“may the knowing one
lift the veil of foolishness
that covers my heart in
cloaks of resent, cure
my blindness that ignores
my raging disease of
plausible deniability
ravaging the body politic
of humanity.”

6.

Indeed,
physician heal thyself.

I run to embrace my
illness.

I pine to understand it.

I undertake the
difficult regimen
of a cure to eradicate
the terrible affliction.

This
pernicious
plague,
subverting
the notion
of a shared
humanness
is a cunning
sedition that
undermines
the unity of
the holy spirit.  

The bell from
the toppled steeples
still tolls, echoing
across the space of
continents and eons
of temporal time.

The faithful chimes
gently chides us
to remove the wedge
of perception that
separates, divides
and undermines.

Time has come
to liberally
apply the balm
that salves the
open wounds
so common to
our common
human condition.

The power of prayer
is the joining of hands
with others racked
with the common
affliction of humanness.

Allah,  
My eyes are wide open,
my sacred heart revealed,
my sleeves are rolled up,
my memory is stocked,
my soul filled with resolve,
my hand is lifted
extended to all
brothers and sisters.
Lift us,
gather us
into one
loving embrace.

Selah


7.

From the safe
windows of
our palaces
we live within
earshot of
the trilling
zaghroutas
of exasperation
flowing from
the besieged
city smouldering
under Bashar’s
symphony of terror.

Our nostrils
fill with the
acrid plumes
of unrequited
lamentations
lifting from the
the burning
destruction
of shelled
buildings.

Our eyes spark
from the night
tracers
of sleeking
snipers
flitting along
the city’s
rooftops.

The deadly jinn
indiscriminately
inject the
paralysis of
random fear
into the veins
of the city
with each
skillful
head shot.

These
ghoulish
assassins
lavish in their
macabre work;
like vultures
they eagerly
feast on the
corpses of their ****,
the stench of bloated
bodies drying in the
sun is the perfume
that fills their nostrils.


8.

From our
safe window
we discern the
silhouettes of militants
still boldly standing
amidst the
mounting rubble of an
unbowed Homs
shouting;

Allah Akbar!!!
Allah Akbar!!!
Allah Akbar!!!

raising pumped fists,
singing songs
of resistance,
dancing to
the revelation of
freedom,
refusing to
be coward by
the slashing
whips of a
butchers
terrible
sword.


9.

From my
safe window
my tongue laps
the pap
of infants
suckling from
the depleted
teats of mothers
who cannot cry
for their dying
children;
tears fail
to well from
the exhaustion
of dehydrated
pools.

10.

From my
safe window
my heart stirs
to the muezzin
calling the
desperate faithful
from the toppled
rubble of dashed
minarets.

We can
no longer
shut our ears
to the adhan
of screams
the silent
voices that echo
the blatant injustice
of a people under siege.


11.

From my
safe window,
I pay
Homage to Homs
and call brothers
and sisters to rise
with vigilant
insistence
that hostilities
cease and
humanity be
upheld,
respected and
protected.


12.

From my safe
window
I perceive
the zagroutas
of sorrow
manifest as a
whiling hum,
a sweeping
blue mist,
levitating
the coffins
from the rubble
of ravaged streets.

The swirling
chorus of
mourning
joins my
desperate
prayers;
rising in
concert
with the
black billows
of smoke
dancing
away
from the
flaming
embers
of scorched
neighborhoods.


13.

From my
safe window
I heed
the fluttering
wings
of avenging
angels
furiously
batting
as they
climb
the black
plumes,
lifting from
the scattered bricks
of the desecrated
city.

It is the
Jacob’s
Ladder
for our
time;
marking
a new
consecrated
place
where
a New Adam
is destined
to be formed
from the
pulverized
stones of
desolation.

14.

From our
safe windows
we peer into
resplendent
mirrors
beholding
the perfect image of
ourselves
eying
falling tears
dripping blood,
coloring death
onto the
blanched sheets
of disheveled beds.


15.

From our
safe windows
our voices are silenced,
our words mock urgency
our thoughts betray comprehension
our senses fail to illicit empathy
our action is the only worthy prayer


16.

From my
safe window
I hear the
mortar shells
walking toward
my little palace,
the crack
of a ******
shot
precedes
the wiz of a
passing bullet
whispering
its presence
into my
waxen
ear.


17.

From my
safe window,
my palms scoop
the rich soil
of the flower boxes
perched on my sill.
I anoint the tender
green shoots of  the
Arab Spring
with an incessant flow
of bittersweet tears.

Music selection:
John Coltrane
A Love Supreme
Acknowledgment

Oakland
2/28/12
jbm

To put our current legal situation into context you have to ask one basic question; what is law? Is law as we have been lead to believe, the codification of statutes defining what is illegal or not? Or is there some inherent property of moral righteousness that must exist for that law to have force?

I will argue that there is a moral component of law that must be present to make the system of law work. I am, of course, aware that there are many places that laws are passed that have no moral basis at all. There are dictatorships around the world that oppress their peoples and use their codified statutes to imprison and **** any who dissent.

The ultimate example of this is was the **** Germany government who made it legal to **** Jews. It was not only legal, but a system of laws was implemented to guide their extermination. But those laws, even though written out with penalties for those who did not follow them by the legislature, were illegal.

It is a basic component of the human being to know right from wrong. It is the reason that human beings set up laws in the first place. They are set up to make sure that innocents are not victimized by the predacious in our societies. In virtually every place that a human society exists, whether on a group, tribal or civilization level, there are always laws that govern behavior. Even those that break the laws have a sense of righteousness. In prison populations, if the prisoners feel that they are being treated in a fair and just manner they will comply with the rules and follow the system. Take away that feeling of just and fair treatment and prison riots and mayhem ensues. The prisoners realize that they have broken the law and when treated humanely will accept their punishment for the most part. The prisoners know that they have committed a wrong and they knew the possible penalty beforehand and knew what they risked. If torture, mal-treatment and other injuries are added to the punishment then a situation of self-righteousness is set up. The only way to control a prison population under those circumstances is with solitary confinement and complete isolation; if left to exist within prison society it would quickly conflagrate into confrontation.

In places where law exists without any moral authority there is always rebellion brewing just under the surface of society. The dictators and bureaucracies of these societies must rule with an iron fist because they know that one moment of slackness will have them swept from power and executed or exiled. Every single individual who is subject to these laws knows that they are illegal. How can they be illegal if they are written into law you might ask; Is that not the definition of law?

My argument is that it is the moral component of the law that is essential for it to work. It has nothing to with writing a statute and everything to do with human nature. We are after all the ones who create the laws, then write them and in the end follow them. It is at the very core of our nature to organize and codify law because we are innately social by nature and always end up forming some type of society that must have rules. It is also our own feeling of self-righteousness that makes us create the laws.

Certain things are innately wrong and one person should not be able to do this or that to another, and that is the basic creator of law. Laws don’t start out as regulations to govern society. They start out as basic rules of moral behavior; don’t steal from those in our community, don’t **** anyone and don’t try to take my wife. It is this same sense of self-righteousness that drives us to rebel when we know that a law is being applied without any righteous basis.

Take traffic laws for an example. Someone is driving down the highway when they suddenly see blue lights in the rearview. They were oblivious to their speed, lost in thought, and look down at the speedometer and see that they are doing 70 M.P.H. When the cop walks up and gives them a speeding ticket for doing 70 M.P.H. in a 50 M.P.H zone, there is little room for self-righteousness. Most people knowing that they broke the law, and one enacted for public safety, will accept the ticket and pay it without even showing up in court. The next example is the opposite.

Someone is rolling down the highway and the only difference in the scenario is that when they look down they see that they are only doing 45 M.P.H. They continue on for a while, waiting for the cop to go around them. When they eventually pull over, part of it is curiosity as to why he would be stopping them. In this case when a 70 M.P.H. ticket is handed out the reaction is going to be entirely different. That person will go to court. In addition to going to court, if not resolved there, they will spend large amounts of time and money to right the injustice. They will actually spend time and money far out of proportion to the actual injustice that happened because they are self-righteous.

Now imagine that the law was written like this: If you are driving down the highway you can be pulled over and issued a speeding ticket at any time no matter what your speed was. That is the point where the law goes against human nature. People would naturally begin to rebel against it because of its inherent injustice. In the second case it is not only that person’s right to rebel against the law, but also their moral obligation. They have a moral obligation to rebel because they should be seeking to re-establish moral law. If they live in human society then moral law, compatible with human nature should be the rule. If this is not the case, then they are being set up to have very bad things happen.

The Jews in **** Germany also had a moral obligation to fight and for the most part they did not (With the notable and heroic exception of the Warsaw ghetto and a few others) and were led to their slaughter. They had a moral obligation not just to themselves, but to their fellow Jews and compatriots. They were obligated to save their children, their mothers and fathers and other humans and in the end, for the most part did not.

Instead they followed the laws of **** Germany. (Just as the German soldiers at the Nuremberg trials did) They agreed to be registered because to not do so would be breaking the law. They showed up in groups to be transported away because to not do so would be breaking the law. They gave up their goods and businesses and money because not to do so would be breaking the law. There were, of course, severe penalties for breaking the law such as being imprisoned or just disappearing into the night and that drove most to comply.

I know that faith also played a part for many and I am not judging their actions or inaction. I am simply stating the results of what happened by their following the law and putting forward the fact that we are all morally obligated to act when law becomes illegal or immoral.

When law has lost its moral authority and becomes nothing more than something punitive to arbitrarily punish enemies then it is not true law; or at least not true to human nature , by which we all act. In that case all the law becomes is a fear of retribution. No one cares if they break the law for they feel no guilt about doing so and we humans, for the most part, are moral beings. Personally I don’t rob people because it is against the law. I don’t rob people because of the fact that it is morally wrong and I have no desire to violently take from another to gain wealth. I will die before I take the sustenance of another to live.

Once the moral component of law is removed only fear of punishment remains. If someone follows the law it is only because they don’t want to be fined or imprisoned; It I not because they have a moral imperative. But fear only goes so far; when the law becomes illegal its moral authority is transferred to those against whom it is used. They now have righteousness on their side and righteousness has a way of cancelling out fear.

Counter-intuitively, the more injustice that is piled on the more it is met with resistance. The IRA is an excellent example. By the 1960’s their membership was flagging and their armed struggle against the British was at very low ebb. That all changed on ****** Sunday when British troops opened fire into a crowd of demonstrators and killed and wounded a number of them. Instead of being frightened by this, they were outraged and active resistance against them doubled. A vicious cycle was started as the British escalated their actions in response to the increase in attacks and therefore caused even more.

The result of the British crackdown was the highest membership in the IRA in history and the start of a real shooting war. The level of violence escalated to a point never seen before and eventually drove the Brits to sue for peace. The danger of enrolling in the outlawed organization was more than offset by the sense of self-righteous outrage that was generated by the deaths and military lock down of entire neighborhoods. When one joined the IRA it was not a matter of if you would die or be imprisoned, but rather when. Still, even knowing what the outcome would be the ranks of the IRA swelled to enormous numbers. When the British military began a covert assassination program to **** suspected IRA members and affiliates, instead of instilling fear it just added to the sense of outrage and drove more to join and fight.

It was the (Legal) injustice of what was being done that gave the moral righteousness to the IRA and drove them to war. I bring this all up because we are now, in our own society, entering an era of legal lawlessness. We will be forced to make choices about how we respond when confronted with these laws. From the patriot act to the NSA spying, the NDAA authorization of indefinite detention, the IRS and the DOJ it is becoming clear that we are living in an increasingly lawless society.

The lawlessness is not on the part of the people, but rather on the part of those writing the law. The irony is that as the laws become more illegitimate the numbers of them are increasing exponentially. There are already so many federal laws on the books that at any given time any given individual is guilty of a crime. We have now become beholden to the very institutions that are supposed to be serving us as a society. Instead of serving us, the people, they now serve the bureaucracy instead. The bureaucracy and the institutions thereof have become the center of law giving rather than we as citizens. The law, rather than protecting us has become an instrument to protect the bureaucracy and punish those who disagree with it.

We have come to the point where our laws are becoming as corrupt as any given banana republic and if we do not actually want to become one, then we need to make a stand and say enough is enough. I am sure that while I have been writing this that I have committed at least three crimes; either by what I have written or done or thought or possibly what type of lighting I used. Do I care? No not at all. My sense of self- righteous indignation has grown to the point that I have no fear. I have no fear of death or imprisonment. The level of outrage has grown in me to the point that I will go to war.

Will they put me in prison? Go ahead lock me up with a captive audience and let me speak the truth to them; I will leave with an army of self-righteous individuals. Of course the speaking of this truth is illegal in prison, but at this point what is law? We all have hard choices coming up in the future; choices that could affect the rest of our lives and need to decide how to act. In the end how we act is going to be influenced by how the legal system acts. Let me end this with a question: If you receive a letter from the IRS informing you that you are subject to an audit, is your hard drive going to crash? I know that mine is.

The fire from hell burn your soul
you run for cover, filled with fear
And even the shadow has lost its life
you can't escape, you've been victimized!
Exposed to the truth, have you lost your mind?!
All these years, all your lies,
will now be known, you can't hide aside
You've fallen from grace
You're no more praised,
To eternity you'll burn
the prayers are no more concerned !

I am the prodigal daughter
of Hestia--
Goddess of hearth,
warmth,
embers that do not fade,
for they glow as softly
as lightning bugs.

But this time,
I will not be returning home.

Don't you see?

I've burned it down already.

Perhaps there shall exist no redemption
for my pyromanic sins.

They could not save
Sylvia Plath
as she ****** her head into the oven,
carbon monoxide stealing away
her last strands of breath.

(Sadness climbs up my throat in
stalagmites of flame,
rises from the chasm of my soul like bile,
like a phoenix reborn.)

They could not save
Joan of Arc,
whose flesh screamed out among
the ringlets of fire
and threads of cinder
that consumed it
so mercilessly.

(No, I am not a witch--
just a demi-goddess,
just a dangerous woman
But, unlike Joan of Arc,
I am no Saint either.)

They could not save Pompeii
whose inhabitants lay
victimized
asphyxiated
stolen
by the magma regurgitated by
the Almighty Vesuvius

(I cannot decide who I am
more similar to--
the inhabitants of Pompeii,
or the lava itself)

Perhaps then,
there is no saving a woman like me--
a woman forged from brimstone,
Hell's very own Femme Fatale.

I wear lighter fluid
atop my collar bone like its fragrance;
braid singed ribbon into my hair,
its ends charred and
curling upwards like tendrils of smoke;
rouge my lips with gunpowder.

Kiss me and
bite the bullet, darling--
make love to me
and you will combust.

But oh!

How these men will  bite their lip
at the thought of
******* me,
of dipping their fingertips
into the molten pools
that dwell between my thighs
similar to the way
a mere girl
(I, 16 years old)
is fascinated by the prospect
of baptizing her own melancholic
hands in candle wax.

(Who's the real ******* here, Baby?


Sincerely,
your Filthy Pyrophilliac.)


I am a
shadow charmer,
arsonist
the  Siren
of this Inferno
(wanted for her crimes).

Perhaps I was never the epitome of darkness,
perhaps I simply
lured the darkness towards me
(sorrow and the devil too.)

It's funny now that I think about it,
how the stars too reside in darkness,
how, when I wish upon them,
I am really only wishing on fire.

And where there is fire,
there is destruction;
it's no wonder all these dreams--
those of
love
magic
poetry--
have shuddered to ash.

Still, l I find myself making
snow angels in the ashes,
stick my tongue out,
let the remnants of desire
scorch my taste buds.

Here I lie
like an extinguished cigarette,
my use fulfilled and discarded.
But that's just fate,
stars ain't too fond
of nicotine, ya see,
ain't too fond of me
even though the very atoms
that comprise my being
are made of the stuff of galaxies.

But, oh, how these galaxies
have escaped my brooding grasp.

I do whatever it takes
to re-ignite what has been
lost--
chew on matchsticks,
let the splinters sear themselves
into my tongue;
lap at the iridescent gasoline puddles
that wade along
lonely streets corners;
howl beneath paper lanterns,
for both the sun and the moon
have forsaken me.

I do whatever it takes
to remember where I come from--
a state of limbo,
wherein I am simultaneously
angel (falling) |and| demon (the fallen)

What am I without flame?

Flame--
they could not save me from it,
from burning.

But perhaps the peril was never in burning;
perhaps it was in  burning out;
perhaps it was in disintegrating.

*****.
Abused.
Photographed in the ****.
or even,
had a sextual comment told too.

Doesn't label you,
anything less than how you see you.

So stop **** shaming your victimized chicks,
who didn't seem to like you from your un puberized ****,

No one asked for this ****,
so do not blame them for it,

As a young girl,I was taught that I shouldn't hate boys,I shouldn't fight back to them regardless of what they did to me because it wasn't ladylike,they probably only did it because they liked me and boys will be boys,right? I tried to remind myself that when in fourth grade,I went home with cuts and bruises because a boy was ****** that I did better than him on our English test and he wanted to get even with me.I didn't fight back because as my teacher had always said,"that's just how it is,honey,boys will be boys".It was one of the two things that she had said to me that never left my mind,along with the reminder of how a real boy and a real girl can be distinguished from the "others".
I was twelve when I was molested repeatedly but I didn't do or say a thing except try to get out of this *****,wretched skin because it was probably my own fault, I shouldn't have such precocious ******* at an early age.
Ha!What was I thinking?Going through puberty like that,looking all sexualized when I know that grown men cannot control their urges.
Stupid little girl, how could she forget that boys will be boys?
I was thirteen, when I was told about the "proper" way to dress and act because I might provoke the boys and they could be ruined for life.
I was fourteen when I was first told what my hips,my thighs,my legs,my bottoms and my chest should be like,in the way that most boys like.
Because the only way I'll ever validate my existence is when a boy takes me as his and to do that I should be what most boys like:
not too tall,not too short,not too skinny but also not fat,witty,funny and smart but I also need to know when to shut the hell up.
And I can't change that because it's the unspoken rule in our world,and no,I can't try to convince the boys either (my ability to know when to shut up is put to use here,because it doesn't matter if you're the oppressed, you need to shut the hell up and grovel before the patriarchy just like everyone else) because that's just the way they are and boys will be boys.
I was fifteen when I witnessed the torture that some of my guy friends experienced because they acted like "girls",as if my gender is an insult, as if being a girl automatically makes you weak and helpless.(Since when did being supposedly invincible and not crying made a boy a real man?I don't think that's what real masculinity is about.Does being a real man or woman come with corresponding terms and conditions?)
It was only a few months ago when a ****** walked free despite destroying the life of a college girl.He did not get convicted because she was reportedly drunk and he was a boy and boys will be boys. (So, who will take the blame?the alcohol or the girl?were they the ones who forced themselves on someone against that someone's will?)
This case took me back to a decade ago when one of my best friends was sexually abused by an older man but nobody helped him, they told him to just toughen up, **** isn't real for him because he was a boy and boys will be boys.
And I wonder,when will these monsters finally be convicted for their crimes?
When will the guilty boys be held accountable for their actions?
When will the pain of other boys finally be considered valid,when will being of the *** that they are stop making them "not really victims"?
When will one's gender stop being an excuse or in some cases—serve as a derogatory name?
When will the screams,cries and pleas of women abused and victimized everywhere be loud enough for you?
Loud enough so that you might actually feel their agony creep in your bones,consume your whole being that all you'd want to do is crawl out of your skin,loud enough so that you might actually begin to understand how it feels like to be us,objectified and dehumanized,loud enough so that you might actually hear the pleas of boys and other men everywhere,asking to be freed from gender roles that limits their ability to exist beyond labels or to feel pain.
I wonder just when will you stop using my gender as an insult,just when will you stop telling the world how a real man or woman should be?
Please do tell because the little faith in humanity that still resides in us is slowly fading.
From where I see it,I feel as if there's no hope.
There will be no hope as long you all remain slaves to bigotry and the patriarchy.
I guess,there's no hope for your mothers,daughters,even other boys and young girls like me as of this time.
And maybe,when another rabid man decides that he wants as his meal for the day,like I am meat,like I am something to be consumed and spent,I would just have to accept my fate.
Maybe,as my lifeless and ravished body lies motionless in an alley somewhere, you would be shaking your head, condemning the girl who was stupid enough to walk alone at night,unaccompanied,the girl who was "asking for it" because she wore "revealing"clothes,the girl who probably got what was coming for her because she didn't know when to shut her mouth,the girl who thought she could exist the way she wanted when she knew full well that there are rules,stigmas and that boys will be boys.
-W.L.A.C

Those you haven’t victimized fear you.
Mighty and dreadful you seem.
Little do they know, you only seize flesh and control the mind.
You seize not the soul.
Hence be not proud.

You’ve dwelled in me for many years.
Imprisoned me to anti-epileptic drugs.
You’ve dispirited me.
You attack, seize, and control my mind.
Your attacks are but brief.

Epilepsy be not proud.
For I fear not what rescind only flesh.
I fear what abolish both soul and flesh.
Proportional to gravitational force I fell.
I’ve always find the forte to rise.

Epilepsy be not proud.
For against all odds, I’m still alive.
https://m.facebook.com/EpilepsyandCpfriends

Single
Exiled
Victimized
Empty
Nobody
Tired
Envious
Excluded
Noth­ing.

There has been a lot of talk going around on face-book and other social networking sites about how girls these days are becoming shameless and have no hesitation in showing of their bra straps from under their tops or wear hot pants in the public or go out partying till late at night. Why are girls being subjected to such comments and derogatory accusations that they are themselves responsible for being *****? No girl in this world would like to be *****. It is not their choice. They are forced to succumb to such untoward actions of men. Women are abducted and ***** whether be it at night or in sheer daylight. They are being made victims of allegations that it is because of their short clothes, their late night partying and the new WESTERN culture that men are aroused and hence are compelled to fall for such repulsive man-oeuvres. People generally call these, self-created problems by women.

Today, India is trying to emulate the WESTERN countries in every aspect. There is a lot of heat beating around the education system being followed by one of the biggest universities in the country as to whether to follow the footsteps of the WEST or not. Be it in the areas of education, fashion, ideals India is keeping up with the affluence of the west. Nowadays, India is seen as a modern country but one of the things that is keeping it down from becoming one of the developed countries is the excessive crime rate especially the brutality against the women of the country. Despite the increasing feminism in the country, women are being victimized almost daily. Irrespective of the efforts by the government to protect the women of this country, men don’t seem to adhere to the consequences.
It is so ironical, that in one of the biggest democratic country of the world where freedom of speech is a constitutional right given to all citizens, women, who are considered to be the “DEVI” and are given such importance and high stature, their voices are being muted when raised to protest against something evil happening to them.  Power and money play such important role in diminishing such evil deeds but only in the favor of men. Just for the sake of saying, men and women are considered equal but when it comes to the actual application of such laws, women are always pushed back.
Coming back to the point, women are not ***** because of the clothes they wear, women of all ages wear short clothes outside of India, then why is it only in India that women are ***** brutally and then blamed for the same. It is not the dressing sense of women that is the main rationale for women being *****, instead it is the mentality of men who cannot keep their junk in their pants after seeing a pretty girl/woman either wearing a short dress or a sari. Their testosterone level spikes up immediately when they see a woman irrespective of their age. If the clothes girls wear was the sole reason for women being *****, then what in god’s name explains the brutality against 3 yr old? ****** 3 yr old or even old women is just an act of shame and satisfaction for men.
Both men and women blame women for the disgusting act of ****. Being someone from the same ***, there are women who blame girls these days and also point a figure at their character when it comes to being assaulted. It is not like we roam around in bikinis or thongs in public; it is just a strap, a bra strap like any other strap of any other clothing like a tank top or camisole. Why should women always sacrifice and give away their wish of wearing what they want, dressing up how they like, and looking pretty? On one hand we are criticized for wearing such short clothes on the other hand we ourselves pity the women living in countries like Saudi Arabia, Dubai, where women are supposed to be covered from head to toe. Our own national dress being as elegant it is, wearing a sari also involves obvious visibility of one’s stomach. But, that is not an issue because it is our national dress. A woman wearing deep neck suites and blouses is not a cause for problem since they are our cultural dresses. Our culture, our values don’t teach us to characterize women on the basis of clothes they wear, a women wearing a sari is equally vulnerable of being a victim of a man’s ****** arousal as is a normal college going girl wearing shorts and spaghetti.
It is in the head of the male gentry, that their unfulfilled ****** needs lead to such disgraceful acts. If in India men are allowed to wear boxers and go out, or no body points a finger at them when they wear hipster jeans and roam around in public showing half of their underpants, then why is it that girls/women are subjected to such carping by the society.  
The convention that “all men are dogs” or “all men are the same” does not apply here. Because of some men, who have no control over themselves and are the culprits behind the discreditable the whole *** is seen as obnoxious people. Even in this world of crime there are men/boys who are decent and respect women be it a 3 yr old infant or an 80 yr old lady. Due to certain men, even such decent men have to go through the same amount of shame and abomination from women.
Our government has taken a few steps In favor of women’s safety by launching fast track courts and by implementing the penal code but the government alone cannot protect us. One of the articles said, “what if the government has banned the use of pepper spray, the red chilli powder used in the kitchen should be brought out of the four walls of the house and put to some greater use.” I totally agree with this comment, so what, if pepper spray is banned, carry chilli powder, carry a mini knife in your purse but just to be used for self-defense, go and take self-defense classes, learn various forms of martial art. Why sit at home and wait for the government to take some actions for our safety. India is a free country, do it yourself. Protect yourself. Save yourself from flagrant men who indulge in ****. Wear what you want, party all you want, make this country safe for yourself and other women. Take a step out of the house, do your thing fearlessly.

Fever-flushed children and
Broken bodies
Litter hospital halls like so much
Human refuse
….Wondering why
their need for care is treated so tepidly by a
Society which worships
Profits
Power and
Prestige
….Waiting while
they wallow in anguish as
Privacy
Paperwork and
Payment are
Debated by bureaucrats in cubicles
….Wanting to be refreshed and
restored to some measure of usefulness
….But
Free to Pursue Life on their terms in exchange for  
Silence
Acceptance and
Despair

Huddling for warmth and in
Fear of discovery
they assemble in rag-tag formation
having scaled formidable fences
Seeking freedom from
Poverty and oppression
Searching for work of any sort
….No matter how
Humiliating or
Hard
….No matter the
Cost or
Conditions
Disparaged and despised they labor
in hope that their children will have a chance for success
instead of suffering a similar fate
…..But
Free to Pursue Liberty
in a land where their presence is
Ignored if not Denied

Unkempt in camouflage
One-legged and
Vacant-eyed
he rolls his rickety wheelchair along grassy median with muted effort
displaying cardboard sign
childishly scripted
in one weather-worn and gnarled hand
while clutching a decapitated jug in the other
Forgotten
Forlorn, and
Discarded veteran
Victimized far more by country than foe
….But
Free to Pursue Happiness while
Begging on street corners as
Upright citizens dispense
Unwelcome opinions or
Pocket change with equal
Self-righteousness


Life
Liberty and the
Pursuit of happiness….
Ideals that slowly incinerate on the
Altar of Capitalism
….Songs forever lost in the
Cacophony now
Played on the
Instrument of Politics

It's mind control, mind control
Corruption of your thoughts, yeah
Destruction of your soul

Mind control, it's mind control
Corruption of your thoughts, yeah
Destruction of your soul

Don't let them mold your mind
They wanna control mankind
Seems like their only intention
Is to exploit the earth, yeah

And you trust in their deceit
Your mind causes your defeat
And so you become an invention
To distort this earth

Propaganda and lies
Is a plague in our lives
How much more victimized
Before we realize? Hey

It's mind control, mind control
Corruption of your thoughts, yeah
Destruction of your soul

Mind control, it's mind control
Corruption of your thoughts, yeah
Destruction of your soul

Ooh, Grandmaster
Let the people go
You put them in total confusion
To downs-troy their soul

For they practice what You preach
So they're always in Your reach
Hi-tech slavery in these days
It's mind control

They'll make it attractive to get man distracted
Corrupting your soul, polluting your soul
Destroying your soul, mind control

Mind control
Corruption of your thoughts, yeah
Destruction of your soul

Mind control, it's mind control
Corruption of your thoughts, yeah
Destruction of your soul

Yeah, yeah, yeah
Come on and get it together, brother man
What, what you say?

It's mind control, mind control
Corruption of your thoughts
Yeah, yeah, destruction of your soul

Mind control, it's mind control
Corruption of your thoughts, yeah
Destruction of your soul

(The truth is there for us to see)
It's mind control
Corruption of your thoughts, yeah
Destruction of your soul

(The truth is there for us to see)
It's mind control
Corruption of your thoughts, yeah
Destruction of your soul
(The truth is there for us to see, the truth is there for us to see)

She leaves a trail of broken heart
in her wake.
Like the River Styx, but
very much alive.

On the outside,
one would look at her and say
she's a faerie nymph
flighty, giddy and naive.

She treats boys like playthings-
they would say,
draw them to her and spit them out
her pixie pranks bereft of benevolence.

They are Theseus and Leucippus
heroes victimized by false love
they say,
the underdogs.
She is to blame.

On the inside, however,
it's a different story.
They fixate on her,
fall in love without consulting her first.

To them,
consent is an idea
and an abstract any-thing.
Something to be taken lightly or disregarded

You see,
consent is more than a verbal yes
and consent is more than ****** thing.

Consent is communicating your intent
before acting on it
and getting permission.

So it should be the same with falling in love.
No one owes anyone anything.
Best friend, dark loner type, new boy/girl in your life,
consider this before you vilify someone
for what they don't feel.

Poetry.
A form of catharsis used to
Subtly touch
Violently choke
Mentally ****

Words that cut so deep making the heartless feel
Words screaming with emotions leaving you paralyzed
Words gracefully gliding down the side of your cheek forcing you to smile
Captured in whatever trap the poet wants you in; victimized

Feeding into every word of the poet so easily
Thriving off the beauty that is poetry
Until you’re shouting

Take me!
The art of poetry now flows thorough my body
Becoming intertwined in their words
I absolutely LOVE poetry

II

Do not be afraid, my darling
I see you.
I see your tattered spirit
and stripped flesh
wandering in darkness.
Alas!
we are kindred,
you and I,
for I too have been
murdered.
I have died a hundred times
and I have lived a
hundred and one
We, who are dead
but still breathing,
are kindred.
I have been poisoned by
the nectar of lust. And
this nectar was
sweet and it was
intoxicating and it was
addictive and it was
******* lust.
It was fed to me by
a man posing as
a god and he kept
my goblet full and
I was paralyzed.
He was not a god
nor a man.
He was a snake,
a false prophet.
The nectar was
venomous and
my blood,
my body, and
mind were
laced with
paralytic venom
I could not move
and died waiting.
Alas!
We are kindred
you and I.
We who have died
waiting and paralyzed.
We who have been
murdered by false
prophets and snakes.
We are kindred with
Eve and the apples of
Eden, we who are
poisoned but  
still alive.
In this paralytic state
a surgeon came
and he said unto me
“I will let you be free”
and he cut into me.
He entered my chest
so delicately and
so eloquently he
whispered to me
“ Darling, if I cannot
keep you I can’t let
you be free.”
He wanted a
keepsake, a piece
of my heart.
Something which I
would never just
willingly part.
He took a small
piece though I
screamed to
his claim. This
was not my love,
just blood,
muscle, and veins.
Alas!
We are kindred
you and I.
We who walk around
with pieces that will
never be found.
We who have filled
the empty cavity with
other objects to
replace what can
never mended.
Do not fear, my darling
we are still pumping
blood and we
are still alive!
An artistic healer
found me wandering.
He said unto me,
“ My love, I see your
rough edges and you
are flawless to me
with all your perfect
imperfections.”
I was his canvas
that could be remade
to what he wanted
me to portray.
He molded me,
bent me,
folded me,
painted me.
He chiseled away
at places that
were already weak
places that were
untouched by people
like He. I was his
muse which he
misused, abused,
and attempted to
create and sculpt
art, which I was,
to his vision
of what I should be.
He coated me,
plastered me,
froze me in time but
paper machete is fragile
and I never asked to
be molded or painted.
Slowly I broke free
from thee. Death by
art was not meant
for me
Alas!
My darling,
do not be afraid.
We are kindred
you and I.
I see you in all
your molded glory
upon the altar
which he built
to display a creation
which he did not create.
I am the one
who chiseled
at the cement
and the plaster
and the paper
and the alter
so that we can
escape a different
type of cage.
I see you broken
but uncaged.
A builder of dreams
approached me and
he said unto me
“ You are a rarity
in a world full of
mediocrity. A rare
bird like you should
not be caged.”
He built me a castle
made of sand and
deafened me with
promises which
were lies. The tide
rolled in and castles
made of sand were
taken back to sea
and i was deaf
and I could not
hear the rumbling ,
the crumbling,
the mumbling as it
was all swept away.
I was asphyxiated by
the sand and sea
of empty promises
and lies
and expectations
that I found myself
chocking on.
Do not be afraid my darling.
Alas!
We are kindred
you and I.
We have
swallowed
and choked
and  inhaled
the dirt which
posed as sand.
We who have been
drowned in lies.
We who have
been buried and
have touched the
ocean floor at great
depths have come back
to the surface.
Alas!
We are still swimming.
We are the ones who
saw the shore and
returned to land
with our feet firmly
planted on sinking sand
and unsteady ground.
Hush my darling, and do
keep our secret safe.
Hush and never let them
know that we, who are
dead but living, are the
ones who created the shore.
We have a multitude of
little deaths. Deaths which
showed us life, joy, and
pain.
Alas!
My darling,
we are kindred
you and I.
We are the masochists.
We invite the murders in.
We who see the axe in his
hand as he knocks and
yet we still allow the
murderous aftermath
to begin with no regard
for the clean up.
My darling, we take with
us a piece of our killers
as they have taken a
keepsake from us.
Alas!
My darling
we have taken
we have learned
we have observed
we have seen their
surgical precision as
they have taken us
apart. We have
mended and
stitched and
sewn and
glued and
filled and
repaired
ourselves.
Oh my darling
do not fear for
we who are
still alive
still fighting
still breathing
still living
still pumping blood,
we have taken
their murderous
intent. We who
were victimized
by batting eyes
and lies that left
bitterness as an
aftertaste have
have learned to
lace honey with
arsenic. We are
kindred, you and I.
We are different
now. The stichting
and filling
and sewing
and gluing
has changed
us.
We are not afraid,
my darlings.
We see you.
You who have
caged and
trampled and
opened and
taken and
broken and
killed are no
longer feared.
Be afraid
my darlings.
Alas!
We see you.

III

I am a serial killer.
I have ravaged
empty vessels
which once upon
a time were
filled with ideas
of what could be.
I am innocent!
I slay the murderers
who murdered me.
Those who murdered
we.
I and we have
perfected the craft
which you,
and you,
and you,
and you
have used as
weapons of
mass distraction,
mass destruction.
I am the one
who distracts
and destroys.  
I have ingested
sufficient venom
to become
arsenic laced
honey.
I have let a
man drink
from me ‘til
he could drink
no more. He
drank himself
to insanity.
Oh dear!
I fear I did
not warn him
of the venom
that’s within.
What once was
just plain honey
is now
poisonous
to him.
I am a serial killer.
The killer of
cervical slayers.
But again
I am innocent!
I once sheltered
a wretch and
he sought
sanctuary
inside of me.
He never looked
at my eyes.
Only prayed at
the church that
he made betwixt
my thighs.
Oh dear!
I fear
I did not mention
that this was not
his church. It was
my sanctuary which
was now covered
in his dirt.
Death by exertion
was his end.
I let him die *******
but I did not let
him win
A tragic death
for a stallion
like he. Because
I am small he
underestimated me.
Like Helen of Troy
I brought
destruction
upon thee.
I am a serial killer.
The killer of
psychological
terrorizers and
verbal mesmerizers.
I have linguistically
lobotomized men
who thought they
could philosophize
the origin of I.
I have sown the
seeds of doubt
within the halls of
confidence which
have lain within his
mind.
I have broken
fortress walls
that were built to
withstand the  
wrath that fell
upon *****
and Gomorrah.
We have cut out
the tongues of
our verbal
betrayers and
left them befuddled
in Babylon.  
Oh dear!
I fear I forgot
to mention that
Freud is my Father
and Jung is my
uncle.
Your mommy issues
do nothing for me.
I am not her!
I am a child of
psychology.
Rationally you are
weaker than me
mentally.
I am a serial killer.
The killer of
egotistical thrillers.
I have paralyzed
and anesthetized
men who have been
thrice the size of me.
My scalpel is sharp
and my steady hand
cuts as deep as my
verbal violations.
This is my body.
This is not your nation.
My dissection was but
a brief vacation to
your annihilation.
Your internal organs
were similar to an
egotistical colonoscopy.
You thought your
insides were different
from me.
You required proof
that we were the
same.
I said
“Let me cut first”
and you did not
complain.
Oh dear!
I fear I failed
to mention I’m
quite skilled and
I have killed before,
far better men and
even their ******.
I am a serial killer!
A killer of killers!
You are a cheap
thrill as I reap
and I sow.
I plant the seeds
that I know will
not grow.
You will stay frozen
and will get old.
I need not a keepsake.
I own your soul.

IV

We are naked.
Our flesh is worn
and our spirit torn.
The garments which
once kept us warm
are now just eaten
and tattered.
We have silently
walked
and waited
and paced ourselves
and learned hatred.
WE have come
back home where
board games and
Barbies wait.
I have broken
all my favorite toys
just like you
and you
and you
and the horse
you rode in on
have taken all
my simple joys.
You have all
taken away
a piece of pink
and replaced
with a piece of
grey. A piece
which will never
be the same.
Oh Darling!
Do not fear for me
do not fear for we.
We have become the
porcelain women
which watch
and wait.
Our pink colored
kingdom shall
never be invaded
because here we
are waiting.
Not even shoots
and ladders or even
the Madd Hatter
can lead you to
green pastures.
Oh my!
You failed to notice
the malicious
twinkle in
my eyes.
I fear this was
your fault
for you created
a steeple
betwixt my
thighs.
Silly rabbit,
we were never
yours.
I was always
mine.
This is
not revenge.
This is a warning
before the rhyme.

Perception is a sickness we conceive.
Letting people control our reactions.
Changing our level of satisfaction.
There is choices in every emotion we produce.
Being offended is a feeling we have comitted.
What you say or do has no effect on my rationality.
Unless, I let your insecurities influence how I carry my body.
Addressing our contaminations helps open our eyes.
No longer being victimized by the lies others drown us in.
We can make the decision to keep opposition or let it roll down like rain.
Having positivity in all is an unlikely belief.
However doesn't mean it can not be studied.
Self control, dedication and confidence is the mixture you need.
Do not wallow in self inflicted misery.
All it takes is you to make a change.
There is no other reasoning it really is simplicity.

Beaten down to nothing
All I ever wanted for love
But instead I received only lust
A tease
A drug that has me addicted
Committing a sin
And a breaking point in friendship

You've left me broken
A disgrace to everyone
An embarassing shame that won't leave
Guilty of a torrid love affair
One that means nothing to me
A cheap thrill to be entetained
And to feel loved
In a distasteful way

Villanelle: The Divide
by Michael R. Burch

The sea was not salt the first tide...
was man born to sorrow that first day,
with the moon―a pale beacon across the Divide,
the brighter for longing, an object denied―
the tug at his heart's pink, bourgeoning clay?

The sea was not salt the first tide...
but grew bitter, bitter―man's torrents supplied.
The bride of their longing―forever astray,
her shield a cold beacon across the Divide,
flashing pale signals: Decide. Decide.
Choose me, or His Brightness, I will not stay.

The sea was not salt the first tide...
imploring her, ebbing: Abide, abide.
The silver fish flash there, the manatees gray.

The moon, a pale beacon across the Divide,
has taught us to seek Love's concealed side:
the dark face of longing, the poets say.
The sea was not salt the first tide...
the moon a pale beacon across the Divide.

"The Divide" is essentially a formal villanelle despite the non-formal line breaks.



Villanelle: Ordinary Love
by Michael R. Burch

Indescribable―our love―and still we say
with eyes averted, turning out the light,
"I love you," in the ordinary way

and tug the coverlet where once we lay,
all suntanned limbs entangled, shivering, white...
indescribably in love. Or so we say.

Your hair's blonde thicket now is tangle-gray;
you turn your back; you murmur to the night,
"I love you," in the ordinary way.

Beneath the sheets our hands and feet would stray
to warm ourselves. We do not touch despite
a love so indescribable. We say

we're older now, that "love" has had its day.
But that which Love once countenanced, delight,
still makes you indescribable. I say,
"I love you," in the ordinary way.

"Ordinary Love" was the winner of the 2001 Algernon Charles Swinburne poetry contest. It was originally published by Romantics Quarterly and nominated by the journal for the Pushcart Prize. It is missing a tercet but seemed complete enough without it.―MRB



Villanelle: Because Her Heart Is Tender
by Michael R. Burch

for Beth

She scrawled soft words in soap: "Never Forget,"
Dove-white on her car's window, and the wren,
because her heart is tender, might regret
it called the sun to wake her. As I slept,
she heard lost names recounted, one by one.

She wrote in sidewalk chalk: "Never Forget,"
and kept her heart's own counsel. No rain swept
away those words, no tear leaves them undone.

Because her heart is tender with regret,
bruised by razed towers' glass and steel and stone
that shatter on and on and on and on,
she stitches in wet linen: "NEVER FORGET,"
and listens to her heart's emphatic song.

The wren might tilt its head and sing along
because its heart once understood regret
when fledglings fell beyond, beyond, beyond...
its reach, and still the boot-heeled world strode on.

She writes in adamant: "NEVER FORGET"
because her heart is tender with regret.



Because Her Heart is Tender (II)
by Michael R. Burch

Because her heart is tender
there is hope some God might mend her, …
some small hope Fates might relent.

Because her heart is tender
mighty Angels, come defend her!
Even the Devil might repent.

Because her heart is tender
Jacob’s Ladder should descend here,
the heavens open, saints assent.

Because her heart is tender
why does the cruel world rend her?
Fix the world, or let it end here!



Villanelle: Hangovers
by Michael R. Burch

We forget that, before we were born,
our parents had “lives” of their own,
ran drunk in the streets, or half-******.

Yes, our parents had lives of their own
until we were born; then, undone,
they were buying their parents gravestones

and finding gray hairs of their own
(because we were born lacking some
of their curious habits, but soon

would certainly get them). Half-******,
we watched them dig graves of their own.
Their lives would be over too soon

for their curious habits to bloom
in us (though our children were born
nine months from that night on the town

when, punch-drunk in the streets or half-******,
we first proved we had lives of our own).



Double Trouble
by Michael R. Burch

The villanelle is trouble:
it’s like you’re on the bubble
of beginning to see double.

It’s like you’re on the Hubble
when the lens begins to wobble:
the villanelle is trouble.

It’s like you’re Barney Rubble
scratching itchy beer-stained stubble
because you’re seeing double.

Then your lines begin to gobble
up the good rhymes, and you hobble.
The villanelle is trouble,

just like getting sloshed in the pub’ll
begin to make you babble
because you’re seeing double.

Because the form is flubbable
and is really not that loveable,
the villanelle is trouble:
it’s like you’re seeing double.



Villanelle Sequence: Clandestine But Gentle
by Michael R. Burch

Variations on the villanelle. A play in four acts. The heroine wears a trench coat and her every action drips nonchalance. The “hero” is pallid, nerdish and nervous. But more than anything, he is palpably desperate with longing. Props are optional, but a streetlamp, a glowing cigarette and lots of eerie shadows should suffice.

I.

Clandestine but gentle, wrapped in night,
she eavesdropped on morose codes of my heart.
She was the secret agent of delight.

The blue spurt of her match, our signal light,
announced her presence in the shadowed court:
clandestine but gentle, cloaked in night.

Her cigarette was waved, a casual sleight,
to bid me “Come!” or tell me to depart.
She was the secret agent of delight,

like Ingrid Bergman in a trench coat, white
as death, and yet more fair and pale (but short
with me, whenever I grew wan with fright!).

II.

Clandestine but gentle, veiled in night,
she was the secret agent of delight;
she coaxed the tumblers in some cryptic rite

to make me spill my spirit.
Lovely ****!
Clandestine but gentle, veiled in night

―she waited till my tongue, untied, sang bright
but damning strange confessions in the dark...

III.

She was the secret agent of delight;
so I became her paramour. Tonight
I await her in my exile, worlds apart...

IV.

For clandestine but gentle, wrapped in night,
she is the secret agent of delight.



Villanelle: Hang Together, or Separately
by Michael R. Burch

“The first shall be last, and the last first.”

Be careful whom you don’t befriend
When hyenas mark their prey:
The odds will get even in the end.

Some “deplorables” may yet ascend
And since all dogs must have their day,
Be careful whom you don’t befriend.

When pallid elitists condescend
What does the Good Book say?
The odds will get even in the end.

Since the LORD advised us to attend
To each other along the way,
Be careful whom you don’t befriend.

But He was deserted. Friends, comprehend!
Though revilers mock and flay,
The odds will get even in the end.

Now infidels have loot to spend:
As ****** as Judas’s that day.
Be careful whom you don’t befriend:
The odds will get even in the end.

NOTE: This poem portrays a certain worldview. The poet does not share it and suspects from reading the gospels that the “real” Jesus would have sided with the infidel refugees, not Trump and his ilk.



Villanelle: The Sad Refrain
by Michael R. Burch

O, let us not repeat the sad refrain
that Christ is cruel because some innocent dies.
No, pain is good, for character comes from pain!

There’d be no growth without the hammering rain
that tests each petal’s worth. Omnipotent skies
peal, “Let us not repeat the sad refrain,

but separate burnt chaff from bountiful grain.
According to God’s plan, the weakling dies
and pain is good, for character comes from pain!

A God who’s perfect cannot bear the blame
of flawed creations, just because one dies!
So let us not repeat the sad refrain

or think to shame or stain His awesome name!
Let lightning strike the devious source of lies
that pain is bad, for character comes from pain!
Oh, let us not repeat the sad refrain!



Villanelles by Michael R. Burch

The modern formal villanelle is a poetic form with a double refrain, although in early incarnations it was simply a pastoral poem with a refrain. The villanelle is related other poetic forms with refrains, such as the rondel, the roundel and the rondeau.



Villanelle: The Divide
by Michael R. Burch

The sea was not salt the first tide...
was man born to sorrow that first day,
with the moon―a pale beacon across the Divide,
the brighter for longing, an object denied―
the tug at his heart's pink, bourgeoning clay?

The sea was not salt the first tide...
but grew bitter, bitter―man's torrents supplied.
The bride of their longing―forever astray,
her shield a cold beacon across the Divide,
flashing pale signals: Decide. Decide.
Choose me, or His Brightness, I will not stay.

The sea was not salt the first tide...
imploring her, ebbing: Abide, abide.
The silver fish flash there, the manatees gray.

The moon, a pale beacon across the Divide,
has taught us to seek Love's concealed side:
the dark face of longing, the poets say.
The sea was not salt the first tide...
the moon a pale beacon across the Divide.


'The Divide' is essentially a formal villanelle despite the non-formal line breaks.



Villanelle: Ordinary Love
by Michael R. Burch

Indescribable―our love―and still we say
with eyes averted, turning out the light,
'I love you, ' in the ordinary way

and tug the coverlet where once we lay,
all suntanned limbs entangled, shivering, white...
indescribably in love. Or so we say.

Your hair's blonde thicket now is tangle-gray;
you turn your back; you murmur to the night,
'I love you, ' in the ordinary way.

Beneath the sheets our hands and feet would stray
to warm ourselves. We do not touch despite
a love so indescribable. We say

we're older now, that 'love' has had its day.
But that which Love once countenanced, delight,
still makes you indescribable. I say,
'I love you, ' in the ordinary way.

'Ordinary Love' was the winner of the 2001 Algernon Charles Swinburne poetry contest. It was originally published by Romantics Quarterly and nominated by the journal for the Pushcart Prize. It is missing a tercet but seemed complete enough without it.―MRB



Villanelle: Because Her Heart Is Tender
by Michael R. Burch

for Beth

She scrawled soft words in soap: 'Never Forget, '
Dove-white on her car's window, and the wren,
because her heart is tender, might regret
it called the sun to wake her. As I slept,
she heard lost names recounted, one by one.

She wrote in sidewalk chalk: 'Never Forget, '
and kept her heart's own counsel. No rain swept
away those words, no tear leaves them undone.

Because her heart is tender with regret,
bruised by razed towers' glass and steel and stone
that shatter on and on and on and on,
she stitches in wet linen: 'NEVER FORGET, '
and listens to her heart's emphatic song.

The wren might tilt its head and sing along
because its heart once understood regret
when fledglings fell beyond, beyond, beyond...
its reach, and still the boot-heeled world strode on.

She writes in adamant: 'NEVER FORGET'
because her heart is tender with regret.



Villanelle: Because Her Heart is Tender (II)    
by Michael R. Burch

Because her heart is tender
there is hope some God might mend her, …
some small hope Fates might relent.

Because her heart is tender
mighty Angels, come defend her!
Even the Devil might repent.

Because her heart is tender
Jacob's Ladder should descend here,
the heavens open, saints assent.

Because her heart is tender
why does the cruel world rend her?
Fix the world, or let it end here!



Remembering Not to Call
by Michael R. Burch

a villanelle permitting mourning, for my mother, Christine Ena Burch

The hardest thing of all,
after telling her everything,
is remembering not to call.

Now the phone hanging on the wall
will never announce her ring:
the hardest thing of all
for children, however tall.

And the hardest thing this spring
will be remembering not to call
the one who was everything.

That the songbirds will nevermore sing
is the hardest thing of all
for those who once listened, in thrall,
and welcomed the message they bring,
since they won’t remember to call.

And the hardest thing this fall
will be a number with no one to ring.

No, the hardest thing of all
is remembering not to call.




Villanelle of an Opportunist
by Michael R. Burch

I'm not looking for someone to save.
A gal has to do what a gal has to do:
I'm looking for a man with one foot in the grave.

How many highways to hell must I pave
with intentions imagined, not true?
I'm not looking for someone to save.

Fools praise compassion while weaklings rave,
but a gal has to do what a gal has to do.
I'm looking for a man with one foot in the grave.

Some praise the Lord but the Devil's my fave
because he has led me to you!
I'm not looking for someone to save.

In the land of the free and the home of the brave,
a gal has to do what a gal has to do.
I'm looking for a man with one foot in the grave.

Every day without meds becomes a close shave
and the razor keeps tempting me too.
I'm not looking for someone to save:
I'm looking for a man with one foot in the grave.



Villanelle: An Ode to the Divine Plan
by Michael R. Burch

This is how the Universe works:
The rich must have their perks.
This is how the Good Lord rolls.

Did T-Rexes have souls?
The poor must live on doles.
This is how the Universe works.

The rich must have their dirks
to poke serfs full of holes.
This is how the Good Lord rolls.

The despot laughs and lurks
while the Tyger slaughters foals.
This is how the Universe works.

What are the despots' goals?
The poor must mind, not shirk.
This is how the Good Lord rolls.

Trump and Putin praise the kirks
while the cowed mind ancient scrolls.
This is how the Universe works.
This is how the Good Lord rolls.



Ars Brevis
by Michael R. Burch

Better not to live, than live too long:
this is my theme, my purpose and desire.
The world prefers a brief three-minute song.

My will to live was never all that strong.
Eternal life? Find some poor fool to hire!
Better not to live, than live too long.

Granny ******* or a flosslike thong?
The latter rock, the former feed the fire.
The world prefers a brief three-minute song.

Let briefs be brief: the short can do no wrong,
since David slew Goliath, who stood higher.
Better not to live, than live too long.

A long recital gets a sudden gong.
Quick death’s preferred to drowning in the mire.
The world prefers a brief three-minute song.

A wee bikini or a long sarong?
French Riviera or some dull old Shire?
Better not to live, than live too long:
The world prefers a brief three-minute song.



The vanilla-nelle
by Michael R. Burch

The vanilla-nelle is rather dark to write
In a chocolate world where purity is slight,
When every rhyming word must rhyme with white!

As sure as night is day and day is night,
And walruses write songs, such is my plight:
The vanilla-nelle is rather dark to write.

I’m running out of rhymes and it’s a fright
because the end’s not nearly (yet) in sight,
When every rhyming word must rhyme with white!

It’s tougher when the poet’s not too bright
And strains his brain, which only turns up “blight.”
Yes, the vanilla-nelle is rather dark to write.

I strive to seem aloof and recondite
while avoiding ancient words like “knyghte” and “flyte”
But every rhyming word must rhyme with white!

I think I’ve failed: I’m down to “zinnwaldite.”
I fear my Muse is torturing me, for spite!
For the vanilla-nelle is rather dark to write
When every rhyming word must rhyme with white!
I may have accidentally invented a new poetic form, the “trinelle” or “triplenelle.”



Why I Left the Right
by Michael R. Burch

I was a Reagan Republican in my youth but quickly “left” the GOP when I grokked its inherent racism, intolerance and retreat into the Dark Ages.

I fell in with the troops, but it didn’t last long:
I’m not one to march to a klanging gong.
“Right is wrong” became my song.

I’m not one to march to a klanging gong
with parrots all singing the same strange song.
I fell in with the bloops, but it didn’t last long.

These parrots all singing the same strange song
with no discernment at all between right and wrong?
“Right is wrong” became my song.

With no discernment between right and wrong,
the **** marched on in a white-robed throng.
I fell in with the rubes, but it didn’t last long.

The **** marched on in a white-robed throng,
enraged by the sight of boys in sarongs.
“Right is wrong” became my song.

Enraged by the sight of boys in sarongs
and girls with butch hairdos, the clan klanged its gongs.
I fell in with the dupes, but it didn’t last long.
“Right is wrong” became my song.



What happened to the songs of yesterdays?
by Michael R. Burch

Is poetry mere turning of a phrase?
Has prose become its height and depth and sum?
What happened to the songs of yesterdays?

Does prose leave all nine Muses vexed and glum,
with fingers stuck in ears, till hearing’s numbed?
Is poetry mere turning of a phrase?

Should we cut loose, drink, guzzle jugs of ***,
write prose nonstop, till Hell or Kingdom Come?
What happened to the songs of yesterdays?

Are there no beats to which tense thumbs might thrum?
Did we outsmart ourselves and end up dumb?
Is poetry mere turning of a phrase?

How did a feast become this measly crumb,
such noble princes end up in a slum?
What happened to the songs of yesterdays?

I’m running out of rhymes! Please be a chum
and tell me if some Muse might spank my ***
for choosing rhyme above the painted phrase?
What happened to the songs of yesterdays?



Trump’s Retribution Resolution
by Michael R. Burch

My New Year’s resolution?
I require your money and votes,
for you are my retribution.

May I offer you dark-skinned scapegoats
and bigger and deeper moats
as part of my sweet resolution?

Please consider a YUGE contribution,
a mountain of lovely C-notes,
for you are my retribution.

Revenge is our only solution,
since my critics are weasels and stoats.
Come, second my sweet resolution!

The New Year’s no time for dilution
of the anger of victimized GOATs,
when you are my retribution.

Forget the ****** Constitution!
To dictators “ideals” are footnotes.
My New Year’s resolution?
You are my retribution.



Rondels, Roundels and Rondeaux are poetic forms with refrains that are related to the Villanelle.



Rondel: Merciles Beaute ("Merciless Beauty")
by Geoffrey Chaucer
loose translation/interpretation Michael R. Burch

Your eyes slay me suddenly;
their beauty I cannot sustain,
they wound me so, through my heart keen.

Unless your words heal me hastily,
my heart's wound will remain green;
for your eyes slay me suddenly;
their beauty I cannot sustain.

By all truth, I tell you faithfully
that you are of life and death my queen;
for at my death this truth shall be seen:
your eyes slay me suddenly;
their beauty I cannot sustain,
they wound me so, through my heart keen.



Rondel: Rejection
by Geoffrey Chaucer
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Your beauty from your heart has so erased
Pity, that it’s useless to complain;
For Pride now holds your mercy by a chain.

I'm guiltless, yet my sentence has been cast.
I tell you truly, needless now to feign,―
Your beauty from your heart has so erased
Pity, that it’s useless to complain.

Alas, that Nature in your face compassed
Such beauty, that no man may hope attain
To mercy, though he perish from the pain;
Your beauty from your heart has so erased
Pity, that it’s useless to complain;
For Pride now holds your mercy by a chain.



Rondel: Escape
by Geoffrey Chaucer
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Since I’m escaped from Love and yet still fat,
I never plan to be in his prison lean;
Since I am free, I count it not a bean.

He may question me and counter this and that;
I care not: I will answer just as I mean.
Since I’m escaped from Love and yet still fat,
I never plan to be in his prison lean.

Love strikes me from his roster, short and flat,
And he is struck from my books, just as clean,
Forevermore; there is no other mean.
Since I’m escaped from Love and yet still fat,
I never plan to be in his prison lean;
Since I am free, I count it not a bean.



Rondel: Your Smiling Mouth
by Charles d'Orleans (c. 1394-1465)
loose translation/interpretation/moderniz  ation Michael R. Burch

Your smiling mouth and laughing eyes, bright gray,
Your ample ******* and slender arms’ twin chains,
Your hands so smooth, each finger straight and plain,
Your little feet―please, what more can I say?

It is my fetish when you’re far away
To muse on these and thus to soothe my pain―
Your smiling mouth and laughing eyes, bright gray,
Your ample ******* and slender arms’ twin chains.

So would I beg you, if I only may,
To see such sights as I before have seen,
Because my fetish pleases me. Obscene?
I’ll be obsessed until my dying day
By your sweet smiling mouth and eyes, bright gray,
Your ample ******* and slender arms’ twin chains!



Oft in My Thought
by Charles d'Orleans (c. 1394-1465)
loose translation/interpretation/moderniz  ation Michael R. Burch

So often in my busy mind I sought,
Around the advent of the fledgling year,
For something pretty that I really ought
To give my lady dear;
But that sweet thought's been wrested from me, clear,
Since death, alas, has sealed her under clay
And robbed the world of all that's precious here―
God keep her soul, I can no better say.

For me to keep my manner and my thought
Acceptable, as suits my age's hour?
While proving that I never once forgot
Her worth? It tests my power!
I serve her now with masses and with prayer;
For it would be a shame for me to stray
Far from my faith, when my time's drawing near―
God keep her soul, I can no better say.

Now earthly profits fail, since all is lost
And the cost of everything became so dear;
Therefore, O Lord, who rules the higher host,
Take my good deeds, as many as there are,
And crown her, Lord, above in your bright sphere,
As heaven's truest maid! And may I say:
Most good, most fair, most likely to bring cheer―
God keep her soul, I can no better say.

When I praise her, or hear her praises raised,
I recall how recently she brought me pleasure;
Then my heart floods like an overflowing bay
And makes me wish to dress for my own bier―
God keep her soul, I can no better say.



If
by Michael R. Burch

If I regret
fire in the sunset
exploding on the horizon,
then let me regret loving you.

If I forget
even for a moment
that you are the only one,
then let me forget that the sky is blue.

If I should yearn
in a season of discontentment
for the vagabond light of a companionless moon,
let dawn remind me that you are my sun.

If I should burn―one moment less brightly,
one instant less true―
then with wild scorching kisses,
inflame me, inflame me, inflame me anew.



Recursion
by Michael R. Burch

In a dream I saw boys lying
under banners gaily flying
and I heard their mothers sighing
from some dark distant shore.

For I saw their sons essaying
into fields―gleeful, braying―
their bright armaments displaying;
such manly oaths they swore!

From their playfields, boys returning
full of honor’s white-hot burning
and desire’s restless yearning
sired new kids for the corps.

In a dream I saw boys dying
under banners gaily lying
and I heard their mothers crying
from some dark distant shore.



I AM!
by Michael R. Burch

I am not one of ten billion―I―
sunblackened Icarus, chary fly,
staring at God with a quizzical eye.

I am not one of ten billion, I.

I am not one life has left unsquashed―
scarred as Ulysses, goddess-debauched,
pale glowworm agleam with a tale of panache.

I am not one life has left unsquashed.

I am not one without spots of disease,
laugh lines and tan lines and thick-callused knees
from begging and praying and girls sighing "Please!"

I am not one without spots of disease.

I am not one of ten billion―I―
scion of Daedalus, blackwinged fly
staring at God with a sedulous eye.

I am not one of ten billion, I
AM!



This World's Joy
(anonymous Middle English lyric)
loose translation by Michael R. Burch

Winter awakens all my care
as leafless trees grow bare.
For now my sighs are fraught
whenever it enters my thought:
regarding this world's joy,
how everything comes to naught.



Elegy for a little girl, lost
by Michael R. Burch

... qui laetificat juventutem meam...
She was the joy of my youth,
and now she is gone.
... requiescat in pace...
May she rest in peace.
... amen...
Amen.



How Long the Night
anonymous Middle English lyric, circa early 13th century AD
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

It is pleasant, indeed, while the summer lasts
with the mild pheasants' song...
but now I feel the northern wind's blast,
its severe weather strong.
Alas! Alas! This night seems so long!
And I, because of my momentous wrong
now grieve, mourn and fast.



Fowles in the Frith
anonymous Middle English lyric, circa 13th-14th century AD
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

The fowls in the forest,
the fishes in the flood
and I must go mad:
such sorrow I've had
for beasts of bone and blood!



I am of Ireland
anonymous Medieval Irish lyric, circa 13th-14th century AD
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

I am of Ireland,
and of the holy realm of Ireland.
Gentlefolk, I pray thee:
for the sake of saintly charity,
come dance with me
in Ireland!



Whan the turuf is thy tour
(anonymous Middle English lyric, circa the 13th century AD)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

1.
When the turf is your tower
and the pit is your bower,
your pale white skin and throat
shall be sullen worms’ to note.
What help to you, then,
was all your worldly hope?

2.
When the turf is your tower
and the grave is your bower,
your pale white throat and skin
worm-eaten from within...
what hope of my help then?


Ech day me comëth tydinges thre
anonymous Middle English lyric, circa the 13th to 14th century AD
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Each day I’m plagued by three doles,
These gargantuan weights on my soul:
First, that I must somehow exit this fen.
Second, that I cannot know when.
And yet it’s the third that torments me so,
Because I don't know where the hell I will go!



Ich have y-don al myn youth
anonymous Middle English lyric, circa the 13th to 14th century AD
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

I have done it all my youth:
Often, often, and often!
I have loved long and yearned zealously...
And oh what grief it has brought me!



I Sing of a Maiden
anonymous Medieval English Lyric, circa early 15th century AD
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

I sing of a maiden
That is matchless.
The King of all Kings
For her son she chose.
He came also as still
To his mother's breast
As April dew
Falling on the grass.
He came also as still
To his mother's bower
As April dew
Falling on the flower.
He came also as still
To where his mother lay
As April dew
Falling on the spray.
Mother and maiden?
Never one, but she!
Well may such a lady
God's mother be!



Regret
by Michael R. Burch

Regret,
a bitter
ache to bear...

once starlight
languished
in your hair...

a shining there
as brief
as rare.

Regret...
a pain
I chose to bear...

unleash
the torrent
of your hair...

and show me
once again―
how rare.



Enigma
by Michael R. Burch

O, terrible angel,
bright lover and avenger,
full of whimsical light
and vile anger;
wild stranger,
seeking the solace of night,
or the danger;
pale foreigner,
alien to man, or savior...

Who are you,
seeking consolation and passion
in the same breath,
screaming for pleasure, bereft
of all articles of faith,
finding life
harsher than death?

Grieving angel,
giving more than taking,
how lucky the man
who has found in your love,
this, our reclamation;

fallen wren,
you must strive to fly
though your heart is shaken;

weary pilgrim,
you must not give up
though your feet are aching;

lonely child,
lie here still in my arms;
you must soon be waking.



The Effects of Memory
by Michael R. Burch

A black ringlet
curls to lie
at the nape of her neck,
glistening with sweat
in the evaporate moonlight...
This is what I remember

now that I cannot forget.

And tonight,
if I have forgotten her name,
I remember:
rigid wire and white lace
half-impressed in her flesh...

our soft cries, like regret,

... the enameled white clips
of her bra strap
still inscribe dimpled marks
that my kisses erase...

now that I have forgotten her face.



The Quickening
by Michael R. Burch

for Beth

I never meant to love you
when I held you in my arms
promising you sagely
wise, noncommittal charms.

And I never meant to need you
when I touched your tender lips
with kisses that intrigued my own:
such kisses I had never known,
nor a heartbeat in my fingertips!



Ah! Sunflower
by Michael R. Burch
after William Blake

O little yellow flower
like a star...
how beautiful,
how wonderful
we are!



Published as the collection "Villanelles"

Keywords/Tags: villanelle, refrain, repetition, chorus, rhyme, sea, tide, moon, heart, love, rondel, roundel, rondeau, poetic form, poetics, poetic expression, Chaucer, Orleans, love, art, beauty, mercy, merciless, words, heart, hearts, pity, pride, prison, mrbvill, mrbrondel

Frenchie. there's a lot that i'll probably never tell you. either in fear that it will drive you away, in spite of the numerous times that you've told me you won't leave or run because the chance of something scaring you off is slim. or simply because it slips my mind. trauma, am i right? you say a lot, and i mean this in the best way.  you can talk, and you can tell me as many things as you want, and i'll never properly believe them because i've learned that words are ****. then again all we have are words, smiles, and through-the-phone, air-blown, crush-induced kisses that bring back memories, and yet rewrites them as something entirely new and, of course, much much better. something ours. i hope it's never given to another person, this sweet kiss of life, the final kiss of death, an angel brings me to heaven, enter whatever aesthetically pleasing line you want but it will never be as good as, "and so the lion fell for the lamb." haha. it's 11:16 pm, August 9th. and i'm laying in bed. for reasons i'll try to explain in a second, i'm tearing up, as i have been for a while. i think i first started tearing up the first time we called, which isn't so much a bad thing as it is a surprising thing. because it was a sad happy cry. it's similar to breaking a piece of jewelry that you really enjoyed, but then buying something much better. you loved that plastic, feeble, oversized, first love bracelet, but now you have a moonstone or (enter favorite gem) filled, perfectly fitted, wifey-made promise ring. you'll keep the bracelet somewhere, forget about it, find it again, and again, and again. discovering it under blankets, and pillows, and promises that we've tossed around ourselves. it will peek from inside my black coffee, in the dirt i praise, in the trees, in the music we'll listen to together. in the color brown, Frenchie, that's where you'll see, i'll see, we will see, that piece of plastic. dark brown, the colors of his eyes. my favorite color for the longest time. i don't want it to mean him, so it doesn't. but that's where it comes from. i'll find it, we'll find it, up until you get tired of seeing it, of seeing me see it, and take my hand, begging to throw it out. but, my to be discovered favorite gem filled, wifey-made perfectly fitted promise ring, it might take a while, with me quietly begging for your help, to get rid of him. not because i want to wear it, but because i horde emotions the way i horde stuffed animals. it's a labrinth to find the bracelet, we have no map and somehow we have to get from this forever smile to the closed-off corners of my mind, where even i, as it's supposed owner, struggle to collect, and comprehend, and conquer my horrid thoughts. but Frenchie, we laughed. and it was the first time in so long that i've been able to laugh with someone like that, and not worry, and not expect, and not be afraid. except, since we're here it's already obvious, that ended up making me afraid anyways. Random, but there's this song in my head right now. "make me behave like an animal." Sir Chloe's Animal, everything by Sir Chloe is absolutely incredible. but, let's continue. you may not believe me when i say this, but i'm scared out of my mind so entirely that every second between our conversations is an hour added to my inevitable future breakdown. how weak, and pathetic, and disgusting, i know. i have told you so many times that i can't like people, that it's so hard for me to connect to someone new, and yet it's day three and i'm imagining that i'll be happy if only you'd hold me, as if that's what you want to do, as if that will heal me, as if that should happen. as if i'm taking things slow the way i want to, and yet don't want to. if i could properly explain in words, i'd tell you with lengthy descriptions, both vastly and vaguely, calmly and excitedly, slowly and quickly covering deep hidden and obvious and in-between meaning, proving how desperately i want to be with you, be yours and you be mine, and how, ****, how i hope you don't **** me up. because all i can think when we talk is "****." you breathe, and, between each of your heartbeats, i figure out that i like you more, and more, and ****! the way your face looks so angelic when you sleep makes me just think "god, she's going to really hurt me. she's gonna **** me up, and chances are i'll thank her for it." to be hurt by you? that would be a blessing, and yet i'm shaking. what a interesting concept. i'm sure this is proof that i'm ****** up already. i keep bringing up the time. three days, Frenchie. Three. and that's it. that is literally it. that's all we've been. so explain, please, why the first few words you said had me ranting to my friends. please, tell me, how within a day, everytime your name popped up on my screen i would giggle like a child. please, explain to me, why everytime i talk about you, my cheeks hurt so much from smiling. i'm crazy, absolutely crazy, and i know my friends have to be thinking so too, because it's been. three. *******. days. but why? as in, why is that so bad? three days, what's so wrong with that? why does liking someone have to have a time? let me explain something that i've been thinking about. two years, on and off, thirteen breakups. that was Justin and I. roughly six months after the final one, i met you. "cause everytime you hurt me, the less that i cry." i'm way too good at goodbye's. i never particularly got that song the way i do now. had we stayed apart the first to the maybe fifth time we broke up, i would have took longer to heal. but it was time thirteen, so it was all expected, hurtful of course, but expected and so, it was almost boring. almost. it would have been if it didn't rip my heart out. i rebounded. hard. many times. many people. zero regrets. but this connection to you, sometimes i catch myself fearing i'm picking up where Justin and I left off. which, yes, is really toxic. but then i remind myself, this is how a good portion of relationships start. if i like you, i'll act like it. if i want to be with you, regardless if we just met, i should act like that. right? right, that's what normal people do. but we already explained i'm not normal. i'm ****** up, and i overthink. i'm ******* up. so ******* up that i can't hold eyecontact with you because i was "trained" not to, because i'm not used to, because it makes me nervous, because i hate the way my eyes look and i believe that you shouldn't have to look at something so disgusting. god here we go, i'm talking about him again. blaming him with my "trained not to" rather than blaming myself for letting it  happen. i let myself feel like that, i let myself bow down. that's on me, that was my weakness. admittedly so, yes. i'm scared of looking in your eyes. maybe out of submission. or maybe i'm afraid of seeing what i once saw in his. but truth be told, i think i'm scared of looking into anyone's. maybe i'm once again overthinking things and it's just regular anxiety. "regular anxiety," what an interesting statement that even I can't properly explain. and by the way, i never want to compare you to him, not even the good things. (just realized this entire thing is bipolar and has been written and rewritten to a point where the overdramatic stuff became simple conversation). but why not the good things? because i don't want you to be like him in any way, and i don't want to be with someone like him again. i realize that i will eventually, and might have already without properly realizing it, compared you to him. but, as i like to say, if i don't look at it, it isn't there. so we're not going to pay this any mind. there's so many things that i can say behind all of  this but my mind is going too fast, and it also just realized that most of this is literally so ******* stupid that i should shut up about, i was truly overreacting. maybe if i remember, i'll retype this until it sounds less crazy and obsessive. good thing i edit before i show, so yes i was planning on showing someone. but probably not a lot. only a few trusted people. but now that i read and reread i might just keep this to myself. not that it will matter if i explain, seeing as i might never show this to you, but it's nice to give this to a ghost of you, although it leaves my imagination running wild trying to figure out how you would respond. everytime i type something i want to rewrite it, and i have been rewriting it by the way, because there's no way in hell this captures a fraction of a fraction of the surface of how i'm hurting, even though i've been typing for almost two hours trying to find better words and longer sentences. this all sounds so meek and weak and pathetic in comparrison to the metaphoric erruptions and hurricanes and other natural disasters. haha. this doesn't feel natural. it's like i'm begging for attention, or manipulating you more. fun fact, he called me overdramatic, and manipulative, and tons of other things i won't get into, so i often use the words on myself. because it was and is accurate. i keep making myself out to be a victim and he said i always did that too, that i always victimized myself. he said it a lot. let me explain: i panic so much, i get sad over the smallest things. for example, he was mourning over the death of his mother and started yelling at me and wouldn't tell me that he loved me back, which i shouldn't have gotten mad over but i did. he told me "jesus, i can't even ******* miss my mom without having to make sure you're not having one of your episodes." of course i apologized, and tried to fix my issues myself when he got tired of me or in general and hung up. literally, believe me. i'm so ******* sensitive and it's annoying and i'm annoying, i'll never understand how i got the amazing friends that i do. Apollo knows that i don't deserve them. and please ******* please, i just want to stop crying because it hurts so bad. but after writing it down i feel so much  better. i stopped crying, this is part of my editting by the way, and i feel much better writing to you, ghost Frenchie. but really. it. hurts. so. bad. so bad to a point where my heart seemingly stops, i'm left breathless and NOT in the best of ways. and then said heart explodes. over. and over. and over. in milliseconds, again and again and again, all while the usual me laughs and tries to make my eyes look lively, you might get this but there's so many hours of the day where i hope no one can see the pain i'm in. because i literally have zero ******* clue how to explain the way that i feel. eeehhhh, how edgy. i'm sooooo misunderstood haha. when it hurts, my jaw clenches, i'm no longer in control of my breathing, my head hurts, my brain becomes helium and all i can think is "fuuuuuuck." but ****, as well, because. "i don't wanna be your friend, i wanna kiss your lips." i just want to touch you, and lay on top of you, legs around your waist, snuggled into your neck, breathing in your scent and finding shelter in it, listening to you sing whatever song you put in the background, the smell of **** and cigarettes and us. and beg you please, between each kiss, each time my hand finds yours. please, promise ring, please, please. please. learn how to love me. love me, please. heal me. please fix me. please make me okay. because i'm not. and i haven't been. and i don't know if i ever will and, ****, i swear i'm calm now. but knowing that, knowing that i will never be okay? that hurts worse. because it's proof that i'm aware i'm nowhere near good enough for you. i added on to Justin's issues. I don't want to add on to yours. "But J, remember, I told you that making sure you're okay is giving me something to take off of my life." but you need to focus on you, i can't just take all of your attention. i know that seems like i'm wanting you to tell me "i want you to have it," but that is literally the way i feel, please don't tell me that. i want you to drink water, and eat, and call me. god i feel awful for not calling you today, holy absolute wow. Frenchie, you're hurting on your own without my added everything. You deal with so much, you've dealt with so much, from your birth to the girls and boys of your past, and **** it. ****. we're talking and i should make the most of it, but i really just want to make you okay. i lied to you, y'know. you asked me about my best quality. i told you that i gave good advice, but truth is i probably don't. i think that my best quality is that i make jokes out of everything, i try to make people laugh all the time. that's not always a good thing. last time i texted, i said something about holding you and giving you a watermelon to make you happy. that might have ****** you off. truth is, i doubt there's something only seen as good in me. there's always a second face to everything that i am, i'm a two faced, four faced- no no. twenty faced *****, and not even like a bad ***** i mean like. little ***** baby type faces. and i know for a **** fact that your life has been worse than mine, Frenchie, my issues are literally nothing compared to yours. so, once again, i can't let you add my issues to your own, and yet here i am pouring myself out and begging ghost you to fix me. i mean what you don't read can't hurt you, but something tells me that i want to give it to you. everytime i think about showing you this, i cringe. because jesus three days, man, and i'm writing this absolute *******? and yet i can't just stop. i can't just leave. i'm too selfish for either of those. i have **** to say, and call it growth but i'm gonna ******' say it! y'know? someone's gonna read it eventually. half of me hopes that they send it to you without my permission, but the fact that i'm writing this out proves that it's more than half of me that hopes. and yet the thought of you reading this makes me wanna swallow rat poison. i can't just let you free, y'know? give you the chance to run without wanting to grab you by your legs, pull you back, breakdown and just ******' scream that you're mine, MINE MINE MINE, until you feel sorry for my hoarse voice from crying, scared because now you know, now you ******' know, Frenchie. the opening to run, the ability, it's here, it always has been. but you won't take it, you won't, will you? will you? no, i don't think so. because you've been through worse, because you want to convince me i'm not as bad as i make myself out to be, because you're not afraid, because "it takes a lot more than this" to scare you. don't you see? i'm manipulating you into liking me, Frenchie, i am. i know what to say, how to say it, i read people, i get under their skin, and then i play victim when they flee my spiders web. and i love it and hate myself, haha! ******* ****, please, ****, oh, please, like me. oh, Artemis. please. i want to try, and i will, but, seriously, don't. do not trust me. don't love me. don't like me. run. please. please. you shouldn't, i'm not good, i'm really not. and no one gets that. i'm the Jerry of the world, people are attracted because they feel sorry for me. that's my magnet's secret. pity. **** it. listen, i'm proud and upset at the fact that i'm doing this to you. i've admitted it, dearest Ghost Frenchie, and yet continue. because in the ways that i want to show you my crazy, use it as a "please help me" and keep you here, i do actually want to try for you. read that as many times as you want, I want this. I want to try, but this is my warning that maybe no one will read. this is an entire universe of new things and old things i haven't or thought i couldn't feel. i've thought about it, and i've almost done it, but i can't block you, save you, and leave it at that. because i actually want to try and be good enough. i had cried to my friends saying that you would hurt me, but i wonder if i'd end up being like your exes and just be more proof that you don't need that this world is ****** up. oh wow, there i go again with my manipulation. just. ****. i want to be with you, even though i don't deserve it, even though i have no right to, even though i know that you, lovely butterfly, have a life ahead of you. though small, i'm still a spider. this has been on my mind for so many hours that i've spent typing this, but i should have said so much more to you when you told me that you were having a bad night. you admitted that you were too stressed to even eat and that you didn't want to take it out on me, calling wouldn't be a good idea because you didn't want to snap at me. can i please just say that, good Aphrodite, the fact that you're humane enough to say that, to warn me, means so much. you don't want to take it out on me, you didn't know for sure if it would happen but you wouldn't even let it happen because? ****, because you're, ****,  you're a good person. you care about me already, and that's so ******* heartbreaking and heartlifting at the same time because, AH! ****, she LIKES me? likes, me? likes. me. Frenchie. likes. J? and at the same time. why? Frenchie seriously likes J? Haven't they warned her? i almost didn't text you, i almost just left you on open, just so you could come to me when you wanted to. i don't know why, but i responded. sort of like a puppy, y'know, that's just been yelled at. or, rather since you have cats, a kitten literally just purring and rubbing themselves along you even though they clawed your wall and you screamed. i was hesitant, but i knew that you'd try to be nice, i think? truly, i don't know my reasoning behind that, but you responded anyways. and maybe i'm wrong, but you sounded so soft and it made me smile. because you were trying, and it's dumb that i have to say that but, relationship wise, it's been so long since anyone has TRIED. when you leave me on opened or when you don't respond, my heart drops. which isn't to make you feel bad, because i know you're either frustrated, or busy, or it's a habit, but it scares me. because, again, three days??? and yet you leaving for a little just freaks me out. also, allow me to admit this. while we called, i have reasons for why i'd wake up everytime you moved. i was scared that i'd wake up and you'd be gone. not to be creepy, this is supposed to be romantic, but at least twice i remember waking up, and you were asleep, and i looked at you. god, you're literally so beautiful, Frenchie. you're literally so unbelievably gorgeous that the sun pales in comparison to your radiance. can i say more depressing, Justin related things? i shouldn't, because him being mentioned is literally making me look worse, but i never really feel up to talking about it with anyone besides, well, you. talking about exes with you, it's just, comforting. you telling me you were having a bad night gave me these wretched flashbacks and- oh, ****! this isn't meaning never tell me, like, please, please, always tell me, just, uh, let me explain cause, uh, ****, oh, Hades, it hurts. it's dreadful, really. he, uh,  he would get upset about something, or really anything that he could think of, and uhm. just, haha, stop talking. for uh, for literal hours.. and hours. and hours. out of nowhere. i wouldn't know why, so i'd blame myself and then i'd spam him, thinking that would make him want to answer and begin my whole, "please, don't leave, please, Justin, please, i'm sorry, i love you, don't leave, you're supposed to be my daddy, please, you're supposed to be mine," skit. i mean, see? proof. he couldn't deal with his own issues because i needed attention and reassurance. all. the. ******. time. i won't give excuses, he really just needed space. but space felt like a break, which sometimes he made for. but, right, for me, Justin was famous for his "just leave me alone's" and then the "i don't want this anymore" or "i'm really tired of you" haha. or it was the whole, "you're just not what i need in my life." or i mean "there's someone else" or, of course, haha, the, uh, last one, my personal favorite "we're just not compatible." like, oh, really? i mean, yesterday you hit me and told me that i was a ****, like? we're not? we? we aren't? compatible? wow, like, really? so, no future together? like, uh, oh! c'mon Mistah J!  ouch that hurt to say, but please laugh because haha, TRAUMA, am I right? but, wait? does that count as trauma? hm, i mean some of it was traumatic, right? wait hang on, yes. wait. being beat- ? well, not beat! i mean, like, i could still, y'know, move-? jesus **** what is wrong with me. i don't want to call it traumatic cause victimizing. haha, ****- but uh anyway. i'd be left trying to off myself in some petty way. because i felt like if he couldn't love me, if he, Justin Ryder, the long-legged **** who knew me better than anyone, couldn't love me, honestly, who would? "But, J like. you have friends!" yeah, i do, and i did then, too. but these lovely, amazing friends didn't come to mind the way they sometimes do now. sometimes. i mean, why do i feel like it has to be romantic for "i love you" to count. i say "i love you" to my friends all the time, honestly, because they need to hear it and i've lost so many people without telling them, y'know? but anyhow, right, no one came to mind. just him, and his lack of love for me. i mean, he was God. he was MY God. he was my world, everything, my reason to breathe, the reason i existed. i loved him. more than i've ever loved someone in my entire life. and, i mean, that's why i let him come back so many times, with open arms and apologies from me that should have slithered from his own serpent lips, the reptile. they rained from mine, eagerly, harshly, on repeat, no questions asked. he hit me, i apologized. he made a mistake, i said "i'll never do it again." i blamed myself for a lot of things that he did to me, gave excuses for him, too. y'know, the cliche "you don't know him like i do." god, i mean, i was right about that. no one knows Justin Ryder the way that i do. i hope no one ever does. Frenchie, dearest promise ring i keep referring to for poetic purposes, you asked me if i was over him. i am. i don't want him back. but if he ever texted or called, i'd break down, lose myself, hysterical hurricane J. not because i miss him, just because of the **** that i went through with him, Frenchie. it's small, y'know, compared to what others have went through. but it really, i mean, REALLY, made a huge impression. i don't want him. i keep saying that, everytime i do it becomes less believable but please understand that it isn't him, it's what he did. but **** there i go putting the blame on him again. Frenchie, are you over her? see, the fact that someone came to your mind means that sometimes you question it. unless you really just thought to yourself, "who, am i over who J?" maybe i'll never know. but you should know this. desperately, quite desperately, i want to tell you that your smile makes me feel safe. and i haven't been able to feel so safe from such a small thing in months, almost a year. because how could i trust his smile, y'know? even before the very end, in the middle, in the first time, how could i ever trust his soul-stealing smile? especially when i saw him making it at whatever girl he chose next or, funny thing, even during our time together. i want to explain to you, Frenchie, that i know you need space, and that, even though i realize that, i'm so terrified of ******* up the way i did with him. when i'm upset, i need to be smothered. not everyone is like that, i have to cope with it. haha, wow what a *****, i have to cope with your ways of coping, god i annoy myself. but. regardless of the amount of friends i have who assure me that, "J it wasn't your fault, Justin was the issue, J you weren't the toxic one" i can't believe it. i refuse to think that it was just him. another lyric so a song i enjoy "it takes two to toxic," i keep thinking of songs, but i think you understand that, too, my adhd love. i should have, could have, done better as a person for him. not saying that i regret not, but the fact that i could and i didn't? maybe i should have shut up, maybe i should have said more. everything was beyond the severity of walking on eggshells, which he said often that he had to do around me because, i mean, i've explained that. it's just more proof, you see, that i was too sensitive, proof that i should have been tougher, said less, comforted more. but didn't he know how he made me feel? that i was trying, truly trying my hardest? didn't he know that i loved him so entirely that i gave up my best friends so he'd look at me. didn't he know? didn't he? honestly, how could he have not. i worshipped the literal ground he walked on, didn't i? did i? or am i exaggerating again? should i have ran? yes, no. yes. maybe, or maybe he should have? i don't know. **** me, this? this really, this isn't about him. but it is. because he made my head all ******, the time with him anyways, cause once again it was me, too, and everything is like, oh, ****, a minefield or something. and i don't want you to think that i'm not over him. because i am. him, as himself, i'm over. but the way he made me feel, the experience, the way he changed me? i don't know. did i change for the better or the worst? i wish you could have known me before, maybe you would be able to tell me if the me that i am that now is better. but maybe if i knew you before, my time with him never would have happened. but i hate myself for it. "it" as in everything from the time i got with him to now, every word i've now spent almost three hours revising and rewritting, i hate myself for. that's what's ******, i don't even hate him for it or this, i literally just hate myself. i sound like such a ******* idiot for all of this,  but i'm not, Frenchie. i'm not. well, hang on, i mean i am. i'm a literal ******* *******. haha. but this is how i'm trying to explain to you, and if you ever read this maybe you'll get it. but, i want to make you happy. me. i want to make you smile more and laugh like you did, like WE did. and i know that i got attached so ****** quickly so my whole "it's hard to love people" thing seems fake. but it isn't. i can't. i literally can't tell you how hard it is. and this right here, this is hard, too. because i'm fighting with the "oh, J!! this is different" side of me and the "**** her, *******, everyone is the same" side. i'm pretty sure i told you this, but i broke up with my last girlfriend because she actually gave a **** about me. and it made me want to puke. when i did, when i left, she told me that she was in love with me. and i ran to the bathroom. and proceeded to cry, getting rid of my lunch and dinner, and almost just ended it right there because i thought, "****. if someone can love me, can say those three sacred words, to me? TO ME? i must be hiding so much from them." i just want to scream. yknow? to the world, to my friends, my family, you, that "i'm ****** UP IM ****** UP IM ****** UP PLEASE LEAVE" but "oh, gods, don't leave." please, ******* ****, if you're not ready, if you don't want me, please, tell me. if i'm too much, especially after all of this, holy ******* ****, please, tell me. because i can't take it. i can't. tell me now, these three days in where i'm confessing i want to be with you, that you can't. because i wouldn't be able to handle it much longer than from here. oh, **** yeah, it's going to hurt so much. i kept saying that i didn't want to like you. but everything draws me in, dearest Edward, and it ******* *****. it. *****. because i'm beyond aware of possibilities of the failure. and, yet, i couldn't be happier. in the middle of my frequent breakdowns, i'm so entirely full of joy. my mother tells me that i'm glowing from how entirely, like, happy i am. you're miles away, Frenchie, and yet you make me happier than i've been in a long, long, LONG time, dancing and singing around my room like an absolute idiot because i'm thinking, y'know, MAYBE. MAYBE THIS IS THE ONE. "J MAYBE YOU CAN BE LOVED, AGAIN. MAYBE SHE'LL LOVE YOU, MAYBE YOU AREN'T AS BAD AS YOU MAKE YOURSELF OUT TO BE." and everything looks so ******* amazing with you in the picture. and, still, i always ask myself, is this too fast? am i still not ready, still taking things too fast, should i shut up, am i hiding too much, doesn't she get my bipolarness and bpd? you do right, you do? oh ******* ****- **** all that, those last few questions are entire other things, and it's now 2:07 in the morning and i'm ******' done. the end done, I won't write anything else. except this. Frenchie, I know you love being called that, but there's something so entirely personal about being called by your name. sometimes I catch myself slipping on typing. maybe it was a mistake to tell me your real name.
frenchie.
sydney
a rose by any other name would smell just as sweet

One day there was a bright glowing canvas, a pure sparkling white
It was beautiful, but not complete
Then someone came along and drew lines on it to form flowers and mountains and streams, it was more beautiful and it made the natural white look more distinct
Then one day someone else added color and the canvas radiated and became more and more complete, it seemed whole and functional
Suddenly, one day someone came along and slew the canvas, destroying its color till it showed black, and an ugly black
The canvas seems so drab so empty without its color, so lifeless
People refused to help the canvas, refused to anything about the canvas slayer refused to listen to the canvas’ plea
Instead the canvas slayer’s free to roam free to hurt and damage other canvas
Who will restore the canvas?
Who will bring justice?
Why is the canvas slayer free to roam while the canvas feels imprisoned, crushed, victimized?
Why is the canvas treated like a criminal?
When will the canvas feel free, joyful and peaceful?

In the solace
Drifting transient
Before the dawn
Quiet light
Scattered sentient thoughts
Dreams lift on gossamer wings
Effervesce on heady winds
Like milkweed fluff on a summer day
From the narrow path
I stray

Lost in thoughts
Consuming
Stones thrown from distant shores
Placid surface
Fractured
This undertow defines my mind
Spinning evidence of chaos
Purpose slips away
From the narrow path
I stray
  
Fogbound vessel
Aimless deadwood
On a restless sea
Storm tossed
Lost and anchorless
Victimized by riptides and eddies
Uncharted course each sunless day
From the narrow path
I stray

TL Boehm 040508

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”

are like some people,
they are victimized to death
within one's palm
they're taken down and thrown

they had power
but no more
human eyes show pity
for picking them,
but not humanity

pressed flowers are they
who sleep under the tents,
walking for decades,
searching for new hope
cause it's crumbled back home.

I garden naked
When one does not comprehend the places you've been,
Ignorant they name your path
Twisted facade, let's fornicate the law
Switch our curfew
Night is dark
Deep cryptic essence
Let no man take the massive ego, hiding in your stilettos
The ridge of the heel crushing the victimized windpipe
Polish and clean
Sparkling
Almost brand new
Steady, walk in progress

After too many years of mom’s psychiatric issues,
whose pendulum of unpredictable emotions swung
between fits of violent rage and victimized hatred,
I gave up the struggle many of us
try and fail to endure.
Some people who love the insane
fall into the pit of personal torment,
an anxiety or depression of inner madness.
Others choose eye for an eye revenge.
Headlines of such retaliation steam over social media:
‘Wife Murders Husband Over Cold Turkey Complaint’
I made the completely selfish choice of maternal divorce,
to spend Christmas with a neighbor friend
who had endured much of the same abuses
and learned the same lessons years earlier.

Ana and I spent several merry Christmases
at one of those all you can eat seafood buffet joints.
The restaurant was simply a massive room.
A trough ran the 100 feet length of the back wall,
where the cattle lined up to feed.

Each year, we looked forward to our glorious feast,
not for the quality of the food, but the friendship
and the king crab legs neither of us could afford
any other time of the year.

We’d trade laughs and stories of the year.
We reminisced about friends and family passed on.
For 2 or 3 hours on a cold winter’s night,
there was no poverty, no family, no hardship,
no greed, no fuss…only laughs.
Except for the year I asked myself,
‘What would Jesus do?’

Standing in the long, sweaty buffet line,
a mumbling buzzed about a **** up front
taking too many crab legs.
Even though the restaurant claimed unlimited portions,
in reality, the kitchen workers played a good game,
only filling the large metal bin every 30 minutes.
The unwritten rule among buffet veterans
is to take 5 or 6 crab legs and leave some
for the others behind you.
The poor must look out for each other
because we all **** well know
rich ******* only care about themselves.

After a couple minutes of the crowd grumbling,
a heavyset woman in a moo-moo screamed,
‘Look at that guy! Look at his plate!’
The slicked-hair office drone the moo-moo pointed to
confidently strode past the hungry patrons
in his business casual golf shirt and khakis.
In one hand, he balanced a plate stacked
with at least 20 crab legs.
His other hand carried a cereal-sized bowl of butter.
The apparent jeers of shame from my fellow wretches,
whose bellies would go empty for another half hour
didn’t affect this guy’s silent march,
his corporate attitude to loot, to conquer.

I stepped out of line in the guy’s path.
‘What the are you doing?’ I said.
‘It’s a free country.’
He tried to squeeze around me, pressing his hip
against the orange chicken buffet station.
I moved to block him again.
‘Free for you, but no one else, huh?’
‘Whatever,’ he said. ‘Just move.’

His empirical entitlement inspired me to perform
a little Christmas justice.
With both hands, I lunged for the man’s plate
and wrapped both hands around all but four crab legs.
‘What the hell, buddy?’ he shouted.
The guy had become a moneychanger in our temple.
‘Do something,’ I said.
A woman in line looked at me, her eyes wide, startled.
I handed her a crab leg.
The coward ran his mouth in an emasculated mumble,
but skulked back to his table.
I then walked down the line,
handing each of my fellow diners a single crab leg.
Old men formed expressions of confusion,
Young mothers and fathers laughed.
Children pointed their single crab legs to the ceiling
in a show of solidarity to the cause,
victory against a great evil.

A short Asian man approached me in line.
‘You must leave,’ he said in broken English.
‘But I paid for the buffet.’
‘No troublemakers. You go.’

I’d become a scourge to the Roman power structure,
an immoral bandit of Nazareth.
Being bad never felt so good.
After all, one can remove the boy from madness,
but without intense psychiatric treatment,
one rarely removes madness from the boy.
Ana wasn’t happy that we missed our annual feast.
I drove us home quietly content.
Another Christmas celebrated.

green island privilege

we thread our way through the Johnstone Strait,
where every landmass, largest and smallish,
all islands, so this particular three-island-man is comforted and
comfortable in his surroundings, in his skin,
in his watery rivered veins

the outlines of myriads shapes, assorted puzzle pieces of earth adrift,
fitted sheets, awaiting assembly upon the magic of water,
fitting the continuously moving puzzling frame, accepting all,
mutually funding each other for each must, by definition,
define each other

the sky allows itself to be glimpsed, “yes, I’m still blue,” it teases,
but sky is busy bathing its undersides, in gloomy whites
of a bubble bath, of a deep morning mournful fog,
we underneath, observing, bestride a double sided fir and pine forests corridor either-sided of our the cold calm watershed,
a green privilege

fog above, touching so lightly our green tree waterway enclosure,
just as a human caresses his truly beloved’s cheeks, so so softly,
the fog sitting on top of the treetops, kissing, allowing that,
but no more,as the day is now only hours young,
disallowing mature sunset romance

close enough to touch, the fallen branches that people the shoreline and I, marvel at my privilege, my history, how I came to be
witness to this moment, testifying to the luck of life, cris cross continental running from European Black Forest persecution,
Spanish inquisitors, whose auto-da-fe cris cross burnings earned them no truth, no fame,
where racism hatred made my tribe an official inferior kind,
worthy of extermination, yet, here I am surviving to be arriving
to the serenity of this goddess Columbia moment in natural embrace

but here again, at this second, still excoriated as virus-privileged,
aligned this time to the guilt of my skin colorations,
guilty genetically, in my nation of 99% immigrants,
which confuses us,
for we, our troop, victimized by quotas, ghettos, crafted laws,
once upon a time burnished, now burnt by our successes,
we asked for nothing more, fair play,
a chance to win but never by stepping on the backs of others,
are told, no, no, guilty by chance,
cause you won the oppressors color coded lottery

the sun keeps on battling, though now late afternoon,
its glare, no fair, makes me squint to see the horizon,
a thin lucent bright line, who knows how far away,
it challenges me, saying am I not the sun to everyone,
leading you to new islands, green end zones for anyone
to touch down, leading you back home to where you shelter
anyone who asks, a new horizon for anyone comes to me,
giver of words, my inspiration family history shared for anyone,
I adjudge guilty, your privilege was earned, by the exile you’ve endured and the truth of your island green privilege,
and the trees, in unison say, hallelujah selah

I don't like to celebrate my birthday
I don't celebrate my birthday.
What is there to celebrate?

My existence is stained in accident and I don't need to be given purpose in rubber balloons, and paper streamers, and cheap wax candles.

My birthday feels like a date that's begging and pleading for someone to acknowledge that I'm alive, and I don't want to have to pretend to be.

I don't want to be thankful for stupid gifts that are brought on by obligation and I don't want to smile when I hear "happy birthday" come off your lips. I'm not happy.

My birth is just a day. A mistaken date, an accidental date, a victimized date that had to bear my name being attached to it like I'm of some significance to the calendar. Like I'm of some significance to time.

Time that will also be one more year closer to death which is just as unbearable because it's confirmation of my accidental, mistaken, existence. It's the stamp that says "she shouldn't have been breathing in the first place". Don't date my tombstone.

Its uncomfortable for me to celebrate my birthday.

I'm not trying to be depressing, or pitiful, or too "deep" about things BUT this is just a fact. A statement. An acceptance in my life. A way things are kind of feeling. Permanent.

So don't tell me I'm thinking about it all wrong and to be more positive. That people love me and are happy I'm alive and want me to know that. That's a bunch of *******. If you loved my existence you wouldn't need to express that to me in chocolate icing, and blow horns, and confetti bits. I'm not pitiful. Birthdays are just a pitiful excuse for you to make my existence more about living for you. A debt for your "kindness" at throwing me a party. A debt for your "thoughtfulness" because of that expensive gift you bought with me in mind. A debt for your "love".

That's what  I mean when I say simply, " I don't want to be 19".

Assaulted once again,
Betrayed by the ones she loved,
Consumed with utter sadness,
Dehumanized in every way.
Embarrassed by what they made her do,
Fearful that there's more to come,
Heartbroken and humiliated,
Inadequate in all she does.
****** around with such great force,
Kept quiet with threats of death,
Laughed at as she cries in pain,
Mistreated and manipulated
One broken heart left on display.
Pain they left within their wake,
Robbed of all her happiness,
Scared to trust again.
Trapped within their shadow,
Uncertain of my fate,
Victimized for the final time,
Worthless mindset overcome.
X'd out all the lies you told me,
Yearning for all that I deserve,
Zeroed out of my heart forever, as I take my final stand and finally leave today.