A Poem for Three Voices

Setting:  A Maternity Ward and round about

FIRST VOICE:
I am slow as the world.  I am very patient,
Turning through my time, the suns and stars
Regarding me with attention.
The moon's concern is more personal:
She passes and repasses, luminous as a nurse.
Is she sorry for what will happen?  I do not think so.
She is simply astonished at fertility.

When I walk out, I am a great event.
I do not have to think, or even rehearse.
What happens in me will happen without attention.
The pheasant stands on the hill;
He is arranging his brown feathers.
I cannot help smiling at what it is I know.
Leaves and petals attend me.  I am ready.

SECOND VOICE:
When I first saw it, the small red seep, I did not believe it.
I watched the men walk about me in the office.  They were so flat!
There was something about them like cardboard, and now I had caught it,
That flat, flat, flatness from which ideas, destructions,
Bulldozers, guillotines, white chambers of shrieks proceed,
Endlessly proceed--and the cold angels, the abstractions.
I sat at my desk in my stockings, my high heels,

And the man I work for laughed:  'Have you seen something awful?
You are so white, suddenly.'  And I said nothing.
I saw death in the bare trees, a deprivation.
I could not believe it.  Is it so difficult
For the spirit to conceive a face, a mouth?
The letters proceed from these black keys, and these black keys proceed
From my alphabetical fingers, ordering parts,

Parts, bits, cogs, the shining multiples.
I am dying as I sit.  I lose a dimension.
Trains roar in my ears, departures, departures!
The silver track of time empties into the distance,
The white sky empties of its promise, like a cup.
These are my feet, these mechanical echoes.
Tap, tap, tap, steel pegs.  I am found wanting.

This is a disease I carry home, this is a death.
Again, this is a death.  Is it the air,
The particles of destruction I **** up?  Am I a pulse
That wanes and wanes, facing the cold angel?
Is this my lover then?  This death, this death?
As a child I loved a lichen-bitten name.
Is this the one sin then, this old dead love of death?

THIRD VOICE:
I remember the minute when I knew for sure.
The willows were chilling,
The face in the pool was beautiful, but not mine--
It had a consequential look, like everything else,
And all I could see was dangers:  doves and words,
Stars and showers of gold--conceptions, conceptions!
I remember a white, cold wing

And the great swan, with its terrible look,
Coming at me, like a castle, from the top of the river.
There is a snake in swans.
He glided by; his eye had a black meaning.
I saw the world in it--small, mean and black,
Every little word hooked to every little word, and act to act.
A hot blue day had budded into something.

I wasn't ready.  The white clouds rearing
Aside were dragging me in four directions.
I wasn't ready.
I had no reverence.
I thought I could deny the consequence--
But it was too late for that.  It was too late, and the face
Went on shaping itself with love, as if I was ready.

SECOND VOICE:
It is a world of snow now.  I am not at home.
How white these sheets are.  The faces have no features.
They are bald and impossible, like the faces of my children,
Those little sick ones that elude my arms.
Other children do not touch me:  they are terrible.
They have too many colors, too much life.  They are not quiet,
Quiet, like the little emptinesses I carry.

I have had my chances.  I have tried and tried.
I have stitched life into me like a rare *****,
And walked carefully, precariously, like something rare.
I have tried not to think too hard.  I have tried to be natural.
I have tried to be blind in love, like other women,
Blind in my bed, with my dear blind sweet one,
Not looking, through the thick dark, for the face of another.

I did not look.  But still the face was there,
The face of the unborn one that loved its perfections,
The face of the dead one that could only be perfect
In its easy peace, could only keep holy so.
And then there were other faces.  The faces of nations,
Governments, parliaments, societies,
The faceless faces of important men.

It is these men I mind:
They are so jealous of anything that is not flat!  They are jealous gods
That would have the whole world flat because they are.
I see the Father conversing with the Son.
Such flatness cannot but be holy.
'Let us make a heaven,' they say.
'Let us flatten and launder the grossness from these souls.'

FIRST VOICE:
I am calm.  I am calm.  It is the calm before something awful:
The yellow minute before the wind walks, when the leaves
Turn up their hands, their pallors.  It is so quiet here.
The sheets, the faces, are white and stopped, like clocks.
Voices stand back and flatten.  Their visible hieroglyphs
Flatten to parchment screens to keep the wind off.
They paint such secrets in Arabic, Chinese!

I am dumb and brown.  I am a seed about to break.
The brownness is my dead self, and it is sullen:
It does not wish to be more, or different.
Dusk hoods me in blue now, like a Mary.
O color of distance and forgetfulness!--
When will it be, the second when Time breaks
And eternity engulfs it, and I drown utterly?

I talk to myself, myself only, set apart--
Swabbed and lurid with disinfectants, sacrificial.
Waiting lies heavy on my lids.  It lies like sleep,
Like a big sea.  Far off, far off, I feel the first wave tug
Its cargo of agony toward me, inescapable, tidal.
And I, a shell, echoing on this white beach
Face the voices that overwhelm, the terrible element.

THIRD VOICE:
I am a mountain now, among mountainy women.
The doctors move among us as if our bigness
Frightened the mind.  They smile like fools.
They are to blame for what I am, and they know it.
They hug their flatness like a kind of health.
And what if they found themselves surprised, as I did?
They would go mad with it.

And what if two lives leaked between my thighs?
I have seen the white clean chamber with its instruments.
It is a place of shrieks.  It is not happy.
'This is where you will come when you are ready.'
The night lights are flat red moons.  They are dull with blood.
I am not ready for anything to happen.
I should have murdered this, that murders me.

FIRST VOICE:
There is no miracle more cruel than this.
I am dragged by the horses, the iron hooves.
I last.  I last it out.  I accomplish a work.
Dark tunnel, through which hurtle the visitations,
The visitations, the manifestations, the startled faces.
I am the center of an atrocity.
What pains, what sorrows must I be mothering?

Can such innocence **** and ****?  It milks my life.
The trees wither in the street.  The rain is corrosive.
I taste it on my tongue, and the workable horrors,
The horrors that stand and idle, the slighted godmothers
With their hearts that tick and tick, with their satchels of instruments.
I shall be a wall and a roof, protecting.
I shall be a sky and a hill of good:  O let me be!

A power is growing on me, an old tenacity.
I am breaking apart like the world.  There is this blackness,
This ram of blackness.  I fold my hands on a mountain.
The air is thick.  It is thick with this working.
I am used.  I am drummed into use.
My eyes are squeezed by this blackness.
I see nothing.

SECOND VOICE:
I am accused.  I dream of massacres.
I am a garden of black and red agonies.  I drink them,
Hating myself, hating and fearing.  And now the world conceives
Its end and runs toward it, arms held out in love.
It is a love of death that sickens everything.
A dead sun stains the newsprint.  It is red.
I lose life after life.  The dark earth drinks them.

She is the vampire of us all.  So she supports us,
Fattens us, is kind.  Her mouth is red.
I know her.  I know her intimately--
Old winter-face, old barren one, old time bomb.
Men have used her meanly.  She will eat them.
Eat them, eat them, eat them in the end.
The sun is down.  I die.  I make a death.

FIRST VOICE:
Who is he, this blue, furious boy,
Shiny and strange, as if he had hurtled from a star?
He is looking so angrily!
He flew into the room, a shriek at his heel.
The blue color pales.  He is human after all.
A red lotus opens in its bowl of blood;
They are stitching me up with silk, as if I were a material.

What did my fingers do before they held him?
What did my heart do, with its love?
I have never seen a thing so clear.
His lids are like the lilac-flower
And soft as a moth, his breath.
I shall not let go.
There is no guile or warp in him.  May he keep so.

SECOND VOICE:
There is the moon in the high window.  It is over.
How winter fills my soul!  And that chalk light
Laying its scales on the windows, the windows of empty offices,
Empty schoolrooms, empty churches.  O so much emptiness!
There is this cessation.  This terrible cessation of everything.
These bodies mounded around me now, these polar sleepers--
What blue, moony ray ices their dreams?

I feel it enter me, cold, alien, like an instrument.
And that mad, hard face at the end of it, that O-mouth
Open in its gape of perpetual grieving.
It is she that drags the blood-black sea around
Month after month, with its voices of failure.
I am helpless as the sea at the end of her string.
I am restless.  Restless and useless.  I, too, create corpses.

I shall move north.  I shall move into a long blackness.
I see myself as a shadow, neither man nor woman,
Neither a woman, happy to be like a man, nor a man
Blunt and flat enough to feel no lack.  I feel a lack.
I hold my fingers up, ten white pickets.
See, the darkness is leaking from the cracks.
I cannot contain it.  I cannot contain my life.

I shall be a heroine of the peripheral.
I shall not be accused by isolate buttons,
Holes in the heels of socks, the white mute faces
Of unanswered letters, coffined in a letter case.
I shall not be accused, I shall not be accused.
The clock shall not find me wanting, nor these stars
That rivet in place abyss after abyss.

THIRD VOICE:
I see her in my sleep, my red, terrible girl.
She is crying through the glass that separates us.
She is crying, and she is furious.
Her cries are hooks that catch and grate like cats.
It is by these hooks she climbs to my notice.
She is crying at the dark, or at the stars
That at such a distance from us shine and whirl.

I think her little head is carved in wood,
A red, hard wood, eyes shut and mouth wide open.
And from the open mouth issue sharp cries
Scratching at my sleep like arrows,
Scratching at my sleep, and entering my side.
My daughter has no teeth.  Her mouth is wide.
It utters such dark sounds it cannot be good.

FIRST VOICE:
What is it that flings these innocent souls at us?
Look, they are so exhausted, they are all flat out
In their canvas-sided cots, names tied to their wrists,
The little silver trophies they've come so far for.
There are some with thick black hair, there are some bald.
Their skin tints are pink or sallow, brown or red;
They are beginning to remember their differences.

I think they are made of water; they have no expression.
Their features are sleeping, like light on quiet water.
They are the real monks and nuns in their identical garments.
I see them showering like stars on to the world--
On India, Africa, America, these miraculous ones,
These pure, small images.  They smell of milk.
Their footsoles are untouched.  They are walkers of air.

Can nothingness be so prodigal?
Here is my son.
His wide eye is that general, flat blue.
He is turning to me like a little, blind, bright plant.
One cry.  It is the hook I hang on.
And I am a river of milk.
I am a warm hill.

SECOND VOICE:
I am not ugly.  I am even beautiful.
The mirror gives back a woman without deformity.
The nurses give back my clothes, and an identity.
It is usual, they say, for such a thing to happen.
It is usual in my life, and the lives of others.
I am one in five, something like that.  I am not hopeless.
I am beautiful as a statistic.  Here is my lipstick.

I draw on the old mouth.
The red mouth I put by with my identity
A day ago, two days, three days ago.  It was a Friday.
I do not even need a holiday; I can go to work today.
I can love my husband, who will understand.
Who will love me through the blur of my deformity
As if I had lost an eye, a leg, a tongue.

And so I stand, a little sightless.  So I walk
Away on wheels, instead of legs, they serve as well.
And learn to speak with fingers, not a tongue.
The body is resourceful.
The body of a starfish can grow back its arms
And newts are prodigal in legs.  And may I be
As prodigal in what lacks me.

THIRD VOICE:
She is a small island, asleep and peaceful,
And I am a white ship hooting:  Goodbye, goodbye.
The day is blazing.  It is very mournful.
The flowers in this room are red and tropical.
They have lived behind glass all their lives, they have been cared for
        tenderly.
Now they face a winter of white sheets, white faces.
There is very little to go into my suitcase.

There are the clothes of a fat woman I do not know.
There is my comb and brush.  There is an emptiness.
I am so vulnerable suddenly.
I am a wound walking out of hospital.
I am a wound that they are letting go.
I leave my health behind.  I leave someone
Who would adhere to me:  I undo her fingers like bandages:  I go.

SECOND VOICE:
I am myself again.  There are no loose ends.
I am bled white as wax, I have no attachments.
I am flat and virginal, which means nothing has happened,
Nothing that cannot be erased, ripped up and scrapped, begun again.
There little black twigs do not think to bud,
Nor do these dry, dry gutters dream of rain.
This woman who meets me in windows--she is neat.

So neat she is transparent, like a spirit.
how shyly she superimposes her neat self
On the inferno of African oranges, the heel-hung pigs.
She is deferring to reality.
It is I.  It is I--
Tasting the bitterness between my teeth.
The incalculable malice of the everyday.

FIRST VOICE:
How long can I be a wall, keeping the wind off?
How long can I be
Gentling the sun with the shade of my hand,
Intercepting the blue bolts of a cold moon?
The voices of loneliness, the voices of sorrow
Lap at my back ineluctably.
How shall it soften them, this little lullaby?

How long can I be a wall around my green property?
How long can my hands
Be a bandage to his hurt, and my words
Bright birds in the sky, consoling, consoling?
It is a terrible thing
To be so open:  it is as if my heart
Put on a face and walked into the world.

THIRD VOICE:
Today the colleges are drunk with spring.
My black gown is a little funeral:
It shows I am serious.
The books I carry wedge into my side.
I had an old wound once, but it is healing.
I had a dream of an island, red with cries.
It was a dream, and did not mean a thing.

FIRST VOICE:
Dawn flowers in the great elm outside the house.
The swifts are back.  They are shrieking like paper rockets.
I hear the sound of the hours
Widen and die in the hedgerows.  I hear the moo of cows.
The colors replenish themselves, and the wet
Thatch smokes in the sun.
The narcissi open white faces in the orchard.

I am reassured.  I am reassured.
These are the clear bright colors of the nursery,
The talking ducks, the happy lambs.
I am simple again.  I believe in miracles.
I do not believe in those terrible children
Who injure my sleep with their white eyes, their fingerless hands.
They are not mine.  They do not belong to me.

I shall meditate upon normality.
I shall meditate upon my little son.
He does not walk. &n

Change

Verse 1
It starts right deep inside of me, a true grasp on identity
The present moment is the place to be, regardless of who's watching me
It’s plain to see, comprehensively, no real gain comes easily
Whether to the left or right of me, time in motion, truly free
To persevere is the truest reward, ride this train be truly on board
This right here to truly afford, come together, one accord
A single mind retrain able, good grades are attainable
Accomplish the impossible, you can be unstoppable
A single step to take, of directions moving on
Keep it moving in forward motion, articulate my song
With an aim of harmony, we can but soldier on
We must create a place, with a feeling to belong

Let’s begin and start a new change
For in time we truly can change, subtle change, ample change, some folks just ain’t trying to change
Aim real high towards the change
Constant force, there’s always change
Release control with all the change
For yes in time we can truly change
Smaller change, greater change
So much here to rearrange
New concepts are hardly strange
Stand united welcome change
Restoration welcome change
Conservation bring the change
Re-establish forward change
For yes in time we will truly change

There are challenges that are facing me, complex to simplicity
Teams move forward socially, share discussions vocally
To stand as one, it’s just begun
Separation can’t become
A team with victory truly won
A united cause, brought as one
Determination is the real deal, certified replacing the seal
Energy the people can feel
A new beginning, fresh appeal
A brand new chapter practical
Solutions that are workable
Greatness is achievable
Concepts are conceivable
A new journey to take, whether short or whether long
Keep on moving forward, embracing a new song
With amicability, we all will progress on
Let’s create a place, with a feeling to belong

Let’s begin and start a new change
For in time we truly can change, subtle change, ample change, some folks just ain’t trying to change
Aim real high towards the change
Constant force, there’s always change
Release control with all the change
For yes in time we can truly change
Smaller change, greater change
So much here to rearrange
New concepts are hardly strange
Stand united welcome change
Restoration welcome change
Conservation bring the change
Re-establish forward change
For yes in time we will truly change

Chorus
There is ever present change, many thoughts to rearrange
Together we can change the world, let’s rewrite the page
There are many forms of strong, yet we all must soldier on
Together as one, together as one
For each and every fight, is a chance to so unite
Every lesson in the wrong, it can be rendered right
There is opportunity, be the change you want to see
Let’s set ourselves free, let’s set ourselves free
In time, beyond the impossible
Breaking through every obstacle
By faith from the intangible
Objects, they are exchangeable
Yet lives are irreplaceable
Real change is attainable

Verse 2
To offer forth a helping hand, notions yet to understand
To be welcomed in a foreign land, disharmony is sinking sand
It’s clear to see, comprehensively, operate more tactfully
With wisdom understandably, let the innocent be truly free
A greater love that can’t be defined, to comprehend the passage of time
Appreciation truly is mine, reverence beyond the sky
Of nature undeniable, progress transformational
Advancing the responsible, of wonderment sensational
A single step to take, cultivated going strong
Keep it moving in forward motion, can we all just get along
With advancing harmony, on a road that may be long
Let’s now create a place, with a feeling to belong

Let’s begin and start a new change
For in time we truly can change, subtle change, ample change, some folks just ain’t trying to change
Aim real high towards the change
Constant force, there’s always change
Release control with all the change
For yes in time we can truly change
Smaller change, greater change
So much here to rearrange
New concepts are hardly strange
Stand united welcome change
Restoration welcome change
Conservation bring the change
Re-establish forward change
For yes in time we will truly change

Advancing with a point of view, discernment of what’s really true
Comprehension of what’s true for you, of new horizons to ensue
With a faculty of proficiency, movements of efficiency
With complex capability, time in motion, skillfully
Experience that can be applied, universal always onside
Letting go of innermost pride
Truthfulness, no need to hide
Application practical, let your goals be reachable
In him all things possible, passionately powerful
With awareness to awake, with weakness rendered strong
Keep moving in forward motion, articulate my song
With all tranquillity, uncover what is wrong
We can now create a place, with a feeling to belong

Let’s begin and start a new change
For in time we truly can change, subtle change, ample change, some folks just ain’t trying to change
Aim real high towards the change
Constant force, there’s always change
Release control with all the change
For yes in time we can truly change
Smaller change, greater change
So much here to rearrange
New concepts are hardly strange
Stand united welcome change
Restoration welcome change
Conservation bring the change
Re-establish forward change
For yes in time we will truly change

Chorus
There is ever present change, many thoughts to rearrange
Together we can change the world, let’s rewrite the page
There are many forms of strong, yet we all must soldier on
Together as one, together as one
For each and every fight, is a chance to so unite
Every lesson in the wrong, it can be rendered right
There is opportunity, be the change you want to see
Let’s set ourselves free, let’s set ourselves free
In time, beyond the impossible
Breaking through every obstacle
By faith from the intangible
Objects, they are exchangeable
Yet lives are irreplaceable
Real change is attainable

Verse 3
Let actions be effectual, real change be perpetual
Creative with the intellectual, let guidance be instructional
Be rational, co-operational, shared ideas are practical
Measuring the mathematical, alignment formational
Aiming high reach for the sky
Given standards you can defy
With courage here the aim is to try
Moving forward, mystify
Far from the undesirable, feelings unreliable
Testing the improbable, reality is changeable
A bolder step to take, of directions moving strong
You can always go beyond the place that you came from
With realised clarity, we gain sense of the wrong
Let’s now create a place, where we can all belong

Let’s begin and start a new change
For in time we truly can change, subtle change, ample change, some folks just ain’t trying to change
Aim real high towards the change
Constant force, there’s always change
Release control with all the change
For yes in time we can truly change
Smaller change, greater change
So much here to rearrange
New concepts are hardly strange
Stand united welcome change
Restoration welcome change
Conservation bring the change
Re-establish forward change
For yes in time we will truly change

Change may be uncomfortable, let fear be inexcusable
Steer from the reprehensible, payback is repayable
To so forgive, inexhaustible
Of oneness that is plausible, the broken rectifiable
Connected, relational
Associate and we can relate, don’t waste time, a pitiless state
Memories that we cannot retake, in position, get in place
Abundance that is plentiful, examples observational
Joyfulness obtainable, experience the seasonal
Of actions yet to take, we’re keeping the game strong
Keep moving in forward motion, wherever you came from
With avid harmony, we all will soldier on
We can now create a place, with a feeling to belong

Let’s begin and start a new change
For in time we truly can change, subtle change, ample change, some folks just ain’t trying to change
Aim real high towards the change
Constant force, there’s always change
Release control with all the change
For yes in time we can truly change
Smaller change, greater change
So much here to rearrange
New concepts are hardly strange
Stand united welcome change
Restoration welcome change
Conservation bring the change
Re-establish forward change
For yes in time we will truly change

Bridge

With mind-sets evolved, there is true insight
Let’s create a place, to truly shine our light
There is wisdom to release, to regain our inner peace
Together as one, together as one
Compassion in the land, with a heart to understand
A true united force, let’s lend a helping hand
With due simplicity, re-establish harmony
Let’s set ourselves free, let’s set ourselves free
True change may be uncomfortable
Yet it is unmistakeable
New steps that are approachable
Of thoughts from the conventional
Mindful and relatable
Hopeful and aspirational

Verse 4
To go beyond, no greater time, reclaim your light it’s time to shine
In relaxed mode we will decline, natural gems can be refined
Branch of the vine, be aligned
Masterpieces of design, purposed for potential prime
Stand in line, for such a time
Become a part of the solution, let’s create a revolution
Educate the institution, truly merge into a fusion
Reduce the confrontational, join the inspirational
Movement motivational, achieve the aspirational
The journey will be great, endurance may be long
Keep moving in forward motion, can we all just get along
With solid harmony, a team can become strong
Let's now create a place, with the option to belong
Of problems to be solved, of all the games to win
If the foundation is laid, by then we can begin
A sense of harmony, let's take the vision on
Let’s now create a place, where the people can belong


Let’s begin and start a new change
For in time we truly can change, subtle change, ample change, some folks just ain’t trying to change
Aim real high towards the change
Constant force, there’s always change
Release control with all the change
For yes in time we can truly change
Smaller change, greater change
So much here to rearrange
New concepts are hardly strange
Stand united welcome change
Restoration welcome change
Conservation bring the change
Re-establish forward change
For yes in time we will truly change

Chorus
There is ever present change, many thoughts to rearrange
Together we can change the world, let’s rewrite the page
There are many forms of strong, yet we all must soldier on
Together as one, together as one
For each and every fight, is a chance to so unite
Every lesson in the wrong, it can be rendered right
There is opportunity, be the change you want to see
Let’s set ourselves free, let’s set ourselves free
In time, beyond the impossible
Breaking through every obstacle
By faith from the intangible
Objects, they are exchangeable
Yet lives are irreplaceable
Real change is attainable

Written by Geraldine Taylor ©️

There are times in life
when a man needs change,
And I don't mean,
dimes and quarters.

Remember when you
were just sixteen,
Driving all alone, solo,
in your old man's Buick?
All the windows down,
radio music blaring,
Your bare arm draped
out over the side of the door.
to better exhibit your bicep.

Hell mister, no doubt,
you were ten feet tall,
the king of the road.
Ever wish you had,
that feeling back again?

Cars were always my thing.
I owned some Detroit
Muscle, Full blown Chevy,
Firebird 400, Chrysler Hemi.
Smoked some tires and
went to Court a time or two.
Of course all that was long
ago in my fitter youth.

When I became a Yuppie
I acquired a Poodle Puppy,
a Porsche and a MGB.

But the ***** does turn.
and so then, did I,
And my road got,
a little bumpy.

Along came marriage,
then a baby carriage.
And a big house
In the Burbs.

Then came a progression
Of Volvo Station Wagons,
to Soccer Dad Mini Vans,
to large SUV's.
All for hauling,
any number of things.
Kids and dogs, strollers,
bikes, kites and scooters,
Fellow car poolers,

And less we forget,
"Pulling" things too.
Boats, RV's, Utility trailers,
and all nature of landscape,
gardening, and general
shopping paraphernalia.
Little League Teams,
Drooling big dogs,
Papier Mache Volcanos.
Home Coming Floats,
Once even a Goat
You name it, I hauled it,
Or pulled it!

Years rolled by,
eventually the Kids
flew the nest, got married.
And low and behold,
The wife and I split,
Each going our separate way.
No one's fault, just grew apart.
The thinly veiled allegorical
Previous Patriarchal
arrangement became,
A whole new start,
A workable self allegiance
to just one.

Soon once more, I was the MAN.
I ran out, bought a **** boat
But not having the kids around,
Soon sold it, having found out,
that alone, I was not a water sport.

I caroused around, dated women,
got my pockets picked,
learned a few lessons.
Fell in love, fell out again,
Took a few pretty good blows,
Right on the chin,
Even some down lower.

Round about then,
An Epiphany kicked in.
Remembered my most,
ennobling, happy events,
behind the wheel,
driving Dad's Buick.

As I stepped on the lot.
There was never doubt,
There was only one choice,
I just had to have that,
Little VW Bug Red Racer.

Nothing like your Mother's
Beetle, the engine's up front,
Not stuck in the trunk,
And man it produces over,
200 Big Time Horsepower
Not to mention,
Lays rubber in three,
Of six gears.
Getting all the while,
33 miles per gallon.

Receiving additional help,
from a sweet Turbo Booster,
Just like a big, Indy Track Bruiser.

There's 19 inch racing
tires and alloy wheels,
They look so cool,
Spinning in motion.

Dual stainless steel exhausts,
And best of all,
a cool collapsible,
Convertible top.

Rack and Pinion steering,
Handles like a sports car,
Yet still offers a backseat
To take my Grandkids,
out for a spin.

Dude, it's got,
All the bows
and whistles!

Top Down Driving is such a thrill,
Makes me feel sixteen again.
The open road, the sky above,
The wind blowing thru my hair,
what there is left of it.

Perhaps the only thing that
Could possibly make this
Driving experience greater,
Would be to speed down,
The road, going eighty,
Behind the wheel of my
Little Red Racer,
Completely **** naked,
And of course all the while,
Feel the wind in my hair.

I don't know, I'm too old,
To call this a mid life crisis.
But on the other hand,
Maybe the acquiring of
This little red sporty car,
Has something to do with,
Those Testosterone shots I'm taking.
I'm even thinking, of dying my hair,
naw, lets not get crazy!

life is never what it seems to be, always reoccuring with a thought as put upon the length of arms that revolutionize this thought. . .for those that can be bought,
is day like today less then feeling of want to rot, because so simple as a breeze brought down your temperment to be pleased. . .caught in a storm, that has outlasted
longer then your heart to feel content and warm, to feel the essence of a breath among a group of bad breaths, in other words, to breath among a group of brothers and sisters
from whom you can gain so much. But life is never what it seems to be, instead you look yourself in the mirror pointing at me, you, fool. Glowing from ragging frustration,
the toll blows for you unsurpassable deflation, because it is not for your hand that grows for the motion, to pick which ******* **** you want to lotion. Spearing the reasons,
the ego is your hero, born to work zero, and trusted with such hand to uphold all by command. To twist on the ****, that opens your door, to circumstances i certainly care less
the **** to continue to explore. But with this slight little mention, please pay close attention because this song is a *****. At least to explain the message, my whole is a
whole that takes life time to experience and grow, and appreciate the things that stoop all the levels around me, no barrier, no door, just genuine life experience to bring me
to come to this point to explain to the world something within the self, that is described by astute persons, for whom these ideas carry on to fulfill an immense part of
something that is casually slipped in and never thought about because it is told within reason that humanity cannot be without such astute person's idealogy. For **** sake my
friend, if your have many common sense, think of the common thing that has driven you to come to the conclusion that you have come to about anything. Everything is absolute and
existent and is evoked through the means. . .from the time of your dissapating freedom, as kids, not as adults, because look at how adults are this days. They teach their kids,
and they let others teach their kids, but the kids never get the feeling of being free. I promiss you, that cry or emotion you have experienced due to lack of friendliness from a
neighboring ****, it is an instillement that sparks up many motions of your life to believe into bizarre things the world portrays. For myself, I find the starting point of my
when I first breathed my first sensible air, when I walked in my own two feet without guidance as to where my eyes were seeing. How can a mind be so tender, lost by the misconformed
train thogh after train thought. That is why I find schooling such a fascinating ruthless thing that can be broken into several fashions as to why is that case. But not even
reason to fashion an answer that I know will and is definetly can be viewed to abhold a societal dismark of "wF"is wrong with that guy's mind. He must be **** casing a storm to
bring an ideaology of thought or some **** religion, but that's what so funny to me. I find everything in life comedic, non concerning except at times if I feel similar to
someone adjacent because that is their essence in my prescence, and I feel the need to comfort it, to bring back the importance of that self. The part of life I find so comedic,
how bits and bits and everything with **** have all so many fascinating
things to learn from, the progression of one's mind never attains self worth in the world with something interfering. That something interfering for example, is me personally
writing what is can be taken as pointless and presenting my writing to you how I say I do. But did I say how I am presenting this writing, absolutely not. So brings the funny,
that school teaches the aspect of disfigurament of a person's essence. This thing is a complete oblivion to everything and anything, that because even though I did not specify
how I tone myself on this paper, there is the predicament to assume that I am very angry deranged person who but pokes charasmatically at something no one can grip, because he
is portraying me the image the way I was bred to see. But then it is so **** funny, you can also take my words describing
all that I intend to explain and stick them against me to simplify your circumstances as to the causitive feeling your experiencing, and maybe the confusion that I am creating
noting a significant point that I do write intentionally without any figurative wording, just simply talking about this to evoke a presence of an essence within you that is hindered,
by what type of **** everybody is wearing, where they are starring, who is ******* and adoring, and who's simply the **** because they don't fit in a deranged group, developed by
ego-centric level stingers, who but want either good for you, or it is the drive to profit from you everything. That is, words blah blah, can take stroll
on one day's role and make no complete sense, and all they did were live the sense of a tangled mind that fostered on what has been in some form, taught, over
what you can call a lively existence, considering how much traumatizing headaches this could cause, and resembled among a group of similar constituents with similar reasons
as to whatever the situation might be. I could point this out within one sentence, but it wouldn't hold any deeper understanding of this essence, so instead I decide with all
my reasoning and tremendous experience that even to some, even at this gritty expertisians who grease up the world to guess everything based on study and reasoning by other humans,
who believe all these ideas are shifters to the mind but always stem the relentless, functioning without any perspectives open to the idea that mold humans into one spatial and far better
so called community, which in all it's case has lost the essence to preserve the self without a ***** on the back. That ***** of course is the communal ****, that builds from a
trigger of words, then they teach the brain as if it is known how to be as a functioning unit. The amount doesn't matter, the amount that is thought brings hope, but the most
amount to the self is the function of you, like I feel I function amongst anyone because I have come to terms and realize what really important things I have learned from my life.
My life to some is gripping, only because it sounds unbelievable, but of that life I found the same driving forces that drive madness even today, and has been reaccuring for as
long as some form of expression has been. And in all humiliation of humanity, or as I consider it digression of being self around the bounds of comfortability, it has been
a grand experience to see many a people transgress from the point of my meeting them with a continuous contact to the point of now, and then, and future plausible. But then
and future plausible for me stand out as notions needless of evocations due to the fact that the self is a dwindling factor hung by a rope to swing the way the self first portrayed
to me, and then to the direction away from the first encountered mind. But in all, without senseless ignorance, I do understand these things are studied for a reason, for a reason
that is workable to be as they are for some variables do affect person's in many different way. That is why, the sense of one roof and too many aloof is but a big spoof. With
sensibility, how can forging something into your life help you to achieve greatness within self to portray it in a manner plausible. The only way is as a current flows, so do
the gulls.



where do you. . .come from. . .so many leagues unbeknownst among my dreams.
life is never what it seems. . .until i met your eyes.. . that built
my stongest implication, dire in desire to live a life inspired. . .
but then so is, to dream upon what tends on building motivation. . .
life is beautiful sensation. . .
from the first rainfall with you meeting outside spontaneous realm. . .
we fought the solemn wind to calm our cumbered spirits. . .taking flight,
fighting what might have been. . .semeless to even entertain. . .lost in
each others warmness. . .everything we built tended harmless.

now see how we have. . .related to each other's hearts. . .left the scrutinity
at obscurity prolonged on scale of mirror. . .where it has always belonged.
now it's just time darling
i promiss it wont be long until our roots bind the maximum strong.

from even across the plains, and mountain long trip stains. . .i feel
less pain. . .from what's the phrase non loose then gain, consorting time
absorbing each other's essence in rhyme.
the deepest of sensation of you. . .the meekest of me, makes me be the simple thing
that i've reconnected to . . .to realize, the sensation of you. . .from our first
encounter, i felt deep into your eyes. . .what agree's none behind with lies. . .
you evoked the deepest motion within my sphere of emotion not to betray myself within
this realm and dark frivolous potion. . .for my first set of emotion set on your tone behind
this potion. . .

i face you eye for an eye of every day until i die, but will ever will i die. . .not with you
never. . .darling angel, angel you are my expressive tone to call you so. . .nothing more
is the essense of you that you seem to implore, how busy life must be. . .we need feel free
to good ridance from this fee that life doesn't instill our good griefs beyond simple joys and beliefs. . .
for simply darling we are each other's heart beats, if it's simple smell of you
i will carry out my deeds in hell. . .beneath on hearth this earth, where all of us have been given
birth. . .but sent to spend what is driven by multipolluted cord, the time in blunt approach from
the thing that planted our roots. . .

how i feel you is simply too rich for some dirt to enrich you. . .i simply love and cherish
every bit of your essence, it has lifelong presence that even doing what they call
reminiscing, can't surpass living without missing what they have been reminiscing. . .
i cherish you beyond what little faith can teach about having bigger faith, when all my hopes
ride faithful slopes without elongated stops and rope bearing hopes. . .
my life i see to the extent to remorse only what some feel beyond scope of too openly. . .
but how can i retreat on what i can't stop to feel to protect you from, to their heads we are getting closely. . .
how in the scope of your first essence, can i give up to give way to ruin such pure essence. . .

i understand the world makes a feeling for such pure feeling is counted by blessings. . .
and in order for us to make it, that thought i feel senseless baking . . .constant roll of assorted
reasons for why we bleed to them treasons . . .for how can i express, how simple love doesn't
just digress, or something with time you invest. . .it's simply have been a joy of building
together a foundation for our nest. . .**** the rest. . .**** the pest. . .the world is the best
when sleepers are put to rest and the spark of commune are dwellers dwelling on these mischivers'
locked up chest. . .
to find out that darling. . .you simply are a joy to give me whole, that i'm not uninspired troll
reluctant to breath beside the one he placed his greed upon. . .or her, or it. . but all the essence
is closed and beat, by some known with ideals humanity can't consider too farfetched to bare to grit. . .
and sway to the essence that i hold in my glances. . .are as simple as these branded constructed norms
that most tend to manipulate and distort to one contorted form. . . .so all can bend into one socket for 365
degree view that most tend to agree. . .but never really see.

i know it's many there with this essense around the breeze of an aura, that simply are stranded too far apart by such horror.. .
to relent their essence with their prescence. . .to whom Barbarians find the essence is planted full on messes.
but how can we relate to such things darling. . .when the first glow of your essence showed me life full
of memories by the smile in your eyes, glowing beauty of any sort. . .i feel the world will someday . . .
take flight. . .in my way, but **** that. . .i'm to speak when my message is too simple, provoked only by the
thought, "protect the world its miser mother has been beaten". . .i can never relent, the message that is never
but to contradict what's life has not eaten. . .because of the times put to squares, living life, fostering a step back, into recluce. . .these biches wont even
say cause their too ****. . .to figure out that there's a worrior to stump them pleaded sheets out of wood. . .
i say this out for your sarcasm, elongated this song a bit to give you big ******. . .so when you repose, you
think nothing but what side are the pro's. . .and enter them into oblivion, grasping each by the billion, how
can i repose for i know, without one word it is and has been always come down to the special chosen million. . .

because my darling, i feel the miser that this essence in me you inspire, is up and target for no good. . .for
these pleaded fockers granted themselves unrelentless priveleges for centuries, changing diepers to giving
blood diamond marriages. . .riding on what they call prestine carriages. . .oh what,you don't recognize this
what the world has come to building from everybody's demise. . .feeding on high rise. . .splitting cots in the
rots, most alluded with plots and continued building upon the essence of you, keeping you stewed, brewing up a flu. . .
to this day when i met you. . .
will never cease your memory by only that it was circumstance. . .romance among thieves denying our chance to dance. . .
with one glance, their world just plopped a chance. . .for i know they know who im refering to, without a glance
i'm sure they feel my stance just to look **** eyed puking. . .**** blocking their world to rocking, while else where goes to foster under
this ugly monster. . .stooped on a porch ******* their air, without any underwear. . .haha must be due to how
much pull goes to their hair. . .how do i, they feel ****** diddlidy ****, what, is this person a human or a
restored frame of mind living. . .i can't be what's in my eyes to be believing, but i simply am retarted man. . .
a ******* rough psychological fighting bluff, to them i would. . .but trust me, how could i in my life, i
never could.. . .fall to false pretention, that life is a great invention, that my desire's are for simple
hires. . .for i know my life evolves around that which your first essence, darling, we built stronger everyday
to our future of what we call present. . .

life with you, i simply can't resent. . .but figure out what's best
to make what we don't need to make. . . because the essence uproots life's shrivel of what they call romances. . .
rooting upward from the seed we planted on the day people deside to bleed
all over the notion, that this emotion they conquered stems from shot of elixir handed down from the heavens by
some they call cupid fixer. . .relentless, they push through many dances. . .all so strained and constricted by many
glances, restricting their free essence to feel in whole their life is shot down by simple messes. . . .
but you, none taken, broken and mistaken. . .how can simple things be so. . .when you know my essence for you is
far greater then what one instance can remark for the whole, i feel simply. . .protect you from their hole and
bind you with my essence that strives in whole. . .even through tormenting lonely dances. . .when i saw the world an ugly form. . .
nowhere to want to run to, or feel
resentment.. . where's life going to go. . .if my essence in a whole feeds you. . .away to their
mysterious goal. . .i wouldn't have the patience to ***** their abnormal pretence, as if life is sweet with
such mysterious fowl. . .create little thought to create bigger picture, many aditions just create tensities
among those who bicker, loosing control each time only quicker. . .that's why it's never lesser to speak for the lesser
dresser, or the person they showed you, that looked like he ******* told you, but instead they made the mistake
to grow lower. . . cowering even bolder. . . what **** is the point of that. . .to say it none meeker as if its meant to outcast the bleeker
. . .i'm not that so. . .to scowl like fowl crackhead, loosing self reliance to gr

Your daisies have come
on the day of my divorce:
the courtroom a cement box,
a gas chamber for the infectious Jew in me
and a perhaps land, a possibly promised land
for the Jew in me,
but still a betrayal room for the till-death-do-us-
and yet a death, as in the unlocking of scissors
that makes the now separate parts useless,
even to cut each other up as we did yearly
under the crayoned-in sun.
The courtroom keeps squashing our lives as they break
into two cans ready for recycling,
flattened tin humans
and a tin law,
even for my twenty-five years of hanging on
by my teeth as I once saw at Ringling Brothers.
The gray room:
Judge, lawyer, witness
and me and invisible Skeezix,
and all the other torn
enduring the bewilderments
of their division.

Your daisies have come
on the day of my divorce.
They arrive like round yellow fish,
******* with love at the coral of our love.
Yet they wait,
in their short time,
like little utero half-borns,
half killed, thin and bone soft.
They breathe the air that stands
for twenty-five illicit days,
the sun crawling inside the sheets,
the moon spinning like a tornado
in the washbowl,
and we orchestrated them both,
calling ourselves TWO CAMP DIRECTORS.
There was a song, our song on your cassette,
that played over and over
and baptised the prodigals.
It spoke the unspeakable,
as the rain will on an attic roof,
letting the animal join its soul
as we kneeled before a miracle--
forgetting its knife.

The daisies confer
in the old-married kitchen
papered with blue and green chefs
who call out pies, cookies, yummy,
at the charcoal and cigarette smoke
they wear like a yellowy salve.
The daisies absorb it all--
the twenty-five-year-old sanctioned love
(If one could call such handfuls of fists
and immobile arms that!)
and on this day my world rips itself up
while the country unfastens along
with its perjuring king and his court.
It unfastens into an abortion of belief,
as in me--
the legal rift--
as on might do with the daisies
but does not
for they stand for a love
undergoihng open heart surgery
that might take
if one prayed tough enough.
And yet I demand,
even in prayer,
that I am not a thief,
a mugger of need,
and that your heart survive
on its own,
belonging only to itself,
whole, entirely whole,
and workable
in its dark cavern under your ribs.

I pray it will know truth,
if truth catches in its cup
and yet I pray, as a child would,
that the surgery take.

I dream it is taking.
Next I dream the love is swallowing itself.
Next I dream the love is made of glass,
glass coming through the telephone
that is breaking slowly,
day by day, into my ear.
Next I dream that I put on the love
like a lifejacket and we float,
jacket and I,
we bounce on that priest-blue.
We are as light as a cat's ear
and it is safe,
safe far too long!
And I awaken quickly and go to the opposite window
and peer down at the moon in the pond
and know that beauty has walked over my head,
into this bedroom and out,
flowing out through the window screen,
dropping deep into the water
to hide.

I will observe the daisies
fade and dry up
wuntil they become flour,
snowing themselves onto the table
beside the drone of the refrigerator,
beside the radio playing Frankie
(as often as FM will allow)
snowing lightly, a tremor sinking from the ceiling--
as twenty-five years split from my side
like a growth that I sliced off like a melanoma.

It is six P.M. as I water these tiny weeds
and their little half-life,
their numbered days
that raged like a secret radio,
recalling love that I picked up innocently,
yet guiltily,
as my five-year-old daughter
picked gum off the sidewalk
and it became suddenly an elastic miracle.

For me it was love found
like a diamond
where carrots grow--
the glint of diamond on a plane wing,
meaning:  DANGER!  THICK ICE!
but the good crunch of that orange,
the diamond, the carrot,
both with four million years of resurrecting dirt,
and the love,
although Adam did not know the word,
the love of Adam
obeying his sudden gift.

You, who sought me for nine years,
in stories made up in front of your naked mirror
or walking through rooms of fog women,
you trying to forget the mother
who built guilt with the lumber of a locked door
as she sobbed her soured mild and fed you loss
through the keyhole,
you who wrote out your own birth
and built it with your own poems,
your own lumber, your own keyhole,
into the trunk and leaves of your manhood,
you, who fell into my words, years
before you fell into me (the other,
both the Camp Director and the camper),
you who baited your hook with wide-awake dreams,
and calls and letters and once a luncheon,
and twice a reading by me for you.
But I wouldn't!

Yet this year,
yanking off all past years,
I took the bait
and was pulled upward, upward,
into the sky and was held by the sun--
the quick wonder of its yellow lap--
and became a woman who learned her own shin
and dug into her soul and found it full,
and you became a man who learned his won skin
and dug into his manhood, his humanhood
and found you were as real as a baker
or a seer
and we became a home,
up into the elbows of each other's soul,
without knowing--
an invisible purchase--
that inhabits our house forever.

We were
blessed by the House-Die
by the altar of the color T.V.
and somehow managed to make a tiny marriage,
a tiny marriage
called belief,
as in the child's belief in the tooth fairy,
so close to absolute,
so daft within a year or two.
The daisies have come
for the last time.
And I who have,
each year of my life,
spoken to the tooth fairy,
believing in her,
even when I was her,
am helpless to stop your daisies from dying,
although your voice cries into the telephone:
Marry me!  Marry me!
and my voice speaks onto these keys tonight:
The love is in dark trouble!
The love is starting to die,
right now--
we are in the process of it.
The empty process of it.

I see two deaths,
and the two men plod toward the mortuary of my heart,
and though I willed one away in court today
and I whisper dreams and birthdays into the other,
they both die like waves breaking over me
and I am drowning a little,
but always swimming
among the pillows and stones of the breakwater.
And though your daisies are an unwanted death,
I wade through the smell of their cancer
and recognize the prognosis,
its cartful of loss--

I say now,
you gave what you could.
It was quite a ferris wheel to spin on!
and the dead city of my marriage
seems less important
than the fact that the daisies came weekly,
over and over,
likes kisses that can't stop themselves.

There sit two deaths on November 5th, 1973.
Let one be forgotten--
Bury it!  Wall it up!
But let me not forget the man
of my child-like flowers
though he sinks into the fog of Lake Superior,
he remains, his fingers the marvel
of fourth of July sparklers,
his furious ice cream cones of licking,
remains to cool my forehead with a washcloth
when I sweat into the bathtub of his being.

For the rest that is left:
name it gentle,
as gentle as radishes inhabiting
their short life in the earth,
name it gentle,
gentle as old friends waving so long at the window,
or in the drive,
name it gentle as maple wings singing
themselves upon the pond outside,
as sensuous as the mother-yellow in the pond,
that night that it was ours,
when our bodies floated and bumped
in moon water and the cicadas
called out like tongues.

Let such as this
be resurrected in all men
whenever they mold their days and nights
as when for twenty-five days and nights you molded mine
and planted the seed that dives into my God
and will do so forever
no matter how often I sweep the floor.

Ancient people, ancient ways
Protracting back through time,
The culture of the Chinese race
Far predates Roman line.
Before the Huns and Visigoths
Cascaded forth to burn,
Confucian bred conformity
Did budding scholars learn.
Astronomy, anatomy,
Philosophy and law,
The ancients sought the knowledge path
Wide open lay the door
To secrets, mystic and arcane,
They plied their trade craft well
...Then broke into another age
Of red chaos and hell.

Swarming by the millions
And dying by the score,
Brother slaughtered brother
Until Chiang said,"No more!"
To Taiwan's craggy shores he fled,
He fortified it then
And left the Marxist mainland
In the hands of Mao's men.
The red tide swept the nation.
To militarily expand
And the cruelty of a massive force
Descended on the land.

Oh your heart should weep for China
The sensitivity and grace,
Is lost forever in the ******
To revolutionize this place.
The educated strangled,
The policemen didn't care,
And the little children running
With that red book in the air.
Oh your heart should weep for China
With her golden history torn
And her future in the sewer
Where the filthy vermin spawn.

The Chairman died without a God
Praise Allah, let it be.
And Jiang Qing, his willful wife,
Was jailed for treachery.
Deng Xiaoping rose from the dead
An elderly, wise man
Who galvanized the nations will
With a workable great plan.
Gradually, the people breathed,
The terror disappeared,
And hard repression from the top
Was nervously unfeared.
The cogs began to mesh again,
Commerce began to flow
The Red Brigade was over
And NEW CHINA was on show.

In recent years the old men
Still retain the reigns of power.
The Communistic system
Commands to this very hour.
But the rigid hand of commerce
Has loosened up a lot
And the capitalistic system
Allows profits to be got.
And the flow of information
Issues freely from the west
Influencing aspirations,
Putting systems to the test.
And the leaders know with certainty
That just around the bend,
There will be younger challengers
Who plan a different end.

The Olympics are in Beijing
In the coming August moon,
A showcase for the nations best
A demonstration soon
Of advancements that will show the world
Just how well that we have done
And that the hand of friendly comradeship
Is well and truly won.

But there is trouble in Tibet!
The saffron runs with blood.
The monks and soldiers trading blows
Are dying in the mud.
Agitation to be free
Is Tibet's distant call
And the rage of hot embarrassment
Demands the brutal fall
Of the troublemakers...Old men say

The saffron legions die.....

The howling Prayer flags scream their rage
To a lonely, cold, blue sky.





Marshalg
Mangere Bridge
1st April 2008

Written by Serge Kahili King

There is a famous *Zen koan (philosophical riddle) which asks,

"What is the sound of one hand clapping?"

The student of Zen is supposed to meditate on this riddle until some degree of insight or enlightenment occurs. *The tricky part is that there is no right answer. What you are, or what you know, or what you believe, is what you get.

Although no longer an active student of Zen, I was recently meditating of the riddle of one hand clapping when I got an answer that might be useful to share:

The sound of one hand clapping is the same as the sound of two hands clapping.

How could that be, you ask (for the sake of this article
I am assuming that you do ask)? It's simple, I reply.
The concept of clapping implies that a sound is being produced by two surfaces coming into contact, even if only one of them is actually moving.
No sound, no clapping; no second surface, no sound. Yet, the riddle definitely states that there is a sound and that there is clapping.

Therefore, my answer follows logically.

Yes, I know, the answer to a koan is supposed to be beyond logic, but rest assured that the answer came intuitively. The logic came after.

Before you dismiss this as simply a bit of cleverness or a waste of time, let me tell you about the rest of the meditation. After the revelation that the sound of one hand clapping must be the same as the sound of two hands clapping, it struck me that this was a nice metaphor for two of the corollaries of the Second Principle of Huna.

The basic principle states that there are no limits, which implies that everything is in a relationship to everything else. And that implies that if you change one side of a relationship you change both sides.Even if only one hand changes its position relative to another, unmoving hand , a clapping sound will be produced.

We don't have to wait for both sides of a relationship to participate before bringing about beneficial change.
Change one side of that relationship and the other side has to change because the relationship has changed.

We use this idea a lot in teaching Huna.
For instance, in third-level healing work where we assume that

everything is a dream and everything is dreaming, we say that
~ if you change one dream you automatically change all related dreams.

So you can go to an imaginary garden and make changes to symbols of your life experience, and your life experience will change.

In second-level healing work where we assume that
everything is telepathically linked, we say that
~ if you begin to silently bless and forgive people with whom you are having difficulties, they will know it and they will begin to change their behavior toward you without a word being spoken.

And in first level healing, where
we assume that everything is separate but potentially interactive,
we teach that
~ if you smile and hug a lot you will tend to get a lot more smiles and hugs back, even from people who don't normally smile or hug.

Now what do you think would happen if you applied this idea to the whole of your life?

In a strained personal relationship, for example, instead of waiting for the other person to make the first move toward reconciliation you could start the process in your own mind, either by purposely creating a better opinion of the other person, or by imagining the two of you getting along with all of your differences.  Sorry, you can't control with your imagination what the other person thinks or does (it simply doesn't work), but you can use imagined persuasion just as you might in a face to face meeting. As in any form of persuasion, however, the more your persuasion is based on a benefit to the other person, the more successful it is likely to be.

In a strained global relationship, assuming our theory is valid
(which means workable). We might be able to get together even in a smallish group and and rethink ((or redream)) our relationship with one or both countries involved. Theoretically, of course, it ought to take only one person to make a change. On the other hand, the change of one person's relationship to a country might only produce a very small change, so the more people the better. The thing to remember, in this context, is that you are trying to change how you think or feel about the country, not trying to change the country. It's a subtle but important difference, and it applies to people as well as countries.

If this idea catches on we can introduce  "a Huna koan" ((the actual Hawaiian phrase is "nane huna," a hidden riddle or conundrum))

*"What is the sound of one person loving?"

no matter what pronoun use is in place, there won’t be time
to decipher it as personal or impersonal, subjective or objective,
singular or plural... to write a book of philosophy pulsating
existentialism:
i miss the rugby world cup, i miss it,
the gay referee too,
i miss the hugging and blood mushroom sprouting
from the cartilage of smeared sneeze and sniff to a hark
of semolina saliva in the up-shoot...
i miss it in the scrum... away from
the balancing mary antoinette and ballerinas,
modern lawful facade: he anchored me! gone sail the titanic!
he anchored me! foul! see? precisely! a guillotine on the ready
for those insured legs of footballers...
i miss the rugby... i fancied playing it once in school...
we had p.e. (jerseys) on the reverse with a yellow stripe
going across all maroon... football was favoured...
even though i got the ball and walked 1/4 of the field in that sloth
of being fat... why do people always have such negative memories of youth,
esp. in school?! i don’t know... all i know...
when i walked for a bottle of brown whiskers tonight,
the streets of essex were filled with that fabled smog of 19th century london,
it wasn’t guy fawkes' night but the night bling bling was out...
the firework smog settled into the streets and i started gesticulating
‘trouble breathing! trouble breathing!’ using sign language...
i couldn't translate gasping into an onomatopoeia,
let alone sign-language... mime mime mime!
3 words: film... beginning with seismic shifts... severn!
it’s an american holiday for god’s sake
(the slavs are sombre remembering the day
with virgo mort of mexico... you’re out partying
******* and ******* on graves)... have some decency to be
remotely commonwealth in attitude... like australia!
i wished they won, 2nd half, 21 to 3 i thought they were whitewash flushed...
then they bounced back to 21 - 17... then the drop goal from carter...
ah it was a knockout...
never mind the mary antoinettes and ballerinas of football...
i said it once... i’ll say it again: ref! oink ref! police officer!
you missed a spot, this tile will not have anyone slipping!
it’s how you get a working man’s sport audience impassioned...
no middle-class sensibility in a sport...
make him give a wrong decision many a times...
and you’ll get the pub rumble...
not time-out... no: let’s see it on the BIG screen...
get the referee on the side of the masses and get them impassioned
through his bad decision / multitasking... i was imagining
a big mac / watching nickers being slingshot onto the pitch...
get the referee behind the crowd and orientate them
with william wallace at stirling crying - war war woad! tadpole ooh! tattoo! blue 28! blue... grr!
in rugby you’ll just get as much passion as a workable middle-class
english marriage... oops **** daisy loot the loo (with stressor r missing trill missing h):
bloom!
and your uncle was nicknamed ***** harry?
was he ginger and donned a beard?
must be royalty.
ah man, i miss the connectivity of rugby,
where everyone's making a sandwich... with football
you just get the replica of english sociological etiquette...
saying hello 5 metres apart...
so no french chequers kissing on the cheek
to feed intimacy? problem sorted...
let me just get my umbrella... seeing the teardrops
of feminism shower me under a roof salivating from the chandelier.

Dragonfly   o   Dragonfly  
framed against a lazy summer sky,
you'll hover and ponder out yonder,
like an acrobat you fly.

You'll dance and dart, hover and peer,
Touching, stalking, feathered walking.
On pond shadows dark and near,
onto sunbeams  sparkling clear.

Casting imaged reflections,
on a mirrored surface of life's crystal pond.
Where ever-diminishing dainty rippled circles,
disappear onto a distant misty shore beyond.

You'll ponder and peep,
through dark secrets your pond might keep,  
captured images of animals & bees,
scented flowers & soft young trees.

About political boundary bursts,
and agonizing desert thirsts.
While strife-torn agony song is being sung,
at the scorching heat of the searing Sun.

Witnessing a climate change,
Industrial, Oil, Air & Waste pollution.
With no workable cleanup program in site,
to warrant a solution.

Our planet's resources stretched,
to its limits by human misery & industry untold.
Life's habitats are disappearing,
the beginning of Earth end is nearing.

It is inevitable that soon, to soon,
after million a year, on life's crystal ponds so clear.
You'll too succumb to man's industrious endevours,
and for eternity disappear.
Andreas Strauss.16 June 2007

Describing a User Trial
(a Section Commander's story)

In Vietnam I most enjoyed the ambush because it is static.
And if you use your head you can **** from comfort without the need
For fire-and-movement which is a physical business at the best of times.
And in ambush you are often placed as part of a group, without responsibilities; Because they are assumed by that particular ambush commander,
Which is a relief and relaxing.

Most ambushes are triggered at night, but this one happened by day.
It was company sized, and memorable for other reasons too.
3 Section, my section, was deployed in three groups like an elbow:
Two being part of the killer-group and the other one part of flank-protection.
That's where I was, on the flank.
It was the Dry-Season.

Although it was a good killing-ground I was concerned by the
Lack of cover to our particular front; that is the part of the ambush for which I was
Responsible. My concern was the track because it curved about my section's elbow, And we, the flank-protection, could not see more than six feet through the thick, Secondary growth that grew between it and us.
It made for good concealment, but would never hinder an assault.

The plan was that the Platoon Commander would trigger the ambush with his M16.
He would know when to do this because our Platoon Sergeant had been given
Some sort of box dial, attached by wire to two metal spigots. These were
Buried in the ground one hundred metres to either flank of our position to transmit, They said, the ground vibration of the enemy's approach. It was on trial and had not Been used before. A neat devise for early-warning we supposed.

Our Claymores were sited to cover the killing-ground.
They were to be detonated so soon as the Platoon Commander fired his weapon.
3 Section's mines were under the control of lance-corporal Frank Chambers.
He was clever. He could compile workable, section piquet lists, with staggered sentry times. Try doing that in the rain. I never could.
So I was content with my lot, excepting this patch of secondary growth to my front.

As I remember it the day was hot and very lazy. We had a man alert in every group
And the guns were manned. Otherwise we sprawled at ease, hunting shade,
Fantasy, mind-escape. Sergeant Maloney will give plenty of warning;
Remember the o-group? Those spigots live on the end of one hundred metres of wire And will transmit the ground vibration of any approaching footfalls.
One hundred metres is a fine, relaxing distance - we thought.

But then it happens; without warning the day erupts:
With a shattering, terrifying, and continuing roar the daylight turns black.
A rolling, cloud of grey dust puts out the Sun. Something hot plinks my side. There is Too much noise. And in the raging dark my mind begins to scream:
'What happened to the ****** signal, John? The ******* early warning'.
And I begin to hurl hand-grenades as high and as far to my front as I can:

Take up the grenade.
Rotate the safety bail (Why didn't we have these in Australia?).
Ease out the pin, rise up; draw back the arm,
Let fly the lever. Hurl the grenade.
Count two, three, crouch, take up the grenade.

Ingleburn might raise its hands in horror but my air-bursting hand-grenades
Are based on the premise that we have engaged a small, advance party of the enemy.
And I want to deter it's main-body forming up on the other side of my bit of
Scrub then assault through it from the dead ground.
And remember we are blind. Hence, take up the grenade,
Rotate the safety bail, ease out the pin, etc.

Memory has the action lasting many hours, a long, long time.
But in reality it must have been all of two minutes before the noise begins to falter And the echoes of the guns slowly fade away.
And the World, unmoving in the awful silence,
Slowly turns to white
Beneath the settling dust.

Through the quiet, distant voices, begin to murmur.
‘Cease-fire’ is ordered and the day resumes.
I pass the order on then change my magazine.
Frank comes over with the Section's casualty and ammunition count.
No one has been hurt but we have used a lot of ammunition.

Frank reports 'three "Nogs" moving into the killing-ground.'
One noticed a claymore and Frank says he had no option but to fire.
He is nonchalant, unexcited about the killing.
When he has gone I lean into the shade of a tree and light up a cigarette while Reflecting on the body out there alone and still, and sweating in the Sun.

Finishing my cigarette I go to find our Platoon Commander. He is with the Major.
At CHQ, while Ronny Jarvis curses (we did use a lot of ammunition),
Guy Baggot inspects my ****** side with interest. 'A bit more to the right
Would have given you a ****** good scar.' He says.
What happened to the early warning device? The dial, the cable and the spigots
Go out with the next chopper. We never hear of them again.

poetry can resemble a jackson ******* method - but it can also resemble sitting on the stairs in the garden, just when winter starts to dig into it's cold at night (but still not cold enough) for a man drinking beer and smoking cigarettes to feel the skin etch out in itches from the mild freeze, and imagining himself holding the beer bottle with skeletal fingers... then the thoughts come... nothing is really planned by a narrator working out a fictional linear process, it's more like that soviet invention of a game of tetris, thoughts come, the ego disappears, thoughts arrange for a brief narrative, then disappear, new thoughts come, then a randomisation process takes over, until ex nihil complete dispersion, the faculty of thinking is exiled, and the faculty of memory takes over.*

after watching two grand movies in one day,
it felt really sour to return to the grand stasis of things,
the only constellations that are visible
without any ******* notion of light pollution
are scorpio and the big dipper...
the litter dipper is more dim this year,
so dim i mistook the earth's celestial geographic
route as spring summer the big dipper is
when in autumn winter the big dipper is
the small dipper... but seeing the two in the night
once i became aspirational in my error -
if only the prefix aspi- existed, derived from
aspen to the added continuance of the word
left: rational: rationality based upon unforced error?
but these two films: kingsman: the secret service
& the hobbit: the desolation of smaug
you get penetrated by so many active ingredients
for the narration via images, that when you
un-glue your eyes from plato's cave (actors
are the best conclusive interpretation of shadows,
no rabbits in the hand to be mistaken for the real things)
you get this drawback sensation of having to focus
on inanimate things in stasis -
and it can & does become pretty glum,
esp. if you want to return to the realm of using
phonetic symbols, to not speak in reserve for
an up-and-coming stage performance
but to see the glaring starry composition of hidden
things in the things already seen...
so there with the beer, scorpio elsewhere
the big dipper only thing providing me with
a workable dynamic: in schematic
          
       .         .
                    
                       .
                .

       .
            .

               .

i had to active this arrangement of stars
to negated feeding my exposure to
so many images...
i began by coupling the stars: three couplets
one star the odd one out...
then i started to create a dynamic
on the basis of geometry, a geometric
non-linear representation of infinity,
but the constellation into a circle,
and therefore thought of infinity as not
beginning                         sequence                    end,
after all, infinity as a constant interchange
of 10 distinctions 0 - 9 can be ridiculous,
whereby infinity just becomes a randomisation:
either 14123480345792340834 etc.
or 12300984393657499393030, etc.
so using geometry i need to acquire
a infinite parallelism, infinite parallelism
implied as non-convergence.... two points
small enough (atoms, sub-atomic particles,
stars) to interact in parallel, but never converge,
for if convergence was possible...
i wonder: me being conscious of being
the olympic gold swimmer to the ****?
i hardly think so.
i can perceive atoms via the greek imagination
or with the galileo of small-print via the microscope,
but i can't individuate an atom of some sort
to a specified functional guarantee: well yeah,
sulphur stinks... but i could technically
atomise the one unit in my capacity to a state
of an atom... my self... given the number of people
and all the chance interactions in an environment
big enough to all a minuteness of the atomised self...
which is perhaps the counter to that old chestnut
known as solipsism: how to get the right phonetically
chemical concoction to get an etymologically word
out of this? atomipsism? no philology in me just
yet to open the bible of philology (the dictionary)
or bother thesaurus rex for comparative literature.
but anyway, as things go i was musing this other thing,
the fame of achilles with the modern fame machinery...
back then you really had to push the right buttons,
and your actual fame was post-mortem, in order
that you might be glorified in some way...
modern fame seems like a bad orwellian joke...
it's translated into our modern themes of catchphrases
slogans and trademarks as c.c.t.v., a ****** camera
on your shoulder... it actually is a bad orwellian joke...
no double think i rephrased into:
there are more c.c.t.v. cameras in england than in
all of europe put together... so the double think
is as this:
a. should i be bothered, or
b. should i not be bothered?
i'll answer with my usual enigmatic methodology by
just changing the subject -
we left the realm of philosophic doubt and thinking,
we entered the realm of modern denial and thinking,
i dare say i prefer doubt to denial,
it makes all our apprehensions, petty fears and
all petty concerns a bit smaller - via the maxim:
the only fear to fear is fear itself... denial doesn't
provide what doubt provides, doubt is like
cushioned fear... if there's a fear to fear as simply itself
doubt puts a lid on it, a spontaneity,
a kantian noumenon by definition, fear-in-itself.

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

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

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

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

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

dear mr. / mrs. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

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

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

Thirty-nine and single
and its been this way four years.
A few flings on the side,
a little skin to skin win,
jumbled kind words in passing,
bubbled emoji smiles,
a morsel from your crumbling heart,
a giant bite of your sin.

I've never been the cheater.
Had my fun when things were undefined,
kept my exes as friendships,
but never crossed the invisible fence line.
Never broke that kind of promise,
never ate the fruit from that Tree of Knowledge

Never been the cheated as far as I know,
I wasn't born to play that cuckold role.
I am just the grateful accomplice,
a secret man-shaped hole in your life,
you speak of only with that man.
We bump and rub our egos,
while you make more sensible plans.

I am a gift that knows nothing or generosity,
humility that swings with fists for fences,
salvation with a price tag,
water for the hungry,
sunshine on a frigid Universe,
the morality of a well meaning fool.

"I can get by on little or nothing."
And I quit my job without reason.
I've got no paper in my pocket,
and not much working for me,
on the street.

I'm not a vegetarian,
I like the smell,
the flesh and soul,
of sizzling meat.

I am "woke" in a way that is not yours,
Woke to the true and endless fight against injustice.
Woke to pragmatic workable solution,
But I expect people to laugh off
or confront a microaggression.
Your complaints mean little to me.
I was born with an incurable disease.
And "if I was half the man I used to be,
I'd take a flamethrower" to your safe spaces,
to your shout downs,
when they threaten free speech.

My hands and arms are strong,
but my legs are weak.
My life is weak.
My car is scraped, dented,
and full of paint and ash.
I quit my last job without a reason.
The next one will be worse.
I owe more than I earn,
preach more than I learn.

My jacket is torn.
My sweater is fifty years old.
My feet are rough beach rocks.
My jeans sag below an alcoholic's gut.
My teeth are yellow nicotine.
My knees crack.
My *** bleeds.
My hands shake.
My **** quakes.

My back aches,
threatening violent mutiny.
My beard is just beginning
its unstoppable transition to gray.
My sweatshirt reeks of ****.
Nights sweats flood my sheets every night,
whether we are together or alone.

My eyes are above it all,
window to my soul,
so much more apt and able,
to produce tears.
In that one way,
I have grown.

This Soul is the unforgiving ice
of a small pond
in a giant winter meadow.
The yellow grass is dead,
but keeps its head above the snow.
The evergreens sway solemn in brutal wind.
The pond is safe to skate on,
If you don't fall too hard.

As we move towards the work of Love
the internet makes a shrewd habit,
of taunting our loneliness.
It supports an army of strippers,
sending stock requests to be "friends,"
with the hope a man might feel loved,
just enough to surrender Visa digits.
Lost girls courting lost boys,
twelve dozen at a time.

My heart wails for affection,
As all hearts must do.
But the wail is just another song now,
passed by painted fingernails
on the local radio dial,
sung only to myself,
like an organist practicing hymns,
in an empty church at midnight.