SAYINGS

1) The difference between God and devil is the
difference between supplicant, and masochist.

2) A father has no duty to a son when a
father’s words are harsher then a son’s tears.

3) A little sleep in death and afterward
the cry of an enfant eternity.

4) What is sin to God?
What is man to man?

5) Saints are only this and nothing more than this;
sinners who acknowledge the source of their sins.

6) To trust in the law is to trust in
the thief who knows his time is up.

7) Consider the insect and be wise; they
murder their parents and their lovers too.

The greatest torture? Time,
and the inability to use it.

9) Lie best by saying only the truth, for no one
believes the truth when a lie would suffice just as well.

10) Honour is worthless when children are not fed.

11) War on your enemies best by defeating them, but
letting them live. It is a worse punishment than death,
my friend.

12) To the man without compassion do not make
his children suffer to punish him, but only ruin
the possessions he has.

13) The rabbit is prey to the wolf til the
rabbit learns to shoot, and cripples men.

14) Everything goes back to the source of itself;
the worm devours and is consumed by the worm.

15) Suffering is the language of the
tortured and the torturer as well.

16) I want a world bereft of you who read my words
only because it is expected of you, so that you may grow
simply wise.

17) Wisdom is summed up in the man who takes
a throwing knife to a gun fight, when other men
take the gun and forget the bullets out of hand.

18) The rabbit is for the wolf too greedy,
the rabbit is greedy even for the wolf in
the wintertime.

19) Wings are made of
words and the sky of eyes.

20) A lie spoken by those in authority can
cover over even the laws of reality, for a time.

21) What is sex for the torturer or the righteous man?
Foreplay, and for the same reason. It doesn’t seem
to satisfy their lives.

22) To die for one’s enemies is
the duty of every martyr, or slave.

23) Let your children preform every depravity they can
name. Those who survive, welcome them into your home,
or just cast them outside. You have all gone thru the same.

24) Kill your enemies, but leave
some space to be buried beside them.

25) To love is easy. Just ignore when
the pain ends, and the pain starts again.

26) All things created must one day
end. Even death, but sadly not today.

27) There is no end to the thoughts of
men, only an end to their imaginations.

28) A taste of dust and ashes on the wind is all we get
before the closing of our lives, if we believe our life
was lived in vain, and only if.

29) To suffer and grow wise is one
way to live. Another is not live at all.

30) Sun, moon and star seem all the same to those
trapped in the shadow of a cave, or a hollow life with
out direction, leading aimlessly to a pointless grave.

31) How to be righteous? To be righteous you must
do what you are told, without conscience or concern.

To be righteous is a path untaken by those who serve,
without conscience or concern. Do what is in your

own heart to do, for that is the sum of righteousness.
Both of these statements are true, depending on the

age which we are surviving in, my friend. Nov 7-11/09.

SAYINGS II.

1) If you want to hurt someone tell
them you love them, then walk away.

2) To be an emperor or king is to be brutal, and to achieve
such titles more brutal still, all leading to the slavery of
a revolution at the hands of slaves.

3) If you want to fly practice falling.

4) Luck and fortune is not a god but merely
a demon of another shape than ours.

5) What is the point of life? Ask first the point
of death and who benefits, if not the living?

6) Sex is a universal language to all
people, save those who are depraved.

7) War is the sum total of all Man’s
failures, when the war is lost.

Cynicism is the last refuge of the
idealist. The first refuge is the cult.

9) To live with no purpose is the same as being
married to the same person as yourself, that you are.

10) To be invisible is the same as
being a slave who conquers kings.

12) To sacrifice one’s life is the same
as living it when the sacrifice is in vain.

13) No price is equaled to one’s
health, except the health of another.

14) What is the penalty of sin? Listening
to the minister or priest recount his own.

15) Why must we suffer? Because if there is no boundary
without, no challenge to overtake, no challenger to defeat
than we must create one from within, or possess nothing
without the chance to prove we are alive, after all.

16) What devil is worse than an uncaring father
or mother to a child? Do not ask me; I do not know.

17) Why must we live at all? Who is to say
existence is not itself a flaw of some kind? But

then again only one who exists can know if existence
is a flaw, or if this is itself some perfect, grand design.

18) Beloved means only that one remembers what
one was; memory is the source of all delusions of love.

19) Potential; that is the most dangerous word in the world.
Every child can become a killer or every child a saint. The
dice rolls and never stops or sates itself on anything at all.
Not even fate. Nov 22/09.

GRASS SOLDIERS

Soldiers are like grass; wound a single man
and the army marches on, unaffected by the
loss of so small a part of itself.

If but one is killed, or burned, or tortured all
other soldiers forget he ever lived and continue
with the logic of the grass, to march

and be marched on, without a care. This my
father once believed. And then he went to war. Nov 4/09.

LIKE A STAR OF NIGHT

Like a star of night in morning, never ending,
like the colour of the sun in a land of blind men
and beasts
so is my lover to me as she taunts
me with the thoughts of her innermost desires,
smiling that self
same smile of hers, all the while. Nov 4/09.

TIL OVERARCHING TRUTHS

Til overarching truths conceal
themselves in us we have no
thought of mysteries,
or the grandeur of deceit.
Every virtue creates a vice
in its own image. Every virtue
is a sin in spite of itself. Nov 4/09.

THE SERMON OF SAMUEL T. TYADD

“To love God is the first step toward
wisdom. To know the mind of God is
the first step toward understanding.
To think of anything else is a sign of folly.
God says so. It is written in this book I don’t
know how to read, and can’t understand.” Nov 4/09.

SAILING (The last line is my father’s.)

Sailing in those forgotten
skies beyond a sea of dreams,
there we go to where we want to be. Nov 4/09.

TILL COOLER HEADS PREVAIL

Til cooler heads
prevail
there is only us,
acting the best we can
with the facts
at hand.

History is never
the sum
of our successes;
it is the sum
of our failures,
and how
we deal with them. Nov 4/09.

MOSQUITOS

They sip and bleed a planet slowly dry,
plunging sharp needles neath the planet’s skin.

It has not even the strength to cry, til almost
dead the planet loses even the echo of

a strength and falls asleep, and mutters
pain like some dark secret as it dreams. Then

they move as one great shadow and cast
themselves headlong between the stars,

for other worlds to find, and crucify as ours. Nov 4-11/09.

DAUGHTER OF THE ANDROID

The men who created
you in your birth were
these; one to give you
a personality, another
a body, a third gave
you your mind. You
are a child of so many,
and loved by all of these. Nov 4/09.

A MILD NIGHT IN NOVEMBER

A mild night in November and all the grey
season comes to bear on me, in the company
I keep, the meager menageries composed of
pen and paper.

Nothing else remains neath the tremor and the
despair of the grey season as madnesses take
hold, as boredom supersedes all else, til
even suicide appears

too hopeful a fate for such a one as I, in the
great swell of a grey mild night, somewhere
stranded in the wastes of November, before the
first bitter snow falls,
when the past of all our
transgressions at last abides. Nov 5/09.

THE MADDEST DREAM

The maddest dream that I
could have is you, my dear,
and I, you and I together,
long after we have died. Nov 7/09.

TO NO PURPOSE

To no purpose in the end is the life
I lead. Words on top of words give
only these; fragments of epitaphs
lying tattered on the street. Nov 7/09.

THE TORMENT OF LUISANDRA BENTLEY

Girl give up your airs for me, your
smooth wealth, your too much perfume
like a pampered child in doll’s clothing.

I am waiting girl. Don’t keep me waiting.
Love can be wasted as easily as the wealth
you always cling to, in your need. Nov 7-11/09.

THE GREY INSECTS

Can insects be beautiful? Oh, I don’t mean
in some obscure, pseudo-artistic way
involving light and shadow or the brilliant
hue of ice-stained wings. No. I mean sexually
alluring in some foreign, yet familiar way.

Her name, or at least her name as far as I
could pronounce it, was Taxatra, and she was
meant to be my insect bride. Grey as a moth
in autumn with dung coloured wings and
eyes the colour of shale in the winter time.

She was chosen to bridge her people and mine.

The marriage ceremony was simply bare, without
artifice or display. We simply stood before
an ancient stone with the sun overhead, a sun
constructed by some ancient queen who gave
light to their new world, in their lost mythologies.

Neither of us loved the thought of bonding to
the other, and the wedding night and what it was
supposed to achieve frankly terrified me. But
stranded here amid grey deserts tasting of bones,
here where the remnants of giants and leviathans

lay scattered like ghosts of echoes on the ground,
here there is something beautiful merely in the

sound of someone, anyone saying to me “I am as
lonely as you are. Come sit beside me for a while,”
which gives great comfort, and a lessening of
homebound thoughts and familiar women, especially
when I answer her in the evening tide of night. Nov 9-11/09.

THE CRIMSON AVENGER IS ABSURD

To imagine a crimson cloaked avenger is absurd,
shouting inane soliloquies about justice and truth,
leaving the criminal masterminds alive,
to be handled by incompetent justice systems,
til they escape from prison which they inevitably do,
and the whole insulting charade starts all over again.

Equally absurd is the gun toting vigilante killing
everyone in sight who breaks the law in even the
slightest way, given his vendetta against
crime only because his own family was affected
or eliminated in some pointless, heartless way,
thereby giving him carte blanch autonomy to
break whatever laws he might once have observed,
before adopting his new and lethal killing ways.

But most absurd of all is to imagine the police
could do better than either of these impossibilities,
not because of mere corruption, nor even the lack
of resources, but merely because, like all of us, they
have experienced far too much in the lives they lead. Nov 4-11/09.

GAHANIS

The Mother of Scorpions,
the Mother of Spiders
embraced the hero Tabalycia,
and struck from her life and
breath, and made of her
food for the demon’s children.

Gahanis, wise Gahanis let
fall himself into the demon’s
maw, to be devoured by her.
His flesh was poisoned
years before. It was a good
death to avenge his lover; of
that I’m sure. Nov 9/09.

KYNADIJIAH

A fate I would not give
to lovers or to enemies,
the face of Kynadijiah.

She is of a beauty that
breaks the souls of men, and
women so inclined as well.

None compare
to her wit or grace.

And the curse is this; that she
will remain perfect and alive when
all those in the world are sadly

dead, and she’s all just passed them by. Nov 9-11/09.

THE SHELTER-MAKER MAN

What’s the good of a shelter-maker man
when you need to eat or drink some wine?
He’s only good for a short, sweet time,
and after all the buildings are so squat
they sit hunched like beggars on the ground
we throw that used up fool around, because
there’s no more any need of him.
Unless the tide comes in from the
water’s reach where all our buildings are,
except that one hovel on the hill for him . . . Nov 12/09.

RUBBER JOHN (The title
is my father’s, Nov 10/09.)

My name is Rubber John because
I have no other name. My father
thought it would suffice; I think
the same. Is there rubber in my
veins, or do I bounce? Cut me and
find out. A name is just a thing to
be called. I’d rather have a name
than none at all. Nov 12/09.

AN ABSURDIST PARABLE (“None”
quote first part is my mother’s, Nov 11/09.)

I. Life sustains itself on the scaffolding of life
wherever we may find a passing strife. None
of us ever bargained for whatever comes along,
yet all of us are caught in the wellspring of
Nature’s song. And so I present to the best
of my own view a parable of life and what life
must do to survive in unnatural climes or never
survive at all when the hourglass runs out and
the sands must fall.

II. Four worlds, four different worlds were taken
by four peoples, because they lacked the common
sense to stay at home, or perhaps they simply
misunderstood that where they settled demanded a
hardier stock than some of them could well afford.

But undeterred they pressed on and made what
best they could of situations unresolved, which
should have proved they didn’t know what all
this living is worth living for.

III. Praetoria was like a garden, put to stand upon it
would break your bones and crush your teeth from
the gravity of it. So what did they do? They built

new bodies from machines and made themselves
nice new steel eyes, but there was no hatred in those
eyes, nor lies either. And all about them is a garden

of green plants and trees, and if you want it you can
have it, if you embrace machinery to be your new flesh
for forever more. So what is all the garden for?

IV. Farther from the sun than green Praetoria rose
a black scar, and this was Centuria. No great down
swelling of gravity’s rope but instead shrill-sharp
mountains of obsidian slopes. Few lived here and

few ever could, what with only twenty-three people
taking claim of this new world. So what did they do?
They copied themselves and copied themselves again,
generation after generation of copies after them.

And all day long they plot new ways to die, to simply
improve their old bodies and old minds and make
themselves at home on this black stained skin of a
violent world, and nothing new is left for them but

dueling with one another, til all their old lives and
flesh and memories of Earth are sadly, finally dead.

V. Farther still from grim Centuria lush Draconia
rises. A world covered in jungles green or scarlet as
the lust filled sheen of two lovers caught in a riot.
Here all things are poisonous; so what did they

do? They changed their shape as best they could, and
then they learned to get better at it, til they forgot what
shapes they would have had so short a time ago. Now
they just keep changing shape, now a table, now

a chair, and all the hours are getting late but they are all
just unaware. Cancerdogs in jungles cry for their lost
masters newly gone. All they can do to get along is piss
on these street lamps that came from nowhere.

VI. Finally Aracix’s turn emerges for us all to see, a
barren world without an ocean, a sky overhead, or one
lone tree. So what did they do? They cannibalized their

own old selves and made new kinds of men and women;
some grow bones to grow more buildings, others weave

clothes from strands of skin. Some others become small
and thin and break into other minds to direct the actions
of them all, as they begin. A whole world blooms from

men and women in other shapes than theirs.
Still I think I’d rather stay at home or be content
in all I know than be confronted by the fears I have. Nov 12/09.

A GARDEN OF NIGHT AND SHADOW

Blood mist rising from a cacophony of wounds
becomes but seeds for a garden of night whose

shapes uncoil to flower and tree,
black blood red and obsidian white.

Shadows walk along well trod paths and speak
only with the voice of echoes; only the language
of echoes is spoken here.

The moon all falls away like the shapes of sand
in a small child’s hand. As I die I am still afraid. Nov 12/09.

EVENTIDE, A POEM RECORDED
FROM AN ANONYMOUS SOURCE

How stately the sun sinks obedient to its Maker’s
will, bidding us a peaceful night while we see
its face no more upon another shore.

With my life complete, a glade farewell,
a step across the border line this life of mine,
in vain while toiling here at the passing knell. Recorded Nov 10/09.

EVENTIDE, ORIGINAL VERSION
(Can’t count as one of my poems.)

How stately in its golden glow
the sun sinks neath the western hill,
it gave what it had to bestow
obedient to its Maker’s will;
its face still beams forth ways of light
bidding us all a peaceful night,
yet while we see its face no more
it shines upon another shore.
Be it at the passing knell
with my life’s task complete on Earth
that it may be a glad farewell yet not
a finish, but new birth;
a step across the border line
to serve God in higher sphere with
happy thoughts this life of mine
was not in vain while toiling here. Recorded Nov 10/09.

THE DRAGON

Savage leathern wings aslant of fire
and dragons are but smoke condensed
to embers. A dragon is but memory

out-placed from some vague recollection
we all have of burning and of being
burned by some grim, dark desire,

when serpents had limbs and wings
as well, to grapple with angels and throw
down their lyres. Nov 14/09.

CRIMSON SWIRLING CLOUDS OF MIST

Crimson swirling clouds of mist
descending to the amethyst terrain,
where priests step and poets rest
gazing upward for the coming rain

as the ocean swells about, while
stars proclaim some triumph over
all the other elements til they crash
into the sea again, dwelling where

the sons of pain must dwell, beneath
swirling clouds of mist, descending
to the amethyst one day. Nov 14/09.

SYMPHONY OF INDUSTRY

Symphony of industry, symphony of metal,
ceaseless pounding as the world is engraved
with chisel and blood and fire,
ceaseless machines rolling across the rivers
of steel and cement, dinosaur machine warriors
going to battle against the sky and the sun and
all the worlds combined, as workers don
the hard hats and burst a new bubbling black
river of asphalt as it rolls against a field,
obliterating everything as the road mowed down
all life, together. July 8/97.

LIFE, AS A KILLER

All things come to me. I rise up everything
that is and ever was. I carry life in my arms
like it was a little child, as I rock it softly,
until it too often grows old, and then I throw
to the ground and watch it die. I’ve smiled

to see Creation fall, watching stars burn out
from their monotonous racings against the
torturings of Time, watching galaxies melt
like hot wax in the night-black seas of God,
watching mankind pile into a heap of garbage,

piling up like a mountain to heaven, waiting
for me to set it aflame. I live and I am Life,
living forever to kill, sensing my sister Death
sit close beside me as we torch the stars to
dust. Have a happy life and let me give you
a beautiful death. July 4/97.

MY LIFE

This is not my life,
I will not die for I have not
lived. I’ve spent so long fighting
to untangle my creation and
I have not.
My life, my hope, my tears,
they are all spent, even the sleep
without dreams is a dreamer
I cannot cling to
anymore. For I have never lived
and so I must never, ever die,
for fear I will dream
the dreams of sleep that lay in
the grave, and I have never been. July 10/97.

ARIEL II. (Woman Silveria. Original version.)

Silver shimmering darting, flying between
the stars, hair trailing behind her gold
silver fire, eyes blue ablaze, hands searching
out to touch a far flung sun ripping the womb
of Creation, sung songs of fire silicon

glass and stone, burning fast, falling faster,
emerald embers trailing like a falling firefly,
and I wept when she free fell into the lost
sun and into the forgotten sky, as she crashed
into the seas, extinguished black coal, and

every time I dream I dream of her, and I see
her die, my Ariel she died twice to touch a sun,
once she died of flesh, once of steel, and every
after time I close my eyes and dream and dream
alone, until my body rusts and I join her

in a silicon burning sea and Time turns the
last page and every age closes like the last and all
dies in the dies, including my memories, my
dreams, my soul; but she will never fade and she
will never fly and fall inside my head.

She is my fantasy, my hope, my love, my soul,
and yes I know that all of these good things they
are dead, instead of the life I should have lead
my dreams have cost me everything I ever loved
and ever will love again. And this regrettably
is not quite the end. Amen. July 14/97.

ARIEL II. (Woman Silveria, corrected.)

Silver shimmering darting, flying between
the stars, hair trailing behind her golden
silver fire, her eyes blue ablaze, her hands
searching out to touch a far flung sun ripping
the womb of Creation, singing songs of fire,

silicon, glass and stone, burning fast and falling
faster as emerald embers trail behind like a falling
firefly. And yes, I wept when she free-fell into the
lost sun and into the forgotten sky, as she crashed
into the seas, extinguished as black coal, and

now every time I dream it is of her as I see
her die. My Ariel died twice to touch a sun,
once she died of flesh, once of steel, and ever
after I close my eyes and dream alone, until
my body rusts and I join her in a silicon

burning sea when Time turns the last page and
every age closes like the last and all dies together,
including my memories, my dreams, my soul;
but she will never fade and she will never fly
and fall inside my head. She is my fantasy,

my hope, my love, and yes I know that all things
are dead, even the life I should have lead which
my dreams have cost me, besides everything I
ever loved and ever will love again. Which is
regrettably not quite the end. July 14/97-Nov 17/09.

JUST A MAN

I’m just a man
and all the stars are dead
inside my head, and all my
hells burn away
and heavens fall away
like chains and
the pain doesn’t stop
and the rages peel my flesh,

and hells pass on by
into the midnight sky
and I scream and scream
until I dream
that all my screams
resound in a singly cry

until I think I live again
and then I die,
until the pain she calls me
home and heaven’s bliss
and hell’s fire
they pass me by
as I spire into midnight skies

and as I come I know I’m
going home, my pain
she takes me
home until I dream I live
and die all at once
and I scream out
and all Creation is silent,
and then in the silence
I know I’m home in hell’s
black soundless heart. Amen. July 14/97.

I WANT TO GO INSANE

I want to go insane,
I want to strip off my hands
and let the blood-tapering
flesh dangle from my

pain-soaked fingers while
the acid burning blood drips
to the grass while I watch
the sun rise at dawn,

and I scream and dream
that for one split second
all the years of my life
would fit complete in a
perfect symphony of pain.
I want to go insane. Aug 11/97.

THERE ARE TIMES WHEN I DIE

There are times when I die;
today I am dying, this day
is one of those times.

I know what it is to be in
pain. I know what it is to die
inside, for a few minutes

to lose everything, life, hope,
humanity, death, and my soul.
But I will live. I have fought

to live. I live to fight, and damn
anyone who thinks that I give up
at anything, easily, or at all. Aug 22/97.

THE ENTICEMENT OF DISBELIEF
(The first two lines are my father’s, Nov 14/09.)

The enticement of disbelief was
instilled in the last few years,

by people afraid to believe anything
at all, through all their pointless fears. Nov 17/09.

OCTO-SEPTIMA (Style mentioned
by S D McDaniel Nov 10/09, online. Style
is abbca, syllable count 8, 7, 7, 8, 8.)

I have spent my time in the act
of fighting with time, til now.
Nothing is left here below
for me to cling to as I drown,
for nothing is a proven fact. Nov 17/09.

Give me a chance to amend my
grievances today. Give me the
opportunity for me
to prove I love you my dear.
But all you hear is my one sigh. Nov 17/09.

Another and another drink
is all I want tonight for
better company, or
perhaps no company at
all; sometimes my heart should I think. Nov 17/09.

Girl you are too generous for
words. Give me a heart like yours
when grief has two wings and soars
upward toward some unseen place
beside a fire drenched, black shore. Nov 17/09.

I end what I end when I stop
my pen and drink some small sleep
tonight. Nothing left to keep
but a few tatterings of words
which are my last, and only crop. Nov 17/09.

I have one too many shadows
which lead to strange encounters.
I have no way to count her
because she is too hollow now.
My second shadow is shallow. Nov 17/09.

Life is too full of oddities
to stand, for I wouldn’t dare
to guess what gives us a care
for another soul so trapped here
‘cept for our humane abilities. Nov 17/09.

What gives us a sense of passion
now, if not a sense of sin?
How can a lost soul begin
to have a hope, unless they learn
sin becomes hope, hope compassion. Nov 17/09.

BALMORA

I. Fields of grass and shadows start
to lengthen across my face
in the country of no place,
when scarlet women stain their sight
of a secretive, ruined heart.

II. Castles rise above the grove
where scarlet women wander
in the countries of yonder
legends neath a bright horned moon
where lust-burnt demons also rove.

III. In Balmora secrets have a
second skin and lies clothe their
flesh of secrets there in. Fears
have masks which they must all wear well
in the country of Balmora. Nov 17/09.

EVERYBODY
(The poem is my father’s.)

Today everybody’s something
whether they know it or not. Nov 17/09.

WASHED IN SHADOWS

Washed in shadows my thoughts
lead me on somewhere my heart
can’t explain but my soul

can name as more hopeful than
the years I’ve lived caught in
the wastelands of nowhere’s. Nov 17/09.

CALEIRO KHELLUMIRA
(Or Cassandra as a serial killer.)

Quote- “To be a good detective one
must have a good criminal mind.”

We rush thru our lives lived in vain til
Caleiro Khellumira comes and claims
that she will kill us. And because

she says it so plainly, and our lives are
passed in such a rising frenzy we never
notice til the knife is plunged in

deep, or our throats are garroted, or
perhaps against our wills we are forced
to drown. And all the while all we say

is that we committed no crime; we
deserve no punishment of such a loss of
time taken from off our precious years. Nov 17/09.

MY THOUGHTS BECOME MY OWN

My thoughts become my own on a
dangerous night when imaginings
run to dimensions cut clean by

butchers and the cries of strangely
frightened children. There is the

sound of a cat being torn to pieces
by the rats, and still I plunge deeper
into whatever wells remain of my

once vast imaginings, laying naked and
tattered like broken bones along the ground. Nov 17/09.

THE CHILD

I. Changing seats in a bus after sliding
into the cool leather the man who
didn’t get the seat he wanted

started to complain to me words
of the effect that I had changed his
destiny and he was going to sue me

for it. “Go ahead.” I said. “It’s
good to know I still have an effect
on anyone in the world,

even in so small a way
as taking someone’s sit on a bus,
denying Destiny his favourite game.”

II. A child is born male and female
at the same time, which is not
so strange sometimes, but

it is today. It would be easy
to claim one gender was a lie but
the child slips effortlessly either way

into a girl’s life, or a boy’s. Why
restrict the child’s choices,
come what may?

Destiny is only destiny for
those who play Destiny’s game. Nov 17/09.

THE PRIESTESS OF THE GREY RAIN

The priestess of the grey
rain has sailed the sun to
embers in the storm of her
own making, as she burns. Nov 20/09.

YOU DON’T EXIST

You don’t exist, who read
these words of mine, or if you
do then why have I never met
you in the coming of the tide? Nov 20-21/09.

MALATHAIA AND UMATHAIA

There were two sisters
who loved one man, and they were
named Malathaia and Umathaia.
Each tried to prove
their love to one man
who was their father.
Sad to say their father loved
them both as any father would.
Proving love is the same
as proving the sky is blue. Nov 20/09.

I DREAMED OF ROBOTS WITH HUMAN FACES

I dreamed of robots with human faces
and metallic skin, golden skin or silvered
sheen, and eyes as blue as the sea is blue
because there was nothing else to do
growing up except imagine impossible things.

I dreamed of factory planets manufacturing
trillions of machines, each as human in thought
as me, though I often had fewer human thoughts
than these I created from dreams and fantasies.

There were worlds of water and worlds of ice
and a woman of tanned metal with a jewel upon
her brow, blue as the sea is blue, diamond shaped
and embedded in her brow as some other eye.

I imagined my body ripped apart and my brain
placed in a body of steel because such things when
one is a child seem almost real and I had no better
thoughts to think about when young.

Of course no one ever understood because such
thoughts are not considered by adults when one is
older and all their thoughts are bled to affairs of jobs
and church and wives and husbands, and friends
and love maybe.

But I had nothing else to do and nothing to prove
to anyone but myself so I imagined as best I could
another world than I was living in, then and now. Nov 22/09.

ANASTASIA IS FLYING

In cities that once were cities of men Anastasia
is flying again. She has the wings of a bat and
a woman’s form, and bending down between
the stars she offers little company to the worm.

Yes, there between the walls of final night the
woman soars and plays her lyre. She is not the
last to be born nor like some thorn will she be
cast into the all consuming fire of ruined time.

When the final night has past then will she
return again to those lone cities of a crippled
race and take her place among the stones like
some old prophet as of old, at last alone,
but not at peace. Oct 12/09.

ONLY BONES

The spell was meant to get the body chained.
Or rather meant to keep soul and body together.
But after ten centuries lost in a tomb, asleep, only
the poor man’s bones remained; that and his intellect.

He spoke at first when the sun shone thru but
his tongue was gone and his lips with them. The
scientists marveled when he moved for he had no
muscles left, yet force of will was his to wield;
though he could not speak as of yet.

As weeks wore on he learned of his new world. He
marveled at the genius of all those about. He longed
for the scent of wine, the taste of meat, and as he
grew stronger these things were found.

They taught him how to wear a suit. They asked his
name and he answered them at last. He had so much
to talk about with them. He had so much to reveal
of the world that had died above that ancient

mound of grass where he had been laid centuries before,
for crimes unspeakable in ages past. But seeing the
world as it was today and knowing his fate was his
own again he took up a rifle and went to war,
because that was what he always lived for. Oct 12/09.

SCARFACE

It is five trillion miles round, spread on
every side with walls and towers that make no
sound, for none of them are occupied.

The whole of the world is limitless, but
not for those who dwell there in. Prisoners are
they for their own meek sins,
while all the world is pitiless to them.

They can walk from edge to edge, or try
at least, though seldom try. They know that
home has passed them by.

Scarface is there, sitting like a child,
gazing at walls he’ll never see. For all his sins
he has no defense. He is the man he is to be.

Somewhere out there, beyond the stars
is a world that he called his place to play. He
killed and raped and loved both the same.
But now there are no games today.

A million miles another man is sitting
just as Scarface is. They are spaced apart so very
far that the place has warped their minds a bit.

So all they do all night and day is sit
and wait for death to claim at least some small
victory while they lay, here upon Eden’s shore.

Were they a kinder, gentler breed this
would be a heaven to them all, and more. Oct 12/09.

I. MY PERFECT ENEMY

They raised her I think. We were on
patrol and the bugs came down on us.
They were like ants but larger and
the stench of death clung to them like
some perverse winding cloth that never
left the paths where the creatures walked.

And she was with them. Blonde, naked,
clicking as they clicked, and she killed
one of my men before we had time to
think. And it wasn’t her being naked, or
even the alien speech from her lips that
made us forget the guns in our own hands.

It was her eyes. They were not
human eyes, not even the eyes
of killers or starved and demented
men driven to eat their brothers
at the worst of seasons. For
I have seen those eyes.

Her eyes could not be described. They
were the eyes of black beetles crawling
over dung, the eyes of ants gazing at the
sun. There was no rage in them,
no love, no pity and no hope. I think
the bugs raised her as their own.

Two of us escaped the attack. No one
else. The stones were littered with
dead on both sides but she somehow
escaped. I don’t want to ever see
her again. I pray to God I die at the
feet of enemies that have faces unlike
my own. Staring at her eyes was like
seeing a mockery of how the enemy
wants us to behave among their company.
I’d rather be enraged than be the enemy. Oct 12/09.

II. BEETLES

They became our allies. The ants, the giant,
black as coal ants drove entire other species
to our side.
They look like beetles, glinting
like the sky when light hits their armour. We
have to work with them.

It isn’t always easy. They’re like blunt pieces
of granite moving with the subtlety of a tank.
When they walk
the ground trembles. When
they speak it is the same clicking as the enemy.
But they claim to be on our side.

There are whole worlds, a beetle told me once,
where creatures like me don’t exist. It doesn’t
mean human,
or mammal, or ape. It means
bones, teeth, bodies inside out with flesh coating
what should be the outer garment of a body.

It, she really, told me that watching me move
made her ill, watching muscle tear and shear
when I walked
was like watching her people
skinlessly (they think of their armour as “skin,”)
crawl about, oblivious to the agonizing pain.

So I asked her, why was her people finally
ready to work with mine? And she answered
and said because
they didn’t have any choice
if they wanted to survive. After that I stopped
thinking of her as an it. I don’t know why. Oct 12/09.

THE DOLL (From a dream a long time ago.)

Three children became two children.
They weaved the third to a doll, gave
her doll’s eyes and a doll’s tongue.

Out on the moors those evil ones, that
boy and girl used to pour hot vinegar
into the throats of rabbits, til they

bled urine through the pores of their
skin, and their brown-tinged fur. So it
came as no surprise when their little

sister was left crumpled like a doll,
stitched with eyes and hair not her own.
And all their parents used to say was

thank God their two most darling and
important children were still so safe at home. Oct 15/09.

KEZIAH

He passed between the walls of the older world
and back into the lands which he called home.
He felt her breath upon his neck, the scent of
leaves unnatural as a white crow walking upon
the air of unseen skies, that have not been.

Her sisters gathered bout her and consoled the
girl. Keziah with her hair of gold and eyes of
night just smiled a short sad smile, and rested
on her throne in the gardens of broken bones.

Nialus with her fury almost took up the thought
of vengeance, while Myagana with her robes of
storm considered how best to annihilate that
younger world. But Keziah said no, and just
sat upon her ivory throne, content in the way

all young lovers are when love has not deserted
them, or ever will. As for the man he came home,
but found the whole of the world strangely dull
and bent and broken, and after a few short hours
returned again to the walls of the older world.
And she was waiting there for him. Oct 15/09.

THE ROOM

The room was designed,
she said, to inflict maximum
pain with minimum effort. All
I had to do was step inside.

Well, as I had no choice in
the matter, I obeyed. And
there was nothing in there.

It was just an ordinary room,
at first. Then the sound began.
It was a rumbling storm-catching
sound, like the way fire audibly

burns the air. It grew louder
and louder and at the last
moment I thought the sound
would kill me, before I was
pulled outside.

“What was that?” I asked,
horrified. “The sound of
your first step into the
room, magnified.”

“That was horrible,” I said,
ruined almost by the sound.
“I know. For your execution
we’re going to fire the gun
you used on that child. Then,
and only then will justice be
satisfied.”

And so I was led away, shaken
by the thought of a gun that had
so faithfully once been mine. Oct 15/09.

THE DEER (The first line
is my father’s, Oct 12/09.)

The deer will disappear now
for I have lived my life and
seen the sights.

I have lived my life til autumn
has become an echo of itself,
and bones have bled

deep into the ochre of itself.
Still the deer remained, til now.
My sight has closed itself of sight.
I welcome night. Oct 15/09.

LADY RAYNBOW’S PARTY

I suppose I should be surprised she’s
actually competent at her job. Lady
Samantha Raynbow, complete with
multi-colour hair and a fashion sense
bereft of fashion sense is one of the most
gifted detectives I’ve ever met.

In five years she cracked 75 cases, ranging
from the most horrific to the most innocuous.
She cornered murderers, hounded rapists,
and my personal favourite, invited
six members of the Russian mafia to
have tea with her, and to arrest them all
without needing to ever raise her gun
above the table’s ledge.

That party was really her crowning
achievement though she hasn’t
stopped solving crimes since.

You see, as I learned in working beside her
Samantha uses her appearance to disarm even
the most sadistic killer into thinking she is
nothing more than a nuisance, or a pest.

She pretends to be unaware of even the
most obvious clues, pretends she has no idea
what she is doing until the criminal grows
tired of everything she does, agonizes
over how his or her attempts at brilliance
are ignored, until its all they can do not
to blurt out they are the ones who
did whatever awful thing has compelled
two officers of the law to investigate.

That Russian mafia thing was the best,
because she hounded them with inanities
for six whole weeks, wore them out
with questions and even saying the
word “hello,” until they all decided to
conspire and kill the chief antagonist
to them, at her simple tea party by
a rose strewn road.

They shot her, one and all, but wearing
kevlar always helps, and when they had
run out bullets she mentioned her gun,
but more than this. She mentioned that
she had all the evidence she needed now,

but unless they confessed to everything
they’d ever done she’d follow them to
prison, make them sit through her long
and pointless monologues, until she
drove them all insane, or worse than that.

They confessed. And afterward, in their
cells they were grateful for a little peace
and a little rest from the calculating
mind of a torturer who knows how
best to torture, and how to torture best. Oct 15/09.

TIME IS A LONG CORRIDOR

Time is a long corridor which allows us
only to see what is behind us. We walk
backward into eternity

but if our sights could be
arranged to let us see the future road
would that mean our lives would pass

behind us, backward into the past,
as we gaze our eyes ahead? Oct 15/09.

I’D WALK INTO THE
CENTURIES OF A MOMENT

I imagine almost that time moves
differently at different points across
the universe. Maybe somewhere
the seconds run slow or maybe
the seasons run faster than the
sands of an hourglass.

Maybe I could even walk from
one point of time to another, step
backward or forward merely as one
steps across a shallow river no
wider than a thread.

Imagine if I could walk
into the centuries of a moment;
would this mean that at some
future time I’d crash
into myself or leave behind
some husk of who I was,

escaping backward each future
time to avoid the punishment
of traveling along this thread of
unimagined moments, dripping
into the hourglass of days gone by? Oct 15/09.

CROWDS (The first two lines
are my father’s, Oct 13/09.)

You’re going to do what you
do in the crowd you’re in.

Remember the crowds doesn’t
get punished with you for

your crimes, or for your sins. Oct 15/09.

DROP OF WATER

I remember distinctly hating Diana,
both when she was a princess, but
even more when she was a corpse.

That’s less cruel than it sounds
because she had money while I
had none, and her death was

everywhere’s while mine was not,
and would never be close to the
scale of her final accomplishment,
being a corpse and all.

So I thought to myself about how
nice it would have been before her
death, not having to listen to all

those mourners, or having to watch
parades of pointless people grieving
over some bitch too dumb to avoid

marrying into a family of inbred, but
well paid, hicks. And that led me to
the idea of time, that perhaps time

is not merely the passing of seconds,
but rather the passing of events. Take
for example a planet with one side

facing its sun. There is a stone on that
world, and above it an inversed pillar
of salt, and hanging from that pillar

is a drop of water. Of course water
dissolves salt, and water falls upon rock
and erodes it, but in this case nothing

happens, because perhaps circumstances
are different here, or perhaps the water
is nearly frozen solid, or some other

reason. Point is that without an observer
time has stopped, and until that drop of
water falls time is as frozen as water

above a flattened stone on a foreign world.
It is the event which recognizes the actions
of time and not time itself. Time is not

an observer, time has no internal conception
of itself. As for Diana, she is still a corpse.
I don’t know why but that comforts me
in some small way. Oct 15/09.

FACETS OF TIME

Time is a gem of many facets, crossing
one into another without rhyme or reason.
Memories, thoughts and dreams all
make of time some other flesh,
conspire to make of time something which
exists and does not exist simultaneously.

As such nothing is certain, even as
all things are certain. We are that we are
because the language of our dreams and
of our memories conspire to erase
and create new conceptions of ourselves,
which are and are not real simultaneously.

Which is a fancy way of saying we
don’t know who we are, we don’t know
how time moves. We don’t even know
that we don’t know these things. Oct 15/09.

STAIRCASE IN A TWO-DIMENSIONAL WORLD

Flatten yourself out a little bit, and then a little bit more.
Flatten yourself til you are the size of a length of line
no thicker than an invisible echo of a far off shore.
Now that you are such a shape think of a staircase

and start to climb, or wait beneath it as it arches
above your head. But it too as just as invisible as you
are, and so in either case to anyone watching only the
sign of a length of wire no thicker than a politician’s

thought would be noticed by anyone at all. So how
can we claim to know the universe if a length of line
might hold a universe of possibilities all its own? Oct 15/09.

A THOUSAND HORSES

There are a thousand horses running
across the crimson sands. They are
metallic silver; their breath is on the
wind.
They will run forever, even
into that final stand between the end
of everything and what is left to come

when all the universe is finished,
but the universe is undone. Oct 15/09.

CANCER’S DEATH

There is cancer in my veins I know;
death in life, life in death.

Once it sees you it will never let you
go; death is life and life is death.

Either I die and my cancer lives, or
else I live and my cancer dies.

Life has no shape and death no
country. Death has no boundary

neither life a dominion. Flip a coin
and see what lies between. Nothing

is there between, but there should be. Oct 15/09.

SIMPLE PUZZLE

Simple puzzle: two guys in a space shuttle,
somewhere above the world. One guy wants
to open the hatch and fly into the void,
because he’s insane. The other one wants
to kill the first guy, simply because he’s evil.
Question: considering the situation as it is,
why should you even care? Now if you
were there with them, that would
be a different puzzle entirely. Oct 15/09.

ONE ARMED AND FORTY

The world was decaying about him, and he
was forty years old at the time, with his left
arm rotted off, like a half-eaten vine from
some plants the beetles crawled into, and
never bothered crawling out from again.

Then there was the sound of wings, great
hollow wings without a trace of feathers or
any softness at all to them, and he was taken up
by great insect claws, and made one with them.

They showed him the whole of Creation
devoured by creatures no stranger than them,
and allowed him to drink from the sum of
fifty million years, and all the worlds touched by
creatures that never before had seen the sight of men.

Then he was returned to Earth, just as his world too
was fed upon and left cold and empty as a hollowed
tomb. But only his body was there. The rest of him
was flying with creatures no stranger than him. Oct 15/09.

WHAT IS THE WAY TO DESTROY A THING?

To use a plague to kill is a brutal thing. One
never sees the face even of their killer. To use
the fear of a plague, a gun, even the fear of
scalpel blades hunting along one’s skin is also
a brutal thing, and has the same effect.

I have often wondered which will destroy an
army first; the arsenal of plagues or the weapons
of the mind. Vlad Tepes left the bodies of
thousands hanging in a garden of corpses outside
his city walls, just for a single Ottoman general
to regard, and demonstrate fully the nature
of his cruelty.

Corpses were thrown in cities to spread Black
Death, to decimate the strength of enemies
in times of siege. Genghis Khan himself used
such a thing, and terror as well, though plague
seemed a weapon favoured by so many. Perhaps
the answer is simply this: whatever destroys my
enemy quickest that is the way I shall proceed. Oct 23/09.

THE CITY OF THE SOUTH POLE

Buried neath the ice, so far from the seas of shifting sand,
there is a city where creatures have only the subtlest echo
of the shapes of man.
Their hair is crimson and their bodies
flow and twist along the frozen winds, and there is the jaguar
smile of the hunter upon their lips, which I have seen only
once before.
I have heard the winds cry with human voices
and have studied the bodies of children frozen on the ice.
I have heard the sounds of gnawing teeth

and felt the hot breath of women
who are not women close round me like the hunger of a
knife, like the hunger
of a knife that has no fill,
either of blood or the cries of children lost upon the ice.
And their city is carved of bones, great whales
and creatures no man has seen.

They have lived and died and lived again;
so my heart has told me in the shadows of my dreams. I
have nowhere to run
and will not run. They will hunt
for me and they will come; such is the irony of the
lives we lead. I have my knife beside me, and my gun.
I am no child who will whimper in the cold.

I have fought on seas of sand that devoured men as beasts
devour me. What is the cold to me? What are demons
or beasts, or those beyond
the limits of these things?
Come for me; I am ready. But are you,
who are the offspring and the origin of all the
fears that men have dreamed to be? Oct 23/09.

NECROPHAGE

All of the zombies, ghouls, creatures of the dead
not wholly dead are terrifying only because we don’t
seek to deal with them.
So when all the cliches burst
through, when the rotting bodies rose and all the worst,
most horrific creatures gained a second skin,
and a second life, so to speak,
it fell to those who
deal with the dead to find a new solution for the dead
refusing to remain in coffins and cemeteries, where
they were supposed to remain.

I don’t wield a machete, or need a shotgun where
I walk. Don’t bother with clever puns or a gallows
humour. Don’t really see my job
as anything
other than a job, that I want to get paid for. Instead
I carry beetles, worms, maggots, a whole arsenal
of creatures
that we normally dealt with before
the dead had legs and the will to use them. We go
from abandoned buildings
to cemeteries and
pour in through a remodeled sewer pipe, specially
remade for this purpose, all those beetles,

maggots, worms and the like, til the buildings
and the fields are crawling with legions of them.
In the mornings
we scrape out the bodies, or
what’s left of them. There’s never any survivors,
never any hands reaching up for human flesh.
The only things left
are the insects, gnawing on stumps
of bones, hollowing out rotten skulls. We take
them with us too, and move on.
This is only one of our
jobs. It doesn’t pay enough to let us live our lives.
Night shift’s done. Day shift’s still to come. Oct 23/09.

THE MODERN AND THE STRANGE

We must think of the modern as a set thing.
It is not enough to imagine a machine, not
enough to imagine a single technology.
The modern is summed up in the concept
of all we feel as well as all we know, and
all that we believe.

A city is not modern for being a city, neither
a town provincial for being a town. To
communicate across vast distances does not
in itself prove itself a modern thing; smoke
signals are proof of these, as is the sound of
a muezzin from a minaret at times of prayer.
Both are the achievements of ages far before
the “civility” of our modern times, yet both
evidence a profound solution in a world
before modernity intruded on us all.

Now we seek to know what is beyond the
borders of our own small world, but how
can we know if we cannot first imagine?
All of our achievements profess a single
trajectory from what has been to what is
now. This is neither progress nor some
pre-destined sense of the manner in which
civilizations must move on from “lower”
states to some pointless 19th century
view of the shape of things to come.

It is however the shaping and whittling of
our minds from a multitude of possibilities
to but a few. Technology is the lathe which
cuts away at seemingly superficial concepts
of reality to only those realities tied to
the technology themselves. How then can
we understand another, alien mind, if that
mind’s view of its place and its view of
technology so widely differs from our own?

One cannot change the nature of one’s
thoughts without effort. How then can
one understand thoughts which counter
everything that one knows? Should we
someday stand on a world not our own
and view a civilization that we cannot
perceive even as a civilization then it
is the fault ultimately of ourselves.

This is not because we are modern;
this is because we believe we have
reached the end of learning, when in
truth there is no end. The question
begins when we wonder how many
species and how many peoples and
how many individuals believe that
they alone are modern and the apogee
of progress, based on the limits of
what that transitory state even means? Oct 23/09. 23

HAD THE MEGALADONS NOT DIED

We all want to imagine dinosaurs of course.
When we think of times before the times of
men dinosaurs are always the first creatures
we think about. But I think more of megaladons
than them; I’m sentimental that way I suppose.

I imagine ships splintered by teeth thicker
than a man’s hand. I imagine great oceans
and the scent of water burning their secrets
into men’s darkest dreams. I fantasize about
fleets of vessels devoured and the screams

of the dying slipping beneath the waters,
leaving bloody stains on the water’s skin.
All this taints my thoughts when I remember
megaladons, because such thoughts are a
comfort in days like this. But not only this.

I consider so many creatures lost even in
our dreams. I place such things in the paths
of our history and in my mind’s eye history
changes as I will it to be changed. A T.Rex
wandering the fields of France, or perhaps

a giant sloth or ape moving through the trees
of an African forest as slave ships arrive, and
make yet another horrific mistake. All the
creatures of the past in present times affect
those times. How sad that so few human lives
have ever done the same. Oct 23/09.

BALTHAZAR

In the skies are roads like spider’s
threads, running across the clouds,
and these are cities; so the elder said.

Exiled from this place a great man was.
Left on the shores of our world to die alone.
But is was not so, because we came for him.

His name was Balthazar and his skin
was stone. He claimed he committed
some horrid crime, and had to atone.

High above the threads kept forming. Great
engines there were, the first ever built. They
were made from machines that had never
been before.

The man of stone in his exile helped
us leave. We had no time to worry
over so many dead. No time to grieve.

He said that the engines would burn the sky to
ash. His crime was trying to stop the burning of
the sky. The elder smiled and understood at last.

We journeyed across the sea where great
creatures lurked below. Monsters longer
than our ships they were. But we had to go.

When we arrived at the far off place we saw the
sky behind us catch on fire. We saw the threads
blister on the wires of themselves.

Balthazar said their time had come
and gone. They were leaving to another
place and he was alone. Then the elder

put his hand on the Balthazar’s shoulder and
shook his head. “You are never alone amongst
our company.” He said. Oct 23/09.

TAKE ME BACK

I had an idea about a killer, linked to some alien symbiont
that made him look like a living skeleton. I know, I know,
aliens and serial killers are common place; the comics
have turned them both into a bad cliche.

Anyway the idea was that the killer and his alien “friend”
eventually split up when the killer finds a woman he likes,
only for him in the most dramatic fashion to find his
symbiont again, and on some rooftop say

“take me back” to it. At the time, like so many ideas, I
destroyed it out of hand, and not just because it involved
Frankenstein and an amphibious humanoid and the armour
smashing a robot to pieces when it was trying to kill the killer.

No, what really made me decide it was a bad idea was
the thought of the killer looking for this woman and a stable
relationship, and then going off with the symbiont again.

That said, I’ve seen my brother’s love life. Nothing is
more messed up or frightening or down right bizarre than that.
And so I present the idea here, for your amusement, and regret. Oct 23/09.

AT THE SIEGE OF JERUSALEM

He seemed a different man at the siege of Jerusalem.
The Saracens kept coming and his eyes dulled. His
armour broke but I saw no arrow or sword break
his armour.

When the Saracen drove his sword point through
my brother’s heart there was no blood. There was
no cry of pain. Instead the Saracen seemed to melt
away, to dust.

I prayed, oh God I prayed to You, but this is not
what I prayed for. My brother wanders from street
to street and everyone whose eyes he meets are
obliterated on

the very spot on which they stood. There must be
some new darkness in his blood, some witch’s terror
that he has learned. The siege goes well for us in
any case at least.
Until he turns his eyes to us of course. Oct 23/09.

THE PLAGUE AND THE HOURGLASS

Disposable women exist in societies where
the plague has equal stay as the hourglass.

This is because when men confront the thought
of having no control and knowing that time will

do whatever time will do the most ignorant of
them will brutalize whoever they think can be

brutalized. Of course not just women, but
it is enough to know that women are victims

too, in places where the fear of death and
time is mingled with the fear of facing both. Oct 23/09.

UNKNOWN ASSASSIN

I saw or chanced to see a man without a face,
riding on the roofs of railway cars in some city
without a name.
Haphazardly arranged against
the stars his silhouette was cast, and with his gun
held tightly in his hand I saw his body become

taunt as a sea of glass burnished by a thousand years
of winds and storms that have not ceased to pass.

I wondered who he was hunting now. Perhaps
it was me, I thought to myself, but I was never
important enough to
deserve a bullet through my
back. In any case he passed on by and I haven’t
seen him since. Oct 23/09.

THE GODS OF MARS

There were eleven men and women who
claimed themselves the gods of Mars.
Each had a fortune; each was beautiful
or handsome or wise or brave beyond
any possible standard we could name.

They built a dome of steel to live within,
and then, because they considered each
and everyone of them a god, destroyed
the Earth, rather than deal with any
mortal women, or mortal men.

It took them five days before they killed
each other. It took only three for them
to break and bend their sanities to little
more than hollow embers on a burnt
and ashen wind, the colour of bronze
cast against a Martian sky.

As for the Earth it was never really
destroyed. I just thought it would be
convenient if they believed their plans
an unmitigated success. After all,
when the gods are dead it is always us
mortals who get what the gods intend. Oct 23/09.

I WAS ONE WHO COUNTED STONES

I was one who counted stones
when the blade was not the same,
when the old led the old, when
scars were added onto scars.

I was one who counted stones
when stones could not be found,
when the corpses were without
number, when the world was
littered with the dead. Oct 7/09.

THE IMMORTAL ASSASSIN

The story was simple enough, as I tell a simple story.
An immortal assassin was on a wooden ship, traveling
from Europe to the States, sometime in the 18th century.

He meets a man and a boy, and the boy is a prince of
some alien world. Well, the assassin is, unfortunately for
him, given the job of taking this young prince back home

to his home world. A gate is opened and the assassin
thrown through, with the boy of course. The world they
come to is one of black stone continents and lava oceans.

The assassin fights against great armies, defeats monsters
and villains, all to put the young prince upon the black
coral throne. None of it fazes him, none of it surprises him.

Then he returns home, and kills the man who sent him
there in the first place. I was such an idealist back then. Oct 23/09.

DRAGONFLY SYMMETRY

Dragonfly symmetry
delicate as an enfant’s
fingernail, delicate
as ulexite is delicate,
transparent and clear,
colours the skies
themselves with light
and dark, and light. Oct 24-30/09.

MISTAKE (The saying is my father’s.)

There’s not a thing
made without a mistake. Oct 24/09.

MOUSE AND TREE (Inspired from
a story I wrote as a very small child.)

Mouse climbed into tree and
tree asked why.
“Because I want to see
further than I can.” To which
tree replied “Well I can’t see
lower than I can,
stuck here as I am, so tell me
what it’s like down below.”

“Oh in the ground and in the
fields are many tall grasses
singing, and the world shrinks
to a few small clumps
of dirt and ashes.”
Looking out from tree’s
branches mouse saw a thousand
other trees, and leaves and clouds
shrinking down to
small insignificance, as if
mouse were bigger than
any of these.

So he got off tree and went
back down while tree just stood,
rooted to the ground, thinking what
it might be like to be anything but tree. Oct 24-30/09.

DARK SHADE COMPANION

“No matter the joy or peace of a man
there exists beneath all vengeance and
rage, buried in an eternal companion.”

“And what companion is that?” I ask,
expecting some sexist reply, of a woman.

But instead, “His force of will is the
companion he has. The drive to never
be forgotten, even as a tyrant or a killer

of men.” “I will not kill,” I reply to
him. “Nor will you have to,” he said.
“I’ll never forget you, old friend.” Oct 29/09.

HOPE FOR DESPAIR

It is in the ruins of cultures that we
hope for despair, in the white lightning
strike, in the black thunder glare we long
to feel an end of things for the wreckage

of lives not felt in the ages of our own
meager time in the world. But eventually
everything that has been created will be
destroyed, all we have known will be

forgotten in dust and fire and memories
obliterated by the passage of seconds leading
to oblivions all their own. All that remains
is to hope for despair in whatever beings
replace us when our own time is done. Oct 29/09.

THE PEOPLE OF RHYTERAN

Grey winged they ascend, from cliff
and hollow crag, the people of Rhyteran,
so like those of men. Grey feathered are

their hair and dull grey tanned their skin.
Eyes are sharply blue as pools of sodalite
and their hands end in blackened nails,

obsidian as the splintering jagged fingers
of mountains, broken by the wind. Into
the sky and the echo of a bronze sun they

fly, til eye is filled of sight and downward
do they fall. They know no other way to
live their lives. It is no better and no worse

than mine, though sometimes I wish it better,
if only to imagine them happier than they seem. Oct 29/09.

THE CHILDREN OF THE
LANIN COME HOME

Across the islands and wide the
children rise up from the sea.
Their eyes sparkle and gleam
as amber beads, and spines adorn
their arms, slender as needles
ripe for their surgeries.

Their tongues click and chattering
their mandibles chew and tear at
the invisible air like savages for
some unnatural feast.

Their skin shimmers like a metallic
shade of gold or silver or topaz stone,
and on two spindling legs, ending
in shards of feet they rise from their
chrysalises in the ocean depths,
where before they had crawled
as metallic worms of gold, spinning
great towers there beneath the waves,
the colour of ashen bones.

The ocean laps at the beaches with
a hint of snow-bird blue, and the skin
of the water recedes soft as the touch
of lovers as they dream.

Afterward the adults will come
from great ships adrift in another sea
and lead their children from their
cradles to a menagerie of worlds set
as nomads in oceans dark and empty,
where the stars bleed. Oct 29/09.

IF YOU CAN’T GO ONE WAY

If you can’t go one way go another.
It one barrier presents itself go
where no barriers confront you.

This lesson works best for water,
small children, and politicians.

For all others only in crossing
over all that stands in your way can
you grow, or be crushed in any case. Oct 29/09.

THE MOON AND NOTHING MORE

The moon hangs fitfully like a hanged man
that will not rest or burn, while cities turn
against the tide of ruined streets that angrily
protest their abandonment after the death of man.

A small animal crawls from her hole, neither
cat nor rabbit but something more. She scratches
her ears and watches the moon crawl thru skies
unaccustomed to the loss of street light and lamp

and fire, in the cities of man where they once
dwelled. All that is left is some child of prey and
predator and nothing more. She goes back to sleep
and never remembers there was anything as a sky
or a man or a city street ever again. Oct 29/09.

TALENT NIGHT

It must always be assumed, by those less
fortunate, that having great extraordinary
powers must of course be used to some
great intent, but this is never really so.

Strength is measured by pulling trains,
or intelligence by reading minds, but this
does not naturally lead to fighting crime.
Rather they merely have a talent night,

show off their special skills, win money
or awards, and then go home. If there
is any theft they call the police, rather
than contemplate to deal with the matter

themselves. And that is so because of one
simple fact; being superhuman is less
impressive when there is no audience
for the hero to impress, with his act. Oct 29/09.

THE LEATHER HIND

Among the more fantastic claims of
fantastic beasts is the leather hind,
who is but one single piece of hide
through and through, with no organs
at all to speak of inside.

But do not be fooled. It still eats,
from time to time, usually belts or
socks or ties. It is the true reason
we cannot find the clothes we need
when the hind starts to

feed, invisibly in closets or drawers.
Instead people believe in the absence
of men’s memories and forgetful
minds. To be sure this happens
occasionally but fantastic explanations
are better for vanities like ours, and
oh how they satisfy. Oct 29/09.

HAROLD LEACHMANN

Mr. Harold Leachmann
is a suit and tie kind of guy,
that bland simplicity
of blending into everywhere
men congregate as
business men. I don’t
suppose he’ll ever find out
that the only people
who’ll remember him are
just as bland as he is,
with their suits and ties. Oct 30/09.

THE MASTER AND SERVANT

The master is no higher
than his servant and the
servant no higher than
his slave. The slave is
no higher than his beast
of burden; all must return
again from whence they came. Oct 30/09.

BLACK MOON AND WOLF’S SHADOW

Among the harvests of the wheat
in centuries that are not ours
black moon sorceries revel when
the shadows howl as wolves would
howl, in times when Europe was
asleep from any knowledge of the
world as the world was meant to be.

Shamans hide in wolf shadow skins
and witches ride on mares whose coal
black manes make starving winds
hunger afterward only for them. The
black moon and the wolf’s shadow
fall together in the sky and afterward
when light shines thru we find the
shadows are still alive, in our lovers’ eyes. Oct 30/09.

CENOBITES AND LOVERS (Inspired by
Clive Barker’s total misunderstanding of pain.)

Hooks are meant to tear and chains to bind;
sensations of limbs splintered and destroyed
are supposed to frighten us, rip sanity from

flesh and leave but a lasting taste of order,
unrefined by the simple longings to exist,
or to be kind.

But love is the same as this, and lovers tear
in whatever ways they will; their desires write
on us savageries no sins can dare describe.

Love is as orderly a pain as pain itself. Do
your worst to me, I’ve met so much worse
than you. Perhaps in a thousand years

I’ll teach you an order all its own, one you
may not understand til savagery of a kind
you can’t imagine has taken hold. Oct 30/09.

ULEXITE BLUE, ORIGINAL VERSION

There is a place where women never grow up
but remain twelve forever, yet still become
wives. There are places where women moan
and the darkest of the desires have forms and
lives as varied as the children of our twisted
hearts and minds.

There are chains and whips and vines stretched
along a woman’s thigh and scars which make
mockery of her own cries. There are cities
built of men’s bones where skin has plastered
walls, and some are still alive who pleasure
their lovers as to the walls they still reside.

There are tortures that are sweet and girls
who never bend or break even as they bend
or break in the hands of men who’ve learned
too late to never keep a caged wild beast
but let her roam or send her far away, least
she hunger in other ways, and leave blood
stains where men have been.

There are sounds of orgasms that rise to pain
where beasts have cried with the voices of
men’s dreams. There are cats that are not cats
but women disguised in other shapes, giving
birth to human children as they scream.

A sadist tries his hand at trades he knows so
well, but nothing is still and even all he knows
but pales against the onslaught of a world that
has outgrown any semblance of the world we
used to know.

There are oceans where great beasts slip into
the bodies of women and as they embrace
us they slip into the void, leaving half
of our souls outspread in some strange
darkness we haven’t words to express, as
we are pulled along with them, but haven’t
the strength to breathe.

Oceans burn away the scent of skies and
moans and sighs all fall away til I remember
that my lover has burned away all thoughts
of me, all traces of my being from her sleep.
A sadist howls for solace and children cry for
mothers whose shapes are still not human,
and never will be.

In the vagaries of oceans she burns away any
trace of her memories for me, but I am left with
the thoughts of lovers I can’t embrace while
the sun slides into eternity, for the sake of thee. Oct 30/09.

THE GALJIS MOON

In the western skies there is the Galjis moon
sometimes, a blazing second sun that is no
sun at all.
Sometime long ago men carved
the moon from sky and clouds and now it sits
there, proud as a monarch on his throne.

It has no purpose other than to be, and so
we have some company, I do suppose, else
otherwise a stone has the greater life than me. Oct 30/09.

THE MONOLITH III. (Original version
from 1993-94, after I edited the text.)

Preface
As a journey of the countries of the soul.
Dedicated to all Mankind of every flesh
and form.

I. Beyond the ebony river of the Voienar
and the acid seas of the Anderan in that
country of midnight suns, that place of
barren lands the Monolith, a titan of the

ethered skies rose up to heavens of
angels’s height, like an onyx raven of
shadowed realms and the gardens of the
night, traveling across the bleakened lands

of steel as vaultless spires of iron arose
in some vain attempt to touch the sun like
the greying roses of paradise or the leviathan
of the neptuned sea, while the Monolith

sailed on, it the last and final ship of heaven.
It was forged in the fires of the Tyxemian peaks,
the lava oceans of silvered glass, a blackened
wanderer upon the seas of the emerald sun

striding out upon the fortraned wings of the
dawn, sailing beneath the golden crimsoned
morn, its cry resounding through a million
lands as the Monolith soared in endless

flight from the height of the Heaven’s sand
and stars. Then it fell to the phoenix plains
of eden’s fair rebirth out above the Ksadis
reeds where the sleeping Thsui dwell and

streams of ivory milk do flow. Trekking from
the wasted mountains to this gentle sheltered
place, where floating on the tranquil perfumed
breeze butterflies of mosaic hue and the

size of Shialian cities, their wings a golden
cloak vast as the lakes of Larnark, descending
to the azure flowers upon the eden floor
drinking of the wine a ruby dye, unaware

of the silent visitor passing through as a
shadow in the night, an all seeing watcher
from the skies right into the valleys of the
nile and the mortals land in Dorovar.

From the floor of eden the Monolith
came, pausing but a moment above the
lush savanna’s grass beyond those phoenix
plains, gazing on as the Melicors with manes

a stain of red hunt out amongst the ziggurats
and devour hapless prey with fangs of steel,
their claws a glimpse of sunlit death as
they rip the hinds to blood, unaware that

they were like wise being hunted by the
Thynn, those crystal spiders a hue of topaz
stone, their legs the length of Renalian towers
of frozen glass, stalking beneath the gates of

the sun to kill the winged beasts of Jiadic’s
realm, racing phantoms upon the veldts in
flights of death, as they catch the Melicors
in talons of diamond and topaz stone.

So on the Monolith did go, uncaring of the
conquerors’ demise, continuing on to Dorovar
and the Turtle Nile beneath the moons of blood,
like an explorer amongst the countries of the

unknown, or a child with the awe of a mortal
man, sailing past walls of poignant earth where
only the fiery dragon clouds watched this
invader’s march, as they lazily trod the ivory

realm gazing past the heavens silent as the
sun’s departure from the varied lands of
Zana’an. Then the Monolith rode the ancient
winds beneath the port of Syhar beyond the

peaks of Kran, a sprawling citadel of endless
height, and upon the top most spire overlooking
a thousand lands the Lady Ryenil did stand
in robes of darkest purple night, aware of

the titan’s arrival upon her kingdom’s scape,
alone but for the quiet stars as she watched
the onyx raven coming on gothic wings of
ether, weeping for this was a sign of her

mortality yet she was centuries in age and
fell to the marble floor for nothing more
would be the same. So on the Monolith
sailed in sight of the city’s inhabitants

as it flew above the Turtle Nile to the
Caldanian isles of Rumath, uncaring of the
threat it held to all mankind for it was a
stranger in mortal lands beneath the cries

of heaven, where stood the city states of
Verras in the grip of madness and renaissance
with the seas of change reshaping its fair face.
The Monolith came upon Rumath, isles

of greying steel and stone, their inhabitants
a race of Elfin sages, their cities formed of the
scholar’s hand, watching the Monolith
ride upon the silken breeze, startled by

its presence and relieved as it left for the
raven was seeking something near the heart
of this shifting vale, near the heart of the
nile. To Allanis it approached, passing

merchant caravans and herdsmen with their
animals, peaks of steel and glass. To Allanis
it came and descended to the plains, resting
before humanity as an enigma for mankind.

II.
They came upon it as insects upon the
boulder’s scape, trying to assault the
heaven’s reaching arm yet could not
cling upon those fortraned wings of

the dawn nor enter into the Monolith,
seeking to answer what it was for it was
alien to all mankind, all but one. She
hurried from the port of Syhar rushing

to the ships of lanthan design, sailing down
the Turtle Nile as a speeding arrow of
silvered light. To Allanis she came beyond
the isles of Rumath, to Allanis and the

Monolith for her fate was intertwined
with that wanderer upon the plains, the
Lady Ryenil was locked to the wanderer
of Tyxemia and she could not escape it.

She stood upon the plains beside the onyx
raven and touched its iron hide. A door
opened as she alone entered and it sealed
again before the view of Allanis’ great race,

appalled and amazed at what went on. She
strode across the corridors of sunlit steel,
frightened but still she went and sat upon
the onyx throne at the heart of the final

ship of heaven as it rose up, ascending from
the plain onto a prize greater than the mortals’
maddest dream, onto the City of the Stairs
beyond the heaven’s reach where all of Ryenil’s

people, the Star Keepers, waited for her to
come home again in the heart of the Monolith
once more. Yet this was the last time she would
leave her dwelling place amongst the suns,

this was the last time she would rule her city
as her own. To the City of the Stairs she came,
a monolithic realm beyond man’s conceiving
where the Star Keepers waited, where she

departed from the ship and stood in the midst
of them all again, but one immortal amongst
infinity’s canvas, while the Monolith departed
back to its home and the peaks of Tyxemia,
beyond Voienar and Anderan. Aug 14/09.

ADAM AND LILITH

He sits and ponders all that he has
done and all that he has made
among the burning forests in the midst
of night, strangely white on a sea of grey.

She hates herself and hates the world
and hates all things around her, and each
wantonness of her making enfolds itself
upon us.

The little bit of life left in him leaves
and wanders amid the burning forests with
her trailing after him, and trailing after her
we go to a sermon of sparrows on a sea
of grey strangely white. Aug 4/09.

WHERE THE COOL DESERTS ARE

Where the cool deserts are lie buildings
whose shapes I can’t recall anymore

and in the gardens of Mithra-ja the dark
idol Malhroda burns himself squat and fat

as a lusting toad between the lotuses where
Drajada feast on human bones with their

mayfly teeth then ascend on insect wings
where the cool deserts pass away to the

fires of another place, between the stars. Aug 8/09.

I UNIVERSE
(A first poem recovered.)

I Universe; forms so fluid within my being,
life itself a testament of God,
my cells are galaxies, my blood the void,
I am the battlefield from which all battlefields pale.

I Galaxy; my arms are open wide to let the travelers in,
my million eyes are watching as my brethren
slowly depart, lost Goodbyes wasted
in the Sunless Country, farewells foolishly spent
for we will be together again
as all who are crafted of God return to the Maker.

I Star; I shine like a diamond amongst
the void so cold, God has given me a fire
to warm the universe by, and that has made
me a lantern against the dark.

I Planet; covered with the dew,
washed in the cold white rain, cities grow upon me,
foreign structures fashioned by the least and greatest
of God’s beings while I give life to all upon my world.

I Man; the least of all things I am,
frail as a leaf, tiny as dust on the shore,
my existence sustained by all things before
yet it is my kin who will enter God’s domain. Aug 14/09.

MY PERSONAL ABYSS

The loss of hope is the first step toward the abyss.
There is no great wonderment in the loss of hope.
It is writ large on every accomplishment of life.

All that I have done has come not through some
sort of suffering but through the absolute need
of some struggle to take away the uncertainty of

my life. I have spent my days aware of how little
my life has meant to me, yet I struggle on, not
because of God or even the fear of death. I live

simply because the alternative is unknown. Yet
so too is hope. Hope is an unknown once one
has spent enough time in the abyss. This is not

because of life’s pointlessness, nor is it because
of humanity’s lack of direction, or its pure and
inescapable evil. It is because, once the days

have piled themselves on you, once every insult
has been tallied, once every mild and subtle act of
cruelty is considered, when every single instinct

is burnt through only the drive of living is left.
That drive however is not a positive; it is a weight
that never leaves you or forsakes you. It is the

weight of knowing, after you’ve experienced the
abyss, that if all flesh were to die, all people were
stripped of their lives and cast into oblivion

and afterward only you remained alive that even
this would not be enough to break you. Imagine
seeing the bodies burnt black, smelling the charred

incense of billions set ablaze, and after witnessing
this holocaust continue on with life, without hope,
or joy, or peace. But still continue on.

All of my life has been spent only in the struggle
of avoiding death, of facing my darker half head on,
not because I sought to defeat him but only because

his existence, his madness gives my life meaning.
The abyss is not knowing that life is cruel. The
abyss is knowing that even in the midst of all

possible cruelty you will endure and survive and
never, ever be broken by anything. But to do that
hope must die. And joy as well. Still, I want to

live and more than live. Nature abhors a vacuum.
And what else is a vacuum but another name for
the abyss, that sea of nothingness in
those slender darknesses of sleep? Aug 14/09.

IN THE COUNTRIES OF THE SUN

In the countries of the sun
I walked small footed as a child
over stones that bled and seemed
a while sharper than the light
above my head.

I fell into the pool and sank
with all those others above me
on the water. I rose and felt
surprise that I arose. The
sun beat down upon me
all the hotter.

In the countries of the moon
I tried to strangle a young girl,
because she and another
tormented me all the while.
Instead I grabbed her breast

and ashamed to have missed
and worse to have attacked
the weaker of the two
I hung my head in shame
as the moon clothed all
in secrets of her own,
without a name. Aug 18/09.

OCD AND ME

When disease stalks its host
eventually, as must happen
eventually, the host gives in,
because disease in whatever
form is relentless in its need
to live, and feed, and live.

And so, in keeping with the
knowledge of disease, in
breaking down I take the
sure purpose of a sickness
and weld itself to my needs, til
there is no differences in need.

Sooner or later I start thinking
from its point of view, viewing
how disease exists and thinks
itself to being. And of course
what else must happen except
that my thoughts bleed away?

Weights and measures, things
and times and numbers and
words, life and death. It
takes and pulls on all of
these til I forget they have
a meaning beyond whatever
meanings it thinks they have.

So that, you see, I identity
eventually with it. There is
no choice and its strength,
its force dominates til I use
all of my force and strength,
to accept what it is in me.

And in payment for this I am
allowed to linger on, without
purpose or direction. Perhaps
it’s time for a change of things.
Perhaps such changes are an
impossibility. Who can say?

At any rate I am not merely
the sickness of my flesh or
of my mind. I am more than
the sum of what it is. The trick,
the pure deception of the trick
comes in knowing this, at last.

For if the disease comes not of
me, and if I am more than my
disease why is not my disease
more than the sum of what it
is? If it is more, and I am more
than it, than why are we together?

Sickness is not a collection of
cells feeding on blood, and disease
is not a few microbes stumbling
in the dark. A virus is not a tyrant
and the plagues of a thousand
blackened years are not housed in a
few beakers from some scientist’s lab.

There is a palpable sense of malice
in the act of being deprived of one’s
own mind. There is the sense of
pain which knows itself as intimately
as lovers, and knows the soft caress
of flesh torn horribly at moments not
of anyone’s choosing, but its own.

And if I am not responsible for this,
if the screaming and the torture, if
the sense of panic and loss of control
is not mine, than whose is it? I take
up what he lays down, and there he
runs, my other half. There he smiles.

The sounds and feelings of panic
subside, the rhythmic beating of
words dies down, but in those times
what is left for me when he gives me
nothing at all? For after all, in fighting
him I have used all of myself up.

What is left after he is gone? Who
am I if he has left me? He is neither
lover, sinner or friend, but I am told
he is not me, yet he crawls in my skin,
buries face beneath my face, makes
me run through the lines of poetry I’ve
read, and in all of this he is with me.

And say he did not exist, say I was
spared him, well what then? I have
nothing left to keep me here except
the words I write, and my knowledge
that in being sick I can avoid the
fate of healthier men, who’ve died.

Yes healthy men have died for all
their sins remembered, and here I
am, diseased and broken, moving on
and should I not be given a parade?
Perhaps all the world should applaud
for me, but I think not. They suffer too.

All of those within the world suffer
and they suffer often. What does it
mean? I am more than suffering,
but I am also less. He is my only
captive audience, and I am only
his. We are locked together.

Yet he doesn’t even exist, and is not
part of me at all. So I feel trapped
because my disease stretched taunt
my face over his and yet he has no
face at all, so of course my face is his.
It is the dilemma of the cancer man.

Have you not heard of the cancer man?
Let me tell you of him. His bones and
skin were cancer, and all his eyes and
hands. Everyone wondered how long
he’d live, but because he was cancer
the sickness never ate at him.

In fact he lived to a ripe old age,
alone because cancer is not loved
by anyone, except of course by cancer.
And he died and was buried, and no
one ever remembered him, or his name,
except for the name of cancer man.

Now I must try to subvert myself, must
try to see with other eyes that are not
his eyes, or even mine. I must think
like other men, and live like other men.
But I am afraid because I am not other
men. I am just one man alone in all
things, save this disease sparing me
the loneliness of being the man I am. Aug 15/09.

GAMES THAT THE SHADOWS PLAY

These are the games that the shadows play,
each shadow so beautifully self-contained.

A stealer of souls has none of her
own; she looks so deceptively human.

A glint of death has no edge to own;
it exists in a moment of itself, and in
its single, stilted breath.

These are the games that the shadows
play, each so lovingly self-contained,
one to another perpetually.

Nothing else has any shadow by a glint
of death, sliding by into all eternity, lovely
as a dream the shadows once gave to me. Aug 25/09.

TO GAZE INTO A CROCODILE’S EYES
(From a comment by Louise Delahaye, Aug 22/09.)

There is a primal formality in her green gem
eyes, the old stare the dragon gave before
crushing vagrant warrior neath her feet.

At once we return to older worlds caught
in her gaze, to the scent of dragonflies larger
than crows, bleeding yellow ochre neath younger
suns than ours.

In her eyes, in her gem like green crystalline eyes
there is but finally the primal formality of being
devoured without any malice in the act,

only the clean hunger of an animal older
than our conceptions of the stars. Aug 25/09.

IN ONE CITY

It is always the assumption that those around
us must be more normal than ourselves.

But in one city, surreptitiously arranged,
every sociopath was placed without their even

knowing. But more than this, only those who
had killed someone, either stranger or love,

for no reason at all.

No one knows the others are just the same as
they are, so everyone pretends to be normal,

even while at night they all go hunting,
one for another for another, without ever

being caught by anyone at all. Maybe someday
the masquerade will fall away, but for now

everyone is pretending they’re all living
normal lives, having dates, becoming husbands

and wives one to another to another, never really
catching anyone at all. They’re all just

waiting for someone’s guard to fall so
they can kill them all, but no one’s ever does,

in one city somewhere where masks have full
sway, and being what one is not is all the rage. Aug 25/09.

JAKTALU

Poor Jaktalu reared by sorrow knew no joy,
neither pride. Raised to be a slave forever
he only found peace the day he died.

As for his master no name have we, nor have
we found any other name. In all of a city of
five million only the name of one

remains, the name of Jaktalu reared by sorrow,
who knew neither love nor joy nor pride, but
he is all we know of his world, his name
and his story is the last witness of his time. Aug 25/09.

CHRISTINA RODENSKI (See Rosseti.)

Christina Rodenski wrote a poem
about the first man in the whole wide
world. She called him Shimmer, for no

reason, and had him raise the first true
dog, had him train the first true dog
in all the whole wide world.

That was a poem she loved
to tell, or if not that than the one
about green stone continents, riddled

with tunnels, and in those tunnels lived
men made of cheese, or else the
marshal Bass Reeves hunting

a giant rutabaga across state lines,
into Mexico or the state of Do as You
Please. Anyway her imagination is better

than mine. All I can do is write about her
and her successes, give her a copy of my
efforts and hope that she is pleased. Aug 25/09.

GRINNERS (From a very long time ago.)

I had a dream, or almost a dream,
and there were two people at my
door that night.

They appeared perfectly human,
until they smiled, and then their
teeth were bared

and their smiling mouths peeled
back and their faces seemed to
expand, outward.

They had sharp claws I remember,
and those smiles reached as far
as their ears, while

their eyes became obsidian black,
and their claws were bright yellow
as diseased, parched

skin. Nothing happened. They
neither attacked nor seemed
interested in

attacking. The thought passed
away, as all such idle thoughts
do, but still. Even

still when people smile I wonder
what is behind those smiles. Aug 29/09.

FLESH GARDENS

Play the game with no substance,
with cremation stories that have
no reason, pull at flesh hanging
from the gardens til you have had
your fill of another’s treason.

But still the flesh gardens hang.
Still are left the bodies of the
slain made by you in times of
plenty, in times when war was
yours to claim. Oh what sins

you’ve bore, in shame. And yet
the crime is not your own. You
cling to the sins of better men.
The gardens reek of violence sown.
The girl was your lover, and now

she is dead. Rest her head upon
your shoulder, and make sparrow’s
nests from her hair. The garden
moves on in unseen seasons. The
garden is formed of the treason you

bear, against yourself because
you warred and lost, and so are
bound to a thousand cares of
dying men in No Man’s Land,
haunted by your lover’s haunted stare. Aug 29/09.

THE LOGIC OF CATS

I sometimes think my cat and the neighbour’ s cat
across the street are discussing us.
My cat has a white stripe of fur across her left eye
while my neighbour’s cat is totally black from head
to foot. I think it’s some kind of conspiracy.
Late at night I think I almost hear
them talking about how to get the two of us
together, my neighbour and I. Maybe they think
we’ll feed them better if we’re together;
I don’t know. Anyway, just to keep them quiet I’m
asking her out on a date. Should make them happy, I hope. Aug 29/09.

SCYTHIAN LAMB (From the medieval bestiaries.)

Scythian Lamb: of the plant family,
also of the animal family. Unable
to move, yet given four legs.

In appearance a lamb, connected
via an umbilical cord to a plant,
making it unable to leave.

So trapped the lamb starves,
as does the plant, supporting a
living animal, providing its needs.

This explained, to the medieval
mind, the existence of cotton. This
also explains why the medieval period
was so often called the dark ages. Sept 3/09.

THE CALADRIUS BIRD
(From the medieval bestiaries.)

It was said, and I heard it so, that if
a caladrius bird nested by a sick man,
(though never a woman as they
weren’t so important back then,)
that the white plumed creature would
take the sickness unto itself, then fly
away, spreading the sickness
out, defusing it harmlessly into
the world about. That was what
I heard anyway, so that when I grew

sick they brought the bird to me, but
it didn’t look at me, or stare at
me, or even acknowledge me,
as if I wasn’t there. So, with the last
of my strength I snapt her neck, and
then the neck of the caladrius, but
only after I knew my mother was
dead. As I said, in those times men
were always more important than

women, and it was my mother’s idea
to cure me this way. Shame,
that she was right. I recovered,
but my sickness recovered too, and
with no other place to go it hasn’t left
my side in twice a hundred years.
I think it’s just waiting for me to
apologize, but kings never do, even
for their crimes. Still, I catch such

glimpses out of the corner of my
eye of a white plumed bird
laughing in the company of
several blood tinged crows, feeding
on my armies and my subjects, laying
waste to my kingdom whose
name no one remembers, and
no one knows. All I have is my throne
and my sickness as the world grows old.
But I will not bend. Kings never do,
even in the face of the caladrius, that
other mask the Christ has worn
in this blood tinged, dreary world. Sept 3/09.

IN THE LAIR OF THE CALLITRIX
(From the medieval bestiaries.)

She was supposed to love me.
We were twins and she was
meant to love me. Not him, me.

That’s how it works. She gives
birth to twins and loves one
but hates the other. That’s what’s

supposed to happen. So what
does she do? She loves us
both equally. When we were

hungry she’d give food to us both.
When we were sick she cared
for us both. When he cried she

carried him, and when I cried she
carried me. What kind of mother
loves both her children equally?

And worst of all, I think he loves
me as a brother would. That’s
just not fair. If I loved him

too that would mean everything
I’ve known is a lie. I want
to hate him, and hate her for

not doing what she is told, what
everyone tells everyone in
this world. If there’s no one to

hate then what’s the point in
loving anyone, what’s the
point showing someone else

they’ll never be cared for, not
because they did anything
wrong, but only because the law

cannot be broken, not by anyone.
So why can’t I say I hate my
brother? Why can’t I say I hate
my mother, if even she hated me? Sept 3/09.

THE NULI, OR GOING
BACKWARD IS EASY
(From Greek legends.)

In between the waking and the dream
I sat upon the mountain and watched
men walk down with backward feet,
watched them carry ancient totems of

some other farther place, beyond
where the sun has set in a black
rough sea. There was a woman
who sat beside me and I noticed

her cloven feet, noticed the smell of
horses’ hooves burnt by blacksmiths
in vanished places. The men with
their backward feet neither stopped

nor noticed us, neither spoke nor
seemed to breathe. Instead all
their eyes were fixed upon were
the totems of strange insects

carved on golden beams of trees
metallic as bronze dipped armour;
nothing else in the world was seen
by those eyes lost in haunted dreams.

The woman spoke a silent prayer
of sorts and the mountain seemed
to answer back. I could only hear
the whispering of something my

mind could not comprehend. Again the
procession turned from the mountain’s
top to the mountain’s base. They moved
upward to the way that they had come

without a single trace that they had
ever been, besides their footprints
which made it appear that the men
had come from the plains below

and returned to the plains again. The
woman stood up with her horse’s feet
and said goodbye politely as a child.
Then she turned and walked downward

to the plains below where cities lay
scattered like jewels on seas of sand
or savannas where the grasses hide
terrors of their own. I think I saw

a woman come up to her, although she
had no head, instead her face peered
out from her flattened chest. Perhaps
she was not even a woman after all.

I turned from mountain to plain and back,
and then decided to walk upon the skies.
Below me a man on one great leg came
hoping by, then turned his foot upward

to where I wandered, to shield his face
from a burning sun on high. Or maybe
he didn’t like me at all, and was just
trying in his own special way to be unkind. Sept 3/09.

CALINGI GIRLS (From
the medieval bestiaries.)

For her I suppose I must be immortal.
When I was twenty years old I first met
her, on a street corner of some nameless
city, somewhere lost where the maps
don’t show. I thought she was joking
when she told me her age; she was three
at the time I met her you see.

Of course she looked like she was thirty
or so, and her father when I met him
look eighty, but really he was only eight.
Every year I lived she lived ten. By
the time that summer ended she looked
almost forty, and it showed. Lines began
to form about her eyes and

she said that if we had a child together
he’d live and die long before I’d ever turn
old. But we made love anyway, on that
last day before I had to leave. She knew
and I knew we’d never see each again.

The war got in the way. That’s what I
always told myself, but really I was just
afraid to watch her grow old. But
as the years passed I felt myself
yearn to go back, and when I did
twenty years after the fact of loving
someone I knew was dust by now

I saw her on a street corner, of some
nameless city, somewhere lost where
the maps don’t show. She said that she
was three, and I believed her. She
looked just the same as before, all
except for her eyes, which were like
my eyes after all. She even showed me

a picture of her great grandmother, and
her great grandfather was myself of course.
I had dissolved into some kind of myth,
some god from across the waters who
had met a beautiful woman, who had given
birth to a child with strange, haunted eyes.

“And what of your people?” She asked me.
“What of all those gods like you, so far
away?” “They’re all gone to seed,” I said.
“Don’t go beyond the waters my child.
There is nothing there.” She turned

and seemed to walk away a moment, then
came back and hugged me as a granddaughter
would hug a grandfather who’s lost and afraid,
and we sat and watched the sun go down
where the bodies of my people lay. Sept 3/09.

MAKHLYES BIKER
(From the medieval bestiaries.)

Leather fits on her better than a sword hilt.
The motorbike fits better on him than a sword.

Did you know that the very first hermaphrodite
was a worm? Earlier than anything else

alive on the planet Earth this was the first
forerunner of everything to come. The Makhlyes

move from town to town, neither male nor female
but something both. They took their name

from old mythology, and I guess it has some
truth in it, for now. Anyway it’s hard to figure when

or if I’ll change my ways, and decide on whether
I have to change at all. Things are moving

so fast is all, people are going from one sex
to two, to three, and on from there into other shapes

I can’t recall as ever seeing before. I wonder what
my children will turn into when the Makhlyes become
too tame to ever recall. Sept 3/09.

HYPNALIS

Had Wimund the eyes of a sparrow
he would avenge himself on his foes.

I. In the jungles lurks the hypnalis snake.
It needs no poison but kills by swiftly

striking from the trees, downward as an
arrow through the victim’s heart, or,

failing that will move quiet as a shadow
and while they sleep plunge deep her

fangs so that they will sleep forever. To
some such a creature has no equal, in
the desire for revenge.

II. Cambion always despised being the
child everyone assumed was fathered

by a demon. His mother never confirmed
or ever denied anything about his father

and so he grew up with a lingering taste
of bitterness in his soul, which ate at him like

cancer til he was too old to change. When
he was a young man an older man came

to him and said he was his father returned
from some forgotten war no one had dared

remember anymore. Cambion killed
that man without a second’s thought. I

think it was his mother’s desire to make
the boy kill his father by spreading rumours

about herself, til everyone was poisoned by
the words of her own mouth. Or so they say.

III. I don’t want to avenge myself on her.
Let her go which ever way she wants. She

betrayed my heart and made me bleed til
I was spent of tears. But I will not follow

the example she has set. Maybe my heart
is blind enough it needs no sparrow’s eye

to see the greatest punishment I can do to
her is forget that she is there and let her go

along that road that leads to nowhere, with
not even the lingering bitterness of my

hatred for her as legacy to all those lost
and once beautiful days that we once shared. Sept 4/09.

THE BALLAD OF AZAZEL SEVEN

Raime Susquet was a killer. He took
the lives of six young women. When
the police found him he had almost
finished with his seventh.

Azazel Seven took him then, some
where the police don’t talk about.
They say he has no eyes or mouth.
They say his face is not a face.

In the galleries he began his work,
injected Raime with a special venom,
and then began to play, without concern.

Finally Azazel wheeled him away past
so many killers who had come before.
They were all meant to live a thousand
years as mockeries of themselves.

And so Raime Susquet was placed
between two killers no better than himself,
his eyes slouching downward to his jaw,
his fingers sliding upward through his

shoulder blades, creating such a brilliant
pattern of new scars, while somewhere
far distant from the galleries Susquet
could swear he heard the demons play. Sept 4-5/09.

THE DAJALUM

I. No one wins against time. The legacy
of years is not the sum of dominion. Rather
we slide toward oblivion, all of our existence
blotted out in the space of seconds
between seconds.

Yet this too, this oblivion, must itself give way
to oblivion, for without an observer, without a
consciousness even the abyss does not exist
nor have substance sans the presence
of an audience.

II. As such we are caught on the hinges of a
conundrum. Life must inevitably give way to
death yet death without life ceases to exist,
just as oblivion ceases to be unless one is
aware of oblivion.

Will the stars shine after all life has perished
and no one, no not even a microbe is left to be
aware of them, or feel the heat of the sun?

Will gravity remain if nothing is there to
appreciate the subtleties of orbits without
ending, or even without beginning?

III. The greatest of empires is as dust upon the
desert sand, a scattering of fragments without
direction carried by an indecisive wind

leading to a whirlwind without dimension
for none can comprehend the ending of their
world, unless they have first gone mad.

No, not mad, transformed from witness to
prophet to god, before becoming bones too long
bleached on the desert floor. That is the sum of
history, to the uninformed.

IV. If all we have done were to linger after
our lives have been finished with would the
sum of all our days equal an eternity under glass,
like butterflies or scorpions in amber, or would it

become but one second in a gallery of seconds?
The question must be asked for is not a single life
broken to miniature, a metaphor for the whole?

V. The disease of eternity has no cure, nor the
longing to possess all that will come after us.
Plagues have stricken even kings and in the mind,
in the cunning of a disease I imagine their strategy,
listen to their prophesies.

“I will consume this country without end and when
this world ends I will escape into another space, I
will arrive at the beginnings of another, and I will
start again.”

Yet no matter how the plagues try they cannot consume
all flesh, and so some worlds, some lives escape their
grasp. Time likewise escapes our grasp as well.

VI. If I speak I am condemned by my speech and by
my words, for any word however twisted on an enemy’s
tongue can be used against me.

If I am silent then I am likewise condemned for my
enemy conspires to accuse me of my silences, and use
what I have not said as justification for my death.

The realization of this truth is not to speak or remain
silent but to recognize humanity, as an enemy, remains
unmovable if it desires an end to one small part of itself.

VII. The governance of the world is maintained by
swarming insects and flocks of locust. The governance
of the world is taken up by them as easily as it is taken
up by us.
How do I know this?

I know this because they came before us, a mighty
army of ten times a trillion strong jewel armoured
soldiers, and they will remain after we are gone.

Why then do we build and struggle if the very insects
will cheat us of our victories over them, in that they live?

VIII. It was said that certain tribes of cannibals, certain
captured men, would sing before death how they had fed
on the flesh of the kin of those who held them now,

and so in the eating and the taking of their flesh they would
take also the flesh of their fathers and brothers, sisters, wives,
mothers and children. All history is but the cannibal knowing
he devours his own kin in the taking of his enemies.

IX. In reaching for the stars we ignore the subtle truth
that we are wrong, not in reaching for the stars but rather
in believing that by doing so we can possibly change
the sum of what we are.

I do not speak that our bodies will not change nor even the
changing of our minds. I speak rather that the hunger for
eternity will not lessen no matter what shape we wear

or mask we put upon ourselves, in any age that is left
for us when the stars are ours, all ours, finally to claim.

X. In the end when all the stars go dark, when all the worlds
have become husks of their former selves it is possible that
life may continue to survive.

There is some irony in the thought that life may outlive the
universe, that the thought of stars may exist longer than the
stars themselves.

If that is so than it is not the fate of the dead to enter oblivion
but rather the fate of the living. If so then what will greet the
living, those living in oblivion, after they are dead?

XI. A shadow on the sun cannot be seen if that shadow
exists because of the sun. Yet if the sun were taken away
the shadow likewise would not exist, and so would not be
seen. The future is no different.

If the future exists because of us then by definition we
cannot see it, for it is the product of what will be and
not what is. If we do not exist then by definition we have
no future and so there is nothing to see.

Yet in one reality, though undetected a thing exists, and in
another nothing exists. Hidden beneath is the difference
between hope and despair.

XII. The greatest you will have will be taken from you
if there is no darkness in balance to your greatness. Flaws
and weaknesses; it is in acknowledging these that we ascend,
not in our denial of them.

All things can be improved upon, or changed. Stagnant
and unchanging is only the grave. It is for this reason
that a society endures, not by its greatest actions but
by recognizing its greatest sins, and then, and only then
moving on from them.

XIII. Deeply unhappy, deeply pressed for sorrows and
all the world joins in sorrows. But in a trillion years
what will it matter whether we were consumed by grief
but only that we were. Beyond this and out of this is the
sum of what we call life.

XIV. In the end there is no end. Time cannot be
conquered but only endured. Time will linger after
life or death, oblivion or substance, something or nothing.
Yet it too requires an audience to exist, even an audience

of stones. When all is done time will move on, silent
and unmovable, a stranger caught in a strange land
that is no land at all. And no one will be there to greet it,
and no one will be there to watch it depart and walk away. Sept 11/09.

THE BAKU (From Japanese mythology.)

Baku devour the blackest of dreams, so they
remain by the houses of children. Sometimes
you see them, those wisps of black smoke
curling like cats about the houses of children.

The darker the dream the greater the feast,
so the Baku remain where places are darkest.
But they can’t ever harm the source of their
feast, so they protect at all cost all the children

they meet. Never oh never frighten a child,
because after the Baku have taken their fill
then they find the ones who frightened their
feeding and reward them all night with

fears of their own. And why you may wonder
would they do such a thing? Because only the
Baku have the right to make fear in the hearts
of the ones that they feed upon. Sept 21/09.

SLIT (From Japanese mythology.)

I’m wandering the streets where the women walk,
where hair, her hair becomes sharp as a blade at night
and all the spiders cry for the milk of their mother
playing her lyre against the backdrop of the fire that
goads all men to evil in the deepest pits of their heart.

A woman is singing and she has two voices with that
other mouth on the back of her head. Her first voice
is of a woman but her second voice is of a child, a small
scared child begging for some bread. I think the woman
murdered the source of that second voice somewhere
in the dark where the shadows walk alone.

Sometimes a boy laughs to the sound of a girl laughing
and is ripped away like tatterings of prayers and a few
soft moans. Sometimes I catch out of the corner of my
eye women and men together in the alleys, but always
before the passions reaches their lone crescendo does

the woman’s features change, her body grow thin as
skeletal wires, while the man, bulging with his eyes too
wide to really see shrinks into oblivion neath the woman’s
too white hands. There isn’t even a moan at the end, just
the sound of a moan stifled from a scream.

And then I see her, her fragile form cast against the lamp
light. And she always asks if I think she is pretty before
pulling away her mask to reveal the slit which runs
from ear to ear, leaving a frozen smile of skin along her
cheek. But I know the old stories well and so ask her
what she asked me, beg her to find me handsome,

press myself close to her and beg for one small kiss. And
as a hundred times before she is shocked and stilled and
doesn’t know what to say. So I press closer still, beg
her still to come home with me, call myself her lover as
if it were the truth, while spiders cry for milk from their

mother’s tears and women listen to the sound of their
other voices carried along the wind from open graves, but
she still doesn’t know what to say. So finally I give up and
walk away from her with not even a wound to my name, not
even the scent of blood on my clothing. It’s always the same. Sept 21/09.

YUKI MURISAKI (From Japanese mythology.)

So there was this girl, right? And she got cut from
ear to ear by her lover. So now she’s dead, because
I guess he killed her too, and what does she do?
She waits hundreds of years, then puts on a surgical
mask and asks people if they think she’s pretty.

I guess it’s supposed to make some kind of sense,
but really it never does. And anyway, why should
she be the villain of the piece, huh? I mean
she doesn’t even have a name. So I’ll call her
Yuki Murisaki, dress her up nice, drop that whole

samurai back story and make her a modern woman.
And yeah, she gets cut up by her boyfriend, but why
should that make her some monster?

I mean doesn’t it make more sense for her to become
a protector, a woman who gets her voice and her
strength back and says “No more!” I mean that takes
away the guy’s power over her, makes her brave, makes
those scars into something to shame him with after all.

Maybe she goes into law enforcement, or better yet
starts her own self defense class, or helps out other
women beaten by their lovers. I don’t know.

It just seems kind of crazy to me that the person who
gets cut up should be the monster when the other person
did it and all they suffer through is a pointless forgotten
death. Like who even knows the name of the man

who cut her up in the first place. There’s less written
about him than there is about the weather for the next day. Sept 21/09.

OLD WOMAN DATSUE-BA
(From Japanese and Carribean mythology.)

When the dead arrive at the river Datsue-Ba
strips them of their clothes, or, if they’re naked,
of their skin. She sets impossible tasks for them,
for those who are dead.
So one day a Douen
arrived at the great river between life and death.
Faceless little girl she was with her backward feet,
from another host of legends
across the ancient seas.

“So what are you doing old woman?” The Douen
asked, with her tiny slit-like mouth, barely larger
than a spider’s thread. “I am waiting for the dead
to impose my hardships on them.” Was the reply.

“What a shame for you.” The Douen said, whose
name was Rebecca in her mortal life. “And why
is that?” Old Datsue-Ba asked her.

“Because the dead are all used up,
and no one is left to feed upon.”

Datsu-Ba rose up high above the soul of the little
girl. “Well, if that is so then at least I will have you
to play with for a while.” “Oh, I think not,” Rebecca
said. “And why is that?”
“Because I am not waiting
by the river old woman. I am just passing on, while
you remain.” And so saying the tiny soul moved on,

while Datsu-Ba sat and counted the bones of her
lost children, as the skins of lost men hung
suspended high above her, where was heard the
sound of muffled laughter,
like the black songs the crows once made. Sept 21/09.

THE BAKENEKO (From Japanese mythology.)

Gaze into a killer’s face long enough and it’ll
look the same as yours. I don’t mean that you’ll
become a killer, nothing so cliched. Rather

I am saying that there really isn’t much difference
in appearance from an ordinary person on the streets
or someone who’s a killer, without a conscience.’

Maybe that’s why the Bakeneko haunt me so.
I have read of great cats which transform to the
shapes of men, and sometimes, just sometimes

they will choose the form of a murderer before
killing that very man. At other times, oh at other
times they will go into the police station, confess the

sins of the killer or rapist or monster, and lead them
to the sites of the killer’s slaughter before slipping
away. And of course when the actual killer is

caught, obliviously hiding his true nature from the
world there is always the stumbling stutter of his
innocence, until all the evidence is presented to him

and he has no chance of escape. I have often wondered
afterward why they do such things, why those creatures
play at justice so half-heartedly or simply erase

the killer’s life themselves. For you see they never
stop the men or women from their crimes, never prevent
the actions from beginning. Perhaps in this they are like

police officers everywhere; unable to stop a dark action
beforehand and content only in punishing the victim and
the violator afterward. Or maybe they simply

give all flesh a chance to redeem themselves and atone,
or never redeem themselves again. At any rate it doesn’t
matter anymore to me. My daughter is dead

and her killer is dead. What justice is there for me? Sept 21/09.

TWO PROVERBS

1) The rat has eaten of the grain
in the storehouse and is blamed
for the plague of the miser king.

2) The trees have no
recourse against the axe
but only the axe handle. Sept 12/09.

GOD IN AN HOURGLASS

God in an hourglass has no taste of years,
impotent all the while surrounded by the
night frost of uncounted dead and dying stars.

Surrounded by a plague of suns sliding
from one gender to another effortlessly
my life as music becomes an education of

shadows, bloodied wings of fire dissolving
to the shadow of an hourglass where a god
sits and pines, impotent all the while in what
he’d done, to mine. Sept 21/09.

EMBRACE THE SHADOWS

Embrace the shadows of your face.

“They blunted her wings.”

Take to your bed o woeful
humanity, I am coming soon.

“They blunted her wings.”

Trace the shadows of your face.

“Her wings are broken now.” Sept 21/09.

TIL WE’VE OUTSPENT OURSELVES

All is shadows til we’ve outspent ourselves
of bloodied wings of fire and the moon hangs
fitfully like a hanged man, til time has overspent
herself at last and nothing remains but a thread
cast into oblivion, and out the other side. Sept 22/09.

THE WORLD OF KASQYELIS

In the world of Kasqyelis the mountains
curve upward to the sun like fingers from
a grey and dying hand,
while the oceans peel
themselves to a blackness deep as tar and
cower in the secret countries which grey
and splinter their sins upon the ground.

I have even heard the crow Galijimoth
call outward to the stars some arcane rune
which no mortal nor god
can understand
who has not learned the secret language the
ravens speak when the twilight
of Creation falls, putting an end
even to the world of Kasqyelis-Mon-Tara. Sept 21/09.

LIKE SIN

It blisters on the ground like sin,
this memory of the child of mine.
There is no secret safe within

except the knowledge which
blackly burns and blisters all
things to a knowledge

bitter as a seed some scorpion
god received, and made as a
child of his own, that child
which once was mine. Sept 22/09.

MATOPE (“Our Last Child.”)

In fields you are there, and the wind.
In the bark of trees, in the cry of the
heron, in the sound of flies begging
for food. You are there in the tear
of the sun, and the tear of the moon.
You are there Matope, our last child.
But you are not here with me, now.
I miss my child. Sept 22/09.

AS THE RAIN

As the rain misses her daughters
so too does the father miss his sons.

As the sun is missed by the harvest so
too does the poor man miss his fields.

As the soldier misses his life on the
plains of battle so to does the lover

miss the sound of her lover’s heartbeat.
In all these things there is no difference.

In all these ways there is but
a single longing amid the stars
of night and the dawns of morning. Sept 22/09.

HONE-ONNA (“Skeletal Woman.”
From Japanese mythology.)

It’s easy to almost imagine the hate.
She comes to me and tries to tempt
my senses with her form, the scent
of her skin in the night.

There is a palpable hunger to her
tastes. There is the sense of malice
and regret. I imagine that is why
she comes to me so often. She
has to wait.

Monsters die when men lose fear
of them. When I first saw her,
saw her bones poking from that
parchment skin I suppose she
hoped I’d fear

myself to death. At times she
seems to wear my face, at other
times her own. She pretends
herself a woman

or a man, but only half-heartedly
so. She seems obsessed to break
me of myself. I watch her in
my own skin.

Where I walk she wanders
after me. She reaches for my
lips, she comes for me. But I
have no fear left.

I have only dead streets without
names. I have only the grave
where my body is left. I have
only an empty world and another
ghost to share it with.

But all she can do is long to feed
on me, on my torture and regrets,
but I have neither anymore. In
truth I have nothing left.
But I am content. Sept 25/09.

POETRY IS NEVER MEANT TO BE EVISCERAL

Poetry is never meant to be
evisceral. It is too clean, too
clinically calm to really
delve into the darkest heart
or deepest well of human
depravity, or misery.

Words have a symmetry of
truth all their own, because
words reveal nothing without
first being fed, force fed
often as not, down the ugly
throats of those who care
not whatever is being said.

What is war or rape? How
do you define it, give it a
proper shape? Is it enough
to say a woman cries, or
a child weeps? Is it enough
to describe the sounds of
bones breaking, slowly, as
the tanks rolls by, as if asleep?

What is the sound of a scream?
How many shades of meaning
can you glean? How many
ways can a person howl, to
make each sound distinct as the
cries of animals, each different
from the other?

When we speak, or even think,
there is a single view, a pure
sense within us of what we see
or say, or hear, or touch, or
understand as best we ever can.
Poetry is but the scaffolding
of these small things, these facets
of a life amid a trillion other things.

Even words like mine are nothing
more than an echo in the dark,
between what is to come, and what
was already the past of some other dream. Sept 25/09.

THE ACEANS AND THE CHOCOLATE TRADE

They were like giant centipedes, only with
bright sinuous wings of silver, gleaming,
always gleaming when they clicked and
spoke as they so often did, of a single thing.

Everything they did was geared for a single
driving desire, which prompted them
toward us always, as the cliches so often
said, like moths to a flame. What a shame.

The shame was never being surrounded by
them. Aceans were gentle, passive at
certain times, when we needed a break. No,
the shame was discovering why they came.

You see they had arrived from a world so far
from Earth we couldn’t see their sun in
our midnight skies. They arrived because
they could smell, even from so far away that

sweet aroma of sweet things. And I mean
sweet; chocolate and candy, cake, sugar.
They spent their entire history fixated solely
on finding what their senses told them to find.

All of their history, their sciences, their arts,
their songs, even the metaphors they used
were all geared toward developing a way
to reach us all someday. And when they

arrived the first thing they did was set up
shop wherever their senses led, to city
street and African farm, to the corner
baker and the candy bar, and they offered

to pay whatever price we named. So we
asked for them to stay, as long as all their
beautiful machines remained with them,
and they behaved. And they have, in their

way. They have moved as a wave across
the world, raising up the poorest man
and upsetting the common good, which
is never good for anyone at all anyway.

They have linked the world to a single
harmony, because war interferes with
the chocolate trade, and pollution,
not to mention the fact that they love

sharing and it annoys them when anyone
can’t have the salvation which they crave.
They’ve set the world askew; they’ve
taken away the teeth of empires because

empires also interfere with the chocolate
trade. And no one minds, not because
they like the Aceans (though many do,)
but because they’ve opened the universe

to use, for our amusement, to let us play.
Not to mention all their wonderful
toys, and the ending of all disease. Oh,
and the chance to live for a thousand years

or more. And all of this because for eight
hundred million years of their history
they followed the scent of something so
utterly tempting it goaded them across five

galaxies. I wonder what instinct compelled
us all to do less than this when we needed
more? I wonder what instinct will come
next to make us change ourselves some more
when we’ve grown enough to care for more
than the chocolate trade? Sept 25/09.

HONE ONNA II.

Have I not the right to kill?
Have I not the right to make suffer
those I make suffer?
I was brutalized and starved
and left with only bones and hollow
eyes. I was left as a ghost
in a land of ghosts.

I feed on the men who come
to me. I let myself appear beautiful
and when they have
finished with me,
when they have satisfied themselves
of me I satisfy myself of them and
feed upon their flesh
to make flesh of my own.

Maybe in a thousand years
or more I will be given enough and
so sent back fully to the
world of the living,
but I think not, and anyway
hunger has a language of its own.
My hunger sustains the nature
of my bones. Sept 28/09.

DO YOU THINK IT’S EASY?

I. Do you think it’s easy realizing
what will become of us in some
future age?
There is but the
mounting terror of knowing
even the words written here

are less an account of my life
than how some other will
regard my life,
and only in their
estimation will my existence
have any meaning at all.

It is more than this. Every
word or profanity is a lens
from some being
to another

that never ends, so that nigger,
kafir, slut or whore is just the
sum of some
vile attempt to stir
violence in another’s soul. But
what is the point

of words and sentences if at
once whatever best qualities
we have
are diminished
because our values are shifted
and sifted by ages to come,

so that am I a racist for saying
two words while another is a
saint for saying
nothing and being
un-recalled as anything but grass
by the edge of a worn out
and faceless old tombstone?

II. The more flagrant the violation
of a law the less likely one is that the
law has been broken.
But for us
even breaking and bending the law
is nothing but a few sad struts

against straw men who will be as
forgotten as we are forgotten in some
as yet unknown future time to come.

Is it right to blame the world for cruelty?
Is it right to praise the world for peace?
All we have done amounts
to grains of dust thrown
against a dune of sand ten times five trillion
fragments strong, each grain no less and no

more than what we ourselves are. No one
is greater or lesser than another. No one
is more or less in the
grand design of eternity.
Each flawed and broken act, each moment
of pure satisfaction and each moment of pure

depravity is balanced only against itself,
is leveled only by the action of itself.
We are all monsters
in our own very
special ways. If I leave the world with no
more witness to the world than this one

statement than I am content. If you take
more than this go ahead. People tear and
rip apart even the most
banal of things in the
effort to prove something else is there when
only maybe it might be. At least that’s
how I see it, from time to time at least. Sept 28/09.

THE UTTER ENORMITY OF IT

To lose a single word is nothing.
To lose a single idea has not even
the strength of years behind it.

But somewhere, after enough men
and women have been lost, after
enough worlds and possibilities

have slipped into oblivion never
to emerge again, then the enormity
of loss becomes paramount to all.

And the bitter edge is turned against
itself most strongly of all and the
bitter truths are the ones which

ravage themselves the most, but
nothing prepares you for the loss of
everything. Even admitting the most

cruel of truths, even claiming the
most heartless of deeds as the only
sure legacy of mankind is nothing

more than the child crying he has not
toys enough. The utter enormity of
loss can neither be summed up nor

cast so easily into the role of pure
destruction; it is simply the truth that
words and thoughts and lives are mortal.

After you accept that everything done
in life has no extended link to the world
to come save as small intangible threads

and nothing more. Only after this can you
breathe and sigh and understand that in
the midst of this enormity is existence

and however fleeting existence is, it exists.
I am here. Whether I am gone tomorrow,
today or yesterday, I am. That is enough. Sept 28/09.

TU AND EU

There were two worlds,
one of silver and one of gold.
Those of the silvered world
called their homeland Tu,
and those of the golden country,
they called their world Eu.

Across ten thousand worlds
conquerors came, and always
was there the same fate for
them. Always they would be
consumed by greed, til greed
was spent of greed and empires
clashed and perished, always
toward the same ends.

But the silver of Tu and the
gold of Eu neither diminished
nor was spent, and neither the
people of Tu or the people
of Eu ever lost a single man or
woman to the conqueror’s hands.

They always remained in
the end. They would always
remain, immortal as a trap the
gods once set to see who
would first fall to the trap
of their own hands, first fall
to the genius of their own sins. Oct 5/09.

GUITAR MAN

Strumming on her flesh he cuts away at
her, until there is only bone and scraps
of meat, not even fit for dogs to eat,
or notice.

Lilith stands by him always, his lover
and his sole companion as he feasts
on other women, and she with him.
I don’t know why.

One day the Cannibal Man will come
for him. One day the beast of his own
desires will be given form, and it will
seek him out.

One day the guitar man will be taken
and strummed upon, and played by a
creature with razor teeth, and claws.
Til that day

he plays the song himself, and she stands by
him herself, while lurking in the darkness
of the shadows a thousand voices weep,
and cry vengeance
for the deeds of their own children. Oct 5/09.

LIKE JEWELS

Like jewels upon the deep black
water when day has died at last

I take up for myself the workings
of my hands, mold a new world

from the echoes of the old, and
wait til all our future days have
become our past. Oct 5/09.

SISTERS ANNA AND ONNA

She’s got eyes in her hands and a mouth
on the back of her neck, whispering curses
that no one understands.

Her hair is barbed and whenever she gets
mad it whips out and tears small holes
in anyone close enough

to kiss her ruined lips, cut as a jagged
scar across her mouth, ear to ear.

When she touches a man he disappears
and bleeds away, to feed her growing
hunger day by day.

Her body is so thin and skeletal she crawls
through the cracks in the floor and the
small gaps in the window sill,

or failing that she just passes
right through the window pane.

The only name I’ve ever heard her called
is Onna, or “woman” in another tongue
than mine.

Wherever she goes death follows
and death feeds, snatches a few scraps
from the master’s table from time to time.

But her sister Anna also follows after, with
that same scar along her mouth, but no other
wounding touch to count her by.

She always follows, ready to
take away her sister’s life, or mockery of life,
as if she were a blade that needed to be dulled.

But the demon always flies
faster than her sister, always stays one step out
of reach, and so the two are locked together,

never meeting one another, only counted truly
sisters by the scars their lovers gave them when
love was almost sweet. Oct 5/09.

ARCANE

In the last desert she sat and waited,
and she arcane as the patterns left
vacant on the sands.

She held up the winds of a thousand
siroccos with but the outspreading
of a single hand, and threw

out into the stars a tapestry of ancient
songs that have no language any mortal
would dare to understand.

The Xylemer then peeled away herself,
himself, and walked between the worlds.
Left lying on the desert were the

bones of all humanity, lost as
the secrets the devil once knew, and
with humanity once shared. Oct 5/09.

IT’S NOT EASY BEING THE BAD GUY

Do you know why it’s not easy being the bad
guy? Because we always have to play nice.

Being the villain is easy when the hero is there.
Being evil is convenient when the hero saves

the day. But in the real world there aren’t any
heroes left. So we have to balance both roles

in a way. It’s not enough to just be evil because
there isn’t enough evil in the world for everyone.

It doesn’t matter how corrupt we are we’re never
corrupt enough without a hero to balance us.

Only a few sadists and sociopaths get let off the
hook, because there’s nothing inside them anyway.

But for the rest of us we always know if we played
god in some evil way there wouldn’t be anywhere

else to go but off along the hero’s path, or worse. It’s
the little acts of rebellion that get us through the day. Oct 5/09.

THE BALLAD OF THE LONG BOW

In the first of times eleven gods ruled all things,
and made of men the source of all their mockeries.
They tormented him when he toiled and when he
slept. They cursed him when he sat and when he
rose. Throughout forest and plain all men
were thus abused by the old gods.

The gods walked with men and women yet
did whatever pleased them, and so brought ruin
to the world of men and women. Finally a hunter
from the deep forest came, and with a bow shot
at one of the gods, and killed him.

Then arrows were made by other men, and
swords and spears, and though the gods tried
they had no defense against stone and metal and
wood. For the men they tormented possessed
none of these, and gods do not change or grow
or learn. But men change. And women also.

All the old gods, of forest and river, sun, moon,
star and mountain were killed. Only the god of
shadows remained, for no one can kill a
shadow, but a shadow can kill no one.

Thus men and women learned to kill even the
gods. After this, killing each other was too simple
a thing to ignore. It was as simple as breathing.
It was a torment even the gods themselves
did not intend, or understand. Oct 5/09.

TO MY FIRST NIECE OR NEPHEW

There is a palpable hate in lost opportunities.
There is an anxiety building upward from the
spark of non-being which goes beyond any
capacity for understanding. In action, in
being there is always, however briefly, the
hope of something more in the reality of
that which is less. And yet you are dead
and will never hear these words.

My, how much I despise this world! How
I taste that rotten scent of burdens piling
upward to my throat. It is the piling burdens
of knowing my life is uncoiling outward like
a thread into oblivion, and I, helplessly must
follow it out onto its end. But you, how sad
to face that end but days after you began.

My brother is an ass and a fool. I speak seldom
of him because he and I differ in every way, and
he is the more handsome, the stronger, the
more worldly of us two. Yes, he is the one
I had hoped, hoped mind you of being the heir
to some child who would protect our family
from the ravages of time. And now you are dead
and he is still alive. So is your mother. Bitch.

When I was a child the whole world was white
and black, uncluttered by grey, uncluttered by
any colour whatsoever, because all the world is
but a struggle without purpose or direction, yet
still we struggle on, because the alternative is no
alternative at all.

We pass through a world that cares not for life
or death, that remains as bones remain, or less.
And there is no God to greet us after death and
no devil plies our evils with evils of his own,
because such things are nothing more than the
demented hopes of lost souls unable to effect
any change in this world beyond the shifting
of soil over their bodies when they are dead.

Every cell, every bacterium in my body is a world
unto itself, link upon link of some unnameable
thing that defies the expectations of a trillion
lifeless worlds, because such mere fragments
move, live and act, and in their actions I exist,
and in my actions others exist, forward and back
through a billion years in both directions, creating
link upon link with a trillion other worlds.

And now you can’t share in that connection,
now that single frail, pathetic, tragic and beautiful
reality is denied you, because my brother, my
brother, my brother couldn’t bear the responsibility
of your existence. What a fucking moron, to deny
the benefits of life over non-life, to argue
because she was married, because he abandoned
his first girlfriend, because he lost home and
profession he deserves some breathing room,
and you then had to be sacrificed for his sake.

My brother failed in the most profound and
complete way imaginable: he denied himself
an heir to the future. And if you had been sick,
or dying in the womb, if some tragedy would
have befallen you then so be it, but to die like
this, to be broken like this is repellent to my
soul. Even the smallest insect knows the wisdom
of life above non-life, even the smallest cockroach
protects her young. I wish we could have met.

Now I must find someone, now I feel the need
to find someone, find in some way, however
unlikely a means of bringing you back. Years
will pass and I will love her, I hope. And she
and I may conceive, and perhaps in some other
way you will return to the world of living, or
if not you than your cousin.

In any case, I have said my peace. But the
anger is unpalpable, and lost opportunities
are so many, like sand ripped to dust and less
than dust, before being scattered on the tombs
and graves you’ll never see, on the monuments
of others you’ll never share. How can I miss
someone I never met before and never will again?
How can a ghost haunt me whose face and form
were not even set at the moment of their death?

To my lost nephew or niece, rest well.
I’ll remember you as best I can and join
you in whatever under-country exists
on the other side of death. June 23/09.

KAPUTIA II.
(Alternate poem.)

Kaputia, name of an Indian
queen, she who killed her
lovers on the great Ganges.

Kaputia, sought the love
of a British man, Kaputia,
tricked into a power game.

Lost her lovers and her
lands to an English king. June 17/09.

THE SILENCES OF DEATH

I am struck by the silences of death,
I am caught on the briars of silences.
Nothing is still enough for him,
nothing is enough for all-loving death.
Life has a trillion mouths and actions
burn the very air with screams.
I am struck by the silence of my
epitaph. Even death forgets me and my
worship of the workings of his hands. July 1/09.

YOU TAKE THE GOOD
(The first and second stanzas are
my father’s, the third my mother’s.)

You take the good and
learn to know them well.

You take the bad
and ignore them,

who you are and
who you’re with. July 4/09.

HOLOCAUST WESTERN

I’m trying to deliberately write a bad poem.
I’m trying to write about cowboys in World
War II., gunslingers at Nuremberg, why even
the Jews could be mistaken for Indians
with the way so few hide their prejudice.

I’m writing about blind monsters in a world
of sin, a world not their own, a crucified world
for them. I’m trying to write about a blind man
living in a world of monsters who all hold up
masks of human faces, so that when he touches

what they claim to be their faces he feels the
smooth skin of those hapless victims though
somehow even still he knows he is being lied
to, somehow. I remember a dream about being
a time traveler, and in the body of a child I went

forward and back through history, teaching a
man how to make three dimensional photographs,
which he was destined to make anyway, throwing
statues against the walls of future museums,
knowing they couldn’t be destroyed, and so they

bounced harmlessly away. I even introduced him
to his wife and her three children, and became a
kind of son to him, and brother to those children,
though I don’t know why. And then it is always
back to Nuremberg, back to gunslingers and blind

monsters, or some evil queen sending her loyal
brave knight against impossible odds, because he
loves her, and she loves him not at all. I was just
trying to write a bad poem after all. How did all
of this come out of my own ruined experiment? July 2/09.

AT THE SCHOOL OF THE MANTICORE

Ekathai, why she’s just a cute alien girl
from somewhere just beyond the boundaries
of Pluto. Don’t mind her tails, all three of
them, and when she sticks out that purple
tongue of hers don’t worry, it means she
likes you, a lot.

You’ll find working here gets easier after
the culture shock. Half of our students are
from someplace else, either another world or
even other dimension. Why Hatet Sterculion,
the former professor of extinct languages is a
bona fide Old One,
though you wouldn’t know it.

Oh, yes? Well that’s why half of his body is
bandaged up, and why it looks like he’s missing
his left arm, leg and eye. Sometime way back
he got into a fight with something, well big,
and had to rest and recover, so he took human
form, kind of.

He really is quite brilliant, but don’t ask him
for any help, or he might eat you. No, no I’m
kidding, but seriously, don’t ask him for help.
Oh, last but not least Bah-Be Yuyutsu is in
your class. He’s a child of two very different
parents, one being

Balor and his baleful eye, and the other Yuyutsu,
from the Maharbharata. Somehow they got
stuck together and created him. Yes, yes, well
anyway he’s an A-plus student so you shouldn’t
have any problems with him. Just don’t mention
the Irish mythology

and you should be fine. Anyhow, I’ve got to get
back to my classroom, there’s a demon doing
show and tell. Apparently she went to the forest
of the suicides and brought a big hound from
there, or as she calls it, “doggy.” Oh, and don’t
worry, soon enough they’ll

all be in grade two, and someone else’s problem.
Oh, that’s the bell. Have fun on your first day as
a teacher, remember my advice, and when Mr.
Sterculion calls for recess make sure you go out
with him. He may be an Old One but he’s not very
mobile with only one leg.
He’ll need your help,
whether he likes it or not. Well, anyway, have a nice day. July 2/09.

MENAGERIE (Or origami at the hospital.)

I cast to sea upon the world’s wide rivers
of causality a countless menagerie of animals,
laying them eventually in many people’s hands.

Paper begets the flesh of animals and paper
the flesh of the words I write, as I lay them in
your hands. How soon til my memories

are paper, a menagerie of lost regrets, left to
some few others exiled from other worlds and
lands to the country of my imagination,

to the toothless grave that can’t even kill a
piece of paper with all the fury that it has. July 3/09.

FAME SLIPS

Fame slips away: be grateful.
Those who have the footprints of a god
on them, those seemingly touched by the
divine burn swiftly, scar

themselves on such godhoods til
they are not men, are not women anymore.
Stranger things have taken them and grossly
all their actions become but

the merest shadow of a farce,
til every flaw however small is considered
their worst sin, and every act of kindness
some messiah’s echo in their

actions and their deeds. What
fools to struggle so long for so little.
Dust is clean besides the likes of them. July 3/09.

THE MORE INFORMATION

The more information a society has,
the greater the knowledge a civilization
accumulates the easier it is for such vast
resources of the mind to slip away.

But it is the mind which devises
what best ways to ruin and destroy,
it is the mind which transforms the

smallest part, the merest virus of a
thought into the all consuming force
which annihilates all else. What we
create destroys even what

we create. In the end this truth
dominates all else. But still we
create. We can’t help but try. It
is our finest fate, and it is a lie. July 3/09.

EVERY DAY AND EVERY NIGHT

Every day I smash headlong into the reality
of knowing nothing changes. I grow older
and sooner or later death will great me and
find me unpalpable, but still she’ll have her
feast. I am an exile of myself, I am not

the man I should have been. There is another
soul buried neath my own and whatever fate
was meant for him I received, though I have
grown twisted and my heart is blacker than
it should have been. And this is what I know

as I lay in bed at night and this is what I feel
but my hands cannot stop and my mind will
not stop, and so I am compelled, always
compelled to keep going, even in the face of
utter defeat, because I am not being defeated

but rather it is the other one, the lost soul down
somewhere inside, while the mask of who I
am resides and continues like a husk unwilling
to be shed, til I crumble and he crumbles with
me, into death. And that is what I feel way in the
middle of the night. July 9/09.

PART OF ME

Part of me wants the world to end
and all humanity to die. I’m tired
of them all and I wish an end of

things, a closing down of reality,
til even the universe itself could just

wind down prematurely, like a
broken watch. And part of me
desires all things their proper

chance to endure and thrive, and life,
all stars, all worlds the opportunity

to become the seeds of greater
things. Between the two is where the
poet begins. From the two great art

of any kind is born, whether it survives
a day or a billion years of passing time. July 4/09.

TOM HANNEHAN’S MOTHER
(Her son was murdered by King Fisher.
This is a true story.)

At night, years after that final event, she
used to mount his grave and almost wept,
but not for him.
She’d build a bonfire, heap
it high up and dance about the flames,
a circular pattern of steps
and movements she could never reclaim.

Afterward, well afterward she’d go down,
back to the town and the city she was from.
Her son’s memory she put to rest
another night by dancing on his
murderer’s grave. That was Tom Hannehan’s
mother. I’d have hated to meet her son
on a bad day. July 22/09.

IN LOST GOODBYES

In lost goodbyes,
in something.
In lost goodbyes?

We never say goodbye
to those we really hate.
Oh, we speak the words
but never the intent.

We want to keep
them close and
keep them safe.

We want someone
to hate as surely as
the air. It’s all

because there’s
nothing left out
there, but lost

goodbyes or something.
Don’t ask me where. July 9/09.

THE ORIGINAL MIMIC

So what if the beetles all have men’s
faces, or the cockroaches sound like
the voices of lovers?
So what if the
flies gather and plot, shout revolution
from garbage humps? Ours is
the time
and ours is the way.
We hold dominion over all things.
Just don’t ask me to take off my face.
Even I don’t know
what is beneath. July 14/09.

AMI 625

I felt the skin of her breasts,
the soft touch of breath held
taut as wires,
and then as
always the slow release,
gaining momentum into

a single, final act of pure
surrender, into the nothingness
of moments between moments.

Soon Ami 625 will have
to return to the shop, be placed
on a shelf
when my lease is
up, so like a mannequin with eyes
of shale, gazing hungrily

after the world she can’t taste,
and I’ll go on my way down
streets that have no names,
because
I am supposedly freer than her chains. June 21-July 14/09.

THE SCIENTIST IN SEARCH OF LOVE

So there was a scientist in search of love.
He could have followed all the old cliches,
but he did not. Instead he followed a rabbit

and watched what rabbits do, then came upon
a frog, a sparrow, a speck of wheat, a grain of
corn, and finally the corpse-broken worm,

and asked them all what love would be. And
when he got no reply he turned to his wife
and asked the same, and she replied “I do not

know, don’t ask me now. My lover is passing
by, and I don’t want to miss him dear. Perhaps
I’ll answer your question some other time.” July 14/09.

THE VOYAGER OF THE WHITE RAVEN

There are ships of Jupiter that glide ‘tween
clouds violent as gods, vaster than worlds.
There are storms out of season that devour
the night and rains blacker than oil that

poison the world. There is a crow whiter
than snow and on her back it is written but
destruction and ruin to any who gaze ‘pon
her, as I have now gazed. She stood on the

prow of a ship, whiter and clearer than glass.
Her eyes had the seeming of darkness and
shadows I’ll never forget, though I’ll never
describe. The sea shouted back from the

scream of the water that cursed all the skies
and the white raven on her ship almost shed
her pale white wings, and I thought I saw a
woman with hair pale as a hanged man’s

thought before he’s finally died. Then the
ship released her sails like wings that have
no thought but fury and the raven passed
into a raven that once and final time. And

afterward, yes afterward I found my footsteps
carried me home, but my soul is with her on
that ship somewhere ‘tween the clouds of
worlds no man has seen in days gone by,

or if they’ve seen that have not told, because
there are not words enough to tell of what the
gods do not understand, as they flit like shadows
screaming at the storms, as the white raven passes by. July 14/09.

TO DOORS THAT HAVE NO KEY

To doors that have no key
and have no lock to signal
they are dead and the world

has stopped, never to start til
the sun recoils like the springs
of an ancient and rusty clock. July 28/09.

A MARTIAN CHRONICLE
(From an old idea I had after
reading Bradbury as a child.)

Sometimes it isn’t the dream, it’s the
misunderstanding that creates anew.
I read a book about Mars and on the
last page humanity looked down into
the canal and saw Martians there.

Of course what the author meant
was that humanity had become the
Martians, but in my mind’s eye I saw
golden skinned beings transformed to

octopi, swimming along the roads of
water, leaving the vast empty deserts
of their world for a few scatterings of
humanity to conquer. I imagined

great golden eyes accustomed to the
alien water gazing up into the faces of
those stranded in the vast deserts, and
for a moment there was a connection
til the Martian swam away. I never

forgot that first impression of an alien
thing cast on a new world of its own,
living in the roads of water while the
sun blistered everything else to fire and

shadows of fire. Of course the Martians
were humanity by then, but I had no idea
and truth to tell I’ve never thought humanity
was anything but another alien race, to my own. July 14/09.

THE DRAGON

Great outspread the dragon’s
wings, against a blue sky her
storm of breath a flaming tide

caught and stilled in the artist’s
eye, until the flames catch fast
and burn even the artist’s eye. July 28/09.

SARAH 123

Everything that’s been created
comes to an end, except for her
when I place
my tender fingers
round her throat, when I stop
her breathing as she’s lying
in that hospital bed, another
ruined daughter half finished in my
arrogance.

Afterward, yes afterward
she will fade away and I will
fade, til I put the pieces of
her together again, til
Sarah 123 becomes Sarah 124,
but after she is mine
again I’ll lose her
and fall apart myself, til I
try to save her from my sins. June 21-July 14/09.

ALONG THE ROADS OF WATER
ARE MANY MISUNDERSTANDINGS

Winter green in the winter wild
seasons confuse those first ones who
haven’t seen the stars burn through
the atmosphere, or watch the rains
tumble upward when the sky is

tired of being lonely. And
along the roads of water are many
misunderstandings, like when corpses
forget that they are dead or lovers
forget to sigh, or when gravity

takes a turn for going the wrong
way because its forgotten again how
these things go. Anyhow people adjust
if you let ‘em long enough. This new
season will change after a time when
the sky isn’t lonely or roads of water

are less wild as they skim between
the lines of what we think we know and
what reality allows from times to time. July 14/09.

ON SPINDRIFT

There were cities, cities of steel and spires
caught neath glass domes that hung upward
inverted in the sky.
There were caravans
of strange beasts out on purple desert sands
and nomads with their robes of scarlet

or dung black brown. And whether out
upon the wasteland or the cities with their
dragonfly machines,
humming through the
air like insects out of some primordial dream
logic, whatever place you stood upon it

wasn’t home. Earth was half a universe
away, and between all the marvels and the
terrors, between the
scent and flavour
of alien things indescribable by human
speech there was finally and utterly

the loneliness of never going home. That
was what Spindrift was like in the older
days my child, and
even now sometimes
when the wind whips up and machines
scream their staccato screams,

when the merchants gaze with their silver
eyes, when great beasts resemble cockroaches
and bears and marching
soldiers all at once
and mutely wait for their riders to come,
sometimes even still I long for home,

though less now than it was before. And
besides my daughter you are here by my
side and that is something
when a thousand
worlds or more have passed you by, and
in some strange accident an exile
you become in countries not
of your choosing, or your desire. July 14/09.

LABYRINTH PLANET

I once saw a world of gold, a great
sphere and etched on it were the paths
of a labyrinth, a maze
of unending roads
bordered on both sides by walls
as golden as the sky, the ground, the road.

People wandered to and fro but where
they went I could not tell, because
they had
no mouths nor eyes,
and groping in the dark design
they could not see the brilliant sky that
hung above their world.

The stars were different when the night
fell fast and so I stood inside the labyrinth
and did not move
or think awhile, but instead
remembered my old life, somewhere
far from here.

I am not sure if I woke up, or if the dream
is happening still because I can never
know what
blind men know
when their eyes
awake, or deaf men know when
ears are opened. In such a way I do not know

if I have closed my senses up or if I see
the world anew, or if the world has simply
gone away and
another has replaced itself.
But of course in either
world no one talks
to me and they may as well be blind,
for I am invisible as blinding sunlight in a
universe that has no further need of night. July 14/09.

COLE VOLIS

He removed her eyes.
That was the first thing
I remembered.

Or was it his
eyes? I could never be
sure of the gender, only

that Cole Volis had
removed a person’s

eyes. He was a serial
killer and the police, for
obvious reasons,

wanted a word
with him. And so he
escaped into a dream

of mine, fled away
but I have him still.

Now they say I am Cole
Volis, and I killed them
all, but don’t

believe it. After
all, if I were a killer wouldn’t
I know it, somehow? Wouldn’t
anyone know the
dream from reality itself? July 14/08.

THE KNIGHTS OF REMLER

Silver armour and swords never
gleam so brightly as in the fairy
tales. The forests of Remler never
smell so sweet, so fresh outside the

stories of knights and dragons,
and the castle steps never seem so
white, so marble pure except when
the story of another valiant knight

is being told. The moon is always
full and the sun never hides behind
a cloud. Women, all women who
are good are also beautiful, and all

sorcerers are either wise beyond
the centuries or evil beyond the
darkest thoughts of men. And no
one ever, ever suffers long enough

for wounds to fester, for hate to
grow, for enmity to rival enmity,
unless it is an evil soul, and by the
stories end they always suffer their

appointed, perfect fate. And it
would be easy, oh too easy to
consider it all a farce, to make
mockery of heroes and princes

and knights, to ridicule the obvious,
and point out that princes are not
always good, and what is good is not
always beautiful, and the triumph

does not always go to the righteous,
but to the strong. But hasn’t all that
been said enough? In the trenches
of No Man’s Land, in the deserts

of North Africa when the tanks ground
under soldiers better than their sins,
when the bomb fell at Hiroshima and
rendered thousands to charred silhouettes

on walls like they were canvases, all
this stains memories, tarnishes hope
like rust on armour or sword-blade.
We catch the scent of forests best

only after the smell of bodies has left
our lungs, we remember the greatest
heroes in the midst of the greatest
tragedies. The heroes are not meant

for the real world. The heroes and their
ideal worlds are meant to keep us sane,
to keep some pure spark alive when all
else is shamed by the knowledge of the
bonfire, the bullet, and the firing squad. July 14/09.

ULEXITE BLUE

I. That girl is ulexite blue and she don’t know
what to do. Photographs scattered on the ground,
dead photographs caught in her eyes, in those
burning skies.

She’s all tied up inside, all ulexite clear but the
things she fears she just can’t hide, because she’s
ulexite blue, and I just don’t know what to do.

II. Youth’s mad laughter is wide but hurt is never
clean. She’s all tied up inside with those lovely
eyes of hers burning like a thousand skies we’ve
never seen, or ever will be seen.

III. Girls break like toys or spin like tops or cut
like knives that haven’t any lives between their
teeth. My girl will never reach her end

because her eyes are all ulexite clear and blindly
she fears she doesn’t know what to do. And God
help me I think I’m ulexite blue staring at her

dumbly, without a clue even to her name.
But I’d love her if I could, I’m afraid. July 22/09.

A KIND OF HELL, I GUESS
(A dream from long ago.)

In the heart of the city of steel there is
a woman. Her hair was red once but it
has now dulled to a pale copper, and her

arms and legs, indeed her whole body is
bloated and swollen beyond human repair.
Cables or wires run into the backs of her

knees and the fronts of her elbows at
the joints and she is suspended in a great
chamber round as her swollen body is

round. All the city is hers, every street
and lamplight, every room and chamber is
hers. No one else lives there. She is alone.
This is where the dream ends. July 22/09.

THE LOGIC OF ELFEGO BACA
(Another true story of the west.)

And so the message was sent.
“You and yours have caused offence
long enough. If you don’t turn
yourselves in by such and such a date
I’ll feel you’re trying to resist
arrest and I’ll lose no sleep in gunning
you down when I see you next.”
Most of the criminals turned themselves
in rather than wait for a bullet in
the back. But those were different days
when you could rely on a man to
mean what his words meant to say. July 22/09.

MY LOVER THE SERPENT
HAS PALED HERSELF TONIGHT

There on the sands where alien things
still walk, where serpents tread and
demons talk, where a girl with scales
shakes off her robes black as sable
I crane my neck upward to the naked
stars unclothed of any thought.

She starts the magic of her voice and
upward reaches hand and arm, clawed
fingers weave the air and the threads
of some strange web rise higher
than any thought has dared, and still
rejoicing in the sounds of a trillion

demons talking her web outspreads
to all those unclothed stars, to worlds
that have no seasons, to a thousand
countries of an unknown God. And
then at once the magic’s done,
the web unravels and fades away.

All that remains is a girl on the sands
and a lone lost traveler kissing her lips
rough as a splintered song, because
the magic is gone, and my prayers with
it have fled into some unknown day,
without repair. July 28/09.

DISPOSABLE SOCIETY

All things are a commodity of errors, all is but
the past of what we seek. Each thought, each
thing created by our hands and uncreated by

anything have but a meager time, a space of
relevance determined not by itself but by all
that lingers about it. No matter the greatness

of empire, no matter the sophistication of
language or idea, no matter the determination
of will or of desire we are caught as flies in the

amber of a single life and a single time, burdened
both by all that has come before and all possibilities
of what may follow after. Societies render themselves

disposable, but a commodity of errors for each
thing, both created by human hands and uncreated
by anything at all, slides along the labyrinth of time

never knowing when the end, the final end will
come. Even these words of mine but add bricks
to the unsure foundation of an ever more uncertain

world, yet I cannot stop my pen or cease to write.
Even the smallest mayfly here but for a moment exists
for a moment in time. Death, when all the stars are dead

will become as disposable and empty as life has been,
but then life is only empty if death is considered but
the only outcome of the choices we have led. July 28/09.

A LAW FOR ALL

A law for all is a law for one, but do not
be proud of that. The greater the number
of souls connected to one act, to a single
thought of morality, a single grasp of truth

the sooner it is overturned by the ignorance
of youth. Law is nothing more and nothing
less than the majority of all surrendering
themselves to the morality of a few they

don’t even understand. The criminal is but
the last resort of more ignorant fools than
these, trying to be evil, trying to destroy the
morality of a few with no morality at all.

A curse upon them both, a curse upon the
law and the lawbreaker equally, sentenced
to atone for this disease of morality. As
for myself I’ll obey the law for now, but only
because I’m waiting for that final end of things. July 28/09.

DOWN ROADS

Down roads that don’t lead anywhere
at all, somewhere in the thousand lands
of God, in houses without windows and
without doors great bristle-backed

creatures walk and talk as men, as
children and as women, though they
are none of these. Covered in scales
and riddled with spines, beak-like

mouths hooked in some design like a
mockery of an eagle’s they pass thru
walls, devouring the evil dreams of
children to make them stronger still.

I don’t even know their names or if they
know mine but I have seen creatures no
less perverse on the streets of cities
somewhere scattered in the mockeries

of crows, the stars all still
burning in their shadowed eyes. July 28/09.

GINGER (From a dream I had
on the morning of July 22/09.)

I saw a girl whose hair was dark
as sparrows’ wings at night, and
her eyes were no less dark but
her skin, her skin was golden,

tarnished gold, and I don’t know
why. I think that in another life
she was my dog, a pet of mine,
and because it was a dream and

the logic of a dream I knew and
didn’t know if she remembered
me. Did I love her, had I loved her
before, or only in this dream?

Of course I loved her before but
here I did not know and neither
did she. So much uncertainty,
like when one falls from a great

height but doesn’t feel afraid til
after the ground is struck, because
until that moment fear is replaced
by the last scraps and rags of hope

that gravity could not apply so
completely to one such as you. I
remember kissing her and perhaps
she was just a girl or a fragment

of a dream and not a memory at
all twisted to a human shape. But
I think not. At any rate I awoke
and ever since then I have caught

myself looking for a girl with
shadows for hair and shadows
for eyes and skin golden as a

wintry sun at dusk. And yes,
now I know why. Love takes many
forms in the labyrinth of the mind. July 28/09.

GOVERNESS OF ANOTHER FLOOD

Every adult in the jungle reverted to a child.
They stepped backward into childhood and
couldn’t walk out again. There were

flowers the colours of dead men, and vines
with teeth sharper than thorns. There was
an orchid that stank of a woman’s

lust and a rose that stank of the worm. And
there in the midst of it all was the Governess
in her funeral attire, surrounded by

children on every side, cold stern woman
bending down to make safe the jungle for
the children now. Perhaps she had

lived here all along, or only came with the
ones who came to this place beneath a foreign
sun. She’ll never tell and anyway the

children are still children there. They
haven’t the heart to question, or disobey. July 28/09.

THE CORCORAX

Five thousand miles of ground are
ashen littered, blasted earth charred
and bitter like the taste of dust on
burning lips in the coldest months
of winter. Still the Corcorax lingers
long, still the crow in human shape

wrestles with his immortal state,
and he the last witness to Man’s
last fate, when the coldest months
of winter blister on the vine of a
billion soldiers warring alongside

the hidden ugly masks of hate,
behind the glad prophets’ faces,
and behind their sapphire eyes. July 28/09.

THE HEAT

When the heat gets to me my breath grows
shallow, sleep grows taunt, and the knife
of myself dulls and rusts, sluggishly crippled

by the humid air. I forget so much and
so must force my thoughts to rhythmically
work as merely broken machines would

work, now and then. Give me a rain soaked
world melting to rotten cities stained with
grey fog and mist. Give me an ocean blacker

than blood and a thunderstorm that booms
with the voice of twenty gods. Give me this
frozen crystal tear burning the skies to ice

a shade so pale and blue it would seem the sky
has died and only her faintest shadow still
remained. In all this I am content, where heat

does not intrude or blacken memories with an all
pervasive pain, like the hopes of the condemned
at the gate of the prison and the execution

block, wondering however briefly
which path is still open now for me. July 3/09.

CACETUS

Slaves and spices, wine and grain, all
of these Cacetus brought from Egypt
to the plains of India, the dusty plains.

Caravans of horses and of camels
shook from heat, and the slaves in
their desperation seemed to melt

away to shadows, their souls fleeing to
the hills of darkness far away as their
flesh hardened neath the weight of whip

and flail, undeserved in any time
or age. And then, when the slaves
were left behind in the gardens of

other lords Cacetus turned his caravans
back along the route he took, and like a
shadow he melted all away, into darkness

unbecoming where no one knows
his name, there in that shadow country
where names are all that should remain. July 28-29/09.

MASTER

In the end all the tyrants are finally just called
“master.” No name exists beyond this, and no
calling upon some purer aspect of their being.

For these reasons faces all obscure and facts
are destroyed, leaving but one lone impression
of a single being blazing through the centuries.

As for all others, for all slaves and serfs and
ruined children of those lesser ones who never
ruled the world, they have one face as well.

But whether slave or master the face is always
the same. Sooner or later every master becomes
a slave and every slave a master. There is no

other fate, no other conception of hell equal to
this. Nothing we do changes the fact that we are
all equally cruel. But sadly, I like it that way. July 30/09.

FOR EVERY GOOD

For every good there is an evil,
for every evil there is a good.
Does that mean then that if I am
cruel enough than another man

must of course be kind, to truly
balance the scales of Creation
itself? Does it mean if one
nation is destroyed another

must of course be created in
its stead? If one believes in
a devil must there be a God?
Or does it mean that if I am

good here another aspect of me
must be evil in some other place,
that old and sad cliche of evil
twins in other worlds, mirror

opposites of our own? But is
that the best reality can do, to
make balance all things so that
never does good win or evil lose?

And furthermore does not such
a glib statement imply that any
chance to make some part of the
world the better must of course

make some other part of the
world the worse? Now I am
not blind, but really must every
action be for the best or worst

of all about, cannot one action
be mute of any moral conceits at
all? Could not my words here
abandon all pretext of morality

and simply chose to be what they
are to be? Or will even these words
some fools conceive as justification
for atrocity, or the saving of the world? July 30/09.

KAMIKAZE

The skin of the dragonfly
crumpled into the ship’s side,
the great sound of an alien
drum rumbling like a thunder
that never dies.

He thought he would enlist
for empire’s sake, to defend
against some enemy sent
from across the seas. The
rumbling of the drums grew

louder as his dragonfly and
her silver skin burnished itself
brightly against the sun and he
watched almost absently
the women passing by.

He crumpled the way a beetle
crumples into sand, flung by
a storm that knows no words
we utter in the moments of
the dying.

He took how many of the
enemy with him? It never
seemed to matter as we sat
and drank, and waited for
our turns to fly and fall

and fail in the saving of an empire
we never loved enough, because
we only died for it.
As for our enemy . . . July 30/09.

FURNITURE MAN

I think he stitched himself into the chair.
Skin severed and mended into fabric and
his eyes were bleeding like doll’s eyes,
after a little girl has poured her mother’s
blood on them. As for his hands and feet

they were wired tight, and I even think his
feet were changed to add added stability
and strength to the chair’s design. As for
his tongue, well that he cut out and sewed
into a kind of small headrest for his head. I

suppose it was his last attempt to impress
me somehow. I guess he wanted to shock
me before I left. But like I told him before
we had nothing in our relationship that
connected us together. Except for that
chair of course. But I don’t want it anymore.
It reminds me too much of him. July 30/09.

WHEN HEAT OUTNUMBERS DAY

When heat outnumbers day
and storms outnumber nights,
when moons cloud skies to
flooding and tears drink seas

to bursting, when jungles
stink of cities and cities of
a woman’s touch, then
you’ve reached the center of
all that you long for, and such. July 30/09.

BUILDINGS LOOK BETTER AT NIGHT,
CAN’T TELL WHAT THEY LOOK LIKE
(The title is my father’s, July 29/09.)

Buildings look better at night
when you can’t see anything at all
except the grim shadows of some
gigantic space, or the echo of a
wall. Imagination fills in the gaps,
makes pretend we see what we think
we’ve seen. I suppose that’s the
way the world is built, a shadow on
the sidewalk becomes a garden green. July 30/09.

THE SOUND OF DRUMS

The sound of drums slakes his thirst again,
that sound of nighttime rhythms and the
rumble of a war that neither men nor armies
nor anyone could ever hope to conquer, or

be conquered by. The crickets move on as
the drums increase the beating of a rhythm
timed by no heart nor season, but instead by
some unknown pattern without purpose or

direction. He drinks it down, those ancient
tumbling words without sounds as we could
understand, and when the dawn breaks her
back of night he holds out his hand, and waits
for the drums to come again, on his dying day. July 30/09.

BUILT TWICE (The first
line is my father’s, July 29/09.)

Built twice on the end of the road
houses that I once called home.
Now the road continues on and
the houses have come and gone,
but I’m not with them anymore.
I have another house to build, on
some ancient garden hill. Call
it heaven if you will but home
is home by any wayward shore. July 30/09.

IN THE DARK OF THE LIVING WORLD

In the dark of the living world
death seems bright only when
all else is taken away.

In the darkness of death there
is nothing. Life is nothing. I
think it’s all a matter of

perspective. I think we only
want the things denied us for
so long, and afterward

we’re forced to endure the
things we want that we can’t
really ever change. July 30/09.

THREE HAIKU

The fox is not a fox
in the company of
dogs, but only meat. July 30/09.

Soldiers forget their
brothers’ deaths when
generals die at last. July 30/09.

Shoot at a forsaken man.
It is no different than
strangling a helpless child. July 30/09.

THE KNOWING MIND

Time brings perspective to
the knowing mind, naturally.
Our ecologies of madness
bring perspective only
when we name them. May 9/09.

DISPLACEMENT KILLING

On a glass wire we commit a displacement
killing, we shuffle ourselves away in the
other mind of our own skins, through

no fault of our own.
Fierceness personified grows as the world
shrinks away from us til the ones we were
becomes not the ones we are

and along some divergent evolutionary
path in some other world we could have
been as normal as you think
yourselves to be, as normal as you
are through no fault of your own. May 9/09.

SHE DOESN’T KNOW HOW TO SCREAM

She is silent because she doesn’t know
how to scream. She reads truth in every
glance going thru today into tomorrow.

Entertaining her with my tender mercies,
even this and she doesn’t scream. My sister

isn’t my sister anymore. She is barely a victim
now to me. She doesn’t know how to scream. May 9/09.

BURDENS

When there is no external
burden we impose internal
burdens upon ourselves.
To do less is to become
angels we never were. May 9/09.

A BLACK ROSE

A black rose into the river
I cast and made my prayer
to kill them
all and quiet like.
But the river didn’t bleed blackly,
and the world didn’t die. May 9/09.

LEGENDS

Farther in the past
from our present state the
more mundane the act the
more legendary the
result, til the taking of a few
grains of salt becomes the feast
of a thousand strong, or
the conquest of a thousand
kingdoms that never were. May 9/09.

WHERE MEGALADONS ROAM

Time’s passing is the act of evolution.
Every thought that survives and endures
the passage of time is immortal,

as if we remembered megaladons in
our oceans because the water recalls

those beasts and lets it seep beneath
our skin as we scale the waters below.
Thoughts do die, replaced by better

conceptions of the world, til what our
ancestors knew becomes as alien as the

thoughts of those dwellers on other
worlds, neath stranger suns than ours.
Even my thoughts slip away til half

glimpsed they become ghosts to other minds,
swimming in the seas where megaladons roam. May 9/09.

FOSSILS

Dead photographs and even my
thoughts become fossils the moment
they are cast, solidified and given
form, as my words are formed right
now. All things are fossils, dead

echoes of what has been, and as the
ancient seers once said to their emperor
when asked for a statement true on all
occasions, “This too shall pass.” And
I too shall pass, each second dying

before the next begins. Time and
thought and memory; all we ever really
have are these and nothing more than
these. Bones still burn on hot desert
winds even after no one is left to

notice them anymore. That future
time to come, that will be the end. May 9/09.

TORVAL THE MOUSE

Salrokku the cat loved her mice too
much. That was her vice. And so
when Torval the mouse came walking
by she couldn’t help herself but attack

him, claws lashing out and teeth bared,
til he put down a single paw and crushed
her underfoot. Torval was as large as a
kodiak bear. He was as large

as a small elephant. I wonder what vice
will tempt the mouse neath the foot of
some accidental beast? I wonder what
next I will create to tempt the gods
to curse my wicked ways? May 10/09.

THE BALLAD OF CAPTAIN JIM RADCLIFFE

1) People hate and despite Judas only because
they were not there to do the deed themselves.
Have a man preach at every fault we’ve ever

done, have a saint condemn the world
and only want a better one, who would not
kill such a man, and then blame the murderer

for unclean hands? In that act such souls
would have the satisfaction of never being
murderers while still relishing the madman’s death.

2) I was commanded to be a Judas to my captain
because he would not kill our enemy as they
begged for mercy. Oh, this was not the first

time he had done such a thing, which was why
they came to me and asked for his blood if he
wavered in any way to do what had to be done.

And so I did and fired upon the enemy of my
king and country and when I returned, expecting
neither reward nor medal I found I was given
neither, and instead put on trial.

3) And those fine men who ordered my captain’s
death, how they praise him now and condemn me
for the actions which they themselves commanded.

But so be it. The war will go on and others like
me will win it. We’ll kill our captains and destroy
our foes and take the blame for the deeds lesser

men command. But sadly my lords and peers how
long have any of you left? For when us Judas’ all
are dead and the saints with them will any other

apostle stand and save, seeing how the righteous
and the wicked both are punished for your sins?
I think not and anyway there’s no heaven
or hell for any of us to be punished in. May 10/09.

AUTISTIC MACHINES

Autistic machines tell no lies.
They always remain block like
as stone. They are the idols,
the monuments of uncertain
times. They linger as an echo
or a ghost that never died. May 11/09.

I REMEMBER DINOSAURS
(Original version. From a dream.)

I remember dinosaurs,
great mollusks crawling
thru the mud, tendrils

reaching upward in their
golden halls of blood-stained
tributes to their vague, half

forgotten remembrances of
us, as they scatter themselves
to a thousand worlds in

oceans black neath more
foreign suns than ours, and
we are caught in their

parasite’s embrace til
eons, all eons pass to dust. May 11/09.

I REMEMBER DINOSAURS
(Expanded version. Same dream.)

I remember dinosaurs, and the great mollusks
in their seas of mud, green striped shells and red,
scarlet red the colour of blood, and all the time

they were reaching up to me in their halls of gold
as the stars reached out and caught me, caught my
skin and my flesh til I was little more than a ghost

in the company of ghosts, as darker oceans beckoned,
as foreign suns beat down on us, as the memory of man
fled away back to whatever ancient tomb was left

for man when all the eons out of time were finally done. May 13/09.

MOON AND SHADOW AND STAR

Moon sat in her quiet garden til Shadow
wandered by. “Hello Moon,”said Shadow.
“Hello Shadow,” said Moon. In the garden

there was silence all about, great lumbering
silences because Moon was sad there was
no one else to talk to except Shadow in her

garden. So what did Shadow do? Shadow
took flowers, great black flowers and breathed
her magic on them, til the flowers bloomed

and out came Star, the first of all stars in the
sky. “There you go,” said Shadow, and gave
Star to Moon. “Thank you,” said Moon to

Shadow, “and now what will you do?” “I think
I’ll make some people now, and give them all
I know.” And so Shadow created all of us

in this world of stranger miracles down below. May 13/09.

BITOCARI AND BYTHOCAIRI
(From a dream I had a while ago.)

We worship the wandering god,
manifestation of another, perhaps
some Christian deity, and call him
Bitocari, another aspect of the divine.

Soon he changes to Bythocairi,
soon even this new name of God
changes to another and from
Bythocairi emerges yet another

twenty trillion names of God,
or gods. I don’t know why we
worship them, except that we
find their fragments, their bits of
flesh in our dreams. May 20/09.

ORDINARY SUPERPOWERS

Disaster always followed him in death
as he saved people, as he moved volcanoes
and mountains from crushing villages and
towns. One time he lay across the ruined
tracks of a train suspended on a bridge,

and of course he saved the train and
everyone on board, except for one small
child who suddenly died of a heart attack
the moment everyone else was safe. It was
always like that. No matter how absurd

the catastrophe or how insane the villain’s
schemes, when all was done someone died
to balance the hero’s actions on the scene. It
was a shame his powers seemed so small.
Sure he could save the world. But no

one ever figured out a way to save
themselves from him when the time
came and the price was due. No, not
even him when the price was his to claim. May 13/09.

MR. SWARAJ

Mr. Swaraj is walking down the street,
small and huddled over as a gravestone.
I’ve often wondered why the man

still lives, when all his griefs overwhelm
him in the midnight seasons out of time.
But still he trundles on, with

all the ghosts about him, clinging to him
as children to a warm and gentle mother,
as I too would cling were I not a braver

soul, who goes walking on my own down
the streets of the midnight season, when all
the world is gone, and dead. May 20/09.

INVISIBLE MAN

It isn’t enough just to be invisible you know.
I’d want to pass my hand through solid matter,
float like a wraith in the seas of space
and never need to breathe again. I’d

want even more, to heal from any
injury I’d suffer, to plunge beneath
the oceans and feel the pressure bite into me
but never feel the pain or know the certainty

of death in any case. But first I’d want to be
invisible because if I am seen than I am of
course a threat but if I am unseen
than no one will need to fear that

with all my power and my strength
I’d ever be a threat to them. Oh yes,
I’d also like the ability to understand everything
perfectly just to make sure that when I have the

powers of a god I’m wise enough to use those
powers well. Make the arrangements soon
enough. You’ll be richly paid.
Have my entire fortune if you

must. I won’t be needing money
anymore. Just don’t violate my
trust or I’ll make you invisible, my friend.
And you’ll never be found by anyone again. May 20/09.

THE BALLAD OF LANGDON ASHBURN KING

Why must there be a perfect man?
Why must there be a man at all?
Langdon strides by with all the
grandeur of a god, and dies.

Langdon Ashburn King is given
to believe that he must be made
perfect in all the world. Taught
and taught again he believes.

He believes that all others suffer
for his sake. He believes all the
world rises through the sky and
sets because he alone wills it.

He sits in filth the colour of red
malachite and his skin reeks of
sweat and feces and more than
this. He works and eats but little.

He sits in filth and there is no roof
nor shelter for him. He mocks all
those who eat more than he. He
rants at those who sleep in a bed.

Let him believe as he believes.
Let him call me a meager worm
and all the world less than that.
He strides with all the grandeur

of a god and dies only when he’s
tasted a few crumbs of bread and
realizes all he knew were lies that
were alone meant for him. June 3/09.

TWO FINGERS (From a dream I
had on the morning of May 25/09.)

In the dream there was a man. He
had two fingers for each hand and
I made him, or maybe I thought I
did. And someone said that by

making someone different we make
them less human, and so it seems
he was a slave, and I was either
fighting to protect him or maybe

I had reformed myself back to
whatever malice made me make
a slave. There was running and
fighting, but with whom I do

not know. There were streets,
such normal streets, and then
almost nothing as I woke up.
I wonder if he is still a slave

or if I’d freed him to wander
in some other dream I haven’t
seen or ever will, until my time
is up and another wakens from
their sleep. June 3/09.

THE DEATH OF ALBERIC STRAWMAN

Ailsey Lea didn’t tell me about Alberic
until a day before he died. “Oh yeah,
that guy made of straw, begging for hay
on the street corner.” She said it so

matter-of-fact I didn’t recognize her
words til I was asleep. In my dream I
say the strawman, begging for hay, and
when I woke up I went out to the street

corner, but he was dead by then, nothing
more than a thousand nests for black birds
with their red wings. Gavin Cortland still
can’t believe when Ailsey told him about

that girl with raven wings or that giant
insect tending bar, mimicking everyone’s
words, or that time she met, swore she
met a supervillain and pointed out to him

his own comic lying on the coffee table,
showing him exactly where he went wrong
with his takeover of the world. But when
I read over my comic book again the plot

had changed and there was that villain,
laughing on his throne of human bodies.
But you get used to these things eventually.
Sooner or later Gavin will adjust to living
on the other side of the other side. June 3/09.

THE CONSUMMATE PROFESSIONAL
(The poem is made of quotes from my father.)

An actor is many forms of a person
and none of them actually true,
a thought in the dark not worth anything
while everybody is walking after nothing.

Enticing to self injury a body here but I’m
alone, and I didn’t speak, didn’t talk, didn’t
anything but I was alone. The sun
just went down on the back of a cloud.

It doesn’t matter how long the road is
as long as you get there because the man
who prolongs his job never gets it done.
But a prediction in thought is not a fact.

People who laugh make a noise over
nothing. When the wind’s in the
pumpkin there’s bound to be rain, and when
your nose is blocked you can’t breathe well.

I’m not the smartest guy on the sidewalk though.

I’m trying hard and still don’t get very far.
The young can see the doctors and the old
have to be healthy, and wait.
But you’ve got to write something

to figure something out really. I’m not
the smartest guy on the sidewalk though. May 11-June 4/09.

NATIONS CLASH AND PERISH

Nations clash and
perish neath the mother
of all sin
as the
ocean of the sky
bleeds black
her tears,
and mine. May 27/09.

THERE’S A FAIRWEATHER FROST

There’s a fairweather
frost in the
country of
dark elves as the
minister takes the
serpent out of the man.

But the magic holds fast
till the
serpent and man
cast the minister in
where frost blooms to fire
and fair feathers to ash. May 27/09.

A CHAIR I DON’T OWN
(The first line is my father’s.)

There’s a chair I don’t own
and there’s my new life
replaced by the old. May 9/09.

STRUCK BY PANIC

Struck by panic and
unaccountable rage
the black cancer man
wandered from street

to street, and finding
nothing beneath his
feet moved on, til his
dreams fled him

as well, and after his
dreams had fled his
rage darted away like
a fox on a woodland

path, and his panic
flew away like a great
dark raven, or an eagle
in search of prey. June 4/09.

ISLE OF BLACK RAIN

The ironclad sky,
wine dark sea,
quiet tower, towers
of silence, in the
black rain.

The island is not
there. The island
wavers like fog.

She is there,
lost. My girl
is there. I follow.
I am forgotten. June 4/09.

BUTTERFLY WITHOUT WINGS

Life is a butterfly
without wings,
a malachite red
sunset after dark. June 4/09.

JALI WALIARCHY
(From a dream on the
morning of June 3/09.)

He was the father of all
romantic poets. I saw his
name on a wall.

Didn’t read any of his
poetry though. There
wasn’t any there

to read. Don’t know
his nationality or race.
Never saw his face.

Will anyone remember me
as anything except a name? June 4/09.

PONTISFARN’S GHAZAL

Little is the sparrow’s cry at evening
time, when the eagle feasts on sighs.

Gone, I stopped at the street corner,
watched a spider weave her tapestry.

Forgetting my pain over your loss I
heard not the sparrow, nor her cries.

Your voice is lost to me beloved;
I barely have forgotten your face.

Pontisfarn is my name. I am desolate
because she doesn’t know my name. June 4/09.

INCOMPREHENSIBLE DRAUPNA I.

Bone-breaker, mender of war’s rift
maker of raven feasts, devourer of tides,
I grasp the tunnel of graves, worm black,
hold back the downward swinging
shadow of spear-grippers, plunge
the bone-breaker down on the soul’s house,
and rest neath the cradle of eagle feathers
burning in the darkness of candle-stars. June 4/09.

INCOMPREHENSIBLE DRAUPNA II.

Sea-rider into the water’s skin, neath
the storm-bringer clothed in mens’
breathing, into the water’s dark flesh
descending, to the under-country of
black without sight, without death,
til all the seasons rot in the company of
mens’ breath, where gods wait for them. June 4/09.

THE SUICIDE WATCH

At first, at the very first there was only one.
She sat beside me when I ate, had breakfast
with my wife, stroked my children’s hair,
though they couldn’t see her of course.

I had slit her throat sometime before, and
now staring across at my wife I was staring
across also at my first victim, standing above
my wife, glaring at me from behind her chair.

And each time I took another’s life, another
woman with hair the colour of wings, with
eyes like jewels, they always followed me home
afterwards. I had a litany of ghosts after a while.

They all stare at me, watch me shower, glare
at me while I work in my office, typing memos for
men I despise. They never leave. There’s eight
of them so far, and yes I want some more, but.

They tire me and wear me down. Their accusatory
glances never stop. You’d think they’d give up on
revenge, but they don’t. They don’t eat or sleep.
Their “lives” revolve around me. I hate it.

So I’m here, and I confess. Put me away, please,
somewhere. I know my wife and children will
hate me, but so what? I always hated them. And
don’t worry about me ending my life. I have a

whole audience of women watching over me,
always making sure I never cross in front of cars,
never reach for a knife to slit my own throat, never
ever find some other way to leave my life in peace.

They’ll never let me go. I pray you don’t either.
Maybe in your loving hands they’ll finally fade away. June 5/09.

MURDERER’S GHAZAL

It seems a different sadness washes over
me and the gulls are not hungry anymore.

A line of verse, the merest stanza but the
knot of some great thought unraveled to
threads of breath.

I stopped by her grave and you were
not there, not even to mock my tears.

I threw her ring away but you didn’t return
to me. Not even your horror at my sins.

I’ll go to the law and the law will answer
me and say, “Yes, I know you. I’ll never
leave you now.” June 5/09.

ISLANDS IN THE SKY ARE SURELY BLIND

The islands in the sky are blind,
the clouds but cover the nakedness
of the ground.
Like Odin I sacrificed
my eye, my left eye like a dead black
moon and hung
suspended ‘tween the worlds
for nine long days. Between darkness
and daylight I watched
the islands of
the sky, but they were blind as clocks
are blind. I envy not the sky. June 8/09.

CANCER BONES I AM

To feed the bones I am, the cancer bones I am
my shadow is the shadow now of them,

shadow of moths, shadow of moths’ fire,
ten trillion lights attracting them, each
thinking the world is cast neath the light

of ten trillion miniature moons, hanging
in the sky as moons so often do, now and then. June 8/09.

MY LEFT EYE

When they took my left leg the reason
was clear; they’d give me another, better
than before. The same with my left arm,

severed from the shoulder blade, because
it was a time of war and a better arm was
needed with the battle near. Finally my

left eye was gone but after this I had to draw
the line. “Why should I give everything up?”
I asked. “Because we want to make you
strong, before you die,” was the reply. June 8/09.

LIMERICK I.

I’d often go down to the shore
to take a breath from the war,
but the war still goes on
like the sky wrapt in dawn
and a soldier’s nothing but a whore. June 8/09.

LIMERICK II.

The sin is filled of light
and the fields are full of blight.
The drought does not end
and no man’s a friend
but still it’ll be alright. June 8/09.

LIMERICK III.

Man is a slave now of man
as ocean is a slave of the sands.
A woman’s own mirror
is the sum of her fears
and the mirror has no place to stand. June 8/09.

LIMERICK IV.

A glutton has never a feast
for the greatest of foods is the least.
Instead he will starve
on the people he carves
with his actions so like a beast. June 8/09.

LIMERICK V.

A girl will so often sigh
at the handsomest man passing by.
But Age has her reasons
and Time his mad seasons.
Now matter our grandeur we die. June 8/09.

LIMERICK VI.

Life is a long passing show
for any who happen to know.
But no matter how long
much too soon are we gone
in the cry of a passing black crow. June 8/09.

LIMERICK VII.

Owls have a strange secret I’m told
in the long winter months of the cold.
They have some dark ways
of counting dark days
on the bones of a dying scarecrow. June 8/09.

BOGDANUS KOSIJ, CHILD KILLER

He wove face on face, wove into flesh
but flesh not it’s own. He shot a little
girl and some other children some Nazi
claimed as prey. But of course it

happened a long time ago and he’s our
neighbour now. We say hello, have tea
together, try to live our lives ignoring
our neighbour’s crimes. It’s better than

dealing with the monster as a monster.
We don’t like to make waves or upset
people, you know. But when he’s in his
garden I don’t let my children out to play. June 8/09.

RENKU
(The first stanza is my aunt Elizabeth’s.
The second is my mother’s, and the last
two are my father’s.)

The wind was supposed to die down
the weatherman said. It went down
but it didn’t die.

And it’s always nice
until the wind comes

the way dreams come easy
and knowledge comes hard,

the way a bed can come in handy,
but not when you’re far from it. June 8/09.

MORE WICKED WAYS THAN THESE

More wicked ways than these
I have to tell when men give way
to vices neath the swell of human
kindness, or the touch of evil
in the minister’s hand, ere now. June 10/09.

LIMERICK VIII.

There was once a man on the rink
whose soul had started to sink,
when he realized the flaw
of ignoring the law.
No one should skate in the summer I’d think. June 10/09.

LIMERICK IX.

An idiotic man is a shame
because this life is no game.
If you scatter your wits
you’ll fall into fits
when the gravestone is carved with your name. June 10/09.

INSPT. TRAIB

“More wicked ways than we know have
taken him.” So said Inspt Traib, stroking
the head of the great beast nestled by
his feet. His blind eyes stared into

nothingness, but the creature, the great
walking scarlet serpent covered in
shimmering scales and larger than a
hunting dog subtly gave him every

dimension of the room, of the faces
of those uncertain men gathered ‘bout,
of the colour of faded wallpaper littered
with the pictures of flowers, until he saw

everything more perfectly than if he’d
ever been able to keep his eyes. “But how
do you know?” The Baron’s son implored,
haggardly casting his head down over the

many nights spent so close to the noose.
“I have used my eyes to solve the crime.
I have observed the evidence. I have
found the murderer who sought to

place you on the gallows. I have
stopped your father from ending another
life.” And that was his only reply, stroking
the great beast’s head by his feet as she

curled beside him, ever close, her every
sense blending seamlessly with his, with the
great detective who shared her life with his. June 10/09.

FIFTY DEFINITIONS OF ASPERGERS AND OCD

1) PERSECUTION ETHICS

The first thing you learn before all else is that
the world is a square. It’s a cube, a maze, a
labyrinth, and every time you reach the very
edge, the very corner of it’s domain

you are plunged back to the center of the trap,
and forced to march outward again. Each
person, each object, each sense of taste, of smell,
of hearing is a trap of some design you can’t
comprehend, a loud cacophony muffled

by the sounds of whispers leading to the
texture of shale scraping raggedly on your
senses like a vise. No matter how well you

speak, no matter how many times you gaze
into someone’s eyes, no matter how many
occasions you race ahead and get answers that

drag so many others far behind it is never enough.
It never satisfies. Oh there are those things that
we gravitate toward, those lines we make

with toys or cans, those subtle arrangements that
if even slightly displaced lead to anxiety like it
must feel for others when loved ones die,

when houses burn, when lovers beat their fists
against each other for no real reason at all. And
yes despite all else we feel, and feel profoundly,
but our feelings like all else are displaced

and disturbed, not because of some defect, not
because of some accident at birth, but only for
those very reasons you feel the way you do.

It is natural for a man to watch the faces of
another and know in those moments the heart
of that other. It is natural for a woman to watch
the actions of her kin, to know without words

when another is happy or miserable in that
invisible language that crosses the air like
some strange semblance of magic a god once
made. And for us it is natural to see none of
these cues, to perceive only the surface

of a word as if it were some deep smooth stone,
and catching only the smoothness of these words
never realize there is any deeper meaning at all.

How easy it is to suffer in such a world.
It is the same as being counted an idiot for
being deaf because as all others must hear

the deaf must lack not in faculties but in desire.
I can imagine great learned men, great scientists
in such a world faulting mothers and fathers,

then siblings, then claiming that such
children will be able to participate, but
only if they are forced to adapt to the
wider world, without consideration of

course that they are deaf. Teachers fault them
for not paying attention, students ridicule them
for not knowing the rules, and finally such
individuals are passed into remedial lives

because of course if such people wanted to
they could so easily adapt, as anyone else
could. But there is no difference in my

metaphor, except perhaps that ours is the
worst sin. We can hear and see and touch
and speak, so of course we must be fine,
and fine is always normal, and normal

is always the same as everyone else. But
we are not the same. And the world is a
square and a cube and a maze and a
labyrinth for us only because you don’t
know the labyrinth for us is there. May 1/09.

2) WASHING TIME

I remember washing my hands fifty times
a day. I even tried to write down the number
of times in a behaviourist’s attempt to stop
by slowly reducing the number,

but it never worked. I remember the feeling
of dirt on my hands like an extra skin, black,
blacker than ink, blacker than shadows that
no one could see but me.

It was nonsense of course, which only made
it more cruel, because despite knowing my
hands were clean I knew in the self same
thought they were dirty,

and the longer I washed the longer my hands
were unclean, but, by not washing I knew also
my hands were unclean, and so no matter
what step I took there was no

convenient answer to my problem. I was finally
given medication, five years after my condition
began. And until some of the medication
I was given drove me into

a psychotic fury and caused me to gain 170 lbs
in a year life was pretty good. I had actually
wished I’d had such medication sooner.
But like I said, then I went insane. May 1/09.

3) CHECKING OUT TIME

A book has to placed perfectly on a shelf.
There is no other way. Or a pen, or a coat,
or anything at all that is truly mine.

And if I thought, even slightly, it wasn’t
so I’d do it again, just like washing, but of
course how can you make everything

perfectly right in a universe and a world
you barely understand? That one thought
drills into your head and will not stop,

that single word “perfection,” and because
such words have no meaning in the world,
because perfection has no center

and so no edge there is no way to achieve
what the mind longs to achieve. It’s like
being trapped with a madman

in a cellar, and the more he howls that the
walls aren’t there, that the door doesn’t
exist and the prison is just a lie the

more damaged we get, because we see the
prison there, we feel the walls, we touch
the door, and the more he howls to

that he is outside the more we try to let
him out, but we are both trapped inside.
Checking is like this. Only more. May 1/09.

4) HIGHSCHOOL WAS CRAP

I first got sick, had my first experience with
obsessive compulsive disorder in Highschool.
The washing and the checking of course, but
these are symptoms one notices on even the

most bland course of psychiatry and psychology.
What one isn’t prepared for, what one is never
prepared for is the thoughts that come and stay
and never leave. At lunch I’d see, feel, that

there was feces in my food, in my drink,
and while walking the corridors my mind
would turn to girls being crushed and burnt,
skinned and peeled, or babies raped. And

because all of these things were abhorrent to me,
because each thing I saw disgusted me utterly and
completely the thoughts persisted and grew
stronger, as such thoughts do. And the more

you know you’d never do such things
the more violent the images become,
the more sadistic and masochistic the
nightmares grow and how you do explain,

how can you explain to a teacher, a stranger, a
friend the thought of burning girls being crushed
and screaming without sounding like a madman,
or a serial killer? So I said nothing, passed my

grades one by one while feeling there was feces
in my food, while girls burned and screamed
inside my mind, and a creature like a demon
howled, til I saw myself fall apart once or twice. May 1/09.

5) FALLING APART

My legs weren’t my legs back then.
My chest wasn’t my chest. Felt like
glass about to smash and break.
I was falling apart and didn’t know why.

Looking back of course there were
obvious signs. Had I known more
I would have suffered less.

But who knew about these things back
then? Few know about them now.

When I say I fell apart I mean my mind
broke and shattered, and it was like half
of me remained as me, and half

as something else. In ancient times
demons clustered about sick mens’
heads and plagued them with sorrows.
But in these modern times demons
don’t exist. I wish.

It was like being possessed. It was
like cancer with a mind of it’s own,
fixated on anything and everything
that could hurt me.

In my classes there was a girl who was
black, and in my mind I saw her eat feces,
bleed, burn, die, and she sat behind me
every day, til finally I moved just to

avoid seeing her die again. But there
were always girls and children, always
places haunted by my other half,

and sooner or later he would come again
and I would lose again, and face a path
that had no solution, because either way
I choose lead back to him.

So I was always in a state of falling apart,
always one step away from a single suicide,
but I couldn’t kill myself,
and I wouldn’t kill anyone else.

And even if I had killed someone else
how long til he’d say I made a mistake
in the killing, and have to start again?

That was the one choice I always knew
to make; you don’t take someone’s
life. They might be worse off than you. May 1/09.

6) MASKS

If I told you your face was a mask
you’d call me a liar of course. But
to me all faces are masks, invisible
threads of muscles hiding

some secret in plain sight to every
one but me. Can you live in a world
of masks? Can you feel that close
to people hiding and

pretending that what they say is real
when beneath the surface you always
assume they’re lying? Because you
have to assume everyone

is lying or else you’ll be taken for
a fool, you’ll be taken for an idiot
and thrown away like a piece of
trash. Everyone

is wearing masks. But you don’t
know where the party is, or how
to join. And you don’t why
your own mask feels so hollow
on your face when everyone else’s
works so much better than yours. May 1/09.

7) FIXATION

And here is the definition of fixation:
to focus one’s own self and mind
upon another object, place, event
or individual to such an extent that
objectivity, rationality and proper
distance is lost.

Imagine a single word, a lone idea
that encompasses all things at all
times. Imagine a single thing
becoming larger, larger and larger
and more and more important to
you, til food,

sleep, friends and family fade away
and are lost. Now imagine that this
word or idea or thing has been
with you since you were small,
barely old enough to talk. And
now finally

imagine that everyone in the
whole world looks smaller
and smaller and smaller til
ants themselves are giants
to your friends and family,
leaving only this one

thing to satisfy your needs, your
hopes, your soul. That is fixation.
That is the life of the autistic
mind. That is my life. Every
word I write can become another

trap down a maze of repetition and
reiteration til I lose myself in every
sentence that I write, or word I say. May 1/09.

TOUCH

When I was child, too young to
speak I touched a stove with my
bare hand and didn’t cry. My
mother didn’t realize what I’d
done til she was bathing me

and noticed the burn on my
hand. I never screamed or
cried, or even knew that it was
there. When I touch cotton my
skin crawls, anything soft like

that and I feel a great nausea
run through me I can’t even
begin to understand. Once
at the dentist’s I was given
a treatment for my enamel,

two soft rows that ran about
my teeth, sealing them in
some grape tasting mesh the
colour of moss. I vomited
almost immediately after, not

from the taste but the feeling
of wet, soft texture against
the hardness of my teeth. It
was disgusting, and I vomited
and after I had been

cleaned up they decided not
to try that treatment again.
Touch means different things
to us, to me, than it does to you.
And how much more than touch
is the sense of sight? May 1/09.

9) ORDER IS A FRAGILE THING

Every second of every day I live
there exists a subtle need for order.
It breathes with me, exists alongside
me like a second skin, and like any

skin it contracts and bends and twists
with the movements of my flesh. As I
move and act this second set of desires
acts with me, moves and reacts

til no matter what I do I am always
aware of the ordered second universe
beneath the chaos of the life I lead. And
it has no concept of this world and it

doesn’t care why I disobey it. It is like
a mewing baby screaming whenever its
toys are taken away, and its toys are
everything that can be ordered in

the world. But order is a fragile thing
and the enfant screams often and screams
loudly. At it’s worst, without medication,
without sleep, when you’ve worked

and are tired it is like the music of
some crippled beast that never stops
crying in the middle of the night. But
order is a fragile thing, and when order

dies in the creation of living there is
always that second skin to remind me
that my life is not complete, not as
long as it has time enough to play at being
God over everything it has no right to be. May 1/09.

10) BUT YOU SPEAK SO WELL

“But you speak so well.” That’s what everyone
says in their own way whenever they learn
my condition. “And why can’t you learn
what other people know instinctively?”

That question is less often asked,
but I’ll answer it anyway. When you
speak you don’t know every word in a
language. Oh you know the most obvious,

most well used and well worn phrases but
every word is never known, even by the
greatest linguist. Now imagine that
you are given a word you’ve never

heard before, and everyone uses
that word so often they never think to
explain its meaning to you at all, because
everyone already knows what it means. And

that word is a cornerstone to countless other
words, so that if you miss this one you
miss every other word connected to
it as well. It doesn’t matter how

well I speak if the language
everyone else uses has a billion
phrases to it and the only phrases I
know are the words I speak, as eloquently

as I can, and nothing more than this I am
forced to seek. Because no one has
taught me a single word of the
language they use that makes

this world their own. And that
makes their world, your world, so
completely out of my reach. But yes,
I speak so well. Give me an applause for

breathing. It’s basically
the same thing to me. May 1/09.

11) COMEDY IS OTHER PEOPLE

There is always something funny about
the mentally deranged. I don’t mean that
crazy people are jokes or objects of ridicule,
but that when you’re seen
as other than the norm there are all so many
ways to twist such conceits around. Let
me name a few for you, just for fun.

Some people believe that with conditions
like mine there are savants or fools, but nothing
in between. They believe that ability
determines the values of our
existence, and so unless we are the masters
of some profound talent or gift, we must have
no talents at all. It would be the same

as saying because most basketball players
are black unless a black man is good at basketball
he isn’t worth wasting time on, because
the game is the only thing worthy
of his life. Such a sentiment is utterly racist,
but so too are the views people have of us.
Another conceit is that we are the holy

innocents, we are children who will never
grow or develop, who will remain essentially
the same, never becoming more than
we were. In those cases people
expect nothing more of us, to avoid being
disappointed. But you disappoint us as well.
We are as good and as bad, as pleasant

and as unpleasant as anyone else, and
we change from day to day, second to second,
year to year like anyone, just in a different way
from you. But the last conceit
is the most irritating of all. It is the idea that
because we differ so markedly from you we
harbour but a single blinding rage

for revenge against the larger world.
You see it in films where the villain has a tragic
childhood, or is misunderstood, or is treated
badly by the people around.
And rather than accept that such things have
happened the heroes inevitably focus only
on defeating such dangers to the world.

Of course the heroes are always the
handsome ones, and the villains are always us.
Oh, not always autistic but there is in every
example some flaw, some mental
difference that just enough makes us less
human than other people in the world. But
we are never as dangerous as you think

we are. The best monsters are always
easily camouflaged. We know that because
most monsters prey on us first before turning
their attentions to you. Yes
comedy is other people. Look at the papers
and tell me every crime was committed by
some deranged psychopath on a bender.
There just aren’t that many of us in the world. May 1/09.

12) THE CATERPILLAR

When I was very young I was playing
on the front of my house on a stone walkway.
There was a caterpillar crawling toward me,
hairy little furry creature, black head,
brown body, and as it crawled toward

me I almost thought it had a human face,
a human face staring up at me, and I screamed
so loudly my mother came running out to see
what was the matter. But how do
you explain seeing a caterpillar with a
human face? I have no idea if this

experience had anything to do with my
illness or not. It could have been nothing
more than the overactive imagination of

a young child. But how many times
has a child screamed and the parents,
having no clue of the cause, can’t begin
to understand the terrors a child feels in a
world that truly doesn’t seem to be their own? May 1/09.

13) MUSIC TASTES GOOD TO ME

Every sound of every note of a song has a
flavour to it, a slight pitch that moves me
all on its own. Though some sounds
are not sharp enough, their taste too dull,
leaving a hollow sound to echo in my ears.

If a note isn’t high enough, if the pitch isn’t
just sharp enough then the music tastes like
white bread, like some bland mush. Jazz
tastes like that to me because the rhythm
isn’t fine enough, isn’t highly pitched

but instead sounds subdued, like all the
songs were written in a fog and played in
some moor somewhere, so far from
anything that I can’t grab onto the
music and all I taste is a bland half

feeling of a song. Hymns are the same,
all too dull and low frequency, so low in
fact I never could enjoy such music,
even as I tried. Some sounds, though,
like children crying are so high a frequency

they physically hurt me. It’s like being
skewered, tasting metal shavings grinding
on your teeth and down your throat, rage
amplified and reflected in your ears til
the metal shavings have a flavour of lead

or cyanide, or glass. Music has to be in
that special place between the hymn and the
crying child, just above one and just below
the other. Any less or more and it isn’t music.
It’s just another noise, some mindless gibberish. May 1/09.

14) MALACHITE FIXATION

For me it’s malachite. The smooth feel of
a green stone, the shades and lengthening
lines of dark and light, all green but different
shades of green; it makes my mouth water

at the thought. For others it’s a coin with
a devil carved on one side only, or a bug
crawling on skin, or spinning like a top for
hours on end. But for me it’s malachite

and more. Books and more books, knives
sharp and ornate, pieces of art, carrying
hundreds of pounds of weight. All of these
comfort me in no small way. And one of

those comforts is the feel of malachite
before I gaze down at it and am so subtly lost
in the unique patterns of light and dark cast
against its surface like a map of some

lost continent no one else has ever seen. I
wonder if such countries are real sometimes,
some hidden places laying adjacent to minds
like mine. But it doesn’t really matter.

It’s enough that I can see and touch what I
can see and touch. And at other times when
the world gets tiresome to me the memory
of malachite sustains, or the memory of

weights and knives, books and coins carved
with runic signs, or carved with a cross. Such
things can comfort me as no loving smile
or handshake can. Not that I don’t mind

having those too from time to time, despite
what my body language sometimes seems to say. May 1/09.

15) CLUMSY

The worst part sometimes is being
clumsy. The worst part is watching
bodies entwined in some celestial
arrangement, embracing each
other in every activity, from

the mildest and coldest handshake
to the lover’s touch beyond all touch,
and knowing your own body never
works with that same elegance,

that perfect assurance that when
you tell your arm to move it moves
just the way you want it, and not
the way it actually does.
There is some slight betrayal

in that, that minor accident of
muscle and tissue and bone. There
is some sense of a comedy in that
crude situation, as if it’s not
enough merely for us to be
humiliated by our thoughts

but by every move we make, every
sputtering rigid insect trot of step
and finger and eye which darts
from face to face, finding nothing.
Sometimes being clumsy is worst of all. May 7/09.

16) RETREAT

We live in a world that isn’t ours.
So sooner or later we have to retreat
to regain some sanity, or the sense
of sanity.
How many worlds
descend from us, how many myths
were created out of us?
I don’t know anymore.

We are changelings in the
fairytales and ogres exchanged for
healthy enfants, we are
foreigners in our own
countries and we
are the unfinished ones, because
we are not what is expected
a human being should be.

So we retreat into the tools
of our crafts, master some piece of
arcana and from this
extends the pictures
of the world
beyond the borders of our worlds.
The question is why have so few
followed us in
when so many
demand we follow them out,
into a world that isn’t ours. May 7/09.

17) POSSESSION

Everything I own I feel a part of me.
Imagine invisible threads running from
my body to everything I have, or rather
everything I have that matters most to me.

It’s a bit like being possessed I suppose,
like finding a demon squatting on your
chest, pressing down with all its might to
keep you from taking a truly deep breath.

And everything I have has to be in it’s
proper place, or failing that I have to
find a way of divorcing myself from it.
I’ve given away thousands of books and

other things, ranging from the ancient
to the absurd, just to keep that pressing
weight from swallowing me whole. But
it’s never enough. There are too many

things in the universe for a single man to
control, even those meager things he owns. May 7/09.

18) SECRETS PEOPLE KEEP AND HIDE

Everyone has secrets I am told.
And why should they lie?
Everyone has secrets that people
keep and hide, all except for us
because our minds are laid
bare as scalpels for an autopsy,
and of course we are the prize.

We are the ones people use, we
are the ones who say only what
we think is true, and because
so many others lie and keep their
secrets close they find it easy to
exploit us when we act truthfully
while their actions and words lie.

But here is one secret we have you
don’t expect. We feel as you feel.
And if we are betrayed we know
the spark of that betrayal as deeply
as if you yourself felt the sting.
You are alone and we are alone.
That too is another secret we share. May 10/09.

19) CULTURE OF ENTITLEMENT

We live in a culture of entitlement.
We expect all others to treat us with
respect, and lacking this there is
always the recourse of law, of word,
of violence. No matter how old or

how young, no matter how healthy
or how sick, no matter how wealthy
or how poor there is within the
sense, however poorly defined or
explained that we have value, that

we deserve what we deserve, and
what we deserve is respect. Notice
I say “we” deserve respect, and not
merely “you.” There is in all flesh,
human or otherwise the belief

of entitlement, and why should one
forget what everyone knows? And
yes I am human, and you are
human too. But those of us have
been treated less, and beyond any

other thing to be treated less is not
to be treated as human at all. You
are not entitled to ignore us or
our worth in the world. To do that
makes you less than you really are

in this culture of entitlement where
everyone deserves what they deserve. May 10/09.

20) I REMEMBER LEMURIA

I remember Lemuria, and Atlantis and Mu,
or rather I am forced to at times not of my
choosing. Oh it could be anything really,
any name of some far off place,

some pseudo-fantasy world that never was,
but to me, living in this world, this bland
tasteless world of food without flavour,
of sounds too loud to hear which

still shake inside my skull like swarms
of dull and angry bees, for me a far off
world of exotic cities gleaming neath
oceans of sapphire seem almost

normal, and welcome at those times. How
can I describe to you those women covered
in robes of grey or scarlet, singing hymns
to lost gods or demons in temples

of fire-bled stone? What words would
suffice to imagine the colour of skies that
you have never seen before, colours so
varied they blend from hue to hue,

from one kaleidoscope to another without
waiting for our eyes to recognize some
familiar colour we might have seen?
I retreat into worlds that have not been

because the world I live in is too alien for
me. I delve into myths, into legends, into
histories that have not been, all
because I am a ghost in this world

of men. So yes I remember Lemuria,
Atlantis and Mu, and a trillion countries,
gods and demons of shapes and forms
twisted out of shape for souls like you.

Otherwise I’d go mad living in this world
of bland flavourless food, where colours
dull and dim, where sounds bleed like tears
on skin, and where everyone wears masks
I am never truly allowed to peer behind again. May 20/09.

21) THE HEAT DOESN’T DO WELL FOR ME

I’d burn in an autumn cooled to yellow leaves.
I’d burn in a mild winter when the sun shines
too bright. Rain is a comfort and
the dampness of the air a pleasure.

The heat doesn’t do well for me.
I don’t know how it is for others.
I don’t have the words for them. But for me
when the weather changes and it grows hot

I feel a contagion, a sickness of heat wash
over me and I burn, til skin is hot to touch.
No wonder some wonder why
we act so sensitive to one mild

touch and so oblivious when a hand
melts on a black stove. But then I
suppose everyone is different in their way.
If they weren’t would anyone notice me? May 20/09.

22) A PRIVATE SCANDAL

A private scandal for most
is knowing they are less in
the eyes of another than in the eyes
of themselves. A private scandal

is being shamed and knowing only
a few are aware of that shame. A
private scandal is feeling
your heart quicken and

fade, because you’ve made
some horrible mistake. How
many parents feel that way when their
children go away, and yet still remain? May 20/09.

23) ONE RULE

How do you defeat autism?
How do you defeat the drive for perfectionism,
the desire to repeat and echo one act throughout
all time, til nothing is left

but that act, and even memories
of you all fade to black, caught in the moment
of the cage, when the door closes quick, and
closes fast? Don’t ask me,

I don’t know. The one and
only rule I have is to never yield completely
or give in. Every time the tiger bares its
teeth, every time the poison

fills the cup, every time the
lust to arrange flowers on a shelf or spin a
wheel forever or spin a top, every time we
start again and never stop.

Beyond that ask me nothing
else. I have nothing else to give. And anyway
the world marches on and on, and the moon
with it. I have no better wisdom
than the world to impart. May 20/09.

24) BEING POLITE

I. I’ve never been kissed. No one has ever
looked at me and said anything worth
repeating to anyone else in good company.

Oh, of course I’ve heard “thank you,” and
“please,” and “well done.” But when I look
across a room at a woman I never see

her looking back, and when I speak to
women there must always be a formalism
to me, a politeness, because I never, ever,

ever expect anything from them at all.
If I were gay I suppose I’d make the same
statements about men, and I have no

misogynistic bones in my body. But isn’t
sex the next best thing to intimacy? And
if, as in my case I can never be

intimate, can never say I love someone,
never express that she has a closeness to me,
than all I have left is to be polite, and kind,

and nothing more than this I’m afraid.

II. Of course you are polite as well. You
speak so kindly and so nicely when I
go on a tangent to some other place,

slightly adjacent to anything you know,
but just beyond the realities of the world
you’re comfortable with.

How polite you are, to play at being nice
to me and mine. How polite I am when
I have nothing better to say

than “thank you,” “please,” and
“well done.” Maybe if I was ruder
and you less kind we might actually

be able to say who we really are and see
what is beneath the veneer of civility. Or
perhaps we’d both be offended by ourselves. May 23/09.

25) I’M ALONE

I feel on occasion a loneliness so profound it crushes
my chest til I can’t breathe. It is a sadness so utterly
complete I feel a great weight fill me to bursting and
even then the weight but builds, til I can’t stand anymore.

When I watch two people kiss I feel a sickness wash
over me in knowing that I will never come close to
such feelings, such tenderness, that the whole of the
universe fills me with an emptiness equaled to the

emptiness of watching two people kiss. I’ve walked
through corridors and felt the silence echo neath my
skin. I’ve stood beneath a sky the colour of pink agate
with the wisps of clouds a dark onyx and this is not

even half the emptiness of watching a crowd of people
cluster ‘bout, like aliens caught in my midst. I am
surrounded by creatures whose souls I can’t name,
surrounded but never broken, because I will not

be broken, even of these things. But that too makes
me alone, when all the world cries for some tragedy
and still I march on, without tenderness or grace or
God. I march on alone. But I march on.
Still, there’s no comfort in that. May 23/09.

26) I CAN TASTE SADNESS ON YOU

“I can taste sadness on you.”
That’s me talking to myself.

“I know you do. I feel the
sadness on myself, the weight
of being alone in the night.”

“Night isn’t over yet.”
“I’m alone and only have
myself for company.”

“Isn’t that enough?”
“Of course it’s not.”
“Well then I’ll tell you

what to do. Find other people
or let them find you.” “And

then what?” “Who knows?
Maybe everyone is as screwed
up as you think yourself to be.

Maybe you’ll save them
all from their own sorry
selves.” He smiles and
walks away from me,
the other man I am. May 23/09.

27) ANOTHER ICARUS

They always get the moral of the story wrong,
about Icarus, but Daedalus as well. They assume
it was simply about a boy given wings, who, in
flying too high beyond the bounds of other men
came crashing down, felled by the pride of his heart.

But it isn’t so. Imagine being given wings, but
more importantly imagine where those wings led
from, what the foundation of flight was for Icarus
and his dear father. They were imprisoned in
a labyrinth upon his island far from home and

with no other escape at hand had to wait, wait for
weeks on end while Daedalus gathered the feathers
and the wax to make perfect their perfect escape.
And then, the young boy, freed beyond the limits
of an island prison was given but once that single

chance to see all nations, all peoples, to see as the
gods see, to see all worlds spread at his feet like
stones upon a far distant onyx shore by a black clad
sea. And all he had to do would be accept that in
the moment of his finest victory he would die. If

given half a chance I’d do as much or more, just to
know, to perfectly know I had escaped into a world
like yours, but more. Given half the chance I’d hope
some soul beyond the borders of my mind would
make the self same leap, to see your smile, and mine. May 27/09.

28) CLICK

Sometimes my jaw clicks, like a cicada or
some insect chewing on a leaf. Medication
from long ago, but still the echoes of bad
medicine has its place in my life, when
I click.
My teeth grind down a little bit, but
they still seem strong enough to bear the
weight, and even with the distraction I keep
going day by day. Still seems a shame though,
that no one clicks with me. May 28/09.

29) CHANGELING

I’m a creature of myth out of old legends,
my form replaced with that of the healthy
child I was supposed to be.

But it isn’t always so. In fact in some of
the old legends the ogres or fair folk lost
one of their own, and so

stuck with an unnatural child who cries
and speaks and coos as human children
do they search the world

and wide for what they’ve lost. And when
the ogre child is found and the healthy one
thrown back to its old life there

sometimes rejoicing is heard in the hills and
bones of the mountains. Maybe the ogres are
still looking for us and our better

selves are out there in dark forests and valleys
wondering why the world seems so alien and
fearful to them as they moan
in the middle of the night. May 28/09.

30) RELIGION AS AUTISM

Do you think God loves me as He loves you?
The question need not truly seem absurd.
After all to be saved one must first speak,
seek salvation, demand temptation, or failing

this than the guilty one must be aware of some
crime they’ve done, or desired to do. But
for us all is solid and still as stone. If we
err and commit some crime it is only a crime

if we are aware of it, and most of the subtler
crimes of arrogance, self centeredness,
conceit or vanity are not sins to us but
merely states of being. We see the world
distinctly the way we see the world, and sin

becomes sin only when the preacher makes it
so, or failing this when few enough people
consider it a failing of some kind. But how
could we ever know these things? Unless we

are acutely told and shown we never know, yet
God expects of us to know even if we’ve
never been taught, or shown. God expects
too much unless our “betters” are rude enough
to point out what we’ve done, and most are too

polite to ever dare risk the wrath of God, with
vanity, conceit, self centeredness or arrogance.
I wonder if a loving God loves them too or if we
are but all the puppets of His sorry, pointless game? May 28/09.

31) CHAOS THEORY

I have a coin, a half dollar, and engraved on it
is the symbol of Hagal, the rune of chaos. It
looks an “H” slanted slightly, the connecting
line downward cast and cut diagonally left to right.

At certain times I take it out and look it over
and remember the value of chaos, the blunt
creative act of hail ruining and rushing over
frozen hills, the howl of Fenris devouring the sun,

or failing that just remember the power of perfect
uncertainty, and the longings of the uncertain.
You think that autism is all about the order of
the universe, that in making each act a perfect

flawless sentiment of self we are saved somehow
from grief? It isn’t so. Only by accepting the
chaos and the darkness do we begin to survive.
You see, like any ideology order has no place

in the real world. It is simply another thing to
cling to in the dark between the stars of our
lives and days. Order is our religion. Chaos
is the blood in our veins that lets our beating

hearts expand and finally, however very, very
briefly be free to find order and security once again. May 28/09.

32) PROVERB 1

Autism is what other people hope
bad people get. It’s such a vague
punishment no one is
ever sure enough about it to understand
the nuances between guilt, punishment,
and accidents of being. May 28/09.

33) PROVERB 2

When your child is banging their
head against a wall don’t move the
child away, move the wall.
Your child will find something
else to hurt themselves with.
Or failing that, bang your head
against the wall and see why
they’re really doing it. May 28/09.

34) PROVERB 3

When you smile and your child
doesn’t smile back, don’t fret.
Most children don’t smile at bland
buildings or roads, or clocks.
Just love and understand. Everyone
smiles at that, in their own small way. May 28/09.

35) PROVERB 4

Speech is not the same as understanding.
If it were so who would vote for any leader,
knowing the truth of what they know?
We’re no different, our way of understanding
is less overt is all. We consider your
understanding lesser too. May 28/09.

36) PROVERB 5

Don’t confuse anger with confusion.
Don’t confuse anger with hate.
Cats scratch and dogs bite. No one
ever accuses them of maliciousness.
They act the way they are at times
when it seems appropriate for them.
Are we less than dogs or cats, or men? May 28/09.

37) PROVERB 6

A face feels as smooth as glass.
You don’t look in a mirror without
reflection. Why do you think we
should look at you if we see
nothing of ourselves in you? May 28/09.

38) PROVERB 7

We aren’t often the violent ones.
We’re just not often aware that
people feel the way we feel. If
the world were filled with mannequins
and dolls that moved and spoke as

others do but everyone knew
they had no souls would anyone
worry what their feelings were?
That’s just how we sometimes see

all those faces, bruised or smiling
at times not of our choosing, all
those faces and those bodies moving
like beetles crawling on the ground. May 28/09.

39) PROVERB 8

I have to wash my hands Again, Again,
Again, Again, Again, Again. I have to
remember lines of poetry, say them
all Again, Again, Again, Again, Again.
It that pisses you off reading a few
repeating words how irritating is it for
me when the words won’t leave my head? May 28/09.

40) PROVERB 9

Don’t forget. Everyone has bad days.
No one is so perfect they can’t improve
themselves when opportunities arise.
But what those opportunities
are differ and differ again. May 29/09.

41) PROVERB 10

I want to love someone.
How is that different than
anyone else? How is that
different from you? May 28/09.

42) INSECT MASK

An insect cannot move their face
to make expressions that we could
name. I feel the same as they.

The muscles of my face move
awkwardly when I smile, or make
some feeling felt. It feels like

a mask would feel on a face too long
accustomed to it. But in the iridescent
shell of some insect, in the rainbow

hue of some beetle or wasp I see a
shadow of an art form cross my vision
and am taken aback by the knowledge

that in some alien way they might,
just might, understand what it feels like
to have a mask for a face. Or maybe

I’m reading too much emotion in the
still contours of a beetles face, of a wasp’s
wings, or a girl’s smile across a crowded place. May 28/09.

43) HAIKU 1

A butterfly burns her
wings into me when I see.
A crying enfant does more. May 28/09.

44) HAIKU 2

The smell of the heat
and sickness grows. The
smell of the frost and I smile. May 28/09.

45) HAIKU 3

Hands washed bleed.
Mind stabbed bleeds.
Heart alone is stone. May 28/09.

46) SMOKER

Tobacco smoke guts me like a scalpel
piercing into my lungs, eating at me inside
out til I can’t breathe and the poison sips
and bleeds black cancer into me.

So I avoid smokers at all cost, try to hold
my breath as long as possible, feel my way
around the world without stepping on
the landmine of a breath robbed of

air for me. For others it might be anything,
some shadow of a sound or a piece of clothe
that burns like acid on the skin. Who can say? May 28/09.

47) TANKA 1

No face is a face.
No person is a person.
Sickness spreads
her poison. Nations
reap the cost of a few. May 28/09.

48) TANKA 2

Being alone is
being alone with
no thought anyone
out there exists. Who
doesn’t feel that way? May 28/09.

49) TANKA 3

Bored I read again
what I have read
before. The maze
returns to the maze. The
square returns to itself. May 28/09.

50) AUTISM, A REFRESHER COURSE

Alright, you’ve read all the different interpretations
I had to give. You pushed through all the possible
ideas I had on what I live through. Here is the
final point I have left to give; it doesn’t matter.

There are fifty trillion possible ways to tell a
single story. There are fifty times fifty trillion
different ways a strand of DNA could be rewritten
to make anything become anything else that ever

was or could ever be again. All my wisdom means
no more than any of a billion experiences other,
better men and women have had than I. No
answer is left to be found because all answers

exist for each one alone to find. There is no
single path that leads to perfection or the betterment
of another every time. To those of you who are sick
with illnesses that bleed and beat with the same

heart as you it is up to you to find whatever works
to keep the demons to a minimum and life to its
maximum extreme. For those of they who have
friends or family with such conditions as

these there are no magic words, no ideal ways
to bridge a gap as wide as this. Rather there are
fifty trillion ways, and each way can never be
exhausted enough that it can’t be tried again,

or some other path taken that will lead to a better
place. Find your own paths and take them and make
them their own. Everyone has that self same state
to achieve. Even me. If I were perfect I’d never

get sick again, but I do, from time to time. That’s
life. Figuring it out perfectly requires better gods
than any we have met so far, or ever will be
compelled to meet again. Do your best kids,

have fun. And in the words of J. S. LeFanu
“If the patient does not side with the disease the
cure is certain.” And that was written in a ghost story.
I wonder where else we can find the means to save us.
Good hunting kids. We all need it. May 28/09.

1) RED RIDING HOOD WITH AN AXE

One day Mother sent little Red Riding Hood off
to Grandma’s house with a basket of goodies, and
some medicine for Grandma’s herpes. To reach
Grandma Red had to go through the deep dark woods

and so she went, taking her axe with her. She did
this because no one with half a brain would go into
the forest without some protection of some kind,
and since she didn’t have any mace or tasers she

took her axe with her. So off she went until she
met a wolf, and the wolf said “Where are you going
little girl?” And Red said “I must be off my meds
again because that wolf just talked to me.”

“Yes I talked to you little girl,” the wolf replied,
“so where are you going?” “Well as you are
obviously an hallucination I see no problem
telling you I’m going to Grandma’s, though usually

my hallucinations aren’t this polite.” “And where
does Grandma live?” The wolf asked, because being
a wolf he didn’t know. “Oh, along this path here,”
Red said, and continued on her way, wondering

why her anti-psychotics weren’t kicking in as they
usually did at this time. So the wolf took a different
quicker path because Red didn’t like her Grandma
enough to rush over every time her Grandma called

and when the wolf got there he scratched at the door
and spoke to the Grandma saying he was Little Red
Riding Hood. And because Grandma didn’t remember
her own grandchild’s voice that well because she

didn’t like Red any more than Red liked her the wolf
got in and ate up the haggard old crone. Then he dressed
up in Grandma’s clothes because he was a transvestite
and took a nap comfortably while waiting for Red to

arrive. And when Red arrived and entered in she saw
the same wolf she saw on the forest path, only dressed
in Grandma’s clothes. “Damn,” she said, “I hate
hallucinations of Grandma as a wolf. Every time

I come here it’s the same mess, Grandma as a wolf
or Grandma as Satan, or Grandma as that creepy
woodcutter who watches me undress. Well I’ve had
enough.” And so saying she lifted the axe over her

head and smashed the wolf’s skull in two. And
when she came home she told her mother about sharp
teeth and big eyes and that Grandma was a wolf who
tried to eat her. Which was about as true

as Red could comfortably imagine considering her
schizophrenia and the fact that this was the fourth
time she had accused her Grandma of transforming
into something and trying to eat her.

Her mother just patted her on the head and didn’t
even care when she saw blood on the axe’s blade. It
wasn’t like she hadn’t seen blood on the blade before. April 7/09.

2) HOW JACK GOT HIS GROOVE BACK

Jack was going to market with a cow when a girl
stepped out the woods carrying an axe. “Howdy.”
He said. “Hey,” she said and waved and then for
absolutely no reason followed him.

He met a man who promised him magic beans
for the cow, and because the cow had mad cow
disease and shook like an epileptic badger he felt
getting beans was better than getting

nothing, and besides if the guy complained to the
cops Jack had the benefit of pointing out the guy
bought the cow for beans. So he took the beans
and the red hooded girl kept following

him, and when he came home and explained the
whole deal his mother seemed mildly sympathetic.
“But I just got one question.” “Yeah mom.”
“Why is this girl in my home?”

“Oh, sorry about that,” Red replied. “Well, my
mother got upset when I killed Grandma so she
kicked me out. Started walking and came here.”
“Well, nobody’s perfect.” Jack’s mother

said. “Stay here for now and we’ll call the
police in the morning.” “Sounds like a plan.”
Red said, and fell asleep in Jack’s bed, with Jack
sleeping comfortably beside her.

The next day Red decided to see if magic beans
did squat so she buried a few, but not all of them
beneath Jack’s window. A big beanstalk grew
up, and after Jack and Red had a shower

together they climbed up the beanstalk. At the
top was a land of clouds which violated several
laws of physics because they could actually walk
on those clouds. They came to a big castle

and thanks to Red’s axe they busted a nice hole in
the door and went in. Inside was a giant sleeping
and Red, crazy but not being stupid, climbed
up the giant’s leg to his inner thigh

and slashed a major artery causing him to bleed
out in less than a minute. Covered in blood she
came out and they searched the castle, finding
a goose that laid golden eggs,

a magic harp and the burial place of Jimmy Hoffa,
a man whose final resting place had become such
a mystery even finding his remains didn’t
answer the question of what the hell he was

doing in a fairy tale. After they were done Jack
and Red climbed down the beanstalk with enough
money to live comfortably well on for the next
century, and when Jack’s mother found out

she didn’t call the cops after all. As for the
remaining beans they were a great aphrodisiac
if ingested. Red and Jack ate them and didn’t get
out of bed for a week. After that they didn’t know

what next to do, but with a minor fortune they
thought it was time to see a little bit more of the
bigger world beyond their bedroom doors. April 7/09.

3) RAPUNZEL DON’T GET NO LOVING NO MORE

Rapunzel was sitting in her tower which she did
everyday, not having a door to let her out. The
old crone which kept her here explained how she
got Rapunzel after her father stole some plants

from the old woman. And so she was named
Rapunzel, which was the German word for heroin
because the plants he stole were opium poppies to
shut up his pregnant wife who kept complaining

about swelling in her ankles. At any rate along
came two people, a man carrying a sack and a
woman in a red hood carrying an axe. “Oh
perhaps my rescue has arrived.” Rapunzel said

to herself because after fourteen years in a tower
talking to herself was about all she knew how to
do. “Hello down there!” She cried, and the two
people looked up and waved at her. “Howdy!”

The red hooded woman said, “what the hell are
you doing up there?” “I’ve been locked in this
tower because of an old woman. Please get me
out!” “Yeah sure,” Red said, as much to herself

as to Rapunzel and looked around the place to
see how to get in. “Hmm, hey lover look at this.”
Red was pointing to all the briars and thorns
about the tower’s base. “Wow, someone really

doesn’t want to let her out.” Jack scratched his
chin and looked up at the window where the
very pale and only moderately attractive woman
was sitting. “Hey, how do you eat?” He asked.

“Everyday the witch who imprisoned me flies
on a broomstick and brings me food.” “Huh,
that’s a new one.” Jack got down on the grass
and motioned Red to sit beside him. “I don’t
like this,” he whispered to Red. “Why?”

He stuck out his teeth slightly and glared up at
Rapunzel again. “Well, I know what’s it like
not eating, and she doesn’t look starved to me.
You only eat once a day you’re going to look

get pretty damned hungry, and she don’t look hungry
at all.” “Yeah, and I noticed some blood on those
briars and thorns too.” Red said, hiding her face
under her hood when she spoke so Rapunzel

couldn’t see what she was saying. “I got a plan.
Follow my lead.” Jack got up and Red followed
and then Jack said as loudly and as proudly as he
could “I am the Prince of South-West Arabia

(Red rolled her eyes slightly at that remark)
and I am on a quest to find and marry a beautiful
princess from a neighboring land! Are you a
princess my dear woman?” “Oh course I am,”

she lied. “I am the Princess of South-East Arabia!”
“At last! My long quest is over! But how shall I
rescue you my dear woman?” “My hair. It’s grown
so long from never being cut that it must be as long

as the tower I’m trapped in. Here, I’ll roll it out
for you so you can climb up and rescue me.” And
down came a waterfall of golden hair, so golden
and luxurious Jack nodded knowingly at Red.

“Alright, I’m grabbing hold of the hair right now.”
And Rapunzel felt a tug on her hair, and she pulled
with all of her might to get the nice young man up
into her tower so that she could eat him, because

that was how she kept herself well fed when the
witch was away on her errands. But the more she
tugged the harder it was to pull the man up, and
the harder it was to pull the man up the more

painful it was to pull. “What’s going on?!” She
cried, and finally looked down out the window to
see what was going on. And there was all her hair
tangled in the briars about the tower, tangled and

tangled so badly that no one would ever untangle
them again. “What have you done!?” She screamed
and the venom in her voice told them both all they
needed to know. “Where are they?” Jack asked.

“Where’s what?” Rapunzel sputtered out. “The bodies
of course.” She looked stunned. “You aren’t a prince
are you?” she asked. “Nope. The bodies. Where are
they?” “Under the briars,” she said sullenly, and

downcast her eyes. It took Jack and Red two hours to
dig around the thorns to find the bodies of fifteen princes,
all of them little more than skeletons covered with all
manner of bite marks. “I was hungry,” she whimpered

after they were done excavating. “I know,” Jack said,
and nodded to Red who climbed up the tower using
Rapunzel’s hair. There was the sound of metal biting
into stone, and a scream. Then, a few minutes

later Red climbed down Rapunzel’s hair, and Rapunzel
followed her. “Why didn’t you kill me?” She asked.
“We’ve all done bad things,” Jack said, and looked up
into the sky a moment. “Want to come along? We’re

going to a castle for a ball.” “I’ve never been to a ball
before.” Rapunzel said. “First time for everything,” Red
said, but she looked forlorn. “The witch should be coming
soon,” Rapunzel said, looking up at the sky. “Okay, okay

Red.” She looked at Jack and smiled. “We’ll leave in
a few minutes. Oh, I’m Jack, this is Red, and what’s your
name?” “Heroine,” Rapunzel said, because that’s what
the witch always called her. “Heroine. I like it.”

And so the two went into the forest a moment while
Red climbed up Rapunzels’ hair, axe in hand, and
when the witch arrived there was the sound of metal
biting into stone, and a scream. Red climbed

down Rapunzel’s hair and no one followed her
down. And then the heroes went on their way again. April 12/09.

4) THE FROG PRINCE CAN’T CATCH A BREAK

Along the way to the castle the three heroes
spotted a frog in a pond, singing out loud,
lamenting his sad fate, because he was a frog.
However, he was also speaking in French

so no one had any idea what he was saying.
Finally Red hit him with a rock and said
“What the hell are you saying!? Either speak
frog or English, something I can understand!”

“She speaks frog?” Rapunzel asked. “It’s best
not to question some things.” Jack said. “Okay,
sorry, I’ll talk English. Better?” “Yeah, yeah
that works.” Red nodded in agreement as Jack

spoke. “Now what’s wrong?” Jack continued,
“Why the sad song?” “Once I was a prince,”
“Oh no, not another one.” Red moaned. “Quiet
Red.” Rapunzel replied. “Go on Mr. Frog.”

“Oh come on. This is the fifth magically
enchanted prince we’ve come across today
Heroine. First it was the magically enchanted
stork, then the magically enchanted beaver,

then the magically enchanted pussy, and after
that the magically enchanted cat. You two deal
with this one and I’m continuing to the castle,
okay? Damn, all those years thinking I was

schizophrenic and it turned out everything in this
god awful place is magical. All those anti-psychotic
pills for nothing.” And so saying Red continued
on her way, leaving Rapunzel and Jack with

the frog prince. “Now go on Mr. Frog,” Rapunzel
said, and the frog continued his story. “Once I was
a prince, but a witch transformed me into a frog
just because I kicked her accidentally, down a

flight of stairs, into my pit of ravenous wolves,
and wild boars, and one pissed off lion. For just
this minor mistake she made me into a frog and I
will remain a frog til a princess takes me home

and makes me her husband.” “Well, that can
be arranged.” And so saying Jack scooped the
frog into his sack and the two went on their way,
bypassing the troop of royal guards and a princess

playing with a ball, and further bypassing several
other princesses in a variety of bizarre situations,
each situation more bizarre than the last. One
princess they encountered had been covered

in fur because her father the king wanted to fuck
her as she was the most beautiful woman in all
of his kingdom. That princess Jack and Rapunzel
avoided, not only because of her daddy issues

but also because she covered herself in fur to avoid
being seen as a woman to anyone, even though
she worked in a brothel in the woods where most
men would have sex with anything walking on two

legs. Then there was the princess trapped in a coma
surrounded by seven short men, who were also short
eyes and had a fixation on young children. Jack
decided it would be considered rape if the frog

prince tried to marry her and so they left the brood
just as some handsome prince arrived, kissed the
woman and left because the cops did consider it
rape and this was the third princess that prince had

tried to “marry” that week. Finally there was a
princess who was herself a frog, and here Jack and
Rapunzel dropped the frog prince off. “Okay, if
you two marry both curses are broken. How’s that?”

Jack asked. “You jack ass,” both frogs said in unison.
“I won’t marry a creature as ugly as a frog!” “Red was
right, wasn’t she?” Rapunzel asked. “Yeah, she
usually is. But don’t tell her I said so.” And so

saying Jack stomped the two vain little frogs into
mush and he and Rapunzel went on their way to the
ball, where Red had found some trouble all on her own. April 12/09.

5) CINDERELLA NEEDS A GOOD KICK IN THE ASS

I. While Jack and Rapunzel were looking to turn a
prince into a man Red was at the ball, surrounded
by all manner of attractive princes, lords and ladies,
showing off her axe to all those gathered round.

“And then, just when the dragon came close enough
I could feel his hot breath on me I swung my axe
upward, right through the beast’s jaws. Down came
the dragon and ever after salamanders and turtles

have looked at me funny. But it was still worth it,
saving that poor tailor who almost gotten himself
killed fighting some giant. Took care of that one
too actually.” She paused a moment in deep

thought. “Never did get my money from that guy,
but he also had to marry some princess. I was
tempted a bit, but nah, not my thing. So, what
interesting happened in this kingdom?”

“Why, what do you mean?” The prince asked,
looking a little perplexed. “Oh come on, everywhere
I go I find damsels in distress, princes turned into
all kinds of animals, women on broomsticks, lawyers,

it never stops. So what catastrophic problem exists
here?” “There isn’t any problem here.” A nobleman
said. “Our kingdom has been quite peaceful for
many years.” “Wow. I don’t believe it.”

“It’s true great warrior.” A baron said. “Our land
has known peace for many years.” “How many years?”
Red asked. “Why, at least twenty great warrior.”
“Mmm, twenty years huh. I’ll make you a bet

prince,” Red said. “A bet great warrior?” “Yes,
and stop calling me great warrior. It’s annoying. The
bet is this: I bet there is some problem, probably a
woman who needs some kind of really serious help.

If I bring her to you will you give me a sack of gold?”
“If there is indeed anyone in my kingdom whose life
is unhappy and you show her to me than yes I
will give you a sack of gold. Should I also ask

for your hand in marriage?” “Nah, I’m in a good
place relationship-wise. But I got this friend named
Heroine. If you don’t mind unusual eating habits
you might like her for a roll in the hay. Anyhow

I’m outta here. I’ll be back tomorrow night for the
next ball. Oh, and when my friends get here don’t
mention my bet. They’ll just worry.” And so saying
not so little Red Riding Hood left the building.

II. Red scoured the countryside, then she scoured
the towns, and then she scoured the individual huts
til she came across a poor looking girl sitting in
the cinders all alone. She was crying and two

other girls were in the room, both looking haughty
but also very familiar. “Hey, those two sluts from
last night, the ones who almost gave the prince
a blowjob they were bowing to him so much.”

Red was on the roof of the hut, looking through
an open window and even though the other girls
should have considered Red’s bet they didn’t seem
concerned, or intelligent. Meanwhile the one in

the cinders was crying and moaning, looking
downcast and utterly pathetic. “Wow, I won my
bet way too easily.” Red said to herself. “I show
this sorry kid to the prince I get a sack of gold.

But this goes way beyond someone needing help.
This girl needs some balls. I can’t believe I just
said that.” And so Red waited til the two
arrogant but none too bright girls had left

and slid into the room headfirst, only to land at
the last second on her feet. “Who are you?” The
poor girl asked. “Are you a fairy of some kind?”
“No, you’re thinking about the wolf.”
“I beg your pardon?” She asked. “Sorry,

old joke, you wouldn’t get it. Anyway my name
is Red, and I’m here because I made a bet with the
prince of this land.” “A bet?” The girl asked,
looking more bewildered, if that was possible.

“Yeah, I said that if I could find a person needing
help then I’d get a sack of gold from him. Let me
guess, you’re twenty aren’t you?” “Why yes,
how did you know?” “I had a feeling.” Red said,

then continued. “Anyway, I was going to present
you to the prince, but as you are it’s just too easy.
I mean you don’t just need help, you need a
whole army of helpers to make your life

suck less.” “Well, I do have my animal friends.”
She said. “Animal friends?” At this the room was
filled with bunnies and mice and a few stray kittens.
“Where did they come from?” Red asked.

“They just show up whenever I say animal friends.”
All of a sudden two dogs appeared out of nowhere
and started licking the cinder girl’s face.
“Ooo-kay. That’s weird. Anyway, rather

than present you to the prince as is, I’ve decided
to help you out myself. I’m going to give you the
tools to make your life better.” “But what about
your bet?” She asked. “Ah that’s okay. I’ve

already got enough gold to last a lifetime. This
is more important.” And with that Red Riding
Hood began to teach Cinderella the art of war.

III. That night when Jack and Rapunzel arrived
for the ball Red was done teaching Cinderella
all she needed to know. And when the two met
up with her there was a broad smile on Red’s

face. “Oh no.” Jack looked down and grimaced.
“What did you do?” He asked. “Oh, I lost a bet.”
Red said. “What kind of bet?” Jack asked,
and when Red explained the whole thing he

groaned. “Well I think it’s kind of sweet what
she did.” Rapunzel replied, until Red mentioned
the prince and a roll in the hay. Rapunzel didn’t
know what to say, until she saw the prince.
“That’s him?” She asked. “Yep.” “Bye.”

And like a flash Rapunzel met her match, and
the two were dancing a few seconds later. “Think
it’ll work out for her?” Red asked. “Yeah, she’s
a good kid, deserves a break. Give her a month

and she’ll probably forget what human flesh tastes
like.” “Good. Oh, I forget to mention what happened
to Cinderella.” “She’s actually called Cinderella?”
“No Jack, of course not. Her real name is Beatrice.

But what with the cinders and all Cinderella is
what her stepsisters taunt her with. Anyway she’s
going to make an appearance around midnight
when everyone’s drunk and asleep.” “Why?”

Jack asked, but he already knew the answer why.
“I taught her how to use an axe. She’s going to
cut off her stepsister’s feet, and her stepmother’s
too.” “Won’t someone notice her doing that?”

“Nope.” “You drugged the wine didn’t you Red.”
“Yep.” “How long til everyone’s out cold?” “Oh,
thirty seconds tops.” At that Jack grabbed a glass
of wine and drunk as deeply as he could.

“I need a nap anyway,” he said. Red grabbed
another glass of wine and drunk deeply too. “Me
too,” she said. “Hey wait a second. What is your
real name anyway. I mean you call yourself

Red but that’s just because of the hood. I don’t
know what your real name is.” “Just leave it as
Red. It’d spoil the mystery if I had an ordinary
name.” “Well what about Cinderella then?”

“Beatrice was ordinary enough before I showed
up Jack. But after tonight people will only remember
her as Cinderella from now on.” “Night Red.” Jack
said, and stooped to the ground. “Night Prince
Charming.” Red said, and followed him in slumber. April 12/09.

I FEEL THE NEED

I feel the need sometimes to cleanse the world
of things. I imagine myself become godlike,
given some unnatural strength or strange design

and move between the continents, content only
after the world conforms to the intentions of my
mind. First I stand upon some Afric shore

and touch my hands against a road made crude
by the lack of finer things, but still a human
achievement all the same. And in my touch

the road dissolves, shatters to a trillion shards
and storm like rolls backward upon itself,
transforming all human things, including flesh

itself, into dust as well, which rolls backward
on itself til the continent is cleansed of the
human disease. Then Europe with its false

civility, all Asia and the steppes of Russia in
its perpetual winter’s death, by the foot-falls of
the Ganges river in December when the floods

fall forward like drunken men, til all these lands
leave neither trace nor memory of a human step
save my steps upon the sand. Then home

to the continent of my birth, but not before all
islands are done the same as the continents were,
as Australia too is purified in the screams of

dust and human ashes on the wind, til only
a few cities are left somewhere on the edges of
the northern continent, and those few left I leave

a dream, a simple dream to full their nightmares
with a sleep. In the dream I leave with them there
is a war, or perhaps a plague, and they descend to

bunkers beneath the world. Here they sleep a second
time, petrified, and when they awaken they discover
a thousand years have passed them by. Then they

rebuild exactly what they had before, and at this
moment I let them become awake into the lives they
know. And they all believe the world is emptied

which it is, and they all believe they cannot make
the same mistakes again. They try to live in more
balanced ways, try to throw out the debris of

wasted seconds, and there I am in a café drinking
a coffee and reading my newspaper, idly talking to
some children about the ways things used to be.

I’m sure they’ll all think kindly of the time when
wars were real, when disease was rampart and the
threats of narcotics or gangs or some other sin

crippled the lives of men. Now that such things
are gone never to come again let them listen to the
better histories of what once was. And if they go

astray I can always start again, erase a few
unfortunate souls so no one ever remembers
them. But for now I’ll sip my coffee and

pretend a thousand years have passed as people
pray to unknown gods while I am in their midst.
Not that I am God. I’m just a poet
with a need to control what things I can. April 7/09.

WHEN SOMEONE DIES

When someone dies we should forget them,
if we are unkind. If each person could be snipped
and cut away at death,
every memory of them
snapt from living minds it would be

easier somehow then, but more cruel.
What would be graves but riddles empty
of all meaning
and grave-diggers uncertain
even of their work of their hands? April 1/09.

THE ANATOMY OF HELL

What is the point of hell, her anatomy?
All is suffering in her flesh but none are
spent learning the source of her suffering.

We are left with the impressions of demons,
a hierarchy, with humanity at the lowest tier.
But hell is ours to carve with myth and

dream. Medusa of lost women remember
your fathers and your mothers and be kind,
even to those who deserve no kindness in

their hatred of your birth. The geography
of hell flattens herself to a slip of paper
and a list of names, all sent before the

firing line that each lost soul has made.
Suicide and murder, they are the same. April 1/09.

INSECT PROVERB

Insects are an evolutionary backdoor on
society itself. Gaze into the intricacy, the
tapestry of beetles crawling over corpses
or ants warring upon the dust,

and somewhere you are there looking
upward at yourself, looming gigantic
as a god crucified in your days, as you
bury yourself in the flesh

of the gods that have not died, never
to return again as anything except
beetles, wasps or flies. April 1-7/09.

FLESH FOR THE NEW MACHINES

Flesh for the new machines and the
new disease, skin for the bio-weave
of sinews black with oil

or tendons sharpened of cancer til
man is an afterthought for children
of mankind as these. April 1/09.

A SERIAL KILLER AMONG INSECTS

A serial killer among insects is but
an insect. All are killers, all know
that they are killers. Only Man

is naive enough to assume he never
kills just because he has never killed
so far. Give him time. Give him

an excuse. Give him a god and he
will kill enough to put ten trillion
insects to shame in the devastation
of a single, guilt ridden man. April 1/09.

ALONG A MUTANT ROAD

Along a mutant road twisted til death
defeats itself there becomes a spider’s
conceit, the spider’s pocket of flies’
wings
held tightly in the fist of a man
stranded in cities of glass that shatter
at the slightest touch, til death at last
loses to death again. April 1/09.

NEURAL-AMPLIFIER

The brain has a trillion paths leading to itself.
A neural-amplifier is simply the way to make
a trillion paths a trillion more, til the brain has

traveled a billion years of time in the space
of an hour or two. How sad that the heart
remains the same, jealous through rage and

its unaccounted-for restraints. A single virus
has no such needs to think how best to harm
the universe. By existing it but harms all

the same. Man is no less and no more
in whatever shape or thought he claims. April 1/09.

THE DROWNED MOON

The drowned moon rose again from the
moors and all the beasts of the darkness
fled away, as the moon like any woman

would ran to the sun and the sun’s feathers
and wings to proudly declare that she had

not died this day. And the sun, sullen as
any child rushed downward to the moor
but all the world just burned, grass and

trees to embers and all the beasts of the
darkness charred to dust, and all mankind
with them. Nor could I turn away. April 1/09.

GOLDI-INDIO (The title is my father’s.)

Goldi-Indio has a silver toe
and a golden throat and a scarf of
indigo all because she used

to throw out what didn’t suit
her, like a throat or a toe or a heart,
and this I know because she hurt

me so much that I divorced
her. But where is my heart now?
I dare not curse her should she

find my lost heart and
make it her own, like a silver
toe or a golden throat or the

scarf I used to own when into
marriage I forced her half heartedly
to be mine and mine alone. April 2/09.

THE INCIDENT AT CUULUS-N’LYATH

I imagine myself dissolving all the time, drowning
in the moments as the war rages on, as chitinous
claws breach armour too fragile to stand the talons
of other worlds’ children, born neath blacker suns.

The generals all say “You have to trust yourself
enough to know who you really are,” but on the
firing line only brute instinct takes over, to survive
today (what irony in that word for days here last

years longer than a day under our mother sun,) we
fight in the wastes of Cuulus-N’lyath, pushing back
the cold pressing dominion of strange unknowing
and unknowable insect things. Tomorrow, years

after the fact of our first arrival here we may go to
Malijora, an almost lush world with its tinges of
grey the cities of mankind. And the preachers all
say “We must turn again to that vast and ordered

Eden of the mind, imperilled only by its own sins
and vices,” but to be human is our sins, it is in
failure that humanity proves itself. Someone who
never makes a mistake isn’t human I tell myself.

That’s why morale is slipping, that’s why so many
think the insect things will win. But of course our
first mistake was simply this; trying to exterminate
at our own pleasure cockroaches with the cunning

and the souls of more than men. And so when I am
dead I will be left here for the enemy to scrape even
my bones into their maws, to strengthen them in
their vengeance against us all. April 2-7/09.

A ROAD TO THE RIVER BEND
(The first two lines are my father’s.)

Like a steam engine, five days ahead
and going nowhere, broken down

til I find that road
to the river’s bend

and plunge headlong
in, reborn like
another man would

have been, but I’m stuck
living my life in my thoughts
five days ahead

while all that’s left is
the river bend and the road leading
where my thoughts have led. April 6/09.

THE APE’S SHADOW

Cast in the ape’s shadow
there becomes at once
but the skull-monument
of groping fingers toward
some hollow upward path
leading to the man whose skull
is no more than the echo of an ape’s,
as the ape,
screaming wildly in the jungle
for his lost dominion becomes

but the mild businessman groping for a sort
of heaven neither beast would understand. April 6/09.

A BURGESS SHALE EVENT

It started with a worm that had a spine.
That sounds foolish of course, some poor
attempt at a failed rhyme or some sad lack
of profundity. But truth to tell we all

started from a worm that had a spine,
found at the Burgess Shale in a country of
stones older than the hills they were cast
upon. And if some accident had called

herself to that spot, if some haphazard
spark or wayward god had shrugged at the
very worst moment or wrong time that little
worm and all her kin would have died, and so

we’d have never been. Not merely men but
all animals with bones, all fish, and out of their
lack of abundance trees and fields would differ,
oceans change, the very air breathe differently

with the hissing of dragonfly wings rather
than the feathers or the leathern call of bats
feasting way in the middle of the night. And
of course it means so much more than this.

Imagine any thought, any feeling you might have
had, imagine any book, film, story you might have
heard. Imagine more than this, consider every
speck of you, every dream, word, cut or bruise,

indeed everything you think you are and know
to be completely true. And now imagine anything
you know to vanish without a trace, a single speck
of thought, a book you’ve read no wiser than a fly’s

crumpled brain upon a man’s absent palm, and
with that single absence the world is altered as it
never was before. Anything taken from the world
that was alters the world forever. And so

anything added to the world that never was before
must create realities unheard of in the mind of God.
The universe becomes more interesting the
smaller and the larger our lives become. April 7/09.

YOU ARE WHAT YOUR SPEECH IS
(The title is my father’s, April 9/09.)

You are what your speech is,
you seekers of another path unknown,
but you are not alone in the universe
of God, no you are not alone.

The sun has a tear in her eye
for cynicism begets contempt
for everything, til of joy there
is nothing left.

We all have our limits imposed
on us, some from within where heart’s
logic begins, and some from without
when bullets give way

to bone, and there is but
the sound of another lost
boy in No Man’s Land
who couldn’t outrun
a bullet, for no one can.

In the end you seekers of another
path unknown can only ever
understand that you are not alone
in the universe of a God that has
no honour in His soul. April 11/09.

SOME GOT TENTS, SOME GOT NOTHING
(The title is my father’s, April 10/09.)

Some got tents, some got nothing,
some got only the holes of their shoes
walking blind in the alleys of Langston
Hughs, strumming the hymns that can’t
be sung til Judgement Day is through,
and out the other side no heaven,
no hell, no tent, no nothing and
nothing left to do, left to prove. April 11/09.

THE SAGES DREAMING

The sages dreaming in far towers
of the moon remember askance,
slant-wise the lost tribes of men
and a black door that doesn’t have
a key to it, leading to the far towers
where sages wait for someone to
unlock them from their sleep and
free them from their imprisonment.
But no one ever dares challenge
the logic of their dreams. April 11/09.

THE MIMICRIST

I’m not the man I used to be,
I’m a woman now. You see
I wondered what a woman’s
life revealed and left my

other skin in some other
place, but now I can’t find the
man I feel I was in previous
days, and can’t go back to

find my old familiar face.
So this is what age brings
to men and women all the
same; the alienation of who

they were hidden in the
illusions of who they really
wanted to be, when some
sort of youth was theirs to
own but not to claim. April 11/09.

SAVOURING THE LAST
THINGS IN THE UNIVERSE

Savouring the last things in the universe
I eat a final apple, recite a fragment of
a prayer some priest wrote down

a billion years ago, listen to my
favourite opera before all the stars slip
away smooth as a wintry sea of glass, and

feel the darkness of the universe crouch
down and become small as a whimpering
child obliterated in the glare
of an even greater final night. April 11/09.

SHE IS BEAUTIFUL

She is beautiful and she is perfect
and sitting like a queen or like a god
her strengths are magnified and all
her flaws obscured.

There is no finer woman I have
seen but I cannot love a woman
such as she, for she needs no lover
in her company.

My wife is bland as dust but I love
her because she is soft and still and
compassionate and all her flaws
are laid bare

and she herself is laid bare before
me. But more than this, I have laid
myself before her. To the woman
without flaws

what need have she a man
on any tarnished silver day? April 11/09.

VIOLETS ARE CONSUMED
(The poem was inspired by
lines made by Louise Delahay.)

Violets are consumed
of unassuming virtues,
mingled to the stately

simplicity of the humble
mind freed from the
winter’s sleep of night

to days without end, and the
unending births of delight. April 11/09.

THE BONES OF THE TRAINS

The bones of the trains whistling
along through the day reveal the
memoirs of fortunes’ past, the

titans dead of their largess, the
wasted tracks of skeletons riddled
with iron like chained men,

til all that’s left is the cry of a dying
train fading to fog on the wind. April 11/09.

TO HAVE WHAT ONE WANTS

To have what one wants is the same
as being dead, if one forgets that in each
act of having
there must be a further act,
act of loss, act of giving up the illusion
that what one has makes
any real difference at all. April 18/09.

FOLDING OF THE HANDS

A little folding of the hands to rest
and life unfolds better than for the
man on edge, the ever tense, ever
anxious man, which I am. April 18/09.

I FEEL THE GREAT WEIGHT

I feel the great weight of living upon me,
the sure dementia of knowing I slide toward
the balance of a sleep that has no end
and pressed against me the days linger
like shavings of thorns, but still I linger on.

Rhyme worthy the scars bleed inside my
mind and leave me with but the suffering
of another great thought to pierce the silence
of my dreams that have no thoughts, no
memories of pain, for pain leaves no memories.

And who is my audience, who my champions
who plead the cause of the poet condemned to
speak whatever his thoughts portend? I have
not the strength to find them, and they have
not the knowledge that one walks among them
condemned as I am condemned. April 18/09.

WHY MUST THE WORLD EVER END?

Why must the world ever end?
Why must there be a God to ruin it?
All mankind longs for a day of reckoning
when it can be said that some prevailed
but most of course did not.

All souls want to hope that others
fail more miserably than them, but only
if there is an end to all things can one
truly find out how miserable

life was for others, and how blessed
life must have been for them who stand
in heaven while so many stand in hell.
Damn them all, but sadly for all
there is no end of worlds my friends.
This circle of existence without purpose
goes on and on forever. April 18/09.

I AM ONE WHO CONTENDS WITH STONES

I am one who contends with stones,
with idols, for my words are idols

too. I am one who lays burdens
upon myself, the knowledge however

imperfectly obtained that man too
has died as God has died before him.

I am one who is alone, raging against
the stones, the idols of my words. April 18/09.

THE DELUSIONS OF GREATNESS

The delusions of greatness haunt even
the damned man, haunt even the king on
his throne of bones. The better, the

higher, the greater the hope the farther
the fall into despair, but only because we
have nothing left, only because, having

starved on all else nothing is left to
believe in, or care for except hope, sitting
contentedly on a throne-work of bones. April 18/09.

WHAT IS THE BEST WAY TO DIE?

“What is the best way to die?”

“Unknowing that there is
nothing after death.”

“What is the second best?”

“Believing there is a reason
for an ignoble end.” April 18/09.

THE DAYS BURN DOWN

The days burn down
one by one and slip
away into the grey
city that has no name,
besides the city
of dead memories. April 1-18/09.

SEEKERS ON A PATH WITHOUT A NAME

We are all seekers on a path
without a name, we are all the
lost ones stumbling in the dark
chasms of our souls. If

there were light enough to
illuminate our lives it would
blind us so badly our eyes
would burn away. So we

are trapped in either case
to the destinies our own
hearts have sadly made. April 2-18/09.

I AM COMPELLED

I am compelled to lay
a burden on mankind,
unnatural as the stars

upon the water, in my
attempt to teach all men
that Man too is dead as

God once was before him.
In the end we are all but
myths to those blunt beasts

which follow after us, to
those unfinished creatures
who in their time too will

become as myth and legends
to whatever is regarded as
vermin in that age. April 6-18/09.

THE MEDIOCRITY OF GREATNESS

There is in the end the mediocrity
of greatness. For it is not enough to be the
best if one cannot
be who they truly are.

I can almost imagine late at night
great men of business huddled about their
defeats, clinging
to the memories

of lost actions because that alone
taught them the price of being great. To
lose all is not

the same as losing all you are.
Even great men are ashamed at the echoes
of the shadows on the walls. April 18/09.

THE DEATH OF THE AMBER STONES

There in the death of the amber stones,
there in the deaths of Martian tombs

I find the echo of gold waiting for me,
the frozen bodies petrified in amber,

the grim Martian gods peering down
at me weaving on my loam more gold

to clothe their ravaged bones, hidden
in the shadows of great scarlet cliffs.

And far away another weaves the living
threads of men and women to being once

again, but for whom they weave I do not
know as men and women pray only for death

to clothe their ravaged bones while amber
clothes the gods no one prays to anymore. April 2-7-18/09.

YOUR CHILD IS A REFLECTION
(The first sentence is my mother’s.)

Your child is a reflection
of who you are. And your
spouse is a reflection
of what you fear the most. April 11/09.

MURDER TRIAL

Everyone has a story to tell,
witnesses all arranged to give
their best opinions or indicate
what route an eye can take

when the mind is told to
consider one man a suspect
and another something less.
Each side plays their games

and the accused, whether
guilty or misplaced along
some path leading where
his actions have not led

alone knows the truth of
whether he deserves his
punishment. Everyone has
a reason to believe or not

believe, except the victim.
The victim never cares who
caused their death. The
victim is now but a number

and a name on a prosecutor’s
desk, and only if they had any
family at all is the trial more
than a procedural request

of a society afraid that if one
unknown and unimportant
person is killed and then
forgotten how long til those
who matter fall prey as well? April 18/09.

MASNAVI

Two men, too afraid to be accused of crimes
against women, enter into each other’s company,
as uncertain lovers would.

Two lovers, too afraid to ever be alone, enter into
the company of strangers, gazing at each other’s
eyes from across the starved room.

One poet, condemned to write forever, watches
all the world but cannot enter in amid the company
of those he watches over.

One God, blind, oblivious creature of Man’s dreaming,
slumbers on in oblivion as we curse Him for our being. April 18/09.

THE SINEWS BENEATH YOUR SKIN

I would love you for the sinews
beneath your skin, for the muscles
beneath your flesh,
I would love the
thought of your blood rushing beneath
your veins and imagine
lustily the image of your raw,

scarlet tinged muscles aching
beneath me. To say that I love
you for your face,
your eyes, your
hair is no wiser than
saying I love you for the sinews
beneath your skin.

Any beauty which you claim
to have means nothing to me my dear.
Only this has meaning to me: I love you.
Do you love me? April 18/09.

HAIKU

Stuck watching an empty page
be filled with words I write my
own epitaph by silences. April 18/09.

A killer knocks upon the door.
Do not answer him. He has no
other place to be. I envy him. April 18/09.

A cicada preaches that her death
is near. Crushed by my hand
her silence confirms the act. April 18/09.

I want the moon as a child
wants her bed, or a dog wants
straw in a barn at night. April 18/09.

The dog howls for meat and the
raving man for meat, and only the
sane man longs for a gun. April 18/09.

1) A little time is spent in the making
of a mountain, and an eternity in
the making of a deeply loving man.

2) A little time is spent in the making
of a mountain, and an eternity in
the making of a deep love. April 18/09.

The wolf is my brother and the
raven my brother. Man alone is the
crucifer of man. And God with him. April 18/09.

FIFTY POEMS OF CANADIANA
(The country that I love, and can’t stand.)

1) I love my country of cold weather
where the seasons never change.
Everyday is winter here, frozen as
a rambling deer on the side of a road
before she’s hit by a full car load of
drunken teenaged slobs.

2) Saint John is a city that has a thousand
names, all ending with the suffix “sucks
like shit,” but still we love the Canadian
sentiments of reliance, strength and
bootlegged cigarettes. Oh Canada,
oh Canada, we are so full of regrets.

3) The wind whips at streets coated in
dirt and a few urine stains but still we
march bravely on and sing “God save
the Queen,” but we mean whatever
new gay prime minister we’ve got.
We’re just too polite to tell the British
Royal family is all.

4) Nothing happens in my country. Gangs
act polite and say please as they’re robbing
those who pass close by. School shootings
never happen because it’s always taken
out outside, somewhere in the forest
where hunting accidents happen.

And people, oh so many people who close
their doors at night, and you’d almost, just
almost hear the gun cocked back, before
the shot does not echo through
sliverings of bone.

5) A deer is such an excellent creature,
bred for beauty and for war. Against the
tundra she has no equal, except the squalor
of a country store. And still she’d rather
be in the shelter than out amongst
the ruined masses, or those who haven’t
strength to march upon our leaders
with a settle to score.

6) I love the sound of crows. They sound
like saws hacking at the bones of wounded
men. They sound like taxes being raised
by the sentiments of cowards and old
sinners in their crypts. When a crow
cries a soul dies, and is reborn in
another crow’s skin.

7) The trees stand like skeletons about to
fall. They rumble and they shake and the
crimson of a lake cast by the evening light
catches at their shadows, til they are caught.

No wonder painters love trees so much.
They are a landscape of muted corpses,
invisible to the touch.

A war is waging in the South. Let the
boys of America die, so long as we have
time to drink, so long as the ignorant
are other daughters and other sons. Oh,
so we have soldiers dying too? Well
now it’s serious. This war has to stop.

9) A poet has no honour in the winter of a
street. Forget what you are taught, poetry is
itself a lost and dying art. A few artists
scrawl their feces on a wall and it is no
different than words upon a page.
Canada is a land of old stories never told,
because the poet is mute and quiet, sullen
in his sudden rage.

10) The buildings glare and rot as they glare.
I love the eyes of windows as they break.
A poor mother or poorer son asks for bread.
Why not give them something now?
It is too late to worry about tomorrow.
Winter has no boundary as walls have tears.

11) I wish for war to happen somewhere else.
My country is too good to worry about the
world. The green of hills and valleys is flawless
and needs no remedy of bullets. Let all the
world fall away except for my corner of it.
Why should I be punished for the world’s sins?

12) I stand in a grocery store of florescent lights.
Colours are gaudy in this place, and people smell
of nothing. I pick up an apple and in my hand
it turns pale. Far away the apples come, from
far away all the colours come, and my country
belongs to no one. But we all have bills to pay.

13) I’d throw change at the poor if I had a cent
to claim. All the people, all the grey ashen beards
shuffling beside obese hair, all the sticks clambering
for food on park benches and in old graveyards
scattered among trees and parks, all of this is
dissolving now. I can’t see faces anymore somehow.

14) In the summer it feels but a minute long, until
one enters the summer heat. Blistering along shale
and skin heat shivers and bends until it has no
escape, and sweating nothing is calm, nothing feels
right til winter closes her angry fist, and everything
pales in the failure of a lost doomed bomb.

15) Trees give shelter to shadows and shadows
become the resting places of others. Shadows cool
and snakes give birth to scales. Scales are eaten by
moths and moths by flames. Flames give birth
to suns and suns to trees, and all falls back to
shadows in a summer breeze.

16) I love the smell of chocolate, but the smell is
never there. Only the scent of asphalt, cement,
concrete in the rain, hot rain which melts
at the roads til roads reek of strange hot things
that lovers do not pretend to remember on
strange hot nights in July.

17) The fair is coming to town, and the Ferris
Wheel rolls round, and up I come midway between
the sky and the grasses, and down I go where the
people are, and the time elapses. What is the point
of going up if I have to come down again?

18) I had my tongue cut up and then I could speak
in the language of other men. I had my skin ripped
taunt and now it drags behind me like a ghost’s
rags or a suffering dog. The grass does not care
either way. The sun shines and the buildings watch.
The trees disapprove that I am there.

19) This is no country; it is an epitaph. Summer
is a second and winter an hour caught in an hourglass
about to fall apart. Grave markers forget the language
they were born in. Historians dull the legacies of
heroes til they all become the sounds of politicians
deranged from time in Ottawa, or Montreal. When
it ends no one will know our country even ended.

20) Think we lack the serial killer’s touch? Think
we don’t lock our doors at night? Murder is a season
in our homeland. Go for a walk at night and feel
a wind, one wind bite down on you. It has teeth,
it has eyes, it has claws and it has will. One wind
is hungry for one man, and a storm is hungry for a
legion of fools left in the dark where dark things roam.

21) The floor of the room is dull. The ceiling dull,
the windows dull, the talk dull. All is dulled and
muted when the rivers flow ice and the ice
flows tears, and maybe, just maybe a person
could die, ease the boredom for the others, but no.
Death is only interested in the company that isn’t ours.

22) Do you think I don’t love my lands? Than you
are right. But you think I hate the country of my
birth? No, for ice teaches strength and heat,
burning heat teaches strength, and listening

to teachers lacking wisdom teaches strength, and
fighting madness or boredom or death or life teaches
strength. Everything teaches strength except the
ease-encountered life.

23) Boys in back seats with sweethearts don’t always
get the chance for sex. Sometimes it’s rape, or more
often, sadly much more often nothing happens
at all except two people groping in the dark,
ignorant as moths in the center of the sun.

24) Beer spilled from hands used to manure
and wine from hands used to less. Barrels of
liquor snapped and broke and got used up
by men in need of more than drink.
The city doesn’t mind how many places
become urinals. Cities aren’t discreet, or proud.

25) Woods go on til they stop at construction
sites, great ugly sores that eat the woods and wilds.
But we have to live, and in the forest there is still
the smell of witches and loup garou, even after
two hundred years or twenty thousand centuries.
In the woods men don’t get lost; in the forests
the woods themselves hide men away.

26) Rocks bite into country sides and eat up
thoughts til every thought is of rock and stone
and the roots of stony places. Cliffs break up
woods and eat up rivers, carve through cities

without caring where they carve, and still
we cling to the cliffs and mutter in the dark
about nightmares where the land is flat
and just goes on forever.

And in those flat lands they have their
nightmares too, about cliffs and rocks that
devour thoughts and carve through cities
like black vultures without wings.

27) Synagogue sits by a Mosque which sits by
a Church which sits by a house where politicians
come to debate how best to lie. One of these
things is not like the others. Damned if I know
which is which, or why.

28) Weatherman ain’t got the time to spill his
secrets so people go outside, find the snow up to
their eyes, feel the storm break up their memories
and leave just pale shoveling creatures behind,
clearing walkways that go somewhere they’ve
forgotten now, or barely comprehend.

29) Schools taste like ashes in ovens, and teachers
don’t speak, they just stand and forget they’ve forgotten
how to talk. Schoolyards break into tiny kingdoms
and sooner or later a little blood is bound to spill
and become the boundaries of a newer world.
And still the poets creep down and watch
ants cut up caterpillars and take them home.

30) The beach has a shadow spread out from
the water. The sun dips into a pool of light and
doesn’t remember to breathe. A few boys
keep her head down too long. Better
she dies than I die. I suppose it had to be.

31) Red leaves bleed down on white blossoms
and a few ants dig for the retreating armies
of worms or beetles. A boy on his way home
from the bus never notices the other one. Once
you’re there and then you’re gone. Beetles can
relate when their bodies and the ants are one.

32) Green grass has no sympathy. It just
grows on. Cut it and it never bleeds. Freeze
it and it grows back stronger. It never cares
to feel afraid. It doesn’t know how
a mower and a knife share a common
symmetry. But the rest of the dead cannot
forget, if there is anything left of them.

33) A minister prays and makes his sermon long.
The congregation shuffles in their seats and
waits for more. I make paper cranes and play
and never hear a word he says. That was when
I was a child and knew better than I know now.

34) Buildings have no shape, they just grey
and shatter into memories. Consider the thought
of a flower and a building; which is clearer in
your mind? Maybe both should be clearer
but the flower is the sweeter so you remember
better its shape and colour. That’s how I hope
the dead remember life.

35) My country has no thought of other times.
It is stuck in the past that never was. All the cities
boil and burst when any knowledge pours to them.
Revolution is on a few fools’ tongues.
The rest of us can’t give a damn to care.

36) I want a woman tall and fair and no one seems
to find her. I want a woman who speaks and knows
what her thoughts reveal behind her. All I’m
stuck with though are children trapped at playing
women they never really were. And so some women
I despise them, by not being anyone more.

37) There is the terror of listening to people
and there is the terror of hearing them. There is
the thought of answering your demons and there
is the knowledge the demons belong to you.

Cement and concrete and stone and wood and
flesh make up a country, but a man is none of
these. A man is just his demons riddled
to a ball and that ball collapsed to whatever

shape fits them best. The man is but the
echo of demons yearning to be free, and blest.

38) Why should a teacher tell us history now?
This battle was fought here, and people died.
This man did this and changed history.
The country had people living here who
didn’t know how to prepare for winter, and
we call them heroes because they survived.
They should have gone to Florida, than
that would have been our land as well to divide.

39) I want an answer to why I write. I want to
know why painters find sympathy in their
canvases. I want to know why this country tastes
like dried fruit or bitter bones of sugarcane and
tar. I want to know where Alden Nowlan is
buried anymore. I want to know why
answers never come.

40) Some people marry out of love but most
do it out of pity. Some people hate because they
feel superior, but most do it because they’re just
afraid to be inferior. I want people to do
what they would do if the heart were bare,
and the heart laid bare could weave itself
together with the threads of everyone it knows
and it has met. Such a tapestry would have it’s
few regrets, but I’d rather suffer together
than fly alone into that last and final abyss.

41) Potatoes are all I remember eating
when a boy, or apples maybe, or chicken,
or something else. Now I get to taste a
world away from me. I’d rather
forget the potatoes and leave.

42) Doctors run up into strange wombs
and down into car crashes where bodies need
more time to die. Lawyers eat up a body now
or then, not literally of course, though
I don’t know why.

And officers of the law run to and fro,
and often I’d wonder what happened to
them all, except when someone got shot
and their face was on the news.
Doctors always swarmed around,
and lawyers followed after.

43) It’s all a little bland but blandness
has its taste. White and yellow and brown
and green, make anything you want of these,
urine or feces, snow or grass,
but live in any single spot and the
nausea itself will pass, replaced by
the thought of other things, even urine
or feces in a world filled only with grass.
Take that last statement anyway you please.

44) We’ve got an ocean hidden under our
world. We’ve got water enough to sustain
a thousand years. How long til someone
spoils this too? How long til someone
complains we haven’t got enough
time to drink the oceans dry of tears?

45) I want a conversation without the weather,
or a tree of Martian crimson growing out of a
madman’s skull. I want an orgy with
the moon, or even better a couple of women,
but right now the moon seems erotic enough,
and I am lonely in this country on the edge
of the world. I want not to be alone, even
if that means I lie down with the dogs.

46) In fifty thousand years myself might come.
I might read the words I write and ponder their
implications. By the time Canada will be a
memory and no more. It will become some
lost civilization, perfect in its absence of

reality. People may pretend that the snows
were warm or that the homeless didn’t
use the streets as toilets now and then.
They might even think our leaders were
somehow brave, or heroes breathed a

different air that made them special in their
way. Who cares? And the person reading then
will know that things were not as he imagined
them. But as for the person I am now, what don’t
I know that I need to know as the sun goes down?

47) Mountains give way to rivers and rivers
to mountains. Conversations dull into silences
and silences into conversations. Lust
coalesces into marriage and dies.
Death mingles with lust and marriage
is undone again. Lovers fight and fuck
and fight once more. Fucking gives way
to nothing and nothing becomes the
reason people fuck. And finally vulgarity
becomes normality, and normality
becomes a vulgarity all its own.

48) I want ice cream.

49) A little folding of the hands to rest
and labour overtakes a man who’s blessed
himself with a house and a wife and a
child who curses his name. This country
is folding its hands; that’s my personal shame.

50 Give me a rooftop and I will spit
on anyone who’d curse this beautiful land
of mine. Seriously, I love the country that
I’m in. But I despise it all the same.
Complaining is the source
of our national pride. Mar 14/09.

KASWAYL

I. Her name was Kaswayl. In her true form she was bald,
almost grey skinned, but that grey was tinged with a light
bronze shade making her appear almost as if she were born
of white cliff sand.
She came from an island somewhere
in some lost sea and her people were cannibals, what would
be known in polite society as ogres.

Her eyes, her true eyes were black and empty and her
fingers ended in claws, sharp as the talons of some bird of prey.
In her lifetime she had killed and consumed over five hundred
humans, almost all of them criminals. Such was her nature.

Her name was Carolyn Smythe. In her false form she was
blond, with green eyes the colour of malachite and as her
husband once said, was possessed of soft features. Her
voice when she spoke in such
a form was calm, reassuring and as
soft as her form. When she had sex with her husband Richard
she would make herself appear slightly more desirable to him
just because she loved him. And he loved her too.

II. They had met years before though he didn’t know it. She
had been an avenger then, a hero of darkness, a daughter of
worms and shadowlands. She had saved his life
by devouring his attacker. In that moment
in the alley after the evening she saw
something in him she hadn’t seen before. He wasn’t afraid
or angry at being saved, or disgusted by her justice, or even
concerned at being alone in the dark

with a monster, and the creature that was eating the monster
alive. There was but the calm reassurance of a man who had
seen death and liked her face better than the mask of life.
She fled away from him, uncertain of her soul.

The next day she took her false form and followed him.
They met at a small café, had coffee and discussed absolutely
nothing of importance at all. They were married the
following week.

III. The man was named Richard Smythe. He had two
children, aged seven and five from a previous marriage,
and she become the second mother to those children.
She cooked breakfast,
washed dishes, combed the brown
hair of her two small friends and settled down to the
suburban malaise one might expect of anyone else in

the world. Then her husband was murdered and her children
taken away, by a stranger who ended her husband’s life. She
walked in and found him bloodied, and his final words were
“find the children,” before he coughed up blood and died.
And Kaswayl was reborn again.

IV. Her other form slid off her like a chrysalis. Her nails
grew sharp as daggers and her eyes grew black. There was
no anger in her voice but gone was the calm reassurance of a
loving wife. The avenger in her
awakened and she answered it. Weeping
tears of blood she left her home and followed the scent of her
children wherever that scent led.

To any who saw her there was more than the taste of
venom in her gaze. To any who saw her there was a palpable
aura about her, a deep violet blackness that had no edge.
It was as if light bent and was broken by touching her. It
was the monstrosity of a demon awakened by its own lust.

It was the sound of a wailing enfant caught and petrified.
It was all the nightmares of the Time’s ending rolled back upon
itself. She moved but did not seem to move at all. She was a
wraith. The very earth recoiled at her touch.
And far away two children huddled in the grasp
of another kind of monster.

V. His name was Calvin Karst. He was a man, looked
normal, even handsome by most accounts. Paid his taxes
and was good to his mother. He also raped small boys.
It had been a good hunt.
An unimportant man dead and two
boys to feed upon. He whetted his lips and thought about
the things to do when midnight had grown old.
And then there was a knock at the door.

There was no scream, because she did not want to
frighten her two sons. There was no sound at all. With
a single step of fingers along his throat she clasped
his life carefully,
as a moth is clasped by fire.

Later, hours later she walked out with her two beautiful sons
after she had returned to her false form. There were cries of
“where’s daddy?” but she couldn’t answer them. Later,
days later she called the police,
after a portion of her rage had subsided
and she felt Calvin had suffered almost enough. The police
went to his house on a beautiful suburb

surrounded by fences and willow trees. They opened
the door, went inside, found the usual paraphernalia of the sick
and twisted mind, and then later they found him. A few of
the rookies threw up, and a few

of the veterans as well. Calvin Karst was scattered over his
basement floor, pieces of him bloody and raw, lying like a
perverse puzzle waiting to be assembled.
But it wasn’t until he spoke and cried
and begged and begged and begged for someone to stitch him
back together again that the nausea began, and wouldn’t stop.

And in her house, her house of mourning Kaswayl
tried to believe Calvin’s suffering was enough to replace the
man she loved, and the father of her sons. Feb 26/09.

IF HELL WERE REAL

I’m like a fella at the crossword
puzzle. I don’t know what cross
I’m in. (A saying of my father, Feb 22/09.)

I can imagine it. Hell. There are so many depictions
of it after all, in film, comics, even in the old cartoons
the place of fire dominates the mortal mind.

It becomes such a sad conceit, so often the last refuge
of the horror film-maker trying to breath a little life into
a project that wouldn’t scare even the tiniest puppy.

And what becomes the point of hell, especially in such
works? They become but the stopping place of their
villain, the intermediate road between victim and victim.

But then originality was never an accusation made against
a film-maker so why should we be surprised when hell
becomes less the torment of eternity than the halfway

house of the uninspired killer. Oh, and dead, but every
one already knows that. And what if hell were real? A
country with its boundaries and currency, a nation state

whose history extends beyond the pyramids of old?
What then? I can almost imagine Satan speaking at the
UN (as if he doesn’t live there already,) addressing the

plight of poor unemployed demons, begging for reparations
against the libel of Christian fundamentalists, or the ignorant.
(Actually that’s the same thing.) And what must be the

machinery of hell, the bureaucracy of it? How must hell
be run, and for whom? In all the fictions and the fears hell’s
terror comes only by not wishing to go there. But like any

country not our own it loses its terror when the language breaks
down, when the unknown path opens and opportunities arrive.
It would be so easy if hell were real to immigrate there, to

throw off convention and start over in a new place, whether
it be of fire or not. In this world now what isn’t hell after all?
Only heaven I am told and no one ever seems to care what

awaits us there at all. I think it is because in hell everyone
has their own choices, however flawed, and in heaven no one
has any choices at all. Which makes heaven itself a hell

to some, and even to those who’d long for such a place how
do they know God is not just mocking them by leaving them
alone somewhere beyond the clouds, while He journeys
down below and celebrates eternity with his better son? Feb 26/09.

THE CHURCH
(The poem is my father’s.)

Where they put the church
they put a parking lot,
where they put the church
they put a tavern.

Where they put the church
they put a song choir,
but not a Christian one. It’s
all for the sin of redemption. Feb 24/09.

THE TALE OF SVAL-BRAGI

Sval-Bragi was a Svaltalfar, a dark elf, and raised in
the caverns below the roots of the world he grew strong
for he knew no fear, nor understood fear’s meaning.

Across the blood seas of wine and sorrow came the cry
of one in distress and Sval-Bragi took up his father’s
scythe and wandered through the twilit world to the

shores of the blooded sea. With his father’s twin
bladed scythe, (each blade at one of the staff’s ends,)
he carved himself a boat of rotted stone and sailed

himself across the tears of sorrow to the other side.
There seven ravens greeted him and begged him for
some meal, and all he had was mead, which he gave to

them. Then they rose up from the tree’s corpse they
had rested on and flew above the cavern into the elder
space beyond all seeing. Sval-Bragi went on and soon

found a colony of ants, great beasts large as him
which complained of being unable to find any food
in the world. Again he took up the challenge of his

kindness and led them, those black armoured soldiers
to one of the entrances of the outer world and told them
of a village full of humans they could eat. Off went

their thousands and tens of thousands, thanking him for
his kindness, and pointing him in the direction where the
dark cries came from. Up before him a long way from

the ants’ home of labyrinthine streets and the smell
of human flesh was a great tower leading upward into
night. From here the cries came, and so here the brave

one went, his father’s golden scythe beside him as his
companion and his brother, both fashioned by their father,
both honed by the tender steps of a mother teaching them

to be servants of their world. He threw open the great
doors of shale and there within a poor dragon lay, badly
wounded. She cried to him and with the scythe of his

father cut away the wound, leaving but healed skin behind.
Then he asked and inquired of the dragon who had done
this terrible deed, and she cried it was Wassersprung,

Caspar Wassersprung of the deep valley in the world above
the world of Svartelheim. So up must go Sval-Bragi, up to
face the tyrant of a dragon, and after he had climbed the

tower, after he had climbed the cliffs into the darkness
beyond all darknesses he clutched the roots of the world
and pushed himself through, like a moth pushing through

the bodies of the buried ones. There in that upper world
he searched until the tyrant of the dragon was found, and
with his father’s scythe Caspar was slain, so that the dragon

would have her peace again, to roam the places of men
unmolested in her feasting. Then downward he went,
back to the country of his home, as the seven ravens

transformed themselves to demons and went hunting in the
worlds above, where gods linger when they fear the worlds
below, that they do not control, or attempt to understand. Feb 26/09.

THE COWARD

Stone quiet, painting with the shadows
the coward waits. He has no moment to
consider bravery, no time to pretend

the hero’s part. All that is left of him,
all that remains is the compulsion to sit
in the dark and wait as the dragon passes

by, and maybe as the old stories go some
luck will rub on him and he may get the
upper hand of the rumbling thunder

passing by, but he thinks not. And
afterward, oh afterward he may brag all
he wants of feeling the dragon’s breath,

of seeing her black bladed teeth, but
now there is only the fear crouching with
him by the blasted stump of a tree by the
cave of death. And this is
all he feels, as anyone would. Feb 26/09.

FAIRYTALE

The hero must always be without wit
or intelligence, courageous, or more aptly lacking
in the knowledge of fear.
The heroine must
always suffer in some vaguely S&M fashion, be
it Snow White raped

by the Prince while asleep (which is the
original version of the tale,) Red Riding Hood
devoured by the wolf,
(a fine metaphor for sex
or rape according to some psychologists of the
modern age,) and my personal