(Glade, World, Master, Boy, Hero)

                                                 GLADE

There is a glacier.
Its blue tongue’s tip just tastes a frozen gorge.
There is a gorge, its walls shattered by cold; a once-green thing that, in dying, birthed a thousand aching fissures. It works its jagged way downhill, round ragged rifts and drifts until it comes upon a little frosted wood.
There is a wood, an island locked in ice.
Within this wood the gorge descends. It wanders and it wends; it brakes and all but ends outside a clearing wet with sun. And there, forking, its bent and broken arms embrace a strange, enchanted glade.

There is a glade.
And in this glade the black bears sleep, though salmon leap fat between falls. Here the field mouse draws no shadow, the eagle seeks no prey; they spend their while caressed by rays, and halcyon days are they. Here rabbit and fawn may linger, no longer need they flee. For in this timeless, taintless space, the Wild has ceased to be. (Outside the glade are shadow and prey, are ice and naked death. There blood may run freely. There the eagle, that thief, is a righteous savage, a noble fiend. But once in the glade he is dove, and has no taste for blood, running freely or otherwise).
And in this glade there nests a pool:  a dazzling, blue-and-silver jewel; profoundly deep, pristinely clear. All who sip find solace here, for this is the Eye of Being. They lap in peace, assuming blear, not knowing it is seeing. And ever thus this pool shall peer:  a silent seer, reflecting on—all that Is, and all Beyond.
(Outside the glade there lies a world where rivers ever run, where ghastly calves in random file revile a bitter sun. East, the day is born in mist. West she dies:  her rest, the deep. And North…North the Earth lies mute. Wind gnaws her hide, wind wracks her dreams. Wind screams like a flute in her white, white sleep).
But in the glade are tall, stately grasses, sunning raptly, spinning lore. Roots render the rhythms, blades bend without breeze, as signals ascend from the glade’s tender floor. (In this wise the glade weaves its word, airs its views. All the glade’s flora are bearers of news). They do not wither with fall, for in the glade there is no fall. They do not bind or wilt or brown—they gesture, spreading the mood, the mind; conveying, indeed, the very soul of the glade. As ever they have, as they shall evermore.
Bees do not hum here; they sing. They fatten the dream. Mellow and round are the timbres they sound, sweet is the music they bring. Birds do not sing here—they play. They carry the theme. Dulcet and warm are the strains they perform. Gifted musicians are they. (All in the glade are virtuosi. They were born to create. Melody, harmony, meter…are innate). Now the performance is lively and bright, now full, now almost still. For, though all in the glade may lean to the light, they must bend to the maestro’s feel.
And yet…there was a day, long ago in a dream, when this ongoing opus was torn. And on that day (so the lullaby goes) the wind brought a scream, and Dissonance was born.
There was a noise.
Moose tensed, their coffee eyes narrowed, their patient brows creased. Bees mauled the tempo, birds lost their place. The grass stood *****, all blades pointing east. There was a crash, and a shriek, and a naked, bleeding beast burst stinking through the fern, fell stumbling on its face.
Moose scattered:  unheard of. Sheep brawled, geese burst out of rhyme. The symphony, forever endeavored to soar sublime, fluttered, plunged, and, for all of a measure, ceased.
The pool was appalled…what manner brute—what kind of monster was this? Furless flank to forelimb, hide obscured by blood. As for its face…it had no face; only a look:  of shock frozen in time, of horror in amber. A deep welling rift ran temple to chin, halving the mask, caving it in. Such a grievous wound…the pool watched it stagger, on two legs and four, thrashing about till it came to a rise. There it labored for air, wiped the blood from its eyes, lashed at illusion, looked wildly round. Beholding the pool, the beast tumbled down.
And there this wretch plunged his thirst, drank his fill, fell back on his haunches.
The pool became still.
The two traded stares.
The glass read his features:  that durable eye pondered the wreckage and probed the debris. Revolted, the pool sought the succor of sky. But that thing remained—that face…in all creation…surely there could be…no other creature so ugly as he.
And he gazed in the glass.
Beneath the surface were…images…swimming in currents of shadow and light. He saw half-shapes and fragments…hideous men, exotic beasts…saw blue worlds of water, saw white worlds of ice…it was all so vague and unreal—yet somehow strangely familiar. Deeper he peered, but, as his mangled face neared, the sun smote the pool and the shapes disappeared. The brute pawed the ground and, dreaming he’d drowned, shook his head sharply and slowly looked round:
There were starlings at arm’s-length, transfixed with suspense, their tail feathers trembling, their dark eyes intense. Fantails and timber wolves, stepping in sync, paused for a sniff, stooped for a drink. Bees, pirouetting, threw light in his eyes. Seizing the moment, the pool pressed its hold.
And the glade revolved.
The freak watched it spin—saw the ferns’ greedy fingers reach round and close in, saw the tall grass rise high in an emerald sheen, swaying to rhythms from somewhere obscene. This place was madness; he struggled to stand, but, weak as he was, keeled over cold.
And the glade heaved a sigh, and the tall grass reclined, in curious patterns once rendered in whim. Far off in thunder the hard world replied, as iced pines exploded and screamed on the breeze. Down bore the sun, a chill just behind. The pool, grown blood-red, fended frost from its rim. Details dissolved in the oncoming tide. The pool dimmed to black. Night seeped through the trees.
Now flora found slumber while, pulsing below, the pool was infused with a soft ruby glow.
Soon birds bearing beech leaves, and needles of pine, laid down a spread and returned to the limb. But breath from the North blew their blanket aside. The wind grew in earnest, the air seemed to freeze.
And the wolf and the she-bear, of contrary mind, abhorring their task approached, looking grim. They sniffed him for measure, then, loathing his hide, growled their displeasure and dropped to their knees.
All night these glum attendants flanked his naked quaking form. The rising moon drew dreams in gray.
In time the man grew warm.

Morning swept through the glade in one broad stroke of the master’s brush, dappling the foliage with amber and rose. The pool was roused by the sweet pass of light. He opened his eye and the glade came alive:  into the whirlpool of life a thousand colors swam, chasing the scattering eddies of night. The magic of morning began.
Bluebird and goldfinch descended in rings, primaries clashing with robin and jay. Dollops of sun, repelled by their wings, spattered anew on the palette of day. Banking as one, the hues struck away.
There was a crowd.
And in this crowd that oddity sat, its chin on its chest, its rear pointing west. Its forepaws lay leaning, upturned and at rest. ***** and blood messed its muzzle and breast. Passed overnight. Or perhaps only dozed…tendril by tendril, claw by claw, the crowd decompressed:  the ring slowly closed.
And the stranger cried out and shifted his seat. His eyes sought his feet—rounding the arches, and topping the toes, the tall grass was questing. The little brute froze.
And the fauna took pause, and the flora went slack. Leaves followed talons, stems followed claws. Hooves tromped on paws as the crowd drifted back.
Not a breath taken. Not a move made. Stillness, like fog, enveloped the glade.
Now the grass tugged his feet, now the sea of jade splayed—left hand and right, the slender shafts reared. Gaining momentum, blade followed blade. The green field was torn till a deep swath appeared. The swath hurtled west, reflecting the sun. A hundred yards distant it died. Once more the grass stood, its tips spreading wide. The swath, born again, repeated its run.
Plain was the message, and clearly conveyed. The newcomer gawked. Confusion ensued.
The tall blades were swayed by the pulse of the glade.
But the swath was not renewed.
Something tiny bounced by. He ventured a peek, barely rolling an eye.
A chocolate sparrow, with pinfeathers black, popped past an ankle and paused to look back. The bird cocked its head, rocked in place, hopped ahead. It fluttered. It freaked. It glared and stopped dead. Vexed to its limit, it burst into flight.
The sitting thing watched till it passed out of sight.
Now a breeze bent his back, picked him half off his stern. The wind, done its best, grew flustered at last. It trailed to the west, thrilling lilies it passed. It wound round the willows and didn’t return.
So the fauna repaired to the live oak’s shade.
A strange kind of stupor fell over the glade.
From deep in the wood came a shape through the trees—a pronghorn, perhaps, or an elk swift and sure. But up limped a moose, a flyport with fur, low in the belly and wide at the knees. Wizened he was, scarcely able to see. Neither vision, nor vigor, nor velvet had he. He hobbled abreast, then groveled or died, his nose facing west, his tail flung aside.
The brute merely glazed.
But the glade was unfazed.
Those long shafts reshuffled. A tense moment passed.
The ominous shadows of badgers were cast. Three left their holes, as if to attack. They pedaled like moles and the stranger jumped back. He stumbled, fell flailing, and, kicking his guide, threw out his arms and tumbled astride. First he stepped on his tail, then he stepped on his pride. The moose bellowed twice and shook side to side while the little pest clung to his high, homely hide.
And the old moose unbent to his knees by degrees. He reeled like a drunk down the path of the breeze. Together they lurched through a break in the trees. And all morning long, and on through the day, both beggar and bearer would buckle and sway. The moose lost his temper, but never his way.
And the wind blew the sun to its deep ruby rest; the scrub, in obeisance, inclined to the west. Their slow taffy shadow in slinking would seem to slip round the rocks like a snake in a dream.
And the sun became a beacon, and the underbrush a stream. The wide Earth took their weight in stride, and the wind named him Hero.

                                               WORLD

When the sun was low the old moose began to stumble, at last limping to a halt beside a swift river lined with stunted pines. He’d half-expected a somewhat graceful dismount, but Hero, dug in like a tick, wasn’t about to let go. The moose knelt until his joints objected, shimmied, bucked, and with a sudden whirl sent the little bother flying.
Hero scraped himself out of the dirt and looked up forlornly. The ancient moose, his good eye gone bad, glared a long minute before hobbling away, his bony **** rocking with dignity, his scraggly tail fighting off imaginary flies.
Hero managed a few steps and dropped, staring in disbelief as the moose disappeared between half-frozen pines. He remained on his knees for the longest time, his jaw hanging, waiting for the moose—waiting for anything to show. At last a ruckus to his left snapped him out of it. His head ratcheted around.
Fifteen feet off the bank, three screaming gulls were dancing on an immense stone outcropping, fighting over a rapids-tossed sockeye. Hero was instantly famished. He wobbled to his feet and stumbled twice wading out, only regaining his balance by leaning against the current while rapidly wheeling his arms. The shrieking gulls reluctantly backed off as he stepped in slow-motion through the rushing water. Hero lunged at the slapping fish, cracked an ankle on the rock, and hopped around howling with both hands holding his shin. One foot was as good as none in the surging water. He went right under. Before he knew it he was being swept downriver.
This was glacial meltwater, so cold he quickly lost all sensation. Hero swallowed a mouthful and surfaced fighting for life; too disoriented to combat the current, too numb to realize his waving arm was striking something solid. That solid something turned out to be a swirling clump of rotted birches tangled up in scrub. He embraced one of these trunks as the mass slammed against isolated rocks, kicked his feet wildly, and somehow hauled himself aboard. The raft ricocheted rock to rock until repeated impacts sent it spinning. Giddy from the whirling and soaking, he clung freezing to the trees, retching continuously while the river roared in his ears. Through spray and tears he made out only cartwheeling fragments of the world.
But then the river was widening, its fury dissipating. The raft was approaching the sea. Hero gasped as the seemingly boundless Pacific swallowed the broad red belly of the sun. And as he spun he was treated to a panoramic, breathtaking spectacle:  the great indigo ocean with its slow traffic of driftwood and ice—voiced-over by the dismal calls of foraging gulls, and broken rhythmically by intermittent glimpses of the river’s rocky banks growing farther and farther apart. Whirling as it went, the dying man’s soul was taken by the sea.

At the 59th Parallel in winter, the Pacific coast plays host to numberless floes and minor bergs orphaned from Alaskan coastal glaciers. Hero cruised into a watery gridlock on a boat of ice-glazed birches, one bit of flotsam among the rest.
The cold wouldn’t let him move, wouldn’t let him breathe, wouldn’t let him think. He lay supine, feet crossed and hands clasped, terrified that to budge was to roll. An ice patina grew over the tangled trees like a white fungus—this growth soon webbed his fingers and toes, speckled his chest and thighs, glazed his hair and face, danced and disintegrated with his breath’s tapering plumes.
Floes and frozen-over debris tended to group with passing collisions; Hero’s married birches bit by bit accrued a mostly-submerged tangle of trunks and branches, all becoming fast in a creeping ice cement. Night came on just as resolutely, until land was only a flat black memory. The raft moved silently over the deep, still accepting the occasional gentle impact. And the floes became thicker and wider in a freezing doldrums; soon the proximate sea was all a broken field of packed ice, bobbing infinitesimally with the planet’s pulse.
Long ghostly strands of fog came striding over the torn ice field. They leaned this way and that, their mourners’ skirts tearing and patching and leaning anew. The ghosts were there to seal it:  their locked fingers and gray diaphanous wings were quickly becoming a wholly opaque descending shroud, its boundaries lost in the soughing wind.
Collisions came less and less. Darkness and silence, breaching some previously impenetrable barrier, began to take up residence in Hero’s chilling marrow. From his very center broke a weak little cry of refusal, of denial, as mind mustered frame in one desperate bid for freedom. His skin, frozen to the raft, peeled right off, and at that his inner brave succumbed. Hero’s smashed head arched back. His face contorted frightfully while the little lamp fluttered and paled within.
A raucous chorus slowly worked its way through the mist. It emerged a few hundred yards off—a tiny, terrified barking, growing in clarity as it grew in volume and urgency. It was a sound beacon. Hero strained eagerly, and when for one excruciating minute the beacon was cut off by a large passing body, was certain death had claimed him. Then it was back, and his heartbeat was quickening. He caught a heaving sound…something was moving his way down a wide tributary between floes. Hero could hear a gasping and snorting, accompanied by a hard slapping and splashing. The sounds vanished. In a moment the raft was rocked from below.
A sputtering muzzle blew salt in his eyes. A cold slimy flipper flapped across his chest and slapped about his face. The fur seal barked directly in his ear. Whiskers raked his dead cheek. The seal barked again.
Back below the surface it slipped. Hero listened anxiously as the splashing sound retreated whence it came.
The seal swam off perhaps a hundred feet and began barking hysterically.
From much farther off came a profusion of answering barks.
The seal swam back to Hero’s raft, circling and calling, circling and calling, while the responders approached en masse.
Now a sallow beam could be seen cutting through the fog. Several more showed vaguely along a plane yawing with some huge, barely discernible object.
A herd of northern fur seals burst into sight, barking madly, beating through the ice. They converged on Hero’s raft, really bellowing now.
Those odd yellow beams came in pursuit, and soon were close enough to eerily illuminate a gigantic wooden vessel parting the ice. The seals barked ferociously. Whenever the vessel leaned away, those nearest Hero’s raft would absolutely howl.
The fog deepened, condensed, crystallized, and then the collective light of a dozen lanterns was playing over a low, listing nightmare. Hero could hear the shouts of many aggressive men, but the waterborne seals, rather than scatter, boarded the ice and redoubled their din, fighting their way onto his quickly mobbed raft.
The sealers hurled serrated spears even as they clambered down rope ladders. When these men reached the ice the seals snapped and gnashed madly, refusing to be dislodged. The sealers lost all composure with the thrill of the hunt:  wielding clubs, spears, and hatchets—sometimes using iron bludgeons or any old utensil handed down—they crushed skulls, dragged carcasses, hooked animals still spurting and bleating. Clinging though he was, Hero was flabbergasted by the way the slipping and scampering men went about their butchery, hacking and smashing more with passion than with precision. But not a single seal attempted to flee—throughout the carnage they barked all the louder, egging on their slayers, carcass by carcass drawing the impassioned sealers to Hero’s ice-locked raft.
It was all so hazy and macabre. Hero’s eyes rolled back, and the next thing he knew he was sitting hunched on the vessel’s sopping deck. Two men were rubbing his limbs while another poured warm water down his back. He looked around in shock. The very notion of a boat containing more than one or two individuals—a sort of floating tribe—was way beyond his ken; so to see it, to have it come looming out of nothingness, was an experience almost supernatural.
He remembered some of those fur-covered men force-feeding him mouthfuls of halibut and seal fat, and he recalled a small group standing around him, shouting words that made no sense at all. After that he had a very vivid memory of their angry little chief repeatedly punching him while hollering one angry little word over and over and over. Hero couldn’t make out his inquisitor’s face, for the large feather-lined hood quite engulfed the man’s head, yet he could see those quick eyes flash as they caught the oil lamps’ light. Finally this man stopped boxing Hero’s ear. He stared hard. In these remaining decades of the tenth century it was fully within his power to administer as he saw fit—he could have ordered Hero’s immediate execution and not a man of his crew would have objected. He hesitated only because there wasn’t a hint of resistance in his prisoner’s pinched and frightened eyes. He leaned forward, studying the wound that all but split Hero’s face in two before grunting, raising his right arm, and yanking down its seal hide sleeve. Attached to the stump of his forearm was a primitive prosthesis consisting of a thick oak cap strapped to the arm with lengths of gut, and, hammered squarely into the center of that cap, a broad, cruelly hooked blade chiseled from a narwhal’s tusk. He held this obscenity in front of Hero’s eyes, traced the face’s deep diagonal rift, and once more demanded his captive’s identity. Hero then vaguely remembered being dragged along a tilting deck and thrown into the ship’s tiny hold. He retained a strong mental image of landing in a place of musty odors and dank projections.
There came a soft scuffling in the darkness, and presently a blind and exceedingly old woman felt her way to his side, mumbling as she approached. Her speech was comprised not of words; it was rather a running gibberish of cooing vowels and clucking consonants. The old woman was as mad as her circumstances; sick with sea and solitude, bedeviled by age and confinement. She sat cross-legged, patting her withered palms up his arm until she came to his face. Her strange mumbling soliloquy rose and fell as her bony fingers daintily explored the newly opened wound. Hero let his head fall back in her lap. A pair of hands like emaciated tarantulas scurried through the filth and tiny bodies until they came upon an old otter’s pelt bag that held her secrets. The woman loosened the bag’s cord and extracted an assortment of herbs, sniffing each in succession. She then scooped a handful of blubber from a bowl made of a previous occupant’s skull, kneaded the selected herbs into the blubber, and commenced gently massaging the wound, clucking and cooing while the black rats watched and waited.
For nine interminable days Hero remained in that cold, stinking compartment, rocking back and forth between life and death. The old woman never gave up on him. She clung to him during his seizures, rubbed his limbs vigorously when his blood pressure fell. She gathered various accumulated skins and, using woven strands of her own long hair, sewed him a multilayered, body-length wraparound with arm sleeves and very deep pockets, working by touch with a needle formed of a cod’s rib. By this same method she was able to fashion a pair of heavily lined snug-fitting moccasins. The old woman made him eat; she masticated the cod and halibut their keepers pitched into the hold, then shoved the results down his throat with a long gnarly forefinger. She called into his screaming nightmares, talking him out of sleep and back into their foul little reality. Together they lowed in the dark, while the keel groaned along and the waves beat time.
At the end of those dark nine days his strength was restored, but not his mind. Once again he was taken on deck.
The vessel had reached a chain of remote wind-swept islands, rocky and treeless, naked except for patchy carpets of hardy grass. These islands stretched far to the west, shrouded in mist. The ship was making for the smallest; just a chip on the sea. When they reached depth for anchorage Hero was hustled into a rowboat and lowered over the side. He looked up, saw two men climbing down by rope. These men positioned themselves at the oars and slowly rowed toward the islet. Seated between them, Hero felt like a man being led to his execution. He snuck a peek. The rowers’ heads were lowered, their features completely obscured by the heavy feathered hoods; they had all the somberness of pallbearers. Not a word passed between them as they rigidly worked their oars:  the only sound was the dip-and-purl of wood in water. Hero looked away. Against his will, he found his eyes drawn to that rocky islet waiting in the fog.
Not a bird, not a sea lion, not a shrub. It was lonesome beyond imagination.
Upon landfall one of the men used a spear’s point to **** Hero ashore. While his companion steadied the boat, he removed a skin sack full of half-frozen halibut, followed by a few armloads of precious tinder. These articles he tossed at Hero’s feet. He resumed his place at the oars and, without looking back, used the blunt end of his spear to shove off.
Hero watched the boat moving away, watched the men climbing their ropes, watched the boat being hauled aboard. As the mysterious vessel receded he saw a number of those silent men standing at the stern, stolidly returning his stare. Their hooded forms grew smaller and smaller, finally becoming indistinct. The vessel was swallowed up in fog.
Hero looked around, at a desolate world of rock and drifting ice. In the sunless pools at his feet a few purplish, flaccid sea anemones were waving in a sickly phosphorescence; along the rocks ran a tattered quilt of wild grass and lichen. It was the end of the world. He began to pace in his anxiety, only to crumple bit by bit inside his furs. At last he just sat with his face in his arms and wept. When he could weep no more he raised his head and opened his red, swollen eyes.
There were gulls all around him, staring like statuary in a madman’s garden. Standing in their midst were auks and puffins and murres, absolutely spellbound, unable to lean away. The silence was broken only by a wild, fitfully pursing wind—a wind that seemed, eerily, on the verge of producing syllables. And on that wind a flock of terns was rising slowly, their beady eyes fixed on the lone sitting man. The terns watched as he trembled, and banked as he swooned.
Then, beating as one, they threw back their wings and blew into the sun.

There was a blaze.
Behind that blaze a pair of black, bug-like eyes met his and immediately withdrew. A man wrapped in caribou hides stood abruptly, drawing angry swarms of sparks.
The Aleut peered queerly into the icy Pacific, his craggy profile merging seamlessly with a jumble of rocks showing just beyond his shoulder. The man was very tall, closer to seven feet than to six, and thin almost to emaciation.
He was also a mute. Soon enough he would display a talent for communication through gutturals, but now his body language spoke louder than words. It told the shivering stranger that he was not only disliked—he was feared.
The islander removed the hides he’d piled on the sleeping man. He produced a bone awl and strategically pierced a caribou hide, draped the hide over the old woman’s handiwork, and ran a cord of tightly woven tendons crosswise through his made holes, knotting it at the bottom to create a kind of cloak. He then killed the fire, heaped wood, fish, and remaining hides into Hero’s arms, and led him to a tiny cove where his long skin canoe lay in the grass. This was not the one-man kayak used by his people for centuries, but an actual canoe modeled on the graceful vessels he’d observed under the control of northern coastal tribesmen. After dragging it into the water he perched Hero in the fore, placed the cargo in the middle, and stepped into the rear like a gaunt furry spider. The Aleut dug out a paddle and began pulling with smooth strokes of surprising muscularity, his black eyes trained on his quiet companion’s back.
So began their long island-hopping journey. They stepped the chain one stone at a time, living off the sea. But much as the islander disliked Hero’s vapid company, it was not in his nature to proceed expeditiously; his people, remote as they were, had learned to count not in days but in generations. Given this, the Aleut took his time. He showed Hero how to build shelters of skin and gut; during bad weather the two would sit on an island in utter silence while rain hammered on their stretched seal-intestine window. And one very clear night he pointed out constellations while attempting to demonstrate, using broad gestures, just how the brighter heavenly bodies were in perfect alignment with the Aleutians. Hero followed his guide’s gestures as a pet follows its master’s movements and, like a pet, soon became bored. The Aleut did not grow flustered. He grew ever more wary:  behind that granite, weather-beaten exterior squirmed a very primitive imagination. Superstitious as he was, the Aleut was almost certain Hero could read his mind. So one time, and one time only, he threw a searing look at the back of Hero’s bowed and listing head. After a long minute of vigorous thought-projection he shifted his gaze aside. The brute appeared to feel this shift, and gently turned his head. And both saw the ocean break rhythm, and watched as otters and sea lions surfaced, noted their progress, and slipped without tremor beneath the waves.
In spring the fogs lifted. The grimness gave way to serenity, a generous sun buttered the dappled sea. On the islands grass grew lushly. Wildflowers leapt on the color-starved eye.
And one day the islander’s nape itched. He turned to see a flock of arctic terns casually tracking them under a gorgeous, white-plumed sky. As the day progressed the terns came drifting high overhead, slowly but surely taking the lead.
The Aleut squinted against the sun. He’d never known these birds to pursue a westerly migratory pattern—the terns were distributing themselves into a rough wedge shape, much like geese on the wing.
For a while he let the flock be his guide. Then, to test his stars, he cunningly steered his canoe north. At once the wedge disintegrated. Not until he’d lowered his eyes and pulled purposefully to the west did the disrupted pattern reassert itself. He peered up timidly. The wedge was now in the shape of a perfect arrowhead.
Just so were the fates of mariners and aviators inextricably entwined. At night, once the Aleut had landed his canoe on the nearest pearl, the terns would light in a quiet circle and remain until sunrise. As the Aleut and Hero took to sea, the flock would quickly form that same authoritative pattern.
In time the Aleut paddled his companion clear to the westernmost islands of the Aleutian chain. His people had dwelt, even here, a thousand years and more, but no contemporary islander knew for certain what lay beyond. Legend told of an enormous land mass forever gripped by cold, where a cruel people waylaid innocent seafarers for barbaric sacrificial rites.
So here the islander paused. But even as he vacillated he noticed the terns were veering south.
If the Aleut had been able to curse aloud he would have been vociferous. He was being compelled to follow an even less desirable course—that of the unknown open ocean. Now he looked upon his passenger’s hunched back not with fear but with loathing. He took a deep breath, rolled his shoulders, and defiantly continued west. The wedge broke up immediately. The terns dive-bombed the canoe, whirled around the windmilling Aleut, tore skyward and hovered determinedly. Something huge broke surface behind them, but the Aleut was way too frayed to turn. He dropped his head, a beaten man, and began paddling south. Little by little the birds returned to formation.
The tiny canoe had no business going up against the mighty Pacific. It would soon have been swallowed and smashed, had not the terns veered in close formation whenever the distant sea appeared too rough. Once he’d lost his bearings the Aleut religiously followed their serpentine course.
The days began to warm.
Now the sea’s bounty all but leapt in the canoe.
It seemed the Aleut was forever catching the finest currents, practically sliding down a corridor entirely free of peril. In this manner he was able to safely navigate waters no such craft had mastered before.
They were proceeding south by southwest, awed children of a plenteous, generous sea. The going became easier by the day, the ocean heavier with cod.
Nights the Aleut drifted comfortably, but a lifetime of wariness made him wake off and on. He’d slowly rise to find Hero sitting quietly under the stars, and soon he’d see, pallid in moonlight, a large body neatly pleating the ocean’s surface. The shape would precede them a while, only to vanish without a ripple.
All this strangeness kept the Aleut’s heart in a whirl, though he took pains to maintain his poise.
To allay his fear he kept a flat black stone planted squarely between them. It was his oldest treasure; an oddity he’d taken off the body of a mauled Tlingit woman when he was a child. Who she was, and how she’d come by the stone, were mysteries far beyond him, for no such piece had ever been known to Aleut or Inuk.
The stone was smooth and had been worked perfectly round. Bright yellow specks were scattered about its dull black face.
Long ago someone had etched a quaint and clumsy rune on that flat black surface—it was the crude, universal symbol for sun:  a broad circle surrounded by several rays. When the stone was rubbed against a pelt it possessed the curious property of growing quite warm and bright in the rune’s grooves, while the surface remained cool and dull.
This stone, both friend and overlord, had always “spoken to him”. It caused him to become restless when it was time to move on, and allowed him to relax when a destination had been reached. In this way he’d come to the familiar islet and discovered the unconscious little man. Just so:  the stone, he was sure, was responsible for making him “feel bad” as he watched the stranger shiver, and “feel better” once he’d built him a life-saving fire from the small pile of tinder he’d found nearby.
By now, however, the Aleut was wholly disenchanted with his stone, and deeply regretted having done its mysterious bidding. Never before had he been so long from sight of land, and never before had he felt so very, very small. The unimagined immensity of the Pacific was really starting to get to him when, after all their while at sea, a gray, seductive haze broke the horizon. They had reached another chain of islands, an Asian chain, the dark and smoky Kurils. Here a cold current kept the climate cool and foggy, and the chill, along with the prevalence of otter and seal, made him feel almost at home.
But this place gave him the creeps; he was a stranger, a trespasser somewhere sacred. There was a looming quality to the island mountains that made him extraordinarily aware of his transience, his pettiness, his puniness. He grew more and more cautious, sure their progress was being monitored—he could have sworn he saw wraiths in the trees, and wolves padding warily in the brush. The big islands looked on breathlessly. All along the rocky cliffs, thousands of auks and puffins followed the canoe in dead silence, their heads turning simultaneously, their countless tiny eyes peering redly through the fog. As the weeks passed, the Aleut’s anxiety was manifested in tics and sighs, and he’d cringe each time the crimson sun sank behind those black volcanic summits. In his imagination the mountains would rise right out of the sea, as though to pluck him. But the islands, in all their dignity, would always refuse to acknowledge so meek a stranger, and return their eyes to sea. The Aleut would hang his head, and timidly paddle by.
Then for days and days he pulled his weary canoe west—through a strait parting two mighty islands not part of the chain, and thence across a sea that was a warm, enticing bath. Spring had come to the East Asian coastal waters, and the Ainu, alone and in groups, were venturing deeper in search of increasing bounty. The Aleut, absorbed in his thoughts of sweet climate and bitter fate, was unaware they’d been spotted.
This first meeting between strangers of different worlds was a brief and awkward one. A lone Ainu fisherman, seeing the Aleut come paddling out of the unknown, dropped his net and turned to stone. The Aleut, for his part, instinctively froze with his body turned half-away to make the leanest target possible. Their stares locked. Never had the Aleut seen a face so heavily bearded, and never hair so fair. The Ainu began banging on his bronze catch pail. Other fishers soon appeared from the north and south, effectively cutting off the canoe. The Aleut caressed his stone and looked to the sky. The wedge had vanished. He put down his head and paddled for all he was worth.
With the word out, uncountable fishing craft appeared out of the blue and broke into hot pursuit, their pilots determined to force the canoe ashore.
Suddenly they were in sight of land, and the sea was absolutely riddled with watercraft. A train of small boats cast off from the mainland, even as a posse of two-man coracle-like tubs began to surround the battered skin canoe, their inhabitants calling back and forth in astonishment at the sight of these dark, savage newcomers. But the pursuing little coastal men, banging excitedly on the sides of their boats, were not Ainu. They had very straight black hair, prominent cheekbones, and strangely slanted eyes. And their speech, oddly marvelous as it was, was a rapid series of coos, chirps, and barks. Their boats formed a tight semi-circle around the canoe, forcing the Aleut to approach the mainland. The little men banged their boats maniacally, with more joining in as the canoe neared shore.
A bit farther south was a natural harbor swarming with fishing vessels of every description. As the canoe was forced into this harbor, people along the rocky coast began banging whatever they could get their hands on, until the air was filled with their lunatic percussion.
Tiny brown men came running along a soft yellow cliff overlooking the harbor, gesturing wildly. The canoe was squeezed between a chain of tubs and the shore, and, as it slowed, the tempo and ferocity of the banging decreased accordingly. When the canoe came to a halt the banging and shouting stopped. Hero creaked to his feet. The first North American to set foot on Asian soil stepped out shakily.
There followed the profoundest silence imaginable.
A second later it was as if a dam had burst.
Hundreds of hysterical, yammering voices erupted from hundreds of hysterical, clinging men and women. Hero was spun around, jostled about, handed along. He stared into their astounded, pinched little faces, and the sun, pulsing between their heads as he was turned, repeatedly stabbed his eyes. There came an excited outburst and frantic splashing which could only have been the Aleut’s violent demise, and then Hero was somehow limping alongside a primitive fishing village, blindly following a narrow dirt path that hugged the yellow cliff’s base. The warm spring sun caught the dust as he shambled. He rounded a bend and stopped.
Half a dozen children stood in his way, too fascinated to run. A chatter and scuffle rose behind him. He looked back to see that he was now in the midst of a small crowd of these children, and that more were running up with cries of amazement.
A stone struck his shoulder. As Hero turned another glanced off his chest.
A moment later he was being pelted from all sides, and the giggles and gasps had become something wildly unreal. He dropped to his knees in a hail of hurled rocks, covered his head with his arms, and slithered up the path on his belly.
A new voice broke in; an older, authoritative voice.
The children scampered off squealing.
Hero, shaken to his feet, found himself face to face with a diminutive, shouting, incomprehensible old man. The old man threw his arm around Hero’s waist and, jabbering all the while, led him to a secondary path cut into the cliff’s face. This path sloped gently upward over the waves. Together they picked their way to a place maybe halfway up, where the cliff’s face was honeycombed with natural alcoves and dug-out caves. Most of these spaces were used as one-man shelters; a few, cut deeper in the earth, as family hives. Strange gabbing people slid out of these holes like worms, reaching, but the little old man, who was evidently a little old man of some stature, embraced his find possessively and shouted them back inside.
The path narrowed as they climbed.
At its summit spread the upscale end of the neighborhood. Hero was led to a hovel nestled amid dozens of similar hovels, all scattered around a dainty stream wending between patches of stunted vegetation.
The old man’s place was basically a one-room hut fashioned of earth and salvaged boat hulls, with a slender side-yard surrounded by dry, dusty hedges. But inside it was clean and tidy, with rice paper partitioning and, built into the far earthen wall, a miniature stone fireplace. The old man sat his guest in the exact center of the room. There he fed him scraps from his bowl, using long sticks to pluck out bits of fish and clumps of tiny, starchy white pellets.
He studied the brute closely, watched him chew, walked round and round him. He poked here. He pinched there.
And that night he lit a fire on his crushed-shell hearth.
Hero curled up on a mat where the gossip of flames could reach him. Nearby, at his delicate wicker table, the old man sat in semi-darkness, illuminated only from the waist down.
But his eyes were alive. They spat and darted as they reflected the fire’s light, and, when at last they’d begun to sputter, his scratchy little voice came pattering out of the dark, muttering something vile and oddly modulated, sometimes in a whisper, sometimes in a gathering snarl.
Hero feigned slumber, unable to ignore those paired ominous flashes. Still, the room was cozy, and the fire warm, and the play of light and shadow kicked sleep in his eyes.

In the morning he woke in the old man’s side-yard, his head pounding, a rusty iron clamp securely fastened around his neck. This clamp was attached to the outermost link of a crude three-foot chain, and the link at the other end to a long stake driven into eight inches of solid rock. The chain and stake, like the clamp, were hammered of local iron. The clamp was too tight for comfortable swallowing, the chain too short to make standing possible. Hero could, however, spread out on his chest and stretch an arm to a low row of hedges. By parting the tangled undergrowth he had a limited view of the fishing village below, and of the harbor beyond. As the days passed he was able to tweak himself a view-space discernible only from his peculiar vantage. He accomplished this by gently breaking small branches strategically, then guiding their interrupted growth with the utmost tenderness. It was his secret garden.
He had no memory—none whatsoever—of being staked here. Obviously the old man hadn’t set this up overnight. Hero’s mind prodded timidly…how many others had been chained to this spot, and why?
But over the subsequent weeks and months he went beyond caring. Each day was the same:  just after dawn the old man would storm into the tiny side-yard swinging his reed whip wildly. The lashings were savage and unremitting. The old man, except for his eyes, would be mute. Only his whip need speak. And the snap of his reed had but one message:  when you see this whip you go down, and you go down immediately.
The naked savage, scarred head to foot, learned to go prostrate on the moment. Even so, the old man couldn’t resist the temptation to indulge in the occasional good old, all-out thrashing. And after each session he would toss the prisoner a vile mess of dead fish and rotting leftovers.
Hero lived like this for many months, lost in a confused world of pain and anticipation. Perversely, he came to look forward to the bite of that whip, for, whether he flogged him in passion or just for sport, the old man was always sure to make it personal. It seemed their relationship might go on forever.
But one day there was a great commotion in the sleepy little fishing village. Hero parted the leaves and beheld a small train of oblong coaches at rest near the harbor. Large oxen yoked in pairs lolled between the carriages, immune to the clamor around them. There were dark shaggy horses and colorfully dressed Bactrian camels. The horses and camels were tethered in the rear, but were occasionally paraded around the carriages by little men wielding long painted bamboo poles. The whole affair was exotic and mesmerizing, eccentric and profane. Hero watched all day in amazement, infected by the hubbub, though he was totally mystified by the crowd’s fascination on the carriages’ far side.
And late that afternoon he saw the old man come walking out of that crowd, talking heatedly with another man. The stranger was shorter and broader than the old man, with long stringy hair and long stringy mustaches. He saw them climbing the path, saw them crawl inside a hole lashing furiously. They were lost from view for a minute, then popped up big as life. Hero glowed and curled up eagerly as they approached.
The old man and stranger came into the narrow side-yard still arguing. The old man grabbed Hero by the hair and twisted until he was facing the newcomer.
The stranger had oily, porous skin, and a round but grave countenance. His highly slanted eyes were bright and restless. He studied Hero’s mutilated face with keen interest before borrowing the old man’s reed. When Hero scraped at his feet he grunted and returned the reed.
The stranger pulled out something shiny and hefted it in his hand. He then raised his other hand while considering Hero, as though weighing him too. The old man’s eyes glinted, and for an instant his expression became grotesquely servile. The stranger and old man, facing, nodded curtly in unison. The stranger dropped the shiny thing onto the old man’s itching palm. The old man whipped Hero frantically before taking a small ax to the chain. A few hard blows split a link, the broken link was bent back by the tool’s shaft, and the prisoner was at last released.
The old man handed the stranger a short hempen rope. The stranger bowed deeply. He then tied an end of the rope through one of the remaining links and began dragging Hero along. Hero’s hands sought the old man, who kicked and cursed him all the way to the path. The three stumbled single-file to the bottom. The old man waved his arms and shouted hysterically, trotting behind until he ran out of breath. But he got in a final kick and, before he came to a gasping halt, managed to lash Hero once for old time’s sake, and to spit on him twice for luck.

There were five carriages; a long one in the center hitched to four oxen, and two smaller coaches in the front and rear with a pair of oxen on each. The carriages were old and battered, built of splitting wood slats and rusted iron braces. Various hides, spare wheels, and a hundred odds and ends were tied to the sides and roofs. Hero’s new master, using him as a ram, shoved him through the crowd to the long carriage. He hauled him up the single wood step and watched the crowd’s reaction. Children hid behind mothers, mothers hissed and jeered, men spat in that smashed, disgusting face.
Satisfied, Hero’s master twisted the rope tighter and dragged him through the hide flap that served as the carriage’s rear wall.
A strange ruckus began at their entrance.
Inside the carriage were bulky shapes and quirky movements, yet the immediate and overwhelming impression was one of unbelievable stench. Hero, instantly covered with flies, was kicked and shoved down a foot-wide aisle. The carriage’s walls were riddled with black flecks of old dried blood, the floor coated with standing *****, a variety of small carcasses, and some clinging, indefinable slime. But the living contents of this hell were so horrifying, and so unexpected, that Hero at once dropped to his knees. Observing this, master grabbed a whip off the wall and lashed him along the floor.
A number of bamboo cages lined either side of the carriage, each four feet high, four feet wide, and three feet deep. In the first cage to their left, a quadruple amputee dangled in a leather harness in a cloud of flies, jealously gnawing a chicken carcass balanced on his belly. The second cage held a man who had been burned over ninety per cent of his body, and the third a middle-aged woman with no eyes or tongue, her head shaved. The next cage housed a fully grown black leopard, its bright eyes fixed on the horrified newcomer. Then an empty cage, and finally a cage containing a demented man whose long yellow nails were busily raking a face deeply scarred and bleeding.
The first cage against the opposite wall held two girls rolling in their own excrement. Siamese twins unable to part, they had developed a unique method of locomotion, and now executed a three-quarters cartwheel in Hero’s direction, their mangled, severely bitten hands attempting to reach him through the bars. In the cage next to theirs a naked dwarf glowered menacingly, his eyes following coldly as Hero’s master shoved him down the narrow aisle, occasionally pausing to lash a cage. The hissing and howling increased as each prisoner beheld the new neighbor.
The third cage held an intensely sick adult Bornean sun bear, so confined it was entirely unable to move. Its hide was a patchwork of scraggly fur and grayish skin, glistening with odd eruptions. It rolled its sunken eyes in Hero’s direction, its muzzle twitching feebly.
The next cage contained a man who was frightfully diseased. Broad fungal patches covered his face and limbs, terminating in waxy folds that dangled like a rooster’s wattles. Welling sores spotted his chest and back. His eyes were bugged and sallow; his lower lip drooped below his chin. He barked wetly at Hero’s passing legs.
The second-to-last cage housed a rare, completely hairless Chinese albino, and the last cage a very tall, skeletal woman. The albino snapped at Hero while repeatedly banging his head against the cage. The woman hissed and coiled like a snake, her spine arching amazingly.
Master hauled Hero to the empty cage on his left, swung its door open with his foot, and forced him to his knees by pushing down with all his weight. He kicked and punched until Hero had been squeezed inside, then shut and secured the wide bamboo door.
Master inched his way back down the carriage, hammering the **** of his whip on each cage as he passed. There was a glimpse of daylight as he lifted the flap.
Once he’d departed, the carriage grew eerily silent.
Hero cautiously turned his head. Less than a foot away, the black leopard was frozen in place, one paw waving hypnotically in his face. The beast’s fangs were bared, its ears straight back, its eyes glistening. Hero turned ever so slowly, until he was looking into the eyes of the demented man in the final cage. The man cocked his head quizzically. A second later he was screaming his lungs out in a bizarre downward spiral.
At once the carriage erupted. The freaks shrieked and scrabbled, the leopard spun in place. Directly across the aisle, the albino hurled himself against the bars of his cage. He batted his face with his fists, threw back his head, and just howled and howled and howled. The snake woman curled even tighter, her long scrawny legs entwined behind her head.
Hero sat with breath held, absolutely silent, absolutely motionless. He very, very slowly closed his eyes.

Later that night the flap was flung high. The menagerie came alive as master, weirdly illuminated by moonlight, slowly made his way down the aisle carrying a skin sack oozing blood. He stopped at each cage to toss in a dying chicken and a handful of smelt.
When he reached Hero’s cage he looked down thoughtfully.
He extracted a quivering chicken and held it above the cage so that blood dripped on the brute’s deeply pleated forehead. Hero lowered his eyes. Master’s face darkened. He smashed the bird against the cage, over and over, a vein throbbing in his temple. Finally he hissed and displayed the limp chicken high over the albino’s head. The albino yelped and kicked, thrusting his hand up between the bars and jerking it back to lick away the blood rolling down his forearm.
Master eyed Hero coldly before pointedly dropping the chicken into the albino’s searching hands.
Master hissed again. He slowly made his way out.
Soon there was a commotion outside. The carriage rocked a bit before settling. Hero, turning in his cage to peek through a rift in the wood, saw horses being urged forward. He could hear men shouting. The carriage rocked again. He looked up and saw the gibbous moon suspended in mist. For just a second something wedge-shaped cut across its soft white face.
But then the oxen were grunting, the wheels had been freed, and the horses drawn abreast. Master’s lash spat left and right, and the show proceeded…west.

                                              MA­STER

She was very round and very small, with very short, very shaggy black hair. Her arms bore the scars of numerous bites from beast and man, and around her neck ran long wheals from a particularly savage owner. Hero, having spent the better part of the morning watching master storm in and out of a strange screaming house, now watched him drag the little round woman through the dirt. For a while he listened to the song of his master’s lash, waiting for the woman to break. But there was never a whimper.
It had been a difficult transaction for master, and an altogether difficult morning. For hours he’d paced up and down the main carriage, alternately murmuring affectionately into, and lashing at, each cage he visited. The sun bear, long dead and stuffed, had been taken outside for barter. It had soon been returned.
Master had lingered over Hero’s cage for a good while, staring critically. He’d begun shouting, and three of his men had burst in through the flap, unlatched the demented man’s cage, and dragged him out by the feet for trade, master personally stomping on his torn and groping hands.
And now master was kicking and shoving the little woman down the aisle as his men restrained her by the hair and throat. Upon master’s command these men stripped her naked and commenced pinching and slapping while making threatening faces and mocking noises. The freaks sat right up in their cages.
The woman looked as though she’d fainted:  her arms were lax, her eyes rolled up. Her whole face seemed to purse, and her body, head to toe, began to run blue. Her fingers quivered, arched, and clawed—the woman was self-asphyxiating. Master fairly leaped with delight while the cages rocked around him. He had the men slap her awake. Once she was fully conscious they stuffed her into the demented man’s old cage next to Hero’s.
Master then looked in eagerly, one to the other, his hands balled into fists. The woman buried her odd round face in her forearms as she squeezed herself into her cage’s deepest corner. Hero gazed indifferently and went back to his peephole.
Master exploded. He smacked and kicked the cages over and over, swore up and down, ran the shaft of his whip back and forth against the heavy bamboo bars. Eventually he calmed somewhat. He stared coldly at Hero, made a ***** smile, and spat right in his eyes. A tense minute passed. Master slowly made his way outside.
Hero automatically relaxed. Across the aisle the albino ****** his face between his cage’s bars to sniff the newcomer. The leopard, bobbing rhythmically, emitted a high-pitched squeal that gradually descended to a steadily throbbing growl.
Hero looked the stranger over. Once she’d lowered her hands he saw that her eyes were crossed, her jaw slack, her face as round as the full moon. He looked closer. There were scars all over her throat and arms:  plainly, the small round woman had been treated very badly. Hero instinctively slid a foot between the bars; the woman cried out and scrunched even deeper. Across the aisle the albino quickly extended an arm. Without knowing why, Hero turned on him. The albino flinched, his eyes tearing into Hero’s. A second later he was stamping his feet and grinning wildly. Hero went back to his peephole.
Next morning master and two of his men dismantled the bamboo walls separating Hero’s and the woman’s cages. They bound the frames with broad leather bands, making a single cage of the two.
A common door was fashioned and secured. Master used his broad blade to shear away Hero’s rags. The men hunched around the long cage expectantly.
The naked couple backed away. Master was instantly exasperated—he shouted, lashed furiously, stamped and screamed, jabbed a broken shaft between the bars with malevolent intent, whirled and hurled the shaft at nothing. The carriage’s inmates went out of their minds. At master’s bellowed command a man scurried outside, returning with a long rope of woven leather strands. Master opened the cage and, applying all his weight, pinned Hero and his new mate in an awkward embrace while his men tied them together.
Again master and his men bent over the long cage to watch.
When Hero realized his predicament he made a desperate attempt to reach his peephole.
The men, misreading his struggles, babbled and cheered, but master threw up his hands. He then, through gesture, ordered his men to drape a number of hides over the long cage. Once these hides were in place he very quietly bent to one knee and placed an ear against the cage. After a while he cursed and rose to his feet. He shook the cage and stormed out, whipping and kicking the howling inmates.
In the semi-darkness the man and woman quit fighting their bonds.
A muffled patter began on the hide-covered roof.
Rain, as always, had a calming effect on the carriage’s occupants, causing the freaks and beasts to slip, one by one, into lethargy or slumber. Under such a spell, the attainment of master’s goal was inevitable.
It was a coupling both innocent and vile, without passion or celebration. Occasionally the freaks would surface, register their excitement by shrieking, shaking their cages, or otherwise clamoring…but very quickly the air would stifle them, weighing their heads and confusing their impulses. The atmosphere grew heavier by the minute. And, when night rolled over the carriages, the rain came down in sheets.

Leaning ******* the woman’s cage, master slipped his gnarly hand between the bars and slowly rubbed her belly in a counter-clockwise motion, his sinister features soft in the candle’s light. And he told, in nonsensical cooing whispers, of a lovingly secure and impossibly prosperous future.
How large and promising that belly had become! And how wise was he, the cunning and aggressive master, in his far-reaching business decisions. He turned his affection to the motionless gaping brute; stroked the battlefield of its face, tossed in another lizard. Master rubbed his palms together. From now on it was extra lizards daily, for both the woman and her mate. He remarked, with only passing interest, his star player’s continuing indifference. They didn’t know each other, didn’t need each other.
There’d been months of shows on the road now, broken only recently by this sensible rejoining of the mates at conception.
Hero’s horrible disfigurement was unquestionably top draw; he was a guaranteed crowd pleaser at every stop. So now master looked him straight in the eyes and smiled. He held the reeking candle high. The carriage was absolutely silent. Master smiled again, rose to his feet, tiptoed away.
Hero watched him retreat until the flap had fallen. He returned to his peephole, saw master round the rear of the carriage and slowly crunch by. For a time he could see nothing but the half-shapes of junipers bathed in starlight. There was a tentative movement to his right and a large shape came to obstruct his view.
The horse stood for a minute in profile. It slowly brought its head to rest against the carriage, applying its eye to the peephole. Hero froze. The two remained fixed, eyeball to eyeball, while a breeze played odd tunes on the outer wall’s hanging paraphernalia. The horse’s big dark eye rolled nervously. A long moment passed. Slowly the horse backed off. It stood uncertainly for a while, staring at the peephole. Then it quietly moved away.

Master kicked the cages one by one, left hand and right, as he slowly made his way down the aisle. Into each cage he delivered a personalized warning in passing—a growl, a hiss, a bark—but he was quickly losing control. Animal electricity hopscotched the carriage, cage to cage, ceiling to floor, front to rear and back again. Master froze. Much more of this excitement, he feared, could seriously agitate the woman—with grave consequences for master.
She was splayed on her back, in labor’s throes, her ankles and wrists bound to the long cage. Hero had been removed to give her room, and now sat hunched atop the snake woman’s cage, two men holding him by the throat and legs.
Master gnashed and snarled, listening to the woman scream, watching her stupid round head bounce up and down and back and forth. He knew it! He’d been suckered, hoodwinked, scammed—ripped off like a common rube. The woman was too ******* to handle even something as natural as childbirth. Still…it was too late to second-guess himself—all these months he’d been patient—he’d been supportive and vigilant and now he would not be denied. He flogged one of the men to alleviate his tension.
The blue lady was very slowly, very dramatically arching her spine. Master wiped the sweat from his eyes. When the bars were pleating her big round belly, her shoulders began drumming on the straw-strewn floor.
Master screamed one very colorful expletive.
A razor silence came over the carriage. Not a body moved or breathed.
At last two men tiptoed around their purpling master and leaned into the cage. One obediently ****** a foot between the bars. He pushed ******* her right knee while using a hand to grip the left knee, spreading her legs wide. The other man drew a broad leather strap between her teeth. After lifting the woman’s head he pulled the strap behind her neck, knotted it to make a gag, and yanked a skin sack over her face. He looked up anxiously. Master licked his lips and nodded. The man made a fist and frantically punched the woman’s face until her muffled screams ceased. She moaned gently throughout her contractions.
Master genuflected, brought a spitting candle in tight, and took a deep breath. As he raised his hand the candle’s light bounced off his knife’s chipped and scored eleven-inch blade. Master swore and reached down carefully. He flicked his wrist twice and the menagerie went mad.

The child was a tremendous disappointment.
Master had eagerly anticipated an infant ******* and deformed; something embracing the best qualities of its parents. He had even designed a special cage that could be expanded by degrees as the spawn developed. There also remained the tantalizing option of a family display, though such an undertaking would require the eventual construction of a structure even larger than the cage its parents now shared. Master anguished over the logistics, knowing it would break his heart to have to cut one of his jewels’ throats just to make room for a growing child. Nights he would slowly pace the carriage with all the possessiveness of a jealous suitor, one hand maneuvering a sputtering candle, the other tenderly rapping his whip’s **** against each visited cage.
But the boy was a flawless specimen; a beautiful, undemanding baby. From the moment master angrily tossed the placenta he felt cheated, even betrayed. He grimaced as it peaceably took to its mother’s breast, despite the surrounding horrors. Master hated it, immediately and entirely. The ****** thing was so docile it was almost charming. He drew his knife and was just reaching down, when an overwhelming sense of dread shook him like a rat in the jaws of a mastiff. Sweat poured down his squat, pig-tailed nape. He knew he would live to regret it, but decided to not cut the child’s throat right away. It was the oddest feeling. His knife hand had trembled for the first time in his life, and he had found himself momentarily contemplating right and wrong at the outset of a perfectly simple and commonplace procedure. That was it, then. His business instincts were letting him know there was a good, albeit unknowable, reason to let the sweet baby live. Master left the carriage anxiously, muttering in his ambivalence.
The boy grew to embody his worst expectations. Not only was it a poorly oriented child, clinging to its father rather than its master almost from the moment of weaning, but it soon proved a lousy draw with the patrons. Those who paid to view the child dangling in its special cage inevitably departed unsatisfied, some vocalizing, strangely, an acute sense of shame. So once again master entered the carriage with his knife hand steady, and once again he exited trembling, his heart in his throat and his soul in a whirl. He whipped the dwarf savagely before leaving. What place conscience in the mind of a businessman?
Soon as the boy could walk, master put him to work fetching and feeding. But the brat was slothful in his chores, preferring to hang around his family’s cage while staring wistfully at his father. For their part, the parents were wholly disinterested. Master would fume while Hero gazed for hours out his peephole—even as the mother lolled, perpetually ill. Sometimes that accursed woman’s condition riled poor master to no end. She could teeter at death’s door for months at a time, her body changing hues to the fascination of customers, only to bounce back with a hardiness that was of interest to no one. But at the peak of her performances the blue lady could really hold a crowd. Master produced an entire outdoors extravaganza around her:  within concentric rings of raging torches his men would slowly strip her naked before wild audiences, then allow the dwarf and albino to take her while the leopard strained against a gaily festooned chain. Master circulated his crew through the crowds to encourage his patrons’ cult-like behavior of breath-holding and fainting. No getting around it:  the customers were crazy about her—village to village, master’s Bactrian vanguard’s colorful robes shouted her approaching fame. And Hero’s popularity continued to soar. Many were the nights when master, pacing the perimeter, wondered just what devilry could have produced the lovely boy.
Overall, Hero remained his master’s favorite conceit and hottest property. Part of the little brute’s appeal was, of course, his exoticness. And certainly the ugliness arising from his deformity was compelling…but there was a detachedness about him that fascinated every soul with a fistful of copper cash coins. Whether they ****** him, cudgeled him, or spat in his face, he remained unflappable, staring only at the aching sky. Though many would leave uneasy, master noted with deep satisfaction that they almost invariably returned.
The boy soon evinced an amazing affinity for animals. No matter how agitated an ox or horse became, the child could pacify it with one hand on a lowered brow. This was a source of endless fascination for the crew. Wagers were made. The boy was pitted against oxen whipped to a frenzy. But they would not harm him; they would rather go prostrate and take the lash. Master tried to work this knack into a viable act, but his patrons just weren’t buying. They wanted freaks.
When the lad was a mere five years old, master had him trained in the peripheral art of the pickpocket. The boy worked well alone, and had all the makings of a fine little flimflam artist. Master sighed, his chronic nightmares a thing of the past. As ever, his business instincts were guiding him well.
Then late one afternoon he found the boy squatting outside his parents’ cage. The boy had done the unthinkable:  he had deposited his day’s pickings at the feet of his father instead of bringing the ***** to master. Master flew into a rage and raised his whip to give the little traitor the lashing he deserved. But before he could deliver a single stroke his other hand shot to his chest and he staggered back against the albino’s cage. He blinked down at the boy, who regarded him steadily while scooping the plunder into a little pile.
From that day on the boy placed whatever he could get his hands on at his father’s feet. As time passed he became ever more adroit at thievery, growing into a youngster both admired and despised by master and his crew; admired because theft was a cinch for him, despised because they were all that much lighter in their possessions.
Now, for eleven long years the strange little train had bounced along, sometimes camping outside villages for months, occasionally pausing on connecting roads. The show traversed the heart of Manchuria, skirted the Gobi in the north, and so eventually crossed almost the entire width of Mongolia before proceeding north to the confluence of the rivers Yenisey and Ob’. Much silver and copper had come to master’s coffer, much fame to his name, but he now sat looking over a vast, unmapped Siberian wilderness. The mostly nomadic characters they’d been encountering spoke in tongues unfamiliar even to his personal valet-translator-accountant, and the tone of these nomads had been unmistakably hostile.
Master huddled surlily under a canopy of sopping hides. Night was falling hard during a merciless rain, the wind was picking up, and his supplies coach was bogged in a growing sea of mud. At that moment he accepted the whole end-of-the-line concept, and knew he wasn’t going anywhere but back. And when he got back he was going to shine! He jumped from the coach.
The earth took his weight for a heartbeat—and he was up to his chin in muck, splashing about on his hands and knees, sliding forward on his palms and toes. He did a belly flop into a rain-filled depression and churned to his feet with the devil in his eyes. Wallowing in mud and bile, master stomped to the supplies coach and kicked wildly at the stuck rear wheels.
Somewhere between kicks he lost it completely.
Master broke for his whip. One minute he was blindly lashing his men, the next he’d succumbed to a mindless ferocity. He thrashed about like a berserker; whipping the beasts, the coach, the very night. His men were scarcely able to move in all that mud, but their dread of his savagery kept them hopping. They gathered as one and shoved the coach recklessly; slipping, splashing, shouting. A minute later, three lay splayed underfoot, but the mired wheel had been freed.
Throughout all this the oxen had swayed nervously, while the horses softly tramped their hooves in place. Master had his men turn the oxen about until the rickety train was pointing dead east. He checked the hitches and personally applied the lash. The oxen didn’t budge. Master swore and wiped the rain from his eyes. He had the horses hitched ahead of the oxen, but they were even less obliging. Master flew into a spectacular rage. His men, fearing for their lives, ran liberally with the lash.
The swaying of oxen picked up until the entire train of carriages was rocking. Yet the oxen could not, would not be compelled, under any amount of prodding, to take an eastward step. Master looked around in exasperation.
The night had gone insane.
Horses were fighting hitches, oxen walking on fire.
Master cursed the rain and mud and lashed all the harder. His men, seeking to please, whipped maniacally until the horses and both lead oxen broke their hitches and bolted west. The men immediately embraced the rear oxen, but the hitches shattered and the beasts stormed off. The remaining horses blew it, kicking at everything and nothing.
Inside the long carriage all was chaos. The albino was neighing and screaming, the aged leopard spinning in its cage. Hero stared out his peephole, amazed at the blur of figures stumbling by in the rain.
A pair of clopping blows rattled the opposite wall. Three slats cracked. A tremendous impact, and a huge section collapsed. A thrashing, hysterical mare burst through the breach in a veil of rain.
The horse went mad, killing the albino and snake woman in a flurry of hooves. She fell ******* the near wall, crushing the cages. The leopard shot into the air like a rocket, slashed at the mare’s throat and vanished in the rain. The horse reared above the family cage. She was just coming down in a wheeling storm of hooves when something made her freeze. Her stare locked with Hero’s, and a second later her eyes were rolling in their sockets. The mare kicked crazily and came down ******* her left flank, smashing the long cage’s side. She whirled upright and leaped outside.
For a tense minute the family sat in the rubble, rain bombarding their eyes. Nothing in their years of captivity had prepared them for such a situation. But by the end of that minute the son had taken full command. He rolled onto his back, braced himself, and kicked his parents across the aisle, through the remnants of the opposing cage, and out of the carriage. They all fell about in the mud and rain. To the west, the mare stared back strangely as she splashed into the night. The boy wedged himself between his parents, threw his arms around them, and pushed with all his might. Their bodies found a common center of gravity. Fumbling drunkenly, the family staggered through the rain in the wake of the mare.

The boy was the natural leader.
Master’s innocent-looking little ex-student could quickly assess and exploit almost any situation. He did the foraging and the figuring, slept with one eye open and one fist ready. He got what he wanted by charm or by stealth, slipping off at nightfall, returning at daybreak with small slaughtered animals and chunks of dark peasant bread. He also pilfered any bauble or oddity he could get his paws on, to be placed reverently at his father’s mangled feet. Breadwinner and watchdog, he faithfully held the family together; a nuclear son. He sewed hardy feather-lined cloaks of reindeer hide, and turned a cache of marmot pelts into a kind of side-slung backpack. He was doting nurse during his mother’s episodes, and unbending apportioner of calories in lean times. Dauntless when it meant crossing mighty rivers, relentless when it came to finding mountain passes. But the endless marching, the unreliable diet, and the countless predators made the three wanderers lean, haggard moving targets. There were times when the little lamp of family was all but extinguished, and long stands in places that seemed absolutely impassable. Still, the boy would work things out. He would stoop to any level to feed Hero, and for a stranger to threaten his father was to summon a psychotic, unyielding monster. He was both spear and shield.
The toughest job of all was maintaining a tight unit, meaning he was forced to become a hard-nosed ******* whenever his father was ready to wander off, which always seemed to be whenever the mother was hurting most. She’d become a tremendous impediment to Hero’s compulsion, and therefore her son’s chief nemesis. It wasn’t a big-picture concern anyway; the writing was on the wall. The blue lady’s attacks were increasing spectacularly on the steppe; her world had always been an enclosure of some kind, and the great horizon was proving just too much. Perhaps these intense affairs served as links to Hero’s suppressed memories, for at the onset of each attack he’d turn and hike, and then only exhaustion could curb him. The boy would press his mother on, dragging, shoving, and smacking—he could be mean when necessary, and though circumstances had made him the nucleus, their worlds unquestionably revolved around Hero. Where he sat, they sat. When he rose, they did the same. In this manner they marched for years across the vast steppes, single-file—father, mother, and son, respectively—unmolested, lacking possessions, always following the sun. Long before they could be measured they had drifted into obscurity.
The woman’s end came quickly and dramatically, in a rocky little depression on a half-frozen field. One moment she was responsive to her son’s prompts, the next she was flat on her back, her eyelids fluttering. That night she leapt from fever to chill, from alertness to stupor. The boy, squatting beside their campfire, watched her face and hands run cadaver-blue to fish belly-pale and back again. While he was staring her eyes popped open and her hands came scrabbling. He sweated through the clawing embrace until he could bear it no longer. He oozed out and ran down to fetch his father.
When they got back Hero watched incuriously for a while. His mate’s face was scrunched up and her skin the color of sapphires. She wasn’t breathing.
His gaze became glassy, his eyes returned to the night. As he rose the boy immediately grabbed an arm. Neither moved for minutes. When the boy at last relinquished, his father casually stumbled off.
Strange things were going on in Hero’s world. Some days he would notice how animals regarded him oddly, in a manner that seemed almost personal. He found, for instance, that particular creatures were recognizable even over great distances. A number of times he would sit with one in a stare-down, waiting patiently, until the animal’s natural disposition caused it to bolt. Though the meaning of these encounters was way over his head, he would watch, and he would listen.
In time he noticed an increasing skittishness in some of these familiar creatures. Something had them spooked. He then observed a number of lean gray wolves moving in and out of the picture with an air of complete indifference:  these wolves weren’t hunting; they were loitering—lounging in the grass, lackadaisically padding to the rear, filing by slowly in the distance. Once in a while a lounger would raise its head, yawn cavernously, and drop back out of sight. So unobtrusive was their behavior that even Hero’s ever-vigilant son began to take them for granted. They paused where the family paused, and halted whenever the woman broke down. Perfectly camouflaged by the gray boulders and dire sky, they were completely forgotten in the drama of her passing.
There were other, far subtler events existing for Hero’s senses alone. He could perceive patterns in everything around him; in the manner vegetation gave way wherever his heart was leading, in the way so many animals appeared to be not merely mirroring, but making his course. And wind, rain, running water:  these phenomena had voices. Yet not for everybody. No one—not his mate, not his son, not another soul on the planet could hear this call, for they were all of a sort. They were static, they were temporal. Hero couldn’t have cared less about the lives of his family, or about the mundane goings-on in the encampments and small tribes they skirted. Such beings lived in a world that was defined by the moment. They shouted, they banged, they clamored.
But west—west was music.
For his boy, once again watching Hero shamble off, the moment of truth had arrived. He looked back down, at his mother’s death mask being remade by the dying light of their campfire. As the flames dwindled he could have sworn he saw shadows creep into the wells of her eyes, while others, crawling up around her jawline, drew her bluing lips like purse strings. He hopped to his feet and ran for another handful of tinder. When their little fire provided enough light he dropped to his knees and looked again.
She was sinking right before his eyes, every aspect of her expression in collapse. The boy watched clinically, fascinated. As the flames began to sputter he thought he could see large purple bruises spreading across her cheeks like the seeping limbs of overflowing pools. He bent closer.
From deep in the night came the longest, the leanest, the saddest wail he’d ever heard. He turned to see the starlit ghost of his father, facing away, staring at a low barren hill. Uncountable stars embroidered the spot. The boy made out a low shape moving along the hilltop, cutting off patches of stars as it passed.
The wolf howled again; a mournful, spiraling cry to nowhere and nothing. Hero’s head notched upward. He began to hike.
Halfway to his feet the boy stopped dead.
It took a minute to sense why he’d frozen in place, and a good while longer for his heart to quit pounding. He was aware of a nervous padding, and, once his vision had adjusted, of a lazy stream of eyes gleaming in the dying campfire’s light. The eyes bobbed around him, glared momentarily, returned to the ground.
A massive gasp, and his mother was tearing at his wrist. He watched her hyperventilating, saw her bulbous yellow eyes sinking in a wide violet pool. With a sizzle and pop the last tongue of flame was taken by the night.
Then her clammy hands were all over him, pulling and demanding, caressing and beseeching. He had to pry them off like leeches, had to place them clasped on her shuddering arched belly.
A silky snarl rose almost in his ear.
With a little squeal he sprang to his feet, even as something nearby jumped back in response.
The boy stood absolutely still while the panting thing padded nearer. They stood very close, smelling each other. He instinctively extended a hand, palm forward. But it was no good; his arm was shaking out of control. The snarl rose again, not so tentatively this time. His mother’s nails tore at his ankle.
The boy gently stepped away, only to find himself surrounded by the shifting silhouettes of half a dozen gray wolves. They approached in a calculated manner:  two from the left, one from the right, another from behind. He was being goaded away from his mother; he could hear her fists beating the ground, and a few seconds later the sounds of a nauseating assault and ravaging.
He shakily raised his other hand. Now both arms were extended, and their message was clearly one of defense rather than control. Two snapping wolves stepped aside, leaving him a gateway into the night. A cold wet nose bumped his wrist.
Screaming like a woman, he took off after his father just as fast as his feet would carry him.

                                                  BOY

Alon­g the great Kazakh Steppe a man could wander a lifetime and never meet another of his kind—especially if his kind happened to be Alaskan Inuk, and if he happened to be the teenaged patriarch of a two-man family going nowhere.
Here history is mostly mute.
Upon this continent-spanning steppe, unnamed communities were scattered and rebuilt, lives blown about by the wind. The only centers of humanity a traveler might encounter, far removed from the Silk Road at the very crack of the new millennium, were temporary encampments of civilization at its rudest—shifting holes of cutthroat commerce existing solely for the barter of silk and spices and hapless souls. Life here was revered far less than merchandise, and the longest-lived men were those who kept their distance.
Hero and his boy hiked over permafrost and tundra for years; their meandering course a drunken mapmaker’s scrawl. Chronological entries along this imaginary line would reveal that they’d stopped, sometimes for months at a time, when the father had grown too weak and disoriented to continue. Hero’s internal compass was long-sprung, and his weight had fallen considerably. He’d sit on his lonesome, scarecrow-scrawny, wistfully scrolling a 360-horizon while his boy scouted and scavenged. Then, for no apparent reason, he’d just up-and hike—sometimes northwest, sometimes along a tangential plane that always threatened to spiral. It was brutal:  winters were frigid, summers, by odd contrast, running steamy to baking. Season by season these marches lost their tenaciousness, and eventually their heart. Hero’s obsession was becoming his demise.
Now, to a hypothetical observer, the ratty pair of woolly camels materializing out of the rising August heat might have been mirages.
These beasts were novelties here, and pioneers, for they were way beyond their normal stomping grounds. They’d tramped for months with a mind-numbing monotonousness, a thousand miles and more; round the Urals to the south, and through the hard territory braced by the Volga and Voronezh, avoiding anything that even smelled of men. They’d been wild camels; ugly, ill-tempered, and unpredictable, until the boy tamed them by touch…but this new pattern was a literal change of pace…for weeks the frail little man and his dark teenaged son rose and fell with the animals’ rhythm, lulled by it, sick of it, dreaming of lands far removed from hoarfrost and peat moss. In this manner they were borne clear to present-day Belarus, whereupon the camels’ stupefying march began to quicken. Mile by mile they put on steam, until one day they reached a broad area distinguishable from its bracing terrain only by its many deep surface cracks. Here the camels’ behavior became erratic; they crouched at an angle while tramping, their long necks oscillating, their noses bobbing along the ground. Eventually they came upon a dingy pool nestled in a pebbly depression. The local brush surrounding this pool was situated like iron filings about a lodestone. The boy hauled back his camel’s neck and laid a hand on its brow. The brute slowed to a halt. The other camel imitated its partner, move for move. Simultaneously the animals dropped to their knees.
The boy jumped off, catching Hero as he fell. The camels stood watching stupidly as son maneuvered father, but after a while grew nervous and began tramping their hooves in time. They slowly stepped to the pool’s rim and knelt woozily, their noses poised just above the surface. Their whiskers danced on the pool’s face, their lids became heavy, their hindquarters quivered as they drank. Their nostrils, having fluttered in unison, remained agape. They appeared to be asleep.
The boy began filling skins.
The water was quite warm; he slurped a palmful and almost immediately felt intoxicated.
He flicked it off his fingers; the water was bad.
Three heads were now mirrored in the pool; the camels’ at ten o’clock and two o’clock, the boy’s at six. He watched their reflections continue to ripple, long after the pool had become still. His face, melting and firming, rapidly fluctuated between extremes of age, and between his own recognizable features and those of some…monstrosity. The effect was hypnotic. He felt his joints stiffen; his eyes became weak, his thoughts muddled…his face was irresistibly drawn to the pool’s surface, and for a moment he was in real peril of drowning. He ****** his head aside and creaked to his feet.
Where the camels had knelt were only the prints of their bellies and knees. In the distance they could be seen galloping all-out for the horizon, right back the way they’d come. The boy watched until they were swallowed by their dust, and when he turned around his father was long gone.
Now he knew it was all just a matter of time.
And sure enough, after eleven more days of feebly staggering along, Hero completely ran out of gas. The boy bundled him up in a shawl, like an old woman.
Sitting there, cradling an unresponsive man weighing less than eighty pounds, he couldn’t help but let his morbid fantasies run wild. He was now old enough to realize his father had at some time suffered severe head trauma, and honest enough to accept that the man was rapidly approaching a vegetative state. This understanding accompanied him like a shadow, and that night he questioned, for the very first time, his own convoluted rationale.
He was just beginning to sense that his will was not his own.
He built a semi-permanent camp west of the Desna and foraged in a tight spiral, always returning in a straight line. Some days he came back feeling uneasy, sensing another presence. Then it was every other day. It bugged him to no end. At last, when it became every day, he hauled his father to his feet and began a resolute march to the west.
Again he became anxious, and after only a dozen yards.
He turned slowly while hunching, certain something bulky had just dropped out of sight. Nothing looked suspicious, everything looked suspicious. He walked Hero some more, occasionally peering back over his shoulder. There was…something.
He whirled:  only masses of rock and high brush. Yet, when he really strained his eyes, he was sure, pretty sure, that he could make out a large crouching body continuous with the rocks. Heart in his throat, he began a slow steady creep, only to pause, positive the bulge, whatever it was, had shifted in response. The boy very gradually raised his arm until it was level with his eyes, faced the palm outward, and extended the arm parallel with the ground. He could almost feel some kind of current passing between his itching palm and…nothing. He walked over to Hero, stopped again. There’d been the subtlest sense of traction. The boy propped up his father in a cloud of flies and waited.
In a minute the bulge drew *****.
Out of the brush strolled a furry gray wild ***, her back inclined from countless weary miles; stretching her neck, pausing to nibble, taking her sweet time. Grungy as she was, she fit right in.
At the boy’s first casual step she immediately hit the dirt and remained flat on her belly, one big dark eye staring between her hooves. Another step, and her **** bunched up. The closer he got, the higher her rear end rose. When he was almost at arm’s length she sprang back and danced away, seeming to bound with delight. But not to the east, as she’d come.
To the northwest.
She backpedaled while the boy came on whistling and cooing, matching him step for step. But the moment he threw up his arms in resignation she spun round as though cued, dropped on her belly, and peered over her shoulder.
The boy was first to blink. This time he approached fractionally, keeping movements to a minimum. She rose just as carefully, sauntering northwest in reverse, and at the first sign of hesitation turned, dropped, and cautiously gazed back. The boy glared at that huge mocking **** and broke into a sprint. She easily danced out of reach, plopped down, and continued to stare.
He began hurling stones, with venom and with accuracy, until she’d scurried into the brush.
But on the way back to his father he could feel her tagging along.
Twenty feet behind she halted, looking bemused.
The boy nodded ironically. He walked Hero over, murmuring baby talk all the way, and firmly placed a palm on the animal’s muzzle once her breath grazed his fingers. She stroked his hand up and down with her whiskers, gave a kind of curtsy, and waited on her knees while he helped his father mount.
At Hero’s touch a shudder ran down her body. She stood up straight. Her eyes became set, her back absolutely stiff. She put down her head and began the long trek northwest, never once breaking stride.
It was an amazing march, an impossible feat. For a little over three days and almost four hundred miles she progressed like an automaton, driving herself without rest, without food or water.
After trotting alongside for an hour the boy climbed on and force-fed his father berries and smoked meat, his dark eyes constantly searching the countryside. Occasionally he’d see a run of red foxes to their left, watching intently, padding cautiously. Sooner or later they’d vanish, only to be replaced by a train of feline or equine pursuers. Packs approached and receded while, high overhead, flocks formed triangular patterns that continually broke up and reformed. There was a peculiar rhythmic quality to this ebb and flow that lulled his senses further. The boy shook his head to clear it, but his exhaustion was deeper than he’d supposed—even the brush appeared to be leaning northwest.
That first day he grew numb with the pace, and that night the relentless pounding of her hooves drew him into a miserable slumber. He wrapped his arms around his sleeping father and lay half atop. When he couldn’t keep his eyes open any longer he tore strips from his skins, then looped his tied wrists round her neck, his ankles round her belly.
On the second day she was breathing hard, but her back was still high and she showed no signs of faltering. Her eyes remained focused on the ground dead ahead. She always sensed the best routes; finding mountain passes, fording wetlands.
But by the third day they could feel her ribs quaking against their legs. Her breath exploded as she marched, blood frothed and caked about her nostrils. Still she pushed herself on, her pace so steady it was almost metronomic.
On the fourth day her legs were gone. She veered and stumbled, shuddering every few paces. The boy hopped off for the umpteenth time and tried to bring her to graze, but she wouldn’t be turned. He ran behind her as she staggered along, unwilling, or unable, to rest.
At last a foreleg gave and she went down hard. Sobbing and snorting, she plowed her muzzle back and forth in the soil, the useless leg repeatedly pounding the ground. After a minute she raised her head and brayed at the sky, her neck muscles taut, her head slowly swinging side to side. Her cry went on and on.
With a tremendous effort she pushed herself upright and butted the boy aside. Every part of her body was shaking. From her depths a low moan grew to a steady bray, and finally to a wild, pulsing howl. She came to a rise, but was too weak to climb without sliding. Stamping in frustration, she managed a few feet, reared feebly, slid some more. The boy got behind her and applied his back; it took all he had to assist her almost to the top. With a desperate lunge she crashed on her belly.
Amazingly, she dragged herself on, her howl now a scream, her head whipping left and right. When she could pull herself no farther she ****** forth her neck to its very limit and, with a shudder that ran from the tip of her nose to the tuft on her tail, shoved her muzzle straight into the dirt and died.
The boy hauled off his father and fell back. The animal’s eyes were fixed upwards, seeming, even in death, to be straining for a glimpse of what lay just beyond the rise. The boy half-dragged Hero the last few yards. They collapsed at the top, and together looked over the cold Baltic Sea.

At water’s edge a haggard fisherman sat on his boat’s ravaged deck, blindly staring out to sea. His was a queer vessel; a family structure built more like an aft-cabined barge than like seacraft typical of that period. The fisherman’s boat, like his mind, had been abused beyond repair.
He’d lost much in his life. Time had taken his dreams, pox his face, hardship his back and shoulders. And, more recently, a brawling band of drunken Baltic pirates had ***** his wife and daughter before butchering them along with his two fine sons, while he sat helplessly bound to the mast. Finally, to further their delight, they’d set the boat aflame and sent it crackling against the sun; knowing he could hear their hoots and howls, knowing he would drift undead, accompanied only by this last unspeakable memory.
But a squall, without prelude, had doused the flames and blown his home ashore.
There he’d remained for a full long day, staring at nothing, his shattered life caught on the rocks. On the second day he’d worked himself free and commenced staggering about in his memories, gathering shards. It was a pathetic claim. He made a pile of all the old bedding and linen and usable cords, and set about sewing a sort of mementos sail. All that third day he had sewn, and on the fourth he had hoisted this sail and been moved to see it billowing in a northwest-blowing breeze. Again he just sat and gaped. And later that day he’d become aware of a commotion taking place on the long grade leading down to the water, where a writhing mass of seagulls was proceeding like a tremendous slow-motion snowball. He’d never seen anything like it. It wasn’t uncommon to find gulls in a group of many dozens or more, but there must have been two, maybe three thousand of the birds now swarming toward his boat. They were making an incredible racket. In the midst of this cloud could be seen a couple of slowly walking figures; as they neared he made out a small man accompanying a boy in his late teens, both dressed in odd skins. When they reached the rocks his eyes were drawn to the small man’s face. It was a foreign face, brutish and dark, with a deep cleft running from above the right temple to the jaw’s left side. Whatever instrument had felled this man had been devastating—everything in its path was smashed, and with permanence. The forehead was caved in. There was no bridge to the nose, the left cheek was completely collapsed, one side of the mouth was a mangled mess. The jaw itself had set improperly, so that it jutted to the side. The general impression, especially from a distance, was of some unforgettable circus freak’s countenance puckering at an angle. It was a face right out of a nightmare. But there was nothing frightening about the eyes. They were the eyes of a child.
Maybe half the gulls hopped screaming on the rocks. The rest circled overhead.
The boy considered the fisherman curiously before placing a foot on the charred deck. His gaze went around the boat, lingered on the makeshift sail, returned to the slumped figure. He passed a hand before the eyes. No response. He then leaned in close and placed his fingers on the man’s forehead. Immediately that bleak expression became fluid, brimming over with horror and heartbreak. Tears rolled down the fisherman’s cheeks as he gasped, shuddered, and backed up the scorched mast to his feet. Thus propped, he squinted at his visitors and was overcome by a wave of homesickness so strong he had to turn away. The feeling bewildered him, for this vessel, and this sea, were all the home he’d ever known. He clung to the mast while the boy helped his father board. Once he’d collected himself, the fisherman tore a heavy crossbeam from the toasted cabin. He and the boy used this as a lever, and together they shoved the boat off the rocks. The wind picked up nicely, and the little craft was swept across the water.
Exploding off the rocks, the gulls shot after the boat as if it were brimming with fish, the loudest and orneriest vying for favored positions directly overhead. The melee attracted additional gulls—they came shrieking in their hundreds from all sides, banking and calling in the oddest manner, until the mass grew so thick as to cast a permanent shadow on the boat. All day long the clamor continued, and all that night. The fisherman rolled with the rudder, listlessly, allowing the sea to control him. Eventually he let go, that the wind might bear them where it would. His sail ballooned but held firm, and the boat fairly zipped across a sea somehow smooth as glass, broken only by the vacillating ripples of bottleneck dolphins and migrating humpback whales. The three tiny sailors sat hunched together, motionless, all throughout the next day, until the black coast of Sweden loomed in the twilight.
As the boat neared land the cloud of gulls broke up, shot to shore, and landed in groups of a thousand and more; a dizzying, wildly uproarious reception committee.
The dung-covered boat slammed into the rocks, shattering the fisherman’s trance. He intuitively walked his **** up the mast and, swaying there, watched the boy draw his father over the side and lead him to a clearing at wood’s edge. There in the dusk he made out what appeared to be a hefty spotted runaway heifer hitched to a rickety wood wagon. He saw the cow gallop up to meet them, saw the boy look around warily, saw him help the little man into the wagon and climb in beside him. The animal immediately began picking through the woods, the large brass bell round her neck clanging forlornly.
The clarity of that bell made him realize just how quiet it had become. He craned his neck:  there wasn’t a gull in sight. He fell back against the shot mast and slid onto his tailbone with a clacking of teeth. His eyes were misting up. In the gathering dark a few sail fragments flew past and were ****** into the woods. The boat rocked and relaxed. After that there was only the sound of the receding bell’s sad, monotonous song being batted about by the wind.

The little cow strode through moonlit woods until she came to a path formed by the rutting of wheels over many years. She followed this broken, serpentine track throughout the night, and by morning was passing farms and, occasionally, crossing broader paths that might realistically be defined as roads. All day long she bore down that ragged track, until she came in late afternoon to a clearing near a village. Here many such tracks converged. And here the boy slipped away while she grazed.
Sometime after dark he returned with a load of straw, a couple of pilfered blankets, and a fat iron kettle. Crammed in this kettle were salt, tubers, cheese, a few loaves of rye, legumes, and a plump foot of lamb sausage. Most of this ***** he’d brought in tied to the bowed back of a huge, puffing, highly amenable black pig which, thus laden, now followed the boy’s every step like a fresh convert tracing the heels of the messiah. The boy built a fire under the stars, filled the kettle with creek water, and commenced simmering their dinner. While waiting, he couldn’t help but note an odd feature of the local flora:  plants, especially trees, all seemed inclined to a northwesterly disposition, though no amount of wind could account for it. He shooed the pig. But rather than run along, it backpedaled in a nervous circle, round and round in reverse, until it lost its balance and fell on its ****. There it remained, a yard behind the wagon. The boy fed his father and lined the wagon with straw. They settled in for the night. The boy must have nodded, might have dreamt, but while he was drifting he became aware of a stirring in the woods. He sat up, saw the pig’s eyes gleaming inches from his nose. And there were a number of animals, some wild, some strayed from farmsteads, arranged in a broad circle around the wagon, their eyes glinting with moonlight. Not a rustle, not a peep, was lifted from the woods.
In the morning he woke to find the pig still staring. The fidgeting heifer, impatient to roll, began her long day’s march while Hero and his boy were yet stretching and scratching, and the ******* pig, galloping heavily, fell in close behind. Each new day this routine was repeated. They banged past farms and small communities until the ruts intersected a broad rocky road wending halfway across the kingdom. The cow addressed this road with vigor. They picked up followers—a goat here, a couple of sheep there—which hurried after the wagon as best they could. The cow stomped on with resolve, mile after mile, day after day, her bell keeping steady time. That bell’s peal attracted foals, lambs, and kids into the wagon’s narrowing wake. Hares hopped between hooves and wheels, boars and blue foxes fell in and withdrew. White falcons, normally solo fliers, whirled into wedge shapes high overhead.
At night the entire train would camp on the road while the boy raided proximate farmsteads, always returning fully laden. And as soon as the fire died the colony grew, creature by creature, and the moment the sun broke the horizon the heifer came to life and moved on, but each day a bit more resolutely, as though straining to meet a deadline. The march took on a sense of real urgency. The cow pressed on with attitude, the clang of her bell more strident with each passing mile. Soon her followers numbered in the hundreds, as animals deserted their farms or crept out of the woods to tag along. Tillers and traders stood dumbfounded, amazed by the bizarre flow.
Once they’d crossed into Norway the frothing cow veered hard to the west. The pace really picked up; no longer were Hero and his boy afforded the luxury of a night’s sleep in one spot. Days blurred into a single variegated flow as the bashed and lopsided wagon continued building its entourage; the riders were surrounded dawn to dusk by a confused and confusing scurry. Word of the flow’s weirdness preceded it clear to the Norwegian coast, so that now plowmen and merchants, wearily gathering their goggling families, found themselves lined in anticipation along the king’s highway. Horsemen went pounding to and fro with news of the procession’s progress and particulars, children ran through the streets banging pots in imitation of the cow’s approaching bell. Livestock wheeled and stamped, fowl leaped and crashed.
The slobbering cow broke into a run.
Bystanders trotted behind, calling back and forth excitedly, while the wagon’s permanent following squealed and squawked between their heels. The cow made a hard turn onto a widening swath in the brush. This swath, seeming to strain against the soil, ran straight down to the crest of a low hill overlooking the Atlantic. On either side a crowd had been studying the phenomenon for some time, but now all eyes swung to the dark and disfigured man and his son, clinging to the disintegrating wagon behind the careening spotted cow.
The trailing people traded views as they ran. Most—at the very outset of the new millennium, with Christianity burgeoning throughout Europe—leaned to the miraculous. Others, just as superstitious but prone to a darker point of view, threw looks of horror at the deformed little man. Yet they ran no less eagerly.
The galloping crowd made for the seaside, where only one local event of any moment was brewing:  on the coast a Greenlander Viking was preparing his longship for the rough voyage home. Impetuous son of the great island’s first permanent European settler, he’d just been baptized in Olaf’s court, and was now eager to sail—but not as a warrior—as a missionary. While his spirit remained in a tug-o’-war between his father Erik’s will and that of gods old and new, his duty was clearly to his king. And Olaf had charged him with the Christianization of pagan Greenland.
Something on the wind now made this destined man turn his head. From behind the gentle hill to his rear came a kind of thunder. Heads popped up, followed by a confused explosion of voices, and seconds later a frantic bug-eyed heifer burst into view, dragging the wheel-less skeleton of a shattered wooden wagon. On the wagon’s splayed frame a man and teenaged boy clung for their lives as the spewing animal made a beeline for his ship.
The new missionary, still egocentric enough to assume his Maker might actually toss him a personal, surreptitiously rolled up his eyes. The sky yawned at his arrogance. At his side a smallish cowled man rose irritably, but the missionary sat him right back down. He then snorted, squared his shoulders, and signaled his men to halt their preparations.
Knowing it was expected, he gathered his hard Nordic pride and coolly made his way into the crowd.

The priest clung to port, gagging above the waves.
After a completely uneventful minute he leaned back and stared through tearing eyes at the distant backdrop of gathering mists. Weeks now…a man of his constitution had no business at sea.
Along, too, were a quirky little man and his fiercely devoted son.
Through his pantomime, the boy had been so persistent in begging their passage that refusal, under the circumstances, would have been unbecoming not only a man of God but a man of the world.
So there it was:  a priest who couldn’t hold his lunch, a witless eyesore who couldn’t sit still, and a surly teenaged protector who snarled at the first hard look. This crossing just had to be some kind of divine test—of mortal patience as well as moral values. Norsemen weren’t made for babysitting.
The mists condensed.
And the shifting shape became a hard familiar coast.
And the longship was mooring, and the crew were jostling and clambering, and the big missionary had booted off the haunted little freak and his hypersensitive son, and was condescendingly half-escorting, half-carrying, the green priest ashore.
And they were home.

Priest in tow, Leif quickly took up the Christianization of Greenland’s Western Settlement, as per Olaf’s command. The mangled little man and his son followed him around like dogs, slept outside his door and annoyed his visitors, ultimately proving far easier to adopt than to shake. Barely tolerable shadows…still, the lad was simply amazing with livestock…and though the youth’s useless father seemed time and again to be just begging for a whooping, his son’s presence bore some ineffable quality that always curbed the missionary’s hand. Several times he’d witnessed the father approached by settlers bent on abuse. Each time the boy had stepped in, and each time the troublemakers were mysteriously repelled. The missionary of course didn’t attribute any kind of celestial intervention to these episodes, and certainly the popular notion of devilry was a natural reaction to the pair’s outrageous exoticness, but…in the son’s company, and even under the sharp eyes of his fellow Norsemen, Leif more than once found himself oddly moved to protect the father. And so the deformed man and his boy day by day blent in—as village idiot and mystic guide. And when in time a ****** brought tales of an unvisited land to the west, it was only natural for the restless Greenlander to buy that ******’s boat and, before stalwart comrades, weary family, and whimsical God Almighty, reluctantly accept the eccentric father and son as sort of seagoing mascots.
Hero was from then on irrepressible. During preparations he would pipe and stammer in his half-mute way, brimming with a confounding anxiety that kept him underfoot and at odds with all. On frigid nights he perched on the westernmost rocks, moaning to the horizon in the strangest fashion while his son stood guard. He positively spooked the locals; they’d gossip, nervously and with bile, of an answering wind that came wailing off the sea like a banshee in labor. The whole island wanted rid of him. And when his champing beneficiary, still clinging to the notion of Christian charity, bundled him aboard with his son and a crew of thirty-five, not a single settler was sorry to see him go.
Almost from the moment they cast off everything went wrong, as all attempts to control the longship were met with some kind of unknowable countermanding force. Vikings were not renowned for passive resistance—they fought, squaresail and steering oar, leaning oarsman to oarsman, until the ship rocked on the waves like a bucking bronco. An erratic weather system pursued them, worsening dramatically at each minute variation in heading. The Norsemen doubled down, and when the clouds finally burst wide, the cowling sea went mad. Dervishes whirled about the hull, crisscrossing winds bedeviled the sail. Patches of kelp belonging to much warmer waters came heaving alongside, fouling the work of the oars, while far to the west a humongous fog bank formed, eradicating the navigable field. The lightning-streaked horizon was a throbbing gray slit.
The longship became locked in a slow westerly current.
Fatigued crewmen complained of headaches and hallucinations, and of a nasty, slightly metallic tang to the air. There were numerous walrus sightings; bobbing flippers and snouts amid drifting ice chunks that came prowling the North Sea like a circling pack of famished white wolves.
Worst of all was the boy’s father—instantly agitated by everything and nothing, prey to some primitive impulse that caused him to periodically incline his head, shudder to his feet, and loop his arms as though embracing the sky. Leif would watch him scrabbling at the prow like a cat at a tree, furs snapping in the wind. He’d watch the boy re-seat him for the hundredth time, and for the hundredth time be filled with an immense contempt. By now he’d acknowledged that it takes a special kind of strength to shoulder charity and tolerance. That brown little freak struck him as an enormous malformed barnacle, slowly working its way back up the prow. Trying so hard to go unnoticed, looking and listening so intently, though there was nothing to see other than the growing shelves of fog, and nothing to hear save the rising, almost hysterical voice of the wind.
Leif sniffed the air, his ******’s instincts nagging him. This was a foul current, and a fool's errand; he took a deep breath and tentatively ordered the longship brought about.
The ship kicked twice, as though an enormous submarine hand had seized and released the hull.
A whirl formed in the water, causing the keeling ship to sweep around like a clock’s second hand. All about them, those drift-ice ghosts cruised dangerously near.
But they’d been liberated from that accursed current. Leif fiercely urged on his rowers, and at last the ship broke free. They made a bead due north.
Night came and the temperature plummeted.
Small sheets of ice converged, drifting between the hunks. The Norsemen, instinctively huddling amidships, passed out one by one in a massive pile of fur and flesh. In the freezing silence the floes bumped and recoiled, bumped and gathered, bumped and bonded. The tiny ship, swallowed whole, was dragged along in a labyrinth of black sea and interlocking slabs of ice.

The Norsemen came to in a surly, foul-smelling heap, lost at sea. While they were still groggy a voice cried out that a darker patch was developing in the fog. The men all fell to port. Under the confusion of their voices could be heard a distant rumble.
At this Hero hauled himself up the high curved prow. A half-light began to penetrate the fog, barely illuminating the irregular faces of drifting ice. The missionary stormed forward and indicated by gestures that if the boy didn’t restrain his father he would have the man tied down.
The longship stopped dead in the water.
The men found themselves regarding a perpetually frozen coastline swathed in bluish veils of mist. Directly before them loomed an immense ice cliff hundreds of feet high. Rising beyond this cliff were endless snow fields, where lean violet shadows seemed to drag about of their own volition. And upon those bleak fields a thin howling wind prowled, kicking up brief white dervishes, leaving a strange zigzagging signature.
Even as they stared, a darker shadow high on the ice cliff’s glistening face began to widen, accompanied by a cracking sound that could be felt before it was heard. With the illusion of slow-motion, a stupendous chunk broke out of the cliff and came screaming toward the sea. It hit the water like a bomb. The thunder of its separation and the explosion of its impact took a moment to reach them. Then, out of a spewing crater of crests and spume, the new calf came lunging, tromping the sea so hard the longship, fully a mile to sea, was swept out and ****** back in like a cork. The floundering mountain of ice bobbed and lilted, generating huge waves which continued to rock the ship long after the monster had settled. In a while the roaring in their ears subsided and there remained only the swirling, nerve-wracking howl of the wind.
The missionary’s eyes swept left and right. Whatever this place was, it sure wasn’t the fair shoreline he’d been promised. Hero again scrambled up the prow, and Leif again yanked him down. This time he made good his threat; he had the little nuisance bound, though he was half-tempted to let him take his chances overboard.
From somewhere deep in the haze grew a soulful, otherworldly call. It went on and on, electrifying the air, bottoming out once the ship had merged with that previously fought westerly flow.
By now Leif’s nerves were shot. He ordered the oars raised.
The longship began to drift. Ship and ice were pulled due west.
The clouds fell far behind as the ship embarked upon an amazingly calm sea—so calm its entire visible surface was featureless except for the faint wakes provided by the ship and its hulking ice companions. To the east a huge fog bank appeared on the horizon, and a while later a smaller bank to the north. Then a very dense one to the south. In time these banks converged, imperceptibly becoming a single mass that closed about the ship, bit by bit creating a slowly heaving dome. Tiny beads of water appeared on beards and eyebrows; in a minute everything was soaked. The only sound was that of the dragging steering oar. The men were now sopping ghosts, speaking only with their eyes.
Directly ahead the fog began to dimple. The dimple became a hollow, the hollow a cave, and then ship and ice were being towed through a low, ever-extending tunnel in fog. The current increased its pull. Ship and drifting ice accelerated through the tunnel.
After a while the missionary quietly stepped forward. He stood with one hand on the prow’s neck, listening to the mist, so motionless he might have been a carved extension of the longship’s aggressive design. Not a man breathed. The tunnel’s dilating and contracting bore was producing an all but seamless series of oscillating, near-phonetic sounds. Leif almost tiptoed back. No god, pagan or Christian, could account for the strangeness of this situation.
They were borne on a course that grew more southerly, and the following day beheld an inhospitable shoreline glazed by dazzling white beaches. Their course held. Two days later they came upon a far pleasanter, thickly wooded coast. Here the current released its hold, and here the missionary untied Hero and personally placed him and his son in a tiny oak faering. He was just as sick of them as he was excited by this promising new land. Once the rowboat had been heaved over the side, he and another man stepped aboard and took up the oars. They began rowing with easy, powerful strokes.
When the boat kissed sand the missionary stood unsteadily.
The first European to set foot on North American soil now placed one hand on his crucifix, the other on his sword’s hilt, and awkwardly plunged his leg into the thigh-deep, ice-cold surf. Before he could take another step the boat lurched as Hero leapt headfirst into the water, followed an instant later by his son. The Greenlanders watched sourly as the two splashed their way into a mad dash for the waiting pines. Leif wished them both good riddance and turned to grin wryly at his fellow Norseman. He must have blacked out for a second, must have been blinded by a shaft of sun, for he found he was staring stupidly at a point midway between his companion and the longship. It felt like he’d been kicked between the eyes.
Everything was dissolving.
He studied the beach and pines closely, but saw nothing of the man or his boy. He turned back, disoriented. With what seemed a superhuman effort he took up his oars. He rowed out sluggishly, in a dream, and the fog rolled in to meet him.

The boy broke into the trees and embraced a trunk, fighting for breath. What happened next happened so fast and so unexpectedly he didn’t have a chance to react.
Three savages stepped from behind the pines and beat him to his knees. They twisted his arms behind his back and hauled him to his feet. He’d barely processed the impression of a wild painted face when something sharp struck him ******* the temple and tore down his cheek to the jaw. Two of the assailants manhandled him into an upright position and held him in place while the third brought his weapon down again and again and again.
All but dead, he watched a nightmare countenance shouting through a shot veil of blood, and behind that image a reeling crimson sun. He lay there gushing while the savages went through his rags. They propped him against a pine and shrieked with triumph, tore the hair and gory scalp from his skull, threw back their heads and screamed at the screaming sky. Tooth and nail, they ripped apart his face and throat and, certain he would die, split what bits of fur were left and let his carcass lie.

                                                HERO

The weeks stretched into months while he fought his way back into the light.
He progressed in stages; only half-conscious, stumbling along in a blood-red stupor punctuated by a slow strobe of frequent blackouts. Days loomed and decayed, nights pounced and were gone; the backlit, swirling gray cosmos collapsed and expanded on every missed beat of his pulse. A thousand times he broke down to die, and a thousand times he clawed to his feet, driven to pursue a tiny, ghost-like figure fluttering in his memory.
Everything conspired to check him.
A bay like an immense landlocked sea was skirted over months or years—it was all the same. Cold locked him in, Hunger drove him afield, that rude ***** Wind lashed him blind, wore him like a shoe, screamed for his skin while he worked his way west.
Somehow he ate, somehow he avoided being eaten; the instincts that had served him halfway around the planet were still vital beneath the abused exterior. His simple burrows became sturdy temporary shelters. He relearned the art of fire, and began to cook what he killed. He manufactured crude snares and weapons and, when his recuperation was complete, paid closer attention to the on-again, off-again trail he’d been following…forever.
Sometimes this trail would call to him like a lover. Other times he stood peering uncertainly, trying to recapture meanings and aims. Then the ground would turn spongy and the sky revolve, and once again he’d be lying all but dead in the woods, while from the face of the sun emerged a vile winged horror, its ugly pale head lashing side to side, its cruelly hooked beak dangling something that glistened in the wild pulsing light…then the fat moon, rising like gas against the icy black night…the feel of the wind:  the slashing of her nails, the chafing of her hem…the sound of things crunching and pausing and sniffing…then the sun, blazing anew. And again that thing, descending, its wide black wings beating slowly, metronomically—but none of that mattered any more. For his mind had quit him, had flown howling into ice and pine to roost with things surreal. In the day his madness might muddle and run, or spend the light stalking, cat-like, watching and waiting. But at night it came creeping from all sides. Sometimes it came in waves. It could gnaw like the devil, or wrap around him like a warm second skin. But none of that mattered either.
The only thing that mattered was the trail—whether it was lost for good, or for only a while. He’d been following it through his episodes, always north, wondering just who and where in the world he was, and trying to shake a ridiculous notion of being led on a wild goose chase.
The cold was unbelievable.
The deeper north he delved, the more confused he became. He grew starved for colors and scents, finding nonexistent patterns in the stark contrast of shadow and snow. He thought he could detect a kind of otherworldly design in the overwhelming number of dead ends he encountered, and, too, in the diabolically frustrating locations of natural obstacles. He seemed to be forever fighting the wind—a hulking, despondent snowman, he hiked face down and focused, while another aspect of his attention floated just behind, disembodied, watching his silent pursuers…leaving no tracks, blending perfectly with the environment in their clever winter coats…not predators, but creatures that normally should have been hightailing it away from him. By the time he could turn, they’d become nothing more menacing than snowdrifts. But they pursued him nevertheless.
And so his paranoia increased…had there ever really been a trail…and when did this miserably cold, miserably anemic crusade begin…his long-term memory was falling apart a chunk at a time. It just got colder and colder and colder until at last, one snippet of a day during one blur of a year, he found himself utterly lost, and clueless as to his history or objective. His mind was a blank, as colorless and featureless as the endless world of ice around him. He’d come this far solely to learn that the only trail he’d been following was his own—and now even that trail was succumbing to ice. On all sides there was nothing to see but an infinite field of glaring whiteness, and nothing to hear but the ululating wail of the tubular polar wind. It was the loneliest, the unholiest, the creepiest sound imaginable. But it wasn’t insanity that made him wheel. It was his self-preservation instinct.
And then he was somehow on his knees in the woods, facing a furious setting sun.
Whole seasons had passed from his memory like chalk from a board. His only recollections were those of a broken, haunted animal:  of being perilously sick, of fearing the unseen, of blindly struggling across a solid-white wilderness. That he’d survived such an ordeal meant nothing to him. And that he had in some indecipherable manner stumbled across the cold-as-stone trail did not fill him with amazement or with thankfulness—there simply wasn’t anything visual or emotional left to draw on. A significant part of his life had been whited out.
But now he could focus entirely on the trail. And before he knew it, the fuzzy area between fantasy and reality found a seam. He began to analyze and plan. He paid attention to hygiene, and kept a kind of running mental journal. Things were sorting out. Yet there were nights when the old sickness would resurface, reestablish its hold, and leave him sweating and uncertain under the stars. Then, paradoxically, his perception would become razor-keen. And so he would see, on a distant hilltop, a pair of scrawny silhouettes, one on four legs and one on two, slowly crossing the faintly pocked face of the setting moon. He would become strangely excited, and thereafter retain crystal-clear images of himself, as if seen from above, hurrying with adroitness through the silent, graveyard-like setting of black and blue night and white-frosted trees. Then the fuzzy area would broaden, and it would be the next morning, and he would be staring at the prints of man and elk in snow. And he would see how the elk’s prints doubled back, and how the man’s prints terminated where he had obviously mounted his guide. An unfathomable glow would bring tears to his eyes. But, even as he gathered himself, a fresh snowfall would wipe out the prints. And once again the world would plummet into white. And the wind would howl as the snow hammered his eyes. And he would ***** on.

A haggard animal sat shivering in a small grove of frozen pines, watching his campfire die. His eyes were fixed. Like the fire, he was running out of warmth, running out of fuel. There wasn’t a whole lot of tinder round his bones, and not much feeling left in his limbs. The slowly heaping downfall was burying him alive, but he was too numb to care.
It had taken him six long years to cross an entire continent, and during that time he’d known only cold and excruciating pain. The pain was leaving him now. The cold was making it right. His eyes glazed over.
Along a narrow plain to the west a herd of caribou filed dreamily through the snow, cutting across a panoramic backdrop of dazzling white mountains. The slow-motion parade was hypnotic. After a while it occurred to the drifting man, in a roundabout way, that he was dying, that he was nonchalantly freezing to death. Concurrent with this notion there rose in his chest a wonderful liquid warmth. His eyes slowly closed and, once shut, began to set fast.
He was jolted from within. It was as if he’d been kicked in the heart.
He ****** to his feet, pounded his fists on his thighs, felt nothing. The breath spurted from his mouth in small white clouds as he stumbled downhill after the slow caribou train. He swam through the snow, hallucinating, imagining that certain individuals in the herd were mocking him by slowing and accelerating, while others glanced back with expressions of contempt.
As he burst into their midst the animals stepped aside indifferently. A few galloped ahead to keep up the herd, but most simply sidestepped while he danced there, stamping his feet and smacking his hands. The herd grew thinner, until only the old and infirm were filing by. The man desperately embraced a hobbling female for warmth, but she cried out and kicked, triggering a panic reaction in the herd. Clinging for his life, the man was dragged along beside her as the herd stormed into a maze of flying ice and snow. His weight caused her to stagger sideways until they slammed against the flank of a sick male. The man instinctively threw an arm over the male and, thus draped between them, was borne across the drifted plain for upwards of a mile, his freezing feet alternately dangling above and dragging through the snow. The herd broke into a hard run, forcing him to assume a broken trot. Soon his legs were stinging. Sensation rushed through his body.
Now the herd, still picking up speed, began to contract, jamming him between his bearers. There was a quick jolt to his right and he was lifted clean off his feet, nearly straddling the bucking female. It had become an all-out stampede. Through hard-flung snow he saw the cause:  just ahead, the caribou had run head-on into a solid wall of galloping wood bison, and both frantic herds had blindly veered to the east; were in fact running side by side down a deep, ragged canyon—were pouring over the canyon’s lip like a cataract. He was approaching, at breakneck pace, that very place where the converged herds so abruptly swerved. The hanging man snarled as he was borne inevitably to the point of deflection.
There came a concussion at his left shoulder, followed by a blast of snow. In an instant the ailing male was tumbling head over heels to the east, ****** into the stampede’s plummeting mass by the fury of its descent. The man and female, rebounding from this impact, were shot to the west in a crazy jumble of flailing legs. The caribou lost her footing, flew nose-first into a snowbank, and came up running. Kicking off, the man used the last of his strength to heave himself astride. At first she fought to shake him, but the spell of the run was too strong. She and half a dozen others went pounding in the opposite direction of the stampede, quickly joined by a number of bison that had likewise splintered from their herd. The riding man could make out their huge hulking shapes thundering by in a blizzard of flying ice, could hear their heavy gasps and explosive grunts. One passed so close he felt its massive flank brush his leg. He peered to his right and saw a black, pig-like eye regarding him excitedly, moving up and down like a piston as the beast ran alongside.
The eye shifted, focusing on the gasping, completely obsessed female. The bull dropped its head and slammed into the caribou’s side, sending her and the man careening down a ***** to the west. The caribou brayed hysterically and her backside went down, but she managed, despite the weight of her rider, to return to all fours and frantically continue along the *****. Again the bull charged, crashing into her shoulder. The man and caribou were launched sideways into the white searing air.
He sat up carefully. The huffing bison was straddling him like a bully laying down the ground rules. Its big wiry beard came right up to brush his chin. The stench of its breath was stupefying.
The bull stamped and snorted, thrusting its stubby horns left and right as the man used his elbows and heels to back away. The bull followed, move for move. When the man collapsed under his own impetus the bull shoved him along with its snout, bellowing furiously. Clear down the ***** they lunged, shoving and lurching, until the man lay sprawled on his back; up to his chin in snow, completely helpless. The ton of a bull butted and kicked, but only glancingly:  those hooves could **** with a blow. At last the man, in one clean sequence, spun on his rear, dropped to his side, and went rolling down the ***** using his elbows for ******.
At the bottom ran a narrow fence of frosted saplings marking an ice cliff’s precipice. He lay face down in the snow, too done in to do anything but **** at an air pocket.
And there came a high-pitched crackling, a sound like the protracted gasp of embers in a dead fire. He turned just as those saplings began leaning to the west, their frozen skins cracking with the strain.
The bison bellowed menacingly.
The sprawled man looked back and saw it still standing with legs spread wide, silhouetted against the sky. In a moment it began huffing downhill, lurching side to side, surfing the snow between lunges.
It chased him through the genuflecting saplings straight into a frozen gully where, protected by a few feet of insurmountable verticality, he was able to slide on the ice between its stomping hooves, downhill out of reach, then downhill out of control—spinning just in time to glimpse a breathtaking vista:
Partly framed by the gully-straddling saplings was a vast crescent of jagged white mountains seemingly huddled round a small stretch of snow-draped pines. The little wood these mountains surrounded was isolated in a broad lake of solid ice. Hundreds of fissures radiated crazily throughout this packed ice field, appearing to issue from somewhere near the frozen wood’s center, which was completely obscured by a ring of rising mist. Above this thumbnail panorama the sun showered gold.
Then the gully dipped radically, and he was skidding headfirst, slamming back and forth against its slick white walls. This uncontrollable plunge had the positive effect of getting his blood flowing. Yet it tore him up. Had the gully concluded in a cul-de-sac, or had further progress required a single calorie of uphill effort, his struggle would certainly have ended here. He would have been too weak to move, and death would have been swift.
But there was a glacier—a great river of ice pouring slowly out of the clouds. The gully, terminating in a little scoop formation near the glacier’s base, spat him flailing onto its gnarly glass hide. He went head over heels, bits of skin and fur flying like chips from a band saw. Somehow he gained his footing, and then he was running against his will, tumbling and recovering and tumbling again.
He didn’t catch much of that crazy run. He half-glimpsed whirling walls of ice, felt a fickle surface underfoot, and broke through an assaultive mist that clung to his ankles and arms. He remembered having the ragged hides torn right off his body, and then being skinned alive. And he remembered reaching the glacier’s base and crawling like an animal; round its sweeping drifts, past its peaked moraines, all the way to a twisting frozen gorge.
And he followed this gorge down; ricocheting wall to wall, delirious, small plumes of thrashed snow marking his descent.
Through a freezing wood he fumbled. In a veil of mist he tumbled down a steep and verdant grade. As cold consumed his closing breath, he fell upon, near-blind, near death, a strange, enchanted glade.

There is a pool.
And in this pool a man lay purged, his broken body half-submerged.
The stumbling man stopped. He knelt to weep, but lost his thread. One hand took a bicep, the other, the head. With a twist and pull the corpse emerged.
That visage…that face—misshapen mask, contorted, bleached; of life’s deposits fully leached. Essence dispatched—a void, sodden wretch.
He let it fall and the glass was breached. All a freak, all a stretch:  upon this act his grip detached.
And the bridge collapsed…one vagabond grasp…what were these feelings; recaptured and trashed…a span elapsed…who was this puckered mass…he hauled it by the waist and thighs…slid it in, watched the pool react:  purse and recover, expand, contract. The glass reformed, now silver-backed…a sudden mirror…the man leaned nearer…saw his reflection, just smashed, remade intact.
The pool grew still.
Within its depth a shadow stirred—visions gathered, some distinct, some obscure. What they meant, and who they were, was much too much to fathom. The glass became blurred.
He closed his eyes, let his heavy head fall, fell back on his haunches, felt the sweat seep and crawl. The air was a pall—as he struggled to rise, a nib crossed his wrist.
He opened his eyes.
Between his fingers the blades poked and crept. Round his knuckles they ventured, up his forearm they stepped:  they seemed to be triggered by prompts from the ground. He shook his head slowly and dully looked round.
There were jays grouped about him, their black eyes aglow. Red hens came running, their fat chicks in tow. Gophers engaged in a weird hide-and-seek. Bluebells and buttercups craned for a peek. Sparrows hopped past and, paying no heed, burst into flight. He watched them recede.
Westward they flew.
Bewildered, he slumped.
Bumped from behind, he jumped to his feet, flabbergasted to find an ancient gray moose near-eclipsing the sky, with grit in his snarl and fire in his eye.
The old moose took aim.
The man turned to flee and stumbled, then tumbled and fell on a palm and a knee.

But there lies a world (so the lullaby goes) where rivers ever run.
Poked from behind, pushed out of his mind, he staggered into sun.







Copyright 2020 by Ron Sanders.

Contact:  ronsandersartofprose(at)yahoo(dot)com

*****, What are those?
creation of some great architect.

they vary in size, shape and dimension
also in weight, width and assimilation...

one touch takes you million stars away
heavenly bliss, on the earth nevertheless,

squeeze them to the delight,
hold them to their perfect shapes,

Hands in joy and trickling liquid SomePlaceElse..

moaning body, screaming someone's name,
dude! you are the luckiest, keep up the fame..

Lambs that learn to walk in snow
When their bleating clouds the air
Meet a vast unwelcome, know
Nothing but a sunless glare.
Newly stumbling to and fro
All they find, outside the fold,
Is a wretched width of cold.

As they wait beside the ewe,
Her fleeces wetly caked, there lies
Hidden round them, waiting too,
Earth's immeasureable surprise.
They could not grasp it if they knew,
What so soon will wake and grow
Utterly unlike the snow.

preliminary explanation

before i really begin the project i have a few scatterings
of thought that made me do this, without real planning,
a different sort of impromptu that poetry's good at,
less Dionysian spur-of-the-moment with an already
completed poem entwined to a perfect ensō,
as quick as the decapitation of Mary Boleyn with the
executioner fooling her which side the swing would
be cast by taking of his hard-soled-shoes -
i mean this in an Apollonian sense - i know, sharp contrasts
at first, but the need to fuse them - i said these are
preliminary explanations, the rest will not be as haphazardly
composed, after all, i see the triangle i'm interested it
but drawing a triangle without Pythagorean explanation
i'm just writing Δ - i'll unravel what my project is
about, just give me this opportunity to blah blah for a
while like someone from an existential novel;
what beckoned me was the dichotomy of styles,
i mean, **** me, you can read poetry while in an awkward
yoga position, you can read it standing up, sitting down,
eating or whatever you want - obviously on the throne
of thrones taking a **** is preferred - the point being
what's called serious literature is so condensed for
economic reasons, font small, never-ending paragraphs,
you need an easy-chair and a bottle of cognac to get
through a chapter sometimes - or at least freshly mowed
grass in a park in summer - it's really uncomfortable because
of that, and the fact that poets hardly wish upon you
to be myopic - just look at the spacing on the page,
constantly refreshing, open-plan condos, eye-to-eye -
but it's not about that... the different styles of writing,
prose and the novel, the historical essay / encyclopedia
or a work of philosophy - what style of writing can
be best evolutionary and undermine each? only poetry.
poetry is a ballerina mandible entity, plastic skeletons,
but that's beside the point, when journalism writes history
so vehemently... the study of history writes it nonchalantly,
it's the truth, journalism is bombastic, sensationalist
every but what courting history involves -
a journalist will write about the death of a 100 people
more vehemently than a historian writing about the Holocaust...
or am i missing something? i never understood this dichotomy
of prose - it's most apparent between journalism and history...
as far as i am concerned, the most pleasurable style of
prose is involved in the history of philosophy, or learning per se,
but i'll now reveal to you the project at hand -
it's a collage... the parameters?

the subject of the collage

it weighs 1614 grams, or 3 lb. and 8 7/8ths oz.,
it's a single volume edition, published by Pimlico,
it's slightly larger than an A5 format,
3/4 inches more in length, and ~1 centimetre in
width more, it has a depth of 1 and 3/4 inches in depth,
a bicep iron-pumping session with it in bed -
i was lying with this behemoth of a book
in bed soothing out a semi-delirium state
listening to Ola Gjeilo's *northern lights
and flicking through the appendix, and i started thinking,
no would read this giant fully, would they?
the reason it's a one volume edition is because
the only place you'd read such an edition would
be in a library, at a desk, and you'd be taking snippets
out from it, quotes, authentic references points
for an essay, esp. if you were a history student,
such books aren't exactly built for leisure, as my arms
could testify... after the appendix i started flicking
through as to what point of interest would spur me
onto this audacious (and perhaps auspicious)
act of renegading against writing a novel (in the moment,
in the moment, i can't imagine myself rereading plot-lines
after a day or two, adding to it - that's a collage too,
but of a different kind - and no, i won't be plagiarising
as such, after all i'll be citing parallel, but utilising
poetry as the driving revision dynamic compared
to the chronologically stale prose of history) - i'll be
extracting key points that are already referenced and not
using the style of the author - the book in question?
Europe: a history by Norman Davies prof. emeritus
at U.C.L. - the point of entry that made me mad enough
to condense this 1335 page book (excluding the index)?

point of incision

Voltaire (or the man suspected of Guy Fawkes-likes spreading
of volatility in others) -
un polonais - c'est un charmeur; deux polonais - une
bagarre; trois polonais, eh bien, c'est la question polonaise
(one pole - a charmer, two poles - a brawl, three poles -
the polish question) - mind you, the subtler and gentler
precursor of the Jewish question, because the Frenchman
mused, and not a German, or a Russian brute...
and i can testify, two Polish immigrants in a pub,
one senior, the other minor, one with 22 years under
his belt of the integration purpose, one with 12 years,
the minor says to the senior about how Poles bring
the village life to cities, brutish drunkards and what not,
it was almost a brawl, prior to the senior was charming
a Lithuanian girl, before the minor's emphasis on
such a choice of conversation turned into idiotic Lithuanian
nostalgia about the disintegration of the Polish-Lithuanian
commonwealth, primarily due to the Polish nobility.

10,000 b.c.

looking that far back i don't know why you even
bother to celebrate the weekend -
i mean, 10,000 years back Denmark was
still attached to Sweden,
England was attached to France,
and there was a weird looking Aquatic landmass
that would become a myth of Atlantis
in the Chronicles of Norwich,
speedy ******* Gonzales with the equivalent
of south america detaching itself from Africa...
mind you, i'm sure the Carpathian ranges are
mountains. they're noted here are hills or uplands,
by categorising them as such i'm surprised
the majority of Carpathian elevations as scolded
bald rocky faced, a hill i imagine to have some
vegetation on it, not mountain goats with rock and roof
for a blacksmith in a population of one hundred...
at this point Darwinism really becomes a disorientating
pinpoint of whatever history takes your fancy,
Europe - mother of Minos, lord of Crete,
progenitrix / ******* and the leather curtains
of Zeus's harem (jealous? no, just the sarcasm
dominates the immortal museum of attachable
****** to suit the perfect elephant **** of depth
the gods sided with, by choice, excusing the Suez
duct tightening of a prostate gland... to ease the pain
upon ******* rather than *******); mentioned by Homer
the Blind tooth-fairy, the Europe and the bull,
Europoeus and the swan, same father of wisdom to mind,
on the shores of Loch Lomond -
attributes a lover to the bull, Moschus of Syracuse,
who said earring Plato cured him of where the ****
should not enter even if it shines a welcome
in the disguise of Dionysius... revisionists bound to Pompeii
named Titian, Rembrandt, Rubens Veronese
and Claude Lorrain revived the bulging bull's *******
and her mm hmm mm, too gracious my kind, hehee...
Phonecians from Tyre and Io - so too the Sibyl of ****** -
and unlike the great river civilisations of the Nile,
the Ganges, soon to be the Danubian civilisations
and gorged-out-eyes-that-once-sore-colour-but-lost-sight-of-
colours-­after-seeing-the-murk-of-the-Thames...
soon the seas overcame civilisations of the rivers,
as Cadmus, brother of the thus stated harlot said:
i bring you orbe pererrato - hieroglyphics of the cage,
but not an owl or a hawk inside it -
so let's perfect speaking to an encoding by first
rummaging into learning how to procure the perfect
forms of counting - i say left, you say I, i say right
you say II, left right left right, what do you say?
VI. bravo! the Hellenic world just crossed the Aegean
and civilisation bore twins within the cult of a lunar-mother,
Islam of Romulus and Remus, a she-wolf
a canine of the night - according to another -
tremulae sinuantur flamine vestes - or so the myth goes -
a cherished phantom of what became the fabled story
of sole Odysseus with his ears open and the remnant
sailor's ears waxed shut - as if the bankers of this world,
revelling in culprit universal fancy than nonetheless
bred the particular oddities - lest we forget,
the once bountiful call of the sirens to the oceanic
is but a fraction of what today's sirens claim to be song,
a fraction of it remains in this world, the onomatopoeia
of the once maddening song, the crude *******
arrangement of vowels bound to the jealous god's
déjà vu of the compounding second H.

from myth to perpetuating a modern sentiment

you can jump from 10,000 b.c. to the Munich Crisis
of 1938 - 9 with a snap of the fingers,
imitating quantum phenomenons like gesticulating
a game of mime with Chinese whispers necessary,
if Europe is a nymph, Naples her azure eyes,
Warsaw her heart, Sebastopol and Azoff,
Petersburg, Mitau, Odessa - these the thorns
in her feet - Paris the head, London the starched collar,
and Rome - the sepulchre.
or... die handbuch der europaischen geschichte
notably from Charlemagne (the Illiterate)
to the Greek colonels (as apart from Constantine to
Thomas More in eight volumes, via Cambridge mid
1930s)... these and some other books of urgency
e.g. Eugene Weber's H. A. L. Fisher's, Sr. Walter Ralegh,
Jacob Bronowski... elsewhere excavated noun-obscurities
like gattopardo and konarmya had their
circas extended like shelved vegetables in modern
supermarket isles, for one reason or another...
prado, sonata sovkino also... some also mention
Thomas Carlyle (i'd make it sound like carried-away isle,
but never mind); so in this intro much theory,
how to sound politically correct, verifiable to suit
a coercion for a status quo... Europe as a modern idea,
replacing Imperum Romanun came Christendom,
ugly Venetian Pirates at Constantinople,
Barbarossa making it in pickled herring juice
in a barrel to Jerusalem... once called the pinkish-***-fluff
of Saxony, now called the pickled cucumber,
drowning in his armour in some river or Brosphorus...
alchemists, Luther and Copernicus were invited on
the same occasion as the bow-tie was invented,
apparently it was a marriage made for the Noir cinema,
beats me - hence the new concept of Europe,
reviving the idea of Imperium Romanun
meant, somehow including Judea in the Euro
championship of footie gladiator ***** whipped
narcissists, rejecting the already banished Carthage
(Libya / Tunisia by Cato's standards) and encouraging
the Huns, the Goths and the even more distant Slavs and
Vikings to accept not so much the crucifix as
the revised spine of the serpent but as the geometry of
human limbs, well, not so much that, but forgetting
Norse myths of the one-eyed and the runic alphabet
and settling for ah be'h c'eh d'ah.
dissident frenche stink abbe, charles castel de st pierre
(1658 - 1743) aand this work projet d'une paix perpetuelle
(1713) versus Питер Великий who just said:
never mind the city, the Winter Palace... i have aborted
fetus pickles in my bedroom, lava lamps i call them.
the last remaining reference to Christianity?
Nietzsche was late, the public was certain,
it was the Treaty of Utrecht, 1713, with public reference
to the republica christiana / commonwealth was last made.
to Edmund Burke: well, i too wish no exile
upon any European on his continent of birth,
but invigorate a Muslim to give birth on it
and you invigorate an exile nonetheless:
Ezra expatriate Pound / sorry, if born in eastern
europe a ***** Romanian immigrant, pristine
expatriate in western Europe, fascist radio has
my tongue and *****, so let's play a game:
Russian roulette for the Chinese cos there's
a billion of them, and no one would really mind
a missing Chow Mein... chu shoo'ah shaolin moo'n'kah!
or a cappuccino whenever you'd like to watch
classic Italian pornographic cinema with dubbing
with nuns involved... Willaim Blake and his
stark naked prophesy, pope pius II (treatise 1458)
even though Transylvania, Tharce and Hungary
shared the same phonetic encoding with diacritical
distinctions like any Frenchman, German,
or Pole at the Siege of Vienna (1683)
to counter the antagonising Ottoman - i swear historians
do this one purpose, juggle dates and head-of-state figures
prior to entering a chronology - they must first try out
a ******* carousel before playing with the toy-train...
broadcasting to a defeated Germany public, T. S. Eliot
(1945) ****** import to into Western Germany
and talk of the failing moral fabric, China laughing
after the ***** intricacies of warfare of trade,
what was once wool we wished to be silk...
instead of silk we received vegetarian wool, namely
hemp, and Amsterdam is to blame... nuke 'em!
that's how it sounds, how a historian approaches
writing a history from the annals, from circa and
circumstance and actual history, foremost the abbreviations,
the fishing hook standards, the parameters,
the limits, and then the mathematics of history,
one thing culminating into another... contra Lenin
N. S. Trubetskoy, P. N. Savitsky, G. Vernadsky
Russian at the perks of the Urals - steppe Tartar shamans
or salon pranced pretty **** boys? where to put
the intoxicant and where to put the mascara... hmm,
god knows, or by 21st calculations, a meteor;
they say the history of nations is a history of women,
then at least the history of individuation
and of men who succumb to its proliferation
is astoundingly misogynistic.
Seton-Watson, among the the tombstones too reminded
of remarkable esteem and accomplishment
with only one gravedigger to claim as father...
as many death ears as on two giraffe skeletons
stood Guizot, men of many letter and few fortunes,
or v. v., incubators of cousin ***** and none the kippah
before the arrogant saintly diminished to
a justly cause of recession, ha ha,
by nature's grace, and with true advent of her progression
as guard-worthy pre- to each pro-
and suggested courteous of the ****** fibre,
oh hey, the advent of masqueraded woofing,
a Venetian high-brow, and jealousy out of a forgotten
spirit of adventure that once was bound
to hunting and foraging... forever lost to write  history of
a king dubbed Louis the XIV...
crucibles and distastes for the state to be pleased,
once removed from Paris, forever to Angevin womb
accustomed once more, at Versailles released -
as cake be sown so too the aristocratic swan necks
for worth of mock and scorn - and the dampening rain
rattle the blood-thirst of the St. Bartholomew's Day
slaughter, to date, the rebirth of Burgundy,
of Anjou, and with the dead king presiding, to be
of no worth in judging himself a king before god or pauper...
saluer Antoine Quentin Fouquier-Tinville!
that i might too in stead rattle a few bones prior to burial
with the jaw that will laugh and chatter least
had it been to my kingly-stead a birth so lowly.
then at least in satisfactory temperament i procure a
judgement of the noble like of a *****
for an hour's worth of pistons and jarring tongues...
as if from a nobleman then indeed as if from a *****,
for who sold Europe and said: Arabia, if not the
Frenchman, the Englishman, the Spaniard?
the former colonial conquests served you not enough?
i imagine the reinstatement of Israel like
the Frankish states under Philippe-August...
precursors to a cathedral dubbed Urban the 2nd's..
there were only Norwegian motives in the Ukraine
and the black sea... Israel to me is like plagiarism
of the Frankish states of the middle-east, with Europe
slightly... oom'pah loom'pah mongolian harmonica.
some said Rudyard Kipling poems,
some said Mr. Kipling's afternoon tea cakes -
whichever made it first on Coronation St.
some also say the Teutonic barbecues -
it was a matter of example to feed them hog
and cannibalise the peasants for ourselves,
a Prussian standard worth an army standard of
rigour - Ave Maria - letztre abendessen nahrung -
mein besitzen, wenn in die Aden, i'd be the last
talking carcass...
gottes ist der orient!
gottes ist der okzident!
nord - und sudliches gelande
ruht im frieden seiner hande.
germany's lebensraum, inferiority and classification,
inferior slavs and jews, genetics and why my
hatred of Darwinism is persistent, you need
an explanatory noting to make it auto-suggestive
for Queen & Country? diseased elements,
Jewish Bolshevism, Polish patriotism,
Soviets, Teutons, the grand alliances of 1918
or 1945? Wilsonian testimony of national self-determi

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Dear Readers, President Theodore Roosevelt wanted
to save this marvelous Natural Wonder for posterity! So
the Grand Canyon National Park was set up in 1919. In
1979 it was declared as World Heritage Site! With the
portion “Sun rises and sets over the Grand Canyon”, -
I have concluded this poem. Kindly take your time to read,
no need to comment in a hurry please ! Thanks, -Raj

CONCLUDING THE GRAND CANYON
STORY IN VERSE – RAJ NANDY

INTRODUCTION
Literature about great natural features include
two personal types of writing;
Description of things observed, and impressions
of what is known and seen!
The story of the Grand Canyon takes us back
to the Pre-Cambrian Age,
When violent forces were unleashed from within
the Earth, during its formative stage;
When mighty forces of erosion began to sculpture
her undulating landscapes!
Therefore, I begin with a quote about Erosion,
From the great poet Alfred Lord Tennyson; -
“The hills are shadows and they flow,
From form to form, and nothing stands.
They pass like clouds, the solid lands.
Like clouds they shape themselves and go!”

TO RECAPITULATE PART ONE:
In Part One we have seen, how movement of
earth’s tectonic plates unleashed violent forces
from within!
It formed mountains and lakes, shaping our
landscapes, which now appear so peaceful,
grand, and serene!
Over millions of years the forces of erosion in
the form of wind, rain, sun and snow,
Sculptured earth’s evolving features creating
majestic, panoramic vistas as we know!
Geologists now opine, that the Grand Canyon
was carved out by the Colorado River, -
cutting through ‘layers of Geological time’!

THE COLORADO RIVER CARVED THE CANYON:
In the state of Colorado, from the high country,
Where snow and ice lasts well beyond the dawning
days of Spring;
There the majestic peaks of the Rockies form the
perennial fountain head from which springs, -
One of the great rivers of the world the Colorado;
Which travels 1400 miles through seven States
reaching the Californian Gulf west of Mexico!
Now during prehistoric days, the pristine Colorado
had flowed almost along the same path as today!
But after the magical rise of the Colorado Plateau
some five million years ago, (Refer Part One)
It had blocked the river’s path making it flow
south-east into the Gulf of Mexico!
Few Geologists now opine, that this diverted river
had formed the pre-historic Lake Bidahochi,
Which later drained out to form the Little Colorado
River, which today we get see!
But the cut-off western portion of the river (named
Hualapai Drainage) continued to eat away through
the Plateau’s southern portion,
Through a gradual process known as ’Headwater
Erosion’!
For the river flowing at a steeper gradient along
the ‘Grand Staircase’ of the Plateau, carried
stones, rocks and debris,
Which formed the cutting tools, deepening the
Canyon over countless centuries!
When the softer sedimentary layers of the Plateau
below the top rocky layers gave away, - it resulted
in several rock falls!
While flash floods and erosion continued to breach
the sides of the canyon walls!
Thus over millions of years the width of the Canyon
gradually increased;
While the gushing and untamed Colorado River
chiseled through the depths of those Cyclopean walls, -
running deep!
Now the ancient Lake Bidahochi which had breached its
banks, had captured our pristine Colorado;
And their combined power increased the volume of
water and river’s chiseling power, with its rapid flow!

ENDANGERED COLORADO RIVER :
It is unfortunate that today, the Colorado no longer
reach the mighty Pacific as in the olden days!
With the progress of civilization and the spawning
of big cities,
Like Denver, Las Vegas, Phoenix and Los Angeles;
And to cater for the agricultural farmlands and the
Industries,
Many dams got built to divert its water and to
generate electricity!
Thus over a century of overuse and abuse of this
precious natural resource,
Gradually choked up the great Colorado, as it
became a mere trickle at the end of its course!
Ecologists now debate, while USA has launched
‘Save the Colorado River Project’!
Let us now cheer up by getting back to our
Grand Canyon’s scenic beauty,
Before concluding this wondrous Canyon Story!

SUN RISES AND SETS OVER GRAND CANYON!
To see the sunrise from Mather, Yaki, or the
Hopi Point, - located on the Southern Rim,
Becomes a life time experience, better than any
surreal dream!
First a glimmer then a glow, when a faint blue-white
sheen begins to show!
As the sun gradually sprinkles its light, streaks of
crimson red spreads across the eastern sky!
Soon orange and yellow shafts of light, light up the
Canyon walls up high!
Squirrels scurry out of sight, and birds twitter in
the sky!
The Hummingbird hovers like a helicopter, and
Big Horn sheep are also seen;
The Hummingbird which can even fly backwards,
enlivens this early morning scene!
The sun now rising in its resplendent glory,
showers the canyon with its kaleidoscopic beams;
With streaks of yellow, gold and red, it chases out
lurking shadows from within!
Like a curtain lifting before their eyes, the tourists
view this panoramic sight!
As the Grand Canyon awakens to greet the day,
With cameras madly clicking away!
The great ancestors of the Hopi tribe, Hopi
meaning both peaceful and wise;
Had inhabited these areas some eight thousand
years hence!
Their scooped out granaries and tools found inside
Canyon walls, - have an ancient story to tell !
The Spaniards were the first Europeans to reach,
in search for gold which they never found!
But for the Hopis the Canyon remains, as their
sacred Holy ground!
When those Spaniards saw the Colorado way
down below, from the Canyon’s upper rim’s side;
They said that this thin blue streaked River, was
barely five feet wide! (In mid-16th century)
The average width of the Canyon is around 10 miles;
While the River at its narrowest point is 600 yards
wide!
The Condor the largest American bird, catching an
upward draft circles up high;
Like an uncrowned monarch he surveys his kingdom
below, nothing escapes his watchful eyes!
Temperature at the Canyon’s floor is 20 degrees
higher, when compared to its outer rim;
Supports an ecosystem of plants and animals,
With the river as chief nourisher of all things!
Evergreen pines and furs grow along the cooler
areas of the Canyon’s outer rim;
While cactus species are found on its arid floor,
Their exotic flowers bloom during Summer and Spring!
The Northern Rim a thousand feet higher, offers many
spectacular sites!
But the Southern Rim remains open throughout the
year, while the Northern closes during Winter time.
From the Hopi Point west of the Canyon, the visitors
enjoy the beauty of the silent, sinking sun;
When the sky gets diffused with vermillion red, as
darkening shadows engulf those Canyon walls!
The mighty Canyon with its Cyclopean walls,
perhaps the playground of the Titans from eons past;
Shaped by some mythical Vulcan, shall remain till
this World continues to last!

CONCLUDING THE GRAND CANYON STORY:
I conclude my Grand Canyon Story by quoting a
poem I had once read;
Written by an Anonymous author, whose name
I had failed to get!
“BUILT WITH PATIENCE OF ENDLESS TIME,
YEARS ERODE AND SHAPES DEFINE.
LAYERS YIELD THEIR COUNTLESS AGE,
EYES CAN SEE BUT CANNOT GAUGE!
STAND AGAPE WITH AWE INSPIRED,
IMAGE READS OF LIFE TRANSPIRED.
CLIFFS REACH OUT TO TOUCH THE SKY,
PATHS LEAD DOWN WHERE RIVER LYE.
COLORS, SHAPES AND SHADOWS MELD,
HERE, A PLACE FOREVER HELD.
WALK AWAY YET NEVER PART,
BODY LEAVES BUT NOT THE HEART!”
- Anonymous
……………………………………………………………
ALL COPYRIGHTS WITH THE AUTHOR RAJ NANDY
OF NEW DELHI, E-MAIL: rajnandy21@yahoo.in

And there I saw the perfect bed.
Just the perfect size, height width everything I could have dreamt.
I imagined the perfect sleep in my perfect bed.
Never quite seeing home the same again.
It came equipped with sheets and blankets even a heated mattress.
This bed was better than anything I could have imagined.
I climbed her leg and slipped myself in her pocket.
I haven't slept this good in a long while

'Hopes and Dreams'...explores the limitations of perception in more than three dimensions plus time.


I

Uncoupling hopes from truth sometimes reveals reality
Which is hard to bear
According to Eliot.
The difference between hope and what is real
Is sometimes the basis for laughter
Or tears…..
In equal measure
Depending on the deficit
Between reality, and the reality of hoping.
Two sides of the same coin
The masks of theatre,
Comedy and tragedy.

Yet reality is what we face day to day
Uncoupled from hope
An atheistic vision of what is true
In which dreams expire.

Hopes, dreams and reality
Congregate in theistic minds
As a woven integrity
But is the congress true?

Atheist and theist in perpetual conflict
One offering only truth,
The other hoping that belief is true
But, to what ….?
In this world caught in three dimensions
But do not forget time that marks when
We are born and when we die
According to Ecclesiastes.

The atheism of truths of a certain kind
Confined by the question asked
And who is asking, and the way of asking,
Atheist and theist talking at each other
But not in conversation
A dialogue of deafness to other points of view
An unbridged chasm for all of human history.

The certainty of truth is one problem,
Because certainty brooks no other view
But remember the constraints of truth’s
discovery and then assertion
In three dimensions, and do not forget time.

Unwittingly Carl Sagan made the point in flatland
A place of two dimensions,
Breadth and width, but no height
Infinitesimally flat, thin
Flat and thin, so that an apple
In its plump three dimensional roundness
Made its visit, announced its presence
But left only an infinitesimally flat, thin
Impression of its visitation,
With its announcement seemingly coming from wherever,
Infinite confusion.
For flatlanders who perceived a visitation
Without explanation
A mystery within which we experience
The determinism of truth
Not qualified by the dimensions
In which it’s made
Or defined
To the confusion of those who question truth,
If truth means the assertion of certainty.

Was it for flatlanders first cause?
Just like Paley’s watchmaker of the watch
found on the heath,
Each trapped in their respective
Two dimensions and three dimensions
Limited by their dimensionality
Of what they could see or imagine.
Not yet liberated by many dimensions
That liberated Tennyson to understand
That more is achieved by dreaming without limits.

Tennyson said…
That more things are achieved by prayer
Than this world dreams of,
But what are dreams?
Visions of hope, or the darkness of damnation?
But can we imagine these visions
In many dimensions?
And find new truths which we cannot perceive
In the day to day.

II

Dreams can be suspension
Between what is real and what we hope for,
Or ……
A plunge into an abyss of horrors
The nightmare’s nightcrusher
That reflects the fears of our experience,
The fears of Fuseli’s nights
Of grotesque creatures that taunt the hopes
Of our tomorrows
By revealing the layers of yesterday’s experience,
A past that haunts the future
In the day to day.

Yet redeemed by intentions
For the good,
And honourable to the nature of humankind,
And lifekind with which we share organic ancestry.

Dreams release the mind to find another place,
Another dimension, where what happens
Can happen and more than we can suppose
According to Haldane.

Limitless possibilities that dreamtimes
Expose what we do not own
But instead we are a part of.
Land, sea and air fused with the spirit
Of peoples that inhabit distant shores
Where they are one with the place
Where they are, were and will be
For all time.
The dreamtime of Australia’s
Original peoples.

And so the plump apple
Becomes a part of the experience
Of those who live in two dimensions,
Carl’s flatlanders experience their
Dreamtime of first causes
Because the missing dimension disallows
Their understanding of what is real.

So conflate the idea to many dimensions
And you can see what I mean.
Imagine the unimaginable
That cannot be seen
Because of the constraints of three dimensions.

And do not forget time
Perhaps the portal for imagining
What cannot be experienced
In spacetime warped and curved
By the embrace of gravity.

We sail in this cosmic sea
Not seeing its possibilities
Because we are not equipped
To see through a glass darkly
Or so Corinthians says
But to half see, dimly see
Love
And the truth of black holes
Where physics is sundered
Perhaps allowing passage to other creations
To us mere visions of what we aspire to be
And understand
Just as Blake saw heaven in a wild flower.

III

To perceive the possibility of many dimensions
Is to free the mind
From superstition
From the prejudices
That blight the landscape of our thinking,
And the landscape of dreams
When we perceive self
As if disembodied
Floating on the ceiling looking down
Detachedly on what we do
And what others do in the day to day.

Doings driven by the limited framework
Of width, breadth and height.
Width and breadth and height
And do not forget the passage of time
In which our doings take place.

One is singular in mind and body
Meaning self in the day to day.
To be beside oneself is joy and anger
The Janus faced self
Somewhat like the masks of comedy and tragedy
But of emotion and not theatrical circumstance.

How many multiples of
Space and time
Are needed to be beside oneself
In a quantum universe?
Or universes where to touch would be
Annihilation of self
Tracked as energy pure, and as simple
As the dreams of our disembodied self
Looking down from the ceiling.

IV

Is hope the delusion of optimism,
Dreams its manifestation of unreality?
Who can say because analysis
Is limited within the context of our perception.
Perception influenced by prejudice and misunderstanding
Because we are limited by what
Can be understood
In three dimensions,
And do not forget time
And gravity
And the failure of its resolution with dimension
and time
Limiting understanding.



But……
If we acknowledge the limitations
Even if not understanding the quantum context
Then, given we are prepared to accept the
uncertainty
Described by Heisenberg,
Then we are mentally equipped
To understand that truth is provisional
But with verity according to experience
Accumulated through the continuity of history.

We try to resolve contradictions
Because resolution anchors us into
the certainty of
Our present experience,
And certainty is comfort, allowing us to live
Day to day.

David Applin, May 2013

Copyright David Applin 2015

Ah, doth swayeth the grass around the heavily-watered grounds, and even lilies are even busy in their pondering thoughts. Dim poetry is lighting up my insides, but still-canst not I, proceed on to my poetic writings, for I am committed to my dear dissertation-shamefully! Cannot even I enjoy watery sweets in front of my decent romantic candlelight-o, how destructible this serious nexus is!

Ah, and the temperatures' slender fits are but a new sensation to this melancholy surroundings. How my souls desire to be liberated-from this arduous work, and be staggered into the bifurcating melodies of the winds. O, but again-these final words are somehow required, how blatantly ungenerous! What a fine doomed environment the greenery out there hath duly changed into. White-dark stretches of tremor loom over every bald bush's horizon. O-what a dreadful, dreadful pic of sovereign menace! Not at all lyrical; much less gorgeous! Even the ultimate touches of serendipity have been broomed out of their localised regions. Broomed forcibly; that their weight and multitudes of collars whitened-and their innocent stomachs pulled systematically out. Ah, how dire-dire-dire; how perseveringly unbearable! A dawn at dusk, then-is a normal occurence and thus needeth t' be solitarily accepted. No more grains of sensitivity are left bare. Not even one-oh, no more! A tumultous slumber hinders everything, with a sense of original perplexity t'at haunts, and harms any of it t'at dares to pass by. O, what a disgrace t'at is secretly housed by t'is febrile nature! And o, t'is what happeneth when poets are left onto t'eir unstable hills of talents, with such a wild lagoon of inspirations about! Roam, roam as we doth-along the parked cars, all unread-and dolefully left untouched, like a moonlit baby straightening his face on top of the earth's liar *****. Ah, I knoweth t'is misery. A misery t'at is not only textual, but also virginal; but what I comprehendeth not is the unfairness of the preceding remark itself-if all miseries were crudely virginal, then wouldst it be unworthy of perceiving some others as personal? O, how t'is new confusion puzzles me, and vexes me all too badly! Beads of sweat are beginning to form on my humorous palms, with lines unabashed-and pictorial aggressions too unforgiving too resist. Ah, quiver doth I-as I am, now! O, thee-oh, mindful joyfulness and delight, descend once more onto me-and maketh my work once again thine-ah, and thy only, own vengeful blossom! And breathe onto my minds thy very own terrific seizure; maketh all the luring bright days no more an impediment and a cure; to every lavish thought clear-but hungrily unsure! Ah, as I knoweth it wouldst work-for thy seizure on my hand is gentle, ratifying, and safely classical. How I loveth thy little grasps-and shall always do! Like a moonlight, which had been carried along the stars' compulsive backs-until it truly screamed, while the bountiful morning retreated, and mounted its back. Mounted its back so that it could not see. Invasive are the stars-as thou knoweth, adorned with elaborations t'at humanity, and even the sincerest of gravities shall turn out. Ah, so 'tis how the moon's poor sailing soul is-like a chirping bird-trembled along the snowy night, but knocked back onto abysmal conclusions, soon as sunshine startled him and brought him back anew, to the pale hordes of mischievous, shadowy roses. Ah, all these routines are similar-but unsure, like thoughts circling-within a paper so impure. And when tragic love is bound, like the one I am having with 'im; everything shall crawl-and seem dearer than they seem; for nothing canst bind a heart which falls in love, until it darkeneth the rosiness of its own cheeks, and destroys its own kiss. Like how he hath impaired my heart; but I shall be a stone once more; abysses of my deliciously destroyed sapphire shall revive within the glades of my hand; and my massive tremors shall ever be concluded. O, love, o notion that I may not hate; bestow on my thy aberrant power-and free my tormented soul-o, my poor tormented soul, from the possible eternal slumber without tasting such a joy of thine once more! I am now trapped within a triangle I hated; I am no more of my precious self-my sublimity hath gone; hath attempted at disentangling himself so piercingly from me. I am no more terrific; I smell not like my own virginity-and much less, an ideal lady-t'at everyone shall so hysterically shout at, and pray for, ah, I hath been disinherited by the world.

Ah, shall I be a matter to your tasty thoughts, my love? For to thee I might hath been tentative, and not at all compulsory; I hath been disowned even, by my own poetry; my varied fate hath ignored and strayed me about. Ah, love, which danger shall I hate-and avoid? But should I, should I diverge from t'is homogeneous edge I so dreamily preached about? And canst thou but lecture me once more-on the distinctness between love and hate-in the foregoing-and the sometimes illusory truth of our inimical future? And for the love of this foreignness didst I revert to my first dreaded poetry-for the sake of t'is first sweetly-honeyed world. For the time being, it is perhaps unrighteous to think of thee; thou who firstly wert so sweet; thou who wert but too persuasive-and too magnanimous for every maiden's heart to bear. Thou who shone on me like an eternal fire-ah, sweet, but doth thou remember not-t'at thou art thyself immortal? Thou art but a disaster to any living creature-who has flesh and breath; for they diverge from life when time comes, and be defiled like a rusty old parish over one fretful stormy night. Ah, and here I present another confusion; should I reject my own faith therefrom? Ah, like the reader hath perhaps recognised, I am not an interactive poet; for I am egotistic and self-isolating. Ah, yet-I demand, sometimes, their possibly harshest criticism; to be fit into my undeniable authenticity and my other private authorial conventions. I admireth myself in my writing as much as I resolutely admireth thee; but shall we come, ever, into terms? Ah, thee, whose eyes are too crucial for my consciousness to look at. Ah, and yet-thou hath caused me simply far-too-adequate mounds of distress; their power tower over me, standing as a cold barrier between me and my own immaculate reality of discourse. Too much distress is, as the reader canst see, in my verse right now-and none is sufficiently consoling-all are unsweet, like a taste of scalding water and a tree of curses. Yes, that thou ought to believe just yet-t'at trees are bound to curses. Yester' I sheltered myself, under some bits of splitting clouds-and t'eir due mourning sways of rain, beneath a solid tree. With leaves giggling and roots unbecoming underneath-ah, t'eir shrieks were too selfish; ah, all terrible, and contained no positive merit at all-t'at they all became too vague and failed at t'eir venerable task of disorganising, and at the same time-stunning me. Ah, but t'eir yelling and gasping and choking were simply too ferociously disoriented, what a shame! Their art was too brutal, odd, and too thoroughly equanimious-and wouldst I have stood not t'ere for the entire three minutes or so-had such perks of abrupt thoughts of thee streamed onto my mind, and lightened up all the burdening whirls of mockery about me in just one second. O, so-but again, the sound melodies of rain were of a radical comfort to my ears-and t'at was the actual moment, when I realised t'at I truly loved him-and until today, the real horror in my heart saith t'at it is still him t'at I purely love-and shall always do. Though I may be no more of a pretty glimpse at the heart of his mirror, 'tis still his imagery I keepeth running into; and his vital reality. Ah, how with light steps I ran to him yester' morning; and caught him about his vigorous steps! All seemed ethereal, but the truthful width of the sun was still t'ere-and so was the lake's sparkling water; so benevolently encompassing us as we walked together onto our separated realms. And passing the cars, as we did, all t'at I absorbed and felt so neatly within my heart was the intuitive course; and the unavoidable beauty of falling in love. Ah, miracles, miracles, shalt thou ever cease to exist? Ah, bring but my Immortal back to me-as if I am still like I was back then, and of hating him before I am not guilty; make him mine now-even for just one night; make him hold my hands, and I shall free him from all his present melancholy and insipid trepidations. Ah, miracles; I doth love my Immortal more t'an I am permitted to do; and so if thou doth not-please doth trouble me once more; and grant, grant him to me-and clarify t'is tale of unbreathed love prettily, like never before.

As I have related above I may not be sufficient; I may not be fair-from a dark world doth I come, full not of royalty-but ambiguity, severed esteem, and gales-and gales, of unholy confidentiality. And 'tis He only, in His divine throne-t'at is worthy of every phrased gratitude, and thankful laughter; so t'is piece is just-though not artificial, a genuine reflection of what I feelest inside, about my yet unblessed love, and my doubtful pious feelings right now-and about which I am rather confused. Still, I am to be generous, and not to be by any chance, too brimming or hopeful; but I shall not be bashful about confessing t'is proposition of love-t'at I should hath realised from a good long time ago. Ah, I was but too arrogant within my pride-and even in my confessions of humility; I was too charmed by myself to revert to my extraordinary feelings. Ah, but again-thou art immortal, my love; so I should be afraid not-of ceasing to love thee; and as every brand-new day breathes life into its wheels-and is stirred to the living-once more, I know t'at the swells of nature; including all the crystallised shapes of th' universe-and the' faithful gardens of heaven, as well as all the aurochs, angels, and divinity above-and the skies' and oceans' satirical-but precious nymphs, are watching us, and shall forgive and purify us; I know t'at this is the sake of eternity we are fighting for. And for the first time in my life-I shall like to confess this bravely, selfishly, and publicly; so that wherever thou art-and I shall be, thou wilt know-and in the utmost certainty thou canst but shyly obtain, know with thy most honest sincerity; t'at I hath always loved thee, and shall forever love thee like this, Immortal.

If you want my heart you must ask my curves for permission first.
Convince them you will be the one to adore them, no matter their width or depth.
Let your hands do the talking.
Touch me so soft I tremble and you break the code.
Only then will they allow my chest to open and my heart will be yours to keep.

Hi, my name is female.
I might not fold my hands the way she does
Or flip my hair the way that girl does.

Hi, my name is female.
The width and length I am shouldnt define if I'm qualified for Vogue.
The way I lick my lips may not be as attractive as the next female,
How my eyelashes flutter may not appeal to you.

Hi, my name is female and I like mashed potatoes and Thai coconut.
They say “eat less, its prettier. Where this, it shows more.”
Why?
I shouldn't have to balance myself on misleading scales that does nothing but swallow my pride up.

Hi my name is female.
Because one chicken breast is smaller than the other….it's not the same?
Because another person's peach is plumper than mine….its better?  
They're still the same and we should treat them the same.

Words get thrown at us everyday and its expected of us to pick them up and change the way we are.
No.

Hi, my name is female and I shouldn't be talking this way just for a guy.
I shouldn't be crying for this guy,
I shouldn't be kissing up to this guy,
I shouldn't be changing for a guy,
I wasn't made for a guy.

Because I can't reach my toes like the next female, shouldn't mean a thing. Because my palms may ash more or my bones may creek more, shouldn't define how pretty I am.
Her hair may reach her elbows, her hair may touch her neck.
Her skin might love the sun, her skin might hate it.
Its still beautiful.

Hi, my name is female and I like mashed potatoes and Thai coconut.
Just because you may not like it, doesn't mean Its gross or Im repulsive..

One female can say, “I am” while the other girl across the street can say, “I is.”
“No I won't”
Or
“No I ain't”

I can still smile just like the next female,
I can hold a laugh,
Cough,
Sneeze,
Wink,
Eat like the next female.

We're all one conjoined masterpiece.
One cannot make me feel low of myself.
One will not tell me she's better than me.
One will not let me cry my eyes out.

Hi, my name is female and I have a name.
My name defines me.
I am beautiful just like the next girl who likes mashed potatoes and Thai coconut.

Embrace your beauty, honey. You're gonna have it forever.

I have been here before, and with this same pen, I express myself through words.
To better understand myself, and to avoid being misunderstood.

Some call it bewitched, but I call it love.
There is an emptiness in the freedom of being alone,
And liberty in being caught in that divine spell.

The day that I stop writing love poetry is the day that my pen's ink will run out,
Along with my sense of connection to humanity.

Love is hard, and so difficult to describe,
Too complex to express simply by stringing words together.
Yet here I am, trying over and over,  
Always feeling limited, unfulfilled, unsatisfied.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

I have been here before, I am comforted by love's familiarity,
Its pleasant tenderness, shining like rays of sun, enveloping me in warmth and sincerity.
Its floral fragrance in the form of beautiful golden sunflowers,
Bundled with red ribbon at the stems, followed by conversations that go on for hours.
Its sweet taste in the form of kisses, followed by more and more and more, all over my cheeks and face,
Until there is not a spot that his lips have not touched, and then I point lower, to a different space.
I want more but I am too timid to say,
But my flushed cheeks and smile gives it away anyway.

But, I've also been here before, reminiscing on this familiarity,
I am then reminded of the heartache that follows, and I get a sense of polarity.
The shattered promises of forever, and the final goodbyes,
The returning of sweaters that smell like him while holding back desperate cries.
The empty and cold interactions as he shuts the door behind him,
The sinking loneliness as I stand in the room that is now increasingly dim.
The racking sobs as my heart begs me to stop doing this to myself,
So, I take the thought of love, lock it in a box, and put it high on a shelf.


But, I have been here before, knowing that I cannot stop,
Love is embedded deep inside of me, it is not something I can just drop.
My heart knows how capable I am to feel such raw emotions,
It flows gracefully through me, and soars with plummeting waves like the ocean.
My heart demands to spark a flame in the one who ignited such feelings inside of me,
It longs and yearns to douse them with love and unwavering loyalty.
It demands to be expressed, through every form of self-expression that I use,
Whether that is poetry, painting, music, whatever outlet I choose to let loose.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

I have been here before, trying to express my feeling of love.
It is difficult and frustrating, and most attempts are ripped apart and disposed of.
I have been trying to describe love for years, and still feel unsatisfied,
The countless filled notebooks are evidence of all the times that I have tried.
I cannot find how to put it simply but in a beautiful way,
I write about it for hours and hours, from night until day.
I want to be cherished for not only who I am, but who I was, and how I came to be,
So instead of writing about love, I will write about how to better love me.

I have not been here before, so I will take it slow,
If it helps you better understand me, please let me know.
This is for you, if you want to love me,
It is complex and it may not come immediately.
Please understand that it will take time,
For you to love me the way that I need, this is not just a rhyme.
This is new to me, I have not been here before,
If it makes you see the real me, for you I will write more.
I have not been here before, but I am still using the same pen,
If you follow my trail of disorganized thinking, please nod every now and then.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

I am honest, and I will never lie.
I want you to be my best friend before being my guy.
I want to build a sense of familiarity -- to know about you and your life.
I want consistency, continuous communication, so we can avoid all strife.
I want passion and longing, the magnetic pull between our lips and bodies until they unify.
I want "I love you"s to be meaningful, not fillers to be thrown in when our conversation dies.

He must know that the "he" in this story, could also be a she.
My ability to love isn't limited by appearances that fade with time, life’s bittersweet guarantee.
He must know my personality, my strengths, goals, hopes, and dreams,
And when we fight, he must remember that we are not on opposing teams.
He must know how to support me and my life goals, how to motivate me,
When the coldness of the world frightens me, and I search for ways to escape reality.
He must want the best for me, for me to be happy, even if that is not by his side,
If we realize that we are not compatible, or our relationship makes us feel unsatisfied.
He must know my weaknesses, my flaws.
My tendency to push away when I am overwhelmed, and how to find the probable cause.
He must know that though I love to care for others, I am not great at caring for my own body.
My self-destructive nature has a story of its own, and it is not shared with everybody.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

I have been here before, and with the same pen, I try to help him understand me,
I have been fighting my demons for a long time, and I can't remove the shackles that would set me free.
He feels a need to fix me, as if I were a broken wine glass,
I tell him to mind his footing, bringing attention to the pieces he should avoid and overpass.
He thinks that sweet words could be the glue to adhere my shards together,
And praises the curvature of my body, accentuated by a jacket made of leather.
He believes that he could love me more than anyone else has, and by doing so, he would mend me,
I quietly sigh, close my eyes, and slowly count to three.

I have been here before, and with the same pen, I try to make him see,
My broken pieces are not mean to be picked up by fragile hands, nor by anybody.
He learns this when the sharp sting of glass runs along the tips of his digits,
He realizes that the scars on my fingers were from all the attempts I made when I felt brave and ambitious.
Trust me, I have been there before -- I know how much it hurts, I do not want you to share my pain,
I know that I am a sad girl, but still some happiness remains.
I want to embrace this darkness, my ability to feel emotions so immense,
My dear, there is no need to put your fists up in defense.

I have been here before, and I watch him try to fit the pieces together,
But they are sharp, merciless, and weigh much more than a feather.
They are not a puzzle, they do not even fit me anymore,
But he becomes increasingly frustrated, exclaiming that this is more than he asked for.
I try to make him understand that they do not define me,
I only want them to be a visual for my story, I do not need them to be complete, nor to feel free.
I want him to see my past and my struggles, laid on the table,
Only then he will know how intricately strong the roots are that ground me and keep me stable.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

I have been here before, and I don't feel like rhyming anymore,
It took me a long time to understand myself and what I stand for.

The shattered pieces that lay before him are all of the times I've lost a piece of myself;
The innocence that I clung to for so long and had to drop in order to survive and adapt.
The ideologies of supportive families, shattered by abusive alcoholics that no one questioned.
The expectations of loving and supportive friends, broken by betrayal and abandonment.
The life that I once knew, had to leave behind, and the shock that crackled my perspective and forever changed me.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

I have been here before, and with the same pen, I try to reassure him,
But he is drowning in my sorrows and has forgotten how to swim.
He feels a need to scare away my demons, and cure what plagues my mind,
He becomes frightened by my pain and wants to protect me, so he covers my eyes.
But my self-destructive nature was never his job to correct,
I try to help him understand that I am grateful, I never meant any disrespect.

I have been here before, and with the same pen, I try prove that I am his equal and that we are the same,
I am not expecting him to be anything more than he is, I am not a helpless dame.
But he feels that it is his duty as a man to complete me, to support me, to give me a reason to smile.
I put down my pen, and and stare into his eyes for a while.

Though I may be broken, I am complete on my own.
The only support I want is holding hands as we walk side by side, not in the form of you carrying me.
Our world is beautiful enough to make me smile, I only want to enjoy it alongside you.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

But, I have been here before, and I have been through all that.
For 24 years actually, so that makes me stronger than you.
I am better equipped and more than capable to deal with certain things on my own,
These pieces are not even a part of me anymore.
My demons do not need to be slain by a knight in shining armor, because they are more afraid of me.
They know what I've overcome, and know that I will not take **** from anybody.

I've been here before, and with the same pen, I acknowledge my strength,
I've rebuilt the walls of my wine glass exterior with precise width and length.
I designed them using the knowledge that I have gained from my hardships and where I went wrong,
I shaped and molded them with the experiences that have taught me how to be strong.
And I placed seeds that blossomed when nourished by my own self-determination,
I spent many years adding to my durable and unbreakable flooring and foundation.
I painted the walls crimson red, and hung golden accents on the ceiling,
And laid mats to meditate on when I am hurting and need healing.

I have been here before, and I've created this for myself,
I will invite you in, if you'd like to see it for yourself.
I am strong, I am intelligent, and I hope to be more brave,
But I am a lover and a fighter, so please don't think that I need to be saved.
I want to share this beautiful experience of life with you,
But it is not a journey that you have to carry me through.
We will put on comfortable shoes and make our way together,
And we'll prepare for obstacles, challenges, and unpleasant weather.

I have been here before, and I see that look in his eyes,
The corners of his lips curl down and he feels the need to apologize.
I don't need an apology, or for you to change who you are,
Let's enjoy our time together and have a cigar.
The universe granted us to exist alongside each other, and we have crossed paths for a reason,
So please enjoy the warm weather with me this season.
There are so many beautiful sights out there,
I don't care what we do, or where we go, we can go to Times Square!
As long as I'm by your side, and you love me,
In the most pure, raw, and passionate form, it would make me so happy.
Put on the other headphone in and listen to this song,
I think now that you understand how to better love me, you can do no wrong.
I put my pen down as we listen along,
I dedicate a playlist to him, filled with love songs.

I have been here before, and even though my pen is down,
It seems that I cannot and will not stop expressing love.

Somehow he pulls along
He breathes
In his little width of life,
He gasps
In making that width
When moves flesh
That far outweighs
What he gets at the ride’s end,
Sweats it out in the sun
Splashes in the rain
A pedaling run
Joyless but gritty
That if can be made
Would fetch him his bread
From the rider in comfort
To the puller who transports
Mountains of loads
Knowing not to pause
Till drawn by fate
For a rest in sunset!

Dear Friends, I have simplified the true story of
the Grand Canyon of Arizona by leaving out the
plethora of scientific details, & the various theories
of scholars about its formation! Presenting here the
more popular version for your kind appreciation!
Therefore, I have used only a part of my Notes on
the subject. Kindly don’t forget to read Part Two
later, for the total story. No need to comment in
a hurry! Thanks, -Raj.

STORY OF THE GRAND CANYON IN
VERSE : PART ONE- BY RAJ NANDY

              BACKGROUND
Our unique planet earth on which we reside,
Remains restless and dynamic, which in its
bowels it hides!
Titanic forces have been at work since our planets
formation; (App. 4.5 billion years ago)
Tectonic plates collided shaping continents,
along with quakes and volcanic eruptions!
Mighty glaciers had formed and receded, while
forces of nature did shape,
When mighty Himalayas and the Rockies rose
up, as we see them on date!
Several species evolved and of multifarious kind,
Leaving a trail of geological mysteries behind!
Geologists have tried to figure out what caused
the rugged Rockies to rise,
From miles below the surface of the earth,
stretching across 3000 miles;
Across New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming and
Montana, all the way up into North Canada;
To become the longest mountain chain of
North America!
The Geologists speculate that the heavier
Pacific Oceanic Plate, had moved northwest
under the North American Plate;
And as a result of this geological seduction
and embrace,
A split had opened up in the American West!
Such mountain building activity or ‘Orogeny’,
Had occurred in several phases during Earth’s
evolving history!
But mostly it occurred during the ‘Age of the
Dinosaurs’ in the Mesozoic Age,
Around 100 to 200 million years hence!
Now cutting across million years of Geological
History,
I come to the Colorado Plateau to commence
my Grand Canyon Story!

THE COLORADO PLATEAU
The awesome forces which raised the Rocky
Mountain Chains, also raised the Colorado
Plateau at a later time once again!
But during the Plateau’s gradual rise there was
surprisingly no devastation,
As the well preserved sedimentary layers rose
up with the Plateau without deformation!
Like an elevator traveling upwards this Plateau
gradually rose,
Along with its several embedded rock layers,
with which it was composed!
The Plateau is scattered over an area of some
1300,000 square mile as we know;
Going clockwise it covers Arizona, Utah, Colorado,
and the State of New Mexico!
Within this rugged area are located the Grand
Canyon, Grand Staircase, Bryce and Zion Canyon,
Arches, National Bridges, Monument Valley,
Glen Canyon, and Lake Powell.
It was Major John Wesley Powell a Geologist,
a brave solder and an explorer,
Who during the 19th century had mapped the
entire Grand Canyon area;
By sailing down the treacherous rapid infested
and uncharted Colorado River!
During the American Civil War Powell’s right
hand was amputated,
God bless his soul for the work he had initiated!
(The area from Bryce Canyon down to the Grand Canyon
is referred to as the ‘Grand Staircase’ due to the existing
land features!)

THE SOUTHERN RIM OF THE PLATEAU
Standing near the edge of more easily accessible
Southern Rim, one gets captivated by the sculptured
beauty and brilliant colors of sedimentary rock layers;
Which also captivated the imagination of tourists,
geologists, painters and explorers!
Geologists have opined, that till 80 million years, this
area was inundated by the Sea several times;
By dating the limestone and marine fossils on the
top Kaibab Limestone Layer they now find!
The lowest rock basement of this Plateau the
Vishnu Schist, dated as a third of our Earth’s
total age, still exists! (Dated as 1.5 billion years.)
Yet the dominant color of the layers of the
Canyon is of a reddish kind,
Due to iron deposits in the layers that we find!
Standing on the edge of the Southern Rim one
is struck by the grand panoramic view and its
macro immensity !
Gazing into a 1500 meter deep gorge carved into
nearby horizontal sedimentary rocks, - a stark
reality,
Where Man becomes aware of his own micro
fragility!
These layers were deposited 500 million years ago,
Prior to the elevation of the Colorado Plateau!
Viewing this testament to Nature’s magnificence,
Man loses himself for a while, to become transfixed
in space and time!
Though there are other deeper canyons in this
world we know, but none are more impressive
or grander;
So Major Powell named it the ‘Grand Canyon’,
which had also made him to wonder!

GRAND CANYON AND THE COLORADO RIVER
The Grand Canyon stretches from Lake Powell near
Utah-Arizona boarder right up to Lake Mead,
Is around 277 miles long with a max width of 18 miles,
and a max depth of around 6000 feet!
The Canyon proper is located in the northwestern
portion of Arizona, in the midst of the Grand Canyon
National Park,
Where the Colorado River bisects this Park into
Northern and Southern halves!
The Northern Rim is a 1000 feet higher and is ideal
for rafters, trekkers, and cliff climbers.
The better connected South Rim has around 5 million
visitors annually!
But the affluent few with lesser time, visit the glass-
bottom horseshoe shaped ‘Skywalk’ in the western
section, in Hualapai Indian Reservation territory!

             CONCLUDING PART ONE :
The question that intrigue Geologists and the visitors
alike, is how the Colorado River did shape,
The mighty Canyon through this great depth?
Before giving you the answer in Part Two
I must pause here to quote,
Lines from the poem “Grand Canyon” which
Lisa A Williams once wrote; -
“I look to the depths far, far below,
To crevices and caverns formed long ago.
To twisting trails, ledges steep,
Winding rivers with pools so deep! ..........
Cascades of color with each sunrise,
Golden walls with lavender hues,
Shades of pink and smoky blues.
Rainbows of stone, dance in fading light,
Lengthening shadows, with approaching
night . …………….
A brush in hand the painter can see,
The miracle of nature and all it can be.
Trying to capture the beauty of age,
Seems impossible with human gauge!
So much to take in, the eyes try to behold,
An ancient image of creation so bold.
Formed by ice and melting snow,
An artist’s canvas sketched long ago!”
-  by Lisa A Williams.

Dear readers, later in the second part of this
story,
I shall conclude by telling you how the
Colorado River in all its pristine glory,
Carved out this vast Canyon through million
years of our Earth’s History!
Part two will be posted later after a break
surely,
Thanks for reading patiently, from Raj Nandy
of New Delhi.
*ALL COPYRIGHTS ARE WITH THE AUTHOR ONLY

One glossy raven perched, stately,
atop a snowy hill, Unearthly Long flowing wings, hanging down the *****, framing the hill
on the face of which,
were interposed two glacial ponds of blue.
Between these pools ran a simple strip of sloped marble,
But at the base of this was the most gentle depression in the snow.
In disbelief I observed two rows of strawberries, blossoming,
heavy laden with the richest red.
Each gentle bite of these more delicious than the last.
I continued my survey,
down to a long narrow hill of the freshest snow.
Here I came upon a wide expanse, a plain,
two long, slender berms extended at opposite sides.
But this was no true plain, and all the better for that,
For two equal mounds of snow enchanted the landscape.
The setting sun cast a pink light at the peak of each pale globe,
So beautiful I wept.
As I passed between their valley the snowy distance continued.
I observed an infinitesimal sloping on the Western and Eastern edges.
This expanse, perfect of any true blemish, was punctuated by the shallowest little empty pond at its narrowest width; which only served to enhance the beauty.
The length of this snowed plain was far greater than its width, the edges slowly creeping into the narrowest part before flaring out to a wide expanse.
And there in the lowlands was The Delta,
to the side of which extended two of the longest and most shapely tapering ridges I had ever observed;
each ending with graceful peaks.
But that Delta!
Though snowy, the darkest , shortest scrub had capped its mound.
At the apex of The Delta was a precipice,
on its face a cavern, pink walls glistening with wetness,
at the caverns base, a cave.
Its tunnel, with walls ribbed, was warm and humid despite the landscape of snow.
This is the landscape I cherish most.

I have yet to find the exact
size, length, width, weight, height,
of my rusted trusty nail, which I lost.
Painted golden brown
and rough on the edges,
that old man pinned my door to the wall.
Now it's left hanging in the open
dangling in the wind
swaying with the broken rain,
my home
vulnerable,
a feasty treat,
like the first time Hansel and Gretel saw the witch's house.

I'm not afraid of the
teeth baring wolves
bloodcurdling hounds with red eyes
massive 10 foot hungry bears
that tower over you with outstretched paws
holding a steak knife and fork
its brown fur a bib.
No

I'm afraid of my house
zipping up its backpack
filled with all the canned goods
fresh water canteens from the well
and all the matches and firewood in the cellar
taking off during the night
when the moon is at its darkest,
leaving I,
to do the only thing left:
To pay the bright orange flames
to entertain me as
my wads of money lit up the
darkest night of the century
all because I couldn't replace my

*most dear, loved, precious
nail.

Onward and Upward
Trending on mind-bending signals that send you on a trip to perfect love making
For the sake of awakening the inner child making a bad girl go wild
Letting her inner child out on her worst behavior
Save the Christian values for later
For now live in the moment of every lover’s dreams
Let your inhibitions roam free
Lets heat things up with rose pedals raining from the ceiling
On this cold crisp evening go see
What cupid has left you under the tree
Wrapped up in a bow
It’s time to let go and release the thing you’ve always been afraid of but wanted to be
Exalt intimate thoughts to heights beneath where the Holiest of Holies and great *** meet
Close your eyes
Follow each of my fingers on a ride
Each pushing electrical impulses pulsating until your body convulses and goes into a frenzy
Each one
Precludes the width and the tip of my tongue
And turnpikes all the way down until it touches the inner sides of your thighs then slides…
In and out
In and out of the walls of your gateway
Just point me in the direction of the pathway
The cove the place where I lay my suitcase and we make our case to fill the atmosphere
With rotating, rewinding, refilling
Our empty glasses with wine and no fear
A cycle of love making on relentless rotation being made...right here

I spent my life as a ghost
drifting lost through the halls
knocking on the closed doors
immaterial against their charm

a mere shadow by life’s gauge
with a past the most can’t see
while I dread the future times
existing longer than I dare

in response I mark my time
exploring themes most avoid
by this measure I am lost
a phantom seeking what most avoid

moaning poems to be heard
these enchantments from the muse
delivered a mantra daily shared
asking a world to bear witness

the themes of life are countable
on one hand or maybe two
knowing others also struggle
also shades to my form

only a spectre, nothing more
I’ll end my time with a verse
asking for an equal ear
to listen through the keyhole’s width.

© 2018. Sean Green. All Rights Reserved. 20180807

Vernarth and his companions delighted in the company of the biosphere since he was in the Eclectic Spiritual Portal, and in this dimension only he could be. Later, they communicated only through his donkeys, when they wanted to send them messages or share with him, they mounted one of these equids and they could pass into this atmosphere of ultraviolet light that separated them. More than an egregious Pythagorean calculation, he already stood out in his eon of matter-spiritual energy Vernacentricus, as a quantum station of the geodesy of the Megaron that has already begun to be built. At this precious moment the secular and demiurge satellites of him arrive, they came with the foundation of the points to refer to definitively raise the Ultramundis Vernacentricus. From the Vóreios or boreal the apocalypse of San Juan will be intertestamental with the canons of Zefian that transmigrated from the powers from the transversal valleys of the Horcondising, essentially following the sensory track of the Nothofagus Obliqua to attract the iterated populations of the forest.
The patriarchs and the orthodox mountain range appeared in the cords of the fungi called Ambrosiella ceratocystidaceae, to provide the Ambrosia Mercurial, as a nutritional addition to the main pilasters of the temple, with great influence of fungal fungi. Everything was beginning to demarcate from the eruv of the Zefian arrow that was named Tetarto Vélos, or fourth arrow that was already beginning with its culminating operation with the borer beetles, demarcating the urev of the Vóreios throughout the region and on the oaks of Patmos, that began to be located from the Meli Witran Mapu Mapuche winds, beginning with Pikún-kürüf Northwind with the first two arrows of the Taxotas, and Sur Waiwén, of the Pezhetairoi, of the quantum of transmigration of the Horcondising-Panhellenic sub-mythology. Then the Puelche drags the borer beetles with more force to lift the uprising fungi of the Mandragoron by the eastern vertical, to culminate with the Lafkén-kürüf all attached to the axis that supports them from this great bilocation. The boreal is demarcated, so that the Necromancer Ezpatkul with his Augrum and gold teeth, twisted the tendency of the beetles to move the main columns of the frontispiece, being colossal in reality with twice the diameter of the central ones. Then the conclusive and posterior ones of the rectangular quadrant of the Beit Hamikdash were bilocated, to bilocate the Bern Olive Trees from Gethsemane so that they finally joined the Meltemi, and towards the aeolian winds of Tramontane Eolionimia falling on the Tekhelet of Paul of Tarsus, dropping relevant heights of some cranes with gravitating silt on their extremities, and with garbeas that were secondarily colonized on the banks of the desert areas of the rocky Hamada. As was previously proverbial, three birds climbed reflecting the crown of the kings in Bethlehem, Arriving at the sacred native city, and beginning the choirs of Nativity and passion for the hiss in tenuity on the twelve Giant Camels, where they paid special attention to rebuild another temple with a sigh greater than a Sheba Dean. The canon of Policleto was renewed with Zefian who agreed with San Juan, for this kanon that will be the relevant line of topographic surveying. Thus the basal measurements of the golden number will begin with the acroteria concerted summer seats of prosperity next to the Metopes. Ezpatkul would bring with his magic the red blood cells of Betelgeuse along Leiak with all the Templar three-dimensional morphology, naming this singular parapsychology of Pope Urban II who proclaimed the First Crusade at the Council of Clermont, in France, on November 27, 1095, to delineate the paradigm in the anatomy of Gaugamela bled into Vernarth's breastplate, as the archaic and first crusade that would inspire Christian supremacy, which was already anticipated before the Christian era to come. It will be visible gestures of the trajectory of the arrows of the Zefian Torah that were deposited with their hallelujahs from the ***** of Crete. The sulfur yellow and red blood cells marked the radiosity of the Eclectic Portal that opened to give Vernarth material egress, so he would take his tools and go with his donkey's escorts for the chromatic that will be sulfur yellow and red blood cells, both dependent on the complementation with the Cinnabar, and in the raised bodies of Court V of the Helleniká Necropolis in Kímolos.

Under vileness or absence of light among darkness or apocryphal light of Evil, in contrast to the robust equanimity of light and shadow partisan of Saint John the Apostle, for the hegemonic good of his incorruptible vision. The naturalness made the world apologetic with the immune defenses of the polish textures, they invoiced proportional mathematical measures ibidem of the Hommo Novis, and of the Geometric Pythagoreanism for a body seven and a half times of Polykleitos, starting from the base to the feet as the base of the plinth or frieze until reaching near the capital that exemplifies the chin, before reaching the cornice, highlighting the figure of the capital with the front of the proportional ligament between the trunk, and the columns duly. Here the seven-headed Kanon of a David would recite the measures of the psalms, or beads in degrees with hoped-for dimensions. The kinetics was earth towed by towing carts in tetra bronze arrows, which balanced the unbalanced balance and harmony of the created whole. The symmetry of the transverse poles was muscled to make kinetic centripetal in the inertia of the bolt when hitting the faint glow of the canon rays. Making himself the sustenance in the stone and the mound, towards the Vernarth counterpose when the Himathion was tried, he appeared disguised and in composing. After this initial task, they approached the fire and scalding water to **** herbs, which pretended to be the formula of the backhoe extracted from the palimpsest of the generals of Alexander the Great, when they distributed their illegitimate Ark with royal titles; they were Perdiccas, Antipater, Crátero, Eumenes de Cardia, and others like the satraps who came to be enunciated as kings; Antigonus, Ptolemy, and Seleucus. Residing only the most substantial military colleague of them in this parapsychological saga Vernarth; and his brother Etréstles de Kalavrita who seconded and predestined him in his monolithic, and in the constituent sovereignty of Polis, for the purpose of reigning and raising his Kopis and Xifos intertwined in aldehyde manumissions and in the alcoholic carbonyl residues emanated from the Backhoe ferment and Nepenthe, depositing LSD in substantial amounts to align itself with Seleucus, and materially present itself in the sphere of Patmos as two representatives of both empires, one ancient Christian and the other Panhellenic, placing Seleucus in that totalitarianism over that of Alexander the Great, now extinct. On the last day after working and being satisfied with the construction work of the frontispiece, and its major columns, Vernarth joins them after temporarily leaving the eclectic portal, they sit by the fire to review the plans of the subsequent construction process del Megaron, along with his seven donkeys, mentioning Borker's necromancy. Since the omens of Wontehlimar, the linemen before Borker became reigning, for the static balustrade that will surround the Megaron, where all the Ibics rings were enlisted chorally by the patronage of the Hellenic Orthodox legacy of Alexander the Great after he was rescued by Wonthelimar from Babylon, and finally take you to your physical and spiritual shelter. The eruv of the Nótos was demarcated, surpassing the limits of the rings of stefánes Íbix, or Hoops of ibix, like nano kvantikoí daktýlioi, Nano-Quantum Ring auguring sensitize the dermis and its carpal phalanges. From the intertestamental, such as in Vóreios, passages from the Old Testament are explored here that says…: “The temple that was the only legitimate sanctuary of the Israelite people contained within it the Ark of the Covenant, a golden altar, and candlesticks of the same metal. , a table with sacred loaves and other utensils used to carry out the worship of the god Yahveh. It was located on the esplanade of Mount Moriá, in the city of Jerusalem, possibly where the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque are located. From this dome the larnax of the Great Macedonian, a prioris, the schismatics of ancient Christianity, and orthodox Judaic will be derived, separating from each other, after the fall of the second temple. Of this class and previously this was detonated due to the undivided troops of the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II, who destroyed it in 586 BC, also taking captives a large part of the inhabitants of the Kingdom of Judah, to Mesopotamia, giving rise to the exile and captivity of the Hebrews in Babylon. A reflective Borker of this premonition, he takes the Ibics Rings and selects one of them to join them with the first Zefian Arrow, as nano Kvantikoí Daktýlioi, quantum Nano-ring, to ensue in future similar events, avoiding invasions that cause looting and destruction. of the temple to be built on Patmos.

Nano-scales for Borker's nanotechnological conception, and estimates of threats of invasions and climatic changes, in one billion (109) and one billionth (10-9). In a meter there are one billion nanometers or, in other words, a nanometer is one-billionth of a meter. For those who will have to configure the dimensions of the Mandragoron "Temple of Vernarth" with carbon atoms, the support will be made in chemical units for the re-conception of nature, and its two- or three-dimensional networks. The nanotubes with 60 carbons, distributed in 20 hexagons and 12 pentagons, according to the geometric patterns of the cellular scale, in the conformation of the Hexagonal Primogeniture, being in this way concealed by the Ibics Rings, for each linear meter and cubic, traced by a nanometer which is one-billionth of a meter. Here, the borer beetles will catch the fungi ambrosiella ceratocystidaceae and will displace the virals that move geometrically from the beams of the Icosahedron.

The ranks of Falangists moved triangularly in multiple directions, to reach the Austral del Nótos de Borker, thus they would form the magic vectors of the polyhedron internally, triangulating at the top of the ram that carries an illustrious triangular phalanx, opening up the areas with its prop. vulnerable, to consolidate the buttress of the façade; the Áullos Kósmos, and pay homage to the apse that was filled with rejoicing. Sones of the philosopher Plato, made them regular or perfect in convex polyhedra, such that on all their faces were regular and equal polygons were made, and in all solid angles also equal. From this boulevard, the theology of Vernarth and Alexander the Great, fully professor and Platonic guide, will follow, making nomenclatures of nanostructures that affirm the volume and structure of the central sections of the radier, and their foundation bases shielded by the icosahedron in the nanotechnological scale, having physical material cells, for adaptation of structural changes and their environment.

The volume will be adapted microscopically, to analyze small particles with the return of the fourth arrow or Tetra Sagita of Zefian, absorbing nutrients and discarding the environmental threats based on carbon dioxide, to make a limiting membrane beauty, which moderates the nanoparticles that borer beetles were developing. The solidity of the partitions and walls will have the exact proportion of the nanomaterials, to adapt to the general area of the Mandragoron Nótos, which will ooze the surpluses due to the porosities, towards a volume highly resistant to invasions of limestone nanomaterials, and boulders that are made from the flow of the buttress of the apse that rises towards Aorion. The interior and exterior faces will be supplements of prayers of Prochoro, in didactics that will shield with the Antiphons Benedictus, and the hive of Plato's Icosahedron, becoming a consular material organism, and solid in interstices or leftovers from the feces of the Borers, until pasting and to reach the volume of the polyhedron, and its twenty faces pointing towards the physiognomy of the boulevard, tracing the general volume of the Mandragoron, and intercommunicating the quantum support and its theological harmony.

Says Borker: “if the organic cells operate with homage and with greater multicellular fields, here are the nanoparticles, in greater fields of fiatto, and in the slides that will recirculate in favor of the throat of the Mandragoron, and in the carbon nanotubes, essential elements of the biosphere and in useful layers of life that retrace the rest. There will be 20 linear meters in the area that lavishes the width and height, the projection of this scale of nanotechnology, will make the three-dimensional shape and a large voluminous serial in the Austral Nótos ”Vernarth's purging dimension, made him materialize at times and laugh out loud because he knew that everyone who was with him loved him! and from this fraction of faith, the Angel Raphael diagnoses them bread with archangelic essence; herb with great healing powers, especially in the dimension of the eclectic portal that allowed Vernarth to concern himself with material living beings.

Definitely, the second step of consolidation of the Megaron was established in the linear that the seven donkeys eagerly left, as masons and cabinetmakers who worked together with the Hexagonal Primogeniture. From this moment everything begins to have an inter-dimensional aspect, from the Invisible Eclectic Portal to the majestic geodesy and orography of this temple, which incorporated everyone for a charitable epiphany together with everyone in the Profitis Ilias, which was already crowned as the cusp Spiritual World of the Vernarthian Eclectic.

Regardless how precise the assay of their life,
Most men must remain an enigma;
Their motivation fired by inner strife
A polymorph for which no sigma,
Nor algebraic symbol will suffice.

No If and then which personality
To a course of action thus relates,
Nor can it be hypothesized conditionally,
The turmoil emotion intrinsically creates,
When alone they stare into death's reality.

Two dimensional is the biography of any man.
We see his length and width, never grasping depth,
Though fortune deems we live within his span.
Much like this into my life have crept
Those I love, yet may never understand.

the child recieves his paper
****** backward by the one in front
flip the three pages flippantly
one : intimidating . . two : boring
the third adorned unexpectedly
a longer -than seems can be usually- grown hair with a clump of green root
sprung out and slaughtered, down across the width; stuck above the questions beneath

how could he not have seen?
a pile so viscous and obscene?
does everyone else have one???
are they holding their disgust beneath?

he looked up at the teacher.
A look of vigilance his face bequeathed.
B  ut now it sprung out almost pus like
a faint smile,
        a teachers calm reprieve

he then leaned back on his chair in comfort
drooping his head back
his nostrils flared now toward the child
the hairs brustling from inside, all locked up in a ***** days remnants
all foul
           and long
and dehydrated
    like a swamp now sunned crisp; reeds on a stale bank

drawn in he felt uneasy
unable to cease to stare
incased inside the world that spawned
in the swamp that lay up there
in the cavernous orifices there

then he saw the teachers eyes, his gaze it
stuck on him, the teacher began to grin
further back his head leant
his eyes jaundiced
his teeth tanned
his face pale
his grin outstretched and thin

W.H.O has poisoned the vaccine
against fertility of African girl
African boy mother and father
it his now hovering around
the third world geographies
using its satellite mouths and arms,
ringing alarms over the coming tetanus
only to trap the ignorant one
into its infernal of injections
for nothing but permanent sterility,

WHO has no sympathy
for the folks in the poor world,
Nicaragua, Mexico and Kenya
being already depopulated
by ills in history
it still goes ahead
to inject sterility
into their bodies
while pretending
to be in war on tetanus,

wars, slavery and deliberate castration
of the captured slaves
for fitness to royal gladiator
has already made Latin America
and her sister Africa
to suffer fate of the times
in the curse of underpopulation
then still WHO is insidious
in her racist moves
to depopulate the poor world
through her imperial arsenals
in the name of vaccinations
against imagined tetanus
is a sly ploy in single,

W.H.O is sterilizing daughters
of Africa and the poor world
in the age width of 15 to 50
a sure bracket for fecundity
for no other reason
but global Afro-phobia
or universal racism,
or who knows the whole deal
other than the orchestrator
of the anti-human orchestra,

Ebola is already foot loose
on its deadly mission
to wipe out the Negroes
as the imperial powers that be
are armed to the teeth
to confine it in Africa
the way they have already done
to confine cancer and impish ***
in poor Africa,

W.H.O leave Africa alone
to sire and sire,
to fill their land
for a half of Africa
is under dearth of emptiness,
five million square miles of Mauritania
has less than ten million people
a thousand square miles of Turkana
has a hundred thousand turkanas,
Sahara desert is sparsely populated
Namibia and Botswana are cursed
with the spell of humanilessness,

the ***** has no other work
but to plant the human seed
the womb has no other work
but receive the human seed
while the ******
has a royal duty
to germinate the human seed
and these are Godly duties
as the breast of a woman
feeds the seedling
at no cost,

W.H.O leave us alone
to be lame and crippled
late us be wounded
with gangrenous wounds
Like the ****** ulcers
that opportune on ***,
for Tetanus you are fearing
is not terrible as ***,
we better have wounds
and children
other than being barren
in danger of foreign reign,

W.H.O you are in arms
with your fellow bigots
to legalize and empower
Homosexuality in Africa
this being a strategy enough
to jab the ribs of African humanity
a deadly sucker punch
off the right pedastle
of tyranny of numbers,

W.H.O have you ever seen
an African burial of the barren?
listen I tell you, I am aware
you know not,
burying of the barren and the sterile
is the most black ritual
most pale in the world,

give birth Africa! give birth
give birth to twins
in the prime of your childhood
before you go to cities
give birth, and give birth,
children and only children
are the glory of our poverty,
children pulled China out of poverty
they are pulling India out of poverty
as France is stranded on which way out
as it gambles and gambols in stupidity
with free money for the second child,

W.H.O! I know you are foolish as a stone
but I will leave you with pearls of wisdom
from the Bukusu people of Kenya,
that; even if you are foolish
Foolish and stubborn like a stone
but I am as hungry as a hyena
i am sure you have heard.

Strolling, wistful, through a thousand lives,
across the chasmed centuries gone past,
he calls her name; it never quite arrives
to fall upon her ear.  Just at the last,
she leaves the hall, or shutters windows closed.
The fading echoes rebound, fall, despair
upon the careless earth, alone who knows
how many times he's haunted up her stairs
and stood before her door, unwilling hand
hung limply at his side. The heavy years
passed by them both again; he hadn't planned
that they would not meet. This chance disappears  
to speak the truth he knows she knows as well;
two ancient souls in broken bodies dwell.

Two ancient souls in broken bodies dwell,
a karmic double-helix twists through time.
They spiral 'round, attracted and repelled
by cosmic force, the space between defined
as two arms' lengths apart. Their fingertips
will brush by chance; the spark that generates
ignites the kindling lust, the heated lips
which speak the wildfire words of love. The fates
dictate the places, times where their paths cross;
circumstances, consequences feed
the choices made.  They've chosen fire, the loss
of reason, stoking starving naked need,
dance with abandon, passion, without pride;
they trip light-years fantastic side by side.

They trip light-years fantastic side by side.
The pas de deux began in ancient court
of some small city-state.  He is a knight
sent by his Queen, a diplomatic sort
of mission.  At a dinner hosted by
the local King, the knight, while taking in
who might be helpful or a hindrance spies
a shaken mane of gold, blue eyes within
her stunning face, struck slack with ennui
until she meets his eyes.  An eyebrow lifts,
a corner of her mouth curls up, unseen
by all save the old man beside.  He shifts,
and stands to pound his staff. The hall is still;
bound by an angered mage's curs'ed spell

Bound by an angered mage's curs'ed spell:
"Your burning gaze, Sir Knight...your smile, milass;
returned. You want each other?  Very well!
So mote it be; I'll have it come to pass.
She will be linked to you, eternally
yours, to have, to hold and never love;
to consummate and quench your lust will be
your death. And you shall lust, by Jove above!
I hereby mate your everlasting souls;
condemn you with a love like Hades' fires,
passion's heat incinerates you whole.
You'll take him, child, and **** him with desire.
You'll die for her; she'll bring you to her knees
across uncharted lands, bedragoned seas."

Across uncharted lands, bedragoned seas
uncounted years of wandering, he seeks
asylum from the memory of her eyes.
The softest skin, most gently blushing cheeks,
wildest fingers raking skin from back,
ever-changing hips which ****** and thrash;
the tavern *****, the courtesan, all lack
whatever power it would take to smash
his crushing need.  An aching pilgrimage,
life spent in shameless chase to slake the lust
imposed by jealous wizard in his rage.
Now weak and old, he walks alone through dust
and sandstorm, seeking solace, final rest
in desert's scalding carborundum breath

In desert's scalding carborundum breath
she oversees construction of her tomb.
Her father started it; upon his death,
she left the mage to build the solemn room
of memory. The waves of slaves pour sweat
in rivers onto stones, their muscles scream
and ripple in the undulating heat.
Mirage becomes a staggering man, unseen
by all but her. She mounts and rides to bring
some water, some relief.  When their eyes meet,
their souls enmesh, their spirits start to sing,
his failing body falls about her feet.
They're found again, and still there's no release;
not even end of life can bring surcease.

Not even end of life can bring surcease;
she lived another twenty years beyond.
His final glance of longing gave no peace,
but chained her in the everlasting bond
of arcane condemnation. Her ****** heart
is pierced by passing seconds, every one
a blunted needle, mildly poisoned dart
not strong enough to stop her pulse's run.
The mage's gift to her: the agony
of life remembering her lover's kiss,
then a death too short to set her free.
It sends her toward another fatal tryst,
spun round again the universe's width;
their love a measured minuet with death.

Their love a measured minuet with death,
a dance with destiny.  They wake again
to unfamiliar bodies, unknown paths
meandering across the haunted plain
of time.  A muddy pasture, half a million
blissful stoners join in raucous song:
"...and you make it hard". Among the hills run
****** lovers who can do no wrong,
all sharing bodies, needles 'til the smack
runs out. Her shaking arms strapped 'cross his chest;
he huddles close, awaiting the next stack
of Methadone. He shivers; breathes his last.
She cries and rocks his body, they will spoon
throughout the summer's thundered afternoon.

Throughout the summer's thundered afternoon
as heavy clouds erupt on thirsty soil,
cooler air meets skin on fire, a boon
to Magdalene and lover.  The sweet oil
washes off, the rain obscures the sound
of marching feet.  Centurions approach
and ****** him from her side. "So now you're found
beside this one, whose last ride gave us such
an evil time.  We strung him up, but now
his body's gone, and you were seen beside
the tomb. You'll die just as he did, and how."
She watched another man be crucified.
Supported by her love, he passed in peace
suspended in expectant spring's embrace.

Suspended in expectant spring's embrace,
the royal courtyard at Versailles in bloom
is laid out for the party.  Every face
is rouged, each powdered wig precisely groomed.
The hundred soldiers stand down, raise a toast,
Vive le roi!  One teasing courtier
seduces a queen's guard to leave his post.
Behind a hedge, they make love unaware
of peasants, women milling through the gate
in search of bread and royal blood, not cake.
He runs to save the Queen, and seals his fate;
the mob will **** for revolution's sake.
The oaks a silent witness to his doom
in autumn colors, reds and golds festooned.

In autumn colors, reds and golds festooned,
the twin moons rise and set, reflecting sun
upon the biodomes.  Earth shines down, ruined
by man's neglect, what could not be undone.
The population by law zero sum;
resource conservation held above
the joy of new life.  Parents here must come
to know the anguish of requited love.
She bears his child; they knew too well the chance
they took.  The court will force a choice be made:
the father or the child. A tear, a glance
as he's locked out. She watches as he fades
in cryogenic punishment, life lashed
to winter's icy shackles holding fast.

To winter's icy shackles holding fast
her soul, she proffers prayer, slogs through the sleet
toward her cloistered cell.  One chilling blast
wraps habit 'round her, knocks her off her feet.
The heavy, sodden cloth, the wind prevents
her gaining purchase on the frozen ground.
From monastery cot, the monk could sense
distress.  In thin burnoose he dashed and found
her, cold as stone, yet breathing; swept her up
and rushed her to the hearth.  His warm embrace
brings on familiar heat.  Their pasts stirred up,
relived, decision made within a trace:
"'Tis best this time we live, and never start."
Their minds attuned, yet cleft by broken heart.

Their minds attuned, yet cleft by broken heart;
the aching need grows stronger day by day.
He tends her failing health without regard
to duty, vows.  Her weak voice strains to say,
"I will be gone before you this time. Hear
me out; this may be what we need to break
our curse.  Stay with me as my time grows near;
and love me as the Reaper comes to take
my soul, and finish with me after I
have left.  God will forgive sins we'll commit
for man alone has ****** us.  We must try
or curse ourselves, continue to submit
to endless pain, remain just as we are:
connected, blessed, and doomed to be apart."

Connected, blessed, and doomed to be apart,
they cling to every moment here and now;
the priceless beating of her failing heart,
his passions roil out in unending flow.
He gazes deep in her eternal eyes
as they glaze over, looking past his face
into the hollow stare of death.  She lies
suspended between life and time and space,
to hear an old, familiar voice sound in
her ears.  "To dance with death before him
as you rut...how clever!  Most astounding
that you'd carry out this futile whim.
He dies; you'll live, just as the curse defines;
strolling, wistful, through a thousand lives."

Strolling, wistful, through a thousand lives
Two ancient souls in broken bodies dwell.
They trip light-years fantastic side by side
Bound by an angered mage's curs'ed spell.
Across uncharted lands, bedragoned seas,
In desert's scalding carborundum breath
Not even end of life can bring surcease;
Their love a measured minuet with death.
Throughout the summer's thundered afternoon,
Suspended in expectant spring's embrace,
In autumn colors, reds and golds festooned,
To winter's icy shackles holding fast;
Their minds attuned, yet cleft by broken heart:
Connected, blessed, and doomed to be apart.

Crackling criss-crossing blue in mind. It scissors down the lanes through the pipes and tubes and little dividers. Electrical mind numbing beauty. Veins-bursting in excited anticipation. Convulsions and scenic skittering routes. Into the Nexus! Here simmers what we are thinking and believing. Our mind's eye focuses and drips into the pool until completion. Psionic figures dance flicker through life existence. Pulse-width fluctuations. Tiny menagerie of our Will. Scribbling through dusted panes of time interface. All afire with ourselves once we have discovered ourselves. Nano-tech emotions. Hope fear anger mercy curiosity buzzing swarms of grey goo jibbering and bubbling in an artificial mind-****. What is all this allusion? Nothing complicated. Speculation on future times where sensual technological biological singularity is paramount. In my room where the clocks are taped over and the sun is dark and dim. Through the windows I see myself. The boxes on the floor emanate simple clickings with melodies intertwined casually. I myself appear redundant. I have done this and so have others. To discuss oneself is worthless unless you become convinced you are another entity gazing back across the room. I feel I am being watched. I become cautious as he may have noticed. Tingling weightlessness tickles in waves in both heads. The Jazz Classic appears. Old dark men and women in hazy environments. Organic supposition or cold observation? Both hold importance so let us appreciate it all. The cello quivers and hums with vibration. Fingers callused and riveted like the age-old corn field bother still strings. A child hums to just myself. What does he want? I never asked him for an audience. Yet he freely gives it to me. Now he multiplies. Or she? Children confuse and cause one to be apprehensive. Nothing and silence. Silence in movement. Cease my visual stimulation for a couple seconds each. The child is back. What does he speak? Pray inside the rubble? Heal in this place? In disgrace? I do not know. His octaves are meshing together. Whining and thrumming with strange alterations. Some madmen tweaks my ears. Maybe he knows the child? I'm not sure. Let us continue on. The flute is the child. Old cello, you have stopped? These musings mean nothing. I would look upon them in a year and think nothing of it. Yet it feels as if this time is important. Da Vinci knocks on the door. Not as if I wanted to talk to it. Wouldn't mind I suppose. He is gone. We talked but I do not remember the conversation. Perhaps we've all talked but we just don't remember our conversations. That's ridiculous though. Then anything is possible. We could have flown to the moon on scarlet weasels outfitted with the latest nano-pores that secreted pure liquid indulgence. And we did because I just imagined we might have. However, I don't remember actually doing it. Just what I thought it might have been like. How frustrating. My thoughts are the same as all others who write out their thoughts when under the influence of yourself. It always seems like some thing is scuttling near my feet or under the nightstand; just out of view. Strange. I would be afraid. No reason to fear that which doesn't bother me. No reason to fear much of anything. That's been said before. Why are we so often concerned with saying that which has been said before? Cliche? auump-ump auump-ump auump-ump little thumping noise in my ears. That vibration is calming. Every night I am awake. Every day I seem asleep. I do not like it but I do not care yet I allow it to be what it will. Vision defaults to out of focus. My eyes always cross if I cease trying to control them. People are strange. Animals are strange. Same thing I guess. Someone will find that clever. Someone will find it cliche. This someone won't care. ****** fantasy permeates day to day. More entertaining than living a fantasy though. ***. Not that entertaining. Perhaps no one knows how to do it properly anymore. Maybe we never did. Maybe some people are just disenchanted with it. When I'm by myself, I never have any ****** desire. When around others, I generally think of it out of curiosity: what would it be like to please the person in front of me? The only enjoyment I've had with *** would consist of pleasing another or observing another ****. The human body is intriguing. Definitely. I really do think so. Sometimes I look at my own. Not out of appreciation really. Just the fact that I have body allows me to investigate it and understand it more. Pain is merely a stage one can get past, so I suppose I injure myself sometimes to see how I react. It's like I need to check I'm still working properly. I can't tell when I'm tired. I feel something, but when I ask myself if I'm tired, I murmur back, "I don't know." Maybe that is why I stay up till early mornings? I wanted to add again that the human body is beautiful and unappealing all in the same space. Perhaps the unattractiveness and softness and strangeness produces attraction. A negative and a negative equals a positive. Three negatives likes to fluctuate. In my mind at least. I may ask another to remove their clothing and whatnot during those intimate moments. Eh, never quite feel like having *** though. I like the emotions and sensuality of just looking at someone. They usually want to physically play around with each other. I think I enjoy fighting more. One day I'll leave everyone except I'll reminisce on those I enjoyed meeting. Maybe come back and visit? I would like to ride something quickly through an empty desert. Find my own food and water. Create shelter. Think by myself. My room is the smallest desert I have and the biggest. I have more in my head but I only occupy one at a time. I suppose I like I do like things like all others. I mean, materials can be nice. If I impart meaning on to an object it gains importance. I see it vital to also say that if it were to be lost, then I wouldn't mind and I would obtain something else or nothing at all.The constitution. Just mentioned by some woman in my room. Or in my ears would be more correct. Constitutional Rights. I honestly don't see the need for them. I was criticized for burbling that once. We should not need a constitution. We should be able to do what we like to do without fear or concern. Unless natural fear and concern appears. Now that may confuse a bit. Right to bear arms. I shouldn't have to be told or allowed to massive bear arms if I feel the need to have them. Big hairy bear arms. Curious little mishap. Freudian slip as Johnny said once? Danger Danger. Anyway, Right to bare arms. I shouldn't have to be told, as I look back,  go back and throw in that comma after told, that I'm allowed to bare arms and defend myself. I'll just do it if the need arises. Freedom of speech. That already has many issues these days. However, there shouldn't have been a need to tell people they have freedom of speech. Speech should have been freely allowed and never oppressed in  the first place. Theme? We have erred so much in the past and I would think sometimes we ignore that and just try make little cosmetic fixes by saying it's okay. Another point. Hold that: side discomfort. I sometimes feel like a little spider or creature is crawling or skittering on my leg under the covers or I'll change the music to Galaxy 2 Galaxy 90's hi-tec jazz there we go. Done! Now back! Or I forget what I said about the spiders. Another point: what? ******, curse damnable ****. Can't recollect what it was I was connecting together. Something that tied in to deceiving people into things are okay. I could go on about consumerism and all that jazz. Instead I'm listening to some techno-jazz whatever-decided-to-call-it. Hyphenated phrases are fun when I decide they are appropriate. English and grammar in such can be cool but at the same time I want to say **** it and stay proper. Do both. Acknowledge how to write and speak "correctly," but as long as someone understands what you are trying to say, then why correct more? Someone large doesn't like the fact I make a lot of noise in the morning. I stole some speakers and subwoofer from the room next to me as I was going to say Austin.  They are on the floor and whichever large person lives below me is probably annoyed or was. I don't spend any of my actual time despising them, but I'll easily say I despise them when someone asks. Otherwise it isn't worth wasting time on. Perhaps the vibration quivers downstairs and shakes them silently. The greate beast is perturbed and sneaky vibrations cause electro-annoyance! Her pulsewidth as I understand it must be like a super-saw as I think it. Silence. Some woman said it's just a feeling. HEA not sure what why I put that sounds like a garageband song. Switched to Inspiration! That is what I did this night. Finally start writing and making things again. Even though I never did and always did. My head sometimes hurts from thinking. Never truly though. Gotta say those things to keep the conversation going. That is really the only reason I say anything. To keep the conversation going. Otherwise I'd just watch people and be just fine. Just yelled "bahh," out loud (didn't sound the comma) because I felt the need or the want. Same. Wrong keys erased. sdas=a====dddddddddd Sorry. Oh well. Oh My. How the time flies goodbye. Going nowhere. Could write more but I felt the slight flicker of wanting to stop. So I do. What an ending. Now I'm only typing to continue the conversation with myself. Just thought ******* sounds good melody. Do as I sayt way to go good job. STOPSDMFA

****** a

Guess I'll read this little conundrum I wrote up. Stop writing ******. Stop EDITING

. only last night i decided to put out a cigarette stump on my left hand's right knuckle...  squeamish? i didn't exactly hear a protest, invoking a gasp, of imploding pain.

                                           so...
  when was the last time,
you, actually tell your
neighbor to...
  *******...
   trembling with anger
as if waiting to have a fist-fight
over the most minor triviality?
i've heard him speak
foul words before his
supposed bride...
  and before the ******* kid...
i hate bullies...
  back in school i remember
being a bully for a split second...
i stephen kennedy...
   i heard an anecdote
   about a girl forcing him
to eat **** from the pavement...
so i jagged him up
with a fist to the kidneys...
    but then i took care of
         martin elliker -
the crooked toothed hunchback
during chemistry classes...
helped him out from time to time...
didn't mind the bad breath...
     we talked about playing
final fantasy VII...
   in this catholic school -
even the so called bullies protected
the genuine victims,
   from whimps, cry-babies,
you name them...
    and we shared a, as i mentioned
before, a pax non bellum...
we corporated in our approach
for the general morale of the peers...
in the 6 or so years at the school?
one suicide, a girl...
   just one...
              not bad...
       i met this girl at a romford
bus-stop once... told me her father
walked from Ethiopia to England...
        so we took the bus,
to Goodmayes...
    i, trying to be polite...
said i was going to visit a friend
to smoke some marijuana...
   she bought the story...
but then... i had to tell her the truth...
she already shielded my supposed,
slumber approaches with the line:
i have a boyfriend...
   so i told her...
    i'm actually going to the brothel
for an hour's worth of a, "girlfriend"...
all of a sudden, "richard" pops out
out of nowhere...
   "richard" was a proper bully before
moving from high school
to a six former status...
    on the sly:
    on a school trip to Glasbury-on-Wye,
for kayaking, caving, horse-riding,
      just after the mad-cow epidemic
cooled downed...
    each morning...
      me... at the breakfast table...
with about nine afro-saxons...
   not even making jokes
about phallus sizes...
                so this, "richard" remembered me,
asked me if i remembered his name...
which i did, several days later...
OH ****! DANIEL!
           would have been *******
easier if it was Fola Malomo...
a nigerian kid from primary school...
      point being...
  all this "real" life and the internet
imprint, internet banking
and internet shopping - also not being real,
apparently...
      well... internet trolling -
first i'm all for internet transparency,
second of all, some sort of cordiality
ethos -
                 ****-posting is not my thing...
neither is trolling...
   when you have a real problem
with a neighbor, over whether he tells
you that you should inform him
when you're cooking up a barbeque
and he has clothes on the washing line...
and you start trembling,
internalizing berserk anger in a
metaphysical ******...
                 and all you have in your head
is the color red, and plum...
    and a smashed in gorilla cartilage
of what was once a human nose?
    - and you have to use
verbal restraints, akin to: *******...
   what's with all these internet, "problems"?
it's not even worth the tunnel vision
analogy of a horse donning pomp
shutters...
     by then i turn off... become black-eyed,
losing a reference to an iris...
    i become a honing device...
between my tongue and my fist...
   is the matchstick's worth of width
of keeping up the least, or last
         artifact of civilized cordiality;
here?
   but an outlet - a refrigerator...
   some men would probably
      prefer to cool down aiming at
a punching bag...
                i can't do that...
       i have to be more subtle...
   and employ words as the worth
of punches... and a blank canvas as
the punching bag.

At the beginning of the date he wanted sushi,
I wanted a large pizza with extra cheese that sounded like, "No thanks, not hungry."
It was cold outside and it was raining
So naturally we opened up the window as far as it would go -
He quickly lit the panda candle near the window
as if the spark came straight from his fingers
And all I could think was, "****. Even with the wind the candle is still lit. This is my guy."
It was romantic and slow and I was a **** fool,
****** in
Feeling like I'm falling after four days.
A little conversation and some food later, I could suddenly make out the width and length of his eyelashes -
"Oh ****. He's leaning in."
His hand surfed the curves and waves of my hip,
My entire body felt like a magnet towards his and
Having felt it all
I chalked it up to friendship
While thinking and dreaming of my "friend" wondering how
How could I have been such a fool?
I broke his heart and mine too.

Mirror, mirror, on the wall, tell me what suits,
Soft natural highlights, or strong punk roots?
Auburn red or beach blonde hair,
Brunette with greens, or short blunt rare?

Mermaid midnight old balayage blues,
Grey ombré curled with lilac hues?
Lemon yellow paint or neon spice,
Purple color that matches my hazel eyes!

Tousled, textured, twirled and twined,
We could take it to the front, or let it all behind.
Black hair with beautiful mahogany dye,
Fringes looking pretty every day passing by.

Straight hair with an asymmetrical bob,
Lips painted red, formal and hot.
Tie buns and bows with colorful clips,
Grow pink hair long, till they reach my hips.

Fish tail braid like a Boho chic,
All pastel shades spread, across the width.
Blonde and bright, they are in my sight,
Soon to be a celebrity, wearing them uptight.

Burgundy wine perm, crazy long,
Every hair color has a song.
There are chances that they may look all wrong,
But hey! I'm not scared to just play along!