Too Much Love
All day I have tried to get the cat to sit on me.
And finally just as I am about to finish a movie
and stand up, she does, and so does the dog.
She is beautiful and fluffy and purrs
her warmth into my hand.
It is a lot of warmth. The dog is also warm.
My temperature spikes. I have to pee.
My nose is running and I have no Kleenex.
We all believe we want love and endless love
but it is too much, my body cannot bear it,
the weight of floof and love.
THE CURSE OF WAR
Let the wars be only in them
and let only they bleed to exhaustion
but to survive and celebrate victory
over themselves
let their wars keep them alive
and let the riots disturb them at all times
and let the riots boil them into sick brains
like hungry birds pecking grains
and let him quench his bloody thirst
such as quenching quicklime
let them eat their flesh
and because of defeats and victories to exhaustion
and let the war never cease in them
until they destroy themselves
on a day that will not be reminiscent of other victims
so, fight you to whom wars are sacred
you have eaten our meat enough
taste your own now
fight within yourself and drink from your womb
and the poisoned wombs of your mothers
who renounce you in death
and curse the days when they gave birth to you
therefore, worship your shadows today
because tomorrow no one will worship them
if my curse reaches you
you will be saved from new bloodshed
Poetess, Writer, Great Humanitarian
Samar Al-Deek
Translates Bhagirath Choudhary’s “Let My Child Live”
Let My Child Live
How could any mother ?
Ever gets so terrified
From her own brother
And how much ?
She ever gets so victimized
By existential pain
And life’s burden so insane
That she takes a decision
For any damned reason
Trying to save
Life and future of her child
From brother savages so wild.
How on earth ?
A mother can throw her child
Over the barbed wire
Trying to save her child
From beastly hell’s fire
To an utter stranger
And that too
To a foreign soldier.
She has lost
Her faith almost
In her own kith and kin
Who are bathed
In human blood and sin
So vile and utterly wild
Who are chasing her
And her unfortunate child
To ravage her femininity
And her sacred humanity
She will stay back
So her wild cousins
Can tear her skin
And humanity apart
But making sure
That at least for her child
It will be possible
To make a fresh start.
All rights reserved
Bhagirath Choudhary
French Translation from Samar Al-Deek
Comment une mère
Peut-elle jamais être terrifiée
Par son propre frère ?
Et jusqu’à quel point
Peut-elle être ainsi brisée
Par la douleur existentielle
Et le fardeau insensé de la vie,
Au point de prendre la décision,
Pour quelque maudite raison,
De tenter de sauver
La vie et l’avenir de son enfant
De la sauvagerie de son frère devenu féroce ?
Comment une mère, sur cette terre,
Peut-elle jeter son enfant
Par-dessus des barbelés,
Essayant de le sauver
Du feu infernal et bestial,
Pour le confier à un parfait étranger,
Et de surcroît
À un soldat étranger ?
Elle a presque perdu
Toute confiance
En ses proches,
Trempés dans le sang humain et le péché,
Si vils et si sauvages,
Qui la pourchassent, elle
Et son malheureux enfant,
Pour ravager sa féminité
Et son humanité sacrée.
Elle restera en arrière,
Pour que ses cousins déchaînés
Puissent déchirer sa peau
Et son humanité,
Mais en s’assurant
Qu’au moins pour son enfant
Il sera possible
De recommencer une vie nouvelle.
© Bhagirath Choudhary — Tous droits réservés
Translation from English to the French language by © Samar AIDeek
_____________
The Woman
Woman is the most beautiful ray of sunshine
at the mercy of billions of rainbows
she is also the rainbow-in-the-earth
with a fine determination not to remain silent.
Quatrain by Billy BiN (born Billy Nzalampangi Ngituka)
Country: DRC (Congo Kinshasa)
****
Illiberty
At a time when wars are tearing each other apart
and great dangers lie ahead
our planet, with all those who torment it.
millions or even billions of people in humanity
are indeed without freedom, no freedom at all.
on the razor’s edge of “illiberty”.
Six of Billy BiN (born Billy Nzalampangi Ngituka)
Upbeat
☆☆☆
Living at the edge,
a hope that lingers with faith
The time is yet knock in,
and the sailor at this end keeps on sailing.
The destination has been declared.
Awakened and aware, silence speaks its glory.
The sleep is sound today.
Dreams peek from the sleeves of slumber.
A smile floats at the edges of the river.
That had been a testament of winter.
Spring knocked long before the fall,
and the luminosity keeps sailing, on and on.
the new axioms
pocket calculated risk
You may also have recently noticed a conspicuous trend in an absolute surge of Netflix recommendations on your scroll or in your email box of content exploring plots of false allegations, frame jobs, deceitful accusers. Perhaps you can take a wild guess as to why that might be. No doubt it has at minimum a small something to do with an exponential hum of suggestion, implication, speculation, prevalent whispers, which has steadily increased in volume and urgency over the course of our lifetime, indeed has been exponentially, incrementally ramping up since our grandparents’ day, hell since before the talkies in the silent film era, back to the rosicrucian cavorting of Francis Bacon, until the shrill shrieking of pleas for justice, begging for prosecutions, wailing for the lost, raging for those who might still be saved has reached a veritably deafening fever pitch which threatens to drone out our ability to function as an organized society, and our willingness most pressingly to surrender selves dutifully, forego privacy and autonomy willingly thanks to a prevailing faith in the functionality of this farcical machine we inhabit and make for insignificant cogs in, but which lacking the cumulative combination of contributing blood and labor and their equivalency defined via capital the great mill stone ceases its requisite grinding, and that they cannot allow. So until we might be less expensively replaced by sex dolls, human dolls, artificial girlfriend experiences, until Boston Dynamics can replicate a suitably sniveling and groveling serf and a compliant, adaptable hostess, Bill Gates will have to keep his mosquito legions nominally in check. But those celebrities, politicians, movie stars, musicians, comedy writers, late night hosts, book club paragons, most of them have done things unsavory. Not the acts you thought couldn’t get any worse. Outrages ripped from the pages of the Brothers Grimm. From Edgar Allen Poe. From H. P. Lovecraft. From Stephen King most especially.
in the z-space tracking stuff you never heard of
And despite your best attempts to dismiss and disregard you’re going to start hearing about it. You likely have begun hearing about it, and shall in time know more than you’d like to. And that’s not all. Because to further muddle and confuse matters, you may begin to discover that a handful of the most egregious preexisting assumptions of guilt you have spent years processing and reconciling yourself with were in fact among the vanishingly slim, nearly non-existent fraction of a percent of false allegations, of frame jobs, of deceitful hired accusers. This one in a thousand it’s important to recognize, who are laughably, preposterously, outlandishly overrepresented in media, yet in their actual cases (watch for this, and review with bias of hindsight as more illustrations slowly come to light) are presumed guilty immediately without due process, are vilified and smeared far and wide, are the subject of elaborate campaigns and prominent ‘documentary’ programming, of tabloid savaging and wholesale ostracism by the culture and its reining authorities. Now, when a universally revered daughter-marrying pedophilia advocate and enthusiast for consumption of human flesh can keep attracting a-list talent and producing laureled films, garnering the most prestigious honors (and on a parallel track political iterations receive standing ovations for their barbarousness, and have streets and libraries named after them) one wonders how such a permissive and accepting (of profound malevolence at least) industry could so roundly and definitively turn on, condemn and abandon a comrade no more guilty than the rest of their despicable club, while giving a pass in perpetuity to the vast majority for getting out of jail free with on every flamboyant high crime from strangulation to flashing a minor. I’ll tell you: they tried to interfere. Which is not permitted. The skinny, thus, is the patsies of these group efforts, presumably being too valuable alive as salable commodities to retire permanently – more acceptable where they might be enshrined with a profitable tourist attraction, provide a lucrative library of music for divvying to corporate bidders, be commodified to sell a great many dorm room posters and screen printed t-shirts – and/or holding some preventive trump card measures in place should they be heaved into traffic, say a video of underage victims of abuse in a secret holding facility beneath a famous museum, as well as when the retaliation for breaking some sworn oath requires visible humiliation and sadistic glorying in raking person over coals and reputation through the mud as a deterrent to others with some shred of conscience remaining who might be considering similar ill advised candidness, bright whistle brandishing ideas. So examples must be made, and all knowingly play their various perverse and hypocritical roles. That malicious world, perhaps more so than any other, does love a piñata.
grimoire school
There is a further curious incentivizing element in that if or when the ruse comes to light the real string pullers donning people’s faces like Hannibal Lecter benefit doubly, can appropriate engineered precedent, cite their example, exploit such unjust martyrdom to build their future cases, introduce a liberal seeding of reasonable doubt. For how well they already know the vulnerabilities and exploits to that legal framework in their lowdown, dirty game of manufacturing consent and unscrupulously monopolizing popular perception, having explored each themselves. How can the public truly guarantee an accuser wasn’t hired for reputation assassinating? Is it certain the corrupt police, the final evolution of slave catchers, famous for fabricating evidence, losing exonerations, actively participating in violations of the elites, covering up after their misdeeds, framing innocent plausible parties, can we ever accept at face value the testimony of law enforcers famed for their completely immortal license, or coroners whose findings agree not whatsoever with independent subsequent auditing, who most recently are demonstrably staging deaths and swapping out bodies.
bitcoin pizza underground
And the reporters, who lied confidently and knowingly, completely bamboozling us time and time again about shocking practices they were apparently not just aware of but hideously participating in, surely we cannot ever trust them again under any circumstances, can we? And then there’s science and history. What a delight to learn that a human trafficking, honeypot operating, morality compromising genocidal spy through an intricate network of publishing empires has been doing all in the planet’s assembled collective power to completely misinform humanity for generations through a devastating stranglehold on school textbooks, science journals, encyclopedias, atlases. Combine this with the irrefutable evidence that these very conspirators were (and so far afflicted platforms have furnished zero indications the capability and pattern in the slightest bit has relented) completely controlling Google, Wikipedia, 4chan, reigning over Reddit, and their cabal is completely rigging, quashing opposition and elevating sympathetic narratives to steer every platform of social media, which itself is a massive op to encourage users to supply exploitable intelligence details. Have a child? Perhaps you heard in America school photograph apparatuses are searching for new vendors, because the ubiquitous nationwide gold standard was being controlled by an island predator using the resulting images as a catalog for literal kidnapping and torture. That was happening, and is only one suckery tip of a single tentacle of this octopus of pervasive treacheries. They will age you years coming to grips with. Verily, how can we be expected to believe again?
magical realism ghosts of christmas
Jerome Berglund has worked as everything from dishwasher to paralegal, night watchman to assembler of heart valves. Currently residing in New Orleans, previously having lived in the Longfellow neighborhood of Minneapolis which was locus to the George Floyd protests, his writing as often as possible strives to engage with significant social and economic concerns of our day that align with missions of decolonization and abolition across prevailing institutions. He has been involved in grassroots activism for the good causes of Occupy Los Angeles, Standing Rock, and the Black Lives Matter movement, supported outreach efforts promoting ecosocialism. Many haiku, haiga and haibun he’s written have been exhibited or are forthcoming online and in print, most recently in bottle rockets, Frogpond, and Presence.
The Mother God
The Mother God goes walking gracefully
Without the worries of the world
Stepping madly on the edge
Of the conceptual lake.
Sunny climes and tall pine trees
A cottage of silver and spice
Dwelling for unclouded love
Of every rock and stone.
In Memoriam, Johnny Thunders
I dreamt I met Johnny Thunders, and what a resplendent dream it was. To see him sprawled out in a near comatose sleep, and wake up and get another shot. We were sitting in his car, I showed him my work, he thought it was good. I knew he had only a limited time, so I tried to pick out my best poems. As he was heating up the spoon, what a tragic figure he became. I knew he had to leave. But he thought my work was good. He said he had to go soon, on some sort of delivery run. Never got a chance to hear him play.
In the early morning outside in the drizzle of rain, I saw him get up and leave. Shaking off the effects of drug-induced sleep, he got in his car and drove away. And what must have gone through his mind in those final hours: an absurd man willing to face the uncharted desert, choosing lucidity and consciousness over hope and belief, able to face the world without despair, yet careful not to go forth unguarded. The thing is the action—the will and determination to shoulder responsibility in the face of vacant, desolate, detached silence, and to go forth. To continue on destroying the maps, knowing the chartered course is wrong. When one is realized, the desert seems deep and fathomless and goes on eternally. One must have courage and a certain muted insensitivity, for man’s domain is not one of solace for the meek and faithful and all lives irrevocably come to an end.
Yet that does not stop this absurd man as he stops, takes in the morning dew, prepares himself for another shot, starts up the car and moves ever forward. Stagnation and reintegration must always be avoided at all cost. Such hope is detrimental to this man who suffers all the more for it. I watched him pull out and continue deep into the bowels of the desert. Surely, this would be the last anyone would see of him.
There would be no maps left behind, as it should be. For no maps would suffice in an unchartable area. And nothing postpones the day of reckoning, no acts of rebellion will save oneself, yet the warrior rebels to the end. In such an act—an ungraceful man shrouded in illusions throughout his life at last shows his nobility—and one must conclude that all is well.
Burning, Burning, Amerikhan Inferno
I’ll bet you didn’t know the Amerikhans were allowed to build their own facility at the Olympics in Milano. Burning, burning. It wasn’t put up for debate; the alternative—a full blockade of Italia. When the tanks rolled over frozen corpses, you believed yourselves superior, from the land of the free. You believed blacklisting Dellusian athletes was just fine. You believed they could compete only by denying their country. Now you find yourself in the same jam—but they don’t dare ban the good ole U. V. of A.
The facility spirals concentrically, down, down, round and around. The lowest, deepest level—burning, burning, frozen ice like Frownland—is reserved for gold medal winners who protest against the United Vassals of Amerikhan.
The reptilian Vice Premier makes snap judgments, a drumhead trial if you will—this being foreign territory, at least for now. His long, iguana-like tail coils round and round the condemned, flinging them down, down far below to their allotted space. The motion is so fast it blurs, casting down half the contingent, until El Presidente calls:
“Good work, good work—but leave some left to compete.”
Burning, burning. The disco inferno under the mirrorball continues on.
Joey Whitton is a poet with a BA from the University of South Alabama. Born in Salem, Massachusetts, and raised in San Diego, he has lived in Mobile, Alabama, since the late 1990s. Hardcore punk has inspired his writing for decades. His poetry has appeared in Flipside and is forthcoming in Misfit Magazine, Sky Island Journal and Poetry Pacific.