two steps from the bar and just a drink from Hell.
SINCERITY
I wrote love poems
on the back of my hand,
always meaning
to put them on paper,
but the ink wore out
or was washed away
just like the emotion.
CONSTANCY
Some things a woman says are bridges
raising grief over happiness.
Once, I could only be satisfied
if she was always there, then just a touch
was enough, then the sound of her voice
and finally just the thought of her.
A face can grip your mind like unrelenting tongs
and wipe out everything else,
like a barrage of hail strafing
your gently swaying fields;
you wouldn’t find fire down a well
or dew on a lightning bolt,
so don’t hope for something more.
THE COCOON
I found a cocoon made of twigs
somehow stuck together in a lattice.
I don’t know why, but it never opened
and many years later I went away
leaving the cocoon behind on a shelf,
while whatever creature lay inside
never learnt what it truly was.
S.C. Flynn was born in a small town in Australia of Irish origin and now lives in Dublin. His poetry has been published in more than a hundred magazines around the world. His collection “The Colour of Extinction” (Renard Press, October 2024) was The Observer Poetry Book of the Month. “An Ocean Called Hope” (Downingfield Press, May 2025) is forthcoming.
If your father is with you
You are not walking on a bad road, zinhor.
Good wishes are in your blood.
You're lucky, you're always happy,
If your father is with you
You will not be one of the others,
I'm sorry if you don't break your heart.
Blessings to those who work,
If your father is with you.
One of the moon and one of the sun
Don't let the tears flow.
If you are proud, don't bend your head,
If your father is with you.
Smile on your children's faces,
Carelessness and sadness in an unpressing heart.
This is your friend and this is your country,
If your father is with you.
Prayers are answered,
May your days be filled with joy.
Happiness will not leave you,
If your father is with you.
Don't be ignorant, don't be weak,
Enjoy every moment.
Your heart will never have a dream,
If your father is with you.
Khaitmurodov Ismail
Address: Samarkand city
Alfraganus is a 3rd year student of the Faculty of Economics
Antoine de Saint Exupery’s Children’s Novella The Little Prince Critically examine The Little Prince as a children’s novella by Antoine De Saint Exupery
Like The Pilgrim’s Progress and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Antoine De Saint Exupery’s historico-autobiographical novella, The Little Prince is an allegorical narrative of the innocence manifested and cherished in the terrains and frontiers of nature and humanity.
“Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them.” Romanticization and fantasization with roses in the lamb like spirited angelic soul is literally unfathomable to the authorial autobiographical narrator. This is evidently crystal clear that P. L. Travers, author of Mary Poppins, rightly prophesied that, “The Little Prince will shine upon children with a sidewise gleam. It will strike them in some place that is not in the mind and glow there until the time comes for them to comprehend it.”
“You can’t ride a flock of birds to another planet” pontificates the assertion of the Little Prince’s cosmic odyssey from varieties of galaxies after being exiled from homeland asteroid B612. Personalities of this peregrination enlist a king’s empty domain or the hollow sham of the conceited man, a drunkard with the tremens delirium, the business tycoon’s engagement with the proprietorial starship, the extinguishing and relighting of lamppost every thirty seconds interval and finally the elderly geographer’s errand persuasive of the stately invitation to the monarch. Apart from these, the Little Prince encounters the railway switchman and the merchant. Firmament of the imagination and will-o-the-wisp reign within the fantastical narrative and thus projected as fable and parable.
That the sensitive blond stark hair, mysterious and adventuresome, precocious, charismatic angelic lamblike child is a telepathic wonderkid of dreams and castles that brings back the old memories of the gullible and melodramatic narratorial personae. Both chroniclers including the young at heart narrator aviator as well as the seraphim cherubim sophomoric little prince are preoccupied in the quest for the springwell in the sand dunes of desert canyons. The Little Prince is the embodiment of buccaneering sea pirate vessel along with the blast from the past trip down the memory lane of the aviator’s personage. Captivating and fascinating detective novella of the mainstream childrens’ literature The Little Prince encapsulates satiric penchant of allegorical fable as pontificated by the characters of anthropomorphic beasts such as the Fox.
Fox is the reincarnate of companionship, fraternity, solidarity, association, camaraderie, fellowship, closeness, amnesty, brethrenship, brotherhood, matyness, chumminess and clubbiness. Upon the sea of time little prince certainly must have been elated by the euphoric ecstasy of the rapport between this beast in want of taming: “But you have hair that is the colour of gold. Think how wonderful that will be when you have tamed me! The grain, which is also golden, will bring me back the thought of you. And I shall love to listen to the wind in the wheat.”
This quotable speech insinuates the overtones of springtime golden harvest season being eternalized despite fugacious mendacity. Since the fox aspires to be domesticated by masterly human farmers and ultimately beseeches socialization within the anthropogenic anthropocene.
As if truth and beauty and beauty and truth allusion, a carnivorous fox pledges melodramatic rhetoric to the dumbfounded and stupefied little prince: “If you tame then we will need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world.” After all, the penultimate gospel of the fox enshrines a universalistic lesson: “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”
Absurdities, travesties, follies, blunders, idiosyncrasies are burlesqued and lampooned by the novelist of The Little Prince. Rapaciousness and avariciousness of the case study implicated the mercenary capitalistic money grubbing extortionate business tycoon. Detachment and dissociation from the reality of romance and chivalry as engendered by this materialistic acquisition of wealth and fortunes in space time travel. Furthermore drunk as a wheelbarrow is the satirical innuendo of dipsomania. Alcoholic’s drunkenness and sobriety allegorizes inward withdrawal of the slothful moron and lethargic escapist in fantasy of delusion and paranoia.
These are the gothic macabre scylla and slough of despondent charybdis from the exploratory voyages of the braggadocious inland creatures of the worldly planet. The lamplighter’s inclination epitomizing pedagogic pedantry is laconically prolific engrossment of puritanical orthodoxy embodied within the rhetoric: “There’s nothing to understand. Orders are orders.”
Sanctimonious outlook and puritanical viewpoint underscored by the sagacious allegory and sententious caricature of mankind by the observant little princes’ imago alludes to the psychic double and doppelganger of the aviator narrator. Thus the pilot of the aircraft lampoons and burlesques superficialities and travesties of humankind in the vein of the doppelganger effect.
Moreover, the solitary figure of the chronicling aviator narratorial personae is the incarnate of solitudinous solipsism, narcissistic obsession and seclusionary detachment. Candidness and frankness, outspokenness and open mindedness of the naive and gullible Little Prince are the characteristic traits that harbour the harbinger of philosophical profundity. Symbolic wonderful lamp espoused by this harbinger transcends spiritual deadliness through subversive triumphalism of Platonic idiolect: “That a life unexamined is unworthy of living.”
Since the uncluttered lovey dovey cherubic, seraphic and lamb-like cupid child, the prodigy poltergeist chronicler Little Prince condones the domain of power, fame, wealth and money as prospects yielding toward the brink of futility. Leisure and pleasure of modernity are thus let bygones by bygones at the connivance of the Little Prince. This young at heart princely juvenilia is that stellar and cosmic apple of the aviator’s eye symbolizing curiosity is the mother of invention.
Pragmatist rationalism of the quasi autobiographical narrative is reflective of the aviator’s professional and personal odyssey and/ or bildungsroman. Alienation of literal solitariness in the canyons of Sahara mirror emotional and psychological state/stance as embodied by seclusionary detachment. Elevation of lonesomeness by the gaiety and joviality of childhood roots entrenched in past upbringings nostalgic introspection. Transformation of the narratorial personae being open mindedness to the exposure of the little prince, conniving materialistic accomplishments and achievements. Melancholic and contemplative stance of the mysteries of human relationships sojourning into the trajectory from loss of innocence to the absurdist realism of the world. Protective and possessive relationship emphases real friendship. Compassion and empathy demonstrates existentialist aviator’s nostalgic yearnings as depicted by the little prince. Reckoning of wonder charismatically espouses love, relationship, fantasy, imagination, human companionship in the symbolic quest for survivalism. Cooperation and coexistence of both realistic and fantastic outlooks and points of views are essential traits explored by the novelist.
zebra skips over river and crocodile jumps and takes a bite out of his belly underside. zebra kicks croc away and lands on other side of clough ravine of river. his cherry-blossom innards ribboning out in mountains. he kicks instinctually, hoofing around. and kicks out entrails on loop.
gunshot wound to the head, explodes one-half of cranium. and it slops away like melted ice cream, with small pork chops in the whipped cream dropping, cow-milked, to the bare ankles and staining them with fresh blood hues.
unlike that, entrails remain in a cohesive snake. the zebra’s fluctuating between albino boiled chicken and red as red as red. the straight highway that runs from top to bottom. the croc was ad-lib but will eat up the ugly business. zebra stands still, glib, as the meat is torn away.
there is no embarrassment outside of man. even if this was Take The Piss Thursday and W. C. Fields used his day in charge from beyond the grave to orchestrate the zebra’s demise. we were all meant to laugh I guess. And I can hear him still cackling from heaven.
drought has burned up the river and equally it makes the innards taste defective and the croc surfaces to spit them up. and they float on the surface like red bits of cogs. the croc stays up feigning slapstick vomitous disgust. W. C. on vermouth, makes another play at a masterstroke.
sickly ICU lights in San Tropez. was problematical when I tried to murder my stepfather and he survived. I used an undergrad’s computer to fake my alibi and was disheartened when they pumped the blood back into him like there was no tomorrow and like there was no limit to the blood in the world.
zebra at last falls dead and the innards just lie there. no one wants them. except Alistair Cowley who takes them in a handbag of alligator leather and keeps his bare feet away from the lurching croc. he’s ill in the head but good at train hopping.
witches made good use of entrails on a constant basis. they plied them with frog’s legs and brandy spilling down their hinges and maybe some of that vermouth, Mr W. C. and maybe some of that sweat beer-knifed off your skinhead Mr Cowley. And oh it was just wonderful.
And let’s not forget Myanmar where the hundreds backed into deaths their safari park purgatorial deaths. And the crocs take their legs off each other, popping off muscles, they will eat each other, and show no pain on their hateful death masks.
Rumbling Machine rumbling machine is an Egyptian jungle a set of spots that spring up endlessly bluebells blaze on cold heathland mornings the dishes of the earth are washed and dried out over jumping hearths the droning malaise, it is a rumbling machine a deeper layer to your lives a football chant croaked with a strange voice wavering the windmills are growing in church-like seabeds the jerk off is hot hot creamy bilge a python mouth dripping between fangs and defeated and nibbled at and snarling he wakes and the snake, knowing, drinks from his aqueducts on the farm, where my dad and I knew each other very well as parents and sons do the horses were bloody and dark eagles landed on their backs or their flat parts which were stained with cherry blossom or so we thought but we later found out it was just blood white blood cells cascaded down the carob tree boughs and they took me out of the school paper after my arrest for what the snake provoked out of me militarily the water-troughs around the farm are touchstone ornaments they bounce light between themselves assorted silver medallions of field sweat, spit for the creatures of the field under the blue mountain in their stables, clad in blood and red pent up anger like leaking apple orchards unfurling green spaced, rank and file, moss cold with blueberries and bluebells and lazuli in the Scottish land gets lonely even in summer when the grass yellows and crows flight and the green flows out – open-mouthed – cyber friends block me arbitrarily pornography is a rumbling picture of background, a brain bleed the bodies are prismatic vibrations yoga and coves, tights, lips they are hot under the collar like the horses the bodies wash back and back, lick and rubbish the silence with wedding bells rumbling just as an afterthought over undulating anti-Nazi-glider fields the loneliness of stroking yourself under white table cloth and the memory, pictorial, of the snake weighing on your skull the poison of the trough melting out the floor of your mouth the football chorus is a chorus for life these fields are a wasteland where we make urban legend and pain and pen in those creatures of the field the bulls have their death sentence and their sterile penises, venomed, their bodies need to be rinsed their bowels leak and flies stick spliced together into one on their swooping batting-away, congealed tails the blood mills of the factories turn in or out and rat race or rat race clambering over and under nets held by steel railings and scraps your dad picked up from plate-steel shipyards closed and pumped with English exit wounds self-redundant and fetishised and clean the stone in your garden is cold, is bird-like, iguana-like, dog dream the jagged edges of your loins look perfect rested on the fence posts – cowboyed – you look like a man and you have become a good one and it’s a shame no one will touch you on account of all you did roofied, serumed and invaded by something eldritch in the spaces in that decadent orchard you entered the enclaves of thinking you would like a wife or maybe just a smoke or might change your name to Hume or Hubbard or Billy and play on rocks like you were just a kid a kid out in the cold getting smeared in black getting laced in black-white and so cold out in Scotland it’s like drowning in a bog, the lawyer can see that this is Hell stomping over it that child killers have buried not just bodies but less obviously their perverted instruments under the hardened soil his rubber boots walk over insulin pens discarded the Budget comes and goes and you’re no better or worse off you go to the lake far beyond your home you try to drown yourself hidden by the trees weigh down your pockets with stones and everything will go under except your head you are treading and your head stays up looking at blue, happy times, summer, no dead dog moaning and no pigeon-holing into something you weren’t meant for and you pivot more vertical and see another horse watching you all fill with secreted blossom the vibrational pornified eyes of death
They looked at each other, blank-eyed, after the delivery van drove off, outside.
What’s the matter. Why the look?
I told you already. I don’t like this.
Don’t like this? Don’t like what? The TV’s here, right? Look at it. There it is. What more do you need?
It still bothers me I never heard of the company you said you ordered it from.
What? Why? You said you were nervous it’d never get delivered ‘cause you never heard of the company. I could even see that, maybe. But—here it is. What’s the big deal now?
They gazed at the TV on the floor between them.
I don’t know, I—hey listen, I think anybody hit in the face with a name like the “Regulation TV set factory out West Bruce Toothpull” would think that’s fake.
Uh. Okay. So the name’s odd. But—here it is.
Yes, I know. But—oh, never mind.
No no no, wait. Here it is. It’s plugged in. It’s powered up. What were you going to say still bothers you? Come on.
Okay, okay. I almost think we shouldn’t have it, that it shouldn’t be here.
Why?
I guess because I—think its dirty—like something I can’t touch ‘cause I don’t know where its been!
Instant’s stunned silence, then, Jesus Christ, that’s crazy! How can that be?
Don’t pick at me now. You forced me to say that! I wasn’t going to say it, but you forced me—so don’t look at me that way!
Okay, okay—I didn’t mean—
Oh yes you did. I always know what you mean! You got me started now, so—shut up and listen! First, the name of the company. You see it anyplace on any paperwork we got?
I don’t know, maybe—I—
Never mind maybe. The answer is no! Next—did you see the van it came in?
Okay, sure. A big white van. So?
That’s the kind of van you always called a kidnapper van. Remember?
Huh? What—I never heard that term—kidnapper van. What is it?
Oh, again, a nice pat convenient answer. I swear, you’re so stubborn.
Stubborn? Really? When I’m simply honestly saying I don’t remember things the way you do? I just—just don’t know what a—kidnapper van, or whatever you said—I just say I don’t know what that is, and—how is that being stubborn?
Okay. Maybe not stubborn, but—what you’re admitting to can’t be true, because I can see and hear you as clear as a bell, telling me all about “kidnapper vans” way back when. Why have you decided to get your back up and lie about it to me, today?
Wait—hold it, this is going too damned far!
Really? No! I’llgrant you that liar may be just a hair too strong, maybe you’re just forcing yourself to believe you don’t remember to keep yourself clear of being an actual liar, but—
What? That’s crazy!
No, no! Never mind—pay attention! When you used that term back then, I asked you what a kidnapper van was, and you told me clear as day. You said—
No! Can’t possibly have happened! I’ve never heard of such a thing!
Hold it, don’t cut me off—yes you did, because you explained that a kidnapper van is a van of one blank color : mostly white or black—other colors are rare : with no windows in the sides or in the back door and no—
No! Can’t possibly have happened! I’ve never heard of such a thing!
DAMN it don’t talk over me! Uh—okay, a van with no lettering of any kind and even sometimes with blanked-out license plates, this all being so, so that—
No! Can’t possibly have happened! I’ve never heard of such a thing!
—the victim can be snatched, and thrown in the back there, and then with the doors locked the kidnappers can drive away to the secret site of their choice to do what they wish to the victim in secret, and—
No! Can’t possibly have happened! I’ve never heard of such a thing!
—and if even someone saw them grab the victim and take off, there’d be nothing unique about the vehicle to tell the police to look for—
No! Can’t possibly have happened! I’ve never heard of such a thing!
—and you capped all that off with some kidnappers even take the van to a scrap dealer for crushing, once they’ve used it in the kidnapping grab and—
No! Can’t possibly have happened! I’ve never heard of such a thing!
—then they can proceed with the rest of their plan for the use of the victim for this that or the other—and then you said—
No! Can’t possibly have happened! I’ve never heard of such a thing!
—you said that was all that there was to be known ‘bout a kidnapping van.
No! Can’t possibly have happened! I’ve never heard of such a thing!
But, the description I’ve just recounted, I got from youway back then!
No! No! I’ve never heard of such a thing! What are you—you are calling me a liar?
Uh—isn’t it possible you may just have forgotten what it is? That wouldn’t mean you are a liar. Perhaps a bit forgetful, but—
What?
—but no way could you be considered a liar. That is, if you claim to have simply forgot.
{wink}
What? NO! I did not forget, and am not a liar, both. Both things, and both, and—
Hold it HOLD it just one more thing—and that is why I fear this damned TV—I fear what may have been done to it—and what it may do to us in revengeif we let down our guard!
{crazy eye}
Step back—
{crazy eye}
Dear God!
Look down, up, away, and into straight into pierce probe prod and stab-b-b-b w’, the n say softly as humanly possible—Let’s talk about something else now, okay?
Okay sure. If you’ll admit you believe me.
—NO but I never no b-b-b-ut I it’s always but I this, and but I that—Let’s talk about something else I tell you say one damned more syllable—
Ah. Okay. Sure. I believe you.
Good. Deep silence in-tween in-tween, deep silence—both then turned and left the tense airless room after one pulled the plug on the no-name TV and pushed it into a corner. Over there in the corner it sits to this day under stuff come on top more and more and so under that stuff on top of it there, under it all, there it sits alone; the dark room
Breathe
The maple trees told me it's in the ashen branches
Where the squirrels hide
Their little child soul set afar from human conditions
I surmise the longing of things
From near and far
Where the river is spread out against the sky
The night stars are falling around
I saw in a sleep
The jumpings and quiverings of non living things
Stay in my mind like a biscuit parchment paper
I blew the dandelions too loudly
Alas they catch the midheaven star
The North node of all our dreams where they shine
I now think of the maple trees
The red apples sodden
With arched bow whites
I know not what to name these
Perhaps they carry their own destiny
A hidden blush of lost stars and milkyways
I breathe in thee.
