MIRACLE REDEEMS A MAN, LIKE A BLOOMING FLOWER IN A DESERT

(for Charles)


i. 
my grandmother, before her death, said: surviving a war is the greatest miracle. 
& i paint a portrait of war as a ravenous beast, that slakes its thirst with blood, leaving trails of shattered bodies in its wake. 

ii.
she fed me with anecdotes of how she survived the civil war, how she rolled into her skin at the sound of deafening blast of grenades.

iii. 
to survive an explosion, you must not bunch up with the crowd. take cover after a bomb has fallen & lie flat on your belly. let your hands bury your fears between the clip of your teeth.

iv. 
what if the war is not without, but within? how then would i escape the battlefield of my mind? 
& she replied: pray & wait for a miracle. 

v. 
a man’s greatest battle is not that of grenades and ammunition, but the mêlée that comes from within, a struggle that lurks in his mind & plagues his thoughts, filling him with uncertainties. by this i mean, the war within is a parasite. 

vi. 
but miracle redeems a man, like a blooming flower in a desert. 

vii.
& the greatest miracle is to survive a war—within or without. so, i choose to confront my chaos & navigate this battle. if i’m lost in this sphere, let it be known that i faced my cacodemon with intrepidness, but if i emerge with my head up high & my victory flag flapping, call me a miracle. 
 

Savor the thick sweet juice of David Estringel's sensual poetry collection Blue. 

This volume melds luscious food and drink (Red Raspberries) with sacred and religious images (Coda-Switch) to describe unions between lovers. Some pieces incorporate both gustatory and spiritual references (Gimme Some Sweet). Estringel also stirs together Catholic and indigenous spiritualities throughout the book, at times in the same poem. 

Most unions are consummated, yet a few pieces reflect curious "meet-cute' imagination (Coffee House Romance) while others convey loss and longing (Blue Room). Due to the power of the human mind, even the pieces that aren't about an immediate moment of consummation convey intense bodily sensation. 

Some pieces mix both intimacy and the awareness that it cannot last forever (Duende). This book's motifs surfeit us with the sensual joy of nature in summer and autumn, which reminds us of our physical glory and mortality. We enjoy the harvests we share with each other, even if only for a few seasons. 

David Estringel’s collection Blue will be available from Back Room Press in September 2023.

The poet

In the ocean of metaphor,
In the heart of simile, 
Where personification reside, 
Metonymy, and anaphora ride, 
Behind stands a pen, 
Like a gentle wind, 
Like a growing light, 
Trying to survive, just survive, 
In this widened world, 
Where creativity unfold, 
Where ink becomes rain, 
Dripping on more beautifully,
Designing lightness and darkness. 


In it poetry becomes a land, 
Where euphoria and love held, 
Where nature and beauty abound, 
Like a blowing breeze, 
Like a roaming sunlight, 
As bright as air, 
As obvious as breath. 
In this narrow path, 
There exists no dearth, 
For only fulfilment birth. 
Languages are embellished, 
Words are sowed, in the sand, 
Psyche, dreams, are depicted, 
So in it we breath – it's a soft breath. 


Abdul-Aziz Muhammad Inuwa is an enthusiast writer, a mass communicator, a student with Taraba state university (T.S.U). He hails from Jalingo, Taraba State, Nigeria. He's a lust of becoming a poet, so, he's inspired by the landscapes of literature. 

Burn Me

Burn me with your touch
The pain reminds me I am still alive

Suffocate me with your kiss
It is a sweet death and worth the cost

Cut through me with your gaze
So you can see me for who I am

Take away my memory of anyone before you
No memory is more beautiful than yours

Blind me from seeing the future
My dreams are all that I want to see

Bury me with your love
For only Heaven can compete with it.




When I Saw You...

Your face...
took the place of the moon. 
Be gentle and don't place me in darkness
when I approach. 
Sprinkle the stars on the path that lights my way to you.

Lead me to you !

Your eyes... 
became the desert 
Where I now wander, 
and where the night breeze 
keeps me company until I find 
your footsteps that lead me to where you wait. 

Come and find me!

Your lips... 
were the place
where our love began 
Do not keep them from me 
They are the wellspring of your 
sweet elixir from which I will be sustained, 
and the place where the sweet sound of your poems 
are kept until they are whispered softly in my ear.

Never keep them from me!

Your chest... 
hid the the doorway to your heart 
where every emotion of love and gentle 
touch emerges for me only. 
And where my hand rests over the beat. 
Open your door for me and then quickly lock it 
behind me so that no one else can ever enter after me. 

Throw away the key! 

We are to shape our state in a world of uncertain seasons, sudden catastrophes, antagonistic diseases, inimical beasts and vermin, out of men and women of the like passions, the like uncertainties of mood and desire to our own.”. Examine the Time Machine as a static utopian fiction contrasting critical perspectives of kinetic utopia highlighted in the commentary.

H.G. Wells' time traveler surmounts to venture upon his adventuresome journey in aftermath of the narrator’s dialect to ‘consider I have been speculating upon the destinies of our race”, the epilogue of the novel where the narrator suggests, “He [ …] thought but less cheeringly of the Advancement of Mankind, and saw in the growing pile of the civilization, only a  foolish heaping that must inevitably fall back upon and destroy its makers in the end.” The time traveller’s futuristic analyses of the society of Victorian England are extrapolations of close surface similarities of male and female Eloi community between adults and children alike, where forth the author concludes, “the strength of the man, the softness of the woman, the institution of the family, the differentiation of the occupations are merely militant necessities of an age of physical force. 

The science fantasies are offered as so many cautionary fables, so many dreadful warnings to humanity to look to itself, to take stockings from its current sick condition and remedy it before it is too late. Population control, childbearing and childrearing decline of motherhood, falling stoicism of menial chores or physical labour in males, will show less differentiation and consequent immaturity into adulthood, such leisure brings, leads the Time Traveller to observe that, “children seemed to my eyes to be but the miniatures of their parents.” 

Morlockian cannibalism satirizes the burgeoning working class proletarian revolution in the tumultuous turmoil wrecked by the upsurge of militant trade unionism particularly left wing labour party political organization. Earlier the Eloi had rose to ascendancy but subsequently dethroned by Morlockians, since the latter possessed initiative in the face of adversity. Industry and working-class accommodation were removed from the surface of the earth and buried underground, since all the surface of the earth was bequeathed to be conferred upon the ruling class of aristocracy. In this sense, all the surface of the earth came to be dominated and owned by the enterprises proprietors of Victorian bourgeoisie, “artificial undergrounds that such work as was necessary to the comfort of the daylight, race was done”. The Time Traveller maintains that for his audience, envisioning a society that does not require a great leap of imagination, “even now there [/////] is a tendency to utilize underground as the space for less ornamental purposes, there is the Metropolitan Railway in London, for instance, there are new electric railways and subways, there are underground stations and restaurants, and they increase and multiply.” 

It is worth analyzing how the Elois degenerated and eventually were eliminated by the surge of extinction, since they were diminished of their intelligence and their strength in contrast to their subterranean habitats dwelling neighbours subalterns Morlocks; Morlocks possessed the intuitive spirits of resiliency by engagement in productive labor and physical prowess in order to savage damnable starvation and malicious suffocation. Post Darwinian evolutionary adaptations, thus, overthrew the Eloi to their downfall and the Morlocks to their triumphalism in the extremes of individualistic collectivism. The Time Traveller discovers that the Elois privileged aristocracy as the automatic rulers of the earth unearthed the fatal flaw: “that perfect state had lacked one thing even for mechanical perfection-----absolute permanency.”

The Time Traveller believes that middle-class inbreeding was fundamental and crucial to the slit in the humanity produced by the Eloi and the Morlocks, with the widening gulf between classes, being the result of the promotion by intermarriage, which at present, retards the splitting of our species along the lines of social stratification, becoming lesser and lesser frequent.” An animal in harmony with its environment is a perfect mechanism. Nature never appeals to intelligence unless habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence when there is no change or no need for change….” Eloi over the centuries have adapted so well to their environment that life had become instinctual once again. 

However, when considering the Morlocks the opposite must be the case: “It is a law of nature to overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger and trouble….Only those animals partake intelligence that have to meet a huge variety of needs and dangers.”  Food crises reinforced these minion ant like creatures to prey and preserve their cattled like creatures upperworlder masters Eloi. Event the writer prolifically exclaims in astonishment, “I was surprised to find it had been carefully oiled and cleaned. I had suspected that the Morlocks, had even partially taken it to pieces while trying in their dim way to grasp its purpose.” 

Robert M Philmus points out that, “by 802/701 no species has the intelligence anymore to set limits on the struggles for existence, in where the defenseless Eloi fall victim to the carnivorous Morlocks. Furthermore, the Morlocks are unable to walk upon the surface of the earth due to their blindness in daylight and their new role as exploiters of the upperworld Eloi simply reverses the old equation rather than changes its nature. Thus the story ends with the general biological devolution and the destruction of the planet as witnessed by the Time Traveller in his “Future Vision”. 

In valedictory argument, Mc Connell’s critical interpretation is a justifiable approach to vindicate the Time Machine as a static utopian fiction, “The environment will inevitably change upon the course of geological, cosmological time. And the species that has been too close at home with one phase of climate and ecology will probably lose the resiliency to change and meet the demands of another phase.”

Further Reading and References

John S Partington’s The Time Machine and A Modern Utopia: The Static and Kinetic Utopias of the Early H.G. Well’s, Utopian Studies, 2002, Vol. 13, No. 1, pages: 57-68.
HG Wells’ The Time Machine Reviewed –archive, 1895 The Guardian 

When The Heart Becomes An Artifact


For few it begins with the first kiss,
While for most it is a game of hit and miss.
Hoping for the one solid contact bringing them home;
Landing in the yard with picket fence and garden gnome.
Holding out for love's holy grail,
Losing more of their selves the more they fail.
Always on the lookout, hoping to find
That one arti.....WAIT....STOP....rewind.
When the heart aches and the earth quakes
Just hope it doesn't open to a pit of snakes.
I've fallen so often it's hard to tell
Just how often and deep I fell.
In a long forgotten hell I was sure I found the one
That would forever shine like the Sun.
Just a dream that toyed with my heart,
And I watched the Moirai take that future apart.
Sorrow fell upon me like raiders of a lost heart.
The darkness deep within picked me apart.
In this love I was alone
Searching for the philosopher's stone.
Trying to make love out of pain.
Trying to make sense of a stain
But that dream did in fact
only make my heart an artifact.
Burning blood became cold
Until I finally found my gold.
And this love is in fact
The only true artifact.




The Code Says I am a Number


Minority Report should have been a warning not a template
And yet we have judicial A.I. we will soon regret.
Emotionless computers judging the human factor
Non empathetic hardware trying to correct human error.
A.I. : Artificial Intelligence; Algorythmic Inqisitor
Tomorrow's dark future is here today;
More and more human purpose being taken away.
Facial recognition assessing job applicants; qualifications exempt.
A false interpreted expression can block the best attempt.
Bots deciding what we can and can not say;
Taking human rights to express away.
Do we still have control or causing a butterfly effect?
What more do we have to expect?
Humans are becoming the minority
Code is taking up the majority.


Author Biography 

From South-Western, Michigan, Jerry Langdon lives in Germany since the early 90's. He is an Artist and Poet. His works bathe in a darker side of emotion and fantasy. He has released five books of Poetry titled "Temperate Darkness an Behind the Twilight Veil", “Death and other cold things” “Rollercoaster Heart” and “Frosted Dreams” Jerry is also the editor and publisher of the literary magazine Raven Cage Zine poetry and prose. His poetic inspirations are derived from poets such as Edgar Allen Poe, Robert Frost and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. As well as from various Rock Bands. His apparently twisted mind, twists and intertwines fantasy with reality.