I love Uzbekistan

It is unique in the world

He is my pride

Mercy is a fiery mother

I am still a student

I have a bright future

Tie up your country

Do it, the beating

Dilmurodova Dilfuza was born January 9, 2010. She is a student and poet.

Jeff, of Allentown, PA

	Jeff stood at the case holding all of the bakery’s delights on display, cup of coffee in one hand and pumpernickel bagel in the other.  He took a bite of the bagel, eyes closing like a whingy baby who’s finally dropped off to sleep.  Then he opened them and began to chew slowly, rapturously.
	“Ah, a Rockaway bagel,” he said.  “You can’t beat them.”
	The woman who’d served him only moments before and now was in the process of helping the next customer in line glanced over at him long enough to say, “Thank you.”
	Very courteous, Jeff thought.  And friendly.  New Yorkers get a bad rap.  They were friendly people.  He’d never met friendlier people.  Especially the ones here in Rockaway.
	“I heard some goofball say on TV that Montreal has the best bagels.  Montreal.  Can you believe that?  I’ve had Montreal bagels, young lady, and I can tell you they don’t hold a candle to these,” he said, raising the bagel, which was about the size of a catcher’s mitt.

	The woman was boxing up an order of a dozen, mixed.  She didn’t say anything in response to his Montreal comment but did nod in his direction.  Yes, despite being busy, she took the time to nod.  Jeff wished now that he’d given her the change from his bagel and coffee.  She was the only person working the counter, and the line was getting longer.  She deserved a tip.
	“Now, I’m sure people will tell you that bagels are better in the city.  Well, I’ve had bagels in the city, and I’m here to tell you they don’t hold a candle to Rockaway bagels.”
	Each time Jeff said “the city,” he waved the bagel in what he was pretty sure was the direction of Manhattan.  That’s what natives meant when they said “the city”:  Manhattan.  Jeff wasn’t a native, of course, but he didn’t want these people to think he was some yokel who thought “the city” referred to the whole damn five boroughs.
	Jeff swept his gaze from the woman behind the counter along the line of customers that extended across the little shop to the door.  No one acknowledged him with a word or nod or even a look back.  Why should they?  They were all there to grab a bagel or pastry on their way to work.  Busy people.  Industrious people.  Look at the city they’d built.
	Jeff took another bite of bagel.

	“Mmm.  By golly, that’s good.  I haven’t had a Rockaway bagel in twenty years.  I tell you I feel like I’ve come home.  No, I’m not a native, but Rockaway and I go back a long way.  I spent some of the best years of my life here.”     
	The man at the front of the line looked at him for one instant without expression and then turned to the woman behind the counter and asked if they had any bialys.  No, said the woman.  They were out of bialys.
*
	“My kids used to call these trees ‘phony trees’,” Jeff said.  “That was when they were little tykes, of course.  Lisa and Joey.  Twenty years ago or more.”
	“Oh yes?” the man said.  He was bent over sorting through envelopes in a big brown leather bag attached to a pull-cart like Jeff used to have back in the days when he played golf.  After the divorce, when he moved into the little one-bedroom apartment, he didn’t have room for his clubs.  No matter.  By then he’d given up playing anyway.

	Only at that moment did Jeff become aware of the man’s blue uniform and connect it with the bag and envelopes.  The fellow was a mailman!  Jeff worried about himself sometimes, walking through life in a daze.
	“It was the way the bark would peel off the trees in raggedy sheets like paper, you see.  I’d tell the kids the trees were made out of paper, so they called them phony trees.”
	The mailman seemed about to reply but instead took a handful of envelopes and walked toward the front porch of the house they were standing before.  Then up the steps.
	“Oh,” Jeff said, an almost inaudible moan of pain.
	These trees, he’d just realized with dismay, weren’t his trees, the ones he’d remembered.  He didn’t know what kind these were—in fact, he’d never known the name of the phony trees, either—but these had slender trunks with unremarkable bark unlike the trees he, Lisa, and Joey would walk beneath on their way to PS 114, where they’d play stickball and basketball on the asphalt playground.

	“No no, I had it wrong,” Jeff began explaining before the mailman reached the bottom steps of the house where he’d just made his delivery.  “These aren’t the phony trees.  Hurricane Sandy killed off most of those.  All that saltwater.  Ah, but here I am a visitor telling you about your own home.”
	“I’m from Roxbury,” the mailman said.
	Roxbury.  Jeff knew that wasn’t far off, but he wasn’t sure how that fit in vis a vis the hurricane damage to Belle Harbor, the village in the Rockaways where he and his family had spent a week in the summer and a week over the holidays every year, year after year until it all ended.
	“Roxbury’s nice, too,” Jeff said, following the mailman on down the sidewalk.  “I love Rockaway—all the Rockaways.  Wait.  Is Roxbury considered part of the Rockaways? . . . No matter.  I’m sure it’s nice, too.  I spent the best years of my life here.”
	The mailman stopped at the next house and began sorting through his bag.
	“Damn Sandy anyway,” Jeff said, hands on his hips as he gazed around him.  “A lot of change.  A lot.  Not all bad, though, I’m not saying that.  It’s still a great place.”

	The mailman suddenly looked up from his bag.
	“Change?  You talking about change?  Have you seen 136th Street?  Those enormous houses they built after Sandy?  You won’t believe the place.  Go take a look.  That direction.  136th Street.  No use coming this way.  That’ll just take you away from it.  That way.”
	“Great idea.  Thanks,” Jeff said.
	He was well aware that the mailman was trying to get rid of him.  Couldn’t blame to poor guy.  Some tiresome old fart comes along and . . .
	Jeff came to a halt.  He’d just remembered something.  He turned and called back to the mailman, “Hey, buddy!  136th Street.  That’s where I was heading.  Some guy in the deli on 129th Street told me I should check out the big houses on 136th Street.  That’s where I was heading when I ran into you.  Funny!”
The mailman went on delivering the mail.
*
	Even though the mailman had pointed him in the direction of 136th Street, when Jeff got to Newport he became disoriented and wasn’t sure which way to turn.  Then he heard the music coming from the direction of the sea.
	He really wanted to see those big houses.  Built to replace homes in the flood plain destroyed by Sandy, they looked bizarre, he’d heard somewhere, like a sudden outcropping of skyscrapers amongst cottages.
	He’d had a dream once about a little village outside of Allentown that he used to drive through on the way to visit some old girlfriend.  In his dream the little town had been remarkably transformed, still only a very few blocks long but those blocks towered over by enormous new chrome and glass buildings that gleamed in the sun.  That dreamscape was still vivid in his mind although the girlfriend, alas, he could not remember one thing about.

	Would the big houses on 136th Street beguile him like his dream?
	But he did not go to the big houses.  It was the music from the sea that summoned him.
	He crossed Newport and continue toward the ocean.
	People started coming out of their houses and joining him on his walk southward as if he were some quaint and clueless pied piper.
	When he got to Rockaway Beach Boulevard, he didn’t cross and continue the final block to the beach because, he realized, the music wasn’t coming from the sea after all.  It was coming from the east, coming ever nearer, coming down the boulevard right toward him.
	A parade!

	He remembered the date:  March 17th.  Of course, the St. Patrick’s Day parade.
	They came on toward him, then past him, strutting and high-stepping and dancing and marching as to war.  School bands and social-organization bands and motley crews who looked like the bars on 116th Street had kicked them out but handed them instruments on their way and commanded, Go make music, you drunken Irish bums.
	Jeff cheered for the Rockaway Hibernian Society, striding out splendidly in their green and black tartan kilts and tall black palace-guards’ hats, bagpipes moaning and whining out that song you always hear with bagpipes, that song . . .
	He turned to ask the old gent next to him what the song was you always hear with bagpipes, but before he could get the wording of the question straight in his mind, the Rockaway Hibernian Society band had marched on, their place taken by a school band, youngsters.

	Jeff let out a roar of laughter.
“St. Camillus!” he said, elbowing the old gent and pointing.  “St. Camillus!”
	“Yes, I see,” the man said, edging a step away.
	Jeff watched the band a moment, then laughed again.
	He turned to the old gent to explain and, when he saw there were now a couple of yards separating them, closed the gap.
	“My wife—my wife that was—went to St. Francis De Sales, you see.  A long time ago, of course.  She was in the St. Francis band, would go to band competitions and the like. They were good, St. Francis, but they never could beat St. Camillus.  And here they are, here they still are, St. Camillus!”
	He laughed as if it were a delightful thing but also a bit scandalous, St. Camillus, still at it after all these years.
	The old gent turned his back to him.

	Jeff tapped him on the shoulder.
	The man turned back halfway toward him.
	“My wife—my wife that was—she didn’t march in this parade with St. Francis, this little parade.  Not that I’m knocking this little parade, understand.  I like this one.  But I’m talking about the big one, the one in the city.  That’s the one she marched in.  Played the fife.  About froze a couple of times, she said, my wife said.  My wife that was.”
	The man turned fully toward him and studied him a moment.
	“I’m sorry for your loss,” he said.
	“Pardon me?”
	“Your wife that was, you said.  You’ve said it several times now.”
	“Oh.  Ha, no.  I mean she used to be my wife.  Divorced now.  You thought she was dead?  Ha, no.  She’s alive as we speak, living right here in Rockaway.  Neponsit, actually.”
	“I see.”
	The man turned his attention back to the parade.

	Another school came marching down the boulevard.  Jeff couldn’t tell by the initials on the bass drum where they were from.  He recognized the song they were playing, though.
	He began to giggle.
	“Ha.  ‘MacNamara’s Band’,” he said to the man, who apparently took no notice.  “Grand old song.  There’s a really funny version of it, pretty raunchy version, if you get my drift.  Want to hear it?”
	“Not interested,” the man said without turning.
	“It’s really funny.  The first line goes—”
	The man turned and said, “Not interested.  And isn’t it a little early in the day, buddy?”
	“Early in the day?”
“To be drinking.  You’re drunk.  No, don’t bother.  Now look, I’m going to move on down this way.  Do me an enormous favor and don’t follow me.”
	Jeff watched him move off to the west.  He chuckled as he said to himself, He calls this drunk?  
*
	“I know you’re a serious man.  We’re all serious men here.  But that’s not what this is about.  All I’m asking you is if you’ve got The Ramones on the jukebox.”
	The bartender stopped wiping the bar top and laughed.
	“Not that kind of serious,” he said.  “The music Sirius thing.  S-I-U-R . . . whatever.  We get our music through a Sirius hookup.  We haven’t had a jukebox since I’ve been working here, pal.”
	Jeff finally got it, and then he laughed, too, briefly.  But he was disappointed about The Ramones.
	“Time was you couldn’t walk into a bar anywhere in the Rockaways without hearing The Ramones on the jukebox singing ‘Rockaway Beach’.”
	“Right you are.  That and ‘The Wild Colonial Boy’.”

	It wasn’t the bartender who said this but an old gent sitting at the end of the bar.  Wait.  Was he the same old gent Jeff had talked to at the parade earlier that day?  No.  This fellow wasn’t that old.  Probably no older than Jeff.  Maybe younger.  Forty years old, maybe, but looked twenty years older the way a man will sitting in a cheap bar by himself.
	Jeff looked in the mirror but couldn’t see himself because of the big Harp decal plastered across it.
	He looked down at his beer.  Was he drinking Harp?  Took a taste.  Well, that didn’t do him any good.  He didn’t drink enough beer to tell an ale from a lager from a pilsner.  Whiskey, though.  He could tell you a Scotch from an Irish or a Canadian or a bourbon or a rye, tell you one Scotch from another Scotch, one bourbon from another, right on down the line.

	“Yuengling,” the bartender said, and Jeff thought it likely that he’d asked what it was that he was drinking.
	“A Pennsylvania beer!” Jeff said.  “That’s me, Pennsylvania.  Allentown born and bred.”
	“Oh?  I would have taken you for a local, the way you’ve been doing a Rockaway travelogue here for the last hour.”
	Jeff reared back on the barstool and gave the bartender a closer look.  Was he being critical?  Jeff decided that he wasn’t.  Nice fellow, he looked like.
	So, Jeff had been in here for an hour talking about Rockaway.  News to him.  This time of day—or night—his memory tended to take him back no farther than his latest drink.

	“Just taking a sentimental journey,” he said.
	He took a sip of the Yuengling and was just about to ask the bartender if they had “Sentimental Journey” on the jukebox when the fellow at the end of the bar began to sing.
“There was a wild colonial boy,” he sang but got no farther.  Apparently he couldn’t remember the colonial boy’s name.
	“Andy Byrne,” Jeff called down to him before remembering that Andy was his brother-in-law—or had been before the divorce.

	“Andy Byrne was a great pal of mine back in the day,” Jeff explained to the bartender to cover his embarrassment for calling out the name.  “I wonder if they still live here—the Byrnes.”
	“Couldn’t tell you,” the bartender said, glaring down at the end of the bar where the old guy was getting into an increasingly heated argument about the identity of the colonial boy with someone at the table behind him.
	“Keep it civil down there,” the bartender called to them, then turned back to Jeff.
	“No, I couldn’t tell you about any locals.  I’m from Arverne myself.”
	“Ah, Arverne.  I’ve had good times in Arverne, too,” Jeff said.  A lie.  He’d driven through Arverne, always careful to keep his doors locked.
	“Oh?  The only good times I have in Arverne is every time I drive out if it.  How come you know so much about the area?  I thought you were from Pennsylvania.”
	“I am.  Allentown born and bred.  But I married a girl from Belle Harbor.  Beth Byrne.  My Belle Harbor Belle, I called her.

	“Called her.  So she’s . . . not with us any longer.”
	“No, divorced is all.  All my fault, it won’t surprise you to hear.  She lives right here in Rockaway.  Neponsit, actually.  Not five blocks from where she was born.”
	“I see.  So you’re back on business, I guess,” the bartender said, not waiting for a reply but moving off to fill an order from the waitress.
	He came back a minute later and wiped at the bar, a dreamy smile on his face.
	“I’m trying to remember how that song goes.  ‘Rockaway Beach’.”
	“No idea,” Jeff said.
*
	It was thirty blocks from the bar on 116th Street to Neponsit.  The blocks were shorter walking west to east than if he were walking the numbered streets from north to south, Jamaica Bay to the beach.  Still, he was exhausted by the time he got to Neponsit.
	He stood across the street from the big brick house, leaning against a tree—not one of the phony ones but one of the new ones.  He was having trouble catching his breath, panting, his legs rubbery, his shoulders, arms, and hands trembling.  Thirty blocks.
	Why had he come?
	It hadn’t been a conscious goal, to see Beth, the wife that was.  But why else drive all this way, what point to this sentimental journey?  If there was any point at all.

	Now that he was here, he was frightened at the possibility of seeing her and being crushed, annihilated by the enormity of all that he’d lost.  And what if she saw him, saw what he’d become?  A wheezing, stumbling remnant.  Bloated bag of whiskey-soaked memories.
	The first floor of the house was dark, but two windows on the second floor were lit.  Across the lowered blind over one window a shadow passed.
	Beth!
	Maybe.  Impossible to tell.  Could as easily be him, the man, the son of a bitch.  He was likely to be a son of a bitch, wasn’t he, Beth with her poor taste in men?
	He couldn’t bear it.  He released his hold on the tree and watched his shadow, thrown by porchlights, stumble south down 145th Street toward the beach.
*
	He stood on the sand, eavesdropping as the waves murmured to one another.
	He had been to the beach many, many times with Beth and the kids, but they’d never come at night.
	It had been an overcast day, and there was no moon, no stars.  Still, it was beautiful enough to kill a man.
	He had not come for that, though—to walk into the sea.  No, he had come to create this new memory for himself alone.  He’d take it back to Allentown and wait for what was inevitably coming for him, a thing he probably wouldn’t even recognize when it came, so in thrall would he be to the stars and moon that did not shine this night on Rockaway Beach, the waves that spoke to one another, but not to him.
	
	
	  Dennis Vannatta is a Pushcart and Porter Prize winner, with essays and stories published in many magazines and anthologies, including River Styx, Chariton Review, Boulevard, and Antioch Review.  His sixth collection of stories, The Only World You Get¸ was published by Et Alia Press.

Musings on the Flowering Spring of Everyday Souls

[Originally published in Soul: {Anthology of Poems} & in Fleury’s book You Are Enough: The Journey to Accepting Your Authentic Self] 


“Peace cannot be kept by force; it can only be achieved by understanding. --Albert Einstein

Perhaps some vexed fire breathing mythical furor will immolate the
          anthropomorphic earth
Already smarting from desecration and disparagement from fellow
          anthropoids,
In a cataclysmic Inferno although already in attrition in exchange for change,
In exchange for contrition for what and who we’ve wounded,
A temporary impedimenta involving pondering our own failures to evolve
Beyond things that are tinged with an altered hue from our own…
A phalanx of obstinate, bellicose, secular, egalitarian democratic misfits flock
          the streets in gripe
Bellies full of Teutonic pragmatism & visceral dictums of right and wrong;
Adopting pioneering separatist ideologies of dissent against imperialists
Akin to The Great Pilgrimage to the Americas, a leitmotif of displacement and
          resilience
Throughout human history; proselytizing the proletariat to join their cause
          with an odious sneer!
But who am I? Perhaps a perennial philosopher:
“Cogito ergo sum” or “I think therefore I am”
Thank you Rene Descartes for your rarefied ideologies…
I am an evolving being willing to listen to others involving
In the daily duties of being human, what choice does one have? But there’s
          always a “choice”,
We can “choose” to evolve or we can simply dissolve by default…
I am grateful to be here on earth, grateful for the power of “choice”
Even as the world around me is seemingly crumbling…dissolving…
For over the years I have come to know that:
“Everything in [our lives] is happening to teach [us] more about [ourselves] so even in a crisis be
grateful…live in a space of gratitude…” Thank you Oprah Winfrey for your proletarian approach to philosophy! 

We are in a crisis of polarity that is deflowering our gardens
Pitting brother against brother, sister against sister, wives against husbands,
Dispute ideas and beliefs don’t invalidate & dismiss the people who have them,
don’t give up on each other, all deserve to be heard and understood;
Yet we still have to remember even as we hurt, we don’t have to suffer,

          However!

“Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with
scars.” Thank you Khalil Gibran for your tarry
          pansophy.
Open your heart to your scars, befriend your scars, let wounds of
The past strengthen and heal you rather than weaken & hurt you;
Even as we get angry, we don’t have to forfeit our ability to be joyful,
It is not happiness that makes us grateful, it is gratefulness that makes us happy…

We can find our strength in our weakness, for “God’s strength is made perfect in weakness”
Thank you Corinthians: 2. Keeping in mind that the early mystics
          perceived
God without subjecting him to tangible proof…
Name calling is the last refuge of the monosyllabic;
Be mindful of your words and resist engaging in
Gratuitous verbal violence of the morally virulent and their unconscious ilk

Amidst the clamor of contrived and nebulous directives for divisions;
Know that what’s meant for you will never miss you and
What misses you was never meant for you,
Anything that has your attention becomes your energy and manifests itself into your existence,
Evoke Immanuel Kant’s first rule in his categorical imperative
          philosophy:
“Don’t use other human beings as a means to an end”
Remember! we are products of our past not prisoners of it…
May the best of your yesterday be the worst of your tomorrow!


Jacques Fleury is a Boston Globe featured Haitian-American Poet, Educator, Author of four books and literary arts student at Harvard University online. His latest publication "You Are Enough: The Journey to Accepting Your Authentic Self"  & other titles are available at all Boston Public Libraries, the University of Massachusetts Healey Library, University of  Wyoming, Askews and Holts Library Services in the United Kingdom, The Harvard Book Store, The Grolier Poetry Bookshop, amazon etc...  He has been published in prestigious  publications such as Muddy River Poetry Review, the Cornell University Press anthology Class Lives: Stories from Our Economic Divide, Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene among others...Visit him at http://www.authorsden.com/jacquesfleury.

Waltz of Electrons

In the realm of circuits and code,
Where electrons dance, secrets unfold.
Technology, our modern muse,
Weaves dreams in lines of binary hues.

Science, the seeker of truth profound,
Observes the cosmos, its mysteries unbound.
Through telescopic eyes, it peers afar,
Unraveling galaxies, each distant star.

Together they waltz, hand in hand,
In laboratories and cyberspace land.
Science whispers equations to the wind,
While Technology builds bridges to begin.

From silicon valleys to particle streams,
They birth innovations, like celestial beams.
Quantum leaps and bytes of insight,
They illuminate our world, day and night.

So raise a glass to this harmonious pair,
For they propel us forward, beyond compare.
In the symphony of progress, they play their part,
Technology and Science—a dance of heart.

Muntasir Mamun Kiron is a student of grade 10 in Harimohan Government High School, Chapainawabganj, Bangladesh.

Do costs of renewable energy increase generation? An empirical test across Eurasian countries

Today energy is an important resource in every nation. The countries conduct various energy policies to distribute daily consumption to avoid shortages. According the goal SDG 7 of United Nation access to affordable energy by 2030, (UNSD, 2021) and models of World Energy Model (WEM), Energy Technology Perspectives (ETP), Global Energy and Climate (GEC) which adopted by International Energy Agency (IEA) to refer transition for renewable energy by 2050.(IEA, 2022) Hence, renewables are developing sector-by-sector and region-by-region to transform from traditional into alternative energy and replace to diversify the energy sector.     

Implementation of renewable energy by government and investor impose in differently from both side. Financing from government require subsidizing to equalize for internal or external price of energy. The main cost of renewable energy by government is subsidizing for public power system.(Zhao et al., 2014) Government can subsidy such as interest rate, financing entirely of the project, providing in-tariff policy etc,. In previous years for constructing traditional energy power generation plants have been commissioned 61% state-owned enterprise and 35% from private companies.(Steffen, 2018).

Additionally it depends on government budget to allocate expenditure for realization of electricity or energy plants. In terms of government expenditure, investment incentives are the main important indicator to finance Renewable Energy Sources projects respectively. Moreover, projects of RE should be considered with stakeholders and government in different stages (Lam & Law, 2018) and accept Energy Service and Power Purchase Agreements. (Ottinger & Bowie, 2016) But, Power Purchase Agreement in some countries is not implemented and this risk to financing RE projects, the costs which include capital flow can be decreasing concerning investment of private sector that give the result decreasing of development RE plants.(Taghizadeh-hesary & Yoshino, 2020) According financing by government, RE supports by international organizations on the frame of SDG 7(International Renewable Energy Agency, 2022).

So, initial capital or investment define the government expenditure and finance flows by international organization (some emerging countries receive).Considering the cost of renewable energy we can explore the improvement and implementation the projects of RE. Compare with creation RE technology with today’s update equipment, it is differ from with price decreasing and installation is cheaper than previous technology and it has increased confidence for using (Ellabban et al., 2014). Especially wind energy supposed one of the low cost technology (Østergaard et al., 2020)(Blaabjerg et al., 2014) 

Operation and maintenance cost for RE installation is more sensitive because of different type soft energy, such as, solar PV, wind, hydro, geothermal, biomass etc,. Thus, estimation and analysis reveal some uncertainty.(Wilson, 1984) We used a cross-country dataset of 72 Eurasian countries for the period 2019 and our proxy variable is capital cost the other variables are independent vector variables which reveal the significance to the model.  

In our study we take one proxy variable: initial cost for installation RE or capital cost that understanding with government and investor costs, investments from international organization that we use jointly as capital investment. Operation and maintenance (thereafter O&M) cost we omit because of opacity distribution in this case and it derives from capacity of generation installation in total.(Wilson, 1984) According the positive relationship between RE generation and costs, we find that costs are the main indicator and without any investment have not development in this field.     

Our results show that capital cost has a positive relationship with RE generation. Moreover, this study impact to invest on RE generation to achieve for sustainable and affordable energy resources. This finding not only substantially contribute to the extent literature, but also pay attention for policy and decision makers to increase the share of generation RE among Eurasian countries especially nations that dependent to traditional energy. Finally, we use OLS econometrics method and check for robustness standard error tests to avoid heteroscedasticity.

Daniyor Gulomjanov was born on August 5, 2007 in Namangan district, Namangan region.

16 years old, 10th grader of Namangan District Presidential Specialized School

Winner of the “Pride of Education” badge

Awardee of the “For Achievements in Education” badge

He is interested in Geography and History

Geography Olympiad

I liked tracing

Currently thinking
about how
if I had to split my life in two

the before
and the after

it would start with watching
Avengers Endgame
in Daly City theater
on the week after opening weekend

For you, 
it was just like any day
you gave me everything.
But for me,
it was the day I noticed the cracks in my basin
the thin, hidden lines that have continued to widen
and from my point of view
I started to see
how they aligned up with yours
in a completely different way.
I wondered if they would grow into tendrils
and now I know
they would.

I am now afraid
of when, I hope
our lines might intertwine
and I won't know
where I want to end
as you pull
and push
and I don't know if its you or me

So I wonder,
if the creator teaches the created
or the creator can never end.

-----------------------------------------------------------
gently on the shoulder
 

i found you naked

in my bed sleeping

so quiet and i snuggled

up next to you

 

kissed you gently

on the shoulder

and told you

i love you

 

i woke up alone

 

a note on the pillow

saying thanks, you

need to buy some

toilet paper

 

i laughed and then

realized what you

used that towel for
--------------------------------------------------------
thirty some years ago
 

you ever remember

the time we kissed

under a bridge on

a rainy night thirty

some years ago

 

how all loneliness

left us

 

two souls determined

to take on the world

 

sharing cigarettes

at three in the

morning

 

two weeks later

 

you would be gone

to some other place

 

i never saw the

world the same

again
---------------------------------------------------------------------
in science class
 

earth shaking like never

before and some idiot

thinks it is the wrath

of god

 

and soon the sun will

give in to the moon

and some genius will

take it as a sign from

god to shoot up a school

or rob a few banks

 

it is pretty easy to see

who was actually paying

attention in science class

and who was busy

daydreaming about

a life they could

never ever achieve
---------------------------------------------------------
slowly come to terms
 

tears race down

my face as i slowly

come to terms with

my inevitable demise

 

i've squeezed more

talent out of apathy

than is probably

allowed

 

be thankful they

allowed you to

go this far

 

most of your types

end up in institutions

or cemeteries

 

i have a modest

urn in mind

 

ashes to be spread

in the pacific ocean

 

lord knows i'll

never make it

there while alive
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
a proverbial box
 

shooting stars have

no wishes attached

to them

 

fear is a disease

that can trap any

soul in a proverbial

box

 

sometimes i think

it would be better

to burn the fucker

down than figure

a way out



J.J. Campbell (1976 - ?) is stuck in the suburbs, plotting his escape. He's been widely published over the years, most recently at The Beatnik Cowboy, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Black Coffee Review, The Asylum Floor and Horror Sleaze Trash. You can find him most days on his mildly entertaining blog, evil delights. (https://evildelights.blogspot.com)