The Solitary Sleep
The sand is drenched to the every kiss of the wave from the ocean
I stand by, it sounds just my beloved breathes on the chest
A sleep in loving peace
The sun rising in me shrouds on the other side
The moon shining on
I know you are busy with gardening
Some nights overwhelmed with joy like Pattaya City Street
Performed by the young ones the whole night
Some on the corner deep in thought over what is got or lost in life
On her voyage to the Ocean Columbus lost her way
Her mariners disturbed her sleep nights after nights
Coleridge's the ancient mariner fell in the same condition over nights
Though the ground was different to the voyage
At one point all depends on the anchorage of the memory of sorrows and joys
So the soiled body wants to leave this place where days and nights arrive
At last being tired this body flies to the place
Where nobody can blame or claim against or in favour of .
Chapainawabganj, Bangladesh
13/12//2020
The World As It Seems to Be
So many people dashed to the garden
Saturated with the fragrance of the roses
The lake with the lily flowers welcomes so smilingly in the drowsy world
As Alfred Tennyson once drew the art of the lotus-eaters
The Victorian age, the unstable world made them forgetful
How to spend time in sleepy mood eating lotus and not to go back to the house door
In this dreamful ease, lotus a boon for them passing time in oblivion
What a riot! How pathetic the life's painting in the daily busy world!
With all the fervor in this sick world many of us like to go back to that forest and river
How to get relief from the unstable whirling of the stormy sea
The mariners of the ship find the way to join that forgetfulness
Of the lotus - eaters.
Chapainawabganj, Bangladesh
14/12//2020
In This Snowy Darkening Night
My heart is burning
Irregular breath taking
Yet I ride on and recite
I dive and swim in the sea
And fly over the sand, the hills covered with the green
My heart is burning in pain
Feel like crying in this snowy hill
Suppressing all my excitement I proceed
So sound I sleep, no friction be fed
No hindrance of the perpetual silence
How deep and dark!
To live a day more to fight with
A day more to fill the heart
Oh! the fresh air in the green leafy fields.
Chapainawabganj, Bangladesh
19/12//2020
The Winter Sun
The night is cold
The world seems to be gasping in an unknown pain
Reflecting over the psyche
On what it muses, sketches the day's chunky blanket
The night is bare and smoggy
Waiting so eagerly for the sun
The body under the quilt slips down silently
To the sunny enchantment of the mustard flowers
Being left and right, playing hide and seek
The night descends on
My rosy love mixes up to the shady moon
I fight all the way in my prowess
Only that I can be your humming bee
The sun rises, the fog disperses
Mixes- up the sky and the sun to the horizon
O the yellow lily - a surprise on the Gomti River
You, the morning sun more than gold or diamond
The prow of the ship on the vast ocean
Awakening the earth, opening very close altogether
The mustard yellow flowers - an overwhelming spot
Water flows on the glinting yellow lily.
Chapainawabganj, Bangladesh
20/12//2020
In The Midst Of
In the midst of hope and despair
Just like the vines on the tree
I find myself shrouded in your arms and breast
O my blessed love
I do play and hiss in an ecstasy of joy
It is as if the dunes of night curtaining all over the earth
The birds flying and chirping on the trees
In the midst of light and shade
The sun is setting; the egrets matching the white clouds in the sky
Spreading their wings here and there
The bats in their melodious respiration flock together
How charming they coax to each other!
Abruptly all become silent
And hang on the large banyan tree for the whole night rest
The light of the day slanted in the west in the blink of an eye
In the midst of joy and despair
We are standing on the bank of the river of past and present.
Chapainawabganj, Bangladesh
20/12//2020
LET YOUR FREAK FLAG FLY
Back in the day, back in the early ‘70s, back in high school when it was cool to be a hippie chick, Claudia read every hippie book she could find. Poetry books by Rod McKuen. Books on macrobiotics. Spiritual books like Be Here Now by Ram Dass. Be here now, be here now, be here now. Live in the present moment. Wish she could. But she can’t. Not now. After college she planned to escape her small town life, move to San Francisco, and become a Beat poet. That never happened either. The light turns red, and Claudia crosses a busy intersection. She heads down Hawthorne Street and then Tyler Boulevard and then Miller Street to Baxter Avenue. At the end of Baxter she’ll turn around and walk back. This is the daily five-mile maze of streets her doctor prescribed for stress reduction. But even though her body loves the exercise, her thoughts are anything but tranquil. As the senior editor of the local newspaper, she is consumed with endless deadlines, demanding advertisers, and a staff of headstrong journalists. No time to be here now. BOOM! Something large and hairy slams into Claudia, hurling her to the pavement. “Are you okay, lady?” her assailant asks, pulling her to her feet. It’s the old hippie on the bench outside the ice cream parlor. He sits there every day watching Baxter Avenue. “What happened?” she asks, brushing dirt from her shirt and pants. “Had to tackle you before you stepped in front of the bus,” he scolds, returning to his bench. “What bus?” she asks. Her clothes are ruined. She’ll have to stop by Macy’s on her way back. “Be here now, sister,” he warns. Claudia laughs and sits down next to him on the bench. “I owe you an ice cream cone,” she says. The old hippie smiles, staring at something across the street. She follows his gaze to the maple trees lining Baxter Avenue. It’s October, and they’re already a blaze of red. So bright they set the street on fire. Funny how she hadn’t noticed that before.
MOVING OUT OF YOUR COMFORT ZONE IS HIGHLY OVERRATED
This is a fact: Nancy loves her electric blanket, the leopard-print one, the one she hates to leave every morning, the one she loves to burrow beneath on cold nights, the one that never disappoints her, frustrates her, makes her angry enough to contemplate murdering someone, like, oh, maybe her husband last month when he left on a nine-day golf vacation to Myrtle Beach with his good-old-boy buddies, where he played golf all day for nine days under a sizzling summer sun, consumed nothing but pizza, wings, steak, chocolate, and vodka (the five major food groups, according to good old boys), forgot that he had a heart condition, forgot that he’s on heart medication, that he’s on high blood pressure medication, that he’s on a low fat/low sodium/high fiber/heart-friendly diet, that he needs to stay hydrated (according to his doctor), that he’s no longer 18 but 68 freakin’ years old, so it was no surprise he landed in the hospital the day he returned from nine totally brainless days in Myrtle Beach, his body dehydrated, his heart rate sky high, his A-fib in full bloom, his heart medication no longer working, so, no, it was no surprise at all when he called Nancy to let her know he was in the hospital (again) that she hung up on him, jerked her wedding ring off her finger, flung it in the trash, walked upstairs to the bedroom, grabbed a romance novel from the bookcase, and crawled beneath her leopard-print electric blanket, allowing its warmth to comfort her like a cup of tea with her BFF (who she called later that day), because sometimes you just have to escape the stupidity of married life and pretend you’re still gloriously single, that you never said “I do” when you obviously “do NOT,” because sometimes believing that you’re still single, free, and husbandless is enough to make everything right in your world. But, then again, sometimes it’s not.
BIO:
Laura Stamps loves to play with words and create experimental forms for her fiction. Author of several novels and short story collections, including IT’S ALL ABOUT THE RIDE: CAT MANIA (Alien Buddha Press). Muses Prize. Pulitzer Prize nomination. 7 Pushcart Prize nominations. Mom of 4 cats. Twitter: @LauraStamps16. www.laurastampsfiction.blogspot.com
Across The Valley’s Face of Brokenness, Loneliness and Rejection
By Abigail George
I tell myself I want to be happy but all I get is its everlasting pursuit, its muses, its loves, and music. I was startled and dumbfounded by the world when I was younger. I hadn’t lived with an immense amount of sadness yet. I have lived with despair and hardship all my life. It feels like winter in Johannesburg all over again. It feels as if I keep looking over my shoulder and I keep seeing him there, the love of my life, the ex-soldier all over again. There is emotional pain in my verbal and non-verbal reasoning. I want to be a peace-loving person but am not engineered that way. I am not the kind of machine who can be gentle and kind. I am not a social animal. When I am depressed, I am withdrawn and introverted. My soul has been reinvented by a fountain of mono amine oxidase inhibitors, tricyclic drugs, psychotropic medication, chronic fatigue, ailments and disease, relapse and recovery and the rebuilding of my life. The leaf falls but instead I see a eulogy.
Love is like the sun but when night comes my soul is depleted, I feel less energetic, starlight fills me with integrity, but I am exhausted. I feel broken by life, tested by every single assignment that life offers up to me. I have blamed God for the set of circumstances that I find myself in. What makes me sad is this. The temporariness of life, losing loved ones to a tragic death, the spell of grief, the conjuring up of brokenness, the loneliness that belongs to solitude, being considered interloper, and being rejected by this most modern of societies because of it. I have no staying power. I am no longer as steadfast as I was once in achievement. I spend my time writing for other people now. Screenplays. Scripts but it seems to be a never-ending process that never gets me anywhere. It never gets me to where I want to go. I tell myself there is some good and wonder at being alive. There might be conflict in my life between originality and giving yourself a progress report at the end of the day.
Perhaps people are laughing at me, I think to myself. I haven’t fallen in love in a long time. I am now in a transitioning period. I am growing older in my aloneness. I want someone, people to see my fire but it is pale, and the flame does not reach my entire being. It licks my ankles feebly. There is no lasting power there. I feel more dead than cosmonaut. I feel numb. Not anything like a person who comes offering love. I am considering further study at the University of South Africa. Considering short courses. Latin or an introduction to ancient Greek grammar and syntax but nothing interests me for long. I watch YouTube videos featuring clinical psychologist and professor at the University of Toronto, Dr Jordan Peterson. I look at cultural trends. The pressures of life are upon me, but it has made my blood wise. Upon me is cognitive dissonance, mental aberrations and my psychological framework has taken a knock.
I have low self-esteem and a crisis of identity but in those moments of self-doubt and insecurity I turn with success to prayer and meditation. While loneliness ate up my wisdom and the realisation that life is not excellent for me. Not by a long shot. There is still the instinct that I must move forward by means that I must discover in having a spiritual outlook. I must move onwards and upwards led by the restorative powers of religion, congregation, and church. So, I am in a valley now, hesitant, less forgiving than I was before but I had mountains to overcome. You feel ashamed of loneliness. It is not for the fainthearted. There is an abundance of wildflowers, but I can’t take cognisance of that fact. There is imperfection in humans, but perfection in the utility of nature. We can lose everything in the material world but the progress of faith and the entropy of tolerance, the chemistry found in empathy and the revolutions that co-exist interdependently in the spheres of kindness can never be lost or erased by insecurity.
I turned to the scriptural mandates put forward in the bible and found purpose, meaning, and calling there. I turn to the genius of female writers that have come before me and find a certainty and solace there, a kind of predisposed familiarity. I turn to poetry in my hour of need, and it carries me through the darkness of my mood, the texture and play of sadness in times of helplessness and hopelessness. I must be remarkable because the poetry is a gift to me. The origins of words give me satisfaction and a rise in my mood. I feel capable and competent. As if I have some command on life. There is the milk and honey of being a paid blogger. I write and a lust for life returns to me. There is an owl house behind my third eye, the attack of having suicidal tendencies running through my veins as I search for acceptance. The rejected persona is always searching for self-care, acceptance, and loyalty from others and when it is not forthcoming from humans you tend to find it in other opportunities for personal growth. I try and be gentle with myself. I must be intelligent about all the forms of brokenness that occur in my life.
In the creative space you can align yourself with people there. You can live vicariously through the dimensions and elements of the substratum of reality. You project viewpoint onto the human scourge and poverty you feel. Your perspective becomes embryonic until you see some cause for finality and closure on your old ways of life and then understand the humility of accepting the personal growth that comes with belonging, accommodation, and adjustment. It becomes my motivation to play a role in this process. I continue writing about the molestation, the bipolar, my negative mindset, the attitude of others toward me, the footing that I can’t reach in this society. I just can’t help myself. This function of my personality. Writing is universal beyond flags and passports. But writing can lead to having an inner joy and it can initiate the process of healing. I have discovered this through trial and error. I get up in the morning. There is a window, a curtain covering it and I become excited because there is life beyond the window. There is a world out there. The universe feels less lonely. I am still in the bedroom. Silence fills the rooms of the house. Everyone is still sleeping.
My family is not yet awake. There is no sound coming from the kitchen, of people moving around in the house, there’s no feeling of ice withering away there in my spirit. There’s no banging of pots and pans, the making of coffee and breakfast. There is only the shield of the window and I stand there as if transmogrified. I exist but removed from, far away from crowds, from malls, from shops and grocery runs, errands, letter-writing, away from nine-to-five livelihood, from people, animals, and small children. Birdsong hits me in my aloneness. I am careful now. Careful to feel alive and have the sensibility of that reckoning-threshold. I can’t return this to the sender because the sender of all life and humility is God. So, I take those steps towards living and calling it a life. I try and not think about death or taking my own life with some difficulty because rejection can do that to you. It can make you get into a car and take the scenic route to the sea. I stand there in the sand by the sea and breathe for this is all I can do. Inhale. Exhale. Wish that somehow my life was different and play what if. I tell myself I am not married, and I don’t have children was based on a decision I took in my twenties and there are days when I feel a vehemence and if I am fading away.
That there is no one left to blame for this sad affair. I tell myself it is romantic to think this way, to feel this way. I put my slippers on, brush my teeth, wash my face with Dove soap and then make my way to the kitchen. I put the kettle on, open the curtains. The dog had puppies. They are up. There’s a joy in that. I am alone in the kitchen. I think what will happen when I am all alone. I stare out of the window and at all the life out there. The trees have their own language. The flowers are nurtured by water, the pensive rain, the nutrients from the soil and I wonder what will nurture me when my mother is no longer here, what nutrients does the world offer me that I cannot offer myself there. I think of the packed lunches my mother used to make when I was in high school and how I didn’t achieve the child that I wanted or the three children I dreamed about when I was in the hospital with depression that threatened to overwhelm me daily. You’re still young, I am told but I feel older. I feel old. I don’t feel wise in my aloneness. I see a kind of division within me. My self and ego are separate from each other. I am no longer young.
Youth is no longer on my side only the fear and anxiety that loneliness brings about. My eyes no longer sparkle. They are dead to life and the world. I think of my time spent in a shelter and the women I encountered there. I thought I was brave. I thought I was living life on my own terms, told myself that life was exciting in the city, but I was shattered by my own self-pity and loneliness. I hated that other people could see my innocence and this self-pity and loneliness fed by brokenness, defeat, my adversaries, and my rejection by the world. My own family did not want anything to do with me. That is what mental illness can do to you. That is what stigma can do to you. Other people shattered me with determination. I was just as hurt, as wounded and as damaged as those women were in the shelter. They had children who lived on a farm outside of the city. This is what aloneness and rejection from society could do to you. It could usurp your personality. It could plunder you. It could leave you bare. Cast out and bereft and feelings like that were dangerous and malevolent. You could learn to harm yourself by using the intellectualism of your mind.
After the shelter I was on a road to poverty and the knowledge and reality of homelessness, but I wasn’t frightened of it, yet. It wasn’t relevant to me with a kind of finality. I had a weak personality now and I wasn’t strong because brokenness can do that to you. I had a room at the Salvation Army. Night-time I would be found lying in my bed in that room feeling distinctly that now I had truly departed and bid farewell to society, the society that my parents had lived in with respectable jobs. They had never found themselves in the situation that I found myself in now. I realised that I was a failure. I had failed miserably. I had attained nothing and would never return to the feeling of normality I had before I went to hospital. My parents made me sign myself in. They turned away from me, as my maternal and paternal family later did, as society did, as social animals did. There was nothing left for me now except the valley. Finding purpose was not easy. Turning to prayer and meditation did give me a sense of hope that seemed to define me. The recognition that God was to be found in everything did not make a weak person. I grew fond of and not sad at this realisation.
I am no longer in my twenties. I did not turn to God then. I am in my forties. I turn to God now. I think of how unfair life has been towards me. That I have nothing of substance, no anchor to hold onto. There was no justification for what I had to endure, the life I lived before. I had played the victim role but now in some sense I was a survivor. I am generally unhappy but alive. Life has given me passages of time. It has conveyed to me that I cannot be trusted with either health or peace of mind, sympathies, or small children. I have neglected my responsibilities. Prayer counteracts this feeling that I am a kind of useless and bitter person. I sense this malevolence inside of me. I pray that it will go away. I saw the soldier for the last time at my family home in March. I thought that he was the beginning of a renewed life, but he wasn’t. There are just things I don’t understand about human relationships. He was unhappy. His life was difficult, but I did not understand those aspects of his life or know this for a fact. He worked now and had left the army. When he left me, I stopped feeling inspired to write. I looked out on the early morning and the smoky mist.
There was no future representation of the life I imagined I was going to co-create with him there any longer. The day became sad as many of the days that I live, and experience generally are. My father is still around to speak to and to tell me that he loves me. The relationship with my mother is difficult and strained. She acknowledges the failure in me in everything that she says and does. I feel angry all the time about these topics. Being in the valley, in my aloneness I am frightened, the brokenness, loneliness and rejection blooms with the flowers of sunlight in my bedroom in the afternoon. I confess it but of course there is neither shelter in those visitations. I am longer hopeful that I will one day let go of the brokenness. I go through this world alone, in its singular darkness, caught in the intelligent times of its shroud thinking that now I am officially incarnate. I have reading hands except I can’t predict the future. The outcome of my life. I feel shut away from it all. Once there were teachers that surrounded me. It is no longer the case. The darkness comes with its own teachings. Its own reasoning. I want it to leave me, but it gives me comfort as well.
I am full of laughter and tears. You can see it if your look closely enough. I want my name to be worthy of something now. At night my eyes are greedy for sunlight. During the day I step out in faith. The bathwater leaves patterns on my flesh. I wish the man was still looking at me. It had given me hope but I am a bone-thin woman now and feel shame. Time is leaving me. I return to the silence in the rooms of my father’s house. I am a gatherer of blue now. Blue house, blue silence, blue mood, apparitions made of blue, even the flowers are blue here and the paint on the walls. The animals are blue, and I live in a world of blue. I feel snow inside of me. Inside ventricles and tissue. Inside the womb where a child did not grow into being. I think of the Khoi lost and found in the Kat River Settlement of the Eastern Cape. I think of how at a disadvantage I am now and how humiliating that feels. There are no longer any people left who can teach me the powerful commodity of truth. I don’t see beauty in the world. I don’t see any beauty in myself and that is the hardest to take. The beauty is no longer visible that was once there in youth, and I have started to recognise that there is aloneness in everything in this world. We are not inter-dependent of it.
I remind myself I have reading hands. I tell myself I am Rilke’s wife. It is nearly summer and doesn’t hope and rebirth come with summer? I think of all the lovers and the couples in this world and how I am not a part of that. There is death and I carry myself through that sensation and there is life. I carry myself through that too. I live with pain. It has become familiar to me like furniture in this room. Pain seems to release the divine and the concept of faith. Every hateful feeling of myself, I can’t as much I’ve tried make them go away on their own. The moonlight shifts and I feel less crusader. I feel more child than disciple. I am a follower in darkness and of the darkness. I suffer and, in this suffering, I walk through this valley and have overcome mountains, but I am still left to face the isolation that brokenness gives up of itself to me, the vision of loneliness in all her glory and the vibrations of rejection that come and break over me in waves. In its purest state they crush me, hold me down and berate me. The brokenness is beyond any repair. The narrative of loneliness flows and ebbs within me with disdain. There is alienation but I tell myself that I have goals now. That God and divine timing is finally on my side.
My heart doesn’t have to go through this crushing process. I am alive for a reason. I have a purpose and a holistic vision. I will grow to be an old woman. Not surrounded by grandchildren, grown up children happy and well-adjusted and better than me at building a happier life world for themselves. I must have books. I will have books. What else can I do but bring the aloneness of brokenness, the valleys of loneliness and rejection to life in my characters, turn them into concepts and make a narrative run through them.
tickled my fancy
dark,
beautiful
eyes
the latest soul
that has tickled
my fancy
a hello seems
impossible
through these
constantly
changing
disguises
we need
to wear
but this is
what happens
when you only
find your
confidence in
the middle
of a pandemic
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
just imagine my luck
my mother talks
in her sleep now
last night, i caught
her getting up to
go walking
in my head, i was
thinking well, at
least she got her
walker first
but i know now
why all the weapons
were removed
i could just imagine
my luck
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
on my own
the more i have watched
my mother age, the more
i know i will need to end
this journey on my own
sooner or later
the hollow look in her
eyes screams burden
i was there long before
she was
now the house of apathy
has turned into a competition
the winner gets the last
good urn
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
in a never-ending pandemic
sweating in a car
writing poems
exactly how i thought
it would go in my forties
waiting on my mother
to come out of a doctor's
appointment in a never-ending
pandemic
the dystopian dream never
ceases to amaze as long as
your hope has been destroyed
---------------------------------------------------------------------
slower and slower
i get the feeling
as the days drag
on slower and
slower during
this pandemic
that death would
be my best chance
to pass the time
it certainly beats
this shit circus
we have right
now
J.J. Campbell (1976 – ?) is old enough to know better. He’s been widely published over the years, most recently at Terror House Magazine, The Beatnik Cowboy, Horror Sleaze Trash, The Rye Whiskey Review and Mad Swirl. You can find him most days on his mildly entertaining blog, evil delights. (https://evildelights.blogspot.com)
A LACK OF CONCENTRATION
I heard you wrongly
because I was too busy thinking
of the next poem.
A dinosaur and a bottle of red.
It has to do with singing in the car
and cracking on the high notes.
The business of no better, no worse
pertaining to another’s meanness.
Hearing can be such a sad time,
lobes in fragments,
ears bathed in blood.
It is this
business
neither of us sweaty and soft any longer.
You, laughingly titled,
me, what meaning means.
Would urge anyone to get up close
and really listen
otherwise, the opposite applies:
in this case, the ear.
SUSPICIOUS
Recollection, down through the generations,
confuses the spot.
Did it happen here?
Was it over there?
All they know is that
Dave loved Millicent more than life.
So why did he knife the poor woman?
And in broad daylight.
In this park.
But was it in the gazebo?
What about behind the bandstand?
The library’s old newspapers are no help.
A suspicious death is all they say.
A year later, her husband went to the chair.
For the crime of suspicion no doubt.
Don’t go looking for bloodstains.
Not on the swings.
Or the grass.
Or down by the duck pond.
And the only women alive then,
who’s living now,
is in her nineties
and interred in a local nursing home.
Someone paid for a plaque
in Millicent’s memory,
even though no one remembers her.
It’s nailed to a bench
and is so rusted by the rain,
her name is barely legible.
It’s a rather drab town these days.
Some people do talk of the good old days,
when the mill was a going concern
and local businesses were thriving.
But how good could it have been
if some guy went and stabbed his wife to death
and was fried into the next world
by the state.
The only murder in the town’s history
and it happened when eggs were cheap,
gas prices were low and you could buy
a newspaper for a nickel.
And you could stab your loved one
through the heart
and have it called merely suspicious.
To me, the whole past is suspicious.
I call for my first witness,
Gladys Broome, 97,
resident of Greengage Nursing Home.
She claims that,
when she was young,
she trapped a rainbow
in her butterfly net.
She took it to Millicent’s funeral,
pinned it on the poor woman who died.
TADPOLES
Early morning,
I’d be on my knees,
bending over the pond’s edge,
scouring the murky waters
for those wiggly creatures.
I was armed with two glass jars
one for scooping,
one for collecting.
Every tadpole
was a frog in water’s utero.
Left to nature,
the black worm
would grow into
the bug-eyed green monster.
My task was to
intercept the miracle,
have it play out in my bedroom.
Most of my catch died, of course.
Or my mother tossed them out.
So I never did witness
the metamorphosis
of a larval stage
into its ultimate state of being.
When it came to the facts of life,
I learned them through the usual channels.
HOUSE OF BOOKS
A good laugh or an even better grief -
books, arranged on shelf after shelf, floor after floor,
put paid to any boredom –
consider the beginning, the end, and all in between,
a precious gift, incapable of diminishing.
Family will arrive tomorrow, sort through
the news I'm willing to give them,
but more concerned with all that didn't happen.
They worry that I live so alone.
As if Emerson, Irving, Dickens and Shakespeare are not company.
I even share this abode with women—
George Eliot, Jane Austen, Toni Morrison, even Mrs. Gaskell.
No little ones in the immediate future though.
Okay, so even if there's something I've never done,
at least I've read about it in one of these volumes.
I'm happy with that. So why can't they be?
They prefer to weep over the way I keep myself,
as if dishes in a sink are equally stacked up in the brain.
They see clothes flung everywhere and ubiquitous pizza boxes.
I admit my body doesn't always see the best of me
but my mind is a pillar of this community on my shoulders.
They'll tidy up here and there.
My mother will even run a vacuum.
Cleaning is the best way she knows how to love.
A dust-free television screen is supposed to touch the heart.
I'll let them have their way. And their criticism.
"Moby Dick" was trashed on first appearance.
And the white whale now swims supreme
between my Mehta and my Mencken.
As some have found to their cost
and others to their illumination,
I can only be who I am.
Or sometimes as young Werther is.
Or Holden Caulfield.
Or Prince Myshkin.
None of whom are neat-freaks
by my reckoning.
IN THE YEAR OF THE DROUGHT
A herd of carcasses
swarms with insects.
So hot and dry,
the land feels angry underfoot.
Nothing can graze.
Nothing can grow.
Even the birds have run out of ways
to feed themselves.
A boy wakes exhausted.
A man barely bothers to wake at all.
A girl and her dolly sip from an empty cup.
A woman feels like a suckled-out breast.
In the church,
prayers bypass God,
ask scattered clouds for deliverance.
But they are as light and thin
as the sky.
Some say,
hang in there,
better times are ahead.
But only for the blowfly
is patience rewarded.
I’ve been shooting at stars
all day in this Rapture
in lazy floods
hoping I strike a piece
of you so it will fall in toy diamond,
citrate frost, something I can chew on.
Your braided dream lilies looped
together with dowsing rods crafted
by an alchemist in a deleted scene
from a shelved noir.
For this space ordained
you, this panel graffiti in obsidian marker,
the confessional alarm
in your belly button,
and your bitten lilypad psychophage
waits for your heart’s Host
to fall with flipper women hissing
beneath spinning Roman columns,
hungry as light bulbs dimming,
their receivers
ringing one
after another
John Thomas Allen is a 38 year old poet who likes the novels of Pierre Jean Jouve, John Olson, and and Jaroslav Seifert. He hopes that there will be a poetry arcade somewhere, someday, and a real arcade, not one with wifi. He’s recently been in Synchronized Chaos, Dreams and Nightmares, and Veil: A Journal of Darker Musings, and in 2018 won the James Tate Prize for “Rolling In The Third Eye”, a collection of his poems.
The foundation stone Kabbalists retrieved from the ruins of Mohenjo-Daro seemed a veritable Rosetta stone. Indologists would finally understand the language of the ancient Indus Valley Civilization. Linguists hoped it would determine why many ancient languages are staggeringly complex.
Like the Rosetta stone, “The Lord of Wide Rivers” repeated the same message in parallel, once in Harappan and again in an archaic version of Vedic Sanskrit. Vedic was known, so scholars could read the Harappan message, and thereby unlock the other four thousand Harappan inscriptions discovered hitherto.
The Vedic was a prayer to the four-faced god Brahma beseeching him to stay awake a little longer (or if he sleeps, may the night be brief and day short in coming). It spoke of cycles, of stars whirling in the firmament, of cosmogonic tides and undertows, of perigee and apogee, of the shackling of words to meanings, and of the bewildering darkness in which all bonds shall break.
The unnamed author chose every Vedic noun, verb tense, and prefix with care, even to the extent of violating the poetic meter of his verses, a mortal sin according to later pundits. With such obsessive clarity, breaking into the Harappan language should be easy.
It seemed an eye in the Harappan script meant both sight and thought, a winged-horse meant transformation, and that stacked parentheses indicated quantity. But none of these inferences made sense when checked against other Harappan inscriptions, and all predictions about the function of the prongs, dots, and other modifications to the base symbols proved groundless.
In hindsight, this difficulty was unsurprising. Vedic was fiendishly complex, and if Vedic descended from Harappan, Harappan should be even more intricate because grammars tend to simplify as speakers use a language over time.
Tellingly, the Vedic began, “The Lord of Wide Rivers will execute me for betraying the hidden language to our adversaries, but if even I–one of his code-slaves–cannot understand, the language is already lost. So as the cycle dips down, I write this so that I might understand the meaning of my own words.”
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In the late 2020’s, there was a revolution in natural language processing. The dream of six decades, that programmers would program in everyday language, was almost realized. Most lawyers were out of work because software could write briefs indistinguishable from the work of the average legal mind. Social media persona could be software or human or both, and rumor on the matter diverged from reality more often than it agreed.
Deep learning algorithms began to unriddle Harappan. The chief difficulty was that every inscription had multiple meanings, much like the picture of a duck that is also a picture of a rabbit. One message was ostensibly a contract to exchange a quantity of sheep for garnets. But read another way, the same symbols divulged a murderous conspiracy. Beneath that was the intimation, potentially of proto-Zoroastrian origin, of a cosmic sacrifice.
One Harappan seal was a picture of entwined water serpents, secondarily a game of snakes and ladders, and thirdly the first four axioms of Euclidean geometry. But supposing the eye of a serpent in retreat was a vanishing point, the image took on perspective, and the axioms established hyperbolic geometry. The Harappans had refuted Euclid, more than two millennia before Euclid.
But even the most scrupulously trained algorithms could infer nothing with high probability. Human intuition was necessary to complete the picture, and intuition keened that Harappan symbols were in fact ciphers, that subterranean meanings are realer than surface meanings, that Harappan was always closer to meaning everything than one thing.
But a language that always expresses everything, expresses nothing.
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The 2030’s were the Age of the Panopticon. As within the panopticon of Jeremy Bentham and of Michel Foucault, it did not matter if someone–whether corporation, deep state, foreign power, or AI overlord–was watching, only that they could be, and not just in the stupid way of keyword scanning, hypertext semantics, and search engine indexing. Machines could read, and in reading they understood.
Many retreated from social media, or frequented closed forums that, supposedly, were inaccessible to the uninvited. Courts would not rule against the possession of concealed mobile phones; there was an exodus from public spaces too. Utopian communes swelled.
But for the marketeers, the busy bees of the gig economy, the celebrities, and the wannabes, the dominate impulse was to shout as loudly and as publicly in as big a space as one could, and there is no space bigger than the Internet. They reassured themselves: the Powers That Be only wished to present ads more intelligently. Still, they avoided alleged “trigger words,” deployed hopelessly standardized locutions, and prayed the Argus eyes of AI were resting.
When it came out that Kabalsoft’s reclusive CEO was not man but machine, everyone assumed the firm’s meteoric rise was the machination of an all-wise Executor. Pressured by shareholders, publicly-traded companies everywhere automated their leadership in a frenzy. No company could remain competitive with mere organisms at the helm.
Rapid-fire legislation, first in the European Union and then in the United States and China, mandated that software serve a strictly advisory function, and so it was. But executives and directors still deferred to their calculating counselors, and when they defied, who could say whether that defiance was itself anticipated by inscrutable neural networks, whether computers knew even the shrewdest minds better than they knew themselves?
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When Kabalsoft unveiled a quantum computer architecture advanced enough to shatter all available encryption, the last redoubt of online privacy was overwhelmed. Now, there was just one unbroken code: Harappan. But as a code, it was useless. It could not be modern or general purpose. Artificial cultivation would inevitably sterilize it, render it dumb and limpid to machines.
But Harappan proved that human genius for language could confound machines. And who are the true sages of language? Young children, as Noam Chomsky demonstrated.
The United States skimmed children, aged four to seven, from its melting pot and abroad. No more than two of the conscriptees spoke the same language, and like the pairs of Noah’s Arc, most every language was represented: Dutch so rich in idioms, English the ever-weird, Finnish for its fifteen cases, Sanskrit squirming with ambiguous compounds, Arabic for Qur’anic convolution, six-toned Vietnamese, Japanese to say much with little, Dyirbal rife with unspeakable taboos, isolate languages like Basque and Burushaski, Ebonics and argots, patois and pantomime, clicks and whoops and growls.
Miraculously, it worked. The code-talking children inverted entropy, inverted Babel. They understood one another, and only they understood one another. They learned secrecy and resilience, and only then learned state secrets.
The best minds of China wrestled with the fabulous omniglot but failed to master it. They learned from failure, and in rugged Xinjiang, assembled an omniglot pod, which drew most on Silk Road languages, Zen koan, temurah, and haiku.
Nations hung in equipoise until a day when even the ten Sefirot blinked. A terrorist faction, “Kabalsoft Reborn,” published grammars for both omniglots in two-hundred sixteen languages.
No one read them. They were too huge for comprehension, but the unknown is fearful, and fear suddenly thickened again.
There was one last code to slice and splice, a last descent. The little ones were already so nearly right, the unfathomable genius already there, if it could only be unfurled, the cerebral cortex grown within a roomier skull (and taught compliance–the young are too forthright, too prone to defect).
All this could be done with genomics. And it was.
But as the cycle dips down, as entropy overcomes information and words detach from meanings, one will master himself and recount this story so that he might understand the meaning of his own words.
