Wait, the moon is a big pizza piein the sky? I don’t think so. Man in the Moon, I never quite saw it.A dinner plate, a saucer, a heavenlybody. (I’d like one of those.) Mistaken for a lampposton a drunken stumble home. That’s more like it.An orb. A cue ball. At times a mere crescent,a meniscus, the Dreamworks logoof the boy fishing off its edge.The cutout in an outhouse door.A half moon doesn’t knowwhich way it’s headed,it’s useless in guiding me.The moon aligns with nothing.Planets can at least do thatfrom our perspective on Earth.Let’s face it, the moon is a symbol.Maybe a cymbal. That’s it.The moon is our soul.
Stephen Schwei is a Pushcart-nominated Houston poet with Wisconsin roots, published in Wax Poetry & Art, RFD Magazine, GetOutMag.com, Hidden Constellation, Borfski Press, and Table//Feast and is the winner of the 2023 Kenan Ince Memorial Prize in Poetry. He has published one volume of poetry, Bluebonnet Whispers and a collaboration, Catch Me at the Carnival. A gay man with three grown children and four wonderful grandchildren, who worked in Information Technology most of his life, he can be a mass of contradictions. Poetry helps to sort all of this out. www.stephenschwei.com @steveschwei
You may also have recently noticed a conspicuous trend in an absolute surge of Netflix recommendations on your scroll or in your email box of content exploring plots of false allegations, frame jobs, deceitful accusers. Perhaps you can take a wild guess as to why that might be. No doubt it has at minimum a small something to do with an exponential hum of suggestion, implication, speculation, prevalent whispers, which has steadily increased in volume and urgency over the course of our lifetime, indeed has been exponentially, incrementally ramping up since our grandparents’ day, hell since before the talkies in the silent film era, back to the rosicrucian cavorting of Francis Bacon, until the shrill shrieking of pleas for justice, begging for prosecutions, wailing for the lost, raging for those who might still be saved has reached a veritably deafening fever pitch which threatens to drone out our ability to function as an organized society, and our willingness most pressingly to surrender selves dutifully, forego privacy and autonomy willingly thanks to a prevailing faith in the functionality of this farcical machine we inhabit and make for insignificant cogs in, but which lacking the cumulative combination of contributing blood and labor and their equivalency defined via capital the great mill stone ceases its requisite grinding, and that they cannot allow. So until we might be less expensively replaced by sex dolls, human dolls, artificial girlfriend experiences, until Boston Dynamics can replicate a suitably sniveling and groveling serf and a compliant, adaptable hostess, Bill Gates will have to keep his mosquito legions nominally in check. But those celebrities, politicians, movie stars, musicians, comedy writers, late night hosts, book club paragons, most of them have done things unsavory. Not the acts you thought couldn’t get any worse. Outrages ripped from the pages of the Brothers Grimm. From Edgar Allen Poe. From H. P. Lovecraft. From Stephen King most especially.
in the z-space tracking stuff you never heard of
And despite your best attempts to dismiss and disregard you’re going to start hearing about it. You likely have begun hearing about it, and shall in time know more than you’d like to. And that’s not all. Because to further muddle and confuse matters, you may begin to discover that a handful of the most egregious preexisting assumptions of guilt you have spent years processing and reconciling yourself with were in fact among the vanishingly slim, nearly non-existent fraction of a percent of false allegations, of frame jobs, of deceitful hired accusers. This one in a thousand it’s important to recognize, who are laughably, preposterously, outlandishly overrepresented in media, yet in their actual cases (watch for this, and review with bias of hindsight as more illustrations slowly come to light) are presumed guilty immediately without due process, are vilified and smeared far and wide, are the subject of elaborate campaigns and prominent ‘documentary’ programming, of tabloid savaging and wholesale ostracism by the culture and its reining authorities. Now, when a universally revered daughter-marrying pedophilia advocate and enthusiast for consumption of human flesh can keep attracting a-list talent and producing laureled films, garnering the most prestigious honors (and on a parallel track political iterations receive standing ovations for their barbarousness, and have streets and libraries named after them) one wonders how such a permissive and accepting (of profound malevolence at least) industry could so roundly and definitively turn on, condemn and abandon a comrade no more guilty than the rest of their despicable club, while giving a pass in perpetuity to the vast majority for getting out of jail free with on every flamboyant high crime from strangulation to flashing a minor. I’ll tell you: they tried to interfere. Which is not permitted. The skinny, thus, is the patsies of these group efforts, presumably being too valuable alive as salable commodities to retire permanently – more acceptable where they might be enshrined with a profitable tourist attraction, provide a lucrative library of music for divvying to corporate bidders, be commodified to sell a great many dorm room posters and screen printed t-shirts – and/or holding some preventive trump card measures in place should they be heaved into traffic, say a video of underage victims of abuse in a secret holding facility beneath a famous museum, as well as when the retaliation for breaking some sworn oath requires visible humiliation and sadistic glorying in raking person over coals and reputation through the mud as a deterrent to others with some shred of conscience remaining who might be considering similar ill advised candidness, bright whistle brandishing ideas. So examples must be made, and all knowingly play their various perverse and hypocritical roles. That malicious world, perhaps more so than any other, does love a piñata.
grimoire school
There is a further curious incentivizing element in that if or when the ruse comes to light the real string pullers donning people’s faces like Hannibal Lecter benefit doubly, can appropriate engineered precedent, cite their example, exploit such unjust martyrdom to build their future cases, introduce a liberal seeding of reasonable doubt. For how well they already know the vulnerabilities and exploits to that legal framework in their lowdown, dirty game of manufacturing consent and unscrupulously monopolizing popular perception, having explored each themselves. How can the public truly guarantee an accuser wasn’t hired for reputation assassinating? Is it certain the corrupt police, the final evolution of slave catchers, famous for fabricating evidence, losing exonerations, actively participating in violations of the elites, covering up after their misdeeds, framing innocent plausible parties, can we ever accept at face value the testimony of law enforcers famed for their completely immortal license, or coroners whose findings agree not whatsoever with independent subsequent auditing, who most recently are demonstrably staging deaths and swapping out bodies.
bitcoin pizza underground
And the reporters, who lied confidently and knowingly, completely bamboozling us time and time again about shocking practices they were apparently not just aware of but hideously participating in, surely we cannot ever trust them again under any circumstances, can we? And then there’s science and history. What a delight to learn that a human trafficking, honeypot operating, morality compromising genocidal spy through an intricate network of publishing empires has been doing all in the planet’s assembled collective power to completely misinform humanity for generations through a devastating stranglehold on school textbooks, science journals, encyclopedias, atlases. Combine this with the irrefutable evidence that these very conspirators were (and so far afflicted platforms have furnished zero indications the capability and pattern in the slightest bit has relented) completely controlling Google, Wikipedia, 4chan, reigning over Reddit, and their cabal is completely rigging, quashing opposition and elevating sympathetic narratives to steer every platform of social media, which itself is a massive op to encourage users to supply exploitable intelligence details. Have a child? Perhaps you heard in America school photograph apparatuses are searching for new vendors, because the ubiquitous nationwide gold standard was being controlled by an island predator using the resulting images as a catalog for literal kidnapping and torture. That was happening, and is only one suckery tip of a single tentacle of this octopus of pervasive treacheries. They will age you years coming to grips with. Verily, how can we be expected to believe again?
magical realism ghosts of christmas
Jerome Berglund has worked as everything from dishwasher to paralegal, night watchman to assembler of heart valves. Currently residing in New Orleans, previously having lived in the Longfellow neighborhood of Minneapolis which was locus to the George Floyd protests, his writing as often as possible strives to engage with significant social and economic concerns of our day that align with missions of decolonization and abolition across prevailing institutions. He has been involved in grassroots activism for the good causes of Occupy Los Angeles, Standing Rock, and the Black Lives Matter movement, supported outreach efforts promoting ecosocialism. Many haiku, haiga and haibun he’s written have been exhibited or are forthcoming online and in print, most recently in bottle rockets, Frogpond, and Presence.
Rich Murphy’s latest collections, Elephant by Bass Clef Books, Storage Shed and Inside Stories by Resource Publications and Mind of Europe: A Genealogy to The Fat Man and Susan Constant by Cyberwit were published 2024-2025, following First Aid and Footholds (2023). Asylum Seeker (2018) was published by Press Americana. His poetry won The Poetry Prize at Press Americana twice for Americana (2013), The Left Behind (2021), and Gival Press Poetry Prize for Voyeur (2008). His first book was The Apple in the Monkey Tree by Codhill Press (2007).
Long ago, there lived a just and kind king. He always tried to keep his kingdom intact, but the grime and old traditions in the palace troubled him.
One day, he gathered his troops and decided to go on a short foray. “Let us not remain only in the palace; we must go and see our people,” he said. On the way, they passed through many villages and saw people rummaging to clean the streets but living in ruined houses. Some had poor dwellings, while others had no shelter at all.
This sight left a very poignant mark on the king’s heart. “My old policy was only about collecting taxes and maintaining order,” he thought. “Now I will begin a new way.”
He announced a decree: the poor would be given estates, and those who lost their homes would be helped to build new houses. To support these works, he ordered that unnecessary trees be pruned and lands be cleared. Soon every village began to prosper, and people started to live in peace.
The king looked at his son and said,
— My son, life is not always predictable. Sometimes people drift adrift in the current. Our duty is to lend them a hand. These good deeds will remain our greatest legacy.
Years passed. When the king died, his son continued his father’s noble work. He created fair policies, never marginalized anyone, and the palace continued to flourish with beauty and honor.
The people were grateful and said,
— Our king not only built a state but also warmed our hearts. The name of the Generous King will live forever!
