derailed

she was at a train station
with no direction in mind.
the world spun on
behind her,
people talking on business calls,
yelling at kids to “keep up!”

it was his fault she was here,
adrift in a world
where being tethered
to inanimate objects
was key.

she wondered how hard it would be
to dash across the train tracks
and avoid being caught.
it was the type of thought
he would have.

he had been damaged
for a long time.

his childish snowflake edges
now sharpened into knives,
unwittingly ready to cut
anyone who came near.
his flowered heart
once blooming and joyful,
now a ninja star,
incapable of being cradled
by smooth hands.

he had spent many hours
looking at the moon.
or glaring at it.
she didn’t know.

but his silhouette
hunched on the deck
and bathed in white light
was a secret
for only her.

his fingers were always calloused now,
ridges from guitar strings
pressed into them.
permanently.

she secretly hoped
she could hear him in the night.
sorrowful tunes
made by someone who knew
what he was doing
even if he never showed it.

the wrinkles behind his eyes
faded long before she realized
he never smiled anymore.

they were on separate trains
heading in opposite directions
and the most she could do
was press up against the window
and love him
while it lasted.

Nashville Shakespeare

From his tongue he spoke like Waylon
The bard of the Cumberland River
His journey from Macbeth to the Grand Ole Opry
In the Ryman he battered us with sonnets. A long dream.

In the dead of night 
He wore the cloak of tragedy
While the Honky Tonk boys erupted in laughter
As he tripped over the cowboy boots scooting on the dancefloor.

Then all the romances in the world,
Within every glittering star in the sky
Violated the Romeo and Juliet pact.
And watched him cough through his fumes of sighs.

All the women he used to fancy
Are chasing the broncos at the rodeo.
Everyone is drunk on whiskey and moonshine
Less on wine and Absinthe with wormwood.

In the mirrors he believed to see the future.
With a skull in his hand feeling axiomatic
An original intellectual filled up with the Viper’s spit.
Surrounded by tornados and outlaws in a sun wrought sky.

There is a banging, clash against the church glass windows
The art painted by the halos of exotic angels
The cholera will hit the streets and the cowardly all say goodnight.
In the buzzing city, the homeless and the golden dances become one.

The light returns in a gleam as the alert hits Broadway
The pounding of hail and glass molding hits like hammers
Playwrights always preferred a bubonic ending.
The Kings were noble and didn’t know the calls to country animals.

Bio: David L O’Nan (he/him) is the founder of Fevers of the Mind Poetry & Art, A writer, editor for nearly 20 years.  He has pieces found in Icefloe Press, Anti-Heroin Chic, Ghost City Review, Royal Rose Magazine, Rhythm & Bones Press Lit, Cajun Mutt Press, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Nymphs Publishing, Spillwords among others.  His website for publishing older work & others work is found at www.feversofthemind.com   He is from the Midwest . Kentucky/Indiana area.

This month’s contributors beckon us within, to the inner landscape of our memories, thoughts, and emotions. Each of us contains a whole world, which is worth developing and exploring.

FYI Dennis Mann, a national of Ghana, is the head of a nonprofit donating children’s books to low-income children in the country. This group is known as Wide Reading Among Kids and readers may find more information on the organization and how to support it here.

Hongri Yuan’s glimpses of transcendence, translated by Manu Mangattu, connect ordinary people to the vastness of the universe. Abigail George turns to poetry to express longing for a cause and a connection that is both practical and inspiring. John Thomas Allen captivates with a lush rendering of the Tarot, an ancient spiritual way of understanding life and human nature, set in a circus setting.

Deborah Kerner’s work links herself with a modern-day hitchhiker/bag lady through the sisterhood of history and nature. Kerner’s other pieces describe life seen through a veil of interiority: from a train window or during insomnia. Sanjeev Sethi’s poetry collections Bleb and Hesitancies, here reviewed by Cristina Deptula, also highlight the intricacy of our innermost thoughts, fostering reflection and respect for all people.

Mahbub looks to birds and other creatures in nature for life lessons, building on his inner understanding through contemplation. Nature, nighttime and storms become metaphors for both the passionate beauty and the hidden dangers of romantic love.

Doug Hawley writes of romance as well, in an elegant piece on the twilight years of a long marriage. Dennis Mann spins the tale of another wedded couple together until death does them part, although more tragically.

Robert Thomas reflects on what life might be like after his wife’s passing, a pre-emptive elegy of love and grief. J.J. Campbell mourns relationships and other human connections that almost happened, or never happened. Chris Butler poignantly comments on not being able to go home again, not being able to recreate one’s lost childhood, in a collection that includes an elegy to a stranded and dying rabbit along with descriptive, near-musical odes to bees.

Charlie Robert mourns the Berlin Zoo’s animals lost during WWII bombings along with the Jews and other minorities who died in the Holocaust. Ahmad Al-Khatat’s piece presents marginalized people who call forth their own dignity, determined to leave a record of their presence. Gaurav Ojha calls out corruption and lack of concern for important matters within his native Kathmandu.

Chimezie Ihekuna’s screenplay collection featured this month looks within individual, ordinary lives and relationships for deeper truths about compassion and understanding.

Mark Blickley created his performance art piece, shown here through video, with the intention of bringing us back to simpler times at a slower and less distracting pace. Alan Britt writes of nostalgia as well, remembering the youthful beauty of double dates with a friend. Britt also semi-playfully reflects on our connections with other species as well as with God, whether we explicitly believe or not. Marjorie Thelen offers up a narrative from someone who’s become a relic in a post-human, post-philosophical era.

Richard Chetwynd integrates words and letters into visual art that alludes to concepts of faith, mental health and spiritual connection. Mark Young’s technical wordplay is thoughtful and poignant, with a piece on soul-building and visual imagery that evokes thoughts of loss.

Raquel Silberman describes the psychological rebuilding and ‘cleanup’ after a disaster in a poem that makes some traumas seem messy, but survivable.

Z.I. Mahmud looks into the rich panoply of characters in Dickens’ works to find allegories that promote compassion and respect for all people. Christopher Bernard also draws upon the language and narrative techniques of fables and children’s literature in his monthly installment of The Ghost Trolley, which comments on power, justice, equity, and grace.

Elizabeth Hughes reviews Mike Honeycutt’s hunting and travel memoir Into the Wild.

We invite you into the world of this magazine and also more deeply into your own world as you read this month’s issue.

KATHMANDU

Gaurav Ojha (Kathmandu, Nepal) 

Kathmandu, your moral saint has learned the art of starving 

He takes on impulses of greed with hunger 

However, merchants of medicines are selling

Sickness into health 

Kathmandu, socialism is your delusion, self-interest is reality

Still, a house within your circumference signifies we have made it

Kathmandu, you have no mystics 

Too literal, nothing left of magical or mythical

Your history has crumbled with quakes

Kathmandu, where is your destiny?

New York, Beijing, New Delhi or Sydney

Kathmandu, you resemble your roads

Potholes, cracks and patched-up works

Just as street children smell weird stuff from the plastic bags

For all the puffing that goes

Living in Kathmandu is like dust in and smoke out 

Kathmandu, city of contrarians

Communists are the best practitioners of crony capitalism

Your thinkers think with what has already been thought out

Kathmandu, knows how to get fooled by clowns 

Discussions never end here

No actions, only possibilities, idealisms and imaginations

In Kathmandu, all of us have same old stories  

We have all been deceived  

Kathmandu, knows how to tame the tiger

Turn revolutionaries into rascals

You can shift destiny of tattered slippers into golden shoes 

 But you have trampled many dreams

 Your shadows are taller than your street light

Kathmandu, why does this generation want to leave you?  

You have been compared with all other cities 

Your clock is out of joint

And, the pendulum swings in extremes

Still dragged in the battle of history

You have remained as old liquor in new bottle

Kathmandu, waiting for something new

To copy, duplicate, remix and echo

Kathmandu, you are too fast to embrace fads and fantasies

Too slow to let go of what used to be

Kathmandu your face is restless and confused

In-between everything else, identity crisis

Without living philosophy of its own

The elevated language in Sanjeev Sethi’s poetry collections Bleb and Hesitancies draws readers in, encouraging multiple readings of each short piece. Although the collections consist of small vignettes without a true narrative thread, some characters take shape: the speaker’s tiny grandchildren and aging parents.

Many pieces explore memory and internal thought processes: In “Palmer,” the speaker reflects on solitude: “The aftermath/is soaked in sapience./ Richness of receptacle/
endows the individuation/of insights.”

Others comment on the writing process and on words and imagination. In “Cry for Clemency” Sethi compares writing to raising children. “Poems are like progeny, after parturition they are nursed and nurtured until they fasten their futurity.”

While some would consider this metaphor unusual for a male writer, Sethi’s sensibility is delicate, full of grace for the human condition. He shows this sensitivity by including people of all ages and genders, including the elderly, as poetic subjects and describing them with dignity.

The slow pace of both collections encourages us to ‘hesitate,’ to step back and think, to develop and honor our interior lives. Sethi uses the word ‘hesitancies’ directly in a few pieces, many of which concern physical and emotional intimacy that deepens as people take the time to let relationships unfold.

Bleb and Hesitancies call to readers with a quiet insistence, pulling us in to matters of the heart and mind with the voice of a wise friend.

Sanjeev Sethi’s collections can be ordered here and here.

Discussion of the success behind the authenticity of the novel

“Perseverance for knowledge and passion for dreams” engender the issues explored in David Copperfield to be interweaved in Great Expectations. Fact and fancy, reality and imagination or private and public encapsulating life sketches of memoirs: memorial, monument or testimony chronicles a spiritual autobiography. The world of the biographer’s existence has been socially, morally and imaginatively much more complex, compromising and more essentially ambiguous than one David inhabits as interpreted in the parenthetical thesis of Anna Foley foreshadowed within bibliography.        

 Enslavement by a heartless society, destructions of war, mass genocide and totalitarianism engrosses modern critics such as Chesterton’s shrewd criticism apprising and appreciating Dickensian character Tobb as the vitality of real humanity or humility, those who have nothing but life. Furthermore, George Orwell, the satirist of political and moral allegorical fable quintessentially denotes in his essay on Dickens always, “respond emotionally to the idea of human brotherhood.” 

Differentiating Advantages and Disadvantages of Reading The Autobiographical Narrative Fiction Great Expectations

Psychoanalysis Freudian theories and gender studies by modern critics today, question the integrity of memorable characters, boisterous humours, intrigued plot twists, precipitous cliffhangers or suspenseful ending and universal themes. Bread and butter (graveyard scene) were connoting alleged erection employed by Pip to hide and cover adolescence. Victorian ideals abhorred and despised the tendency of incestuous relationships, masturbation, lascivious or carnal desires, adultery and so on. Magwitch and Herbert’s guidance or guardianship excessive handling of Pip is a striking matter of moral degradation in modern criticism by shrewdest psychoanalysts or gender studies theorists.      

 Mr. Pumblechook appearance of that of a Sheriff and the reticent patronage of Compeyson disdains readers or critics detesting demonic characteristics in Mr. Pumblechook’s personae. Another striking fact in debate is the emotional setting of prison infirmary. Incidentally, Pip reconciles in salvaged spirit to acquire redemption for the penitent sins encountered after demonizing feelings about Magwitch. Withdrawal of snobbery from the redemptive minds of Estella and Pip ending doesn’t disseminate justification in absurd ending despite smugness shattered by the discovery of great expectations. 

Further drawbacks of the novel discusses the issues of being the idealized gentleman in the ironical witty commentaries of Dickens to satirize being gentleman to table manners, style of dressing, body language, speech, wealthy fortunes and so forth. Interestingly, the irony here talks of Victorian tradition of mass graveyard shameful, embarrassing, defame or guilty conscience because bereavement of working class or middle class bourgeois should be preserved in sepulchers and epitaphic tombstones inscripted. Farm labourers, coal miners or domestic servants weren’t exempted from the case study. Socio economically youngsters were passionate about being marines or veterans and clergymen whilst the legacy was endowed to the elders. Daughters inherit dowries or petty estate unless the male relations remain obscure. Dickens employed the character of Drummle from Somerset as neither aristocrat nor Shropshire gentry which provokes the issue of class distinction and classification of a gentleman. Romantic delusions implored Pip to board the accommodation Boars Hotel with the illusion that Miss Havisham [fairy godmother]’s Estella, the ward would be his fiancée.              

 “Poisonous” and “pernicious”, “infamous” and “shameful” the novelist epitaphic phrases paraphrase poor living conditions in prison. “From head to foot there was convict in the very grain of the man” demarcate English, French or Convicts curtailed from European civilization  “a savage air that no dress could tame.”  In reality Dickens shrewd criticism allegorizes the Victorian prison reformation. Gospel of improvement or progress brightening or heightening metropolis with passing of traits in the transformed sub urban hypnotizes colonial enterprise. Dickens forgets to narrate the vanishing or exclusion of Abel Magwitch symbolizing injustice. These extremism of characters resonate unrealism oscillating in the novel. In the novel, Estella, the heroine marries the doctor from Shropshire after Drummle’s death. Pip understands that she has developed maturity through suffering –irony of resolutions. Superficiality of the gentleman sways away as soon as the hero, Pip’s inferences and conscience awaken. What really matters in life is being honest, true, loyal and kind. Great Expectations is nothing but a work of genius by modern critics. It is also very widely read by ordinary people except those who dislike fiction. Dickensian vocabulary, complex and lengthy sentences and verbal irony are obstacles in interpreting modern Dickens.       

When snarling, Orlick, the tangible flesh and blood presence denounces Pip as “young wolf” and remonstrates Mrs. Joes, “You’re a foul shrew, Mother Gargery”. Dickens contrasted this to the boarding school educated counterfeit money con artist bcause he could copy handwritings that appeared behind the scenes- elusive and shadowy. Compeyson blights the lives of Miss Havisham, her ambiguous half weak brother and of Magwitch on the one hand. And on the other, the deal of treachery trial’s betrayal stimulated white terror vengeance of the open book of crime and punishment-the symbolic of ripest exploitation. Magwitch “marries” Molly “over the broomstick” unlike his counterparts Orlick and Compeyson [Compeyson breaks Miss Havisham’s heart]. Why brevity and humour? The barbarity of the justice system sentences mass and Dickens mocks the judge’s verdict in ordering a special censure for Magwitch. [“My Lord I have received my sentence of death from the Almighty, but I bow to yours”]

Orlick’s indulgence of vengeance after being dismissed from the forge and Miss Havisham’s caretaking, tempted him as Compeyson’s dupe luring Pip into lime-kiln [*lime kiln- kiln or furnace of reducing limestone shells to lime through burning or incineration]. Orlick was sentenced to imprisonment in the final part of the novel through a commit of blundered heist: the robbery of Mr. Pumblechook-the ostentatious caricature. Dickens’ laughter and humour reflection in Pip’s  appraisal that the villainy of Orlick showed atonement is subtly the question of moral integrity. [Pip acknowledged Orlicks’ temperate behavior of stuffing the nose of Mr. Pumblechook with flower annals]. However, critics like Andrew Moore, disparaged shrewd glimpses of analogous to a loose ending of the plot.