Sui generis

one day i wanted to be top on the news
while watching superstars on boob tube
i dreamt of it as a whim for no bona fide proof
howbeit, my dream came into reality
like a raw fruit, a tenderfoot
i was high in a jubilant mood
heading for Hollywood
donning a la mode tuxedo
while I was afoot to give my first stage debut
that was like a rendezvous
potpourri of confetti firing into air all aglow
over Miss Celebrity, the bride, and Daffodil, my nom de plume, the groom
i was like a seed abloom
going to Tinseltown
i made my best clean sweep
riding on the moon, touching sky on its roof
i fell between two stools
when i was making good
turning myself into a tycoon
i was stuck in a groove
waving at throng from my limo’s sunroof
to leave it for no good
paparazzi had poke all around in pursuit
high and low, they snooped
this story can be true
but keep it entre nous
everyone can be Santa Claus in the Yule
take it as a dandy boon
after all these years i’ve been through
let me tell you the truth
i’ve become for this too old
growing long in the tooth
you live in a cutthroat vale
maybe you’ve heard of this de trop
easy come easy go
life is full of turpitudes
be careful not to lean on a slipper dude
you also find this abstruse
but get off on the right foot
i had repeatedly fallen into lock horns
you won’t find a rose with no thorn
no one can keep a good man down
even by running him out of town
we may grow up living in forest of fient
big waves whip barques by cat-o’-nine-tails
but they never ever lose
enlace tight your own combat boot
even when someone gets on your nose
mens sana in corpora sano
you might find a foe who would inspire you
whilst a cunning cully meaning to deracinate you
no one will be a dead ringer for you if you believe
take the life on life’s term as tickety-boo

Bio: Husain Abdulhay has poems published in Alban Lake Publishing,
Avocet, Cacti Fur, Eskimo Pie, Fib Review, Foliate Oak, Jellyfish
Whispers, Madness Muse Press, Quail Bell Magazine, Scarlet Leaf
Review, Soul-Lit, and Ygdrasil.

Kafka had a tyrant for a father

By Abigail George

“Sex on the lips. Give mummy more sex on the lips.” Said my beautiful mother, while watching her favourite soap opera, drinking a homemade martini after the vodka was finished. She was reclining on the sofa, with a lit cigarette in her mouth. She popped a mint in her mouth afterwards. I was two and a half years old. Hair tousled. Skinned knees from falling outside when I fell of my tricycle. I had bruises on my arms. That’s how I broke the fall. I was brave even then. Didn’t cry. You think that it is just a phase. Talent, doing well academically, passing exam after exam, being creative, the writing. I was four and a half when I read my first poem. Eight when I wrote my first poem. At twelve, or perhaps even younger than that I was published in the local newspaper. I contributed letters to the editor, opinion, short stories all through my teenage years to the same newspaper. Poets write about monsters. Monsters in the abyss, in their dreams. In their devil-may-care suffering. In their blissful ignorance. The monsters in the closet, under the bed. The monsters who touched them (like I was touched for years, molested by my own mother). There are millions of us out there. Dealing with incident, or, incidents from childhood. Dealing with the currency of sexual ambiguity in our relationships. Not having romantic affairs, not caring about matters of the heart, only a beer buzz in the morning. Starting early, roundabout nine or ten o’ clock in the morning. I don’t blame God. I’m not on some spiritual quest. On a pilgrimage to find myself. I write about the sex, about the abuse, but I see it as if it happened to a stranger, not to me. As if it happened to my doppelganger. Yes, I was the outsider all my life. But when I write I tell the truth. Honesty is dazzling for me. I don’t want to win hearts. I just want to impact one life. I read James Baldwin. Martin Amis. Then his father. Hemingway. Oscar Wilde. I fell in love with Dorian. With Van Gogh. I had a crush on his art dealer brother too. I fell in love with every single one of the young English lords of the flies. Piggy. That was me. Young. I read everything too young. There was, for me, still is, a kind of seduction when it comes to A Streetcar named Desire. Marlon Brando’s rippling muscles. I’ve been rejected. I’ve had love affairs, both intensely emotional, and sexual. Touch has always been physical for me. My mother was mentally ill. Abused most certainly herself. She buried a sister, a brother when she was just a teenager. We are defined by our demons. It will also teach you how to love. Letting go. There was no tension between me and my father. We had an understanding. We did not talk. He never spoke to me. Never came to a teacher-parent conference. For most of my life the devil came my way. The devil came for me. Now, surrendering the weight of pain is the name of the game. Pain slanting, leaning into my childhood psyche. Abuse kind of seals your fate. It goes the distance with you. You never forget. It will oppress you, sabotage you, transform you for the rest of your life. I see everything in a metaphysical light now. My mother’s spiritual wounding is my own spiritual wounding. I remember their bedroom. I remember the sound of the rain on the roof. Her mouth. I remember how she smelled like the sun. Her bed hair. Her older brother was pharaoh. She looked on death early on in life. Her father was an alcoholic. He worked in a canning factory. The drudgery of life and work getting to him, he took to frequenting taverns, bisexual affairs unbeknownst of course to my religious mother. Every Sunday she would dress, doll herself up. A flash of décolletage. Crimson lips. Peacock blue eyeshadow. Showing off her good legs. She had played tennis at provincial level. Received her colours. Even made it into the newspapers. She confessed once to me, afterwards in the bedroom, before my father would come home, that she only started smoking because of the stress. Your father, she said, brushing the tangles out of her hair at the dressing table, is stressing me out. He can’t decide whether he likes girls, or young men. He sleeps with both. How does that make you feel, Jerome? I said nothing. I just wanted to leave the room. Not smell her perfume. Her perfume even now is still in my head. Every flashback. Early on I read D.H. Lawrence before I had any knowledge about sex, about what sexual assault was all about. Predator, pervert, paedophile. These are all words I knew before I was ten. I also knew there were older men who would pay for sex with boys. It was the physical abuse that started it all. Drinking was in my genes. I think back to my very first downward spiral into the world of narcotics, of anti-depressants and sleeping tablets. Of how my mother hovered in the background of my every academic achievement. Every award at prizegiving. She took all the praise. As if she was the one who deserved it. I see me, the victim gate-crashing into the underworld’s belly of addiction. My dealer on the line. I used everything. I started young. There was also a side-addiction to pornographic material, books and films and gay magazines that they put behind the counter. The manager of the store would be ever so discreet about it. You had to summon up the nerve to ask for them. The owner looking you over. Knowing what you were, before you even knew yourself. I never called myself homosexual. But I guess maybe it’s the mouth, the way I dress, the manner in which I talk, the way I walk. But I’m still insecure. My inner child is still two and a half. I can talk about it. But I don’t want to. It hurts too much. My spirit captive forever in my mother’s arms. In the end, she was an inconvenience and curse in my life, but then I had this gift. I became a poet. I had lovers. Most of them emotional attachments. Then there was the first love of my life, Giovanni. He was a physicist. A brilliant, brilliant man. The first intellectual I ever met. We don’t talk anymore. He doesn’t write to me anymore. He’s moved on. I’m still here like driftwood. My son escapes into television series as well. I married. Everybody deserves happiness. I married Sujata. A journalist. She is just as intense as I am. She is proud of the poems. Nobody could be prouder. Nobody could love me more. She’s not a substitute for Giovanni. She is the second love of my life. The hills are blue. The animals, the dogs, happy. They have had nothing that hurt them in their lives. You slowly become the happiness of the people you surround yourself with. Sujata is my muse. My soul’s sweetheart. She is also a talented amateur photographer. Many hurt. Millions. I write for them. The writing was always on the wall for me. Awkward in the beginning stages. The content filled with disorder. Young, my mind was ambivalent, like my sexuality. My life, there are times a terrible sadness comes over me. But I think of my loves, my muses. The progress I am making. So adequate. I’m so distant now from my parents. All they are to me now are dead. Very much alive in a nursing home. But to all intents and purposes they are not a part of Sujata and my son’s life. Never will be. I’ve made them immortal. They’ve made me neurotic. It is as poet that I exist. Sujata, she is laughing at something that I’ve said. Tucks a stray hair behind her ear. She is a beautiful and caring woman. She is kind to me. There’s remorse about the past. Also regret. But that’s sporadic. There is kinship in the writing life. It adopted me. In return I worship its every climate selflessly. But is this a poem. But is this a prose poem. If it is, then I am detached from it. Detached, separated from the woman with no impulse control. I am voice and space. There is a split right down the middle of my brain. On the one side there lies the external. The cute mood in television-mode startling the psychological with its scarcity. Whenever I write I also investigate. Mostly the improbable. The spark is the poetic game. See ‘homosexual context’. It nurtures and feeds off its own vanity exclusively. I write the silence. Give it voice, platform, exposure to controversy, censorship, opportunity most of all. The silence opens territories. I am the shaking woman’s son. The lithium has taken its toll on her. Life was, is, always will be hell on earth. Everything that never happened between us is my fault. The idea of you as master. Well, I search for the idea of you in the faces of younger men. Men much younger than me. I want to share everything of myself with them. I want them to come to know me. Which is perplexing, right? I want to sleep with them body and soul. You’re perfect. You always were, Giovanni. Oh, I know how imperfect men are. Especially when it comes to the fairer sex. An older man desires. A younger man envisions. I will write to you my entire life about the wholesomeness of my life now. I’m spiritual, enlightened. I meditate. I pray. Giovanni, I’ll pretend to video call you. I’ll pretend to give you the time of your life. I will predict the exact moment you fall out of love with me. The religious aspects of it. Some days I yearn for it. Yield to prayer like a servant. Trying to reach you (because you are prophet, scribe and here I think of the Dead Sea Scrolls). I try my utmost to seduce the boy, but I’m old now, take sleeping pills at night to sleep, sometimes tranquilisers. I can never again (although I want to very badly) make you mine, but you are not mine. Giovanni, you belong to another. My trauma does not belong to another. It belongs solely with me. The impulse is psychotic. The stimulus is chemical. The imbalance, the medical fraternity tells me, an imbalance in the brain. You are genius too, Giovanni. It matters that you are. It doesn’t matter so much to me anymore whether you are a man of genius, celebrated for your innovation in research. That was never the key issue of faith for me. You are loved. That is the most important thing. I have the survival instinct. You on the other hand are that most rare thing. You are loved. You were never abandoned as a child, or neglected by your elegant mother, or beaten in the dark with a belt. That one time it was my father’s belt. There was a swarm inside my head that night. In every brain cell there’s a fortress inside the adult that I now have strangely become. I wept the terrifying physical pain away, but the emotional trauma has a vein. This trauma travels with me wherever I go. They come and go as they please. My physical body took the beating like a man, not a very young child. My mother screaming at me. While I was screaming too. All I wanted to say Giovanni was that I love you too. I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t want to talk about my mother, or rather the lack of her. If somebody had just loved me, believed in me as a child, not thought of me as plaything, and object perhaps I would be different, feel different, not objectified. I’m subjected now to the indifferent world of men. Can never catch up to you. For I was never educated. Everything came to me through luck and determination and hard work. This case study was largely elf-taught. You’re a man of the world, a sign of the times channelling visions and signs and symbolism that is original only to you. You see what I cannot see. You hear what I cannot. The unseen is seen by me. Only me. And the state of mind I’m in now is one of elation, an uprising movement of euphoria within me. The mania, the obsession I have with you. With the man, with the males who are old enough to be my father. But let me speak about the mania first. Can’t come down yet from that high. I elevate Salinger and Updike. Can talk for hours on Holden Caulfield, his brother the screenwriter in Hollywood for a time. These days I am lonely. Despair eats away into the core of my soul. That vortex filled with chapters of indecision and conflicting choices. I tell myself that even my mistakes matter. Even the past men in my life still matter. It has been years and years. You must be an amazing lover. Robust. Vigorous. Energetic. But I am ashamed for thinking of you in this way. You don’t think of me in that way. All you see is the boy. The boy in his twenties who is disconcerting and intense. Every glance from you simply annihilates him. In his world he is no beauty. Only younger master in distress that must be saved. Nobody comes to his rescue. You were there once. Opportunity passed me by. Now there will never be another chance. Only the fear matters to me. Keeps me inside the house. For the time being let me be frank and disarming, vulnerable, sharp, innocent.  I don’t eat. I don’t sleep. Nothing is nourishing to me. I hurt my mother on a daily basis. Well, I write to her in everything. I still judge her. I mistrust her. This shadow-figure. In my life she is a judgemental figure. A woman of great physical beauty. And when I get that feeling, I can no longer hide anything about my childhood, the man with the child in his eyes. What confessional missive is this? You say I am too intense. My gestures wild. I try and dazzle you, but you can’t, or won’t, or don’t engage with me, don’t interact, don’t involve yourself too deeply in my world. I’m troubled, and jaded by this ancient world, the cracks are beginning to show. Love does not find adoration. Does not find that warm afterglow. Does not find reward. You are you. You remain you. British. British accent. And I find everything about you devastating. You destroy me. The insecurity, the search for identity in helplessness, and the recurring hope found in passion and reconciliation. Grant me a grand permission. Let me talk. Let me talk of the more classical elements of creativity and suffering, ignorance and the triumph of the hope that you, I, will live to see another day. In separate cities. Our separate worlds. Yours research. Hers journalism. Giovanni. Sujata.

I am who I am because I had a tyrant for a mother. She taught me nothing about love, but everything about being a dramatic player, a spoilt artist, rubbed my nose in the intelligentsia of the day, so I could smell like them. Like a rose garden. Chlorine in a swimming pool. I have your number. You have mine.  I have your email address. You have mine. But you don’t write to me anymore. This makes me sad. You don’t worry for me. I am not in your care. I am neither wife, nor husband, nor Giovanni’s lover. Nor the stepfather to your adult children. I achieved what to me was the impossible. There’s this dazzling fear and anxieties inside of me like a fire breathing volcano. I use that word often in my correspondence. Volcano. There are days when I am that volcano. There are days when my mood is like a river. You understand me. Sorry, understood me like no one else. And then you took your love away. Just like that. Knot in my throat. Ache where my heart should be. Nothing but heartbreak. Heartbreak can be seductive when repeated. When it is the dominant feature in all of your adult relationships. Call me toy radical. Call me, invent me, turn me into a toy exile. Everything I am capable of doing I turn into something called art, or vision. The sky is waiting for the heavens to open up. Rainclouds gather. You are me. You are not me. I am you. I am not you. I would love to be where you are, but cannot reach those breath-taking hearts. I asked you take me far away from this childhood home. Once you could have done that effortlessly. Rid me of mental and emotional pain. Rid me of the burdens in my life. To play caregiver, cleaner, slave in my childhood home. This is my soul. Speak to my soul. It is the only language that I can understand. Otherwise we are lost to each other again, as we have been over the years. There will always be circumspection. You are a compelling figure. Attractive to other men. All men are arrows to my heart. You are more handsome now than you ever were before. Love sets this species apart from the biological makeup of the spirit. The wilderness-decay of the soul. The change in climate transforms my mood from easy-going, I’m too difficult in a matter of hours. You guessed right. I don’t think of touch. Of making love. I think of my parents. They might as well be divorced. They do not make love anymore. They haven’t for years. They sleep in separate king-sized beds. What is love anyway. It never brought me any satisfaction or fulfilment. It gave you an empire. You have a laboratory were other geniuses work under your supervision. You call it a science. All of science is fragile. All of science has karmic accounts. All of the dimensions of the flora and fauna inter-related in the cosmos. Their inter-connectedness spellbinding in nature. The nature of the beast is wolf. I am content to be wolf leading the pack. Understanding, accepting of my followers. Followers are usually disciples. You don’t love me anymore. Not in that way. How am I supposed to live without you, Giovanni? You’ve been the all that I have waited for, survived for, lived for. You gave me a sense of the natural world whenever we went hiking in the mountains. Became inspiration repeatedly. Told me that fear and anxiety were the most natural feelings in the world next to kindness, mediocrity, child prodigy. You were the first man who ever called me genius. I showed Giovanni some of my work. Just for perusal’s sake. He always had input. Be it in a line, phrase, verse. Don’t talk so much about your mother, he said. The work will improve after time, he said. The work will evolve in its own time. I loved him for that. How to describe it? He became my atmosphere. I had a tyrant for my mother. I told you that, Giovanni. I never told you about the romantic feelings for you I was inclined to have time after time. You, so wise. Beyond the phenomena of constellations. Beyond the galaxies that exist in another space, another place and another time. Oh, I know you don’t think of me in all the ways I think of you. Your lips are warm. The husband is exotic-looking. Of German and Nigeran ancestry. He is exquisite. You are surrounded by men. You surround yourself with men like you. I cannot sleep anymore. Not even during the day. I have been awake for hours. The cold air is brutal. Its force has a disarming intelligence. The fear is aloof. Family is non-supportive. Birthdays in my life area non-event. I always eat salmon and Philadelphia cheesecake on my birthday. There are only ever two guests at the kitchen table with me. My narcissistic mother. My elderly father. Over the years I lost my lanky frame. I think back to how bone-thin I was in my early twenties. It has been more than years. You married. So, did I. There are no arms to hold me. No loving glance. No stare to turn me on. Just my legs. My bone-thin legs. The only thing blue about me are my wrists. Then there is my genetic makeup. I might be anorexic again. I wear layers of clothes. It is spring. In exactly two months it will be summer. I promised myself I wouldn’t call. You said what you wanted to say in your last message that you emailed me. It’s over. The dream of you was over at the end of that letter. We were talking again. We were communicating. There was a meeting of intellect. Like mind meeting like mind, and for a brief moment in time I could forget my old life, being a child stuck in a man’s body. You can’t possibly imagine the ways in which I love you. Now that you’re no longer in the scenario of my life anymore. Now that you don’t feature in its landscape, I must move on. I’m so out of touch. I live within this non-reality. I don’t want love. I don’t want a master to care for me, to stand up for my rights. I don’t believe in the waves of radical feminism anymore. I’m a mess. I’m not your gay mess. I’m a shadow, just a plain shadow-figure of the confident person I used to be when you knew me. You think I’m suspect. I expect you are right. I don’t seduce any more. I’m not pulled in that direction. That’s not the path I follow anymore. My life as it was then is over. Every day there’s a verse, or a line of remarkable beauty. There’s nobody to share that part of my life with. Only Sujata. The writing life. Here I must be honest. I work. My trauma work for me. I produce. I’m an artist. Artists create. I’ve given up smoking cigarettes. Will sometimes inhale but never smoke marijuana. It always gives me a headache. Red wine also gives me a headache. I can stomach pain. Nothing about it is ever wasted. Everything is a race. I have yet to meet a man as complicated as I am. I was forward in the old days. Not anymore. I have a high pain threshold. I have had no male suitors. Nothing but empty promises from boyfriends over the years. Measure the span of a decade. All I can see for that decade is a boy with wild hair with a new boyfriend every week. Nobody wanted to marry me. So, I shut the majority of my indigent self and ego away from the world. I withdraw, withdraw, withdraw ever mindful of the fact that I might be mad again. Be hearing voices again. Seeing the unseen. People suffer all the time. Suffering is the most natural feeling in the world. I suffered as a child, but so do millions. Kafka had a tyrant for a father. I had a tyrant for a mother. Giovanni’s bright existence has become my fortress in a close-knit jungle. I don’t want you to see me like this. Ever. You want to know something. You still have an epic mouth on you. Hottest summer in years. But summer didn’t bother getting up this morning. It is raining. All the trees forgot to wake. The river is a mental river. Today it is too wide. Today I bury my father. The topic for today is hell.

BEAUTY

We who live in this world and behold the elegant works of nature that enhance our lives every day are very fortunate.

There are days when we are in awe of the striking brilliance of the sun. 
On a dark and rainy day, we hear and see the dazzling beauty of sparkling raindrops. 

When that storm is over, we often see a colorful rainbow arching across the sky and, at times, it seems to be never-ending.Did you ever wish upon a star?
Sometimes the sky is filled with twinkling stars and it is an awesome sight.

Many days we observe different kinds of birds who are arrayed in colors of beauty.
Sometimes, we see flowers of many kinds reaching out to a nurturing sun. 

As we enjoy the these visions of nature, it brings sense of peacefulness to our soul.
The animals on this earth are many so we can love and enjoy and be thankful for the gifts of nature.

About B.T. Lowry, from his website.

Hi. I’m B.T. Lowry, aka Venu Gopal das.

I grew up in Canada, where the Rocky Mountains meet the Great Plains. I love badland landscapes with knobbly stone hoodoos and deep ravines. I love forests with pine boughs mounded with snow and deep silence. I love the Himalayas, whose peaks defy gravity as they fall upward into the sky.

When I was about twenty, I met my spiritual master, Sri Srimad Bhaktivedanta Narayana Goswami Maharaja. I’ve spent the last fifteen years or so studying bhakti-yoga under his guidance, mostly while living in India.

I’ve loved creating and hearing stories all my life. Now I’m working to infuse my work with spiritual experience. I pray you find these stories deep, exciting, challenging and hopeful.

The Deterministic Necessity

Darkness where the swells pick up,
flatten in white spits of foam.
Underfoot, hard plastic caps
bright blue, red, orange.
We walk the beach
in black homicidal cheer
thinking our own sad thoughts
dead love stories
we heard as kids
the path ahead unfurling
like a hot pink tongue
lapping up our future.

Everything that is necessary
cannot be otherwise.

The night moves, stars traveling
in sync, cold, long dead
while the sea drags its hinges
rusty and old, full of trash
it coughs up on shore.
The sliver moon browses
the shoreline for shells, other
treasures tangled up in detritus,
the dark tumbles around us,
frosts the rich cake of the earth.

Everything that is necessary
cannot be otherwise.

Beside you I want to come loose
of myself I am haunted by that
part of me, the young self that left
all kinds of others
in all kinds of weather.
Flee the rough waves,
let go of deep roots.

But here comes sunrise
a heaping mound of juicy peaches
and your warm hand will lie flat
across my sunken breast.

It cannot be otherwise.

Old Man Wild

He let the farm go
back to the garden,
further than that, back
to when nature revealed itself
not as coping but preference
for the wilderness.

He let it all go
absent the trap of theory,
the limits of observation
wilding the land to a land
before pioneers, plantings
fields of grain or corn
barns of cows, ponies, goats
to the prehistoric lush
of ancient forests

In came the luminosity
salted brine from sea
air, the rush of wind carry
insects and fungus, mushrooms
popping through rich leaf-strewn
dragonflies, butterflies, dizzy bees
drunk on golden pollen

In came songbirds and rats
the hawks, owls, snakes
raccoons, boar, wild deer
moles, voles and mice
creatures large and small
feeding on weeds and vines
the luxurious nameless green
blooming everywhere

He let it all go
like hair, beard, nails
thicken, grow and spread
an elusive transformation
in a striking change
in a long slow glide
a slide toward ruin
like an old man
in decay and overgrowth
aging, wizening
hundreds upon hundreds
of wild, wild years

Points of Entry

“Slaves, let us not curse life.”—Rimbaud

When he enters the port of misery
and clogs the path to victory,
traffic behind his parade stalls
for hours of miles.

On his sleekest horse
he rides high, dead set
on reining all the cities
the weak citizens, the babies
eat only dust, thus
raising him up
like a brilliant banner or trophy.

He escalates up the road
to the castle behind the seawall
where he will dine the rich
write bullied sentences
rage against those who elevate
rage against those who do not.

A civil war within him
sheds darkness on the world.

He is not a prisoner
of reason but of largesse
punishing the herd of lowing cattle
he looks down upon
from his gilded perch.

Under cruel moons, a bitter sun
he sits tall in the saddle
full of his own vagrancies
his ambiguous face a twist
of warping reflection
and in that sad mirror
poor animals
see themselves
the farce we must live

unless a fat blue wave
from a hard-boiling tide
sweeps him out to sea.

Read more of Mickey Corrigan’s work here.

---

Originally from Boston, Mickey J. Corrigan writes Florida noir with a dark humor. Project XX, a satirical novel about a school shooting, was released in 2017 by Salt Publishing in the UK. Newest release is What I Did for Love, a spoof of Lolita (Bloodhound Books UK, 2019). Her chapbook the disappearing self is due from Kelsay Books in March.

the year that was

January

The world watches in amazement

Longest shut down in history

Watching it all in Korea

contemplating escaping the cold winter

February

World watches as North Korea and the US

Walking back from the brink of war

escaping the cold winter blues

revisiting Vietnam after 15 years

March

The chaos president continues his chaos tour

the world begins to ignore his constant insane tweets

heading back to DC inspecting property

seeing old friends glad I retired

April

the chaos King’s policy remains a shamble

as the Mueller team closes in

in Korea I write a poem a day

and begin to become a publish writer

May

watching from afar

the chaos in DC and the world

traveling to DC to inspect property

celebrating my wife’s big 60

June

the President walks away

from a non deal with the North Koreans

I am back in DC

end up cruising to Alaska

July

watching the insanity in DC

while visiting Alaska, Seattle and Yakima

visiting my father’s grave in Yakima

communing with family ghosts

August

the dog days of summer the world is consumed

wars, rumors of war, trade wars

retuning to Korea

surviving the August sauna like summer

September

The whistle blower sets off a bomb

the president lies no quid for quo perfect all

trying to avoid watching the news

hiking in the Korean mountains with old friends

October

the President flitters about my crisis after another

the UN diplomats laugh at him national humiliation

returning to DC yet again more property blues

celebrating my 64th year orbiting the sun

November

the House starts formal impeachment hearings

watching fascinated by the impeachment drama

entering my third NoVoWrMo competition with Timeless Love

ending the month sudden surprise trip to Okinawa

December

the year ends on a high dramatic

President Trump becomes the 3rd impeached President

hiking enjoying the late autumn like weather

contemplating my wealth at the end of the year

the Terrifying Teens

2010

The dark days of the great recession

Begin slowly to fade away

Ending my Barbados experience -the best job in the foreign service on high note best labor officer award

2011

the president and Congress locked in battle battles

glimmer of hope as economy comes back to life

Studying Spanish arriving in Spain

worst year ever part of three years bad luck

2012 

the US re-elects the Black President

rejecting Romney entitlement mentality

I leave Spain my last foreign posting

buying new property in the fall

2013

In the US the religious right

loose the social Battling gay marriage, legal pot

Starting a new job as an evaluate program evaluator

ending my six month wandering the halls of State

2014

The Obama presidency

The tea party rebellion on the right

Moving to Capitol Hill

My sister’s sudden death rattles me

2015

The end of the Obama era

Was this the beginning of the end of America

Beginning the year with a new job

resolving to retire, enjoy life while I still can

2016

American voters and at the madness

Elects the mad would be king President Trump

We traveled across the country 10,000 miles

To celebrate the end of my foreign service career

2017

the year of the chaos president

Fast and furious disruption to the norms

Went to Oregon to renovate property

becoming wealthy in the process

2018

the American public woke up

Send a blue wave to clean up the mess

Moving back to Korea

Blogging up a storm

2019

in the end of the year that was

The house races up and impeach is the president

I travel to Vietnam, Alaska, Washington, Oregon, California and Okinawa

Dreams

Dream what may come

Recalling past lives lived

Every fantasy comes to life

All night long

More nightmares to come

So many worlds to explore

 
Fate

Fate has a way

Always catching up

To you embrace your fate

that is what’s up

at the end of the day

Endless dancing away

 The Oyster Speaks Up

A diner sits down

looking forward

to eating oysters

it was their season

after all

just as he was about

to pounce

on the oysters

the head oyster spoke up

saying

hey human what the hell

do you think you are doing

you think you have the right

to eat me?

that’s violating my human right

don’t ya think

the diner laughed

said to the oyster

shut up and accept

it is your fate

to be eaten this date

just let me enjoy eating you

and you have no human rights

as you are in fact

not human don’t ya know

eating the complaining oyster

shutting him up

as he ate him up

Welcome to Kathmandu 1995

Where are the traffic lights and street signs?

Water buffalo, cows, dogs, goats, roosters, and chickens wander across and sleep in the streets.

Masses of people – women in beautiful flowing saris with dabs of paint on their foreheads and men wearing clothes of every conceivable style from leather biker-jackets to loin cloths – walk, run, push carts loaded with lumber, bricks, or raw meat.

Street vendors point at their goods and shout as we pass by.

Shop owners gesture enthusiastically or doze, and beggars hold up withered limbs or a malnourished child.

We pass men shaving and women washing their long black-hair in buckets of water right beside the street.

Cars, busses, trucks, motorcycles, bicycles, rickshaws, tuk-tuks, and animal-drawn carts flow chaotically by.

Road surfaces vary from stone, brick, pock-marked pavement, or rutted dirt.

Odors of incense, spicy foods, diesel and auto exhaust, sewage, and body odor assault us. Horn blasts, shouts, conversations and arguments in a polyglot of languages, bleats, barks, bellows and clucks of animals, and the grinding gears and strain of rickety vehicles on the verge of collapse create a surround sound you’d never hear in Indiana.

Our car pauses beside a bright red rickshaw. Its driver stares at us with dark perplexed eyes, then opens his almost toothless mouth and laughs as we pull away.