Deception 9

As a married man or woman, I can still keep company with bachelor or spinster as friends.

 Does the assertion “forward ever, backward never “ring a bell to you? Have you read an expression that reads “Upward will I ascend, downward will I never descend “? Are you familiar with statement: “dream big “? If you are not familiar with any of these, there are salient expressions pointing at the need to elevate or graduate from one stage of life to the other that would have been a part and parcel of you.

 At your work place, you were the only person given promotion from your current designation to one of the most enviable position of the company you work with, would you still keep an intimate company with your colleagues that you were the same level with? What is anticipated, the interaction between you your colleagues? Of course, painful to say, it is going to be on a low key! This is because your attention would giving your all-in – all to the challenging and highly contested designation you are presently occupying interacting more with your colleagues at the same level for the sake of synergy and continuity.      

You and four of your friends have just finished high school and are seeking for admission in a college or University. Along with your friends and to your surprise, you were the only one given a latter of admission to study the course you applied for.Of course, your challenge would be primarily centered on personally equipping yourself; physically, materially and academically and socially. No doubt, you we get to meet people in the University from different backgrounds, make friends with them (based on evaluation of compatibility, depending on how mature you are) and do certain things in common on and off-campus activities, whether good or bad .       Although, depending on schedule, you will get to converse with your yet-to-be admitted friends, such conversation will certainly not be pronounced compared to your stay (with them) as an “admission seeker” Primarily your concern will be more centered on association with your level or course mates.

What if you still decide to keep on intimate relationship with those you left behind as you were elevated promoted or admitted into a University?     A question you may ask. Consider this question: “can twenty friends be in a place or state for twenty years”. If they do, such situation shares a similarity with stagnant water. It stinks after a long period of time. In the same vein, such friendship experiences stagnancy, social decay and as they say “familiarly bring contempt”. There is no moving forward.

 Before you got married, you were a bachelor or spinster, probably flanked by friends who were (at the time) yet to get married. Now, you are married and most of them are yet to settle down, would it be appropriate to keep an intimate company of still-bachelor and still-spinster friends?   It is anticipated you associate yourself more with those who are of the same relationship status as you. In fact, it is expected you keep an intimate company of like- minded friends who are married.  Viewing your current relationship status, what should be of immense importance to you are things that will certainly improve, edify and add flavor to your marriage rather than (trivial) matters associated with bachelors or spinsters. Hence, the reason you keep an intimate company of married friends rather than unmarried ones. Otherwise, you will be stagnating the meant-to-be thriving marriage.

It is therefore left for the unmarried ones to be inspired and challenged by pulling the bull by the horn towards matching the castle of marital convenience and be on the same level of marital interaction as you.   Sincerely, if you are married, how would you feel if your husband or wife still keeps an intimate company of bachelor or spinster friends?

A Bleeding Screen of Need

Where we once used words

we now send a swarm of electrons

buzzing across hyperreality, wood bees

aerial dogfighting in futile clumps

to simply say me me me

and mark an ever widening aura

of territory in the saturated

air; static grows thick

locked in mortal combat

for the numbers, the handshakes,

the fleeting flow of friends

across a bleeding screen of need,

careful not to fall off the flat edge

into the pit of the unknown—

a nobody who cannot conjure electrons

to save their life—a life is not a life

unless digitized and tossed upon

the flipping tides of lore

The Pieces Fail to Fit

Waiting for the kitchen to clean itself,

I pick up my old rubber band ball

and stretch a loop or two, massing

it into the bowling ball size range—

it takes a lot of loops to grow an inch,

but it’s just a matter of adding it all up;

another dozen bands makes another layer,

but the clock won’t stop,

and the kitchen won’t clean,

and this life won’t live itself,

or perhaps it will, but one day at a time

won’t satisfy a man who needs to shore up

some vague shelter against his end time,

pieces fallen outside the box and fit together

balanced by no real logic,

and the monument I make thus

is all the monument I’ve got

Salamander Tides

Leaky boats bob

with every tide;

any wave that rises

fills the shell.

Bailing, whether you

like it or not,

becomes the only

way to float

Logs pull together

as a raft, so dead trees

rise again, this time

to move free of land,

roots abandoned,

cast off like a rind,

like leaves,

like memories

of a time before

these floods

A salamander sheds his tail

to escape the dog,

slapping its muzzle

like a lick of shameful fire

smoking to conceal its flight

A multi-media artist living near Washington, DC, Jeff Bagato produces poetry and prose as well as electronic music and glitch video. He has published nineteen books, all available through the usual online markets, including And the Trillions (poetry) and The Toothpick Fairy (fiction). A blog about his writing and publishing efforts can be found at http://jeffbagato.com.

Forever Hustling Bob Marley

I was standing outside a trailer in Ft. Worth, waiting to get paid at the end of a two-day Bob Marley Festival. May 11 is the anniversary of Marley’s death, a good time, I’d learned, to hustle a gig. I’d talked the director into paying me as an M.C. to do a memorial presentation about Bob, and provide samples and music throughout the festival.

Standing there at dusk in Trinity Park along with musicians from regional bands, I was in a disillusioned mood. This festival had degenerated into excuse to sell products. The throng mostly shopped in a sea of booths. The Bob Marley hustle keeps getting stranger. There was one red-headed singer, a gal in tight pants and with a dubious voice, who went into a monologue about Bob, which ended with her shrill declaration: “Bob Marley died for your sins!”

My time finally came and I was ushered into the trailer. Two 30-ish African American women with processed hair were in charge of paying performers. From their looks, their manner, and the R&B on their radio, I guessed they knew little about Bob. Our conversation, in which I described my work about Bob as a “real revolutionary,” quickly confirmed this impression.

The talk turned to money – the real reason we were all there. One woman insinuated that I wasn’t going to get paid. “Didn’t you read the fine print of your contract?”

“No,” I confessed, although in truth I only had an oral agreement.

She told me the contract said I would have to, in essence, sing for my supper.

“Show me what you got,” she said.

I was determined not to take these women seriously, and they were determined to make me grovel. This went back and forth, as I tried to figure out exactly what they wanted, and whether or not I was willing to give it to them. At first, they made it sound like they wanted a strip tease. Or a demonstration of my bedroom techniques. They seemed to be in no hurry, so I finally stood up and demonstrated a “slow wine” to these women. They squealed in delight or amusement, and quickly forked over the money.

I remembered this incident later while living in Jamaica, when Bob’s birthplace was being invaded by Robert Roskind. In 2001 Roskind published a book, Rasta Heart: A Journey Into One Love. After Roskind fell for Marley’s music, he envisioned the Rastas as saviors of humanity. Roskind’s naiveté was comic in the scene where he takes a jambox onto a Negril Beach, puts on Legend, and begins testifying to Jamaicans about the gospel of “One Love.”

I began seeing Roskind’s name all over Jamaica. Penning a letter or editorial for the Gleaner, in full reverse-missionary mode. Putting on concerts all over the island. Sure enough, Roskind found co-sponsors for this missionary work in the Marley family, and the Jamaican government, who together put on a 60^th earthday tribute to Bob in New Kingston (February 6, 2005), which I attended. It had been hard for me to take seriously Roskind’s reports about his various missions, like carrying One Love to the Havasupi Indians in Arizona’s Grand Canyon. But Roskind’s interests clearly intersected with those of the Marley family, and the Jamaican Tourist Board.

We’ll be forever milking Bob, I reflected. I suppose I was as guilty as the rest. I’d written a book with a chapter about Bob Marley, and although it paid me little, it did put me into contact with Marley fans from all over the world. I rationalized what I was doing with the knowledge that at least I was actually bringing pieces of Bob’s voice to public events, sides of Bob that have never been aired in public before. But I was doing the Bob Marley hustle, all the same.

And the Bob Marley hustle continues….in 2015, the United States Supreme Court ruled that companies including Wal-Mart and Target could not sell items with Marley’s image, without obtaining permission from the reggae star’s children.

But here in Puerto Rico, where I live now, small vendors everywhere sell merchandize with Bob Marley’s face and name. No court of law will ever be able to stem that tide.

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Gregory Stephens teaches creative writing to STEM students in Puerto Rico. He was born in Ada, Oklahoma, and during the 1980s was an award-winning songwriter in Austin, Texas.

a family history  i’m trying to play it cool with the medical procedure i have tomorrow morning  i’m trying to not think about what they could find when they look at my stomach  that a family history of cancer and god knows what else is nothing to be concerned with  that i’ll simply be a little groggy when my sister drives me home listening to some music, thinking about how much i hate thanksgiving god has all the answers  i laugh when they tell me god has all the answers for me  so, i suppose i was supposed to learn a lesson from my cousin molesting me   or my father never telling me he loved me before he died  trust me i can take a fucking hint  he ignores me and i show him the amount of respect he has earned just not the one i have had more than one woman tell me i am a great guy, just not the one  and on these nights alone  where the world makes it feel like the one for me never existed in the first place  the mind starts to wander back to my youth and the first time i tasted my own blood  where i started to question my will to live and accept the pain  how many times can a person talk themselves out of death  how many times can a man listen to himself cry before enough is enough  it’s one thing to realize being unloved it’s another to stomach knowing that’s never going to change already burned too much  fell in love with a mystic  she was already burned too much by this world  one of these days i hope to find bliss dripping from her lips  and an eagerness for just one special night before either one of us finds the sweet relief of death shopping on my porch  a little over three weeks from christmas  wondering if anyone has the guts to go shopping on my porch this year

Just Being At Peace

Spring,
Suddenly I smelled a watermelon from the sea.
Maybe I miss my childhood-nostalgia when everything was just pleasant and happy.

Summer,
If two people live life together,
there is much more happiness than loneliness because when two people are together, in everything

There’s a feeling of being one, not two.

Throw away haughtiness,
Throw away greed,
and hatefulness, and resentment, and the memories which sometimes makes me sad.
To live happy and beautiful, I ‘m going to have to throw them all away.

I want to be a woman who always misses someone whom I love.
I want to live a beautiful life with someone I love, become the only precious treasure to each other.

Autumm,
Autumm prepares for New Birth.
Leaves are ripening in Autumm sunlight.
I also am ripening, we all are ripening.
I learn to love more, how to be one for two or everyone,
also I’ll keep learning through life .
My body is getting older,
but I don’t want my heart which can love someone who loves me, to grow old.

A couple days ago,
The sun which I had seen covered by clouds,
It looked exactly like a diamond.
How breathtaking was that!!
I was lucky to see that moment.
I feel like that marvelous and  amazing moment has shown me a hint that my wishes will come ture.

And Winter,
Now I feel grateful, everything is precious.
I’ve had a hard and painful time by myself
It was for a long time.

A winter sun to the heart hugs me today too.
The sunshine is so warm ……………………….