Ageless Love 
 
The two teens were walking home along a forested country road.  She looked at him and said “Duke, your fly is open.’ 
 
After looking around and not seeing anyone, he zipped up. 
 
“Sandra, you’ve got pine needles on your skirt butt.  I’d be pleased to wipe them off.” 
 
They had made a slight detour on their way home to a place in the woods which they thought of as their spot. 
 
As they approached her place she asked “Do you suppose your parents know?” 
 
“They either expect or know, but I’m pretty sure they don’t mind.  My mother made sure that I respected girls and very pointedly insisted I carry condoms after she heard some of my end of our phone calls.  I don’t know what I said that clued her in – mothers are mysterious.  My father saw us together once and said ‘That Sandra is a fine girl.  You couldn’t do any better.’  What do your parents think?” 
 
“My mother gave me the talk too.  I mentioned that you had been walking me home.  She gave me a look, but didn’t get nosey.” 
 
As Duke dropped Sandra off at her place, the parents made a big deal of inviting him in for a coke.  Despite the seeming innocence of the treat, he felt like he was under a microscope. 
 
An old man woke up in his sickbed from a beautiful dream mumbling “you are my sunshine, my only sunshine” and first looked over at the picture of a young couple on the headboard at the opposite side of the double bed, then at the medicines lined up on his end table. 
 
“Sandra, I had another one of those dreams.  This time we were in high school a few years before we got married.  People thought we were too young, but we raised two fine children and stayed together until death did us part.  I should have been the one who parted, I miss you so much.  It isn’t the only dream.  Sometimes I dream about us watching one of Jeff’s baseball games, or Betty’s dance recital.  I give you most of the credit for how they turned out.  We must have been good models; they now have fine families of their own.  The grandchildren don’t mind hanging out with granddad, or if they do they hide it well.” 
 
“Some of the dreams aren’t as good, but I always wake up from ones in which you start to show symptoms.  That was hard enough to take the first time around.” 
 
“The kids try to fix me up with someone from time to time.  I know they thought they were being kind to a lonely old man, but the memory of you is better than any woman.  When I did go out a few times, the dates were driven off by my talking about you.” 
 
“The dreams have helped me survive.  I took up painting and have gone to community college classes.  I volunteer in the local park, run a wheel chair at the hospital and teach a class on writing so I don’t feel completely useless.” 
 
“The hospice people say we won’t be separated much longer.  Expect me to join you in about a week.” 

J.J. Campbell (1976  ?) is old enough to know where the bodies are buried. He's been widely published over the years, most recently at Mad Swirl, The Nerve Cowboy, Terror House Press, The Rye Whiskey Review and Horror Sleaze Trash. You can find him most days on his mildly entertaining blog, evil delights. (https://evildelights.blogspot.com)
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
with a little umbrella
 
snowflakes in the
air and the smell
of a never-ending
winter piercing
the gray skies
 
i used to love
this shit
 
the weather
perfect for a
fat guy fashion
show
 
now, arthritis
and back pain
run my life
 
i could fucking
use a sandy beach
and a drink with
a little umbrella
right about now
------------------------------------------------------
the beautiful dark souls
 
wondering where
the black angels
are
 
the beautiful dark
souls meant to take
me on a wild ride
and conquer the
world
 
that soft brown
skin still dances
in my dreams
 
kisses me gently
on a private beach
in some tropical
land
 
clues me in when
privilege rises its
ugly head
 
hopefully, i still
can be a lucky

soul
---------------------------------------------------------
a russian conspiracy against me
 
i am convinced every
woman i meet online
is part of a russian
conspiracy against
me
 
the first one that i
figure out is actually
real and not part of
that mafia
 
i'm going to surrender
to and let life finally
start to breathe
 
of course, by the time
that happens, death
will be the more likely

scenario
------------------------------------------------------------
madly in love with me
 
my former muse likes
to think that she used
to be madly in love
with me
 
anytime she would
tell me that, i always
wondered if she knew
she was talking to me
 
of course,
it's my own damn fault
for allowing a beautiful
woman to use me for
as long as i did
 
thankfully, i woke up
before the gun found

the inside of my mouth
----------------------------------------------------------------
in over forty years of life
 
a cloudy, damp
valentine's day
 
perfect
for someone
who hasn't
had someone
really love him
in over forty
years of life
 
these are the
days where
suicide is
a cliche
 
drowning
sorrows in
alcohol is
a waste of
time
 
and there
isn't a porn
out there that
adequately takes
care of all the
pain
 
i'm sure someone
else has it worse
off than me
 
that's little
consolation

anymore

Richard Chetwynd taught writing and literature at Emerson College for 30 years, is the author of several chapbooks and a full-length collection of poems, Heroic Age, as well a collection of short stories, Turkey & Peacocks.

Welcome, readers, to October’s issue of Synchronized Chaos. Each of this month’s submissions comes from a place of considered perspective. Whether through the craft or the subject matter, these authors show they have taken some time to reflect on what they have to say.

J.K. Durick considers our warming climate as an example of how we are sometimes late to realize what is truly important.

John Hicks’ descriptive narrative poetry reflects on the dislocation of Vietnam War service through a soldier reading a newspaper on his day off. In his second piece we ride with his speaker on a crowded bus with various local people to visit a Thai temple. Robert Thomas contributes a rich tale of watching the centuries-old Palio horse race among different neighborhoods of Siena, complete with characters, history, and local color.

Jeff Bagato encourages us to step back from our human productivity, take a lesson from the cycles of nature and rest for a season. Oona Haskovec turns to withered grape leaves for an extended meditation on navigating age and decline with grace. Jack Galmitz also contemplates the passage of time in pieces with natural scenes as backdrops to the pageant of our lives.

Mahbub laments tragic deaths in his country through balladic poetry, concluding with a few shorter pieces reminding us of romantic love and nature’s beauty. Chimezie Ihekuna’s collection of screenplays catalog his various thoughts on how to build and sustain a relationship and marriage.

John Culp makes a bold statement on the triumph of his love while Lorraine De Mauro reviews Michael Robinson’s poetry collection From Chains to Freedom, a celebration of his surviving a harrowing life. Ian C. Smith relates stories from an older man recollecting his rough youth after the loss of his father, time in prison and hitchhiking.

J.J. Campbell proffers his signature witty, jaded view of life and would-have-been relationships.

Randall Rogers muses on life and human nature while conveying a healthy skepticism of social institutions. Z.I. Mahmud, in the monthly installment of his thesis on the works of Charles Dickens, explores how the author satirizes corruption in high places. Santiago Burdon posits a child’s questions to force us to re-examine the founding myths of American society.

Christopher Bernard offers up a dramatic section of his “Ghost Trolley,” an all-ages tale with a children’s sensibility that illustrates the eternal conflict between the lust for power and the instinct towards compassion. Ike Boat promotes a children’s literacy program in his native Ghana.

Jaylan Salah interviews Egyptian film director Amir Ramses on his passion for artistic representation. With an attention to detail that some may call ‘bossiness,’ he illustrates the harshness of societal judgement, the power of residual memories, and the everyday journeys of characters unlike himself, including women and Jews.

Some contributors go beyond meaning to craft language itself like a cinematic work, creating an atmosphere and sensibility with words.

Joshua Martin joins strings of words, giving a simulacra of meaning while suggesting the presence of a fanciful ‘speaker’ and ‘mouthpiece.’ Mark Young juxtaposes snippets of sense and conversation, then ends with a statement of loneliness while J.D. Nelson contributes an inventive set of wordy experiments.

Santiago Burdon speculates on what fame and success mean to a writer, while Hongri Yuan (translated by Yuanbing Zhang) brings us back to a place far removed and more glorious than our personal quests for recognition.

We hope you enjoy this issue as food for thought with the changing seasons.

Wide Reading Among Kids – WRAK Donation Promo-Script.

A child can read.
A child can dream big by reading one book.
A child be it from a rich home or a poor home has the same potential to dare to dream.
The easiest way for our beautiful pearls to escape this world into a world of possibilities is for them seeing themselves in stories.
Stories told by locals and in African settings.
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Make your contribution in a form of donation as low as 1 Cedi daily and in one year you’ve blessed a community.
Kindly, send your Mobile Money Support as Donation to MTN: Mo-Mo Pay ID: 760719 or Pay to 0594064037 – Account Name: Donkomi Fie Ltd.
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You can also log on to: www.widereadingamongkids.org to read and learn more. Go-Fund-Me Donation Web-Link: www.gofundme.com/f/xccby-wide-reading-among-kids   https://soundcloud.com/ikeboatofficial/wrakpromojingle  

Wide Reading Among Kids – WRAK – Improving Kids Reading

Originally, Written By Dennis Mann #Founder #President #Director – WRAK.
Re-Written Edited And Studio Recording Voice-Over By Ike Boat

Blood Stirring Under Scars

Although memory’s boat has drifted far downstream now I remember a movie directed by Resnais about troubled memory, others adapted from plays by William Inge, Paddy Chayefsky, characters living in boarding houses, but alone, clocks ticking, repressed sexual energy, longing; Cheever’s stories, sadness of the human heart, days draining into the gulf of middle age.  I also strain to remember staying near a train station, some storm of my own, some calm, leaving almost-love, airy dreams, behind.

A publican’s spoiled daughter with a taste for carnal excitement who resembled a Toulouse-Lautrec model, liked Elvis Presley, averted her head to exhale smoke, showcasing curls on her nape, hair in a top-knot.  Tracing her after so long, I ambushed logic with foolish assumptions, a wrong address.  You could blame addiction to quietly dramatic tales, wanting two goes at life.

A postal employee in the Dead Letter Office, perhaps a TV soapie fan with an old-fashioned attitude to service enthused by possibilities of solving problems of the aforementioned human heart, placed a newspaper ad that tinkled a tiny bell of memory in a reader’s mind.

I hitch-hiked thousands of miles across foreign soil through the Yukon to Alaska without losing my nerve, yet now, feeling the heft of years, sleeping too much, welcome her answering service, relief a brief respite from angst, my message putting off expectations, but too late to turn back.  Coward, coward, I think knowing not how many blurred, bestilled evenings I have left.

Train arrivals once shook our floor like great wind gusts as we sought each other’s heat.  I again trawl over early chapters, their residuum, questions needing detailed answers.  My agitated phone’s signal engulfs me, trapping a small bird in my chest.  Those trains emerging from the blackest tunnel, those dilapidated days, surge back.  

                                                                         ****************

No Mercy

A thirteen year-old boy wearing a school jumper and gauzy bravado he shall always remember strides towards a beach several miles from his poor family home south of Melbourne, cold, trembling from his latest thrashing.  The gravel road lies quiet but for a lone car driven by a novelist who never stops to offer a ride.

When my father died my mother gave me his wallet, his belt.  He left no memory of kind words.  She knew this.  She remembered.  Inside the wallet, hidden, I found money, too much for the old-age pension, not part of a memento.

The novelist’s family, with their own light aircraft and airstrip, lives beyond the boy’s, all English emigres settling a domain of kookaburras and copperheads.  He has finished writing a book about the fraught end of our beloved world, a world I wanted to experience before it ended, later to be filmed, partly in this area where the posher properties swoon, immaculate, with white horse fences gleaming below a pale moon and its jewels.

Through the long personal twilight I thought about my father’s life, and death, which he feared right until the end.  I thought I heard a man weeping when a bird, seeing only freedom in my window, stunned itself, lay panting on my veranda near a birds-nest fern in a tub before travelling on, a wingbeat ahead of silent cats and certain death.

The car’s sound faded, the boy’s contempt for that novelist, for most adults, parents, teachers, cops, dissolved into shadows at a paddock’s edge, a stray dog passes him, then turns to follow ten yards behind, gait faithful to his, seeking adoption, the boy’s mind running amok through a dreamlike future, that unknown pinprick of starlight we each grope towards.

I fell to thinking about how I found a kind of love, relegated the past, discovered the remainder of my days.  When I returned the banknotes, everything except a cropped photograph of my sister long ago, and small change, my mother’s face stamped her guilty of attempted bribery.  And heartache.

The boy has a pound for each year he has lived, earned, stolen, stashed, his pouch of tobacco, a rage for freedom, for cities’ giddy adventure, thinks he could hitchhike 500 miles to Sydney: in imagination’s kingdom a truck-stop, a jukebox, songs of lonely far-off times.  

****** 

Spelling

Those days furnished no mementos, only hard memories about dreaming of freedom.  Locked up in an historic gaol built in an era of self-satisfaction, of statues, outdated then, townhouses now, we spotted hardened lags wasting precious days in the much larger adult section.  Like them, most of us boys were heading for damnation.  Protocol savage, recent tattoos serving me well, we hearkened back in that pandemonium to times when we were boys as if our collective childhood happened in the distant past.

An infamous murderer, a DJ on the outside, ran our in-(the big) house radio station.  I listened wrapped in a cloak of provisional safety holding a flat earpiece connected to a wire, alone at last, dreaming of freedom, endurance of solitude the best time for me but apparently not for many of the other young offenders between 4p.m. and 7a.m. when we emptied our waste in the cold light, avoiding splash, fetid stench swirling in the air, our reek the only vestige of us in that stink hole free to float away.

Old magazines circulated.  Most boys didn’t care to read, or couldn’t, although they liked the pictures.  Glossy photos of food outraged my hunger for a meal better than degrading.  Swimsuit models caught my eye, my breath.  I devoured word knowledge tests dreaming of freedom using a pencil stub kept in my tobacco, often guessing the opposite to correct answers of multiple-choice questions, otherwise doing OK.  I instinctively mentally corrected spelling mistakes reading the despair, defamation, humour, and of course, rage, in graffiti etched and inked over years into my walls, but I lacked answers.  Still do from time to time, faded tattoos become motifs these remedial years on.

Two boys who hit an elderly newsagent harder than intended when robbing him received crushing sentences, unlike mine.  The younger one, who acted tougher in the yard, was overheard sobbing nocturnally in that silenced madhouse of rage sorrowing for a lost dream of freedom, or the dead man.  Who knows?  I can’t find them on Google, but traced another, a loud, ignorant boy from those drear days, dead now, described as a habitual petty criminal all his life.

There was a girl whose letters had finally caught up with me.  She worked in the city.  On my release, unmet, resolute after a careful countdown, a thing I still do, the raw cry of a tram rattling towards the bright city surged my young blood.

                                                                     ***************

Ian C Smith, P.O. Box 9262, Sale, Australia, 3850.  <icsmithpoet@gmail.com>

Discussion On the Plot, synopsis and setting of the novelist Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations 

Fundamentally, Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations immortalizes satirizing constitutional democracy, parliamentary reforms bill, labour rights’ and prison amendments through reformation of genteel characters as gentleman. Marginalization and exclusion both extend suffrage of these fictional characters; they accomplish the triumph of success and prosperity of Dickensian doubles or juxtaposition with regard to indigenous or hybridized gender, caste and ethnicity. The publication of “The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin” theorized or reinforced Dickensian novel Great Expectations compelled characterization undergoing cataclysmic degeneration or progressive evolution.

“Through all my punishments, disgraces, fasts and vigils, and other penitential performances, I had nursed this assurances.” These lines expostulate the infernal despotism of injustice and tormenting tyranny, grieved by the biographer or the protagonist.  Firstly, churchyards symbolize deathly gallows or gruesome grimace and secondly, prisons symbolize the exploited or persecuted power. Sepulchral graveyard with tombstones and the dramatic encounter with the prisonship or hulk escaped convict memorializes Charles Dickens’ juvenile infancy –the symbolic immaturity. Through freemasonry sympathy or affectionate tenderheartedness, the narrator embodies Abel Magwitch as the marginalized or underprivileged distinction.

Intellectual liberty or freedom of education enables readers to interpret that this aspect Miss Havisham abandons ever since jilted by her fiancé Compeyson twenty minutes past nine.  “She an’t over partial to having scholars on the premises […] and in partickler, would not be over partial to my being a scholar, for fear as I might rise. Like a sort of rebel, don’t you see?” The narrator doesn’t want to be governed by institutionalized authority that penalizes the rural village folk community. These majority of oppressed from injustice and victims of presentment becomes marginalized as minority by administrative power, aspects of wealth or finance-the symbolic evil menace. Dickens references to “savage young gentleman contrasts ”“wild beasts” symbolic of modest aggressiveness and profound explosiveness respectively. Abel Magwitch’s Gentleman Compeyson, the sham involvement in feud reflect Dickensian demonic that needs to be polished. This misty marshes or moors scene foreshadowing contrasts with the feud of Satis House, Pip challenged to duel with Herbert Pocket, “the pale young gentleman” ere in the novel.

Moreover, Dickens’ Great Expectations turning point plot twists renders to the advancement of society from the threshold terminal of the sub-urbs to the absolute cosmopolitanism. The narrator or biographer’s migration embodies aquaintanceship with Mr. Jaggers, the lawyer. Beknownst of the stranger’s eccentricity Mr. Jaggers. “smell strongly of soap” body fragrance and the incessant “washing of hands” memorialized by the incidental wedding feast of Miss Havisham’s party. Dickens allegorizes British imperialism, English the parliament and justice system through the obsessive washing of hands as a psychological mechanism to persecute criminals from corrupting or impure him- this symbolize despotism in shrewd criticism. He consorts with vicious criminals and even these ruffians are terrified of him. Although a criminal lawyer-ironically symbolic impenetrable exterior [Mr Jaggers can be characterized as pragmatic, dark, professional and arrogant] Mr. Jaggers was bestowed with the sponsorship or patronage to be Pip’s counselor and guardian. Benediction of wealth and fortunes intrigued Mr. Jaggers to solicit family Havishams’ or Magwitch’s lawsuits of legacy.

“Jaggers has an air of authority not to be disputed” and “a manner expressive of knowing something secret about every one of us that would eventually do for each individual if he chose to disclose it.”  Wemmick’s remark further elicits disposition of Mr. Jaggers when he says, “as deep … as Australia.” Mysterious Molly, the wretched savage caregiving or civilizing was happening by and by. Subtlety of detrimental knowledge pertaining to the appraised Molly’s persisting  existence. The hero’s Great Expectations should be fulfilled by solicitation and purchase of shoes and suits embody the perpetual condescension as a gentleman-symbolic of cultural assimilation to consumerist London.  “Through good and evil I stuck to my books.” and “I had a taste for reading, and read regularly so many hours a day.” Education of Victorian England and passion of learning exemplifies the Dickensian spirits of Shakespeare’s reading. The narrator subconscious acquiesced privileges of attending the tutorship of Herbert Pocket. Even Magwitch dreamed of being a gentleman despite being a fierce rebel; nonetheless, he wanted to embellishing prospect to mould Pip as a young gentleman. Moral regeneration lacks in the apprenticeship of Orlick [“He should never be thinking”] or education of Drummle [“half a dozen heads thicker than most gentlemen”] respectively.