687-

Real choices: being posted to hot
war zones or medical volunteer
programs. Front line duty or human
lab rat. After the competitive ping
pong the psychedelics. Chemical
Warfare: Secrets Almost Forgotten.
Consequences of. Lifetimes of.
Insomnia. Depression. If you’re lucky.
“You will lose your mind. In life unkind.
Goodbye Ruby Tuesday.” Not a place
To eat. In 1960. Never a happy hour.
Like Applebee’s.

    689-

I keep to the heights. Mahler
or Byron. Symphony of a Thousand
or Manfred. Mann. The Magic
Mountain or Quinn the Eskimo.
“Come all without, come all within.”
Guess who. Bob Dylan.

                690-

Don’t be a Child(e) Harold.
Vampyre or Lover. Flawed
angel or Greek God of war.
For independence. Seduction
And Betrayal. My Sister, My
Love. Waiting in Dante’s ante-
room. With or without Don Juan.
The heart of a poet, the soul of
an assassin. The us in clusterfuck.

691-

Beppo or Balso Snell. Sarantopoulos.
Not Ozymandias. Look up all ye.
Despair. A ring. Of hell or the Hellespont.
Not better than a whirlpool bath. For
some. Byron could swim it but he wouldn’t
survive. The after effects.


692-

The wind whales of Ishmael.
Right whales in the sky. Not
Riders on the Storm (again and again)
Humpbacks. Cruising above
the canyons that were the Pacific
Ocean. Island(s) Not like Huxley’s.
Aldous or Thomas. Plant pod
Water sacs. Not body snatchers.
Worse. No Drink Me signs but on a
parched planet. What are the choices.
Dosed. Hallucinate and die. Blood
sucked by vines. Preyed upon by all
living matter. In the Green.

    693-

Random photograph of an Old Man
and the Sea. Or Re-incarnated Herman
Melville sans beard with adolescent beached
humped back whale. The author on
Mansion Beach Block Island October 2022
posed to provide comparative size perspective
or casual tourist mourning the death of another
sea creature from the depths. Both.