Olaf's Yom Kippur.

Head-busy, out delivering the mail, utterly anythingarian with the world, no convictions either way. The sun blaze's through unforgiving, but a glorious butter field all the same. The sweat sticks my shirt to my back. I have a large bundle of mail secure in my right arm and my left arm is free to do letter box slight of hand, all morning. I'm in Belmont Drive, one of the wealthiest streets in Giffnock, a suburb in the affluent south side of Glasgow, home to many orthodox Jews. I post the mail thoughtlessly through the mouths of the letter boxes.

As I walk up the tenth drive way, I see a small congregation of Jewish men sitting in a garage up the top It's Rabbi Kakov's house and I see him, I walk up to him and hand the mail, no offering just a few bills and a parcel, and the men stare at me in tassels and black coat attire. They shut the door and begin to chant in tones that are no doubt directed to that which is God. Chanting on, tongues almost, mysterious on this summer Thursday morning. Chanting mysteries a million worlds apart from suburban docility. They sing to evoke the great Jewish spirit-thing in Hebrew tongues. I know not what they do. No comprehension of God in a book comes easy to me, to anyone perhaps, perhaps, if I was to put I name to it, I might say I'm a lover of the God beyond God conception.

I crunch off down the driveway. I stop to listen once more. I want to hear their chant, their wonder, taking up the moment, this far fetched possibility of something holy in the moment, what magic has captured their spirits or what madness has loosed upon them? I cannot tell the difference. I am not a man with answers. What strange history tradition holds. I do not know who is right or wrong. I stride on, rock upon my back, mailing the messages. My finger has a paper cut, I consider it as I walk, then I think of the Jews in their orthodoxy tassels and fedora hats. I think of Israel and Palestine. All the crossed wires, everyone chanting at the same time, making war out of the noise. I want to sing 'Liberate Palestine!' 'Scrutinize the Jewish Lobby' 'Tell us what you believe...' Everyone link arms.

Fishing more mail into voiceless letter boxes, I carry into new streets, and more indifferent stone houses. My back aches and strains, kilos of messages and pointless junk, kilos of the suns warm glare, kilos the crossed wires pushing on the phone lines. God surrounds me with its earth thing all around me, tree air water. I walk on as ever and know I am saved because I am still alive, and deny nothing. I carry on to Orchard Park and stuff letters and bills and good news into these sacred slots, then I hear a call: 'Excuse me! Excuse me, young man.' I turn swift, it's a Jewish man, he is in his uniform, black fedora, long black tench coat, and short thick black beard. He is God's gangsters. Slightly chubby. Pleasant. He talks with me.

'I don't know if you know but today is a Jewish Holy Day, and I was wondering if I could ask a favour of you?' 'Sure, in fact, I was just round on Belmont and I could hear the many chanting.' 'Ah' he said 'Where you you really? I was just round there myself praying. Well, on this Holiday we cannot use electricity and, if you wouldn't mind, could you come in to the house for a few minutes and give me a quick hand.' I smile all teddy bear soft and willing. 'That's not a problem. Lead the way.' 'Thank you so much, most postmen say no.' We waled into his house He was carrying a blue velvet pillow with golden writing stitched precisely upon it in Hebrew. Clearly this was pillow of or for a God, to sit upon or lay his head. It was beautiful in the sunlight.

'I find all these traditions intriguing but ultimately mystifying, especially when we look into the details of their origin. I haven't done that yet. Have you?' I ask frank but not rude. 'Yes, the world his many traditions , different religious traditions, that's all.' A blanket statement. We walked into the warm house he spoke Yiddish to his wife, saying somethings perhaps like: I've brought a genteel in to help with the electricity. I could hear the family chattering in the next room, lively and engaged, like Christmas or New Year. 'I was wondering if you could turn the thermostat on our fridge up to 20.' The thermostat sat at 15. I had to move it all but 5 tiny fractions, 5 cosmically insignificant fractions, and then the job would be done. But then I thought to myself - is this some joke? Have I been had? Was such a triviality really forbidden on this day? Or was this some kind of 'get-a-genteel-to-help-you-with-a-menial-task-day? Surely to ask a genteel to disobey the Jewish law would not exempt the Jew himself from partaking in this metaphysical transgression? Should I tell him?

He stared directly at me and thanked me kindly. I obliged a smile and wished him happy days. Then, the second I walked out of his house cognition pulled through: Wait a minute! They had all the lights in the house on, including the porch light, how the hell did they manage to get all those lights on without help? Had the Jews been asking every passerby to switch on the odd light or two out of the kindness of their own Godlessness? I thought further through my mind, couldn't he just of accidentally rubbed against the thermostat until he had reached the required temperature? A test from God or was the man testing to see if I was anti-semitic - did he expect me to decline and walk away in secular indifference.

I'm the postman with a sore back and strong calf muscles. My God is absolutely anything. I guess the meaning, I live alone, and I don't read books with a fine tooth comb. As far as I can tell, further perhaps, we all live together in God, and die alone in the end. Isn't it obvious? The Universe is Heaven. I'm off to finish this route. What a morning. Yom Kippur to you all. (Which reminds me, I must buy some kippers at the fish mongers) I'll see you in the rebuilt Jerusalem.

The waiting syndrome.

Joey sat in silence on his couch every evening. He was like a calm patient Buddha but then like a Buddha you began to wonder if he wasn't actually retarded in mind and soul and simply sat there for years because he didn't have the capacity to actually get off his posterior and do something with his ennui. He sat. Said nothing - invited nothing, and I bet he still does, if he is still alive, if he ever was. Maybe now he's teaching teenagers with mania or digging wells in West Africa or shelving it in a supermarket. Perhaps, at least, he finally liberated himself from self imposed exile. Like I did from my straight jacket.

Honest to madness.

Deliver us from evil.

Rab was a narcissist. He liked his sex aggressive. Liked to simulate rape scenes, mock strangulation was his bent. He liked to throttle a little, bruise her, a slap, give himself totalitarian control. He was twenty something - a post man. He usually dumped junk mail in the industrial waste bins at Toryglen ASDA. He was a young alcoholic and not yet robbed of his courage by the drink. He would get into a fight at least once a week. I think he was a closet homosexual. Who isn't? Surely, it just depends how much space your willing to admit is actually left in your closet? Rab laughed deranged. Donkey sound – 'Hee Haw!' 'Hee Haw! A donkey without his Sancho Panza. One day he'll be in prison for rape or murder. He was a solid guy, sincerely damaged, sincerely fucked up. In a world this insane, he was quite the rationalist.

44A Charing cross.

It never arrives but when it does it's at the last minute. The innards smell of sweat and a faint hint of urine. We lodge beside two by two. Battalions dip heads into newspapers and scroll through the mobile locked in the screen. Everyone rudely brought to life by morning finding themselves here daily.

Passing by Queen's park, the sun spears through the trees, making a greenhouse of the bus; welcome in the morning. A baby startles the air with her primal cry. The bus moans and stretches as it takes a right corner. We sit in rows two by two and someone accidently brushes the leg of another, they flinch as though they had touched something cold and disgusting. They shift gingerly and settle back down again, no eye contact,settling down for a few more paragraphs of gibberish.

At the back of the bus a man and a woman talk nonsense to each other through long awkward pauses. Someone cringes and coughs. Two strangers admire the view from the window but one actaully only stares through the glass. The bus lurches and hisses down Victoria Road, passangers move and sway like audience memebers, the lights halt us, we each say a short prayer - red, orange, green. We play Monday morning solitaire in separate chairs. In ritual. And someone always sends out a thought or two for the angel left standing.

Centipedes crawl the road and moments run like cats under cars. Blurred flashes of headlines as pages turn. Everyone is generalising internal monologue and the brains creepy almanac informs us of a dangerous future. The bus pushes on through the streets. An aging crossword puzzler has dozed off. A lady is blabbering about a recent biopsy and a few of the men over hear and think of their testicles and the women their breasts, and some others, the rectal passage. The sun pours through the glass pure orange juice. Morning stretches and yawns and wedding bells are tolling somewhere for lovers in the universe of a quite perfect mortgage. And the spelling mistakes in the newspaper forgive themselves, a zebra crossing in sub-Saharan Glasgow halts us, a set of lights, again, betray us. Some are running late now.

The congregation shuffle their feet nervously. 'Better to be safe than sorry' says an aging widow wearing a long brown coat. The man beside her says nothing. She is afraid of her naked body. Heliotropic trees inhale their fix of the sun. Everyone is taxed and no one has anything to say and wishes to tell the world about it. And the ego is being fiddled with by signs and beta rays; no one can take themselves lightly, someone farts in divine silence, four wheels make 840 revolutions every mile, five passengers yawn in synchrony.

The arbiters of life sit neatly in their pews. Heads in papers soaking up the inky meaning. All waste and pine against the routine of work. Many hearts beat in time, but it's impossible to know exactly when this is happening. The engine roars. The noise fills the bus like colourless smoke. One rusher is tapping his feet desperate to urinate. Most are sullen and inconsiderate. A prayer it sent up: 'I must be joyful.' And now they enter the city, out of the mountains, down into the valley into the uterus of the business zone.

Someone makes a mental note to re-read the book of John - 'those who believe in the Son are not judged'; someone concludes that 'some things are under our control while others things are under the control of others'. A lady confesses to herself she must edit her diary to take out the truths she is ashamed of. And a man smiles, his face touched by the sun, thinks to himself 'take care of a thing as though it where not your own'. The bus comes to a halt, and the professionals, the marching band and the fingered administrators of practical reality queue off the bus, at Hope Street. They sink into the day, in swarms of fabric and wrist chains, clock in time together under the grey sky of the same nullifying office blocks throughout the city.

Deranged penguin.

A clip from the documentary filmed in Antarctica by Werner Herzog, 'Encounters at the end of the world'.

Holy Water.

The world is out of water.

The last droplet has been drank.

Everyone is so very thirsty.

Everything so very dry.

Everyone hunting for that

miraculous glass of water.

Congregations with cracked lips

kneel and bow trembling

before the effigy of a giant iceberg.

A lovely read.

Elizabeth: 'Hi Karen! Fancy meeting you here. What books that you're reading?'

Karen: Hi, Liz, it's 'The beauty of being' by A. H. Hart. It's devastating. So moving. Tear filled. I would recommend it. Really plays with the heart strings. How are you doing anyway? How are Eric and the boys?'

Elizabeth: 'I'm brilliant. The family are doing great. I love a good book too, Karen. I adore Emmanuelle Terez, a wonderful Latin novelist, I love to read philosophy, romance, and poetry, in fact, I'm actually in a community book group. Ah yes, such types as we are truly beautiful, peaceful, we won't be dragged by the demands of life. We have an overwhelming sense of empathy. We love the sensitive side of life, the soul, introspection, the passionate life. Don't you agree?'

Elizabeth: '...O Karen, look at the time, I really must pick the children up from school then I must dash to the supermarket and do the shopping. We are having lamb chops for dinner and lychees and vanilla ice cream for dessert. Can you believe they charge one pound and sixty three pence for a single can? I was outraged, almost complained, dear dear, rotten supermarkets. I'm thinking of changing to the new Tescos branch thats just opened. '

Karen: 'God yes Liz, I've started shopping their myself; the smaller supermarkets are just too over priced. It's extortionate. So, is that the book group Susan Redford attends? I've thought about joining actually, it's down at the local library, is that the one?'

Elizabeth: Yes, Susan is secretary. You should come down, it's on Wednesday evenings. I'm sure we'd all love to have you. Well lovey, my jeep isn't parked far from here. I'll be off, see you soon love. I'll pop round during the week with a copy of 'Soft lives of the delicare unaware' by Emmanuelle Terez; it's so poignant. kiss kiss xx.'

Faux pas

Greasy spoon

The cigarette coughs and splurts ash
into the coffee cup. The coffee
splashes in shock. The table cloth
is ruined and she'll have to wash her
dress. The breakfast was a near miss.
The table had nothing to do with it.
And the chairs, straight backed,
look unimpressed. 'You should give up
those bloody cigarettes George, they're
more bother than their worth.'

When I was a girl.

Memories from my mother's wardrobe.

Once. Only once. Did the tights come out.

The feel of them. The warm all encompassing
caress of nylon hugging leg, thigh, buttocks.
Once. Only once. Did the bra come out.
The feel of it. Tight and secure
cupped around your chest and nipples.
Once. Only once. Did the lipstick come out.
A lick of red across your lips. I was
generally more inclined to be a tomboy.

Summer biscuits

Five children sun about in the sun,
searching for their mother
who has fallen asleep in the
back garden with slight sunburn.
They will sneak into the kitchen
and steal three biscuits from the biscuit tin.

A Peculiar History of the Banana.

Bananas were once shaped like penises and there was once a man who was averse to eating bananas in their ithyphallic form - as he put it. This man had spent most of his adult life running a local fruit and vegetable shop in central London. Every time he had to eat a banana, he would peel it, revealing the naked yellow centre, then quickly slice the entire banana into discs, dispose of the skin, and eat them one at a time or often as additional ingredient for desserts.

'Like a sweetie' he said 'not like a penis at all'. Like sliced daisy heads. This gave him some feeling of security. He claimed that women loved to eat bananas and that a banana was naturally for women. Any man who ate banana without slicing it into little discs was 'highly suspicious', prone to effeminacy, lecherous deeds, and should not be trusted in friendship, marriage or financial matters.

The central aim was to deconstruct the banana in phallic form; not simply in shape, there was a psychological motive at work, the man believed Bananas imposed upon the eater certain perverse suggestions. Possibly, encouraging people to partake in promiscuous acts, the latent promiscuity of bananas was dangerous. He wanted to pull down the obelisks. So to speak. Keep power inside the suit trousers.

The man found ideological interest from Christian Evangelists, The Institute of Absolute Masculinity, realmenarenoteffeminate.co.uk, Builders and Tough Boy Humour Unions. They supported the idea, believed masculinity must be rescued from saturation in effeminate sexuality; some provided funding for the man. While supermarkets showed interest in marketing possibilities the sliced banana would bring to the passive consumer as a sensible alternative to the banana. So, with this interest, he refined the process, creating dried bananas, freeze dried banana, even choosing to coat some with honey or sugar. Now was the time to put his idea to wider markets.

Only after many late night phone calls and arduous meetings with bankers stewing over profit trajectories, projected first years profit returns; then protracted consultations with import haulage companies did he finally secure his backing. After one tough year planning, small premises were bought in India, Latin America and West Africa. The banana chips would be grown and prepared in these premises, then delivered throughout the first world first rate supermarkets of the European Union and the North American Union. With this success, he realised that ultimately, his dream would be for the new banana form to eclipse the old banana form, forever.

It started to work. It took consumers’ time to take to the idea of eating sliced banana, it seemed unnecessary, bizarre. But supermarkets introduced the new product with a massive advertising campaign, giving instructions on how to apply and use the slices. Quite simply, the banana chip was more convenient. In shape and form but most importantly, and most covertly, the erotic quality of devouring the phallic banana had been removed entirely from unwanted unconscious associations. The customers swooned to the idea once it had been explained.

The man became wealthy very quickly. Contracts came far and wide throughout Europe. He was hailed throughout many parts of the fruit and vegetable industry as an innovator in produce consumption. He aims to do the same with carrots, parsnips, and perhaps even architectural structures: monuments, obelisks, lampposts, war memorials. Bring them all down. ’ The phallus is not a sign of male domination but of masked homosexuality’- his maxim.

This has been a short history of the banana and the man who changed its shape. His name is William Shepherd. He remains a wealthy bachelor, now lives in Hawaii and works between the U.K. and India. William Shepherd is now lobbying members of the UN to pass legislation restricting the sale of imperfectly shaped fruit and vegetables across Europe. His company, banana republic, is one of the largest producers of sliced and dried bananas on the world market.

Closing time at Literary Mary bar.

Here I am sweeping the floor after everyone has left.
The boss never did give me a chance to sing.
He said I could. He said I'd have a big night
dedicated to my voice, if I was good enough.

Now I just walk this mop like a woman I'd love.
A woman I'd dance with, cup her thin waist,
lock onto her eyes. And I'd sing into her ear
like all sentimental lovers do.

I'd show her my voice. I'd sway crowds with it.
People would hear the truth of my voice.
But now that opportunity is gone, wasted, lost.

My voice will be known only by a few close friends.
I will sing on hot nights from a bottle of red wine.
They will sing along in those drunk moments.

And here I must sing to myself,
sweep my fortune away with the rubbish:

'Tomorrow.
Tomorrow never comes
What kind of a fool
Do they take me for?

Tomorrow
A resting place for bums
A trap set in the slums
But I know the score

I won't take no for an answer
I was born to be a dancer now, Yeah!'




*Song lyrics taken from Bugsy Malone musical. Song is 'tomorrow' sang by character 'Fizzy'.

Shot to pieces.

Saturn devouring her son - Goya.

{I}
Slow breeze and idle peace in the town ammo store;
tenuous friendship between a hand gun and rifle
living together on the same shelf for too long.
Immaculate glass cabinet shines in sun light.
A gun smirks and glints beneath its glare.
The shop owner takes stock of his weaponry.

{II}
Elderly couple in the parking lot argue
over the necessity of firearms for safety.
'A society without guns disarms
a population against possible takeover
by the military. We got freedom with the gun,
Betty.' 'Then we'll never be free without the gun,
George. If people need to protect themselves
from other people, by killing each other,
their is blindly something wrong with people.'
'War is the art of protection. We need a gun
in case the worst happens, Betty.'
'What if the worst never ends, George?'


{III}
A chandelier in the White House hall hangs
like a constellation and the chandeliers
of the palaces of the world hang and
the chandeliers and the chandeliers.
While all around the world in arms:
The right arm sells the war,
the left tends to the wounded.

Distrust and chandeliers.
Six billion bullets have never kissed.
They lie in bed having never held each other.
And the bodies pile and the bodies pile
like fallen logs. Entire schools
hosed down in broad day light
and the world is doomed and sealed in a bang.

Summer apples.

How truthfully the apple falls.
It knows how to fall.
How to rot and how easy
it is to lie among friends,
when the sun shines out like an answer.

Olaf observes a poeyatree reading.

Ridiculous branch of poeyatree. -McGuire

these poeyits are reeding poeums
to a large awedeeince who sit on chairz
in a room wide as an olympic swimming pool.

they listen with their ears to hear,
with their eyes to see, the mouths
to taste the humble poeyatree.

they understood by laffing or knowing nodingly.
but not one utter of their utterance
was complete understand or comprehend.

they spoke honestly of how the whirld
had experienced them. of a dark red
streek of emoshone. of the thoughts that
inhabited their brain.

and o so warm waz the room with the poeyum
the heat of their bodies. and the beer so coaled
on my throat balansed me so with the fizz of its tang.
made some moments delishus.

i like the poeyits and the poeyitesses.
the whole poeyat earth. even the awfil
poeyats. words made completely naive.

i will deafinitely return. i is
simply for the peephole.
and now i awash with golden
grin of stupid happiness am.

for the poeyits are finnished,
and nothing has been said,
the lights are dimmed,
everyone leaves for the door.
i trip up delibrately as i go
because i enjoy mistakes.

one day
i may even
make my own
on that proud stage.

If honest you make me feel.

Even the hangman grows sentimental - McGuire

I love you very much
meaning
I think about you a lot

I consider the muscles of your naked shoulders.
The taut skin. Your still eyes. The delicate blinds
of your eyelashes, what you carry,
all more than they are.

I love you because I am alive with you.
We share that blizzard in common.
For you to die, be taken, what is that?
That is a mystery to me.
For me to die, be taken, what is that to you?

Despite death, most remarkable of all
is quite how alive you are when you are still
and breathing. It will be as though we had never
even touched, when the eyes fold for good,
sweeping away our very being. Become intangible.

I love you very much
meaning
I think about you a lot

Solitudinarian

Painting by Michael Endo

Barricaded on all sides,
the hyenas are everywhere.

Solitude is a necessity,
for that which does not
conceal itself loses definition.

Solitude builds out
of sorrow strength
which defeats crowds.

But bad poetry is
everywhere trying
to unblock the spirit
and make itself known.

There is nothing to elevate
the loneliness people
this is the way it is.

Romanticism and sentiment:
liars throughout the centuries.
Realism wipes it arse over
and over again. Dies old and
bitter having learned faith
in rooms of God's infinite silence.

What a lamb is.

A smashed skull off Via Dei Mille, another drunk has fallen from their chair. Sprawled, the fool lies on the ground motionless, cap saturated in red, a small pool of blood slowly forming around his head. It poured for some time before he woke up, then the feeling of being pinned down grabbed him, he stood up-right, fast as a bolt of lightning and grabbed the table to steady himself.

O, Olaf: what joke have you played on yourself? Quick assessment: burst egg shell skull. Minor pain. Plenty of war paint. Olaf rushes to the shower to wash off the blood, but it pours, trickles down neck and all through his clothing, outrageous! another anonymous unremarkable human, bleeding. Olaf doesn't feel right - unbalanced on his feet. Olaf berates myself. He has blood down the left side of his face: a clown paint - half red, half white. A sharp pain and letting throbs from the back of his head, and the neck is stiff and slightly twisted: look at this farce. Out of drunk concern, he decides on a shower, he fumbles in the bathroom, strips bare haphazardly, arms and legs entangled in clothing, struggling. Olaf holds onto the side of the bath, like an frail man, stiff and incapable. Slowly he stands up right, hot water pouring over his thin white back, a soft acid, stinging the flesh wound, he lets the water pour over his body, sighs with relief.

This is useless. He turns the shower off, dresses again - cautiously. Out of selfish concern, he knocks on the door of Mr Bianco, a reader of latin, maybe he can rescue. But he has passed out on his bed, drunk and debauched from the previous night. No waking him now. Dead to the world. He has found immaculate sleep and dream. Olaf knocks on young Pasquale, a student of physics. He is usually in his room with his lover, Donatella. The room is empty. Olaf decides to call an ambulance and in terrible pidgin Italian makes his ridicuous demand. They come, luminous orange knights of God to tend to his open wounds. They set to washing the wound. Are they thinking, tiny nick, what a time waster! They wrap a white bandage across his forehead and round his skull. A Rab C Nesbitt halo, he plays dumb, as they chaperone him down the stairs into the ambulance.

Italian hospitals are quiet and bare. Clinical white. Is this necessary, olaf asks, sitting giddy in his precautionary wheelchair, goggle eyed, glazed over, a doughnut of chance and foolery. People die here in private final rooms. Some one has throat cancer. A young girl with ginger spice hair is going in for surgery in three hours. An elderly woman is praying with her Rosary. Something serious is affecting them all. Life has brought out her weaponry to unbalance the scale on their soft, typical unassuming lives. They have long devastated faces. The lines are sharp, eyes moist, sober seriousness haunts them.

He shouldn't be here. He should be in bed. Drunk, sleeping it off, waking up to an Easter holiday week. But no, he is the invalid, Don Quixote in a wheel chair, where is his Sancho Panza? Now for the stitches. Only three, thank god, a pathetic trinity, at that. Five last year was enough. In and Out, In and Out, minor pain, Doctor weaves pin point miracles, tough on the last one. Nothing special. He deserves some pain. Someone mentions Braveheart, Olaf thinks of the word cretino. His heart is neither brave nor emotional.

Back into the waiting room. The death termius. Olaf, giddy, still drunk, sits and considers wheeling home, but he doesn't know the direction. How can I help you? Asks a male porter in pure white. (Do you know a good psychiatrist? Olaf should ask.) No grazie, he says, I'm okay. (The flesh wound is obvious but the real problem is unutterable. Olaf has a head problem.) Ok, he says, the Doctor will see to you soon.

Twenty minutes pass, then he's pushed to the radiology department by a male nurse. They want photos of his skeleton. The bare bones of his structure. Left, right, front, back, Open Wide. Olaf gets a look at the pictures and he sees only a horrible thin skeleton, not Olaf, not Poetica but a thin breakable, fragile web of bone and muscle, blood and microbiology. The jaw line like a permanent scream. He studies the evidence, the spine. The neck. The skull. The Doctor advises: Buy a neck brace. Go to sleep. Be watched over closely while you sleep. Return in a week to have the stitches removed. This will cost you money. Do you have a European Health insurance card?

Olaf lectures himself: learn control, not this self inflicting malady, this head trauma woe is me break dance. Tom Foolery, class clown, fractured psyche, tortured mooncalf of the genus homo eructus. Take a good look at someone else. He walks home, spaced nervous, a sterile sun warms the city bleach, his eyes strain through the white glare, his head reels. He wants to lie down, to reverse tactics from the previous night, to be reborn, start again, a clean slate. What disturbs him is private and unutterable. A problem of the head. He walks into the morning, away from the hospital, back to the apartment to sleep in a quiet corner.

Mr Bianco is awake, bloodshot eyes and a look of confusion at the door, as Olaf enters with a head bandage, tired and gaunt, like a sodden rag. Bianco asks: 'What has happened to you, all the blood on the kitchen floor?' Preoccupied, he continues 'Have you heard the news? L'aquila has been hit by an earthquake, 6.3 on the scale, the city has been pulverised, hundreds dead! Maybe more. Think of it! An entire city, not far from this city. Incredible!' They agree the situation is devastating. They sit down to watch the T.V. in the kitchen, the news transmit dismal tidings on the grim fatalities. They both agree, things are bad, things could have been a lot worse. Tectonic plates shift. Everywhere around the world people are awakening to different tragedies. We should count ourselves among the lucky.

Infinite wandering

The eyes,
such touch
in their glance
but the face,
the angular
chiselled
youthfulness
brushed me
enough to touch me.

It is worth
lighting candles
to how beautiful
his eyes are.

Everything ends.
But his eyes,
above all
so moist,
touch me.

Touched
the moment
almost perfect;
a piece of
memory.

The eyes,
soft
wandering.

The supple
long arms
tone sinew
fresh figure,
imagine:
the chest
taut and
breathing.

The moment
of his look.
Everything
about him,
noticed.

He noticed himself
for a moment;
the eyes caught on.

We know it exactly.
How new
for a second,
his long
gaze (imagine)
immortalises us.

Hercules: The Untold Story.

I am in my bunker walling in again. Searching for ammo, kicking the rats in the scrotum, (or what might be deemed scrotum if they had one…). I smoke a nervous cigarette (cigarettes are always nervous). My ammo is my excuse for a few more minutes of solitude. Thud! Thud! Thud! The shells over head are rattling the earth, and the dirt falls upon me. It falls down a sick brown kind of confetti. The bombs burst like wombs upon no-man’s-land, were many men live and die, and many nations too, and many how centuries have bent and broken there?

I am sure someone is boiling a pot of communal tea before battle. Someone is praying to Mary, someone to Melanie, someone to a secret Derek, polishing their rifles carefully, straightening their uniforms. Swearing oaths and reaping prayers, psyching up for the mad rush. I recall an infantry man saying to me: 'the existence of the Universe was optional’ Who ticked the box? I ask myself, needing such a choice reconsidered now more than ever. My bunker is the entire universe right now, my private ward. Young, soft in the head, wandering about my mind, made nervous by the mountain I cannot climb down from. My mind trapped like a rat in a skull, scratching my scrotum, biting my nails, pacing the floor, worrying if the general will notice my absence.

‘You need a rude awakening Son!' He said to me with certainty to me at roll call. 'Get a hold of your weakness.' Of course, he is right; though I won’t tell him that. To acquiesce, to put the hands up clear in the air and admit: it was me, I could not cope, weakness wracked me. It is hard to concede our failing. I was foolish and untrained. I was laughing in the face of responsibilities stone weight. I wanted to become lost in the whirl of time. There was a shadow in my thoughts. An unspeakable thing. I wanted to elude forever the great seriousness of age and the great honour of war.

What can be done, truth speaks through many passing voices, listen. I had large sheepish brown boy eyes and I nod in agreement. I can not fight my way out of a paper bag. I am not much of a solider. The war fights itself. All wars are one war. One perpetual human war: the flowers garland themselves. The blood is overwrought. I am overwrought. This whole thing reeks of the navel: a longing for the return to the womb.

Despite myself, I soldier on, a mere 23, my rife like a snake from some mad taxidermist. My hands like great roots of some mind tree. But I am not much of a mind; I am infantry, infantile, infinite midst the decibels of shells. I’ll be gone in a quick mist. Ack! I could murder a good woman right now. By that I mine, I could love one, I could fold myself into her, but I’m so bad at folding, I do it either to eagerly or not at all, I have all the hallmarks of a bad amateur with women: over confident, self-conscious, showy. But! I am too harsh. They are equally shaky immature flower openers of lust. They could be English, French, Italian, Japanese, but each one I would kiss, with ten times the lips. Ah, but these women of love and ball squeeze and heart ache are a million bombs away, a thousand realities from here.

The Commander and Chiefs whisper voodoo into each others ears, conspiratorial, stroking some grandiose behemoth scheme, which, I we you them us our all, know nothing about. I am riddled with doubt. But it passes till death do us part. Logistics/practicalities/numbers: This is a Commanders Holy tablet. There is no doubt. We don’t have much time to learn the steps, before we’re on under the flare of the bright Light.

Here I pace the floor expecting the worst of life. The rats are at ease in the corner. I am thin. My sabre glints its third eye. I am barely a man but you should see me animal on the park. Fired up, trench-wise, feral and frantic, primed for destruction. Switched alive, ready for Agamemnon, Troy – some Battlefield of Medals and casualty rolls. This is the place were tiny pawns: stand side by side: explode one way or the other, who rush into the lions jaw, who pour into the fiery chasm of artless war, who rush like fireflies fire wise into the belly of Moloch, Ares, Madeleine, Medusa, who rush hell bent toward the future, screaming like a choir of eunuchs.wailing through bestial throats the blood of Worlds pummelling.

I am Ready. I am Fierce. I am Possessed. I am Fire of Flesh. I am Skyscraper. I am Wall. I am Metal. I am Jaw. My bullets shall kiss the blood and with that paint themselves and laugh with the shrieks of whores! GOD MAKES MEN MAD, BUT SOMETIMES, WAR MAKES MEN GODS. Insane enough to return again and again.