Gopher - Issue 25

WRITINGS FROM THE RODENTS OF THE UNDERGROUND
Volume Number Three -- Issue Number Twenty-Five
"Issue of the Ancients"
[Rewired raises coffee cup in a toast:]
"This to three years of Gopher, with millennia running in the gaps between issues!"
When life gives you lemons, hide them in your pocket,
Piss in a jug, hand the jug back to life on a hot summer day and offer it sincerely, saying, "Lemonade?"
(c) 2000, All rights reserved to Rewired and the Gopher Society.
e-mail submissions to me, the stupid fucking editor, at: Rewired@Trianglepants.com,
because hotmail sucks cock and is currently booting me off line consistently.

-The Guy Sitting at His Computer, Who Takes this Shit and Puts It Together Every Five Thousand Years, and Then Takes Two Thousand Years to Send it to CIB Man to Edit It-
Rewired

-Spell-checking and Grammatical Correcting Gopherboy Who Takes Three Thousands Years to Find His Edited Version of This Issue to Give Back to Rewired So He Can Update It, Adding up to Exactly Ten Thousand Years of This Issue Bouncing Around-
The CIB Man

-HTML-Reformatting Ex-Green Haired Guy Who Took Me to My First Two, and As-Of-Yet the Only Two Concerts of My Life, Who Might Take a Few Days to Post This Issue on His Site-
Mr. G

-Beautiful Brown Eyed Cook of the Month Ten Thousand Years Ago When the First Version of This Issue of the Zine Was Put Together-
Tiffany

-Dedication-
The Twisted Programmers of this Banal Reality,
for Making All the Beautiful Bullshit That This Zine Contains Possible.

-Nifty Fact of the Month, Ten Thousand Years Ago-
You can live off of Ramen Noodles for at least two weeks -- but I wouldn't recommend it.

-List of Literary Masters Who May Be Dead By This Time For All We Know, and to Whom We Deeply Apologize-
Tinman
Yustin
CIB Man
Issa
Nightfall
zweiten zu Gott
mnrevera
Alex Travanti

-Table of Literary Expressions of Mental and Emotional Phenomena Contained Herein-

Editorial of the Ancients	by Rewired
The Mud that Splashes Up From the Bumps	by Rewired
The Potty on the Hill	by Rewired
Picture, if You Will, an Historic Work of Art	by Yustin
Untitled	by CIB Man
So Where's My Center?	by Rewired
nirvana	by Rewired
Carpe Diem	by Issa
Untitled	by Zweiten Zu Gott
Of Mice and Men With Tongs in Bathrooms	by Rewired
Creation, Evolution, Death, and Decadence	by Yustin
An Interlude
Chasing the Tail on the Donkey That is Me	by Rewired
High School Memories	by Issa
Fucking Your Own False Ego	by Rewired
Get the Real World Off Your Shoulders	by Rewired
Untitled (#2)	by Zweiten Zu Gott
Semantics, Communication, and Pointing at the Moon	by Rewired
Let Us Find the Way	by mnrivera
Sheep in Wolf's Clothing (another Parking Lot Conversation)	by Rewired
Frustrated Poets	by Tinman
Filling the Silence Left Behind By the Lack of Verbal Communication	by Rewired
Bullies	by Rewired
Fire Thought	by CIB Man
Green World	by Tinman
Age is but a Number	by mnrivera
Romance: It Ain't Just Lovin'	by Yustin
Unpredictable	by Rewired
Triumph of the Crab	by Tinman
Dusk	by Alex Travanti
Hollowed Ground	by Tinman
Stream of Consciousness #1	by Alex Travanti
How I'd Die	by Rewired

If you haven't noticed, it's still 2000,and we're still not dead yet, or overrun by aliens or dominated by a one-world government. I have motivated myself enough to move back to the college town of Kent and get a job, but that really shouldn't be of much interest to you. Don't mind me. Third shift has been getting to my brain, and not always in the good way-- and since I really should be getting to bed here pretty damned soon, and I want to email this to my spell-checking friend before I pass out or start hallucinating due to sleep deprivation, I will leave you with this short, unneeded editorial lacking the usual lengthy, annoying substance and let you to see how damn good this issue is all by yourselves. Live long and slobber.

All right, straight to the happy horse shit: we're back, like last time, only we were lazy longer this time. And no, it wasn't just me this time, you reader(s) out there - this involved a lot of confusion and forgetfulness, not all of which was my fault. It's here though, better late than later, unless your eyes aren't reading this, which could mean any number of horrible things: someone killed me and stole this disk and my computer's hard drive, the internet ceased to exist, someone somewhere caused the space-time continuum to collapse, I inadvertently erase this issue, causing more chaos to what has already been a chaotic system of events, or some other cause that cannot be grasped by the boundaries of our puny human intellects.

Speaking of puny human intellects: I encounter a lot more of them nowadays than I used to - those robots that call themselves people - and perhaps this is because I get out more, but I don't really. So maybe I've become a moron magnet. Maybe the world's getting dumber, or my delusions are gaining strength, an my arrogance is growing. Maybe some guy around the block has the secrets of the universe in a little cookie jar he keeps behind his stack of pornographic magazines. Maybe OJ didn't do it. I don't know. Was I just talking about stupid people?

Women can be horribly stressing, as any guy will tell you (unless you're a guy, at which point you already know this). Two ex-girlfriends go into the Army, get pregnant, get married to Army guys and move away. Every time I move to Kent, someone from Thompson is interested in getting together with me. Whenever I'm in Thompson, I have a shot at someone in Kent. If I station myself somewhere in between these two sorry-ass towns, I'll probably hear from some gorgeous girl who wants to be my sex slave - who lives in Nebraska. I almost had it going with a great girl here, but as with most women I get involved with, she was going through a turbulent time when I met her, got drunk with me and my friends, stripped for all of us, and never called me back. Then I bumped into her on my way into my grocery store stock job on my first day, only to find out she was spending her massive amounts of free time smoking pot with some guy. So I'm back to gawking at Christina Aguilara and Claire Danes. I gots Claire Danes wallpaper for my computer.

Hrmmm.... A bit too much personal information for you all, eh? Well if decency is what your looking for, you came to the wrong place, my friend.

[Brief Pause as Addicted Editor Rushes Downstairs to Get a Coffee, on his Way Outside to Smoke a Cigarette]

Note: Hostess Brownie Bites taste like stale donkey turds - and yet I am still eating them. ...okay, I stopped. They really are disgusting. Hopefully the coffee kills the flavor. Mmm. Now I have that liquefied and thoroughly-caffienated stale donkey turd aftertaste in my mouth. Not at all pleasing. Short sentences. Yes.

I'm quite agitated about something: since I moved back home (again) after living in Kent (for the third time since May of 99) I decided to start watching television again. (As if you really giving an enflamed flying rat's left ass cheek, I wrote television because I hate writing it's abbreviation, because more than two capital letters in such close proximity to each other just looks bad. I hate exclamation points, too. Woody Allen had a good quote on that, but I'm too lazy to look. Good thing I filled in the quotes for the zine three months ago, when I cut-and-pasted-and-typed the original version). I noticed that, though MTV (damn) stands for `music television', it very rarely plays music videos. They got all these stupid shows on now at all hours of the day played by bad actors - they had such a hard time finding decent people to act for their bad scripts that they had to create a host of shows that are all about consistently taping normal, everyday boring individuals in the `real world.' You only see videos on that annoying show were that guy sits in front of an audience of pimple-faced teenage girls, and play videos that those pimple-faced teenage girls want to see most. They especially like playing videos that are indirectly mocking the stupidity of the shows and the other videos, songs and singers that are on that show. After watching the show long enough waiting for a good video, wondering if there were any in existence any more, I feared my IQ was lowering to their level. It's low enough. Stay away from so-called `music' television, kids. It's a rip-off.

I can't believe she danced naked in front of my friends. My friends are going in and getting out of the Army, going in and getting out of college, having babies and buying houses and getting good-paying jobs - and I can't even hold down a low-paying job or get a fucking date.

This is really getting sad, isn't it? I'm done now, it's five forty-three in the morning, I haven't gotten any sleep, I'm listening to an old Green Day tape in the background - it's been awhile - and I'm thinking I should probably save this thing to disk, take it downstairs and email it to the G Mister guy. I'm thinking I might babble a bit first, but it's already a dreadfully long editorial and a pretty long issue - as it well should be, having taken this long to get finished - and it'll be a long, long, long time until I finish this sentence anyway, so I might as well just write to my heart's content, or mind's content, which should take a long time because neither my heart or my head have been content in a really long time. I'm really embarrassed at that article on masturbation I wrote a long time ago - but no one ever commented on it, and so I'm thinking maybe they just didn't read that issue of Gopher. But none of my friends even commented on it, isn't that sick? Well, the article was. I also hate that Benny story. It started nowhere and got lost there. My stories are getting better though, at least I think, so at least there's some self-improvement in my life. Now I just have to get a good job, draw and write for a living, stop brooding over two pregnant ex-girlfriends married out of this state all the while being in the Army - a horrid pattern in my life, this army-ex-girlfriend-pregnant-married-out-of-state-brooding-thing - and get myself a girlfriend already. It's been... awhile... too... too, too long....

She hid in the shade of the weeping willow, and she could feel the old life of the tree on her back, even through her black button-down shirt and leather coat. She thought for a moment that perhaps she could remain in the darkness that swallowed the world beneath the tree forever, for she felt a certain comfort here, a security that she found hard to describe. She watched as people walked by, their minds on their short-term goals, which for most of them were reaching a slightly-altered manifestation of yesterday and every day prior. Her own motives might me pointless, she thought - a waste of time and energy. Nevertheless, she knew she had to do it, she knew she had to break her comfort to face the truth, something she had desired for so long but had, as of late, come to see as untouchable.

Her eyes skimmed across the faces now, but none which matched the photo she had burned into her mind. Then she saw him - tall, with fuller cheeks, tortured eyes and an attention that seemed focused on something that wasn't as easy to read as it was with the others in the crowds that slumped on like redundant, soulless robots on the streets around him. He was at the bus stop, taking drags off his cigarette. The bus stopped, and he waited for his chance to get on.

From across the street under the tree, she breathed in deeply, and then let it go. She ran across the blacktop, dodging the traffic expertly, casually walked up the steps that led to inside the bus.
An elderly fellow with gray hair and a thick moustache stared at her through thick-rimmed glasses that magnified his green eyes to the size of the lenses.

She dug in her coat pocket and handed it to him - he took it in a manner that almost seemed like disappointment.

She glanced at the faces and found his - he was in the seat, alone, hands in his pockets and eyes gazing out the window. She plopped down next to him, but he only glanced at her out of the corner of his eye before resuming his gazing out the window. The silence was almost comfortable, and that seemed to bother her.

She watched him, and he didn't even seem to realize it as he took his sleeve to wipe the window free of the fog that had formed on the glass.

He looked at her and shrugged. "It's nice to watch things as you go by, but you can hardly focus on the scenery when all this mud is smeared into it."

"You act as if someone put it there strictly for the purposes of pissing you off," she said in a half-joking voice. He didn't seem at all offended by the sharpness she had feared her voice had expressed.

"I suppose I kind of act that way," he said, "but I know that it's just the mud that splashes up from the bumps. I guess it is kind of dumb to mad at, huh?" He said.

She laughed under her breath - his face held o much life. What was he - forty? Fifty? He seemed to house so much sadness, but also an immense will, endurance and determination. He seemed to hold the same curiosity for her that she did for him, but anxiety barred both of them from being up front about it.

"You going to school? Have kids?" He asked, apparently feeling the need to spark some conversation.

"No kids," she said, grinning at the question, but then slipping back to an expressionless face, the eyes the only indication of her feelings. "I'm going to school to become a writer."

"I don't read the paper too often," she calmly lied, "I probably wouldn't have read anything of yours." He seemed turned off, perhaps a bit confused about the energy behind her response. She felt an anger within her that drove the next set of words. "You ever been in love?"

His pupils dug into her. There were graves in her, tombstones that marked the supposed deaths of things which still stirred in the caskets six feet below. He saw them, he felt them, but he didn't understand. She silently wondered if he even had the capacity to do so.

"Once, a long time ago," he told her. "I never married her. I haven't seen or heard from her in a long time."

He looked at her, shook his head and moved in his seat - slouching down low, crossing his arms, shifting his gaze from the window to the front of him, where he would focus on a patch that covered a hole that someone had made in the back of the bus seat.

"Traditional story," he said after a long pause, "I fucked up. The last time I saw her she had a boyfriend and I was engaged to be married. Nothing ever came out of me and her."

She scowled. "You know," she said, "there's something I don't understand about you men. Looking at you, I can feel you loved her - that's doubtless in my mind. Why didn't you try to keep her?"

"It's not as if love is about possession, dammit - it's about freedom. You're young now - give yourself some time and you'll understand. You can link up with someone at a deep level and all the surface material can distance you. When I realized I loved her, she realized that she really didn't love me as she once thought she had - or that if she still truly did love me, that giving me another chance was an exercise in futility. So I did what anyone who truly loves another would do - I accepted that her life was her own. I got married, she disappeared. End of story."

The silence grew long, and the silence grew loud. The earth stood still; only the bus moved, jittered, bumped.

He stared out the window, and began to talk again. "You know, I ride this bus every morning on my way downtown. I go into a caf� and write my heart away. Every day on the way to that caf�, in this bus, I look out this damned grody window and wonder why the world looks as bleak as it does. I sit in this seat and listen to people's conversations, people letting others know a bit about their life stories. Everybody's got a sob story. Everyone's life sucks. Everyone's existence is based upon the foundation called hell - and everyone believes their pain is greater than everyone else's'. You know what? Pain is pain. You can't measure it. The same with it's dual extreme, love. Of course your shit stinks more than his, or hers, or mine - because the shit is yours and you're closer to it. Life is consequence through experience. Life is the biggest classroom, and experience is the best teacher. Life is nearly impossible to control, at least from this stage in human evolution, and the closest you can get is controlling your stance in it. You fill yourself. Yet I sense that for some unknown reason you are mad at me. Perhaps you've read some of my material. Maybe you found my short stories, written under an assumed name, and found that my problems and thoughts and feelings have a likeness to your own. Maybe I'm just some mirror for you, some object onto which you can project all that hate you have for yourself but are unable to contain any longer. That's why you waited under that tree, staring my way, contemplating as to whether you wanted to follow me on this bus."

"So am I right? Why are you sitting here next to me, digging those angry eyes of yours into me? Because of how I see the world? Because I'm hypocritical? Because I look out this damned window, and yell about the mud that splashes up from the bumps - the shit that blurs my vision as I ride on through life? I have anger, okay, and I don't blame anyone else for it. I blame myself for where I fucked up, I realize I fucked up, and I don't need anyone putting down my choices. They're mine, and they're in the past, and now I'm not happy with them but I learned from them, because although it took me a long time I finally saw that you can't undue what's been done - once an action is taken, or an inaction is chosen, it's irreversible. You live with the mud on the window, you take what you find and what you made and you bear it and go from there and do what you can."

He shook his head. "I'll always love her. That was the never question. My love for her was never the question."

He gave her a look that expressed his annoyance of her, an insulting look. She got up as the bus came to a stop, threw an envelope in his lap and walked off the bus.

He picked it up and opened it. It was a photocopy of a birth certificate. He shook his head, clenched his teeth.

He opened the bus window, and, with his sleeve, wiped off the dried mud from the outside. In a streak of clarity upon the window, he saw that girl in the leather jacket as the bus drove away.

It might be hard for a human to understand unless they've been through the experience themselves, but the potty held a deep beauty -- not in appearance, as any old ninny with the brain capacity of a brick could tell you, but it had an inner beauty. It had a feel about it that was most heartwarming and undeniably unique. The way it rested there, amidst the weeds and freshly mown grass -- it just called out for you.

I remember the times I would go by the place. It wasn't me driving, of course - I was the yutz who waited two years and four temporary permits down the line to even go in for the driver's test, then four times to pass the written test, only to finally pass it on Friday the Thirteenth, a month and a day after my eighteenth birthday. No, it was usually my mom driving, talking to me about something important that was essential for me to know in regards to my future; about getting through high school and keeping my grades up and growing up happy and focused. She babbled on and on about these things as I surfed on my own wavelength, staring blankly out the window in that usual zoning glare of mine, dissociating the entire world away and hoping for a scrap of sanity to fall into my lap. I wished for something meaningful to come to me - something to give me a sense of purpose to make my belief in life, death and rebirth and all that rested between worth something. I stared out that window hoping to find a shred of something that mattered.

Finally, one day, I was struck with a revelation - I had found something that mattered, and this profound source of meaning busted through the most unlikely of manifestations. Staring out the window as we drove down 528, right across from where that company that's digging up all the land around here and making those nifty piles of sand and pebble (that are fun to run up until you get stuck, sink down into the sand, inhale the minute pieces of stone and suffocate, never to be seen again), atop a hill by an old tree, that toilet just stood out for no apparent reason.

It wasn't right. It didn't belong. It was so not conformity. You couldn't help but be struck by the bravery of that crappy torn-up toilet, and it made you want to burst into tears. Whether out of a moment of madness or a sudden strike of sanity, you'd find yourself cracking up inside and unable to help yourself from yelling frantically, "THE TOILET!!! THE TOILET!!!" In the midst of your pointing and shouting and uncontrollable laughter you'd finally notice that what you had just done was completely uncalled for, and you'd realize that you were me, because no other idiot ever gave a flipping hoot about that toilet.

Whoever it was that put that latrine up on that grassy lump on route 528 in Thompson was committing an act of mental terrorism, which is a beautiful form of art that breaks down established guidelines of thought and conformity and flushes it away, leaving you with a mind temporarily disposed of waste so you might bathe in the enlightenment behind life. Every town needs a potty - and the world we've made needs a flush.

In a short amount of time, the potty had become my special source of enlightenment. I'd go by that hill, see that potty sitting atop it, wonderfully out of place, and smile and feel that energy surge in me. Then one day I went by that same old place in search for my friend the toilet, only to find that he was gone. Someone had taken him away. I was devastated - and that sadness quickly bred into anger.

Whoever took it down shortly after my discovery brought up anger that had been hiding in the depths of me. As time goes on, I find more and more that I miss the potty on the hill. The question that still plagues me to this day is what that sinister force was that removed the potty - for as quickly s I had seen it, experience it and wrote about it, the lonely commode disappeared; the throne was dethroned. I imagine it's held in some government warehouse like the Ark was at the end of that Indiana Jones flick, but I cannot be certain. Much like the assassination of Martin Luther King or John F Kennedy, there were so many present motives and so many possible enemies that could have had those motives that it's almost impossible to uncover the truth.
Sidley's may have disposed of the potty. Sidley's is a company that's been digging up land in Thompson at least since I moved there in 1988, and the company that has it's base directly across from the hell where the potty once sat - but it could also be the act of some clean-up crew, the local two-cop police force, or some secret shadow sect attempting to enslave mankind. Due to the fact that every `out-of-place' potty --- four in all o far - has disappeared under strange and prompt circumstances, and only the original potty appeared again briefly before disappearing permanently, I've come to believe that it is the last of the listed possibilities - a sect or force of some kind that I will from here on refer to as the Ultramegasupersecret Potty Retrieval Team, or UPRT for short.

This secret sect must put out a keen eye, searching for toilets placed in bizarre locations that might break down the barriers in people's minds - the barriers that have been imprinted on them since birth through the medium of societal institutions. Whether this sect is dedicated to disposing of only ponderous potties or other like items as well is a good question, but what other thing, besides a potty, could cause such an effect on the life of a perceiver? Save for the potty, I have yet to experience an object of such simplicity that could lead to a stage of such profound enlightenment.

The potty on the hill had become the one beacon of hope in a world overrun by shit. I didn't know who the bastards were, but I made a vow to myself: I swore that somehow, some way, they would pay for the pain they had caused me by taking my lovely, crappy toilet away. The thoughts that ran through me in those moments of angry reflection: "It was `trash', right? Garbage? Junk? Some bastard just takes my toilet away and thinks he can get away with it? Who the FUCK do you think you are, man? Take my family, take my freedom, break my heart and twist my mind - just leave me my damned potty, hear me?"

There she sat, nestled amongst the many tables. Dark curls glided down the back of her neck tucked behind her sylvan ears, coming to rest just above the collar of her dark grey shirt. Oh, temptuous torture; her back was turned to me. In one smooth hand, she held a yellow book, only briefly of interest to her. In the other was her white, cancerous addiction. This cigarette was the luckiest of all things, thought I, as she raised it to her full, red lips. Inhale. . .pause. . .exhale. She dispelled the lucky cylinder to the cruel, black ashtray below, ending its short, yet fortunate, existence.

Why, oh, why could she not turn to face me, that I may write further of her beauty? But alas, 'twas not to be. A new person sat herself between us, allowing me to see only those dark, sumptuous curls. She was a true work of art, but one that could not be admired. Oh, for a chance, even for a second, to see, to record her existence for all to know. But how, how could I do such a thing? I know no prose that I can manufacture can do justice to her; more than a thousand words could I write, but it would still fall so horribly short. A thousand words. . .but is a picture not worth a thousand words? Where is a camera? A camera, oh, my kingdom for a camera! One picture is all I would need. I could turn that work of art into something that will not be forgotten. I would turn it into something; something. . .historic!

But then which would it be? Would it be art, or would it be history? How can one declare that an object is only worth of existing in one sphere -one category? She would be a work of art, had I painted her. Ah, but I have painted her -painted her with words. If a picture is worth a thousand words, and a thousand words could be art, then must she be, therefore, art? Or, if I were to take a picture of her, recording her beauty, but also recording her surroundings, would I not have recorded history? To think of the words 'art' and 'history' as mutually exclusive is nothing short of sinful. Thus, I must say that the two are not mutually exclusive, not antonymous, but synonymous.

For example, in the 1700s, those creating this nation painted a picture with words, a picture of what a free nation should be. Today, we call this document, this worded painting, the Constitution. We must see that a picture need not be a photograph, or painted strokes on an artist's canvas, but anything we can conceive. I could pack up now, go to the District of Columbia, take out a camera, and take a picture of the constitution. Does it then transform from an historical document to a work of art? Well, yes. . .and no!

Everything around us and everything our senses detect is known to us only as we perceive it. We gather information in many ways, but it travels to our brain in only one form. It is all electricity; at least once we experience it. An unimaginable number of electrons travel from our skin, ears, eyes, nose, and mouth as electricity. Our brain then takes this electrical impulse, and puts it into a form we can use. Thus, no matter what the medium, everything is essentially the same. It is entirely up to our brain to decide what purpose it has; for example, it may say, "This is art!" or, "This is history!"

It is impossible for any one authority to determine what something is. Why is this? Look at any dictatorship. Cold War Russia is a good example of this. While Russia was communist, it was not a true commune - a place where everyone works to their ability and receives according to their need. This is why Russia failed where the United States succeeded; but I digress. Take, for example, Josef Stalin. Stalin told everyone what they could or could not do -how to interpret everything. What did everyone think of them? Generally, people in Russia 'loved' him. Whether or not they were told to or actually did, it is hard to say, but everyone else seemed to hate him. And now, to wrap up this tangent, it is safe to say that people telling you what to do is a bad thing. How can I, then, say that a picture is art or history? I cannot.

I can paint you a picture with my words. I can take a picture of the scene around me. I can take a picture of the words that I write for you. Either way, I am creating something. What that something is, I cannot tell you, as I have no right to tell you what to believe. I can only tell you what it is that I believe. I believe that it is all relative to the situation. I believe that the two can co-exist. I believe that I have created for you an historic work of art. Everyone interprets things in their own, unique way. Therefore, it is impossible to say that a picture is either art or history, but both.

Untitled
by CIB man

My hand drawing arches
across this pale parchment
You tell me they're beautiful
My arches on parchment
Such lovely flowers
these colors in black and white.
My poor inadequate hand,
brings some beauty to those
who must not know how to smell
Poor excuse parchment
To be valued by those with too much money
by those with no mind to see true beauty
The cracks in the pavement,
and the ant's tireless marches
For granted at best in real life
Until captured by some eye's hand
To show it on the wall in one brief second
A moment held in time for distracted minds to ponder
To appreciate in artificial light.
To appreciate in black and white.

Amidst the vast, black ocean of space speckled with so many gaseous glowing orbs, around which travel planets, amongst asteroids and antimatter, nowhere near the center of the universe, lies the Milky Way Galaxy. Among that galaxy's multitude of components, nowhere near it's center, lies a sun -- and the third planet circling it, counting from the inward outward, is earth -- and nowhere near that planet's core, on the surface of the planet but nowhere near it's meridian, or even it's equator, lies a damned college town -- and in a white trash neighborhood lies a house, and on the deck of that house, on a couch, writing in a notebook, off to the side and nowhere near the center of the page, writing this in a Bic black pen, reaching for the mug to his side, filled with sugar and a wee bit of coffee added, planning to light up another cigarette, wishing this cloud or smog above would dissipate so as to stare at the available cranny of the visible universe from his perspective, sits my sorry-ass self, taking my time to try and reach the very core of my own being.

Life seems like an act -- we spend our lives building characters, false egos, in a game that seems as if it's just one big distraction from the truth. I was closer to that truth at one time; I fought the game that called on me to play, but I was forced into it, and now stand as an active participant in the game under the character type Looser. The game is mandatory, they say, and you have to play within it's system and seek goals that it makes available to you. Yet I know we, as a species, trapped in these false egos in this false reality that is, in `reality', nothing more than a crude game, are doomed to fail. Whether we win or loose by the standards of game, of society and culture, is irrelevant -- I'm speaking of us loosing something much greater, something much more meaningful, something True. We are doomed to fail in the true reality that the game has been built to veil. So I'm left having already read the last chapter of a book, but forced to live it from page one onward in chronological order in measured pace with the rest of the players without knowing how close I am to the last chapter.

Now the faith I once had in myself -- my true self and the faint whispers of wisdom from my inner core; my soul's conscience -- has begun to dwindle. I reflect on my past, for it holds something I'm not fully seeing or realizing, something I feel with utmost certainty that I need. It provides a key to unlock a door I desperately need to step through. I sit on this porch now, as I have so many days before, and before then in other places, wondering what to do with myself. Sometimes I almost think I hear something calling me, though I can't pinpoint the exact source of the voice. So I follow where I think the voice comes from, only to hit the wall. The wall that this echo was bouncing off of the whole time; I'd just imagined it to be a voice other than my own.
It could be likened to a labyrinth -- my life, that is. It's a maze of illusion, confusion, entrapment, enslavement -- and it's inescapable nature leaves me fearful, angry, and with a sense of futility that runs so deep sometimes I wake up immobilized. I regain control, though. I still go to work, I still pay the rent, I still act in the game. I still see through it all as well, even through the windows of the eyes of others.

Why do we do this? I try and ask them: why do we live this way, why do we live the lie, live in ignorance? Why can't we break through those clouds and gaze at the universe rather than pretending our petty lives and petty masks in this game of mundane all lie at the center of existence? Why do we live our lives controlling others or being controlled by them? Why can't we control ourselves, recognize the images for what they are -- illusions -- and wipe our lives clean of the act and be real, realize the game's nature and penetrate it to reach for Truth?
Their eyes are open as they talk with me, but they blink and go on with their lives. It's proving them to others that matters; it's the mundane things they work about, it's the material things they want. They make it the center of their universe. I fight to keep my eyes open, and they burn and water. I've been looking damned hard, and understand next to nothing.

nirvana
by Rewired

he chants at noon then meditates
forever lost in his altered states
a something striving to be
nothingness
buddy... it ain't all that bad
Sure those racist freaks
whose bald heads leak
from too much LSD
are idiots.
And the arrogant dicks
who've got those sticks
wedged up their asses
are stupid fucks.
And the dumb fluff chicks
in their little cliques
chasing brainless buff boys...
they're all useless bitches.
And those godhead dopes
dressed like oreos
we both know they're full of shit.
(Those who live by a book, most certainly
should be hit over the head with it).
And those rich little snobs who dare
to stick their noses so high up in the air
as we work for bread, they feed like crows
I hope a plane flies up that skyborne nose.
And those pro-life hypocrites
burning down abortion clinics
after holding back mothers trying to get in
where's their respect for the life of a human?
Maybe it's all hopeless, to keep waiting for it to click in
that their isn't only dark and death and selfishness
and everything doesn't really taste like chicken.
Maybe they've really all got brains of pints of piss,
but hey, it's their life, and ignorance is bliss.
But you've got to love the chaos
of so much diversity
your hearts got to go out
and feel a little pity.
Do you really seek to escape
the chains of this hell
by letting them win
by disintegrating yourself?

The smoke curls up from my cigarette. I have been sitting contemplating the things written from your mind. You seem to want everything, but obtain nothing substantial from just pondering. I have come to believe that to get anywhere, you must take actions to achieve your goals. When opportunity knocks and hands itself to you, you seem to try to find a hidden meaning behind it. "Carpe Diem", to seize the day, as you stated is a key factor in life. Seize opportunities as they come, passing up only what you don't want and never will want, for, you may never have the opportunity again. Mistakes are made, yes, but you learn from them so that when you come across similar situations, you know better what to do about them. Such are the principles of lust. Lust is, basically, an opportunity to expand. Perhaps to try to find what you are missing in your life. Sometimes things are just around the corner, but you have to get up off the sidewalk and walk there to find them. And when things seem to be diving head first into despair, its only because you haven't opened the door to the right opportunity. So, you must get up and start again. Dust yourself off, and prepare for the next one. No matter what it may be, another one will find its way to you.

Right now, in my life, I sense that things are going to get worse. I have done what I can to stop the bad from happening, but it just seems to want to go wrong anyhow. What I am left with is the knowledge that things will be better again, but not without getting shitty first; my chaos theory at work. You will find a time in your life when you are the happiest you have been in a long time. But, you must know that with that happiness, you must accept the fact that a certain number of things had to go wrong in order for you to reach this point. Sometimes it takes a long time, a span of years, sometimes just a few days, but things get good again eventually. You just need to take the time answer the door when something comes knocking. In the past, I have heard just about every knock on my door, and, as I looked through the peephole, I liked what I saw. Sometimes I did it out of need for change, to experience something different, to try to fill the void in my life that seems to be getting bigger. I have found that with every opportunity taken, I have gained knowledge; sometimes seemingly useless, but for the most part, these things have come into use at a later date. Last weekend, I had a handful of opportunity, but I pushed it away. I didn't like what I saw, so I pretended no one was home. Eventually, they went away, and I was left the way I had been found.

I also search for things, as I could imagine you search for knowledge on certain subjects, I look for specifics, to try to catch up on things I feel I missed. So far, I have been rather unsuccessful. Austinus knows how unsuccessful I have been. As I could imagine that you do as well. You inquired about how people can just do things to make others happy. I do that. It gives me a sense of security that I do have a use in the world. Maybe that's why I have been placed on this god-forsaken planet. At least I can make people laugh. If I can make someone feel good, then I have accomplished something. Even though it is a small thing, it still is important. If I have been put here for that reason alone, that is good enough for me. As my mother always tells me, "you are here for a reason, even if it is just to drive someone nuts. But that, in time will put a small meaning in someone else's life." So, you could be here for a number of reasons, like just to be sitting in a coffee shop, talking with a friend or someone about anything, and someone over hears a part of your conversation. They will think about that and perhaps change something in their life to better themselves. Even though you may never know how you affected their life, you were still there to serve a purpose.

Untitled
by Zweiten Zu Gott

The heavens are not shared
when she beautifies his dwelling
with ceilings and city lights
separating her and what is in her eyes
and whispers from the soul
drift away into the night breeze
even though she is near
she is deaf to them and blind to me

Of Mice and Men With Tongs in Bathrooms
by Rewired

"The early bird gets the worm -- but the second mouse gets the cheese." -- unknown.

Just before I moved out of my parent's house for the first time, I faced a test of morality one evening. I'd been off to the bathroom to poop -- along with the necessities, which include a cup of coffee, a few cookies, and some reading material-- it's sort of a ritual with me. Other's have found my rituals bizarre, and I've tried to explain to them, but as I begin to rationalize in an attempt to justify myself to others I come face to face with the futility of my ways -- they'll never understand how the bathroom is a holy place, almost spiritual in it's workings.

Bathrooms can be so damned inspiring -- I think we'd all be surprised if we knew how many great contributors of humanity thought up their ideas while taking a shit on the trusty old toilet. Anyway -- at first I found my mind wasn't too interested in reading. I instead found my eyes following the patterns on the floor tiles, trying to look at them in different ways, seeing how many shapes and how many things I could make out of them just by changing my point of focus and the path of my eyesight. It was kind of like that picture I used to look at when I was a kid, where if you looked at it one way it was two black faces looking at each other with a white background -- and if you looked at it another way, it was a white vase with a black background.

I soon grew bored with that, however, and did take up some reading, deciding I ought to take the opportunity to do so at such a novel time of solitude and comfort. Over the more than two decades of my life, I'd gotten so used to reading on the john that after awhile, even when I didn't have to `two' it, or even expose of any bodily waste at all, I'd go sit on the pot -- and all for the sole purpose of catching up on my reading. Suddenly, however, I found myself distracted from my choice of literature -- it could've been Nietzche, one of the books on lucid dreaming that I have, the Principia Discordia or even one of the Bloom County Collections by Berkley Breathed -- when I heard a strange noise nearby.

I instantly knew this must be the mouse my parents had seen in the house and had been talking about so much ever since. Having been selected by unnamed universal forces to be the member of the household to discover the general whereabouts of the pest, it was now my unvoiced duty to dispose of the rodent. I slowly pulled up my pants, buckled them, and grabbed a plunger nearby, listening carefully so as to determine the exact location from which the noise came. Was it in my grandmother's cardboard towel cabinet? No. Perhaps it was in the cabinet under the sink, I thought, and so I opened the cabinet door. I saw him there immediately, and I was ready to catch him when I realized that he had already been caught -- he'd fallen into the trap my parents had lain out for him. The mouse trap had caught him right in the shnoz, and he now lay there, motionless. Just when I had settled on the fact that he was dead -- for he certainly looked as dead as a doornail -- he decided to squirm. Contrary to my initial beliefs, it was now quite evident that he was very much alive, and not only that but scared as hell, confused beyond all belief and pissed beyond all recognition. I began pulling things out of the way - dirty rags, cleaners, and other such things -- to make it easier to get at him. I tried to tie together a strategy in my mind as to how to go about doing this -- and I ended up going into the kitchen and retrieving a brush and dust pan, a fork and some tongs (why I thought these tools were necessary I do not know now -- I am not certain I knew then). I'd decided that I felt horrible for the little guy and I had to get him loose outside somehow, and these were the only tools that would allow me to achieve that end. The plan I'd outlined in my mind didn't translate to action the way I though it would -- he squirmed and jiggled like a maniac and it seemed impossible to get a hold of him, even in a tiny bathroom cabinet as he drug around a mousetrap on his poor, mangled nose.

If I couldn't catch him and let him loose outside, then what? I couldn't turn my back and pretend I didn't see him, to let him suffer until he died, or until my parent's retrieved him, whichever happened first. It wasn't right. And it would get on my conscience.

Since plan A wasn't working out at all, I decided to go with Plan B: let him die in the natural way; prey versus predator. I called on my trusty dog Jasmine -- the Australian Shepherd, the sheep dog, man's best friend. She jumped out of her sleep at the sound of my voice and followed me into the bathroom, awaiting the surprise. I pointed to the mouse enthusiastically, "Get it!" As if blind to the presence of the mouse, she instead dumbly slobbered excitedly and jumped upon the patterned tiles, head whipping this way and that, apparently in the fervent search for the meaty buffalo that was hiding somewhere in our small bathroom, which I had brought her in there to execute promptly. Keep in mind this is the same dog that barks at things that aren't even there at night, and chews up things that are both inanimate and highly priced -- but place natural prey in front of her and what does she do? Look for a meaty buffalo hiding behind the Charmin. I thought that perhaps I could still pry it loose from the trap and let it free -- it'd probably die outside anyway, I realized, but at least I'd known I'd tried. Above all, I knew what I couldn't do -- and that was kill it myself. I couldn't stab it with something or stomp on it or slam something into it. It was against my moral standards -- but so was letting it suffer. So I was between a rock and a hard place -- or, more specifically, a dog as dumb as a rock and a mouse in a bathroom cabinet.

I do realize that wasn't a very funny sentence; bite me. I see your still reading. So I found a pail in the house somewhere, by this time thoroughly frustrated with my dog, which I was now convinced had the mentality of cole slaw. I finally managed to nudge the mouse into the pail with the tongs. I then placed the dust pan over the top of the pail and hurried it outside into the front yard at three in the morning. Hrmmm. Great. Now what? I called for Jasmine again, my oblivious sidekick that I was desperately trying to get to earn the title of savior. She looked at the mouse in the pail -- actually, all I could say is that she looked in the pail -- in a very disinterested fashion, as if she had looked there to humor me. She yet again resorted to chucking her vacant cranium to all sides, still in the passionate quest for the meaty buffalo of doom.

"Get it! Get it! Get it! YOU FUCKING IDIOT, GET THE GODDMANED MOUSE ALREADY!" I picked up the pail in anger, and threw the mouse out of the pail into the dewed grass. I pointed at it as enthusiastically as I could.

Thousands of miles above, Russian spy satellites were looking down, saying, "What the fuck?!"
"Jasmine -- get it! Hey! Get it!" She walked away, confused and scared at the weird man waving his arms pointing to the wet grass and whipping around an empty pail. "You fucking moron, GET BACK OVER HERE!"

Pissed and tired and constipated, I placed the pail over the mouse, walking away in disgust, walking inside as I cursed at my genius mutt. I went back in the bathroom and resumed the shit that I'd been expertly holding in for what seemed like millennia. I stewed on it in the back of my mind for days. I eventually came to bury it amongst other little annoyances. I came home one night, and my mother was boiling hot dogs for dinner. We usually just cooked them in the microwave, on the grill or over the fire, but they tasted really good that way. She placed the hot dog on a bun and handed it to me. I reached out and grabbed the bun.

I recognized the tongs in her hand. Not only that, I wasn't absolutely sure that I'd washed those damned things.

"What?" she said, with a confused look on her face. I shrugged. "Karma." I said, and ate my frankenfurter.

Flat. . .absolutely flat. The paper rolled off the press -one continuous sheet of blurry nothingness. It was not, however, a colourless nothingness, but neither was it intelligible. I paced around the noisy machine, hoping to locate a finished copy; time was money, and my time did not come cheaply. That was not, as I saw it, my problem. I slumped into a nearby hard plastic chair. The rhythmical mechanisms were an industrial symphony humming one monotonous lullaby that was simply irresistible. My head grew heavier each second, the noises slowly fading.
THWACK! I jolted awake, a copy of my masterpiece just having made contact with my head. I grunted angrily, glaring that glare that would make the most powerful of men to cower. If I valued anything more than my time and my money, it was my sleep, and it had been in horribly short supply. I grabbed the final copy from the boy's hand, reluctantly standing as I did so; the popping and crackling of my many aching joints broke the ongoing drone of the great metallic beasts. I slowly looked the page over...Perfection once again -an absolutely flawless production.
I reached into the inside pocket of my jacket, retrieving a package of cigarettes and a book of matches. I struck the small stick upon my boot, igniting my cancerous addiction. I inhaled deeply, exhaling slowly so as to savor each moment. The evil glare dominating my face slowly faded as I exited the building. This would be the one; this will be the one that everyone remembers and no one dare repeat. This is not some small undertaking, mind, but it was well worth the capital invested. The returns generated from this one small thing would be immense.
It was a deviously simple idea: a buxom young broad, and the best-damned cigarettes money could buy. How could anyone refuse that face? That body? Those lips, those legs, that dress-or what little of it was there . . .what more could a man want? It would be impossible to refuse her! That dame had a cigarette between those full lips, looking forward, right at you! She silently sang a Siren's song, luring men to their doom - or at least the cigarettes- and there was no escape . . . no escape. . . .

"And that," said the young executive, "is how my grandfather founded this company, as it was read from his own journal. It is funny," he continued with a chuckle, unfolding an old paper, "that such sex appeal could be found in this ad. Look at this thing! If she had any more clothes on, she would be dressed for a visit to Antarctica!"

He held aloft a yellowing poster. In it was a girl clad in a somewhat-tight but otherwise conservative gray dress. She was not bad looking, especially for the period, but today such things would be laughed at. It was, however, the start of the modern ad.

"I know this is not much, ladies and gentleman," the executive stated, "but this is where it all began -the catalyst if you will. With that small spark, we reached critical mass, and the explosion is still going."

The young man folded the old poster, replacing it in the aging journal. The journal was exchanged for a glass of water, from which he sipped as he let his words sink in.

"Yes, ladies and gentleman," he said softly, making them lean toward him to hear, "we set off that explosion, and it is still going, blowing up every boundary put up by those before us, and if you think that we are stopping here then you are wrong-damn wrong!"

His fist slammed into the oak meeting table for added emphasis, sending ripples through the various glasses of water.

"No, we shall not stop," he said, quiet once again, "but we shall keep pushing the envelope. It's not just a matter of finding 'that girl' or 'that guy' anymore! That, my friends, is but one step! We first find a handle for the ad; something unique --exciting --something never thought of before."

The young man's eyes were now gazing back into his mind, fixed on some nonexistent point in space. His hands flailed about, forming every word in the air as a conductor's baton forms the music of a great orchestra. "Then," he continued, "we find our model, then her costume, then the photo shoots; we have hour upon hour of photo shoots spent looking for that moment of perfection."

"But what, sir," asked an even younger gentleman from across the table, "are we to do if no such moment exists?"

"Why, we create it, of course!" He said slyly, the expression on his face reminiscent of a child not just in a candy store, but one built entirely of candy. "With the advent of air brushing, there is nothing that we cannot do. If we do not find the right girl, we create one. Wrinkles? Blemishes? Fat? Not as long as I have anything to say about it. If Mr. or Ms. Right does not exist, then out of the darkness shall we create her!"

The young man unbuttoned his jacket and seated himself in a plush leather chair, pausing again before going on.

"It is no secret," he stated firmly, "that sex has sold, is selling, and will continue to sell. The general public may wish to deny this, but to do so would be absurd!" His head drooped, and he began to shake it back and forth slowly.

"The general public is so strange," he mused. "They allow their children to be baby-sat by a television, let them have free reign over everything, and many of them die each year. Alcohol also kills a sickening amount of people. We cannot, however, show a naked body in an ad." Again he paused, quite melancholy.

"What is it coming to, ladies and gentleman? We allow so many to be struck down and killed, and most all of them innocent, yet we cannot even show the naked body of someone in an advertisement."

"Oh what great times are these that we live in," his sarcasm so thick a knife would not cut it, "when we are here, being accused of selling products to children with adult ads, forcing our children to have sex. . . ridiculous! All of it is utter lunacy! As I said, sex sells, but we are not selling to those underage; if my son were to. . . no, I shan't even consider it!"

The young man fell into his chair, his head cradled in his arms, sobbing uncontrollably.

"What have I done? What did you do?" he shouted skyward, his voice quivering. "Why are we doing this? What state of madness have we been driven to? No longer do we sell a product, we sell that person sex. Sex, sex, sex, it's all about sex!" He sat up straight, and quickly jumped up onto the table.

'Decadence! A decline! Morals, where are the morals?" He kicked angrily at anything on the table. "What monster was it that my grandfather created? We cannot appreciate beauty any more, only sexuality! What has our country come to? Our greedy yearnings have caused us to make people into fake symbols. . .we create those people, we create the people, they aren't people, they are just objects, and could be of no harm!"

"Why gentleman?" he raved on, pacing the length of the table, "Why can we not respect people? Anyone have any ideas?" He glanced about the room, meeting only with faces a ghastly shade of white. "Not even one of you knows," he snorted "not a damned one of you!"

"I shall tell you, then," he smirked, leaping over a woman's head and on to the floor. "Money. . .money, money, money, fucking money! Money is our lord and savior! We can touch it, feel it, buy things with it, buy happiness. . . buy people. We buy all those people. We put them in our ad. In the twenties through the forties, pinup girls with more cloths. In the fifties, it was Marilyn. In the sixties we had women bearing more skin than ever -short skirts, low-cut tops, the works. It was all down hill from there. . . yes, all downwards into the pits of hell!"

"I don't know about you, but I can no longer live this decadent mess of a capitalistic rat-race we exist in."

At this point, the young man moved to the far side of the room, sobbing, rocking back and forth.

"Nothing is sacred anymore. . .nothing. . .nothing is beautiful. . .it's all owned, it's all fake! We are selling lies with sex! I do not know how you sleep at night! I can't do it any more! The body is such a beautiful thing! Look at other cultures, freely showing what beauty is, and it is respected, not flaunted and owned by a company. Lies are not being sold on a consistent basis. Only in America, ladies and gents, only in our accursed America! No more! No more! No more shall I do this!"

Frantically, he paced about the room. No one dared move or speak. All at once, he made a mad dash for the window, jumping into the great nothingness. Downward he spiraled for twenty-seven floors.

"Another successful businessman driven mad by stress. All of his coworkers are now undergoing counseling to prevent further occurrences. More details will be made public as time unfolds. All we have now is the account you just heard, picked up by the room's tape recordings. It is indeed a sad, sad day. And that, folks," said the young woman who was sent out to this tragic scene, "concludes the six o'clock news. Be sure to tune back in at eleven for more on this, and other stories."

"Oh, thank God," the anchorwoman said. "At least this was much better than the other story about little Suzie winning some stupid spelling bee. No one wants to hear about that stuff anymore. Happiness isn't a part of the scandal, drugs, or death program, and that, of course, is why they watch us. What a loon, "she scoffed, "Had everything goin' for him and he goes mad and jumps out a window. That dumb shit."

Chasing the Tail on the Donkey That is Me
by Rewired

I took the path where the wind blows
I stopped down half a mile for a side show
Lost my way, I didn't wanna go
that way anyhow -- so where do I go now?
Off to the distance, the horizon glows
within the forest before me, mysteries grow
there's a sky above and a rut down below
my mind's everywhere
-- how do I fix this? --
my heart's in there, at the nexus
and as I juggle thoughts within,
my heart's about
I try a familiar path again.

She threw the shirt I had given to her for Christmas at my face. It landed in my arms in a maroon mass of cotton. I had liked the color, and she did too, so I had gotten it for her; along with a green one for Sue.

Somehow I had managed to piss her off, but I hadn't done anything. I was very weak-minded at the time. She was one of my best friends, I couldn't do anything to hurt any of them. Since I was a small girl, and my brothers tormented me, I could do nothing to let my anger out, so therefore kept it repressed in the back of my head. Every once in a while I would let go into rage, but, aforementioned, I was small and would break myself if I had tried to punch the lockers at the time. So, after she walked away, and after she had properly crushed me, I sat, on the verge of tears, trying to push the rage back in my head, tuck it away until I was strong enough to let it go and do damage. I sat thinking, tears streaming down my cheeks.

About half an hour after that happened, I spoke with one of my other friends on the subject. He told me it was because I broke her and her boyfriend up. I saw her boyfriend, Ben, later on that day. He seemed fine with what was going on, or maybe he didn't know. I asked him, and he said that he had no idea. He told me that they were still together. I was more confused than ever, and so was he. They (Sue, Cindy, Angela, and the fat one, Marie) started telling people the things I had told them in secrecy, personal things. For a week after that, one by one, the people I thought of as friends stopped talking to me, or even acknowledging the fact that I even existed. Each time in study hall, when I tried to pass a note to one of them, it would end up being knocked to the floor. The only kind of attention I got in there, was an icy smile from Cindy. I never really talked to my parents, and my friends were the only ones that I actually did talk to. Now no one was talking. I was left to figure it all out on my own. After a while, it started taking its toll on my mind. I started laughing more...at nothing, of course. I would walk through the halls and scream at the kids, laughing like an idiot to myself as I walked on. My grades plummeted, not that they were ever UP there where they should have been. My wrists started to itch; they felt as if there was something inside dying to come out. I used to scratch until they bled, and only then did they feel any better. After a few days, I resorted to cutting them. My brother had stolen a dissection kit from the biology lab, and I stole the scalpel from the kit. It cut easily enough, though I never really had the balls to cut them all the way. My wrists didn't itch as bad after that. Only occasionally. When that happened at school, I would take whatever sharp object I could find close at hand at the moment and scratch at them; my left wrist became my more favored one. My right hand was stronger, so I could cut deeper. I discovered that the art room had a better supply of sharp tools than any other place, and of course, teachers never let me borrow their scissors; that was unclean anyway.

Day after day, I would sit in study hall, and write little notes to Cindy, smearing them with blood and writing some Latin I had learned from my brother, knowing they would never reach her, but hoping anyway. (I wrote Latin because my friends somehow thought I was a Satanist, and that pushed the image of throwing a curse on them) Eventually I learned that fear is the ultimate revenge. But that comes later. I still cried, but I tried to keep it to myself. Occasionally, I would do it during that study hall, and they would all giggle and snicker at me. The best I could do was to look at them all and grin the biggest grin I could muster. I could imagine it looked pretty horrendous, with my face all red, and tears streaming down my cheeks... pretty pathetic.
One day, one of the people I had considered a friend, came over, as I was scratching at my wrist in the back corner of the room, crying. He knelt down and looked at me. He told me that I shouldn't do that. When I asked why, he told me that they all knew about it. This infuriated me. I asked him why he came over, why he was the only one willing to talk to me. He just said that he knew what I was going through. How? I thought, how could anyone possibly know how this feels? I was at my all-time low, and someone was telling me that they had had it worse? I was definitely angry. Outraged even. He smiled as he saw the anger swelling inside me and said, "I knew that was the key." Then he walked back to his seat and sat down. I remained pissed for a while, until it clicked why he had said that that was the key. He knew I was an angry person to begin with, and that was how I covered everything up. Bless him. He turned and smiled at me, I smiled back with a knowing grin.

Since that time, I've had many other friends, and that boy that saved me, still to this day, owes me and my other friend quite the sum of money. He denies it, of course, he said he had given it back to her... I didn't really trust her either. She probably took the money and spent it all on coke or something. Damn druggies. But those girls stained me. They scarred not only my mind, but my wrists as well. Incidentally, I wore the maroon shirt until it didn't fit me anymore. And later I learned that Sue had burned her shirt in her backyard with the rest of the girls.

That was quite a while ago. And, as I mentioned earlier, fear is the ultimate revenge. Sometimes people humor me with idle threats, but no one ever really realizes how powerful fear can be. Often I am reminded of the Scarecrow from Batman cartoons. The writer knew about fear. You figure that all this happened years ago, but I keep tabs. The time is coming for me to release my built up anger. I don't forget people that hurt me. I am reminded of them every time I look at my wrists, and though the scars are fading, I can still see them.

I know what has happened to them, but do you think they know what has happened to me? I know where they live, and who they hang out with, I saw them each once, at different times, while I was working at the restaurant. I smiled politely as they walked in, made light conversation to find out where they were living and if they were going to school and where. And, as they were leaving, I said to each of them, "I haven't forgotten you." I grinned as I said this to their surprised faces. They all left with a strange look on their face, as I just stood watching them leave with the same cheesy grin on my face. It felt good. The thought still crosses my mind to remind them that I still keep track of them. I think I will mail them each a Valentine's Day card. Maybe remind them what they did to me.

Gentle words of sorrow
I so wish to hear
your existence is a mockery
of true depression and fear.
You wear these false emotions
and even fool yourself
thinking you have a heart
your empty mind speaks for itself.
It makes me feel embarrassed
when you talk alone with me
you must think I'm a fool to believe
but you're a fake, that I see.
You smile when you are angry
I can see the smirk crossing your face
thinking you can put up this false persona
and trick the human race.
You're so far from yourself,
if, in fact, you're there at all
all these bad acts, these poorly-written scripts
I can't wait till you really fall --
if you ever learn to stand at all.

Get The Real World Off Your Shoulders
by Rewired

"If you can't fuck the system, at least give it a good fondling."

I'm told consistently by friends, family, and enemies alike that I'm pessimistic, morose, angry or cynical. They persist that I dwell to much on that which I can do nothing about. I won't pretend to be happy when I'm not; I've got to find a way to be happy. It's not that I enjoy feeling like this, but I try and accept it and deal with it. I'm not arrogant in my pain; I don't weigh it against that of others. To the contrary, I'm convinced most are as unhappy as me, some are just better at hiding it than others. They merely have their own separate way of dealing with it. When you really talk to people; really probe and really pay attention, something about the human race becomes abundantly clear: no one's happy. Ask yourself, are you really happy? If the answers yes, think again - just for me, strive for a moment to boost your self awareness. Unless you're a young child, on feel-good drugs or you just got laid really well, chances are you are, for the most part, not happy. The person beside you, in front of you, five feet down from you, and across the block is equally unhappy. Pain can't be measured and we won't attempt to do that here; all I mean to point out is that people, as a whole, are generally unhappy. And I find that frightening but equally intriguing.

The reason I find that both frightening and intriguing is the fact that we live in the United States of America - the land of the free, home of the brave, where the government is by the people and for the people. Strangely enough, however, the people in this society aren't happy with society. Since the nature of our government is equal right of every man and woman above the age of 21, and the people being positioned above the government, using the government as a tool, I find the fact that we are wholly unhappy confusing. Or at least I used to, until I realized how very much democracy is a farce. If everyone's so unhappy with the way their lives work, the way the system is, and we have been granted the power to rule ourselves, why haven't we changed this society to better fit the needs and desires of it's people? I used to bitch and itch about this to people, and I asked many people, including my parents and grandmother, and I usually got the same answer - oftentimes the words were exactly the same, too, which was odd: "this is just the way it is, the way it's been, and the way t always will be. One person can't change the world, you might as well accept things the way it is." Sounds like a democracy to me, how bout you?

Here's how the democratic-based society works: we all go through school, brainwashed by the education system, learning bias versions of history and science and mathematics, and we graduate and are introduced into what parents always seem to call the Real World.

A moment about the Real World. I expected some constrictions, but I did have some high expectations for this foreign place. When I graduated high school (by the skin of my teeth) I felt confident that I had, indeed, graduated to a higher level in the world. A place where I would encounter hard-working, well-rounded, mature and responsible individuals in the so-called real-world that were filled with passion and in the constant pursuit of ways in which to express it. I expected to, in time, become what I had envisioned my parents to be when I was a young child. I saw the Real World as respecting this model individual I hoped to become -- a passionate, orderly, dedicated, mature and responsible individual; a person in complete control of my life. I saw myself able to fly high in the skies of pure freedom given to me by what adults referred to as the Real World, for I saw the Real World, being created by men that must be as passionate, to have that goal in mind: freedom.

Freedom as defined by society is this: financial freedom. It's confined freedom, as some might describe it, but that, in my mind, is a contradiction: abridged freedom isn't freedom at all. What the Real World basically had to offer was `the freedom to choose who you are a slave to.' That was the first big surprise, the first big letdown: the lack of true freedom as a potential goal in this world.

Next was the maturity issue. Immaturity flows even more in the cold veins of the work force than it did in high school. Pranks, acts of jealousy, gossip, crude and mindless insults clearly made out of anger and in order to belittle another simply to make oneself seem bigger -- all these are consistent elements in the work force. Respect for the fellow human being is also lacking, and the freedom that had supposedly been granted to them by the Constitution. People are either lazy, crooked, irresponsible, disordered, weak-willed feeble minded societal drones, or corrupt, power-hungry crooked deceiving bastards.

Instead of going out in the Real World head-first, we have another option: we can go to college. That is, we can g to college if we're rich, if we are subservient enough to the school system prior to graduation to ensure grants and scholarships, or if feel like being in debt for the rest of our lives. The other option is that we can enter the work force right out of high school, flipping burgers or bagging groceries or working for decrepit old ladies who look like some sinister version of Yoda off of Star Wars, where we are trained to do what we're told and how to become good little subservient societal drones.

As drones, we are taught by society, through it's mediums - the institutions that we work for -- what really matters in the world: a shaven face means more than a passionate soul, words are more important than the meanings behind them, subservience is valued over creative free-thinking, approach is valued over intent, and it's not at all what you know, it's who. Material is primary, mentality is secondary, then emotional, then -- perhaps, if you're lucky -- the existence of a true inner self in a person is realized and striven to be comprehended with the least bit of effort.

The Adult's Real World is more backasswards and insulting than the World of Adolescence, and we begin to feel growing admiration for the innocence and freedom of childhood as the years push us farther away from it. We float away from that nurturing link with our inner selves we had when we were children, as we are weave ourselves more closely and tightly to the image we have to work through, the superficial part of ourselves, the mask. Our brains, once fed valuable knowledge, is now programmed by the work force to master tedious tasks and potentially meaningless, strict routines.

Unlike high school, where we're fed bias information, here in the Real World there are only motions to be memorized. Everything's mechanical, and you're demanded to do these redundant, robot-like tasks. The quality, speed and efficiency of your work - your subservience, basically - determines your authority, your authority determines the amount of money you rake in through your salary or hourly rate, and the amount of money you rake in determines your worth. So if your subservient enough, you get to climb the ladder of worth. Otherwise, you're a bottom-feeder - often at an ass-end position at a bottom-of-the-barrel job.

This shallow sense of worth we get battles with our conditioned feelings of responsibility to society. Between these two factors breed many other issues, all which creates within us a certain gripping feeling we call stress. Stress has a unique quality, and even as a low-grade form of pain it causes the same type of arrogance in those who hold it -- it becomes the person's pride. Everyone in the work force is convinced they have more of this stress than anyone else, and their certainty in this is used as a justification for sour moods, and sudden bursts of unprovoked, unprecedented anger (remember I never said I was a stranger to any of this). This stress also grants them, above all others who believe the same thing about themselves, the right to have things their way, without the least bit of coherent rationalization.

The little time our jobs leave for us we use to escape from the reality we really need to work with if we want to have more pleasurable lives. Consumer culture gives us no true satisfaction, but a convenient distraction and escape. It's like a numbing agent, a means of dissociation, a distraction from the sense of banality this society gives us in these roles we're forced to play out within it. It's not as if any of these stress-relievers are otherwise productive - each and every one of you know this as well as I do, we're all prone to indulging in them. Our little escapism called consumer culture: video games, cigarettes, booze, drugs both over the counter and illegal, material pleasures of other kinds. Even more frightening than escapisms are the times when the consumer culture doesn't work for people, or when people refuse to indulge in it, and they instead dwell on it, and they become monsters of rebellion - they kill their classmates or coworkers, put bombs in office buildings, kill their parents and beat their wives.

I think most kids, when they're young an innocent, look forward to when they'll be grown ups and living out in that Real World they always hear so much about. Wherever they are in childhood, they always want to be a few more steps up, seeking a time when they can be more responsible and looked upon more highly and not taken for granted or shluffed off. I remember my little sister, Lisa, when we lived back at Mentor on the Lake. I was going to elementary school and she was still just a little tyke, and she used to get her bags ready for school and hang them on the hooks were me and my older sister, Erika used to put our things for school. Both me and Erika tried to convince her that she didn't have to get ready yet, that she didn't start school for a few years, that she should enjoy the time when she didn't go to school -- but mom told us to leave her alone.

We have such high expectations for the world after high school when we're younger. We see the pre-destiny of academics taking us so far, and then we're given this power of `freedom'. Then we realize, as we get closer to the end of senior year, how uneasy we are about this whole Real World out there. Then we find ourselves in it, forced to abide by it's rules, forced to be subservient to the bitter aristocracy if we ever hope to get anywhere. The Real World isn't life, it's a machine that draws life our of us -- it has green veins of cash that we help circulate, it's arteries the institutions, it's heart the Government. By the people for the people is indeed an American dream -- a collective mirage -- for the government is supposed to be below the people, not above it as it is. Freedom isn't at all how we imagined it; freedom as defined by society comes in the forms of financial freedom and free market-- a freedom within a framework, a freedom within a maze. Freedom my ass -- abridged freedom is no freedom at all. To beat the system you have to work inside of it and play by it's rules, they say -- you have to climb up the caste system, the ladder of worth relative to your wage and your position in the chain of command.

So long as you're a willing slave, a fast and efficient drone; so long as you're willing to sell your soul to something lifeless, unsatisfying, robotic, mechanical, and superficial, you can make it somewhere in this world. People who probe meaning, want something more, who's minds wander and can only find satisfaction and even hope for clarity through the medium of pursuing whatever passions they have -- art, writing, acting, singing, playing drums or guitar, and so on -- where do they find their place? In a cardboard box in a dark alley? In the back kitchen of a fast-food restaurant grilling greasy dead cow, dressing it with vegetable matter, wrapping it in paper and throwing it down a slope for other drones to give it to customers -- fat, hairy heart-attacks-waiting-to-happen?

Through money, we get power; through power, we get comfort. That is achieved at the top, perhaps, but on every step below we have to work our asses of to gain money to supply ourselves with merely the necessities of life. Isn't it grand that we have to work our asses off in a country we own just to gain enough money in order to buy that which is necessary to sustain our existence - and then, if we've got time left, we're able to use what we have left of that money to release the stresses that are caused by that which we have to do in order to get that money? We're caught in a loop. In a horrible complete circuit in a machine that's driving meaning and life from our lives, leaving us passionless and imprisoned. We have to work in order to keep society alive, keep the green veins flowing in the paper money system, to and from the heart of the World Bank, and we are so worn after labor that we take what free time we have to use what is left behind of the money we've earned to enjoy the `fruits of our labors' -- what society has brought to form and left behind for us: television, drinking, smoking, sleeping, playing stupid video games. We then have little time left to remind ourselves of who we really are deep down, beyond the shallow layers of superficiality, of the Mask, and down to what we're truly passionate about -- much less find some way to make society allow the collective, or in the least the few of us who actually hoped for more out of life, true freedom. In the end, we fool ourselves into believing that financial freedom is the only true freedom, and our souls fall ever-deeper asleep at the wheels of our brains on the road of life, guided -- we could say controlled, even -- by societal tracks that keep us in line. We fall into numb, lazy comfort in our lives, pushing away the futile thoughts of achieving some hopeless fantasy called true freedom that we dreamt about in childhood. We fool ourselves into believing we're satisfied with contentment. This is the way things are, we tell ourselves and others over and over, and this is the way it's been and forever shall be.

In truth, belief -- the motivation, the will, the intent, the spiritual force that drives us to materialize our dreams or fall into acceptance of our living nightmares -- is the only chain that binds us. True satisfaction comes through pursuing one's passions, which we're usually kept from, and if we're lucky we get to have as jobs but which are still hindered by the ever-present ominous system that infects our lives. There has to be a way to live our lives in free pursuit of our passions, but we're forced to abide by their rules in order to obtain what is necessary for us to survive, (food, water, shelter) and have little time for actually enjoying life. There's no time to live, so we accept the world for what it is and we carry the demands and burdens of the so-called Real World on our shoulders -- and, below our feet, we crush our dreams under that worthless weight we hold so high above what should be the real ideal, blind to the fact that if we wanted to, we could all change it.

By the people, for the people, my ass. America is more like `the Land of the Meek, Home of the Slaves'.

untitled
by Zweiten Zu Gott

but there exists a magick potion
that rids you of your conscience self
and lets your thoughts become pure
as your blood is tainted with its toxin
After you are in its power
words flow free as does emotions
cleansing your mind, forming a void
a void that allows room to think
of thoughts without disruption
from yourself and this damned society
a society that is dumb to this prescription
only seeing it as a stimulant
just as sex is anymore, just another high
And they call me addicted and alcoholic
yet I see and hear and know
more then most should
and with this brilliant drug
I shall teach to those who have a chance
or the ability to see

Too many arguments occur as a result of and are carried out by words alone. The words are symbols people lie all their faith in; symbols void of certain meaning for everyone as a whole, sometimes even the individual in particular. How can one argue over something when they don't know exactly what it is - what it means? How can they belief in something they don't understand?

My most favorite example of such a word or symbol is "god." People are certain that `he' exists, and need no evidence to base this fact upon -- only faith, or more precisely blind faith. Yet when one really pays attention, he notices that such people have no idea what it is in which they believe. Ask them if they believe in god, and they'll say `yes'; ask them to elaborate upon what god is and why they believe in it and they cannot find an answer for either. They haven't defined god, as with so many other blind assertions -- and without definition, without substance given to that word, it essentially means nothing. I can say a Neep exists, and when asked why it must exist I can voice all sorts of evidence: "well the sun comes up every day, does it?" or "if you let go of that pencil, it falls, doesn't it?" If I am asked to explain a Neep., I might say "it's inconceivable." Two people often argue the validity of a concept, such as god, and yet in having independent conversations with the two of them in solitude I find that their definitions of what god exactly is turns out to be vastly different.

Likewise, people can argue for hours over words that seem to indicate the people have beliefs that are diametrically opposed to one another only to find out hours later that what they've both been arguing in defense of is the same thing. Their argument has been over descriptions, over words, over symbols. They were trying to point at different routes that lead to the same destination. Or they even wanted to take the same roads -- just called them by different names. We'd escape these problems if we didn't just saying something like, `I believe in god', but rather defined what it is that god is.

Semantics are useless unless they are a medium through which we communicate meaning, and using semantics without backing them up with alternate semantics often leads to misunderstanding. Words are only tools of explanation, not explanation themselves. One must understand a belief, what it is and why one believes in it, in order for it to be useful to the person. One must understand the beliefs as best as they can, and far beyond the words they hide behind (and the string-of-words we find in the dictionary that are used to define that word).

The mind naturally `fills in' or rationalizes things into completeness when all it may have gotten was a tiny nugget off the tip of an iceberg. The mind does this with the senses, giving us the illusion of a complete reality when our senses only give us limited information -- how could we not believe it would do the same with interpersonal communication? So understand what you believe fully, and understand why you believe it, and explain it from all different perspectives. You might be an incessant speaker, but at least you'll get your point across and into the minds of others so you can have a healthy argument, or get the information you desire.

In order to explain, one must use as many different types of explanation as possible in order for words to be an adequate medium for communication. It's kind of like trying to take a picture in your head and trying to guide another person to pain that portrait in their head -- it's all in the art of communication, and it's not easy, but it aids in another's comprehension of your meaning. That's why I don't believe the short and simple route is effective.

People can't read our minds (at least, not consciously), so make it as easy as you can for them to understand you via communication. Realize it's not only Zen. All language is like pointing at the moon, too.

Let Us Find the Way
by mnrivera

Let us find the way,
As hard as it may seem.
These fierce emotions I feel,
Are bending and twining me.
I want to be free;
Please let it be--
Can't stand this feeling of melancholy.
As I open my eyes,
I am burdened in deep stings;
That rush through my veins,
Stabbing my heart with no remorse.
Then lo and behold?
I hear those words saying,
"Let us find the way."
Am I hearing right?
Is there really a way to that special light?
A light that shines bright,
Ever so genuine and heavenly-filled.
Lo and behold?
There is such a light!
You grabbed my hand,
You touched my soul,
You touched my heart,
And never did let go.
You told me that we would find that way,
If I could only see within myself,
That a stinging heart is not forever;
For I can be happy--
I can fly freely;
As free as the heavenly angels that fly;
As free as the wind that blows in the air;
As free as the water that runs in our seas.
To be free is to live freely,
Without worries that depress our souls;
We need to see the light and open our minds,
To the beauty embedded within each of us;
For that is the essence that will help us find the way;
The essence of life as it ought to be!

Sheep in Wolf's Clothing
(another parking lot conversation)
by Rewired
2/14/99

`Is there room for second chances
or am I on the third or fourth?'
This pain, friend,
it's no stranger --
we all live this life,
of course,
and like attracts like,
we're both
darkened fools upon
shadowy shores --
on rides the bullshit
forever more.
We drove here to talk on the likeness
of our women problems, listening to punk rock tunes
in the battery-powered stereo in the back of your car,
and spoke a bit about beatniks.
Now I hear the thoughts run in your head, as loud as your stereo,
in the car next to your own car, where I sit alone,
the swirling emotions, not my own, pinching every pore of my being,
as she talks with you, and you talk with her,
arms waving and red in the face:
`Is there room left for conversation?
If not, give the gift of your eyes
Let me see the truth in your pupils
and I can bear what your mouth lies:
it'll all be over
no love between us
there is no hope
there is no feeling.'
She throws her heart into a steel chest
of self-preservation
where your warmth won't harm her
because with it's presence comes the threat of it's absence
and it's better to live without or at a distance
than to live too close and then have it fall away
so she fools herself into believing that you and her
-- that love --
is expendable, in the presence of her fear
of pain, of loss, or perhaps something she couldn't handle,
couldn't bear to allow herself to experience:
perhaps she turns away for fear
that it just might work this time.
Maybe the sincerity in your eyes
frightens her --
she fears your sudden nakedness
in her heart,
as she's layered,
a sheep in wolf's clothing.
Yeah, I know how it is.
I know a sheep myself.

I am reading The Physics of Star Trek. I realize that this is somewhat of a nerd thing to do, but I do it anyway. I am bold; I am unafraid. I am a rebel. Professor Krauss, the book's author, likes neutrinos. He says so many times and writes profusely about them. They are the third tiny little particle that forms when neutrons decay into protons and electrons. Neutrinos-- with neutral electric charge-- make up the left over bit of mass. He says that billions pass through every square inch of my skin every second, but that they are so unreactive that one would need to travel through lead that was light years thick before it reacted with the metal. I am amazed; I write a poem.

My Response, in ballad stanzas:

Your neutrons are decomposing,
Dividing into parts
Shooting a few lost neutrinos
Straight through my heart of hearts.

But I can't feel them passing through,
Can't make them stop and stay,
Nor even see those fair neutrinos
As they sail on their way.

If you but spewed out gamma waves
Which leaked into my soul--
Instead of inert particles
Which react almost null--

Through radiation you and I
Could easily combine,
And though you burnt me to a crisp,
I would have you be mine...

I call it: "The Dreamer's Hope for Love and Death" because it sounds appropriately deep and moody and sort of suicidal. Everybody knows that all the good poets are suicidal. Then I give the poem to her.

I don't think that she really understands it. She makes a little start at the end when she reads about me getting burned to a crisp, but other than that, she doesn't make any reaction. She wants to know what neutrinos and gamma waves are. I just sigh and say, "Physics stuff." She doesn't like the word "spewed". She doesn't know what "null" means. I think the poem was too scientific.

I read a book that I bought a long time ago about weather. It is much more fascinating than I remember; especially the parts about lightning and St. Elmo's Fire and clouds and the jet streams. Basically everything. For weeks afterwards, I am obsessed with the forces that produce cyclonic and anti-cyclonic weather systems. Of course, I eventually write a poem.

My Response, again in ballad stanzas:

Which is our love: the flattest prairie
With symmetry unbroken
Or the whirling dusty fairy
With its fury awoken?

Or am I amber waves of grain
And you the whirling dervish
Which lifts the pieces of my plain
Into a windy skirmish?

You fling me high into the sky
And I am not alone
For all the world goes scrolling by
Beneath your black cyclone.

Where your dark funnel touches earth
It goes never unaltered:
Begetting some chaotic birth
Which ever stays unhaltered.

Your love has fully ravaged me
And left me blown apart,
Exposing, for the world to see,
My foolish loving heart.

So, when summer starts to swelter
And the sky grows feller,
I'll not run to find a shelter
And not seek a cellar.

I'll not hide from your darkened wrath;
I will never take cover,
For when they search the aftermath,
They'll find I'm with my lover.

I'll be strung out across the night
Somewhere above Laredo,
In one long endless spinning flight,
Holding my tornado.

I give it two titles. First I just call it "The Maelstrom of Love." Then I get a better idea and subtitle it as "We're Not In Kansas Anymore: We're In Love." I think it's funny. Then I give it to her; I give them all to her.

She thinks the ending is poor. It is. I didn't meter it very well, especially compared with the beginning of the poem. She wants to know why I picked Laredo. I shrug. It rhymes with "tornado". Actually, I wanted to use another place besides Laredo, but after searching my atlas for half an hour, I couldn't find anything else that rhymed as well. She doesn't know what else to say. She gives the poem back to me.

I watch Monty Python's Quest for the Holy Grail. I think that the little killer rabbit is cool. He bites off all those guys' heads. It's funny. Then they blow him up with the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch.

My Response, in blank iambic tetrameter:

What killer rabbit lurks about?
What kind of deadly bunnies graze?
On grass, on flesh: it's all the same
To little leaping killing ones.
It looks as though it cannot hurt;
Whoever nears it laughs out loud.
It jumps as high as necks and bites
And slices throats with little teeth.
Your head will fall upon the ground
And bounce and roll and dribble far.
Decapitated, death arrives.

Suppose this hare is more human.
Suppose your lips must say her name.
Suppose her eyes are grey, like storms;
Suppose they're soft, like puddled rain.
Suppose her hair is brown, like sand;
Suppose it's free, like laughing wind.
Suppose her teeth are bright, like coins;
Suppose they flash like little suns.
Suppose her lips are pale, like down;
Suppose they move, like swirling smoke.
Suppose she talks and laughs and cries,
Suppose she smiled for you just once,
Suppose you think you love this one.
Suppose she doesn't want your head:
Suppose she wants to break your heart
With lips and teeth and eyes and hair,
By smiling once for you just once.
Suppose there's nothing you can do,
Suppose you cannot run away.
Suppose you never wanted to.

I call it "Run Away". It's a Monty Python allusion.

She looks mildly revolted. Probably she's never seen the movie and has no idea why killer rabbits are decapitating people. I realize that the poem is actually pretty sick and gory if taken out of context. If somebody gave this poem to me, I'd have a judge issue a restraining order. She doesn't really say anything at all, but just smiles a fake smile.
Personally, though, I like the line: "Decapitated, death arrives." I think it's cool. Then again, I wrote it.

I listen to the radio. Percy Sledge sings a song. It's called "When a Man Loves a Woman". Then I hear these couple lines: "When a man loves a woman / She can bring him such misery / If she's playing him for the fool, he's the last one to know / Lovin' eyes can never see..." Then I am intrigued, so I write a poem.

My Response, back in ballad stanzas:

If loving eyes can never see
Then what good do they do?
And since they are no good to me
I'll just give them to you.

I know you'll keep them safe and sound
And polish them up bright
As any treasure you have found
That twinkles in the light.

So wear those two around your throat,
Like twin and salty tears,
Or hang them in the air to float
Beneath your perfect ears.

Or keep them both upon your breast,
Above your heart and mind,
And though I look both east and west,
You are all that I find.

Already both my eyes belong
To no one else but you.
'Twould be sinful, 'twould be wrong
If either were untrue.

So I'll take them out of their holes
And give them as a gift
So never once betwixt our souls
Might there appear a rift.

For if my eyes upon you lay,
We both would happy be:
You'd know I look no other way,
And you'd be all I see.

I name it "Mine Eyes". I think it is really my very best poem because it is rhymed and metered well and is really kind of clever. I consider using the word "breast" to be racy, so the poem is also edgy and fresh. I am pushing the envelope as far as it will go. I am, as I mentioned, a rebel. I wonder what she will think.

She looks up at me. "Why do all you frustrated poets always have to write about love?" she asks.

She takes off her glasses and puts them on the desk. She rubs the bridge of her nose. "Do you have a girlfriend?" she asks.

She marks a big bold 'F' in red ink on the paper, right on top of the third stanza. "Then for God's sake, don't write about it. Find another topic." She gives me back my poem.

I go home. Because I am a teenager, I am moody and depressed and unable to take rejection, even from the Institution. I withdraw from the class. I receive a big fat 'F' for the entire quarter.

I sort of take my teacher's advice. I don't write about other topics, like she said, but instead I go out and get a girlfriend and fall in love. I didn't do it to get even or anything; it just kind of happened and I went along with it. I mean, after all, I'd never even kissed a girl before and it was all sort of exciting for me. Six months later, I write a poem. It has no title:

The craziest thing I ever did do
Was that crazy thing that I did with you
You held me and showed me and true told me
That nothing there was that I could not see
We explored your lips, discovered your chin,
And sailed down your neck to conquer your skin
What there we both found was but a surprise:
My soul in your mouth, your heart in my eyes.

I put the poem in a big manila envelope, sealed it, addressed it, stamped it, and mailed it off to that same teacher who gave me an 'F'. Then I got in my car, drove to my girlfriend's house and, in that single moment when we kissed, I wouldn't have noticed or cared if the whole world had just dropped right off the face of the earth. I guess that's just how it is when you're in love.

Filling the Silence Left Behind By the Lack of Verbal Communication
by Rewired

Two in the morning, I drive for hours
you weren't too hungry, save for thirteen Asprin
your drugged voice echoing in my head as I drove
all the way there to pick you up
I bring you to my home and watch you sleep
on my floor, like you used to watch me
a few days before I saw you for the first time
in a long time, bought you cigs and din
introduced you to my friend, the magician
who read your Tarot and mine, you hear what it said?
The same thing I hear every time I'm around you
the same thing I feel when you let yourself
look me in the eyes, and I feel you
through mine
don't tell me there's nothing there
it's so thick I can feel it's
warmth as I breath
I don't get this -- I can tell her to
shut up, tell him he's an ass,
tell my mom she's a bitch, tell myself
I need stability, tell my dog
my problems and spill it all onto paper
but I can't tell you how I feel
and you can't tell me I'm wrong
and that you don't feel the same.
Let's talk, let's walk, let's sort it all out
I think we both know what
this is all about:
Love and Fear.

Even in kindergarten, kids were perverts. Actually, they're not much unlike the jocks I used to be forced to deal with in my senior class. Their personalities don't change much over the years: large, dumb, and committing stupid and perverse acts merely to impress other friends of theirs that did the same imbecile things to impress them. There were several stupid acts I recall, like some kid stapling his fingers together during nap time (Andy... what a dweeb), but the incidents that happened most often and stick out in my mind most strongly dealt not merely with the blatant stupidity but the juvenile sexual perversity. Some of the boys would peek up the teacher's dress as they were on their sleeping mats during nap time. I guess they thought it was pretty cool, and they were kindergartners, but the act seemed sort of deviant, even to me. I mean, the teacher was nice and all, but even I knew it wasn't exactly a cool thing to peek up there at a seventy-year-old woman.

I used to wait in the lobby near the school room for school to begin, and my friend Christy was always there, with her amazing height and short, curly hair, and her dramatic story for the day. She had been saying how some kid was bothering her, and some other guy was saying that the guy must be a jerk and he'd beat him up.

As could be easily rendered from the above and through the processes of common sense (unless you're a jock, at which point in time there is no hope for you) it's obvious to see that kindergartners don't at all grasp what I define as "true love." Though most do seem to form adequate relationships, by society's standards anyway. You know those thirty-five-year-old guys with gigantic beer bellies who's sole purpose in existence is to watch baseball and football and respond to every action made on the playing field or court by making incoherent noises using various parts of their sweaty body? Their kids were a crude mockery of them. They bonded with their fathers, just as the adults do with themselves, in mindlessness: vegetating before the television, talking about what they witnessed during their extended periods of vegetating towards the television, and looking up women's dresses. So they've at least got the male-bonding friendship mastered at an early age.

I hated all sports, specifically football. My dad liked football but, in respect for who I was, never pushed me. Up until a few years ago I went with him to games, but I did it to spend time with him, not to watch the game. I wasn't one of those kids born knowing everything there is to know about football. When we played back in school, as the cliche' goes, I was always the last one picked. On a better day, I was the second to last picked. On a day delivered from a heaven I cease to believe in, I was allowed to go sit on a chair and draw pictures in my notebook and throw around a hacky-sack with friends.

There were things I liked about football - namely, how much my dad seemed to enjoy it, how it kept him in touch with his friends and gave them something to talk about, and how I could sit and talk with him, eat roasted peanuts, and spend quality time. Realize that nowhere in the equation comes the game itself.

After two decades of life, I'm not even really sure the right way to play the damn game.

Due to this ignorance of the mundane life, and the choice I'd made early on in my life to ride my imagination and let it take me to some far-away lands, I seemed to be a magnet for rather large mutants of society that reveled in beating wimpy little ex-duckboys like myself to what resembles a meat slushy. For instance, every day on my way home from school, I would walk down my road by the apartment complex and this tall, skinny, blond reject from hell would come and flick me in the back of the ears (come to think of it, I've got a lot of that during my life - what is people's obsessions with flicking my ear?) and pushing me and beating my head in (that too... ). I told him to leave me alone, which does nothing but fuel the fire.

Which brings us back to the fact that mother's are experts at saying, "ignore the bullies and they'll leave you alone." I've discovered this about that cliche: if, by chance, as a kid three times your size is committing some violent act upon you such as, say, pushing you into the pavement of a road or jabbing a blue pen into the back of your oversized cranium during History class, you find the ability parents believe is so easily accomplished - the ignorance of that act occurring - I'll tell you what happens: the little rat tries even harder to annoy you. And no, feeble earthlings, they don't get bored. People seem to think that if you ignore something it goes away - well, it doesn't. Ignore a rabid dog running towards you, it doesn't go:

"Heh, this doesn't bother him. I guess there's no point in ripping his face off and humping his leg." No. You ignore something, it bites you on the ass. You run away from something, it catches up with you, or eventually you get tired, and it rips vital tissue off your gluteus maximus. I have a better suggestion. You know what you should do?

Strip down naked. Right in front of him. And start walking around like a chicken.

I admit, it sounds ludicrous, and don't take my word for it, but I think it's the only thing that would work. Unless you want to take the abuse for a long period of time - like, say, after a few years when there's nothing left of you for them to crack their fists into and annihilate - that's the only other option I haven't exercised. And it beats getting beat. He should just run the other way, and you could end up seeing a psychologist, but if you can't master selective ignorance you'll end up in a psychologist's office anyway. I know. I've seen a few myself.

Fire Thought
by CIB Man

While I'm sitting by the fire light
wishing my mind wasn't flickering so
I need to hold on to these memories
How quickly does time go...
Can I think about your touch
And still feel your warmth from the hearth?
Objects separate strive to be the same
The cuckoo screaming a different sqwack
In the mind's mechanical clock.
As I drift further back memories become sharper
The fire's bite stronger as the hand grows closer.
Drift out
Burnt out
Doused out
Awaken again next to the barely glowing ashes
A new day's dawn and a return to the present
The sky's light above drawing you forward
To reveal new firelight memories.

Jeb was better now; he wasn't trying to kill himself anymore. He had come to a resolution. I could tell.

"My whole life," he said, "I have assumed that somebody else was more powerful than me, knew more, had all the answers. The government, the CIA, the United Nations, somebody. I figured that organized bodies as vast as those with all the resources and technology at their disposal would obviously know all sorts of things about aliens and UFOs. I thought that they were just keeping the secrets to themselves in order to preserve their nefarious world order and their tenuous hold on power. An educated public will never submit to the imposed will of a third person government that deigns to rule without experiencing the rule which it impresses upon the people. Only by depriving the common class of information and intentionally misleading them about the nature of the world through carefully manipulated realpolitik and subtle brain washing are the current world leaders able to wield power in an efficient and effective manner. The combined intellect of the informed masses would be enough by its mere existence to topple any dishonest regime or even any leader who did not truly hold the best interests of the citizens foremost among his responsibilities. Yet, oddly enough, this is not the case.

"The information networks of the world don't supply material about aliens because they are unable to. The superior technology and methods of extraterrestrial visitors-or, rather, extradimensional visitors, for it has never been established that UFOs are not simply from a future time period-makes it impossible for any of the current governments to observe, record, or report with any convincing degree of accuracy the maneuvers of these persons whom we know to be inexorably among us. Although they are aware of their existence, they are powerless to even gather evidence about them.

"In fact, it appears that the only reliable information that has been accumulated about the alien visitors has been done almost exclusively by informal, underground observers who are not affiliated with any force except their own passion for truth and discovery. By a series of unlikely, but inherently inevitable, circumstance, I became the coincidental hub of this network, receiving by statistical quirk the majority of available information over a period of several years. The revelations that I incorporated into my theories prove to the most part to be dangerously and frighteningly correct, as certain recent events in my life have verified. At this point in history, I am the foremost expert in this field, neither by choice nor chance, but rather by some mysterious universal force that guided the transpiration of events. The individual recipient of the information is, I believe, incidental, but the necessity for a keeper of this knowledge seems to be inherently warranted by extreme necessity. My position as that keeper is therefore an active impossibility of probability, but the existence of the keeper in general is not surprising at all. I only wish that I had known of my importance earlier and that I had not permitted my knowledge to lie fallow. Yet, it is perhaps for the better.

"I was abducted by the extraterrestrials repeatedly because they knew of my importance even before I did. It seems likely that their unwillingness to kill me would indicate that I possess some piece of information or conglomerate theory that is of vital importance to them and not reproducible by their means of discovery. I hold some kind of key that they require and, because I do not know what it is myself, all of my much knowledge may be potentially fatal to the world as we know it. I am the most dangerous man alive, albeit in an unwilling and tertiary manner."
Jeb was reeling off some kind of verbal manifesto, the result of a week of continual speculation that he had given himself over to while he had foregone sleep. I was only half listening, permitting myself to be dazzled by the sound and harmony of his words rather than their meanings. The rain had stopped the night before and the ground was sprinkled with drops of water but the sky was wide, blue, and cloudless. Everything was green and the world was alive.

"At first, I didn't know what. If I am the supreme repository of terrestrially based knowledge about them, then there is only one other place that I could get more. That would mean infiltrating their own culture and learning directly from them. I am not willing to do this under any imaginable circumstance. I do, however, have a plan. I know exactly what I need to do."
Jeb was pale and thin from his unbroken vigil, worrying about when they might come for him, wanting only to be conscious when it happened. He had finally let himself sleep last night, after the thunderstorm and his attitude was improving a great deal now that he knew what to do. He was no longer suicidal and he was talking like he used to. Jeb was getting better. Believe it or not, Jeb was getting better.

"There is only one thing that I can do. There is only one thing that I can think of that they will never expect me to do. It is what they fear the most, what they have been trying to prevent from happening. It won't help me at all, but it may destroy them as well, or perhaps spare the Earth from whatever plans they have. At the very least, it will make them very uncomfortable and prove that humans cannot and will not be subjugated as pawns and peons and that we will not be intimidated into compliance. They may think twice about what they are preparing to embark upon." Jeb smiled a little, a thin smile.

The world was fresh, the world was new. The storm had passed away and the blinding cascades of green in its wake. I could smell the life. I smelled it in the same way that you can smell death, but this smell was a fulfilling comforting one. Life smells sweet, not afraid like the stench of death.

Jeb had a plan, he said, and that meant that it was only a matter of time before he was building a radio telescope or making hieroglyphic crop circles. The rain was over, Jeb was getting better, and the world was green and sweet.

Age is but a Number
by mnrivera

Age is but a number.
It is not an obstacle or barrier;
But it is something which,
Should not really matter.
For the world belongs to anybody who will,
Recognize that now is the time and,
Here is the place to show how you feel.
So regardless of your age,
The world can be yours if,
You take action in every stage

My heart doth grow warm when I am graced by her presence. This could be considered a romantic line, and with good reason. However, upon mention of the word romance, love letters, poems, and stories of clandestine lovers such as Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, are not all that come to mind. When I think of romance, I think of poets such as E.A. Poe, and other such "dark romantic" poets, I think of swashbucklers; I think of knights, dragons, and damsels in distress. I think of times past, and future, and of times that may never be. All of these are romantic ideals, not just love stories.

Unbeknownst to many, I am what some would call a hopeless romantic. I grew up reading novels of fantasy worlds o