Thursday 10 September 2015

Great (?) Expectations. David Stone (USA) and Cheryl Penn (South Africa)

GREAT (?) EXPECTATIONS
They looked
they wanted
they expected
a boy,
but only she came.
disappointment
he died
on the way here
he was buried by the tracks
along Aristotle’s Way.

wagoner's grief grips the seat. identification. dog tags. erupted parcels of pills. dreams of aliens mixed with night mares survived. who took the survey? beliefs in the Hippocratic Oath. members only drinks. cigar smoke. reading the news. parallel memories.

on walls of parallel memories
who wants to work
who wants to eat?
scaffolding so high
it blocks the sun
lines no longer
carry life
THIS is why grey snow falls.
Another attack
like it was nothing/our walls were
NOTHING
mediocre pilots
it’s a new record
blades made hypocrisy rise.


ice scrapers. absolved Soviet dishes. drones. a new empire. past. past the scaffolds wavering in the wind zone high up 80 or so miles so high that I can see over the Rockies into the Canyon so bizarre in haste scrambled to eat and run.

words were spilling
new frozen realms
can you take me to their leader?
music was waning
a search team not sent.
its too good to be true
hooked up to inevitable conclusions
upside down
she said she would try free her
but chains too long
attached clipboards
names of the doomed
embedded in Canyon scaffolds.


haste.

driven past the equinox Adonai heeded healed disrupted animal life bizarre sounds of the stereo equipment installed opened climbed up a ladder a stone stairwell eaten
resolved. analysis of the leader. speakers. microphones. assailants. sound traps. a trillion deaths. miles of sand the conclusion dissolved in apprehension.

Apprehension
its all a Questions
Does life give
second chances?

            Do you?

Flat line bomb drop
You’re not helping.
I wont endanger
your entitlement to  knowledge
(and dead ends),
minor innovations
the chance to take  assailant labor
into uncertain futures.
make up your mind.
As much as we give,
our mistakes are impossible
to recover from.

a thought of Beckett's Waiting. messenger. Abraham-the fable. attempt to imagine God. ideas. a breath. an atom. who knew that the first atomic explosion would stop?  Teller's tall talent. enough. air. bodies breathe. taken awry. split. swam across
an alleyway. of beliefs that bled and followed the course. a simple extraction. people laugh. ideas suffer. graduate. degrees. splendid. we repeal.

Truth Tellers
Stay out of sight
they were so young
red sightings through trees
stones tinkering
it was 5.42am
and warnings were scarce.
he hunts alone
while we try
to rebuild our strange cities
NOT based on fables
but Abrahamic faith.
Confessions of escapees
confined at all times
former members of council
deterrents
our hands always forced
(here),
a chance to start something
better
(there)
now just prisoners without titles.


The birth rings. parallel. aspects. pieces. meanwhile the space voyager espies Pluto and eavedrops beyond the geomagnetic prism.

We found a way out
perhaps we will go home
whatever is going down
these places,
these people,
they’re not real
not our real.
We’re forever playing
Catch-Up
and life
it’s The Great Fire
over and over and over
again.

Great Fires-burnt Europe through the ages. the Heraclitean fire,the photons embarking on their 100,000 year journey from the center of the sun to reach California to burn the shrubs.
accelerants. fire obsessions. the Great Chicago Fire caused by a cow in a barn. smoking. a band. a smoking jacket puffing in the lounge and discussing macroeconomic stats.

A verse
set on fire
lost replaced with
Outside there,
things seemed more vibrant
but you were dead
and the insects,
they feed on us.
a funeral
I tried to get away
as far as possible
other wars,
rescue missions
Great Fires
I needed that payment
dreaming
every night
nothing was real
how?
that cut in the earth
wider than we could imagine
found in emergency kits
while Edwardians danced
their silly dances
and the poor?
they just starved.

the fire in Baltimore-the riots-the CVS pharmacy and an unfinished apt complex for elders. the police commissioner was fired. games. game theory. the rulebook of Machiavelli. you must be a master of lies to advance.

If you have something you know other people want
how do you hide it?
Coins in the jukebox
Campari on ice
excavated from the Himalaya’s
by Japanese running columns
connected somehow
were you Machiavelli followed?

Its what the seasons come down to.


someplace to rest. London. criminal bombings. the Londoners hiding in the Tubes.  the Americans come. D-Day.  reichs. the penalties never end.

We have to keep moving
through isolated landscapes
so cold the rotors freeze
even music is quiet.
Can you shut the airlifts to safety?
its getting worse in quarantine
hiding makes changes necessary
be safe out there
in
someplace to rest.

the airport vision. the pilots' visors. their families home somewhere maybe divorced and alienated while the flight ventures through streams of clouds and tariffs.

flying
past families
past files and sweepers
they didn’t really care for anyone
if he dies
no one will know
trying to open metal doors
that never were locked
windows on top
the view down
-   it was enough for us
-   to hang on
out there
getting creative.
Conversations that stopped
  watching
clouds and tariffs.

deaths and ports. waiting for arrivals. a smoking lounge. a comfortable seat on the flight. first class. travel. relics. what is your favorite dinner? we have learned. arrears. tables. meal preparations. for a banquet. requests. songs. the players.

the airport vision continues?
I’ve just come from the stars
(a game face).
 - said the players
Strapped to requested chairs
- What’s the plan?
Regarding?
- You’re here to screen us?
You think you’re ready?
the drawings
they pass the time
no more voices, just mine
that’s better -
in and out of these mind places

why do you question me?

Secrets my dear
are never said out loud
no matter what or where
you cannot even breathe them.

listening,not on purpose,in the lounge. secrets?  everybody's business. earphones. games. everything is electronics. waiting to physically fly someplace else. to be aloft for a while.
Pluto. suddenly we know it is a red planet with a nitrogen atmosphere and liquid nitrogen rivers and a giant moon with a gash in its face. and it is not all dark-it gets a few minutes of dusk from the sun.

ice mountains, on icy orb downgraded dwarf planets, clues to water soft bedrocks, secret surprises on tv on tight chairs, people breathing too close.
From the flightdeck
Please pocket your great expectations
the deal was signed a big piece of the puzzle спокойствие
but aren’t  you curious about the rabbit? secretly of course
I’m skeptical
the very nature of ethics
is
they cant be trumped
decaying moral fiber
walking
talking
rarely wanting
whatever you gave them
(from the outward bound flightdeck).

the dictation. anarchy bites?  escapes. the structure explained. Hobbes: here are the passions-chief of which is the desire for power which is only cut off by death.   the ascent of assessments. the judge. cherubim. (Poe's visions).
his highness. the queen dictates the stages of ascent. the Dantean spiral.  accentuated models.  animated. the debate in the lounge.

Jasmin-what-you-doing?
Stop staring/scaring the customers
do you know who that is?
The Pilot?
everything all right?
it could be better - right?
what you got kid?
five years later
high penetration bullets
stock trading on power
deep breathing
a son down a rabbit hole
betting 10 to 1
in airport lounges
falling though barriers of ascending assessments terminating in accentuated models.
rightly observed. the cost of money. a separable calculation. bonds. all is found. unpaid. representatives tolled. i can't find my monocle. i know it slipped out of my pocket. it might be 35,000 feet down by now.


home (a while away)
in better spirits?
a whole newfangled realm
no boundaries
loosing our minds (at 35000 feet)
tell me if I’m crossing lines
a tired
but tested compass.
obscurity in misunderstanding
where are we?
no sign yet
could they back out?

in some kind of orbit impossible to recognize. skepticism. belief systems. The Egyptians discarded the brain considering the heart the most important.

(The We) are
transhistorical
longing
for what has eluded (The Us)
transcultural
relinquishing character
to
irony
breathtaking in scope.

met somewhere in Berlin sometime when it was tranquil in the aftermath. read a map. the zones. the quarters. the ideologies. past times.


They found your monocle
homeless in Berlin
early map reading
birds in flight
circumferential navigation
unique ideologies
no fake calls
jumping on loose boards
he kept kicking
chaos to touch
when they looked for him
when he saw him,
he just wasn’t there.

a no show. I ducked into a café. watched out the big glass window. a field of lives. a coloration. a speech. an inspection. creatures. which customer has a bomb? field artillery signals.
it was the butler.


Who would have thought…
his companions at the citadel
DID they try stopping him
hard enough?
Blame.
It goes a long way on winters nights out there
looking for her
it doesn’t matter who wrote it
but who acts it
(that’s what they whisper)
(ultimately).

Columbo interrogated so innocuously with his dog and his wife and inspected the food particles on the fork.  a death sentence. the judgement. the frail system. sized penitentiary. besides it was a calm night and the wind seemed comforting.

Book and Chapbooks made for An Encyclopedia of Everything - The Expanded Version.
Edition of 1 Book and 7 chapbooks.  Word collaboration with David began 29th June and ended (but began again) on July 29th 2015.  Serendipitous? I think so.

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