Brief Battles in Baltimore

    Film Scene

 The center of the world is different. May it be a cop-out, if just at once. Some answers are pretty good, and then Love is at its center. Most people represent themselves falsely. That can be a powerful start to any day. It can also end them. The intangible is still something. Or not; maybe not. Love's intangibility is in all of our reason to stay at our center. We are always in pursuit. I see such pursuit is to keep Love as more than a word.


  

 
  Freire

 The necessity of a constant questioning directed at the motives and consequences of an educational process exceeds the curriculum itself. Never has it been a fowl idea to attempt a reform or perfect a system of education.

      "...a concept of men as conscious beings, and consciousness as consciousness intent upon the world."
   ---Paulo Freire.
 
 The struggle of educating a society of peers revolves around a pool of thought eons in the making; ever-changing and ever-dissolving. Education built from collective thought and imagination has shown to be vital to us as beings, living and feeding off of more and more information as we develop. Our education, in the end, beautifies our imaginations in turn.
 So why should we care about education? Thoreau wouldn't have given three s***s about where he had lived or what he had lived for if his imagination had not taken him to a point of question. The details of what we imagine are key to reaching our goals. We are searching for the pictures we conjure.
 The idea of starting anew, starting over or starting fresh would be null and void without the desire or need towards betterment in the first place. Someone could move anywhere to start a clean slate. They know what they want to try. They know what they want to do. Someone imagined living an isolated, simple presence in a gorgeous country with few people and lots of time and a f**k-load of space. Some place like Montana. Someone had something to achieve. Someone expressed their intentions in a subtle way when they remarked on walking through the night thinking about the coming dead of winter. Someone is littered with magnificence to display their affection and contentment with what was once only a thought derived from their brain matter -- white and gray. Now this picturesque notion of big skies grew into a fully realized 3-D illusion. Because, remember, it's all an illusion. Don't kid yourself. This outcome would never have occurred without the pictures in that mushy s**t throbbing with electricity. Only they made that possible.
 Such an unfathomable process of the human imagination is in itself an idea and a process. Imagination can be both fierce and humble. Conscious thought cannot come into fruition without this dichotomy. The more wild or vivid, the better.
 Imagination creates societies, culture, cities, followers, nations, leaders, invention, intuition, degradation, love, hate, art and, amen brothers -- boogie-men in the clouds. Etc. This list could go on past the farthest stars, but what it really creates and allows to be is Everything as it happens.
 The b******s hold the hands of the innocent and they skip forever side by side. The facts are unavoidable. The point is less than unavoidable, yet still valid. After all, "...we are the imagination of ourselves."
 Well said Bill.
 Educate yourselves.





   Bad Influence

          I've been drinking
       lots of highly acidic vinegar
    and cranberry concentrate
 In the opposite of a noble attempt to detox myself.
         
          Not from drugs.
              Not from love.
                  Not from poison or infection.
       
          As good as I feel some days,
       and as much like a fecal smear as I feel like right now,
    I'm having trouble with my innards and luck with my hour.
 
          Failure encroaches;
              belches in my face.
                  Disappointment faces my incoming approval.
                      It matters.

          My tinnitus wales, my bones creak, my hair thins,
       my weight stagnates.
    I've never had much to lose.

          Only I can see the wreck in slow motion unfurl before me
              like a nocturnal flower blooms for bats.
                 
          Money should have more bacteria on it
       so we'd be more frightened.
   
          I prefer the moments of optimism,
              but I rebel in those of pessimistic euphoria.
                  Topping off my cup with a little...
                      "I'm gonna f**k everything up."

          At least I had a good run.
      
          The Devil and I,
         we always pick the parties well.
        He f***s up anything.
       He tops off my cup,
      rebels with me in pessimism and kills the optimists.
     He carefully sets bacterial fright among my many dollar bills,
    brings the bats to ravage my pedals; wrecks me on the floor.
   He stalls my weight, thins my hair, cracks bones and eardrums;
  approves of torture, belches in my face and covers me in s**t.
 He hands me the best drugs, steals my only love, plays in my gangrene, and supports my self-dilapidation.
         
          The Devil shrivels by the scent of cranberries and vinegar, and so do I.





   New Old Fables

     Hey piggy, don't run to me.
     No refuge is safe with you looking after it.
     You know he'll dice my door into shreds.
     And in will swim a whirl of teeth and peppermint.

    I was once a prey, as you.
    Angled by the nets and trapped, I learned how to handle it.
    Everywhere I went he was over me.
    Hanging ready with a hammer; cut my losses, and I ran from it.
  
Oh, sometimes it's the only thing to do.

      And when I cut me down to size.
      Noble courage was no match to surviving him.
      I went away and I never came back.
      It's not for you or your peppermint breath to go and question
       it.

         Drunk and lousy, I've blushed for less
         Been macabre and all but life-less while playing dead.
         Little piggy, why won't you leave my home?
         Sweet and juicy; fat as f**k on all his peppermint.

Oh, sometimes there's only one thing to do.





   Story From My Lackadaisy
    
     A Persian king was named after a Russian land. He looked like his brother and shared the same name. They had many mutual friends.

     In the book he was reading, Jesus was a kung-fu master with a side-kick and spoke any language he could muster. The king saw no reason why that wouldn't have happened. If he had thought he was the messiah and God was his father; he went flipping tricks, he would have had a close friend or confidant along for the ride to do all of his decrepit bidding of farewells as well.

     He loved inside jokes inside and out.He reveled in it when things just looked that special way. He would lay in his bed smoking away, talking about his laugh to himself while his queen giggled in the black-lit background fuzz.

     She had a freckle on her inner right thigh. Small, unique and beautiful. It would be nicer for him once they could do this in the same room.

     The king devised the following week to pass with swift grace. In his youth and innocence; from lack of accountability for the power he possessed, he sped up the time-line and changed the face of the earth. He wanted to get to her. He made impossibility groundless.

     She coughed and he maintained his worried joints with suffer and ache. He held no other woman up to high light.

     She would soon die.

     Rare, it was, to carry scents of pain and sift the air for love. There were few women there who did not take daily showers. Not all can believe in their own pleasant nature.

     The king was destitute. He had hoped his arrival could simmer the heat by a sharp degree. He thanked the heat for less and less. It welcomed him. It made her sick.
 
     He began to smoke more often. Not as much as under the pillars in college but well over too much. He told no one what to do. No one told him.

     Himself and his brother wished they could venture into conversation with something to enjoy. The king refused to acknowledge his wife's impending doom.

     The brother said, why her? He could not understand such a an obvious attachment to, what he thought was, a sad, wet blanket his brother needed to unlatch. He remembered the king crying a lot. The only relationship he saw by the king was one of weeping through Monday's mid-day card games.

     The brother grieved over his friend's mother's recent death more than any demise of otherworldly lovers.

     An official hater of multi-taskers, the brother gripped into a driving intent impossible to escape. He devised his plans to bore them both. People who pride themselves in multi-tasking are, not only lying, but the tasking of multiple acts defiantly slows them down; pulls tight and reigns them in. There were tests. He knows. Not like his peers.

     He would lead them to a healer well known. Only the healer's fiction would dissuade the kings tenacity to save a lost cause. And the queen would be forced to agree. She would tell them to leave her be in peace.

     All the king wanted was some things to fit together without gouging out the edges.

     When his brother claimed a healer the king gathered his queen, precious in her nest, and went on smoking by train in the heat of the summer to see Jesus and his partner in a far and distant Russian land.
    
     When Jesus and friends derailed the hills, the brother bailed out to be crushed, to his surprise. The king had lost his brother.

     His highness stayed and paced around from car to car wondering why this happened day in and day out. Unfortunate occurrences always flipped their talons after the good news had long been delivered.

     His majesty, of course, was unaware of his brothers prank so mourned he was along with his bones and a course was set forth beneath the wires; her highness still intact.

     Those days of pacing and humming and whistling; they come though locked doors with battle cries.

     Once reached, even here, the walls bow inward and, the warts grow in from worry. But when the lady's warmth began sweet decent from her halo, a radiance of gallant proportions hailed over all surroundings and showered the Russian plains. A brilliant, shaded firmament upon the face of the earth.

     The warts turn into ivory.

     On an evening not far removed from this, the royalty dines by candle light.

     The king takes his seat at the head of the table in declaration of naïveté overcome. In celebration of his mate, he toasts the empty room. He longs to greet her again. Until then, he fills her presence in all that has reformed him.

     With his mind free of fancy reading and spectres such as sin, he lay in humble absence of his missing portion...awaiting her scent again. Abiding by his time this time around.

     With ability comes comes great respect for trial and error.

     And still he lives with his love in this magical place apart from the sea. Damned up where no form of people will ever forget his name...apart from me.