ONE TRILLION EYES SEE ME

See, eyes see yes you say yes I see
Eyes see and say
Eyes see me-What I really see
Is one-trillion eyes staring at me
Winking and blinking and prodding watching and glaring
With a great big colossal dare searching around me shining out
In the glaring bright with clout
Moving about from side to side, looking to the left looking to the right
All in one a great big glide
Tall eyes, tuned eyes, teared eyes bent in all shapes
Round, oval and square/eyes, eyes everywhere
Look, look, look if you dare
One trillion eyes: check out the stare
Eyes traveling fast without a blink
Surrounding my wholeness spectacular
Seems like a dream near a kitchen sink
Astoundingly to my mind's eye how sturdy the eyes
Can see and cry, I can surely see only I

Eyes see, yes you say eyes see and say
Yes I see, see you say, eyes see and say

Velma Jean Bennett

Beth

So you want to sit alone in your kitchen, staring at the toaster?

She's a very nice girl, Quentin. At the very least, if you prop her up at the other end of the table, you'll look more normal when you talk to yourself.

You say you don't like going out all the time? You don't have to go out all the time. She'll probably cook you dinner if you ask her. No, she's got no problem cooking dinner now and then. She has to do it anyway. I told you Quentin, she's a very nice girl.

You don't have to entertain her. Just talk to her, like about how you hate your boss or how lousy traffic is, what you usually talk about Quentin, I'm not asking you to talk about dew-covered roses. You're always complaining that no one listens to you. You talk and she listens and then you listen to her too, that's how it works. You let the talk go back and forth, like a Ping-Pong ball Quentin. Imagine we're playing Ping-Pong on lunch break. But gently. You don't want to take anyone out. You're just trying to keep the ball in the air; don't think about the food or the clock or the girl or yourself. No offence Quentin, but we have known each other for a long time and I've noticed that you let yourself get distracted by things that don't matter.

You start to develop an interest in what she's saying. I'm not telling you she has an interesting life, it's just a life. But when you pay attention to something, you develop an interest. You want to see what happens next. It's only natural. Remember how you got interested in the OJ Simpson trial last year? Believe me Quentin, that was very boring.

And then maybe she's had a hard day and you're sitting there taking an interest, and she gets up out of her chair and walks around the table and takes your hand. No, I'm not saying you've never done this before, I'm just saying you let yourself get distracted by things that don't matter. So maybe you pay attention to what you are holding in your hand, Quentin. Instead of going along with it like you're strapped into the passenger seat of a car and then complaining to yourself because maybe you were expecting the sound track of Xena, Warrior Princess to start playing and all you can hear is the hum your refrigerator makes when the motor comes on.

You excuse me for talking to you like this Quentin, but I am very afraid you are going to mess it up. When things really happen, it's different from how you expected. The ball comes at you with a spin on it. You are used to things being how you expected, Quentin, you complain about it but it's all you're used to. You watch too much TV.
A hand is a strange thing to hold. It can just lie there, limp and cold, or it can be all muscle, it can grasp you with every inch of itself. It's smooth and hairless like the inside of something. It sweats: maybe it trembles a little because she's nervous. She's got a warm hand, Quentin. The hand is a lot warmer than anything you're imagining. You need to stop taking things like that for granted.

So you get up out of your chair and step towards her. Careful, Quentin, you're going to back her up against the stove; maybe you draw her towards you, but then you're going to bump into the kitchen table and spill something. Maybe it doesn't happen that way at all. Maybe you've moved the table back against the sink and pulled two kitchen chairs up to the window to look at the moon. Those chairs with the metal backs and the skinny metal legs that splay out from the ripped green plastic seats mended with duct tape. Not to criticize Quentin but you could use some more kitchen chairs.

Maybe you've taken her out to the movies for once. The two of you are sitting side by side in those deep cloth-covered chairs with the tilted backs and the seats that only stay down because of your weight on them. There are people all around, but your hands are hidden in the dark. No one can see you. Don't look around. Don't think about the movie. Don't think about anything Quentin, just fix your mind on that white ball spinning through the air.

11/7/2001 7:12 a.m. (for Ruth Ozeki & Shonagon) Alistair Allen

Black and White Phylactery

It sits, or rather stands, there on the bedside bookcase, a sterner reminder of duty than even my ever-dutiful father's responsible admonitions of old.

It is inescapable, unrelenting, unequivocal.

Yet, it is pure, gentle, reliably honest.

Honor and reliability radiate from it. Acceptance as well as preparation for fate seems somehow paramount within the white, old-fashioned, wavy perimeter obscurely reminiscent of crinoline.

I am so glad I put it there to send me off on idealistic missions in my dreams and to greet me upon awakening back with aesthetic booty.

Despite its iconical ringing of alarm bells signaling the battle to come, it is silent and subliminal, allowing easy retreat from its message, thus beckoning with even more ardent poignancy. Its mandate is a free will offering from sublime synapses of lost memories.

At first, the pose seems ludicrous mimicry of soldier-like attention impossible for such a child.

Then, one notices the complete lack of stiffness and the absence of hunch in the shoulders available only to youthful, developing muscles. And the hands are at rest, not forced into a moment of immobility against a torrent of restlessness, nor frozen merely for the satisfaction of camera or chiding cameraman.

The slight folds in the baggy pants hint at unlocked knees, straight, yet, on the verve of unwinding.

A totem-pole coconut tree appears to grow out of his trunk, onto the hill rising steeply behind him which accounts for the eyelevel point of view of the shot. His brow bent to shadow his eyes from tropical sun intimates a slight deference in his peering down patiently, sternly and lovingly at the mechanical and living eyes scrutinizing him.
He is staring through space and time towards the future weight laid on his shoulders by the invisible progenitor photographer; a weight left over from the hidden father's burden.

He is staring at me from the blessed past.

He might as well be my own son enheartening me with his desire to take on what I have left unaccomplished.

Be that as it may, it is actually a picture of me about six years old in Montserrat, my Caribbean isle of birth, and my soul scurries to catch up to this pictorial pang of conscience's silent certainty, wanton wit and daring aplomb in desiring to deal with his destined duties in the world which I have forgotten, misplaced or abandoned.

Vincia, my fussy sister who always presents prescient gifts right on time, found the old photo in our dear, departed mother's bottomless bastion of belongings, a hen's nest of nostalgia once hallowed in her reveries.

allenalistair@yahoo.com

Planet of the Pigeons

They coo and murmur like lovers, like conspiratorial neighbors, like gossiping locker room adolescents.

You sometimes are the subject of their conversation, the topic of witty ridicule or pensive appraisal as their host. They like your taste in music. That is why you've been chosen as avian rendezvous for this Mattapan block. The flights of fancy within fusion music on Emerson radio to which you extemporaneously create lyrics and synthesizer licks makes them eager to flutter around your eaves and alight atop your roof, your third floor windowsills and porch near your front room's makeshift, non-soundproof studio.

They critiqued and ridiculed your first pathetic attempts at keyboard radio play-along. Then they changed tone from churlish syncopation to ebullient pratter as dogged practice rounded off some of the squares and snags in your finger's repertoire seeking improvisational skill.

Finally, when the Muse possessed you completely and you flew in zen coma over the keys, feet skewing inner city cadences with wah and heavy metal pedals, and with
left hand slithering notes up and down with key-slide throbbing like blood-engorged clitoris, your throat an open channel, they flocked in droves, silent now as the best of attentive audiences. On that full moon evening you played a four-year-rehearsed performance for the angels alone, thronging and humming along in your living room.

Then, sweaty with solitary success, you rushed out of the house simply to breathe fresh air and smile in the open, but, to your chagrin, discovered a mob of teens under your lamppost silently awaiting an encore as you sheepishly slunk through the excited crowd, embarrassed that human as well as angelic ears had been cocked in earnest to the warblings of your soul.

Thereafter, Club Dove opened up in full force complete with a feathery premiere of nests and foul feces. Sometimes you would wander out to stretch after practice and find a virtual barroom lounge atmosphere of scampering scavenger doves shooting the breeze, buying each other drinks, making new friends, ornithological networking if you will, and generally having a grand old time until your rude intrusion at the end of another unpaid, untipped, but evidently appreciated stint as their entertainment center, sent the shocking horde of sometimes scores of fowl, jazz aficionados into panicked flight.

Actually, I only grew tired of their belligerently clingy company, their happy, but haphazard (due to my menacing marauding) homesteading on my front porch when their matriarch began bemoaning incessantly early every morning as if she had been appointed as my own personal horror alarm clock. Her exasperating wailing seemed to last a little longer every day and grow a little louder and more mournful. At first it had almost seemed like cries of lovemaking. But after a few weeks it had grown so irritating to me I couldn't imagine it was seductive or sensual to any living thing, even of a feathered species.

Whenever I went out to investigate my snowy porch she would scuttle out from under the eaves and hustle off in a flurry of panic. Occasionally a male elsewhere under the railing might join her in flight.

Then one day I got a shock of my life. I peeked before pushing through the porch door and noticed something odd about the nest she was mounted upon moaning and groaning away. After she made her escape I bent down to look and my ghastly fears where confirmed. There was no nest. The snow had melted enough to show the upturned leg-less body of another pigeon. She had been nesting on the corpse of another pigeon partially mummified by its feathers and the cold snow.

Immediately I knew exactly who that frozen pigeon on its back was.

Two years running she had laid a pair of eggs three different times on my porch. The first pair had been abandoned when visitors seeking air on the porch had terrified her once too often. These unlucky two had lain under eaves too close to the door for her to flee comfortably. So she eventually gave up the stressful nurturing.

When I saw the second pair many months later I stopped going out there and declared it off-limits to friends. I would peek through the door's windowpane and gaze at the chicks like an adolescent naturalist as the chicks grew into adulthood. I noticed that there was a time when the young pigeons looked old enough to fly but would only run around the porch a little worried if you cracked open the door.

So I left them alone.

The third set weren't quite so lucky. By the time I went out they were already helpless, little, tawny brown bulbs. I didn't expect to find them at all. I had gone out because there was too much clamor and I was troubled by the prospect of a health hazard from all the dried feces around the last nest. There were about four birds now homesteading out there. Probably the parents and the last two kids.

I couldn't kill the fledglings, but I could stop my porch from being a hangout. An unexpected maternal ward was one thing, but a Hell's Angels Pigeon Paradise with loud, partying birds at all hours was another.

So, I would make an occasional foray to their club threshold once or twice a week, and that seemed to discourage club membership.

Finally when the feathered toddlers looked grow I went out boldly to serve a serious eviction notice to the socializing set. All flew right off but two. The youngest and latest entry: recently eggs. They were panicked with adrenalin; a strange, happy light in their eyes. Suddenly in a burst of desperate creativity, one of them, the girl, flew clumsily off, leaving the other a stubborn male, to suffer at the hands of the never-before-seen-ogre due to some fear of flying factor or forlorn prey paralysis.

I left but heard no more chattering and cajoling on the porch for months. I did peek out intermittently but refused to acknowledge the shadowy form under the eaves.

That profile in the periphery had been the abandoned boy, still unschooled in the finer art of soaring, stoically suffering ignominious banishment from his brood...an underprivileged, starving outcast due to my callous intrusion on their harmless merrymaking, an uncalled-for perfidious pillaging of clientele perimeter, an outrageous, postmodern plundering of the sacrosanct "fourth wall" barrier, an unconscionable piercing of the suspension of disbelief shield between audience and performer, possibly motivated by insidious, capitalistic urges for payment in coin of the realm rather than in pennies and dimes of dung! Why hadn't I just left a hat out there to let the mischievous music-lovers contribute what they could or would?

Moms had probably returned eventually to find her agoraphobic boy hidden under the eaves, an uncomplaining corpse sill waiting in frozen anticipation of her speedier return with handbooks on flying, adorned with diagrams of wing-flap-angles for takeoff and landing, as well as delicate, living filigrees decorating the borders of title and final pages with wriggling festoons of delicious grubs.

When she realized he hadn't escaped with his sister to climes unknown, she had started that pitiful mourning, her cursing at me that begun to sound so personal. She was fighting mad and calling me out to acknowledge my sin. Nevertheless, she would fly off reluctantly when I would eventually stumble out blurry-eyed. The sunrise timing of her sleep-deprivation tactics as well as her departures' daring delay hinted at some secret delight in merciless mocking. Leaving rather slowly and too stiff-necked with a new modicum of disturbed and disturbing dignity that didn't befit our relationship in the time-honored hierarchy of the survival-of-the-fittest code handbook, she seemingly had come to believe my bark was so much worse than my bite that the only ones my cowardly cries---so unbecoming a harmonious chanson-lover---without proper provocation could harm in an aviary audience were innocent fledglings and fluffy, feathery infants.

Then one morning I saw two more eggs near the corpse and decided this was it. She flew off but I hadn't the heart to smash the eggs under the eaves. So I sent back inside and as soon s she returned went back out much more threateningly than usual. She started to scream then suddenly ran back in and grasped an egg in each claw.

I figured she had gone nuts.

She was under the railing so she could not fly up out and away without walking upon and crushing out the bud of life inside the tender shells of her precious eggs.

Thus she stood waiting.

I couldn't see her upper body. I threw snow at her, barely missing. I just wanted her to abandon her ovoid offspring, so my conscience would only be half-sullied. She didn't flinch though her claws were raked crazily around the shells.

I threw a two-by-four six-inch plank near her. No response.

I dashed at her.

I kicked above her head at the railing.

Absolutely no movement!

She had made up her mind.

As long as I only wanted back my porch for innocent sightseeing, she would play the game and politely fly away.

But, if I had more vicious intent, this time she would not lose another of her offspring. Her maternal pride had been wounded by the sight of her dead son. She was going down with the sinking ship like some sort of suicidal captain.

I slinked off sheepishly and haven't returned with such a surly antagonism since.

Sometimes I wonder if it was actually the father or daughter who was willing to die for the eggs that time, as I have since peeked the entire immediate family taking tag-team turns sitting on the unborn brood.

Alistair T.S.E. Allen

3/13/1999 & 2/26/2002

allenalistair@yahoo.com

D A N C E

LIFE AND DEATH
A DANCE
A SLOW WALTZ
A FOXTROT

A WALTZ IN ¾ TIME
GALLOPING
MIND NOT PRECEIVING

WHAT SPEED DANCE WILL TAKE
GLIDING
SLIDING
CAVORTING
JIVING

WHERE IS THE DANCE TAKING US
SPRINGTIME OF YOUTH
MID-LIFE
WINTER OF LIFE

IF ONLY WE KNEW
WHEN AND WHERE
THE DANCE WILL TAKE US

WOULD WE CHOOSE THE DANCE
THAT WOULD TAKE US
FROM HERE TO ETERNITY

WHAT SPEED
DON'T KNOW
JUST DANCE
AND ENJOY

IT'S THE DANCE
THAT MATTERS

LIFE AND DEATH
WHAT A DANCE

By An Crotty
2/21/02

Love is a knot...
A noose.
A choke chain.
Only kidding
But I did get your attention.
Love is, at least for me
A stroke of good luck
To find someone who responds to you.
Who matched you in some magnificent way.
Who catches your eye long enough
To make your heart forget to beat.
Love fills your heart with joy
Bringing a surge of blood to your vein and arteries
Two hearts beating as one in perfect synch.
Love, too, is exquisite pain.
To be torn apart by love is no fun.
To suffer the pangs of love
Is a wake up call to life.
I love.
I suffer.
I am in some inexplicable way alive.
Love is of course a miracle.
Love spiced by jealousy is futility.
To be pierced by the arrows of love is sublime
Love is amazing.
To be both physical and spiritual
The togetherness,
The sheer animality of love
Shocks me even more.
To be so open,
So vulnerable.
To see oneself reflected in another's eyes.
What makes me so deserving of this love.
What have I done to be so lovable.
Says the spider to the fly.
Love, love me.
Enter my nest.
Only the first bite hurts.
Love bites.
Love stings.
Love is eternal.
Love story.
Life story.

Fedju
2/2002

SPIRITUAL

He acted like he was a spiritual person. All his exhortations were of this type; citing the age-old warnings about what would happen if one 'did something'; about what a man 'should do', or 'not do' and 'must do'! As he aged, his spiritual stance hardened so much so that people began to avoid him. Yet, one person sought to wean him away from this behavior; not because he liked disliked spiritualism; nor because he like the former. But, because he was terribly wild, angry, with this person, his apartment mate: He could not stand him, nor his constant preachings any longer!

Very soon, there was a transformation in this spiritual individual's behavior. For, upon being introduced to the 'cup that cheers', soon found complete fulfillment in this new behavior; the 'spirits'!

FIRST HAIR CUT

Jan and Mona had their first baby. The mother was a stickler to custom and tradition. She
expected to follow every traditional practice which the family had believed in, and followed, for generations: The 'first meal'; the ritualistic practices that tradition required should be followed on behalf of the baby on particular days of the year; the religious rites to be fulfilled for a new born; the vows made before her birth that had to be fulfilled through the performance of various traditional customs and acts; and, how the child's head of hair had to cut-off for the first time on a particularly auspicious day from the child's head!

Several months after the child's birth,

(From here onwards it is an addition which I only had in mind
but failed to put down on paper within the permitted time!)

the preparations were underway when the unexpected happened! The husband, Jan, disliked this slavish adherence to custom and foolish tradition; he belonged to the scientific generation. He abhorred the suffering the child had to undergo because she carried an excess of hair waiting for the auspicious day during this very hot season when rays of the sun were very strong upon the earth. Very quietly he arrived home after work with a newly purchased pair of scissors, and as his wife and mother-in-law were bus getting his meal laid on the table quietly clipped the baby's hair in patches of ugliness! So ended the slavish effort to heap unwanted suffering on their dear daughter; his first born, too.

I like to write because!

Why do I like to write? Is it because I 'cannot be without' writing? Or, is it because
'others want me to'? Or, 'do I like to' write at all? Come to think of it, I have seldom written without compulsion! Compulsion to sit an exam; compulsion to write an essay in
class! Or to fulfill the requirement of a term paper! Or, even to 'reply' a letter!

I cannot remember writing at all merely for purposes of my own fulfillment until very recently when I developed the urge to say some of the things I have wanted to say for quite a long time. Now the question is whether I can write! I've decided to try, and write, because I have to.

So, I joined this group which pushes me into writing as fast as I could, and try to get some thought or two of mine outside. 'Good luck to myself in this new vocation; And, so be it! If no 'good' results; "too bad"! For, we do not always live to write. Maybe we 'have to write to 'live'! Who knows? But, this I write to myself.

TIME WAS!

The time was when we had plenty! But, times change. There were many occasions when "the TIME WAS THIS'! Or "the TIME WAS THAT'! About what 'times' does a "happy" person talk about? An 'unhappy' one dwell on? Think of? The older one gets to be, the more there were times that were "good of course". We forget about the 'bad" times, particularly when times are 'good'! But when something bad occurs, we think of the 'good' times that were!

( The rest is added)
Yesterday's (Feb. 6th, 2002) special event on television epitomized this distinction between the "good times" (for the British Raj) and implicitly highlighted the bad times that are unfolding for the regime: They bring to focus the 'bad times' which the British Royal Family are beginning to experience; to face today! It brings to mind the abdication of King Edward VIII to marry Wally Simpson, a commoner, and a divorcee in the U.S. at that - a thought abhorrent to the then Englander!

It brings to mind "the time that was" when the British Empire had no part on earth in which the sun could set on the same day it began rising! The colonies were giving high returns; the British citizen was fully employed and well fed, appropriately clothed and entertained! The Royal Family was adored all over the world, and every elitist (or a commoner at that) in any part of the Empire had one major goal s/he desired to reach towards: To go on the Honors List of the King, or the Queen of England; to be invited to the annual Royal Dinner for the Colonies and/or be a guest at a Royal Coronation. One finds this evidenced in the photographs and pictures hung on the walls of many a family that was part of the upper sections of the social order. It was part of the process of unobtrusively proving or showing to visitors to the house one's family background and history! More evidence of "good times" that were!

To emphasize - the time that "WAS" by highlighting the time that "IS, we may cite some of the debacles experienced by the members of the British Royal Family: A former King abdicated to marry a divorcee - Wally Simpson, who was later found to have been cuckolded by the very woman for whom he gave up his throne woman! The profligacy of Princess Margaret, and her failure to marry and settle down as any stable member of the Royal Family should and thus become an asset to Royalty, is another demeaning the Crown! Prince Charles, the heir to the British 'throne' cheating on his marriage vows with a secret 'love affair' with a 'married' woman ridiculed the thought of his being an heir to the Crown: The breakdown of the Prince Charles - Diana marriage, and the ugly accident that Diana met with after the separation and died in France: The divorce of Charles' brother, Prince Edward, from a woman commonly believed to be of loose character! And, now, young Prince Harry caught smoking marihuana and being required to seek medical assistance! These times are not good at all for the royal family! This institution is now appearing to become more of a cost, relative to its historical returns (including a nostalgic, an emotional, component) to British Society! To top this all, the then beautiful Princess Margaret, and the best dressed member of the Royal Family, has just died after a series of sick bouts resulting from alcohol dependence!

By: Upali
February 14, 2002