Poetry and the Philosophy of Composition

Philosophy of Composition I: Irises

It was April 2007 in Seattle, a month of joy, with hummingbirds tilting at red bird feeders we placed in the garden. The weather was mild, but bright. The loveliest cherry blossoms were blooming outside International District Post Office. In my room stood a calendar of months with Japanese woodcuts on every page. We were preparing to turn the ground of the garden which was one of our community's points of pride. All over the city, handlers of their yards gave floral attention to every germinating, newly budding detail.

In the mansion of the clubhouse, through beveled windows, shone gorgeous light, giving extra radiance to the festive air arriving bright through large windows. We fought over duties we usually shirk. Coffee steamed, everyone shy with smiles. We were in our sanctuary. In our small library was a slender volume by Ok-Koo Kang Grossjean. Explaining poetry, Ok-Koo writes, "As there are countless ways to enter truth, there are also countless ways or reasons a poet writes poems." In a hummingbird's dance, she writes, "There is no bird, only movement. The dance danced without "I" is the dance of the heart."

The walk home was always preciously long, at a brisk pace a half hour, at a mopey one twice that. Spring is a time for the forgetful, to lose memory of all human cares and inevitable travails, in a sunburst, a warm breeze.

So it was that I found myself at last seated in my humble room overlooking Safeco Stadium, then recently opened Chinatown Gates, from Japantown corner of International District, and with a hearty sigh, looking over at my wall hangings, a poem came to me.

Tenderly, I lifted my pen.

Irises

Contemplating Hiroshige's woodblock of irises

in my room

as the Chinatown cherry blossoms begin blooming,

I picture the century of men before me

pleasantly inspired

for whom the blue tints of time

in Hiroshige's print

awoke the heart's hummingbird dance

for the laborious turning of the ground.

It is as if

by engraving and paint

the human-ness of a flower

becomes real.

Through the woodblock

the little garden blossoms become wise men

much as the Buddha smiles from a living lilac.

Philosophy of Composition II: Playing Chess with Delgado

The poem, Chess with Delgado, is my oldest work still under revision. It has been said that even when I try to explain why I can't finish it that I don't carry a tune or make much sense. It predates my attendance at the Pennsylvania Governors School for the Arts in 1978. For some reason I truly just cannot get it right. The impasse, I suspect, is in a complicated subject that I understand so viscerally, attempting to reach someone else becomes hokey. To understand but not be able to explain is quagmire and makes you a lightning rod. Since I am mentioning PGSA, this would be a good place to tell you about this program, which found me in close study with Peter Balakian, recent winner of the Pulitzer for his work: The Ozone Journal at Bucknell University in the summer of 1978, after my junior year in high school. Suffice it to say that while attending PGSA equipped me with the power to continue my first love, being verse, it did nothing to resolve my struggle to express Chess with Delgado, which I began three years before. I always knew this theme to be very, very serious.

Auschwitz. Reagan. I wonder if connecting these dots is where my listener thinks they are being led astray. There are a lot of cruel things that can be done to the mind. Think 1984. Orwell which is retro nowadays, always been upgraded. Being told something insane by your own government and being forbidden to retort. Jose Delgado authored a book titled Visions of a Psycho-civilized Society which proposed to make lobotomy at birth as common as circumcision. He stopped a charging bull with an electrode in its brain. Yet there is something eerily unnecessary about such means. Mankind has been known to just follow orders. What happens to the psyche of a mind twisted into dementia by its own conscience at odds with immoral authority and stricture?

One of the central problems for me may seem ridiculous, but subconsciously I am sure how I want this to look on the page; further I know the density of content that I want, which is closer to this essay than anything I've ever arrived at in verse, perplexingly my authorial license as a poet also has certain criterion: asking that the poem be committed to memory, meaning sufficiently archetypal, and sing song, in the direction of Mother Goose, to make it worthy of inclusion in my important box, where I call what Larry Crist often reminds me derisively, my "important poems".

What makes a poem important is obviously an opinion, meaning that the unsaid is that it is important to me. A good poem, a popular poem, a winning poem, none of those sound right as qualifiers to a poem that reaches the heart of my objective in a short lifetime of aspiring to have an offering to my fellow man and womankind. Important, to me, does.

Even at its worst, Playing Chess with Delgado is kept in my important box. I thought I would try to explain what that meant on the road to opening up a study of this astray, elusive work, but I was told by readers it just makes it worse, less important to them, frankly. I can't entirely accept what I am doing either. It shouldn't have to be done. The poem should be self-explanatory. Wherever it is and whatever it is when it has to be considered finished because I am dead it remains there, to me very important, or said better, very important to me.

There are some finished pieces of mine, winning pieces, popular and good, which do not seem important to me, which isn't to say that the important box means serious. There are whimsy in my important box, even vapid. So, I have to sidetrack here, building bridges over the nothingness of my power to solve this problem, and end up, instead of talking about this hard problem for me, I talk about my Important Box.

How could a whimsy or vapid poem be important to me over a poem that was lasting or valued by my fellow man? That has to do with archetype and inspiration, the circularity of circumstances that lead you to happiness which you may refuse because you are sad. It has to do with authenticity and the myth in my small, but beautiful life that gives me significance even when I am anonymous. It is easier to paint the sky sometimes, in all its levitation and grandeur, than to capture a drop of water for what it contains and means. My mother always liked something she found in my long winded writings, and pointed it out to me which I have used since as an epigram: Poetry is a nibbled edge of leaf and yet so clearly a cause. If vapidity wasn't part of the cause of man's search for meaning, it wouldn't be a word. So even if something seems not so very vapid, maybe it struggles to just the same.

A vapid poem then may very well create such a sucking feeling in your stomach that you have to put it down breathlessly for fear of becoming cold, becoming flat, becoming haole, without soul. Against the shortest poem I have ever written:

Caesar in ennui reclines on nuclear divan.

Which is perhaps descriptive of Bush and Clinton, their years on high.

The words: she loves nothing and nothing makes her laugh and cry, has a downgrade, an emptiness in which one almost forces the sentiment of meaning and the awes of profundity. Yet vapid as it is: she loves nothing is a phrase in my important box.

Mac Crary, ah, he's the one who struck upon, "she loves nothing," and couldn't make it budge. So there are some stultfying carcasses in my Important Box, which, like some African tribes preserving bones, taking them out to polish them occasionally, Chess With Delgado rings hollow.

Chess with Delgado is less than a poem, and from that plank I cannot make it budge. Yet I continue to wish that I could find it. In so wishing I know that it is deeply ingrained in my feeling of cause, an artifact, a poem that missed, a bat I sometimes take to the plate knowing full well I will only strike out.

It isn't not finished because I haven't gotten it from the outside. It's a New Yorker cartoon in that sense, as opposed to a literary achievement. You can see, in its bubble gum power point all the stuff that make it the rage, but inside, getting deep inside of it, only a moment of it does, but since I cannot bear for it not to have the shape on the page I envision, which it certainly doesn't in its present form, but wanting it to, I am prevented from writing:

I say that I do say

I say that I don't say

I say that I do say

I say that I say

... and calling that: Chess with Delgado. Although, admittedly that would say more than the rest of the poem combined without that stanza. So that leaves me chasing my tail for an hour and claiming I have walked for six miles.

The Poem: Chess with Delgado (unfinished)

I say that I do say ~ I say that I don’t say

I say that I do say ~ I say that I say.

~ there is no such thing as truth/what is reality?

Illusion No Meaning

It’s the purest of fig leaves

On the shingles of Eves

And a Marion Doctor

When rhyme and reason leaves

There’s no lucky lotto, no Chinese fortune cookie motto

~ it’s all in your mind.

When you’re playing Chess with Delgado.

Johnny Rotten was Incorrect.

~he once stopped a bull with a spark to its brain

Drilled a small hole, plunked it

Right down the drain

When it charged him to gore

Went snort, snort and snore

As soft as a kitten at the push of a button.

There is such a thing as a proper attitude.

Jose Delgado, brain surgery master

Found South America just a little faster.

Society sanitized in the locker room

Lobotomized citizens are satisfied.

Take the dixie cup from out of the dispenser

Play it back into the top

Continue until you run out of cups.

I’m not saying I do say am I?

What you must keep thinking

this is what you must keep thinkin

what you must keep thinking

is that it just doesn't matter.

Someone has stolen my mind.

Philosophy of Composition III: The Firefly Song

I have a firefly named Iron Hammer.

Cross the border to the house next door
prying eyes have seen this before
atheist thing we tried to drown in the lake
keeps company with the snake.

Lights out! On Memory Lane.

Tears fallen,
as rosy early waters of years comes cheap.
A man of malevolent moods
a woman disheveled
song of the devil.

Bury me in Osaka.

She was wanted by the water
she was wanted by the wind
she was wanted everywhere
I had no place to go.

Bury me in Osaka.

Made for the pleasure of man
in a keepsake box
on the streets of shame
there's been a firefly
since time began.

I have a firefly named Iron Hammer.

From the soap of a city
because I didn't get there in time
she sends me a sign
that sets my soul to shine.
I am a firefly about to die.

Bury me in Osaka.

In the West
we sometimes say,
"Sayonara."

The story of The Firefly Song is precious, grueling, ironic and terribly sad, but I think, with understanding, you may arrive at the point I did in seeing it for my finest work of art. It took a long time to write this poem. Unlike some poems I worked on for a very long time, The Firefly Song did not ultimately come to a standstill, and although there is one alternate verse in it that I sometimes take out, it is a finished opus. The woman I wrote it for was gone by the time I returned from Iowa (where it was written) to Pittsburgh and sought to find her in the hopes of impressing her with my sensibility. She was not, I want to note, either Midori Goto, who the poem is about, or her swallow.

The deepest irony of this poem is that what it means was both obvious and lost upon me as I wrote it under deep subconscious drives. In explaining that fact, I may appear evasive, which is to say, I won't solve that for you with this writing, preferring to show it as I saw it when writing, full-knowing that its obvious meaning may therefore also be lost upon you. This shouldn't shortchange the work, since it was written under the spell of misguidance and its internal music is a sage of self-deception.

Among the things necessary to understand is the truly psychedelic nature of the strawberry schizophrenia that I live with which onset with the writing of this art rock anthem. The opening line:

I have a firefly named Iron Hammer

was an allusion to the ruthlessness of the AIDS onslaught and the love I felt for a generation betrayed, but of course it is multiple allusion, also alludes to the super-tragic Japanese mature cartoon about children orphaned and dying after Hiroshima titled: Graveyard of the Fireflies, a movie of extreme situation and pathos, pushing the boundaries of what children should be asked to understand. I grew up in a Jewish Holocaust Survivor Community and have lobbied over the years for the Yeshiva and Hebrew Schools not to teach about what happened to the young so early in their growing years, having witnessed abnormal adjustment.

People of faith who believe in Intelligent Design try to find meaning interlaced in the macabre of earth and humanity. For this reason, there is no inherent disaggregation between large themes applying to a disparate group of ideas if you are a person of faith. The human condition reaches the far corners of the heart in our diaspora spanning the generations, cultures and belief systems of our species. Our limited power to express this while perhaps a point of departure, requisites the comprehension to de-garble the miasma of amazing grace. Nevertheless, if I were to propose an affinity directly between the Jewish Holocaust and the graveyard of fireflies in around Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I would be simplifying.

Cross the border

to the house next door

is a terrifying authority over the inert. Any movement causes trembling, an act of overt revolt is at work, not trespassing but pitted against prurient rage; for alas the lover surrenders and temptation catches fire, snapping, splitting the branches, impaling ash upon welcome heat.

prying eyes have seen this before

The accused is doomed, guilty of taboo.

Atheist thing

we tried to drown in the lake

keeps company with the snake.

Lights out! On Memory Lane.

Tears fallen,

as rosy early waters of years comes cheap.

Man, malevolent moods,

woman disheveled

song of the devil.

Bury me

in Osaka.

The historic foundation of manipulation by fashion expectation through violence directed at a deep non-violent belief is ensnared between temptresses mistaken for soul force in a time of torches and mob scene. The catch is that faith is the worm of deception by which the fish of love is caught by the ancient enemy, for behold the lynch posse and they alone are love! Who fails to see that the miscreant has lied, the wastrel, the fake form howling for satisfaction at the bed of the vampire killer who stakes the whimpering wannabe by his cloned, clowniac throat.

She was wanted

by the water

she was wanted

by the wind

she was wanted

everywhere

I had no place to go.

(The optional verse above).

Bury me

in Osaka.

The eternal return of the battlefield of the senses played out as prey vomiting in an Iowan river, as the Executive managed a feud for the spoils of call girl tribute and entry between parties claiming grievance and vying in Los Vegas between the enchantresses of the Orient and those of Italian syndicate. The stooge collapses into the puddle of sincerity discarded.

Made for the pleasure of man

in a keepsake box

on the streets of shame

there's been a firefly

since time began.

I have a firefly

named Iron Hammer.

The woman is posing as captive in the tragic guise of a trafficking victim, attended by the great laugh of joy in the creation of the universe witnessed in shock and pain by those saddled with the crucifixion of war. What then is a woman's gloat but the mirth of spectacle?

By the soap of a city

because I didn't get there in time

she sends me a sign

that sets my soul to shine

I am a firefly

about to die.

Bury me

in Osaka.

The last gasp of trust in the man who sees a splendor of longing in the devices of humiliation, a kiss on the cheek in the wispy slap in the face.

The poem, to Midori Goto and her swallow Rosa, a tributary of an unspeakable game, didn't have an ending. On July 4, 1998 or something I left Davenport, Iowa to Tipton on foot, and walked all night, forty miles, waking myself up under a water pump. Finding out that my grampa Mac was from there, the Sheriff of Cedar County put me up in the local motel, gave me a Sheriff shirt and drove me back to Davenport where the city police looked on in fury. I went down to the Mississippi River and the last, hardest lines I have ever written came to me:

the West

we sometimes say,

"Sayonara."

The day that Shannon Harps died outside the clubhouse in Seattle, a result of long corporate feud over my right to court a woman, was the day my love for Midori Goto died. It was a truly awful moment in my life. The most powerful emotion I have ever known sucked shut. For years I have woken up doubled over in pain from the vacuum left, but in recent times what I have noticed most is that it is truly gone, as though it never was, even in those shocking dreams that used to arrive in sleep, where most often I awoke screaming from the loss of her swallow.

Grateful is the wrong word, but dead isn't.

Philosophy of Composition IV: Astronaut in a Paper Cup

It's piquant for me to describe what went into Astronaut in a Paper Cup, a poem I like to say which got me arrested. In hindsight, for lack of knowledge this seems impish, a sign that I was being manipulated, a depth of psychology lost on me as a social insect in the process of finding myself. It is in a style I have used a few times that I refer to as Flower Punk.

In 1971, when I was 10 years old, HAIR appeared at the Nixon Theater, now closed, in downtown Pittsburgh. Mayor Flaherty objected to children being taken and tried to have it closed. Penny, who was later to play a strange role in my life, after her divorce from my father, insisted it was okay to take me, so along I went, thoroughly excited.

It would be impossible to describe everything that went on with regard to my life during that time. A larger problem is shaking off the temptation to add what I know now, which isn’t fair to understand what guided my hand, that isn’t to say it is irrelevant. When my mother hemorrhaged while teaching class and nearly died in the hospital, I watched the police riot at the Chicago Democratic Convention on TV. It was 1968. When I discovered a photo of the My Lai Massacre on Flagstaff Hill (Alison Krause’s family were present) I would not have been able to conceive of a world where the CIA was manipulating rock music like King Crimson. Much to the satisfaction of kidnappers, the word “torture” wasn’t in my vocabulary.

As a Medical Library Clerk in 1984 when the first AIDS information arrived, a job I worked when my father, in Philosophy at the school, showed up and died, I was in the center of a strange brood. Since I was very young when attacked in mayhem, it was fore-doomed that I would handle it in a confused, immature way. Strangely enough, the so-called investigators that arrived at Pitt uploaded the idea of a National Security loyalty into the neuroplasm, and I was dealing with a Nuclear madman from Bowling Green, while trying to comprehend alexytemia (a rare condition of inability to express), traumatic amnesia, omerta and just about every form of felony ever visited on someone as a child. To no end of viciousness by the Elect.

Without a doubt CCAC, my school, despite Honors Department witness Patsy Williamson, have chosen, with my blessing, to wave away the hostility and obsession of recording artist Peter Gabriel towards me, a strange and heavy influence over a few of my nightmare poems.

This isn’t to say that Flower Punk is meant to be all dour, or the drumming of dead souls. I had a band in Reagan’s era called Citizen’s Arrest, which was flippant and to the point. This was not written for that band, but had I not backed away from the sense that people were orchestrating the claim that I am a liar, maybe it would have been.

So it begins in cyberswag:

Hungry imbeciles in concrete drag
needle up from the slopbucket dying.

It's hard to explain sometimes when your head just tallies up what you want to say

The city's an inferno
hell's a TV

a sort of simplicity

the rat republic
shysters defamed
madmen ride on camelback
in a sweltering bled

This was the era of Iran-Contra

meld scripture, imprimatur insignia
though I am a humpback descendant of Cain.

Sliding drawers and paper shredders. In fact John Stockwell of the CIA showed up in Allentown (where I was working) on my birthday, the day after the Wall Street Crash of 1987.
Skull cracks black upon the highway

death is everywhere

red core pops out just like a pimento

gallows humor

green olive brain
black olive covers me with a sheet
spiders beetles and prunes
transformed into hideous nectarine
sabine magi, simian spice
another twist of logos
and it scurries out from under your breadbox.

About this time the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette called me on the phone to secure an interview series during which time they basically taunted me about Fundamentalism and put the memory of my deceased father on trial as a Red Witch.

If the business of a man is his soul
then bring on the auctioneer
and don't be disheartened if you're bought and sold
and your smile is insincereat least you're surviving and your head's screwed on
though you may feel a little uneasy
take this pill for your stomach pain
then sidle up to power
power leans back in his chair
sweat pouring everywhere
he's got a looking glass that can design
he's got glasses of gin
for his Mephistophelean contractors.

People at Pitt were calling to the face lying by the rube: the nature of reality.

And who drives up in a Cadillac?
Goosestepping through the doorway
with his cracker jack,
he's got megabucks and snacks.
And who flies down in a whirlibird
with crates of rifles and the holy word
fighting for control of the herd.
He flies down on a laserbeam
to test upon the monkeys for his shaving cream
superfluous as Faust in a dream.

In a song about race riots and evil
neuro-anatomical needles
in a song about bad drugs and monkey
Black Panthers and the Ku Klux Klan
Chairman Mao versus Charlie Chan,
everyone wants it just like before
you know I can't even get to sleep anymore.
Monk babies drunk baboons
broken fingers angry wombs

Here comes Gipper’s men

Coming to the scene

Heap, demented Gipper’s men

Their sniper eyesight keen.

You can see that they’re unhappy

You can see that they are mean,

Here come Gipper’s men

They’re gonna vent their spleen.

Old Yitzhak took a trip to Zaire
Old Yitzhak he's a rabid rabbi
What's this new beetle crawling out of my hair?
Ask Old Yitzhak he's the rabid rabbi.

Oliver North said Jesus is here.
Edwin Meese added Jesus is fear.

His legions march before him
he leads them on in mindlessness
goosestep to goosestep
rank and file.

Tell them I cried, Muskie,
he said with a laugh,
heard all the way to Telluride.
Tell them I cried.
Bring me the head of the traitor, he cried
so they brought him John Lennon's head
and the new beetle and the new beatle
crawled out of his eye.
Bring me the fable of your Catholic Church
Walrus then, am I?
Bring me the feast of Jerusalem

Walrus then, am I?
Walrus? Walrus?
Walrus then, am I?

I was washing my hair
when the Secret Service came with their lie gun

ahem

Oliver Stone was blocking the streets for Yoko Reagan
Ming Na Wen was playing Rat Patrol
getting us to hit ourselves for Mother Jones.
I said, "Yer dirty Girt
and you'd better git in that hole!
I said Yer dirty Girt
and you'd better git in that HOLE!"

Monk baby, drunk baboon
broken finger angry womb
concrete overdrag.
Put me outta your head.

I may be loud. I may be dead.
At least I'm out of womb 210.

Fade out:

Some black folks they sing

Christian for Ollie, oh yeah.

Children:

We’ll all be income free

When Ollie Ollie’s in D.C.

I've only written a few pieces of Flower Punk. I can’t imagining anyone who isn’t me understanding them.

Philosophy of Composition V: Dust and Honey

Love is a blizzardous dust storm.
The Tree of Honey serves the tea of dread.
Shouts collide in the dust storm.
It is no wonder woman is silent.

Bad breath of love.
I drew, "I Ching," in the dust.
Beheld a fractured leaf
like faience glazed in dust and honey.
It had fallen hard and nearly shattered,
then cracked, it lifted and withdrew,
wafted like a porcelain balloon
in a gently drifting arc until
it caught on a corner of light
and abruptly made its final fall from grace.

Please don't put it aside
There's no need to hide
when this sullen perfume
for protection and emergency
finds its way through.
It's an offbeat sour
not quite sickly nor dour
pungent sweat sweet.

Let's Play Honey, Now.

It's like hide and go seek
The Lord made this world
to be ruled by the meek.
Carry me through the dust.

Sip with me.

The artless tea
tense for a broken hour
frustrated hinge of desire cracks shut.
I'm trying to understand you
but it makes no difference what I do.
Your bereft glare
reminds me to beware
the sticky infidelity
this fig leaf of tea.

Before you send me away
show me the way.
Dust and honey.
Dust to dust.

On one occasion in my life I lost seven boxes containing my life's work. I was 35 years old. This was a struggle. My poetry, most of it, all but one, survived because my ideals about poetry make them easy to remember. I like poems that for me are archetypes. They become portraits in my mind’s room. Also, since for me writer's block is only gestation. Poetry comes together in some cases like wallflowers. Phrases float around, sticking, but not attaching, whirling, merging and finally arrive, being from the process of becoming.

I had always loved the word: faience, like insitu, yet though it chimed in storage, there was no shelf for it, so I strung it awkwardly from the ceiling light by a convenient ribbon, hoping someday it would be useful. Then one day it was.

It had fallen hard and nearly shattered,
then cracked, it lifted and withdrew,
wafted like a porcelain balloon

in a gently drifting arc until

it caught on a corner of light
and abruptly made its final fall from grace.

Please don't put it aside
There's no need to hide
when this sullen perfume
for protection and emergency
finds its way through.
It's an offbeat sour
not quite sickly nor dour
pungent sweat sweet.

Let's Play Honey, Now.

A phrase potentially sinister that deserves to be title of a play, as does Illusion no Meaning from Playing Chess with Delgado.

It's like hide and go seek
The Lord made this world
to be ruled by the meek.
Carry me through the dust.

Sip with me.

The artless tea

(!)

tense for a broken hour
frustrated hinge of desire cracks shut.
I'm trying to understand you
but it makes no difference what I do.
Your bereft glare
rememebers to beware
our sticky infidelity
this fig leaf of tea.

(Set the preset to Isley Brothers)

Before you send me away~
show me the way~

Dust and honey.
Dust to dust.

There’s Something I Didn’t Tell You

It began when Jesse Owens ran. 6 Deutsche Reich on every stamp.

He crossed the Iron Cross when Jesse Owens ran he ran the race of man.

And little Adolf jacked up the Nazi standard, high as the price of fish,

Barked with a square jaw from death’s head what it means to be a man

Is when it all began.

Oh Suzanna, oh don’t you cry for me~e~e.

It began in a Hollywood bunker on the edge of time

At the entrance to Hades, cloak flapping in the black smoke

As he turned his gaze on a smoldering Germany

And climbed into a mystery plane and plan.

Oh Suzanna, oh don’t you cry for me~e~e.

It began when Ahmed Isa ran at the Tokyo Olympiad

For an Actor’s Revenge, winning, he stumbled, then crumpled paraplegic

Struck by a mystery plan

Is when it all began.

Oh Suzanna, oh don’t you cry for me~e~e.

The Cannibal Girls sat at the table and said, “Princess Grace.”

Because Rudolf Hess’ plane came down in just the right place.

It wasn’t just Goering who cheated the hangman

It wasn’t just the Emperor they allowed to stay.

Oh, Suzanna, oh don’t you cry for me~e~e.

There is a simple way to explain this poem and there is a discursive way; I shall try to do both, aware they inevitably convey a paranoid zeitgeist: the idea of Hitler’s escape. What comes to mind for me is a scene from Tolkien’s last ring novel: Return of the King when two hobbits lay near death in a sea of lava and one says to the other, “I’m so glad you are here with me at the end of all things.”

My father, Dr. Ryland Wesley Crary, was Chair for Philosophy of Education at the University of Pittsburgh for a while. I learned from Naval Records that he was a voice of America, Lieutenant in the radio room of the US San Jacinto from which deck George Bush flew in World War Two. He was also a Peace Corps leader and an author on books advocating for affirmative advancement of African Americans in Higher Education and leading texts on human rights, particularly in Latin America. He was a status quo liberal by all appearances professionally. When at the age of five or so, when we talked about serious matters because of my confusion about the death of JFK, he told me his war stories and the defeat of Hitler, I chafed at the news they’d never found Hitler’s body, and felt it meant he escaped. My father laughed when I said this to him.

That’s the simple way to explain this poem, just as a haunted fiction from dark remorse. The more discursive way is a lot less pretty, because a lot more stubborn, announcing that a Skull and Bones excavation has proven this terrible nightmare. Like fish swimming away from a sudden disturbance in their tank, I am accustomed to seeing seasoned intellectuals cringe into themselves when faced with such certainty. Nothing demands you continue reading. Maybe if I were in a position to announce over the world’s Presidential intercom: This is Mac Crary speaking, I could force people to listen to what is commonly renounced as insane theory. There is of course no such power.

This past November, Dean Betters, over-riding the judgment of Prof. Lowe and the Student Activities Office, as well as former Prof. Alice Greller who would demand this service from me once a semester when I was a library clerk who she heard speak to a packed auditorium with Dr. Cyril Wecht, ruled that I was forbidden to offer a seminar on the subject of the murder of JFK during the week of November in which it happened 53 years ago. Although I had planned to stick to topic, I had no objections to being forbidden to speak. Seattle Central Community College forbade me to attend school because of my views, which, when summoned from the off-topic sidelines, appear quite offbeat and I have no remorse about them. In other words, it is not exactly decided beyond all contention that I have the right to even recount my own experiences. I trust you understand this as a reader’s advisory. If you do continue to read, be aware that what I say might upset you.

I was kidnapped, tortured and subjected to mutilationism as a child. In Oct of 1987 on the eve of the Wall Street Crash, John Stockwell of the CIA followed me to Allentown. Then I was lured to Mt. Desert Island and used in an AIDS testing war game. Peter Gabriel wrote a vicious, vicious alibi for the program after a huge laboratory fire. It was the island where Caspar Weinberger lived. Afterwards, I was set upon sexually in a deliberate trigger of an impacted neuroplasm. The murderers scorched me in my home with a horrible tear gas. I was hospitalized and fled to Seattle, screaming on the streets of Iowa in seizures. In Seattle, I was poisoned in the heart, which semi-castrated me, and in the stomach, which has led to permanent embarrassment and an unwillingness to dine in public due to ongoing and apparently intractable health problems; the caustic source, a Vietnamese doctor I trusted in Chinatown. After years of exemplary behavior, Sound Mental Health, having organized the ripper slashing of a bystander living nearby to death, attacked and started a fight with me to have me detained over Christmas on fraudulent grounds, under-writing the decision of Seattle Central not to allow me to go to school. I managed to crawl back to Pittsburgh and in terrible trauma was persuaded by a professor of black psychology to return to school. After two and a half years, I am now a straight A student awaiting results of six classes in the Honors Program. Despite this no one will speak out. That is the sort of fear anything resembling the CIA wields by which they author terrible control. The group that did this, which is by all evidence both paramilitary and administrative, had no intention of seeing me revive as some sort of hero.

I worked in a Medical Library at the campus, PITT, where the Federal Emergency Management Agency was created, in 1984 when AIDS information was first coming in. Peter Gabriel and King Crimson (neither of whom made any attempt to warn people or tell the truth) were working with Reagan on anger management strategies. They told me privately that they were unconcerned and unaffected by AIDS which they saw as a solution to the population problem. When I investigated a pre-meditated war game on Mt. Desert Island, Peter Gabriel authored a bogus alibi and cover up, leading me to conclude that John Lennon was evacuated, not murdered. That is now my conviction. Lennon once sang, on a song called Nobody told Me from the album Milk and Honey "everybody's talking, no one makes a sound." There is a terrible problem explaining Donald Trump; everybody has an opinion, no one can explain. To me, it shows the futility of trying to get help or understanding from an uneducated public. No matter what you say, no one will hear or understand.

The devious nature of this situation is a windfall for those who authored it. Several points will never get out of the suffocating bag, and thus the facts and horror of what I have been through will be perpetually ignored. If one were to cherry pick the situation, saying, well, Lennon did die, but that doesn’t justify what happened to me, you could find a way to work through the whole narrative and find yourself stoically in the right defending me, defending him, while carefully avoiding, for your own safety, defending us both together. The reason that doesn’t happen is in the clause, for your own safety. People are damaged when it comes to defending what is true and what is right. It was terribly improper for Seattle to poison me for reporting child mutilation, but they did it anyway and they were cheered for it by people who had up their sleeves that I spoke funny, held funny views, that aren’t normal, that I admit to hearing voices, and so on.

When I say: the hidden potentialities of the affair are the smoking gun, a few people follow me. I was even called a hero by someone I admire for his independent views and a book he self-published on kindle in Amazon. His name is John Pesa and it is $9.99 if you care to read about the powers behind the war machine, the bankers who profit selling weapons to both sides, and so on. What we don’t get from this is barbaric certainty about the matter. Any attempt to blow air into the balloon causes it to explode. I might just as well try to travel around the world on a children’s balloon from the zoo as tell anyone that a secret script was written blaming me for the death of John Lennon by an agent shown protected by Pitt and the British Government from Falk School named Gail Burstyn. The fact can be proven.

I live with a nerve agent in my facial nerve. It was used by Willy Wattenmaker of Pitt Neurobehavioral Research, Peter Gabriel and Shawn Brooks to humiliate me by an attack prostitute hired by them to become engaged to be married to me. The nerve agent was exculpatory evidence in the brouhaha that was used to underwrite the deadly AIDS war game on Mt. Desert Island. I didn’t know it was there. They did. Gail Burstyn’s letters prove this fact. They created a persona about me, put me places doing things I hadn’t done, such that when my personal affairs guided me to write an eulogy for Olga Havel which received an encomium for taste and feeling from Czech’s Committee of Goodwill, simultaneously my deaf advocate was attacked and raped to punish her for defending me.

Skull and Bones are at the root of this. After I went to the Governor’s School for the Arts, where I studied with Pulitzer Prize winning poet Peter Balakian, Pittsburgh Police trumped up an armed robbery charge against me. They kept me up all night showing me a picture of Ronnie Zzsinski who tormented me as a child, along with a man named Kasper. Kasper and Ronnie were the names of Reagan and Weinberger, his Secretary of War. Skull and Bones hovering over a Pittsburgh Public School student, yet if you questioned this a lot of powerful and immediate local forces would be in your face demanding you stop acting like I’m special or something.

Why Caspar? The friendly ghost? Why Burstyn? The name from the Exorcist? Why a nerve agent on a humanist child to illustrate “the enemy within”? Like it or not, even under the screwtape walnut of infirmity and undesirability, the woe is me of okay you have the right to delusion, these are killer, killer questions. The Liberal Establishment, which I do back to the hilt, I love my school, and have many times offered to leave rather than impose here, has earned in some ways their notorious and standard defamation by super-conservatives because they failed to prevent our public from supporting the resurgence of right wingers using the philosophy of materialism and scapegoat theory to Liars Club us into surrender and silence about the assassinations of our liberal leaders and the AIDS attack, which was bully open an affair from my seat of reference. No I don’t have AIDS, they avoided that outcome as part of their alibi. This situation should not have proven too complex for PITT to address without torturing innocent people. It is a death tract for me that could possibly save you.

The right wing have educational opportunities that are denied the lower classes whose rebellion they control by superior strategy and mobility, a fact the lower classes are conditioned to deny. The powerful, in other words, in their mania and maniac spree, know about The Last Temptation of Christ and used Zorba the Greek to declare me unfit by virtue of public screaming from neuro-control, to weld me into a situation where they have empowered themselves, through ripper attack on Shannon Harps in Seattle, to state they will infect me with HIV or kill the children in my family if I ask anyone out, a secret war game from those who took my stomach from me like a toy water pistol misused. The fact that this mission statement of theirs was written in their hand and can be presented immediately without delay in evidence has no affect whatsoever on the hysteria with which I am answered when I raise the point. Hence I have been alone 25 years. In commissioning their Liars Club spree, they are at great pains to justify themselves, including such remarks from Britain’s Amnesty International who I accused of getting deaf Jeannie raped by calling me a snitch for reporting child kidnapping, to which they replied, “Did they use a ball gag?”

In their secret script fulfillment I am a voodoo doll.

British-American media is just a wall of sound. Blackout is enforced by flashing red klieglights. This is not a society where The White Rose types are beheaded. They are just laughed at and given malefic prescriptions. There was an immediate symbiosis between The Warren Report and Beatlemania that I now believe was planned. The Paul is Dead rumor that went around as a craze looks like an Orson Welles styled War of the Worlds dry run. Welles, by the way, claims to have met with Hitler after his performance which aired during Crystalnacht. This Hollywood entertainment system calling itself the news was in place to command absolute silence and campus tranquility during adjustment to the AIDS attack, slyly putting their own leaders into vogue, all of which had the effect in sum of defining our adopted values.

King Crimson were my enemy. They did the work of King Edward VII, who was a close personal friend of Adolf Hitler. That is the meaning of friend to the modern English. They called abortion their metaphor and had no compassion in turning me for snitching to armed men who attacked me blindside as a gradeschool child. With abortion as their metaphor defacement and mutilation of a child to them was a statement of moral equity. What could be proven they laughed at because they will not allow it to be evaluated and believed. No one who believes me will be liked by the Beatles and if the Beatles don’t like you who will? King Crimson, who I knew well in my twenties, angled for the best of worlds, to have their cake and eat it too, to show me clinging to their legs as a child, not knowing they were behind the terrible attack and hostage taking. My father, it is true, encountered the Beatles in a small club all night before their rise, back when they were known as the Quarrymen. It is to be noted that the Pitmans were behind gassing me in Kings Estate when the holocaust letters arrived.

From GayIll CarolIng Burstyn, whose partner Sean Strub was photographed at the Dakota the night Lennon staged his Double Fantasy disappearing act, just as I was in D.C. with Reagan’s FEMA attorneys the night before Pentagon Disney played the Hinckley game. He waved to me the night before. All in all I was on my way back to Philadelphia. Fi l’adolf phia, brotherly love for the friendly ghost.

In the sense that you have this diagnosed text Dx22, you might call it, they wanted it to come out, to get very away with it, like a comic book villain. Being known and allowed gives them a political mandate to have it known and denied. They authored a food fight around it, poisoning me and so on. Denial forgives them and the institutions they used for blackout and misleading. Hollywood wins another round.

So when I conclude that the Love Field for JFK signified the arrival of Oswald Mosley’s crew and that the Beatles’ hand behind the AIDS attack was the perfect crime, control of morale and music as the only place to turn for comfort, an upgrade of Orwell and Orson Welles, this too allows them to have their cake and eat it, too, for yi ‘on’t beyeev nyat! King Edward VII’s revenge proved to be a barn burner, and the enemy within was top sacredly your best friend.