The Falling Leaf Review, January 2017 by The Falling Leaf Review

Volume 1 Number 5

December 29, 2016

The Falling Leaf Review

A Monthly Literary Review

The Falling Leaf Review

Volume 1 Number 5

December 29, 2016

PUBLISHING & CONTRIBUTING EDITOR JAY V. RUVOLO

The Falling Leaf Review

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December 29, 2016

The Falling Leaf

Review

The review's the thing. --JVR

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Table of Contents FICTION ..................... ANONYMOUS BLOOD SUCKERS, SHE SAID TO BROTHER JACK IN AN HOUR WIRE HANGERS, CURTAIN RODS, QUEERS AND GUNS MIRROR, MIRROR

5 11 14 23 42

POETRY ..................... VARIATION IN THEME [four haiku] SRIOUS [three haiku] TWO ANOTHER MAN HOLES TIRESIAS IS BLIND [haiku] CRECENT NARCISSUS AND ECHO GOOD MORNING RAIN, RAIN [old falling pebbles] SETTING SUN [a prose poem] NOVEMBER IN MY SOUL

22 22 22 47 48 48 48 48 49 49 49 53 53 54

ESSAYS ....................... HOW MANY, AM I? ALL TOO HUMAN

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50 51

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â&#x20AC;Š the soft fleshy spot on the upper inside of each thigh, pinched, finger index to thumb; upper and lower lip, prehensile. One journal entry following another journal entry . . . to enter is to between, and so the pages and pages after line after line word by word pen to paper completing notebook after notebook into notebook, just one more page before bed, sometimes hours more before bed . . . one more notebook kept, I am keeping, continuously continuing, another and another . . . the French understand duality when it comes to mind and soul, where we embrace only dichotomy, if that can be imagined . . . the many selves Self proved on the pages there before me in my journals. Yes, I no longer have faith in soul because we no longer have faith in anything; but we do have the most savagely defended dogmas about mind, the upper hand, how that idea ever gained the density it has, displacing that of soul, in me in you, as if it were more credible. Freud was a soul-less bastard. I do not believe in mind any more firmly than I do in soul, in soul any less than I do in mind, if mind then soul, not necessarily saying that one is the other and the other the one . . . to know or not to know what is knowable, yes what is knowable? How is it knowable? Where then do we know anything? When is another question we could ask, could pose, could impose. All questions are impositions, inquiring minds want to what? What do I know and what are the limits of my knowledge? What is knowledge? What is unbelievable and how

FICTION Anonymous by Jay V. Ruvolo

Legs long, legs slim, legs firm, soft, smooth, lightly, how Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d move my hands up, tips of fingers down, they them, legs, hers; how to roll over them, along them, itsy-bitsy, I played when I was a boy, a new kind of wave after wave, silver tips, wavelet caps in the sun, I recall a poem I had written how long ago now I cannot count. I had said tin foil caps although I never had tin foil, only aluminum; my mother used to say tin foil for aluminum, shimmering and shaking in the breeze, they were, you would have said, would have had to know was skimming the ocean top as I would flat stones off the surface of the lakes in Pittsfield (Melville had written one-third of Moby Dick in my mother's hometown) one of them, the lakes we would swim, summer friends, Onota . . . vacation for a month or more at Aunt Maeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s in the Berkshires every July or August. The morning sun off the water at the beach in Montauk I recollect, a video I had taken--I had taken many videos of many scenes from the shore on the South Fork. I take I took tip of tongue between teeth almost clenched from ankle arch instep toes to calves knees behind crease thighs soft and lighter skin, oh right, the light that there did break through the clouds, what was between, unfurling, a fold after fold, linking, every rose builds its labyrinth. I remember The Falling Leaf Review

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is it unbelievable? How is leaving one's closet not leaving Plato's cave? How is the refusal to come out not described in the allegory? How can soul not know? We do have faith; we just call it something else. The State has replaced God, hasn't it? How have I come to this? No, how have we come to this? Why do I always come to God, to the State, to Freedom and Love? If love, then sex--how could it be otherwise for two in the way I am expressing here; the desire to fuck is love I recall from me, having said before and elsewhere. Listening even to most educated people is troublesome for me. I find myself only talking to myself. The loss in the believability of soul weighs on the believability of the human heart which in turn weighs on the possibility of love. You easily deny the existence of soul, and more easily than you do that of God--you do persistently refuse access to soul, mine, yours, anyone's, by anyone anywhere any-when. We say soul, but then in our culture you are so afraid of words, and we are so superstitious about language, as I become, and we are---we wouldn't police speech as much as we do-and it is amazing to me how so many people outraged by police activities can be so obtuse about their own "policing" behavior--and all policy is police activity-how they in the name of some new liberal progressivism, as they must believe, are quick not only to police speech and attitude, but be equal in brutality to language with the police brutality they speak of, by how they respond with a meanness of mind The Falling Leaf Review

equal to the mean their thinking has descended to . . . Theirs is not faith of a kind that loves anything, especially words, but only a persistent gnawing, undermining superstition about language, about words, and you fear words, don't you--don't lie, you do. You're afraid, very, very afraid because sticks and stones may break your bones but names will do a whole lot worse to you, right? We fear them, words, we do; all political correctness is superstition. Saying anything makes it so; there is no substantiation, only symbol, nothing of the mystical body, but only some kind of degraded poets-party in the churches, but then poets do not believe in the muses either which is why so much poetry today is shit--and I mean really fucking shit. Who does not understand that when Christ says "be seen not praying in the synagogues," he is talking about temples, churches and mosques; libraries, classrooms, meeting halls; television studios? What is it that we make use of to disbelieve in soul as we do? And that we should carry into disbelieving in mind? We do not. I do not. I try. I do not always succeed. Success is Bitch-goddess, I heard someone say, one of the assholes I knew growing up who came of age in the 80s to work on Wall Street in one of the investment firms, one or two after a B.A. in Accounting or Business Administration, talking as if they were somebody on the Street, and then when they were drunk, as if they were somebody on Wall Street talking as if this somebody had discovered

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that they had a soul but so fucking full of steaming stinking shit . . . Feeling real emotion, she said once —everyone feels real emotion; can anyone manufacture artificial emotion? What do we know about how someone experienced the soul of another, when in letters or journals we spoke of another's soul? Life is short we used to mutually confirm. The experience of one's self, the fires within, inside of her was indescribable I used to think but not so much younger when I was in university too much Byron and Shelley and Keats she read and reread as I read too with her recollecting when I first read Byron when I first read Shelley what I read the first time I came across a copy of the Lyrical Ballads, 1797, all of us reflecting on the occasion when I was a student studying reading writing . . . to write or not to write has become my to be or not . . . studying, she was a student, in her early twenties, one of the times I returned to school after having left for reasons I no longer remember . . . the Romantics, I read and reread, yes, time and again, while in my early twenties, the papers, the essays I wrote on Shelley, on Keats, on Byron, on Blake, on aesthetics, Romantic agony, poetics . . . more and more, what more? There is nothing more glorious here on earth than cunt. The I sometimes wishes I could suppose again what I once believed about love and desire, all psychological and moral remedies for decadence do not alter corruption dissolution debauchery people in the dark people lost people disjointed cracked pottery . . . she used to like saying The Falling Leaf Review

the vase that will not hold water . . . what is left of our humanity. Priests, Rabbis, Protestant Ministers, Imams, television preachers of the religious or secular kind speaking of inner power, what or who social workers or school psychologists armed with bureaucratically sponsored diagnoses of behavior, modified, modified, modified; proliferated by one or another Department of Education all teachers are closet fascists. All remedies have no power—we are impotent at stopping anything we do to ourselves with each other alone or en masse to reach oblivion, to leap headlong into the abyss; how many times I’ve drunk myself I cannot count; nothingness, a brave unconsciousness; how we abuse misuse disuse reuse, no one saves anyone—we are not even our own saviors—salvation coming from the Gods alone, she said— deliverance is divine—we are not divine. The Gods are dead. I had to, I said. Why? She asked. If I didn't, you'd haunt me Haunt you? You'd come into my dreams. I couldn't avoid you there. I'd have no control over it, over you, over anything. You'd hound me, you'd hunt me, tear at my clothes, all haunting is hunting is hounding. And you'd do it all with a skeleton hand, bone fingers, icicles stretched, reaching, clutching. I had a dream like that once; there was this woman, I can see her as I saw her, but I don't see her, if you know what I mean. No one has a face in my dreams. I knew her and knew it was her, 7

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who she was, but I couldn't see her face. She was running behind me, hand stretched out, all white, all bone.

built? What happens to them when we burn? Why do their roofs collapse as we do? How does it happen? Don’t trust the truss the fire department would say. Don’t let anyone tell you no one knew that that could happen. Everyone involved in building it knew it could happen. The Twin Towers were just another warehouse fire one-hundred and ten times two; greed; maximize profit by maximizing floor space. Don't trust the truss, firemen always say. Yes, a pig is a pig is a pig, that is, until the pig dies is stuffed filled taxidermy style I think we say and set as a coffee table before a couch. The pig then becomes a table. Function supplants form? What are we left holding when what we have left is absence? Is the after-image real? No such afterimage exists for the Twin Towers now; her after-image, she comes to me in dreams. No such taxidermy exists for absence. Yet absence is not alone, solitary, separate from everything anything else surrounding it. Absence is presence as well, but this idea is not new; this present-absence, this lack that is as well happening, sometimes denser than the kind of presence that displaces absence, is the sort of being we have in something rather than nothing which of course is always something else, this nothing that is more than it is not, otherwise there wouldn't be the word nothing to refer to it, it, nothing is ‘it.’ We had eaten steaks that night. I had bought them at a butcher in Manhattan, a retailer I knew who sold it to me for wholesale; prime; rib-eye.

Absence is absence, I thought, in the way a chair is a chair or a pig is a pig and not a table. Truth is apparent in every tautology; what about tables, those that were once pigs. All of it to me thereafter true beyond true, how we fell, never thinking we could; people who think we understand do not, people who think we have special knowledge to figure things out that many do not; how special we must feel doubting everything everyone else knows about the Towers falling the Eiffel Tower at night one really fucking cold February. I remembered how I said that it was impossible for them to have fallen over; I never imagined collapsed when a friend called to tell me that the World Trade Center had fallen over. She had called me on the phone; I had been playing Play station Hockey. I needed to relax. Genius, pure genius; it was genius figuring out how to drop those buildings as they did I thought. She thought it was not possible for them to have fallen the way they fell. But greed was the impetus behind how we were built, I recalled. I knew how we were built what left them vulnerable to what happened to them. Any fireman who remembered any of the biggest fire disasters in New York City, the ones where the most firemen were killed, knew it was possible, how the Twin Towers were two stacks of one-hundred and ten of the largest warehouses ever built. How are warehouses built? What supports their roofs? How are super-sized supermarkets The Falling Leaf Review

What's your name? 8

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Does it matter? Perhaps it does not. So then why ask and ask again. The desire to know and the fixation on knowing have little to do with whether or not the facts of finding matter. You don’t agree with Keats that there is Holiness in the heart’s affections? She said nothing. Do you? There’s a holiness and a depravity to everything we do, everything humans think want dream has the potential to be holy, to be part of the divine; our humanity is a divinity, but our nature by nature is Homosapiens and that is as close to a chimpanzee as our 98% identicality allows.

we pass through to pass through arrows and tunnels what I possess when being . . . do we have power over it or does it enjoy you as you are when you are whatever it is that you could be? Where after that do we learn the things we must, what we must by necessity; to be necessary or not to be necessary is just as much to be or not to be as any other question, and all questions of this nature do decide the limits of knowing. To know or not to know what is known what is knowable all questions of ontology cannot escape theories of knowledge. To say again what is knowable; my nose set out for all the world to take a look at, a shot at; it; every shot we take learn what makes us lucky the limits thereof therefore . . . to choose an actual existence is to remove oneself from the stream of becoming. No one has a face in any dream I dream. To dream the dreams I have dreamed. I remember how I was nervous when I realized I was going to meet her, be with her, one with her, the nights we’d go to our favorite bistro; to choose or not to choose, choice is not a question. Does it take you from the flux of perpetual becoming which has always been nonbeing, as close to primordial nothingness as anything close to annihilation. What am I? Who I am in the mirror; I am I; I am you; I am he. I used to write the words Love and Time and Being and Freedom with capital letters because I believed that they deserved special treatment, that they possessed special energy, of course energy, energeia in Greek was not a term of science but one of rhetoric; science

I believed it, but then I usually spoke in terms that expressed one or another metaphysical notion that most of my classmates used to laugh at in college, university for those of you who think the idiom is not alike. I did believe that ideas possessed reality as much as forms in the world, things in the world, nothing but the thing in itself a friend once said of poetry, what was a revolution in poetry, modernist poetry . . . he loved Wallace Stevens. Plato had nothing to do with Modernist poetry or the latter with the former time, being, not being, becoming; what more is there than the space we occupy here exactly here where I am every step of the way to be once more without gain living being is not a get, What does it mean to gain or not to gain? Human greed keeps us in perpetual becoming without ever being anything or anyone anywhere any when the time that passes or the time The Falling Leaf Review

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borrows it as a metaphor from rhetoric; to become is not to be; inside ourselves we conduct a symphony of selves in harmony with the Self; there are many selves, every one macrocosmic to every other. One chooses being, but not by resisting the will of one's nature or by artificially imposing a self to the displacement of every other self that seeks affinity; harmony springs from chaos, we discern, often by the choices we make I make you make what is it that he or she makes? I remembered something in common with the flights of my soul, the flights of my reason, and reason never withstood so many onslaughts--onslaughts? Flights of fancy... I am each, I am no one, nothing, none, neither what you nor I suspect is nothing, is no one--I cannot forget, I said, but I will forgive, I remember. No, she said, if you do not forget you cannot forgive. I did not agree. She said that that was a problem, or did she say, the problem? I said that if I were to forget what would my forgiveness amount to? It’s all about having no words at my disposal for saying not saying what I only would have half believed. I only said we could. I should have said more? What more could I have added? What should I have said? I never really know what to say once I begin to think about what I should say. Saying something anything I should have said was always so much easier if I felt it was right. Thinking about whether it is right or not I remember she said so much of what we think we think because others have thought it. I mean how many of us would stand alone in what he or she thought against others if it were right and everyone else The Falling Leaf Review

were wrong . . . would we stand against those we love, those we like, those we respect? I look at the faces of the people on the subway and I see only lumpen brutish expressions, troglodytic faces everywhere, and monkey people riding the trains as if it were an express from the zoo. I never remember so much ugliness everywhere even Hollywood has an impossibly degraded sense of beauty . . . don’t tell me there weren’t dozens of far-far better looking actresses back in old Hollywood I mean really beautiful actresses more so than there are today because today they are impossibly uninteresting, and you can’t tell me that some of them aren’t pigs, she said, I mean, real fucking pigs, she said. And now? Now I can relax, settle down; and when I dream of you, I'll be able to dream of you as a woman should. And how is that? The way a woman wants a man to dream of her. Which is? The way you would want me to dream of you; I see it in your eyes. And how is that? I mean, seeing as you are so sure. You're not asking me to teach you how you should hope, are you? No, my hopes have always been my own, and I’ve never felt the need to share them.

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they cannot. If all things were relative, then there would noting for anything to be relative to. Now, telling tales to those who want to listen to tales told, all toll, addition, addition and furthering the cause with addition . . . the narratives are exhausted, the narrative’s exhausted? Nothing more of me from me? History is progressive is a grotesquely wrong idea. Tall tales I tell myself about myself, I could have expressed differently. Am I an idiot? I do not wonder out loud, or even inloud, asking this rhetorically. I have a specially endowed penchant for asking rhetorical questions. I used to think, when I was boy, that 'penchant' and 'pension' were the same, an auditory confusion I perpetuated and currently like to play with; puns turn on homo-phones, homo phones, homos I have known have used phones-now use your imagination. History, legend, tale, story, what story, kind of story--history tells what? How many trees have fallen in a forest I cannot see? If no one is present to hear an ear fall, does it make a sound? No, is the answer. The same is true for a falling beaver. Sound is made in the ear. Compression waves are made in the air. (Pause.) If all things were relevant . . . you know what. If I had all the ears in the world would I hear the Truth, the Bridge of Truth is falling down, falling down. My ears have fallen. What is left for me to discern? All this falling down, falling down. Children's rhymes I remember. Children I have forgotten saying what I know I used to say, singing what I used to sing. All of us falling

Blood Suckers, She Said to Brother Jack by JVR

I see a nose for a witch in a fairy tale on her face. Ah the tales told by us, all of us idiots of a kind. She did—she had a nose straight out of a fairly tale told by peasants from the Carpathian Mountains--how is that something she did? Witches and vampires and succubi, selling boots, she was, in a store many people had come to on Broadway, around the corner from Union Square, at the top of the park. Sleep walkers everywhere. What any of this has to do with telling you something of worth about what I see, what I feel, what I know, have done--I am done. To do or not to do in this culture seems to stand in opposition to being; no one is; we are not be; to be or not is no longer the question as it has ceased ever being a question. To be done with something, with what? What is done, what has been done? Being is no longer a concern. I have nothing more of me from me. Cinderella's sisters cut pieces of their feet off trying to fit their feet in the glass slipper-the Brothers's Grimm are what their name says they are, what? Another question asked made posed? The glass slipper--how does anyone put on a glass slipper? Another birthday has passed. In relativity physics, the fixed constant everyone forgets. All things cannot be relative. No, The Falling Leaf Review

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down as the dish runs away with the spoon. Hey, you, who are you? What about you? About me? What is it that I am saying? What I am saying has been said? Will be to have been or not to have been . . . what? To have been or not to have been; in itself, themselves, what? Hey diddle diddle, and all that fool's stuff on hills or heaths and during thunder storms that rage and blow and knock me down. I remember one afternoon the skies turning nearly charcoal as the wind kicked up and jagged bolts of lightning split the sky in the distance as I stood under the awning of the Shanghai restaurant on the corner of Bath and 19th coming home from work, counting in Mississippi(s) to see how far away the storm was and will be, coming or going.

having to piece together a jigsaw puzzle of confetti pieces. Ring around the rosy A pocket full of posies Ashes, ashes, All fall down Again and again, over and over, how many times this and others, we would sing as children, I sang as a child; my mother sang—-she sang in her Uncle Miller’s band, 40s stuff. She had a beautiful voice Five hundred years or more later, still singing the folk/children's rhyme, Ring around the rosy. Yes, I remember from childhood; what do I recall from childhood; what can I accurately recollect? I think I can see childhood in the images I catch, assuming they are from my childhood, that they feel like my childhood, I say sometimes . . . a pocket full of posies, yes, flower petals kept in the pocket to ward off the plague . . . one in three died--one in three . . . imagine if one-third of the population today died--so many of the worlds problems would be solved? Is that why we are still so slow to respond to suffering, to misery, to hunger, to disease, to epidemic, to bloody conflicts? Decrease the surplus population--and how is it not a surplus if our great book of ethics is the Ledger Book? Yes, ashes, ashes, I recall having sung, singing as I did as would others as we would together, not knowing what would spawn such melodic outbursts . . . the flea, the flea sucking on the infected blood of the black rat, my friends, all of them falling down, one in three having died, how could

Hey diddle diddle The cat and the fiddle The cow jumped over the moon . . . I think I remember an illustrated nursery rhyme book from when I was a boy, obliquely the living room with the full length ceiling-to-floor, corner-to-corner, mirror in our ground-floor East Flatbush apartment . . . and the dish did run away with the spoon. A dish ran away with a spoon? Obliquely? The illustration, what about it, I recollect; and all about the rosy rings rising on the flesh of the plague victims. You know what we used to sing? She asked me. I shook my head, no. More and more memory becoming like a jigsaw puzzle to piece or sometimes, confetti. Imagine

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feudalism continue--bubonic plague broke the back of feudalism, toppled the feudal hierarchy, created a sparsity in labor, less workers to do the work required pay to work, free at last, free at last, thank the blood sucking flea for freeing the serfs. The true beginning of capitalism was the Flea? Yes, the world is a flea market. Irony, you would like to see, to seize, to say; but is it irony or just an inescapable logic that Capitalism began with the blood sucking flea? But please do not mistakenly think that I am calling anyone on Wall Street (who has survived to continue to do the same things they have been doing except in variations revised) a flea because that would make each of them small. Wall Street Investment House CEOs are not small; they are big. They are not fleas or parasites because these are small. Wall Street CEOs are vampires, big, strong, blood sucking vampires, very, very old and very, very savvy Wary . . . intelligent, except for the short-sighted semi-literate under-educated motherfuckers around them whose stupidity fuels the greed that the vampires use to suck more blood out of our social and political life. Freedom does suffer a horrible anemia. Even Jefferson had warned us. Banks are more dangerous to a people and their liberty than standing armies . . . and why do you think the new intellectual hegemony, or popular intellectuality likes coming out against Jefferson and Madison as much as possible . . . why? So everything alien to them can seem more correct, appropriate, possibly necessary? I love hyperbole.

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Yes, my brothers and sisters; a New Undead are among us. Nouveau Nosferatu. "Money is Blankfein's God, and to get enough of it, he would betray his country and its people and their security," she said, paraphrasing one of Benedict Arnold's earliest accusers. So then we have to drive stakes through their fucking undead hearts, she said. And the hearts of their children, she said; and their children’s children, she said; and their wives and brothers and their brothers’s wives and their sisters and their sister’s husbands and all their children too, she said; and not to forget, their reverend parents, no matter how old, she said. You must drive a stake, she said; yes, you must drive a fucking stake through every one of their motherfucking hearts, she said. And do not forget to chop off their fucking heads, she said; stuffing their mouths with cloves of garlic, she said. The People must never equivocate when facing the Devil. And if there are infants, we must pit them on pikes for them to see and suffer before we drive the stakes. Anything less and you are all full of shit thinking that either Party and its leaders and the CEOs of the Banks who made the Oval Office one of its Board Rooms and and our President their Bitch, and delivered to the President of Change his Cabinets are not laughing at how stupid and blind all of you are . . . naive motherfuckers. You are really fucking stupid if you imagine that the greatest Machine Politics in history was not the Guillotine. There was no revolution without the guillotine; the idea that The Jacobins went too far is just the propaganda of the 13

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contemporary status quo of Totalitarian Bourgeois Capitalist hegemony. And the Chief Cunt of American Politics today is the Whore of Babylon, if you like Biblical analogies, she said. A She-beast of Satan, the oily bitch wife of Demon Bill, she said with a smile on her face because nothing made her happier than thinking of making the power and monied elite suffer through torture before dying agonizingly. We're going to have to kill an awful lot of these mother fuckers in front of us and to the left of us and to the right of us and behind us, if we are ever going to make anything True for us again, she said, I imagine. I do not need to shake hands with devils or lie down with demons to prove what a good person I am, she said . . . fuck this psychopathically drawn up politeness and goodness--they only chain us in our efforts to fight evil, and bind us as we try to manage our responses to evil, she said. But all of you have been trumped by Power and Money because you still imagine electoral politics serves the People; but so long as the Media elite are one or the same with/as the Power and the Money elite, a Simalcrum of ourselves or of our freedom will become the only reality of Liberty, I say, thinking of what she has said.

In an Hour by JVR

I do not know how lucky I am, but then I don't know how unfortunate I am when I imagine myself lucky. To philosophize is to learn how to die we know from Montaigne, but imagination is necessary to philosophize I learned from Doc Brown as I called him, Doc, Professor Brown. Imagination is something most people do not associate with philosophy. Imagination is necessary to be able to philosophize well, I said. Imagination and intuition are necessary for both logic and higher mathematics. Blake reminds us imagination is the doorway to eternity. Imagination was the faculty of mind most highly prized by the Romantics, suspicious of rationality as they were, or how the rational was used as a tool against humanity, the great human humane. The French distinguish duality between the two in one word, humaine, and we English speakers create dichotomy with our tongue, a forked tongue, we must understand that human is not one thing and humane anotherâ&#x20AC;&#x2022;of course not. When it is in my mind this way, one thing for one, another for the other, then I get what I get, human is not human without the humane, itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s just Homo-sapiens, and that is something different from human as I have been saying and saying and saying again over and over, do you need an answer to each of these questions now that I am herein mentioning them, now that it has come to the fore that I have not before

Suit action to word and word to action, citizens . . . Let us go, children of our nation! I remember having thought I could hear her in mind saying what may or may not have been in her words exactly.

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answered or even attempted to answer any of these, unless what I have thus far said could be said to have some say in the matter of my who and my what.

I am strange when estranged―again, how can anyone not respond, of course. Yet, there is a truth in the following, that I am not strange even when estranged―how so, the truth in this? I am me and I am not me, always who I am even if I no longer remember me, no longer recognize myself in the mirror. I hate my voice on tape. It doesn't sound like me I say. I do recognize me even when others do not.

Everything of me about me with me for me is mine; I make it mine or it becomes mine; mine is mine is mine; to mine the depths of soul, of mind of memory, memories are what are where―the where and the when is a perpetual here and now as all writing has that, and what I say here is in words on a page, printed for easy reading because my handwriting is shit. I am who I am even when I am not being the me I have been before, a me, an I, others I know might recognize. I am me with every stranger I meet even if with that stranger I lie through my teeth and tell no truth in the factual sense of truth we sometimes hold too pedantically dear.

There is an estrangement that results is dissociation from who I am whenever I am what or this or that or who; I am who; I am what; I am also when and where. I am because, because I am why, also how. In French, the stranger is l‘etranger, also the root of the verb to estrange, etranger. You can’t believe familiarity will last, that the familiar persists. It wears away, gets worn, frayed, tattered. We slip into forgetting . . . I remember saying, in the hall of the hospital on the floor outside my mother's room, Maman est morte.

The stranger is strange, she says. He is always estranged from others as he is from himself; if from himself, he certainly will be a stranger to another person, familiar or not. If he is estranged from others, those unfamiliar, he will surely become a stranger to himself. In himself is more devastating. The Self of many selves finds a stranger among them. How unsettling. Madness is an estrangement unmanageable. When I am estranged, I become strange, again for others as primary, to myself as secondary condition threatening to take over the primary one, the one I recognize, those many selves in this Self I recognize.

Forgetting is just another form of decaying; to forget a kind of decrepitude. No? You think otherwise? Normal, abnormal, social or clinical do not have anything to do, most of the time, anyway, with a stranger’s strangeness. It does not matter to me or to another if I am strange because of some clinically defined condition, or if I am acting strange because I feel like it or because of how I feel. If I am aware, others, who may or may not have been another--and it is usually someone who feels as if he is another of whatever I

I know all the I(s) I am? All the I(s) I’ve been? But who I am now? I am we has become the cliché of all my telling. The Falling Leaf Review

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am who says for me to stop acting strange whenever I am acting out of character.

dogma or another set up to enforce how we think about how to be.

There is nothing in my character that is a stranger to me, unless I impose a condition where I cannot understand what I am doing. Yet, even when I say to others that I don’t know why I did what I did when I did something out of the ordinary, I am still not completely strange, except to those who think I am strange because I have not acted in the habitually expected way, have not acted as I have before in their company, their presence. What I do is mine to do to have done, who is really strange when we consider the possibilities of what we can be do have act like―it is interesting when someone says you are acting like a stranger. Don’t strangers many times act in a manner not strange at all? Don’t people who are not at all strange do things that are strange to the eye, to one’s sense of what―most of sanity is culturally derived? Immigrants are strange and they are strangers, and in being strangers and having become strange there is a selfeffacement, an estrangement that results in a temporary insanity. All immigrants suffer a temporary insanity; we hope they recover. Most hope is against hope. Everyone acts strange sometimes―what does that mean to say someone is acting strange? We are always strange, or perpetually strange, strange at the same time we are familiar, familiarity and strangeness of one coin, a single minting, what else have we to say what it means what it says how to say what is unsayable, so much of reality we deny out of vanity or fear or adherence to one

My life is an act; the entire world, you know. How do we perform on the cultural stage? The stages here, the stages there, stages family, stages friends, stages work, stages other social, stages somewhere else, stages anywhere, everywhere; the parts we play. Everything is about play. The games we played when we were boys were preparation for life? Sports prepare you for life? In football, every play is reset and started and finished and there is interference, blocking, tackling, gain or loss, and everything is measured and recorded―and it never taught me to beat my wife, so don't get on football because, never mind. You see it in football: you get knocked down, you get up and then reset again.

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The masks I wear, how many times can I say the same thing? Everyone wears masks outside and inside and some of us wear masks on the masks: the masks at work, the mask in the classroom, the mask with colleagues, the ones I wear with friends, the ones I wear with my lover, the ones I've worn with family, father, mother, aunts, uncles, cousins, where, when, what clothes I wear, the parties I've been to, the strangers I meet, yes, strangers less strange the more I get to know― everyone does this by nature. What if under certain social conditions one had to wear other masks on top of these natural masks, repeating myself in other words and still other words, 16

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the same thing said many ways, for many ears, there are people who do this, wear masks on top of the masks human nature compels them to wear by situation, the context demands one or another mask, who is the same person with his mother that he is with his sister, with his sister as he is with his wife, with his wife as he is with her best friend, with her mother, with the pharmacist, his doctor and so on and so on―I am constantly overhearing myself―I know others who constantly overhear themselves―a trick I learned from reading Shakespeare, but do I get behind their masks, these other people who wear masks these others maybe walking in another one’s shoes I do not do the same as wearing another man’s mask, do any of us know anyone? Who he is, who she is, what are you doing? Why did you do that? Why did he do that? She does what she does when she does it irrespective of what you think you want to know want to understand think you need to see.

watch a film? Most people say to themselves, what if Hamlet were I? This is not the question one should ask. If communication is the state of communicating, then a question is the state of questing, everyone who truly asks is on a quest. The language I use, words, a walk on Gran Via in Madrid comes flooding back, the shore one afternoon in Barcelona, the clothes lines in the cul de sacs on our way to the beach after leaving the statue of Columbus, Barcelonetta―when I was a boy I wanted to go to Barcelona, mi maestra in Public School was from Madrid, I spoke funny for the Puerto Ricans in Junior High School―I left my Spanish with my pride, buried with my pride―she had coal black hair. I tried to learn Catalan one summer. She gets under the covers. She lays herself down to rest, not sleep she says I think differently. I watch her get under the covers. I watch her at home, I watch her out of the home. I watch her walking. I watch her eating. I watch her cooking, preparing soup, making roast chicken with sausage sage corn bread stuffing. I watch her having coffee, making coffee, pouring coffee, and stirring her coffee with cream and sugar. I watch her sipping it, taking the cup in her fingers, the loop between her index and thumb. I watch her lifting it as delicately as she is able, I say, have said to her, you eat delicately, you drink delicately, I love to watch you eat. I do love to watch her doing anything.

You know she is he is I am and we are each of us a cosmogony as I have said and no one knows anything they are supposed to know never mind what they cannot know that the other doesn’t know about himself herself and yes it is all about myself . . . would anyone waste living on thinking too much? I must say somewhere inside of me, an actor prepares, gets behind the mask of the characters he plays if I were Hamlet, not, what if Hamlet were I―yes, what if I were Hamlet? How would I write this, how would I buy a metro card, how would I open a door, how would I drive, how would I sit in a movie theater and The Falling Leaf Review

A flower many have said about many women before, everything she does she 17

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does with something I have imagined to be grace, and I’ve told her as much I can’t count how often, that what she does she does gracefully, gracefully she does the things she does, she closes the book, I watch her close the book, I think about my father closing books that I have watched him read. I remember having remembered that I used to watch my father read in his recliner, in his bed, on the couch, never on the toilet bowel. My Dad said he did not understand people who read or who had to read when they shit, to be able to shit, I used to run the water from the faucet when I wanted to relax on the toilet bowel before taking a shit.

I miss my Dad―I have no words for how much or for what I am supposed to say, or what I was supposed to feel. He speaks. And what he says . . . to say what he says or to bite his tongue and thereby end all discourse on the facts of Shakespeare--funny coming from one who imagines that facts are not possible to discern? That is not what he imagines, is it? But he does equate facts, facts and more facts with factory made things; yes, facts are made and being things made, they are fictions, if you follow the course I am running here. How is it that a man like and unlike other men his age--and he is like them and he is not like them which has nothing to do with how much he dislikes them, too many of them? This age or another age--what age is this that we find ourselves in? And yet to the question breach, once more my brothers. Close the gap. Do we find ourselves in an age or with an age, all about us this age and yet that one there, not here as is now: of all the unities of time and space, the oneness of the two; here now, not there then. Which one is it? This one here, that one there? More questions. Inquiries abound. Any other before is there . . . only now is here, and here is now.and time is not an ocean, I have said before, again before as everything in regression of time is less. Every age that has ever been has been in each age, which is an awkward way of saying that everything that has ever been thought has been thought in each age by at

I remember now the complete letters of Van Gogh, I had gotten them for him to read from my college library one year, coming upstairs into his room and sitting and watching him hold the book in his bed propped up by the pillows he’d pile three high, one from the other side―she’s going to nap. I came up into his room and caught him once wiping a tear, you have to be able―you must not be afraid to shed the tear, I shed a lot of tears, vats of tears, gallons of tears in my life, how many tears, we measure rain by the inch, leave a beaker outside when it rains, put one by the bed at night. I think that maybe I should take a nap with her. I don’t get into bed with her. I only think about it and then let it go, a passing idea, swiftly gone. I used to like napping with her in the afternoon on a Saturday or Sunday before dinner after lunch, sometimes big on the weekends.

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least someone somewhere at some time . . . yes, how is it--what? What was I trying to say? Graphing is another expedition, how so the matter of this making when all about me I hear in my head echoing the methods of others who could not hold my pen--no, they could not hold a pen to me, to mine, what gives life to thee--when I am old I will take down these books of mine and slowly read what I have written or more pretentiously, what I writ--writing is a writ of habeas corpus in a way, no? I wrote, I wrought, and I have wrought well, long and hard and arduously. Thousands and thousands of pages of essays, stories, vignettes, reports, letters, notebook entries, journals, emails, memos, poems; and then there are the novels and novellas. I read so much contemporary trash, not because my selection process is challenged, but because so much of what is written today is crap. Yes, every thought that has ever been thought has been thought by someone somewhere in every time throughout all of history and before what we think we call history. Here we are now discoursing on Shakespeare--and we--why we? We is awfully pretentious, is it not? I have discoursed on him (should I say Him, a hymn for Him, I have--I cannot say now how many times--sung his praises, lifted up my voice, my pen . . . a pen, a pen, a kingdom of praises for this pen). And the discourse for scholars on Shakespearean discourse has reached--what does it reach, what do they reach for, teach us in their stretching, for all that I know they may not The Falling Leaf Review

even stick out their hand to take down his book and slowly read. Do we read anymore? To read or not to read. Hamlet is a prophet of our contemporaneity--no, for all of modern history. The religion of the book--what book, all books being one book; the Holy Literary. Nonetheless, all discourse only one or another way of going astray? Dis-course, of course. Discourse, discourse, my Shakespeare for dis-course. I have veered off course herein; every essay is a wandering through a woods? Make a path and others will follow. He announces, this man not so unlike other men; he pronounces, his name, other names, no names, what names are there, everything to be named or not to be named, that is Adam's question . . . and until the last syllable,.silly bells ringing our their rhythm, their rhyme, their reason or mine? He bellows with a bombast reminiscent--he cannot; he does not--what? Say of what it reminds him. To come to mind again; do you mind? I mind what you say even when I do not mind the meaning or the intent. To be mindful, you know, means something other than to mind when to mind is to take offense? I do take offense to Gary Taylor, he might say after me, following or imitating . . . me, of course. Let us now discourse on me? Analogies he needs not indulge, he thinks, does not say to himself exactly, although these words would find agreement with him, almost as if he could say that he would not have minded if he were the one to say them.

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He is at the bar in a Bar on Saint Mark's in the East Village--he has had a bone to pick with Gary Taylor's closet or latent elitism, something he has said he has suspected for many years now. He goes on to say, "Gary Taylor is a twit. I can't say that he's an asshole, but an academic twit" caught dripping, he would say, "in the residue of a particularly insipid kind of political correctness, a nearly virulent type of iconoclasm that accompanies this, advocating, ironically, a kind or renewed anti-bardolatry that had once been discredited, the kind of the latter anti-bard arguments" that find themselves peculiarly elitist in their effect. What say you, you Post-post Structuralist twits? "Taylor has become one of the most sophisticated of the anti-bard critics, bardolatry not being something I have ever sponsored; not the way it had been used politically by schools, a pedestaling of Shake that kept him distant concurrently with offhandedly praising him, much the way many religionists keep their God-praised and remote, especially from their hearts," he pauses. Eternal Liberty; I'm with Keats when it comes to reading; Bloom, too, I could say. Yes, as much as Bloom would say he himself was Johnsonian, I could say that I am Bloomian? I am a Bloomian Shakespeareanist? Now is the fall of my discontent, made gloomy winter by contemporary cultural studies programs everywhere making or mocking bad social science instead of literary criticism, which was never in itself always good reading . . . (you are following me, are you not. I am beginning to The Falling Leaf Review

think that I am only talking to Literature majors, or those who have done Graduate work in literature). "Mr. Taylor's devotion to Marlowe's having authored parts of the Henry VI plays smacks as much from the old argument that Shake could not have written his plays, given his schooling, but must have been written or largely rewritten by someone of a university education, someone like Marlowe or Middleton, even, this later Elizabethan being one of Taylor's chief sponsorships." I too have been Marlovian--I, myself, had advocated for Marlowe as an undergraduate while everyone else was talking Shakespeare. Ah! To be different; to be unique; to be in the minority opinion. Just as great as Shake. Will in the world did learn a lot from Marlowe. He pauses. That is, the man pauses as I too pause--and who am I to this other you read here, hear here, is here filling out places in the text--every text has texture, you know. I have said this many times before now in my life: Don't be fooled by the flatness of the page or the overt linearity of the words in lines. Do you hear what I hear? I know seeing is believing, but what about hearing? Is it too believing? He said, or is it he says? "When I was an undergrad, any professor who taught Shake in the university always said that Shake did not invent the forms or the stylistics within which he worked; it was always insisted that it was Marlowe who was the Tudor theater revolutionary. I don't even object to Marlowe being credited with co-authorship 20

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in the very early written or wrought Henry the VI plays, having gone through my own Marlovian period as an undergrad, announcing at times that I preferred Marlowe to Shakespeare--never Middleton, though. However, Middleton did have a sound and crediting reputation from Elizabethan scholars and the professor's of Shake at my college. Especially in grad school, you would have come face to face with the reputation of Marlowe and Middleton--maybe Taylor laments that Middleton does not have the rep that Shake has among the public, or more specifically, the troglodytes Taylor teaches in Florida, not to say that everyone from State University's are trogs, but the way we have systematically undereducated in America, there are far too many undergraduates who have been left unprepared or underprepared for university learning, most exactly by how elitist schools prior to college have become, basing all pedagogy on a pedagogy of failure where cream will rise to the top. "Now that's elitist. "I just do not trust anything Taylor puts his hands on or has his fingers in-reading him is like taking a proctological exam. " He does not pause. He is not kind. But you do not need me to say that. I say that because I do know that there are enough readers who cannot help but confuse character and narrator and then narrator with author; author with man is another debasement. "Advances in electronic technology have not added to our ability to read; textual scholarship and the ability to read and The Falling Leaf Review

analyze and compare texts I do not imagine has gotten much better or far superior, in fact of my own sense, I imagine it probably has gotten worse. The alphabet is the technology that has helped literacy and is the only technology a reader needs to employ in reading--and I do not imagine that the ever increasing degradation of standard reading from what we once understood to be hierarchically arranged higher literacy and what we now should call general and pervasive alphabetics even on university campuses has become anything less than appalling. "Yes, PhDs like Taylor must champion Oxford educated men in a grotesquely politically correct attempt to debase the old favorite of the old ivory tower. Of course Taylor will insist that Middleton must have revised a couple of Shake's plays; no one can say that this Lord or that Lord wrote what so many have examined and have found enough consistencies to say that they have been authored by a single author. I do not imagine that anyone as hyper politicized as anyone from one or another grotesque branches of cultural study political correctness like Taylor could have less of a political axe to grind with tradition than those from the Ivory Tower allegedly had axes to grind for a conservative tradition." He pauses. He hesitates, mumbling unintelligibly, as if he were going to speak, but no. He stops. He pauses however long you think he should pause before beginning again without appearing to have spoken in one stream. Disjunction continuity should be apparent, even if there is no disjunction in rhetoric. 21

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Not feeding them.

"In the spirit of having another pint of ale, Death to Taylor, Long Live Shakespeare." I too loved Marlowe as an undergraduate English major. I too made argument for the greaterness of Marlowe, at times. (More greatliness?) I wish I knew. I wish I could wish I knew, wishing as well that I could know what I have known and what I have not known--now that's too much: for anyone to wish that he knew what he did not know, that he knew what he has not known, what he had not known at a time before another when he knew not what he knew . . . I have forgiven myself, for I certainly knew not what I was doing too many times.

4. Waves spread into wakes At my feet sucked in the sands-I step and stumble.

Serious 3 Haiku 1. A squirrel scurries Up an oak with an acorn Never to be an oak. 2. Sunlight on the Window sill—midmorning shadows— A breeze blows through leaves.

POETRY

3. A flock of wrens lands Outside my kitchen window— Cacophony with sparrows.

Variation in Theme four Haiku 1. On the steps at my Feet--bottom to bottom, two Katydids mating.

Two 1. On the ground, shaking At my feet—a hole In the light, a leaf

2. A seagull gliding, Drops a crab onto the rocks Splitting a wave.

2. A boy and two girls Run away from a boy with Two boys—playing

3. Pigeons surrounding A woman on the park bench The Falling Leaf Review

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authorial/writerly connections . . . what then must I say conclude build as a trope? Is it a trope? What is being said here? I say so much, have said so many things over so long a period. What follows is what has been put to paper by pen in hand, my hand, I used to say from brain though arm into hand through pen onto page . . . or something like that, I think. How I found what words in a journal I had written how long ago is irrelevant, the howling I have done on paper, the more than fifteen thousand pages of journals I have kept for decades now growing by the thousands of pages as the years mount?Â For you is not much of a consideration. I am not writing for your entertainment here. I do not wish to set you back, turn you away, push you away? What could it do for you to know when I have written anything? All time is one. Past, present and future are persistent illusions we cling to out of vanity and hope. But hope is useless, isn't it? I mean to hope or not to hope has been how many person's last line of defense before madness? And to wish. I wish I may, I wish I might? I ask the questions I ask of my readers---I always have readers whether there is an actual person reading or not. Know your audience is every writer's mantra. What I imagine to be your expectations, how I will or will not meet them, I couldn't say for certain. I am most likely not going to try . . . another interesting turn here in the narrative? in the exposition? To try is essayerÂ in French; yes, to essay is to try; an essay is a trial, of ideas,

Wire Hangers, Curtain Rods, Queers and Guns by Jay V. Ruvolo I looked to the clouds gathering on the horizon and there I saw shapes like white hippos. --Thomas Sarebbononnato

Prologue To tell a story of woe, which story of woe? Whose? To write down what has been suffered, yet to choose by whom might be another mis-step. I trip myself up as I walk through. To see what is afoot; to see where I am going, maybe where I have been; I have always imagined that there should be a twelve step program for people addicted to their former selves. I used to be swept up by nostalgia when I was young. To understand what has been---only, of course, if standing under is recommended---holding yourself up can give you a different kind of hernia. These and more---what more, how much more--are what we are going to uncover here in the ensuing pages. I have included you--you do know who you are, don't you? You are a fictional you the narrator is talking to in spite of you knowing yourself differently. I just referred to me in the third person, which is the writer in the persona of author of this story writing a narrator/expositor (itself a multi-faceted? multi-valent . . . what am I saying here? Let it go for now) . . . a narrator/expositor in the first-person who then refers to himself as other narrator selves or narrators independent of his The Falling Leaf Review

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of thoughts---how do thoughts differ from ideas. Where do they go when they finish running their course? Thoughts like electric currents, run. Current is running; what then do we mean when we mean running current? A bit redundant, don't you think? To think or not to think; it seems to me. Facts, facts, nothing but the facts; we are labored by facts, inundated with facts; facts are avalanches waiting to bury us. I have used this image before in another context. We have been burdened by bookkeeping for several centuries. Defoe began writing with the ledger present in the subtext; a court stenographer's pen and paper, perhaps? Who then do you imagine you are as the reader of any text? What then do I imagine for me as I set pen to paper? To write or not to write; who knows what he thinks unless he writes? The layers, you know---you have seen those Russian dolls in stores, haven't you? Matryoishka, a set of brightly painted hollow wooden dolls of varying sizes, designed to nest inside one another. I hope, not really hoping, you get what I mean, what I wish my words to say. Hoping and wishing are utterly useless though; to hope; to wish, perhaps to daydream my life away . . . I was considering Moll Flanders more than Crusoe. I love onions fried in olive oil with garlic in peas in pasta, shells.

this. Words, words, more words could have been said, other words were probably said, these words might have been said . . . If I were put to it and had to say exactly what was said--but, truly, who does shove--who ever shoved--a curtain rod up her cunt? It's easier to shove the latter than it is the former? She got a Q-tip swab stuck in her ear . . . I knew a girl who tried to give herself a miscarriage---she had taken an extremely hot bath. She said her skin was red for hours. Have you ever read the words of Les Marsellaise? You haven't read what they say in English translation? Read it; read them. Valence? Veracity? Necessity? The guillotine was a machine for democracy.You know this, right? Mon droit . . . let it flow. You can't imagine that the further the French get from the convictions of Les Jacobins that they will continue to maintain their freedom. Almost everything is hazy in recollection; I recall this, but vaguely---what did I just say about being hazy---Manhattan skies mid August in one of those subtropical summers we loathe. Yet, Why vaguely? I hear asked. I do not ask myself. Perhaps I do not want it to remain anything other than hazy in mind? Most of our desires are backward looking. Ah! The glass darkly. All of you named Paul should take note. What is that supposed to mean, and to whom? Recollection is something willful and more certain in its search, to look for is sometimes what we have already found, to find a need expressed by the kind of search we engage. To recall, to recollect, to

I I remember hearing, I forget where, cannot see now, a woman's voice then, my incredulity clearly understood, Who shoves a wire hanger up her cunt? Yes, she said The Falling Leaf Review

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remember are all not exactly the same things, are they? You should know. Memory is not going back to the video tape. Memory is mostly fiction, don't you know that. Even old photographs are cropped; there is a choice, a framing, a focus or an out-of focus. History is by consensus. Legend is something else. Most people remember out of their assholes because they talk mostly out of their assholes. Bad story tellers. But where's the compassion . . . and it's compassion, not commotion. Passion and emotion are not the same.It's thePassion of Christ, not the emotion of Christ. Today we got a bunch emotional assholes looking to give women crosses to bear on their way to some miscarriage Cavalry; but that's okay because that is what will make America great. We were in Washington one July 4th and it was impossible, horrendously humid, impossible to breathe. You could not see down the block through the humidity. The air was white, like talcum powder sprinkled instead of rain. Heat, humidity, walking as if through wet fog at the ocean in the fall, only nothing cool about it. How is it that I am supposed to imagine that I need to explain to you what living with your eyes opened should have taught you? Anymore questions? You know the fool of all proverbs asks questions to avoid learning anything. There is a way for this. But curtain rods? You don't remember Godard'sÂ Masculin et Femminin,Â do you? What is it that we are thinking or not thinking when we imagine that we should repeal Roe versus Wade? Ten thousand words . . .

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I recall myself having said something like this, words, what is this, what are these, where are they now, more and more I am convinced that what we see in the mind is as much a creation . . . What do I recall, to call again, where, in the mind, what about voices and vision? How can I imagine that I have not filled in the gaps where there are large swaths of empty or black. I do not exactly recall where or to whom, saying what has been said---let it go, the not knowing. This is what is meant by recreating yourself. it begins with memory---not delusions or . . . What would the problem be with complete fabrications. You trust the people you know who have formed their own consensus they call the history, they insist are the facts, the facts, nothing but the facts . . . what is it that factories do? I must have said something like, Who shoves a curtain rod up her cunt? And I have to imagine the correct curtain rods for vaginal insertion. It is interesting to note that the manufacture of unwindable clothes hangers has dramatically decreased since the days of Roe versus Wade. Need I see correlation whether one exists or not? How we met is unimportant. Most people imagine that it is, clinging to former selves the ways junkies cling to their works. Was she or wasn't she; did she or didn't she; could she have or shouldn't she have? I knew she couldn't have. I knew she was not adverse to saying what I have so far herein said, in these and like other words, she and I together writing essays for our journal, our review, what was it when we were back as undergraduates, I think I

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can see, I cannot, who are any of us as we look through the glasses darkly. We can make all hangers plastic because there's no need today to shove a wire hanger up the cunt, is there? Yes, if girls do not need to unwind a clothes hanger to shove up the cunt to give themselves an abortion, we can make them from unwindable plastic. Spare me your fucking working class moralizing; you wouldn't know your best interests if they fucked you in the ass . . .alway one or another thing to shove up someone's ass; put my foot up your ass; someone should shove a foot up his ass, up her ass. It's got to be uncomfortable for someone to have something shoved up his ass by someone sans invitation. I also forget where or when I did--did what? I remember a lot; I remember a lot I must have already altered in the mind. I cannot locate the soul, cannot locate the mind, where then is memory? What place in the brain . . . Â I say what I said after having heard that girls used to shove curtain rods up their cunts to induce miscarriage. How the fuck . . .? I did not understand how they could do so--I did not ask her if she had ever done so. It was how long then after Roe and Wade? Girls I knew were inclined to say You can't understand, whether they themselves did or not. Just let the air in.Yes, that'll do it. Push it against the cervix and let in some air. What does a man say to his sister, to his daughter, to his wife? On the beach at the shore at Land's End, the South Fork . . . coming here to relax, to unwind . . . what is wound is winding, the wind blows in turns and swirls,

The Falling Leaf Review

spiraling out of control off the waves that repeatedly batter the shore. I still do not understand what most people I have known think, believe, know . . . I had no cunt. I have never wanted a cunt. I have never imagined what it would be like, or might be like, to have a cunt. I did, though, have an asshole, and I knew that I would never shove a curtain rod up my ass. I have had suppositories shoved up my ass when I was a young boy and had, however infrequently, constipation--prescribed by my GP.Â I just can't get with the Republican assholes who want to send us back to some punitive theocracy which will be a Christian version of a Muslim theocracy--assholes! Not yours and mine---I wish they would shove curtain rods up their asses---I have assumed that you could not get this far in the narrative with extended exposition without having some affinity for what I also think, believe, hold to be self-evident and true. If you vehemently disagreed, where would you be now but someplace else? I have used wire hangers unraveled at the hook to clear clogged drains; I could not imagine being able to imagine shoving that up my ass. A wire hanger? How desperate would a girl have to be to shove a curtain rod or a wire hanger up the cunt-and I still do not understand the kind of morality that functions on the level of punishment as a means of instruction. I do understand Nietzsche's observations, his thesis, in The Geneology of Morals, but I am confused by a society of JudaeoChristian moralizers who are against abortion and use pregnancy as a form of punishment, perhaps because they can no longer get away with stoning the girl who 26

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gets pregnant, mostly from a lack of foresight or caution, as they would say of her as she engages in the most natural of all our inclinations. To fuck or not to fuck was my to be for some protracted period of time. Let us drop a millstone on her head. I remember something about how Edward II was buggered to death with a red hot iron poker by his wife's lover Mortimer; Edward had a preference for men over his wife. She took a lover and then conspired for the throne. Of course, there are many who see this as justice for Edward's homosexuality alone. We have lost or have yet to develop the idea that the desire to fuck is in itself love, and that from the choice to act on this inclination of love, we can do a whole lot of messing things up, denying, refusing, corrupting by other choices. Has anyone ever shoved a wire hanger up his ass to rid himself constipation? Recall the clogged drain. She would not have done it herself. She would not have used a wire hanger if she were to do it herself, if she had to do it herself. There's a pill now that makes abortion do-it-yourself? The waves one after another after yet another continuously continuing repetition of rising curling turning falling crashing thunderously, tumult. . .Â I remember walking on the beach Â . . .plastic hangers today, and as they have been made now for a few decades, cannot be shoved up the cunt, can they? You can't use one of today's plastic hangers to shove up the cunt, nor can you unravel one and use it to unclog a drain, or your constipated asshole if you were a Sado-masochistic bastard, or unlock your car . . . so when you The Falling Leaf Review

do get one of those old-fashioned wire hangers from the cleaners, keep it, save it-you never know when you might need it in a Republican future. Plastic bags on the beaches in New York piss me off. The litter; the poor and tired motherfuckers who probably need to be beaten with a stick before they will not leave their trash everywhere around them on the public beaches . . . as if they were entitled. I do not understand anyone I have ever known not getting just how satirical I was in many of things I said, how much critique there was in a lot of what I did, how much Dionysian revel there was in drinking with abandon . . . I am not sure those who actually said they liked Jim Morrison had any fucking ides what they were saying they liked or understood when it is clear in hindsight that they did not have a clue. Does anyone recall pink hangers on buttons? Am I imagining this. But then I couldn't pull the plug on my mother although I knew there was no hope. Induced miscarriage does sound softer than 'abortion.' That's the reason, you know. Scare the shit out of girls. She had had a bleeder; her brain was stuffed by blood, I saw the MRIs of my mother's brain, a hemisphere pushed aside. Held her hand until her heart stopped when finally she was declared brain dead, nine months almost to the day my father died. Slept at his feet like a Viking dog the night before the morning he went--more euphemisms. Don't know why I asked the Doctor to resuscitate when I was asked---I had to leave the room. Should have, would have and could have are three fools wandering the world; got that from an old drunk in a bar. Left the 27

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room. The doctor came out to say I'm sorry. I no longer wish I stayed or am glad I left; resuscitate? I knew somewhere it was an exercise in futility. How could it not be, there was an ethicist who came to my mother's room to talk to me in the hospital, and I told hm to leave with his fucking pablum constructs--he only meant well. But I could have been teaching the courses he had taken to get him in the position he was in to speak about ethics and loss and human psychology, all of it a bunch of bullshit dripping over his lips, and I do not mean to trivialize what he was trying, only his failed attempt, but who would have succeeded with me that day? What more do I need to say? To say or not to slay. Everyone today wants you to say something if you see something--what am I supposed to be seeing, anyway? I have always mistrusted most of what most people see, but I do not want to retreat into an overbearing subjectivity or solipsism. I mistrust what most people think they recollect, a recall that should be recalled ... leave people to what they think they think, what they imagine they know. No one knows you, especially all the impossibly ignorant fuckers who couldn't see you if they had the Saints, the Arch-angels, Christ and Tiresias to help them. Sticks and stones are not words, are they? There is a collective unconscious fear of sex and sexuality (not identical) in the U.S., and this has left us diametrically opposed not only on issues like gay marriage but also on abortion. Unlike the issue of gay marriage, though, life is jeopardized if we do not maintain the law that insures safe and antiseptic procedures The Falling Leaf Review

are part of a woman's choice. However, if historical memory as well as recent memory serves me correctly, this is reactionary America, so we must punish women who have sex and do not wish to submit to marriage as the sole means to manage their potential bastards. No, America is not still Puritanical? What the hell does this have to do with me, with her, with any man or any woman, this one here, that one there, whoever, wherever, however? White clouds up and over the horizon, East, East-South-East . . . look at those clouds. What do you see? What do they look like? Most of the abortion debate--really ping-pong or rhetorical hop-scotch--pivots on this ethical and retributive hinge: do we want to punish women for having sex or do we not want to punish them for expressing themselves sexually. What are we saying-and do we say anything, or do we continue to shout badger scream respond to one or another stimulus . . . when we want to deny women access to safe, antiseptic medical procedures when they want to choose an induced miscarriage instead of going forward with a pregnancy we are taking giant steps backward . . . and it is an induced miscarriage, not a fucking abortion---tongues stuck up the ass; tongues up the ass in taste in wine, tongues up the ass in the way we eat, tongues up the ass in our love of language. Be fruitful and multiply---yes, big words from a desert God. Like the Statue of Liberty who asks for the world's tired and poor . . . We systematically under-educate, she used to say, and how can you disagree. We have allowed semi-literate to 28

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masquerade as literate enough for too long for anyone in pedagogy to recall any other standard for literacy than the alphabetics we enforce, I say. Alphabetics; the ability to spell your name correctly, to fill out standard application forms, address a letter, write a check, read the tabloid press, although I am beginning to include the NY Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. We the members of America's liberal establishment are astonished by the conservatives and the popularity of Donald Trump. I would sayÂ for shame,Â but it's not in my nature, not part of my idiolect, I have no f-in' desire to say what I think I can hear an old Great Aunt saying at the kitchen table in the Berkshires for what reason I couldn't even guess and won't for a moment make up. Surprise, surprise, surprise again. I never questioned my desire to fuck--I understood it to be a natural inclination. She felt the same way. It is nature--and I am not here to debate the merits of Nature over Civilization or viceversa. No. I wish I had answers---I do have them. But the desire to fuck as a natural inclination is not identical with the Homosapiens natural inclination toward violence and aggression, is it? Ninety-eight percent identical in DNA with a chimpanzee; examine chimp behavior. It is looking in a species mirror. I like girls who read. Reading is sexy. If you do see identicalness there between our desire for love and the homosapiens's need for violence then perhaps you should re-examine your ability to think because thinking has nothing to do with Â randomly passing images in the mind or The Falling Leaf Review

playing hop-scotch with words. No, neither of these is what thinking is, in the human sense, which must always be measured by the humane, how humane, when humane, why humane you must know. There is no human without the humane. Do not even try to give me something that says you can vote for Trump and think he's a viable candidate because this is a free country because then I know you'd be deluded, perhaps insane, but most of what I have gone through to get where I am intellectually cannot even be imagined by most of anyone I have ever known; and do not think that I will debate anything with you, as if, again, playing ping-pong with ideas or simian constructed political sloganpolicies--I guess I am so pissed that I am getting my tongue tied up in knots. But there is no clearer example of someone being an idiot than that someone, who is not rich, supporting Trump. Being white and stupid is not enough. Troglodytes should not be allowed to vote; but then I recoil from this reflex in me. But twice the number of African-Americans who voted for Romney, voted for Trump, and African-American turnout for Hilary was not as high as it was for Obama; so, African Americans have to stop blaming White People for Trump when black people who voted for Trump were not going to tell it like it is, which is the assumption for African-Americans, that they still tell it like it is, which is bull shit, I mean, African-American criticism of closet Trump supporters among White America is some reflexively racist sour grapes. Maybe we should be asking why twice the number of African-Americans who voted for Romney, voted for Trump? I'm astounded, but have 29

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no desire to play ping-pong or hop-scotch with blame. The Homo-sapiens cognition is not in itself what I call thinking--it might be, but there are certainly other processes in that mode of cognition we really should not call thinking.

the anti-abortion camp; just say no to sex is what some say women should say when they do not want to appear punitive. I cannot understand this desire to inflict punishment finding support among civilized people. Most of the anti-abortion position hinges on coercing women's chastity. It seems ridiculous--I almost imagine fathers, or mothers, even, locking up their teenaged daughters in iron belts around their pelvises--and it does not seem a stretch when one listens carefully to the vehemence and sees the violence of the people today who voice their opinions against women who seek to exercise their rights when seeking to have an abortion. She was so far from uptight. You know what is amazing is that most of the parents of the people I once knew would be very hesitant to vote for Trump; too many of our grandparents would know he's an idiot and should be feared. This is what I mean about our regression. As conservative as my dad could seem to be sometimes; voting for Trump would be beyond him. The rhetoric of anti-abortion in America is paradigmatically similar to that of Jim Crow rhetoric levied against the civil and human rights of black Americans during the years of segregation, poll taxes and miscegenation laws. We are not forgetting the years pf lynching anymore than we are forgetting that abortion clinics have been bombed. But then we forget many things without forgiving anything; we do prefer to forget than to forgive, and the latter is as different from the former as giving is from getting. Some of the political opinions I hear from too many people, and even people I know, is frightening. State administered

Why would she do what she did? I would have asked, would have liked to ask . . . liked--what the fuck does this have to do with liking or not liking anything? No one knows anyone, knows another person, not really, not entirely, not in that persons deepest darkest places, not in the continuum that is was will be this person's living. Stop deluding yourselves. Yourselves? Stop deluding yourself, I should have said in the mirror. Why don't people dust their mirrors often enough-again, using they and we instead of I. And people who go on and on about friends and friendship probably have the least idea what it is. More out the ass. How could it be otherwise, as full of shit as we are, all of us. And that's the truth. I just cannot tolerate a man or a woman taking pride in remaining not only remotely recognizable to their former selves or others who were once in their life, but taking excessive pride in fixing himself in a spot and staying loyal, as he must imagine, to a former self he either imagines he must remain, or other others around him enforce through their own pettiness, resentment and fear. No change? There is a thick vein of punitive retribution present in the minds of those in The Falling Leaf Review

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proctology exams are what our administrative politics have become, no? We cannot hope to have normal relationships between men and women, between any partner and another he or she chooses mutually and reciprocally, if we still want to criminalize sex out-of-wedlock, which is what we would be doing if we were to criminalize abortion. This is also what the opposition to Gay Marriage fears; legitimacy of homosexual sex--but homosexual sex is the flip-side of heterosexual sex--it is of one minting in human sexuality--heterosexual and homosexual are heads and tails--no puns intended. We do live in fear, in trepidation when the fear is not overt. We are not talking about fucking animals, or children or the dead when we talk about homosexual sex, are we? No. And I do have to say it because I can't assume you are not simian in your attitudes toward other humans---and this is not a simian pose or posture . . . human is not human without the humane---period. The French have one word for both;Â humaine. It's clear what is contingent with humanity in the French language. English has two words; we keep them separate for some reason unfathomable and non-locatable. We think we can have human without the humane, as if humane were something separate, different, distinct--why the string? Midday, before lunch, going to IGA to pick up what we need to eat, strawberries, yogurt, a rotisserie chicken, beer, olives, chips, tomatoes, cucumbers . . . I once saw Julianne Moore passing as she was coming out of the IGA and I was walking toward the front door. I nodded and smiled and and The Falling Leaf Review

she smiled and we continued in our contrary directions. She was smaller than she appears on screen, but still a big actress---loved her work in The Hours. Also better looking in person coming out of the supermarket than on the screen . . . The problem with many from the anti-abortion side of the argument presented in a woman's right to choose a safe and antiseptic medical procedure in the course of induced miscarriage is that perhaps too many of them are also antisodomy; therefore, the idea of fellatio as birth control may never get addressed. Blow jobs do reduce the need for abortion; yes, sucking instead of fucking--but the Puritans still rule America's unconscious. We still stigmatize oral sex because we are still sexually repressed if not simply sexually uptight, and that's as a nation, a culture--you cannot imagine that even America's liberals are not stupid, uptight, narrow-minded, prejudicial in excelsis. If it were not for the stupidity and lumpen minds of America's Totalitarian Bourgeois Capitalist Liberals, our conservatives might not be so criminally mentally debilitated and dangerous.Â We used to criminalize homosexuality--we should criminalize how we teach. We even used to criminalize sodomy--I do not know why we cannot criminalize semi-literacy among our teachers and professors . . . The acts of sodomy themselves labelled after the ancient biblical city of Sodom. It doesn't matter what the popular culture thinks its saying or doing; pop culture actions are reactions to the core belief; they are reactions similar to how pornography, and the proliferation of porn 31

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and its availability, reveal our true attitudes about sex. We have no healthy notions about sex or sexuality, and that's heterosexuality. But please let us not look to the Old Testament---the Jewish Bible--as a means of instruction of how to live democratically and free, with respect for women, because Leviticus alone is enough to disqualify Torah as a document any feminist should look to today. Leviticus is the greatest testament to misogyny in the history of the world and is only page after page on how to terrorize, brutalize, torture, maim and execute women in the most agonizing ways for being women. It's a serial-killers handbook. How do we expect to handle the idea that homosexuality is normal when we still fear heterosexual sex. But it is necessary that we step out of the norms of our social behavior and atttitues about sex . . . what was it she had said?Â The issues raised by gay marriage and abortion are contingent with all discussions of basic Human Rights, the fundamentals of human sexuality and sexual expression. All of this seems beside the point? Is it beside the point? Why does it have to be beside the point? Imagine how backward we were even in the fifties and the sixties--and I mean really monkey-minded backward-simians all. What more do I need to say, could I say, should I--what? Say what? Say when? Say where? More than enough. Enough is always enough, but just what is enough--when is it? I am genuinely asking because we certainly do not do enough when we think we have educated enough; surely what we call literacy is no longer literate enough, but then that has a much The Falling Leaf Review

longer legacy than we might want to investigate. During the eighteenth century the rise of the novel gave rise to questions about proletarians and peasants reading and what that would do to upset the class hierarchy.Â Looking back on what it was she had decided she was going to do; it is a woman's decision and not mine. That can become a convenience, can't it? II Gay Marriage and Abortion are both prochoice issues--how you do not know this is beyond me? And if you do know this, how you are unable to defend this articulately only speaks to how we under-educate, and we do---I don't want to insult anyone, but if the brogan fits, wear it, please do not put it into your mouth. The above are both issues of freedom or the lack thereof, whether it be sexual freedom, which both of them do address, or what I choose to do with my body, which both of them also address, albeit from different angles of approach (no puns intended; any position two humans choose when they fuck is normal, is natural). The matter of gay marriage is a part of the pro-choice issue in a larger sense, and you have to get this, and if you do not, maybe you should have someone smack you in the back of the head, and I am not a particularly violent person, I just do not have any of the received reflexes we are supposed to mimic to prove we abhor violence, more out of our society's desire to control the people, or lessen their weight against the state, that is, make them less 32

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likely to aim their rifles at the power or monied elites who keep raping them in the economic ass--and herein lies the difference. Of course, we still have nuts who aim them at children in schools and I still cannot help but fear that it is the government doing so with an operative so they can take our guns away . . . so, I am not entirely apart from being a Libertine. Homosexual men most often fuck each other in the ass out of love, but we cannot understand that because our government keeps fucking us in the ass when we don't want them to, I think I remember her saying. To say what or not to say what, when and where would be a consideration; to whom is important. Know your audience. Not hungry yet, breakfast was enough, almond croissants and coffee, a long walk along the shore afterwards and then a late morning pre-lunch beer from yesterday . . . We have to know that we are not talking about a society's obligation to ensure someone gets the appropriate psychiatric treatment who might actually be mentally defective to a point where he is a danger to himself and others. Homosexuality is not a mental illness, nor is it another kind of sickness from which someone can be cured, nor is it an incurable illness. It is normality in variegation. I am not trying to say that some Gay men are not crazy--or that lesbians are also immune to forms of insanity. What more do I have to tell you? I wish she had said what it was she knew, what it was she understood, could say, could have said, might have said, but The Falling Leaf Review

did not . . . not or not-not; I am X, and if I am X, I am also not-not X, right? True, I think we are supposed to say. Â Do you see the clouds coming up over the horizon . . . why did I say "up over?" Why not just "over?" Abortion rights and the rights of same-sex partners to marry are contingent on the law recognizing that gay marriage is not an affront to opposite sex unions, and that the legal right to choose a safe, medically induced miscarriage is not an affront to having children. Having a gay teacher does not make your children gay; allowing same sex unions does not cheapen heterosexual marriage. Allowing for same sex unions does not lessen the integrity of marriage in general. Allowing that safe medical procedures are performed when a woman has an induced miscarriage does not devalue children, nor will it lead to a significant drop in birthrates, which itself is a separate issue. But the woefully ignorant cannot be told this; and any one of them picking up a book is not likely to happen. Haven't you wondered why I am doing what I am going to do? She asked. Most arguments against gay marriage are absurd; most of the arguments levied against pro-choice in the matter of abortion are beside the point. (I never hear anyone from the anti-abortion camp encouraging anal intercourse among heterosexual teenagers as a way to reduce teen pregnancy, but then we are not supposed to be having unprotected sex, unless two partners decide to get tested and re-tested six months later and then joyfully fuck each other anally without threat 33

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of pregnancy [and I know that there is no one reading this who can get to the question, are you sure you cannot get pregnant by fucking in the ass? I think I am going to get ready to go and get stuff for lunch . . . should have something else in mind to pick up in place of what they might not have that we want, what about having bar-be-cue for dinner, what to get, steaks for the grill, a bottle of Margaux with that . . . Let us not set up straw dogs. Another one of our favorite past times. There are some who come from a religiously informed position, a place where their religious views and beliefs are confronted by even the idea of gay marriage or the notion that a woman should be afforded the legal right to choose an abortion, who are not zealous lunatics looking to lynch women for having an abortion or simply for supporting the right to choose one; they certainly wouldn't nail a young gay man to a tree or a barbed wire fence post or drag him from behind their car . . . the way I hear some talk, beating their chests in simian pride that a buffoon like Trump has become the Republican Party nominee for President, one or more grunts given in the belief that he speaks for them, finally, as they would say, someone speaks for us. One religiously informed position is the missionary position--but then this is also the chimpanzee position; yes, chimps fuck face-to-face. Yes, missionaries advocating the monkey way to natives who were most likely not uptight about sex, which is not to say that they did not have a metaphysics that was centered on patriarchy and patriarchal control of women. Not always, but . . . and I cannot listen to anyone, with The Falling Leaf Review

any seriousness, who dismisses this, what is said, has been said, might be said at any point in the argument, without having considered any of them, thought about them, read anything related to them, anything at all that would allow one to raise literacy . . . I do not want us here to get sidetracked into a debate about the merits and demerits of religion or the religious when it weds itself with politics--always a bad idea. The focus here is on the rights a woman has independent of any metaphysical system, and whether the laws of her society are going to get behind her right to choose, stand behind her, remain behind her or not.Â I know that this has become a non-debatable issue, and that these remain truths self-evident for anyone on either side; that is, the pros and cons are not part of a debate only a ping pong match of slurs and slogans and vehemence and violence. (I afterwards thought of saying "slurs and vehemence and slogans and violence," but no; I could have said, "slurs and vehemence and violence and slogans," but no; I chose what I did more out of expediency, which has here and now been spent---it was the first thing that came to mind, what I wrote before this parenthetical insert.) Legislation that insures a woman's right to choose an abortion can be safe is of course the crux of any rational argument supporting pro-choice for women who are so inclined, she would say. I know to my horror that there are many, many women oppositely inclined, she said, but then how many of us see how easily we ourselves act and vote contrary to our interests 34

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politically?Â She said she had been inclined in the past . . . induced miscarriage is what the procedure is, not abortion, which has been chosen for sensational effect. She could not avoid feeling guilty, it seemed, sounded by how she talked about it---what the hell do I know? Steak. The steaks we got. The strip steaks. The long part of a Porterhouse. There are no religious beliefs that can be used to justify or support violence against a woman or clinics, not unless we live in or want to live in Muslim Theocracies--and we have to be clear about what we mean about honoring diversity in America. There is no place for Sharia Law here in America---she was one of them, and I recall her passion for women's rights, whatever that means to you or to the next the guy or woman, from wherever you come, whatever decade you came of age in, whatever class, level of education, degree of superstition, ignorance, or . . . and do not tell me that there are not many who are outraged by police officers being ambushed, as I am, who did not say good when Omar shot up that nightclub in Orlando. Pro-choice is, in the specific sense of choosing to have a safe abortion, part of the larger more encompassing Human Right to choose--how do any of us who imagine us thinking persons, any of us with children or sisters certainly all of us with mothers and maybe aunts, and grandmothers and girlfriends and wives . . . daughters . . . Â very person, man or woman, heterosexual or homosexual, married or unmarried, has an unalienable right to choose the life he or she wishes to live, and The Falling Leaf Review

if they do not, what does that say about anybody's freedom, anywhere at any time . . . . what did you imagine the Founders meant when they said constant vigilance. The right of gay men and lesbians to choose whether or not to get married in a same-sex union is on par with a woman's legally sanctioned choice to have an abortion if she should want one. They are each a part of the Pro-Choice argument that is essential to any Pro-Freedom position in any society. And I do know faceto-face just what kind of idiocy there is in this country on matters like these. I do not want to be disrespectful or hurtful when it's people I might have once had affection or friendship for, but when I listen to some people say things I know have come from a dangerously dark place in the mind I have to recoil, run for cover, hide and hope never to be found. I do suspect that most Muslims who are here in America want to live in peace as Muslims, although I am not so sure that they would prefer no longer in some confused and confusing Islamic medievalism . . . or so I have come to think, say as I would in other contexts, as it seems to me I have. And do not tell me that there are not a mass of Muslim women living in the middle ages today because they are, they do, we could see it if we weren't so clouded by our desire to see something else in what our eyes tell us we see. It is easy to be prejudiced against Muslims; I do have to say that even she was to the extent that she was vehemently opposed to any kind of theocratic construct for government or social control, which of 35

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course is exactly what the right wing fundamentalists believe, want, desire, look to accomplish. The croissants were especially good this morning, they are never stale, but on some days they certainly fresher than on other days, a fresh batch of almond croissants, I do not think the baker makes them every day, which baker would? Nonetheless, there is no pit and the pendulum looming if gay marriage is not supported by law. There is, though, something out of Edgar Allan Poe for girls in the foreseeable future without a law that protects their Human Right to choose to have an abortion, and I remind us herein again that a woman has the right to choose to have an abortion whether the laws in her society support that right, protect that right-I do not know how anyone can be against providing women with a law that upholds her right to decide for herself how she wishes to use her body, a law that insures medicine is practiced and not something out of a chamber of horrors when she decides to have an abortion, and it is a chamber of horrors we are subjecting her to when we put her between social rocks and medical hard places. But of course she should never be in a place to get one, to have one, to choose one, right? (Imagining what I must be thinking by what I have said is not a bad place to start; nothing outside the text, could be your guide.) Abortion before the law got behind it in the 1970s was appalling--most antiabortion people would be shocked if they saw what had transpired or does transpire in some places in the world. Of course, this would then be used against the right to The Falling Leaf Review

choose, assuming that the horror of illegal abortion is endemic to all abortions. There are no other ways to express what illegal abortion represented: terrible, shocking, appalling, horrible, frightening; what else do we have in words to say what is intended here: butchery, something out of the slaughterhouse--woman as carcass? You think this is too much? She did not. She liked it. She liked my essays; we were attracted to each other, her mind was sexy. What all of the ramifications were when a girl needed to get an abortion for whatever reason convinced her she needed one--how many women still die yearly worldwide from unsafe abortions is staggering. There is something downright gothic horror. You know, we are talking curtain rods and all that went along with less than antiseptic surgery. The question for me is why should induced miscarriage be less safe and less anti-septic than operations performed at Mobile Army Surgical Hospitals during war? This has changed here in the United States, we imagine, at least we imagine it has changed for the better and that that change for the better is permanent, as if no vigilance were necessary.Â Nonetheless, more women die annually from medical malpractice in America than from breast cancer. Maybe women are still the second sex in America's mind--perhaps this second sex status crosses over to second class in other ways as well--how could it not. Is woman the nigger of the world? If so, what then are black women in the world? Think about it--I mean think, not reflex from it. I know that there are still too many people who are exclusive about the use of the word 'nigger,' 36

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even downright snobbish, as ironic and paradoxical as that becomes. What do those white clouds look like, they are big, puffy, voluptuous white cumulus coming up over the horizon . . . The idea that we cannot take giant steps backwards is naive. There is really no low that people cannot descend to; there is no limit really to how bad things can get in a society; there is no condition that people cannot get used to, none. We were shown the documentaries made with the footage taken from the liberated camps by the U.S. Armed Forces. We did not have access to any of the footage the Soviet Armed forces took in their liberation of some of the Nazis camps at the close of World War II. Don't imagine that we could not make things any worse because we could. The United States only sometimes an exception, there are nearly a hundred thousand women worldwide who die in the process of having an illegal and/or unsafe abortion. Nearly half of all abortions worldwide are not safe medical procedures and this has to stop. But then why should it when most of us are convinced we should be grateful that more women do not die annually from illegal or unsafe abortions. There is something uncivilized about a society that cannot protect a woman's right to choose, or provide safe and antiseptic medical procedures when she does exercise her rights--just as there is something uncivilized about a society that systematically under-educates even most of its university graduates . . . I cannot see her sometimes; other times I have a clear picture of her; yet other times I see her and hear her as if she were in the room with me, The Falling Leaf Review

walking with me, talking with me, sitting next to me or lying down next to me. Women of the world unite? You have nothing to lose but your chains--or maybe your life, as Pakistani women might if raped or if they elope--there is always some brother lurking about ready to kill a woman because she has brought shame upon the family through the violent actions of another man through the act of rape. Yeah, that's the world we want to go back to, you fucking idiots--and now I am talking to the assholes who I once called friends who support Trump. I can imagine that semi-literate is literate enough has been an unspoken mantra on Wall Street for a long time . . . and please do not imagine that I do not believe that I know that guillotines are not the solution for our problems economically; the Power and the Money have no fear; that's what Bush senior meant when he said he envisioned a kinder and gentler nation, a nation where sheep are gentle and power and money wolves are left to ravage un-accosted . . . the impure blood must flow! Â You know this, right? A society that upholds those rights by law is a civilized society, I've said this and I say it again as I will do so again. Of course, any society that does not is less than possessing an advanced level of social, cultural and moral development--and it is not a morally developed society that moralizes and punishes the way . . . you know that I hold these truths to be self evident. I wish I could make this clearer-make something here I am trying to say . . . to choose to have an abortion or to choose to have the baby; these are the flip sides of 37

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the pro-choice issue.Â And so, a woman's right to choose must also include her right to have a child. I thought I had said we could have the baby; I was sure that I had said we would have the child, that we could have the child--they're not the same thing, are they? Any pressure from either extreme in the diametric of the abortion issue is unacceptable in a civilized society. What is civilized about letting her choose when letting her choose means leaving her alone when leaving her alone means to abandon her? is that what it was? To oppose prochoice is to support pro-horror, whether one supplies the curtain rods or not. No it was not. You do remember the final scene in Godard's Masculin et Feminin, when the girlfriend (played by Chantal Goya) of the chief protagonist (played by Pierre Leaud of Truffaut's Les Quatres Cent Coups fame) is asked what she is going to do now that she is pregnant and her boyfriend is dead, and she says something to the effect of not knowing, but that perhaps she'll use a curtain rod? I still do not know what happened. I'm still not sure. There are donuts left from this morning if anyone wants a snack before lunch, some yogurt, maybe . . . get more for lunch, the strawberries were good from yesterday, for lunch and again before dinner last night . . . The words from a young girl's mouth, particularly flippantly expressed, a curtain rod--again, how could any girl shove a curtain rod up her cunt, but then I have never met a woman who thinks her cunt is beautiful. I mean, I have never met a woman who has looked at her vagina in a The Falling Leaf Review

mirror and said, That's beautiful. How could girls not shove curtain rods up the cunt? She did not, I know. I bought some IPA to have today with lunch and dinner. I knew that she did not like the word cunt as much as she liked the word pussy when she talked about the vagina when she wasn't using the word vagina.Â The last time we were in Paris I remembered the opening montage sequence of Truffaut's The 400 Blows . . . we were staying around the corner from L'Ecole Militaire and the park that opened its vista on La Tour Eiffel.Â I touched the walls, rubbed the wooden doors and held the handles of the doors Napoleon might have touched . . . fucking in the city of lights. We had a bottle of Gigondas in a small bistro after La Tour Eiffel one night. The next day I took a bottle Vacqueyras to Baudelaire's grave. To shove a curtain rod up the cunt or not to shove a curtain rod up the cunt, this is the question, whether it is nobler to carry a pregnancy to term, or on the other hand, shove a curtain rod up the cunt and end it. I still do not know exactly what happened; no one explained anything, said anything, talked around everything, the questions . . . decisions, decisions, decisions creeping in their petty pace to the last syllable of recorded arguments over whether a woman has the right or whether or not she should be allowed by law to pursue her unalienable rights. III I do not think women have been carefully handled by their mothers, certainly not 38

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society, in thinking they are beautiful . . . too many times I have been with women who have never really looked at their cunts, never looked with admiration at their pussies, the vagina for them was not beautiful. Sad, really. They're further up now . . . looking like something, not elephants, no . . . When Chantal Goya said what she said about the curtain rod, the scene immediately faded to black, and everyone was shocked. There were many who were outraged, of course; but then people are always easily collectively outraged. An individual standing up against many to do the righteous thing is difficult and almost a sure futility in anyone's expectation. But joining a mob to do anything inhuman is easy. Misunderstanding is many times disunderstanding, and that is also very easy to accomplish.Â All of the outrage about Godard's film, though, was in 1966 Paris . . . it is 2016 and in the name of democracy we have to endure the hopelessly stupid and the criminally ignorant . . . I guess this is what we mean by honoring diversity--what did you liberal twits think you were doing when you sought to erase boundaries, blur the lines, abandon Truth, question the validity of knowledge in perpetuity and raise doubt to the highest form of wisdom? America's contemporary liberals are so fucking stupid, they might be more stupid as liberals than contemporary conservatives are stupid as conservatives, if you could get real thinking around that . . . and I am sorry that if in a story you must be inundated with wave after wave of ideas and thoughts and The Falling Leaf Review

critical responses and diatribes and tirades and lamentations and irony and wit and viscera, venting my spleen asI do have done will keep on doing. Wire hangers when curtain rods were not available . . . I still can only say, What the fuck? Some took scalding hot baths, others, like Kate Winslet's character in Revolutionary Road, used a variety of tubes and hoses and forceps, what else had we then in the fifties for middle class suburban women to have the do-it-yourself abortions.Â Just add water . . . we want everything instant. There was no pill when she--what did she do? Why do I ask this question? I ask it because . . .there is no because. There are only implications and inferences. Stop looking for prior contingencies. (What passes for thinking in this country is the problem.) We wonder about torture of suspected terrorists, and yet we want to send women backward historically and subject them to the horrors of illegal abortions, what some 20,000,000 women worldwide get annually--but those who want to send women backward are not the ones wondering about or worrying about torture at Guantanamo. . . but then most people who are or who pretend to be anti-abortion are vehement supporters of capital punishment. I know people who are prochoice who are against capital punishment. Fuck me, really, what are we talking about here when we actually entertain going back to the fifties, the forties, the nineteenth century--where are we going, where have we been . . . I did know girls who induced miscarriage with nearly scalding baths, how many of them I never 39

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asked . . . talk about torture. Look at what we have been doing politically for the last quarter century or more. The Oval Office is a TV studio and everything is a joke or sensational entertainment, yes politcomercials? (I'll get it. I'll find the word, the other words to express what I am trying for here.) How many girls have we known, the men I know and have known, have had abortions and have told none of you? Division of labor is one set of unnecessary proscriptions we used to try to cling to as if it were a fact of nature, but then nature is red in tooth and claw, and a woman not telling any man about her abortion is telling. These are all of piece? The pieces of embryo that do and do not come out--how do we know if all of the pieces of what was up there have come out . . . just let the air in, you know, you remember, you have to, just push the curtain rod against the cervix, how does one sterilize it, can you use rubbing alcohol or would it be better to use what for up the cunt . . . five hundred women a day commit suicide in China; there are more men than women because forced abortions, especially when the fetus is female is the rule in China. Doctors have to reassemble the placenta to make certain that there are no pieces left inside, after birth. To birth is to carry. What is all of piece? What then must we do? Let us add our light to sum of light . . . each of us adds this, can add this, should add this . . . let us still hope that light will win over darkness. I do not know why that sounds so trite--it should not, but we do wonder if it does or does not. We suspect anyone with convictions that cannot be packaged with the correct bows and The Falling Leaf Review

ribbons . . . and just because gun nuts will use as a excuse to keep automatic weapons available the fact that someone shoots an anti-abortion nut is no reason I should not shoot anti-abortion nuts . . . which side are you on--yes, which side are you on? What are we willing to do in the name of civilization, democracy, freedom, Human Rights? What? Would you let the Nazis win? I am not saying Trump is a Nazis, although he is another kind of Fascist, and he might have a lot more in common with Mussolini or Franco or Pinochet than you will want to imagine--it hurts to imagine what Trump is really like, what he is really capable of doing or not doing, what he will be unable to handle. Maybe hippos, yes, white hippos, the clouds up and over the horizon now have taken shape looking a lot like a group of white hippos wading there on the horizon . . . I ask the question, More? How often? I ask it rhetorically; I ask it genuinely; sometimes I am doing both at once. Sometimes I am not aware that I am doing neither when I ask; only reflex. Reflection is what we try to call remembering? To reflect is just what it is, casting the light of memory or experience in a different direction. Epilogue I got a Matryoishka as a gift, one year. I do not know what this means or what kind of story you want out of it . . . I have lost touch with readers, I have lost touch with friends, with family, with teachers, with classmates, with colleagues, with everyone or anyone I

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have ever loved . . . what does this mean, prodigal me. The journey, my boy, the journey.Â It would have to be the journey; I have no idea what the destination is. Fuck you. I don't need your credit card. How many incarnations of me have I gone through? I picked it up the other day and took it apart and put it back together, one inside the other and so on until complete, the wooden doll . . . did I put anything inside of it? I have asked me the same questions; the psyche, memory, who am I; the many selves Self, and how is it that you do not see this, this fictional you reader you are here in my mind as I write put to paper or is it screen? Holding onto who you used to be is a malady, is a neurosis in some, psychotic in others. Let them go; let them die when they have to. Sleeping with the corpses of former selves is really fucked up. I have seen them displayed in stores and in homes with all the inside-each-other dolls of smaller and smaller sizes, if in one direction this one you choose, set next to one another. I am talking about those Russian dolls---the degree of bigotry and racism and reactionary politics and polemics from Irishmen, Italians, Jews and AfricanAmericans is frightening, and a little bit ironic---no, a lot of irony is there in these reactionary responses. I do not need stop at who I have mentioned herein above; I do not see anything but racism, bigotry and narrow minded suspicion from just about everybody, anybody I meet in my multiThe Falling Leaf Review

ethnic, multi-religious neighborhood, each eye on everyone else with derision. All persons, any person, one-hundred percent Homo-sapiens, fully prepared to show how he is 98% identical with a chimpanzee. Humans will always do something that is completely contrary to what is best for them. My drinking three too many pints of IPA the other night is just a minor example. But to get drunk on Trump and reactionary politics because it gives vent to your Spleen and not your mind, which you have turned into a knee--reflexive politics-knee-jerk conservatives and knee-jerk liberals, is so monstrously stupid, which again is why there are so many fascist responses from everywhere because intelligent people know there is no talking to anyone with how simian everything and everyone has become--a stick; taking a stick to everyone present; slapping every body with the stick. What anything has to do with anything we often only know after the facts of occurrence or happenstance; it is all about interpretation, all in the interpreting. Or so I like to say sometimes, not really knowing what I am saying, just as too many I know work with love talk straight out of their asses. The older I get, the fewer people I listen to; I sometimes do not listen to myself, growing weary of what I say to me in the mirror. I just feel sorry for all the poor bastards who think the superficial skimming of pages they do is reading.

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never know, I wouldn't want to, there would be something insane about wanting to know this. Madness is madness, sanity, sanity, what else is there to know, there is always truth present in every tautology, oftentimes in nothing else. I am I, you are you, a chair is a chair, a woman, a woman, et cetera. But persistence, tenacity, I remember what the Buddha says to the man who does not know it is the Buddha when he asks the Buddha who he is--he doesn't know. He asks a series of questions, what kind of being he is, supernatural, divine, and so on. The Buddha simply says no to all the man asks, and on the man's final question, What are you? The Buddha says, Awake. I could always tell how much I had spent to the penny between my paychecks, recollecting where the dollars and cents were done in, at a newsstand, at a bookstore, a bistro, a bar, a deli for beers with friends at the beach. Who's the truest of them all I could not tell, the mirror this morning was coated with dust. Recollection and remembering are not always one and the same thing; to recollect is a kind of remembering, but not all remembering is recollecting. To recollect is a conscious remembering; remembering does not have to be a kind of volition, there does not need to be any active participation in the remembering. To remember may or may not be by choice. There is no room left for anyone else in me, it seems, or so I believe, as crowded as I have become in my life, the number of selves multiplying over time, potentiality always the mark of created beings. Humans are created; homo-sapiens may or ma not

Mirror, Mirror The difficulty anyone faces when trying to connect with another is that the I is already a plurality. I am solitary, for sure, but I am we as well. Just as often as they are accurate, the senses are inaccurate verifiers of reality: I walk on flat ground, my senses tell me, but I know the surface of the earth is curved; I see parallel lines converging on the horizon, and I think this sight is an illusion, yet the parallax reveals the curvature of the earth to the senses. No illusion. The curvature of the earth is obvious to anyone who looks, for anyone who sees. How is it that anyone thought ships fell off the earth when they slowly disappeared on the horizon, especially with masts as tall as they were, but then Viking vessels did not have sails as big as ships did in the age of discovery, the age of discovery already having settled the flatness or roundness debate. I know that the object in the sky most often reported as a UFO turns out in the end to be the moon; yes, it does stop when you stop on the road, and it does move when you move, does speed up when you speed up, does slow down when you slow down. I stand before my mirror every morning in the bathroom, look to the one in my bedroom when I wake. Mirror, mirror on the wall . . . I say as I have said, I do ask it who is the fairest, the smartest, the handsomest? I ask the mirror everything. No question left unasked. How many times I have asked the mirror a question I could The Falling Leaf Review

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be. This is not a Genesis moment here; but there is always a genesis of the human I am or the human I may become. Whether God is a noun or a verb to the contrary otherwise stated--only God in my philosophy gets to be pure actuality. As I found in this essay, "I is We," I am an amalgamation of many selves in a single Self, one and many simultaneously. You know how it works for me it works also for you; I am every person, everyone is me. I always have an eye out for the stage. All the world, we know, everywhere I go another platform on which to perform--what was the correlation between acting and criminality, social degeneracy? Actors, criminals, theaters, houses of prostitution; prostitution, constitution, institution . . . the Self is an institution with its own constitution, and that's the physiological constitution and the political one as well; we all know we can prostitute ourselves, this Self I sell, but did we know we could do so inside ourselves with our selves for another self . . . in the course of reading there was the idea that choosing from among the selves in my Self could be a problem. There is also a problem of selection, of making a choice: which one of the many selves do I decide is the first, the foremost, the one and only one? Isn't the notion of hierarchy where the selves are concerned itself a mistake? Which is the I that everyone or someone else sees, hears, has revealed before her, him, you and me? Who am I? is not the question as much as When am I, where and with whom, for how long? We will get to Shakespeare's stage, the world, The Falling Leaf Review

his theater was called the Globe not incidentally. What does a woman choose, how can she, what can she choose when she is pregnant? I don't have to be woman to ask this; in fact, if I were a woman I might not need to ask this question, except I would then assume that because I was a woman, I'd have a hotline to all women. But does anyone woman have this hotline to all women. They say a tree screams when you pluck its leaves. I used to wonder if embryos scream when we pluck them from their waters, little tadpoles swimming in their pools. You can understand the confusion any person might face when faced with what face to wear as mask, every face a mask, the face in the mirror yet another I see. I sometimes face this anxiety over who I should be, how one should act is everything about who to be. An individual human life is singular, certainly, but also plural . . . this singular plurality a complex of mutual multiple reciprocations, in space, in time (through it or carried by it). The world is a stage, Shakespeare assures us; life the theater of parts to play over time. But what of the other roles for theSelf to play--its parts? The Self is made up of many selves, but its sum is greater, nonetheless . . . Who I am when and where is one thing; at what period in my life, another; with what person or persons, family, coworkers, neighbors, friends, man, woman, child, older, younger, lover or enemy, yet others. What relationship I have with whomever I am interacting is in part, more or less than other parts, who I am, which I I 43

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choose to be. I am not the same person in every one of these fore mentioned contexts, nor am I the same person I was last week, last year or ten years ago. Midwives have managed birth and abortion for millennia. There have always been herbs to take, or teas to drink, whenever the one was needed. Abortion has always been by necessity. No woman has one frivolously. Even if she's the stupidest woman alive, do you imagine she says let me get pregnant so I can have an abortion? No woman takes this lightly, even if she acts as if she were. If she were the greatest actress in the world you might suspect something were amiss; every woman is the top actress for the roles she plays for herself, almost invariably before her self, chief protagonist and audience simultaneously. I know this because I am for me and for mine. Abortions used to be scary to talk about, terrifying to imagine, horribly grotesque to . . . how do I experience another's experience? I do not. It must have, though, been something out of the concentration camp, a Grand Guignol for women as puppets managed by Nazis. What do you imagine abortion was before Roe versus Wade, presumably legal means safer, but before legal? We have all come to know how criminals manage illegal desires and needs; the black markets of the world are filled with the highest ethical considerations because pimps, drug dealers, bootleggers, doctors without licenses have all always upheld the highest standards. Desperation meant getting what was needed, but what was needed was not

The Falling Leaf Review

safer until it became legal I remember my cousin, my Godmother, said. Paradoxes and conundrums concerning my mutual singular and plural nature aside, any choice I make determining my I-ness amounts to an exclusion of my many other potential selves, but for how long? If protracted, if one and only is persistently chosen, as if this were the best, the only, or the most natural and thus the healthiest choice, it would amount to a Self too repressed in its attempts to reach out to others, themselves like myself, cut off from the many that populate the Self, mostly by convention-societal norms require self-denial; all of this together inside as well as outside of me. Living only another way to string the suppositions I've made about how I could live or should live. All thinking itself seeming, all seeming a way to mature our assumptions, allow them to ferment into beliefs, believing into a way of life. I've come full circle with the above. Details, what's in the details, of or from the tail, the end, the conclusion, are they the same? We imagine that the details are important; Virginia believed that this was so, that everything was in the details down to the minutia, the fragments of thoughts, the passing images, the bit of color, a piece of wave worn glass picked up on the beach walking with whomever whenever, however. A question arises in the practicalities of my confusion. If I were as awkward as has been implied, in handling the fundamental nature of my Self, how could I then allow another to enter me--how does anyone enter another, all this entering and 44

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exiting, human relationships always in the between, the between a place, every entrance is one, to enter is thus to between. I ask another to become a part of me, desire could not countermand this faith, and faith it is as long as it remains part of my beliefs, part of that structure of inferences from premises without direct tactile evidence.Â How many more lessons? How is it that anyone can endure the mania of being one and only one person, a singular and invariable personality, harnessing the process of becoming, freezing it, capturing it in stone, locking it there so to speak, making of one's self a statue of a kind most popularly appreciated. The aesthetics of Self in our country are inorganic. But why is it America's fault? It's no more America's fault for me in my choices how I come to choose than it is France's fault for the French or Japan's fault for the Japanese. There has to be a way I am me, I get to be me and me apart from any way I have been brought up, taught, shown, exampled what when where by whom whenever. Does it matter what my name is? Could it matter where I am from, what ethnicity I am, what religion, gender, kind of profession I have, whether I have one or not? Does it matter her age? Does it matter any of these things I have mentioned for me? Would it matter for her for me for you if she were Christian, Muslim or Jew, whether she were Catholic or Baptist, Reformed or Conservative, Shiite or Sunni? Does being Chinese really matter when human matters most?

The Falling Leaf Review

The shape of her eyes, the length of her legs, the contour of her breasts, her collar bone . . . I don't know who I am or what I am most of the time; how can I know anyone else? I am when I am but when is that? Most of the selves in my Self remain hidden. I wear masks I'm sure in the world, among even my friends and family, I would then have to wear masks on masks; wearing masks is by nature and by nurture. But the masks I wear inside. I have to get behind them? How? Will I ever? Water from the moon? I am is a mystery. To me. How can anyone know me? How can a plurality of selves inside any one of us sustain themselves in a being that starves all becoming? How does this rigid, statuesque Self not crack, crumble under its own weight. Could not Schizophrenia be a result of this oppression of the many selves Self, splitting apart under the forced pressure of remaining one and only one person, of not allowing an organic fluidity among the selves to reign free, by disallowing multiple selves an equal an mutual election, an easy and contextually determined transition from one to the other depending on necessities. A man is never more certain of his reality than when he is insane or when he is dreaming, dreaming then a kind of insanity, psychosis a form of day dreaming.Everybody lives in an asylum of his own. I construct the prison houses I am locked up in, all of them, every jail, inmate and keeper. The sane man shouts the loudest when locked up; innocence protests the most? The guilty man changes his story; the one without guilt does not? 45

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Maybe. To be or not to be is a fundamental question; but it is not solely a question of whether or not to live or to die. It is also a question in the foundation in Being. It concerns what it means to be, but also what it is to become. Becoming is being as it is also non-being; non-being what it means not to be. To be or not it is not simply a question of suicide; it is to mediate being, but being as a choice in existence, something that mediates becoming by choosing. To choose to be I remove myself from perpetual becoming, from the flux of constant and perpetual non-being, for to become is also not to be. becoming which has always been non-being, as close to a primordial nothingness as anything related to annihilation. I look in the mirror--the doppelganger I have hung by the side of the bed. The mirror is coated with dust. I look to the opposite wall as I did that night before the day. I looked and I saw the light blaring, a stampede of elephants I used think, this sight in sound I imagined. I used to imagine that sounds had shadows overshadowed by their echo, and that sights had echoes drowned out by their shadows. I imagined a world where sight and sound were interchangeable, that one for the other could be understood. Her torso was pitch. Her body entirely silhouetted. Her face as she turned to me a black hole. Black the absence of light; no definition. I strained to see if I could see her eyes. There were still many things unsettled between us. In the end there are always unsettled things, unsettled desires, unsettled arguments, other contradictions. The Falling Leaf Review

The body only reaches equilibrium when its dead; if our relationship was dead, where was the equilibrium? I am everyone in my dreams. I am every voice--there are no faces in my dreams? Everything is as if looking out through the eyes of an ancient mask. Every persona, every personaggi, my personality, my personalities . . . each of us is every other one of us; I am me, I am all, I everyone, I am no one. I could write a new morality play. In order to be, one must choose being in direct opposite tension with becoming. One does not do this by resisting the will of one's plural nature, resistingÂ by artificially imposing a self to the psychic displacement of every other self that seeks mutual-ness in the many selves Self.Â There is harmony that comes out of this seeming chaos of selves; this harmonic SelfÂ is not achieved by imposing one self among many to be the one and only, but by conducting a symphonic coalescence of all of the selves in a harmonious Self of many selves macrocosmic to all exterior being. I had a dream where I was dismembered by her as Osiris was his brother Seth. In the same dream she became Isis. I was chopped into parts, arms, legs, torso, head, all the pieces laid about on some plane, platform, a stage, it was dark where I was, or where all of me was, the parts of me lying around there. I recall that in the dream I was also piecing me back t together, yes, I must have been on some stage trying to put me back together. I was arranging and rearranging parts.

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I don't know why I had so much difficulty. I never knew why she had as much difficulty with the lock to the door to her apartment. But there I was, all the King's horses and all the King's men. I was trying to put me back together and somehow I felt as if it were again. I heard a bell. A bell was ringing. The ringing continued. It grew louder and louder. The light in the dream got brighter and brighter. The stage became a room. I was in my room. I was in my bed. I heard a phone. A phone was ringing. I woke and I answered the phone. It was morning. I hoped it was her. It wasn't her. It was someone else, another she . . . I imagined what I should want to say to her. I did not say anything. I thought about what I could say. I said nothing. I let her talk and talk all the wile giving those special verbal cues to the other that you are listening, just as easily relayed when you are not. But if you do not uh-huh and mmm your way through a phone conversation you are ignoring, you will alienate. Who I was going to be that day passed through my mind. I always freeze when I have too many choices. I recall another dream I had where she was sitting or kneeling, I forget which, but nonetheless, she was about to set herself on fire, having already poured kerosene all over herself. She struck a match and was immediately engulfed by flames as was everything else everywhere. Everything in the dream was on fire. Everywhere there were intense flames. I woke quickly as I think I heard her scream, but why would she scream if she were so intent on setting herself ablaze? The Falling Leaf Review

No one is able to imagine their death before they kill themselves. I can't believe they know how to. I'm certain that suicide is a product of an under active imagination, a failure on the part of the one who is gin g to kill herself--you couldn't be able to imagine burning to death and then strike the match. You'd hesitate before lighting a bar-be-que if could imagine Dido doing what she had done. But how can I imagine being Dido you might say if I am a man. A man cannot imagine a woman, neither a woman a man; no one can another, certainly nobody white somebody black. The world is fractured. The world is shattered. Broken glass, broken pottery, a vase I dropped with flowers in it, a mess.

POETRY by Jay V. Ruvolo

ANOTHER MAN I bought my father penny rolls To roll for me my pennies. IÂ have collected pennies in empty cans For years I cannot count. I couldn't possibly do it myself. The tedium would kill me. My fatherÂ is a different man, I wrote.

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Surrounding me? Another sight surrounds this seeing. To see is to understand; How firm are these old legs? HOLES Words echo, Resounding In other words.

Looking is a way not to see, I know. And I do look but look away and not. My gaze--stuck in the maze. Wonderment or wondering;

A shadow Is a spectral echo, An echo An acoustic shadow;

The spectacle-I need spectacles. I can't read Without stretching my arms

A shadow, A hole in light; Light, Filling up the holes.

To their limits. My Coffee's grown Cold as I have written These lines (I will want to say, For you.).

My soul is like Swiss cheese. [haiku] TIRESIAS IS BLIND

cool night spring I in you out of my new covers-curtains rise then fall

Tiresias is blind. I have met him before. I do not pity him his blindness. Blindness is different in antiquity.

CRESCENT Venus chased by the cream-white head of an open-mouthed snake

I imagine I am more compassionate. Odysseus seeks him in the underworld. Blindness has given Tiresias other eyes. How blind am I? I would have asked.

windows facing east by north-east morning October early in a Jewish month

I am blind in ways my sight hides. I see and I see not. What then are these eyes for that I have? That I use? To see the world around me?

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Wondering, I look out my window. I see an old woman Surrounded by pigeons. I do not ask why she is not feeding them. I pause. I look. I hear the squeak of Shopping cart wheels rolling unevenly

NARCISSUS AND ECHO The pool must have longed for Narcissus. In a world where the gods punish girls like Echo and boys like Narcissus, Pools can pine for men, The flower he becomes.

Between the grass and trees. One dog barking Another barking after him In the distance, Four or five more times barking, A third dog.

She liked them in bunches. I used to buy her bunches of them every Spring, early spring, The daffodils mark the season. I'd put them in a vase I bought at Macy's one

A breeze blows. Branches sway. Leaves shake.

Summer For the irises I had bought at a stand on 2nd Avenue. We'd share wine at Jules; stares, gazes, words and photos.

A primitive rattle bringing rain. I close the window and turn away. I walk to the kitchen. I make my morning coffee.

GOOD MORNING

The world outside disappears

I watch intently as I do shadows on walls the mornings I wake without rising her legs long out of blankets in a tangle at the foot of our bed

RAIN RAIN I see grass. I see trees. I watch the wind in the branches.

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me. The mirror image. But like the Chimpanzee, I recognize myself. Narcissus does not. It's never made clear just how long he watches himself. He does watch himself, not knowing it is himself. I watch me in the mirror too. I have often understood that I have to do more than look at me. But everything that appears in the mirror is on the mirror, the pane of glass a plane, again and again without gain. We speak of glass ceilings, but this is a glass wall, is it not. I know I recognize myself, so does the chimp--the dog barks at another dog never knowing it is himself he barks at. Who answers me when I talk to me in the mirror, when I talk to myself, Hamlet is the father of modern consciousness. I have been over hearing myself since I was a child? My question is the question. I wonder more how I capture my conscience with these questions. I do sometimes wonder aloud about who I am, but not for long do I persist in this line. Montaigne often stood in postures such as the ones I pose; to pose is to posit is to put in place a posture, the posture itself molding me. In his trials, his tests, Montaigne poses as is necessary. When French school children take a small test, perhaps a quiz, it is an essai; to essay is to test one's ideas, one's thinking. I remember believing that I did not know what I thought until I wrote. When I talk to myself, I proudly announce that Montaigne had as well, does as well, past and present in writing are matters of tense, not time; tense is not time you must know. I talk to this Self of many selves, one self at a time? I've said this before. There is a larger 'S' self contained of many other

ESSAYS How Many Am I? by Jay V. Ruvolo

Who am I? I ask. I do, I ask this question here. I have asked it many times. I am waiting for an answer, it seems, much the way Didi and Gogo are waiting for Mr. Godot. I pause before the mirror. I look to the mirror. I look in the mirror. In? I thought I settled this in and on dichotomy? duality? My poetry tries to settle much I cannot settle in my head. I see me, I assume, when I look at the mirror, toward the reflection, how am not like the celluloid heroes I watch on the screen? Why do I assume there is more veracity in the mirror than in, on, the videos I watch? There's that problem again, positional arrangements, fixed before . . . We do know that what is in the mirror is on, no? I am standing there in front of me, a reflection of me, there is no reflection without light, no vision of any kind, without light. To say I see means let there be light has taken hold. I am standing here in front of me, that him, that someone else who is me? Am I someone else; I am frequently someone else somewhere at some time. Question after question, I string along so many questions. I look into my eyes I think; eyes the world full of sorrow enough. My wife has sad eyes too; her eyes are a lot like mine. Vanity, vanity, thou art not verity. I never appear too sad for me to watch. There is something Narcissistic in The Falling Leaf Review

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selves. I do know that I am the same person over all time in my life, in every context with every person, every kind of person--not every person is the same as every other. It would be folly to believe that my selves do not contradict one another. I am not the same person in the world in every context, with every person. My wife is not my mother, my mother not my supervisor, my supervisor not my colleague, my colleague not another coworker, my co-worker not my neighbor, my neighbor not my doctor et cetera. How could all the selves in me be alike. I wear masks outside; I wear them inside too. This Self I talk about, is a capital 'S' self, a complex of many selves, a nexus; so, this who I am is not as important as when I am or who I am when. This capital 'S' Self is it made up of many other selves; simple enough said. But how many? Is it again an infinite potentiality; what are the probabilities? All the world, you know, stage after stage after stage. Humans long for actuality. Only God gets to be actual all the time; He is pure actuality; He is no part potential. In my religion, it is He, although I have asked why God cannot be He, She and It if He is Father, Son and Holy Ghost. This Self inside, a many selves Self inside, what selves inside me . . . where would I find this Matroishka? The questions of who, of what, of when and where, are important, no? But then to question is to position an answer, or is that a response that puts, that places again--responses are in themselves not answers? I thought I settled this already.

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I lay out again each question with my responses; do answers differ so radically? Perhaps not in how we think of them today, but they should. Answers and responses are not one and the same; brandy and cognac, you know, brandy and cognac.

ALL TOO HUMAN by Jay V. Ruvolo

If what is humane is now the question, then one of the first responses would have to be directed at the notion of love. Herein stated as a priori true, love is the principal attribute in acting humanely, in elevating our humanity to where we can live beyond surviving, which if we recognize the French in our English, to survive is always beyond or other than living, sur/vivir in French means just that, beyond to live. I connect to my humanity and to the humanity of others by choice, thus by an act of freewill, which I accept as selfevident, this idea that humans have freewill. We must never confuse the existence of oppression or repression for the absence of free-will. Humans have free-will even in chains. This choosing to have is exactly what distinguishes humanity from other things we are able to have without choosing. We do not choose to have blue eyes, we do not choose to breathe, we do not choose to be the homo-sapiens we are, presented with the heredity we have—we do not choose our biology as it is given to us at birth. No one chooses if he has to piss; the will to piss and the bodily function of pissing are exclusive. If holding one’s 51

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piss and shit has its limits. We do choose to be the kind of human we are, though. Thus we choose our humanity; but, of course, we do not choose it as we do other things; if we do, so much the worse for our humanity. For certain, humanity is not a thing in the sense of an object, whether that be a rock, a chair, a tree or a piece of paper, or a part of the body separate in consideration from the entirety of one’s body in symbiosis with mind. It is also not a thing in the sense of idea or of energy, such as freedom or love. But it is a thing in the notion of thing present in the idea of entity. Yes, humanity is an entity we choose; it is an entity that possesses us, becomes one with us, transforms us, and transfigures us even in the eyes of others who can see, seeing here a part of our knowing our understanding our ability to learn, something even the blind can perform, this kind of seeing. An entity has being; it exists as one. Humanity is a thing yet as a state of being is a thing. Humanity is a thing we must highly prize because to be human in this sense is to have what we have herein so far come to understand as humanity, which is to be human in the way we mean when you cannot be human unless humane. Humanity is thus an a transfiguring entity, it exists for this purpose; it is to be had, it is to be allowed, it is to be held, and what is to be held is to be done so with care, with caress, with tenderness. It cannot be extinguished, exterminated, and not even by the most monstrous inhumanity. It is the most fragile and yet the strongest thing in the universe. The Falling Leaf Review

Having humanity then is to be human in a way that can only be thoughtful, selfless in the sense that egocentrism (as we mean in the most pessimistic connotation we have given this term) is not the primary way in which we choose to interact with others. Love is the axis of the humane; love is the essential ingredient in kindness, tenderness, forgiveness, and compassion. Without these virtues, there can be no humane treatment of another human being. They are, though, the first qualities to disappear in any society suffering from a protracted dehumanization, the kinds we have seen throughout the history of totalitarianism, whether Bolshevik, fascist, Nazis, Stalinist or Maoist; or the kind performed in one dictatorship after another, whether Franco's, Pinochet's, or Hussein's; whether Romanian, Serbian, Cuban, or Haitian. Dehumanization seems to have become one of the leading pastimes around the world; the forms of which have been at the disposal of, for instance, one African war-lord or another; one ethnic group against others, in Iraq, the former republics of the Soviet Union, during the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia, or in Israel/Palestine; in Rwanda. Tribal politics are always in the service of oppression or genocide. All the fore mentioned isms have aided in the transformation of the nation-state into tribe.Tribal life is the beginning of the humane, not the further cultivation of being humane. The tribe forms as a step in civilization. Herein I mean civilization as we have tried to mean it, a civilizing force, thus an 52

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advancement of the humane, thus an agent working against inhumanity. Inhumanity has been all too human throughout history, where we mean any human-being, or member of the species Homo-sapiens, or the genus Homo, by the lexical reference, 'human.' How often we repeat this or the ways we do only ensure we will forget the message. In our media culture, where the medium is the message, the content gets lost in the conduit. The way we are taught to read now only further makes certain we will dis-understand the information conveyed. America is not immune to inhumanity; the fact we are human leaves us susceptible, the fact we are undereducated only insures we will mismanage our legacy and responsibility to ourselves and our posterity. The fact that American Bourgeois Capitalism has become Totalitarian only ensures inhumanity and a multiplicity of dehumanization will transpire more readily.

SETTING SUN; a Prose Poem A crow crows, another crow answers; he wakes; he dreams rain trying to purge something he thinks he remembers having said. He knew a girl who said her boyfriend had trouble opening and closing her door, locks turning next day, next month, several more years later, just two. How much time has passed, he does not ask. It does not move, all of it one without part. Past present and future are illusions; hope and truth no longer the world. Hope we offer truth, never our wishes. Only the past tense herein as good as time; tense imposes time. He hears, he listens, he thinks he feels. He sees in his mind's eye wide opened. He listens to her to hear; he only hears, she says. She says he does not listen. Who is she to say what she says? He asks. Response and answer are not necessarily the same. (Even I nod.)

POETRY AGAIN [old falling pebbles]

Where is she, why is she she, the rug has been pulled out from under him? Who he is as important as who he could be on a train home station after station sun-settingsoon shadows. He doesn't fear shadows. His soul; what goes on for him inside him, we fear Muslim women their veils, he said.

old falling pebbles ripple into petals flowers unfolding stones into ponds

Dinner together with her, Our favorite table The Falling Leaf Review

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On the banquet In the corner Right-angled by mirrors Diagonally opposite the entrance, He re-collects.

To name or not to name, I would like to say is the question, Was the question, for sure, for Adam. No thing ever but the thing in itself.

Meursault, foie gras, magret; The black hole they let love become, She imagines, he thinks.

Each itself a thing Without a word.

He and she every where either of them who are you, you are; who is he or she . . . we do let it become a black hole, he says he thinks she must imagine how he feels.

No more. I have to reiterate for you that If there is no one in the woods To hear the tree fall, Then the tree does not make a sound. Sound is made in the ear.

NOVEMBER IN MY SOUL

Yes, we have been calling dog shit a rose for so long that we have nothing but contempt for roses because they do not smell like shit.

Looming. A word, I say. Any word. For the thing I name.

Call me Adam.

Things in themselves only things. Nameless. Yes, things are until we do not. Name. As it has been called. This thing. What about this thing? The act of naming. We would like it to mean something, mean everything, it means nothing? What is in a name? I recall something about roses and dog shit, Something I read somewhere, Some-when. The Falling Leaf Review

Volume 1 Number 5

December 29, 2016

MERRY, HAPPY MERRY CHRISTMAS NEW

YEAR FROM

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Volume 1 Number 5

The Falling Leaf Review

December 29, 2016