haiku 18 Nov 2018

What does that shirt say?
The one the boy is wearing?
I am so confused...

americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan ]

dreamstate writing 1 May 2018

This dream occurred sometime in the early hours of this morning.

A dark-haired boy and what appeared to be his father were sitting next to a water-filled channel running across the descending edge of a sand dune. Beyond and below them was a flat beach upon which a few dozen bathers lounged. As I was walking up the mound toward them the boy climbed onto the rim of the channel, which collapsed, sending him tumbling head over heels into a trough of water at the bottom of the dune. I yelled at the father to alert him of his son’s plight, but he never turned to look, instead sat facing away from us the whole time. Swallowed instantly by the trough’s quicksand-like substrate material, the boy disappeared until only the very top of his head was showing.

Clawing into and digging away at the golden liquid sand, my efforts hampered by freely-flowing water, I managed to free the boy’s head, then finally after more frantic excavations his whole body. His eyes were closed and his face and neck were turning blue from lack of oxygen. Gathering his rag-doll body into my arms, I picked him up so that his head rested to the right of mine and his limbs draped around the right side of my torso. Standing up, I shouted down to the lounging bathers, who seemed unable to understand me. I tried different languages, saying things like Police, Polizei, Polisi, call for help, ayudame, rufe einen Krankenwagen, and tolong sakit.

Then, the scenery changed and I was ascending a tall tower of glass and steel, still holding the unconscious boy, mounting flights of stairs and riding upward in elevators, climbing ever and ever higher into the sky. Upon reaching some sort of top-floor control center packed with blinking computer terminals and walled in with slanted slabs of glass, I was approached directly by a small blond woman who finally offered to help me revive the unconscious child in my arms.

[ americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan ]

Child Pioneers adulthood ritual

As planned beforehand, the ritual lasted into the early morning hours. The Grigovian Child Pioneers being rotated periodically out of the Circle of Judgement so as to be allowed to catch their breath noticed fewer and fewer lights shining in the shimmering cities dotting the valley below. While in the circle, they carried heavy weights and tried to dodge thick ropes dangling from wooden structures overhead that were being swung at them by their instructors. The day before, they had been on the move for nearly the entire period of daylight, stopping only for a short lunch during the hottest part of the day. The day before that, they had learned skills of archery, knife-fighting, and some hand-to-hand grappling and striking moves.

Before they knew it, the hands of the clock had passed two after midnight, at which moment they were ordered to get in line and shut their eyes. Instructors then tied blindfolds to their faces before leading each young person, one by one, into a large tent erected nearby. Once all of them were seated on blankets inside, the instructors started banging on drums and chanting in an ancient Grigovian tongue while one of them, dressed all in black with a frightening mask tied to his head, walked around growling at the children and yelling at them to sit up straight.

Adulthood rituals are no laughing matter, and the organizers of Grigovian Child Pioneer Company 2.2 (W), Pyltagrad City / Village of Border Heights, knew their business. Properly preparing children - especially boys - for the rigors and expectations of adulthood was a task the nation had learned not to leave up to chance, or happenstance. After days of strenuous exercise and patient coaching from their leaders, the boys and girls were near the breaking point, physically and emotionally. Joining the Child Pioneers was not mandatory, but a majority of Grigovian parents encouraged their children to do it, mostly because the benefits far outweighed the possible drawbacks. Sure, some kids broke bones, occasionally, and almost all had to deal with scrapes and bruising, but these annoyances were a small price to pay for a lifelong sense of purpose, identity, and self-respect.

The drums fell silent, and the children were told to remove their blindfolds. In the corner, they saw the masked man lurking, his face illuminated by a handheld torch, which frightened them slightly. He laughed at first a cackle, which quickly became more human, and kind, whereupon he removed his mask and threw back the folds of the tent, bowing forward to usher the children outside. As they emerged, their leaders applauded them and handed each child a black bandana as well as a cup of hot herbal tea sweetened with local honey. After being informed that they had passed their tests and could now join (with their parent’s permission, of course) the ranks of the Teenage Pioneer divisions, the eleven and twelve year-olds limped off to their tents, where they were soon sleeping soundly.

americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan

student uprising in Grigovia

From the capitol city of Grig to even the smallest of hamlets, students enrolled in the Grigovian public schooling systems – some of them merely children – took part over the weekend in often violent protests to draw attention to a number of different issues. While some rose up out of solidarity with Syrian rebels fighting the regime of Bashar al-Assad, others took to the streets to voice their dissatisfaction with capitalism and such poverty and income-inequality as is associated with this unjust and outdated economic system. The youngest protesters, however – they who are most prone to sudden, brutal violence – actively fought various police and even military forces to bring attention to the rising cost of candy and sweets, whose prices have skyrocketed following a local outbreak of the virus nonspecificus willibrandtis, which has destroyed much of the country's reserves of sugar-beets, ruining most of its sugar-beet-derived sweeteners, sweet-makers, starches, and similar smack-a-licious substances.

In a statement posted to youtube and disseminated by hand-printed fliers, the students of Grigovia's vocational-technical colleges declared their allegiance to all other vo-tech student movements around the world, especially to those in Thailand. “We – and our brothers and sisters around the world, especially in Thailand – are dedicated to the free speech, free assembly, and to the propagation and free expression of the various trades, among them woodworking, electrical wiring, and gun-smithing; any government organization that opposes our right to unionize shall not stand long.” Long columns of vo-tech students – recognizable by their red and gold shoulder-patches – marched through the empty streets, or drilled in abandoned lots.

Said Noviembr Chu-Yendt, age 7, from the northern village of Vonya Yellenda, who had traveled to Grig by train, alone, in order to take part in these historic uprisings, “Last night, I ran into some school-mates who were going to join a street-march to highlight the degradation of our national park-lands by foreign companies mining there for rare-earth-metals, but, afterward, we became separated, and so I had to spend the night in a park, which was no so bad, because I brought my father's Soviet-Afghani-War-era Makarov pistol, and all these knives.” The boy opened his knapsack, allowing us a glimpse at what appeared to be a collection of trench-knives dating back to the First World War.

Later that day, we spoke to unemployed former factory forewoman Hana Blastisyennd, a 67-year-old grandmother whom we found manning a street-barricade in front of a Home for Orphans of the Israeli Occupation of Palestine (HOIOP). “When I heard rumors that some teenagers were looting the orphanage of its silver, I erected this barricade to keep the police away while my grandsons went inside to re-capture the stolen goods and to give those damn teenagers a good spanking,” Mrs. Blastisyennd said before stooping to pick up a hissing tear-gas canister, which she promptly threw back into the midst of an approaching phalanx of riot-gear-clad policemen. Pulling an AK-74 assault rifle with a telescoping stock from a floral-print carpetbag resting by her feet, the otherwise-unassuming old woman fired it into the upper windows of a building a few blocks away. Her well-placed shots caused two men who had been hiding there to flee, carrying what appeared to be scope-equipped rifle and a pair of binoculars away with them. Furthermore, the phalanx of cops – which had approached to within a few scant meters of her position – drew back in haste, reforming behind the thick stone walls of a nearby auxiliary citizen's armory. “On any other day, if these policemen had asked nicely to make sure everything was OK within the HOIOP, I would have let them pass in peace, but these pig-dogs are not acting like gentlemen, so fuck them – fuck the police.”

Analysts except the protests to spread before they peter out, hopefully sometime around the harvest festival, in late November.

場黑麥 mentiri manufactorem fecit

on the Nittany rapist

please look, oh yes, upon his scheming, upon the boys who got his creaming
for they who squealed and begged for mercy also donned the famous jersey
of players good or bright or true, their hopes soon dashed when touched anew, by him,
the Nittany rapist
don't think, oh my, him too far going, for to these kids his member showing
he did not know, they had a mind, to keep him from their young behinds
or not to take him in the mouth, for people gave him so much clout, to him,
the Nittany rapist
his wad he blew into the flues of children young and tender
his deeds exposed, for all to see, tossed into media's blender
the perfect foil, to war and toil, he is
the Nittany rapist
we eats it up, us dumb Yankee, of nothing else are speaking
while children die, in drone air-strikes, and our tank treads are squeaking
of nothing else, we seem to speak, not famine, greed, or warming
only of him, that worthless thing, of him,
the Nittany rapist
so give it rest, oh yes please do, and quit with this obsessing
the deed is done, it is a mess, the beast he mulls confessing
for once inside, his butt shall bleed, his bones shall crack and splinter
that little man, he shan't endure, I'll bet not long past winter
we're all upset, and we shall stay pissed
at him, the Nittany rapist

場黑麥 mentiri manufactorem fecit

child goes pirate

Following his preschool's staging of “Pirate Day” during its last few sessions before the beginning of summer, the parents of four year old Woodland Hills, California native Kyl Ussuf Stonezyphr awoke in their own bed to find their grog-addled son standing over them with a knife clenched tightly between his teeth. While they had been alarmed the day before when – just before his nap-time – he waxed poetically, expounding upon a burning, insatiable desire “to pillage the nicer houses in the neighborhood, and perhaps to have my way with either Frank, or Francine (teenage, non-fraternal twins who live nearby), or the both of them,” Kyl's parents are debating whether to guide this, their third child, onto a different life-path or to accept and love him as he is, regardless of his rapine, lustful ways. “We don't think that there is much of a future in piracy,” Kevin Stonezyphr, Kyl's dad, said wearily. “But,” interjected Bettina Michaels-Stonezyphr, Kyl's super-attentive mother, while doing her best not to make eye-contact with anyone, “we agree that he has the right to choose any path in this life that he should think is best, and that there are piracy hot-spots all over the globe: at either end of the Strait of Malacca, off the coast of Somalia, and around the Strait of Hormuz.” Interrupting our conversation to investigate the source of such hammering as seemed to be coming from the rear of the house, the Stonezyphrs discovered that Kyl had not only crucified a stray dog to the rear garage door but that he had consumed so much of its blood as to make him sick to his little stomach. As punishment, they locked away his tools, and took steps to cancel the family's plans to go on a nice, leisurely Caribbean cruise later in the year.

場黑麥 menterefecterem fecit

Woman, mother, “Has things sewn up nicely.”

Reading from a prepared statement to an unsuspecting crowd of her siblings and other relatives who had gathered in commemoration of one death or another, Violetta D. Juk, 28, mother of two girls and a boy who now lives outside of Wilkes-Barre Scranton, Pennsylvania, said, with due gravity and poise, “Yes, you all heard correctly, and this is not a hoax or a joke, nor is it vainglorious bluster. I, little old cousin Vio – buddy, crying-shoulder, and confidant of yore – I have reached a plateau that I have been striving for for some years now, and things are nearly completely sewn up.” With a nearly invisible flick of the hand, Violetta signaled to her two girls, who swept in from a side room – where they had been obviously waiting – carrying their toddler brother, Fredirik, on a chair between them, paraded with him around the table of seated and perplexed adults, and exited without explaining themselves or making much in the way of unnecessary noise.

“Do you see?” Violetta said into the void left by her children's nearly silent passage. “Do you all get it now? I am telling you guys, this is what I have been trying to make clear to you all these years. It is, truly, possible, and, do you all see how very happy I am? How well Hildebrand and June managed with their little brother on that chair? Yes, dear family mine, yes, it is all coming together nicely.”

After the get-together had broken up, while everyone was packing up their cars and generally getting ready to disperse, Violetta was waylaid by a certain Uncle Darius, who was more interested, however, in obtaining her recipe for light and flaky pie crust than in listening to her nuanced, mysterious, and apparently sewing-related proclamations.

場黑麥 mentiri factorem fecit