The gentle drone of wings that fought for air
Against the very sky
Had wrought a lullaby,
Which earned soul’s complacency by virtue
Of it’s struggle’s beauty.

Time passed, while many notes of ecstasy escaped our lips
And with each visit to the lakeside I became convinced
Of my deepest inability
To imagine it without her

Now many sins have flown like stones between us
Twilight’s promise broken by the fires of dawn
She in lust, and I in anger
Forsook love’s lofty flight
And spiraled headlong into wicked acts and darkened karmas

I know the evil in your soul -
Gentle lover, your wrath and mine yet circle,
Promethean vultures, stalking hungrily toward vengeful prophets
Insight dusts the scrying crystal of tomorrow – do you see them feasting?

Know this – a thousand eyes have shown the beauty in a tragic universe
While transience and transitivity foretell the tragedy in beauty
These visions yet remain in harmony.

As the end of it all, just as the beginning saw
My Dragonfly
Is but an insect.
And these thousand eyes
Seeing vultures to be phoenixes
Will shed their tears in memory alone.

We ask ourselves, forsaken yet salvific
Have we not by our constitution earned
Like iron swords that cry in infant innocence
The joy of pain – the right to burn?

 “Out for a walk, Father?” the Bishop asked, moving quietly from the within mist’s nocturnal veil.

“Mourning,” Adam replied, turning to face his friend with a heavy sigh. His voice seemed an eerie whisper to the Bishop, as if floating in from beyond some uninhabited body. Only the slight but constant wince that strained his eyes betrayed in Adam some shred of life or feeling.

“I’m sorry,” the Deacon replied in sympathy. “A friend?”

Adam’s eyes rolled back slightly, and the bishop thought he caught the man biting discreetly at his lip.

“An adulteress.” The Bishop nodded, and with a knowing look pursued the matter further. “It is upsetting to find our parish cursed with such a woman. Let her stay within the earth, my son – she’ll do no harm from these harsh trappings.”

The silence moved yet onward, but Adam didn’t.

“I threw the stones myself,” he continued, though whether or not the bishop’s audience concerned him seemed unclear. “I watched them drag her to the pit in chains, threw the rocks that smote against her head and body.”

“It must have been gruesome,” the Bishop responded softly.

“Gruesome,” Adam continued with a dismissive snort. “The spectacle was gruesome. The cracking of her human skull, the bits of brain and fluid caking on the missile’s surface – those were gruesome to behold. But her screaming, the damning tones of hatred and repentance, the pleas that hung behind her dying eyes even as her flesh was sundered – these were haunting in a way no ghast in hell can contemplate.”

“She was sent brutally, to a brutal realm,” the Bishop interrupted, impatience manifesting in his words and tone. Then, more empathically, he finished. “Let the whore burn, Adam. She has earned the wrath of the Lord.”

“You taught me that God loves all creatures,” Adam began, something terse awakening behind his mask of introversion. Still, the bishop only sighed.

“God has no love for this woman, I assure you.” Adam turned to face his colleague, as a barely measured anger fumed impatientyly behind his shell-like visage. Gritting his teeth, the young priest spat a brief and poignant retort:

“I did.”

A lone rose fell from Adam’s trembling hand as he turned to go, cursing his own heart and the sordid ways of man.

And high I was, as the ‘psilo and THC took hold. My trip-mate on this particular journey peered over the building’s edge, standing comfortably atop my faux-something fence, a salmon colored mass of not quite stone that had facilitated my ascent. Nonetheless, I found my attentions firmly captivated by the aforementiond shards strewn haphazardly about the rooftop, laughing aloud at my companion.

“I’m being amused,” I told him, “by the fact that I’m not amused by the broken glass.” My friend dismissed himself for fear of heights, and I relaxed in the soothing warmth of sun and mushrooms. Reclining pensively against the rooftop’s edge, I thought on how the one-two-punch of masochism and nihilistic devaluation had led me to embrace the glass shard as a symbol of my own bizarre struggles – the “cover art” to my deranged if beautiful autobiography. Playing dinsintered with a random shard, I found myself perplexed and relieved by anewfound lack of identification with the obect. The glass’ brown tint seemed to mellow once-searing rays as the sun came through it’s shattered lens, leaving my to wonder why I felt so distant from the imagery of carnage, when I had come with pride and even celebration to embrace the more aesthetic darkness of its paradigm. Was it maturity, or perhaps vanity that spurred me to imagine something brighter?

There is a time, I believe, when shards are necessary; when we find our spirits shattered into similar disarray, lying with the needles and broken bottles somewhere off the alleys of our own misfortune. At this time, I found myself the loving son of knives and fire, melding my own shards back into something human in the only way I knew how. The blade seemed a necessary avenue, a road to something stronger, something scarred in the most gorgeous ways our universe imparts, and it was then that the part of Michael who’d traversed that road looked back at me.

“We don’t need me anymore,” he pleaded. “I came to deliver you through fire, and I am burnt, bleeding, broken.” I knew his weariness, and sympathized, wondering what part this strange, salvific warrior would play in a philsopher’s future scenes. I knew that he would stay as long as he was needed, that he would never fail to serve me in our damning need. I knew also what lay beneath this fellow’s resolute demeanor – the yet unspoken plea for something better, for a lighter load and a life worth bleeding for. At this moment, the facade was broken.

“My time is through,” he said to me, a wounded whisper amplified by moments into screaming psychedelia. He more collapsed than knelt before me, the pain behind his voice a manic wailing as he looked away, ashamed in his weakness to look ourselves in the eyes.

“I love you,” I told him as the sun washed over us, and found myself alone before the zenith of redemption.

To summarize” the site is still running, the novel is still being written, and you should amuse yourself at projectgroupthink.wordpress.com.

Peace, Groove, and Wisdom,

-Michael

Of course, discontinuing Gushers could have unknown economic detriments. Under the capitalist system, it is politically imperative that synthesized food products be given unique Pronouns © and sold to us and our nutritional deficit. Then again, what’s more important, health or comfort? Isn’t the former merely a form of the latter?
We also must consider the drastic social implications of this decision. For example, the grape may be offensive to some women, due to its status as a fruit – the perpetrative word in such sexually-laden colloquialisms as “forbidden fruit” and “fruit of the womb.” A quick thought to “poppin’ cherries” should kibosh the subject outright.
Gays, too, may be offended by the term fruit. This is why we have classes in “Queer Theory,” not “Fruit Theory.” Then again, isn’t the word “fruit” more positively conceived than the word “queer?’ Fruits are juicy, low in calories, and well-liked by people of taste – qualities which are attractive to people of all sexual persuasions.

This, it seems, may be the problem – all people enjoy fruit, whereas what is uniquely beautiful to some may be found queer by the majority. This argument collapses when one realizes that either X) there is no phenomena to which the agent ascribes the evaluative property of queerness, or ~X) the argument’s appeal to queerness necessarily presupposes a hetero perspective.

What we are left with are two distinct but equally pivotal questions; one concerning the value of fruit as such versus that of synthesized fruit morsels, and one pertaining to the ascription or relation of fruitness to various particulars. Thus, the debate must be dichotomized into two fields: fruit-sophy and metafruit-sophy. Never to be forgotten is the perspective of Asian fruitsophy, that fruit is Gushers and Gushers are fruit (G ↔ F), but this view is still not understood widely enough to present an immediate threat to our well-entrenched academe.

As there are particualrs within the category “fruit,” so must we concern ourselves with various and disparate “fruit-perceivers.” Are we then concerned with the secondary qualities of fruit, or the first order qualities of individual fruit-agent relations (fRx)?

These questions will surely puzzle fruitosophers for a decade or so, before some smart-ass meta-head asks what happens when someone creates a synthetic fruit or a natural fruit snack, through advanced culinary chemistry or genetically engineered Gushers plants. That useful little contribution will earn some lucky son of a bitch tenure.

In the end, very much will inevitably hinge on whether or not fruit exists in a material universe or as an artificial construction a la the Matrix. What happens when one contrasts an artificial mental construction of a natural Gushers plant and a materially existent synthesized grapevine? What if there exists a supra-present Grapeality over and around our own universe, a view endorsed by a staggering percentage of phenomenologist mushroomheads?

Don’t miss the answers to these and other maddening questions in the next action-packed installment of “Brett’s Frustrated Adventures in Ivory Tower Land.” Stay tuned!

P.S. This is pretty much what I do for a living.

Oh woe! had stricken Dublin
All the people bowed and prayed
When lo, there came a hero
And Arthur was his name

Young Arthur was a magic lad
With spells learned from the Druids
He traveled to the Faerie realm
In search of potent fluids

To guard their nectar, horrid specters
And fiends assailed him daily
But not-a-one withstood the wrath
Of Arthur’s fierce shillelagh!

He fought and fought, ’till at last he thought
To search a place worth lookin’
Wherein he spied, with his falcon’s eye
The Dagda’s kettle cookin’

“Good Dagda, Dublin needs your ale,”
He asked the spirit’s mercy
“The men grow pale, the women wail
The wee ones’re getting’ thirsty!”

But Dagda denied, and our hero cried
“Great fool, you think I’m finished?
I’ll have your brew, before I’m through,
Or my name’s not Arthur Guinness!”

Irish proud, he yelled aloud
His voice rang out like thunder
“That beer will flood the streets this night
By charity or plunder!”

He ran home to his dressing chest,
His enemy outwittin’,
And stole once more to the Faerie realm
Disguised as a Briton

As he approached the Dagda’s lair,
He hummed a jaunty ditty,
With spring in step, he onward schlepped,
To hydrate his good city

A drinking match, he would propose
A sand-bagger’s solution
For a cornered hat and polished spats
Undersell one’s constitution

“Good chap!” he called in cheery tones
Before the Dagda’s kettle
“My tea’s run dry, do be a sport
And prove your liver’s mettle!”

If you should drink me under, sir,
A handsome sum I’ll pay,
But if your stomach fails you,
I will have your ale this day.”

The Dagda’s howling shook the ground
In disbelieving pride,
Till tears rolled down his giant’s face
And laughter tore his sides

“What merriment this jester brings
A holler and a hoot, he!”
The Dagda laughed, whilst Arthur moved
To steal the frothy booty

Yet longer did the Dagda howl
Fresh waves of laughter bubblin’
That ere he knew he’d lost his brew
Arthur’d booked it back to Dublin

Where Saint James Gate still sings his praise
With pints and loving smiles
“Long live good Arthur! Slainte! Cheers!
All hail the Emerald Isle!

Once upon a time, there lived a grasshopper. He was a friendly grasshopper, and very smart, but never long on cash. This did not bother him, however, because he had lots of friends, and good books, and the occasional bowl or two to keep him mellow. Besides, his field was relatively wealthy, and the grasshoppers in charge were willing to support him if he would study great grasshopping minds and teach future grasshoppers about philosophy.

One day, however, a colony of army ants moved into the grasshopper’s field, and started to do very bad things. They sent troops into other fields, killing innocent creatures and spending all of the money on bombs and guns. This made the grasshopper very sad, so, ever the philosophe, he elected to reason with his unwelcome neighbors. He told them that they should not go about declaring war on people’s fields, because it was not very nice, and because they were wasting all of the money. Unfortunately, no one listened to the grasshopper, and thousands of insect lives were wasted needlessly. No one seemed to care, however, except for the lonely grasshopper, locked quietly in his room with his books.

As time went on, the ants spent more and more, until there was hardly any money left in the field. It was a hard time for the insect colony, and finally some ants knocked on the grasshopper’s door. They told him that he was lazy, and should go and work to raise money for the rest of them, because their army was failing, and they had little food. They begged, they threatened, and they questioned his patriotism, until finally the grasshopper could take no more. Reclining in his grassy field, he felt the wind on his antennae, and thought about how beautiful life was without ants. Lighting a joint, he breathed deeply, and politely told them all to jump off of the highest fucking rock in the meadow.

The ants were very, very sad, and the grasshopper laughed as the world kept burning.

THE END