Eight decenniums ago
A woman sang near a riverbank
A wife's longing for a husband in imago
A soldier far away bearing no ankh.
Katyusha was her name
A well-loved dame
Left by a husband in war
Defending his country in tar.
She and her husband only wanted peace
For the world to see and feel
No soldier will die for callous frontispiece
Than become an image of New World's heel.
Katyusha will live in memories and dreams forever
Singing for women and wives of soldiers
Serving a country under God not sever
With a song to linger in the beholders.
The landscape of love can be found in a child's coloring book,
for love demands simplicity. The coloring-in of that land is your work.
Firstly, it is essential that you gaze upon the frontispiece
just beneath the cover.
This page will be blood red if it’s any other color
then you are in a fairytale.
Study the page
if you don’t see yourself drowning in that deep red,
then you are not willing to make the sacrifice,
turn no more pages.
This is not a land that is any place on a map,
it has a certain amount of roughly sketched-out pages;
to see beyond them a part of you must be remade,
perhaps some piece of you must die.
If the red page has changed to a more amiable hue by page seven
then you can move on confidently coloring within the lines,
and the story being told
will probably work out just fine.
You walk into a green and gold landscape.
The landscape is in a green and gold book.
Until now, you have just been looking, sensing, imagining,
but (and this is essential), you must now gaze upon
the frontispiece under the cover.
This page will be blood red, if it’s any other color
then you are in a fairytale.
Study that rouge, that scarlet, that blood,
if you don’t see yourself drowning in that red,
then you are not a willing sacrifice, you are a victim.
This is not a land that has anyplace on a map,
This is not a book that begins, it has a certain amount of
beautifully adorned pages, then something must die.
This landscape you have imagined for you both
is a killer, it beheads you.
If you are both headless by chapter three
then the story will work out just fine
until
you or her tire of the tale you are telling each other;
then the book will close slowly
but the ending is never closed,
like a genetic set of musical variations
you must keep returning to
it will play on,
even when you find
another book in another place.
Thy birth on January 13th – cervical contractions would not abate
the pesky master (papa), strove to synchronize his seminal bait
thence, forty-two weeks after ma parents did pro create
Imminent lviii plus years ago to date
this present baby boomer doth indubitably and inherently equate
Nineteen hundred and fifty nine bequeathed birthed mine kempf ill fate
neurological manifestation sans obsessive compulsive did grate
behavioral motif and analogous to frontispiece per the story I hate
of my life and hard times, when all of a sudden out the blue irate.