Top of the Rock

Violets and crimsons at war

Over emerald hills.

The sapphire water links the sky and earth.

Just below lies the chapel.

On my left sits a couple,

The woman in a cocoon of beauty,

The man in a suit of debt,

Feasting on sixty dollar steaks.

I then notice then a small boat.

It seemed to be in flight upon the water's reflection.

A man appeared behind the sail.

His shirt flowed and his hair bloomed in the wind.

I put my hand upon the glass,

These are the times that I beg for an escape.

The sun finally disappears

And so to do my hopes of freedom.

I look up at the stars and imagine

How I could feel such openness.

The lights go off all around me,

And with them my illusions cease.

Little Letters from Across the Way

Bingley/Bings

I am a silent person. I am not very good at interflowing with other people. However, some sincere friends are my most precious fortune and some gifts from them are heavy for me. Such as watches album and evergreen tree and so on. In particular the watch is the most signal to me.

The watch comes from my first love who is a lovely and considerate girl. The watch is made of iron and has a red heart on the surface, which symbolizes our heart will being together forever. But reality won’t be act as you imaged. After we finished The College Entrance Examination, we are apart and our affection having been broken. Now I still remain the watch, it suggested me our enjoyable time in the high school period. At least encounter with you is my most fortunate thing in my long life journey.

Another precious gift is evergreen tree, it was my best friend gave me on my 13th birthday. He told me that whenever our heart will be together. No matter where we are. We are concerned each other. To my moved is once I got a cold and had a high fever, but my parents were out and left me alone. When I felt afraid, he came into and carried me on his back as soon as he found I am in sick. He does things like this, say less but do more no matter how difficult the thing he has promised is he would make it.

Reply:

This is rather touching, Bingley. You seem to be fluid with your emotion and willing to accept the importance of feeling. I have also had relationships, both friendly and romantic, that have been important to me. They always seem to end for me in one way or another. The ability to hold onto those types of relationships is not only a valuable skill, but I see it as a strength. I am glad to here that you have somebody that is important to you. I have a few friends of my own that I could call lifelong. One would be my friend Ethan and the other my friend Alec. The three of us are superbly nerdy. I actually just got back into reading the Naruto manga. What things do you like to do with your friends? Also, if it is quite alright with you, I would like to know what dating is like in your culture. I look forward to hearing from you again.

P.S. Would you be alright if I called you Bings? I enjoy giving people nicknames.

Blythe

Author note: Many memories can not only exist in our brains but also be recorded by
some cards. The reason why I write this essay is that the cards come from my friends
and senior school classmates and they represent our friendship.
In our society, there are all kinds of people. Maybe they are shy, they are
outgoing or other personalities. But in any case, everyone must have many beautiful
memories which were probably related to the past or happened recently in his or her
mind. Of course, I am no exception. As for me, I have a good habit that collecting
meaningful things in a specific box, and just because this habit that I can soundly
store these cards which come from people who I would never forget. These cards bear
the most beautiful memories.
I can say that I almost have all kinds of cards. In terms of their shapes, there are
circular cards, rectangular cards, rhombic cards and cordiform cards, etc. Besides,
every card has a beautiful design on one side, it may be a cartoon type, archaic type,
romantic type, literary type or whatever, and the other side is covered with their
congratulations which they want to tell me. Among all these cards, my bestie’s card
impressed me most. Her card is in a fresh style which gives me an eremitic sense.
What she wrote was the story between us. It began with our encounter and ended with
her congratulations. I remembered when I read it, I almost could not forbear crying.
Every time I saw her card, I always miss her, after all, we are so close in the past, but
now we are in different universities.
Effectively, when I open the box seeing these cards, they remind me of not only
my bestie but also that particular party for me. It was two years ago, at that time, I
was in senior two and our class were preparing for our school’s chorus competition.
On my birthday, the whole class practiced singing as usual and I was also serious in
practices. But suddenly they all stopped, I thought that it might be time to take a
break, to my surprise, they turned their voice and sang Happy Birthday to me. After
singing, our monitor gave me a stack of cards. I instantly realized that these cards
were from every classmate. I could not control my emotions so I was moved to cry. At
that moment, warm and happiness filled with my heart. I felt that the whole world was
saying the congratulations to me and I was a flying bird in the sky because I was too
happy. No word can describe my mood.
These cards gave me a sense of belonging and let me believed that there was real
love between people. To be honest, I really miss that class because it was like another
family for me. Although we can not meet everyone everyday now, I believe that the
feelings between us are as before. Finally, I wish everyone lead a happy life.

Reply:

I truly enjoyed your essay, Blythe. It brings me great pleasure to know that you have known such happiness. There is a beauty in being able to cry in front of one's friends; one that I am all too familiar with. The relationship between a person and their friends is one to be treasured and kept close to the heart. I hope that we can achieve a level of friendship that requires me to send a card. With that in mind I would love to get to know more about you. What are some of your hobbies? What kind of music do you listen to? What types of film do you like? Anything you would like to know or tell me is welcome. I look forward to hearing from you again.

Boy With Twig

Sound. Rhythm. Vibration.
This is all so new.
I spy a hollowed log and I begin to tap it.
The rocks under the water accept this new beat.

I run around tapping my log.
The small waterfall beside me follows along.
Then the birds begin to sing.
The trees sway with my sounds.

The winds whistle through me.
I can feel the vibrations in the ground below me.
Then it all slows into the twig in my hand.
I have fallen for music.

Aerial View

  Destruction, pain, desolation; these are just a few things that pop into mind when I look at this painting. To me it appears as a few different images. I see a barren, desolate land, plagued by warfare and ill times. I see the people roaming this wasteland in search of some sort of salvation or mercy. I also see purity; a white grace that is slowly being consumed by the darkness around it. A final peg of hope that is being ripped apart by the corruption that surrounds it. There is also a hint of fiction here. It looks like an image that somebody is trying to understand. It has this feeling of fogginess, like someone confused by a premonition or slighted by a difficult decision. This painting saddens me.

The Man In Wolf's Clothing

  The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. Agent Wilbur Mulligan stood at the edge of the shoddy wooden structure, surrounded by what was once a glorious trade port for early Bostonians. He wore a black suit that made him look like he was hunting aliens and always had his butterscotch colored hair perfectly combed to the left. There was a soft April breeze coming from the shore that bore a distinct smell of oils and heat. 
  He heard a car door from up on the highway behind him. The road was about ten feet above the platform on which he stood, making him uncomfortable with any height advantages one would have on him. He focused on the image of the Russian gangster, Isaac Barishnikov, as his face and outfit began to warp. Within a matter of seconds his stature was shorter and rounded. He no longer looked like a six foot two government agent that was designed on a computer. The accents were rough though. It was the only thing he couldn't change. 
  Three men descended the stone stairway to the platform. All three were in business suits harboring handguns. Wilbur stood there looking as disdainful as possible. The men quickly eyes the large silver briefcase at Wilbur's feet. The man in front had blonde hair and piercing green eyes, making him resemble a serpent of some kind. The other two were large and built much like the one in front but there slick brown hair and sunglasses made them seem unreal. 
  Wilbur had contacted these men in search for a lead on the disappearance of his older brother Garrett. Garrett was Wilbur's partner in a private detective agency that they opened after the second Korean war. They were part of a special experimental unit that did super soldier tests in hope to make the perfect insurgence agent. Only five participants lived through the experiments. The project allowed them to reconfigure the cells in there body to match any figure that they've come into contact with. Two of them were killed in the war. Wilbur, Garrett, and an Asian man named Matsuki were the only survivors.
  "Is it all there?" The serpent man asked. Wilbur just smirked and grunted, picking up the case. He clicked it open to reveal $70,000 in cash. The serpent man smiled and motioned for one of his lackeys to produce something from their jacket. The man to his right conjured a small envelope and handed to Wilbur. Wilbur handed over the case and gave a slight bow, bidding the men goodbye.

  He quickly opened the envelope as they left, revealing a large stack of pictures of his brother's head, no longer attached to a body. The pictures also showed a man who had butterscotch hair clutching the severed ligament. It suddenly all made since. They had made more and they wanted Wilbur dead. Then there was a chance that his brother left willingly. There was a chance that he could still fix this.
  Just as he was coming to a conclusion on what to do next, he noticed that there had been no car door shut. The men had not left. Something was wrong. He began shuffling through the pictures of gore and bloodshed. There were easily two hundred pictures. Then he found one with something laced into the back. He flipped it over to reveal a paper charge. Paper charges were an advancement made in counter-insurgence that the American government had employed to take out informants without raising alarm. He dropped the sack and ran over to a nearby hovel of boards and boxes. As he ran he twisted his face into one more dirty and hairy, sliding into the hut as if it was the winning hit of the World Series. There was a drastic pull, and then a pop, as Wilbur was thrown twenty feet into the air, landing hard on a pile of trash behind a warehouse off the port. He heard the ring of steel against steel as a far door clanged shut.

When the Future is Yesterday

  I recently sat in on a magazine presentation. It was a local magazine and they focused on the indigenous people of "417-land", putting a distinction on the people. They work around the clock to produce a work of literature littered with ads and stories and places that rip you from where you are and take you to where you could be. I have a personal affinity for magazines with more educational purposes like TIME or National Geographic and if I had to choose I would much rather work there. With that being said I think there is a beauty in the work that they do. It got me thinking about where I could go.

  Jump forward to next year. I'm drudging through my second semester of college and am in desperate search of love. I don't go to parties so my chances for interaction with the opposing sex is limited. I make do with the income from my part-time job at Family Video and I spend as much time as possible at friends' houses. My ambition is rivaled only by my laziness as I do everything in my power to pass my classes and still be an amateur gamer and writing enthusiast. My diet consists of usual college kid things; pizza, pizza rolls, pizza pockets, pizza sliders, and pizza fries. My depression hasn't fully subsided and some days it is a struggle to get out of bed whereas others I cannot wait to carpe diem. The path to being a teacher is truly ironic to me. I can't wait to be done with school so that I can go and work at a school.

  Four more years pass. I'm finishing my first year teaching at Kickapoo alongside my favorite teachers from when I was here. It is quite different from what I expected. I have both more and less control than previously presumed, and I fear I am not as exquisite as I had planned on being. I get along with the students fine but the computers are showing to be more of a hindrance on my abilities than a help and I'm not sure what I am going to be doing for a living for the rest of my days. I finally acquire a girlfriend and we plan on moving in together within the next month. I have tossed around proposing to her, but I have no idea if I'm ready.

  Tack on five more years. I am almost thirty, married to the love of my life, twin boys with a girl on the way, and life couldn't get any better. I finished my masters in poetry and there is talk of letting me teach a class centered on the subject as a communication arts elective. I have never been so well-respected in my life and I'm not really sure how things got so easy. My house is bigger than I had ever hoped, and I had finally saved up to buy a Porsche. Her name is Virginia and she is electric blue.

  Forty more years go by. I am now sixty-eight years old. I have lived with the death of my wife for thirty-eight years. My kids are all through college and working various jobs. My son Malaki and my daughter Au-Riel are both married but my other son Carter hasn't yet settled down. I retired fifteen years ago and I've never remarried. I got involved in politics and am planning on running for office for Missouri. My books have won various awards and gotten me plenty more death threats. Life is hard again. I am lonely, my kids are gone, my wife is gone, and I am stuck fumbling around, barely being able to wipe my own ass. Somehow I miss the days of ignorance and inspiration. I miss the color and the emotion. I am tired, and every single today makes me miss all of the yesterdays.

Between the Lines

 "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." -William Gibson

  William Gibson is a science-fiction writer who is regarded as the father of cyberpunk and even coined the phrase cyberspace. He was born on March 17, 1948 in Conway, South Carolina. He was the first winner of the science-fiction "triple crown", which is made up of the Nebula Award, the Philip K. Dick Award, and the Hugo Award, for his novel Neuromancer (1984).

  Neuromancer is a book about a former hacker named Henry Dorsett Chase, who also happens to be a drug addict, that is dragged back into the mix of dastardly deeds involving computers when he is given promises of a repaired self and cures for his addiction.

  I really think that I would enjoy this book because I love scenarios that deal with certain "what if" situations, and I have a personal affinity for all thing related to science-fiction or fantasy, especially when the tone is dark or hyper realistic.

"He heard the ring of steel against steel as a far door clanged shut." -Richard Wright

  Richard Wright was born in Roxie, Mississippi on September 4, 1908. He was commonly known for writing controversial pieces of realistic fiction about racial tensions and was believed to have had an impact on racial tension in the mid 20th century.

  His book Native Son (1940), was about a young man named Bigger Thomas who is responsible for taking care of his mother and his siblings during the 1930's and finds himself caught up in an altercation with the law.

  I would most definitely want to read this book due to my passion for knowing everything ever and for the sole fact that it would give me an informed glimpse into the life of a black man during the early 1930's.