ACT ONE:

The Brunette in Grapes

 

Prelude

 

 

Brooklyn, New York, U.S.A.

 

 

Hold your breath. Breath smoke in if you must, you have to push yourself man, and you have to see things, make connections where you’re not totally sure they exist. You have to count down, you have to blink. To squint, break your knuckles and bleed maybe, bleed in quiet. You have to try, dig in your stuff, you don’t see it.

Pity, you can’t. You don’t have any solidarity at all. You don’t even know you’re still a slave. The chornay do. The world reminds them every day.

I don’t know if you can picture it yet comrade, the big wink. I don’t know if your mind can see the uprising as it was, how it all it went down. In a heartbeat, all was in flames. Anyone with black skin just being shot down in the street like rapid feral dogs! It didn’t have to be, no it didn’t! We could have reached some settlement the liberal elders said, I fundamentally disagree.

Black lives certainly don’t matter to anyone at all.

Were you to observe the crumble of the high grounds, the moral roads into base animal rage, I think it was enough that one in eight of their men was in prison, I think it enough that one died a week it seemed, a week, a day, every 48 hours? Statistics are all make believe. I don’t think any whites thought the chornay human anyway, so it was a real surprise that they were organizable.

 

The signal was a song, it is impossible to plan an uprising without a good sound track, that’s an old Haitian saying, and the gun fire erupted from make shift big truck alliance barricades and over turned cars, piled by the Grand Army Plaza. And the human spear thrust north, the melee of thousands, supported by millions counted on by no less than five billion souls, take over Manhattan and burn it all down. Light it all on fire.

Make them pay!

It was probably not a very good day for those marauders in the front of the flying columns, those the NYPD emptied clip after clip into, as was expected, before being torn apart and beheaded by the mob. The crush and screams of feet pounding the parkway, the blare of the signal song, the gun fire on both sides, fire bombs bursting in air.

Perhaps as many as four hundred men and women too plus died in the fire fight to conquer only one square of the board, the Grand Army Plaza was on fire and the Garveryites were killing police officers with the Kalashnikovs the Russians sold them, well anyway the Jews who sold them spoke Russian, but that’s as misleading a term as chorney.

And that eruption, that mostly black eruption lept north supported by tens of thousands of masqueraders, there was gun fire all night. You could be sure they’d ban Jeuvert this time for real, what was it really all about this annual dry run, now the streets were wet with blood.

The uprising had been about grievances, but it wasn’t about politics. It wasn’t about the handful of modest reforms groups put out there on the wire. No, it was about hate and about rage and about decades of powerlessness, about the failure of non-violence and playing the game to advance. Well, anyway what really was there to write about?

Concentrated machine gun fire stopped the Negro rebel onslaught at the foot of the Manhattan Bridge. The corpses were piled high, no one learned anything in the popular press.

 

 

 

#That Night

Brunette in Grapes & Other Russian American War Stories

Written By Adler S Walt

Dedicated to Natalia Abashkina

 

Characters:

Valera Adonaev, a Chechen patriot, Dasha Andreavna, courtesan of Penza, Benny Adonaev, Spanish smuggler, Viktor Dragan, East German spy, Valentina Stanovova, a Russian architect, Salvatore Caminiti, Sicilian gladiator, Natalia Abashkina, expensive supermodel, Dmitry Khulushin Koch, a villain, Avinadav Debutelier, Commander of the Resistance in Israel, Polina Mazaleava, a singer in Nizhny Novgorod, Oleg the Bear, Ukrainian Israeli photographer, Maxim Oztap, a smooth operator, Rafael Contreras Lynch, Peruvian revolutionary, Lauren Ayers, an American! Liana Zavulonova, Bukharin Princess. Valera Arefyev, a mystic, Mickhai Dbrisk, Jamaican paramedic, Rachael Rambo, an attorney from Fort Laughtrerdale, Daviti Koreintelli, Georgian arms dealer, Philip Rybalnik, Ukrainian hooligan, Jefferson McIntyre of New Orleans & Guyana, Stacious McKenzie, Trinidadian Special Forces

Mr. Ersatz, a real fucking villain.

 

 

 

 

Prelude

 

 

Brooklyn, New York, U.S.A.

 

 

Sometimes, old friend, I cry from own weakness. I bash my Jew face against various mirrors around town angered by my own lack of force, lack of seed, and lack of ability to carry my band more truly into glorious and successful battle. I beat my frail fists on concrete walls which always win! I ask my God why it untrusted me with anything at all. For I am so small and so unable it seems to be a good fighter, an adequate lover, or a good leader, or a good son, or a good husband to Adelina, a good much of anything. I started the game with such a strong position but have not leveraged that to advance my people and cause, even protect those I loved the most!

 

And then I remember my actual role, not the role my mad ego ascribes. I am but one single partial partisan. One isolated man with such true friends.

 

I am commanding, a funny word “commanding”, more appropriate term coordinating for can one even give orders to a volunteer? A force that numbers at any given time no more than ten to maybe twenty women and men. And no God nor man nor foreign government gave us marching orders; well at times a Russian woman gave me some directions, but only when at most desperate and bleak junctures, I had to no council to turn to. But, I brought almost all this chaos upon my house unaided! But this is hardly a wide conspiracy. But looking into my own soul I am not doing this for God or man, I am not simply avenging my losses, nor am I simply working off a duty to act. No, no; I am self-propelled and highly lucky. I am doing this because my eyes see fire. I am doing this because I have seen the view from the top of the Mountain, I have seen the killing fields too. I have a great empathy with my kind. I wish good to triumph over callous and well planned evil.

 

And the responsibilities that were impressed on me by the old leadership, they were small bits. And I say to myself that if our little band with no weapons and no training and no funding and the protection provided us only by our passports and various skin tones could do so much! Still we did accomplish a range of small things in the Americas and beyond. We took over buildings, and organized demonstrations, built unions, operated a substantial underground press. If we could build youth brigades and lay cells across four continents; if we could operate clandestine supply chains, raise tens of thousands in equipment and supplies, conduct hundreds of underground political trainings, infiltrate major city civil service organizations, if we could smuggle activists and trainers into distant countries uninvited and opposed by government. If we could do all of this with no outside support and do it with keeping all our partisans out of long term prison, and have only buried three men in seventeen years of war under questionable circumstances. Well perhaps we are all still young and the war shows no sign of being over. Perhaps we have a small latent talent for freedom fighting and if not killed or imprisoned could with a little guidance grow more professional.

 

And we have not killed one single person in seventeen years, in fact we have with our own hands saved the lives of thousands and counting.

 

“I’ve always said he has a fucking ton of potential! For good, for self or for evil, wherever his own heart ultimately sends him,” Daria once declared.

 

So, really as was explained to me then in 2011 before the uprising in Brooklyn by my confidant Dasha Andreavna; I could either surrender, collaborate or be utterly destroyed. But as she gauged my nature was highly American, she guessed correctly I would never tolerate a life of collaboration, so thus death or some impossible victory were the only moves coming.

 

I have been imprisoned twenty times. My brothers and sisters have never allowed them to take me for long. Each time they have chained me to beds, administered electricity, loaded me with drugs, asked millions of stupid questions to attempt to make me alter my perspective, denounce my own logic.  I have observed members of the band lose their very homes and their livelihoods and their freedom and their health. I have seen men thrown through Plexiglas glass windows. We have been held in cages and also tortured. The deaths of Mcgaffey, Becker and Black were all sudden and violent and unexplained. I remember little Paul behind bars, I remember harassment and humiliation of Comrade Vik, I remember how much was sacrificed vainly in the name of this struggle. This struggle which absorbs my beingness as though it were the love of a woman, but I am a zealot. I am not good for anything but this. I am in love with my entire people and I have resolved that it would be better to be killed, to lose my privileges of skin and class, than to live in a world where a tiny vile few make the lives of the many, the lives of all I know and love a wretched grinding torture. Truly a half-life.

 

I cry sometimes, no longer in the presence of any others. Dasha mocked me so each time I failed to be a man. I cry because the horror is so vast and the injustice so great. And I have but ten to twenty partisans, several with wives and children. I worry that I am not going to be able to shoulder this struggle, that I lead my closest to sedition and doom. I worry I have not the moral fortitude, the calm patience of humble leadership, the organizational skills the funds we will need, the weapons, the uniforms, the petrol, the Planes, the will. For I am a man and I am seduced sometimes by wanting more good life, wanting to walk away. This is not your fight, she said, no one asked you to struggle!!

 

Friends, they torture me once a year. They tell me I have an unstable mind. They drag me away over and over and over again. I am grateful for such friends as you, who refuse to accept surrender. Who know that we can win the war. I wanted to tell you all, see what we do with just ten women and men. You have that many fighters too. Here we all are at the top of the mountain, assembled in the ghettos encircling the Isle of Man.

 

I loved her so much. Maybe only one or two of you know what I’m talking about. They took from me the only thing a man should care about.

 

I’m thankful for the resistance. I’m thankful for our little Otriad in Brooklyn. For the cells in Chicago, Philly, Baltimore and DC. The underground in Moldova, Cambodia, Haiti and occupied Israel. Thankful for Commander Reed in Mosul, Commander Bonhomme in Port Au Prince. Inspired deeply by the teachings of Solomon and Debutelier. I love my family and my wife, I hope this is the year we go pro.

 

She is a million miles away, but she can hear me. She can see me. She liked me better before I found communism, liked me better before I rediscovered my religion. She even liked my used suits better than the grey uniform I wear now.

 

I raise glass to the East, for there somewhere out there I hope she is waiting for me, waiting for us to win. I raise my glass, I look my men and women in the eyes when I toast, “Long live the resistance, God protect the blood line of the prophets and the Mossiach and the Mahdi. God keep us moving along the straight path, not the path of those who are cowards, or those who have been lost and lead astray.”

 

For those of you who are joining us from home, for those listening from the trenches, from the fields or from the big house, or as servants in the towers. This is just a love song.

#10: Bread of the Future

And now_cast aside, I’m always hungry here.
For the bread of the future.
That is because my sugar was consumed.
Not my goodness or sweetness,
But like Haitian charcoal, an endless burning
Took me to pyre.
Meat is made cleaner now with salt.
A Hilal regime also comes with blessings.
I’m told.
Fortune cookies are more fun when dinner is pleasant.
Yours last said,
“I will take steps never to hurt you, by seeing you only when your dreams return.”
And mine said, “Run and hide boy.”
You cannot offer her the world and ten deliver just a handful of poems!
This is no feast for the night train to Moscow.
But, that’s not in me these days to deliver on command.
To run and hide is no option either.
I am a fighter even against hopeless odds.
Even when my face is newly broken.
“There is no hope,” she says.
“That heart I captured in oils was yours not mine.
You are saying things with words,
That are not backed up by work you put in me.
Your eyes and actions are mismatching all stated intention.”
Tak!
I always stay and fight when it’s something worth tears to fight for.
And I knew you would never hurt me of your own intention.
Selfish-intention non-withstanding.
Nothing, is more worth fighting for than to win a heart.
But not to capture it.
I seek to win your hard heart_
_Overcome resistance,
With longing and with promise of a future happy life.
A life without love is not a life_
And love is no parlor trick.
It is built on passion.
On contract and on persistent deeds.
I am not so broken that these tears are for you.
They are my water spilt for failings of the past.
I am a partisan.
We are allowed tears in front of our lovers.
So do not spit on my tears.
Say sometimes, “Adler I have missed you, and you must give me more Adler.”
Happy Adler can change the world for his woman’s smile
And her crazy eyes, azure eyes looing sky high.
And live a long life for a partisan.
All 88 years left.
Dasha, “When you say you can’t see me again soon,”
I say I will walk not run.
Patience in long lives must be able to overcome fate.
I am now wide open to arrows.
A plate is my armor.
Made only of tin, not steel.
So basically I’m bullet proof officially,
I must stop chasing you or you will quickly be able to have me done in.
You are the only thing that can hurt me.
And you are also the only person in a cold world who can set me on fire.
What do I do with my heart?
I do love you and you are in the arms of another.
So in the meantime know this:
Without knowing each other’s futures,
We do know something of our pasts.
We shall assume this is a Russian bed time story, not an American fairy tale.
I am now a serf.
And you the wife of a baron.
I am an ambulance aristocrat in exile and you can always call for me to come back as your friend or a lover or partner forever.
I think forever is like General Winter.
Not open to suggestion, only indomitable.
Baukunin and Kropotkin knew.
They knew love is like General Winter too.
It dominates a man,
Consumes him until he retreats or reaches safely to a lover’s heart.
I am less like Mayakovski and soon more like Walter Sebastian Adler.
Dasha have some hope.
Winter is not long here.
Please don’t forget me, and sometimes even call on me.
Have hope; it floats.
I swear to that.
I saw it once in an American cinema.
This is the country we now share.
Hopeless odds are just the way our cowboy minds take to a challenge.

#9: Our Job is the Great Train Robberies

On the surface I am a man who bleeds and has blue blood.
It gushes,
It stains,
It slit-throat dies my collar,
Whether blue (or) white:
Into a deep Red half past dead.
I suspect an inquisition will be launched.
After the blaze of glory that will cause these businessmen and bankers_
To attempt a separation of my body from my head.
Please hear me now, I vow.
I will not allow_ your misconceived appropriations of my conduct_
To pave a path of larger virtue_
Conscript a newer logic, and make up parables about my motives on the day they strike me dead.
For her flesh is worth every dollar that they spend,
It pales as well as blushes,
I aim to pull her from her squalor,

And get below the surface of defenses that form the basis of her cries.
My hands are rough, to match my constitution:
Only knocking faces with knuckles bring solution to generate a proper exit for this operation sketched out in its entirety,
In dark places in my head.
I been knocked upside my head before, but I can count my victories as in the end far less pyric than the scale of my defeats.
When you let me caress your face it is like a jack knife to a swan.
Zeus as a swan, and you as perfection and me as the knife.
I run through you.
Because you let me.
Begrudgingly.
Each night a promise of the last night.
I am addicted to you like a junkie.
Addicted to your eyes, to your moves_
The way that you steal.
All the attention in a room.
I’d like to rob a train with you.
We’d use loaded guns not the blanks with pistol whippings that we lob at late nights at each other.
I’d like to make our passions something of a grandiose spectacle.
Only bed room interactions need remain secret.
Our escapades will be the stuff of urban legend.
You’ll talk about me as a lover over until we are old and grey, I hope because we will make love and escapade and unrelenting fuckery until our hips give out to age.
But if that is not the way it goes down, cookie crumbling courtship,
I am certain we will never forget each other.
I’d prefer we do your robberies in your fatherland and retire in to the mother love o the Caribbean. I am certain you’ll grow accustomed to the Chornay eventually.
Somewhere in the Caucuses.
The setting occupied Ickeria!
If we get caught we will be tortured, and that as you know better than me wil be just the beginning.
If we get away with it, it will be a political act.
And you will probably be accused on face book of marrying a communist.
If they clip me I’ll heal myself.
If they catch me, I’ll just hold out for your rescue and hope they don’t cut my eyes out first. If they catch you.
Have mercy.
I’d take to the theatre, by storm.
A plane or four.
If they harmed even a hair inferno!
Dasha, I love you if the world lacks applause we must generate it.
To tears, to fears and via audacious candor.
If we robbed a train in Russia,
It would, or could be a victimless crime.
Because the oligarchs, the business men, they run those trains.
As long as no one died, we would be heroes,
So long as we dumped New Rubles in the ghettos of the Caucuses.
And performed the deed in style.
I know you love to watch me work a crowd.
Hands in the air for the people’s train robbery!
Like a Chechen Ned Kelly.
But obviously even a little more insane.
Remember when I got those hipsters to do nothing for years?
I bet with some irons they’d dance to tune_
Or storm back a ticket booth after a bar halled speech.
Or maybe just do nothing still because everyone is so well fed here.
Did I tell you lately how once I wished_
Well honestly hoped_
I just want to work under you and beside you.
On a Job.
All those boss qualities you’ve got.
I’d like to take more of your orders.
To compete with the material affections of other powerful men,
Well that is a game I will lose.
To run away with you to the forests of the Caribbean.
Live to see that old blue moon twice.
Now those are preferential odds.
Remember when you asked, asked me to drip_
Drip hot wax on the fingers that I shoot with?
And then on your back?
And it was like seduction with nowhere to go as the midnight clocks struck.
And you drip it now on my iron spine.
And I admit longing is a certain kind of torture too.
Irons like I used to run the run the Q Train job.
The Tel Aviv Plane job.
The last evening in Spain job.
My little girl loves to eat so I got to make sure my girl has enough to eat job!
Dasha!
‘Til my lights go out,
Those fires below my brow are turned silent,
In a blaze of more incoming fire;
This gun is for your hire!
It is to now be your gun only.
And whatever occurs;
I shoot just for you still.

#07: In My New York Cell

In my cell_ time doesn’t move the same.
You dwell mostly in the past.
Or some far off, seemingly hopeless future.
I try_
And dream of you.
But I cannot.
That is because torments weigh on me and keep me from visions of happier times.
Self-hate over whelms.
You learn to hate your best in a cell.
Too much time to spend of the past_
The future is just a glimmer through a key hole.
I whisper your name to the rats and roaches that are my witnesses. I extol your virtues to a homeless Lune who sought-solace-in-suicide_
Tried it twice and_ will try again upon his release.
Your name has more fulfillment than the rations or the recycled air.
Dasha Andreavna!
I say it aloud and it is like the hurricane outside is a product of our passions, a fitting cap stone to our separation
It bears down on the city and could render my captivity and chemical manacles, tear the whole goddamn place apart.
I fade in and out.
I try and count the kisses I’ve received from you in just the first five weeks of courtship.
They took me just three weeks from our first kiss.
If each kiss was a bullet or hand grenade used against our faceless oppressors
I’m sure I’d be here longer.
I am drunk still on those kisses.
Drunk on the past.
Intoxication is no good substitute for really feeling.
I desire you still.
All about you, every smile, every stolen moment we have left.
Free me from this place Dasha. I cannot be a
Man right now without you holding me upright.
I love you limitlessly.
I wish that I could open myself like a Siberian doll;
Open each part until understanding became possible or at least there might lie hidden a jewel to steal.
But I fear each layer comes with more questions and there is now jewel, only madness and a blood diamond.
Shines with a price.
Unbreakable but such toughness has heightened emotional cost.
Dasha Andreavna!
I am neither a phantasm or a ghoul
Not a demon or an angel either, nor some hybrid like you.
We are unique specimens. And the world has punished me for my loudness and perhaps rewarded you for our beauty only to punish you in other ways.
A lot of worth we are, with a lot of trouble.
I hope my poems survive me.
I hope you are wrong every night you say it is our last night. You’ve been wrong a very good number of times before.
Mostly only about that last.
My art is thriving under your casual supervision. I hope my life these days is a testament to your glory and not self-glory.
I cherish you;
I am a slave to what we might be.
Not what we are.
I would do many tragic things to prove myself a hero.
Again, and again.
I do not have to prove I am brave; only brave enough, well enough to fully love.
Love early, love often, and love with complexity building to completion.
And then you will forget your slavery and your grinding imprisonment.

#808
Fearless_Hopeless_Hearts

“Tell me storytime!”
She curls up on me_her ethonol engine exausted.
I want to fly us_so far away:
This cab is now a magic carpet for a story cabaret.
Using-a-punchdrunk-kitten in the back seat of a Breuklyn-southbound-gypsy as my muse. One doesn’t choose,
_the muse they use. Or when.
There were worse assignments.
Given to more cowardly men!
And my constitution is and always will be_a wide canvas for futurist painting_
My-heart-when-fainting_
Is grinding, then breaking it_causes Brighton to flood and post Haitian earthshaking:
My soul is for barter_sign the dotted line,
I’m a phantasm now-shaking collapsing-and up for the tainting.
Exsanguination! Being bled dry!
There’s blood in my eye,
A mind game, that’s fine, but the mind can unravel before the right time, and the things it envisions; the things you complete; like a thousand lifetimes emptying out of your whispers_
_Like two shots in the dark_unloading my heart on the cold of the street!

Vasa, she whispers:
“Why so sad all the time?_Tell me a story with Camels and Bandits and rhyme!- and keys strung to kites_ mix your biwinning antics and Arabian nights! Make more epic poems! Can-we-not-agree_the audience cannot swallow_ an endless account, as you wallow in all of your feelings for me.”

I.

Starry night burns bright, I begin again:
I have the will!
In a previous life she believed mostly in kill-or-be-killed.
She comes from place_ So brutal, so base, frustrated, consumed by the men in her face,
The following ointments, which vodka let boil to a brine of pure hate_ juxaposed with the partisan flame of my zeal,
I’ve been reborn in a futurist gate.
_And invested with powers to steal or to heal!
Absorb all of your pain_ and restore your ideals! And you will open my chest with your fingers: And start spinning the wheels_
It’s Russian Roulette, the way that she feels!
Magic carpets to carry us so far from this place where we are_Highspeed races and chases_
_ Drive bys taking place without use of a car!
Her kiss is the bullet of deady surrender.
The sweetness of service she’s willing to render_greatest by far:
To enroute replace my pumping mechanism, without medical training_without even leaving the hint-of-a-scar!
A pipe dream_a pipe bomb_ a zen.
Near endless composition, the art of story telling unleashed from my phone or my pen_
In base thirst for a woman I’ve known in other lives.
And desire to keep knowing forever_
_If forever could just be again, and again.
I am trained to fix a broken heart, my own excluded.
For the heart is a time bomb_ your emotions are fire ball bearings_
_Your wiring is now made faulty,
your rational mind is at times misguided-deluded…

– “Vasili, please, I’m lying here counting on your story to ease, I want erotic adventure, daring or fun, no more talk of feelings or the latest bombastic-head-fuck-with-a-gun, I like alegory, the-cave-with-the-thieves? What’s the name of that story?! No more tales of the mechanical heart, right before bed,”

– “I’ll tell you my dreams about star crossed Chechen peasants instead”.

II.

How can I, live so many lives; But be without you so many nights?
Cold sweats. And the ache of seperation, imprisonment and then exile:
Broken bottles or spears or my pen’s wronging rights,
Sweat itself often passes as tears.
While Writing my politics off as mere hooligan fist fights?
I didn’t mean to trouble you with me, But we seem unable to end it quickly,
Or end me quietly.
I have been hunted like a partisan and I found refuge in your secret kisses.
Now we are partisans together I suppose, but you warned me you prefer the cities to the forests. The Peoni to the Rose.
What about Peoni verses Prose?
I prefer bath houses to General Winter_and the wearing of my solitude below four layers of my clothes.
So how now?
Where will we find shelter?
We’ve run helter-skelter on the glass-bottle-broken-beaches or that Bulgar tavern where we hide.
They have done so many things to me,
Until now I cannot recognize my own face.
I listen it seems, but prefer to confide.
But it is just the face of a man claiming love!
Cupids arrows mutilate.
The barrage burns apart my barricades like katusha rockets, raining from above.
Don’t fail me fearless heart,
Ill get back to you!
From Shali, the mountains, Brighton or Grozny too!
With black eyes, black ties, last tries; this is no mere seduction, or simple desire:
It’s a visceral longing to woe.
Putin has declared war! But foolishly I long for just peace on this front line fight_
_A lull in the violence allowing me to steal my way back to you_guided by moon and my tragic-parachute-knockaround-daggerman-incite.
The barricade-we-made was cobbled together with useless albiet pretty word;
Damn all my gradiose promises,
The misuse and abuse of fables and myth that confuse what I see with that which you claim that you heard.
I am almost quite old.
In old soul time.
I bought what you sold. Dash my face against Dagestan’s rocks, break all my bones if in this life I am more coward_more villain than hero and bold…

“Silly Vasa,” she giggles, pulling her supple body supine even closer to closeness of mine, “Your passions on fire when you press your fingers to prose,_I’m drawing a line_ press your fingers to hold, I want Ambulance Action Peoni ambush_No thorns of the Rose, and my grand design for the story this time is to hear about the dark in your soul, the black rabbit hole where your ambulance goes!”

III.
A Poet paramedic: warm body, heart now made stone cold. I have the will, I carried bodies in piles through Bed Stuy,
Up moutains_we always will battle the Reaper uphill.
I never cried then, I did not even wince,
Every night I’m not dreaming of loving your company, kissing your lips_I’m flashing right back_senses under attack: to life tremmors we trembled_in the City of Port-au-Prince!
We carried legions off to what passed as hospitals.
I’ve had to watch ten thousand die, now all I want is to carry you away from the coast of Brooklyn, magic carpet fly.
Fly in the face of your husband, your secrets;
The dance I do with my stories, in trains or in cabs, returning with you
To the place that you lie.
But I dance again from time to time.You bring it out of me.
“Why cry old soul?” She whispers.
“I saw things I wasn’t meant to see.”
“Women like me?”
“You’re a dangerous creature we both can agree.”
She gives me fourth and fifth tries, the body dies, but the song of the heart is timeless, therefore free.

IV.

Because when you are gone there are only words. Words make the basis of poems_ forming a plee from the deepest depths of my heart’s agony.
When each parting seems so long my mind invents monsters which lurk which are not even there!
In a silky, billowing dress_ I’d hide under your covers, I’d caress the folds of your being, run fingers through darkness through the locks of your hair.
– “Until I’m safe too?”

– “Like my fallen angel with her wings on gold fire; Dorogaia I need you.”
I pace the Brighton Boardwalk so long that all these lives mesh together ’til the story seems too wild, too Noire to be true;
– “Turn this cab toward the seaboard, turn Idlewild, let’s run away, before we break day_”

– “You haven’t a clue! Mad man! A poorly laid plan!”

Begging for some proof of goodness of his kind.

– “The validity of his mind!”
A million cold stones acquired over long tenuous adventures, but regrets are for traitors on rewind.
Battles and then conflicting accounts of my enemies treacheries abound.
An escape plan is successful only when the underlying logic is found!
The logic is half based on a whisper, and half on a dream.
Their scissor hands dripping from love of the kill. Demons enter the portal with intention to scheme. To make you a mark, turn me to a skell or a shill.
They separated me from my humanity, loving you is against my rational will.
She’s half in the old world,
and half in the new,
half iron curtain, half crystal glass shoe.
The cab nears the Verazono precipice, the Brighton abyss where we will be seperated anew.

Tell me Odysseus: What mean me to you?
Was that voyage anything but unjust for all involved?
Once I had a white motor cycle, I was a fugitive slave, I was evolved. I killed the master and stormed the plantation and then half of the problem was solved!
And on it you waited to escape north toward the blue moon.
– “Sooner than soon? Did your love for me grow after the rooftop fist fight in the light of my murderous swoon?”

– “Dorogaia that’s right.”

– “I don’t want such a life; a life of no humor, a life or death struggle, the terror of night.”

– “Stories for night, are about all of the wrongs swept away by the dawn and the light. I require one muse only. One significant. One longing. Never again in the trenches so vast, so empty and so lonely.”

– “The story of us? Us is a wild tragic roundabout fuss!”

– “Is_to_be_a_tale_of_triumph. Over the hopeless heart via the art of romantic prolonging!”

– “Righting or wronging?”

– “I sought out your company.”

– “Do it again.”

– “I do it still out of the longing.”
I have a voice and I have a loud pen.
And I have passion and it overflows my body until I see miracles in the streets.
The strength of forty men!
And the moon winks.
Then on Banner Ave. the story completes.
And then again, the world’s smallest violin plays just for us, she thinks.
Why does such a long shadow fall over his house every time he drinks?
We are not star crossed.
We are not divided by a sea.
Or by barricades. Maybe we’re just in defiance of destiny.
Or the flaming up of the ghettos in the latest Caucasian raids.
When I looked to the sky I saw three ships sailing us apart.
You off to marriage and the world of the continent.
Me, bound forever to the belly of the ship enslaved only to my own fearless heart.
And as they sailed us apart, to never meet again,
Some sailors sang out, “The Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria!”
“To the glory of the new world!” they toasted.
Vain Braggarts and white men.
But I begged the moon:
“Dasha, Dasha, Dasha! Why can’t you love a wild peasant like me?”
What fate was this where we have to part our story time in endless tragedy?
Death itself could not stop this kind of beating in my chest.
If am reborn another thousand lives,
Each time waking from a long kiss good night,
Each life I will call out to you again as my test.
The body will die, but its sleep is the cousin of rest.
So, tied again to the mast.
Shackled and blinded I swagger on hopeless, fearless heart.
In dreams, don’t forget me.
This was begged long ago.
I will steal away and climb to the roof of Mt. Olympus if I must to give the gods a show.
I’ll ask for the help of the spirits if God has no time for us artisans.

Wild peasant partisans, from good families with magic carpets and reckless biwinning minds. The heart yearns, the back breaks, the soul is on fire, the real man, he grinds.
Black until blue.
Carrying me, one day, with wings home to you.
And if you read my verses see if I still appear a slave.
And we can say we knew each other when I was a free man and you were a free woman. I’ve traded my weapons of war for the power to save.
There is only one chain I cannot learn easily how to break.
And that, is the one I first broke to be by your side. By your side, give or take.
I long for you.
It will always be that way. It has been that way since Labor Day.
But then, story time is easy for an old soul with a pen.
– “You’re not like other men.”

– “Hopeless, Fearless Heart how long apart must I wait to stay gone?”

– “Vasa, I don’t know, forever. Or Until Dawn.”

By: WSA,
dedicated to DASM.

Declaration of the Rebellion

Initial Working Drafts:

 

Proposed for ratification  to the Second Congress of the Development Union (D/U) June 5th, 2016

 

Preamble

 

The people and the oligarchy have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among billions of working people and the few, who make up the tiny self dealing elite, have all the good things of life.

Between these two groups a struggle must go on until the people of the world organize as a movement, take possession of both the means of development and production, with their aim to abolish the current world system, and live in harmony with the Earth evolving past the narrow confines and divisions of imagined identity.

We find that the centering of the management of industries into fewer and fewer hands makes the existing trade union movement unable to cope with the ever growing power of the corporate oligarchy. We find that the numerous Socialist parties of the past 100 years have produced societies as repressive as those of the Capitalist West, and all but two have abandoned their commitments to implementing communism. We find that no successful anarchist movement has secured or liberated territory on a sustainable basis. We find that liberals and democratic socialists are quick to humanize domestic social policies but unable to remedy pervasive wealth inequality.  We observe the march of political Islam to be implementing social policies that are contrary to many human rights and repressive to women and non-Muslims.

The trade unions foster a state of affairs which allows one set of workers to be pitted against another set of workers in the same industry, thereby helping defeat one another in wage wars. Moreover, the existing trade unions aid the oligarchy to mislead the workers into the belief that the common people have interests in common with their national elite, with perpetuation of the existing wage slavery system.

These conditions can be changed and the interest of all people upheld only by a movement formed in such a way that all its members in any one change making industry, or in all industries when necessary, may cease work whenever a strike or lockout is on in any department thereof, thus making an injury to one an injury to all. As importantly as efforts to paralyze the productive mechanisms of the core states which rule the World System are by what means can we conquer the means of development to enable billions of impoverished and oppressed people access to their basic human needs and thus discredit the oligarchy in each state’s monopoly on meager subsistence social services.

Instead of the conservative motto, “Human Rights for all people,” we must inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword, “Abolition of the Oligarchy.” These struggles must happen in tandem.

It is the historic mission of our movement to do away with the world system, before it renders our planet uninhabitable and collapses more societies into wretched intractable violence. An army of both  production and development must be organized, not only for everyday struggle with the oligarchy, but also to carry on social services and industrial production when the world system is overthrown. By organizing industrially we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old. By embracing emancipatory development we are securing our needs and rights outside of the control of those who oppress and exploit us.

Declaration of our General

Grievances and Baseline Demands

 

The global movement to which we are allied has always existed in human history as long as humanity has been victimized and subjugated by local government and the state system on behest of the wealth elite. Our opposition to the governing oligarchies in every nation, our opposition to the lawless world system thus unites us in a fighting union & association of resistance and emancipatory development.

We are aware at this juncture that this is a war to the death.

As we gather together in solidarity to express a feeling of mass injustice, we must not lose sight of what brought us together. We write so that all people who feel wronged by the corporate forces of the world, wronged by warlords, wronged by governments and wronged by the iron heel of the Oligarchy can know that we are your allies.

As one global people, united, we acknowledge the reality: that the future of the human race requires the cooperation of its members; that our system must protect our rights, and upon corruption of that system, it is up to the individuals to protect their own rights, and those of their neighbors; that a just government derives its just power from the people, but corporations and oligarchs do not seek consent to extract wealth from the people and the Earth; and that no true democracy is attainable when the process is determined by economic power. We come to you at a time when oligarchs and their corporations, which place profit over people, self-interest over justice, and oppression over equality, run our governments. We have begun to unite a rebel alliance and encourage the formation of a trade union, as is our right, to let these facts be known. And attempt to address them with bold, pragmatic action.

 

 

 In the South

 

• They have reduced 71% of the human race to abject poverty; 5 in 7 humans.
• They have engineered and profited off of 45 ongoing wars, and armed conflicts.
• Armies are now running states (Pakistan).
• Transnational Crime Syndicates run countries (Russian Federation and North Korea).
• Countries exist on paper (Haiti, DRC, Iraq) but are run by UN proxy armies and state funded Northern NGOs.
• Countries exist with no governance at all (Somalia since 1992, Libya since 2014).
• Apartheid occurs in plain view (India & Israel).
• Genocide occurs in plain view (Bosnia, Rwanda, Chechnya, and East Timor, Sri Lanka).
• Massive atrocities are being carried out for resources (Democratic Republic of Congo).
• States are unraveling into civil war (Iraq, Syria, Yemen, South Sudan, Central African Republic).
• Global peacekeeping bodies regularly introduces disease and mass rape into populations it serves (Bosnia, Haiti, Mali).
• Several thousand labor exploitation work camps called Export Processing Zones pump out cheap consumer goods for the developed world core.
• They have enabled and encouraged a vast human slavery that utilizes 21 million plus humans as forced laborers and sex slaves.
• 3 million persons are infected with HIV, which has so far killed over 36 million people largely in Sub-Saharan Africa. This pandemic is still actively spreading, despite a marginal decrease in the rates of new infection. The WHOreported 198 million cases of malaria worldwide in 2013 which resulted in between 584,000 to 855,000 deaths, the majority (90%) of which occurred in Africa.
• Some 795 million people in the world do not have enough food to lead a healthy active life. That’s about one in nine people on earth. The vast majority of the world’s hungry people live in developing countries, where 12.9 percent of the population is undernourished.
• They have established unregulated, deplorable work camps that exploit the desperation of the war and drive wages in a race to the bottom,
• They have engaged in social policy to accelerate brain drain.

 

In the North

 

• They have taken our houses through an illegal foreclosure process, despite not having the original mortgage.
• They have taken bailouts from taxpayers with impunity, and continue to give Executives exorbitant bonuses.
• They have perpetuated inequality and discrimination in the workplace based on age, the color of one’s skin, sex, gender identity and sexual orientation.
• They have poisoned the food supply through negligence, and undermined the farming system through monopolization.
• They have profited off of the torture, confinement, and cruel treatment of countless animals, and actively hide these practices.
• They have continuously sought to strip employees of the right to negotiate for better pay and safer working conditions.
• They have held students hostage with tens of thousands of dollars of debt on education, which is itself a human right.
• They have consistently outsourced labor and used that outsourcing as leverage to cut workers’ healthcare and pay.
• They have influenced the courts to achieve the same rights as people, with none of the culpability or responsibility.
• They have spent millions of dollars on legal teams that look for ways to get them out of contracts in regards to health insurance.
• They have sold our privacy as a commodity.
• They have used the military and police force to prevent freedom of the press.
• They have deliberately declined to recall faulty products endangering lives in pursuit of profit.
• They determine economic policy, despite the catastrophic failures their policies have produced and continue to produce.
• They have donated large sums of money to politicians, who are responsible for regulating them.
• They continue to block alternate forms of energy to keep us dependent on oil.
• They continue to block generic forms of medicine that could save people’s lives or provide relief in order to protect investments that have already turned a substantial profit.
• They have purposely covered up oil spills, accidents, faulty bookkeeping, and inactive ingredients in pursuit of profit.
• They purposefully keep people misinformed and fearful through their control of the media.
• They have accepted private contracts to murder prisoners even when presented with serious doubts about their guilt.
• They have perpetuated colonialism at home and abroad.
• They have participated in the torture and murder of innocent civilians overseas.
• They continue to create weapons of mass destruction in order to receive government contracts.

 

IMMEDIATE DEMANDS

OF OUR MOVEMENT TO BE ADVANCED VIA ITS UNION SHOPS, Working Groups & ASSOCIATION of AFFILIATED FACTIONS:

 

1. We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our Community.

We demand full and protected equal access to our Human Rights Entitlements regardless of our national origin, as a baseline prerequisite to being called free.

 

• We demand that all of our 58 specific human rights entitlements identified in the 39 core declarations and covenants are to be enshrined the in the constitutions of all 206 nations.

 

• They are to be made legally enforceable and the basis of actual international law.

 

• We demand the measurement of all NGO and Multilateral development interventions and government policy, via an objective AAAQ human rights system for M&E and making all aid funding contingent on precise Human Rights Advancement.

 

2. We demand democratic control of tax revenue & spending.

 

• We demand full transparency on the use of our tax money in all nations subject to audit and popular control.

 

• We advocate progressive taxation of anyone earning above $200,000 USD a year up to 75% and favor tax reductions for those earning below it. We believe in expanding social welfare programs such that education, healthcare and housing are largely if not totally subsidized by the state.

 

3. We demand fully protected workers rights.

 

• We want full employment for our people in a manner that brings about an end to wage slavery and through hard work allows for proper compensation and social advancement.

 

• We are pro unions and union made goods.

 

• We demand the human right to organize labor firmly protected. We demand that the ILO establish a bureau to monitor and enforce labor standards in all nations.

 

• We are pro $15 USD an hour minimum wage in all nations as a baseline.

 

• We are pro living wage as social policy.

 

4. We demand the end of all gentrification & structural apartheid.

 

• We demand an end to economic apartheid of social services, specifically in health, education and housing.

 

• We demand the expansion of rent control and rent stabilization policies.
• We demand affordable housing to be a human right.
• We demands the reduction or end private control of public spaces & utilities.
• We demand the end to social access barriers based on gender, race, religion and sexual orientation.

 

5. We demand an inclusive political process, selected by popular mandate and participation.

 

• We aim to end casual political involvement in all available local elections. We reject bipartisan monopolies and the mockery of democratic governance.

 

• We are against all polarizing, dogmatic political discourse.

 

• We demand an end to systems of private campaign contributions and lobbying in favor of public financing of campaigns.
• We believe in increasing coordination and alliances between members of the progressive, pro-human rights, liberal and leftist movements.

 

• We reject false necessitarian principles such as the need for wholesale political system change, the idea of a closed list of political systems and that nations are unable to experiment with social policy hybrids of all systems.

 

• We thoroughly reject the demonization of socialism and glorification of neo-liberal democracy.

 

6. We demand universal equal access to education at all levels.

 

• We want education for our people that exposes the true nature of the decadent World System and its particular structural violence inflicted on all people of color.
• We want education that teaches us our true history and our role in the present day society.

 

• We believe in expansion of Civics & Human Rights education in all school systems. We believe in strengthening the inner city and rural public educational system through taxation of the ultra-rich and big corporations.

 

• We believe in ending Common Core and in decentralization of curriculum development.
• We believe in expansion of diverse models of teaching and learning in the public school system.

 

• We believe private educational institutions must open an increased number of seats to low income students. We believe in state subsidization of primary, secondary and tertiary education.

 

7. We demand universal, equal access to Healthcare.

 

• Socialized medicine is an explicit human right.

 

• Expanding equitable health services to all sectors of the population is mandate of government. We want divestment from the military industrial complex into masshealth programs like those pioneered in Cuba.

 

• We want fully integrated health systems allowing progressive training.

 

• We want all medical school subsidized by the state. We want better services for the homeless and veterans.

 

 

8. We demand the right for free migration of persons across borders.

 

• We are pro protection of the undocumented and believe in freedom of movement and migration as is a declared human right.

 

• We believe the Global North OECD nations should increase absorption of war refugees. We believe in the naturalization of all undocumented migrants living in nations and children of migrants born there to be made citizens.

 

9. We demand the abolition of human Slavery.

 

• We are anti-slavery and anti-human trafficker anything we can do to emancipate victims and penalize perpetrators.

 

• We want prostitution decriminalized and buying of sex to be made a punishable offense.

 

• We want corporations found to be linked to human slavery and labor exploitation fined heavily and be able to be sanctioned for repeated offenses.

 

10. We demand a Justice system based on justice.

 

• We demand the release of all non-violent offenders from the prison industrial complex and greatly reduce the amount of all people behind bars.

 

• We want all people when brought to trial to be tried in court by a jury of their peer group or people from their actual Communities.
• We demand an end to blatant police violence against communities of color. We wish to end disproportionate sentencing for minor crimes. We are pro decriminalization of marijuana.
• We believe in full community control of the police. We wish to reduce and end militarization of the police forces.
• We want an immediate end to POLICE BRUTALITY and MURDER of people of color in general and Black people in particular.

 

 

11. We demand the end of Military Industrial Complex.

 

• We want an end to all compulsory from military service.

 

• We demand all military and defense spending of all nations to be reduced to 5% of budget.

 

• We demand the end of domestic and international spying,secret detention & torture.

 

• We demand the end to all foreign wars and the financing of regimes that violate human rights.

 

12. We demands decent housing fit for the the shelter of human beings.

 

Public housing is not fit for human living.

 

X million live in settlements

X refugee camps,

 

13. Environmental Justice

 

14. Water

 

15. Reparations for Colonialism

We want an end to the open robbery by the oligarchs of our oppressed communities and compensation paid by all the beneficiaries of colonialism, neoliberalism and the last 500 hundreds years of the World System.

 

There are rights you never even knew you had which entitle you to a life much different from the one you currently lead.

To the people of the world,

To all the friends and allies of the J1 Rebel Alliance,

To all organized forces willing to engage our enemies with militant non-violent resistance,

 

We, the Second Congress of the Development Union (D/U) now occupying positions in Cambodia, USA, Moldova, Haiti, Brazil, Liberia, Uganda, and Jamaica urge you to assert your power.

 

We outnumber our enemies far more than 99 to 1 and they cannot kill us all.

 

Exercise your right to peaceably assemble; occupy public space; create a process to address the problems we face, and generate solutions accessible to everyone. Utilize the 198 tactics of nonviolent resistance in defense of your rights, establish emergency groups and parallel state infrastructure in every nation via social enterprises, engage in consciousness building and emancipatory development.

 

To all communities that take action and form groups in the spirit of human rights and direct democracy, we offer support, volunteers, and all of the resources at our disposal.

 

Humanity this is your call to arms.

Oligarchy this is a war to the death.

 

 

Based upon; IWW Preamble, 1906, Ten Point Program of the Black Panther Party, 1968. , Declaration of the Occupation of New York City, 2011.

 

D/U, D/A General Charter

Ratified by the First Congress of the Development Union, May 25, 2015

Amended by the Second Congress of the Development Union, June 5, 2016

 

PREAMBLE

In response to the growing series of humanitarian crises abroad and with the understanding that resilience and abundance can be found in the face of hardship and scarcity, we invite you to join an association of members who work toward and are committed to actual social justice and the realization of human rights for all.

We envision a sustainable and prosperous future and believe that we can achieve this future by protecting and assisting each other and our families in our present work.

Our goal is to meet the needs, ensure the quality of life, and support the work of our members. The Association will facilitate the integration of our disparate fields around a theory of change that prioritizes indigenous knowledge and agency, putting development tools in the hands of the people we serve.

Our immediate aim is to foster solidarity and facilitate collective action.

The Development Assocation (501 c 3)is to be an exclusive network for such professions that, “by their very nature, implement an unambiguous public good or civil service, a positive development in achieving greater human rights within the communities they serve.”

 

Workers in all fields meeting the high standard set above who are dedicated to establishing this vision and adhering to the principles outlined below are invited.

Our Strategy

 

1. Emancipatory Development

Emancipatory Development is the utilization of technology, policy, capacity training and management systems to achieve actual human rights on a structural basis for the impoverished and oppressed not dependant on extra-national, multilateral and state actors. Emancipatory development in an explicit challenge to neo-colonialism, neo-liberalism and top down state bureaucracy as its aim is to place democratized, locally operated social services in the hands of the people they serve.   

 

Emancipatory development is not an ideology or series of social policies. We reject the false necessity of selecting a monolithic ideological paradigm or imposing one on others, however any ideology incompatible with broad investments in social services and reduction of elimination of extreme wealth and poverty is at odds with E/D. 

 

2. Human Rights Defense

Human Rights defense is the willingness to combat escalating human rights abuses with all means of non-violent direct action and or passive resistance as defined but not limited to the 198 Tactics of Nonviolent Resistance.  Human rights defense is explicitly non-violent to persons and to property as the taking of life is in itself a total human rights violation, and the property is ours, build on our labor.

 

Human RIghts are just the initial and immediate baseline list of our ultimate demands on the state system.

 

3. Consciousness Building

Consciousness Building is the understanding that without popular education to raise the social awareness of the people throughout the world to know their rights and act in solidarity against their oppressors, then we will be divided against ourselves from the beginning.  Consciousness building through popular education is a direct challenge to the false consciousness division of our identities by gender, race, religion, sexual orientation and nationhood.

 

Consciousness Building has no fixed paradigm or practices it is a combined regimen of teaching and learning to broaden the feeling of collaboration, empathy and solidarity with one’s fellow humans as well as the planetary environment in which we live.

 

 

4. Social Enterprise

We must use personal economic buying power to pull our money out of institutions and corporations that exploit us and ruin our environment. We must establish our own businesses and services based on work self-management, high standards of labor protection with positive impacts on the social and environmental spheres.

 

Any Social Enterprise started up by or invested in by our members must adhere to rigorous controls to ensure the positive nature of its practices and regulations.

 

Immediate Objectives

 

• Establish a global network that embodies true solidarity and unity of purpose that enables collaborative activity;
• Develop a unified international strategy with horizontal leadership and decentralized global operations through local enlistment.
• Advance of auto-centric development methodology with explicit restoration of control of the means of development to be restored to the developing world generally and the local community specifically.
• Direct & Maximal transfer of tools, skills, and training to the peoples of the developing world, as well as all poor and oppressed communities to build their capacity to act as agents of their own development.
• Unite into a broad union all segments of the progressive, non-violent community centered development enterprise with front line providers of the change making, socially useful professions. Focus educational efforts on raising the collaborative capacity and social awareness of all communities in which we serve.
• Develop a unified and evolving framework of principles via a Practitioners Code of Conduct as to better define who is/ an is not by their actions and ethics promoting emancipatory development;
• Establish a uniform system of development measurement rooted in actual local needs, tangible human rights, and the solicited perspectives of the poor and oppressed;
• Engage and actively enhance the indigenous capacity of local Community Based Organizations, local Civil Society Organizations, Social Movement Organizations, Social Enterprises, and Civil Service Enterprises in the developing world to take further control of the means of development.
• Advance human rights entitlements in a tangible, measurable way in each and every community in which we serve;

 

• We will utilize the 58 human rights entitlements of the 17 core U.N. treaties as both a list of demands and basis for monitoring and evaluation of our own operations.
• We will invest our personal economic buying power in indigenous responsible social enterprises, local commerce, and civil service enterprises as well as utilize personal and collective economic buying power to support businesses and corporate entities that are fully compliant with our human rights entitlements, as well as do no harm to social, economic or environmental spheres.

 

COLLABORATIVE PRINCIPLES OF ALLIANCE:

 

➠ Mass proliferation of useful and needed training accompanied by the the systems of management for local people to be agents of their own development.

We will establish an open source database and a training methodology for the mass proliferation of development technology. We will regularly work to transfer skills that enhance dignified livelihoods to the communities in which we serve.

➠ Ongoing improvement of Indigenous capacity for human rights defense and administration of social services.

We will engage and enhance the indigenous capacity of local Community Based Organizations, local Civil Society Organizations, Social Movement Organizations, Social Enterprises, and Civil Service Enterprises.

➠ Strict & Absolute Adherence to Nonviolence; to both persons and property.

 

We hereby engage in a true and firm commitment to nonviolence in the face of human rights violations. We will offer training in nonviolent strategies to our members as means of achieving and protecting human rights.

Membership will be rescinded from any member who engages in violent action resulting in the death of others, even aggressors or any club, shop, unit or emergency group who by action or defensive compulsion takes up killing or property destruction as valid tactic for change.

Members are to be instructed how to deal with physical threats to themselves and their families via peacefare and evacuation. By every and all means necessary are you to abstain from offensive/ defensive engagement of a human rig   ht violating entity state or non-state.

Remain in groups, evacuate when possible

➠ Strength in Unity, Strength in Diversity!

The following professional associations, trade unions, factions, ideologies, parties and modalities for change are considered our welcome allies, provided they are not actively or clandestinely using violence as their theory of change.

List:

 

 

➠ Decentralization supports safety and sustainability.

We will establish directly elected shop representation in all our places of work, service and employment. We will not ever encourage a consolidated registry of members

➠ Solidarity with all poor and oppressed peoples.

 

➠ Solidarity with all units of the Association, Union, Movement and affiliated member groups.

We will provide standard benefits such as medical and legal, references, and contractual negotiation. We will want for every member what we want for ourselves and our families; life, liberty, equality and security of all human rights.

➠ High Levels of Integrity

You will never be off the clock as a member of this movement you are to uphold at all times high ethical standards and be subject to

We will develop via annual Congress a unified and evolving framework of principles that reflect both normative human rights entitlements and rigorous commitment to better the lives of our fellow humans.

➠ Professionalism of our Conduct

We will develop a Practitioners Code of Ethical Conduct whereby all working in the field of human development can be held to a common standard to be determined by committee.

➠ Popular Planning and Implementation

Our members will coordinate their projects, programs, and policies in consultation with beneficiaries. Members will be led by the communities they wish to empower.

➠ Populist Monitoring and Evaluation

We will assist our members in their development of appropriate monitoring and evaluating mechanisms in order to increase the accountability of development agents and ensure the use of best practices.

➠ Living Wages & HORIZONTAL PAY SCALES

No one, anywhere on earth should make less than $15 an hour and within our own payrolls and operations there should never be a radical discrepancy between expat & local pay, field and office pay, officer and rank and file pay. We are all equal and entitled to living wages for our work.

➠ Environmental justice

We view human rights as fully intertwined with environmental justice. In recognition that environmental degradation is a root cause of human suffering, we will support our members in development of environmentally sound practice.

➠ Human Rights Measurement of progress

➠ Human Rights Advancement

We will achieve human rights in each and every community in which we serve. These human rights are codified in the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. We further stand in solidarity with all people and do not discriminate by race, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, class, or religion.

 

 

 

ORGANIZATIONAL PROCEDURES:

 

Please refer to your Union Book for bylaws and procedural protocols.

Shops will be established by 3-10 local members and chartered by the Congress when they submit a local chapter, elect officers and submit a charter request to Congress. This charter may only be amended by ratification of a simple majority by the Congress.

 

COLLECTIVE BENEFITS OF SOLIDARITY:

 

Please refer to your Union Book fo for your benefits entitlement and how to access them.

All union benefits are based on voluntary contribution and free association. They will be managed by the local shop branches through elected local delegates and shop stewards. There will not until amended by Congress be centralized collection of union dues.

• Benefit 1: (An Internal Emergency Fund)Voluntary cash and supportive service pledges to be activated by delegates in the instance of member, or member family need. Cash will be pledged online and be turned over to local delegate on the basis of qualified, demonstrated member need.
• Benefit 2:(Medical/Legal Referrals)Preferential access to in house legal and medical services based on availability. Free legal and medical consults and basic referrals. Later to be supplemented by actual medical insurance coverage and legal retention per diem.
• Benefit 3: (Reference Support for Employment, Study and VISA Applications)Members agree to assist all other members with supportive work references where appropriate. Members agree to notify each other about job openings and temporary contract work.
• Benefit 4: (Temporary International Lodging)Based on availability and references members of the union, all members are asked to provide up to three days of accommodations to other members traveling on work or holiday to other villages, towns, cities, regions and countries.
• Benefit 5: (Time Bank)The Time Bank is registry of member skills, abilities, ins, access points, as well as requests and will function as round table system of asks for asks, ins for ins and trades of skill sets on an hourly basis. An example is to request a certain number of hours of car mechanical work for a certain number of hours of barber work.
• Benefit 6: (Research Support Sharing)access to frontline sources, sharing of contacts and networks, research support in other languages, and in country contacts to support projects or research.
• Benefit 7: (Module Database Access)ability to contribute to and utilize the development training modules developed by members to proliferate best practices, new technology and skill upgrades. Will also be a repository of development and continuing educational materials.
• Benefit 8:(Psycho-Social Support)all members will have access to an open and compassionate system of critical stress debriefing to cope with stresses of the field via ongoing confidential counseling and correspondence.
• Benefit 9: (Jail Support) any member detained for any reason will have their bail raised, legal resources made available and be immediately assigned a working group to secure their release as expeditiously as possible.
• Benefit 10: (Family Benefits)all benefits will be extended to family as defined by members.

 

 

Structure Management/ Governance:

(Please refer to your Union Book for explanations on Association, Union and Movement governance structures.

 

Ratified: 5 June, 2016

Signatories:

 

LIST

Scene 28

Time traveling?

The past

 

 

Every time, that I am killed, I return immediately to the past. I have died many times, each is quite painful. It is very painful to inhabit the world so powerlessly and so indefinitely.

I always think of a woman, I always try and hone in on her face, remember what she felt like sleeping next to me, or what her smile looked like on the face of my un born children.

I have never died a painless death. I remember my suffering, my families suffering. My people’s suffering. I remember what they did to my woman.

 

I’ll tell you what time travel feels like, it feel like jet lag. It feels like getting a shit night’s sleep before a big day, or clearer still, a big new opportunity. You wake up knowing something went wrong.

 

When I first saw this woman, I knew only but two things! One, was that she was very attractive, exuding high class and the second that she spoke her English with an unusual accent indicative of either speaking Czech, living in Germany or have a Swiss lover; all of those things made me vaguely uncomfortable. For I am highly prejudiced to Europeans. While I was unfamiliar with her physical and also mental terrain, I had come across the woman architect in a Baha’i meeting in the People’s Republic of Cambridge, a liberal bastion of the separatist movement; a pocket of tranquil intellectual flatulence loosely north of Boston Soviet about forty and some five checkpoints to West to Sharashka Waltham, the prisoner camp I was being held at in the Winter of 2014. Now say you, there are no prisoner gulags in the United States of America; nor are there Soviets or free zones; is not that fat and happy place a great giant tranquil cream puff of make some money and gain some weight? Ha, well it was for some time. But by the time I met the lovely little architect, a civil war had been raging for two years, it’s very epicenter the city in which I was born New York, New York! Her name, yes what was her name it was also unlike a usual Russian name, but she was vaguely unusual woman with her accent as I said, but also her name, Adelina Blazhennaya. And she was a linguist and vaguely interested in my work so we exchanged our information at her birthday, just two days before the Chechens blew up the marathon and I didn’t see her for over a year. These were the years of the civil war, the so called Great Revolt and I was in this miserable prisoner of war camp, under a fake name with bomb embedded in my chest in case I chose to leave. I quite hated and still hate provincial Massachusetts, quite despised the chill of just three hours north. Despised my duties in the camp. And my ghosts, I was playing dead about to be shipped overseas in the service of the revolt. I was an agitation propaganda officer working as a paramedic.

 

My death had been arranged in 2076 to assist my companions and we were bring a certain system of training rebels out to places abroad, but then I was ensnared.

 

A bomb was placed next to my aorta or somewhere besides! Whatever technology you think brings so much innovation to your life via the internet and smart phones is nothing compared to what the ruling elites and oligarchs and real power brokers have. I was forgotten in this cold dead place of purgatory while in New York and in Haiti my comrades and family, my lovers and friends thought me dead, and Great War raged inconclusively!

 

A great wall went up around Long Island cutting Brooklyn and Queens off from the USA. Heavy sanctions and drone raids and state of emergency.

 

I will tell you the worst thing that happen to a man is to forget his face, to forget who and what he is. What he is doing in life. Worse still, for him to wander so far from his companions that none no him and anything he thinks he could be, he is. That was me. Trapped in that special engineering camp walled in my highways and radio towers. The bomb that was put into my chest come with special instructions; build us a training system or you die. Die alone and forgotten. Your city burning yonder will be the fire under your feet, design us a system to unleash whole societies against the oligarchy.

For you see, while I served the rebellion; I was also a serf to the Oligarch mad man Sasha Perchevney who told me that if I did not design him a system he would sell my former lover Natasha Andreavna to the soldier brothels on the Western front. Powerless me, a scrappy intellectual and Ivory what could I do but what that mighty war lord wanted. And I was thought dead so no one came to look for me in Waltham at all.  And it seemed to snow in that place nearly all the time. Like American Siberia, manufactured with great hidden machines.

I’ll tell you what, I was thinking! That’s never been the problem, not at all. And the snow was falling hard, compared to what? I have no idea. Seemed hard for America anyway. What I was thinking then was that I was late, again.

That’s a terrible look in every single culture, except for chornay culture; it’s normal and expected. If a black friend shows up early, well, don’t worry that won’t. But I am not a Chornay, I am a part-Ivory half caste and it is quite cold in New York now, quite over snowing, quite utterly miserable and you wonder why people even choose to live in this country except for the ability to make some money. It’s worse in Boston, I can tell you first hand. Some better money is made here evidently, and they build a family and mythology around that.

I think I know some things about some things, but I don’t know anything at all about women, Russian women in particular. I can’t tell you anything of substance about Slavic culture, only stereotypes and inventions based on being around them so long. I would say with certainty that I’ve never met a Russian idealist, never met a Russian man at least not overtly claiming he’d commit any kind of high or low crime for some rubbles or better still Renminbi or Euros. There are perhaps over one hundred reasons Russian and Americans should or should not date; but they come down to aesthetics, culture, balance and improvement. This too, a stupid mythology because its’ all banter and barter and pheromones and fuck; it’s just about attraction to what you’re told is decadent or, self-improving.  The Cold War is not after all fought between individual antagonisms; but over politics. Most so-called ‘Russians’ I have met in New York City State are not actually even Russian, they are every type of other former Soviet Ivory; or Ukrainians, Uzbeks, Tajiks, Georgians, Moldovans and Armenians; most Slavic Russians stayed in Russia. The Americans call anyone who speaks Russian, the Russians; but quite frankly outside the tallest of Manhattan towers and the highest of the high end; well there aren’t that many Russians here. For whatever it matters, in the scheme of the story.

I have met causally only a few in greater New York and Brighton, Boston, most in Brooklyn Soviet’s Russian quarter and all but one forms or shades of a Jeuf. Dmitry was born in Uzbekistan, but was Slavic Russian Orthodox as could be and a scheming hoodlum. I shot him and he wounded me in a duel for insulting the honor of Maria Parsheva, also a Slav but born in Ukraine claiming to be a Ivory. He lived together for two years she and I; a quiet geisha mostly. She was afraid of blacks, wanted to leave Brooklyn. She sucker punched a hooligan one night and pulled me bleeding form under a sixteen person pogrom. Yelizaveta is she half Ivory, born in Ukraine but her mother was Slavic Russian. She never loved me like I loved her, I chased her for over a year. It was more sentimental until they locked me up after the blizzard, for an unrelated series of events. I was then abandoned on Mondays and fucked apart on Fridays. I have no regrets, her mother didn’t approve of my condition or my profession. And, then there was Natasha Andreavna Skorbogatova from Penza; who looked at me with bright and completely fascinated alien eyes who I rallied my mighty little Otriad around her suffering and declared war to the death with the Oligarchy to avenge.

 

She was carried away into night. And the rising that occurred on the 1^st of January, 2076 was violently suppressed its supporters killed, imprisoned, driven underground or into early exile. Made to have never existed to the outside world.

 

I was transferred to exile in Shrakasa Waltham in the fall of 2077 and spent two years in that Special Engineering Camp. I met there perhaps the hardest and most glorious woman of my life then so far Adelina Blazhennaya, the coy brunette from Chelyabinsk; we fell in and out of love and finally escaped together to Hispaniola, D.R. and Haiti to train young partisans participating in the Great Revolt there.

But I owed a debt to Perchevney, so he took her away from me too and said finish your mental toils, finish your system or both your women will be sold to the Western Front to fuck Germans and U.S. troops. If you run again I’ll explode your Ivory heart! Little did I know that both my lovers were perfectly safe and Sasha Pervechnvny the Voorhi just liked to manipulate my weak American emotions!! But, it was for the best because by 2080 the rebellion was going quite poorly and the rebels were being massacred and encircled in both New York and Port Au Prince, and here I was complaining about the cold!

Why trade one cold place for another, when people will treat you like an enemy alien, a whore or a criminal, or both. Maybe if I repeat this story enough times it will take on the veneer of recreational anthropology. For I had read their books and know their leaders ideas, and know their history and studied but failed to comprehend their language multiple times, I and my countrymen have no gift for language. I waver at times between extolling the hope and idealism my land cherishes, and denouncing the Americans as hypocrites and man babies, silly violent monkeys. I artistically and rhetorically paint with a wide brush, but I would not think any high civilization comes from the interior and the provinces. I am regularly accused of romanticizing the Soviet Union, but frankly not everyone on earth has a human right to television, two cars, two homes, a two course, four increment meal 2,500 daily calorie diet; and to get as fat they wish then die of heart disease. That’s not in the UNDHR. I’m sorry it is not. Nor is it a human right as I see, or have read to enrich yourself well beyond need on the backs of others; and the Americans have certainly done that.

 

While on leave twice a week I managed to see the Russian linguist three times even sometimes. Once for to paint together in Chinese restaurant, once to ain’t together in a Canaanite restaurant. Sometimes for personal poetry recitals, sometimes to hear jazz at the Bee Hive; I was unimpressed with my choice of eating, had wanted to be charming, but I was distracted. We kissed for the first time at a masquerade ball on Halloween. Eventually I took her to fancy fish restaurant, we drank a bottle of white wine and made love in the attic of the hovel in Waltham I was then living in.

 

The candles set the bed partially on fire and damn police towed her car.

 

I should keep all these views of mine more cards to chest. I should not paint myself into a cliché, or my lovely new associate into a cultural strong hold. She has a strange cute accent, so it’s not so clear that she is shaped by Russia, well of course she is, but she has been here since 18. It is not a passport or a world view it is a way of being. Like being a New York Ivory; but I and she are nuanced by experiences and by interaction. Every time I kiss a Russian I tighten myself, I tighten my circle I fight inwards, clasp closer to my family and associates; I learn about my failings and correct accordingly. Does every time a Russian woman kisses me; do they become more fiscally savvy? Do they earn more wide beliefs? Do they see a Slavic face with an American mentality; or do they fuck me and with me, one me and about me mostly because I am so curious, or just a curiosity. Oleg Medved the photographer, the Israeli Ukrainian who is most familiar with my artistic and agitation work he doesn’t try and answer questions like that; he just assumes I have an exclusive taste for Russian women, he doesn’t see anything peculiar in that. They are fearless, hard and very beautiful. As well as highly educated, combatively non-judgmental and quite literally rolling off planes and boats since 1989ce.

 

They being Oleg and I had once tried to have a series of talks about the so-called Russian mentality; but we were both ultimately Ivories. The Ivory has never ever found an empire more long term hostile to it that the Russians, short of the Germans gassing everybody 1939-1945 and the Spanish inquizitioning everybody in the 14^th-16th century perhaps Iran as well. The Pale of Settlement and Siberia were cold places where Ivories were sent along with others to starve and die. It’s just that when a Russian says Ivory, their skin crawls a little. Americans have learned to suppress that twitch, publicly.

 

It was in the Fancy Fish restaurant in the fall of 2077 that I found her smile most assuring and she blushed several times, and that was incredible because he didn’t know they could blush. “We’re human too you know”, she smiled so much they stayed much longer in the French restaurant than either had though and then it was a bit after midnight. He wanted her clothes ripped off and to taste her all night.

 

All his people were hostages. In Haiti and New York, the military and secret police were cutting down his friends and family. He felt at times that he was worse than dead; he was alive and inanimate. Allowing by doing nothing the oligarchy to slaughter all those he ever cared about. These were his dark thoughts; that instead of courting this young woman he should shoot up the place; should kill these chubby junior banker around him in the streets of the District Financial; gun them down helter skelter like the police did his friends and associates.

But he was no terrorist! He had taken an oath of total non-violence, though he knew and so did his god that in many other lives he had been a killer.

The lovely linguist was so completely charming, it came so naturally to her and so incompletely to him. She was teaching petty aristocrats in a small school in Newton. What made everything so much better than almost any dinner he’d had in the last several years was that one thing flowed to the next and it was all small talk. Which he didn’t even know he could make.

His 29^st birthday had happened the day before, it was his reason to be back in New York and confer with his associates, approved four days leave from the special engineering camp signed off by Alexandre Perchevney himself, Sasho. She had given him an art book on New York architecture for his birthday which was classy. And he had found a short and debaucherous story within it, about a playground for underage girls some robber Barron built on Madison Square Garden.

Now, from her perspective it was only medium small, but the dinner was nice and he was medium charming and medium handsome and reasonably intriguing because he was designing some kind of training system in a medium famous Sharashka, was a Baha’i and evidently a petty bourgeoisie based on his family living inside the District Financial, but what she liked the most was that he was educated. He was mildly funny. And she might have had a few drinks with him and seen where it went or maybe not. He was a little surreal. And normally they parted a little after midnight with a soft kiss on her cheek and he thought to himself he’d like to see her again, or a few times. It was happy to feel things un-extremely, to not be made into zealous creature about every single thing. But she leans in and makes out with him, tells him they’re going back to his place in her red KIA Soul ranger.

 

“You’re gonna name love for me ok,” she smiles.

 

I will tell you what the loneliest thing on earth is, it is to feel you are insane for seeing something as evident as the sky being blue or the grass being green. To believe that poor people are poor because of the decisions of the powerful. To feel like you are incapable of being a participant in a great crime.

 

The third time he saw the last queen of Russia, he was late. He was getting his hair cut. He was about to load a small crew of internationals into a car, get in suits clear fifteen check points and make contact with the Cuban special interest section in the heart of Washington D.C. He was late. It was rude and third impressions are really important. And he promised her dinner the night before but had to change plans because one of his crew was losing her shit, an Egyptian doctor, she kept talking about suicide. And he had really wanted to see Adelina the last queen of, not over morning coffee but over an intimate dinner. He’s wanted her to make a good blue print of his chest, use her keen eye, ask her to utilize her engineering skills to take him all part and remove the bomb and the heart too perhaps so he could stop with all his sentimental feeling to his species. He wanted her maybe to take him apart down to base components, dismantle all his usual malfunction. She wasn’t certified as a human architect but he knew she could do it, if he earned her trust.

 

They met for less than twenty minutes, he bought her some crappy green breakfast truffle candy and a coffee. Promised he’d write a story and take her to dinner. He didn’t tell her that the Egyptian doctor was brutally raped during the 2075 uprising and her parents were dead. That as they spoke an Afghani named Farooq and an effeminate fellow named Juan Mishanga from the Republic of Congo were loading several large bags of simtex into his Honda civic. Of course not, she wouldn’t understand why the National monument was a superior alien military weapon and needed to get blown apart. That wasn’t third date style talk. No not one bit.

She was annoyed and he could tell that easily, being an expert in women being annoyed. Should have gotten up earlier. Should have gotten a haircut on the road down to D.C., let barbers of Baltimore have a cynical go, the Cubans didn’t care what his hair looked like, just that he was not a spy for the wrong side. Should have said to the Egyptian doctor Mayaada, ‘bitch be cool’ we have to bring 500 pounds of simtex across fifteen check points and three damn states. He should have just made the time, social engineered things to get her ass to dinner. Oh well.

There was a small nano-explosive wrapped around his aorta. So Alexandre Sasho Perchevney could blow a tiny whole in his heart and send him into a horrible stroke. And he still thought Alex, Sasho as most called him was going to send his two ex-girlfriends to a German brothel, which truly to an Ivory is worse than personal death. I’m not a terrorist at all.

But I will tell you what the worst thing in the world is to feel; that you were built of different stuff than others, constructed of other parts. I remember some old phrase about that which does not kill you makes you into stranger form and now here was I, a relic, an antiquity. He wished he could make the Russian architect understand all that fuckery. Maybe run away with her for a week or two to Cuba or Israel one day, the only places he didn’t watch his own back much. Had others to do it.

It was better sometimes to live in a world where you didn’t have responsibilities to others, or at least only one or two others. It would have been nice to be able to write poems and paint and listen to jazz music and see the wave’s crash on the sea wall or the shore, every single day before and after work or play. Sometimes, sometimes he wished that he could be renovated like a building, brought up to speed with the rest of the monkeys. He had so much he thought he could offer, but time had taken a gristle toll not reflected on his face.

He suspected maybe she’d see him again a fourth time, unless the short story was so outlandish that she might question the validity of his thought process and mind. But what of it, he had very little these days to do but write and tinker on that what he was building with the field trials approaching as soon as the white walls of winter subsided and he would be released from this cold and miserable place.

He had wanted when he was younger to be an architect, but now he was convinced that before anything might be built that was of use to those he answered to, well first he’d have to focus on knocking a few things down. There’s a dream I have, he told her. I wander down the board walk and end up in the White City of 4,000 Bauhaus structures, the golden age of Tel Aviv. And the war is over and we won, and the justice and rights are real. And everyone is ok, and I’m working on my third major book, and I see you again after all these years of struggle and I say, you wanna get a coffee with me? You wanna hear jazz over dinner? And nothing else is on my mind because it’s over, we won.

But there’s a bomb in my chest. The Bratva took some hostages I care about this time. My mother and father have high Ivoryish expectations about my medical education. I’m locked in an American gulag, at least three more timeless. I may have just helped some foreign agents bring a large IED into the Capital. I haven’t slept well in days, I haven’t gone to yoga and all this blatnoy with my case officer about this system I’m designing, well fuck it. It leads a man to smoke and drink, this vast and evil game.

You’re beautiful you know, the way you smile. I hope your stadium gets built before the rebels take Atlanta, which they might in 2017, all a matter of Afula Specials. We don’t have a lot of use for stadiums, but I bet without knowing you know that there are things you can build that won’t get swallowed up in the war effort. Like the Greeks, like the Bauhaus school. If form follows function, trust me that what’s in my blue print will keep us all building another ten thousand years.

 

But I would like to see you again, and I’ll make it happen. Somehow, despite the prevailing factors weighted against me. The commons sense to ask you to not see if you knew what were better for you.

Disjointed, that’s what time travel feel like. Bits of this reality, bits of that. My soul trying to hold into a corpse with duct tape and zeal, a zeal for something.

 

The bus ride on the Lucky Star Express cost $28 American and sandwiched him between two gay Canaanites or really, he was the outer crust to their love sandwich. American had just made gay as American as Apple-Cherry pie and mass shootings. The Empire State building was lit up like a rainbow. It was one of the new reforms to slow the separatist movements.

 

He caught the 8:45 out of South Station evading a small man hunt for him after he pried the impediment off his face and squirreled down an tunnel it took him 32 days to dig with a silver spoon in his mouth, well he was covered in filth in a blue kibbutzinik shirt, grey pantaloons and the bandana of Adelina Komarova, his now cold as Chelyabinsk steel ex-partner. She was working for the Germans now. He alliance with him most tenuous. He washed the tunnel dirt off at South Station, in rubbed into his dirty brown main a little Choco Latina General Product and he saved with a two blade razor to look more like plumped Ivory writer and less like a stone cold assassin, and Israeli killing machine he was sometimes written into being.

 

Before he swiggled down that tunnel his cell mate for a time in the camps, a Zimbabwean bio chemist yelled; “the memories are not real! YOU HAVE NO DEAD WIFE! YOU WERE NEVER AT THE DOMLPHINARIUM BOMBING! You’re ABSORBING THE TRAUMA OF OTHERS MY DERANAGED ASSOCIATE! MY DEAR PALE DROOG! You are not going to get any answers at that wedding in New York!! Take your damn salt!”

 

But he left Kudzai prying at license plate machine and got clear of Sharashka Waltham; the Zionist Internment camp they had been toiling at for over two years in winter and worse winter. A hell.

 

I would have the young dvotchka professional teacher know that I had to chisel through a plastic cage and with a hair pin remove from my face the mask that was keeping me speaking soothing words of poetry. Eyes glued to a telescreen unveiling world horror after horror! I would have her know I then had to tunnel nine hundreds aquariums, yes aquariums the bizarre system of measurement that is used in Gulag Camp to say just under three kilometers, in civilized measurement.

 

She smiled at him. What was real and what was so surreal about Sebastian Adon, Hebrew named Zachariah pronounced Zechariah with that kh-h-h should only Ivories and Arabs make. He would write and he was almost never one time. And he had designed her an eighteenth wonder of the world to honor her Mother Russia on the Apple of the Empire.

I would have the young, elegant and truly stunning dvotchka linguist know that for 35 days I was a captive. To my ambulant planation surely but then to a fiercer master that of Sharashka Waltham which seems to hold me in its thrall and not let me leave it’s westerly prison for what how now-pow! Two long years, nearly three.

How now, she replied, still grinning. She was at a new work site now the fearsome dome completed. The gladiator thunder dome of Atlanta, or Chinese internment camp deepening whom one asked at FEMA, those fucking people. She remained a happy optimist.

Well then she says, “All that escapery had in fact taught you to be on time!”

And he blushed. For it was true.

What did they make me a Master of he wonders? Sustaining International Development or sustaining himself for unrelenting struggle. With some coexistence thrown in there as if he didn’t play well with black and brown people.

“What was the last thing you remember, that made you happy, she asks. Ultimately settles on.

“I remember being at the Baha’i meeting and catching the eyes of a beautiful woman, so I spoke more. And I remember they had cherry juice, juice of every kind and it wasn’t too cold in Cambridge, so it was leather jacket season and I felt quite cool, and intellectual, and like you were watching me.”

 

“You just wanted to draw me like your other Russian girls,” she replied.