The Speed of Light and the Simplicity

By Richard Clough

This is a compilation of poems and stories based on a similar material that is still in its gestation stage. Like the title says, this book has come relatively fast after shaking off the forces of the black hole resisting its light-filled message. It’s this anomaly in the flow of expression that gives the speed of light its unusual texture and uniqueness, leaving it to the most perspicuous people to perceive the subtle distinctions between the past simplicity it is based on and the present so-called complexity.

In the Speed of Light and the Simplicity, it says I was clutching my therapist Laurie Boxer voluptuously at the end of the dark Southern night, which in the complexity is the spirit of the house. One can see how time has brought into focus the warped aspects of light through time.

This book has a sequel called The Maryland Prize.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jun 14, 2018
• ISBN: 9781984534347

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Copyright © 2018 by Richard Clough.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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Rev. date: 01/09/2024

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

Burnt Again (The Story)

Wisdom

Andrea

Rim of the World

The Light

The Real Zombies

Culver City

Insomnia

Chesapeake

Burnt Again

The more time, the less

Philosophy

Jail

Classified

The Spirit of Greece

The Army of Glory

The Ivans are Coming!

The Elements of the Game

The Spirit of the House

Escape from the Fat People

Croix De Querre

The Good Schooling

The Spirit of a Woman

Visions of the Unsuspecting Pauper

Coup De Grace

The Dangerous Girl

The Classic Story

Fortress of Darkness

Glents Redress

Rhi Lavrador

Pretorias’s Party

The Man From The Mountain

La Bitch

The Fount of Poetry

The Presidency

Reality and Illusions

Another form of Justice

The Day

Xlibris

Whats a Future

Insanity

Life and Death

The Woods Anew

The Span Between 2011 and the Present

Things Begin in Threes

Time

Worm Island

The Power of a Woman

The Night

Finis

Chanute

THE

SPEED

OF

LIGHT

A LITTLE INSIGHT INTO THIS BOOK

When I heard the beer songs salute to the Maryland being the land of pleasant living, I believed that without any consideration of how the beer made it otherwise. It was a reflection of my single mindedness created by my pillow sex that deflected the power of the reality gripping everything else. The power would fluoresce namely Carrie and all the rest but the germinal point was completely naïve. For a writer of the truth this could be a bad sticking point. The incipient poetic ness, however, would be because of my love with the spirit that would create something greater than all the rest. Sort of like the writer of the bays gloaming. Its majesty was hidden by a terse reality that undertook some massive existence to find the golden thread. In the first Speed I mimicked Michener in some lines of poetry knowing the writers deficiency. This carried on into common experiences that began to reflect a great story with intelligence interweaved. For instance, there was the young birddog named Spot that ran away from its chain by my mistake that forced me to chase it to the far woods where it flitted like a spirit of its rare freedom contrasted to my burden to cope with a arising reality which was to bring it back to its chain. This was something so subliminal that it transcended the other writers into the gloaming in the same vein I showed how the great old lady writer would relish something like me at a young age picking up twigs from the storm tossed yard. This is just a little insight into this book.

INTRODUCTION

The Speed of Lights seminal broaching of some far off intergalactic and worldly plot has now for the most part been disassembled into something more cogent and insightful as seen in the last two books of 2017 where now one can see a kind of antiquity previously missing where the bluntness of LA has now become a distant city in parallax to the rural milieu. A force the prisoner of the behemoth of the red hills defines in its truthful testament.

BURNT AGAIN (THE STORY)

Religion has made people believe that life and death is common with the exception of things like tragedies, diseases, accidents etc... that we may describe the mechanism of death but it is this storys effort to show that death isn’t common and there is something greater involved in spite of all the inherent resistance from death. In the course of the odyssey one will see the nuances of life in a way that brings it glory even if one knows the reigning death will finally consume it for the very reason of its greatness and it will be painful to him but hopefully enlightening to you.

The nature of the main character - me - is so complex it involves a kind of second sense like when he drove his pinto onto the freeway quickly after leaving behind the skid row hotel and possibly the alerted police. Its so complex that it often causes the zombies and vampires he grew up innocently among to inflict damage on others by being blinded to the powers of his light. Its in this vein the plot shows this happening and how he avoids the greater pain the evil scion has planned for him. A fact that could have made the police alert. He does feel pain but he sabs it by ingeniously writing all its twists as they seemingly reveal themselves either from the past or present that is blended with a kind of déjà vu. He has a following from one life to another which might explain the ten bad ones or guardians of the past secrets in order to preserve and facilitate his further efforts. All these incidental details are part of thwarting death just by being aware of them. He had no more money but he never thought it was because he beat their champion. However, he believed her cancer a few years later was real. He also knew there was a hateful mentality against him that saw him the way he saw his father but since his father was defiled by life they thought he was alright even his feeble book Truth Cannot be Buried that now became Cloughs great book that seemingly no one would know. It was all part of life his instinct made him write of the female comic extolling the virtues of the Nazi war criminal comic in spite of what people said. Yet like this preamble he’d be burnt again.

WISDOM

My princess mother, Sarah, was driven away from her rural Maryland home by almost preordained circumstances. First there was her health that her parents belittled then it was her business education the result of so called politics that gave her the leverage to travel across country to first Chicago then Phoenix, Arizona where she was smitten by this flashy Latin dancer who became my crazy father who months later held me above the rim of the world with a telltale frown. By that frown I was raised by my mother in LA and fared well in spite of a guileless nature that grew with age to the point of so called mental illness. It showed after high school graduation when I went back east. I had just been driven by Dale like in the movie the Rocky Horror Picture show to our two houses together where by dint of feeling the sexual insinuation I walked away feeling like I had the stature of Abe Lincoln. Of course this was the beginning of my frustration with women as if I weren’t the great jock. Instead I’d take this mammoth energy and expend it in the phantom prison with no recompense just the succor of fulfilling the famous irresistible impulse that derived from other lives frustration fertilizing it for this life.

True to my word I was feeling the misery but it was defrayed by certain intangibles outside people don’t think exist. In spite of them saying I was a murderer upon admission and their turning off the TV over the impending invasion I was succored by rock and roll Dawn who I kept from opening my VA payment that later was sent electronically to my bank in SM. There was my progress in running in spurts beginning from two hundred yards to a marathon. For this I almost basked in the veritable furnace. I still didn’t think I was getting out which is how I got out just to elude the posse and write my new intangible poetry.

After winter summer chores

Make one pleasurably sore

A feeling like the flag fluttering on the pole

More lore is in store

The wind once gone

Has been restored

America was free

From the freedom it lost annually

This is what the spirit of Anna Lee

Told me

Even as this reinvigorated endurance left many souls floundering there were newer generations coming whose reveling only made me feel the impetus like the air rising in the storm. It was my hope my works would let them know from those that dared.

The philosophers politics

Had become as simple as a cup

In reference to the life we sought

Due to the tribulations

From what time forgot

This was over rode by a song

I heard early on

A sentimental testament to life

In even as small a place as Price

That let my life be spiced

By the radio day and night

At a time it might mean war

If people continued on the wayward way

Since it was a reminder

Of what was a intolerant geiser

Nay I don’t follow the throng

My destiny is to nurture the spirit

That makes the song

Through the darkness I strode

Suacony Shadows were the shoes I wore

This so I could write poems

As if inspired by the cumulonimbus’s glow

That was my beacon

Down the illicit road

In summary I may seem a criminal to them but at least I have eliminated the difference of what the devil might make my words. I have also solved the problems with women by sprinkling their spirit through these pages. I also didn’t like being a boxboy or minimum wage actor but it was the essence that required my naïve nature to shine in even my eyes. Because just like Harmon Killebrew told Sandy Koufax he made the game look sick so have I transcended meaningless living clichés that I hope won’t be a secret I take to my grave.

Brandy sees his glory and rage said the song. I don’t think so just as I’m Tupac’s real motherfucker expressed in living and dying in LA. All part of my son of Dave Weisbarts movie initiated with me swinging on the rings at muscle beach as a little boy. Like it said originally, They knew of me, that is. A once dynamic individual, who had to feed almost in a retarded way on some meager sustenance by some act of the greater God.

ANDREA

When I arrived at Foothill in 1986 experiencing the famous trepidation that seemed to disappear once inside it was just the deception or lull before the storm because if I hadn’t been able to rise to the pantheon of the sporting unknown by playing volleyball better or as well as the others on the team that went to gymnasiums for games I wouldn’t have deflected certain consequences in the embryonic form of my six foot two roommate Charles Blackman or the girls silently moving about. Of course then there would be other things that I held at bay for my future until the inevitable squeeze forced me to escape Foothill. I say inevitable because I wasn’t brought there to succeed and the chances were I shouldn’t have succeeded in volleyball or the talent show but that I had succeeded enabled me to seduce one of those secret girls and this turned out to be a almost catatonic Jewish girl reminiscent of the kind of spirited girl I’d like as a girlfriend and she was to my jealousy and delight – Andrea. We couldn’t have intercourse because I didn’t learn of Vaseline until after my escape and it was just as well. We still were naked and engaged in sexual contact that lasted until around the time of my escape.

What happened was Andrea and me were sitting on her bed when a heavy set female bully stood several feet away in the adjoining room. I made light of it yet Andreas unit was then sealed from my entry. It was just a little later before it was sealed I was coaxing Andrea to do it with me when I instead turned to her sweet blonde companion who said she couldn’t do that. It was a Satanic trick because the obese woman had sex with my new room mate. It was then Andrea visited me and wanted to do it but without Vaseline I couldn’t do it so I made a physical joke of what the blonde said to me, I can’t do it!

Days later as I was getting amped without them checking my mouth for the meds another long term female came into my room and she briefly sucked my swelling dick indicative of what would become a boner with Vaseline. As we didn’t really do it completely her departure lit the fuse for my escape because it was obvious these girls didn’t care. The rest was history. The sweet blonde would be there another ten years until my alliance with Sheila and, in the meantime, after I came back a year later I was overdosed on Prolyxn so I couldn’t consummate with Andrea but here is where I began reaping my nine vampire wives who would never have done it with me if it wasn’t for the escape. This vampire assertion is kind of bolstered by them doing it with me on over doses even at phantom with Joyce and its what made me know without malice that Andrea really didn’t want me. They were real smart too. The third time at Foothill I wasn’t taking the meds and using Vaseline but they just resorted to kissing as if to plant the seeds of desire for the next life.

As for my room mate, not Charles, because of the girl that came into my room before the escape and his alliance with the pig he was sent into the phantom hell. It wasn’t hell for me because I wasn’t stupid. There were women there like rock and roll Dawn that engendered constant respect and activity in light of their secret presence. There was also Carrie after my last stay at Foothill who I thought was a greater version of Andrea. I thought Carrie may have really liked the flabby butted nemesis and she used her essence to create illusions that influenced me in finally writing the great romantic book. Her love wasn’t love but maybe the kind of hate that made the higher powers kick her out of my adolescent halcyon existence just for her presence in later years to excite what would have been so bad in youth. Don’t get me wrong she was with me at times in youth where girls warned me and she flinched when people touched on past issues my murderers of the future focused upon. But happiness could only be so long and she might really love the flabby butted nemesis who would no longer be so flabby in the ass in the next life. As a matter of fact he could be a formidable adversary the way I way I had viewed him now. When we were naked in the shower in 1981 we were that close to doing the nude fight but he backed off. We were, however, way ahead of most others in this insight into sex with the bitches which is how I succeeded by the greater God. Of course if I think he might be formidable in high school it just shows how things are just the opposite in my view. One cannot forget, however, that Carrie might also be the black hole agent from my antics in the house and not just some time transportation contrary to all this rosiness and I have to believe in Andrea the next time in spite of all Carries artifice in order to be happy. Because everything I’ve been through from the gun shot wounds, surgeries, overdoses, and fights in this life were the necessary preparation for the things I’ve earned for the afterlife. One of them being Andrea and the nine vampire wives.

RIM OF THE WORLD

After LA county jails horrors I was taken aback upon my entrance into the unbeknownst phantom prison in June 1981. I marveled at the unit that seemed comfortable and relaxing while I noticed the hot desert weather and the various insects. Still my need for recuperation from the gunshot wounds was noticeable as I always got light headed going up the steps to chow which I ate until after three weeks the comeuppance came on the so called west-side. Here there were twenty bed dorms and no air conditioning. I felt threatened yet the inmates seemed docile. I was uptight as they smoked and drank coffee and I seemed to be retarded by some past live inhibitions. It would prove the old axiom the worse the start the better. In the interim, however there were women here that I felt would force me into the hell of sex I had avoided on the street. There were also a lot of patients leaving the first year just prior to the extensions that would begin around my release date of 1985. I felt good seeing them leave and bad for myself, but nevertheless I evolved while dealing with some nuisances never knowing I had beaten the ones known or unknown when I went to jail for six months to come up with the victory. It didn’t seem a victory because I was really happy with the money I had to buy things from the inexpensive and less crowded canteen and the manuscripts and cassettes I got in the mail. I was going to publish a three hundred page book of being with Ezravita and some mysterious killer as well as the musclemen of Venice etc.. but instead I was sent to foothill. I had also developed my running to the point I was running in sets about twenty laps a day even in the summer. Yet I accepted my fate because phantom was very irritating then with Mr. Coles constant mania and their focus on little intangibles that became apart of my famous neurotic expositions. I had a typist who I must have given thousands of dollars to in San Bernardino but I later had to learn to type myself. The patients may have seemed comical to me but it was debatable that anyone could think them funny esp. if I hadn’t gone to Foothill. I had also accumulated quite a tidy sum of money from the VA that yet hadn’t been deemed cost of care because it took a doctor in 1993 to write the VA that I was incompetent which was the only way to take my money. It was this last part that represented just a little of the constriction leading to the fight with Slaughter and the mall that helped define the phantom prison and the rim of the world I so poetically alluded to in 2007 about the time of my great literary revelry. At least they did this for me even if grudgingly. All this was so forbidden like how they bloated my stomach with a shot after leaving the admission unit for not eating that it possibly explains why I couldn’t be released besides luckily escaping Foothill. An escape that I said wrought this treasure of thought. Even to this late day in spite of bitter memories and the misery of experiencing their remodeling of the dorms into rooms I will always be fond of having seen the mountains from the then unsealed patio on those first cold mornings of winter 81-82. It’s for all this in light of a world that is just as constrained my vision is worldly even from here that is more than the phantom prison but the rim of the world.

THE LIGHT

I feel everyone knows what I know as though it were communal property. This is an illusion but also the mysterious God no one until me has defined. My insight got a rough start characteristic for my type as my mother said in Santa Monica, No one even knows you. It was just the same in a way as how in stressful situations I felt bad which was really good in beginning my understanding of some complex dynamics. I don’t like feeling good anyway because this seems to precede something really bad.

If one read the books that derived from this book one may pick up an extremely positive effect on most things referred to. This isn’t because I’m unrealistic or some stupid delusional person. It’s the alchemical synthesis of a lot of suffering and frustration that through it all sees something that now appears a divinity. This process has basic roots. Everyone has heard of a good man’s success was based on some sin in his life like the preacher raping his sweet girl in his house. Well something like that should have transpired between Lynette, my cousin, and me when I was staying with grandma following high school. Grandma had taught me the Lord’s Prayer before meals with just her and Lynette present. It was the famous great temptation that was possibly nipped in the bud by the prospect of Dale, a cop, next door in Price or my uncle Bill who really wasn’t friendly but a ghoul looking for a tasty morsel in the same vein as any zombie.. Due to this inversion of normal vice instead of my consummation leading to success the threat of the opposite is what created this book of God. Thanks in some great part by the last survivors I met after leaving never, never land that perpetually housed me except for Foothill, the last survivors, by dint of a law that surrounded intangibles like my Uncle Bills daughter leading a stricken life and dying in surgery in her thirties like many others who became just head stones in the cemetery. A fact that makes me more infamous than just violence. Because real church people, in spite of my apparent connection to the church, don’t have this precocious trait of mine. Real church people are like the dead anyway and this is what draws the police who do more than protect them but eliminate those like me who could see the apes and the zombies in the first place. Somehow leaving it to me to unravel the essence that first came as disjunctive chapters of raw ore that needed time to be refined into the present enlightened message. The resistance being part of its text.

The speed of light was obvious in light of the swift passage of time that saw me seeing a girl running up the steps of the famous palisades in SM where I used to run but was there instead trying to futilely escape the zombies or last survivors or that then saw a whole row of inmates in the county jail killed just months later that sort of proved there was something amiss.

Through its breadth it’s hoped these books could have saved something better for Lynette and me in the next life. Maybe it has even transcended a happy family that are fairly common place and shrouded like all the rest in a darkness only this light can reveal.

A light that was created by being a rare receptacle of experience and insight that defied the auspices of the devil. We now see the circle of boys and girls in SM at Lincoln junior high along with a lot of the rest that the aliens let him escape the invisible plague and find lives glory.

It was prophetic my vision of Kate Jackson since it gave me the impetus to find the truth and develop a true glowing role as minimum wage actor that defied the true reality of my kind.

THE REAL ZOMBIES

It took years of my exposure to them to discern they were zombies. The feeling of anxiety they instilled and the evil spark between men and women, which I didn’t possess, exposed them. This sparklessness was the main cog in saying I was mentally ill because it played into the anxiety they were trying to foster in me and it worked. It took my nine vampire wives of the last survivors to resuscitate me from their scourge. It was then I could more comfortably write of how a bikini clad woman said I could only look or write how a black young man carried down my staircase a nubile woman in Culver city without it being viewed as hate but as some insight into life. In this respect I may have beat mental illness and its potential life of woe but it still didn’t set me free. My only succor was to evince the almost evangelical triumph by stating Carrie and me would be sitting at the late, late show which, of course, could never happen.

I can visualize some of the movie scenes like me slaloming up the hill on my bike below Marine street just to happily greet my mother or hearing my mother crying in her room on Marine street over who knows what. Then there was me overcoming in the end the mockery the zombies made of the living spirit which I did to Abe Lincoln thus being laid by a southern belle – the spirit of the house.

All this conjecture isn’t so farfetched when one sees how my being pure of heart keeps me young and the reality is Carrie is a zombie or vampire that once turned into a ghoul before letting Slaughter do so at the tasty moment of vulnerability.

Movies are often the reverse of what they show and what has besieged me is presented in a somewhat realistic was in movies like The Bourne Identity, The Planet of the Apes and The Matrix that are only to lead me into feeding the zombies and fertilizing their love affairs.

I lose