Walking through Logan

Here I move among the happenings,
breathing the miasmas of needing,
hearing the the wrenching seizures of solitude
and foot fall through the shallows
of winter's waters
horded in pot-holes.
In the dark looks, under the heavy brows
of the shadows limping past, needing,
I see their eyes are no longer
lucid devices.
Headlights and Broadways
by static amber light and
speeding white-blue
a boy picks from the gutter
not a toy,
or a ball,
not a coin,
but the death of a squirrel
holding it high
bushy brush tail wire
between thumb and forefinger
Joy
alarms from his lips
but there is too much alarm
on these streets
for others to notice.

The Furies and Lucidity

You hear a hundred darker lines
each turn of the sunlight
mine are only troubling
in an articulate way
The voice of the calling
from outside the amber light
inside the edge of shadows
is easy to ignore
He is mad you say
His is intoxicated and estranged
He is not me you say
You walk on untouched
My words are ruthless lucidity
Dark, yes, Shadow, yes... clear
not coal for wrath
but edged for bloodletting
Within the melee and uproar
of the towering full moon
may my words taint
the madness calling
and open to you,
the woes and the furies in his drunken heart


The Morrigan

From Ghost Pictures
She is the vibration,
the note, the chord
of night's abject abysses
which sundered my eye's light
From full lips
dropped with
red wine dew;
Moonlight silver
on her wetting tongue... perish
Between stones and surrenders
under descending onyx autumn
on brittle leaves and moss rock
Winter's waters draw from breath
a cannonade of thirst.
Crow and wolf
and cat's eyes
will open before
the pith of the sun
hurling the rage of day
like snow across the dead

The Time that held her Still

The Time that held her Still

The musk of rotting walls
laced with web and dust
and ivy's fresh green
wet dark by fog
A blue dress,
the hem a scythe-whisper
across grass and weed.
Alabaster fingers
bruised by brick.
Fear runs, tracking blood
in its wake and wash
of flowers, closed, but
waiting.
Hands, white, gripping stone,
pulling,
wanting.
Sunlight, pulled under the mist water
drowning...
Time
white and bruised as the fingers which
claw the walls, crumbling
slips its hands between her breasts
to hold
her heart still.

Mom not the mother of the child in her womb - Chimerism

Off the Wikipedia page for Lydia Fairchild

Lydia Fairchild was pregnant with her third child, when she and the father of her children, Jamie Townsend, separated. When Fairchild applied for welfare support in 2002, she was requested to provide DNA evidence that Townsend was the father of her children. While the results showed Townsend was certainly the father of the children, the DNA tests indicated that she was not their mother.

This resulted in Fairchild being taken to court for fraud for claiming benefit for other people's children or taking part in a surrogacy scam. Hospital records of her prior births were disregarded. Prosecutors called for her two children to be taken into care. As time came for her to give birth to her third child, the judge ordered a witness be present at the birth. This witness was to ensure that blood samples were immediately taken from both the child and Fairchild. Two weeks later, DNA tests indicated that she was not the mother of that child either.

A breakthrough came when a lawyer for the prosecution found an article in the New England Journal of Medicine about a similar case that had happened in Boston, and realised that Fairchild's case might also be caused by chimerism. In 1998, 52-year old Boston teacher Karen Keegan was in need of a kidney transplant. When her three adult sons were tested for suitability as donors, it was discovered that two of them did not match her DNA to the extent that her biological children should. Later testing showed that Keegan was a chimera, a combination of two separate sets of cell lines with two separate sets of chromosomes, when a second set of DNA was found in other tissues. This DNA presumably came from a different embryo from the one that gave rise to the rest of her tissues.

Fairchild's prosecutors suggested this possibility to her lawyers, who arranged further testing. As in Keegan's case, DNA samples were taken from members of the extended family. The DNA for Fairchild's children matched that of her mother to the extent expected of a grandmother. They also found that while the DNA in Fairchild's skin and hair did not match her children; the DNA from a cervical smear test was different and did match. Fairchild was carrying two different sets of DNA, the defining characteristic of a chimera.

The soul(s) of the Chimera

This is perhaps a bit deep for blog posting, but it has been on my mind since starting the novel Winter's Harvest.

One of the characters is a Chimera, which I'm sure most of you have figured out from the amount of time I've spent researching the subject. The idea of a chimera is that you have two different embryos, and one has been completely absorbed into the other.

Now, if we look at the (very controversial) question of 'when does life start', this condition brings up the interesting point of how many souls does the chimera have?

Let us (for the duration of this blog posting), take the answer to the question of the beginning of life, as the moment of conception.

Since this is the standard answer for most Christian religious groups, it should not be too much of a shock to suggest that the beginning of life would also be the moment the soul is present in the prenatal form/body. Perhaps it is however, I find that many discussions and articles of this nature tend to make unwarrented assumptions as to the state of things. I am making this assumption based on the idea that the breath of God is the beginning of life, and thus assuming the presence of a soul at the moment of life.

In the chimera, the second child is not killed, but absorbed by the primary twin. So, the question I have is the state of the primary and secondary souls.

In a practical area of pondering, let us take a story line that has the primary twin as a Cain, a real bastard, who in 25 short years of life, has racked up enough death sentences to cause a state-wide power shortage if they were all to be executed on his mortal form.

Now, even though it is only up to God, let us also assume that damnation is the course for our primary twin after the death sentence is carried out.

What is the state of our secondary twin?

I would like to think that this secondary twin, if he exists, is understood to be a complete innocent, that although he has been exposed to the world, the world has not been exposed to him. --- but I wonder about this as well. Two souls could also suggest two areas of influence on the actions of the body and the beliefs of the mind.

There are cases where the communication between the right and left hemispheres of the mind have been damaged and/or severed. This severing creates two distinct persona, two minds, inside the same body, with the existence of a primary personality (normally the one that got to keep the speech centers of the brain).

Such a state could also be created by the existence of a binary-soul chimera, and in fact, in chimeras, portions of the brain are from one of the twins, while parts of the brain and even portions from the same areas of the brain, are from the other twin.

Since this is an underlying theme within the plot of Winter's Harvest, I'm having to consider several possible resolutions to this quandary.

The Theory of Planned Behavior

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