Ajax Kallistrate

Don't touch me, SIR.

"He's such a nice guy.
He says Hello to everyone!"

I'm not your buddy.
I'm not a man.

Don't clap me on the shoulder.
We're not on the same team.

I don't know you.
You don't know me.

I am another man's wife.

I can't keep my dignity so
I keep my distance.

I earn less than the man who
mows your lawn, sir. I earn
less than the woman
who cleans your
house, sir.

So don't touch me, sir.
I am not yours.

I didn't make the rules but
I will not play the game.

July 30, 2026

The man I married and the man
I spend all day with both
call me 'kid.'

This disturbs me.

There's nothing I can do about it.
There is no remedy.

This is the world I live in.

The older men who politely stand
aside to let me out of the elevator
will also politely stand aside
to let me struggle with a
heavy box because to
do otherwise would
be to endanger
my ability to
support
my
family.

This disturbs me.

There's nothing I can do about it.
There is no remedy.

This is the world I live in.

The young men who manage my
time, my space, my movement,
and my body are indifferent
to it all because they were
raised by single mothers.

This disturbs me.

There's nothing I can do about it.
There is no remedy.

This is the world I live in.

July 30, 2026

I wish I could stay home on
a rainy day but I can't even
stay home when I'm sick.

I'm just a tiny woman in the
teeth of the machine, working
my tiny brain to understand it all,
working my tiny feet to put food
on our plates.

Is
the
world
a collossal
phone screen?

Degradation everywhere I turn.
Demoralization just a part of
the routine. I squint to see
past it, beyond the
women on
YouTube
jiggling
their breasts
for children, beyond
the men so exhausted by
female liberation that they eat out
of cardboard boxes every night,
beyond the Jewtainment of
broken families and the
mocking of White men.

And what do I see?
The only thing I can still afford
in an artificial economy: nothing.

Bereft of kin, ancestry, history,
mythology, and divorced by
no fault from the divine,
I'm left to ponder
in solitude.

Our enemies have rewritten
our stories so I ignore them.

I buy books I don't have time
to read and steal time to write.

How can I elevate my spirit
in a world where nature itself
tortures innocence for an
evolutionary advantage?

The pelican mommy disgorges
the chick of another pelican
mommy into her nest.

He trembles, bewildered.
He's coated in digestive juices
and tries to shake himself free.
He expects his own pelican
mommy to look after him,
to soothe him.

Instead he's eaten alive by the
offspring of another pelican
mommy.

And thus he dies in fear and
confusion, and thus nature's face
is besmirched by its foundational
premise: eat or be eaten.

Top to bottom, nature itself is a
machine that crushes innocence.

Are the baby-eaters among our
own kind then akin to nature?

Is self-sacrifice then false?
Another lie?

What is evil if not the deliberate
destruction of innocence?

And so I'm consumed by my own
thoughts on a rainy day at the end
of July. Safe and warm and dry
only by sacrificial separation
from my family. My family
safe and warm and dry
only by my sacrificial
separation.

I have no answers. No answers,
honestly, would satisfy me.

'This is why you suffer' or
'your suffering is your own fault'
has no meaning when I can't
find the time to think in
between my labors.

I know only that it's raining
in Albany and I wish I was home.

I am a tiny woman caught in the
teeth of the machine. Some day
it will grind my bones to dust
and everything that I am will
blow away on a wet wind
and all my questions
will be forgotten. 

Maybe that's
the only answer I need.

July 30, 2026

I grew up in a blessed place,
at least for a few years.

A valley.

The sky always painted with
the faces of mountains.

Snowy winters, humid summers.

I thought all places were like this,
forgetting in a child's way all
the other places I'd lived.

It was magical.

All the trees were taller than
all the houses. Oak, maple,
dogwood.

There were special places
for a girl with a bike.

Wild raspberry thickets.
A tree swing. Fieldstone walls.
A seasonal pond that filled with
tadpoles every spring.

But the most special place
was TPBTM.

A sacred name for a sacred place.

I had to ride my bike through
the neighbor's yard to get to
the boulders that blocked
the dirt road.

I always left an offering of
flowers. I was always
filled with joy there,
especially at the
swamp.

Painted turtles, snapping turtles,
dragonflies, bullfrogs, snails,
minnows, sunfish, poke-
weed, pitcher plants,
mullin, skunk
cabbage,
and
bugs,
amphibians,
and birds of all kinds.

I spent so much time there
I dreamed of it as I slept,
partially submerged,
my ears filled half
with water, half
with the ever
present
drone
of
miraculous life.

I keep it only in my heart now.

I grew up.
I went to college.

Bulldozers filled in the swamp.
Chainsaws cut down the trees.
Pavers paved over the black-
berry bushes.

All the houses there are taller
than all the trees.

I grew up in a magical place,
at least for a while.

Not yet harnessed to time,
I never saw change coming.

I imagine her, me, still pedaling
her bike (it had a name too)
as fast as it could go,
down the street
and through
the
neighbor's
yard and straight
up to the boulders that were
enough to stop a grown-up with
a car but not a girl with a bike.

I see her reverently placing her
gathered flowers, asters
and white clover and
violets, her mind
only on spotted
salamanders
and
maybe
a blue heron
if she was lucky.

She climbs over the boulders,
her bike in tow, and disappears
into the woods, into the place
behind it all, beyond it all.

Unbowed. Unbroken.

I can leave her there.

And hope someday I get to
see another mountain painted
sky, taste a wild fruit, glimpse
an orchid, and so fondly
remember TPBTM.

July 24, 2026

I am an iteration on a theme.

I look at the back of my head
when I look back six months,
six years, and maybe I feel
my eyes on the back of
my head now.

It's less
Who am I? and
more When am I?

(Are we all like this, unrecognizable
to ourselves in the main?)

My reality now is vastly different
than my reality six months ago,
six years ago.

My reality on a Saturday afternoon
is different than my reality
on a Monday morning.

My reality in the company of my
family, nestled in my home,
sheltered from the
elements,
from
the unknown
quantities of strangers,
is different than my reality at
work, driven second by second
by the toothy whip of time and
the judgement of the over-
seer's eyes, my interior
self perpetually
alert
for the
unpredictable
reactions of foreigners,
my mental hands shifting
here and there to buoy my mood
and restrict my words, my head
bowed to reflect my obedience.

I am an iteration on a theme.

Themes of homelessness,
loneliness, sadness, misery.

Which iteration outside of the
mayfly selves who exist for
only a few moments or
hours have been un-
burdened
by
the
weight of them?

Not me, surely.

Not she of six months ago,
trapped in her mind in a
windowless refrigerator
for eight hours a day.

Not she of six years ago,
freefalling in the
electrified
terror
of
living
alone for
the first time,
for the first time
relying entirely and
solely on herself, breaking
down over and over again
on the hardwood floor
of that dull empty
room in between
working two jobs
and learning
how
to
speak and
not knowing (in hindsight
as I look at the back of her head)
just how breathtakingly naive
she was, how profoundly
vulnerable, a prey
animal who
slipped
through
the
cracks
of the sprung
trap and narrowly
avoided annihilation. 

Or maybe she was annihilated.
And now she's me.

I've been iterations who held on
too tightly, like the one whose
last act was to step onto
a plane (she died before
she disembarked),
or even my last
Sunday evening
self who clutched
her head between her
hands and balked at knowing
that when the lights go out
so does she.

It's a mercy really, mortality.

What's one more death after a
hundred thousand?

That final self won't have to wake
up and wonder who she is, what
trials and humiliations she'll
have to endure just to end
up in the same position
all over again, another
day, another point of
bifurcation, another
interior mutation
that can't be
predicted,
directed,
negated,
or
controlled
in any way, a
spiritual crap shoot
for a spiritual being trapped
in a spiritually dead reality.

That is, until her, until the last,
and for that I envy her even
if she doesn't exist... yet.

For her no more anticipation of suffering.
No more enduring what can barely
be endured.

With any luck she'll have (maybe)
one memory of having been lost
in bliss even if it was as
another self, another
iteration,
one
that existed
for only a brief bright
moment, a bloom of spirit,
a reunion with the divine before
sinking back into oblivion and
darkness.

Even I have a few of those,
faded as they are in the
imagination of who
I am now.

Half a day spent under the spell
of my drawing tablet. Singing
a silly song to my cat as
I cooked dinner. A
conversation
with
my husband
that was half laughter 
and half dark banter over
the ridiculous darkness of
the world, about sleepwalkers
and the things that destroy
the soul.

Remembering isn't living.

I'm here now, at work.
I dress the way they want
me to dress. I speak the way
they want me to speak. I labor
the way they want me to labor.

I am their little daemon.

I can only hope I'll be someone
else this afternoon, barefoot
on the cheap rug in our
borrowed home,
listening
to
my husband's
beloved voice, reaching
out to pet a cat, an iteration
who absently slips into an eternal
moment unbound from earthly
shackles, who can forget for
the length of a breath
the weight of bills,
the aging body,
the scores of poverty,
the uncertainty of
the future
and just...
exist.

I am an iteration on a theme.
Themes of dislocation,
solitude, madness,
and loss.

I am a puzzle piece without a puzzle,
a question without an answer, 
an anomalous soul, a traveler
on a journey to no
destination
at all.

July 2, 2026

Anything you would hand over
to the State if the State had
the proper paperwork

(which the State created because
the State is nothing more than
bureaucracy and obedience,
literally magic)

belongs to the State. You might be
responsible for it, but it belongs
to the State.

Your money.
Your land.
Your home.
Your car.
Your kids.
You.

For which of those things would
you disobey the State if the State
came for them? For which of
those things would you fight?

For which of those things would
you risk your liberty, your reputation,
your job, your wealth, your health,
your future, your autonomy?

For which of those things would
you die?

June 28, 2026

They own my body for eight
hours a day.

I'm their whore for forty
hours a week.

My entire life is shaped around
endless labor, endless servitude.

And it's my family who suffers for it.

I spend more time with strange
men than the man I married.

I do a man's labor but I'm no
more a man than a piece
of broken glass is a star.

I ask for permission.
I do what I'm told.

I work FOR the system.
I want to work WITH my people.

The world is a mirror, an inversion.
We live inside a machine that
consumes souls, breaks down
families, dissolves nations.

It makes us animals.

I can't ask why. It doesn't matter.

I keep my eyes cast down, unable
to meet shallow interactions
with farcical jibber jabber.

I don't care what you did over
the weekend. I don't care about
your 401k or how your kid
watched porn at school and
you shrugged it off cuz
boys will be boys amirite?

A racial awakening is a spiritual
awakening.

It's a call to arms, the tolling
of a great bell, an alarm
foretelling of dire threat.

How can I chitchat with a woman
who coos to her gurgling infant
through a piece of metal and glass?

What do I have in common with
Indians and Bengalis and Egyptians
and all the scattered tribes of a
continent as alien to me as
the moon?

I come from a people stripped
of their history, their culture,
their land, their gods, and
now even their language.

"Young white [sic] men," they say,
"no longer have the words to
describe the world around them."

Mask-muzzled Baby Boomers
clutch the last scraps of wealth
in age-mottled fists, my home
their investment property.

Where do we belong?

It washes through me in great seas,
lifting me from the inside out,
shaking me from the inside out,
surrounded by nonsense and
distraction, demoralized by
black faces wearing White
faces, by the parade of
mutilated White women
with their breasts cut off,
by children so terrified
of being White they'd
rather be gay.

And my voice is suffocated.
To speak is to be cut down,
drowned.

And yet some do, still.

They shine in my eyes, those few,
those burning souls who know
what Degrelle knew: that to give
wholly of your self is the only way
to lift your spirit above a spiritually
dead world, to find joy in suffering,
satisfaction in virtue.

We are made for more than this
transparent world of vile illusions.

And far less than those transient
ambitions that occupy a man
to death.

We find peace where the wild things
dwell, in forest and field, in hearth
and home.

Simple places for a simple people.
Plain. Direct.

As right, good, and natural as
a baby at the breast, as
a spear in the hand.

Sustain. Nourish. Defend. Uplift.

When we do those things,
we find each other.
It's inevitable.

We must let the rest fall away.
We must let go of it.

We must set no roots in rotten
soil, fill no belly with fake food,
accept no offer, however
sweet, from an enemy.

Know them for what they are.
See them for what they are.
See, and wake up.
BREATHE DEEP.

Wake up!

We are here. Look for us.
Reach out. Come home.

Unfurl your sails and let
the swells bring you home.

June 26, 2026

Self-pity is the enemy of joy.
Even if there's no way out,
you still have to walk through.

June 23, 2026

There is a power in tending
gently to beautiful things.

May 8, 2026

what ever my suffering
my spirit is free
and my heart is full of joy.

May 8, 2026