Writing

Here and Now (part 4)

/ Michael Michael / Leave a comment

4.

Viscosity locked between frog spawn,

Raindrops falling, and up again,

Get it off pat, learn the language,

By form and rote, round, in circles,

Top to tail, top and tail,

Round fruit unchanging.

Gay lives lost in such floss.

Could just say: I love you.

Bastardised, brutalised, battered and bruised,

Holes in broken hearts and seeping, unhealing sores.

Rubbing pus such affection,

Gagging on swollen tongues,

Far too much pretended understanding and pretenses of love.

Not my: I love you.

Gather up in large arms and hold close,

Moody, muddled, and seemingly morose,

Never will stop me.

Never will want to stop me, too much to say –

Never an end.

Here and Now (part 3)

/ Michael Michael / Leave a comment

3.

Gashing this with teeth flaring

Meat for the hook

My meat on a platter

Feeding frenzedly

And choking on gobs of gristle.

Long hope.

Long shot.

Do what you want, including all that you can.

Do what you must, no refusal.

Blank walls, blank pages,

Blank days, blanket close huddle,

Messages through the airwaves.

Veiled communication lost in blinks of eyes –

Blink of an eye and all over.

Making space to make space,

Sense to make sense.

Sensations nervously vibrating somewhere beneath the surface,

Slight movements, and feet tapping, tails wagging,

Somewhere, in another room, in another house, vision, vista,

Open up, see, petals splayed,

Love orgasm and leopard spots,

Attenuated vulva velvet.

Desperation and pretense –

Honesty and truth, meet me!

Meeting honesty and truth.

Confrontation and emotional blackmail.

Bad, bad boy.

Just ten sins a day adding through a lifetime

Sinning on someone else’s account

Sinning for personality.

You get in there, weaving and dodging,

Smiles creeping around doorways

To anger and upset.

Locked in a mantrap

Feet going in mouths

Placidly unruffled silver surface

Stretched stark over mountainous seas,

My luck aiming high

Cards topple

No reading

Here and now.

No need to worry and let them do what they will –

Headaches float off, drug haze lifts.

Avoidance as long as possible

(Still beating heart).

Catchphrases abound, skipalong,

Skipalong, input, input,

Soaking to the skin.

Living life ever young,

Wrinkled children old and new

(Deep shadows beneath all eyes)

One view promulgated,

Act, write, paint, work, play, eat, shit hard.

Never let a moment slip by –

How can it be empty?

Filling up like bags of sick,

Always indulging, always giving, saving up

Good memory for ending.

Constant fear trapping too far off the beaten track,

Only lounging around,

And out to spoil everything, vindictively.

Knock from any pedestal,

Shatter any image, back down –

This is what we are!

Our holes gaping wide and vacuous

And deeply penetrable –

Lit up from inside

But barely required.

To be not noticed.

Secondary.

Having to take second place.

Primary unit, oh my, oh my, all so fine.

Back to primal love score, and drugged interchange,

And highs ever whipped up into highs,

Where we want to stay, lest it all come crashing down, around our years.

And of course there may be the lurking impression that there is nothing here for you,

But I do not need to assure you only love flows,

Virgin and horrible,

With terrifying and terrific consequences.

Out all day and so alone –

You know what I mean,

Yes you do.

Think of the impact, come shining through,

Moments through the hit parade.

So happy with it all.

Have to give out something worth biting into –

We all have other blood to spurt and flow,

Just wash your hands,

Self proclamation,

Life reading,

Clairvoyance.

Reading and writing and uncertain transmission,

Unknowing reception.

Power and control, weak, don’t leave me!

Always the opposite,

Who the hell are you?

Are you?

And I too.

Here and Now (part 2)

/ Michael Michael / Leave a comment

My dear Oscar,

I will continue to indulge myself with the second part of my epic poem, Here and Now; I am sure you will enjoy it – if nothing else it will take your mind off somewhere else from wherever it is that you are languishing! A life of languishing – or so it seems,

Best wishes, as ever,

Algernon B. Duffoure.

2.

Staggered, foot in front,

Drag, be, foot behind,

Weight distributed, uneven terrain,

Lurch forward, backward.

No smile on any face, just nervous hatred,

Deep rooted intolerance of all things breathing,

Envy ungreen, but knowing,

Inadequacy bare, nubile, vulnerable, naked with tits.

Collating no more, marking.

Nor anyone shall weep.

Cries.

Dies.

Legacy unwarranted and unwanted,

Stuck in a drawer,

Drawing water, veiled tear lecturettes and picture books,

And sketchy outlines and no interest shown,

And no sympathy given,

And no empathy established –

Just bumper cars which do not collide.

Too deep rooted suspicion and intolerance.

Not tolerated, 

Nor encompassed,

Nor encouraged,

Just growing feathers and shitting in trees,

With separate piles of shit.

Forming a view, building up

Layer upon layer,

Not what is seen, but what is put there.

Green salads of existence.

Water, life, pulse, death,

Rotting invertebrates, churning closely,

Contemplating or coping with pieces of misery.

Make it all

(My piece, my portion, what I am given)

Happen to me.

No more the indulgence of youth

But only the self indulgence.

Rain and drain and feign my pleasure,

Waiting for pleasure,

Always in anticipation, and highspots lost

Through cables of transmission, too gone, too over, too close.

Useless pursuit – chasing arcs en ciel,

Sucking lead, grim, stunted,

Shattered and underfoot,

Eaten by dogs, children taunting,

Anxiety flooding back from other sources.

Take me on board.

Non reactive, and only elaborated in plastic filigree,

Playing the part, just nothing to say.

One day you’ll be without me.

Making something from nothing, fabrication and invention

Making a mark like a piss stain.

Interpreting and writing out of a hole,

Too close to tears in isolated and self violating splendour

To be seen and acted away,

With beautiful and rapid script,

And mark my yesterday.

Contentment lost beneath the surface,

Wanting the shock and sharp and pick me up verses,

(Melodic muttering).

Just wait and see what is left behind –

Too good to be true.

And in truth I lie all the time,

Couched and bedded inventories,

Unsought itineraries,

Just a bag slung over a shoulder

And a reception for unwarranted thoughts.

A bolster for unmitigated actions,

And blows to a punchbag.

Pregnant, rent, and gaping,

Fingers in wounds (pulling out the entrails)

And not mine but everyone’s.

No rain today, just slithery.

No time today, just endless.

Endless pick me up and moods of bodily functions

And chemical input directing me.

Only a reason to catch it if you can,

Only a reason not to.

Only a drawn affinity in pictogram and brushes.

Go with the flow, only is the flow, of matter against matter –

Continental shelves.

Summarily and coarsely received,

Detracted from and unanalyzed,

Fleeting impressions, and the collisions of moody interplay.

Making of yourself mine, where mine is but worthless and to be tampered with, and yours is all.

Out to destroy and be destroyed, or to upset and be upset.

If I don’t get enough then why not give me more?

Indifference and reactive only to violence and loneliness.

Glass walls erected and keeping in and out.

Only visuals to play with, and make into something,

Only mental imagery to elaborate and build upon.

With no action, and no activation,

No contact, nor continuation.

Hurt and left to hurt,

Bleeding and left to bleed.

Ineffectual niceties cushioning ill feeling and masking awed and inspirational reach out and touch –

Expecting or accepting response,

Sharing nothing because nothing is shared –

One way systems.

Ink into blotting paper, blotters sodden to bits.

Skating in glistening step along lines well travelled and figures laid out and lives laid out to order.

One way of being shagged out – shagged to death.

Cannot slow down, cannot relax, got to keep it going.

Trickle, tickle, up there,

Worming its way up there,

And all for you.

The lopping off of genital contact.

Eating shit shat by others,

And chit chat mildews into lively fungal forms,

With spots pricked out in bas relief,

And such terminology not lost on the knowing ignorant.

Cannot discount a thing,

And never a price to pay,

Only constant perversity,

Unadulterated and never denied.

Filling it in, not fleshing it out.

And more than a line to say

(More than an impress)

Build up a fantasy, whip up a dream,

Create a living entity you call myself, I call you.

Might be nothing with nothing holding it all.

See what a wonderful person I am

While I am mistreating you.

There is some menstrual stain in trying,

Some locked in, locked out, getting closer.

I’d like to teach the world to zing, and pulse rhythm.

Fiddle, fiddle,

Smile and dribble, fiddle.

Oft repeated martyrdom

And open hearted sacrifice,

And record the time passing,

As it happens.

Slipping away –

(Oops it just slipped away!)

Crash in the pan, spew over it, carrots and coriander,

On a roll – me over

On a roll – me over

Me over.

Here and Now (part 1)

/ Michael Michael / Leave a comment

Dear Oscar,

I thought I would treat you to something a bit different today – rather self-indulgent, I know, but I also know that you will be interested and that you will be fair in your reception. It is the first part of a poem, to be printed in full over the next five days. Enjoy, dear,

Algernon B. Duffoure.

It is called:

HERE AND NOW

1.

Gonna be with you in the here and now

Make a there and then of the here and now

Gonna erase all the where and how.

Memory making of me someone I’m not gonna be.

Could catch such thrills recuperating and my bland recovery

Called living again – live it over again

(If I could have my life all over again)

Waiting for life to be all over again.

Then and there – such formulations to bring me here,

We, here with now, our moment to make here and now.

My words to hack out the space for you to look back upon,

A still and paged representation,

Like gross fear to me, and sheer perfection to you.

Sublimate awesome desire, and do not look

To the brow of the hill

To the side of the stage for the main bit player to enter.

Charting moments like footsteps,

Longing for unification,

My bliss ascending,

I could fly.

I see from wombic caverns light slitted and valleys and no reflection,

But only to sense in odour and ordure your slipped presence sitting in a tree with me.

Now focus, not blackness.

Now sights, not still beatings, and your erupted quiverings.

Just flesh going in the pot,

Living it, living it over again,

Deep collectivity writ large.

Hands to hold and branched embrace,

Read out, voice loud, and gather in gently

(Trust being given to me)

My spoken attempt at poetry.

Crook finger, stare eye

That I lose form and am right here in the here and now.

Words which are told to be passive, and shut in books, and put away, with no living moment,

Gone as they hit the page,

Indelible not to mites and dust, and shattered with meaning –

Baubles picked out from babble.

Please give me peace and quiet that I may disrupt and pacify.

Please let my moments brush up against yours.

Still life to remember.

I suppose you think you will catch me sleeping, but I know you will only ever catch me dead.

Join hands and sing to Jesus,

Lose sight in a happy home,

Draw curtains tight and miss the spotlit action,

The mistake of letting it all keep happening,

Keep on happening,

Behind the densenesses of ill fortified doors.

Your chinks glow in the dark.

And why should I be known at all?

Making of moments my precious moments, so few and far between,

Like a banquet at the side of a desert.

Push me, pull me, knock me into shape.

Treat me like a blank page,

Or an empty canvas,

Or a lost narrative.

Spit your wanderings into mine.

So cold I could cry, my metaphor mirroring me.

Never any pressure to finalise

Only a round full stop,

Blip on the machine,

And goodnight ladies, the gentlemen won’t take you home.

Ground rules have been laid, and I can only acquiesce.

You could break a bough thinking sap would spurt,

And the bough would wither away.

Don’t you think I’m gonna be o.k?

I need to be drowned in your suffering

For mine is exactly the same.

It is only a limited masterpiece

And the option is there to hate it.

Personally my love knows no bounds

And I can tolerate any interruption.

Might as well be glad to be here,

Might as well want now.

Your loss in your paid for seat, and your self protective policies,

Dark ships notching up voyages once over and always done with.

Not the way we’re thinking nowadays

(Don’t even want to know).

I could die in the seated position as I die when I’m lying down.

Gonna go home and tuck in my bed,

Back to the swamp that they bred me in,

Consent to the word and the meaning, and the meaning is suddenly clear,

Or thick swaddling clothes bunged up to mine alone.

Not a choice, but a necessity.

Not a voice, but a relativity.

Well you’ve made your cheap investment and the crock of gold’s in sight –

Do I have to point it out to you?

Or will a smile surrender?

Only one movement here, but a thousand mumblings.

Only one quick change, one fleeting glimpse, but a thousand mutterings.

Invade my space, it is not mine –

You are privy to the merest portion.

Could have caught me musing on a massive madeleine,

Could have caught my cleverness clip my own desire,

Can’t say, won’t say.

Too many myths to demystify.

Too much calm and sugary silken balm to unwind and fracture and blister bare and make our common dog.

Too much and over the hill,

Grass being grass burnt stubble kneeing silks and dreamtime.

Dredging depths clear, pure,

Gonna be just simply here, now.

Call it the cop out if you wish,

I’ll call it the weary way home.

Call it the end (if the end is your goal)

I’ll call it lights and action,

I’ll call it again, at the stage door,

Just a space that was there and then.

Anytime, anyplace, anyone.

Always the same feeling

(Deep inside).

Uncover, slip back covers –

Oh revelation!

Pretense of interaction singularly kept!

My way,

I resurface,

Small vision,

No language, (necessary)

No language, (available)

Always lost,

Bits and pieces,

Shreds and ribbons, (bloody caught between teeth).

The foulness of acrid taste, chewed over, don’t want to know

(More important concerns).

More important lose your ways to blind out, simplify, see afresh,

Represent in dull form, flat form,

Two dimensions battening down a maelstrom,

Ironing out feeling,

And dreams in dream-time.

The Wait

/ Michael Michael / Leave a comment

Dear Oscar,

We’re you always waiting for Bosie? And all the others?
It seems to be the prerogative of youth to keep the older and the more learned waiting for them to deign to find the time to make a call, meet an assignation, keep a date.

Of course I was just like them myself when youth was on my side, but now, alas, I must be the one who does the waiting and has to practice patience and must be understanding and accommodating. I wonder if such attributes do come with age, or if they are forced upon us by the emergence of a circumstance which makes of us dependent. I could of course just get on with my own life, but the hankering for the presence of youthfulness, the magic the young bring with them keeps me hooked like an addict!

Take care, Oscar dear,

Your friend and ally,

Algernon B. Duffoure.

Eternality

/ Michael Michael / Leave a comment

Dear Oscar,

I have a feeling in this modern era that I am more of a Bosie than an Oscar.  Over indulged and flighty, everything at my beck and call, able to pick and choose and reject and dismiss – to ‘like’ and, of course, to ‘un-like’.  Oh, I wish you had encountered the internet!  Where an ‘influencer’ can die and be mourned by millions, while many other millions never knew that such a person ever existed!

I have a feeling that you were actually very set in your ways, and that despite the reprimand of imprisonment, of public humiliation, of loss of career and income, you actually carried on as normal, selecting youthful companions across France and the other denizens you visited once you were in your retirement.  Very strange thing about retirement; you may stop one thing but you carry on doing all of the other things that have been the compulsions of living.  I do think there was an element of compulsion in your character, Oscar, because you seem to have had to keep on doing what you always had done, like some irresistible urge, some ongoing defiance in the face of censure and opprobrium, an obsession lived out in your own real time.  

Almost addictive.  

We think we know all about addiction in this twenty-first century, because we have invented drugs and formed habits that have become utterly all-consuming.  I think it is probably the case that much of the planet is now drug dependent, and where people think they are not, they only have to look to the ingredients of the foodstuffs that we are all forced to consume, to the levels of sugar, caffeine, nicotine, alcohol that have become the staples of virtually the entire globe, to realise that we all keep on returning to the same substances, the same stimulants, to regulate not only our waking hours but our dreaming ones too.

None of it was unknown to you, Oscar, and I would hazard a guess that you indulged in various illicit substances throughout your lifetime.  After all, there may not have been the multiplicity of chemical concoctions that we have now at our disposal, but your Victorian age was notorious for gases and potions, acids and poisons, that were mind altering in their effects.  Even before your time!  Samuel Taylor Coleridge springs to mind, Kubla Khan, Xanadu, the ‘pleasure dome’ of heady intoxicants transporting the romantic mind.  I expect it has all been going on throughout the millennia, the ancient world with its nymphs and satyrs, its gods and demi-gods, the mysticisms of the Orient, water pipes, and hashish, and transcendental meditation, the yogis of the Indian subcontinent, the dream-time of Australia’s originary folk.  A part, it might be argued, of the human condition.

The problem, of course, is that such behaviours encourage a stepping away from the established norm, a re-evaluation of that established norm, and very often a subversion of its intent and its effect.  In collision with that other part of the human condition which seeks regularity, order, compliance, rules and proscribed regulation.  You know, we all know, all about all of that.  I wish you had not been made to suffer because of it;  as I wish those of today were not made to suffer because of it too.

Love to you,

Algernon B. Duffoure.

Oscar Wilde! Viva!

/ Michael Michael / Leave a comment

Dear Oscar,

I write to you across the years – the many years since your death – the century and more …

I write to you across the years because I think you will understand me, and I think I am more like you than I might want to imagine or admit. I have the same desires, deep-rooted lusts, needs that overtake my very being and come to be my purpose in life, my essential self, my way of being. To the point where I do not even notice life slip by.

You were deemed a bad man, and you were punished for being bad. Your society saw you as greedy, as gluttonous, a gourmand, an ugliness. In my age I am more indulged for the sins that you committed, but there is no difference, and my blue, green, pathway-led lifestyle choices, my waywardness and neediness, my refusal to be a part of it, my dependent hegemony to the new/old and older/newer status quo demands that our parallelism is seen. All over the world. Whether recognised or unrecognised, whether spoken about or whispered in hushed tones, whether displayed or hidden from view, you walk with me and I with you, our banners fluttering in a mythic sky.

You were open; I am closed. You made yourself known; I lock a door on the world and do not even venture out. You faced your fears whilst my fears paralyse me to the point of immobility. I do not know why your star shining before mine dimmed the lights, nor why it is that your reflected luminescence is all that I can see to grope my way forward on a path not dissimilar but exactly the same, nor why it is that where I live and when I live boys hang from cranes in the same universe as boys kissing, as weddings and nuptials flit between and beside imprisonment still and beatings and the funeral cortege. I have all of your emotions de profundis to the clouds and space and beyond to worlds you never saw.

I do not think you were ever free and I too am never free. Just as your age and society made you, so my age and society make me, and the two are terrifyingly the same and overlap and coalesce and become inexplicably crushed beneath the monoliths of being that are the dictates of the norm.

Your friend,

Algernon B. Duffoure.

Me, myself and I

/ Michael Michael / Leave a comment

Dear Oscar,

There were some people who liked you and supported you even in your darkest days, either because they were the same as you, or because they sympathised with you, or because they found a way to position themselves in opposition to the established norm. The vast majority, however, did not support you at all, their reasons being that you were unnatural, perverse, uncommon, alien, other to themselves. There was what is called ‘moral opprobrium’.

I do not know where I would have positioned myself had I been there at that time.

I may have believed all of the salacious gossip that was made public through the newspapers, and decided that the voice of that moral opprobrium was correct, and that your existence was against nature, and that you were too strongly against ‘God’s will’ (and it would not have mattered which God I may have been referring to – they all seem to have had a problem with you – apart from the deities of the Ancients, whom you knew so well, and promoted for your own ends).

I may have been caught by the auspices of the time, the expectations of the society which surrounded me, and which dictated a ‘correct’ path, a way of living from which no-one was supposed to waver (and so found a wife, as you found a wife, had some children, as you had children – in fact I remember this pressing in upon me in my own time – the family requirements, the social law).

I may have condemned myself to a lonely path of fetid academia with its rules and rigmaroles, or turned to the Church with all of its proscriptions, embraced a faith which showed me the way forward, lived out my life as I seem now to live out my life, in quietude and reflection, not making my presence felt, not speaking to the world and not responding when the world speaks to me. I may have developed an illustrious career, a set path of noticeable progression or obvious failure which could be pinned upon me as a point of definition, to make me known, make me understood, and distance me as far as possible from anyone like you.

But of course, like most people, to some degree, I am like you. On occasions I like to show off and be noticed, be regarded as witty and entertaining, make people smile, hold up a mirror to absurdity, make people laugh. I like to dress up, to make known my good fortune when good fortune comes to me, to lament my losses in a way that evokes sympathetic understanding, be proud and fearless, stand tall and broad and unassailable. I like the company of others like myself, and I am driven by primal urges at root, the very spark of being, the need to indulge passion, experience pleasure, set forth the serotonin, enhance my feelings, move in the fast stream, in high definition, in three dimension, fly, speed, gorge myself, dream and desire.

Feast with panthers.

Your good friend,

Algernon B. Duffoure.

This n’ that

/ Michael Michael / Leave a comment

Dearest Oscar,

How appalled you would be at the brazen behaviour of the young men of our time. They do like to show off their bodies at every available turn, and some of the websites in the virtual world, well, they leave nothing at all to the imagination!

That young men can be persuaded to pleasure themselves in front of a camera seems almost inconceivable, but they do it seemingly without batting an eyelid, and for hardly any reward, or so I have been led to believe. Of course the images made are hawked around all over the internet, so that the same young man will appear in exactly the same poses on a number of sites, but that in some way accentuates the brazenness of the activities in the first place.

I suppose it could be argued as a laudable liberalisation, when in fact all it really provides is an easy access of exploitation, both of the models displaying their wares, and of the punters who sign up and pay their subscriptions. I suppose it alleviates that boredom and isolation of provincial existence, and I would love to know how many households in Chortleton Spa receive such material. It must be a very profitable business, because a plethora of sites are advertised if you can be bothered to look (which I must confess, dear Oscar, I simply cannot be doing with – there are, after all, other things). 

I saw a marching band of the Boy’s Brigade last Saturday, and it actually sent a chill up and down my spine. I thought they had been disbanded years ago, but there they were, beating their drums and blowing their cornets, and generally displaying a pseudo militaristic bearing which was much less than attractive. 

I kept my distance, I can tell you. 

They looked like the sort who could be commanded to be a persecutory rabble to the likes of me – like the Nazi Youth in Germany before and during the Second World War (something from which you were spared – but I am sure there were many thugs, and certainly blackmailers, who were out for your blood and dollar). 

Given the record of the twentieth century for warfare you would think that preparation and killing of gullible young men would have stopped, but of course it has not. There are still theatres of war this very day, and the young (mainly men, although women are now equally recruited) are being sacrificed to some supposedly greater glory that is very ill-formed.

The pornography and the battlefields are very similar scenarios. The cheapness of flesh and of life, and at the very cheapest are the lives of talented young men who are not nurtured with love, and certainly not to love. 

Oh, there is an ongoing and largely unspoken condemnation of Greek love still prevalent;  it is not to be encouraged, and still largely to be ridiculed, and not accounted for within the upper echelons of power.

Hey ho,

Much love,

Algernon B. Duffoure.

Fantasy

/ Michael Michael / Leave a comment

Dear Oscar,

Maybe it’s me. Maybe I am a manic depressive, or some sort of easily identifiable misery guts, but even though I was successful in buying the gay magazine this time, I do not feel great now that I have it. It presents a gay paradise. One of the articles quite specifically talks about money, and how the big corporations have worked out that tolerance means profit, but I find that worrying, don’t you? There is no honesty and no integrity there; everything is dependent upon the vagaries of the market, and so any hope of politicisation is lost. 

All of the bigger corporations are straighter than straight can be, and you can bet that at the tables of the top boardrooms homophobia is rampant. The pink pound only generates a certain amount of money; it is not the same as trading in arms, or pharmaceuticals; they are richer pickings. It just worries me that gay men can be targeted very easily, that they can be miked for their money while the consumer express rushes ahead, but dropped just as easily should the need ever arise. 

You will know nothing of the world wars that dominated the twentieth century – the only real events that happened. Persecution of homosexuals ran alongside persecution of other minority groups, and control of the population at large was absolutely merciless. Dreadful times. People being killed. You were locked up and your life was in tatters because you were discovered; in the second world war thousands of gay people went to their deaths. 

Recently we have witnessed the treatment of prisoners in another battle zone (there are always battle zones, from your day to this), and a part of the ritual humiliation inflicted upon prisoners is gay related. If they are not gay then they have to act gay, be sexually assaulted, be ridiculed as effeminate;  if they are homosexual, well, you can imagine. It is frightening. It does not seem very far away. 

So that within the pages of the magazine the wild hedonism of holiday resorts, the fashion tips and the designer outfits, the pretty boys putting their bodies on display, all seem to be intermeshed with a legacy and a present day reality that are extremely disturbing. 

Of course it all keeps relating back to how men are, how men behave, how men interact with the world around them. 

These gay magazines are really exactly the same as their straight counterparts; masturbatory fantasy images of lifestyles and of people that the camera has rendered beautiful for an instant. You should see what has happened to photography;  now it trades in its own lies quite blatantly. We are presented with a false version of reality, and all sorts of consumable distractions proliferate to help us forget that outside of our tried and tested bubble of delight a real world is in operation, and it is one that exists in the realms of fear, of killing, of persecution. 

Oh, I am a little morose today – but who wouldn’t be? I was given a lukewarm cappuccino and a stale Danish pastry this morning, and overcharged for the privilege. 

Is it worth it?

My warmest regards,

Algernon B. Duffoure.