The Night Security Patrol

The night security patrol -
that's Grant and Mischief II.
A university. Extensive grounds,
a six mile beat to be completed
twice or thrice a night.

The half-way point: a statue
of the venerable founder. Ghost-
like and silvery in pools of light
that move with clouds and trail
deep shadows in their wake.

Grant becomes aware
that Mischief's nose or ears
are on to something he has missed.
Grant lets him run on the long lead.
Mischief growls. Attacks the noble

founder. Will not let go his legs.

Best Love is Never Seasonal

Best love is never seasonal.
It may begin on some high plane,
a bare plateau where nothing grows --
or has not until now. It's looking down
(or back)the lovers see their futures.

The world removed from love (and them)
looks small, not worth a French kiss
with an empty mussel shell. They shall
much rather forge their worldly way.
With nothing set in stone, all things

are possible. The frisson is between them, not
between them and our world. They look around
like frightened rabbits with no bolt hole.
They should be focussed on each other. Spring
holds the key, but love is never seasonal.


Written for Willow's prompt at Mag 164, with much thanks for the image.

A Very Private Monster

Outside my childhood bedroom window,
a tree of unknown species --
the family at variance.
I don't recall I ever saw it in full leaf,
though leaf buds came and went,
but never blossom and no fruit.
It had a scar down one side from a lightning strike.

On windy nights my phantasoid*
might take possession of the tree,
the tree become a miscreation in disguise.
The creature's bony fingers scratched
across my window pane in search of -- always searching --
for that one elusive crack, a weakness, a way in.
Sometimes it found it, and its digits or its arms
would wind their way across my ceiling,
down the walls, and even scrawl
their patterns on the pages of the book
that I'd be reading with my torch.

It had, I came to realise, as many arms
and fingers as its work required.
No point in counting them. Their numbers changed
from one look to the next. In constant flux,
I would have needed to know calculus
to calculate the sum. Two heads it had --
that much seemed constant -- black and grey.
The grey one scowled or roared, the black
just smiled, as if to say Good day!

On stormy nights when all the elements
turned really wild it aged enormously.
I called it then my phantaswick* -- because
it had a beard (on its grey face)
that stood up to attention like a wick.

A monster of a mystery, it never frightened me,
but next day if the storm had passed, I'd go and look:
the tree was quite unchanged, the miscreation
quite restored and unpossessed -- and far too far
away to ever scratch my window pane. Nothing
of note to catch a small boy's interest, except
two birds' nests side by side -- one black, one grey --
and maybe something weeping from the scar.


Written for Brian Miller's prompt at dVerse Poets Poetics ~ Monsters
* My names for

A day with the brush.

Me__ Any thoughts about today?
Toby Yes, actually. Thought I might sit up near the conveyor belt and look down into the abyss... And you?
Me__ The opposite. Up on the high bank, looking straight across to where you'll be.
Toby Sounds good to me!
Me__ Anywhere should be OK today. Conditions are ideal. No matter where we park our easels, should be fun.
Toby Have we ever had a day like this before, with both wind and sun? Take your pick.


Silence and shiver.
No sound but traffic
hum from below.
Sun's dazzle a quake
gently shakes what I see.


Everything white
other than sky,
nothing visibly not white
except for its blue --
and the sun's yellow pencil
outlining a shape
and a texture or two.


My easel's black shadow,
a cataract, falls
down the bank's sharp incline,
the sun's latest cut-out --
or black-out, say you?


Think of a coal mine
its coal brilliant white
dust crusts the landscape --
grass, shrubs and trees
a building or two...
the conveyor belt wheel
is the mine's winding gear.
The men all below.
Birds never come here.


Riddlesdown. Quite unique in my view.
Cement works and chalk quarry.
What little remains
of the downs that were here
is covered with dust sheets.
Spectral, the scene.


The conveyor belt rattles
and bangs into life,
buckets clatter and sway.
Deep in the quarry
jive their shadows all day...


Toby Would you believe it! Some guy comes up to me while I'm painting. Says "Why you bothering with paints? There's plenty chalk down there you could use.
Me__ And you said?
Toby Nothing! I thought: Prick! But then, afterwards, began to think it not such a bad idea. I might work over it with pastels.
Me__ Yeah, I can see that working!
Toby You know if heaven and hell ever got together and reached some sort of compromise, it would probably look a bit like that place.
Me__ Maybe, but I think I prefer my good and evil a bit more black and white.


Written for Herotomost's Destinations and Dialogues prompt at Imaginary Garden with Real Toads where we were asked to sandwich the poem between two pieces of dialogue.

Meeting the Dreamer

They call me the dreamer, he said,
I having asked him who he was
who'd burst upon my idle time above the tide line,
lost among the marram grass and sand dunes,
watching the sea-whipped waves play in the bay.
Strange boy: man's body, girlish face that now
and then would greatly age and then be young again;
and covered head to toe in moths and dragon flies
that when the face changed would fly off
to form a cloud that followed him -- or was it her?
No answer ever came in all the years we met.

Why do they call you that? I asked.
That's not high science, sir, he said.
Because I dream! I am the one
that has dreamed you and put you in
this dream time and dream place. I gave you
what you're pleased to call your life.
I thought about this deeply for a moment as I watched
the moths and dragonflies dance lightly on the waves.
Then: I'm just a figment in your dream?
I asked. He nodded his assent. And yet, he said,
We were great friends before I dreamed you here.

Pockets --Wot they 4?

Once in my early teens --
Oh, memorable evening under stars,
trees bidding us keep schtum --
wearing a great coat not my own,
and in a pocket of the same,
a rabbit -- not a beast to conjure with,
not one to pull out of an ear or hat,
Oh no, a rabbit, though unbloodied
and still warm, quite dead.

My coat, a poacher's coat
(each pocket big enough, I thought, to hold a horse),
belonged to Jake who lived with others
(the others who were with us now)
in coaches on a railway line.
They'd put me up when I'd been in distress.
And Jake had put his coat around me
when I'd shivered -- from excitement, not from cold.
Inordinately long on him,
it reached the ground on me.
Railway men they were.
Plate-layers they were called.
They introduced me to their sport --
of poaching down the line.

Alas, the phase of pockets filled with fluff,
dead mice and chewing gum - part chewed -
passed me completely by; so this, my solitary
bragging right, is what I offer now.

These days the contents of my pockets seem
much friendlier, if more mundane:
coins of the realm and keys, a mobile phone,
a lucky stone, a note-book, pen
and camera, some paper tissues, like as not,
my wallet and a tube of peppermints...
These simple things
are more fulfilling now
than that poor rabbit was back then.

But not completely so! I yearn
for something tactile and exotic
to play with as I walk or wait
in some quite cheerless waiting room.
I'd love a netsuke,* for example,*
to roam my fingers round and secretly
enjoy the sculptor's special skills.
That or a small stone God or godess,
a replica perhaps of the oldest one of all
the WILLENDORF,* that neolithic Dame...*
Oh, how I'd like my fingers roaming her!


The prompt brilliantly suggested by Poetry Jam

To the Sound of Breaking Glass...

This is the moment
that comes occasionally
or not at all:
the dream
fading into reality,
lost in the borderland
between full sleep and wakefulness.
With eyes still sleeping soundly
the ears are wide awake.

One foot in nightmare, still I stand
and listen to my other land.

The mind is stretched between the two.
The dream runs on,
a silent film,
no longer silently.
The soundtrack comes from somewhere else:
the street outside
where two men argue about... about...
but now drowned out
by children playing,
the bin men on their rounds,
the clatter of the bins,
the sound of breaking glass...

all this laid over... what?
A London bus,
the upper deck,
A Buddhist monk
immolates himself in front of me.
His sacrifice.
Protest for freedom.
Immersed in flames
he disappears from view.
A horse jumps through the flames.

Silly man, silly man, out you go!
sing the children in the street below
to further sounds of breaking glass.
Surreal. How could they know?
The Buddhist figures in my world, not theirs.
Innocence and artfulness walk hand-in-hand.

The couplet (lines 10 and 11) though in italics is not a quote, but an allusion to a Poem of similar title by Edwin Muir. You can read it here

Trust him, he's an artist!

If an artist tells you
that he wants you for your body,
it's best that you believe him Ducky.
Let him have his wicked ways with you,
distort your body's finest features,
include more loving detail in the towel
than in your sexy shoulder blades,
and smudge or blur your face or breasts.
Humour him his pastels or his paints,
for if you scorn what he has made of you,
you may have scorned your immortality.

If a sculptor tells you
that he wants you for your body,
try to believe him Dearie,
though you know it isn't true.
It's his stone interpretations that he wants:
the shapes he's found in rocky outcrops
that hold memories of you.
Humour him his syntheses
of chiselled flesh and marble stroked,
for if you scorn the visions that he's seen
you may have scorned your own memorial stone.


My thanks to The Mag for the image as prompt.

A mind forever Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone.

A Birthday in April ~ Wordsworth

Prompt from The Imaginary Garden with Real Toads
(The first of three posts which will celebrate the life of a
poet or author who was born in April.)

The title of my poem is a line from Wordsworth, one of several offered as inspiration.

There are thoughts that run like rip tides through the brain
and carry you far from the firm and reassuring land.
The swimmer here is far beyond his natural depth
and struggles, kicking in blind panic at
the images that lurk below the surface or attack
your preconceptions from their skyward mounting waves that lift you high
until you're dizzy from the visions that you see
as you look down from God-like heights through many a
pooling green or blue into a world of flying fish with monkey faces,
whales with horns and crabs with buckets -- the J.C.B.s of their
unlikely worlds. Between your high enlightenment and that
great darkness far below, a net of foamy white lines stretches
out across the surface of the sea in patterns such as fish scales make
on creatures that you can't describe, an ocean wide.
It's thought made visible perhaps, a watery script
that someone may decode, of how a dolphin thinks.
A slight wind ruffles, rearranges them;
new insights surface that had lain below.

Though few and far between and lucky you will be if you can catch one
of the thought tsunamis. Like summer storms on land
they rise from nowhere, sweep you half a world off course
and shatter every dated thought-form that you ever had.
They'll leave you crumpled on some rocky shore with
a whole world of concepts to rebuild. Once back afloat,
words, shapes, sounds, smells and surfaces flow round you,
round up past associations and form new. Connections made
that never were before. Cross currents slap and suck,
their slackening waters slow your headway, but the slowness is
the point, the sea now has you in its arms.
It curdles even as it cradles you. Others will play safe,
will make the voyage in a boat or on a raft.
Such thought is not immediate, it cannot take you
by the throat or simulate the drowning of your ancient past,
the freedom that the waves give
to the thought that dies, only to give birth.

Anecdote.

being the theme set forth for us for this Saturday's dVerse Poets by Kelvin S.M.

Raymond was due for work experience.
Mad on cars, they'd picked a garage for him
known for their sympathies for special schools.
The teacher supervising him was new.
Ergo I was put in as adviser.
I had misgivings, so stuck to basics:
When you brief his gaffer, make sure he knows
to give instructions one by one, I said.
Similarly, demonstrate one action,
and when he's got it, demonstrate the next.

From what I subsequently understood,
it went somehow like this: We need to change
the oil -- that small round screw beneath the sump...
You place this large container underneath,
then you remove the screw and drain the oil.
And last of all, you must replace the screw.

Well, last of all is what it should have been.
So far was more than quite enough by then.
But they went on: they showed him where the oil
went in -- so that is what our Raymond did:
he drained the oil and then replaced the screw,
he even tightened it to the right torque.
He then unscrewed the yellow cap that sat
next to the dipstick... and slowly poured in
all the oil he'd just drained from the car's sump.
They had to strip the engine and then wash
each part with spirit. Did the new teacher
not pass on the instruction? The gaffer
not listen, or not understand? Raymond
messed up - though not entirely without help.

Are you Al Capone, by any chance?

From front door to the road
a biting North East wind
cuts into me.
A left turn brings relief.
Another left, I'm on the square,
the wind's behind me now.
But facing me:
a young boy -- ten, maybe;
or eight; or somewhere in between --
sits on a bollard
nursing a new, shiny Tommy Gun.
Never mind your AK-47 or whatever,
this is World War II
or Prohibition vintage.
He looks like some old brigand
guarding a high pass. He's coatless
and faced into the strong North Easter
quite impassively. An older boy
appears with football in his hands.
The brigand shakes his head -- and gun.
Its barrel points the long way round.
He does as he is told.

In the shop the papers are delayed.
The shop is crowded. Next to me,
a small boy in a Teddy Bear type coat.
From one of its deep pockets
he takes a soldier. Stands it on the counter.
He's the captain. "Is he now?"
I smile. "Important guy!"
Shot five hundred enemy!
"That was good work."
Got himself a medal! "Right!"
He puts the soldier in his other pocket.
Replaces it with one who's lying prone.
This one's dead... His voice begins to fade,
I don't hear all he says from this point on,
but know I'm being told the histories
of all the men in his battalion.

Then back outside. Two older boys on scooters
(Could be paper boys)
get the now familiar treatment,
take the long way round.
I pass the bandit.
"Who are you then, Al Capone?"
(Knowing he'll know nothing of such figures
plucked from history.)
Nah, he replies, I'm Che Guevara!

Irony

Come with me, my friend,
we'll walk this town
of high hopes and grand promises
and you shall see
the fruits of all those yearnings,
the deliverance of years --
three decades -- of
unbroken rule that led
us to this promised land.

Come see the wonders
that have made this town
the envy of the world.

See here, my friend,
think what imaginings are here.
Have you seen anywhere
a town with more
or better housing for the destitute?
It stretches in its leafy streets
as far as you can see...
What architect would not be proud
to have designed so many?
This is New Minimal, a concept
that ensures the houses are so tiny that
they hardly break into the lines
of architect-planned trees.

We come now to
a major aspect of our brave new world:
the largest and most graceful
prison in the hemisphere.
At a pinch it could be made to hold
a fifth of the town's population,
so I'm told. And doesn't it look swell?
I love those bright mosaics on the walls!

And now there's this: for many, I believe
the highlight of them all:
the children's cemetery.
The concept was so popular
we set aside
land to last us centuries,
but already it is filling up --
as you can see from fields
of marble Teddy Bears, Walt
Disney figurines and animals
to catch a child's imagination.
I swear there's nowhere like it in the world!

And lastly what for me must take the prize:
Are you not over-awed as others
have been in the past? What do you make of it.
For me it conjures up a union
of two of the world's greats:
I see The Sydney Opera House
with, in its arms, The Guggenheim Museum
in Bilbao, the latter being
the world's first future generation
generator of more power
than anyone could need.
There is a price to pay, of course...
and so, embracing it -- and passionately too,
in my imagination -- is the hospital
for treatment and research into
all forms of radiation sickness
burns and injury. Had Eden had
a hospital, this, without a doubt,
is what it would have had!

Are you not now impressed as I
with our town's gracious living?

The Theme was suggested by Victoria C. Slotto for this week's Meeting the Bar: Critique and Craft at dVerse Poets' Pub

King Lear II : Or a study (short sketch) in Existentialism.

Imagine...
Autocrat!
Absolute ruler!
Czar of all can see...
but age is tiring you:
how welcome retirement would be!

So you shovel your crown,
your sceptre and throne
and the weight of the world
that goes with them all
on to your least favoured son --
in whom you have sown
all the wisdom and duty you've grown
in the years you've been king.

So was it the weight
or the greed in his heart
or the fact that he never did bloody well care,
that he turned from the way,
betrayed you and the faith
and acted the anti-Christ King?

Your life-style adviser advises retreat
to a cloistered place with a strict regime
in the wildest terrain you could wish,
but you take yourself off,
just you and your God
to the Desert of Hungry Souls.
And you live in a cave
and you don't wash or shave
but rail night and day at your God
and your prayers explode
in the language of filth
and there's nothing but you,
you finally see, in the world,
but the snake and the toad
you've befriended out here.

The world is a grand, empty place,
remote and extreme, and there's no way to guess
why the hell you have ended up here!

And was it the herb that you ate from the stream
or the storm that left you for dead,
or the bite from the snake
or the ice in your bed
or the loneliness rendered you mad?
Was it seeing yourself as the one soul alive
who is guilty, unable to put things right,
with only the gift to stand alone
and reject the easy and trite?

But you're making no sense that sane men would see,
blaming yourself for the ills of the world
as if you were God - and praying, I hear,
to the god of your dreams (who doesn't exist)
that your kids may be spared
a trauma like this.

Written for The Wednesday prompt at Imaginary Garden with Real Toads where we were asked to write something on Existentialism which The Free Dictionary defines as A philosophy that emphasizes the uniqueness and isolation of the individual experience in a hostile or indifferent universe, regards human existence as unexplainable, and stresses freedom of choice and responsibility for the consequences of one's acts.

Our Castle of Blown Glass.

We were the lucky generation -
or might have been
had we been stewards of the things we had,
not taken them for granted.

We lived the life and thought the thought,
whatever thought was a la mode,
whatever brought us Kudos by the K.
Freemen of the Castle of blown glass,
we counted ourselves Bless'd.

Would we sit to write a song? It wrote itself.
If we were hungry, fruit fell from the trees.
In every way and every day
life was ever sweet.

And in the glass walls we could see
the beauty that was us, the way society
takes nature by the scruff.
And through the walls another grace --
Nature the provider, ever offering the teat
and there for ever at our beck and call.

Elsewhere than here -- perhaps, we thought,
where the footings stood
on the long sleep of the long departed --
fissures ran, the famous glass had clouded.
We searched hard for the flaw,

distraught to think we could not see
what was before our eyes. Outsiders,
hungry near to death. Long columns of them.
Displaced and dispossessed...
We did not see them make their way
to a new and denser darkness
that we had never seen.

We were seduced by feelings of eternity;
the permanence of life. It was not so.
The fault lines ran through us, and only then
through that which bore our name.
We had the eyes that dim when strangers starve.
What use to us were walls of glass?
They saw no more, we saw no more,
than through a wall of brass.

Written For Mary's prompt The Castle of Glass at Poetry Jam.

Surfboarder

The moon petals the sea. Rose petals the sea.
Stone sea. Stone petals. Rose petals of stone.
Stone rising before me. Sea moves. How moves?
Only the not-stone board beneath me
steadies itself and is still
where wave calls to wave
incessantly
where sea is a word re-writing itself
written in stone
to me, a text to my not-stone board,
pulled from the shelf.
Peaks towering above me. Strong. Still.
As stony as any landlubbery hill back home.
Powder to nothing in wavebreak and seashake
feeling the shale, the stone floor.
(As the written word, as it trembles before
the locked-in power, the power of speech.)
Tightly it locks me,
a lost soul, lost in the lost power of speech.

Dumb in the shivvering pit, in the shimmering flow
of the dark words' call to us, to me in the now.
Wave clash to wave clash, brash
in the light of the moon's yellow staff.
Pierces the stoniness. Grave-like and tunnelled.
Sea-tunnelled. Shore-runnelled. Bundled with love.
Stone after-glow of a joy from above.

Inspired by Wordle 102 at The Sunday Whirl. to whom much thanks.
The Given words were:
Moon, peak, petals, staff, lost, pit,
stone, after, calls, locks, written, powder

Between Heaven and Hell

And I was taken
by The-Angel-of-the-In-between
to see the Kitchen-of-the-Uncommitted-of-the Age -
the angels' latest Digital Experience, that shows
how nourishing may Heaven's dishes be
and how very toxic Hell's,
though they boast the same ingredients
and work from the same recipes,
and how both are born of mankind's muck and muddle,
the fecundity of human thought and strife,
the clatter and the clutter
of the pans of old ideas
and the sprinklings and the stirrings of the new:-
but the difference between them
is the imaginative love
that is added by a chef who's bold and true.


Thanks to The Mag162 for this excellent visual prompt.

What George Told Me : Helicopter Gunships?

George went missing at odd times.
Could not -- would not? -- tell where he had been.
He once went missing with a class of children
though not far. Was quickly found.
Then one day he confided:

Knee-jerk reactor me.
That's all I'm left with now: knee-
jerk reaction is the whole of me.
Like yesterday
walked up Clover Hill
branched off towards the cliffs
just before the ridge
a whoosh, whoosh, whoosh...
Bird. Eagle. Owl. Dunno,
coz I'm not countrified, you see.
A helicopter gunship
whooshed up from beyond the brow.
Nearly took my eyebrows off,
i'm telling you.
Missed me by inches. Anyway,
drops down doan I? Flattening meself
in the long grass. See, what I'm saying?
Anything that moves could kill me, eh?
Would kill me. Anything
out in the open. Just like that!
Just got this well-honed knee-
jerk going for me, eh?

That and the single strategy they taught
us all to stay alive in desert sands.
Last week down in the town...
the marching jazz band passed by me.
I followed it. Joined on the back.
That's what they taught us, but
that's how I got lost...
The crowd was laughing fit to bust
I didn't give a damn.
That's the strategy they said.
Get separated from your group your done for --
mostly. Only chance. See a column moving...
join on the back.

Now that I could believe,
but helicopter gunships? Really?
Or something he's picked up since then?
What he clearly did pick up
was agoraphobia of some sort. If I
would take my class out to the playing field
and passed his classroom on the way
I'd find him and his pupils
lining up with mine for games, but then
he'd have a change of mind
and take them back, resume his classroom
talk of theories. Mind control.

The Man Who Wrapped the Reichstag

The man who wrapped the Reichstag hung a dress
of haute coutour on an iconic bull;
a delicate and spectral garment full
of silver glints and feminine finesse.

He who wrapped the Reichstag found a princess
in an ancient warrior king -- a cool
exposure of the way such lines can rule
or free a vision, hide it or express.

Who wrapped the Reichstag showed a diff'rent view,
as of a person, intimately known --
as many sides as there were folk to see.

Though viewers often asked for some small clue,
Meaning, he'd say, is something art's outgrown.
An art work's single purpose is to be.


In Form for All at dVerse Poets Samuel Peralta challenges us to write a Miltonian Sonnet. Hopefully, I have!

NOTE: The name of the man who wrapped the Reichstag is Christo. The project took a million square feet of fire-proof polypropylene fabric covered by an aluminium layer -- and 15 km of rope.

The image is from Wiki Commons.

Colour-blind - or Simply Racist?

First day, first special school,
I make my way to the first floor.
The first half-landing gives a view
of fists and feet employed in anger
in the playground way below.

At first just two or three boys,
but multiplying as I watch. No sign
of staff. (I'm hoping that's
unusual.) I'd better to the fray.

Beyond the main doors: steps, broad
and semi-circular, descending to
the battlefield, make grandstand seats
from which to watch the show unfold.

I stand above it all and call,
in my best Sunday foghorn voice,
for Silence! The insurgency falls quiet.
All eyes towards the stranger in their midst.
From somewhere at the back, a small quiet voice.
It carries: Could he be the right man for
the job? I do the usual thing
(remembered from my visit for the interview):
pick out the boys I think responsible
and send them to the first floor hall.

They've done the usual thing and spaced
themselves along the full length of the hall.
I'm wondering what would the usual next
thing be, when as I enter, the nearest boy
accuses me: You've only picked on us
because we're black! I look along
the line. The first six boys are black -- and I,
until this moment, had not noticed. Owch! But
now, at the far end, boy number seven --
sigh of bless'd relief -- I see is white as I.

So why, I ask, did I choose him?
You can't pretend he's black!
Back comes the quick reply. Nah sir,
you picked on him because he's Irish!


Written for Poetry Jam where this week's challenge is to write on the usual and/or unusual.

Storm Brewing

In a grey sky
a dark cloud. Spreading.

Rolling out from under it
a rose and copper cloud with purple veins
stoops over us.
A school ma'am on her rounds
not liking what she sees.
She straightens
topples fast towards us
flattening a white cloud child.
The child keels over knowing that its time is up.
No cry rings out from the dead child
but mournful wailing comes to us from somewhere afar off.
Sea cries like a chorus answers it.

A dark cloud issues from her skirts
rolls back upon itself. From skirt and bodice now
the rose and copper cloud spawns other clouds. Streaked,
mottled, ink dark, glowing, stirred
as by an unknown hand, they bubble, burst, come to the boil
as though there is a heat source hotter than the sun.

Softly they drop towards the sea
like feathers from some bird kill in the sky.
The water is in turmoil. Dark beyond the rocks
and far beyond man's dark imaginings, but blazing white
where now it's springing skywards from its slapping of the rocks
before it crashes in a shower of flying shards on top of them.
It's mirroring the clouds. It rolls. It plunges. Spirals
inwards. Is flung in all directions. Water ejects water
in great jets. Great gobs of water are sucked down. Spewed out.
Subdued. Waves turn into tunnels. Spouts turn inside out. Are holes.
Become the sea's black holes. No light escapes them. Stars
might die within them. We would never know.

Water pours down from the clouds. At first fine sprays.
Soon these are heavy, bouncing columns battering
the pock marked surface of the sea with all the vigour
that the sea expends upon the rocks.
The rain welds sea and cloud together in some conspiracy.