Break my bones;
cut my throat.
Pull me open,
learn the ropes.

Breath me in;
taste the fear.
Shank my skin;
stand and cheer.

Kick my head;
let me bleed.
Unbolt my veins;
enjoy the read.

Gouge my eyes;
punch my face.
Wrap me up
in your embrace.

I awoke as a tinder wolf
growling
a cut shawl man
dreaming of scarf’s
that left the world
drifting on infinite
dependency

I know I have
to wash
my human on
there are cigarettes
to be sung

could I be
a long shank man
a conqueror
or magician

No I am tinder wolf
howling,
hunting more
tobacco

Walking silent
forever
an assassin

Oh to wander down country lanes
Where ‘shank’s pony’ is the mode
By which one travels from end to end
Beating off the open road.

Willow-herb and cow parsley
Grow tall against the hedge
Where dandelions behave like kings
Growing wild among the sedge.

A toad pops out and then pops back
To long grass where he’s hidden
Where birds will sing a merry song
And ducklings scurry when bidden.

For these few hours you forget the world
And you feel at peace with yourself
But the lure back to your reality
Gets this dream returned to the shelf.

©JRW2014

We know you, and your little dark colors too. A picture book in your purse penned in mustaches on the full faces of your fare. We call you from bed, 8 o' clock in the morning, dog-light you slow wander the Peruvian darkness making jellyfish tentacles with your hands while you feel your way through Salem. We're colder than night and we wake thrice the bits of your day gig. You collapse in a green field of dandelion where thrushes drown you in Brown. We gorge ourselves on mango slivers, pineapple yolks, a half of grapefruit. We know you are close to your end.

On the tops of the cities you call to your lycan friends, the half-sick and muted bray allures them to you, from Bratislava and Mimon, the thoroughfare through the suq. We wait. The foregone untold, the beep beep jug jug swoop sound of the nightingale, in all her dun glory, we wait. Then, as if descending through the moor-lounging silver smoke, the cool stickiness to your fingertips; the fog.

We are there when the blue-less and smoky screen surrounds you, when you shank the auburn Scot hair of the sly fox that stalks, say, a cigarette from your lips. When you take the corners swiftly, gadding the streets. The prize king of vulpicide. You rub its matte fur against your bristly gray beard. And while you lay in your lumps of twelve carat flesh you bleat and you nag. One day you will never come home.

Nobody was born today
But you picked up a cake anyway
for five dollars fifty plus tax

Now you're watching
Criminal Minds on a couch made for three
and eating it with your hands

It vaguely occurs to you that
you should be sharing it with someone
or at least put on some **** candles

You're not even hungry
you don't even need to fill a void
you did good today

You hardly even miss her anymore.
You haven't thought about it in weeks.
If you just slept you'd be fine in the morning.

You consider it all
examining the red velvet
stuck under your thumbnail

Maybe you're looking for
a file or a prison shank
sunk beneath the frosting

Or maybe you just need
to make this a Night
The Night of the Cake

It'll blend in
with the others
in a matter of time

But for a few weeks
you'll look back
and remember

you are a member
of those romanticized ranks
those plastic or terracotta statues

Tomorrow you will feed the dog.
And after work you will pick up groceries.
And after groceries you will pay your bills.

But tonight is the Night of Cake.
Tonight
you become a stereotype

An unforgiving consumer
with chocolate-stained hands.

Come on do The Locomotive with me
Shildon smoky days with black sheet cloud
terrace rows
buy some cheap beef shank for the dog
open shuttered butchers smell of blood
sit at the bar peel the sheets soggy New Statesman
by the glass
started reading it on the toilet at home
had to get out
sink the pints eat a chicken tikka masala flavour
pork pie isn’t that an oxymoron? and humour
Gappy slumped at the bar no longer violent new leaf turned
collects shopping trolleys in the Asda car park
he’s got a badge and a green jacket waterproof
which is nice
so come on do The Locomotive with me
roadside ****** familiar faces though not so many
these days
faded glory days wall images of train filled
old days of engineering and purpose and place
the starting point of a world phenomenon a
phenomenon that brought global joy and death
in equal measure but sod that
Darlington and Stockton
got all the glory.

i tried to assimilate, oh wait, i did, and i speak better native sprechen than the actual natives, and for that? you get the boot, because some camel jockey egyptian mongrel mixed with iranian blood gets the better of you... i guess the "natives" were fans of the eastern european *******, but not the eastern european males, **** it, i'm coming for the ride; can just see the ****** shouting: ooh ooh! their male counterparts are a'coming! and next thing you know, i'll be asking you to play the ******* banjo, with a toothpick!*

and it was always going to be torrential rain,
suspended in a prelude crescendo
of soulfly's song prophecy...
oh all the hoes come from eastern europe,
just like all didlo moulds come from africa,
gotta perfect that "pleasing of the white
******* honey cougar in plastic too, yo, bro..."
black people don't speak the current
lexicon, they are hyper-evolutionary
with their slang impromptus,
gets annoying after a while,
when you stop keeping track of their
ghettosprechen...
      ******* could have said custard,
meant margarine, but i'd still think of
jungle...
                     ghetto *****, get-a-go!
next time you mention all women of
eastern europe as ******, i'll mention
you in my charcoal wish-yo-were-edible
roasts... **** me... i'd prefer eating a leg
of lamb than a ******; shank.
oh, the word offends you,
but doesn't offend you in a rap limerick?
i.e. ***** ***** bab bab *****?
black people invent too much slang,
too much degenerate use of language,
      i try to keep it straight and universal,
off the orangutans go, talking orange is
the new black...
           i still find it hard to fathom
darwinism, who would be mad to begin
in africa, and end up in the arctic circle,
and no china?! common origins *******...
  tried looking for an eskimo in china,
all i found was, a ******* icecube!
      post-existentialism does exists,
it exists in the form of anglo-existentialism,
i.e. a darwinistic blackmailing...
    21st century existentialism is blackmail,
plain dumb & simple...
   and yes, i have a girlfriend, i call her...
sophia...
       and nietzsche was right:
the ugliest of the ugliest? atheists,
intellectually speaking.
       and why would you ever consider
the pristine sophia / ****** mary if not considering
aspasia, phryne, rahab, theodora,
   to counter philosophy,
   why not craft a:
    philospasy, a philophryny,
       a philorahabu, a philothedorum?
guess what, of the most famous prostitutes,
the contestants are philorahabu,
                     and philothedorum,
and all are famous prostitutes;
then the pristine sophia, my "girlfriend";
philosophy has a deity, that although
deemed pristine, has been touched by
many hands, and many strangleholds of ego,
time to turn this princess into a *****;
and the ones that visited a *******,
will look at those that haven't with curious
eyes.
let's not forget the siamese twin prostitutes
safa & marwa, and the matriarch
and true founder of islam ha-gar -
      the concubine of abraham,
  that ******* mother of islam.... hagar...
you really think men invented the islamic
attire for women?
              who's at the chanel catwalk,
straight men, or gays and women?
       you blame anyone, you blame: hagar...
running between the mounts safa & marwa...
islam, that totalitarian reinvention of
"repentant" / "revised" mode of prostitution...
and as i once overheard an englishman speak,
the niqab? satan's postbox.
- the craft began with treating the world as
solely inanimate, to make it as inanimate as
possible, and interact in it,
   as the sole animate agent, obviously with
the obvious hurdles of animate expressions,
nonetheless, these expressions being
outside the vicinity of integrated animate
actors, working around in inanimate surroundings,
conclusively,
  the "supposed" animate expression regain
their inanimate stratum by a repeatedly
predictable observation of
a prior re similis ad infinitum
  (prior to, again, similar toward infinity).
the point was always to make the world
as inanimate as possible,
    collecting books is a starter,
  collecting cooking utensils another,
the point being, to surround yourself with as
much inanimate reality, as to prove yourself
the animate, the "actor"...
             or more expressively: the puppeteer...
it still bothers me, grinding two prefixes...
the penta-      vs.        the tetra-...
   why? well, we are embodied with five sense,
but there are only four elements...

    vision
audition
gustation                       yes, but there's only
  olfaction
     somatosensation

                    air, fire, earth, water...
      this is almost gagging a schematic,
  we can see fire, earth and water,
  we can hear fire, air, water and earth,
      we can taste...
      we can smell fire, air, water, earth,
we can touch fire, water, earth...

this, by the way is crude...
   and is limited by not adding particular
observations...
   but the ratio 5:4 is in place, akin to
the mad hatter's 10/6 = 0.666...
         and that missing one is: ad infinitum,
might as well call it the lazy eight with 4:5...
since the elements came prior to the senses.

i'm guessing the "fifth element" to compliment
the five senses is a far greater posit than
a sixth sense, in that, this "fifth element"
is a plagiarism of kierkegaard,
  i.e. the "changelessness of god",
namely the eternally immovable object,
an object of constantly perpetuated friction,
so stationary that it moves all things,
which also precipitates into an eternally
recurrent subject matter,
immovable, ergo, inexhaustible.

- and i will die believing that anglo-existentialism
is an argument from the perspective
of blackmail, esp. since it's overtly-repetitive
and unoriginal,
  and if the english found continental
existentialism boring, a continental european
like myself, will find some hidden interest
in this "boring" artefact of time,
   but nothing can redeem repetition,
not even a boring artefact of writing,
   since when reading a boring "effort" of
writing, you can actually wake up,
and yawn...
  but when the same "effort" is repetitive,
you never get a chance to yawn,
you're still asleep, "apparently" enthralled.

- and to give a conclusion...
if an irishman thinks you write akin to
the psychiatric slang of "word salad",
ask him if he has read any james joyce,
if the answer is no, and he replies that he prefers
video game narratives, and has ambitions of
writing a book citing the cliche moonlight sonata
of beethoven... it's one of those times
you can't even laugh, internally, or externally.

- eventuality vs. actuality -
whereby actuality is a reactionary stance
that drags past events into present and future
events...
   whereby eventuality is a liberal stance
that drags past events into a wall,
   the present into a status quo,
  and the future into a snooze button phase
of a clockwork orange.

- no, i don't like this darwinistic blackmail of
continental existentialism,
  this monochromatic monolith...

- better start calling philosophy by its proper name,
philorahabu / philothedorum
(were not underlined on the pixel canvas,
thereby bypassing the oxford dictionary panel
for nuo-verbum acceptance) -
      keep that ****** of yours sophia
in a cage, because your thinking,
like your body, will become contaminated;
but one thing is for sure,
that concubine hagar running between
safa & marwa looking for water...
    can't imagine any other grander matriarch...
a reformed *** slave, who gave birth
to the niqab...
            i really can't imagine jannah
that way... i think it looks like:
1 man + 72 prostitutes,
              and 1 woman + 3 holes stuffed.

You're sitting across a table, in the next room- and it's the month of July.
                                                                                 And as the beads of sweat chip off your forehead
                                                                                                              like a shank of butcher's meat,
                                                                                                                        your dorcel fin peaks                                                                                                         through the sand where my toes peak                                                                       through. The picnic table where I write letters; post cards.
                                                                                                   I take photos, make reservations, and
                                                                                       even after I'm canceled on for walking around
                                                              downtown in my bright neon-pink underwear, I still roll to the
              left side of the bed sit up and drop the cigarette I fell asleep on. You're just sitting, first entry:                                                                                                                                                 Stardom.

                                                                                                I don't have room for you in the corners.

                                                                                                The corners of this room, padded walls,
                                                                                           shifty vaseline sway- the white cotton stick
                                               of a sucker pointing out of your mouth, its red numero forty dye shines
                                                                                                                in the specks of light flicking
                                                                                                  out of the horizon like a carousel ride
                                                                                                                              around and around.

                                                                                        I'm getting a bit dizzy, and even less honest.

                                                                                                                 If you want to see me spring,
                                   like the silly string on my birthday, yellow silly-putty; molding the monster face,
                                                                                                     I observe you through a kaleidoscope                                                                                                                   of dexedrine and morphine.
                                                                                              Your catastrophe with Xanax, passed out
                                                            in alien-green *******, at that party in the abandoned firehouse
                                                                            on News St., how you could lay trust on me after that

                                                                                                (a daydream with sawing you called me)

                                                                                             sixteen-year-old mishap of an afternoon.
                                                                                            &

Fair fa' your honest, sonsie face,
Great chieftain o the puddin'-race!
Aboon them a' ye tak your place,
Painch, tripe, or thairm:
Weel are ye worthy o' a grace
As lang's my arm.

The groaning trencher there ye fill,
Your hurdies like a distant hill,
Your pin *** help to mend a mill
In time o need,
While thro your pores the dews distil
Like amber bead.

His knife see rustic Labour dight,
An cut you up wi ready slight,
Trenching your gushing entrails bright,
Like onie ditch;
And then, O what a glorious sight,
Warm-reekin, rich!

Then, horn for horn, they stretch an strive:
Deil tak the hindmost, on they drive,
Till a' their weel-swall'd kytes belyve
Are bent like drums;
The auld Guidman, maist like to rive,
'Bethankit' hums.

Is there that owre his French ragout,
Or olio that *** staw a sow,
Or fricassee *** mak her spew
Wi perfect scunner,
Looks down wi sneering, scornfu view
On sic a dinner?

Poor devil! see him owre his trash,
As feckless as a wither'd rash,
His spindle shank a guid whip-lash,
His nieve a nit;
Thro ****** flood or field to dash,
O how unfit!

But mark the Rustic, haggis-fed,
The trembling earth resounds his tread,
Clap in his walie nieve a blade,
He'll make it whissle;
An legs an arms, an heads will sned,
Like taps o thrissle.

Ye Pow'rs, wha mak mankind your care,
And dish them out their bill o fare,
Auld Scotland wants nae skinking ware
That jaups in luggies:
But, if ye wish her gratefu prayer,
Gie her a Haggis

There are things
I did not do.

I did not  touch
you.  

You
died. Without
a sound.

Your soft brown eyes pierced me.
I saw you go in the quiet
way you did everything.
I knew you were gone
but not before I
knew sadly, silently
that
I
could not hold
you in a final

embrace.

Closeness had run out
so long ago,

though we loved until the end,

bereft of speech,
as we we were bereft of
touch.

I bowed to your
blank stare.

I would have died for
you if I could have.  

but I could not
save you from
this destiny

with the Father

Who

Loved

you



Caroline Shank
2.2,2023