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Mateuš Conrad Nov 2016
i.

for the past few weeks i've been doing an experiment,
thankfully philosophy allows such things,
of course, they're deviations from what i'm used to
in chemistry, they're less, what's the word?
spectacular - but they are nonetheless experiments,
and that's the beauty of being grounded in some sort
of science (trinity of biology, chemistry and physics
and that's the limit, beyond this there are only
pseudo-sciences)... medicine? that's the tsarina of
learning: like any tsarina: gets down and *****,
and yes: mathematics is the genteel queen.
philosophy on the other hand seems like a vagabond
in learning, never really pieced together,
never really sentenced to a single direction:
and for that matter, thought can become less narration
that stretches into the sort of philosophy that Sartre
embodied with his novel, and more into thought becoming
experimental...
you might be wondering what the experiment consisted
of... well, over the weeks i've been sadistic unto myself,
it's to do with trying to figure out the modern curse
that's the 3D's: debt, depression, dementia.
                i can't fall asleep without a bottle of whiskey
cigarettes, sleeping pills and music playing in the background:
which would make me a terrible partner, anyway.
   beyond that though, for weeks i repeated a pattern,
i fell asleep to the *hellraiser ii: hellbound
soundtrack
by christopher young...
       day-in-day out: as if to pressurise the idea that
the faculty of dreaming could be censored in the same way
that thinking is censored in liberal speech
eroding people's vocabulary, **** included.
     what i mean by that: every day i woke up with 15 minutes
of despair, then the zenith came after i lay in bed
for 4 hours and felt too many leeches ******* at me...
   those 15 minutes of despair were always there,
but then i usually got up and went about my daily business...
i admit that whiskey could be to blame,
anyone could argue the alcohol-is-bad argument,
but arguing as R. D. Laing might have that it's
also a sedative if you don't include social adhesion to loosen
the tension of going out and dancing:
then i don't see the point of saying it's all bad.
         sleeping pills (i found) are not 100% active without
what the prescription states that you should do:
i exceed limits, but then i write during the night -
            create a balance and i'm sure any insomnia
might be made minimal... anyway:
so i've been doing this roundabout experiment,
listening to the above album while falling asleep,
but then yesterday i decided to fall asleep listening to
godspeed you! black emperor's album F♯ A♯ ∞,
and guess what the experiment proved:
  i felt little or no anguish for 15 minutes,
obviously the usual groggy of a pseudo-hangover,
  but that doesn't mean staying in bed for 4 hours
because you feel **** about life 'n' all...
                   as already stated there's what we call
a cartesian dichotomy, that somehow altered mental
states cannot be translated into a physicality -
depression in this sort of language becomes lethargy -
people never seemed to connect the dots that
state the monism of everything having a pairing either
side of Humpty-Dumpty sitting on the ergo fence
asking about a flying omelette... ergo is a variation
of what precipitates... depression = lethargy...
the purest kind of what i know (i have enough psychiatric
literature to redeem myself from what would
be deemed quack-medicine with their quack doctors) -
some say that taking the vitamin B12 supplement
could help you: or that weak digestion is to blame, too.
i would be quack doctor if i was in a position of power,
and since i am not really earning anything from my
"poems", what sort of power can i abuse? trust -
but then again these are thought experiments,
           i first experiment on myself, then note down
the observations i have accounted for.
               so what will my unconscious eat today while
i switch off my consciousness? i was thinking of
the cure's disintegration album,
         perhaps that's why i did weeks of falling asleep
to a horror movie soundtrack, to later move into
neo-prog "rock" and then into 80s goth melancholia...
    i'd say that pop ****** melancholics off...
and such a nicer word for depression...
                   it's not even close to compression and has
nothing to do with aviation or the Netherlands...
     melan, melan: ah! melanism - a certain darkness,
    choly -         condition of darkness...
       and that star of Bethlehem appeared at night...
man of sorrows, well that's just blatant;
           but for all the romanticisation about darkness
and the mysterious moon and all the insomnia,
i still prefer the anti-cartesian explanation of actually
creating the proper answer to what has become
a dichotomy between the physical sciences and
the pseudo sciences, given that ergo is a precipitation
then for the two opposite to become inseparable
depression must be equal to lethargy: which is a variation
of the grander genus (family): metabolism.
               is this the point where i re-quote that famous:
doctor! heal yourself!
                                      well, if there's anything to go by
i have in my mind, given my life a prolonging in a way,
what was it... amitriptyline?
                                         the new ******* for
the respectably prone to citizenship's serenity of leaving
other people to their own demises -
  i mean, look at all the teetotalers: hyperactive bunnies
with too much energy that translated into things like
the infamous pyramids and the doubly infamous chimneys.

ii. the danish girl

i would have never thought that the transgender movement
had such a puritanism about it,
such platonism - nearing martyrdom;
who could have thought?! i only managed to see the film
today... i'm a sentimental ******* and i was choking
on not crying at the end of the film
here was a true representation of an artist,
         there's he (einar wegenar): a successful local
artist, within the confines of Copenhagen,
modestly famous: primarily because of having
perfected a technique and sourced it in a childhood
memory that keeps haunting him,
    thus he keeps repeating it, although with slight
alternation to refresh it, but no photograph to work
from, hence my previous statement:
  memory is the best cinema or arts' gallery (this
is not a universal statement, memory doesn't always
heal, or fascinate or have the ability to revitalises itself
or become the most potent "hallucinogenic" experience);
and then she's there (gerda wegener), also
painting, but more in line with paying the rent
rather than appeal, rich people needing portraits to
hang on the walls of the future of their lineage
        in years to come so someone might boast:
that was my ancestor, who founded the first bank
of Copenhagen sort of stories -
and all she wants to do is be an artist like Einar;
and she keeps coming back from galleries with her
works and they never give the critics any appeal
at being original - they have a suggestive generic
quality to them: precisely because they've been painted
for money. art is cruel in that way,
  when critics reduce producing art like they might reduce
being a cashier in a supermarket on the basis of:
job done... then comes the offense from the artist.
the beauty of this film is the platonism that soon explodes,
the near innocence... i really don't know how
the transgender movement borrowed from this:
all those Baphomet ******* with too many parts,
silicon chests and ***** and what not?
       this is one of the finest forms of defamation -
these days the transgender movement is so sexually
potent it doesn't really deserve what can only appear
as a self-imposed crucifixion...
              this story predates the unearthing of the nag
hammadi scripts, it's intuitively bound to what was
unearthed in 1945...
      einar sees the desperation of gerda, he knows
that he'll simply remain a local artist,
    bound to a square mile of earth, local, provincial
even... what he decides on is best expressed
by Marilyn Manson's lyrics: now i'm not an artist
i'm a ******* work of art
.
        how can not this resonate further into the film
if not by this motto:
it is a consecration of a memory, to invert it and
un-seize the moment long ago experienced and now
fuelling art, or the repetition of a safe technique established.
one man's frustration and a woman in a cage:
the potential seen - then a sudden bursting of madness,
the evident anti-cross -
                                  to say he had reached his limits
and she was kept frustrated and under-appreciated is
blatant enough, this self-sacrifice for a woman to
find her subject, was all too evident when she utters
the words that: the student overcomes the teacher,
and that's the whole story,
                       he has to walk into the canvas,
     in whatever way imaginable, and what a better way
than on a whim to escape the dreariness of parties
   by dressing up as a woman, after gerda's model
is late so she can continue a painting and einar
has to step in and wear a few female garments...
       to later realise the Dionysian consequence:
                                  only to the utmost excess, from here.
this could hardly be a propaganda movie for
the transgender movement... the "propaganda"
aspect ends when you hear children imitating this
artistic "prank" in today's society...
      it wasn't a prank in the slightest: but a profound
expression of love between two artists...
          outside of art the whole transgender movement
is still only ***** and silicon **** of Thailand's lady-boys:
that's not reality?        
although i actually did choke with nearing to cry
in the closing scene...
    unlike the Christ story... there was no resurrection.
so hans and gerda travel to the place where
einar depicted the landscape in his revisions,
       and both of them are standing there
        and it's ****** pulverising with so much depth
upon being so little when reduced to a canvas
but because you see the painting first, do you later
see the landscape with more emotion...
     and i thought to myself: gerda will recreate
the landscape in her own eyes, she'll what he saw
and what he gave up for her to paint him in his
transformative (transfigurative) state of becoming
lili elbe...
                     that's why i was about to cry -
     that she could put lili aside, and return to /
resurrect the memory of einar the locally famous
artist... that she would apply the same technique in
painting lili / einar but turn her attention to
landscapes... as if to imply that both of them became
reunited before all the madness of life came chasing them
into extremes.
          to my dissatisfaction? after the film ended
and before the credits started rolling... postscriptum facts
after these true events... she continued to paint
lili / einar as she did, which prompted her to fame
on the Parisian estrade; after seeing that, written down?
tears? what tears... i'm actually thankful that i choked
on them and didn't do an outburst necessarily...
thank **** i wasn't watching the film alone!
     i know that i might have invoked a sense of:
rough around the edges with this description, but i'm hoping
it's abstract enough to make the film more potent:
filling the blanks with images;
still, this was used for a transgender movement?
                                                did he make it plainly obvious
that this was a transcendental transgender iconoclasm?
         it's the platonic element in it that steers this whole
story, away from what 21st century movements regard
as prototype for their ******.
~
May 2024
HP Poet: Melancholy of Innocence
Age: 59
Country: India


Question 1: A warm welcome to the HP Spotlight, Melan. Please tell us about your background?

Melancholy of Innocence: "My name is Raj / Melan (as on HP). I am an Architect and Urban Planner with a MBA. I unsuccessfully pursued Doctorate (twice), but due to circumstances - could not complete it. I have worked with several International Non-Profit Development Organizations and Projects. While living in Amsterdam (Holland) for 4 years I was International Development Manager in-charge of ten-countries of the world – Oceania (Australia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea), South-East Asia (Indonesia, Thailand, Philippines), Spain, Russia, Belgium, United Kingdom and Chile. And for separate projects I have lived for more than 6 months in Bangkok (Thailand) and Accra (Ghana). I have travelled to more than 40+ countries."


Question 2: How long have you been writing poetry, and for how long have you been a member of Hello Poetry?

Melancholy of Innocence: "The first vivid memory of mine that I can call as a poem was when I was 8 years old. I had gone to my Mom’s office picnic tour for 2-days and there I had met someone of similar age of opposite gender. On coming back, whose name I wrote “three” times (one below the other in 3 different fonts) on the last page of my school notebook. I consider that as my first LOVE-poem. My first form of “identifiable” poetry was at the age of 13 years. It was about doing “morning household chores” and helping my Mom so that she can reach her office on time. After a very long break, it was only when my BELOVED inspired me to become member of Hello Poetry, I did so in 2016 and started writing serious poetry. I have 23 books (fiction, non-fiction, poetry) self-published on Amazon."


Question 3: What inspires you? (In other words, how does poetry happen for you).

Melancholy of Innocence: "LOVE surely inspires me. Being in LOVE makes me feel - live and breathe in PEACE. Poetry happens to me when without knowledge amidst mundane incidences of life – like, while taking bath or wearing clothes, standing in front of a mirror, reading some story/poem/article/lyrics, watching an interviews/movies/songs, listening to music OR just by observing the way people behave, express themselves, their ****** expressions, their mannerisms, smiles/sorrows/laughter/giggles; the way they walk, turn and look around them, stand, sit that always reminds me of my BELOVED. I also always make it a point to peep out from my home balcony / window seeking a glimpse of sunrise/sunset, moon/stars, birds, clouds, feeling breeze on our skin, blooming flowers, bees, insects etc. and many more things…! Basically, I think I get inspired by something that touches me deep inside and reminds me of my BELOVED. I immediately experience the realization of “I being in deep true pure eternal LOVE” in our heart and soul. That’s how poetry happens to me."


Question 4: What does poetry mean to you?

Melancholy of Innocence: "Poetry is a true expression of how exactly I feel inside me at that very particular moment of time and I try to be as honest as possible in expressing it with words that communicates my true and pure feelings of LOVE to my BELOVED."


Question 5: Who are your favorite poets?

Melancholy of Innocence: "Rumi, Omar Khayyam, Ghalib, Tagore, Neruda, Pushkin, Kabeer, Jayadeva, all enlightened Sufi fakeers and many more contemporary lyricists."


Question 6: What other interests do you have?

Melancholy of Innocence: "I like to read. Now a days I read in digital format anything that catches my interest ) text books, non-fictions, literary-award-winning books, biographies. etc. I like to draw, paint, sketch, do photography, do exercise, play sports, watch movies, serials etc. I even have written full-feature movie-scripts. I try to download and listen to all songs of music my BELOVED likes and sometimes recommends me. I like to do simple household chores (sweep/swab the house, clean the toilets etc.), do mundane shopping errands, cleaning and arranging things around me, I love to sit and observe things – “Nature”; and especially common everyday people and wonder about their childhood years and their life’s journey. I like to introspect a lot and question my own thoughts – making sure I do not get convinced and/or imprisoned by anything (beliefs, rituals, superstitions, views, thoughts, religion, philosophy, “..isms” and “so-called” TRUTHS) that I may have come across - seen, read or heard. I am very uncomfortable and vary of building identities of I, me, my, mine, myself…"


Carlo C. Gomez: “Thank you so much for allowing us this opportunity to get to know the person behind the poet, Melan! We are honored to include you in this ongoing series!”



Thank you everyone here at HP for taking the time to read this. We hope you enjoyed coming to know Melan a little bit better. I surely did. It is our wish that these spotlights are helping everyone to further discover and appreciate their fellow poets. – Carlo C. Gomez

We will post Spotlight #16 in June!

~
Oliver Philip Dec 2018
Melan.
A limerick

A fine poet we know as Melan
Has a genius second to none
Writes as a master
Never disaster
Now is the time to give him a hand.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Written by Philip.
December 1st 2018.
A limerick for Melan
Words are threads of many colors.
That can be woven into something
Beautiful and strong.
I said that to Melan of Innocence once
And it’s true.
She is a weaver of gossamer truth.
Warp dipped in LOVE and then woven
Through heartwarming weft
To form fabric both beautiful and
Astoundingly strong.
ljm
A humble note of admiration.
Mateuš Conrad Mar 2017
too many youtube punctuation akins before my voice comes through, like: hi! i'm child-minding chalrie! ola! oo! advert gives a ****?! you see that? advert gives a toss! well... ola! original lost to marsh potatoes mash.

like i was led by a solomonic harem:

we're buggered;

   to be honest.... hugh grant could have
said that better, and, would have facied him...
if he made that one film from my youth
about a damsel in distress... and the return
of charles II to england... the thing adam and the ants
imitated: highwayman no robin hood...
clean shaven like a daffodil in early spring frost
for the eye to peer into...

as it turns out, you write one great piece of work
and everyone applauses...
you write a thousand symphonies,
and everyone turns flame-eyed and forgets
your one spectacular moment, which
you take into hades and wish to forget given
the total output, when they mention that it
was all great, but so comes cousin critic and you
know that most of it was... a bit ****...
               and because of that:
they tend to do better... they?
   the ones that hit the banknote of a one song
wonder... and then receded into life,
and debated with gay peerage in some restaurant
akin to bridet jones' diary scenario,
and oh my oh my: the palpitations necessary
like make-up... i can almost see flamingos take to ballet!

and then it's back to *quack quack quack

of promenades in the park watching mallards...
  
original jealosy fades.... no, nothing else,
it just fades... which can feel a bit weird,
basically it, just, fades - i take to foot what people
take to: speeding down the a408 thinking
about tax; well yeah, i tax my feet with a mile, or two,
sometimes i take to the mile or two
with a different pair of shoe.
                                   you a rhyming rhino too?
              
you write pachebel's canon,
you're going to compete with haydn's 103
symphony...
similar to a question: how many eggs am i
carrying in my basket?

dear reader, like i child i never fathered,
or like a dog i never petted,
          or should i simply aim at: dear ego?
what unit i had and never thought with,
never mind the thought of?

the fact that you can't cry, is the reason
that you are depressed,
that's another statement that's worthwhile,
stating apathy as a misery
without tears
, the original melan- -choly...

listen, i don't care because i don't want to,
  i care about something that i want to care
about because thte things i would like to care about
i can't or don't want to,
   so i take the "metaphor" (which means
half my hans zimmer is gone) that keeps
haydn's symphony no. 103 almost floating
above pachelbel's canon...
      i'd love to miss out the second l...
and there, the ****** white, the doves,
     the church, and... hail! the marching bride!
that feeling of consecration...
    can you realise that newspapers are stink
compared to dust-affording books?
              yep... newspapers are ****
compared to book... i kept a week's worth
of newspapers in my room, i realised
that it stank as if a cat ****** in my room...
  when i listen to pachelbel i'm supposed to think
of kent, or devon, aren't i?
thumbs up essex oi oi!
                   halfway house out of 'ackney
  or 'eckham...
      oh right, right, like i was ever invited to a
marriage...
                     some 'un 'as to be the black sheep
of the family...
   well... i hope she divorces aged 40 and has a miscarriage
aged 35... if i really wanted to give a toss...
i'd toss, a cricket 'ard ball of
                mahogany cranium and make
believe that i was loved,
instead of receiving postcards from strangers...
living about a mile away...
    so there i see pachelbel with his canon in D....
and there i see mozart, laughing in steppenwolf
as is worth citing:
      i wrote so much ******* i just had to
tickle my ***** like a philosopher might ****** his
beard... if that answers your question:
they remember him for only one song,
and do so rightly,
   me? i'm not quiet sure why they remember
me for a hundred.
   it's like pachelbel is the *** pistols
        and i'm the ramones, or the offspring,
or stiff little fingers... or the dread, ****!
green day?!
                 according to noel gallagher
who did say that never mind the *******
was something we didn't accomplish with his
oasis albums... even though back in the day...
on the european continent, no one sang anything
apart from oasis songs... you went to paris:
oasis... you taizé... oasis...
yes, what was, once, france... or frau hans...
and then the exagerration on the f....
like an alo alo alo episode...
                 that's basically what it sounds like....
pachelbel's           pa-she-sha  l          fix it bell's
   pashelbel's               it's also half check in czech...
     but that's what noel said akin to mozart:
to be honest? i'd rather just (have) written than canon in D
and ****** off; if i wrote more than that
i'd be anything but that spare prosthetic limb
for that one legged man, dancing at a party in Versailles.
L T Winter Dec 2016
There's blood-
Its warm as it dribbles
Melan-choly with the floor
Half somber,

Its changing things slowly
Brok-er-ing gravity-

There's cruor
Incanting elixirs
On never-read
Centipede's fiction

And we stir softly
For-never and always
As the slabs begin
To grow--

Cold.
A Simillacrum May 2018
You
are
so
mean

Incredibly
mean

You
take
from
me
all
given
things

and take them
for granted

How do I

  know     this for sure?

When I've kept

manipulative

    lovers who loved more to reprogram me

How do I

      separate the abuse from the present?

I
am
so
sad

melan
choly

Romance means a process
and I've watched for years by your side
with my eyes aglow for my god
as you cut your tether to me with
the courage to do nothing else but
tell me otherwise, like I haven't spent
thousands of nights wishing and wanting
for the light of my life
when she was right there
right there
Samir Mohammed Dec 2020
Melan-choly, in me

Could you be, the one to set me free?

I don't be-lieve, in these things

I can't see the things you see, so easi-ly

Blinded by the glare of your bright-ness

Shine your light and let me feel, your soul-stice
Edward Feb 2020
Kianna,AS,Harshitha,Mo, Pearl,Jesse, Tina,Avery,Mrunalini, Donna.
Eli, MAM,Ava,Sylph,RSB,Starving,Michael, Sandra,Austin, Nolan.
Pure, May, Benji,Madelle, shez,Black poison,S-zaynab, Sally,Brandon.
Alyssa,Beautifully,netasha,Rob, Mikey, Anthony,Ashly, Tash, Mister,Frey.
Najla,Thomas,Darrell,RBM,Robert,AHarris,TheGirl,Larr­y,XRhymes,Elizabeth,
Naeema,M,Roumen,Masterchain,Blank,Nylee, Charles,Junior, Sol,Kafka.
Cloud,Danny,Edmund,Melody,Monika,Carrie,Orion,Ronell,L­ogan,Grace.
BR,Eva,JJ,Bardo,Eleni,Rick,Tia,Godawan,Melan,Xant,Bri­anna,Botan.
Thank you all very much for being the Special writers that you all are.
I have not forgotten the rest of you I shall do another poem like this soon.
Kabelo Maverick Jul 2019
"Art is not in crisis,
Art is where Christ is…

Mandatory
Art is like Isis,
that’s where the Light is…

Melan story
He(art) is not just typing this,
Heart is just what Time is...
"
MVR©K
Michael John Jul 2023
i write my poem
and i don´t know
how or why
it is a tomb
it makes me low
it makes me melan-
cholic
it makes me
cry
sometimes it
makes me go
o
sometimes i
know
though what possible
use-who said all art
is useless-it is
a boil upon the ******-dum-di-
dum-it kills time
i suppose and it makes
me think but ideas will
certainly be the death
of us and a ******* good
job too..but meanwhile..
Dr Peter Lim May 2020
Melan,  we are, in the final analysis,  alone---
our flowering and withering is our own doing-
there's none to blame.

We should never betray or disrespect our self-
we live and die in our uniqueness and should not be afraid to declare at the end:
I have treated my self with dignity despite my frailties and failings--
I have lived!
Raj Bhandari Jul 2020
Perhaps you know about Ranjha,Heer,
Melan,now I believe u r from Kashmir
Objectified manifest's dimensional delineations are totally tangential to trajectory extant.  Infinite possibility's exponentially extemporaneous eidetic prospectus perpetrates incorporeity ideology's perfectible ontology.  It's sheer omnificent ubiquity.   Manumission's vicarious recalcitrance to epistemological entelechy's maieutic had an exogamous homogeny with spatiotemporal telemetry's exigence.  The basic fecundity of cosmic continuum's radix repartee's mesomerism becomes corporeally preternatural's impetus intrigue to intuitional intrepid.  Livid lucid lambent loquacious emanations that presage synergy's retrospectively retroactive to nuance fulgurous fulham's fulcrum.  Cognizance categorical imperative's cognitive, clairaudience clairvoyance, omniscient omnipotent omnipresence.  Unary's unbridled aorist actuator ethology's entelechy.  Zoomorphic zoolatry's social contiguities to demagoguery.  Hegira to Xanadu ne plus ultra exodus.  Elan Vital's apotheosis.  Hectic duty deontological probity.  Noumenal sentience's irrefragably inevitable semantics.  Pandemically phatic futurity fatidics to kitsch kithe.  

I'm sorry Melan but I don't believe that we must lose track of our corporeal being's identity to experience the true essence of love.  We should enhance each other's  cognizance constituency.
Written in response to Melancholy of innocence's poem of the same name.

https://hellopoetry.com/poem/4838122/omnific-transeunt/
Raj Bhandari Jul 2020
SO THE ROSES ARE RED & THE SEA IS BLUE,
YOU DON'T KNOW MELAN,I REALLY LOVE U!

— The End —