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JP Mantler Mar 2018
I promise I'll be on my best behavior
But I hear a thing calling me for the keys
As lofty as I try, they drop into oblivion
Serious, I better come back to inhibit
The picture opens up sideways
And they single me out like a crusty chutzpah
The peeling pages ffffffffffffff nnnn
Coccinellidae attacks his family grave light
A nod to the growling and glistening moray next to me
He is big, and he is covered in my spit -- I tell him one
Find a better party whose postponed
I have no idea what this one is about.
Arek Oct 2019
when you're diving until
you see a big fat eel
that's a moray

when you're seeing a fish
too big for a dish
that's a whale

when you see a commotion
deep underneath the ocean
it's no seal

bells will ring ting a linga ling
ting a linga ling ting a linga ling
you're a meal
Mateuš Conrad Jan 2019
and the difference between
a higher tier whiskey
and a lower tier whiskey?

higher tier: pale amber...
lower tier:
   tickling caramel bourbon...

and yes:
i like my alcohol with
a story of its own,
one of exploring
the palette...

yes... glen moray:
there's certainly
butter-scotch in it...
but the lemongrass?
not with every glass,
which is why
i find connoisseurs
suspect...

          not from one
glass,
and certainly not
from a sniffing around...

unlike *****
drank properly:
shoved into a freezer
and then drank
smoothly like
a gômme syrop...

whiskey:
the profanity of
sipping it straight...
or mixing it like
some British WWI
colonel
with some soda water...

on ice...
one minute delay...
culls the bite
of any excess Smokey
Fitzpaddy left...

neck on the guillotine!
oh but i have drank
to the brain-drain
body numbing
stages of youth's exploits...
famously
Edinburgh's snakebite:

half a cider, half a lagger
topped with blackcurrant
concentrate...

what?! not lagger?
what then... lager,
i.e. lay-ger?
          digger not dye-ger
of diger?
           no via
no why as to why:
        it's dein-ger
for danger
  and hop-hop for
the dagger of Brutus?

et tu: tutti ******* frutti...
hop-hop:
Easter bunny softy,
as i...
               et tu:
as an epitaph with
no grave...

         and however
many maxims...
said puppet in
the fiddly tongue-tied
aspect of death's
philosopher stone:
the Hindu wild-eyed
traffic of reincarnation...

epitaph contra
            maxims:
life's load
   and a foot dent
on the earth like:
the one that they won't
take a photograph
of: as they did
of the one on the moon...

pointless going
to Mars...
not taking random
earth objects
to the moon...
  to see:
funny-whacky
gravity do don't:
sample some
clock-ticking
on the father
to the daughters of
the tides,
the rains...
   and all:
   and they minded
the egoist...
while they shoved
the whole universe
in their minds with
cthulhu receptors:

             and...
well... it wasn't exactly
1990s television static...
or... what the sight
of Belzeebub looks like...

the whole lagger
not lager "debate"?
i don't even want to bring
diacritical marks into
this...
         and i won't!

first prize: silver sputnik
of brunswick...

               now all i'm missing
is a banjo... and a toothpick...
as ever this medium:

concentrates upon the motto:

          sequor lepus albus.
Mateuš Conrad Jul 2016
some would call it a profanity - from the islands of northern Europe i liked the Scots the most, in my first year at Edinburgh Scottish weather played a joke, i don't remember a single gloomy day - i do remember not sleeping one night, and trekking up Arthur's Seat to watch the sunrise, then climbing down, buying Kellogg's cornflakes and full-fat milk and eating them - that magic moment just between daytime fully sets in - it's so fresh, a reality proof, just before the mundane job applicants get up, you get a sense of what's truly taken for granted in society - it only lasts for a few minutes - before the commuters' nagging sets in, and everything fresh (awaiting the new dawn) becomes custard thick - sticky, sickly honey glue pungent... anyway... i'm making a grand profanity at the moment: tier 1 - whiskey and ice, tier oblivion - whiskey and coca cola... but what i'm drinking is like a virus immune to antibiotics, no amount of citrus barley caramel can mask the smoked salmon with a tinge of variously fruity accents can mask it... Glen Moray, single malt, an Elgin Classic - it is a profanity, i agree - i should drink whiskey like mulled wine - but i'm in a hurry for a mindset, and i'm not bothered that much about passing down aesthetics - my palette says otherwise. yeah, my love for Scotland came from climbing up a ladder in the English hierarchy at school - everyone wanted to be taught by Mr. Thomas Boonce - aged 15 went into B1 (or however they noted the selection process) - aged 16 on top of my game, A1 class - a blazing comet trail of ambition, shared the same desk with my enemy shoulder-to-shoulder, the one who promised me a south american plant would give me grand hallucinations, ****** the mother of my ******* son and wa-lah! elephant trunk pulled from a top hat playing jazz - that Jesus bit about loving your enemies? esp. if they're your childhood friends and are **** crazy? you don't love them, your heart turns to stone and it says skipping on lake: what a shame... so much potential in him wasted on jealousy, the way he trusted a woman that is now on some sort of psychiatric medication... i can't love enemies, what i can do is feel sorry for a waste of human potential... (knock on chest)... yep, this ol' ticker is solid stone... and sooner or later it will be added to a mountain i'm constructing in my mind.

thank god for rabbinical literature -
i could pour days over these pages - i literally open a book,
a compilation of entries -
why hasn't anyone noticed the genius of written Hebraic?
i know in the middle east is a wasp nest of harking and
memorable achoo - or quasi (~, literary denotation,
thereabouts, so so, kinda, well, approximate too,
hand gesture in that symbol, good-in-bad-bad-in-good) -
just now i was admiring the fact that Hebraic hides vowels -
truly, they hide them, ingenious buggers -
all the vowels in Hebraic are hidden -
in translation to Latin the Hebrews treat vowels
like post-Latin users of the original S.P.Q.R. alphabet
use diacritical marks - and newspaper Hebraic doesn't
include them in print, only: i suppose in poetry and
rabbinical writings are they exposed -
which stems largely from what is cordoned off -
or rather the fruits of the work of encapsulation -
Latin is slightly biased, no letter is truly encapsulated,
shut-off from another - aye, be, cee, dee, ee, ef, hay'tch (
a distinction), em, en, ***... zed (an exception), ex, you
get the idea - there are no nouns in the post-Latin
alphabet as such - which is why in science Greek letters
were used as constants - these consonant constants
encapsulated not only the phonetic content of a symbol,
but also allowed for an encapsulation of some higher
purpose - e.g. α (angular acceleration) -
β (sound intensity) - γ (gamma rays) - δ (heat in chemistry,
the perfect error, the Laplace operator, etc.) -
ε (set theory, the limit ordinal of the sequence -
    html disapproval to be written as: ω (tier squared ω,
    and one above the squared tier ω, ω root ω double root ω -
    variant alias of this? Hebraic notation of u .
                                                               ­                   .
                                                               ­                      .
     *shurek
) - Θ (Debye notation) - θ (potential temp. in
thermal dynamics) - ι (orbital inclination in celestial mechanics) -
κ (curvature) - Λ (lattice) - λ (decay constant in radioactivity) -
μ (micron, SI prefix, one millionth) - ν (a neutrino) -
ξ (a random variable) - π (too obvious, πr squared) -
ρ (correlation coefficient in statistics) - Σ (summation operator) -
σ (area density) - τ (torque) - φ (the golden ratio, 1.618...) -
ψ (the cat in a box, wave function, quantum mechanics) -
ω (the infinite ordinal);
                                         it's precisely because the Greeks to
encapsulate their phonetic symbols that so much stability
was brought up - look how poverty stricken the Latin variations
are - these are not merely letters, they are actually nouns!
you can recite the whole Greek alphabet a bit like going
to a party and being introduced to people: Jim, Charlie,
George, Rosemarie... obviously there are exceptions for
this observation to be bullet-proof (i.e. μ, ν, ξ, π etc.)
but did the scientists mind not using them? no! they kept to
this interpretation that symbols of sound need to be encapsulated -
held together, stable, each symbol needs to be a balancing act -
an ~equal amount of consonants and vowels need to be
invoked when writing either a or α, b or β, g or γ -
there needs to be an invocation of names to these symbols -
not mere ah be c e ef gee... English for its laziness in omitting
diacritical marks did the unspeakable when digital paper came
about - it turned itself into a quasi encryption tongue,
acronym fuelled and in all honestly - self-conscious of its faults
yet basking in them! but the real genius in encoding signs truly
belongs to the Hebraic school...

you find them so coerced by naked pictures,
that their outer resembles no inner -
you find them bound to an idea that the inner can
somehow compensate - but it can't -
the outer as the inner reveals nothing,
no love, merely a **** - the winged-Hussars die
in Ukrainian fertile land, and with the music,
you can only think of the drudgery of walking
through knee-high mud - you can just picture
the Cossack moustaches wedged behind the ears
like earrings - i too would have eaten my tongue that way
had it been permitted - without permission
i spoke of a stake tartar and my tongue into one -
then the mantra came - kametz, tzeré, chirek, kametz,
tzeré, kametz, kametz, tzeré, tzeré, cholem, kametz, kametz
,
- i will not be treated like some dumb farmer!
      your Yurt empire is fledgling into the sunset!
  and my heart is enshrined into a bitter toil! it will love
as it pleases! not with you saying what there's to love!
tzeré, shurek, kametz, kametz, tzeré, kametz, cholem, tzeré,
chirek, kametz
. what a mantra!
a, e, i, a, e, a, a, e, e, o, a, a, e, u, a, a, e, a, o, e, i, a -
patterns strangre than in a poetic rhyming scheme -
respective incisions into still-life motives of movement -
i.e. if a vowel be my hand, a consonant be a chair i sit on:
kametz of aleph (א), tzeré of bet (ב), chirek of gimel (ג),
kametz of dalet (ד), tzeré of heh (ה), kametz of vav (ו).
kametz of zayin (ז), tzeré of chet (ח), tzeré of tet (ט),
cholem of yod (י), kametz of kaf (ק), kametz of lamed (ל),
tzeré of mem (מ), shurek of nun (נ), kametz of samekh (ס),
kametz of ayin (ע), tzeré of peh (פ), kametz of tzadi (צ),
cholem of kof (ק), tzeré of resh (ר), chirek of shin (ש)... and
finaly the kametz of tav (ת)* - we really like our matchstick
men, don't we? in terms of ancients tongues,
we like our curvatures in modern tongues of Greek
and Latin, don't we?
instilled the names of vowels! kametz (a
                                                 tzeré (e
            chirek (i
                                          cholem (o
                 shurek (u
                                                           pentagon thus far,
    revealed vowels with diacritic interpretation
           kametz, as soured: חָ - tau, vowel as diacritical mark
elsewhere -
                       tzeré - or umlaut below the letter - alternatively:
           וָ qàmetz                   וֵ tzeré
וִ ḥìreq                              וֹ ḥólem                   וּ shùreq
     (c, k, q - make it quick, à, 1st),
                (é - prolong it, to catch a breath, or the first
                      tetragrammaton H),
that's the genius of the encoding though... the omission of
vowels, or vowels as diacritical marks - one shurek (u .
                                                               ­                                   .
                            ­                                                                 ­        .)
among 10 kametz and 7 tzeré - gematria at its purest -
one shurek, 2 chireks and 2 cholems -
a form of encoding deviating from obscure onomatopoeia
and the void and meaninglessness, toward
a sound ushering a word for word, and actions parallel -
but this encapsulation of breath taken and
breath released, as in writing, the speaker does not
suddenly breathe again - but is kept within limit,
a consonant starting point, the zenith of breath or soul
and a return to one body, v A v (e.g.).
but imagines being able to avoid noun insertions -
then Hebrew is very much as modern English -
when modern English ought to utilise diacritical marks
on either vowel or consonant, it does not -
it doesn't have a single sound encoding worthy of a name -
there's no omega, there is only oh -
Hebrews treat their vowels as diacritical marks -
their language is one massive crossword -
how do they even read HBRC? who the hell taught them
when to insert the vowels from following the roots
as stated HBRC toward the tree that's HEBRAIC?
this is ******* bewildering - i don't know how they do it!
what's agonising is their notion that patterns in letters
having numerical values is somehow meaningful,
as if something horrid can be averted - to me 1 + 1 = 2
is enough - i don't need alef / αλεφ / αλεθ (א) + bet / βετ (ב) =
anything but gimel / γιμελ (ג) -
this is the ****-pile of having so many prophets in your society
and not enough philosophers - the Casandra Standard -
Greeks had the philosophers, the Hebrews had their
prophets, both in excess - in the end the cult of prophecy
in Hebraic society turned into a Casandra Standard
borrowed from Greek myth - while Greek philosophers...
i don't actually know what happened to them -
i think most of them became dentists after Aristotle suggested
women had fewer teeth than men.
Don Brenner Mar 2011
Thaw

Today I cause erosion
I angle sand once perpendicular
to a half frozen lake
to a beachy slide
softened with shells
with starfish three hundred
miles away in an ocean
warm as the lips of a moray.

Earth stills below me
ten percent snow
thirty percent mud
fifty nine dirt
and one percent soles.
I carry a stick
I drag through earth
like a rudder through waves
and a clearing I swear
looks like it once
housed a UFO.

Remember the summer
in a three foot grass field
we used plywood and a rope
to make crop circles
that nobody would ever see
and had a fire
next to a creek and listened to water
scratch and sniff the shale.
Jason Lingaya Mar 2019
Here there little fella

Here there

C– l – o – s – e – r

Down the aisle

Follow the sign

Tick-tock

Teases a clock

In the shadows

Be brave hither

Heroic never

Trust your host

To guide you

Through an abyss

Of unprecedented bliss

Jack was a wimp

The Ripper I am

At your service

Hesitating still ugh

Never mind fella

Pray hang on

One moment more

Jolly and bright

The darkest alleys

Are my quarters

The austere grounds

On which I Rip Rip Rip

Gluttony is the name

Of my game

Instead of teeth

Dear Lord

Mine are grim lethal

Razor sharp blades

And my throat

A gruesome One-Way ticket

No wonder my stomach

Knows no rest

At your service

The Ripper I am

The infamous

Snowflake Moray Eel.
Childhood fishing memories from Poste-Lafayette, Mauritius.
Mateuš Conrad Dec 2022
i'm sitting... well... i can't call it sitting... not given my proportions
and the size of the windowsill...
i'm perched on it... sure... sitting... i managed to turn
my folded leg: on which i'm sitting into a makeshift cushion:
sure... the leg is numb after i drifted off into the night
and... oddly... the night saved me from the nothing
that not thinking: i.e. pretending to think while not thinking
(creative a narrative) actually creates...
i like the night... the night is not the universe...
i hardly think about the world from the perspective of
thinking about the universe... black holes and stars don't
really bother me... they amaze me... but...
let's just say i need something immediate...
i know it's winter because the early morning fog is heavy
and fog hanging in the air is what finally makes
the trees loose all their golden fleeces of pointless
chlorophyll... so there they are: daunting skeletons...
plus the air is getting heavier because it's getting dried
in the cold... but not the sort of cold associate
with the continent...
    i just sit there and wonder... looking at my private
library... the last books my late grandfather bought...
i'm on vol. 6 of the modern epic and: to no surprise...
i couldn't have read the books in English...
just like i couldn't read a philosophy book in English...
with one exception... Wittgenstein's Tractatus...
the opening line hooked me:
     that line about tautology... and... well?
how people speak tautologically... i.e. misguiding actual
rhetoric for... sinking into the depths of a thesaurus (rex)...
i dipped into that grand book from time to time:
but rarely did i give it much attention...
why? well... if there's a substitute word i can use
to other turn a daisy into a ******* bouquet of flowers...
if my language can exfoliate...
oh... you see it with the decrepit writers...
they will employ the thesaurus from time to time:
it's so obvious... why? the substitute word used stands
out like a Siamese Twin's fourth limb...
if you don't use "said" word on a daily basis...
why are you ramping / vamping your otherwise passing-by
vocab?
esp. when you can work and work around with
alternations of 2 + 2 = 4... why complicate 2 + 2 = 4
with... say... 2 + √4 = 4?!
                                       but i like these moments...
i'm sitting without a single cognitive-itch of thought
cramming my mind... looking at the night
and the night looking back at me...
infuriating me with an absence of something
that's not a wife or children...
or conversation...
                        
                           it's a Friday night and i have a party in
my head... even though i'm not dancing...
well... tapping my fingers keeping a rhythm to
a song: make-out... Cristooh...
long gone are the years of being 18 through to 21
and walking back home from a night out in a club
being "rejected" by women...
i forgot about screaming mad being rejected...
these days it's so much easier...
i just go to the brothel and get my fill...
luck? what luck... i'm just smart to have avoided
any sexually transmitted diseases...
i played this one "prank" on Mona while she surprised
me by wanting to perform oral *** on me
without protection... i ****** my naked flesh into
her twice: i knew she was not willing...
but i did it as a "joke"... listen, i told her...
i know... but i just wanted to give you a feel...
all hell broke loose when i realised that
she actually put a ****** on my phallus that was
way too small... after climaxing and the great
"shrimp-shrinking"... the ****** with the offload
remained in her... my problem?
you put a ****** on me that was too small!

but i just started sitting there "thinking"...
we're not a part of any generation that has...
the capacity to become innovators of bettering existence...
we didn't invent the hammer coupled with the nail...
we didn't invent the ship, or beer...
we didn't invent electricity... we saturated this space
with social media and **** knows what else...
i'm sitting there and thinking...
furore! Adolf ****** killed X number of people...
AIDS? probably killed just as much...
and the latter half weren't dehumanised... they walked
into the slaughterhouse like slaughter-bound-cretins...
the former half had a decent amount of party
with the **** speaking: blah blah you'll be fine...

we don't live in a time when some genius is going
to reinvent aeroplanes... or the process of making whiskey...
or sending an email... or bypassing
the scrutiny of editors of publishing houses:
which are no longer houses...
same ****, different cover on some page
on the internet...
             we're a generation that can either:
1. create as little existential complications... or...
2. create as many existential complications as are deemed
required... possible...
too bad i'm bilingual and my lessons in grammar
sort of short-circuit when an English-speaking person
with the generosity of identifying as trans-ortho-meta-
benzene-cuck-ring-****-friendly-dwag-qveen-blah­-blah...
comes across someone akin to: i'm not budging...
i gave up my formative years to pedagogy...
strict... catholic pedagogy... old dog new tricks...
you think one biologically adult wants to learn lessons
from another biologically adult that has the mental
capacity less inquisitive of a child, something?!
you think?!

oh sure... at 36... i should have a wife and kids...
learning from the most proximate defendants of said practice...
my mother and my father... freaks...
my great-grandfather and great-grandmother...
also freaks...
the rest? oh... nomads of the heart...
perhaps my great-uncle and great-aunty on my maternal
side... he ended up being an amputee
and she turned out to be a hunchback... they stuck together...
the rest? shrapnel alliances...
i'm not getting involved...
i have my space and my books...
and my ******...

                but we will not be of a generation where
something grand will emerge... we have everything...
foremost we have medicinal anaesthesia!
for ****'s sake... the wonders people managed discovering
the ultra-components of cloves!
the discovery of beer!
                         what are "we" supposed to discover?
the decency to shut the **** up and live a very pleasant life
on the verges of teasing a "metaphor" of
Robinson Crusoe?!
                               looks that way!

we're the mediating generation...
mind you... ask me 3 hours prior while i was helping with
putting up the Christmas decorations...
who's your favorite Batman...
i would have told you... Michael Keaton...
hands down...
then again... who directed those two films?
first movie was fine... second movie?
Bat meets Scissor-hand-man... that ******...
teenage girl macabre... i get it... the Penguin made it great...

oh but this Batman movie wasn't like
all that stupendous Christopher Nolan "thinking"...
i actually liked this movie... well...
the first 20 minutes of it... the football was on
and i was gearing up to being busy with drinking...
but? a heresy...
Robert Pattison is the best Batman... ever...

Michael Keaton was... but...
                       no no... this is another level of the playing
field... it's like asking someone: who's you favorite Bond...
Daniel Craig... Brosnan, Connery, T. Dalton... or Moore...
eh? trick question...
   WOE'G'ER! ****'s sake... a ginger **** that ****
beats anything south of ginger... or auburn...
or mahogany... or whatever that ******* pumpernickel
was or wasn't... alive or terribly sorry: dead...

**** me, i grew up on a diet of Batman this...
Batman that...
i wasn't raised by my father from the age of
4 through to 8...
i wasn't raised by mother from the age of 6 through
to 8... it wasn't difficult...
but the "moniker" stuck with me...  
            no wonder i'm stll living in the "incesto...

incestoual rupture: wow! another google-whack
via a mis-spelling:
  incestoual rupture vs.
                  incestual rupture...

time to die... zeit zu sein geboren!
    und alles das ist... willkommen! das ist alle!
nein! nein! alles ist alles!

this begging before the altar of freedoms
before the atomised projection of the bomb...
death by stealth.. carried the dead baby
to its cranium and cradle with
Hispanic sighs...

i still love you: regardless the misgivings
of older and more provocative men...
i still love you...
       i will shed wanting with the tears i'd want
to shed: which i won't...
but i will not cry...
i'll just think of ice-cream!
Mateuš Conrad Jan 2020
i have to sometimes be inclined
to allow myself to feel...
dead people leeching onto me...
and this is no seclusion mentality...
given the already printed numbers
and the readily available
population numb numbing numbers...
i am well worn and subsequently
wallowing in: to come, bargain
neon tokyo proof...

James, the Earl of Moray...
and what was "earl" Fassbender...
and this not any other Macbeth...
i am living but given my prior to:
for the dead inclined...
to have to... speak their unwelcome
tongue among the living!
which makes me!

their equal in me being twice
the unwelcome inclined!
my kingdom the shadoqw,
the rust and the dust and bone
and maxim and all that is least
gracious when all, somehow,
spring back to life!
the scythe bore smile within
the glee of the moon come mid!
and all its harvest of constellations!
too dear my love... to heave me baron over
a cousin!

and you to be gladly: towed!
the beard! the beard!
give me a year to admire my own fervent
blush of ****** *****!
before your fabrege "egg"...
scouts! half-boiled... hard-boiled...
soft-boiled...
and all those promises in between!
within this given framework...
each time i feel inclined to cry...
i want to grow most cruel...
the more i cry the more i want to be
cruel...
i want to tease...................

something that does not require
"it' being teased...

thomas cromwell and henry VIII...
elizabeth I and william cecil!
"oops" via tony blaire and alastaire campbell...
doppelgänger "oops"...
but it's not even an "oops"...
herr goebbels: goebbels nicht herr...

can anyone cite the **** doppelgänger
hollywood counter plotline - lineage?!

vorstellen! finden nicht ein doppelgänger!
nein goebbels! aber sie sah...
sogar Gunther von Hagens
ist nein Paul Joseph Goebbels!

i say! the thespian autocracy! primo?!
the actor is above the painter
and all will: bend the knew before this...
lordship of the weakest knee?!

there was a time where:
a macbeth did come before
a hamlet! you *******, porky pie!
but this is no: minding a Freudian couch...
the macbeth comes first...
the hamlet second!

stiff! in my "upper"... "prime"...
the delicacy of being confined...
the thespian autocracy is still forthcoming...
the actors still hold sway over the nunnery
and the priesthood...
otherwise i would "see" the "truth"...
should i be the next to nothing next
dumb plumber with enough
of ****** to marry a woman and make callus
the offspring wishing to
have been: better bred...
or kept in better lineage.;..

a cromwell a cecil... a campbell... a goebbels...
but just one philip augustus...
solo project...
tough on the tooth and limbo jaw..
said: crown the hazelnut!
otherwise... the flag of georgia was
never a universal identification posit
for the young turks and...
when russia would alwahys yawn...
the crusader myth...
the crusader myth: we woz izlam...
and the northern crusades against the prussians,
the lithuanians...
i almost forget that some of us vicinity cracow
barons would treat the masovians
and the capital warsaw as:
not yet incorporated...

until napoleon...
but of course... not since citing the evil empire...
kazakh and what not... turks in new york...
perfectly angry... perfectly: boring and...
Philip's in-on in-oh... does it matter?
there was only this one type of crusades...
into the... Ishlam Ishmael People-Kind sorts
of: the Peoples...
there was never a northern crusade...
the Poles never defended the last pagans of Europe...
the Lithuanians...
no... no! no! NO! that **** never happened!
we woz kurds!
all the ******* time:

me alias bin-baghdadi! all woz iz woz iz!
******* uncle sam...
******* Meghan Mcmarkle!
the blocks and tiramisu needs woz to we'write woz...
coz... trig and: Fishland! bez knowz uz as
Finnishland! sayz auz!

bongo bongo... cowabunga...
seez you better... zzz... pulling this sort of **** in
Wha-wha-usher-in-us-yah!
bongo bongo? no bongo... choke...
st. petersburg'yah?

for all this "misunderstanding"...
the plebs resorted to misuse the plurality
of the pronoun "we"... via them... and they...
one royal resorted to enforced retirement...
which gave me ample time to abuse
the royal pronoun of: one... and the "concrete" we...
i iz pleb... i iz "eastern" U-rop plebz...
not Rotherham plebz iz w and "e"...
"we"... wed to the weeds on a Wednesday...
widowed come a Friday...

any scot or velsh or essex proud is not
plebz... but uz ****** lithuanian...
mid-week ukranian and not quiet russian
or igor gweek...
we'z plebz! bongo bongo: kenya two-point-oh-oh...
best: betz ugh oh oh!
we'z plebz and we drill!
drill yo! yo!

we learn stupidz in the rapidz oh oh!
we emoji and emopticon con hierogylphic oops
a daisy lo! lo!

i don't even know who, or why,
or who "invited"... "us"... i'm never an "us"...
the ****- can speak for a ****-...
the paddy can speak for a paddy...
but i'm hardly going to speak for...
the old ones from cracow would speak...
rather differently when it came
to the masovians and warsaw...
just like the old germans would speak...
much later... when... the prussians
came down with their berlin...
things change...

it would be oh so much more simpler if...
english, a language...
was not supposed to be this medieval
lingua franca...
at this moment in time...
if i really demand myself to care...
this insomnia will ruin me rampant!
i don't want that...
i will not want that...
i will have... what's leftoever.
David Bremner Oct 2018
I
Ernie struck up his pipes
Ten seconds TOO SOON
And in the wrong millennium

Fiona still had her SKIRT up
Adjusting the top of a nylon stocking
Whilst the KING OF THE JEWS
Left an unfinished drink on the bar
Of the Portland Arms Hotel.

All Hail Jesu, King of the Jews
Striding out through the Portland's door
All Hail George Munro
Best dry-stone dyker in the parish
And owner of a MOPED.

II

The procession moved SOUTH
Across the former A9
Careful never to exceed 30MPH
Fiona didn't go
(Preferring a young stranger's hand stroking her thigh)

Then -                                                                                    
The minister appeared, but.......
DIDN'T BELIEVE
That this was the Second Coming
He stood on the front steps of the kirk
That was now a Cathedral ( Lybster henceforth a SHINING CITY!)
Wishing all a HAPPY NEW YEAR
Including the KING OF THE JEWS
Whom he treated like all others
In true Presbyterian fashion
All Hail Jesu, King of the Jews
All Hail The LYBSTER STONE
Left outside in a forgotten corner
In true Presbyterian fashion

Beyond the Police Station and Primary School
A GREAT BEACON blazed
Lit by two schoolgirls and Mr Marshall Bowman
Pyre for a thousand years
Sinners preheated their teenage **** and middle aged bums at it
The nearby football pitch was illuminated by it
Nobody remembered the forgotten old folk because of it
They held their drinks and met their eyes
And as the procession arrived
Departed for the COMMUNITY CENTRE
A veritable Sodon and Gomorrah (BYOB!)

All Hail Jesu, King of the Jews
All Hail Mr Marshall Bowman
Rm32, Geography Block, WICK - HIGH - SCHOOL

(This part rhymes to appease the DEMANDERS)                        

The hall wis fill wi' yowng and owld
An' packed lek at hid wisna' cowld
Some were timid, ithers bowld
Little bairnies wid no be towld

When the lot hed gethered in
(The fire ootside hed raxed their sin)
They rolled their sleeves an got stuck in
Til grub an ***** an.. well.. ******!

All Hail Jesu, King of the Jews
All Hail Andrew Gunn
Fumbling with a fifteen year olds brassiere
In Donald Eyers' back garden

Jesus turned away from the COMMUNITY CENTRE sinners
leaving them with these words:
The Scribes and Pharisees of LYBSTER COMMUNITY COUNCIL
Will raise here a PAGAN STONE to mark this night
So that Alan Henderson can henceforth
URINATE on it on Gala night
in a political DEED.

And the Scribes took down these words for the minutes
As carefully as I imagined
Taking down the posties knickers.

Whenceforth -                                                                                    
Heralded by three giggling lassies
Jesus entered the great square of the SHINING CITY
Grey's Place
Thst held one butcher shop, two convenience stores
The Commercial Bar and a Post Office
That sold postcards of the harbour
and the Silver Cloud II.

All Hail Jesu, King of the Jews
All Hail the Silver Cloud II
That landed a record haul of 365 boxes
In 1973!

Bare was the square
That lay before the King of the Jews
Only Tony Ryrie's cat Patchy
Moved in its GREAT WASTES
Patch and an empty packet of Salt n Shake
The only witnesses
To the GREAT MILLENNIUM MIRACLE

Whereby -                                                                                  
A shaft of blinding light
Shone forth from the British Telecom phone box
Deflected off the Cathedral weathervane
Up, up (like a great *******) in to the heavens
Where the inhabitants of the moon Titan
Looking up through their dense, noxious atmosphere
Saw this light and sent
INTERPLANETARY FRATERNAL GREETINGS
To their sisters and brothers of Lybster (twinned with Fort Mackinac USA)
That were not returned

All Hail Jesu, King of the Jews
All Hail Johnny Mackay
Envoy from the plannet Titan
to the Court of St James

Jesus was NOT angered by this
For he knew that DEEP inside the people were good
And as Fiona (still in the Portland Arms) dabbed the TIA MARIA off
Her blood red lips
He struck south
Down past Donnie Mackenzie's

All Hail Jesu, King of the Jews
All Hail Donnie Mackenzie
Jannie of Lybster Primary
Pulling out your wobbly teeth in his cupboard
Then giving you a POLO

Until -                                                                                        
He reached the Harbour Road bus shelter
Where a choice was offered
To proceed to the harbour and part the Moray Firth
Or live amongst the lepers
Of SHELLIGOE ROAD.............

III

I was sent to the harbour
To pump the boat
The early morning frost glinted on a half-full Tia Maria bottle
That lay discared on the grass
I pulled the cork                                                
Took a long, sickly draw
                       Then threw it back  

In the SHINING CITY only some things had changed.
I.
You say that there is nothing
To live for,
There is nothing
To achieve.

All is broken here,
There is nowhere to go,
All ways are not dear,
One can only scream, oh!

There are weak shadows of the fog,
There is hate, there are crimes,
There is all this human smog,
There is no sense to our lives.

II.
But I tell you that there is a better,
More wonderful and sunny world,
Where like soft songs, like a short meter,
We can fly, and this is not the last word.

I can tell you that this world remains,
This is on this... such dark earth,
On these streets without stairs
And heaven, if you still breath...

And if you still ask me where...
Where to go, how to have a life...
I will tell you that you can go there,
To yourself to find how rife

Not to be!

III.
And, there is also another world
No one alive has been there so far,
Neither Socrates, who was bald
Nor Plato, and any Judith Shklar!

No one was there and back again,
This is another air, another form of life,
And no one knows the time and when
One has to go there to fly, not strife...

No one knows but everybody’s so wise...
What we see here is real but material,
It is all teeming and brutal disguise,
But there are things there – unfamiliar

We are with them...

IV.
...yet.
Go straight.
It’s a net.

It is a bet!
Pascal’s freight.
Warm, wet...

The eternal bed.
Nothing left.
All left.

V.
You have no concept when you are born,
But when you die, much more is driven:
You see the light when the heaven is sworn,
You see the darkness when the hell is given.

Although during a life you often see nothing...
Like a bee, like a candle, like a batwing.
Like funny moray eels, we have to swim,
And funny is life, and later life is dim.

And, yes, a human being is a moth
That flies to the fire of the candle...
It is you and me, we are such both,
But in life we all want a bright spangle!


17.4.2021, night
Nothing is life.... Really?
Soft eyed seals see us
As we swirl with binoculars
On a circular platform
Looking out to sea.
The Moray Firth chops
Hiding the fins of
Basking sharks from view.
The water is full of potential fins
That trick and taunt us.

When we are stopped for a while,
Potential occurs,
A shift that we both feel.
It is undivorced from our conversation
From the rhythm of the sea
From the times the tide
gravels up higher
Closer to us.
A bird dives, a gillimot you say.

We talk of movement
Then we move, slowly.
Birds fly past.
We may have called them
They may have called us.
We have to 'not know'
In this time of naming birds.

— The End —