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Kevin Feb 2017
face shaped like a sunflower.
no. my face is a sunflower.
le tournesol.
the sun turns my soul.
i turn my face.
i turn to chase;
to chase the sun.
i turn to chase.
rooted roots become undone.
i chase and die.
i wither and dry.
my roots, they dry
when i die.
my face becomes food.
dried seeds for forage.
wooded seeds for storage.
my face becomes undone.
squirrels and birds
peck, peck, peck;
crack, crack, crack.
they pull my face apart.
feeding frenzy from the start.
i dried, i died.
chased the sun,
i chased for fun.
To feed my soul,
i came undone.
i chased away
to face the fact,
i am food to come.
peck, peck, peck;
crack, crack, crack.
sunflower tournesol
Kevin Jul 2019
arugula and watermelon
and the joy in pain
of sunscreen in my eyes
your eyes disappeared into the sky
and the car smelled of running feet

i remembered a dream from long ago
while you were tying your hair
and standing before me against the blue horizon
le tournesol de la beau rivage
was finally real and present
Kevin Feb 2017
She, Rachel, was mentioned in passing,
In a letter addressed to his brother, Theo.
She was just a girl that he had maybe loved.
Maybe more than loved. he didn't really know her,
But we would later learn how far he would go.
What's more than loved? felt possessive towards?
Felt protective of? idolized? worshipped?
These all sound unbalanced.
Some people enjoy that passion.
The yellow house crumbled underneath of it.
That unbalance must be balanced.
Somehow, someway.
It can balance the world.
It can scare you to death.
It can push people away.
In time, it did all of these things.

He lived where tulips grow as rows of rainbows
And beards in winter kept his face warm and orange.
Where the water rests high above his head.
Where windmills turn to mill the fields of wheat.
Influenced by spirituality found in potatoes
Being consumed under dim light.
Influenced by the subtly curved right angles of elderly woman
Hunched over, farming the famished fields.
Repeatedly painting vases of turning souls, tournesol.
Influenced by color as we don't tend to notice,
Influenced by starlight behind a cypress night,
Influenced by the ideals of an eastern world and
Almond blossoms against a blue sky.
He was mad. a genius.
A man outside his time.
He gave her his ear; the whole thing,
Except for a partial earlobe.
He put it in a box for her
And delivered it personally.
Hoping she would listen.

At least thats what i like to think.
'Cause why the **** else would you cut
Your **** ear off and give it to someone
You only know from a distance?
Maybe it was just to hear he voice.
We don't know what he was thinking when he cut off his ear but thats what i like too think. as far off as that maybe. he did it at a time when his "reality" seemed to be slipping out of his control. He was troubled and incredible. And her name wasn't Rachel, it was Gabrielle Berlatier.
Je suis orpailleur
Je vis d'or et d'eau bien fraîche
En attendant Godot.
Je plonge dans les entrailles de ma muse
Armé de piolet, pelle et battée.
Je sonde à belles dents le fil des eaux
Je me prélasse dans le lit de la rivière
Et jette dans la battée sable, eaux et graviers
A la recherche inlassable
Des paillettes couleur de colza et de tournesol
Sélectionnées et assaisonnées par ma Muse
Jusqu'à ce qu'elles se précipitent et fondent.
Je me nourris d'elles et elles de moi
Elles me mâchent et me mastiquent
Pour faire jaillir en moi des geysers d'huile philosophale
En attendant les lingots de Godot.

Et dans chaque mot que je dédie à ma muse
J'engloutis ses carats nature
Sans colorant artificiel
Sans huile de palme
Sans conservateur
Car je conserve en moi les pépites
À l'abri de la lumière jalouse de God-haut.
Mateuš Conrad Jan 2020
nudni ludzie zawsze mają coś
do powiedzenia

-

boring people, always have
something to say,

bo to zawsze znaczy gawarić
         o innych -

because it always means
speaking about others.

3 ******* nights,
i've been mitigating "concern"
for a light source
via a candle,
   and a samsung tablet...

what has resorted
in giving me the most comfort?
what prometheus came down
with onto the plateau...

what the demigod son of
zeus came down with,
with, electricity?!

                  fire, fire is comforting,
in that it warms,
but also illuminates...
what is a thunder bolt?
light... and then?
  electrocution!
         no more, no, less!

the cats agree...
i'm good with:
from earth you came,
unto the earht you will return...
in between?
i need to pour some wax
into my hand,
just, to "make" sure...

                    danke (dir).
hier, mein zeppelin!

          was war was:
        mit die Elisabeth-Gruß?!
             tragen-zu komödie-skizzieren?!

english people talk too much...
   englischvolk spreschen zu viel...

i'll speak my german,
via anglican grammar...
                for a reason...
       beyond the reason of:
well, i've integrated...
there's no other reason for me
to "integrate",
other than to,
disembody myself from
these, corrupt people...

              ich bin deutsche,
durch fälschen...

            i had to...
  you think relearning head-banging
was somehow "easy",
without learning some deutsche?!

oh, yes yes...
   ich war gehen mein glauben im
diese fälschung sachsen...

   pierdole...
               nawet...  jeżeli mówię
gminą mowy,
  a nie panem miasta:
tym - germańskim...
                             to, moja: sprawa...

when was, center, osten?
            oh, right... when Warschau...
und Berlin was "osten" off anywhere
beside Paris or Loon'don,
and as far east as Novosibirsk?
as vest as is vest as
is the "pity" showered upon
           Doob'lin?!

i'm waiting.

and in my waiting: who could say...
i have a fetish for german language...
but none of their pornographic materials?

perhaps i would have learned french...
if i knew the post-latin order...
and how the germanic languages use another
order... how even western slavic uses...
post-latin romantic order of words...

best example?
sunflower oil... in english...
in german: sonnenblumenöl...
huile de tournesol in french...
olej słonecznikowy in ****** western slavic -
masovian or galician or...

the sunflower is a "precursor" of...
oil... not elsewhere...
among the french and among the polacks
oil is stressed first...
then the denotation of: what kind of oil?
why i didn't learn french?
oh... i was supposed to forget my mother
tongue...
i would have learned german
with more ease having acquired english...
fwench ****** it oops...

what's that, kind auditory hallucination
of spontaneity and no l.c.d. being ingested?
what's that word?
niemcy? hear that? the word means:
germans...

so what's cooking and more to the point...
who's cooking and what?
languages?
in my vicinity... 4 at least...
one as still acquired...
one in a caste of a broken lending broker...
one as a fetish and one as
a... minor fetish... Paris circa 2004...
and not because i'm english in any way
possible and i have a: the sort of grudge
that a ****** deals a russian a hand...
english superstitious enclaves when being
a tourist in Paris...
as someone not from Warsaw...
i did find a lisp of Bulgahov in Moscow...
it was aired... suspiciously silent...
a dog-whistle you might say...

the old capital was in lesser Poland...
greater Poland and its trade ties to
Brandenburg via Posen...
no one was expecting a Winchester to London
shift... the masovians were being
incorporated synonym in tempus (in time)
with what was to become of the pagan Prussians...
the new rulers of lower buxton & saxony...
punk history lessons...
because the northern crusades only took
place due to some people
defending the last pagans of europe...
the lithuanians...
and the marriage was a success...
as was rome...
the crown that was known
as greater poland, lesser poland...
snippet of pomeranian...
and...

when bohemia became integral to
the borders of defining the holy roman empire...
the crown with the grand duchy of lithuania...
perhaps the post-vikings did *****
a brick that founded the basis of Kiev...
but there's also L'viv...
and as one greek said to me...
there's no Istambul where i look...
there's only a Constantinople...

no... the Notre Dame would have survived
the **** occupation...
Paris wasn't bombed...
London though? it's a miracle that St. Paul's
survived... with or without a fire...

all this history and... no history class back
in school... dates that are like cognitive
tattoos... i am almost ashamed of reciting them...
but then i do have a body without ink...
historical infantilism...
who is to cite the h'american constitution,
the declaration of independence...
who is to cite the magna carta...
who is to convene over the Union of Lublin -
signed in 1569 - that created a single state
of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth -
who is to ask this "neo-nazis" these
germ-an-ans... and the Muslims regarding
their Iraqi "beef" with the Mongols?

is this truly infantalism? historical infantalism?
to remember or at least,
ascribe oneself a continued presence
of these events? what if not in skin alone...
the mind is a fickle embryo that's bound
to be ****** into a whirlpool of:
scientific exploration and "gender neutral pronouns"...

because what the hell is worth my attention...
that a battle of Hastings took place in 1066?
what of the battle of Tannenberg in 1410...
then the teutonic knights were fighting a northern
crusade against a converted people from 966...
and their coalition of lithuanian pagans
and the rabble e pluribus unum?

infantilism... i guess it must be infantilism...
just like those people citing the former
glory of the british empire...
and they being the descendents of former colonial
subjects...
but if they're all so oh very serious...
look at my tattoos! look at my historical infantilism!

i too can play this game...
i too can look bleak with surprise:
oh you think that the northern crusades didn't take
place? the only holy ground is the levant?
not the old forests of mother Prussia?
to me... it's historical infantalism...
to most it's... Al-Ḥarb al-Ahliyyah al-Libnāniyyah...
or the Dissolution of Yugoslavia...
or...

that... "thing" in Syria...
i love how the Muslims love to put down Christianity
as not being the religion of the pacified...
hell... even i have heard of buddhist warrior monks...
and they cite!
my good friend Samir loved citing this to me...
when i was going through my apostasy and wasn't
ever going to be confirmed in the church's
bureucracy...
apparently a Muslim in the west knows very
little about the catholics coming from old Rus...
vicinity...
what's that quote he used...
matthew 10:34 - do not suppose that i have come
to bring peace to the earth.
i did not come to bring peace, but a sword...

and my most beloved quote about
a second coming... in the Islamic hadith...
حدیث نماز خواندن عیسی به امامت مهدی‎
the (hadith of jesus praying behind mahdi)
as cited by ibn ibn ibn abu huraiah
ibn ibn ibn allamah sayyid sa'eed akhtar rizvi
ibn ibn ibn jabir ibn abd allah...
ibn ibn ibn al-husayn al-ajiri and many others...

where will the kind sir, descend?
in Damascus... and again that Syria "thing"...
once upon a time i could find a good
quote with regards to the descent...
his hair will appear as if falling pearls...
his tears this that and the other...
in a: once upon a time you could find
everything on the internet without it being
meddled for herr zensor purposes and -
an objective lack of transparency...

i see no better indicator that a second coming
has occured within the dogmatism of Islam...
if you couple the two "stipends" of:
believable wording to be carried on and on...
until a freak accident like the Syrian civil
war occurs...

it was hardly a civil war in the polish-lithuanian
commonwealth...
given how the swedes felt inclined to invade
and lay their deluge...
because the king was a swede in this...
freakish... monarchic democracy....
and of course the ukranians...
and of course add some spice of the ottoman
nibble...

again: isn't this historical infantalism?
i should be... when people have all the right
to excavate as much from the holocaust
and the dead in the water slave, trade...
trade... which implies the middle ground
of misery while two opposing factions prospered...

to write of such things...
and not need a little sense of how infantile it is
or rather: can become?
in an otherwise pedagogic rubric?
like we, really needed to learn of the fact
that england was under roman occupation...
and how that's a reason to be proud...
as somehow related to the modern
aesthetic splendour of the Italians...
of which the modern germans scoff at...
given their mozart and their "****"
of the opera... and how... oh ****... i'm using
their letters... but how the germans nor the polacks...
ever entertained the ancient romans...

again... this most certainly has to be some
variant of infantilism... why would i recite
some distant date...
mind citing a past and dead and gone?
perhaps... i never really figured out a "way out"...
perhaps i was always playing the mole...
and digging trenches...
looking up psychological erosion of:
being just as bad as the "other side"...

or perhaps i'm just the sort of *******-beater
that forgot to fall in love so so hard
that he would be living with a regret
of getting a tattoo of a name: ИЛOНA
on his left collar-bone?

perhaps one of the two!
let's flip a coin!
October 1888. Oil on canvas, 72 x 90 cm

Slaapkamer te Arles. Not really.
‘His own ear?’ she says, a twentieth time.

A Wednesday, fortnight before Christmas.
Her idea. Evening flight out of Gatwick.

I’ve been before. Amsterdam that is,
with the lads, before the grind of Year 13.

Pure banter? Far from it. But the chemicals
jived in our lungs, made us all skew-whiff.

This week it’s been Anne Frank,
koffietijd and stroopwafels five at a time,

a bartender called Luuk plying me
with Heineken. Liquid emeralds.

Anyway, the painting: forget-me-not walls,
golden bedframe. Then onto

Sunflowers, or in French, Tournesol.
Turning with the sun.

‘His own ear?’ I hear again. I say really. ‘But why?’
I sigh, wonder where the knife is now.
NOTE: For some reason, the first letter 'O' in this poem is not italicised on HP.
Written: 2018/19.
Explanation: A poem that was part of my MFA Creative Writing manuscript, in which I wrote poems about cities that have staged the Eurovision Song Contest, or taken the name of a song and written my own piece inspired by the title. I have received a mark for this body of work now, so am sharing the poems here.

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