You **** in air to keep your lungs inflating
tied to ancient choices when you gave up gills
and you cannot remember that far history
but you know the ocean can be beautiful
and you know she longs to take you back.

For Helene.


Ashes on the water, now.
Love's bones like dust downstream.  
At least it got to see itself in our eyes,
Feel itself between hand holding hand

And whispered caresses.
From pillow talk to fists raised at
Concerts, glasses of Portuguese wine
On her balcony to the sound of magpies

We named our neighbours.
We were beautiful.
Began beautifully.
Ended gracefully.

I open hands that held hers and see
Nothing but skin worn by labour,
And air.
Ashes on the water, now.

Embers without a chance against rivers  
Cold with melted mountain snow and
Unyielding differences.
Some loves drown with lungs too full

To cry; others float like a funeral-pyre-
Longboat into the night, ablaze.
King and queen, hand upon hand.
Crowns tied from fresh flowers,

We were beautiful.
Began beautifully.
Slid apart the way a glacier parts from
The hills; slowly, but with the force

Of its thousands of tons.
Ashes on the water,
Where the ghost of our union rests
Underneath the surface of our memories.

I will remember you.
Until the stars burn out, raining the
Dust of themselves like snow upon
These waters that always are moving.

She was wild like skinny dipping at midnight, stars watching overhead and falling in love with moonlight. The way it lay upon her skin made the ocean envious of her depths within and sometimes between us. She was my sister, not in blood but in orbit. A Venus to my Earth, forged from the same collapsing star and if the universe was in fact to be infinite then this moment would happen again, and again, and again an immeasurable number of times. I found comfort in this thought, knowing though our existence was meaningless, it was still full of feeling, and this feeling, right now, it insisted on existing forever.

is there noon on this comparison, and where does the stabilising hour care to fathom the giant and dwarf shadows of original shapes? if there is no magnetism of the clock's hour, minute, second, then the only magnetism apparent in the encircling of digestion / decimalisation, is to say the north of a compass, the compass' north equivalence of a clock's misdirecting eternity: of space for a clock asserting a mingling reason: the compass found it's existential reason in the north, yet the clock found it's "north" without care for magnetism, it equated the north with space, and yet what was encapsulated with rotary qualities? for clock the perpetuation of tick tock in space / for the clock treated space as a one-dimensional abstract, with its three-temporal awareness, and yet the compass said north thrice, and on the fourth said Antarctica was loosened to be explored.*

i'm so tired - lifeless poetry,
make words encoded; i'm so tired,
so tiresome of other people
with bellies filled
and eyes in medium postponing,
to compass the needle
a gravity of servitude for the
clock of 12 (north), 6 (south),
and the disputed 9 (east) with
3 the (west),
darting eyes in Bahamas
for direction coarse yet coerced
by a promise, thus the compass riddling a madness
of constant stimulation with magnetism and
the magnet cursor of orbit -
wound three dimensions of time,
space optional, space always optional,
as ever time over-arching to be understood...
where then the compass, where then the clock,
if the compass led by vector of magnetism
to an uncertain place,
if the clock led by vector of missing magnetism
to a certain place of eased: tick, tock, tick, tock...
will that be equally given a wavering of
east, west, east west.... north, south...
what now?!

three beers in the morning
and i'm, as usual, laughing
into them,
i'm reading an article about
a girl drinking her way into
credit card debt, fun moments
at the bar, and blackouts;
me? i practice the arithmetic
of memory all the time,
every time i wake up i keep
my eyes closed and recount
my dreams,
or past experiences,
it's hard, i know, it's not as easy
as remembering a, b, c, 1, 2, 3,
that's easy, with memory you
have to filter out inanimate things,
they're always going to be there,
you want to cherish the animations,
and there's no encoding of that
as you might encode reciting a word
or the number of miles using the
above stress symbols -
memory is a tough one, it's so poorly
developed / nurtured that people
had to create imagination, a fictive awareness;
me? i like memorising my life,
i think it was great, so far, so too tomorrow;
drinking hardly impairs some of your
cognitive faculties, given you can bellow
out a pig's laugh while drinking on your own;
but i say, being bilingual, not able
to read philosophy in english,
i have this terrible black hole of not
being able to remember the names of the months
in polish... January February through to December
via October is fine... but Styczeń, Luty, Marzec...
huh? and i still can't be bothered to remember
the alphabetical sequence... what's the point?
you see a monkey dancing on the cranium
of a dancing bear anywhere?
me neither, i'd sequence the letters as:
a, e, i, o, u... b... etc.

ah, but indeed, the conscious effort, the twin tongues in the eyes making eyes less passive, to talk in remote places of silence, to decode the encoding, and still doubling up the silence, indeed the conscious effort of lost colours with too many contorts, with only a few comparisons to understood mathematics of a U or parabola.

why do i have to *read a poem?
why do i have to read a poem?
why can't i just look at it?
why do i have to give you a start
and finish interpretation
with a genealogy of lifting up
the first sound like a crying baby
and laying into the cold earth
with a tombstone of a full stop?
why? why? why?! can't i appreciate
a poem like an x-ray of paintings
with the two opposites? can't i
grasp a poem on the outlines of curves
and attach myself somewhere in between
not necessarily at the beginning
and making me into a river of narration
following you? poetry can't be music
any more, bob dylan tried and was
criticised for attempting a qualifying degree
of the index pointer and a nodding approval;
poetry now akin to painting...
i don't want chronology or genealogy,
i want the scattering, the lost paragraph,
the never attempted paragraph...
where i begin or end is up to me...
disown me poems... i want my poems
to make me an orphan - completely rejected
by the hands that tilled the blanks of
what became unearthed and poached
into pun plump potatoes of eager jaw and
rattling teeth: i want paintings! i don't want music!

capitalists have retreated
into explaining their
selfish ways by plagiarising
autistic eye-contact...
while i have my cats,
and they do likewise, and they
don't brag about a tennis
court, swimming pool or
otherwise likening such abundance
for eager bullseye worthy imitation
to a magpie's taste of jealous thievery
of silver spoons among the populace.

they want to read you and not think, so too they want to read you and  not see, they hardly care for punctuation necessarily used, so who's out there to please? n'ah really, i was onto something, i meant that if the Kantian thing-in-itself was applied to the cartesian expression, either thinking-in-itself or being-in-itself is jested at, then we can explain the freedoms of disobedience and obedience, truthfulness and falsehood, and the parody of paradoxes, as highest claimants the claimants: (singular plural) choice - whereas will (plural adjective congregating into singular) is always a butterfly fluctuation of measuring an exactness akin to dating and remembering 1066 the battle of Hastings.

mingle Kant with Descartes and you get thought as the
per se* existence - splitting into either fact of coining
phrases or robbing someone: no doubt (existential
good faith) and certainly no denial (existential
bad faith) - mingle Kant with Descartes
and you get the twins
cogito ergo sum mingling with noumenon,
and thus somewhere along the line
you get to see the membrane of the zygote,
like the thought behind a criminal life
where the life is unexplained because the thought
of such a life is "easily" accessed,
so too in reverse, i.e. being a councillor
or a clerk makes such thinking easily explained
for the prop of the life lived "easily" justified via
the person trading tomatoes or lamb shanks
to keep you unthinking in a bureaucratic role.

he sits all alone
in a smoky dusty bar
in a twilight zone of his own
he counts the neon stars

he isn't anywhere
and he isn't going anywhere

he sits by himself
as another day passes
like the bottles on the shelf
and the empty glasses

For over two years, every day, I've dreamt of dying. Historically, I've always hated change but I'd certainly consider killing for some now.