somewhere between:
the mash and the fury... sycamore feeling...
shades of marble...
   & neverglade...
                
can you really... live... enough?
again: can you live... "too much" or
live "too little"?

i imagine myself living a life
of the highest expectations
in the full view of the public...
then i drift and recede among
the shadow-folk...

if on that blatantly glaring
carousel of ups-and-downs of fate...
bound to nothing more than
the gambling of gods...

perhaps i haven't lived some magical
quota of "enough":
to leave a statement akin to:
life is beautiful... even due to all
the suffering...

      perhaps i have attempted to live
the minimum of what might
be expected: if not asked of me to live...
perhaps i didn't want to...
congest my faculty of memory with
too many... repetitive: anti-introspections...
perhaps too much of the same
"thing" wouldn't allow me
for a cinema of... circa 10 very distinct
memories...

how "they" eroded our faculty of memory
when we were still children...
spelling... arithmetic...
random historical dates....
we weren't allowed to remember
something beside was kept in touch
with the narrative of the past 100 years
or so...

have i lived enough: or perhaps not enough?
perhaps i have forged
a memory bank of about 10 memories
that i keep like diamonds...
this sigma-sum of me:
how i might gladly give up these limbs...
to be a thought inside fire...
or water... to be restored to my original
dismemberment...
of how this body came together...

live "too much" and i suspect you won't
be able to remember... a third of it...
this "too much"...
live "too little" and i suspect:
your memories will be of no use...
reduced to the ash of...
2 + 2 = 4 / a b c: barnacle rigidity...
philosophy...

memory is such a fickle creature:
perhaps it would be less fickle if it wasn't
eroded at first by pedagogy...
would it be oh so embarass...
   embarasing... embarassing...
embarrassing... i was going to get
the correct spelling one way or another...
to forget spelling altogether and
make a barbaric return to pure
phonetics... perhaps even as far as
Japanese syllabry... syllabery...
   syllables... katakana: syllabry...
syllabary... syllabery... syllabary...
              
freel will: it's not a question of whether i have it
or don't: whether i'm labouring under
Greek fatalism of German Protestant docrtine
of predestination...
memory is a fickle creature:
i can't remember what i've like to remember:
to hell with all this memory recycling
and forgetfulness...
it's not even that i forget certain
events in my life by choice:
but who or what has staged authority
over me: to remember the "things" i do...
beside the vanity project:
in no way is this a source of becoming
something better: or for that matter: worse!
just... immobilised in this cosmic stasis!

obviously i can't remember everything:
but why do i remember certain things
more: that i remember the spelling of words...
well: that has been drilled into me
with all the scrutiny of ember, amber and cold
coal... of the times when my eyes disappeared
into being fully pupil:
the iris and sclera having lost track of:
there should be an iris and a sclera:
now there's only a blackness...

it must feel terrible to have lived a supposedly:
enough... so much...
to later have no memory of said life...
a fate most cruel: esp. prior to death...
notably governed by the noun dementia...
elevated within the confines of Alzheimer's...
it must be cruel so cruel: to have lived
such a full life... yet not once...
probably never... strained the mind
to remember something trivial...
i have about 10 trivialities...
i return to them because: one must...
sitting on the curb...
at night... drinking... a she fox sits opposite
me on a green lawn...
we have a staring contest...
a woman is walking by from a social
event...
she walks past the she-fox... the she fox
is staring right back at me...
she ignores the woman who is: a *******
meter away from her...

i'm the supposed *** having a staring contest
with a fox at night...
the fox doesn't budge when she's staring at me:
not one bit she allows the woman to walk past
all done... in the confines of a silence
that could only emanate from the deathly hallows...
of the gallows...

running with deer: i was the only stag
metaphor ready to easy the traffic
while this tender creature looked for
inspiration to gallop back into the woods...
it still looks funny in my mind...
holding a can of beer
slightly overweight... steering this little
harem of deer back into the woods...
so the road could be unblocked...

coming out a drinking session from
a park... climbing over a fence...
picking up a disgruntled teenage girl...
rolling her a cigarette...
giving up my phone so she could text like crazy...
she just attended a house party...
had an argument with her friend...
leech...  we talked... she ran back and forth...
we sat down and talked...
a black cat came up to me:
i picked it up and caressed it...
the girl went twice mad...
oh we did find her friend alright...
lying face down on the pavement...
i ran up gave her my hoodie: which dwarfed her
even more...
the mad girl texted her dad about our location...
walking to location i flicked the girl lying face-down
baseball cap: it'll be alright...
said suspect was allowed a selfie...
the girls were taxied home safely...
hmm... Sarah... Everard?

hello warlock me... even by any standard of truth:
you know how impossible it is to...
be emanating what might attract
a black cat approach you in the street at night
sitting akimbo with a clearly distraught
teenager girl: she just leeched onto
a stranger who was climbing over a fence
of a darkened park...
cats are most suspect... a good tendency
to have... tendency: there's a better word for that:
scrutiny... better than scrutiny...
stereotypically sieving through bull-*******...

of the 10... these are the 3...
i'm not going to disclose the other 7...
well... 4th... the widow Swan or widower swan...
Zeus came down and decided to eat
crisps from my lips
when i was still with Ilona as we spent
the sunset at Loch Lomond...

i'll not go into the 5th... it would require me being
a child again...
it's so far dated... that it involves
me... the Danzig Zoo... and a bear similar to
me in height: and him eating a button of my
cardigan...
a traumatic experience:
he ate my button! he ate my button!

again: fickle creature: this memory...
but i guess people too busied with life...
don't spare it much attention...
they hardly invest in memory...
to the point that they forget they're somehow
alive and have to subsequently... shockingly...
"remember" that they have to die...
but... that doesn't happen and so:
dementia seeps in...
there's no science behind this theory
only the words behind them...

memory is sacrosanct: however fickle the ***** believes
herself to be: however much eroded
by the structures of pedagogy...
i somehow filtered through and "remember"
the glory of the Mamluks vs. the Mongol Horde...
but i have my own memories:
i don't suppose that one's life is supposed
to flash before one's eyes when one is
instanced to death's fore...
if you didn't keep "certain" memories
sacred like you might keep: arithmnetic,
spelling... or the geometry of the triangle...
what is one to expect if:
there's a congregation of cognitive failures
culminating in dementia?

i'd want to remember something else beside
what i grieve as being the kept "consolations"...
i truly do...
but what i keep seems to give me
the required momentum...
of the many prostitutes i...
                           well...
          good to know that i'll go down
in history as: the hearty-second-best of...
Jack the Ripper...
but history is not a theatre of good-will people...
is it?
perhaps the man-child complex
of the ancient Greek philosophers...
"complex": ha ha!
in the current climate of
the woman-child...
             i'm not going to bother: grieve...
do anything more than the prescribed:
as follows...

it was so much fun having to romanticize
women in my teenager years...
my 20s are amiss...
i came back to the "narrative" in my mid-30s
and... well... if i'm not ******* the queen
of England while singing songs
akin to; WERE DIU WERLT ALLE MIN!

as much as any: kinder or kind-at-a-loss...
come tomorrow's 9am...
i suppose i should be grieving less...
kinder...
  and all the jokes and balloons...
and... candy-floss... such are the demands...
such the times... such the impossibilities:
and the justifications for having them
to begin with!