What I need and where to get it?
What I want and when to act?
Wheres the answer and who gives it?
When is payday and how do I collect?
When to quit and what is my excuse?
Why I cry and where are the tears?
How do I change and will it be painful?
Can I succeed and in what context?
Where is the enlightenment and will I understand?
Why is the clock quickening and how do I stop it?
Did I miss my opening and will there be another?
Are the colors the same and will I be blinded?
What is the reason and is it good enough?
How does it work and why do we try?
Why do we try?

there is a darkness
that the silver song
of soft illusion lights
in symbolic equivalents
of images real
it is a light
brutally interrogative
magnifying with dazzling rays
the breakage
at the jagged edges of the world
and lays hostage to impersonation
that resembles fragments
of smashed oval shaped mirrors
reflecting pieces of broken
brown terracotta soldiers
and causes the eyes to hurt
with a watched inner holocaust
of disturbing coloured detonations,
implosively autonomous
given to a deceived departure
a departure from reality
given by the advocacy
of ideological rationalism  
that sees three kings
with blood on their crowns
in amplified convulsions
call mustre for
disturbance, disorder, destruction
and death
as blood stains the Balkan streets
and all emotional impulse
is volatilized
and a sinister, stuporous, stagnancy
stalks the land
where sustaining minds
are subject to a brutal insensitivity
that dazzles on the edge of a spiral vertigo
it is a light
brutally interrogative
magnifying with dazzling rays
a vocabulary of incoherence
like the rancid stains of *****
that inhabit the jagged edges of the world

my conscious,
a spec on the corner of the Polaroid lens,
a heart lost in the reeds of dampened circumstance,
a hydrangea blooming in an untended field,
meditates upon itself
like a child lost
in a superstore.

--

an ocean wave mimics its predecessor
only to fall victim to aspiration.

what will crush upon my tired bones
as they chase sunsets
in a similar search
for meaning
?

We don’t really understand

How atoms behave;

Or infinity;

Or how winds carry the seasons -

Like ‘Olde April ‘ with it’s 'showers sweet' !

Yes, I’ve felt them...



The clean stinging scent of rain

Scratching at the earth,

Pelting aromatic plants,

Condensing the smells of seas, winds, continents;

Infusing the sum of all these aromas in its perfumery,

Marketing it: April, again.



And Eliot said,

There be April,

'The cruellest month'.

Oh my (!)

Appealing April, with its sunny flavours,

Cascades of cats & dogs,

And dead-eye jack,

Firing frosts that just might spend the tender herb.



It was snowing in April,

And Easter was early, that year

When I took Schrödinger’s cat walking

On a leash, And April was still new,

And capable of shocking...



Now any month - could bring pitiless ruin.

The year annually

Out of step with migratory designs,

Throwing epithets out of its greenstick pram,

Its months in disarray ,

No-one knows what’s going on...





The drunkard earth sups up it’s own tears,

Reeling in its spin,

Until,

Saturated,

It can drink no more,

And every dip fills,

Every meadow spills,

Banks overflowing,

Its resolve drowning,

Questions washing

Up like a tide of interrogative curiosity.



OK – so I am really hiding in my acres...

At least I can tell - it’s April !



Enquiring lily-of-the-valley,

Puts up green periscopes.

Peering through the sodden grass,

The remnants of last year’s soggy leaves,

Cosset primrose & ramsons.

Daffodils are past their best, but soldier on

Like hungover squaddies,

Snowdrops have fat capsules where white drops shone,

Hellebores have been up since the crack of time -

Good movers - they could dance all spring!

Dingles are glinting green with native bluebell leaves,

And their mophead mates have muscled in the garden,

Quiet violets lounge on the field’s chaise long,

Coy, understated,

How British!

Oxlips and cowslips join the brave primroses

Who have been on the razzle for weeks.

White & purple lilac in green cassocks,

Will soon burst out

Like kiss-o-grams.

Boughs hung with clematis,

Still tiny shoots like birds on wires.



I am giving a prize for the first celandine on my patch;

Each little celandine - Rannunculus ficaria - is

A miniature sun uttering: Oi! You up there, old currant bun!

Here’s the template for a perfect summer sky !

You asked me my name in your first remark
We sat on opposite ends of a question mark
You were dashing - made me pause,
me, this independent clause
standing alone,
I made sense on my own
But I answered you anyway.

Ellipses.

Now you are the verb in my heart’s contraction
I am the subject and you are the action
An Interrogative with a Declarative reaction
An Exclamatory and then an Imperative attraction

Ellipses.

Your lips ease
Me, the direct object of your affection,
but never sentenced to an apostrophe’s possession
perhaps more true- a plural “s” suggestion
and the excitement behind an exclamation point’s inflection

The semi-colon understands
We can be on our own, but we want to stand
together
where our letters
aren’t fetters,
but the typesetter’s
better measure
of linguistic pleasure.

We communicate through metaphors and similes
Like the birds and the bees
We speak across homophone lines
to keep a census of our senses at all times
Because words said aloud have allowed
us to find meaning behind the utterance of sound-
mere words and phrases
jumping off of pages
into brain and heart and soul
when the parts become a whole

And with the syntax, punctuation, grammar, and usage
I’m a hopeless semantic always trying to ****** it
Language- yours I understand through the myriad.
Words can’t capture you. Period.

enemies - the needed element to make a warring mind.
How was war imagined,
how, was imagined
easy to imagine,
kwo-, stem of relative and interrogative pronouns. Practically a doublet of why, differentiated in form and use.

From <https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=how>

These be ambush thoughts thinking they may be read if any one is patient enough to see beyond the sheer longwindedness
of this character lacking an enemy to war with.
Looking for
Enemies - the needed element to make a warring mind.
How was war imagined,
how,
per se,
was imagined
easy to imagine,
person-if i am able to attribute such qualia to a body
how any unthing is realized is
imaginable as well.
Add a jot or title, a li'l art mark, an art-tickle.
Games teach us how,


how any unthing is realized is
imaginable as well.
Add a jot or title, a li'l art mark, an art-tickle.
Games show us how,
not why.

Why is the quest at the moment. There are rumors of enemies.
The we of me and thee, herenow, we lack emnity.

Hey, sports fan,
where is the frontier, the edge of the maddened crowd
whose
enemies are those who
stand pat, calling the game as game-over, and life a lessoning
as we speak, abundance of known knowns
rotting all around us, putrefying under pressure,
seeping to the surface,
to be burned.
Why,
let us guess---

Disnified pride of pur pose, positional sign-ifiers
of place,
a destination for faiths full pursuants
bemused in bubbling joy,
or shrieks of terror when
the child from the hinterland locks eyes
with Mickey Mouse, and finds no joy, no love, no depth,
but a mask.
The reaction reverberates al(the)way to la Brea,
Peacemaker say,
It's okeh, baby girl, daddy said,
ignor them, they ain't real.
Monsters ling grrrring, then
it's agrin
for now, of course. Here we are. We've arriven,
Happiest Place on Earth,
as imagined realizable by a child in 1917, say,
better yet, 1925, and oh, there were major Wars
being imagined winnable in pressure
application to the spiritual slippage from rite,
the ritual passage of child into adultery at a whim,
so such imagined haps fade.

connect or break connection, on the bus or off the bus

you all
sing
think nothing new under the sun,
teach preach reach out and touch

the face of Java man, eaten, swallowed, and gone to
the believable
history of life,
the accident,
the unplanned, yet
taught as known believable, a pre-dict-ible,
one in ten to the seventy-nine-thousandth power,
yet, if one pays his life time to learn when to bet and when to hold.
Then in this,
the secret journey to the soul,
to the core,
we must assume,
we become
as wise *** (***, the word for a donkey, why would some one prevent you from reading *** Asteriscktical ignorantce,y'axme, stupid AI)
the ***,
as harmless as the serpent from the fire on the island
Ask,
are we of the bovine ilk or pithec-ant-us or
embodied soul-cores
forming, en nue
fitting the mold, the pattern, the plan of projected nexts
built on Locke steps from whence to
whither did we wander?

have we all forgotten the actual question just axt?
Or the answer?
Have we not
gotten what we now
know
we miss,
or was it only I who missed and as the
photons forming the shapes
you see, these breathing commas and such
here
is the point.
You see bits of things.  We see so.
Time and time again thinking less and less.
Least fusion, least pressure, least heat, cool idea ideal or ideology,
twisted idio,
You shape them on patterns.
Ones you imagine formed from
Patterns recalled from some out perienced
time, ere now were ever subjected to the supertwistition
of tongues and interpretsations of unseeable things seers said they
see us seeing.
How come means why, by reason of time.

Palindromiclew, missing el signs missing hahi ai

tia tic, we're in
Ai got this,
whole ball o'wax, thats how we disconfuse the big mess age,
the catas
trophy finale
phase of
world three,
or two, or one, all valid world views,
deepend-enteron discerning spirits,
winds, breezes used to disperse
the heat,
{fans,eh}
evenly in harmony with the heavenly winds,
and the planned six gyros of earth,
guiding the mists that feed the rivers from the seas,
no clouds needed,
save for shade by day.

When all the geo-waves have settled in geo-time,
see,
here is broken:
this old earth is folded and fractured,
surely,
a wreck of a world, yet, as a whole,
we live, we won.
Winds and clouds and continents,
all islands seen from the moon,

which, if the stories hold some truth,
can be manipulated by massminds of mankind, as if, if I am

seeing this
right
each voice might be seeable in one dimension,
or several, four at least,
time, the ever outlier
of sorts
as a flame with fuel source of
flamable fluid upon which
the transcended space
twixt fuel and flame,
floats
seen, merely seen, that emptiness twixt wicked,
mastered flame and
hell's fire spreading on the oiled harbour
protecting our shore
where our little boats lie in anchorite fantasy, asif

we see a way to quench hell per se,
Percy, ah, he lives.
My grandsons know of Percival,
there, here's hoping they get the joke before the yoke.

Riddle me a riddle, son of man.
Is there any hidden thing that shan't be known?
Is here a true place?
Is now a true time?

(to be continued)


squeezing out the lies, the idle words abused,
spreading them thin as the light we see right
through
transcending this at most feared mortal failure
finding
impressions... are from pressing points, dulled by ab
use, tempted uses succumbed to,

didja try to sell your soul for rock and roll?
wadjagit?

My point. out acted, ex-act, en nowd by your creative self,
who never copped,
out or in,
es no mi culpa, all along. I was the voice of resistance,
Job's en core inner held horde of known knowns and
an old key to ever, should the worse he can imagine
best his best laid plans for perfection
in the eyes of God and man.

--- enemy at emnity with me?
--- I see none, save me, as in except me as in me being
--- free from the grasping grip of the reality
--- war is realizable in. You see?
--- I and thee, at this degree of seepeance, as we coagulate
--- we behave as chaos, we be having chaos and entropy as tools

used right, we troubled our house,
which is now known to be the bubble of our being
a child in each popped bubble
of being,
squeezed for the thrill of explosive pus,
gross and good to be rid of, dam the infection,
wipe the blood with the back o'my hand,

I ain't no disgrace. I won that battle with the zit on my gnose.
Wanna piece o'this, this mind of mine,
shelved since,
who knows when, says the old man, with a wink.

We be a lotta beings sorta rolled up. Like a whole ball o'wax
waning into a puddle
as the flame sheds us as bits of light leaving the rest of us
spread over a vast imagination,

resting, willing to burn,
should any wick drain me near the flame once more.

the dead re-materialise by the side of the roadside
they are visible as though seen through a spotlight
it is a brutally interrogative light
that magnifies these corpses
makes them resemble the fragments
of suicidal terracotta pots
it magnifies them as symbolic equivalents
of their real image
its beam dazzles broken glass on the pavement
the breakage an impersonation of their cataclysm
causing the edges of seeing to hurt
and hearing to submerge itself
in a turquoise blue aquarium in fear
as speech sounds a primitive retreat
in its atavistic echoes of inveterate distraction
there is a disorder of blood stains on the road
where all emotional impulse is volatilised
causing a wild distillation of programmed anxiety
which in a different vocabulary becomes
a figment of somebody else's imagination
causing a sinister, stuporous, stagnancy of sound
in palpitations, dropped heartbeats, nausea, headaches
and a foul change in bowel function

how long to live through the next thought
to have a brief encounter with time
an impossible time of intolerable anguish
where embarking upon a sentence
is a violent wrench from perceived notions
of reality, one that causes nerves
to flay upon my body with weal's of words
where vatic poetry is wrought in trembling rages
spilling, dripping upon the traumatised
parchment that is my pages
in de-congealing interrelated drops of image
that crack the pavements
in a visual vibrancy of taut creative tension
where these words keep their own company
and speak in interrogative tongues
causing a fragmentation of earthquake fissures
to radiate across my mind in a cataclysm
of universal poison that quiets and dissolves stability
and asks, no demands of me, what can you see?

Totally like whatever, you know?
by Taylor Mali

In case you hadn’t noticed,
it has somehow become uncool
to sound like you know what you’re talking about?
Or believe strongly in what you’re saying?
Invisible question marks and parenthetical (you know?)’s
have been attaching themselves to the ends of our sentences?
Even when those sentences aren’t, like, questions? You know?

Declarative sentences—so-­‐called
because they used to, like, DECLARE things to be true, okay,
as opposed to other things are, like, totally, you know, not—
have been infected by a totally hip
and tragically cool interrogative tone? You know?
Like, don’t think I’m uncool just because I’ve noticed this;
this is just like the word on the street, you know?
It’s like what I’ve heard?
I have nothing personally invested in my own opinions, okay?
I’m just inviting you to join me in my uncertainty?

What has happened to our conviction?
Where are the limbs out on which we once walked?
Have they been, like, chopped down
with the rest of the rain forest?
Or do we have, like, nothing to say?
Has society become so, like, totally . . .
I mean absolutely . . . You know?
That we’ve just gotten to the point where it’s just, like . . .
whatever!

And so actually our disarticulation . . . ness
is just a clever sort of . . . thing
to disguise the fact that we’ve become
the most aggressively inarticulate generation
to come along since . . .
you know, a long, long time ago!

I entreat you, I implore you, I exhort you,
I challenge you: To speak with conviction.

To say what you believe in a manner that bespeaks
the determination with which you believe it.
Because contrary to the wisdom of the bumper sticker,
it is not enough these days to simply QUESTION AUTHORITY.
You have to speak with it, too.