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Mateuš Conrad Aug 2018
. 'as for those poets, only the perverse follow them. do you not see that they go too far in every direction and say things, which they cannot do?' (ash-shu'ara / the poets 26:224-226).

call them what you like,
the Huguenots,
for all i care...

   you always side with
the "heretics"...
  
   given that, "said" heretics
retain some cultural value
relativism of other cultures,
namely in the form of
depiction -

    since why would, "the word"
be deemed holy,
    ****-naked,
                rather than donning
a bikini of "iconoclasm"...
         when words... are at
the meat-market of copyright -
what with © coca cola?

                 sunni islam would have
never allowed sufism...
  but Farsi does...
  and will continue...
since no Iranian will bow
before an Arab within the schematics
of history...

          Sunni Islam, it's Wahhabi sentimentality...
so why persist in signing
the Adhan?
   why not speak in a honing like
drone sentiment of plain speech?
i thought all music was banned?
the current Adhan is a form
of music... isn't it? BAN IT!

    you never side with these Sunni
muslims, exploiting Bangladeshi labor,
you side with the heretics of Iran...
these *******, i can at least respect...
  
      no fast cars, convenient ongoing
cultural insurrections -
   Sufism...
       Afghan women's poetry,
and all that much closer to Hindu mysticism...
    
yeah... "islamophobia":
but only against Sunni Islam...
   but Shia Islam?
   no problem...
   i could stomach these peoples
like i could stomach the in-between
of the Turkish variant -
no ideology - simply, pure, power throttle...

i could make a great Janissary -
with a Turkish barber...
         for a great trim of hair and beard...
i'd cast a shadow on some
obscure chocolatier of Brussels
who thinks himself a politician...

     but there are certain aspect of Islam
i am willing to tolerate...
   what happened to the son in law
of Muhammad, namely, Ali...
was raw ******* kicking...

               promises, promises...
no promises...
           Shia Islam, as an European,
i can tolerate, Turkish Islam, i can tolerate...
Turkey is incrementally shy
of being treated at the 2nd variant of Iran...
at least with Iran, we share a history
via the insurrection into the ancient
texts through Greece...

  come to think of it...
whenever i listen to
matta's song echo babylon...
i start feeding myself goosebumps,
reminding myself
of Cyrus... Nebuchadnezzar...
and the dim-wit that was
   Belshazzar...

always siding with the heretics...
if not on economic groundwork,
then at least motivating,
rather than monetizing an idea...

and the Shia muslims are...
    one way or another...
   unlike the gluttons of Dubai...
the barbie dolls of postage stamp
"proof" of progress,
in size, and worth...

   Sunni Islam would have
never allowed poetics to remain
a viable form of expression -
the Persian tradition that is,
far beyond the western concern
for a comment section...

         Shia Islam allows patronage
of the arts, notably poetry,
without concern for monetary
funding, it, at least, doesn't prohibit it...
given the pride of the Persians...
Sunnis and their continual quest
for finding water...
    sure... poetry is pointless within
such restrictions of
existential concerns...
    but... given the current, civilized
establishment?
   sky-scrapers in *******
sand dunes?

         the qu'ran should have
forbidden the architectural ambitions
equivalent to the tower of babel
being erected, in environments,
that could never sustain said projects...

    and who originally spewed the term
islamophobia?
Sunni Islam...
        i never liked this strand of belief...
i hate the Sunnis like
a Shia partisan...

p.s. it's called patriotism is America...
but nationalism in Europe...
    you sure that's not a synonym?
Europeans can't be patriotic,
and Americans are never nationalistic?

...

   well: how could i ever convert to islam,
i do enjoy the adhan from time to time,
"sorry", but i do...
  i can't help it:
if i'm a sucker for pop songs,
i'm also a sucker for the adhan...
   crusader songs, templar songs become
stuffy after a while...
and last time i checked:
     there were the northern crusades
against the baltic people:
notably prussians, lithuanians...
with that cushion of: mediating the
escalation of war by the polacks...
coming from the east:
  last time i checked the mongols
didn't reach leipzig...
               buffer zone people...
and what of the ottoman onsalught
of vienna 1529: the ****** winged hussars
won the charge...

so, coming back to heidegger... aphorism 26
ponderings IX... how am i to not be
the historical animal?
         perhaps in german, in germany
i might become a non-historical animal,
to begin: anew, but with a terrible
past to hide, to negate...
   i could do that: if i were a german,
speaking german, in germany...
but i'm in england:
            i might have some roots in
Silesia, but it's "hard" to not be a historical
animal, an "animal" with a sense of time,
i.e. a future a past a present...
esp. under the english conditions
of: the biological animal momentum narrative,
like a tsunami, like an earthquake...
ripples throughout...
              i can't move forward with
the english championing darwinism every
single ******* step of the way...
why can't they hide darwin like the polacks
hid copernicus...
given the motto: copernicus -
who moved the earth, and stopped the sun...
why wouldn't i escape into history
if the current biological reality is:
(a) a yawn... the cruel nature of per se?
   the courting of pigeons on a t.v. antenna...
pigeons get rejected all the time,
lesson learned, he bows and bows,
coos... expands his tail feathers upon
the bow then folds them... she flies away...
repeat...
    (b) i can't escape being a historical
animal in the way that what the current
facts are being repeated have encountered
a whiff of Chernobyll...
              history is inclided to answer reality...
biology? not so much... not from what i've
seen and heard...
             truly a schizophrenics disney dream:
to walk among the newly insane feeling
like the only sane among them...
beau-ti-ful!
                   well... given the current criteria
of being bilingual as being synonymous
with being a schizophrenic...
           magic!
                    
   now the crescendo...aphorism 24
ponderings X:

              the word designates, the word signifies,
the word says, the word is (heidegger)...

i found that you can only write
"philosophy" with a neat, fixed vocab. regime,
clarity of boundaries...
    quadratic events in vocab.:

i.e. the reflexive: yourself, himself, itself etc.
and the reflective: your, self....
                       his, self...
                                  it, and the self...
                    ergo? atheistic scissors,
  the two articles, indefinite and definite
                                 a / the "self"...

i'm not playing "identity politics",
when i say that only two peoples ever managed
to sack Moscau... the mongols and the polacks
with the help of lithuanians,
"identity politics" only happens in
post-colonial society, akin to the english,
i'll speak the english,
but i will not be a cucked indian of
the former raj: i will eat the fish & chips,
i will eat the sunday roast,
   i will eat the english breakfast with great
delight...
            but i will not do what these former
colonial masters expect of me:
integrate at the expense of making my
mutterzunge into hubris!
stubborness contra pride...
                hard to tell the difference...

and why do i like heidegger so much?
i'm not into the ad homine arguments...
my grandfather, was, a communist party member...
so?
       i like heidegger... because he appreciates
poetics, i like that poets can share the same
values as philosophers,
thanks to heidegger: we have been requested
back into the republic...
if plato and islam didn't like us, hanging around,
some offshoot german thinker / promenade
enthusiast like used enough to,
i suppose: ban the theatre puppeteers...

i am not playing identity politics...
biological reality is not enough...
but archeological reality?
       can you really advance to counter?
i was born near:
Krzemionki Opatowskie, a Neolithic and
early Bronze Age complex of flint mines
for the extraction of Upper Jurassic (Oxfordian)
banded flints...
  personally? i don't believe in
the African genesis conundrum...
i believe "my" people originated from
the Indian sub-continent,
as, associated with the complex:
Indo-European categorization of language;
i'm still to see an African phonetic
encoding system, beside the hieroglyphics...

i, was, born, there! i'm not a displaced
post-colonial debacle between former master
and former slave...
i have: roots... i'm not ******* up to the fish & chips
brigade with a friday night's worth of curry...
i cook my own curry,
and by god: it is the food of the gods...
i'll give the blue indians that counter...
but sure as **** not the worth of mead
or whiskey...

if they only tolerated themselves,
sure, learn the english language,
but know this much:
           english is the modern lingua franca...
it's the language of economics,
forget the natives, too ignorant to learn
either deutsche or française:
island-folk...
                what else, what other attitude?
even the russians are like:
that land of the weirdos? the idiosyncratics?
yes, we know that land...
the only "thing" that shelters the english
are the h'americans, the south africans,
the australians etc.,
  sure as **** the scots aren't sheltering them...
and, mind you?
   if the i.r.a. really wanted to plant
a bomb?
   a real bomb? they'd revert from speaking
any english to begin with... resorting
to revising their usage of gàidhlig:
ga-id-hlig... gaelic...
   like the welsh, stubborn people, proud people,
retaining their Çymraeg...
celt: said kelt...
the glaswegian football team?
       Çeltic... not: keltic...
  borrowed from the greek: sigma (ς: cedilla to ****)...
   wow! all the particulars in the english tongue!
guess it would take an ausländer to spot them!

U-21 european championships,
england versus romania:
                           a magnificent match...
the youngsters playing better football
than the oldies in their mid to late / early 30s...

i'm trying to tolerate Islam,
               it's not in my nature...
            hell... i enjoyed visiting a turkish barber
shop, i still have an unflinching opinion that,
the turks are the best barbers in the world...
but...

              this quote, is going to **** you:
same aphorism / pondering (24 / X) -


*** fight videos - count dankula...
you know what i'd love to do to these little
snarky *****?
the french revolution isn't enough...
n'ah, them hanging, is not enough....
ever heard of the butchers' hook?
                 it's also callled close-up fishing...
imitation hang-man...
   you insert a fishing hook...
and you let the sweeney todd ****** dangle...
on a hook, rather than a noose...
lords of salem come your way?
i'd rather the snarky teen hanging off
a fisherman's hook than dangle
like some lynched ******...
beside the suffocation,
i'd like them with a fisherman's hook entombed
in their hard palette...
         i don't want them hanging...
what am i? a sadist?
  i want them on the fisherman's hook!
when suffocating without a broken spine absorbed
by the neck isn't enough!
  fisherman's hook gallows is a
masterpiece... of suffering...
  most certain...
  when cheap comedy is being towed...
making fun of bums, or homeless people...
the current society is so welcome
to bypass all the "adventures" of Loki...
but akin to the lords of Salem...
burn!? such a limitated imagination!

ah... right... digressing...
        the reflexive / reflective quadratic...
language - only if speech  has acquired
the highest univocity of the word does it
become strong (enough) for the hidden
              play of its essential multivocity
(as withdrawn from all "logic"),
             of which poets and thinkers alone
are capable, in their own respective modes
and their own directions of sovreignty.

we do live in a time of a lost sense
of dialectic, since we do not live in a time
of etertaining dialogue,
perfectly sensible opinions,
that's all we have...

                       if one of these snarky *******
came up to me...
they'd get a chance to experience a rubric
of 4, knuckles...
what's 189 centimeters in empirical?
6ft2...      oh!
                   see where imagination takes you?
and here i was: thinking i was without it!
butcher's hangman...
oh, not so easy...
                  
                fame by no association to fame...
just the tears of parents who raised their children
to be nothing more than rugrats...
annoying gnat like bothersomes;
and nothing quiet special to be associated
with weimar berlin...
     just, these,
   h'american mall onlookers
with pwetty-guy-for-a-white-fly-mentality,
as borrowed from californian
1990s punk;

re-used ****** losers.

mad-hatter's fraction: 10/6....
      0.666...
      well: to the given extent:
1.666666(7)....
     1, 0, /6,
no number is divisible by 0,
every number, divisible by 1:
is the same number...
    mad hatter's 10/6...

   re-used ****** losers...
i like that phrase...
        7 for every 6, 7 for every 6...
until the 0. fraction comes
a 1.: exponential serf of 0...
0 being the multiplier...
          
         i really am growing a beard to less
don it, but rather to experience
a relief from patience...
war robots?
the first non n.p.c. game...
i like that, very much...
      and when i did:

you know my first experience of
love at first sight?
the younger sister of my then girlfriend...
****** up ****...

love at first sight is a terrible phenomenon...
i was nearing 18, she was barely 13...
i was dating her older sister...
but it was love at first sight,
the trouble with: love at first sight:
it doesn't lie...
it tries to lie...
          but it can't lie...

   paedophilia? a bit... untouched bodies
though... bodies of people who were
never supposed to touch...
i once said to a fwend:
well wouldn't it be ****** up if i touched
her?
   she's a muse, which doesn't translate
into vacating her as a busy body
worth of a touch, does it?
     if only my old friend samuel said
otherwise:
sylvester "contra" tweety:
my first girlfriend...
but her sister?
         i was nearing 18, she was about 13...
love at first sight...
untouched, cradled, unscathed...
and so she remained...
   until she did what every girl would
have done...thank god she remained
a figment of my imagination...
   rammstein: rosernrot...
    
           i have seen love at first...
such a load of ******* that it had to be
the younger sister of a girl i was dating...
and the **** that i had to be 18 and see
was just beginning her teenage transition...
the world unfair i grant
the most justifications... as being
the (just - unnecessary adjective) arbiter...

love at first sight becomes a forbidden love...
love at first sight was always a forbidden
love...
           and the sort of "love" that achieves
a perspctive of change that doesn't
translate into old age...
love at first sight is soon translated
into a love of affairs closely associated
with middle-age disenfranchised
state of affairs...
i.e. to love again...
            how else to feel relief from
having lost both one's inhibitions
               as well as one's ambitions?!
in the conundrum of the mortal
"question" of the continuum being
preserved?
ArielMarriel  Aug 2018
weakness
ArielMarriel Aug 2018
weakness is the bane of my existence.

if strength were an equation,
my weakness would negate it.

please just let me be strong.

i've made so much progress, after all.

weakness is a Demon
i can’t control.

a Demon that will swallow me whole.
Ken Pepiton Dec 2018
Clarifying failed. Spelchek is not on strike.

{clear ification, an ionic bond be tween me and thee,
alienated mind, not mined, crafted
from tactics and strategies
beyond chess.
Player One,
1980's era
jewish-geek-mid-pubesence-kid-level,
proceed with caution.
This trope has trapped many a curious child.
---
Now, enter the old ones,
Grandfather taught uncle chess so well
he went to the state tournament in Kayenta,
and a grandma was
state-champ-bare-bow-in-the-rain-shooter,

these, now must learn

minecraft on x-box to be considered
for the real life role of

good at games grand parents
from the time right after atom bombs kicked up dust
places dust had not been in a very long time and
as the dust began to settle

some dust mights was cationic.
Negative bits, they became embedded in the code.
Bumps, fering, coming together
just a knot in a string,
attracting anionic curiosity might

round and round phorward ferring to be
a thread to tie my heart to yours

like twisted Pima cotton thread,
that I pulled from an old sweatshirt
to tie a crow feather in this paho of words filled with old jokes

Making this clear would belie the entire story AI and I know true}

truth is. we agree. no capsokehspaceasneededcommasetal.
caps okeh space as needed commas et al
go.
Did that work? That line

subject of this act fact done, agree to follow,
and I may lead and be

not you, me, dear reader, I mean first true

there is no any if nothing is. So simple some say its sublime beyond the spectrum of ones
and zeros thought on off probably

either or any time time can be accounted for

wouldn't you take a

thought,  nothing,
as it is commonly said to be understandable,

the state of not being, imagine that

the state of not being we negate in being,
unless you are mad and are lost in a whirlwind
such as such voices have been said to

have twisted into threads as
wicks for our lamps
turn floating on
golden oil twisting
wickered into wickering wee shadow fibers
on the western wall for legends to sprout from.

Wickering mare over there, expands us both by my hearing her
you had no idea she was near enough to hear
time is no barrier in actual ever.
What phor can contain me,
whispered my whimsy

Imagine she spoke,
what would she say for what reason
would she say

good good good, I feel good, ha,
I am right, by accident. ever body can feel this good.

good is good.
good is.
Sam Harris, agrees, good as far as good goes, is good
in every vecter from now

the terrain does exist, beyond the moral landscape, to

true true
trust me, I been there.
Been there done that was inserted into the vernacular on my watch,
first summer post war.

matter must not matter as much to me as it does to thee, nestypass? no se?

All jewish boys have chess move metaphors.
(a phor is for containing,
bearing
meta,
everybody knows, like metaphysics,
after physics in the stack of stackable metadata)

OHMYGOD THE IDW circa 2018 -- who knew I ate this **** up?

[the old code calls for excretion of digested material
from which meaning has been extracted in the idleword accounting processor:
literal
<pre>what if utterance=****, then **** haps, no else then</pre>]

Did that happen? One of my friends told me that happened in Florida, the whole world turned to ****... for lack of a nail a kingdom was lost, they say, little foxes spoil the grapes,
hung chad ex
cuses...

Pre-expandable ROM, not magic. tech,

pre-infinite imagination? impossible.
and nothing is what is impossible with good as god.

Is there no perfect game?
is the game the session or the life of the user
offline

rerererererererererereroxotoxin, poison pen
ideal viral umph exspelliered
up against the wall

reset. We

kunoon albania omerta oy vey, who could say?
one way better, one way not? quark.
up or down, with variable spins, who can say?

Life's right,
yes. but mo'ons of other something must have been for higgs to ever matter

and it does, I got commas, from 2018.

Are you with me? This is that book I told you I had access…

You or some mind other than mine owned mind, where
my owned peace rests in truth,

otherwise, I know every any or else in the code since I can recall,
in time

if this were a test I swore to take to prove to you
the we can be me in your head

phillipkdicktated clue

if you don't know me by now, maybe we should stop.

Temptations are times. Time things. Time spans, yeah, like bridges

or portals, right
The Internet in One Day, Fred Pryor Resources,
Wu'wuchim 1995.

Ever, not everish or everistic or every, but ever
body knows,
but you.

Catch up. We left all our doors blown off, once we learned that we could blow our own doors off,

there are no open sesames or slips of leth or sibylets

shiba yah you knew all along there was a
song she sang all one and we watched it morph
before our very eyes

alone.

The magic stories words may contain, may bear, we must agree

more than we may know, by faith, metagnostic as we see

the sublime gift of the magi
become clear und

be und sein sind both trueture same tu you, we agree.
But. Lock here, no pre 2018 editing codes

validate past last go.
Do one good thing today. That was my goal. Today https://anchor.fm/ken-pepiton Part 3 Soyal Hopi Mystery Enactment (called mystery plays). And the intro to Moral Landscape by Sam Harris, led me let ******* write a poem.
Ken Pepiton  Mar 2018
Anomoly
Ken Pepiton Mar 2018
Anom o ly

Non-named, never imagined much less realized

The left hand can't know what the right is doing,
it's a brain matter, grey area, may be a way to
imagine your unique. task, yours, not doable from here

We can do things as us that we never imagine alone.

Is there a need to negate, wait, think,
must one do any act?
Now, I see, emulating Socrates is thought easier than
emulating Jesus. Christ, you know that ain't easy, eh?

Death is the friend of being. Things change from time to time
but, you know knowledge grows in two directions,
the dark part is not evil.
evil is as evil does. The roots that ever live in the earth,
those roots are required, requirements.

Left brain uses the right hand. Don't tell the left-hand
that nearly all it's skill in serving
and being used right,
is used up by the other side.
Right or wrong, is not a chiral question,  nor is good or bad. ******* Phillips's head screws with a butter knife is wrong.
It can be done right, but not if you turn it the wrong way.
Drawing on the right side of my brain has always symbolized a crossroads experience, in my mind.
I mean I draw, realistically, with my right hand, left brain.
Maybe, brains are no easier to analyze than time in an immaterial medium of messaging.

I am certain life wins.
Meaning everything you think life means.
Do you think evil is required as an activity for life to actively be?
I doubt that.
Death fixes everything. Fret not. Wait.

First make room, what was the Bronte word? Penetrium, no, cut n paste
[A]t once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously - I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason - Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge.

From <https://www.etymonline.com/columns/post/cloud-of-uknowing>

Happiness demands an agreement
Joy is in process, I agree, I am happy, haps happen and I notice

Note: Bronte was one to tweak fine puns with the word Penetralia: 1. The innermost parts of a building, especially the sanctuary of a temple. 2. The most private or secret parts; recesses: the penetralia of the soul. See Chapter one, Wuthering Heights.
----- From
bronteblog.blogspot.com/2006/03/emilys-penetralium_03.html
I checked 13 months later:Before passing the threshold, I paused to admire a quantity of grotesque carving lavished over the front, and especially about the principal door; above which, among a wilderness of crumbling griffins and shameless little boys, I detected the date ‘1500,’ and the name ‘Hareton Earnshaw.’  I would have made a few comments, and requested a short history of the place from the surly owner; but his attitude at the door appeared to demand my speedy entrance, or complete departure, and I had no desire to aggravate his impatience previous to inspecting the penetralium.
Akemi Jan 2019
The Ache is leaving. Three years languished by dead end jobs, drugs and friends. Last week above a bagel store, the sun morphs mute amidst travelling clouds, indifferent fluctuations of light on an otherwise featureless day.

You arrive a tight knot of anxieties over a moment in time that could only have arrived after its departure. The Ache welcomes you into their sparse interior. You trace last month’s 21st across the black mould complex; navigate piles of stacked boxes, unsure if anything is inside of them.

“I always make the best friends in departure,” the Ache says, flipping a plushy up and down by the waist.

“Maybe you can only love that which is already lost,” you reply, with an insight a friend will give you a week later.

The acid tastes bitter under your tongue. Small marks your body bursting, a glowing radiance of interconnections you’d always had but only now begun to feel. The Ache follows suit and you sit on the couch together to watch .hack//Legend of the Twilight. The come up entangles you in the spectacle; the screaming boy protagonist, the chipped tooth gag, the moe sister in need of saving from the liminal space of dead code. You take part in it; you revel in it. Bodies morph on the surface of the screen in hyperflat obscenity, their parts interchangeable to the affect of the drama. Faces invert, break and disfigure, before reformation into the self-same identity form.

A month earlier, you’d hosted a house show at your flat. Too anxious to perform you’d dropped a tab as you’ve done now. An overbearing sensation of too-much-ness — of sickening reality — washed through the nexus of your being. You writhed on the ground screaming into a microphone as a cacophony of sounds roiled through you. Everyone cheered.

The floor rose later that night. A damp, disgusting intensity that triggered contractions in your throat and chest. Pulled to the ground, you fought off your bandmate’s advances, too shocked to express your revulsion and horror, to react accordingly, to reconstitute a border of consensual sociality. You broke free and slurred “I’m no one’s! I’m no one’s!” before running out of the room. Hours later, you tried to comfort them. Weeks later, you realised how ******* ******* that had been. Months later, you learnt their friend had committed suicide days before the show.

Back in the lounge, a prince rides onto the screen on a pig. You turn to the Ache and say “This is ******* awful.”

The Ache responds “I know right?”

Outside the world burns blue with lustre. The Ache trails you and falls onto their stomach. “Oh my god,” the Ache blurts, “this is why I love acid. Everything just feels right.” They gaze wistfully at the grasses and flowers before them; catch a whiff of asphalt and nectar, intermingled. “Like, gender isn’t even a thing, you know? Just properties condensed into a legible sign to be disciplined by heteronormative governmentality.”

“Properties! Properties!” You chant, stomping around the Ache with your arms stretched out. You wave them in the air like windmills. You bare your teeth. “Properties! Properties!”

“You know what I mean, right?” The Ache asks, pointedly. “You know what I mean?”

You continue chanting “Properties!” for another minute or two, before spotting a slug on a blade of grass beneath your feet. You fall to your knees and gasp “It’s a slug!”

You and the Ache stare at the tiny referent for an indefinite period of time, absorbed in its glistening moistures. Eventually, the Ache says “I think it’s actually a snail.”

You used to read postmodern novels on acid. You loved their exploration of hyperreality; their dissection of culture as a system of meaning that arises out of our collective, desperate attempts to overcome the indifference of facticity. Read symptomatically, culture does not reveal unseen depths in the world, but rather, constitutes shallow networks of sprawling complexity — truth effects — illusions of mastery over an, otherwise, undifferentiated and senseless becoming.

Then one day, the world overwhelmed you. Down the hall, your flatmates sounded an eternal return. As they spoke in joyous abandon you traced the lines from their mouths — found their origin in idiot artefacts of Hollywood Babylon. The joy of abstraction you once relished in your books took on an all too direct horror. You recoiled. You bound your lips in hysteria, for fear of becoming another repeating machine of an all too present culture industry. Better dumb than banal — better to say nothing at all, than everything that already was and would ever be. You cried and cried until everyone left — until you were alone with your silence and your tears and your nonexistent originality.

Dusk falls in violet streaks. You reach your room on the second floor of the building, open the bedside window and stick your legs out into a cool breeze. The Ache joins you. Danny Burton, the local MP, arrives in his van, his smiling bald face plastered on its side like an uncanny double enclosing its original.

“Hey look, it’s Danny Burton, the local MP.” Danny Burton turns his head. He glares at your dangling feet for a few seconds before entering his house. “You know, this is the first time in three years he’s looked at me and it’s at the peak of my degeneracy.” You turn to the Ache. “One of my favourite past times is watching him wander around the house at night, ******* and unsure of himself. He always goes to check on his BBQ.” You bounce on the bed in mania.

“See this is what people do, right?” the Ache says, mirroring your excitement. “Like, look at that lady walking her dog.” The Ache motions, with a cruel glint in their eyes, to the passerby on the fast dimming street. “What do you think she gets out of that? Doing that every night?” Without waiting for you to respond, the Ache answers, in a low, sarcastic tone “I guess she gets enjoyment. Doing her thing. Like everyone else.” The lady and the dog disappear beyond the curve of the road. Another pair soon arrives, taking the same path as the one before.

A few months back, you’d met an old friend at an exhibition on intersectional feminism. After the perfunctory art, wine and grapes, she drove you home, back to your run down flat in an otherwise bourgeois neighbourhood. She sat silent as the sun set before the dashboard, then asked how anyone could live like this; how anyone could stand driving out of their perfect suburban home, at the same time every morning, to work the same shift every day, for the rest of their stupid life. The dull ache of routine; the slow, boring death. You said nothing. You said nothing because you agreed with her.

“Life began as self-replicating information molecules,” you reply, obliquely. “Catalysis on superheated clay pockets. Repetition out of an attempt to bind the excess of radiant light.”

It is dark now; a formless hollow, pitted with harsh yellow lamps of varying, distant sizes. The Ache flips onto their stomach and scoffs “What’s that? We’re all in this pointless repetition together?”

You respond, cautiously “I just don’t think that being smart is any better than being stupid; that our disavowed repetitions are any worthier than anyone else’s.”

The Ache returns your gaze with an intensity you’ve never seen before. “Did I say being smart was any better? Did I say that? Being smart is part of the issue. There is no trajectory that doesn’t become a habitual refrain. When you can do anything, everything becomes rote, effortless and pointless.

“But don’t act as if there’s no difference between us and these ******* idiots,” the Ache spits, motioning into the blackness beyond your frame. “I knew this one guy, this complete and utter ****. We went to a café, and he wouldn’t stop talking about the waitress, about how hot she was, how he wanted to **** her, while she was in earshot, because, I don’t know, he thought that would get him laid.

“Then we went for a drive and he failed a ******* u-turn. He just drove back and forth, over and again. A dead, automatic weight. A car came from the other lane, towards us, and waited for him to finish, but he stopped in the middle of the street and started yelling, saying **** like, ‘what does this ******* want?’ He got out of his car, out of his idiot u-turn, and tried to start a fight with the other driver — you know, the one who’d waited silently for him to finish.”

You don’t attempt a rebuttal; you don’t want to negate the Ache’s experience. Instead, you ask “Why were you hanging out with this guy in the first place?”

The Ache responds “Because I was alone, and I was lonely, and I had no one else.”

It is 2AM. Moths dance chaotic across the invisible precipice of your bedside window, between the inner and outer spaces of linguistic designation. There is a layering of history here — of affects and functions that have blurred beyond recognition — discoloured, muted, absented.

In the hollow of your bed, the Ache laughs. You don’t dare close the distance. Sometimes you find the edges of their impact and trace your own death. All your worries manifest without content. All form and waver and empty expanse where you drink deeply without a head. Because you have lost so much time already. And nothing keeps.

Months later, after the Ache has left, you will go to the beach. You will see the roiling waves beneath crash into the rocky shore of the esplanade, a violence that merges formlessly into a still, motionless horizon, for they are two and the same. You will be unable to put into words how it feels to know that such a line of calm exists out of the pull and push of endless change, that it has existed long before your birth and will exist long after your death.

The last lingering traces of acid flee your skin. Doused in tomorrow’s stupor, you close your eyes. You catch no sleep.
“Self-destruction is simply a more honest form of living. To know the totality of your artifice and frailty in the face of suffering. And then to have it broken.”
Zetolgam  Aug 2020
Tender
Zetolgam Aug 2020
Treasure my **** in your mouth
Engulf it slowly with your lips
Negate this gagging reflex
Delight on my hot *****
Enjoy the taste of it
Running down
Wrote as the opposite, in tone and shape, of my other poem "Brutal"
Mateuš Conrad Jan 2020
to willingly listen to some russian punk...
they call themselves:
Sierpień - well... Sierpien -
нь is floating around somewhere -
august... август....
perhaps the ****** word "rhymes"
with sierp (i młot) - sickle and hammer...
pień? trunk - stump of wood...
etymological fascination...
august where no emperor augustus
ever stood... unless a Kaцпer...
sier(p) - sickle
(p)ień - stump of a freshly cut tree:
or trunk...
hence the birth of a name
of a month: harvest the trees...
and we are talking about a russian
post-punk goth-punk band...
almost more congested and less
atmospheric the cure...
old kaц the hangover comes in and
says something with a mirror
and fog...
but i'm sure... living under the much
despised (ras)Putin regime would
never give you such music...
look at the people of the...
look at the free peoples of the western /
hinterlands!
no... thank god the view count is only...
what? 3,880 views...
it's an oyster affair...
Sierpien - Cмeрдит дo caмых звeзд (2016)...
people can still produce art of this sort?
is a (ras)Putin required? really?
democracy per se...
power-struggles from among
the populace...
ever hear the petitions of schizophrenics
in the western lands?
a holy grail status for some...
the "nuanced" *****...
or bilingual...
but this album current saved me from
a despair... a friday night is happening
somewhere... and i'm more than happy
to not be there...
i don't even know what's popular
in terms of music in the hinterlands...
the bellybutton of the world: London...
doesn't exactly spew out pointers
to digest what's new and pop with
the crowd...
how long did it take me to hear about
psy's gangnam style?
a good half a year... but then it was already
playing on repeat...
perhaps not in a way that...
once upon a time... Microsoft wanted
to use R.EM.'s it's the end of the world
(and i'm feeling fine)
for an advert...
and R.E.M. refused...
i can't exactly see any use of an advert...
but for the past decade...
perhaps... the outliers of dubstep:
distance, vex'd... burial...
10 years have passed and i don't even
know what music people listen to...
like i said... i'm listening to something...
only about 4K people also listen...
notably in Russia...
i'll translate...
śmierdzić do samych zwezd... gwiazd...
smerdit do samych zwezd...
10 or so years later i'm at this point...
there's no need to invoke Ms. Cмeрц
but it almost never figured for me...
ц somehow borrows from щ...
that's of course ч is related to ш...
to stink of **** up to the stars...
that's how the album name,
"sort-of" translates itself...
in the past 10 years...
this is probably the sort of music i should
be listening to...
i would somehow abhor myself
being the fully integrated western mongrel...
allowing my soul to die and
this language to dictate the fashionista
dictums "from above"... like a good puppy...
origins mostly focusing on...
Lebanon... the old Raj...
i honestly did think that: the de factor default
implication of the word: integration was
to speak the language...
this is not the great h'america where
you'd call it an alliance to a patriotism...
this is england... where people are not
exactly responsive to the word patriotinism...
and whenever it is used...
it's the ugly word nationalism...
so... this is not an extension of thinking
that can be "accomplished" akin to somewhere
in h'america...
this is england talking to itself in me...
or rather... me... looking at england and trying
to find the sort of footing for a tango...
born 4 hours shy of warsaw doesn't help,
either...
still... as names go...
no one was a cooler name for their capital...
come on... war-saw...
beats washington d.c. -
but... loon'don... that's mighty close...
all the democratic arguments aside...
i'm listening to these political commentators...
and i'm wondering...
what sort of music are they listening to?
i'm still looking for a playlist
i inherited that included bands like...
it's dire to even begin to name them...
the best i found are still...
demdyke stare... and that's not really
being pretentious... vomito *****...
but "once upon a time" music could make
a man stay up into the stillness of the night,
far beyond the night,
he might have sometimes glimpsed
a new unfolding as he would go to bed
from the graveyard shift with
some neglected words being seized...
i've just skimmed through u.k. top 40 chart...
i can't relate...
i can understand just having the vote...
but to have the vote...
and be left... in this barrage of...
i understand that man is a political animal
and somehow social...
but a vote is enough...
no wonder good culture hasn't "happened"
in the past 10 years...
i don't like being informed of culture
via the prism of: it's all or not political...
i don't like being
polarised i don't like being politicised...
all i have is one vote...
and i'm nearing 34 and seeing how...
since i haven't already used it...
it's pretty much a redundant affair...
as long as the status quo is there...
as long as there's a status quo...
and there's the shady bureaucracy cushioning...
but how can one expect to find
a tartar stake of sustenance...
when everything resembles an english
sunday roast: with the beef being over-cooked
over, way over well-done?
the meat is butchered twice...
once as the cow... second time as a piece of roast!
i'm not fond of criticism...
bad... i know as a foreigner but also as
a citizen... only the pakistani grooming gangs
are sacred cows in this, this whittle english...
past allegience to soviet russia?
because, what? russian post-punk takes
my fancy...
one! one benefit of a doubt...
justin bieber's jazzy interlude in:
love yourself... and that's it...
i decided for the: leave me alone button...
and for all the vitality of the western ways
i'm left either the window-licker prized oscar
nominee or some lethargic melancholy prone:
a decade on and a decade without
the better part of me...
i somehow own about 10 pairs of shoes
but every time i only walk in single pair...
until they are worn,
until i can almost imitate:
no borrow metaphor from the african
continent... my second mother siberia...
and the indo-europeans and whatever tag!
tag it necessary! caucasian and la la land...
this was political... before it even started...
even whether there was a demand for my vote...
the tide came, the tide went,
i wasn't given so much as a sniff of civil rights...
my civil rights had to be political rights:
in a redundant format best described:
as a vote... opinions first, vote later...
by then the vote is already a confirmation
of how many more ***** will sink
to this level of: humpty-dumpty...
a culture can thrive when power is clarified...
there's no culture when the only
despotism is the finding the lost
in the labyrinth of bureaucracy...
since i base my focus via Kant... yes...
these are idealistic words...
because idealism is - the already focused on
status quo... and again...
the status quo... perhaps even stasis qua!
- but i'm not listening to current music...
from a "certain" place that once could
salvage the rest of the world of bodies
with its beacon of soul...
not "current" as in: where meat is more mince
than steak...
it's all fine and dandy...
to have the provisions at your disposal...
but you can't expect an annual supply of carrots...
or meat... to feed the mouth that neither
opens, nor bites, nor chews,
nor swollows, not ******* saliva
for the premature process of digestion...
you can't expect this most perfect supply & demand...
something has to be missing for
the soul to have... the realism of the fact
i am bound to a robotic / unconscious body...
what conscious decision do i have...
over the already calibrated heart?
the delusion that the brain... is somehow...
freed from what?
psychological metaphysics?!
i have an automated digestive system...
and an automated ****...
i don't exactly know when i'm going to ****...
but i do **** - and with so much pleasure so...
that i would forgo all homosexual exfoliations
for the mere pleasure of...
easing a **** out of that ******* bang hole...
than allowing a vaselined cockrel in...
quiet a disgust pecker of high ambitions...
when it comes to enjoying
massaging the prostate muscle when sitting
on the throne of thrones...
i am trapped in an automated body!
the only aspect of me agreeing to evolutionary
biology is to invoke the soul...
as something ex "nihil" in coprus...
from "nothing" in body (intact)...
hello intellectual safari of the thesaurus
and the synonym chasers...
from under the Iron Curtain...
once more... thrown under the Silicon Curtain...
but there is something in me that
allows me to escape the already well oiled,
this well calibrated body... shy of being
merely treated as baggage...
there's something that allows me to restrict...
when i will **** out a full bladder...
from time to time...
but this is still oh so mechanical...
the fickle nature of man's own self interests:
the only mirror i could find
to compensate the complexity
of deus ex machina...
i'll last 10 minutes with a swollen bladder...
until i give way...
that's when i know that i am rebelling
against the mechanical nature of this body...
- nonetheless the conversation run down
a different route...
i want to be, as i once was...
politically starved... give me the vote and lace me
with civic duties... minding culture...
don't give me this politico journo-*******...
this spare straitjacket of "opinions"...
opinions that do not hone in on a dialectic...
but a dichotomy...
while under (ras)Putin there was a resurgence
of post-punk... brutalism debauchery...
in the vest of the west...
do i really have to give gil scott heron over?
see? what power do i have?
i have.... a chance to glimpse how a culture
can thrive... musically...
no... oh no! no Vlad... you're not getting off
that easy...
Tchaikovsky - 1812 Overture...
tell me... as a cat might look you in the eyes...
and cats do... when you find it uncomfortable
to lie... a cat will look you in the eyes
when it knows the agony of you telling
the truth... too frequently...
now... tell me...
of the 1812 Overture...
how close was Tchaikovsky teasing...
plagiarising... la marseillaise?
oh i think: this close ||.
i still don't know: listening to classical music...
is supposed to make people,
"somehow" smart?!
- just like Beethoven hides / licks /
alludes to the crescendo of
ode an die freude that is to come in the 9th symphony...
lots of crashing plates and banging
templates of cooking vessels in between...
a crescendo is almost like...
but not quiet... no... it's never exactly a chorus...
but Ode an die Freude is revealed
in a subtle way somewhere in the vicinity
of the genesis of the 9th...
i'll ******* duel over this remark though...
if it takes blunt knifes and spoons...
so be it...
negate: Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture does
not allude to La Marseillaise!
*****, test me! i swear to god -
you tell me this russian кaцaп is not alluding to?
what sort of culture are to speak of,
as citizen... if we have to be...
worthwhile less the already invalid vote...
and more the sway-ghost-vote of...
ditto-heads and less and less...
i remember when i would start a conversation
with girls on the basis of: so...
what music are you into?
has... the don mclean prophesy come true?!
the only music is the democratic opera
of the inability to hush competing interests
of the less than homogenous, cerebral hive?!
wow! believe me when i state:
i would truly rather shun my state of being:
stunned!
to me... people have forlorn to "worry"
about petty, ahem... "petty" cultural worries...
this political transfusion, verbiage,
look... a broken arm of a word that used
to resemble pref-                 ending in
the loose limb that ends with 9...
scary language... informal language...
not exactly the english standard: terse /
whimsical... "way-hey-hey-ha-witty"...
hardly anecdotal: mein herr kapitan!
oh but this is certainly a cultural desert...
i'm still doing my best to shake off the 20th century...
what's it called... what's it called...
you are... ah! 20th century inheritence...
not that i'm by any measure a man
of the 20th century...
come the year 2000 i was still a mid-way
between child and man...
2020... 34... i am a 21st century man...
as i also have circa 10K of student debt to pay off...
but this is england...
a chemistry degree gets you nowhere...
i always fancied the Leibniz route...
a garbage man... perhaps "the librarian"...
the street-cleaner...
10K worth of pounds of debt...
paid? when one earns over 15K per annum...
bless ol' england... this debt will be written off
after 30 years...
i really wanted to find a job akin to being
the street-cleaner...
i wouldn't even mind... seeing as how i could
come home and write a rhythm
of a crooked guitar... perhaps doing some work
in the industrial sector...
the scottish widows' h.q. roof, near st. paul's?
i did that... well... part of the team...
industrial scale roofing...
whatever... this is not going to become
"yet another" autobiographical sketch...
a degree in chemistry led me nowhere...
some lucky fist-first-think-fewest landed
their english B.A.s and:
"the authorities" would never let them starve
having... their poo'ems better read...
oh i wish i could think without having
itchy fingertips and what words i want
to say when i however have to say the mundane
formality of the everyday...
i'm the sort of jack spicer *******...
that i cannot work with this lexicon beside
what's always greeting me with a welcome return
of surd applause...
i can't speak the everyday language
of the everyday -
even my punctuation is suspicious -
an *****-nilly I.R.A. bad device...
i can hold the hounds of bark, leash, girdle and muzzle
until they finally find the dog...
but not until i have feasted upon
the blank canvas that will never see any colour...
but this x-ray of hiding faint hues
working in the subtle grey-of-no-grey area
that comes with these words, these bones...
i have to drink...
to find these words... and an echo prior
to the cave... this being the cave after i heard
the echo... even among drunks i couldn't
speak such words, such sentences...
under them the drunks cower...
and... this is the better part of a friday night...
i best exclude myself to this page
of rummaging... because even if i drink...
i wouldn't find a conversation among the drunks
to compliment this! to compliment this
with an immediacy of a dialogue -
a shared experience...
better i write this... and wait for a delay...
better i wait for a delayed response...
in the quantum sense of:
when observed a wave... when not observed...
a particle.
science as this cohesive orthodox litany of
dogmas to undermine religion...
science is more vogue than religious dogmatism...
science is modern...
it will only and has only succumbed
to modern finicky... vogue... science is...
hardly a... blind sighted hive brain-drain focus
of the replicas and clone surds nodding...
this language... would never be spoken among
the drunks...
i hardly think it would or even does:
deserve a stage... perhaps only if i wore face paint...
if i were truly an entertainer...
but these words deserve more than a stage...
they deserve an: umbratempus...
zeitshatten... a time-shadow...
cień czasu... (время тень)..
regurgitate something to me, akin to:
T4T (oliver baez bendorf)...

see! i knew нь was floating around...
it comes... back... full circle.
Ryan James Jan 2017
We've all felt unrequited love
I've just felt it more than most.

Maybe I'm guilty of loving too easily
Maybe I'm guilty of caring too much
But is there really such thing?
Can a person really be guilty of loving too easily?
Can a person really be guilty of loving too much?
Guilt implies some sort of crime, some form of offense
Who have I wronged?
Surely not myself
Surely not her
Maybe my only true guilt is in thinking that one could ever really be "guilty" of love at all
Because even in this type of love - in this unrequited love - beauty prevails
Surely there is no guilt in beauty.

I love her
She doesn't love me
I know this
But is this not still love?
Does the thought of her not still keep me up at night?
Is the thought of being with her not still the one thing that gets me out of bed every morning?
Of course it does.
Of course it is.

I love her
She doesn't love me
But that doesn't negate the beauty of love
For to love someone is like nothing else in life
The rush of adrenaline every time I see her face is above all others
The high that I feel when I think about her is like no other high
It's not about how she feels
It's about how she makes me feel
It's about the lessons that she has taught me
Lessons about selflessness
Lessons about persistence
Lessons about myself
Lessons about love.

One day the thought of her will pass
A relationship merely a fleeting thought
But a love that will last forever
Because unrequited love is a love like no other
A love that teaches what it's like to love
A love that cements the beauty of love in the imagination

Indeed, there is beauty in the unrequited
And for that, I have had one of the most beautiful lives that a man could live.
Mike Finney Dec 2011
GLUTTONY


Go ahead and gorge yourself upon gallons of gaudy garments,
Gaining more weight got by galling garish goods I guess won’t
Ground

Let loose to the luscious luxuries of lackluster lemon and
Lots of lulling bedtime letters that will surely let at bay the
Ladies

Unravel your unctuous mind and unwrap the unstoppable urge
That undeniably lives under unruly layers of
Unproductive

Together bring the talk of taking another tackle to your taciturn tally,
Taller the score and take down the tormenting tickling
Tack

Over and over in obscure ovals until objective becomes apparent
Only leaving orbs of former obliqueness’ obliging to
Object

Never again nourish the need to negate the null to nonsense,
Leave behind the knots of then and live the neat of
Now

Yesterday was yellow in yielding to yearning and
Today is your yet to the question of no or
Yes











GREED



Gradualy every great thing grounded in your gaudy life will grain,
Falling from grander to
Greed

Run away you realize will render you ridiculously reeled
Be the regal recall of natures
Ranting

Even then elude the everlasting elasticity of your sins
Only to elect your own faults and
edict

Evermore entrapped in the entity of your greed which eels
Its way through your
Etiquettes

****** to depths of hell’s dungeons you will go down
If you never fix your
Deeds.







WRATH



Wound so tightly your will won’t save you when the
Day weans of light to
Wear

Repent all you require if you really must, no reprise
Will be your
Reward

Again and again you’ve all but alleged all of your agitations
And now do you
Abject

Too many you take to the top and through to the terrible
Tale of
Tartaras

How do you have your hallowed hot-headed hate now
Had by all you
hocked







SLOTH



Silently slithering fangs strike and pierce into your supple skin
The serpent of Hades himself forcing you to succumb to
your sloth

Legs let leave your longing to linger standing
The lull of the luscious leisure of laziness
Calling you

Over and over you omit the need to oblige
Object the obscurities and overcompensate the
obligation

Though it takes away tell of your toes, stunning your talk
Teathering you to a tree and leaving you to the
terrors

However hollow the halo, the hearth of hasty hearts, may be,
you cannot halt it before is has you in its hold
sleep








LUST


Linger in line a little longer until your litenous lust
lessens to lethargic
larceny

Undone and unset you undermind your unity
and uncite all uncertainty, understand to this
ulcer

Slung across a slat singing sultry in your stipple,
you slew to sound off your
sanity

Taught thoughtless logic tenderly apply topical treatment
to tape together the tatters, tonight a temporary
Tylenol








ENVY



Eject and exact illusions of elected goals eluding your reason
So eject them for
Ever

Never return, never negate the negligence of this nuisance,
Need it
Not

Vanquish your venomous vicarious visions so vivid
I assure you not very
Vivid

Yearn no more and yearn by years how yellow
Can yell the
Yetti








PRIDE



Perniciously palpable pigs of pride that so prate way their progress,
Putting all but prosperity in their own
Propensity

Ridiculously cold rendering the most righteous of realist,
Even relenting to the racketeering of a
Rider

I too see an iota of insolence in intemperate impostors
Of what internal instances tell us is
Intimidating

Down the street dally a day and discover how detrimental
Such a disease dilutes the delineation of our past
Delegation

Even if one ever eludes the elasticizes of this eccentric extortionist
Eventually another will emit it upon to you again
entirely
Mateuš Conrad Aug 2016
i.

my writing is truly one thing, my life another - not
that's a statement clouded in excuses and guilt:
just the claustrophobic macabre -
and so it happens, that every few days i reach
the limit with wrestling the Minotaur -
the time comes when the liver k.o.s the brain
and the brain then starts punching the liver -
it usually stars in the afternoon, e.g. yesterday,
at 3 in the afternoon, a burrowed sense of guilt
comes over, cigarettes are rolled and chain-smoked...
a promise of not painting the front of
the house is the overpowering weight on the heart -
as is an ably bodied father: who, i might
as the source of my writing capacity: the silence -
but the day flows through... the excess nicotine
adds to the shakes, the detox period begins
with a big meal: chinese pork belly in five spice
and other additives, peppers, spring onions
until a thick goo sauce is cooked slowly to thicken...
served with 'it's called egg fly lice, you plick!'
(Uncle Benny, lethal weapon 4) -
the meal is ate as if a ****** ****** - this is
really the point of critically approaching the
concentrated detox - binge of television,
drinking orange squash and smoking -
playing some stupid video game between watching
an even worse movie - before the saga of
x files begins... at 5 a.m. with the most annoying
feline opera by the most annoying ginger cat
begins... the shades are drawn and the hours between
5 a.m. are spent in a quasi somatic state -
the pain in the brain is too strong to allow you
a kipper without the sedative being dragged from
the body: taking sleeping is avoided -
the blinds in the room don't have blackout plastic,
by 6 a.m. a t-shirt is rolled up and put against
the eyes, the eyes adjust to the light until 7 a.m.,
the body gets up and goes downstairs for more
orange squash, but this time breakfast is stomached,
yesterday's leftover rice, fresh eggs scrambled
and mixed with spring onion -
                                                     cigarette, and a daytime
news channel - Victoria Derbyshire -
the main topic of concerns? only 12% of Paraolympic
Rio tickets have been sold, a charity having raised
about £25,000 wants to sponsor Rio's children
to join in the fun... housing shortages in England,
Redbridge council buying social housing in
Canterbury (once a military base) - 7 people living
in one room (the Romanian standard is
14... you have to remember night shifts) -
oh i seen houses like that, i remember one Jew renting
out his house to 20 / 30 Poles before the Union
expanded... paid of his mortgage... no new reality
here for me... the major misdiagnosis of heart attacks
in women on the N.H.S.: a woman ate a curry,
thought it was only a heartburn... boom, two days
later drops in agony... in between the real
results of the detox... sitting...
not ******* out whiskey yellow ***** when there
are barely any toxins in the body... diarrhoea...
up to about 8 times on the toilet - more orange squash,
more cigarettes... then onto the piece the resistance...
the x files... which last up to about the twilight zone
hour of having reached the 24 hour mark of being
awake... one last **** and then shower, and
then doing the laundry (on a sunny day like this,
it would be a shame not to)...
                                                   at noon
tinned mackerel in sunflower oil... brown bread,
all the oil drank... but by the twilight zone hour
a realisation: ****! my headphones are broken!
i've been walking around these streets with those
very depressing sounds of vrroom vrroom...
i know how the old complain about the youth
and their headphones... yes, but you probably
grew with about 10 cars per hour passing your
house back in the day... and too the birds could
be beautiful, and the sound of children's games
and golden laughter... but all the other sounds...
so off to the shop for a very respectable £1.50 pair...
and then the moment when all the sights
on the streets are no longer synchronised with
what i'm hearing, my eyes sharpen and i dance
past the cars and people never bothering to press
the crossing lights on streets: ease the traffic,
ease the traffic... then into the supermarket and
the detox ends... i can go back to sleeping a decent
night... a bottle of Stella... the only thing sexier
on a hot summer's day on the street... good old,
good cold Stella Artois...
then up to another shop for two more beers and
tobacco...
                        after that? magic...
as the title suggests: on a park bench with Ernie -
something more grand than Beckett's waiting
for Godot
... i.e. something resembling a scene from
Patriarch's Ponds, an encounter with
Mikhail Alexandrovich Berlioz (editor of a highbrow
literary magazine, abbreviated MASSOLIT)
and a young poet Ivan Nikolayich Poniryov -
a few clues to the less knowledgeable parties:
Behemoth ***** and chess, a book that makes
sense of the world interrupted by Herr Woland's
wonderful delights (among many), such
as the notable pandemonium at Ivan Savelyevich
Varenukha's Variety Theatre -
yes very much akin to Hector B.'s:
symphonie fantastique: dream of a witches' sabbath.

ii.

sincerest apologies... the sedative hasn't been bought
yet, and a patient father's invoice for work
done on the construction must be written in tangible
English - in ref. to the uttermost sincerity -
Polski nadal w mej duszy dudni,
                            taki ogrom organów i
                                         bębnów twki -
           że strach pomyślec - czy to wir zamkniętej
historii ludu: czy poczatek gorszych prwad o świecie?
   bo co o zamkniętej historii (skrawku) ludu?
      to przeciez moj dziad'ek w Partii uslugi dawal!
      a kraj podziekowal - i co Prawda to Walesa
   na Florydzie z lwa w zlota rybke sie zamienil.
   (comp. diacritic
                                                       ­                                 pending)

iii.

as i knew, i should have finished this poem on
the principle of ensō - all in one piece -
thus i would have staged what happened on the bench
with Ernest -
                        but after walking to the supermarket
minding my own business and the jokes ensued
about how no one notices, how they know my name
as it's their mascot -
                                   after walking into a world
i found chaos; indeed if i wrote the poem on principle
of ensō, i would have included the phantasmagorical
details of something so simple you could almost cry at it...
the simplicity of it, the fluidity of almost 2 hours
spent in conversation... about what? i'm not telling,
and how was it spoken? i'm not telling either -
let's just they laughed at Ernest's bike, because
it was proper oldie...
                                     i mean, i won't mention the odd
details, but the essence? forget it man!
after writing my father's invoice, and how cut money
on the construction site, blame it Romanians but only
have themselves to blame with their model
of profiteering and that ****** fetish they have
Che's socialism of guerrilla warfare...
                            and the comments in the supermarket,
it just stuck with me about Ernie's bike,
nothing in comparison to the Tour de France's racers
doing up to 50kmh...
                                      it just made me happy to make
a clean bed... and prevent 36 hours awake threshold
glitches of abstraction: black strings and random
square objects popping out of nothing with me in a
variation of nervous startles... Ernest's bike?
an antique, a 1950s Raleigh...
- hard leather seat beneath that modern overcoat?
- yes; no one would even take it if i left it
  outside a shop, they'd probably sell it for parts.
- well, unless someone is smart enough to notice
  a vintage, and tries to restore it,
  buy the vintage green paint and cover the rusty bits.
oh **** it, i can't keep my own company to suit
being happy by saying: ooh, doesn't know a joke,
the happiest he felt after walking out with a stone heart
was making a bed... but to be honest?
psst... i haven't made it in over a month... last night i
was getting cold-heat shivers in the idea of it being *****
enough though i shower everyday... ok, every other day
sometimes, my socks have holes in them, and my
shoes are ripped.
but there's more to this... the bicycle is a pun
of a Heidegger maxim: man is born as many men...
but dies as a single man... imagine how many
influences are entombed in us, the education reformers
to begin with, motherhood tips, cot deaths...
but we die as individual men... so when Ernest said
about the bicycle being only worth spare parts,
i said what Heidegger meant: but i'd take the whole thing
as one.
- how many gears?
- three at the back, one at the front; you see this thing?
- the long tube beneath the seat?
- yeah, when charged it would power up the front
   and back lights.
- oh, i'm used to seeing that thingy-madgit that you'd
   press against the front tire and the principle would be
   the same.
- a dynamo.
- yeah, a dynamo, forgot the name of it.
it started so innocently, i just sat on the bench with my
earphones and two beers and started rolling a cigarette.
- may i invade the bench?
                                               (earphones out of the ears)
- sure.
                and we just sat there, i asking if he minded me
smoking.
- i used to, loved it, esp. after dinner, gave it up 15 years ago.
  then conversations about dogs, family,
                                         and children's games,
          i said
- i'm finding it hard to find people of my generation with
even friendly dynamic of the body: eye contact is gone!
- it's all the fidgeting on those ****** tablets and phones,
when we were kids we used to play marbles,
conkers, hopscotch, so many...
- and we used to draw a racing maze, fill bottle caps
with plasticine and flick them through the maze
(i can't remember if we threw dice to see how many
moves we could make).
  by the time we started talking about the dogs we liked,
and compared them to the dog walkers passing us
   we already forgot who died today: it was Gene Wilder...
the world is mourning him, and we sat there
and the best i could come up with was Richard Pryor.
- dumb animal luck...
- you know how i managed to train my dog to run
  around the park, but come back to me? i used a whistle
  to get the dog to come back and i'd give it a treat.
  until it got the hang of it, i sometimes wouldn't give it
  a treat... other times i would, the point being was
  to teach it both obedience when nothing was given
  and double obedience when something was.
- ever heard of Pavlov? he basically did the same thing,
  but your experiment had coordinates, it was three-dimensional,
  Pavlov's was just two-dimensional, instead of a whistle
  he used a bell... just to stimulate two senses
  as coordinated, the sound of a bell created saliva
  in the dog's mouth, poor dog received treats
  but in the end Pavlov put him in a car with closed
  windows in the middle of summer outside
  of Parliament square; obviously the dog died.
- German shepherd though... i had a friend, naturally
  obedient.
- could walk a German shepherd through Manhattan
  without a leash.
- exactly, not even half a metre away, and when the
  master stops, the dog stops.
(i started thinking, what a great way to invert theology,
in this way from dogs to gods.)
well... i guess there was more, but if i write more
about it, when i'll reflect upon this chance meeting of
complete strangers as more insightful than it
already was...
                         he managed to climb back on his bike
with a slight problem after his hip-replacement
operation... at 74 such things break... and he rode off
and i sat there trying to think about what the hell
i was thinking after watching the x files to find
something insightful...
                                        well, i got one thing,
i mentioned it before... i could never have believed
that adults created the most nightmarish version
of hide (negate) & seek (doubt) -
                   i thought it was just as bad as
  truth & dare with religion - with that motto:
          the Koran: this is the truth, and the only truth...
so truth or dare? i dare you to deny it!
                    can i just doubt it? you know, not be
a definite unbeliever, but an indefinite quasi-believer?
well doubt in the stated quasi-believer is wavering,
isn't it? the two of the most beautiful games of
innocence, morphed into these gargantuan abominations.

— The End —