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Tim Knight Oct 2012
Starbucks for the beach sleeper,
cigarettes for the cruise ship worker,
around the world a further three times more
with a six-a-day job, one on shore.
She smiled with Gatsby glare.
She smiled with  fair, tied back hair.
She smiled.
And how her love for Poe and Wilde
found its way to my ear a mere three year veer
around time itself.
Turkish delight is not a food nor a sweet
but a lady who gives a discreet smile to those she meets.
My cafe in my street has you across from me
and the books I read have you printed in an uppercase key,
black on the white and bound by the spine
for you are the cruise ship lady, the lover of mine.
Marly Mar 2014
death would be easier than dealing with this.
or would it?
i can't be trusted with this decision.
it'd be comforting to know for sure that my life is being controlled by something else.
my veins are aching, leaking out through tiny holes you poked with your teeth
my once full energy supply is now depleting,
battery life draining down to 5%
warning, warning. connect to charger.
1%.
i'll shut down, soon.
hopefully in your arms.
how difficult is it to understand
that people like me never sleep soundly?
i'm sick of you(r) people
and your UPPERCASE letters
UPPERCASE standards
UPPERCASE expectations
you, better than me?
hah.
please.
whispers drawn from scratchy throats,
whispers being the loudest they get,
coated in alcohol and ash.
you try to scream
but your voice is muffled by
the weight of your decisions
i told you to stay with me forever
no way to say no
you're stuck heading in one direction
promises are promises, dear.
you told me you'd rather die.
i'm feeling cold
no shivering, waves of frost wash over instead.
they're much worse.
i keep on tucking my hair behind my ear
it won't stop falling from the perfectly made groove
curved to perfection
signed and dated.
it falls how my best friend "accidentally" fell off of a balcony
mom always warned me about balconies.
why do you think i always walk with one hand against the opposite wall?
it's reminder that you can stay away from the gravitational force that is Earth.
at least, for a bit.
why do spaces matter, anyway
jus ta wayt odi st ance
things that should be,
that belong,
together.
the boy who sits behind me in class
plays with my curls, and then
one day,
he cut them off.
i trusted him.
kinda still do.
trust is a weird thing.
trusting someone not to look when you change is hard,
they could turn around and you'd never know.
somehow,
trusting someone not to tell everyone that you want to die is easy.
i'd trust you even if you held a gun to my temple.
i remember this day. lots of paper.
this day is every day.
Mateuš Conrad Jan 2017
i can't stop feeling this pounce of melancholy,
and i mean: it's like a lynx pouncing on my chest,
i can't even claim a clinical dimension to it,
it's a sadness that comes on two fronts...
   it's a sadness that i left Poland when i was 8,
and the greater part of my life was spent
using the English language...
         and i find the Anglophone world so devoid
of consistency... all this post-truth
          labelling...
       this throwing of the cartesian maxim the other
way around, the "i am" really does
   predated the "i think" scenario on the hopes
of asking for a genesis, a (0, 0) / (ο, ω) coordinate
beginning... yes, i know more of a dougnut
   and less the orbit of a planet in the latter case...
     i can't believe i'm getting this technical -
but it sometimes happens, you know?
i don't really like it... i'd love to write about less
claustrophobic matters, less constrictive intellectual
matters... and before you shoot me down
by denouncing the crass lack of motivation -
                i am frail in undertaking another "poem",
and i mean that as a way of saying:
              terse narration and no claim to technique,
or at least that's what i know is modern...
           i watch the following list of videos
as a sort of freak-natured lullaby while drinking
Obey the Walrus         I FEEL FANTASTIC
Agamemnon Counterpart       Username 666
Cursed Kleenex Commercial      There is nothing
Performance Olivier de Sagazan 2008  
     The Wyoming Incident        My Dead Great
Grandma’s Coffin in My Own backyard!
K-Fee Car Commercial       Pretty Woman
Fatal Diving Accident        Girl Goes ****** During
Makeup Tutorial       Paris Catacombs Lost Footage
Shaye Saint John – Hand Thing (yes, copy & paste
given the uppercase lettering, i can be lazy
once in a while) -
                          so i do see a lot of potential in
these clips... if you can't dazzle them: might as well
scare them...
                      but i watch them and then write
a native-language poem while listening to
    music accompanying a zbigniew herbert poem
by tadeusz woźniak - and i get all nitty gritty
when using a language i should have forgotten
aged 8... and i type one out and i am brought
to tears with it... and then it vanishes from the html
blank...
             and then a deeper horror sets in,
which Ezra Pound would have liked
and it merely means: ten quotes by Horace,
a video, with only 230 views on youtube...
                    no one would dare say carpe diem
like a cliche after seeing this video...
             but still the sadness persists...
and i can't make it systematic, not systematic in
the sense that it might appeal to the zeitgeist of:
the January blues, or... i need the pharmacological
rainbow...
        i have a miniature vineyard... enough for
35 litres of wine... and i make the wine myself...
i pick the grapes...
i crush them, i buy the yeast, i melt the sugar until
i get runny sugar-thick water,
   and you know? out of the 5 litre holders for it...
i get about 10 pristine bottles of wine,
roughly in the range of 15% a pop...
                   from 35 litres i get about 10 pristine bottles
of wine... quality-wise: the stuff you'd expect to
buy in a shopping market...
       and that's the sad part...
it bothers me that i've waited for long for the wine,
i might have mentioned it a few months back that
i do actually make my own wine... but given the addiction
it's a product that could only last for something
worth celebrating...
                     these days people speak of a marathon's
worth of abstinance from the stuff for a month...
    which is a bit sad, given that if people ventured
into producing their own alcohol, they'd have
a Dionysian month of binging on it... and then having
11 months being sober... until the natural cycle comes
back, like the rare event of a comet...
    i'm sad i lost a few poems on the way...
but i'm also sad that the drinking should begin by spring
and that i'm ****** already...
                  that i'm still buying whiskey,
and when i do actually drink that one bottle of clouded
wine today, i'll feel a sense of the most minute accomplishment...
   i can't stop facing this industrialisation of
everything... whether it's alcohol, or art...
   or intellectual debate...
   sure, i'll listen to Breitbart for a bit...
then i'll listen in on how we've began mutilating
language... then i'll think of god, and recount
kant's concept: imagine the pangs of despair i felt
reading through the second volume of the critique -
if you do: you'd be surprised by what's involved
in transcendental methodology...
    what could possibly obstruct you in the existence
of: said word... not enlarged in religious practices?
   i am comforted by the fact that kant deals with
god on a non-religious basis...
    religious i mean: worthy of a reciting only one
book a thousand ******* times and building churches...
if god is merely lodged in your mind and allows
for a narrative, who is sane enough to take that
narrative initiative from you, considering the fact
that you're not bound to kneel and read only one
book a thousand times as if that one book held
the sole capacity for your vocab exfoliation and learning
of the alphabet?
     how can you ever be bound to a cognitive detestation
of god? that really must be painful...
considering that thought is so ****** whimsical, frail,
   picky, panicky... give it all you want...
you can't establish a cognitive detestation of god
  on the simple ground that thought is being bombarded
by a 5:1 ratio of the senses versus 1 non-sense -
    which god evidently is: given the numbers of
the good-church going folks... kneeling lunatics i call them...
but the simple fact that you want to do a lobotomy on
yourself with atheism, is a bit like saying
you'll censor the mathematical statement 1 + 1 = 2...
      at least the concept of god is: language exists...
and can i add to that? if a being as such exists:
he wouldn't consist of games... the verbal colliseum
of anagrams and crosswords... language you seize
to be entertaining... it would spell out a clear
format: a x, y, z      vector precision:
    starting from point (0, 0) moving to (1, 1),
  (2, 2)        to ( 5, 5) etc. you'd get a y = x graph...
   not a ******* parabola of nuance and political
chess... or nuanced ***...
                    and is that a.i.?
           well: the french question about man inventing
god because it would be useful is much better said
these days since we we have the capacity to create ourselves...
and given how it looks: i'm going to be a caveman
trapped in a two-dimensional world of the collective
consciousness by the time the true avant-garde in this
medium starts... creating a god became boring...
so many had to recreate himself in the robotic form...
    man is currently needing this exploration...
forget the space project... it's a case of definition...
but i'm still melancholic about the wine...
     i've been waiting to sniff it and feel the sharpness
of the alcohol for a good 3 months...
       and i really wish i could write in my native tongue
so easily as i do in my acquired tongue...
     i'm sad because i'm drinking the whiskey
prior, rather than getting completely sloshed on
what alcoholism looked prior:
    it's that curse of town insomnia and how we don't
celebrate enough of what comes with natural
cycles...
              which means that ontology is dead...
given we've managed to tame the seasons...
  means that any ontological question, based on
the cycle of wine-making, brings us to a more dreary
position than with nietzsche's god is dead...
look here: at least you have something tangible...
   you can't erase god from thinking...
it's the primost a priori essence of every, single man,
it's not an a posteriori fact,
god is there, in that a priori medium like space
and time...
                              and why do people never claim
that god can contain a dualism, primarily because
the herd is encapsulated by a monotheism?
              if god could ever be an a posteriori you'd
be forced to experience some sort of revelation,
and later encounter the evil contained within the concept's
dualism, so in actual sense: be considered mad:
for not making certain choices in life and wishing to
reach for the pulpit... mind you: i had such an experience...
and my life didn't become better for it...
     evidently i should have pressed harder for
the ontological argument of: marrying the girl...
but then the same ontological argument came back
to me when i started making wine...
                      meaning i could produce alcohol
on an industrial level... and forget any ritualism involved
in consuming it prior... since i would only be
left with an addictive socio-pathological use of the
once celebrated, collective engagement by waiting for
autumn to ferment and keep me warm through
the winter... which i suppose is when all the Greeks
were kept together... drinking and ******* rather
than bother to exploit natural resources like gas and oil...
but hey! that's just me...
         but there's a sadness behind this...
start making your own wine and you'll see it...
which is to say: i don't know whether i'd have lived
a happy life with my russian fiance...
             i have only a quantum idealism to mind
expressed by fanciying myself counter to the history
i'm writing right now...
    so why is god as a priori bound as time and space?
well... why would you otherwise get so many eager
atheist gobs to reach for an argument?
                  i find that the most authentic atheists are
murderers... why? they have transcended
    the cognitive debility of an atheistic argument...
      i'll prove god does not exist by "thinking" about it...
my my: what a lovely congregation you have there!
      i'm not even trying to be clever here...
  well... there's an antidote to this scenario...
               so he's permanently lodged in our a priori
  "consciousness" (might as well do away with psychiatry
******* about with its three-layer cake of
con- subcon- and uncon-) -
                   and he's not lodged in our a posteriori
"consciousness" - i hate becoming the fiddler on the roof -
because what then? experiencing the omniniscence
and the omnipotency and whatever other trait that ******
thing does, would translate as what?
     at best a monotheism... or a place where people concentrate
in numbers... not necessarily worths of being beyond
the estimates concerning their congregation...
            it's dangerous to claim a god in the a posteriori
realm...
                that's why the safest place to keep him is in
the a priori realm... where all the big things happen,
or don't happen, depending whether you're from New York
or Hiroshima...
                    and following from kant's distinction
in transcendental methodology concerning time and space...
and god...
                 it dawned on me that he did see a distinction
between mathematical language and the lingua of
  doodling and anagrams and all those poetic jives that
give no precision...
    if time... then space...
                    if god...            then nothing...
and how are dual in the a priori realm...
       only that with regards to time and space
i'm more likely to throw a 1, or a 2 into conceptualising
these things, than i am to throw an a, or a b into it...
    algebra is secondary in talking about these two mediums...
why? because i'll get a definite rationalisation of
time and space... if i tell you the fastest man on earth
can run 100m in under 10secs...
                       if i throw in x y z into this: i might as well
end this whole narrative with: oi! Zeno! give us
that Achilles joke!
                when i mean god i mean: medium of
communication... that's not necessarily a democratic
omni-versed plateau of sponging everything every human
has to say...
       but i primarily throw 1, 2, 3... 4, 5... 8, 9 and 0
into the a priori conceptualisation of time and space...
  but if i do the same when i throw in the other symbols
into the a priori conceptualisation of god and nothing -
sure, mathematical symbols can be phonetic encoding,
as one, two, three, four... five, six...
          but apply them as one two three four to time and space
and there's no way to rationalise time and space,
because time and space is met with a nonsense
in dealing with a phonetic encoding of 1 (as one) -
due to the vacuum of space... and the timelessness of
    time as a ref. point fixated upon... let's just leave
it with the vacuum of space... 2 overpowers two (because
of to and too), 3 overpowers three (because of free)...
4 overpowers four (because of for)... not only that:
but they're more about photographic memory
and visual conceptualisation ease - no one really bothers
   a - z to be anything more than: what they actually
are as phonetically: awaiting pronunciation.
sure... letter can become mystical in a sense of:
   y looks like a tree (other than pine),
           H is a rugby goal...
                               w is a cosine graph...
                    y is a serpent's tongue...
              but that's mysticism and that's also: fair enough!
what bugs me is the opposite of the a priori
magnetism... as opposed to space and time...
god and nothing...
     well... if i throw 1 and 0 into a priori thinking
about working time and space...
  i'll get, say: 365 days in a calendar year...
               or that the acceleration of earth if 9.8 metres
per seconds squared... (cubic gravity evidently
becomes a bit pointless -
                                        imagine it:
   9.8m/s(superscript)3...   or 9.8m(superscript)2/s...
or whatever variation...
no wonder the chemists got the ****-end of the stick
when they were told they weren't allowed into
the heaven of superscript... but sent to the subscript hell
of writing dwom oxygen... ah shame: Faust! i'm coming!)...
yes... but throw 1 - 0 into the a priori
"conceptualisation" opposite of time and space,
i.e. god and nothing... the best answer you can get
is matthew chapter 1 verse 8... or SIX SIX SIX!  boogie man!
well... not... you throw in the symbols α - ω
into the a priori "conceptualisation" of god & nothing
and you get, e.g.: δατυμ -
which basically means: it can't be meaningless -
       otherwise we'd be stuck with animalistic intuition
and intelligence, overloaded with sensual intelligence
and not marred by the murk of thought...
  how this devolution happened is beyond me...
  no amount of wit makes up for the sensual sharpness of
a monkey shouting at a congregation: spy! snake!
and all with the bare minumum of phonetic distinction...
    thus α - ω are slightly meaningless when it comes
to time and space, i know these symbols to enter
this a priori venture, but we're still primarily talking
about using 1 - 0 symbols to get at the knitting-work...
just like in verse, i say of a crossword
    sound of Valhalla (4),
                 and you say: 1 across... horn!
                              and then we get the pretty picture.
3a.m.
       and the wine ritual is about to begin...
      
xyloolyx  Sep 2014
uppercase
xyloolyx Sep 2014
forget the uppercase
forget the capital
forget the emphasis
forget the apple
forget the operating system
replace forget with something else
replace everything with everything
replace replace with something
something something something something
Jenna Aug 2015
english teachers detest me
because i never capitalize my i’s
but they never once bothered
to come and ask me why

uppercase is a privilege
at least, it is in my mind.
it’s reserved for war heroes
or a painter who is blind

i have done nothing remarkable
i have hardly even tried
everything good i’ve done
is eventually cast aside

why do i deserve an uppercase?
or for that matter, why do you?
we’ve done plenty of bad
when there’s plenty of good to do

english teachers detest me
because i never capitalize my i’s
but i will have reason to someday
and i hope that is not a lie
Causticji May 2015
Deconstructing a Kafkaesque
amphitheatre of the absurd,
Easy wallows she in their hypocrisy,
Son of a gun grabbed on
to the gold that fed his infant
self, doesn't dare let go, won't ever,
Dev breaks the bottle he hits,
scrounges, discards the last scrap,
the rat scurries in, devours, heads
back into the smoked corridor,
the auction goes on, so does he
showering petals and pity upon the
middle road more travelled, bumpy,
potholes full of acid and bile,
the stupidity of the tyrannical majority
and an underwater civilisation consumed
by mind-numbing, mildly shocking TV,
undercurrents of power drowned under.
Uppercase Him, uppercase He,
they hoist a red flag, set it afire,
stomp out the flames, wave a black
rag till the ashes turn to naught,
the Dionysian petit bourgeoisie proceed,
spew, *****, spew, repeat.
The voyeuristic rat has front row seats
gaze fixed, piercing centrestage
auction-house by day, amphitheatre by night,
the bids shall resume when
the morning bells toll, till then,
Dev's hungry for more,
the rat enjoys the show.
Enticing us in, sugar coated doors

for sticky fingers,

Doors of mystery, keep out, staff only

nettled in barbed wire.

Half open doors full of promise,

chocolate soft centred

Exciting doors, silk covered

in lace suspenders

Inspiring doors, Leonardo bold italic,

uppercase only

Lonely doors all shuttered in silence,

cobweb covered

Sad doors, tear stained

and umbrella wet

Happy doors,

candy striped in laughter

Forbidden doors, Pandora boxed,

best kept locked

Revolving doors covered

with the same sticky mistakes

Trap doors crocodile sprung

to catch you out

Doors that slide on tram like runners,

buffered into walls with imprint of face

Secret doors of camouflaged chameleon

Troubled doors

thunder clapped in turmoil

Doors enticing us.
NitaAnn  Aug 2013
C-r-a-z-y
NitaAnn Aug 2013
Sometimes the case of the letter
makes all the difference.  
God or god.
An important personal I or a misplaced letter i.
Summer the girl or summer the season.  
The uppercase letter delineates between importance and the ordinary.

Perfectionism is a haunt of mine.  
It is a ghost that follows me
And does not stop no matter what I'm doing.  
It kills a day in a blink.  
It turns anxiety inside/out.  
It takes away my care for something good;
Even the smallest of outcomes.

F@#k it.

That is perfectionism in two simple words.
If I cannot do it right then I refuse to do it at all.
  How dangerous is that?
Or rather... how stupid is that?

I see my world in black and white.  
Absolutes.
  You are either right or wrong.
Good or bad.  
Smart or stupid.
I have a ridiculously logical brain.
Logic is the glue that holds the shards of me together.
Without this reason,
I probably would have landed in the crazy house a long time ago.
Logic is my reality.  
If I can reason it; it exists.  
If I cannot; it must not be.

And there is the problem.
There is nothing logical about my past.
Although it seems that abusers have a handbook;
the logic chapter is always found
To be ripped out, shredded, and burned.
  They left that part of it up to us to figure out;
To understand their evil.  
That is what makes us crazy in the first place.
So the harder I try to understand;
The crazier I get.  Literally.
I cannot reason what was done to me
And so sets in denial.
I can't understand it;
I can't make it right.
So f@#k it.

The abundance of f@#k its has really slowed me down.  
Nearly to a halt and I'm not just talking about my mental healing.
This is my real life too.
Housekeeping, taking care of myself,
Dieting, exercise, blah blah blah...
you get the picture.
If I can't do it right and perfect;
Then I won't do it at all.  
All great thoughts to live by.

This thinking is not something easy to change.
It is a deep part of who I am.  
It is also something that makes me feel normal.
Normal exactly long enough until
I realize that normal people don't do math and physics problems for fun.
But I digress because my weirdness belongs in a whole other post.  

I have steps to take.
  One at a time.  
Crying just one time worked for me.
  And then I did it again.  
Getting up early once
Led to me getting up early again AND working out.
It doesn't have to be all or nothing
Sometimes it's alright to be somewhere and in between.  
I don't have to be completely healed or entirely wounded.
  
I'm still crazy;
Even with the steps towards tears and feeling.  
But I have progress now
Because I have downgraded letters;
Even if it is just one.
Now I'm just crazy.

crazy with a little "c"...
Kodis Mar 2014
i never have liked uppercase i's
i know it's absolutely stupid
but they always make me feel more important than others
like i'm always saying I, I, I.

see even that was weird
way too many eyes
so i spend half my days, proofreading my lines
to make sure that i'm exactly the same size
as everyone else

when i first met you it absolutely blew me away
to find someone else who lowers their eyes
i'm serious, it's amazing to find someone who wastes as much time as yourself
hitting backspace, and
cursing auto-correct for not allowing this behavior

but after a while i noticed you stopped with the i's
maybe it was around the time **** got weird
maybe it was a fad; or i have some absurd superstition
but it's cool
You always were the bigger person, anyway.
Jack Dalton  Oct 2013
Up and Atom
Jack Dalton Oct 2013
A text message  with uppercase letters.
He could of been an auctioneer "YUP".
Instead he works inside eyelids.
My caukerspaniels ears look like **** carpet tube socks.
Im dreaming of women and dogs all over my one pillow matress.
The same ones who ruined couches and charmed the mail man.
He ran off like a dobermen unaware she extened the leash button.
If im lucky the mornings are reliable (they usally are)
The man upstairs our heavy metal enthusiest
Tap dances away the land words aspestoce flake by flake.
Hes proud of his roman garden (its really greek).
Business as usual,
I take a deep breath and loose fifty pounds all over again.
The fountain gets hot and my dollar store shampoo
makes my hair smell like juicy fruit.
The kitchens old.
The antiqicated refridgorator farts like a unrully bachlor.
And the microwave was upenheimers favorite way to nuke a
cold cup of coffee.  I regrett the things I did to save time.
The sizzling eggs cry "you dont know how good you got it".
The toast smashes the yoke.  
A head line reads:
over four hundread civillians killed from drone strikes.
The radio bleats "waking up..... welcome to the new age"
"Welcome to the new age".  
I thought of the boy in the bubble and paul simon.
"These are the days of miracle and wonder"
"These are the days of miracle and wonder".
Outside my double pain window I look for women in jogging shorts.
Its still not warm enouph.  Instead I find an army of children waiting for
Their yellow bus.  A boy drops his lunch and a girl picks it up.
ell  Feb 2021
my uppercase soul
ell Feb 2021
I stand
I clutch the ground
the same ground that you and I
once walked together.

and a month ago
if you could've asked me
what life was
without you,
I would've said
"impossible."

and that was the answer you wanted.

a week ago,
if you were to ask me the same question,
I would reply
"bitter."

for I did not understand
that the ground
we once walked on
together
was a path paved
for me

so, instead
I let you take my hand
and pull me through
a terrible maze
that was not crafted
for you.
this is seriously terrible I didn't edit or anything
do you hear it
rain at the window

do you hear the lightened notes
of hammers on skin

tunnels fade into waterways
paths are shallow pools

we laughed at the word

damp

the understatement

all wet clothes, mops
and buckets

later he said he would have
fetched me in the truck yet

there is no vehicular access

don’t get wet, don’t get wet
again

we laughed
and carried on with the day patiently

ridding ourselves of the valuables
of no value

things from the past

james

so you know the pattern?

if the name has lowercase things
will continue a while and if uppercase

it has ended
A Sickening Love Nov 2014
i am not important.
i do not deserve to be uppercase.
i'm not that important.
i shouldn't stand out.

so insignificant
i'm so fake sometimes,
i don't deserve to call myself me.
i'm just who i try to be.

i'm not Me.

— The End —