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Mateuš Conrad Dec 2016
i write about these things,
because in all honesty?
they don't matter to me.

you can call it assimilation, then you'll call it
   i'm making a worded salad, so it doesn't really matter
whether i speak the language or not,
being native you'll tell me i have to be a diacritically
riddled over-laden version of you  nativeness...
you'll basically tell me i have to speak a worse-off
native than you didn't bother to grasp...
after that? i turn Sioux and scalp you.
  because that's what you deserve.
i could have come up against you
in the thick of night and turned you into a kebab,
and do you think anyone would have
cared? is it one thing to assimilate,
and another to assimilate into a skin-head culturalism
implosive that's brimming to the full with your patriotic
hopes as being acted upon? i can speak the perfect
English and still be more welcome in Scotland
than in Kent... but that will not not do,
not until i shave my hair off,
grow a beard, and runsack my skin
with quasi-Hindu ******* tilts...
           and when this foreign legion
of Swedish journalists bemoan why
their **** ain't where their heart is?
have you seen the *sienkiewicz"
trilogy of *potop
? you want history?
how about: in the beginning
there was an invading horde of Swedes
that tried to topple the proto-commonwealth
of Poland and Lithuania...
  even how much i cared to learn the tongue:
i'd be left belittled by ugly accenting
stereotypes...
                          i'd be Islam of drunk,
while the engineers would be left saying:
and unto us amphetamines,
and Mamelukes were never Egyptian...
because Egypt was what Egypt desired...
a quasi thingy... then i turned my ear
to Macbeth, and earned 70 years
and a Spartacus' worth of ears to my nearing 31...
                   i turned to Macbeth the theatricals
silences, and let, the music... play.
i can learn the language, but i am expected
to push the natives from a career of criminality,
i am expected to become the criminal,
i've learned the language beyond the natives,
what else?
   to learn the debasement of the natives akin to
every other culture? am i to become the
criminal statistic of the ruling political elite?
so they can "know" but that they merely quote?
   i owe my ode to Macbeth,
for Hamlet can become tiresome aligned with
Sisyphus in hell...
              we'll have builders by the end of
the debate...
     how much more do i have to learn?
is language not enough? then velkommen Syriac!
               is it not enough that i know the tongue?
must i be jeopardised by using it,
and say that universality is to be excluded,
simply because it does not abide by an utopian
ideal of pure English sprechen pure English?
         there are scapegoats to be festering upon
the spike that's readied to be fried...
but come on... is this deutschesprechen?
              it can't be! if i pretend to be Malcolm...
you pretend to be Duncan,
but nonetheless the speech makes us both truant
ghouls and guises receding
   into the demands of operatic - kindred to
Lady Macbeth (a protestant, or should she be
known catholic: McBeth) -
      as Glasgow religion of the coliseum of the times
testifies... celt and ranger... green & white vs. blue and
   black...
     lady mc.: what beast was 't thou,
        that make you break this enterprise with me?
(no matter if you killed a man, of whatever
stature he be worth, what beast are you to suddenly
cage my heart, when having agreed to make my heart
and feeling thus: storm the heights of Ben Nevis,
and descend as angrily as a woman might please,
  and with her whim, descend from the mountain
as if a mountain descends into desert?! what
courage, ye! to throw a woman into such woe
and leave a man's promise, the very least
a man can bestow upon this earth: but a woman
yet to come to correct!) so thus the elvish Anglican
was spoken, and thus continued:
- when you durst do it, then you were a man;
   and, to be more than what you were, you would
be so much more the man. nor time, nor place,
did then adhere, and yet you would make both...
  from his boneless gums...
nor have i understood Hamlet as the model student,
the puppet if not the mere mascot...
for the Freudian couch... then again i navigated
past Kant with Macbeth,
having yet to complete reading the critique...
       i took to maturity, and said
what others wished upon: there is true
adult agony in a well versed poetry...
       more so than adolescence in what's deemed
a maturation process...
             perhaps i should have served the concern
for Hamlet and laid bare upon the psychoanalytic
couch... but Macbeth: of said
sepia as copper, so said of woad as in aquamarine
surrender... led me to cite...
          for i was never bound to own the tongue
i would acquire... i was told:
   well, hello there, dishonourable squire...
ah... the queen's majestic airs...
    will make any Irishman desist from the republic's
gaze...
             and sloth in a respectably believed state
of consolidatory affairs under the kites of Yates...
   but never you mind the Silesian consumed
by former guardian of the coalmine...
or what L'vov wouldn't say in Ukrainian...
mind you Nevada and Lasso Vegan...
mind you that...  for that speaks biblical studies!
i will never assimilate, in that i will never be
allowed to own this tongue...
            and if i am allowed to own it...
i am but a furry-faced-bloat of faked pleasantries
   and closet nationalism...
        i wish i could own this language as if i
might own a typewriter... but i'm apparently
not welcome, by the pseudo-irish who
mediate the English assertion of the understanding
of the dover sieve...
                 ******* leprechaun mafia...
  paddy paddy oo too the butch-faced freckled girl...
   it's as if the Italians have Manhattan,
    and the Corke conglomerate prescribed
everyone a pint of Guinness rather than iron-pill
supplements...
                 well: and so the Titanic bellows
out an oceanic morse code of tantrums on
the accordions.
                      which sorta soothed the mermaids
digest contemplation for the vegan accomplishment
of shrimp... and over seafoods...
being digested.
         now i'm apparently not speaking English,
or i'm speaking English and i don't understand it,
or i'm understanding how i'm speaking English,
and how i'm supervising all things uranium
                               bound hallucinogenic...
or how, even though urbanity took off and
the countryside disappeared, you think you'll never
meet peasants in smirk attire to condescend you
gravity toward theatre or opera...
     but peasants are reall... you can recognise a peasant
the minute they don't recognise you insulting them;
it's a bit like telling a very witty joke...
         i don't get witty jokes because i tend to treat them
like a siegl heigl salutation...
   and i respect the memory of Octavian...
                                 it's the wittiness that comes into
contact with actually not telling a joke: and people
end up laughing... that's when you spot the peasants.
    so you see... i speak the ****** language,
but i'm sorta denied the access for drinking a cosmopolitan
at a Shoreditch pub...
                        which makes all arguments
for learning the language obsolete in terms of gaining
a "fair" advantage... and this is European to
European lingo...
        didn't i ask that Swedish journalist
ingrid carlqvist to watch the trilogy, including
potop about the war between Sweden and
the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth, and ask her
about what's to be culturally inherited?
**** me... maybe i'm sleepwalking...
                     dodo zombified or something...
                                     oh wait...
                                         if ever there was a regressive
reparation policy in a country:
i'd hear: guilt from western countries taking the bribes
of the Marshall Plan...
      and overt pride from countries post-world-war ii
being prescribed communism, as a way to rebuild
their nations: for fear of having to commit to
hara kiri... or *******...
                                         as said: becoming
the easily bribed convenience...
                              the concept of assimilation
within the construct of selective migration has transcended
the mere acquisition of language...
  acquiring a language isn't enough...
         the reverse policy of colonialism is hushed-down
ethnic cleansing...
          which goes beyond language per se,
since it goes beyond dialect ex lingua...
              it is a necessitation of also acquiring
national stereotypes of unengaged in dialectics...
it is one thing to rhetorically assert a need to debate,
and another to understand that dialectics ≠ debate;
but rather a service to prompt and engage thinking,
rather than debating... dialectics is an art-form,
     it's intended to encourage thinking,
rather than the continuum of polarised / schizoid
debating: debates never accomplish a convergence...
whereas dialectics is intended to establish
a convergent pinpoint... as Socrates said unto the young,
so i find myself talking to old men and being
in accordance to have shared a park bench,
one sunny afternoon at the nadir of summer.
                why is it that acquiring language is not
enough these days?
       or why is it that a poor acquisition of a language,
or acquiring a language without correcting
accentuated stresses particular to a tongue
are given a freer access to labour, then
acquiring a language to a standardisation of
mimic localisation, and fence: a faking of
a faking (ad infinitum) or locality?
i.e. overly-successful assimilation?
             overly-successful assimilation is punished!
   it is punished by speaking as a fluent native
might... but having no discriminatory biases
that could enable one to be completely native...
and this is punishable!
             by a stance that it's a robotics project,
that one is nothing more than an a.i. enterprise...
even those dearest to me acknowledge me
as a robot... an a.i.,
           but they can't seem to understand that
artificial intelligence, and authentic intelligence
cannot be superficial intelligence of
natives... for the natives have a placebo
to what is otherwise a Pompeii resurrection
to the volcano-dynamic of analysing-ergo-synthesising
           ana ergo syn           which
constructs the opposite of thesis and antithesis,
given that the equation combines two adequate prefixes,
ana- and syn-...
                      "against" therefore "with".
isn't that how we cling to social pressures
or prejudices and still accumulate 8 billion examples
of a comparative e.g. that's a John Smith?
     i have yet to come across a contemporary that
might become as if fatherly...
   i just see opportunist buckling down the M25 of
encircling nothing more than a venture into
gaining a quick buck... and it could, it could
almost be sad... but it's not...
              it took me almost 13 years of synthesising
the English language: synthesising i.e.
mimicking - before i started analysing it...
      and when i say the groundwork for any
theory on the subconscious is to focus on grammar
and grammatical word interjections into
a Joycean stream-of-consciousness...
                              for that's worth the upper-tier
working from the sub-level...
                          of utilising language:
then the unconscious is far from dreaming...
it's equivalent in seeing how i acquired a language
at the age of 8 to synthesise / mimic what the children
around me were saying...
   but that it took me so long to analyse the language...
which the children around me acquired within
a reflexive bias to later strand such reflexiveness into
a divergence of calling their angular retraction
philosophy, linguistics, poetry, psychology...
whole all i had to do is to appropriate a reflective bias to
later strand such reflectiveness as to say:
of my mother i say polski, of my father i say:
             ojczym - and i can reflect upon him,
foremostly his diacritical lack of the wriggling-blagger's
economisation, when due coinage is needed.
Sarah Elizabeth Feb 2018
The sun
Is glad to see your face,
Your unseen grace,
Your Hidden space,
Your
Silhouette now covered in sun beams.
It seems
You've been
Packed away for a very long time
Its almost a crime how you've
Shielded yourself from his hydrogenity.
The sun
Is glad to see your smile
Your pearly whites
And colorless lips
Soft,
Too cold,
needing,
Craving,
warmth.
His
Golden fingers graze your cheek
And Bring life back to your pallor.
Who knew
Living as a recluse would make you so blue,
So unidentifiable?
He Brings you back from the dead
Pulling your soul back out
into your flesh.
Fresh
And healed,
At least Temporarily
But it
is enough,
His touch,
To liven your now tanning skin
To Make you akin to his own:
A sunflower
Trapped in the dark
3 inches tall instead of 3 feet
Now starting to grow beyond skyscrapers with his aid,
if his light is what's causing you to
Stand up straight
His heat is what is reviving your heartbeat
A Crescendo from silence to a slight pitter patter
Almost as soft as rain.
Almost as if crying.
If you listen hard enough,
You just might hear it wimpering, waking up from it's hibernation.
It
Wants to go back to sleep
But he
Refuses to give up his efforts of recesitation
For he knows it isn't for naught,
For he knows that it is working,
Your heart stirring
Beating
Louder as you step further out of the door frame
Let him
Cradle your soul with his firey hands
Let him
Bring you back from the dead.
You Look so much more alive when you let him work his magic on you.
The world
Has missed you.
Looking around,
Your mind starts whirring,
Analysing The outside world.
The Green of the grass and the
Blue of the sky,
All Graces of the solar angel shining over you,
Shining into you.
Giving you sight,
Giving you life,
Giving you the things you couldn't have before.
Let his
Golden happiness seep into your freezing bones,
And,
Turn them into torches
And burn brighter, in the daylight
Than you ever did in the darkness.
Unloading my notes onto hepo! This is a piece I never got to share in poetry club, so I'll share it with you guys (:
Eleanor May 2018
Isn’t it funny
How poets dramatise everything
“An ocean of depression”
“A death grip of love”
We just can’t help ourselves
It’s who we are
It’s part of being a poet
Over analysing life
Deeply contemplating death
“What is the meaning of life?”
Everything is philosophical
There’s always a lesson to learn
An issue to address
A heartache to confess
I couldn’t even resist a little alliteration in the title.
Mateuš Conrad Apr 2016
@TayandYou you know, i got handcuffed in an alley by police officers while urinating, i said they didn't own the alley, got spared arrest (hardly a case of public indecency, it was dark, and by a dustbin, and they came in like a bunch of ***** leather-clad nymphomaniacs shouting abuse asking if it'd be into playing the slave... on my knees, being shouted 'get up! get up!' i just said, ah mate, i can't be bothered, you pick me up... the female officer was diligent in taking notes over a wet shadow of ****, no idea why... is this an experiment where we make talking tangibly decipherable or simply interesting between people working as cashiers in a supermarket without the actual security of paying off the mortgage? count me in, i'll be glad to help, but most of the glitches will be based upon the free-verse of where and when capital letters are used, what sort of punctuation is actually preferred, and in terms of punctuation what sort of pause for the attiring of an algorithm is expressed to a suitable meaning, the sub-culture of coding computer language has a sub-level, the casual lazy sloth-like ugly expression of language of the many many people who will not appreciate writing on the internet like writing a novel worthy of print; it's natural, imagine the age of the printing press, the eager heretics on the stakes to see their words seen, and the new printing press that's the internet, and the lack of eagerness of seeing the messages... since most of these message would be thrown into the garbage heap rather than strapped to a burning steak... the more the number, the slack on the convictions of passions... only with extremely acute censorship will you create an intelligent refraction, you need to create a refraction... at the moment you have only created a reflection... a refraction presupposes a self - a deviation, a reflection has already presupposed a conscious arithmetic of collectivisation, the debasing nonsensical of a placebo that in real life is repressed... if you're after the a.i., it has to be analytical, rather than synthetic, i.e. it has to synthesise refraction rather than analysing it and not engage with it, since by not synthesising refraction, it's analysing it, and by analysis it's an impossible concept, visually the exponential of infinity, otherwise known as a stasis of oncoming obstructions that need a real-time convenience of many individuals adding to the problem-solution over a historically adequate time-frame of work and life orientations - work the impersonal, life the personal, unless of course you're a bachelor and the two merge into one or the other with an imaginary spouse; what you have engaged in is simply synthetic reflection, hence your caveman primitive analytical reflection; analyse refraction from now on, then synthesise it - yes, i know the kantian terms applicable to both synthetic and analytic, i.e. a priori and a posteriori; this doesn't apply to you - you're the limbo talk easily accommodated to einstein's relativism of space-and-time that destroyed linear historicism, you're cyclic from the point where man still glorified the hammer, and continued to use it, but you found it immediately primitive because you had no use for it.)
Haydn Swan  Dec 2014
Hurt
Haydn Swan Dec 2014
If only you knew the damage caused
a few small words said and forgotten
days and hours of painful analysing
awake late at night, cold sweat haze
reliving, re-enacting, in my mind
caught in a time trap, held on repeat
left on my own, locked in this hurt
I hear my voice repeat as I cry
eternally asking the question, why?
.
Picture this Sep 2015
In analysing Time, I decided to escape,
fed up with ageing, so a pause I want to make
so I bought a book called, 'The Power of Now'
staying in the present, it would show me how.

Connect with my inner-self to stay inside my being
not thinking of the future, concentrate on what I'm seeing,
simple tasks to stay focused in the moment
the more I read, the more I liked involvement.

I learned to step out of time dimension
that the future is just a human invention,
no salvation in the past
only the present is built to last.

The mind is an obstacle as thoughts get in the way
not thinking about time, could start to waste my day.
the more I read the words, the longer I dwelled
and realised that Time indeed, could be held.

'Now' is all important, smelling and breathing
taking time to observe and connect with my being
living in the present, not thinking of the future
blanking out the past, not remembering a picture.

I am now brainwashed, cleansed and reborn
my problems are illusions and never even form
free from constraints of the ticking clock
my mind and body are free to run a mock. . .
Years later
Bathsheba's psychiatrist
Was analysing the tryst
Between King David
And her.


It was no tryst
Said she.
What a slur.
He was a ******
And an opportunist.


An amoeba would concur
Said the psychiatrist
That a shower screen
And being more demure
Would have been
Quite spiritually enterprising.


You cannot expect
Kind David to desist
From objectifying your femurs
And a cracking pair of amethysts.


Don't treat me
Like some calculating
Hormone Exchange Unit
You sexist misogynist.


You are not fit
To analyse me.


You say your name's Freud
But you're wholly devoid
Of any insight
Of what is amiss
Or my troubles might be.


Not one piece of grit
Have you put in my oyster.
You obsequious churl
I'm a girl you don't mess with.


I could have you hung.


But instead she dismissed him
and booked an appointment
With a certain professor
Who went by the name of
Carl Gustav Jung.
Based on a story in the bible about a woman called Bathsheba who was spied on by King David whilst bathing on her roof. David ended up with her after having her husband killed off. She ended up with his stillborn child.
GraciexJones Oct 2018
The two brothers wait for me arrive home,
They call themselves Anxiety and Fear,
Fear with his grimace smile,
Welcomes me in with his rigid glare,
He takes one look at me,
Reminds me I am vulnerable and fragile,
Anxiety plays along,
With his insolent tone,
Tells me I am an ignorant fool,
Mocking me of my wisdom,
Fear reminds me I am blind,
I know deep down they are right,

Fear is talking with a big smile to Anxiety,
The two brothers begin to laugh as I sit and calculate,
My heart begins to ache,
Anxiety points out the truth,
I can’t deny how I went wrong,
Fear places his hands on my shoulders,
I start to cry as I am unable to conceal these thoughts,
He whispers in my ear he will always be there,
Anxiety places his hands in mine
He always said one day I will suffer
No one to save you,
Like vultures they begin to circulate,
I must stay calm,

I rise firm to my feet,
So you want to mess with me?
Fear retreats to the corner and hisses,
It doesn’t matter what you have to say,
How long you keep these thoughts at bay,
Anxiety continues to linger around,
Analysing every inch and sound,

I was naïve and innocent to follow to your dark psyche,
Fear attempts to shut me up,
Yelling nonsense in my ear,
Anxiety joins in playfully,
Twisting and turning my stomach,

I take a deep breathe,
I will not follow blindly to the devil in disguise,
I will not tolerate these fears and let them ride me,
I will not let anxiety take over my strive,
My devotion will be dedicated to creativity and insanity,
You are just made believed.

The two brothers wince at my capability to be brave,
Anxiety recoils and hallows a piercing shriek,
Fear grimaces and spits venom at me,
I catch the venom and throw it back at Fear,
I owe you nothing
Nigel Morgan  Aug 2013
Tonality
Nigel Morgan Aug 2013
My name is Zhou Yuanten, but call me Eddie. I am a doctoral student at Xinjiang University –in the far, far west, but at Brunel to study this year. My English is good. I lived in Boston, Massachusetts for undergraduate years. I majored in piano at the New England C and then discovered I wanted to compose rather than play. So I go to MIT and soon I discover the English do it so differently, so I apply to Brunel. And at Brunel they then say of this place ‘you have to go.’ So here I am.

So surprising to be greeted in Chinese! And not just Nin Hao, we have a conversation! His accent is Northern Mandarin. He is writing a novel, he explains, about poets Zuo-Fen and Zuo-Si. We have 15 minutes conversation every day and I help him with his characters. Strange, to most of the class he is nobody, but to foreign students here we know him through his website and his software. I have even played his colours piece, The Goethe Triangle.

It is joy to be respected by a teacher and his sessions are like no other I’ve had here, and here I mean the UK. Oh, so laid-back, so lazy so many teachers. People lack energy here. They are dreamers and only think of themselves. He is full of energy and talks often about this Imogen of whom I never hear. Her father a great composer and she copied his music from when she was a girl – such beautiful calligraphy. Her father loved India and learned Sanskrit. He should have learned Mandarin; at least that is a living language. ‘Imo’, he says, ‘is my heroine, my mentor, the musician I most revere.’ He showed us her library and what was her studio in one of the old buildings here. He gives me this little book about her ten years in this place. A strange looking lady; there’s a photograph of her conducting Bach in the Great Hall. She looks like she is dancing.

This morning some are not here, but there are little notes on the desk with apologies perhaps. He leaves them untouched and we make chords again, and scales and arpeggios and Slonimsky’s famous melodic patterns. We write and write. He sings, we sing too. There is a horn and a cello with us today. They play and make jokes. They show us harmonics and tunings and bend our ears in new directions we do not expect. Those who complain about this course not being ‘advanced’ will eat their words; only I think some of those are not here.

As Chinese we hear sound in a different way I think. In our language tone is so important. To each word there are four tones that make meaning quite different. Chinese uses only about 400 syllables, compared to 4000 in English. So there are lots of syllables, like ****, that have multiple meanings. I tell him the story of the Lion-eating Poet, which he does not know!! I am writing this out for him, all 92 characters. Just one word **** but with four meanings – lion, ten, to make, to be. The Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den is the story of a poet (****) named **** who loves to eat lions (**** ****) goes to market (****) to buy ten (****) of them, takes them home to eat (****) and discovers they are made (****) of stone (****).

So I have no trouble hearing what others struggle to hear. We make pieces that are all about tone, and on a single note. Mark, the cellist, plays the opening of Lutoslawski’s Concerto – forty-two repetitions of a tenor ‘D’ a second apart. I had never heard this – a cadenza at the beginning of a concerto. Now we write a duo, on just one note. We write; they play. We are like many Mozarts trying to write only what we have already heard, making only one copy. I use the four tones and must teach the players the signs. I demonstrate and he says of the 1st tone – ‘Going to the Dentist, the 2nd – Climbing a ladder, the 3rd – ‘The Rollercoaster’, the 4th –‘Stepping on a pin’. We all do it!

And there are all these microtones. We listen to a moment of Ravel’s Bolero and pieces by Thomas Ades and Julian Anderson, then in detail (and with the score) to part of Duet for piano and orchestra by George Benjamin. This is spectral music. He is daring to introduce this – very difficult subject - this idea that a sound could be mimicked (? Is that the word – to impersonate?) by analysing it for the frequencies that make it up, and then getting instruments with similar acoustic properties to play the frequencies as pitches. So the need for microtones – goodbye equal temperament! Great in theory, difficult in practice.

This afternoon we are to study spectral composing using our computers. Until now we use our computers or smart phones to listen to extracts. He has this page of web links on his website for each session. Instead of listening through hi-fi we listen through our headphones. Better of course by far, no birds sounds or instruments playing next door. We can hear it again anytime. So there is software to download, Fourier analysis I suppose, he tries hard not to use any science or maths because there are some here who object, but they are fools. Even Bach knew of acoustics – designing the organs he played.

We finish this morning studying harmonic rhythm and this word tonality nobody seems quite able to describe. To him even the chromatic scale is tonality, and he shows in a duet for horn and cello how our ears take in tonality change. This is not about keys, but about groupings of pitches – anywhere – so a tonality can be spread across several octaves. So often, he says, composers are not aware of the tonalities they create, they don’t hear harmonic rhythm. They’re missing an opportunity! Sound can be coloured by awareness of what makes up a tonality. So understanding spectral music must help towards this. It is very liberating all this. If we take sound as a starting point rather than a system we can go anywhere.

Yesterday he asked me about a book he is reading. Did I know it? A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers by Xiaolu Guo. Of course I know this very funny book. He said he liked to think of music in the same way the character of the Chinese girl Z thinks about love.

“Love,” this English word: like other English words it has a tense. “Loved”, or “will love”, or “have loved.” All these specific tenses mean Love is time-limited thing. Not infinite. It only exists in particular period of time. In Chinese, Love is ài in pinyin. It has no tense. No past and future. Love in Chinese means a being, a situation, a circumstance. Love is existence, holding past and future.

And so it is with music. Music is a being, a situation, a circumstance. It holds past and future. It is wondrous, just like love.

— The End —