I love the warm smell more than baked bread.
I love the old stories flooding back through my head.
I love the middle-age chatter, with child like mutters,
finding old favorites in old familiar covers.

I love the personalised fountain-penned message,
carefully scribed and meticulously dated.
I don't care about the number of dog eared pages,
or the tell-tale signs of well worn aging.

Tea stains and small tears - they don't bother me,
each tell a new tale beyond what I can see.
I love the weight of the years sitting in my hand,
I love the tether to past lives multi-second-hand.

With memories of libraries with warm worn carpets,
wall to wall adventures and sun faded artists,
battered yellow seats, shooshed conversations,
quietly spoken protests at the books being rationed.

I stayed past closing, riding trains of free thought
with Tin Tin, Asterix and old Mrs Pepperpot.
I'm still drawn to the pages and the feeling inside
second-hand stories where memories reside.

You said I was Alaska- its true
But I'm not gonna crash that car.
I replied 'then you're the Colonel'
And you're much better- by far.

You always said you were Lennie
And this I was George- the clever one.
But I am the fool and you are the brighter,
You'll be around when I'm gone.

You always thought you were Ron
And me Hermione- I guess so.
But then who's Harry- *** we're not gonna marry
It's you- you are the hero.

I reckon I'm Eragon- the wanna be warrior
With a lot to learn.
But I've Saphira by my side
Level-headed fun and stern.

I'm Frodo- I keep going,
But weakness roots in my heart
In you I have found my Sam,
Won't let me fall back to the start.

Asterix the bright and clever-
Always knows what to do.
I follow- a faithful Obelix,
I'll always look to you.

And if I am truly Odin then you are Asgard itself.
How many other ways can I describe our friendship?
Your are Peter the rock-
And I am Thomas the doubter.

the only time we care about the poor
is in disaster,
there's been freedom for decades,
but we're still owned by slave masters,
incorporated trademarks
branded on our spine,
the american dream,
might as well be bovine.
flagpole sitting flappers,
never expect to fall,
'33 til infinity,
greed affects us all,
and it's more,
than a disease,
there's no atticus,
instead, great gatsbies.
and boo radley,
aint gonna right these wrongs,
all we've got are our words
and the will to stand strong,
and it seems we're just monkeys,
launched into orbit,
in spaceships,
that only fall once reality hits,
and i don't see any solutions soon,
we consume and presume,
that this is all a cartoon,
asterix fiction,
we lack conviction,
we lack the diction,
to speak our mind,
we are confined,
to the roles,
and the moulds,
and the holes,
that are made for our souls,
we stay out of the spotlight,
even when the times right,
allergic to great heights,
like madden going to superbowls.
ice cold,
a wise man said was cooler than cool
but these fools aint never heard of ice-nine,
it's the right time,
got the right rhymes,
who cares about these thugs,
i'm set on madoff crimes,
who cares about the dealers,
follow the money like the wire,
we're civilians in vans under apache fire,
and the cover-up is comin,
the cover-up is comin
the cover-up is comin
the cover-up is comin
the only time i'm hostile,
is within,
when i gotta smile
at these businessmen,
that are tearing us apart,
and ******* on our soil,
tearing out our hearts,
creeping like the mcboyles,
i've toiled in the trenches,
for most of my days,
as have the majority of those i know,
and we can't just quit,
we gotta get paid,
materialstic societies depend on dough,
so we dream of being on boats like samberg
the only threat to our fatasses is the hamburg
-ler, there's no cure, there's no care,
there's no health, it's not fair,
but if you keep on dreamin, one day it'll be there,
simply stare at the sun, things'll brighten up,
keep buying that product, trust me, they give a ****,
fall into place, stand in single file,
and whatever you do, don't forget to smile.

this ins't the Cabaret Voltaire moment,
but it almost feels like one,
i'm not cutting up newspapers into
singled-out words to pull out of the bag
like some magician with a top hat and a white
rabbit... i know i can influence people,
and that's my prime worry...
but sometimes you get to point out a correlation
of your own words the preceding day,
and the day that follows in newspapers...
and i do think that newspapers are the perfect
canvases to work from, to write a poetry,
all the tabloid presses get left in the gutter,
the famous and the rich get their faces printed
on its pages, but they nonetheless end up
in the gutters and get stamped on...
if i'll ever set up a polished Instagram profile
i'll think about keeping a clean lifestyle
photo-feed just prior i get my shoes polished...
so this ain't a Dada-revision...
i'd love for it being so... starting with
cuts of newspapers like writing a ransom letter...
you know i stress the need to avoid censoring
swear words, i'm getting systematically peeved
about this practice continuing...
like i said, newspapers are more about poetry
than philosophy ever wished to attack...
of course some of those trailing in the marathon
with their idealism will still meet the natural
critique... but poetry these days is more about
journalistic adventures solo
than essences, orchestras, ideals and singing
about Larks... those that lag behind will get burnt...
believe me... they're already barbecue burnt
chicken wings... and it does happen,
not like Cabaret Voltaire rebellion Dada,
i mean writing something akin to the argument
between Newton and Leibniz about who
discovered the mathematical Antarctica first:
calculus... it doesn't matter...
a day ago i wrote about swear words being
like conjunction words, the lubricants that scare
away dictionaries and thesauruses...
and what do i get today?
I SWEAR THAT'S POETRY... (Tom Whippie),
page 37 of the Saturday Times...
the jyst noting of things:
they are poetic, expressive, build trust and offer
a crucial linguistic hammering...
also aligned with Asterix and Obelix due to
their malignant oncology...
but! but... a US academic has called for a rehabilitation
of swear words, saying: 'profanity is poetic'
(Michael Adams, University of Indiana) - adding
'poetic because it's a surplus of expressiveness
and also poetic because there is something
in an extremely frustrated person finding no other
word suitable fir the level of frustration they feel'.
well... i just liked the idea of toying with
grammatical classification... i already said:
i would condense that statement into... to be honest,
and to be honest once more, and once more again...
i like to see these words like conjunctions -
which is the polar opposite of what western
society deems as: ******* **** and a demise
to further encourage dyslexia - the same joke
from Poland about the graffiti: huj and chój and hój..
people laughed at the excess aesthetic of the latter
two examples... bellybutton intellectualism of
the world (i.e. English) doesn't necessarily have to be
right... but nonetheless, Prof. Adam's in his
in praise of profanity speaks about the versatility
of swearing, that it has a power to make it
a much underappreciated linguistic device...
'there are words that punctuate experience; profanity
is artful speech'... add the word therapy to
that statement and you become a Guru...
socially useful, like teenagers using slang and acronym
encoding to talk cool, but also to provide the herd
an insight against paedophiles... nothing new...
paradox? you cannot praise profanity without
rules of legislation being imposed...
failing to preserve profanity would mean letting
down future generations... then the *** comes out...
a Prof. would talk about restraints...
straitjacket vocabulary... casual swearing...
oh right... i ought to fit my larynx with a bow-tie
for the formal affairs of the world...
i never expected my poems to be Grecian marble
smooth because i was about to gobble caviar and
champagne... well, let's face it...
somehow Evelyn Beatrice Hall's Friends of Voltaire
seems a bit redundant these days - it's no longer:
i disapprove of what you say, but i will defend to
the death your right to say it - is that at all true these days?
i always thought that the internet was more of
a thinking platform than a stage to shout your
opinions... maybe i was wrong... the sins of thinking
and leaving your thinking output exposed
in a public realm rather than in your bedroom
drawer... i rather be offended than live my life
out in an Apathetic Utopia of Fascist Islam...
******... just shoot already, but make sure i'm dead
rather than disabled.

i never knew so much
could be extracted from a noun,
it's like a verb inside a noun,
the juxtapositions, the variations,
the laughter and the vowel eating,
it's a whole lot of Rio carnival tactic
in it - and i'm not even a Jew,
there's a bunch of them training up
to a rabbinical status,
doing this:
θ: th- -eta
ρ: r- -**
                             ω: o- -mega
                             λ: l- -ambda
but with only ~four letters... well, technically nine
given a, e, i, o, u.
i mean, because where's the proper incision?
how to cut up the musicology right?
Ziggy no Stephen no Damian
would throttle to a status of Bob...
Zion in the Caribbean - if i were
Jamaican i wouldn't wish to go back to Africa,
**** me... Jamaica and Nigeria?
send me back... send me back to
the pristine beaches and coconuts!
but linguistics in mind,
you give a noun to a shapely encoding
like ω (omega), but the complexity of
naming such an encoding leaves you
bewildered about the verb (usage of),
so you come up with diacritical stresses,
but it's not about that at all...
it's about how you detach the -mega
for the o-, and how you attach -π without
the iota - surely the π could also be
balanced with any other vowel -
given that consonants revel in balancing
acts, e.g. πα, πι or πε - where the *******
cutting up and putting back together
game of a plastic surgeon? rigid structures
the consonants are, they need attache
auxiliaries (tauto-, convened toward a
river of logic for further flow) to hold them up,
vowels the crutches, consonants the broken
tibias - somewhere along the way i was
asking for a duo of something, no, not a double
shot of espresso in my mocha - i'd prefer
the word moccha - or muchas gracias -
or mushy - or moo chi chi, cheap kiss - or i
invent the second coming of Saxony on
these Isles - write you in Germanish -
or Germglish - whichever - we all know that
the Saxons invented the saxophone (cheap joke) -
i said same phonetics as a cappuccino for the
mocca - but it looks ugly without η - η, precursor
of the Essex dialect 'ave as in not a salute at
a Caesar but as in Asterix rebellion of Gaul have,
same with wω (double-u omega) - as in wo er,
wo er - water - god knows who decapitated the
τ (Tao on the orient, tau on Rhodes)...
but you get me... if you name a letter so, as in
ω being omega, how do you extract the pure material,
the symbol O, it's still a Greek Umlaut...
how do you extract what you want,
mining in omega to simply get something
akin to omicron...
a double-o, a dumb dumb... as in:
how d you, how do you, how dough the cake
from raw yeast, flower, egg, milk etc etc.?
the same how doth we still sprechen Shropshire
or Cheshire, hmm? ask Alice, the ******* daydream.
well... this poems just ended like a premature
*******... there was an ******* somewhere
in between, but the end feels so unsatisfactory
that i better not write another _ _ _ _.

there no doubt about it - with each day there's always a falsetto poem, always at the end of a binge - the mind goes blank, words lose meaning, every day is like a simulation of old age - there's a method to this madness - i'm not afraid of critique concerning such poems: true virtue is unafraid of critique - for one, i can just as well criticise myself - so after each binge i end up with mediocre poems - conceding this point, words lose meaning, associations of meanings disperse - pollination in full swing - i end up writing noises - perhaps because my own silence is so chilling i have to resort to oscillation around the onomatopoeia, and all respective quasi or pseudos or pseudonyms of all required ventures - but the rewarding aspect of such writing is best summarised by a jazz drummer and a jazz teacher combined into one: the crescendo must go on - the movie? whiplash - the moment, the moment, the moment is too sudden and too short - it's essentially everything and nothing at all - always a heart-out-of-beat, at least a feeling of having a heart without the unconscious rhythmic pistons with whatever scientific explanation there is to match - they always come, the trail offs.

i didn't finish the Cantos just in order to remind myself
how i miss the time when it all began with
the second Odysseus of the 20th century -
both this disguised Odysseus of the Cantos,
and the blatant portal of time-warp beginning and ending
in Dublin - Homer's resurrection and reinvention -
perhaps all this Grecian nostalgia is what fuelled
the 20th century altogether - but how anaemic
do the Roman poets seem in comparison -
i could never write along this root toward that
tree near the Parthenon - but taking root in
the Roman tradition has only been accepted for
historical relevance only once since - without
Virgil there would have been no Dante - but still
Dante uses more accuracy of mathematics than
of spontaneity - a clarity of mind is necessary -
trinity rhymes - all clearly presented, cut up -
but no one damns him for the theological impetus -
happily prancing alongside them in hell -
through to the seemingly pointless purgatory
and then elsewhere into what can only be seen as
humanity's limit of imagination: subatomic particles
and a realm were visible to the naked eye we float
in and out of conscious states - well - if what i'm attempting
is an attempt in good faith - then my guide is no one
else than Horace - and already the style between Greek
and Roman is staggering - the selfishness of Roman poets -
the must include item: i. no Trojan horse, but a wooden
barrel of wine - no heroes, only leeches and poking fun at
them like Spartans at a drunk given undiluted Burgundy -
Roman selfishness, self-loathing and all jokes on me -
the 20th century's nostalgia for all things Greek isn't here
anymore - you will not find such legislators of a second
fancy at Ancient Helen - this century has no great conflict
of gathering - and therefore no great victory to parade with -
it's a silly century from what looks like an even sillier 80 or
so years to come - and is there a nostalgia for the Roman
past? there was a nostalgia - it's too practical to think about
it - esp. with the writing kept, even if they crucified an
important, the wrath of the supposed father was not as great
as it was with the Egyptians and the Babylonians -
Sanskrit is just as old and it survived - those two phonetic
encoding systems haven't - you can't say they were
inefficient - civilisations surrounded them - but the wrath
was too great - and they became instinct -
but perhaps the wrath for his phonetic encoding is the digital
age? a ****-stain on human interaction - or a smear
of fondue chocolate? i think the latter - imagine me running
around the publishing world like Asterix in the *twelve tasks
of - the place that sends you mad - including Hercules -
who did, managed to **** his children when his muscles weren't
up to speed with bureaucracy - oh hell, bench-press a cow -
but run with a little leaflet between offices... bonkers.
i really do miss the Cantos - the feel of them - the obscurity of
some of the references i'm not ashamed to admit -
or just the sheer ease on the eyes as is the case with any poem -
(a poem a day keeps both the psychiatrist and the optometrist
away) - so yeah, plenty of apples - and poetry, supreme democracy -
i could reread them, but i'm of a democratic cult -
i have to allow someone else to borrow me their shoes -
tom verlaine's album around - a rare gem, doesn't get listened
to a lot, but unlike other music, it's not something you'd
listen to in a gym, something that's a pleasant but mundane
distraction of pop metal pop rock or pop pop - the o of adore -
as suggested by a Scottish music shop assistant / owner in
Edinburgh - that magic city of where the 21st century's heart
of the literary scene resides - forget Paris, it's too much of
a little Casablanca - the Algiers of the North (Edinburgh being
Athens of the north) - i admit it'll be hard not to be nostalgic
about the 20th century let alone Ancient Helen -
but as the monkey said: got to push on and meet Darwin -
silly hands, silly feet, silly tail... and i'm not wearing Gucci
without Brazilian wax job all over, except for appropriate
places - sure - we'll just wait for the Apache hairdresser -
we only to scalping. however, there is a subversive thing
i want to mention (never mind that i already wanted to stick
in Thesaurus Rex on the matter): Kant (yawn) -
started analysing English aged 8 -
started synthesising English also aged 8 (a few weeks
if not months, from nothing, to gut sprechen -
piuma'h not pooma'h (Puma) -
but it took me 20 odd years of unconditional surrender
to the language, 20 years of synthesising it - blind -
to come across another chance to analyse it -
the difference being it became analytical a posteriori -
that's the thing with philosophers, they have spaghetti
for brains, tangles, they over-complicate things, but sometimes
they get it right, and you read them and then end up
using their labyrinths to find secret passages at places
like Versailles that Louis XIV used between visits to his
concubines - that was the trick, the upper-hand on the Arabian
practice - amuse yourself by not owning them -
but technically owning them - concubine power - the sixth
Spice Girl - dirrrty spice - but yeah, 20 years to get a second
stab at the analysis of the English language -
20 years of synthesis will do that to you, like any chemist
might feel, aged 20 does an analytical study, something
new and never done before, then he lands a job at a
pharmaceutical company and has to synthesise and synthesise
and synthesise the same thing over and over again -
20 years pass, aged 40 he gets another chance to analyse something
that it's just quality control - i know there are puritans out
there who'd lash out at what i'm using here -
but i want the practical side of philosophy, nothing overloaded
with words, theories, knowledge whatever that means -
i know crude, but necessary - a priori (from the earlier):
well, i wasn't a mute aged 8, proof?
an etymological void about to be filled: w środe poszłem do
lasu (on wednesday i went to the woods) - etymology here,
i'm sure of it - etymology or the resemblance of
a Thesaurus Rex roar - a piquant case of synonyms -
środa (wednesday), originally? derived from środek:
the centre - oh look... friday thursday ś tuesday monday -
the days off don't count, we all know that.
etymological spontaneity then, i wouldn't force myself
to practice a detailed inquiry using it - spare of the moment
thing... more pleasant that way;
but as you can see i am at the point of analytical a posteriori:
clearly shown by what i've already noticed in nuances
of the English language - i won't go through what i've
noticed - but having crossed the threshold of
analysing English after having automated synthesising it
for so long, i would naturally end up writing poetry -
the 21st century kind - look ahead! said Columbus,
but please have a sacred respect for your memory as
your own citizen with Friday on Bermuda -
treat memory like a potent hallucinogenic drug -
after all... the state doesn't respect your memory, at school
they cram in all those pointless things you have to
memorise - arithmetic, spelling (well both are kinda useful),
but so much else you will not care to remember -
it's not about how important you think you are when
you're not given there's 8 billion of us - don't get
fooled by this self-importance gimmick - look at what
the education system of the state is eroding... yes... your
memory - so you forget yourself at the happiest of times...
memory is more sacred than thinking and can be
more potent than an Amazonian or a Swiss hallucinogenic.

i don't write, i don't write rhyme, i am a lumberjack with words, and for those reasons: i have imbued some masculine dignity into the art form: i don't do well-wishes, hopes, utopian forms of the sudden burst of emotion; every time i'm trolled i turn into an orc, ravenous with an adrenaline thrill: and pristine english sarcasm comes to the fore: i first nibble on the genitals, the ego hardly mentioned, i mean, who does attack a person's taste in music with such adamant enforcement... but? what pissess me off the most? how puny the argument matter is: freedom of speech should, never, ever! bypass the rule of at least a few dialectical exchanges... blah blah all you want: but what's the point of a freedom, if there is no guiding "aesthetic" surrounding it? ******* caviar on toast, just as absurd as an avocado on toast: point for point: a load of *******.

it always makes sense to listen
       to some scandinavian
music, with interludes of rain,
in the night, after a few ***** sharpshooters -
peaches & cream moment...
can't argue with it -
esp. if it's *corvus corax's song
                 a i mbealtaine, **** just sticks to
the wall, and in every appropriate way:
feels a tune of the heart -
i once had a dialectical mini with a biology
teacher of mine:
i said that lyrics mattered, and that you
needed to understand them -
she said: only the melody matters -
in cooking that's comparable to the presentation
versus the flavour -
     i'm sure she had the hots for me,
a few days passed, and she put on a hijab...
god, but raven dark folds of her pakistani hair
really could be compared to the thickness
of custard...
   shame she put on a hijab soon after -
i didn't even mind her post-acne peppered
face: i thought it gave her character -
and those **** chubby cheeks just fused
perfectly with the thickness of her hair...
hair... every woman's plot of jealousy begins
with another woman's hair...
     at least men are compensated with
a beard... me?
      ugh... too much: on my chest, on my stomach,
on my head: i have to wet it to keep it
from turning into a rampant amazon in
post-apocalyptic new york...
       and yes, i do like the ***** on my face -
i became bored with shaving,
            plus i look more monarchical -
regent - loser regent - nonetheless regent:
donning a beard is exhuming some minor
authority - long hair? you get two food-stamps
ye ******* 'ippy! say hello to the cockney
meister schtick: herr H.
  oh no, not ******, i'm bored of citing that:
if they only let him into the arts academy
and allowed him to paint his mediocre
paintings -
        he wouldn't be that much different
from picasso...
    sure **** he became an "artist" -
       only an "artist" could have conjured
auschwitz; gentlemen! applause for the vienna
school of art!
it was always about not writing cute,
not writing ******* overladen with rigid
technique, most terrible: avoid rhyme:
at all, and i mean all costs;
     leave that for the nursery brigadiers
of bombing blank pages with word bombs...
i can't stomach this notion of "cute" -
   this pedantic pseudo-haikus in women's
poetry: by comparison,
      sylvia plath produces a raw steak
tartar - you know, originating from the people
that made the steak from horse-meat,
and downed a litre of horse-blood,
once upon a time in the days of the golden horde;
sylvia just rhymes unintentionally -
   she tickles rhyme, but as soon as she
has a couplet, she hides it,
  this game of hide & seek &
                  seek rhyme & hide rhyme,
is, in all honestly? genius!
     i find that sometimes just one couplet
work to perfection like glue...
tell you what - i'll let you in on a little secret,
you want to write poetry?
  start by watching australia's masterchef -
i know, weird - it dawned on me that it's worthwhile
watching cooking shows...
  given (a) you just entered a post-pavlov experiment,
and (b) they talk about food these days
are works of art...
         guess what, every time i watched
obelix eat his way through one of the herculean
tasks of asterix in the 12 (1976 a.d.)
   i always felt obliged to eat something...
if i were you, i'd start watching some cookery
shows: after all... the eyes eat prior to
the mouth... you'll find that much of writing is
culinary;
      the "placebo" pointers are already in place:
people have arrived at the multifacet meaning
of binging.
    
and yes, when i said that modern day talk,
even the puny internet "not-real-life"
   (funny how most of us shop and bank online,
not real what?) types of conversation -
really?
           beside the point -
   it's not rude to engage in dialectics
(as nietzsche infamously noted) -
            i don't understand staging two opposite
arguments and expect civility to ensue -
ars dialectica est quaestio ad infininitum,
   "post scriptum" ad nauseam -
to simply have rigid, aphoristic opinions,
without having them question,
well... that's the downfall of appreciating
nietzsche by the modern crowd...
         what we're talking is "safe spaces" -
nietzsche, of all people: instigated this notion!
imagine the paradox;
dialectics instigate rude societies?
      no! dialectics instigate eternal societies!

i sometimes consider sudoku puzzles optical
illusions,
     there's sometimes absolutely no "logic"
involved - well, there is: a tree line a tongue
of a serpent, Y - oh you know -
that invisible γΥy in the sky...
   but once you start solving each puzzle
you realise: ****, there's a blindspot in these?!
and it always feels like there is,
given the matrix to the power of O (revolvi)

( s / se   | e |  | n | n / nw
  s / sw  |w | | s  | n / ne     )º
                  
a tongue that turns into an eclair.

conclusively?
oh, just something minor, a minor detail -
if you ever chance to step on the continent of europe,
do you know how much darwinism you'll hear?
NONE!
       europeans have become bored of this very
english genesis of affairs...
       yes, bored is the appropriate word -
it can be years on the continent where darwinism
is cited, or the fetish over david attenborough
exemplified...
          to most continental europeans the natural
world is nothing more than a blip -
ask the krupp von essen family: steel! steel! steel!
darwinism is only a respected choice
of argumentative positioning in the anglosphere,
outside of it? a tumbleweed;
and i'm of the continental inclination -
   i source my history not in a platonism -
which darwinism is: **** similis - as man be
clearly identifiable as an evolved ape -
i place my history in something much more
compatible within the framework of today -
monkeys used sticks & stones,
man? man uses letters & numbers...
      i see my place in history from a purely
etymological perspective -
  pre-etymology is just boring as it is,
i.e. how the romans plagiarised some of the greek
phonetic encoding -
    then again: it's a mystery how of all
ancient texts - the greeks invented the omicron...
oh, sorry, the wheel...
   sanskrit? any wheels there? arabic, any wheels
there? noope.
  so i wonder as i give my summa summarum...
oh yeah: roman is the masculine (w)
and greek is the feminine (ω) -

which would be easier to solve

(a) 0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0
      0  8  0  6  0  5  0  7  0
      9­  3  0  2  0  7  0  5  8
      0  5  9  0  0  0  6  3  0
      7 ­ 0  0  9  0  3  0  0  1
      0  0  8  0  0  0  5  0  0
      0  ­9  0  3  0  4  0  8  0
      8  1  0  0  0  0  0  9  4
      0  7­  5  0  0  0  3  6  0

or

(b) χ  χ  χ  χ  χ  χ  χ  χ  χ
      χ  θ  χ  ζ  χ  ε  χ  η  χ
      ι  γ  χ  β  χ  η  χ  ε­  θ
      χ  ε  ι  χ  χ  χ  ζ  γ  χ
      η  χ  χ  ι  χ  γ  χ  χ ­ α
      χ  χ  θ  χ  χ  χ  ε  χ  χ
      χ  ι  χ  γ  χ  δ  χ  θ  ­χ
      θ  α  χ  χ  χ  χ  χ  ι  δ
      χ  η  ε  χ  χ  χ  γ  ζ  χ­

                       ?  ?  ?  ?  ?  ?  ?  ?  ?  ?

i suggest you try this, before learning oriental
languages -
it's all cross-eyed spaghetti monsters
from here on in.

Dostoyevsky lies above Chekhov
The yellowed pages of Marquez
Stands aside in sad mood
With hundred years of solitude
From the bearded Tolstoy
Peeps out an innocent boy
For a small piece of land
Just enough to rest in peace
It's all a wildly strange mix
Where Tintin rules over Asterix
Hawking confuses the soul
With time's history and blackhole
On a pedestal Shakespeare loses might
His musty volumes half eaten by termite
Tagore not yet ready to lose his vigour
Shines upon eyes with portly figure
There's astronomy, history, magic and science
Rubbing shoulders with morality and conscience
Neatly stacked one upon the other
Mostly crumbling by time's weather
Ill preserved and not anymore read
Muddled words lost in the head.

But I only admire the tidying woman
Who labours hard does the best she can
Arrange them to restore their old glories
If by chance someone reopens the stories.

there are asterisks on the calendar

we thought it denoted something important

maybe

a coachload coming

for tea



i saw  it

& thought of

asterix the gaul



though no one i know

has heard of him

the glossy covers nor nothing



anyhow i asks the boss, so what are these stars

for you know

asterisks, careful how i say it

so as not to confuse with comics



oh that.

that is me crossing out  my leave

and not a star at all



ampersand