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Mateuš Conrad Feb 2017
apologies, but i will not be abstracting people
as mere pronoun users,
i know i should, but i kinda like "painting"
and giving peoeple race, and differences,
i can't really establish what pronoun-bleaching
would do to, oh i don't know,
perhaps i'd be writing this...

back when i still worked as a roofer and was doing
a project in Greenwich,
  nice try, construction industry men don't
go to the gym... what a joy to remember my roots...
anyway...
    what was i saying?
   so i commuted from north east london
this this little village...
and it really has a feel about it that it is a village...
i went into the Greenwich waterstones
bookshop and spotted something interesting...
    a j. k. huysmans trilogy (beginning with la bas)
and ending with *cathedral
, or something like that,
if i knew what the internet was saying,
i'd buy all three books...
     but i did the dumb thing of buying
the first book of the trilogy, that's always in print...
anyway, no small loss...
   and there stood sideways joseph roth's
the antichrist...
              i can't compare it to nietzsche work,
even though i should, given roth was jewish...
and i figured: if the concept is not originally
jewish and greek, and anti- is a prefix much
more easily understood these days with
the existence of anti-matter...
            than say... armilus...
    well... so i was commuting day to day,
and over the course of the project probably read
two of three books, roth's was one of them,
alongside nikos kazantzakis' blockbuster...
but something weird happened when i read roth
for the first time...
     sitting in this dockland train heading south
of the thames, a group of muslim "women"
spotted that i was literate,
     they sat, about 10 metres away from me...
but the word antichrist must have prompted them,
one just said out-loud: you're satan's *****...
huh?
   there i am, reading my own book not raving
mad reading it aloud, and there she has the prank
of associating a book to a very mysterious person
who riddles the bible being completed...
      mein gott: two world wars ever since nietzsche
wrote he was the person with the title kept
sorta on a whim for nearly 2000 years...
     and then two days ago my father has a car accident
and this hijab clad woman is driving,
  but she does a Pilate and doesn't take responsibility,
the passenger that's with her jumps out
   and gives my father his details
and the woman is pristine...
     a *******, what do you call it: sacred cow?
most pedestrians in england are treated as such...
  so she phones her son and gives the phone to my father
and her son says to my father: it's against
the law to phone the police, you can't phone them...
well... hey presto! we're in Saudi Arabia!
and this is what's worrying me...
no... nope... this is what pains me...
    i had to take my ego for a walk tonight...
i had to think a lot of ******* out,
how the ego would whimper and whine like a dog...
there's your "janus" / "contronym"...
ego... dog...
   the leash? i'm thinking with it...
and suddenly, clarifty, i can pierce it's *******
narrative and think about it... as any id might...
what i experienced was an ego-dispossesion...
   i lost it, it turned into an automaton,
robotic misery... hardly the angry Frankenstein monster...
i lost the care for an ego-embodiment...
i was dispossessed by it, robbed, thief! thief!
i needed to come back home and read
heidegger's aphorisms 174 through to 178 from
the ponderings (it would help that you read the
ponderings... after reading being & time)...
the pain i felt was very much akin to being British,
even though it's something i assimilated into...
which could mean that's it's the odd bit...
should i, shouldn't i feel some sentiment for my host
culture?
word are flying around the place,
they're calling it cultural marxism...
well... i come from a culture that had stated
marxism, period, i.e. supported by an economic model,
that worked, and would have worked,
had capitalism not done what capitalism does
naturally: compete!
   i'm watching these cultural marxists and, i think,
i'm watching penguins in a zoo...
  i don't know what to make of these marxists,
who aren't even leninists...
            where's the economic model?!
  
that's the problem of going to a catholic school
in england, attempting to stress multi-culturalism,
i even ojected to being confirmed ritually,
with a bishop from Brentwood,
sorry, too much Irish around the place....
i too thought i was about to say something in Gaelic...
outer-east london: a complete ******* jungle
of biodiversity...
     so did i misplace my allegiences?
to the tongue? to faking an ethnicity?
    of course i'm pisssed off, i spent the past 2 hours
walking the most mundane of walks,
bewildered why this woman in a hijab wouldn't
own up to causing a traffic accident...
i helped him will out the police forms,
and there she is, on paper, smug like some ****** mary
because i'm the one that really doesn't think
that Islam got Project Hair wrong,
me? personally? i think that woman's hands ought to
be covered,
     in thinking terms, a woman's hands could
get me more excited than a woman's foot...
but sure... hell... why not hair?!
              the last time i checked, normal people
have an aversion toward hair...
ever see that person almost vomiting when they found
a stranger's hair in their soup?
  that **** that grows on your hair is the only silk
you've got... how about a few toenail clippings
to boot? first thing a sane would think: ****! ****!
oh, we're going to get on... just fine, just fine...
   the next time i think about encouraging
an **** ******* position's worth of prayer
i'll be a ******* cardinal.
   what's wrong with taking responsibility?
why are Islamic women so immune to the tractātus
of law? where's the jurisprudence?
   i'd call it something more than diabolical...
you can really become a vampire when you're told
the lesson: those that thirst for justice...
  lesser leech...
            who gives a **** whether it was: "but a scratch"?
woman! take responsibility!
  pampered little coconut jugglers...
   now to think of it... leave those curtains,
and this one time: she was walking with a buggy
and a small child and she unveiled herself from
a niqab before me...
           the perfect arabian nightmare i could
have ever witnessed...
             i had long hair back then...
what she revealed from under that niqab?
wait... am i writing this in the times
when the French occupied the Holy Land and had
the first thirst / idea of a colony?
  
this is me, imitating punching a brick wall...
this is me... in a boxing ring...
bashing myself...
            this is me thinking about how man
has no capacity to usher in karma,
how man's concept of law is hardly cosmic,
how man is a kniving ******* that
deserves something beyond a heaven and a hell:
rather: a return to his self...
that's what i keep telling myself:
i don't want heaven, i don't want hell...
i, just, want, to, return, to, my, self...
    yes, that's a reflection,
hence the pronoun has no compound, i.e. isn't
a reflexive understanding for the fluidity of language
expressed by the concerning compound: myself.
perhaps that's just the beginning of understanding
the noumenon / thing in itself, or rather to counter
the fluidity of the word itself, since, evidently
it self makes no sense that could ever produce
a concept akin to the noumenon...

why wouldn't this woman care to give an inkling into
her concept of right and wrong...
she's driving the ******* car, she makes a doo doo...
pauper... **** up!
            i still don't know why it was about hair...
you like a stranger's **** in a soup?
   what's with this middle eastern fetish for covering it?
hey! beginning from 1986, am i sorta automatically
involved in a cult that has a vintage of ageing from
a **** of a camel a long time ago?
  no wonder the knighthood ceremony was initiated
by slapping a newly initiated knight across the cheek,
like i said, a woman's hand is more ******
than her hair...
      i'd say: take up ye care to don gloves!
and that, i'm sure, will never happen.

it's probably the most delicate thing a woman can possess...
a hand...
the rest is what darwinism cared to provide us with:
a black widow, a mantis;
and that's talking pure earnest about the matter...

listen, i spent the past two hours having the ordeal of
an ego... which i had to anti-narrate into theory...
yes, the id was helpful, is actually told me, or rather,
interrupted the ego from the narrative
to give me this *******'s worth of profanity
(and yes, with due reason; ever fill out a police form
concerning some accident? do that, then you'll be equipped
to read Tolstoy)...

so it was ego-possessiveness,
      the ego already thinks its eternally subject...
that's one of the implants...
eternity and god are inherent in ego,
   your heart means absolutely nothing when the ego
has been given certainity that it can't shake off...
what the ego isn't given is a unit of reason
that sees past it... the id...
in relation to dualism and the much active dichotomy
as alternative to an equilibrium of dualism
i will outrightly exclude the superego
  as nothing but antithesis to the ubermann theory
of overcoming man...
  and on their shoulder they once had
the epitomes of cartoon conscience, an angel and a demon...
but thanks to the superego: they had mama
on their left shoulder, and papa on their right shoulder...

just the mere act of shutting that thing up
was enough, and it was apparent,
that writing fiction could be to blame,
   writing fiction can be rightly guessed at
for levitating a condition of medical proportion
into the realm of mythology,
    we have already depersonalised the unit
of ego to the extent that it has become polarised,
bipolar, e.g., comes from a depersonalised
gravity of ego,
we're no longer in need to write books,
we're in a dire need to write our own psyches...
and it all stems from making the basic human unit,
bound to the privacy of thought,
as needing a system that outweighs the moral
stratum,
           what can a person actually be or become
to even dream about asserting that there is
a da-sein (i.e. something, somethingness)
          "happening"?
i feel that there's something worse than a second
nakedness emerging,
         it's this incapacity to move on,
it's a mental nakedness, i am more easily prone
to dress my body in clothes
than i am able to dress my ego in thoughts,
than can correlate adequately, and peacefully...
toward something akin to a symbiosis
that can reach a = status, rather than an
   ≠ or an ≈ status... ****! Aquarius!
isn't the ≈ symbol the basis for it?
oh hell, back into the zodiac...
              
     i know my ego can be a downer,
but at least that's who i am talking about...
aphorisms no. 174 through to 178?
i do odd experiments with books,
     this is the first of its kind,
i'm actually going to rattle-******* this book out
till it feels like having wanked it 20 times
in a single day... i'll write what i "feel",
funny word, that word feel...
you never get to use it these days,
man is more about hammering in nails than
saying: ooh... that hurts...
and we all know what happened to Jesus'
teaching... forgive strangers...
     make sure your former friends are
crucified up-side down...
                 that really went far...
                      i can just see him...
an oasis of bullet-proof clauses...
              about how to handle people...
give them l.s.d. unconsciously!
         then wait for actual l.s.d. to arrive
and then worry...
when they took to their Swiss bicycles...
and writing poetry... and eating a soft-boiled
egg... given the concern for cholesterol:
a hard concept to fathom: that runny yoke...
     never ate mine with salt, i always like
that idea of legalised abortion...
                and we can be just that...
so imaginative to consolidate being mammal
that we can fathom eating chicken eggs
as easily as abortions... runny yokes have no basis
for a morality, or a compass...
they just are... runny... yummy...
             i call yokes the male version of
a woman's fascination with chocolate...
  i think egg yokes are the equivalent of cholocate
for men as chocolate is for women...
or so the advert said...

aphorism 174: as language...

          aphorism 175:
              philosophy catching up to science,
akin to theology catching up to philosophy,
both condescending extracts
that end up with both of the extreme parties
dressing up funny.

aphorism 176: such that newspapers are
the natural preservers? i.e. the idea of historical
escapism.

      (toilet paper does, much much more,
than a newspaper actually provides,
   press freedom is a bit boring to be honest,
beginning with the need for a moral agent
that's less and less moral, and more prone to
darwinism, i.e. selective, which is also said via:
what's natural, in a more and more techno-savvy culture?)

aphorism 177: only as, a rural thinker unto
a rural thinker... a case of describing a perfume
of those thinking about a day after tomorrow,
   but more precisely:
  the day before yesterday that didn't involve them...
say, on the ethnicity basis,
  the talk of being inheriting from the form
of ancestry... how we cultivate cucumbers,
tomatoes, prejudices...
   which is why i'm a slav happily talking a tongue
that's germanic, an off-shoot saxon,
and hopefuly defending it.

aphorism 178:
         "everything great wavers and wobbles,
stands in a storm. the beautiful is difficult."
   Ezra too, with the last, alas.
     but it's true... what happened in england in the second
part of the 20th century was great,
  and it did indeed wobble past the storm into
a desert of retirement...
            a peaceful coming toward terms of
a natural agreement...
   the generation preceding mine enshrined in their
psyche an england they heard over the radio...
king crimson... all such artistic expressions
found a case to take root...
     how parasites never attack a feeble creature
and only take roost in a strong symbiotic partner...
once it was said england could resemble ancient greece,
and it did, from the second part of the 20th century...
but that ended...
               it's gone, i have inherited a communist
past, a marxism with a concept of money,
and economic policy that wasn't inherently competitive,
but it also wasn't a welfare policy of the Marshall Plan,
and all i get is this freakish counter-movement
known as marxism in culture...
   that's worse than marxism in economy!

it should be heartbreaking to say this,
but coming from a monochromatic society,
watching the death of communism...
     i could say it was perfect... but then i can't
given my grandparents have a secure pension plan
that the state provides... i like that joke,
i just said it, and it makes perfect sense...
there is much more of Pilate in the history
of the peoples than there is of Jesus...
washing my hands clean, the companies said,
meaning self-employment...
     unless you have a really hungry libido
you actually do start worrying about keeping up
the numbers...
  companies don't...
      it's a bit of a bollocking...
i come from what could be imagined as a safety
economics of marxism into a marxism of culture
that i simply can't comprehend...
              well: it did give "us" a sense of pride,
and a will to rebuild warsaw without any american
money...
        the russians just said: where's your pride?
do you want to take their money and have it easy?
and when i ask that question:
i just start thinking about arabs without their oily diapers...
oil diaper... not exactly black gold:
oil diapers...
             Ahmed gonna poo poo?
              &nbsp
Alexander K Opicho
(Eldoret, Kenya;aopicho@yahoo.com)

Here is a toast for valentine
Valentine in all seasons perennial
Where angst of money for love  
Cradled utopian capitalism,
It is once again in the city of Omurate
In the south most parts of Ethiopia
On the borders of Kenya and Ethiopia
Where actually the river Ormo enters Lake Turkana,
There lived a pair of lovers
With overt compassion for one another
The male lover was an origin of Nyangtom,
A cattle rustling Nilotic kingdom
While the female lover was a descendant of King Solomon
The Jewish children which King Solomon aborted
Because their mother was an Ethiopian African
They now form substantial part of the Ethiopian population
Their clan is known as Amharic, they speak subverted Yiddish,
These lovers were good to one another
Sharing secrets and all other stuffs that go with love.

Both the lovers were fatherless
They had lost their fathers through early death
They only had the mothers, who were again sickly
Their mothers coughed a whole night with whoops
And when in the wee of the night, when temperatures go low
The mothers breathe with wheezing sound
Like peasant music from African violin,
They didn’t eat with good appetite
They always left irritating chunks on the plates,
But they all puked mucus from their mouths
And of course with a very sickening regularity.

The menace of sick mothers intervened with love freedom
Among the inter-compassionate lovers
They did not have time for real active love
I will not mention recurrent missing of ceremonies
Fetes that are bound to go with valentine day
The lovers were bored to their teeth
They don’t knew when gods will come to unyoke them.

Especially the male lover, was most perturbed
His mother looked sorriest
With a scrofulous look on her old aged African face
She looked like a forlorn erstwhile cattle rustler
She ever whined in pain like a trapped hyena
Her son the male lover even began apologizing
To the female lover for such environmental upsets
Hence an African proverb that;
No love is possible with impaired judgment.

One day in the wee of the night
With no electricity nor any source of light
Darkness engulfing each and every aspect of the city
Confirming the hinterland of Africa
The female lover woke up from the sleep
And she never heard the usual wheezing breathes
That her mother often made in such hours,
Feat of suspicion gripped her
She jumped out of her bed to where her mother was
On feeling her, she found her dead, cold like a black member
She was already past the rigor mortis stage of death process
African chilliness had frozen her like a poikilothermic creature.

She wept but not in the uproarious groan
In that instinctive Jewish shrewdness
She did not announce nor inform her lover of her mother’s death
She only washed and groomed the cadaver of her mother
She made a headscarf around the head of dead mother
She even placed reading glasses on her face
On her mother’s dead torso she wrapped a dress
The most expensive of all bought from Egypt,
In the same wee of the night
She carried cadaver of her mother on her shoulders
The way a poor Nigerian farmer would carry a stem of banana
And walked slowly by slowly for a distance of a hundred kilometers
Down ***** into Kenya towards the city of Todanyang in Turkana County
Todanyang was a busy city, but silent and minus people in the night
The king of this city was called Lapur the son of Turkanai
And the law that Lapur passed in this city was archaic
It was; an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a Jew for a Jew
A pokot for a pokot, a samburu for a samburu
It was simply the law with nothing else
Other than clauses of measure for measure
And clauses of *** for tat instantaneously administered,
On reaching the market she placed her mother standing
Being supported on a sign post at the bus stage
In pose similar to that of an early morning traveler,
She sat a side like a prowling spider awaiting foolish fly
They way an African ***** exposes its red ****
And when the hen comes to peck
It traps and closes the head of the hen
Deeper into its ****,
At that bus stage there was a hotel
Owned by a Rwandese refugee
From the foolish clan of the Hutu
He had ran away from the genocide
In his country, he was also the perpetrator
And thus he was a runaway from the law *** hotelier
His name was Chapuchapu, meaning the quick one,
When Chapuchapu opened the hotel for the early customers
The female lover walked into the hotel
With innocence on her face like all the Jews
She placed an order for two mugs of coffee
And two pieces of bread
When Chapuchapu had placed food on the table
The female lover shrewdly instructed Chapuchapu
To go and hold the hand of the woman standing at the sign post
To bring her into the hotel for morning tea,
Chapuchapu in his unsuspecting charisma
With a mad drive to make money that morning
He dashed out as instructed with his foolish notion
That the customer is the queen, which is not
He grapped the standing cadaver with force
On pulling her to come along
The cadaver tumbled down like a marionette
Everything falling away; headscarf and glasses
Chapuchapu was overtaken by awe
The female lover was watching
Like the big brother in the Orwellian satire, 1984.
When the cadaver of her mother fell
She came out of the hotel
Screaming like a hundred vehicles
Of St John Ambulance
And two hundred Kenyan vehicles of fire brigade
And three hundred Kenyan cash transfer vehicles,
She was accusing Chapuchapu for being careless
Careless in his work that he had killed her mother,
Swam of armed humanity in Turkana loinclothes
Began pouring in like waters of Nile into Mediterranean
Female lover improved the scale of her screaming
Chapuchapu like a heavyweight idiot was dumbfounded
Armed people came in their infinite
Finally king Lapur arrived on his royal donkey
That his foot soldiers had only rustled
From Samburu land a fortnight ago,
The presence of the king quelled the hullabaloo
The king asked to find out what had happened
Amid sops the female lover narrated how
Chapuchapu the hotelier had killed her mother
Through his careless helter skelter behaviour
The king sighed and shouted the judgment
To the mad crowd; an eye for a……….!?
The crowd responded back to the King
In a feat of amok value;
For an eye you mighty Lapur son  ofTurkanai,
The stones, kicks, jabs began rainning
In volleys on an innocent Chapuchapu
Amid shouts that **** him, he came here to **** people
The way he killed a thousand fold in Rwanda.

The sopping female lover requested the king
That his people wait a bit before they continue
Then the king waved to the people to stop
Chapuchapu was on the ground writhing in pain
When the King asked the female lover what was the concern
She requested for pay from Chapuchapu not people to **** him
Chapuchapu accepted to pay whatever the price that will be put
Female lover asked for everything in hundreds;
Carmel, money, Birr, sheep, goats, donkeys, cows
Name them all they were in hundreds
Chapuchapu and his family were saying yes to every demand
And they rushed to bring whatever was said
The payments exhausted Chapuchapu back to square zero
The female lover carried everything away
The cadaver of her mother on her shoulder
She disappeared into the forest
and buried her mother there.

When she arrived home she found the male lover
He looked at her overnight change in fortune in stupefaction
He didn’t believe his eyes, it was a dream
Sweetheart, where have you gotten all these?
Questioned the male lover
Sweetie darling there is market for dead women
At Todanyang in the Turkana County of Kenya
I killed my sickly mother and carried her cadaver
As a trade ware to Todanyang
Whatever I have that you are looking at is the proceed,
Can my mother fetch the same? Asked the male lover
Of course yes, even more
Given the Africanness of your mother
African cadavers fetch more than the Jewish ones
At Todanyang market,
The male lover was now overtaken
By strong urge for quick riches
Was not seeing it getting evening
That day for him was as long as a whole century
He was anxious and restless more tired of a sickly mother
When evening fell he was already ready with the butcherer’s tools
He didn’t have nerves to wait till the wee of the night
As early as eleven in the evening he axed his mother’s head
Into two chunks of human skull spilling the brains in stark horror
Blood streaming like a rivulet all over the house
The male lover was nonchalant to all these
He was in the full feat of determination
To **** and sell his mother to  get the proceeds
With which he could foot the bills of valentine day.

He stuffed the headless blood soaked torso
Of his mothers cadaver in the sisal bag
He threw it to his bag
And began going to Todanyang
The market for human dead bodies
He went half running and half walking
With regular whistling of his favourite poem;
Ode to my Jewish lover
He reached Todanyang in the wee of the night
No human being was in sight
All people had gone as it was late in the night
He then slept in the open with dead body of his mother
Stuffed in the sisal bag beside him
Wandering night dogs regularly disturbed him
As they came to bite at smelling curdled blood
But he always scared them away.
As per the male lover he overslept till five in the morning
But when he woke up he unhesitatingly began to shout
Advertising his ware of trade in foolish version;
Am selling, the body of my mother, I have killed,
I killed her myself, it is still fresh, come and buy,
I will give you’re a bargain price,

When the morning came
People began crowding around him
As he kept on shouting his advertisement
Also Lapur the king came
He was surprised with the situation,
He asked the male lover to confirm
Whatever he was shouting
The male lover vehemently confirmed,
Then the law of an eye for an eye
Effortlessly took its course
Lapur  ordered his people, in a glorious royal decree
To stone the male lover to death
And bury him away without ceremony
Along with his mother in the sisal bag
In the wasted cemetery of villains
The same way Pablo Neruda
Had to bury his dead dog behind the house,

On hearing the tidings
About what had befallen her lover
The female lover had to send out a long giggle
Coming deep from her heart with maximum joy
She took over the estate of the male lover
Combined with hers,
All the animals and everything she took,
She made her son the manager
The son whom she immaculately conceived
Without any nuptial experience in the usual Jewish style
And their wealth multiplied to vastness
And hence toxic valentine gave birth to capitalism