sometimes the title would just do,
                                                                      in the days
when fame doesn't echo throughout
the ages, where to find
   a Hector or an Achilles?
             only in times when life was
precious that it was doubly precious
by being audacious and teasing death -
where are the death-teasers among
us? who among us is a death-teaser?
no one... the myth of Sisyphus isn't
exactly a myth... what was a myth
in the 20th century is the plateau reality
of the 21st century -
                             there's a great joke
concerning Norway...
    a book sold half a million copies
          in a country populated by 5 million people...
so it's basically a village mentality "nation"...
i already said you should teach evolution
on the canvas of vikings rather than working
from neanderthals...
            berserker turned cultural clique -
the joke about the british decision to leave the e.u.?
hmm... multiculturalism? taking the genes
     to the cleaners in fear of hereditary weak genes?
isolated muslim communities who think that
britain is a country that's 75% muslim?
           it's, the, *******, irony... the brits can be
as well gifted in rude humour or smug with their wit,
but they've hardly explored their gaft of irony,
well, that's a miscomprehend use of a word,
for the mere phonos of the word: i had to use it...
   like gaffer is the chargehand on a building site.
what i mean is that the brits put so much energy
into a monty python sketch that they can't see
the irony they're implementing...
         can england ever become clique?
              did the british empire ever exist is a similar
question: yes, the british empire imploded,
we have three generations of the Raj living in
Islington, three Saudi generations living
in Marble Arch on Edgware Road...
                           we have hobnobs Harrods
lit up like sitting on a marble toilet with gold plated
toilet seats... tacky... that **** is tacky...
          and when people get rich, they just have
   a new way of saying they're poor... no taste.
me? i feel like having a patron... the pope, for example...
for all the god willing reasons i should have been
the poet along with the Renaissance masturbators
of the ******* in clay.... boy... Donatello really rubbed
that impression right into a David post *******...
look 'ere, placid like a gluttonous mosquito...
n'ah... fame these days is too much of a corpus -
it attracts hyenas and vultures once the lions
got bored...
   fame these days is too much c.c.t.v. -
             the omni eye looks at what colour my ****
was (and what consistency) from last Wednesday.
plus modern dialectical discourse has either become
too much solipsistic / autistic... or it's a wanking
marathon... which makes assurances to unsafe
*** between partners, and ultra safe *** between
pundit and *******, with the *******'s
reassurance: i get regular health checks...
        i mean, when she's so hot that after zenith
you jump into the bath and pour cold water
over yourself and she remains in bed *******
herself looking at you? genuine scenes there...
i have a ****** imagination... experience is so
much better... i'd rather slit my wrists than
work for Disney.
no, wait... wait! there's a point coming, referring
to the title... yep...
   a culinary rebellion against modern art backed by
Cézanne... you seen the recent Turner prize?
         i used to see a Turner prize every time i went
to the recycling centre near Upminster...
or a car-boot sale down Walthamstow...
i also used to go and see the dog-races down that route...
E17... when you used to have yella-double-decca
buses 123 and 179 travel the route...
        alright... look at a Cézanne still life...
(i call it instilled life) - now... can you imagine any
artist attempting to depict a modern culinary
experiment? can you, imagine a heston blumenthal
on a canvas in oil or watercolour?
      no, because you can't!
                                  the china or porcelain is the canvas
and there you have: a painting.
             this is a culinary rebellion against modern
art... the chefs decided to work from scratch,
or what you might call: working from Cézanne,
just because we returned to the Lascaux caves
  with huge open space art galleries and a toothpick
   that is cited: abstract of a pine...
                           and it takes 20 cubic metres to
be admired...                     (ever tried nagging?
  it's a steam-release, or like watching an entertaining
homosexual, same ****, different cover);
    and if you have a thumb's worth of a litre bottle
of whiskey? well... hail west!
             no sane artist would re-apply the modem of still
life into depicting modern cuisine...
  i know, i know... some dynamism went into
             turning a pear into a poached pear...
the hand of god...          but that transfiguration cannot
escape the stillness... it's not moving...
                 it's prefiguring a diner (not a place, a pundit
in a restaurant) doing a minor Pavlov experiment
when the plate is before him... at this point,
unless he's not a starving refugee, i think appetite is abstract.
          you know what was in the background
while i was writing this? ambiance...
  feng shui... refrigerator ambivalence...
     in a world when a chinese cobbler gets paid 2 squid
a day... and a poet in england gets paid zilch or close to
10 quid in a decade.

i was about to start writing this up when i thought:
another whiskey Quincy? **** storm,
spilled the remains of the one i barely touched
before having to pour myself a:
puritan Scot in Cheltenham.

now, i heard people say any town in Essex
is a ****-hole...
                            fair enough...
but there are darker recesses of England you
must get to know before making that
assumption...
                  sure, London, proper London,
zones 1 - 4, E17 (post code, outer reaches,
Walthamstow, used to have a dog racing
track - played there once,
like a typical Paris catwalk, those hounds)
can skive off Greater London
                    like New York can laugh off
New Jersey, it's pretty much like that...
the only thing is: Londoners don't know what
exists outside this area: the buffer zone.
this is the buffer zone...
                 you experience England outside of
this very sensitive area of integration,
take for example a 3 hour coach trip to
a little town of Cheltenham in Gloustershire
not far from Oxford (a hub of learning)
and Bristol (Massive Attack, and that
bridge by Brunel - funny, engineers are above
architects, in that engineers build things
that *work, architects are like science-fiction
novelists rather than scientists -
do you know how many problems workers
experience, because an engineer
"forgot to mention" something essential in the plans?
at least an engineer gives you a read table,
all architects work for Ikea -
          ah, here's pieces a - z,
put it together yourself) - anyway...
              spilled my Quincy whiskey, now i'm a puritan
of scotch - unlike that damning quote from
1950s Hollywood: whiskey with a drop of water...
   ok ok... a little **** of ice floating about...
when will the nagging stop? no one says jack
about putting water into authentic absinthe...
      why? cos it goes cloudy green when you do!
(too much digression, news paragraph).

   i was leaving London on Friday,
murky the way i like it... Albert Bridge never seemed
so out of cinematographic urgency -
               but the west end with its grand buildings
appealed to me to start imagining
                    Oscar Wylde ghosts leaving these places
for promenades in top cats and tiaras for the ladies...
                     west London... the best way to see it
is in transit... preferably rather urgently...
                    and in a coach with other people not paying
attention...
                       the Thames receded into the estuary (
as it does), those housed in boats experienced a wake-up
call with a 10° ***** into the mud -
                                past the Chelsea pensioners' abode,
past many monuments to be exact...
   and then onto the open M4... past Windsor Castle
and the streak of aeroplanes about an aerial mile
apart landing at Heathrow -
                                  3 hours later, there i was,
in Cheltenham - chitty chitty bang bang,
apparently dubbed the hub of all English literary
endeavours - well, if you're going to host
a literature festival, wouldn't you claim to host
it with at least one patriotic son of the word?
did i see any statue of a famous poet or writer in
that little rugby stockpile of excess triceps?
nope.
           well, at first i thought it was cute...
                                a little Portobello, albeit
without the St. Petersburg paintwork on the houses,
houses as grey as the skies...
                                           got lost looking for
the b & b hotel i was supposed to be staying at for
the night, went into a gas station, asked,
i was apparently only adjacent lost -
                           old school, map printer and no
g.p.s. on foot -
                                  i once read a map and navigated
a car from an obscure Essex city,
to an even more obscure city in eastern Poland,
past the dreaded Penta Germania consisting of:
Düsseldorf, Duisburg, Essen, Wuppertal and
obviously Dortmund -
                                           i call it the whirlpool
of navigation...
                            anyway, so i found the abode,
what a nice little place it was, shied away from
all the traffic - a lovely garden,
a room fit for a journeying writer,
          actually, everything a writer could hope for
to lock himself away and write,
            tunic scenic - everything to ease the literary
constipation - the surroundings, the whole decor,
i even took a picture thinking: shame if no
Balzac were to not emerge from these rooms...
                           i sure didn't,
i dropped all the things, took a shower,
went into town to do the g.p.s. topographic of
the city so i wouldn't need a map in the future -
bought a bottle of whyte & mackay with a huh?!
apparently this brand isn't popular...
               went back to the room and found myself
drinking in front of the dreaded sight...
well... it was a room fit for a writer...
               but it had a double bed in it...
and a mirror at the desk...
                                    i downed one puritan glass
and looked in the mirror: i don't need your company.
looked away and found to my amazement the
truth of modern writing: the industrialisation
of writing... it emerged in the 20th century when everyone
did it by himself, with a typewriter -
        the industrialisation of writing on an individual
scale can be quiet debilitating when trying to
rekindle the quill... i didn't write anything, i doodled,
and those were bad doodles, it wasn't writing,
it was doodling... i drank a quarter of the bottle
and went out...
        went into the first bar, ordered a Guinness and
and sat down by a table with a
(later disclosed) Gloustershire University student,
a Canadian, jacking-off a script for some
B-short-movie in a public place: to catch the oozing
exfoliation of inspiration from crowded places -
if ever that worked, it might have ever worked
in a graveyard...
                             we were joined by his friend,
some peasant, we got chatting, boy, it was such a thrill
to exchange names... the Canadian's name
i did remember: Darcy...
                          he had that look about him that made
it worthwhile to remember his name,
ah, when names fit the image...
                         chubby, pig-blondish, hairy...
i'm guessing a native of Quebec...
                               but i could be wrong.
so a few hey hey, yeah yeahs later i asked if they
knew something about this gig on the festival slot
that was starting tomorrow, 5 p.m. and for free...
sure sure... got to eye the guide... so i asked:
so, maybe we could meet up at this place at this time
and go from there....
                                  Titanic looked more graceful
sinking than the reply...
                                                 i had to really check myself,
this isn't London psyche chess, this is:
we are small people from a small town,
we think a charming stranger is a serial-killer...
                    the Yorkshire ripper case scenario,
not last... first.
                              i might have been ******* a lemon
by then and pretending to be drunk squirming
a Buddha look - i pretended the polite noting down
the details: suddenly i didn't think like attending
this ****** venture that would start at 5 p.m., end
at 12 a.m. and according to my travel diary:
having to wait 2 hours to catch the 2 a.m. home.
so i went to the first instalment of the "literature"
festival... lemn sissay and salena godden -
and i have to admit, it was a corker - a true
a champagne cork popped and hit the crystal
chandelier and i laughed... and that's how i lost my
virginity to "spoken word",
                                         i wasn't listening to poets,
but i was thoroughly entertained, i swear that
at the end of her performance Salena pointed into
the dark (great tactic, how can they be nervous
if they can't see anyone? they stand on a pulpit of pure
light and see black ahead, where the nerves?)
and said: esp. to my friend over there...
                i might have involuntarily back-laughed /
snorted like a pig trying to catch enough lung volume
for a ha ha...
                          got chatting to this lovely middle-aged
couple: told them: i'm being ***** with gags.
                prior, i was watching the queue build up
into the room, with a god-awful grin on my face...
i couldn't take it off...
                         perhaps because i was looking at
the demographic and thinking: where are my peers?!
i spotted about three people in a close age proximity -
the rest were farts and soon-to-be-farts...
                             now Sissay freaked me out...
in a good way... i met the two after the show,
i brought two copies of my own printed work to give to
them... i had to ask their publicist if i was allowed
to touch the Aegean marbles... luckily i did,
but then i asked the stupid question to Sissay:
so who were you trying to imitate when your eyes
were bulging out nearly gauged out like a Pink Floyd
song video of: teacher! let these children go!
               i should have associated something African
freakish in mask, a strengthening - the sort
of look that New Zealander rugby players put on
to frighten people off when dancing the haka -
he really did talk like that...
                                       the little devil voice didn't help
either... but i only asked that "stupid" question
while mumbling something about how hard it was
getting published and how anyone aged nearing 40
forgot the free press of the internet emerging and
how he asked for a q & a after the performance...
and... hand on my heart:
                                   got asked one question...
          and answered... only one question...
                                        a complete and utter ******* meltdown...
   not: oh yeah, so who's your major influence...
                      a Samuel Beckett moment from not i.
later i standing outside and smoking, a grand English
dame of the west approached me,
chitty chatty kiss the hand later i got to say the most
famous line known to the current Englishman:
unfortunately... from Essex.
             honest. anyone asks you in Essex the question
they always ask: so where you're originally from?
                         anywhere else in England
they just ask you: whe

i was going to write about how
i made kolhapuri masala for a curry i made...
and how i forgot one ingredient
when writing about it
and how i solved a sudoku puzzle to remind
me of it...
and something about...
   the men-yoroi...
               and details of a dream...
             but why detail all of that?
     after all... i reserve the content of dreams
for myself...
i dream so rarely: i rarely have a chance
to ponder them...
i hear about elaborate labyrinths of
dream-walkers... and those people who
have recurrent dreams...
  part envy part: ******* idiots...
reflex not working... hell with a knee ****...
the entire knee is missing!
dream-walkers: ghost-limb extensions
that some make a summary of: brain's ditto:
ergo tweet!
otherwise the real deal...
      the idea came with... a book...
not just any book...
the romford public library can blush...
picked it up in edinburgh...
sold at £28-        the cheapest online? £60!
well... itch... itch... behave... behave...
it's not a shoe... or a pair! ha ha!

it's just a first edition... 1985...
   the anatomy of madness: volume 1 -
people and ideas ed. by w. f. bynum, roy porter etc.
    tavistock publications
         for more information...
please write to: 11 new fetter lane
                            EC4P 4EE...
    east(ern)-central... believe me... no city in england
is given a NW... or a SW... the greenwich
treatment of... far far away in
the "honk honk hanging with kong"
or... whatever that sort of postcode is...
i would say anything with E17 is probably
Warsaw or Berlin... and hardly walthamstow...

if you're looking for the centre of the earth...
otherwise please write to:
      29 west 35th street
                           NY 10001...

sometimes it's just necessary to hit a plank
of wood with a spandex whip...
or... bop around seemingly on the verge of
drowning and misguide a bottled message...
or... droll! what's a droll?
curious or unusual in a way
      that provokes dry amusement;
yes... hardly a doll.

might as well start calling it...
Dickensian out-of-vogue: vogue etymological
revival of... the victorian lexicon...
being heavily influenced by...
the attire of the empire being...
that of saving the myth of rome...
with... good manners... b.d.s.m. ******
parameters and... brandy drank...
with some water...
like... a frenchman would clean his palette
when drinking an espresso...

the essay in mind?
        w. f. bynum & michael never:
   hamlet on the couch...

well so much for english jurisprudence:
due process, innocent until proven guilty...
and all that "jazz"...
not under the flimsy / quasi-hippocratic
"oath"... machado de assis: the alienist...
you are always to be presumed mad:
you have to be presumed sick...
before you can be well...
it's not like you are ever to be well...
otherwise: how does a psychiatric logic
work? yes... all those "metaphysical"
conundrums...

     point being: my new discovery
of my rekindled ability to dream... is my new ****...
my new privacy...
how does hamlet on a couch matter?
how about... dickens in an armchair?
this is my alternative "doodle"...
if a shakespearean character is lying
on the couch...
what am i to do? in passing "listen"...
but doing nothing of the sort...
instead... reading some dickens...
and... having to finally...
succumb the victorian common colloquial...
i.e. of words: directly derived: etymologically
from latin - and loaned into english...
oh no... no romance concerning
Charlemagne, the vikings, the saxons...
the swabians or the dutch or the french...
what victorian england spoke:
having this phonetic encoding...
less and less imperium romanus and more
and more giuseppe belli sonnet slang...

cappuccino!
        e jjeerzera me diede un'antra stretta
    (last night she made me have another fit).
credi che ffussi uno scorpione? eh ggiusto!
era un pizzo d'un osso-de-bbaleno,
che jj'ussciva cqui ggiu ffora der busto.
    (you really think it was a scorpion?
yeah right, and not the piece of whale bone
which stuck our of the corset that she wore)...

so much for ancient rome...
so much so for victorian england...
what would you call it these-days...
if you started calling "it" a... 'lard-buff'?
    
as far as i am concerned: psychiatry is a branch
of "medicine"... or rather...
medicine has a tenctacle that reaches into
the parts of hades that only wriggling worms
get to chew on...
and at that: you're not presumed innocent...
you can't me... adverse logic:
you have to be sick... therefore guilty...
and how did ever... this loophole escape
the grand justices of the crown?
people pleaded insane: therefore guilty...
but thereby somehow exempt...
it's a satanic laugh i tell you...
                      no other... no less...
                  
                      you can't plead a case of law
when facing an antithesis copernican plea
of now standing up-side down in
australia: or the black swan...
or if caging a wallaby will ever bring you aid...

under english law: you are innocent...
until proven guilty...
under an extension of the hippocratic
oath within the realm of:
practice of psychiatry in england:
you are sick... until cured...
                 never can you be semi-well...
and therefore treated...
and by being treated... chances of you
making a recovery? ha ha...
chances of you becoming a spider
in a web designed by learned men...
lost in prefixes and suffixes and other sort
of ******* of rubric terminology?
oh hell!         cudos! applause applause
to you sir!

                the hamlet on the couch is
but a fraction of shakespeare...
for which i prescribe only one course of action...
some Dickens in an armchair...
no other cure for it, sir... and dearest madam...

and oh! oh i almost "forgot"...
why is it sourced as:
woda (water) and wódka (*****)...
such a close alliance...
but no... it's not a drinking water...
so much for water...
what is mirror? lustro...
       well...perhaps it shouldn't be called
for what it's called wódka:
the ill-water...
            perhaps it should be called:
pite-lustro...             drank-mirror...
well... it can't be called a verb and a past-particle
of that verb: pić-lustro: in the present-particle
of: to drink a mirror...

eh... nouns... loan words...
no man's land... brothels and judases...
easy targets... the bulk of the army hides waiting
in grammar...
unless... there's an army...
of "gender neutral pronouns"...
who wouldn't jump first and thirst for the idea...
mannequins eerie: err west!
the middle kingdom mantra began...
no nukes... nukes are not economically viable...
send em a bio-x-factor that the Y in XY will
sooner or later want to forget:
rather than forge...
we **** poor but our women give
the ****** of accelerated reproduction...

      Xin said to Wae Wae:
and that's how the Yang was brooded...
   and Chan said to Ezra: mind the Tao...
please!
  and all other politico: tic-toc
        tic-toc
                            some say it's *****...
some say it's: lustrzyca...
a mirroring-counter-effect...
  blind narcissus...
                my psychiatric ills:
too many words Wilhelm! too many words!
i need the pleb-lingo herr doktor helmut himmler!
to: "fitz inz"!
      
oh y'as sizzor: scissor sir: wery ilz sez he'z...
past the fever's crux 'n' zeniv sirs...

and of course... bad latin grammar...
working from vide cor meum:
     and ad hoc...
                             and a hiccup...
and carpe diem...
      hic: this...
   diem: day
   est: is
           mea: mine...
this day: is mine... or is it...
           hic diem: mea est!
   let's go with that...
  (because it just couldn't be
ancestral language with modern
english... this day: sure...
        is mine? n'ah n'ah'ah'ah)...

             bad english into french can't be
as bad as... good german into good
english and a zeppelin shower...
i.e. good english into bad french...
because it's most probably going
to be... good english into circa-good german...
which is... always the rage of a pwoblem...
you can write bad english into bad
german... and good english into good german...
but however you write good english into
french: it will most probably become:
bad french or... gascon...

    hell: call it a burgundian appealing?
it's a hush... elsewhere... a welshman...
a kashubian... a ruthenian... hell... even a prussian!

sam weller would state, so: wis as whittle
as: theta on the tip of the prefix with
the whiff of: THis!