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Poems

Leigh  Apr 2015
Cause
Leigh Apr 2015
For Idil Ibrahim
In memory of Tim Hetherington - 1970 - 2011

I cannot stay and speak my truth while the front line has no voice.
The carpet doesn't share substance with the blood-clumped
dust of Liberia; Red wine doesn't stain nations and it hasn't
changed the world.

I cannot stay and walk these steps while the fragile youth stand.
Our Sunday morning route doesn't cover landscapes of wounds
and bodies; Central Park has never felt a thousand welted
feet march for death.

I cannot stay and see your face while molten plastic scars her world.
Your delicate eyes have never seen the darkness of a child's grief;
Our democracy cannot fathom the searing, slow drip after a family
massacred.

I cannot stay and feel worthy of your love while injustice goes unseen.
My lens has immortalised what we held dear, but is yet to capture
the human condition; I spoke to you like I spoke to them;
Through decades of mortar fire I spoke to them.
.

Inspired by the life of Tim Hetherington, a frontline war photographer and journalist. His story is well told in 'Which way is the front line from here?' A truly remarkable person.

.
Mateuš Conrad Oct 2017
given the zeitgeist, well, what can you expect, bad punctuation, even worse grammar, and a complete of "raining from above" diacritical appropriation, can make anyone quasi-dyslexic, even if they are said to champion a high-level of proficiency in a native tongue; which always made me wonder: why did i turn into a speedy gonzales, outrunning the majority of natives in the tongue? i guess it came to a dedication to a craft, like any carpenter with a block of wood, english, represented by a block of:
                                               a b c d e f g
                                               h i j k l m n
                                               o p q r s t u
                                               v x w x y z.

sorry, i'm taking over, i've had enough,
enough of these poncy natives speaking
their native language as badly written
as a rap, or as naive as a *simon & garfunkel

song, i don't care for your little english degree,
i know your little scheme,
to ensure the H is mutilated, mainly bound
by promethean chains of surd -
only apparent in laughter...
that alphabet you see before you?
it's my version of sudoku -
i look at that "square" and get **** out -
i never write from the heart,
i write from the perspective of my *** -
**** it out, forget about it, move on,
move on...
            i rearrange what i see and don't see...
and yes: you learn from the best,
and the best being? the ones that allow
you to think, make-up your own little narrative,
you pepper the writing with nuance,
with ambiguity, with a: huh?
   along the the day you also channel in
a tarantula's bite of disorientation -
narrative has seized to be worth a linear
geometry -
  there's no point (a) through to point (b) -
we're talking literature in einsteinian terms,
not newtonian projectiles...
           any ******* idiot can draw a straight
line, this deformed kid i knew from being
a child: hugged the **** out of me,
could have made a brussels pâté out of me,
i liked the ******: his ****** ****** his
wife's sister, and, being a ******,
he supported the whole family with
the benefit cheques...
          couldn't say a word without a ******'s
grin... but i do remember his favourite
pastime - precision of a pair of scissors,
he would sit and tear up newspapers all
day long, sometimes walk the dog,
  but you couldn't cut paper the way he ripped
it in streaks like spaghetti...
       hell: nature abhors a vacuum;
ah, ol' robbie.
                but that's beside the point,
what i learned from my pict english teacher
was: digress... he always digressed,
i learned the art of english is via: digression -
he's the one who got me into jazz -
i can't say i listen to jazz all the time like
some pompous aragonite of catalonia -
       but when the mood is right,
and there's no woman, and there's no wine,
and there's only the identical twins
ms. & ms. pepsi & amber - and it's october,
and the wind is warm in the night,
and i feel like: these headphones are becoming
too claustrophobic, i put on some miles davis
and feel like: like a politician in davos...
   still, i don't believe in linearity of dialogue -
after all, the earth doesn't travel in a straight line...
so why bother with a "beginning, middle & end"
style of storytelling? why not tell a tale high
on a tarantula bite, completely disorientated?
the best english you're going to hear is:
via digression -
     and as i recall, up to the age of 16 -
the pict made us sit through about 2 / 3 hours
of curriculum, i.e. in english class that means
learning grammar...
     ****, we learned about 0's worth of grammar:
his motto was something like:
  hey, if you speak it grammatically,
there's no point learning any grammatically
grammatically grammar, written, or spoken.
fair point.
     so he taught us by digression -
and no one can teach you better english,
  than a glaswegian... hey, you want a great memory
of school, and not turn into some soppy
         morrissey? learn to build up an
affection with your teachers...
           ****, i even remember the teachers
in primary school, everyone feared mrs. hetherington;
she once told us a story of being shipped out
from london (due to the blitz) into
the countryside... the old "hag" is dead by now,
but, although the rumours: she was a gem;
school wasn't a problem, as long as you
didn't buy into this whole famous obscure,
weird yada yada yada, frozen prune on
a popsicle *******, you did fine...
                as long as you had respect and
some sort of weird admiration for a teacher,
or +2, the other kids just, seemingly, drifted
into the song of ambient music - akin
to refrigerator humming.
seriously - the best time of your life is
the time you have in school, esp. given the currency
is nothing more than brownie points / peanuts...
no, i know a teacher's pet when i see one -
but dabbing into the personal life of a teacher,
say, seer thomas! what's your jazz collection
like? and then you get a c.d. to burn
the next day jazz on a summer's day album,
with the opening track being
    art blakey's song moanin'...
but that's beside the point (once more) -
let's just say that solving the sudoku allows you
to clear through the claustrophobia of thinking,
notably, given that all mental illness is
a form of cognitive claustrophobia -
     well...
    there once came an argument against
the godfather of existentialism, JP sartre -
who said: existence comes prior to essence...
so we live a life (borrowing from kant's rigidity)
             vita est a priori
  subsequently esse est a posteriori -
  i need to degrade everything into cartesian
terms, with that eternal formula
that has reached a mathematical pinnacle
of 1 + 1 = 2, i.e. 1 (cogito) + (ergo) 1 (sum) = id,
no matter how much you'd like to shake
it off, you can't! everything in philosophy
zeniths and nadirs on the cartesian sly cat
of expression...
                 what are we though?
do we exist to think, or do we simply,
                           essentially think?
well, if we exist to think, we'd be nothing
more than a brain in a pickle jar...
and we wouldn't get up to moral transgressions
and general idiocy of making mistakes...
    and given the aura and the fauna of
our environment, and the number of sport
disciplines available for us to practice:
thinking is non-essential,
it's a byproduct of existence per se.
before writing this i was actually going to
channel an argument against sartre,
  but given the ongoing arithmetic of the end
product of this writing...
  i kinda agree with him...
       existence is a priori to essence,
as essence is a posteriori to existence -
   nice, look at 'em siamese twins, butter-rubbed
greasy and all...
                 could slide into a chimney
prior to santa (anagram of satan)
          prior to santa saying: bishquits und quackers
and a handful of rollie-pollies to add the
extra, crunch!
    thinking is essential, i admit,
       but it's not exactly an existential absolute
i.e. uniform in: the omni sphere of things,
plants don't think, parasites don't think...
    hence the antithesis of the cartesian
res cogitans is the res impetus -
   phototropism being the best example...
           shlime of a honeybee in the ear
of krampus...
                    how can essence come prior to
existence, given the cartesian reductionism of
pivoting the argument on thought?
  thought doesn't even enter the picture,
once the senses are fully formed,
  and that lesser celebrated cognitive faculty
of memory finally lodges itself on the hamster wheel...
first we memorise, then we imagine (so many
games in childhood) - and we start to think: lastly.
as the world around us suggests:
   thinking isn't exactly essential -
   it's existential...
      wait wait, too many O 0 O 0 O 0 O squashing
of doughnuts and rollings wheels...
                      essence comes prior to existence...
so, by saying that: i am to be born an
essentially good person?
              this is theologically speaking an
inversion of the protestant concept of
  predestination...
        now the spaghetti muddling revision...
       i had it! i swear, i had it!
                         essence can't "predate" existence
since existence has no universal analogue replica,
no uniform coercion of all given examples...
yes, in essence we should all be universally
well off, rich, beautiful, perfect skin etc.,
that would be the "utopian" essential component
in arguing: essence comes prior to existence...
but the reality is: existence comes prior to
the essence of things - given we experience
the odd bouts of daydreaming...
        essentially that, but existentially: this...
trouble with certain counter-arguments
      to doctrines is that they leave the argument
in the jaw of a chimera,
   and never bother with real-life examples of
counter,
          like in poetry,
            with its array of technique,
   philosophy has but one sunshine moment -
   take the abstract road up to a point,
and then ask that age old question:
give a man a fish and feed him for a day,
or teach a man how to fish?
               as any parasitic business model will
tell you: give the man a fish, make him
indebted, and then tell him to mine for diamonds
to make for the first, and subsequently
second fish you're going to give him;
as was my concern:
  if no idea, no concept, can't be made
infantile, or rather, to be reduced to a level assertive:
well, you know, that "serious" thinker was
also, once a kid... what's the point
of taking yourself seriously?