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Autumn Briarhart Mar 2016
Cursed by technology
Born to be a prodigy
Roamed the earth to become well versed in ecology.
Broke the dirt with the farm hand’s anthology

Made a stony hearth from the girth of this broken land’s economy.
Pitched my yurt where the man can’t bother me.

On top of luscious greens,
In the field of dreams,
No more do I pull the weeds of society.

All my proceeds grow seeds
I don’t need deeds just look at these feats
Grab an ear of corn if you haven’t heard of me.

Burn what you don’t need,
An idea of greed, the illusion of necessity.

Brought to you by bold thieves
Who trade lives but don’t sleep
Hold banquets but don’t eat
Grow food but don’t feed.

Ripped from your roots.

Dropped on the streets
in the sweltering heat.
Drying like souls of the ******,
every last one of us lost lambs.

What they want for me, it’s not a part of me

I won’t take place in the injustice that’s been bought for me.
But what I brought for me is a hypothesis,
Tranquility so deep a Buddhist monk couldn’t offer me
More than what my coffers could proffer me.

I’m not crazy but I have started the uncoupling

That’s got me to this mental brink,
Out of this poisonous sink,
No longer do I drink- from this sea of doubt
Where the irradiated mind has its teeth pulled out.

I put my knowledge of “earthology” into this horse and plow
I raise sow in the north for truffles of course
Sell them for hundreds of dollars an ounce to chefs in New York

I make herbal oils richer than kings from thorny things and rosy beings
Contemplating the meaning of life while looking at my fig-leaves

And I will pick the fruit and share it with you
Confuse me not with a more treacherous youth
Whom only seeks to toxify you with some new indoctrinated truth
Give you some of their lead paint proof, glyphosate too.

Their cell phone hooks filling your time with
Facebook looks,
And a MySpace laze
With honeycomb glaze
There in your man-made maze
Where you don’t speak for days.

I have seen the ways good people choose bad things to happen due the deceit
Of the industry they’re tapping’
Where is the Chaplain?
He’s got this book , and his grubby hands are in the pocket of the fat man
Who takes the holy waters and turns them to black sand.

Tossing grains in the air it’s unclear “whether” we can breathe it in
With no name and no face one rigged rat race,

We look for those Rebels M.I.A.
This was a stream of consciousness that I wrote on the way to a farming apprenticeship.
Wk kortas Mar 2017
This thing—unsanctified, uncertified
(Reminiscent of an old, familiar sweater
Comfortable, perhaps a bit threadworm here and there,
Yet wholly functional)
Has become unwound,
Not in some spectacular supernova
Replete with shouting and finger-shaking,
But slowly, almost imperceptibly becoming patchy and care-worn
Until such point it no longer provides much
In terms of comfort or warmth,
A failure of evolution more than an excess of passion,
A matter of recalculation as opposed to recrimination.

Let us proceed onward, then, with as much decorum as we can muster.
Parse the checking statements, divvy up love seats and ottomans
With an emphasis on equity rather than enmity,
Leaving the plates and cups intact
Passing them on (a bit dewy-eyed, perhaps)
To begin anew in some niece’s college apartment
Or with other friends who shall gallantly attempt
To complete and compute what we could not,
Divining some math which leads not to our own aftermath
Of reasoned rumination in search of some cold consolation.
Mateuš Conrad Nov 2015
it was only the first screening of ex_machina,
but the words 'deus' and 'placebo'
were uttered after a walk of thus pondering:

understanding this movie requires kant's
critique of pure reason matter of frankly,
i lost the kantian concepts of *a priori
and
a posteriori using the cartesian method of understanding,
gravitating in my realm of understanding
almost unconscious why the cartesian uncoupling
of the kantian compounds is required:

invoking a purely cognitive aspect of analytical
and synthetic i took the temporal realm of
pre- and post-, which is respective of the definitions
of the above italicised -

when watching the movie... apart from the groovy
part where music has no central role as is usual
in all horror movies... the aesthetic of horror movies
has been cleaned up thanks to technology,
that knife into the chest like knife into butter
is perfect... the knife into the chest also perfect...
it's the robotic of man's daily routines done by a robot
that does the horror bit...
it's music replaced with claustrophobia,
the theory is mesmerising... generally speaking
phobias are tiny... and the horror scenario
losing focus in terms of music and instead
focusing on an expanding phobia, like claustrophobia
is a gigantic leap in the horror movie scene...
i wonder what the moving imagery of arachnophobia
would look like... without technological frankensteins...
a massive thematic move but still trendy with mary shelley's
original idea... more clean cut... no scar marks...
a beautiful frankenstein emerges...
but enough of that...

the kantian translated with cartesian methodology,
losing the a priori and a posteriori coupling
with analytical and synthetic notions -
like me when i first learned language,
21 years later i've just started the analytical procedure,
prior to these years, the cut-off point at 21
i was merely synthesising the language,
so well that i even managed to phonetically
strain my tongue to fake having a limousine
and a mansion and a horse... posh posing fake...
it happens - no geordie no scouser no cockney in me...
just mundane pure elocution to a ****,
harmless if i'm being honest -
but no, no no, i mean i had to synthesise the language
first, before i lost all possible synthesis of it
attributed to vocabulary... it's then that i started
to analyse it!

so this robo chic... i was thinking:
what's the analysis to synthesis ratio in her?
that must be balanced, right?
there are so many things to analyse in life:
all those biologists, chemists, forensic scientists...
but only one successful synthesis - almost
like free will that does not dare to conflict
with other possibilities...
there's no before / after concerning what one knows,
a symbiosis has to exist between these two things -
it's not that she's artificial, she's pure analytic,
she can't be pure synthetic:

deep blue is pure synthetic - he was given all
the possibilities of a chess mastermind,
he's purely synthetic, because the only thing
he can analyse is chess, and in only doing so,
he can only synthesise the authentic craft of
playing chess and nothing else, meaning he has
limited parameters -
but this robotic woman / frankenstein
would be lost in terms of pure synthesis, unlike
deep blue - she's pure analysis, meaning
the interaction is almost two dimensional,
meaning that if man questions his free will,
she would also have to do so...
i'm thinking analytical intelligence (a.i.)
either pondering suicide, ****** - morality
in total... and being drunk...

the same conceptualisation applies
in my own scenario, using the cartesian methodology
on kantian concepts i realised
my thought is an interchange of analysis | synthesis |
analysis | synthesis... this interplay
is staggering... first i cognitively synthesise
then i cognitively analyse, ping-pong.

i have no care for attaching a priori to
synthesis or a posteriori to analysis, or whatever
dogmatic building block is expected,
in the temporal sense i see the future
as ordained by the faculty of imagination
and the present as ordained by the faculty of memory;
in the present there's only this:
a lot of verbs, some which i can control, some which
i can't... depending on my noun bank account...
that same old fascination with flowers and
the complete and utter lack of apps. for deciphering
names of flowers...

but of course there's a moral to the film's plot -
it mentions consciousness and awareness to something...
a bit like man being conscious of his evolution,
hence the necessity of forgetting **** sapiens
and embracing deus placebo...
after all... it will please the vanity of man to
think himself a god...
and in so doing... craft the possibility of a deus sapiens...
a rational god... given that we're still monkeys
in spandex shooting bullets at innocent random targets
in the minority.

did i forget something?
four beers does the trick... i watched a great movie...
now i'm going to drink some whiskey
and paint my room blood red
donning a dracula bun of hair tickling with excitement:
but prior... if the universe is an undifferentiated substance,
say... water... i imagine the geometry of it's boundlessness
concerning the capillary effect of water...
what sort of geometric shape would allow the singularity
of the universe to provide the parabola of it
being in a tube of glass... in comparison to it...
i'm an indentation... i'm like mercury in similar circumstances...
hello big void... filled with aurora colours and magpies.
Moist and monochrome, clouds are gathering
On a Sunday afternoon.
Look up idly from my browsing, at the building 'cross the pool
Winds picks up, the monsoon breezes
Lick at the curtains twelve floors up
On the terrace, woman standing
Arms outstretched, grasp the rail

Legs stressed back, footloose in sandal
Lightly muscled, slightly formed
Kimono slips from lighted shoulder, designer ****** strawberry brown
Fabric glides across the hip-line
Revealing all to me below
Wearing nothing on the landing
Hint of shadow, ***** mound.

From the sliding doors behind her
Steps a man not quite unseen
Waist encircled in one movement, undergarment stripped away
Rigid stillness then the thrusting
Tension mounting at the breath
Woman gasps the O shape forming
Through her silent, varnished lips

Mahler moaning on the ITunes
Waves are forming, silent sound
Thrusting, busting, flexing, *******, arching back crescendo reached
Sun comes out, just at that moment
Roads diverging in the wood
Disconnecting, and uncoupling
Might and maybe should and aught

Trembling  fingers, taught in temper
Blink the eye and pop the top
Shaking hands that hold the taper, to the unformed smoking spliff
**** the wreaths in, breathe the thought out
Bottle clinks across the teeth
Unbelieving, unconcealing
Unrelieving, unreleased
Mateuš Conrad Dec 2015
it's a paradox of yevgeny zamyatin, that the true rebellion is caused by a stress of the necessity of dreaming... talk to any schizoid individual and you find they're the dream manufacturers... dreams happen in the safe environment of the laboratory of the unconscious... they're the socially acceptable hallucinations... it's even socially acceptable to interpret them... which i find very odd... why should unconscious hallucinations be socially acceptable and profitable and career crafting and conscious hallucinations be socially stigmatised? ah the safety, the environment of the freduain interpretation of dreams: well... he's ******* asleep, isn't he?! ******.

after my usual walks drinking, i tend to enter the
realm of heat and christmas tree
a little bit too brooding,
i just painted a picasso or a kandinsky,
burnt it, and then am told to "plagiarise" it...
i don't like the approach nietczsche had
taking a notebook with him
and writing his thoughts written,
i like the way my faculty memory
eats the immediacy of thinking
as counter to the translation of descartes'
theory equating existence with thought
as if thought could prove i exist
thus uncoupling it from the original:
thought and doubt.
memory is central by comparison,
i have the revision from the miscarriage of descartes'
aim: memini ergo cogito.
it makes sense, given i started the night off
buying three san miguel bottles at tesco,
buying five beers at the turk,
spotting russell the schizoid-affective man
huntched in a corner...
told him five minutes max...
started talking with him
about the ol' sailor's narrative... turbulent noons
and midnights with a bottle of jack...
wide eyed russell every time i speak to him
reflected...
i remember drinking my first coffee aged 7...
i was born with a heart condition...
i shouldn't have... live dangerously though...
drank it... magic!
i remember the taste even now.
the cognitive me is not the existential me...
odd, isn't it?
i should have kept the original kandinsky,
but i burnt it and kept the plagiarism...
why is it that the function of memory
is paramount to mental health?
this prof. of psychology itemised this girl
who's north mania south an airplane descending
from the height vector with the ears popping...
why is it that i can remember me aged 7
and most people got cheated into total engagement
in life in the orientation of satisfied or dis-satisfied
expression of puberty?
if the faculty of memory is not defended
then diseases enter...
not one of the diseased is like an original adam,
like translation of original adam, i.e. mozart beethoven
einstein...
good enough to be without plain jane as narrator
and puppeteer...
let the strings do the talking, please!
i'm in love with ****-****** literature...
take that **** of yours, that suitcase
of ***** stockings to your mother to give it a eco-friendly
spin of the washing-machine...
**** that crap should that crap enter my heart...
you heard of ****** latin? i think you have,
it's not church slavonic, it's rude latin...
the type of thing that adds oil on the cogs
and makes you adherent to the philosophy:
pause for thought or pause for fake vocabulary?
i sweat with oaths to add fluid...
if you're offended by **** and not f
ck you
must be really appreciative of pronography...
so they said: we must rid the word of a vowel
and expose the people with **** corn bits between the teeth!
well... it worked...
i didn't tell you remember the pythagorean theory
you were taught aged 12... i told you
to remember you aged 12... like i remember nathanel
with his briefcase in year 8 in math class...
like i remember this english teacher's legs
when i dropped the pen to loon inside the stash-load
of pooddles and *****...
like i remember racing a guy from bałtów
to ostrowiec and winning: he on a tour de france bike
with anorexic model tires and
my on mountain bike fatties...
i told you memory is crucial... given our thought explored
inanimate things as the perfection of our knowledge,
given our thought explored animate things
as perfectly categorising man and animal alike
thus mis-interpretating ourselves, oh the sacrifice of
the perfectly catalogised atom among the toothbrushes...
a convo of assortments...
it's perfect knowledge in relation to inanimate things...
the sort of thing which is question:
but atoms are animate things... calling them inanimate
just because they're invisible doesn't give you a
right to driftwood clung to in robinson cruseo's shakespearean friday.
hence the passing inspiration... so dull now
that i only feel inspired to pour myself another whiskey
and justify the meaning of relaxed.
associate yourself with the world,
hardly many of us will end of with the genius score of don juan,
we're in an environment of strict biology,
we're told that memory governs our world
with the world being on the quest to repeat...
and it does repeat... sounding the encore of biting frost,
sounding the encore of delighted shadows of summer
having postponed snipers to shoot them dead with night...
the world that inquires per se via repeat
only divinites man's faculty that's memory,
and quickly attacks it in revenge by dementia...
imagination is left to the murderers' who fancy
all the hues of red on the face....
this world is not pleasant to those who think,
to those who couple thought with imagination,
and to those who couple thought with memory...
alas... such few increments are left to re-discover
after being taught the uselessness of centimetre
when no centimetre knowledge is used in their
mechanisation of a profession.
that bit monkey less than man already happened
contradictory in theoretical terms
given the diversity whereby man's diversity
per se cannot explain the diversity of each thing
using evolutionary relativism, niche by-product concerns...
penguins will always make it to antarctica...
no banker or plumber on antarctica... just
scientists who started the whole expedition as
worth anything by counting penguin eggs...
indeed... ah this is going nowhere...
i don't believe in evolutionary relatvism
like socrates didn't believe in moral relativism
theft is punishable with the cutting of the hand
that stole... ****** is punishable with the cutting
of the head - it's all really related)...
and the aesthetic relativism is as true as: beauty
is in the eye of the beholder -
to that girl in the night near the church
walking with a concerned friend
concerned by her attractive panda-eyed mascara expression.
most of the time i find the inherent vice of jungian
interpretation of poets
to be a case of narration: poets don't write enough
to be valued! i respect fictional occupants of the
equivalent hammer of a labourer writing long paragraphs!
well, true enough... any idiot would suddenly exclaim
a symptom as: i differentiate that i'm a constant inspiration
for a non-existent narrator, and the symptom i differentiate
from true to fake by the fact it hinders my faculty to think...
pronoun shrapnel i call it... auxillary pronouns
that benefit me to expand my thought on a levelling
that did not want to see in monochromatic divergence
of continued with linear-ism akin to horse blinders
that only exposed a corridor where a valley could have stood
for the eyes to be inspired by.
Moist and monochrome, clouds are gathering
On a Sunday afternoon.
Look up idly from my browsing, at the building 'cross the pool
Winds picks up, the monsoon breezes
Lick at the curtains twelve floors up
On the terrace, woman standing
Arms outstretched, grasp the rail

Legs stressed back, footloose in sandal
Lightly muscled, slightly formed
Kimono slips from lighted shoulder, designer ****** strawberry brown
Fabric glides across the hip-line
Revealing all to me below
Wearing nothing on the landing
Hint of shadow, ***** mound.

From the sliding doors behind her
Steps a man not quite unseen
Waist encircled in one movement, undergarment stripped away
Rigid stillness then the thrusting
Tension mounting at the breath
Woman gasps the O shape forming
Through her silent, varnished lips

Mahler moaning on the ITunes
Waves are forming, silent sound
Thrusting, busting, flexing, *******, arching back crescendo reached
Sun comes out, just at that moment
Roads diverging in the wood
Disconnecting, and uncoupling
Might and maybe, aught and should

Trembling  fingers, taught in temper
Blink the eye and pop the top
Shaking hands that hold the taper, to the unformed smoking spliff
**** the wreaths in, breathe the thought out
Bottle clinks across the teeth
Unbelieving, unconcealing
Unrelieving, unreleased
To those that inquired: pure if unintentional voyeurism. It happened rather quicker than the verses indicate; I'm not sure I could have looked away even if I'd chosen to. Intensity is always compelling! They say that 'character is how you behave when no-one else is watching'.  Not sure what that says about them. And about me...
'Hopes and Dreams'...explores the limitations of perception in more than three dimensions plus time.


I

Uncoupling hopes from truth sometimes reveals reality
Which is hard to bear
According to Eliot.
The difference between hope and what is real
Is sometimes the basis for laughter
Or tears…..
In equal measure
Depending on the deficit
Between reality, and the reality of hoping.
Two sides of the same coin
The masks of theatre,
Comedy and tragedy.

Yet reality is what we face day to day
Uncoupled from hope
An atheistic vision of what is true
In which dreams expire.

Hopes, dreams and reality
Congregate in theistic minds
As a woven integrity
But is the congress true?

Atheist and theist in perpetual conflict
One offering only truth,
The other hoping that belief is true
But, to what ….?
In this world caught in three dimensions
But do not forget time that marks when
We are born and when we die
According to Ecclesiastes.

The atheism of truths of a certain kind
Confined by the question asked
And who is asking, and the way of asking,
Atheist and theist talking at each other
But not in conversation
A dialogue of deafness to other points of view
An unbridged chasm for all of human history.

The certainty of truth is one problem,
Because certainty brooks no other view
But remember the constraints of truth’s
discovery and then assertion
In three dimensions, and do not forget time.

Unwittingly Carl Sagan made the point in flatland
A place of two dimensions,
Breadth and width, but no height
Infinitesimally flat, thin
Flat and thin, so that an apple
In its plump three dimensional roundness
Made its visit, announced its presence
But left only an infinitesimally flat, thin
Impression of its visitation,
With its announcement seemingly coming from wherever,
Infinite confusion.
For flatlanders who perceived a visitation
Without explanation
A mystery within which we experience
The determinism of truth
Not qualified by the dimensions
In which it’s made
Or defined
To the confusion of those who question truth,
If truth means the assertion of certainty.

Was it for flatlanders first cause?
Just like Paley’s watchmaker of the watch
found on the heath,
Each trapped in their respective
Two dimensions and three dimensions
Limited by their dimensionality
Of what they could see or imagine.
Not yet liberated by many dimensions
That liberated Tennyson to understand
That more is achieved by dreaming without limits.

Tennyson said…
That more things are achieved by prayer
Than this world dreams of,
But what are dreams?
Visions of hope, or the darkness of damnation?
But can we imagine these visions
In many dimensions?
And find new truths which we cannot perceive
In the day to day.

II

Dreams can be suspension
Between what is real and what we hope for,
Or ……
A plunge into an abyss of horrors
The nightmare’s nightcrusher
That reflects the fears of our experience,
The fears of Fuseli’s nights
Of grotesque creatures that taunt the hopes
Of our tomorrows
By revealing the layers of yesterday’s experience,
A past that haunts the future
In the day to day.

Yet redeemed by intentions
For the good,
And honourable to the nature of humankind,
And lifekind with which we share organic ancestry.

Dreams release the mind to find another place,
Another dimension, where what happens
Can happen and more than we can suppose
According to Haldane.

Limitless possibilities that dreamtimes
Expose what we do not own
But instead we are a part of.
Land, sea and air fused with the spirit
Of peoples that inhabit distant shores
Where they are one with the place
Where they are, were and will be
For all time.
The dreamtime of Australia’s
Original peoples.

And so the plump apple
Becomes a part of the experience
Of those who live in two dimensions,
Carl’s flatlanders experience their
Dreamtime of first causes
Because the missing dimension disallows
Their understanding of what is real.

So conflate the idea to many dimensions
And you can see what I mean.
Imagine the unimaginable
That cannot be seen
Because of the constraints of three dimensions.

And do not forget time
Perhaps the portal for imagining
What cannot be experienced
In spacetime warped and curved
By the embrace of gravity.

We sail in this cosmic sea
Not seeing its possibilities
Because we are not equipped
To see through a glass darkly
Or so Corinthians says
But to half see, dimly see
Love
And the truth of black holes
Where physics is sundered
Perhaps allowing passage to other creations
To us mere visions of what we aspire to be
And understand
Just as Blake saw heaven in a wild flower.

III

To perceive the possibility of many dimensions
Is to free the mind
From superstition
From the prejudices
That blight the landscape of our thinking,
And the landscape of dreams
When we perceive self
As if disembodied
Floating on the ceiling looking down
Detachedly on what we do
And what others do in the day to day.

Doings driven by the limited framework
Of width, breadth and height.
Width and breadth and height
And do not forget the passage of time
In which our doings take place.

One is singular in mind and body
Meaning self in the day to day.
To be beside oneself is joy and anger
The Janus faced self
Somewhat like the masks of comedy and tragedy
But of emotion and not theatrical circumstance.

How many multiples of
Space and time
Are needed to be beside oneself
In a quantum universe?
Or universes where to touch would be
Annihilation of self
Tracked as energy pure, and as simple
As the dreams of our disembodied self
Looking down from the ceiling.

IV

Is hope the delusion of optimism,
Dreams its manifestation of unreality?
Who can say because analysis
Is limited within the context of our perception.
Perception influenced by prejudice and misunderstanding
Because we are limited by what
Can be understood
In three dimensions,
And do not forget time
And gravity
And the failure of its resolution with dimension
and time
Limiting understanding.



But……
If we acknowledge the limitations
Even if not understanding the quantum context
Then, given we are prepared to accept the
uncertainty
Described by Heisenberg,
Then we are mentally equipped
To understand that truth is provisional
But with verity according to experience
Accumulated through the continuity of history.

We try to resolve contradictions
Because resolution anchors us into
the certainty of
Our present experience,
And certainty is comfort, allowing us to live
Day to day.

David Applin, May 2013

Copyright David Applin 2015
A poem from the collection 'Letters to Anotherself'.... copyright David Applin
Mark Toney Oct 2019
Telephone rings
Announcing your name
Caller ID pings
This is so insane
Selfish acts of subterfuge
Leaving us both confused
Despite the tightening noose
Calling you is what I choose-
I can’t let go

“Hi, how was your day?
What’s that you say?
Have I learned by now
How to play well with others?
What? No? I don't have to bother?”
(Your words stabbing like a shiv)
“You have your own life to live
You have your own love to give-
Just not to me?”

Somber thoughts of divorce
******* all my vital force
This will be such a blow
To the people we know
As mute as a mime
Losing track of real time
Zombifying my day
Hunting for quick getaway-
But no such luck

What shall I do thus
                    ~Telephone rings

If we fail to repair us?
                    ~Announcing your name

Lament inevitable loss?
                    ~Caller ID pings

Calculate incalculable cost?
                    ~This is so insane

I’m a solid secular success
                    ~Selfish acts of subterfuge

I’m a massive mental mess
                    ~Leaving us both confused

At least the former pays the bills
                    ~Despite the tightening noose

No use in crying when milk spills-
                    ~Calling you is what I choose

What’s done is done
                    ~I can’t let go
8/29/2019 - Poetry form: Rhyme - Copyright © Mark Toney | Year Posted 2019
Mateuš Conrad Aug 2016
well, if i found a self-administrative
anaesthetic for celestial tyrants that
are so glorified by historians over
the ages, and only dream darkness,
or dream ******* up that not even
Freud could stomach...
and i teach them how to take it to
do the opposite of what they did in life,
and leave them hungover and
slightly prone to despair, i'm sure we can
have a timetable of when they go cold
turkey, and turn into little budding Buddha...
adenosine and that acetyl thing...
or i got it completely wrong...
how else you going to keep frying
that chicken... obviously you'll have
to keep cutting corners somewhere...
obviously the little budding Buddha illuminations
everyone will resist... i mourned
the fact that a boy encouraged me to throw
a hamster off the stairs telling me: he's
wearing parachutes... i remember that
face... i remember the bloodied snout
of the hamster... makes me a Hindu then:
to have mourned the passing of a petted
animal makes you Hindu...
you can claim having converted the day
you mourned your pet cat passing...
honest to Brahman... like me an Ernest
tailing our conversation into
childless couples who don't want the
murk of a genetic Rōnin ruining
their happy abode even if nurture tries to
overcome nature... dog, man's second child
i inquired... i don't know if i was
elastic enough to call that poetic, but i added:
once you take to the trivialities
of having animals as your children
in a theatre of grievance, the little concern
the animals need, and the way that families
with children belittle the concern of people
with animals as animals making them Everest
summits... well... the joke is: the little
problems of animals dwarf the problems of life...
which is turn makes the childless couples
who have animals as incubator replacements
of pets look at child aplenty couples look a bit daft,
the equilibrium of dwarf and titan combine,
the childless couple incubates a resistance
against the titanic problems of life, or rather the world
with whether their children have autism aged 6...
well, if they don't have play-friends outside of school
where every child's imagination is on equal footing
and there are no educators present to
separate the sheaf from the staff, the wolf from the sheep...
sure... by the age of 8, a child will adamantly
become brutal in his or her individual...
the problem in england, as in America is that
children do not have outside-of-school play-friends
to relax with... it's either all school with social hierarchies,
or all familial bonding, or literally ******* it up
with Oedipus looming...
the funny bit? i remember childhood from 1990s Poland
like Ernest remembers it from, what, 1940?
HA HA HA HA... funny as ****... where's this
unconscious uncoupling then? licking the plates
like a dog starved for a month?
i love the English maxim: got to be cruel... to be kind.
no wait... he said his elder brothers
made their debut... that's the 19... 30s! god...
western Europe is Darwinism on amphetamines.
you can't get play-friends in school...
that's why we have the Cure and the Smiths song...
so much angst at the fact that no one bothered to
build close sky-rise communities...
trying to build them in the 1950s with a Colonial
past? crime... whatever else?
what with those on those estates saying:
my children too! in a semi-detached!
how they ***** Poland with Pope John II at the front...
what a bunch of scummy ratty wankers...
*******... bending the pirate ship's plank wankers...
i'd do them in Kentucky if i had my way...
apparently the recipe is out an all good for the
public eye to see... sometimes civilisation
makes you a natural cannibal by the mere thought of it...
you can't expect children in western society to
not fall suspect to some psychological malnutrition
when their only play-friends are in an institutional
environment, might as well put them in psychiatric
wards and tell them to play razor quickest to the wrist
wins! i do mean that from your neck arteries.
they don't have play-friends outside of institutions...
maybe it was the suburban labyrinths of identical
housing that mismanaged the chance interaction
of a group of children... but in 2 square miles
of where i live, i've seen more biodiversity than
i'd care to see in the Amazon rain forest.
Nat Lipstadt  Jul 2017
half ring
Nat Lipstadt Jul 2017
half ring*

a present, a thank you compliment by way of a poem, for the zealous, tiny, poetess spark who writes exquisitely and calls herself Cynthia Henon*
~~~
strange old night-stands, a stained tan blonde wood
that's going ancient grey, but still handsome in a fitting way,
the front drawer hand painted floral in what I choose
to believe are by Italian hands in Italian reds and greens,
not so fancy as I make it sound, but worn and durable and
not overly functional but two silent, uncomplaining eye witnesses to a ten year ancient, greying love affair

wood ages, human eyes squint, failing to counteract the minute, advancing daily dimming, not paying close attention to the
Richter magnitude of the accumulated changes

the morning coffee ritual as catholic as morning mass,
a straw woven coaster to protect the sun blanched top,
hardly necessary, just a good habit, one of the  rituals that glue,
that couples use to keep the coupling intact

the cumulative subtle changes, the crackling sound unheard, the cracks in everything, even in the human tissue,
breaking, the papered over filler of purposeful ignorance,
cannot forever resist the erosion of the cancer of the
taking for granted

place the coffee cup half on, half off the coaster, un-noticing,
leaving half a ring that will now never disappear, never be
completed, causing her to fly into rage that rips the
complacent band-aids, worn dikes that were holding back the barricaded tears, but the sea~see
level was always rising and though visible, the revelation remained unchosen


later that day, I drive away forever with Yo-Yo Ma riding shotgun,
in charge of map reading and consolation music, thinking
half ring, half ring, half ring, half ring,
an embolism of symbolism, good for a play on words,
and a couple of poems about uncoupling

8:22am 7/1/17
Mateuš Conrad Aug 2016
an anatomy of a maxim, originally: the greatest trick the
devil ever pulled was convincing the world the world that
he didn't exist... perhaps, but what
was the conviction, what ontology lay
behind it, was it pre-existential (Cartesian)
or existential (Sartre's)? we're not
talking gambling with Pascal - we're not talking
games anymore - i'll explain later.
i have too many concrete references to throw
at you, where you'll make this whole affair
a scandalous one that i didn't invent myself,
but we're all refining our meanings,
in youth prescribing unknown to us
slang vocabulary to filter through the included
and the excluded, i always wondered where
slang originated, and to what purpose,
the Beat poets and novelists licked the topic
of slang with their addictions to subplot the
demands for a bubble-effect and a non-touch policy...
i was watching the Olympics today,
and i was watching the height of plagiarising Greek
in Pax Romanum, and it felt very civilised,
an equal contest, handshakes of the defeated,
they are after all games, we're not been equal,
let's celebrate Achilles and remember him
for no depressive isolating ******* when drinking
Dionysian epilepsy of refill, refill, so we remain drunk
and memory of him keep us drunk!
but no, oh no, modern men don't know what
to do heroes, or such memories that might
detach us from thinking ourselves likewise;
oh the slur of jealousy, so much angst, among ably
bodied and among the disabled, the disabled have
no sight of a plateau to look up to among the ably
bodied, they're rotten to the core -
and i know where premature dementia stems from...
i was watching the Olympics today, and it felt so
healthy, but then i watched the opening of another
sport... football... and i put on Salem's debut album
on the speaker, songs like sick, release the boar,
trapdoor, and i felt a reminder of the fall of
the western Empire, and when the Norse men
came against the Roman plagiarism of Greek culture
after the Trojan immigration to Italy after the defeat
at Troy, and Hector dying glorious by a glorious
hand of Achilles, and Achilles dying from luck
for the prototype of Tinder man of Paris, ***** licking
boot straps marching to fake debility...
oh, if you don't have a mobile phone, and never used
the Tinder application, you can see the super-charged
desperation of women, porcelain dolls pretending it
was always hard luck and too much eager ****...
they book the cheapest tickets to the Opera house
to see Bolshoi ballet, they even buy tickets that only
allows them to stand... after the second act there's no
sign of them... they disappear, no Tinder swipe
no Pokemon... better chances looking for either
in Auschwitz (as i heard has happened, Auschwitz,
well, thank god people go to fake mourning and a digital
theme park at the same time, at least the hens and stags
have Prague... they call us the forgotten Europeans...
maybe this is the precise intention of what i once
mentioned concerning the ONE LESSON IN TAO:
to aid the world, let the world forget you,
in order that you might forget the world.
seeing la corsaire we had anna nikulina as Medora,
mikhail lobukhin as Conrad, nina Kaptsova as Gulnare,
vitaly biktimirov as Birbanto (the *******),
denis medvedev as Lankendem and alexei loparevich
as Sāid Pasha... the major dances...
- pas d'esclaves by kristina kretova and igor tsvirko,
- danse des forbans by kristina karasoyova (soloist),
                                       anna antropova, anna balukova,
                                       evgeny golovin, denis savin
,
- pas de trois de odalisques by yanina parienko,
                                        xenia zhiganshina, elvina ibraimova
,
- le jardin animé............................................................­........
- grand pas de eventailles......................................................­.....
lonely girls at the opera, phones in the interludes, swiping
left, swiping right, a boy without a phone,
behind me two young women trying to strike conversation
about ballet exclusively, nothing human, just prepared for
the stage... what an awful talk, and talk, and talk...
no talk about excessive clapping... out-of-time clapping...
i'm truly living among barbarians... i might not be as rich
as these barbarians, but i wouldn't care to clap so much,
i guess the logic is: i payed so much money for this ticket
i better make my presence felt.
as i already said, i did take Ezra Pound on the commute,
i should have taken Kant... on the way back from central
London heading into the west i felt patronising
tourist eyes of misguided voyeurism, here one minute,
gone the next... only the devil sweats with shame in hell,
while everyone remains cool and in denial at being in one...
i was just standing on the tube, reading a book of poetry...
i turned into Niagara Falls... sweat on my back,
sweat on my front... while everyone else remained
surprisingly well hydrated, i looked like i just ran a marathon...
so after watching the Olympics i watched the dark ages emerges,
two strands of sport... god almighty and the barbarian's
religiousness of sports, so hellbent-anti-bohemian,
intimate secretes of Onan as a chant with that curled finger
jerking sideways movement... after watching a few days
of the Olympics, the empty seats, the few remaining lights
of this world... i got a cyst pool of ****** bound maggotry...
dad says to son: as my dad said unto me: 'ammer 'em in!
but now i know where premature depression comes from,
under communism we flourished with our imagination,
we played hide & seek into the night,
even when they imported Nintendo and comics we
were hardly moved... hardly the ones to be domesticated
and zoologically probed by anaemic paraphrasing -
we lived outdoors, we slept indoors, we used to eat
sunflower seeds, freshly baked bread, drink
cheap lemonade, go foraging for mushrooms -
idealism of some sort? but none of us were given
pharmacological attractions to treat - we were
given a childhood - even in England we managed to
play with Pokemon cards, to be puberty riddled geeks,
but then things changed... none of this new generation
of youth is given the same childhood chances,
in my youth few already experimented with ***,
teased us all that it was the highest achievement -
back then we still had people to look up to -
strange how i bypassed ****** pubescent development,
when the first boy masturbated he'd be *******
*****... i'd be ******* a sensation aged 8 or 7...
and said it felt good, i didn't involve a church doctrine
that life begun somewhere other than after the birth...
as it might be reasonable inspection that mere death,
sudden, et tu Brutus?, is like an *******,
the fetus later, then birth, the migraine of mourning,
the ***** training (getting used to angels),
the ****... takes us several years to record our
first memory, some might go back as far as being 4
years old... no further, whoever says they can remember
prior is mixing what's presented to them for distortion...
i can't distort my first name and my favourite footballer's
surname in the 1990s world cup (lothar matthäus),
or the satirical sketch show about Solidarity:
**** wałęsa (lew) was the lion, tadeusz mazowiecki (żółw)
the turtle, jacek kuroń (hipopotam) the hippo -
the memory of the "turtle" politician always made me fall asleep.
to be honest, the maxim sounds better not because the devil
denied he existed, but because God denied he existed,
once having proven he did, he denied it with such force
that his marriage to the chosen people became a brief
marriage to the elect / intellectual people... but then that
failed too... we're at the last stage... with Islam teaching
us the original intention of man having to relationship
with god... when Muslims teach us kung fu and judo and
yoga and stop trying to censor our vocabulary,
teach us mutual respect, a divorce from writing poetry
to solely embrace the Koran... when they finally realise
they have become more decadent than anyone would
have thought give their discovery of oil under the dunes...
the greatest trick the
devil ever pulled was convincing the world that
he doubted his own existence
; and all because he knew
that god denied his own, as became apparent in modern
politics, that the sole tactic politicians used to perpetuate
their authority was in the playground of using denial...
but it was never a playground... oddly enough
doubt and denial mingle like the Cartesian mind-body
duality - but when looking at children i know
that children do not understand doubt, too many games
to play to doubt them, hence the crippling uncoupling
from imagination later on, they're real, undoubted games,
hence the child's complete immersion in them:
whether Walt Disney lived and provided for the lost
children is none of my business.... children don't know
doubt, they have no knowledge of thought per se, thought
per se identified as ego... they know only one form of
lie: which is denial, intuitive lying... doubtful lying is
in good interest only a wavering, but nonetheless a straight line...
if ever doubtful lying ever persisted - even the Koran states
something about non-believers... it states nothing about
quasi-believers... the sort of: well... as long as that
martyr walks into a harem, where all the 72 virgins
are actually prostitutes, and he can stomach their piercing
eyes, then we'll think about giving him 72 authentic brides
to deflower.
Will May 2017
In a flightless freefall, the heart plummets to the ground. Would a soft landing negate the fact that the heart did in fact fall? Would just a scratch or cut be justifiable?

No.

The pain would still exist.

Some say the bottom does not appear at all. That our hearts just continue to fall until we find another heart to fall with. These two hearts join together and fall in love.

The joy that exists between the two is boundless, unfettered, and infinite. Shooting at the combined love would cause the projectiles to bounce off. Yelling at one heart would cause the other to fight back.

In this state of perpetual falling the two hearts complete one another. The rips and tears of one are filled by the unhurt parts of the other. In this simple union they are perfect.

But time does not allow for immortal love. One heart will choose to float away, falling at a different pace. Falling out of the love it so joyously engulfed at an earlier time.

This sudden uncoupling causes the other heart to tumble in a tailspin. No longer falling in love, but falling into heartbreak.

Where love feels like resting by a safe fireplace, wrapped up in a blanket and sipping on a warm drink. Heartbreak feels like a cold house filled with bitter memories and empty tears.

One might ask; "Is there any everlasting love? Why must the poor heart always be falling in and out of the love it so desperately covets?"

Some do find love eternal. Some do not. For some it is a person who cares for them. Others find purpose in a job or lifestyle.

But those wounds are still present on their heart. The scars never heal. The pain never truly fades.

The heart never ceases to fall down, with gravity pulling it towards the endless void below.

— The End —