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Nigel Morgan Oct 2012
There was a moment when he knew he had to make a decision.

He had left London that February evening on the ****** Velo Train to the South West. As the two hour journey got underway darkness had descended quickly; it was soon only his reflected face he could see in the window. He’d been rehearsing most of the afternoon so it was only now he could take out the manuscript book, its pages full of working notes on the piece he was to play the following afternoon. His I-Mind implant could have stored these but he chose to circumvent this thought-transcribing technology; there was still the physical trace on the cream-coloured paper with his mother’s propelling pencil that forever conjured up his journey from the teenage composer to the jazz musician he now was. This thought surrounded him with a certain warmth on this Friday evening train full of those returning to their country homes and distant families.

It was a difficulty he had sensed from the moment he perceived a distant gap in the flow of information streaming onto the mind page

At the outset the Mind Notation project had seemed harmless, playful in fact. He allowed himself to enter into the early experiments because he knew and trusted the research team. He got paid handsomely for his time, and later for his performance work.  It was a valuable complement to his ill-paid day-to-day work as a jazz pianist constantly touring the clubs, making occasional festival appearances with is quintet, hawking his recordings around small labels, and always ‘being available’. Mind Notation was something quite outside that traditional scene. In short periods it would have a relentless intensity about it, but it was hard to dismiss because he soon realised he had been hard-wired to different persona. Over a period of several years he was now dealing with four separate I-Mind folders, four distinct musical identities.

Tomorrow he would pull out the latest manifestation of a composer whose creative mind he had known for 10 years, playing the experimental edge of his music whilst still at college. There had been others since, but J was different, and so consistent. J never interfered; there were never decisive interventions, only an explicit confidence in his ability to interpret J’s music. There had been occasional discussion, but always loose; over coffee, a walk to a restaurant; never in the lab or at rehearsals.

In performance (and particularly when J was present) J’s own mind-thought was so rich, so wide-ranging it could have been drug-induced. Every musical inference was surrounded by such intensity and power he had had to learn to ride on it as he imagined a surfer would ride on a powerful wave. She was always there - embedded in everything J seemed to think about, everything J projected. He wondered how J could live with what seemed to him to be an obsession. Perhaps this was love, and so what he played was love like a wilderness river flowing endlessly across the mind-page.

J seemed careful when he was with her. J tried hard not to let his attentiveness, this gaze of love, allow others to enter the public folders of his I-Mind space (so full of images of her and the sounds of her light, entrancing voice). But he knew, he knew when he glanced at them together in darkened concert halls, her hand on J’s left arm stroking, gently stroking, that J’s most brilliant and affecting music flowed from this source.

He could feel the pattern of his breathing change, he shifted himself in his chair, the keyboard swam under his gaze, he was playing fast and light, playing arpeggios like falling water, a waterfall of notes, cascades of extended tonalities falling into the darkness beyond his left hand, but there it was, in twenty seconds he would have to*

It had begun quite accidentally with a lab experiment. J had for some years been researching the telematics of composing and performing by encapsulating the physical musical score onto a computer screen. The ‘moist media’ of telematics offered the performer different views of a composition, and not just the end result but the journey taken to obtain that result. From there to an interest in neuroscience had been a small step. J persuaded him to visit the lab to experience playing a duet with his own brain waves.

Wearing a sensor cap he had allowed his brainwaves to be transmitted through a BCMI to a synthesiser – as he played the piano. After a few hours he realised he could control the resultant sounds. In fact, he could control them very well. He had played with computer interaction before, but there was always a preparatory stage, hours of designing and programming, then the inevitable critical feedback of the recording or glitch in performance. He soon realised he had no patience for it and so relied on a programmer, a sonic artist as assistant, as collaborator when circumstances required it.

When J’s colleagues developed an ‘app’ for the I-Mind it meant he could receive J’s instant thoughts, but thoughts translated into virtual ‘active’ music notation, a notation that flowed across the screen of his inner eye. It was astonishing; more astonishing because J didn’t have to be physically there for it to happen: he could record I-Mind files of his thought compositions.

The reference pre-score at the top of the mind page was gradually enlarging to a point where pitches were just visible and this gap, a gap with no stave, a gap of silence, a gap with no action, a gap with repeat signs was probably 30 seconds away

In the early days (was it really just 10 years ago?) the music was delivered to him embedded in a network of experiences, locations, spiritual and philosophical ideas. J had found ways to extend the idea of the notated score to allow the performer to explore the very thoughts and techniques that made each piece – usually complete hidden from the performer. He would assemble groups of miniatures lasting no more than a couple of minutes each, each miniature carrying, as J had once told him, ‘one thought and one thought only’.  But this description only referred to the musical material because each piece was loaded with a web of associations. From the outset the music employed scales and tonalities so far away from the conventions of jazz that when he played and then extended the pieces it seemed like he was visiting a different universe; though surprisingly he had little trouble working these new and different patterns of pitches into his fingers. It was uncanny the ‘fit’.

Along with the music there was always rich, often startling images she conjured up for J’s compositions. At the beginning of their association J initiated these. He had been long been seeking ways to integrate the visual image with musical discourse. After toying with the idea of devising his own images for music he conceived the notion of computer animation of textile layers. J had discovered and then encouraged the work and vision of a young woman on the brink of what was to become recognised as a major talent. When he could he supported her artistically, revelling in the keenness of her observation of the natural world and her ability to complement what J conceived. He became her lover and she his muse; he remodelled his life and his work around her, her life and her work.

When performing the most complex of music it always seemed to him that the relative time of music and the clock time of reality met in strange conjunctions of stasis. Quite suddenly clock time became suspended and musical time enveloped reality. He found he could be thinking something quite differently from what he was playing.

Further projects followed, and as they did he realised a change had begun to occur in J’s creative rationale. He seemed to adopt different personae. Outwardly he was J. Inside his musical thought he began to invent other composers, musical avatars, complete minds with different musical and personal histories that he imagined making new work.

J had manipulated him into working on a new project that had appeared to be by a composer completely unknown to him. L was Canadian, a composer who had conceived a score that adhered to the DOGME movie production manifesto, but translated into music. The composition, the visuals, the text, the technological environment and the performance had to be conceived in realtime and in one location. A live performance meant a live ‘making’, and this meant he became involved in all aspects of the production. It became a popular and celebrated festival event with each production captured in its entirety and presented in multi-dimensional strands on the web. The viewer / listener became an editor able to move between the simultaneous creative activity, weaving his or her own ‘cut’ like some art house computer game. L never appeared in person at these ‘remakings’, but via a computer link. It was only after half a dozen performances that the thought entered his mind that L was possibly not a 24-year-old woman from Toronto complete with a lively Facebook persona.

Then, with the I-Mind, he woke up to the fact that J had already prepared musical scenarios that could take immediate advantage of this technology. A BBC Promenade Concert commission for a work for piano and orchestra provided an opportunity. J somehow persuaded Tom Service the Proms supremo to programme this new work as a collaborative composition by a team created specially for the premiere. J hid inside this team and devised a fresh persona. He also hid his new I-Mind technology from public view. The orchestra was to be self-directed but featured section leaders who, as established colleagues of J’s had already experienced his work and, sworn to secrecy, agreed to the I-Mind implant.

After the premiere there were rumours about how the extraordinary synchronicities in the play of musical sections had been achieved and there was much critical debate. J immediately withdrew the score to the BBC’s consternation. A minion in the contracts department had a most uncomfortable meeting with Mr Service and the Controller of Radio 3.

With the end of this phrase he would hit the gap  . . . what was he to do? Simply lift his hands from the keyboard? Wait for some sign from the I-Mind system to intervene? His audience might applaud thinking the piece finished? Would the immersive visuals with its  18.1 Surround Sound continue on the five screens or simply disappear?

His hands left the keyboard. The screens went white except for the two repeats signs in red facing one another. Then in the blank bar letter-by-letter this short text appeared . . .


Here Silence gathers
thoughts of you

Letters shall never
spell your grace

No melody could
describe your face

No rhythm dance
the way you move

Only Silence can
express my love

ever yours ever
yours ever yours



He then realised what the date was . . . and slowly let his hands fall to his lap.
Mateuš Conrad Nov 2016
i.

i really want to write this like a poet, but i'll probably
ramble on, i want to create this poetic haiku
or what one might call a punchline
in a joke, i will, obviously,
           i will (obviously) provide
how the alternatives would look like,
but sometimes i think that the poet
is enraged by the idea of the narrator:
or the consolidator of personae -
defeatist poets write from a personae
perspective, as if each poem is
a new and nuanced character -
a nuance of the narrator,
   yes: not novels, a plateau of literature
that poetry is...
           the setting is unknown,
but these people simply congregate
and say something, akin to the burning man
festival, and then return to their
day jobs...
          i don't know why poetry is less and less
resonating with music: maybe because
the old critique of poetry being faced off
with philosophy doesn't make sense
given that there's this rainbow of musical
tastes and the general diversity?
looking at the classical circumstance of
poetry vs. philosophy makes no sense
when the *logos
is removed and the phonos
is inserted in its place...
   bad grammar, bad spelling... why look for
meaning in words in the almighty sphere
of all things holy, when in the trenches
   people are shooting bullets not at targets
but at empty space?
    that's why i love the notion that writing
can become something akin to a will to power:
the power over not of those illiterate -
urbanism has dissolved such a concept...
  we became literate in order to read adverts:
or the iconoclasm of the alphabet:
pretty coca cola nearing arabic for all
those magpies out there...
           the myth goes that the magpie spotted
the shimmer of a silver spoon and stole it
and as the debate of the fates go:
i was to marry a rich woman and leverage
myself into a calm suspense... but it wasn't
to be. such is the case: when writing
can become as difficult as arithmetic of numbers,
and certain blemishes on the fountain head
of humanism that's literature can provide
the right arithmetic complexity...
   given that, what could possibly be the sum
total of this "poem"?
  the irony of the cartesian 1 + 1 = 2...
                in terms of meaning? in a polyverse
   of the what if? universe?
        a cinema better than the Hollywood industry...
that could fit into my concept of man enduring
for eternity, even with the vain hope of challenging
his mortal frailty... have a historiological cinema
of the what ifs... i'd sit in there and be like: wow!
Adolf graduated from the Vienna Art School
and world war two didn't happen?
    the treaty of Versailles wasn't a version of
colonial powers against expansionist politics
concerning a European nation? wow!
they basically didn't join the club of colonial power,
and they were punishing the colonial powers of
the time... or that's how i see it:
i don't see myself needing to ascribe myself
to pronoun pluralism in any shape or form:
it just breeds some overt concept of paranoia;
and obviously this has nothing to do with the title,
because it i shunned the narrator, i'd be a poet,
and if i wrote a cutiepie version of this
i'd feel hungry for not having played the piano
long enough while tipping a glass of whiskey
into my mouth... just is the curse of
enjoying typing: hurrah for our loss of handwriting
and that beautiful circumstance of writing
words with connectivity - by modern standards
undecipherable as if Hebrew or acronyms
and emoticons: puncture after puncture and nothing
concerning waves or serpentines of encoded talk...
beautiful... absolutely beautiful.
  the new form italics? syllable-ism, to stress,
punctuation marks in words: beau-ti-ful!
there, goes a weeping pair, that's Ludovico Arrighi
& Aldus Manutius...
    and what i do understand, and it's pivotal,
take the concept of a narrator out of the prosaic mosaic
and take away the concept of personae out of
poetry, and mould the two together...
you get an implosion worthy of a Hiroshima...
a bit like what the Beatles conceded too after
releasing their revolved album... they stopped
live touring... they had an implosive moment
and said: as any artists in the background,
we are the invisible hands of the plumbers
who connected toilets to the pipes: hey presto!
the Beckton ****-stink on the A406...
poetry can become this...
        it can also become something akin to:
etymology is a version of archeology,
although there's no physical space to engage with it,
   and i know why Heidegger turned the word
being into beyng... it's not a mutilation
of the word, he was practising a version of
archeology (not etymological) in that he was
excavating (as archeologists do) an archaic word
from the modern equivalent... Sherlock Holmes
of the black forest... found an amber tear
                      wedged in a tree...
i never know why they called it the Baltic sea...
i'd change it... i'll start calling it the Amber Sea...
given so much amber can be found on the shorelines
of it...
             and yes, this prompted the additional bits
in the title: considering the idea that it's twice as important
as what i will eventually write with dues for
the lightning bolt's worth of a title...
    language has to be mandible, language has to
be plasticine... it can't be dittohead bound -
strict, regulated, ivory encased in a museum hush...
   esp. if it doesn't need something controversial to
be spoken... exactly at that point...
          what was i originally intending?
            language as form archeology? perhaps...
no! no no no... the pro-life vs. the pro-life debate...
    a destitute woman, perhaps a *******, perhaps
a woman who was *****...
                         as the laws in Poland currently stand:
she has to give birth...
      i never said i agreed with the stranglehold of
my "brethren", i simply said
           bilingualism as a rhinosaur (dino remnants?)
        stampede against multiculturalism...
what is the perspective? i respect the culture that
assimilated me, only through having the capacity
to speak the language of the culture i was born in...
    multiculturalism has no respect for its
host culture, the multicultural argument goes:
if i speak good enough English, i'll still be able
to wear Pakistani pyjamas in public...
it's the hijab wearing English-pristine girl who
knows ****-all arabic: but speaks good English,
so she's assimilated well enough...
       and there's me... when everyone is going
muddles berserk in their groin regions
     flirting with bisexuality... so few flirt with
bilingualism... well: how could all that fucky-sucky
go to waste, eh?   multiculturalism doesn't work
if the person attempting integration doesn't
have a moderation minder,
    if you don't respect your own original society
in the least, as in: ensuring you keep your
mother tongue and do the utmost to speak two
languages... multiculturalism of people who
don't do this are just plain lazy...
   lazy!           is that an excuse if you were born
in a host country? only if your parents were
so worked up thinking that knowing two languages
was a disadvantage... and so the byproduct
of all things that aren't part of the multicultural
franchise... if you have no respect for your mother
tongue / culture when moving to a different
country... you don't have respect for your
country of birth... or in a more succinct way said
by Napoleon: a man who knows two languages
is worth two heads... etc.
       ah, the debauchery of narrating and not
orientating yourself around creating characters...
bliss... and also the main reason poets feel guilty
about writing poetry... the missing characters.
but onto the title and the main point i was going
to make...

ii.

over an egg.

iii.

can't we simply argue the point
between pro-life and pro-choice
over breakfast of scrambled eggs?
or poached eggs... or fried eggs...
or eggs boiled for 5 minutes
so the yoke is all runny?

iv.

and they said there's no purpose to
abortion...
         the most popular food of
choice for breakfast... is an abortion.

v.

i'd say... make sure those pro-life protesters
stop eating eggs...
           they're eating abortions...
but ****... can you imagine anything
                          more yummy than an egg?
don't worry, Darwinistic existentialism
of furthering the human question
   has already been answered by an abundance
of the Mandarin and the Sanskrit population.
Mateuš Conrad Mar 2016
and they write confessional poems,
and they're scared
when it happens to be too authentic
and they never bother
personae poetry and a shamelessness
about it - as if imitating someone
and able to distance yourself
from the adequate metaphorical word
schizoid - the personae principle
of poetry - the poet disguised
within many people - and indeed
as poetry goes, the crude oiling not
represented by stiff-collar fictive
outputs of he said, she said, "quote",
and the out-of-body experiences -
but then, that wouldn't be poetry,
would it? what it would be would
be jane austen, or anna karenina.
Mateuš Conrad Aug 2016
because i reduced my language to encode onomatopoeia, and because i didn't allow stresses to be pronounced on letters for the appropriate expressions of deviating local accents (instead concentrating on the snail slogans of organic produce, local, ******): to contrast the inherited Latin encoding system - i used aesthetic encoding to such an extent that i gave birth to dyslexia, or to put simply: over-spelling... i deviated from the other inheritors of the Latin alphabet without stressing certain sounds, hence i conquered the world, and subsequently giving up Hong Kong, became the ****-hole of the world, with 5 year old children being accused of ****** exploitation in the newspapers... i didn't follow the continental drift toward evolving Latin, yet i immersed myself in Darwinism, to preach the doctrine of the evolution of forms, the square remained a square, the circle a circle... the monkey suddenly became a man... and since i preached the universality of man, i was wedged in too many particulars in how i said things to be... which is why i believed in America and decided to exit Project Europe... which is why i became the F. D. Roosevelt island of hopes, isolationism being the cure, sure, everyone is employed, but on 0 hour contracts... which is why someone with enough oil in their head came among and said: Sa-id! we need a hyphen over a letter rather than keep it as a wavering compound awaiting the Oxford nod of approval... it's a shame when you care for the aesthetics, but never provide a system of directness, as in always providing a system of indirectness - meaning there's no mathematics involved in lettering - no stress - all the stress gets turned into exploiting forms that don't nudge into coerced trapeziums of disintegration, means you work more than the 9 to 5 prescription... all because you exploited children during the Victorian age, and left the young of our present age to premature ailments that only old people should succumb to... you can't be Romans just like that! too may oceans, not enough seas... you need to add stresses to the letter you are sorta borrowing rather than plundering, be like the Germans, the French, the Poles, invite the aesthetic scientists to desecrate the temples of Runes... but at the same time plunder the encoding with accents, to simply say: we're above, no matter the success of trade your empire provides... we say it chisel, you say it chive... we build, you cook, the end. but keeping it in naked diacritic lack will expose weaknesses in the physical realm of use when silenced... English needs to stress itself with this phonetic encoding if it's to survive at all... but it's too late for that, i fear... there are too many particular instances of its eccentricity that come as pride a minute from now, and as a landfill site the minute after... they are paying for keeping with the Latin alphabet unabashed to continue without mathematical stresses of saying things... but the times of George V and the empire are long gone... it's just that, or the fact that they don't know what their weakness is... since they battle stresses of phonetic encoding with political egoism on a populist scaling.*

i congest myself on the feline onomatopoeia, between a roar
and a meow - between the matured tree
and the bonsai replica i tend to do my quasi-cartesian thinking -
i don't really have an ego to verb together
things with a pristine causality akin to exercise equalling
perspiration - thought has no verb attachment -
no motivational speech to boot -
being is the same -
i simply concentrated on the exponential
existence of nouns -
like anyone with too much information
i find keeping a respectable investment in
nouns to be the source of my misery -
with such a high number of nouns and a pauper's
share of verbs i will obviously become a slacker
in the former category, as in the latter -
instinctively like a cat, speaking the universal
sound that i silence and then rewrite in
the onomatopoeia form i hardly think and hardly
am, a cat... i just have too many nouns to
take care of, most of which i'd only use
slouched with a book before going to sleep,
and never actually using in my everyday speech,
it's back to the garden of Eden and the fruit of
temptation: aiming for a high propane vocabulary
is like Adam given the fruit, gets a vocabulary
of a chemist, but ends up being a plumber...
no one checks this ****, ever!
i get the part of "we're in this together",
but mediating all our specialisations in a democratic way
will only create more tangents and the trigonometric
tan(gens) graphs of solipsism - offshoots and
somehow always "dark graphs" (σκότογραφυ) -
oddly enough, making the acute omicron into a u
never allowed the upsilon an endeavour into Y (macron
i) with any diacritic, other than the hint in capital
of the mentioned lower-case encoding.
what the **** was i saying? i'm astounded at the
fact that i lost the fluidity, not what i was saying per se,
it seem the per se fluidity got blocked and i had
to reopen the Pandora box yet again... let me have
a while to guess where the narrative should realign
without the reverse of fictional characters as extensions
of the narrator - i.e. poetry's synonym of characters
is personae, meaning that poetry has personae
and fictional prose has characters... the fictional
prose narrator tries to piece a space together with many
characters he's conscious of as inventing...
the poet narrator tries to piece a person together with many
personae he's not conscious of, atypically a schizoid
symptom... or not... ... ... ... ... ... oh right...
the balance of nouns and verbs in the Cartesian sense
of exercise and perspiration, or the fact that Serena Williams
never breaks a sweat... love those thighs...
she never asks for a towel to rub her hands or face dry...
she must be doping with the Russians...
too many nouns surrounding us,
i feel like a proton surrounded by what i thought
was the limit (electrons), but no! oh no! there are
quarks, neutrinos, and ******* violins!
whirling whirlwind strings and chopsticks -
which translated into Chinese just means Chopping Suede Sue;
hey! i got a bell ding-**** knocking on wood just now...
funny how poetry can do that... knock on wood
you end up hearing a seashell tide break open
the coral restrictions with a tsunami gnash on earthly goods.
Run  Jul 2013
Personae
Run Jul 2013
Funny
How
One person
Can be more
Than one

Have more than one
Side
Have more than one
Layer

Sometimes
It shows
Sometimes
It doesn't

It takes control
Of you
Like a puppet
Filling up the
S p a c e
Changing
Your entirety

You see things
Differently
You talk
Differently
You behave
Differently

Happy
Cranky
Angry
Anxious
Hard working
Lazy
High
Low
Nervous
Fly
Sink
And everything
Else


It gets
Difficult
To track
Difficult
To control
Difficult
To suppress

Yet

It provides
A certain kind of
Protection
And secrecy
What happens if you become someone else?
Metempsychosis and Dream
METEMPSYCHOSIS AND DREAMSCAPES


Dramatis Personae ---


nYxEr0s -
an umbral being wielding the soul "morpheus nyktelios", in the shape of the sword of nocturnal dreams.
he can enter the dreams and sub-consciousness of trees, rocks, rivers, droplets of rain and people in order to restore inner balance, or destroy it.
he is the principality of earth and water intertwined.
the personification of ****** nocturnal desire and the night itself, and he wields the power to restore, fulfill of destroy dreams.


IrUx0iD -
a name that is whispered in nyxeros' dreams. the inverted and warped spelling of the secret name of his second self, his one true love; The Dioskouri.
this astral phantom wields the sword "Philopannyx", because his power and reason for being is to love the night, and all that the night encompasses.
one day these two variations of one purpose will meet, fuse in a loving and resplendent embrace and then the universe will devour itself, overlapping it's inexplicable film of pure darkness, converge the surrounding nothingness upon it's solemn silence in the darkness, and then light will be born and life will begin anew.


AWAKENING


An eldritch and wyld prescence has manifested itself upon these desolate shores. Emanating from the deep soil of a long forgotten world. Rich with life and benevolence, but also terrible cruelty. It is very old, and at the same time, very young. A will of old, and a spirit of youth. It has taken the shape of a human boy. He has come from beyond the river of eternal sleep. The merciless kiss of death and mortal undoing has left a crest upon that precious dwelling-place of his dreams and young intellect, as it is called in the world in wich his chtonic vessel now unknowingly decays. Now this being has come to us, in his final stage of sentience. Deep in his soul, the nexus of a bleeding ocean, a forgotten dream is trapped in perpetual waxing and waning. Upon his moonlit countenance, two glass-like spheres are set. They belong to him. This luminous soul, fettered to this pathetic configuration of earth and water. two lonely, dark and unfathomable windows into the neverending vacuum of his soul. lying there. poured into infertile soil. alien soil. a mortal coil lying in listless apathy. human apathy. what is this human doing here? from what resplendent dream did he sojourn from and traverse through. oh liminal, boundless being, your tragedy will inextricably unfold, like the petals of a perfectly nourished and complete lotus. there is nothing your dying body can do. the contriving universe has manifested you in this abstract realm for a reason. a purpose. to discover the hidden schemata and destiny that sleeps inside, and to encounter and seek out the other half. your other half. you are a split soul. a mysterious schizm. empty by yourself. whole and compleat when unified. he exists somewhere in this neverending desert of grief. precious limbs that was lost, and throbbing wounds gained in your previous stratum of existance, are in this world reconfigured and presented to you in the form of sacred gifts. weapons and protection and magic that you may wield in order to defend your heart, and the hearts of others in need. weapons of absolute destruction, or benevolent aegis. these curses transmuted as wonders we give to you. absolution for past crimes and malignancy we also give to you, precious dreamer. we exist to guide you. you will find that wich was lost to you. that wich you have longed for all these stringed existances. we incarnate you once again, so that you may resume this task. one day, the interlaced network of dark brooding stars that desperatley glitter and gleam inside of you, will reach out for that wich they yearn and interact and intertwine with your twin light. the one that was made to compliment and render absolute both of your insulated existances. this is the one and only true alchemy. in the black land, lies and misstruths are whispered by venomous tongues. poison poured from dread lips and fill the once pure air. tormenting all fragile life in this sphere. accept this sword, morpheus, in your hand and embrace the hidden music of the night. this is our gift to  you. accept them now into your etherial incarnation and your everflowing, grieving heart. wield your true gifts. wander alone beneath the dying stars of this world, and free the ones who dwell beneath and beside you. living in fear and despair. once you have done this, brave warrior, the hidden path shall be revealed to you, and your love will await at the ends of this universe. at the end of time. go now. into the endless night. dark haired creature. heart of the ocean flowing within. The death and rebirth of stars light the way through the neverending desert of perpetual night. nyxeros the gods whisper. a primordial name. a second gift granted to the warrior, so that all the creatures of this world may speak it and whisper it in benevolent tones amongst themselves. nyxeros had been wandering for 77 nights and 77 sub-nights. weary and lithe in limb and heart. he sat down in a patch of mysterious mercurial grass. everflowing darkness wreathed around him. framing his wyrd existance in silence and a subtle agony. he layed his sword Morpheus on the surface of silver beside him and shut his abyssal black eyes, and allowed sleep’s gentle touch to caress his mind and soothe his aching concience, and thus, for the first time scince he had awakened in this world, he fell asleep. he dreamed of planets making love to each other, and giving birth to supreme music that again gave birth to new planets. of galaxies exchanging wisdom and expanding into one-another. and of a voice, beckoning from some darkness. a darkness from a place in the nothingness. a hollow place. a compression of past, present and future. someone was calling to him. alien words that he could not decipher the meaning of. but his heart fluttered and a deep longing ignited within his heart of chaos. somewhere, in the infinite K0s:m0S, someone was waiting for him. someone had begun a journey at the opposite end of the vast darkness of space. wandering alone, and sad. but forward, always forward. towards him. nyxeros could feel it moving. a faint contraction of the fabric of space. a frequency so weak, barely noticable. but he could feel it nontheless. deep inside. nyxeros opened his eyes. the black stars residing behind the frail lids of his eyes eating up all the blackness of erebus, making the deep, black pools of his soul even blacker and deeper still. his left hand, engraved and scarred with terrible and agonizing poetry clasped around the hilt of morpheus. he stood up and peered deep into the horizon of chaos. The great and wide melancholia of dust and dead wind and withered mountains. The void and the chasm of his cleaved soul urging him to brave onwards. In the ever-expanding distance, a faint light was discernable. His black eyes could scarcely witness it, but it was there, without a doubt, and his heart convinced him that this was true. Something stirred in the distance. So he gripped the hilt of his dream-blade tightly, and began the long waltz towards the strange faint melting light beyond.
I wrote this as an experiment, to see what would pour out if i just kept on writing non-stop, without thinking about anything really...it actually makes a lot of sense to me, but it's mostly just metaphysical mumbo-jumbo, and it's not polished, or meditated upon. Anyway, i just felt like posting it. my reasoning and agenda behind exhibiting this piece is as abrupt and cumpulsive as the mode it was written in. thank you-
Portentous enunciation, syllable
To blessed syllable affined, and sound
Bubbling felicity in cantilene,
Prolific and tormenting tenderness
Of music, as it comes to unison,
Forgather and bell boldly Crispin's last
Deduction. Thrum, with a proud douceur
His grand pronunciamento and devise.

The chits came for his jigging, bluet-eyed,
Hands without touch yet touching poignantly,
Leaving no room upon his cloudy knee,
Prophetic joint, for its diviner young.
The return to social nature, once begun,
Anabasis or slump, ascent or chute,
Involved him in midwifery so dense
His cabin counted as phylactery,
Then place of vexing palankeens, then haunt
Of children nibbling at the sugared void,
Infants yet eminently old, then dome
And halidom for the unbraided femes,
Green crammers of the green fruits of the world,
Bidders and biders for its ecstasies,
True daughters both of Crispin and his clay.
All this with many mulctings of the man,
Effective colonizer sharply stopped
In the door-yard by his own capacious bloom.
But that this bloom grown riper, showing nibs
Of its eventual roundness, puerile tints
Of spiced and weathery rouges, should complex
The stopper to indulgent fatalist
Was unforeseen. First Crispin smiled upon
His goldenest demoiselle, inhabitant,
She seemed, of a country of the capuchins,
So delicately blushed, so humbly eyed,
Attentive to a coronal of things
Secret and singular. Second, upon
A second similar counterpart, a maid
Most sisterly to the first, not yet awake
Excepting to the motherly footstep, but
Marvelling sometimes at the shaken sleep.
Then third, a thing still flaxen in the light,
A creeper under jaunty leaves. And fourth,
Mere blusteriness that gewgaws jollified,
All din and gobble, blasphemously pink.
A few years more and the vermeil capuchin
Gave to the cabin, lordlier than it was,
The dulcet omen fit for such a house.
The second sister dallying was shy
To fetch the one full-pinioned one himself
Out of her botches, hot embosomer.
The third one gaping at the orioles
Lettered herself demurely as became
A pearly poetess, peaked for rhapsody.
The fourth, pent now, a digit curious.
Four daughters in a world too intricate
In the beginning, four blithe instruments
Of differing struts, four voices several
In couch, four more personae, intimate
As buffo, yet divers, four mirrors blue
That should be silver, four accustomed seeds
Hinting incredible hues, four self-same lights
That spread chromatics in hilarious dark,
Four questioners and four sure answerers.

Crispin concocted doctrine from the rout.
The world, a turnip once so readily plucked,
Sacked up and carried overseas, daubed out
Of its ancient purple, pruned to the fertile main,
And sown again by the stiffest realist,
Came reproduced in purple, family font,
The same insoluble lump. The fatalist
Stepped in and dropped the chuckling down his craw,
Without grace or grumble. Score this anecdote
Invented for its pith, not doctrinal
In form though in design, as Crispin willed,
Disguised pronunciamento, summary,
Autumn's compendium, strident in itself
But muted, mused, and perfectly revolved
In those portentous accents, syllables,
And sounds of music coming to accord
Upon his law, like their inherent sphere,
Seraphic proclamations of the pure
Delivered with a deluging onwardness.
Or if the music sticks, if the anecdote
Is false, if Crispin is a profitless
Philosopher, beginning with green brag,
Concluding fadedly, if as a man
Prone to distemper he abates in taste,
Fickle and fumbling, variable, obscure,
Glozing his life with after-shining flicks,
Illuminating, from a fancy gorged
By apparition, plain and common things,
Sequestering the fluster from the year,
Making gulped potions from obstreperous drops,
And so distorting, proving what he proves
Is nothing, what can all this matter since
The relation comes, benignly, to its end?

So may the relation of each man be clipped.
I
Ribb at the Tomb of Baile and Aillinn
BECAUSE you have found me in the pitch-dark night
With open book you ask me what I do.
Mark and digest my tale, carry it afar
To those that never saw this tonsured head
Nor heard this voice that ninety years have cracked.
Of Baile and Aillinn you need not speak,
All know their tale, all know what leaf and twig,
What juncture of the apple and the yew,
Surmount their bones; but speak what none ha've
heard.
The miracle that gave them such a death
Transfigured to pure substance what had once
Been bone and sinew; when such bodies join
There is no touching here, nor touching there,
Nor straining joy, but whole is joined to whole;
For the ******* of angels is a light
Where for its moment both seem lost, consumed.
Here in the pitch-dark atmosphere above
The trembling of the apple and the yew,
Here on the anniversary of their death,
The anniversary of their first embrace,
Those lovers, purified by tragedy,
Hurry into each other's arms; these eyes,
By water, herb and solitary prayer
Made aquiline, are open to that light.
Though somewhat broken by the leaves, that light
Lies in a circle on the grass; therein
I turn the pages of my holy book.
II
Ribb denounces Patrick
An abstract Greek absurdity has crazed the man --
Recall that masculine Trinity.  Man, woman, child (a
daughter or a son),
That's how all natural or supernatural stories run.
Natural and supernatural with the self-same ring are
wed.
As man, as beast, as an ephemeral fly begets, Godhead
begets Godhead,
For things below are copies, the Great Smaragdine
Tablet said.
Yet all must copy copies, all increase their kind;
When the conflagration of their passion sinks, damped
by the body or the mind,
That juggling nature mounts, her coil in their em-
braces twined.
The mirror-scaled serpent is multiplicity,
But all that run in couples, on earth, in flood or air,
share God that is but three,
And could beget or bear themselves could they but
love as He.
III
Ribb in Ecstasy
What matter that you understood no word!
Doubtless I spoke or sang what I had heard
In broken sentences.  My soul had found
All happiness in its own cause or ground.
Godhead on Godhead in ****** spasm begot
Godhead.  Some shadow fell.  My soul forgot
Those amorous cries that out of quiet come
And must the common round of day resume.
IV
There
There all the barrel-hoops are knit,
There all the serpent-tails are bit,
There all the gyres converge in one,
There all the planets drop in the Sun.
V
Ribb considers Christian Love insufficient
Why should I seek for love or study it?
It is of God and passes human wit.
I study hatred with great diligence,
For that's a passion in my own control,
A sort of besom that can clear the soul
Of everything that is not mind or sense.
Why do I hate man, woman Or event?
That is a light my jealous soul has sent.
From terror and deception freed it can
Discover impurities, can show at last
How soul may walk when all such things are past,
How soul could walk before such things began.
Then my delivered soul herself shall learn
A darker knowledge and in hatred turn
From every thought of God mankind has had.
Thought is a garment and the soul's a bride
That cannot in that trash and tinsel hide:
Hatred of God may bring the soul to God.
At stroke of midnight soul cannot endure
A ****** or mental furniture.
What can she take until her Master give!
Where can she look until He make the show!
What can she know until He bid her know!
How can she live till in her blood He live!
VI
He and She
As the moon sidles up
Must she sidle up,
As trips the scared moon
Away must she trip:
"His light had struck me blind
Dared I stop'.
She sings as the moon sings:
"I am I, am I;
The greater grows my light
The further that I fly'.
All creation shivers
With that sweet cry
VII
What Magic Drum?
He holds him from desire, all but stops his breathing
lest
primordial Motherhood forsake his limbs, the child no
longer rest,
Drinking joy as it were milk upon his breast.
Through light-obliterating garden foliage what magic
drum?
Down limb and breast or down that glimmering belly
move his mouth and sinewy tongue.
What from the forest came? What beast has licked its
young?
VIII
Whence had they come?
Eternity is passion, girl or boy
Cry at the onset of their ****** joy
"For ever and for ever'; then awake
Ignorant what Dramatis personae spake;
A passion-driven exultant man sings out
Sentences that he has never thought;
The Flagellant lashes those submissive *****
Ignorant what that dramatist enjoins,
What master made the lash.  Whence had they come,
The hand and lash that beat down frigid Rome?
What sacred drama through her body heaved
When world-transforming Charlemagne was con-
ceived?
IX
The Four Ages of Man
He with body waged a fight,
But body won; it walks upright.
Then he struggled with the heart;
Innocence and peace depart.
Then he struggled with the mind;
His proud heart he left behind.
Now his wars on God begin;
At stroke of midnight God shall win.
X
Conjunctions
If Jupiter and Saturn meet,
What a cop of mummy wheat!
The sword's a cross; thereon He died:
On breast of Mars the goddess sighed.
XI
A Needle's Eye
All the stream that's roaring by
Came out of a needle's eye;
Things unborn, things that are gone,
From needle's eye still goad it on.
XII
Meru
Civilisation is hooped together, brought
Under a mle, under the semblance of peace
By manifold illusion; but man's life is thought,
And he, despite his terror, cannot cease
Ravening through century after century,
Ravening, raging, and uprooting that he may come
Into the desolation of reality:
Egypt and Greece, good-bye, and good-bye, Rome!
Hermits upon Mount Meru or Everest,
Caverned in night under the drifted snow,
Or where that snow and winter's dreadful blast
Beat down upon their naked bodies, know
That day brings round the night, that before dawn
His glory and his monuments are gone.
Mateuš Conrad  Jun 2016
personae
Mateuš Conrad Jun 2016
and suddenly my **** was a brussel sprout
in a pickle jar? fine, fine... leave the ******* to the
Indians and the Chinese; because a second Japan is
coming - all because you're an educated hoo-ha lady
making me want to cut  my **** off and powder
my cheeks rather than roll in the hay with you...
you used to be so much fun when you weren't educated
by that ****** spearhead  of feminism directing you in
only one direction... listen... it won't revise and accumulate
all the areas of interest that men had into one coherent
seagull gobble... you can't just walk in with feminism
and revise everything with it alone...
oddly enough, i don't even want to touch you -
the implementation of sterilisation  was best designed
by feminism, while all the old farts and Vatican
gypsies had all the fun, we were downsizing
our erections and ***** juices; will make the bedroom scene
look like a democracy for sure - one way or another
the Chinese ****** to a billion, the **** ****** to
over a hundred, the Indian a billion to add -
we decided on a Scandinavian model -
which means, in our multicultural society
one bus every hour... imagine! one bus an hour...
the stupendous recollection of what if Saturday night
didn't finish with an angry man walking home
in the fidgety night of kicking things around -
and the jealousy ticket goes to?
you know who i have been glorifying like
a Jew.
CH Gorrie  Sep 2012
Difficulty
CH Gorrie Sep 2012
I thought for days and could think of nothing
to satisfy the eye and hand and heart,
or satiate the mind, or at least seem
worthy to be willed into decent art.
The past ten years offer little I’d deem
rousing enough to write this first part.
Then imagination just so inclined
the speaker, the scene, what I’d sought to find.

Grasping the pen, I pressed it to the page
and out poured imagination as ink.
I painted a line, then outlined a stage,
and pondered for hours on their supposed link.
It seems excessive thought may shape a cage
in the corner of which ideas sink.
Sometime later the stage had some players
and the line had formed multiple layers.

All vanishes the ensuing day,
forcing thought on what’s soon to expire.
Dramatis personae hardly convey
the message famished minds desire;
Likewise, poetical visions crochet
a meandering, allegorical empire.
The thought-maelstrom bids me “Confess!”:
I’ve reduced life to a logical process.
This poem is written in ottava rima.
Mateuš Conrad May 2016
symphony arrangement for poetry - personae distinctions of hidden violins and woodwinds, somewhere along the way brass - leaving Cabaret Voltaire (Zurich), moving to the Beat Hotel (9 Rue Gît-le-Cœur, Paris), ending up on the Cowgate (Edinburgh).

when you read newspapers you realise that dinosaurs roam
the land, the fortress of printing press, unlike the printing press
(which was taken seriously from the word go!)
the internet has been largely squandered; you read these
things in newspapers, the evolutionary reaction - ensuring that
among these dinosaurs are also opinion pieces, dinosaurs write accounts of what's happening, batrachotoxin amphibians write
opinions: i.e. what isn't happening: opinions go forward unchecked
and undisputed, added that there are many potions in the cauldron
it's hard to pick one out and dig deeper until both parties are in no position to hold such and such opinion, given the missing
muscle of implementing change or the skeleton to keep
the status quo - but this is a slight deviation from what i
was intending to convey - the old guard of printing is worried
sick that it might be usurped in the long run - it prints damaging
reports about the existence of the internet, looking at it as not
a niche environment, which it technically is - but cats, ****, cats,
****, apparently we all log on to meow and moan -
as a tool of entertainment it's the least thrilling source of
the desired "entertainment", the unscripted nature of this niche environment is what's actually good about it, in that a single
person can become both writer, editor and publisher -
but indeed, the internet has been squandered,
although it improved from what used to be a wholly anonymous
environment peppered with dangers of random encounters -
the infamous chat rooms changed even more to infamous
phone-books: you heard it, stories of cyber bullying - the internet
has been squandered, by all means, trying to save it is a bit like
trying to save the world, or as one Tao principle suggested to me
early on forged in me: the best way you can aid the world
is to forget the world, and let the world forget you.
a film director would say, well, i'm stuck in the house,
i'm thinking of shooting a biopic of Lawrence of Arabia...
i see a desert, a man riding a camel through it...
but you have to then start muling over the facts: you'll have to get funding, get the casting right,  but no one likes shooting in
the desert, you have to get  the catering sorted, you start shooting,
but the camera track ruins the desert, so you have to move
to another part of the desert that's pristine with wind parallel
ridges in the sand, then the studio calls you and says you're
spending too much money, then peter o'toole stumbles
out from the trailer hungover almost everyday; sure, you need inspiration and ideas, but that's only 1% or the whole,
99% is working with people - as a director you're not actually
playing god, you're helping other people, De Niro preferred
mumbling something prior to a scene, but Seymour Hoffman
went into a scene like a crocodile quickly snapping
to the shout of cut! and the clapperboard.
i suppose poetry could be like that too,
99% being the audience and the necessary oration,
that would work - unless of course you'd do the same with
painting - but whereas with painting you're invited to critical
thinking, see an artist next to his painting elaborating on
the themes and use of colours? i don't want to assert common sense
wisdom from one profession and apply the same wisdom
                                      to another with a trans-occupational
relativism: that red           is relative to               crimson -
              but we'll have to do away with lighting,
              darkening and what not, so yes,
red is relative to crimson insofar as we forget lighting
and Edward Hopper. anyone can appreciate the
lazy approach, but i took to some mammoths without the help
of audio books, a reasoning man, not a mob gob emotive conjurer worth a tonne of heckles and haggles - but i guess the dream
through this gamble would be the monetary reward...
you know... after so many years writing for peanuts i have lost
all appetite for spending money beyond what i consider
to be a workable cure for insomnia - i don't have to buy music
any more since i can stream it, i have more privacy without
a mobile phone, all i have is this little brick wall that's stationary
in this virtual jungle on which i scribble - with the radius from
this point being anything ranging from 1 to 6 sensible miles,
beyond 6 and we're talking blisters on feet; can you imagine what
our predecessors could endure in terms of walking? they had hoofs
instead of feet, while we have skin as smooth as a baby's buttock
cheeks on the soles of our feet. the strangeness of modernity:
1. a man drives a car with with a bicycle on the roof, just so he can    
    peddle down a scenic route...
2. the volume of skimmed milk bottle is the same as full fat milk,
    but if you bought full fat milk and added water to it the volume
    would triple (via semi, so yes, triple)...
3. healthy diets - 350% increase in vegan population
   in Britain over the past 10 years - the protein problem
   (once it was the fat problem, low fat yoghurt came about,
    turned everything into a sugar problem), i.e. women aged
    between 19 & 24 requiring to hit the 58 gram daily
    recommendation of protein would have to eat:

everyday foods
chicken breast (251g = 276Kcal)
eggs x4 (460g = 658Kcal)
salmon fillet (291g = 533Kcal)                                 v.

clean-eating foods
quinoa (1,318g = 1,582Kcal)
chia seeds (371g = 1,818Kcal)
                              goji berries (405g = 1,504Kcal)
                              kimchi (3,222g = 863Kcal)
                              tofu (707g = 70Kcal)
                              ******* (384g = 632Kcal)
                              coconut yoghurt (3,422g = 6,844Kcal)
almond milk (14,500ml = 3,625Kcal)
avocado (2,900g = 4,843Kcal)

  as healthy as stuffing turkeys for Thanksgiving, can you imagine
  drinking fourteen, fourteen litres of almond milk?! i don't even
  have to imagine drinking 700ml of whiskey to get the point
  and reach the threshold of the effectiveness of sleeping pills...
  no alcohol, no sleeping pills, better sit it out than take so near  
  ineffective buggers; although as a warning: you might end up
  sleeping for *12 hours
- variations on the BMI and previous habits
  of drinking - socially? not so much, medically? primarily -
  not in favour of the anti-alcohol lobby being part of the "safety"  
  guidelines given to the public...
4. charities' costs eat up 78% of donations,
    another 21st century anomaly, effectively dismissed
    by the church's alms giving history depicted in Sistine opulence,
    so no wonder whether in cardinal robes or suited and booted for
    the near-invisible secular religiosity, such poverty of symbolism
    compared with the predecessors, at least back then you'd
    know who to send to the guillotine - and this is how Louis XIV
    treated his courtesans, he made a certain type of clothing
    mandatory, a Versailles school uniform as it were,
    most the the courtesans went bankrupt having to buy the
    clothes, some pieces would be equivalent of a sports car,
    they went bankrupt to remain in the club,
    so they borrowed monkey from Louis, and so Louis kept
    them in his pocket: poor rich people, or necessary
    leeches (as once used in medicine, Louis' absolutism
    being the sole malady, abuse of power necessitates
    paranoia); or to quote Lisolette about the royal *******
    'mouse droppings in pepper.' Philippe (Duc d'Orléans)
    was the transvestite who charged into battle
    and conquered the Dutch, much to his brother's
    shame at having only made conquests in the bed - well
money here, money there, shoving a piano into a concert hall accompanied by an orchestra, something Chopin would never
do not wishing to leave the comforts of salons - although
Metallica dared to.
                                                             ­           welcome to
the age of silica and chameleons (cha cha cha champ a camcorder anyone? well, imagine what scrutiny Narcissus would pay a photograph, imagine giving a photograph to Narcissus and
wonder would he change his behaviour), get fooled by
the adverts once, second time you'll eventually see needing to feed
a charity's bureaucracy rather than an African, hence the migrant
                                                                                                    crisis...
sometimes there are no surprises as to where certain things
originate, Marxism and England, zenith of the empire,
or as historians claim, the decadence of the Romans was their fascination with food prior to the end: ready-meals and
microwaves among cooking shows, currently the daily program
of channels, esp. that of 4 is culinary and horse racing,
all the interesting programs are broadcast when everyone
is about to fall asleep... Saville bankrupted the B.B.C.
posthumously: a game show, "jackpot" of one grand.
- advertisement didn't expect live T.V., the mute button,
the pause button and the fast forward button...
but in a 100 years time if not more they'll look back at us as
having finally exhausted Groundhog Day (starring Bill Murray) -
sure, the technological breakthroughs were great, magical,
but the content? 20th century most probably,
the ideal time of fluid and at ease plagiarism - obviously
exceptions were made, but this walking nightmare
of the exhausted second half of the 20th century caught up
in the 21st century - dialogue replaced by visuals,
clash of the titans (1981) v. clash of the titans (2010) -
the only good bit of the latter is the inclusion of Hades -
it's beautiful, i'm nostalgic to a history i was born in and
belonged to, i'm not a nostalgic Nietzsche or Hölderlin
bumming about singing praises of the Ancient Greeks -
you see, it's close-at-heart nostalgia because i belonged to it,
the infant of it - a peculiar circumstance to be in; or coming
to terms with the first signs of decay: cartoon network's
cow & chicken with i r baboon - have you seen the horrors
of modern cartoons compared with computer graphics?
readies them to  pick up gaming soon after,
given gaming graphics. in summary - some say sitting behind
a computer screen is a sign of a lack of self-assurance,
or confidence, self- anything you want to suffix with, well,
that could be true, but you have a photograph included,
and the days of the typewriter are over - but i could also say
the same about certain brands or shops, are they too lacking
self-confidence to stop their existence on  the high street?
the royal mail delivers junk, you might get 100 junk envelopes
and a christmas  card... o.k. make that 1000 to 10,000 envelopes
of junk and one letter directly addressing you that hasn't been
written using an analogue like

dear mr. / mrs. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

we would like to inform you that your insurance
claim has expired.            etc.

the infancy of this century is what's deceptive, the greatest
deception i can think of - the great health scares and subsequent
over-usage of antibiotics breeding super-bugs in hospitals
anything and everything under the sun - including
that damnable idea that the planet Mars employs people whom
it's attracting into its orbit - earthly geologists must be bewildered
that the only subject of learning from all of man's
capacity to send into space is geology: and on the return flight
home we realised that we'd only be bringing back some arenite
(sandstone); that quote about about painting being 50 years
ahead of writing, the same is true with science fiction and
actual science.
Wanted figs sweet seeds fringes
cluster of oh mmm charmin little freckles,
Myrrh & chessnut eyes teasing
chocolate  taste licking
me f a b u lo u s-ly
Skilled as a swift leopards paw
your ticklish personae forest.    forces
me to kneal as a sandalwood essence
mingles and trepidates
opiatic.     cocoa with lush vanilla
God on dew drops evaporating from
our skins.      covering high firenheits
lasting sensual excitement
superstars collidin and exploding
like supernovaes ....soooo good!!!
It's hot in here. . .
Imagines by Impeccable
Space Poetic love some

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