you're not going to read this, and why would you?*

it would be either
naive
or
stupid
of me to expect even so much as a text;
as if our separation implies the ******* of a proverbial
Berlin Wall* between us,
where less than a week ago we were the same *country,
our landscapes of rolling hills,
city skylines,
and forests
so overgrown
that only
slices
of sunlight
could parse the ever-greened canopy,
phasing into one another seamlessly.

We may have been our own provinces,
but aside from small street signs declaring
Welcome to Jen
and
Welcome to Kyran...
aside from separate cognitive centers of self-government
between
your shock-blue eyes and fleek eyebrows,
between
my navy-blue irises and grey,
sunken sockets,
we were a willing confederation of persons,
impulses,
                dreams,
                             ambitions,
                                              anxieties,
                                                              lo­ves,
                                                                ­        and betrayals---

In our past, and provisional separations,
it was your betrayal that pushed us both
into the doldrums of love-lost confusions
and self-hatred;
not that there would be much value
in assigning a blame
with hurt still attached,
because the point,
it seems to me,
was that we somehow made it through everything together.

There wasn't a personal adversity we didn't learn to conquer
---until I began to fade away from you--
lanky, thin, often broke, and depressed,
I retreated.

I cocooned myself in studies of the past and the present;
for some reason, despite my overwhelming love for you,
despite the unspoken commitment I had made
to you
in my head
so long after your second infidelity
when I realized I was finally over it
and that I loved you more than I'd ever loved anyone before
--and in ways I never could have foreseen--

I backed-off,
I fell back,
I disengaged,

and

I essentially abandoned you.

After your impulsive infidelities,
when you admitted you hadn't been
nor were you in your
"right mind,"
you promised you'd get better.

You saw councilors, therapists, psychiatrists,
and psychologists... and you did.

You really did get better.

You overcame all that had been pulling you so low and so far into the darker vicissitudes of irrationality.

And yet, when it came to my own faults,
inadequacies, and disengagement,
I lacked your courage.

I didn't even try to overcome them.
In my self-imposed screen-gazed solitude,
I often thought of how much I loved you;
of how I hoped you might just wait out my confused disengagement
like I forgave you for your betrayals which had,
in their times,
hollowed me out emotionally for months on end.

The thing is, you wouldn't have blamed me if I'd left you then.
You would have understood, and let me go,
regardless of the heavy pain in your solar plexus
and the hollow feeling in your heart.

Though it never came to that,
I now have the chance to do for you what you'd have done for me.

I don't blame you for leaving.

I understand,
and regardless of this heavy pain in my solar plexus
and the perceptive hollowing of my heart,
I will watch you as you go,
        I will wave,
I will live with the weight of regret and memory,
and remember what you wrote in a poem once
when we parted ways after your first infidelity.

Sitting in the university library, reading on Moses,
what went thru your head was

"closure feels more like i can go on without you, i’m glad i met you, however an emptiness drenched in self-regret will always remain."

It was a cold night for a concert. There was frost on the windscreen as we got into the car for the short drive to this city church. We drove because we were going to be late, and it was cold, and would be likely to be colder still when the concert was over. I had wondered if part one would be enough. Could Bach and Rameau be enough? Might the musical appetite cope with Mozart and Beethoven too? Were we about to sit down to a large meal, possibly in the wrong order. Can the cheese course be a transcendental experience I wondered? Bach to begin certainly, a substantial starter with one of the mid period keyboard toccatas and two ‘distant’ preludes and fugues, but then a keyboard suite by Rameau?
 
When I listen to Beethoven though I want to hear a work on its own, unencumbered round about with other musics.  A recent experience of several hours driving to hear a single Beethoven symphony has remained close and vivid, and an experience that brought me close to tears. So I imagine that I might only hear Op.110 to make that opening sequence of chords so ominously special. The introduction seems to come from nowhere and does not connect with musical past, except perhaps the composer’s own past. It is as though the pianist puts on a pair of gloves imbued with the spirit of the composer, and these chords appear . . . and what is there that might possibly prepare the listener for the journey that pianist and listener embark upon?  Certainly not the soufflé of Mozart’s K.332.
 
The audience is hardly a smattering of coats, hats and grey hair. There is another piano recital in town tonight and this is but the artist’s preview of a forthcoming concert at a major venue. Our pianist is equipping herself for a prestigious engagement and sensibly recognizes the need to test out the way the programme flows in front of an audience, and in a provincial church where she is not entirely unknown. I admire this resolve and wonder a little at the long-term planning which makes this possible and viable.
 
Now a figure in black walks out from the shadows to stand by her piano. Coming from stage right she places left her hand firmly on the mirror-black case above the keyboard. She looks at her audience briefly, and makes a bow, almost a curtsey, an obeisance to her audience and possibly to those distant spirits who guard the music she is to play. We will not see her face again until the next time she will stand at the piano to acknowledge our applause after the Bach she is about to play. Her slightly more than shoulder-length hair is cut to flow forward as she holds herself to play; her face is often hidden from us, her expression curiously blank. Perhaps she has prepared herself to enter a deep state of concentration that admits no recognition of those sitting just in front of her. Her dress is long and black with a few sparking threads to catch the careful lighting. Without these occasional glimmers her ****** movement would be unnoticeable. As it is the way the light is caught is subtle and quietly playful, though not enough to distract, only remind us that though in black she is wearing the kind of starry sky such as you might perceive in crepuscular time.
 
Thus, we already sense so much before she has played a note there is a firm slightly dogged confidence and reverence here in her approach to instrument and audience. And in the opening bars of the Bach toccata that is manifest; and not just a confidence born out of some strategy against nervousness, but a ritual of welcoming to this music that now spills out into the partially darkened church. The sonorousness and balance of the piano’s tone surprises. It is not a fine piano, but it has qualities that she seems to understand. There is a degree of attentive listening to herself that enables her to control dynamics and act resolutely on the structure of the music. When the slow section of this four-part toccata appears there is a studied gentleness and restraint that belies any ****** led gesture or manner. Her stance and deliberation at the keyboard remain determined and in control, unaltered by the music’s message. She does not pull her body backwards as seems the custom with so many who feel they have to show us they are stroking and coaxing such gentleness and restraint out of the keyboard.
 
As the final fugato of the toccata flows at almost twice the speed I’ve ever heard it, my concentration begins to disengage. It is too fast for me to follow the voices, I miss the entries, and the smudged resonance of the texture hides those details I have grown over so many years to know and love. This is Glen Gould on speed, not the toccata that resides in my musical memory. I am aware of missing so much and my attention floats away into the sound of it all. It seems to be all sound and not the play of music.
 
In this stage of disengagement I sense the tense quality of her right leg pedalling with the tip of a reddish shoe just visible, deft, tiny flicks of movement. She turns her face away from the keyboard frequently, looking away from the keyboard through the choir to the high altar; and for a moment we see her upturned face, a blank face, possibly with little or no make up, no jewellery. A plain young woman, mid to late thirties perhaps, and not a face marked by children or a busy teaching life, but a face focused on knowing this music to a point at which there is almost a detachment, where it becomes independent of her control, flowing momentarily beyond herself.
 
Then she reins the toccata in, reoccupies it; she is seeking closure for herself and for her audience whose attention for a short while has been, as the Quakers say, gathered. Gathered into a degree of silence, when breathing and the body’s sense and presence of itself disappear, momentarily, and musical listening moves from a clock time to a virtual time. There is a slowing down, an opening out, even though in reality’s metronomic time-field there is none.
 
There is a hesitation. With more Bach to follow, should we applaud? With relief after holding the flight of time’s arrow in our consciousness, just for those concluding minutes and seconds we acknowledge and applaud - the beginning of the concert.

dissipated and disillusioned worms eating through the last splinters of the rotting universal wood.

the last transmission of regret sent electronically, spluttered,
into a tissue; in a moment of self indulgent *******.

live showings of vicious execution, transmitted directly from the electromagnetic waves into the alpha waves of the young and naive. Desensitization, the last drops of humanity into complete disengagement.

endlessly recycled bohemian ideologies whispered into the ear of the eager idealist. spreading like fire, before burning out into the uncatchable reverie up with the stars, with all the other reveries, shining bright, intangible.

Instant dismissal from the old man, as the big curtain draws. Cynicism and fragmented past, falling on apathetic eyes, a proud man treat with a padded hand. faux sympathetic tones, blushing cheeks on old bones.

Begging with your body crumbling to dust with the disinterested doc, looking at the clock counting the milliseconds to the paycheck. Decomposing until you can be swept under the perpetual rug with the rest, Vacuum.

You ran from my tears
Like a flood
When all I wanted
Was for you
To dive in
Headfirst

i discovered philosophy late, i guess the best age to lose your literate virginity to the subject is best asserted aged 21, prior to that i read, traded Linkin Park's hybrid theory for a favourite book of mine by Stendhal with a friend, spotted in a second hand bookstore near Trafalgar Sq., i read Sartre's human comedy where with unabashed delivery he copies the ending of James Joyce's Ulysses, a stream of consciousness where there is no punctuation, a river of words, a great metaphorical technique, forget punctuation, leave the reader making his own indentations... the book in question? iron in the soul, a mimic of Ulysses, absolutely no punctuation, again a metaphor of a maxim by Heraclitus... and you know what sort of heaven i believe in? a place were you can find how each reader punctuated the text, you can see what punctuation was used where, otherwise, all punctuation was missing - i need to find this library.

i know i can have an obstructive demeanour,
but i'm shoving these swear words in your
face like i'd be shoving you pictures of torture or
*******, ****'s for real, you can't be serious
to suppose seeing a correct spelling is worth
a f ** or mm mm mm something or other, can you?
a little bit of criticism goes a long way,
now that i found out that i'm part of the 1.8 million
threshold,
force of nature writing a sociology essay
plagiarising to beat the system of anti-plagiarism
on purpose, not that i'd be found out but that i
wanted to see how plagiarism-proof the system was,
i just cheated using the synonym principle,
and it does indeed exist, received a 1st plagiarising
someone else's work by being a grammatical plumber
or electrician, hell a barber or a hairdresser if you like!
fiddle a word here, fiddle a word here,
do the most obscene mindless regurgitation of theory
imaginable, yep, the synonym principle,
a bit like deep blue v. Kasparov, only i was smarter
than deep blue... the infinite diadems of language
as appropriated by individuation, no wonder this
phonetic encoding produced the omni- to which
everything was ascribed in that unit of connectivity
spelled g o d... Kant does indeed mention this, for about
40 pages he's stressing a simplicity, something that has
to be simple, something necessary and something
simple... some key phrases:
defined throughout all categories (praedikamente)
or quiet simply "unavoidable" predicaments (well
"unavoidable" because it's already apparent that a large
number of people prefer to kneel and mumble
the our father and desire a pope's pomp of attire),
a german word for fiction (erdichtung),
i still need to find out what scil. abbreviation means,
highest entity (ens summum),
highest thing would begin with res... summum
i.e. the sun,
                    i mean i could list all the examples, but what
a waste of time if you haven't read it yourself,
40 pages? give it about three hours, and oddly enough,
listening to Salmonella Dub's inside the dub plates
album... outside in the garden measuring adequate
light with the setting of the sun, i can get lost for hours,
perhaps adoration for this subjects stems from a lack of
care, or the simplest imaginable life, a life were
"reality" is unquestionable, in that you have so few problems
that you have to invent problems, metaphysics;
you didn't actually think my interest in this field is
purely pretentious? i find the hardest thing in written
philosophy is: a. disengagement from internalised cognitive
dialectics that makes Popper a bit like Heidegger
tongue-tied in an incompetent lack of persuasion
(i.e. anti-rhetorical) of their own arguments,
and b. the adjective, i mean, come on, pure reason?
what the hell is impure reason then? oh i know, a thousand
psychological profiles, you see the critique of impure
reason all the time under the curtains of our social endeavour,
criminals, news flash of horrific stories, all the ****** time...
for goodness sake Kant mocks malignant gossiping /
the socially acceptable form of lying as the least of your worries
that doesn't extend to mugging or stabbing you,
some might just now exclaim with a phew;
but 40 pages and what not, a horror movie scene...
a man walks into a supermarket,
puts a beer and a bottle of coke into his basket,
walks into the hard liquor isle, his cheap-*** whiskey isn't there,
he asks the shelf stacker if she could get a bottle
for him... so she goes to the storage room,
the man ends up waiting about fives minutes
looking at Sharon fruit, apples and roll-mops of
pickled herring, bread and t.v. magazines at a distance,
the woman comes back with a whole trolley of goods
that need to be stacked, but she says to him
that she needs to put on the security tag on the bottle
(standard procedure in English supermarkets),
and the man is like, huh? i'm going to buy it in a second
and you're telling me that you'll actually put on a
security tag on the bottle, just so another supermarket
employee will have to take off for absolutely no
******* reason? this is what routine does to you...
an elephant just walked through the room and you
only realised 10 minutes later after memory electrocuted
you for a snap reminder.

watching a German substitute come on is a bit like watching the opening scenes of Gladiator... the German tribe north of the Rhine resounding to the decapitation of an envoy... painting in writing, ascribing the appropriate diacritical marks to the Venus bathing the alphabet the Anglos kept as source of their demise; naked unsupervised to stress certain sounds and thus unsupervised the slang emergence, and total ignorance of diacritical marks of football commentators, stemming from disengagement from dialectics as the supreme proof... from the film: 'tu bista ***! aß sēhta'h fuhta'h ūnna'h!' - das längezeichen, ein verlängerung (two definite articulations of the definite article, a quarter das, a quarter die) - the macron, an extension;
one H the vowel / breath catcher, former H the precursor of catching breath, the latter, a breath shortened, mildly operatic... from the cradle... to the grave... but watching a German match is like watching the battle speech in the opening scenes of Gladiator... a substitute comes on, the announcer says his first name, the horde bellow out: bastian... Schweinsteiger! macron v. umlaut, when did - also mean a horizontal colon above a letter? just now. i'm still surprised that the English are too proud of memories of the Empire to even allow the greeks to utilise diacritical marks, and leave themselves jaded with computer encryptions, ugly emoticons ( :) as a perfect e.g.) and acronyms... what a waste of when revelling in Ave Britannia, Empire of the Pond... ruler of mirror ripples rather than turbulent waves - but it's like that, whether in the Bundesliga or the UEFA championship... a substitute or a goal scorer... like a ******* german tribe antagonising the Roman expansion tactic, the bellowing grooming of a beast.

in terms of song subjects, i can't feel the vibe
of urban socialites and heavy affairs,
any more chromatics' songs akin to
the velvet underground and i'll just keep
staring at only having done marijuana,
whiskey, and the deadly Salvia Divinorum,
many a good Aztec died from this plant,
very few fared to become Proustian shamans
of changed perception - but seriously,
a second more with the haunting female voice
enticing me and i'm done.

but there are some extension i made from
having the oeuvre of Iron Maiden and Slayer,
post-2000 music to me is hardly represented:
the chromatics (**** for love),
the besnard lakes (until in excess, imperceptible ufo),
uncle acid & the deadbeats (blood lust) - i need
to get mind control for one song, under your spell,
naam (self-titled),
dead skeletons (black magik),
tame impala (lonerism),
wooden shjips (west),
moon duo (circles),
black ox orchestra (nisht azoy),
pop levi (medicine),
                                     allah las (self-titled)...
i mean, it's out there, the alternative, it's out there,
but people don't like sharing their personal tastes
for a public reason, but a personal reason,
as long as personal interests are necessary all
public coercion is lost in the art world for
a scrap heap... so true the myth and so also tiresome
the idea that art is best kept (at least the obscure type)
for a Don Giovanni adventure - i mean,
had i more money i'd invest in art more -
but the retaliation was inevitable,
the karaoke culture of philip k. ****'s prediction
of the *man in the high castle came true...
well, it wasn't a prediction but a fantasy...
karaoke culture took over, pop is karaoke, the few
brave souls are there, but the general public is starving,
1950s American cinema and 1970s American cinema,
music prowess in the 1960s -
well, if you steal from artists... why expect any art to
exist if that art isn't simply advertisement?
ever used the radio? i would have, kept my honour...
how many thieves prowl in western society
under the disguise of technological progress?
too many.

*if i were polish, i'd add the Czech utility, to change -sz- with š, and -cz- with a sharpened breve / upside-down circumflex above... and not learning the specific encoding of diacritical marks gave us the linguistic alphabet... -sz- with š as replacement, -cz- with č, to simply drop the z... this is painting, and the only painting you can have is with stresses on the sounds... so in example:
škoda że tak mało času
it's a shame that there's so little time.

Existing, creating, remaining

In constant correspondence with

Fluorescent phantoms stalking
hypnogogic images of

Past selves spilled upon
A marble plane universe.

Fractals of shattered ether,

Taught not
to touch an all,

Indescribably content with systematically

Despairing hairs,
Rapidly engaging in disengagement.

Division of conscious accessibility,
Lately less than half.

Mundane introductions to despairs,

Rapidly devouring
   The residual stillness.

Folk compilations of concepts fabricating
Inquiries into legends of incentive for

Existing, creating, remaining.