I am made for more than drudgery of world,
Each day awake, struggle out of bed,
To one more day, a difference I try
To make.

Within myself, a struggle for the ages, as past
Mistakes remind me of a life lived in
Failures of my mind, unable to please
God or man.

So aimlessly I wander through life, within a
Mess of questions, of motives, of
A purpose divine, planted perhaps upon
My soul.

I search, a little, here and there, for purpose,
Setting my soul in a dance of ages
With One divine, to reconcile world,
Myself to Him.

All around, I move in midst of walking dead,
Enslaved to sinful selfishness, chains
Binding against the Created One that
Loves, sets free.

Eyes to the soul filled with depth of pain, masked
By a bellyful of emptiness served up
On promises of Prince of this world, the
Evil serpent.

Everywhere, voices cry out in silent terror, unheard
By owner, enemy of God, stuck in their
Own mire of hopeless despair , no reason
To live on.

Too often, I choose not to hear, not to respond to
His creation crying for redemptive love,
Too caught up in my own selfish desires,
No time to care.

My praise is empty, as thoughts of God go rushing
By, ignored by one too caught up in comfort,
Self, content to live a life, not God’s, but my
Empty own.




So, each morn, a drudgery ensues, such little joy,
Wondering why this emptiness threatens to
Fill, to overwhelm a God-sized call, a purpose
That is mine.

One more day, one more tick of eternity drawing
Near; a spiritual zombie I become, no
Breath of life, no joy, such little presence, daily,
Of the Divine.

He draws me close, in love-filled rage, hurting for my
Soul, as it wanders once again, far from His
Presence of life and joy, grace and love, He
Wishes to display.

My life, it is my own. No, it is His—He has paid the
Price, poured out His wrath upon the Son,
Covered in my sin; my life is forfeit, He has
Given me His own.

I hear now the voices—the voices of the dead, the
Unredeemed—crying out for life as Spirit
Divine begins a work from beginning of time,
To draw to Him.

I am made for more than drudgery of world,
Each day awake, to share with those
Who are dead in sin—of life, of joy—to
Share the grace that comes only from
Him.

--To come alive
--to break the chains of sin
--to live forevermore in Him.

I am made for more than drudgery of world.

I am made for Him!

Immerse yourself until wholly submerged
in my unholy divergence;
Poor form tormented soul - 
Roll your pain in a J
then dip it in chloroform
Embrace my urges to purge
the remnants of sanity,
Spilling and screaming
all these profanities at humanity

Confuddling all posers
with my bastardized prose ~
Please, continue badgering
and nagging me
with your ****-******* menagerie
of trivial drudgery
I’m in misery so
go ahead and bludgeon me
Square in the noggin’
So that I can jog it,
whilst juggling all these nails
from my coffin

I’m awfully harmful and cruel
got these scoffing jealous skeptics
Acting a fool,
coughing up a lung-full of fuel
for all of the putrid mind puke I spew
My mixing *** skull’s
where the ingredients accrue
Just stew with me for a little
while longer though won’t you

I’m a cancer-ridden addler
babbling mad adages,
ravishingly tenderizing my meat
Laced with some dust from space, yes, no lackage/absence of it lining
within my nasal passages see
spun off some of that absinthe
In a cloud of burning trees
Please tell me you feel me

It’s staggering how I’m both crazy batshit,
**** smooth as rotten laxative cheese
Brain’s melting acidic beef
I’m like Randy Savage I got
Bombastic fat ******* in heat
Straight making my **** go flaccid post-weep

Don’t get offended women
just imagine
How painfully average the package
is within my lap that I’m packin
But now it’s wrapped
and I’m ready to fucken
fully send it no cap
My turnaround is lightning fast
In and out of your *** quick as a wink like The Flash

Faces contort in ghastly panic, actually
Dastardly antics unleashed in vast swarms
Plague the masses in pandemic proportions with them massive casualties factually once more
Give ya some relaxing action 
And skull-**** y’all
with such a passion *******
Your corpse falls to the floor
and right through the trapdoor

Candid, my pen-chance enchants
Heavy-handedly inanimate
in suspended animation
Supplant reality augmentation
Machinations of my imagination;
Implicating **** ransacking  
and seafaring through crab infestations 
Wreaking havoc and bequeathing vengeance
I’m a fire breathing grim reaper reeking of ****** ~

- Off is the nearest direction in which to ****
Dissect my ******* with your tongue
Turnt up ******* plumpies in the rumpus 
Just for the fun of it until I erupt
Remember, I’m avid for dismembering appendages
I expect you’re exceptional at accepting
a barrage of septic bombardment
Chance of success: logistics analysis zero percentage
(Cos I done ******* on all those *******.)

Superbly superlative and speculative
So fast on Adderall
I make Mad Hatter’s head spin
Quicker than you can snap: 
Giving your family heart attacks
Smack you in the face, 
While fapping my fabulous lap rocket

Thunderously plundering under covers
Spring-loaded with faux pas’ so hot
Make your mother’s ***** pop out
and say “hello”
like a Jack-in-the-Box

& U kno Those foxy grandmas
be jaxing off my **** -
Bingo wings beckoning me to flock
Choppin’ up rocks round the clock
with the glock in my pocket til I rot 
Undoubtedly
Caught em wit the molly-whop eyeballs pop out they sockets all dramatically
Whole squad **** swap the rod, on God
Blow my whole *** when I start spitting them double entendre fatality snowballs
Zippity-zop like Cosby’s special BBQ sauce
Bet I’ll dip my puddin’ pop and stay fresh with the drip til I drop
Y’all just holler when you want me to stop

Palpable, these **** butts malleable as putty
Barbarically barrel rolling into dat ***
rip it to shreds like confetti
Power Pole extend
Face pressed into your *******
Inhaling the wafting aromatic stenches
of distant French fish factories

Clearly getting dome from your dearly betrothed violently
Now she bridal and my seeds spiraling virally
Vital signs finalizing
Bounce that *** like jello
Swell; I’m in your hair like gel
Now swallow my jollies and don’t bother
Unless you hollerin’ and giving me dollars
Zealots idol my harlotry

If nose goes go slow grow low
Throwing those yoloing hoes out windows
This ***** simply bonkers
I conquer fear me

***** DON’T HARSH MY MELLOW
SWEAR I’LL MARSH YOUR MALLOWS

1
Though still within our infancy,
we strive to thrive, but woefully
we flash and flaunt our 'primacy',
display our trophies pridefully.

Our terra firma ecstasy
destroys survival's harmony,
lays waste to life on land and sea.
Mankind, thy name is vanity!

By doubting Nature's regnancy,
defying laws with levity,
we strain our spheroid's symmetry
(perhaps a fatal fallacy?)

for, swallowed in the 'world of we',
we feed on vain insanity
with thoughts beyond eternity -
so strange when looked at mortally.

No use to seek a remedy
ensconced in ancient prophecy
for if not handled skillfully,
as clay we'll pay the penalty.

                              2
The Moguls rule with cruel decree,
control the crowds like puppetry,
pursuing greed addictively
with no accountability.

The wind, it reeks of Royalty
(awash in waves of perfidy)
while blowing ’cross the peasantry
(eclipsed in clouds of treachery).

The Queen, well steeped in snobbery,
sits, preening proud Her pedigree,
on throne of sculpted ebony
while sipping Sect immodestly;

to sate Her Regal Majesty,
a caviar clad canapé
is served with golden cutlery
by maidens bent submissively.

The King is bailed from bankruptcy
by Knaves who hoodwink artfully
the down-and-outer evictee
who wallows in their lenity.

Forsooth, the Money Monarchy
exalts the dollar dynasty
engaged in highway robbery
by Peacocks plumed in finery.

Yes, Jesters and the Fools agree
to truckle to duplicity
and laugh about it witlessly.
Long live the peon's penury!

                          3
To champion an oddity
(like two times twelve is fifty three)  
one reaches to theology
through paths of circularity.

In bygone trials of travesty
the doubters, draped in blasphemy,
endured the pain and agony
inflicted by the papacy.

Inspired by the Trinity
fanatics bent cosmology
in geocentric fantasy
while Bruno burned for heresy;

and aged women, randomly
accused of wicked witchery
by justice framed in infamy,
were racked and shown no clemency

That epoch of credulity
(when savants fostered sorcery
and practiced ancient alchemy)
arose in dark age quackery

as clerics dripping piety
(while raging, raving rabidly)
pervaded thralled society
with callous inhumanity;

'repent', they bellowed, 'verily,
forsake the world's iniquity,
live lives of want and chastity,
and give your gelt to God through me'.

                    4
The Masters make a mockery
of freedom and democracy
by holding down the uppity,
released from shackled slavery,

now fettered in a factory
else strewn across the Bowery,
still chained in bonds of bigotry,
immersed in seas of poverty.

And colliers, tapping balefully
in sunken-mine solemnity,
yet thrum a mournful monody
some call the digger's elegy.

To children, pale and raggedy
(behind a day of drudgery),
the boss man, oh so gallantly,
bestows a penny, niggardly;

though some are fed (belatedly),
their eyes recede in apathy
while bellies bulge, inflatedly,
with mothers watching, wretchedly.

When met with health adversity
or broken bone infirmity,
the pauper dangles helplessly
with no insurance policy;

and those engulfed in lunacy
are ailing blobs left floating free
in ******-dream obscurity -
a mired madhouse odyssey.

Ignoring mankind's unity,
the rich and poor dichotomy
breeds dismal doomed finality,
eventual nihility.

                        5
Renewing days of chivalry,
wild warriors fighting valiantly
bring freedom neath the gallows tree
while blending blood and burgundy

to toast the slaughtered enemy,
and so convince the colony
to cede with smile on bended knee
and yield her diamonds, silk and tea.

At first they call the cavalry
and then again the infantry,
so proudly primped in panoply,
with arms from finest armory

(embraced in hands so tenderly
bestow benign atrocity) -
and soon atomic weaponry
will extirpate posterity.

                          6
Misusing high technology
(to feed the face of gluttony)
depletes our Rock of energy,
now slowly dying thermally.

Our gadgets breathing CFC
fuel ozone holes' immensity
while cloud bursts, raining acidly,
wilt woods in their entirety,

and rivers, tainted chemically,
polluted biologically,
refill our cups methodically
and drown our souls organically.

Adjusting genes mechanically
may well blot out the bumble bee
annulling fruits' fecundity,
but brings big bucks reliably.

We wager perpetuity
to revel momentarily
in shadow-like obscurity
ignoring the futility,

but if we bet unknowingly
on fickle fate's contingency
and thereby act haphazardly
we're doomed to lose the lottery.

                 7
The modern day bureaucracy
abuses trust egregiously ,
embeds itself in obloquy
and offers no apology.

It paints the past in reverie
to camouflage the tendency
to strip away our privacy
which paves the path to tyranny.

With earlobes lurking furtively
that listen surreptitiously,
and eyeballs peering piercingly
we've lost cerebral sovereignty,

and those who dare to disagree
must hide away in secrecy
else crowd a black facility
(with water board anxiety).

                  8
Yes, sans responsibility,
our marble in this galaxy
will crumble in catastrophe
ere ever reaching puberty…

The tired, old cliché –life is short—is probably more accurate than I would care to admit. With wry amusement, I have to admit that overused saying can be quite a joke to me, for I’ve heard it said way too many times, quite at the level of nauseam. Often times, I think the opposite, that life can be pretty **** long when you are not satisfied with it.

I am now at the age which I once thought was getting old, just having another unwanted birthday recently, turning forty-seven last month. As a girl, I thought anyone who had reached the age of forty was practically decrepit. Well, perhaps not, but it might as well have been that way. Forty wasn’t flirty. Forty wasn’t fun. It was far from a desirable age to be, but at least it seemed a million years off.

Surely now, life is far from over for me. Yet I must admit that I am feeling that my youth is slowly slipping away, like sand between my hands that is impossible to hold onto forever. Fifty is over the horizon for me, and I can sense its approach with a bit of unease and trepidation.

It is amazing. Many people still tell me that I am young, but even in my thirties I sensed that middle age was creeping up on me. And now I really am wondering when my middle age status will officially come to an end and old age will replace it—just exactly what number that is anyway. If I doubled up my age now, it would be ninety-four, so my age bracket cannot be as “middle” as it once was.

When we are children, we often cannot wait until we are old enough, old enough to drive when we turn sixteen, old enough to vote when we turn eighteen, as well as old enough to graduate from all those years of school drudgery, and old enough to drink when we turn twenty-one. I can certainly add the lesser milestones—when we are old enough to no longer require a babysitter, when we are old enough to date, when girls are old enough to wear make-up, or dye their hair. Those benefits of adulthood seem to validate our importance in life, nothing we can experience firsthand as a rightful privilege before then.

Many kids can’t wait to be doing all the grown-up things, as if time cannot go fast enough for them, as if that precious stage of life should simply race by like a comet, and life would somehow continue on as before, seemingly as invincible as it ever did in youth. Yet, for many people, after finally surpassing those important ages and stages, they often look back and are amazed at how the years seemed to have just flown by, rushed on in like a “thief in the night” and overtook their lives. And they then begin to realize that they are mortal and life is not invincible, after all.

I am one of them.

When I was a girl, I did not have an urgent sense of the clock, certainly not the need to hurry up to morph into an adult, quite content to remain in my snug, little cocoon of imaginary prepubescent bliss. It seemed like getting to the next phase in life would take forever, or so I wanted it to be that way. In my dread of wondering what I would do once I was grown. I really was in no hurry to face the future head on.  I pretty much feared those new expectations and leaving the security of a sheltered, childhood, a haven of a well-known comfort zone, for sure, even though a generally unhappy one.

Change was much too scary for me, even if it could have been change for the good.

At the age I am now, I surely enjoy the respects that come with the rites of passage into adulthood, a status that I, nor anybody, could truly have as a child. I can assert myself without looking like an impudent, snot-nosed kid—a pint sized know-it-all—one who couldn’t impress anybody with sophistication no matter how much I tried. Now, I can grow into an intelligent woman, ever growing with the passing of age, perhaps a late bloomer with my assertiveness and confidence. Hopefully, more and more each day, I am surrendering the fight in the battle of self-negativity, slowly obtaining a sense of satisfaction in my own skin.

I have often been mistaken as much younger than my actual age. The baby face that I once had seems to be loosing its softness, a very youthful softness that I once disliked but now wish to reclaim. I certainly have mixed feelings about being older, glad to be done with the fearful awkwardness of growing up, now that I look back to see it for what it was, but sometimes missing that girl that once existed, one who wanted to enjoy being more of what she truly had.

All in all, I’d much rather be where I am right this very moment, for it is all that I truly can stake as my claim. Yet I think of the middle age that I am in right now as a precarious age.

As the years go by, our society seems ever more youth obsessed, far more than I was a child. Plastic surgeries are so common place, and Botox is the new fountain of youth. Anti-aging creams, retinol, age defying make-up—many women, including myself, want to indulge in their promises for wrinkle-free skin. Whether it is home remedies or laboratory designed methods, whatever way we can find to make our appearance more pleasing, and certainly younger, is a tantalizing hope for those of us who are middle aged females.

Is fifty really the new thirty? I’d love to think so, but I just cannot get myself to believe that.

Just ask my aches and pains if you want to know my true opinion.

Middle age women are now supposed to be attractive to younger men, as if it is our day for a walk in the sun. Men have been in the older position—often much older position—since surely time began. But we ladies get the label of “cougar”, an somewhat unflattering name that speaks of stalking and pouncing, of being able to rip someone apart with claws like razors, conquer them and then devour them. There is Cougar Town on television that seems to celebrate this phenomenon as something fun and carefree, but I still think that it is generally looked at as something peculiar and wrong.

Hugh Hefner can have women young enough to be his granddaughters, and it might be offensive to many, but he can still get pats on the back and thumbs up for his lifestyle. Way to go, Hef! Yet when it comes to Demi Moore married to Ashton Kutcher, a man fifteen years younger than her, it is a different story. Many aren’t surprised that they are divorcing. Talking heads on television have pointed out, with the big age difference between them, that their relationship was doomed from the start. Other talking heads have pointed out the double standard and the unfairness placed on such judgment, realizing that it probably would not be this way if the man was fifteen years older.

Yes, right now I have middle age as my experience, and that is exactly where I feel in life—positioned in the middle between two major life stages. And they are two stages that I don’t think commands any respect—childhood and old age.      

I’ve been to my share of nursing homes. I helped to care for my father, as he lived and died in one. I had to endure my mother’s five month stay in a nursing home while she recovered from major surgery. I have volunteered my time in hospice, making my travels in some nursing home visitations. So I have seen, firsthand, the hardship of what it means to be elderly, of what it means to feel like a burden, of what it means to lose one’s abilities that one has always taken for granted.  I’ve often witnessed the despair and the languishing away from growing feeble in body and mind.
There is no easy cure for old age. No amount of Botox can alleviate the problems. No change seems available in sight for the ones who have lost their way, or have few people that can care for them, or are willing to care for them.  

I think time should just slow down again for me—as it seemed to be in my girlhood.

I am in no hurry to leave middle age.

BELIEF & TECHNIQUE FOR TELEPATHIC PROSE
Lee Sharks & Jack Feistfrom Pearl and Other Poems

1.     Compose real poems telepathically, with mind control powers, inside your glorious brain.

2.     You are your own best advocate. Insist the world acknowledge your poems as artifacts of tiny doom. Accept nothing less. Threaten to smash yourself in the face with gasoline and set your hair on fire. Leap over the seats to aggressively stand inside the world’s personal space and get up in its grill. Take this container of Tic-Tacs and smash it on your forehead. Crush each Tic-Tac individually into your eyeballs and ask the world if it likes your poem, and if it likes your poem, then eat your poem: “Do you like my poem? Then eat it.”

3.     Always seek constant approval, then punch your cat in the face.

4.     Arrive alive. Don’t text and drive.

5.     Always write poems all the time.

6.     Never professionalize writing. Professionalism is the last refuge of responsible people looking for work.

7.     Your life is your poem. Take care to write it biographically. Failing that, invent false biographies and post them on Wikipedia.

8.     Get as much education as you can, then ****** your education in the face to save it from sloppy education. Get enough education to respect your contempt for education.

9.     Give it all that you have, as deep as it goes, as desperate and total as taking a breath.

10.  Also be pedantic mundane pig-critic of precise punctuation juggling and ruthless crossed-out darling murdering of your own puny sentences. Save every draft and revert to original after enormous work, then drown yrself in the bathtub. Remember: editing is organization.

11.  Be long-sighted prodigy of skeptically believing in nothing, but also believe in destiny, but quietly, and hit yourself in the face for naivety’s sake.

12.  You are a seamstress of words—place each stitch carefully, deliberately. Develop a series of rituals and perform them, without variation, prior to placing each word. Allow the frequency and intensity of these rituals to grow until you spend hours, each day, touching and retouching your left index finger to the tip of your nose in a rhythmic, counter-clockwise motion, in sets of thirty revolutions, in order to place a single character. Spend years of your life shut away from the world, wasting away into an awkward, unhygienic shadow of your former self, and have, to show for it, a two-syllable word of Germanic origins on an otherwise clean, white page. This word will be redoubtable, the bedrock of your writing career. Go on to spend vast sums of personal wealth and total dedication, alienating the remaining handful of long-suffering friends who continue, despite all odds, to solicit the memory of your humanity, in order to learn the arts of metalworking, Medieval alchemy, and font design, recreating a metal-cast, alpha-numeric set of Times New Roman font, from scratch, going broke long before “numeric,” and with only the half-formed germs of the characters W, N, and sometimes-vowel Y.  hat are such retrictio s to  ou?  ou are a poet,  ot a mathematicia .  ou are a creature of steel.  ou  ill  rite a  e  and better  orld, a  orld  ithout the letter   , forgi g it, o e smoki g husk of a  ord at a time.

13.  Turn over a new leaf. You’re not getting much done like this, anyways, let’s face it. Break the chains of your censoring, conscious mind; tap into the spontaneous well of unconscious human brilliance that springs from the source of dreams. Thwart the stick-in-*** tyranny of your internal editor by making a commitment to write constantly, without ceasing, editing, or even thinking, no matter what, ignoring the anally retentive quips your brain will no doubt make. Make a further commitment: you will not only write, irrespective of internal censorship, but in a way that is unconscionably terrible, on purpose. Your writing will be, by turns, embarrassing, infantile, automatic, and marmaduke poppers—or shall we say, antagonistic to the indoctrination in repressive concepts such as “sentence” and “word” of your reader, who is always, and only, you. Let your writing be a spiritual discipline of Bat-a-rang pancakes and lightly alarm clock, ding—your toast is done.

14.  Always Alka-Seltzer eyelids all the time.

15.  At last, you are ready to make it new, to ****** your darlings, to first thought, best thought, to your heart’s content. Your adverb will be the enemy of your verb, the difference between your almost-right word and your right word will be the difference between your lightning bug and your lightning. You are ready to have a spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling, then censor the s**t out of it. You are ready to turn your extremes against each other: Unlearn your apple pancakes and burst through the mental barriers; then slow the flood, let the lovely trickle out & edit, edit, edit. Capture spontaneous gem of native human genius, then marshal vast armies of technical knowledge & self-discipline to ensure it glimmers and cuts.

16.  Believe in things like destiny. No really—the path will shatter you so many times your shards will have splinters, your bombshells, shrapnel. By the time you get there—which you probably won’t—even your exhaustion will be tired. Exhaustion of mind and body will have passed so far beyond the physical, and through malaise of spirit, that it will emerge on the other side, as physical exhaustion again. In the face of this, nothing but a little Big Purpose will do. Besides, a little ideology never hurt anyone. Feel free to be all Voltaire with your bad self, in public—but don’t give up.

17.  After all of this, when your will is finally broken (again), and you have given up for the final time (again), start over. The former model wasn’t working. Refashion yourself and your writing. Lather, rinse, usurp your noble half-brother, and repeat, until you get somewhere, or die in the trying.  

18.  Achieve consistency of voice; it is the signature by which you will be known. Your “you” should ring out clearly from each individual letter. In this, the writer is like the salesman. Like a new car, neither the writing’s merits, nor the reader’s needs, will be the final, deciding factor. Ultimately, the deciding factor is you.

19.  Unlike a new car, it is difficult to drive a poem, to use it to get to school or work. Unlike a car salesman, a writer does not wear enormous ties.

20.  Be so consistent that your writing consists in composing the same words, in the same order, creating the some overall voice and style, consistently, over and over, an eternal return of the same. Maintain this disciplined drudgery over the course of years. Let years become decades, and decades, an entire life: You will have “found your voice.” Variety is the spice of life, but consistency is its signature.

20.  Be so consistent that your writing consists in composing the same words, in the same order, creating the some overall voice and style, consistently, over and over, an eternal return of the same. Maintain this disciplined drudgery over the course of years. Let years become decades, and decades, an entire life: You will have “found your voice.” Variety is the spice of life, but consistency is its signature.

21.  Then again, consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds. Throw things up a little bit. One day, put on your hobgoblin hat, the next day, your small mind.

22.  On second thought, re: #16-17: Stop here. You don’t look like much of a writer. Save yourself the trouble of a deep investment that is sure to yield no returns. The prize is big, and not many take it. The Iliad showed us that the prize of writing is life eternal, and taught us to long for that promise; but the Odyssey taught us not to bother. There are many suitors, a single Odysseus. While the husband wends arduously homeward, Penelope weaves impending glory, an evaporating glamour, enchanting them, until he arrives. We are in for a bad end, if we chase another man’s wife, or a prize not rightfully ours. There are many suitors, a crowd of them. They begin as a chittering swarm of bats and end in the very same manner. You cannot have what is not yours. What is yours, no man can take. So, like Emily says,

I smile when you suggest that I delay ‘to publish’—that being foreign to my thought as Firmament to Fin. If fame belonged to me, I could not escape her—if she did not, the longest day would pass me on the chase—and the approbation of my Dog would forsake me—then—My Barefoot Rank is better—

23.  Therefore, take these Sturm und Drang commandments to the trash heap. Return to step 1, as the only useful piece of advice: Compose real poems telepathically, with mind control powers, inside your glorious brain.

(c) 2014 lee sharks & jack *****

from Pearl and Other Poems:

http://www.amazon.com/Pearl-Other-Poems-Crimson-Hexagon/dp/0692313079/ref=sr11?ie=UTF8&qid;=1429895012&sr;=8-1&keywords;=lee+sharks+pearl

No thanks
To the dull drudgery
Of a full time job

And what to do in the summer?

I do not know
Hike and relax

Human life is relatively short

One thing I can say for certain is,
"No thanks to the dull drudgery
Of a full time job."

Rising like smoke from the eternal spring
Approaching with rose petals at her feet
Angel of hope sheds light on everything
Whenever life is bitter more than sweet

Within our secret gardens of desire
Fountains of sparkling passion locked away
Therein lies hope, forever to inspire
lest optimism ever goes astray

Age sometimes dims the dancing flame of hope
And drudgery weakens vitality
Darkness and sorrow sometimes interlope
Between us and our dearest fantasy

Yet human spirit finds a way to cope
As long as we find inroads back to hope.

Go placidly amid the noise and haste,
and remember what peace there may be in silence.
As far as possible without surrender
be on good terms with all persons.
Speak your truth quietly and clearly;
and listen to others,
even the dull and the ignorant;
they too have their story.
Avoid loud and aggressive persons,
they are vexations to the spirit.
If you compare yourself with others,
you may become vain and bitter;
for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.
Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans.
Keep interested in your own career, however humble;
it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.
Exercise caution in your business affairs;
for the world is full of trickery.
But let this not blind you to what virtue there is;
many persons strive for high ideals;
and everywhere life is full of heroism.
Be yourself.
Especially, do not feign affection.
Neither be cynical about love;
for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment
it is as perennial as the grass.
Take kindly the counsel of the years,
gracefully surrendering the things of youth.
Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune.
But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings.
Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.
Beyond a wholesome discipline,
be gentle with yourself.
You are a child of the universe,
no less than the trees and the stars;
you have a right to be here.
And whether or not it is clear to you,
no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.
Therefore be at peace with God,
whatever you conceive Him to be,
and whatever your labors and aspirations,
in the noisy confusion of life keep peace with your soul.
With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams,
it is still a beautiful world.
Be cheerful.
Strive to be happy.

In the midweek of twelves months I torched blunts and choked on wet smoke and chamomile tea.
Fretting the niggling giblets of a queasy disrememberance of a sober stroll through your tossed hair salad.
I managed to mangle  the marvelous gross lust of our impending
delirium. i farmed bok choy to annoy our local siege. our muskets were polished with misdeeds.
our demons barked, all coy and ravenous in the sweet diffuse of our useless aplomb.
ginger rockets in our thespian numb. you Dis-Oriental surrogate Mom.
You.... flame folding cranes, like a Japanese cancer
with opposable thumbs.
Unstoppable in the dead wink
of an awkward eye
upon your heaving *******.

You burn regardless.

when i first found about will alexander, i immediately bought three of his books: kaleidoscopic omniscience, compression & purity, the sri lankan loxodrome - i saw the potential, rekindled surrealism - perhaps a second peacock on the stage, as in more peacock of vocabulary, rather than a peacock of historical quanta merging (E. Pound).

i really do distrust this division in what science speaks
and what poverty stricken humanism speaks of -
i distrust it because science sediments itself supposing
humanism the pauper - science and all its immediate solutions,
humanism and all its delayed problems -
the new priests look so innocent - but i'm bothered,
i don't understand their need for awe-on-purpose -
the old priests demanded kneeling and an agonising
penitence - not a concept of predestination, but
this sort of minority report: you've done nothing wrong,
but we'll assume you already have, better than a microchip
implant, the idea, we'll use that, pre everything
limit the pro of everything, and catch you in a fishnet of
omni, it was too much, all in one go, in defence it started
with a mediator impersonal, Cartesian later Spinoza's
substance - partly due to the omni-etc., a shortcut -
the easiest way out - sure, if i went to a progressive school
rather than a catholic school in an Irish neighbourhood of
far-beyond the East End locality, i might have written
you L.S.D. filled poems, instead i start off tipsy working my
way around vocabulary that's adequate - hushing out
all possible onomatopoeia static in crude tongue -
ridicule feeds the beast, ridicule my prime loathing -
criticism well and truly accepted... ridicule feeds the beast -
but i mean, this perpetuated awe of scientists,
modern philosophy anti-Aristotelian does not begin
with awe, but with a ridicule of it, a disgust -
when did humanism ever experience awe? a stranger's
kindness would be a start, but even then there's hardly
any awe in it - it soon fades, scientists have immersed themselves
as prophets of awe's preservation, one picks up
a stone and speaks of a mountain, one draws a circle and
howls out the moon - i don't know how they can fake their
awe with so many certainties - so many facts -
awe reminds me of my first bicycle lesson, attempting
balance, failing, bruising a knee, and awe when
the balance was mastered - very short-lived, then the
drudgery of re-, i distrust scientific awe, primarily because
we're slowly no longer stepping out into the unknown,
we're stopping into knows and denies - not many unknowns
out there - except as in the case of Iraq, and Donald Rumsfeld,
known knows and there are known unknowns -
now... that's awe... i don't know who was keeping check
on this, but that's more mesmerising that explaining
1,000 million years ago... in a nutshell... how long has
this pneumatic drill of Darwinism been pumping custard
into our brain? is this the part where you tell me we're experiencing
the Alaskan day in the summer months or Alaskan night
in the winter months? all this scientific awe-bashing
is no longer vogue, but they keep at it - oh amazing, ah,
stupefying - and all of it just becomes a regurgitation -
someone said in the 16th century that Aristotle was wrong,
the wrong in Aristotle is that he might have been wrong,
but he was still perplexed... we're no longer perplexed creatures,
not so much... well maybe a bit when it comes to social justice,
but it's not like: sigh and a tear in your eye... it's more like:
if a white boy was shot from a private school, the mothers
and fathers would come up to the police officers with guns
in their hands... you can see awe vanishing when the butterfly
feelings flutter away silently... it's now violent awe:
why is this still happening?! huh?! scientific awe is not
a cushion you can fall back on: we have ~100 years to live
(if you're lucky... or unlucky) and we're being told of life
in caves and trees - Darwinism has hijacked history, this is
where science in written form is like an atom bomb, it wipes
away the best part of humanism, that is: to make human
life itemised on the microscopic level - i don't care if you
go to church and **** out alms for the poor and put on
those ruby shoes and walk the yellow-brick road,
you can't relate to Judea 10 a.d. - not to save your life -
in that famous motto *carpe diem - but strained it's not
so much seize the day, but... relate to the days and those
around you who share them: pertineo diebus - or something
like that, imagine, going to a Catholic school and they
don't even have the manners to teach you a bit of Latin slang,
travesty; but that's how it is, we're no longer awe-stricken
in what the scientists are selling us, fair-dos to
the medicine men, shampoo men, cologne men,
but the awe-invoking men are a bit n'ah-ah to me -
given the timescale for one -  i'm a simple man and i want
to enjoy my beer thinking about last Friday,
my life... not the collective origin of life, and whether
i was too hairy back then - you don't need theology to
argue this point, just a little bit of common sense self-respect,
last Friday, not 1,000 million years ago when there was
no Friday, no Sunday, no March, no human imprint -
no: i can touch it, i can feel it, i can see it... i want it.
just like in my dream today - it's rather strange that i dream,
i rarely do, but sometimes i remember one or two -
and all i can say is that - i had the best *** in my life
last night, asleep - yeah, i was ******* in it -
but what bothers me is that it wasn't lucid in terms of
images, but sensations - i can thus say it wasn't completely
impotent in terms of colour, but then again it was -
i'm starting to believe that i'm a blind-man in my dreams,
i ~see sensations rather than actual images in reel -
i can remember leaning against a wall and moving my
tongue in her mouth and my middle-and-ring fingers
into the... what? cliche? anatomic? *****? you choose -
a strange parallelism - we can use the tongue for such
eloquent fragments, and yet reduce it to other atrocities
of equal eloquence - then the whole dream-world changed
and i felt sitting at the tipping point where the sea meets
the beach sands, sitting down awash the waves and her sitting
on me. it's what i felt, i didn't see anything vivid -
but the sensations presented themselves as such -
i associate that with delving into writing in my mother tongue -
email / diacritics "crossword" (un-ditto and apply a
non-misnomer, i.e. give it a proper name, cf. Aristotle).
to finish i guess i might as well write a short critique:
the over-burdening of man with nouns -
as in will alexander's index of the sri lankan...
a few examples: proxima centauri (nearest star to our sun),
hemiopia (loss of vision for one half of the binocular field),
dukkha (buddhist term for suffering),
nystagmus (involuntary jerky movements of the eye),
nosophobia (morbid dread of some particular disease),
telesto umbriel larissa (moons of saturn, uranus
and neptune, respectively),
karina (egyptian demonology, a familiar attached
to a child at birth),
pretas (ghosts) -                                  or as some people say
including Christian Guerrero - 'they're just words...'
oh yes, and words are not the cogs in the machine?
just words... just words?! a banker's bonus is just
an array of... just numbers... why is this nonchalance
to these fundamental units? first they teach us to read
and write an escape the sunny harvests of the fields,
the easy mental but demanding physical life -
after the demanding physical life went our supposed
"ease" mental life changed into a demanding mental
life and an easy physical life... that's the problem with
establishing a suitable vocabulary in yourself, you can
sometimes overdo it, meaning not many people will
understand it, globalisation didn't save us from
the babylon ambition rekindled (whether myth or whatever,
it doesn't matter, read a book literally and you'll end
up realising what could have possibly been mere myth)...
all the above cited words from the index, by god, impressive,
but why would i pain myself to use a word that i'd
have to write an index to? globalisation and words from
Iran - southern coastal to be exact home to afro-iranians -
but locally it's just a ******* shish kebab and nothing more -
or central scotoma (area of the retina that's blind) -
all this vocab wall building is amazing, it really is,
a fortress at Acre - admirable... but then a return to the dull
grey reality of everyday speech - the painful art of poetry
reduced to a personal involvement with certain words -
it's heart-breaking, well, not for me, for Will it must be,
but hey, bought three of his books, that must have counted
for a cheeseburger and a portion of fries at some point
in his life.