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vircapio gale Jul 2012
"
"nor is this a fact," nor is my syntax the 'true.'
i can't use quotations in the way i'd like to,
to allow the paradoxical to seep through
in the sly act of revising 'this' honestly--
merging truth with falsity, to silently see--
grammar become a means to shatter certitude

"i can't tell the 'truth' with these ["i can't tell the 'truth'
with these{...} very words"] very words"; i really can't...
it's somewhat unfair to communicants, this rant.
let me bolster your trust by not telling it slant:
in fact, it's not poetry, not from this angle.
maybe when you read, this 'this' will be poetic?
meh, i'm relying on telling, not showing. so...
quiet's often better than such entanglement

but this is not about value, it's about truth.
sincerely, i doubt i'll keep those two separate

perhaps... if you pretend i'm a prolix parrot,
who happened through some acosmic accident
to be the transmigrated daimon-soul of Sappho,
or Hypatia, Gertrude Stein or Plath even...
(yeah, i'm like a Cretan for going on): they weren't,
'your gobbledygoo,' or 'Sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet tea.'
stripped bare at the Caesareum, being murdered
for the crime of godlessness or female wisdom
spoken in the scapegoat-hungry rule of Rome...
this is not what they were, not the whole truth, at all
and though from winds of ****** she spoke in verse
that her vast poetic fame 'was no delusion:'
and that, 'dead, I won't be forgotten,' i fail,
painfully fail,
to trace into a verbal womb
the seeds of those that transformed all, yet now entombed...
for to remember them in me is to revise,
reduce, sadly in that poetic untruth found...

"this" is a gestalt, i guess i'll have to say,
a "figure-ground," a floating 'shape' in some context,
one that you embody too, somehow, not in text;
even through a distant sharing, it's realized
(hold onto the random metaphors you find,
they're probably better than what's in my mind)
and to share this with you now, to hypocritize,
it's lunacy. i mean, the moon, the poetic moon
is not a meme, is not a custom, is not a poetic fact,
in fact, it's not in this poem, and if it were--
being televised with some authentic ontic pixel-space--
here between the lines augmented mOOn for you
it would prove how unpoetic the poem is, and how
very true the moon is, if it were here, right quoteunquote"here"
ineffably punctuated
            -- well, let me try
and fail again to make Erasmus proud:
the quotes would hang about romantic beams
parentheses to echo adjectival spectra streams,
an underscore horizonal and asterisks for stars.
but not these * asterisks,
or those_types of underscores--
better (parentheses) and far more "quothy" "quotes"--
the punctuation would literally ^punctuate^ the sky of my text.
time would stop.                                                            ­                   and that would be poetic.
you don't need to breathe, even; not this 'you,' in this moment
(the one i've failed to capture):
'i will put you on the moon' i say,
'and sit you buoyant by the buddha-astronaut, who,
in answer to the question sprinkles moondust in slow motion,
symbol-guiding realness, my "finger" for solution,
to present to you again, what is present to me now.
the Russian names, the rest of names, the 'face' some say cries, "sweetly,"
as if we could use the moon's sympathy,
or as if we should feel it for the white rock that elliptically defines us,
dances to our rhythm, (the tides, the ****** huntress)
the one that taught us to dance,
the one that taught us to yearn darkly in surreal eclipse
more hopefully for the chance of cataclysmic doom
some Greeks thought it was a disco ball, after enough *****, that Dionysian night,
some Greeks thought it was a disc,
like a coin that flipped just right
to match it's dance about our pearoid earth
in synchrony's anachronistic mirth.
i would lick each Bacchant clean to learn the mysteries of poem
i would lick each Bacchant clean. period. no music or noema known
this 'poem' is not a "poem"
in a very real sense
i did not make this,
nor did i compose or create it.
if you're not following it's ok, i'm barely there myself -- i'm trying to refer to...
the elliptical shape that certain publishers use
to refer to fundierung
the double-founding,
reversibility,
the flesh of passive
the flesh of active
enfleshed perceiving
the common meaning we contribute
but can't attribute to any source we express!
(however distorted) after the fact, yes! --
either all that, or the meaning you get from "this" act
doubly-enfolded, with two pairs of hands kneading the same dough,
two pairs of eyes weaving the same lOOm,
another Indra's net to sew,
in meaning you give now,
the techne of your reader's mind
and the meaning i'd wish to know,
if i were still writing what you are reading,
doing my best to ignore the title
and to write something worthwhile...

i do wish i could show it to you the way i love it in your own poetry,
but you would know that, already, without my love

without my unpoetic lack of facts, my rhymes.
free of poems, free to flout the literary sea.
free to be unwordly, and let the contradictions fly
"
-a version of the Cretan's or liar's paradox ('This sentence is false.') inspired this write and took on a life of its own and isn't meant to be an argument for anything. just an exploration of the problem of representation, a universal distrust of language and my associations. hope it didn't drive you crazy like it did me :)

-i quote Sylvia Plath's "Daddy", Stein's "Susie Asado", and Sappho's very short,

"I have no complaint"

I have no complaint
prosperity that
the golden Muses
gave me was no
delusion: dead, I
won't be forgotten
Sappho

-Erasmus wrote "Praise of Folly." the title alone comforts me

-when asked 'what is truth?' by one of his disciples, the buddha is said to have picked up a flower.

-our moon rotates at the same rate as its revolution (not sure why please inform me), so one side always faces us. the greeks thought it was a disc, literally. and when the Russians got to the 'backside' first, they got to name all the craters.

-noema:
the objective aspect of or the content within an intentional experience. NL, fr. Gk noema perception, thought understanding, mind, fr. noein to perceive, think
Nat Lipstadt Aug 2019
Alaska:
“though the whole world should be mad at once
though the elements should be changed, though the angels should rebel: yet verity (irrefutable truth) cannot lie.”  
                                                         ­                  Erasmus of Rotterdam

<> <>

for BJ Donovan, a fine, fine poet
<><><>

verity, irrefutable truth, cannot lie,
or belie it’s non-contradictory nature,
even, in a small airport, a one runway affair,
somewhere in Alaska
ribboned tween icy crags and dagger-ous peaks,
low cloud coverings of sub-zero visibility,
that inquire, in an indigenous tongue
of the flying fool pilots,

“really?”

if I or you ask me why I’m here,
Alaska,
the answers come in only three Heinz varieties,
true or false positive, no differentiation needed,
the other, is called
“one who doesn’t know how to ask”

you know him,
the simpleton, the simple one, me,
who can’t frame the question without

risking that he frame himself

betraying and displaying his woeful ignorance,
a veneered confidence of knowing so little about much

in the shed, a/k/a
‘the terminal,’ we wait,
me and an ex-Buddhist priest,
head stubble shaved, of course, round horn rimmed glasses wearing,
stone washed jeans blue, the color of his eyes,
reflecting mine as well as the blue glacier ice
surrounding us both, we,
the extraneous human eagle interlopers

showed him the Erasmus quote, provoking one of them,
thin lined, whimsical, eye-glinting smiles of those
who know the answer
to the knotty ones, or,
know better, that knotty questions one asks himself
when high up in the mountainous glacier ranges,
get answered just by silent patience

he smiled for an eternity of
at least five minutes,
my heart pulsating big time,
this modern man anticipating, in his calm, dulcet two tones,
his understanding of another ancient translating another,
even more ancient, speaking:

”the world is indeed mad,
through neglect letting the elements warp, glaciers melt;
the angels have indeed rebelled at the
foreseen fated falsehoods perpetrated,
verity,
torn asunder,
and the line between balance and imbalance,
so jaggedly ripped in too many places that verity a victim
so badly assaulted, its face is no longer identifiable by AI, worse,
so covered, dying, undiscoverable.

but you ask!
ask of yourself, asking of others, and tolerating
uncurled, uncut uncertainty, you retreat and reconsider,
this then is your answer!
it is the
ASKING,
that is verity, itself! there can be no lying thing in the
quest of questioning
that accepts, rejects, and unceasingly asks again^

this is a the only irrefutable truth and what it asks of you:

never accept the illogic of belief, let your own eyes be the best judge;
ask and ask thrice, be satisfied that being disastrously dissatisfied
is the norm, the mean,
the line toward a perfection that may not ever exist(ed)
for our flaws define us, thus so much greater is our truths when we
we reshape them, ourselves, for verity itself is not so hard to find,
but the finding of one self is too difficult for most


for asking is too painful,
too primordial, and why I am no longer a priest nor teacher,
but a simple observer of the answers that can be found in the
silences of places,
the Alaska’s inside of us,
where nature’s sets
an open table for anyone
wiling to just ask...”
8/18/19
S.I., N.Y.

^”It is not in the asking, but in the searching and wrestling that we gain clarity.”
Mateuš Conrad Feb 2017
thankfully Hamlet is taken to a couch,
that's hardly a sick-bed,
for we all know: psychiatry is half
of medicine, it breeds more ill men than it claim
to have cured.
and there be that thing, that shadow,
that resemblance of a man,
stalking the highlands, and drinking
at the Lochs...
until there are three,
under a street lamp with due walk,
and a brick wall near,
                         a man and two shadows,
one more full than the latter more fog,
    and the sudden thrill, as if being followed
by one's own unsuspecting guise...
           usurper strong, a Judas in a Judea...
asp tongue, wasp thought,
doubly piercing the status quo of today...
as said, by only a single word,
macbeth, macbeth, macbeth,
into the night, shrill of violins, shark-infested
airs of a witch's shrill cry at the black sabbath
around the fireplace...
    macbeth, macbeth: said: deep frozen
into the night...
   to a neared upon usher of equivalent tear...
avaunt! and quit my sight! let the earth hide thee!
(and hades resurrect thee!)
...
   against all that encompasses the noun zeus:
and fathering wisdom for care to lose repeated
cohorts of the titans sun, moon, gaia...
  aye, and a bold one, that dare
          look on that which might appeal to the devil
;
have you no care to not flog to these
past expressions, reading them,
as reading our modern undermining into
things of origami consort?
             folded, folded once more,
a piece of paper is a metaphor,
that blooms into the end result of it being
treated as metaphor... a piece of paper
given the status of metaphor, later becomes
   a paper-folded swan, and origami swan...
  that icon of monogamy...
           or how swans like to see it:
in sickness and in health, beyond death do us part...
ever look at a widow swan and not feel
a pang of hope to be given the altar of death
upon the crucifix mound?
        just a little bit?
who may i rather challenge for unkindness,
than pity for mischance!
-
        can one man's love affair be as short
as another man's play,
given the chemistry suggest that the man spent
the four seasons in the stated place of concern?
had i been invited to Erasmus Denmark,
my sparrow would have sung differently...
to a less Celtish drum of heart...
             and the man in question would
remain as curriculum material for a midsummer's
night, and romeo and juliet and shylock...
         here, we keep promises...
  just here... every time i read a philosophy book
of deep under-sea thinkers,
   i am the quasi-acuatic animal, a sly
mammal of the seas, a whale, a dolphin...
  every time i read a philosophy book,
and subsequently re-enter shakespeare...
i am that same old mammal keeping his breath,
to surge back toward the heavens of a sea-level
atmosphere...
                   i say: contend with reading philosophy
books to then reread your choice of shakespeare:
for me, nothing beyond macbeth...
    thus said: learn, to live again...
          as i have done on countless opportunities...
   i can not prescribe a most perfected dichotomy...
  oh sonnet so pale, oh other works so well preserved
that they encourage memory dementia
with a workload of pristine recitations...
     just a chance encounter, when psychiatrists
faded with Hamlet, that Macbeth arose from
the ashes and said: i stand as a sword firm in hand,
and i will not reach the safety of
   lounging in gleba...
                  to merely be a dead entertainer of
some obscure theory...
                     and with every instance
upon seeing the **** thing,
   my eye be blunt, and my tongue be sharpened....
likewise in reverse, concerning the same thing:
my eye be sharpened, but my tongue be blunt...
of these two essences, man first thought...
    and had only thought provided man with
a simple yes, or a simple no, wouldn't
the point of thought be more than if not less
bewildering than arguing from its own existence,
an existence of a god?
        not man, devoid of god crafted this deformity
to later impregnate an icon with...
       but man too bewildered by thinking,
that spawned this horror...
       of thought, thus said, no moral grounding,
but merely the numbing, the selective numbing
of the senses, as ailing man suggests,
the ailing via hearing,
   the hedonism feats suggesting exploration
of seeing...
   of feeling numbed, and apathy creeds to experience
as many people as possible...
   thought mediates the sensual-numbing we
all see... and none of thought, is concerned
with being injected into a moral theory,
since thinking is too simple, and a lie a too great
opportunity to be mislead into mis-use...
  for a simple yes and no - the theta-ought...
would not have spurned the phi-nought
    and if the senses are not duped,
then what story are we to be told?
            that might provide a throng, and an opulence
of a campfire for it to be tought?
to the last syllable of recorded time, said Macbeth.
Mateuš Conrad Feb 2017
after acquiring the english language,
and synthesising it for twenty years...
ugh... breakfast that is but a cup of water
and immediately feeling bloated...
or just imagining that you can live
on food and alcohol... like a diesel engine....
comes to just as much
     trying to catch butterflies akin to
nabokov, or thoughts...
      and are either, so trully necessary?
well... unless you take to calling it
the only relative opposite of picking up
a gun and shooting someone for no reason
other than a per se reason, which
subsequently has to be reasoned with -
akin to this...
  or, dare i say, picking up a philosophy book
and seeing how there is clearly
a child in there, esp. in english -
how each philosophy book seems to be
avoiding the pronoun i -
such is the nature of these books,
    a lot of hide & seek happening -
with the basic formula of: being yourself,
to avoid, your self.
then again as this french girlfriend told
me when she was staying in edinburgh
for a year to complete her erasmus program
from the university of grenòble
and she was doing this psychology experiment
and she needed native speakers...
  and i was given the stick for trying to
fake her science by suggesting that i'd do it...
yeah...
           well i really did hook up with her when
an american was about to court her,
and that's the only time i played the huinter-gatherer
role, or was motivated to do so,
when we went bar crawling and i pulled her
from the crowd and we stayed behind while
the group moved to another pub...
that was the only time i felt a need to do the "chase",
later this thing called the categorical imperative
came along, and i subsequently lost the impetus
to compete...
being a gladiator could have been greater,
what with the hardships of life...
but you can watch these gladiators fall...
quiet easily, buying groceries in a supermarket,
or opening a fridge door...
it's this return to the mundane, the household
environment can really beat a man,
if his life is lived to sample the ancient
field of danger...
   so when i did get the schtick of her empiricism
i decided: well... i'm no native....
and aren't we all so puritan about science
when some of it can't be falsified,
which it can:
        never too fond of accents myself...
native or alien...
               some people have a fetish for
feet or a french accent...
                        but that ***** essex slur...
or however you'd like to put it,
  it's not even cockney, but you get to hear
something quasi-cockney around these parts
more often, given that a lot of londoners
are moving away to these parts...
cockney meets essex county...
or meats it... yep: beats it silly with squalor
and at the same time: sophistication of living
in cement graveyards of an international city...
then again, you walk into a forest at night
during the summer, wearing only a t-shirt...
and it's freezing!
   you can actually hear Gaia breathing...
and then out of the woods and onto the cement...
that rush of feeling a complete change
of temperature... well... that's something.
          oh it wasn't me, i didn't dump that
french bird, she dumped me,
       as an experienced woman in her early
twenties would, to a ****** (who lost it with her),
18 year old.
    memories and all, what a grand cinema,
sipping absinthe on the streets of athens,
the athenian strip-club...
                sitting on a stool looking at a stripper
while holding two women in my arms
and kissing that sweet, sweet tender *****...
what happened after?
   drank all my money away,
                was escorted by a bouncer to a cash
machine... ****** myself
           and scuttled away back to the hostel....
and then took the bus from athens to katowice...
macedonia? beautiful, very hilly...
       serbia though... a plataeu of snow...
and i admit, belgrade from the distance
looked stunnig... esp. because of the snow.
oh right, i was supposed to insert a          )
having begun it with a     (      of an original prompt...
english really does have this natural
basis to invoke a self-conscious pronoun base of i,
it's like there's this need for a double-certainty
of the speaker stating that: it really is that person
speaking... or even thinking...
     polish        as a language? it rarely uses
the pronoun ja, i.e. i,
                          it's just certain -
english has to overtly use the pronoun -
      and it would be certainly pointless to ditto it
out... like some careless selfish womanisers
by the name of sartre...
                   that's the one thing i don't understand
about sartre, how it could ever be, something
about "ego"... more like Igor and doctor frankenstein...
i find that expression, yes, that alone
   " e g o " to be akin to pontius pilate washing his hands:
for whather transgression: i can't be to blame...
and then comes that ****** mantra
of mea culpa... and it just goes on and on...
to be frank, the whole point of mea culpa
is to transcend any invocation of self-pity...
      it's probably the foremost notion of transcendentalism,
well given that self-pity exists in people,
and some people would rather take blame;
indeed, it is my fault that i once had a heart
to feel intimate with someone, or even entertain
the idea of a fwend...
                            if anyone asks, i'll just be
a hermit, in my little cave.
Mateuš Conrad Jan 2017
it's twenty past four,
i have spent the past hour watching
the Vierschanzentournee -
like someone in England might
have stayed up, watching
the n.f.l. or a boxing match...
i bought johnny walker black
at the airport and i sat there
watching history.
                        can there be a modernised
version of ecce ****?
             apart from dietery requirements
and angst against Wagner
and all that pompous rattle
invoked in the original by Herr N.?
i guess there can be...
    there i was, on my hiatus,
going to bed almost every single night
trying to sleep-palm a chess set
or a keyboard, but both seemed out
of reach...
                   this, again, a forceful
resignation toward the past day,
              it will never be perfect,
the first approach will always be
rusty, it has been three weeks
since i last entered this spiderweb,
of snappy convo and even snappier
overload of democratic practises;
and before me: endless sleepless
nights, and countless miniature
fürhers... and thus this fact:
  which i thought was worth avoiding...
but then i did buy a used laptop for
550zł, (given the exchange rate,
that's roughly £100... the downside?
everything is in paul-leash (no,
that's not an americanism of drawl
and draw and slobber and Houdini's
last trick) - hence i might actually
sport a cravat, moccasins and a
velvet dinner jacket...
                                   and when
Rodin employed his minions to
    chisel away at chapters from Dante,
Dumas (have you ever seen his
omni coprus?) like some pseudo-Pope
employed heavy-drinking monks
to write out his stories for salon bored
ladies until their hands were
playing shadow-arthritis games
         that children would applaud:
rabbit! rabbit! poor monks, exhausted
from having scribbled and
chicken scratched chicken blood into
papyrus wanted nothing more than
to grow their nails so they couldn't
hold a quill... no matter! Dumas would
say... we'll sharpen your nails,
vol. 25 of the comte bourbon &
the flamingo dance, and Rambo XVI
were both written by the unfortunate
monks...
              once again: there's
autobiography... and there's an autobiography...
  to write an autobiography
so that no biography is worth writing...
perhaps if i used paragraphs:
i could be considered: "serious".
      then there's that thought:
thought as origin of biographics -
           nothing to be preserved in
it having happened, returning from
Stansted in a taxi:
  only a thought:
   philosophy cannot claim anything
to be counter-intuitive in its foundation,
to me that conjures up an analogue:
the guillotine is the counter-intuitive
foundation of the french revolution...
Ivan the terrible threw dogs off the Kremlin
wall, and gauged out the eyes of the St. Basil's
architect... and since then
children in Poland loved to play:
throw a bunch of marbles into a little hole...
evidently ancient Egypt resounded
in capricious cappuccino Milan...
or: Míllánò! nurse! nurse! the syllable-scalpel!
herr doctor, is that defined by diacritical
marks? yes sister.
                  **** in boots to suit you toppling
too...  and may i add:
             how ever did i digress from
the mundane reality of: second-hand laptop,
Windows in Polish... every single word
in english: red tape, underlined...
if i have dyslexia, it'll show like a crow's
feather on a dove -
and when it does, you can start calling
me Chief Apache Pixie Jack...
or how you have black and white as
polar, the rainbow... and then
nights in grey satin by the bothersome blues.
this will be defined by lacklustre
and hopping along... then, vaguely:
a romance?
                        it was supposed to
be a hiatus... hiatus...
         3 weeks of what became defined by
anything but such hopes...
   some people span a literary career of
20 years... take 3 years to write a book...
         it takes me 3 years to keep
a single thought...
          can you really repress biographic
accounts these days?
                                 well... if written
par with the times, i guess it's as much
fun as questioning whether
     the following two are very much akin:
1 + 2 + 3 = 5 - 10 + 20 x 2 = 30
is the same sort of arithmetic as when
you do the "math"of writing out
a word like onomatopoeia...
the hanging vowels of babylon...
          if anything, then this -
             as it also could be: on the scrapheap
of memory, a dazzling iron-clad
      heftiness of pulverising vector -
a Gucci demanding a pulpit and an
avocado on toast... champagne and
squid... or as the Michelin criteria were
revealed: rubber tire and squid di Calabria...
tell the two apart... you'll get a republic
passport... who would have thought
that rubber tires were the benchmark,
the ph 7 of foody palettes across the
azure blob, with some ashen and fern
bits in between.
   but this is me, testing new equipment...
having spent 3 weeks on two kinds
of detox... alcoholic... oh the whiskey...
and the ski jumping gavrons...
   plush? sparrels in a rolling dozen
of figurative barrels - and more sensibly?
kestrels, petted by stiff, castrated
   hippos of the sky, akin to astronomy
naming blobs: pi-7773-quatro-offshoot-of
Juno...
                 or a boo boo 747...
about as gracious as a **** launched
off a trebuchet at the dome of the rock...
gimmicky the sliding down...
hot wedge like swallowing a sword...
                3 weeks on this vegetarian
diet... detox alcohol detox 21st century
phonebook...
    rusty first imprints from the waiting game...
but my my...
               wasn't it fun...
                  Jan Kazimierz Waza
(the finicky cardinal)
                                       as presented by
Horatio... no no: John Ignatius Kraszewski...
   (Copernicus was apparently Prussia)...
which means Ignacy was Bella Belyy Kraшevsky...
      which makes me wonder:
why is the violin the pauper's? instrument
or the instrument of hoped-for empathy?
any one would tell you:
as also the accordion player on a tree...
well... roof here, roof there:
try doing ballerina's tip toe on a gothic
spiral tip of a cathedral...
and yes, the gargoyles... sing-along:
silent night...
                       holy night...
again: this was supposed to be a hiatus...
dogmatic statements... and....
    apodictic statements...
                      in truth, most people are
size 0 with their diet of words....
      where that turkey of a tongue to
fatten 'im up? well... ask the shepherds
of Damashek when Saladin will come
to rattle the blacksmith to wield a sword.
a thousand maidens faint...
   (if this was a cabaret voltaire play,
it would happen...
    and the two will never win:
one has a crop of hair on the scalp,
but spider-legs of a beard on the chin...
the other has precious silverware on
the scalp... and 21st Amazonian nomads
peeping out from between his
beard)... well...
not bad for a break from hiatus...
the whiskey is good,
                    the breadth has already been
tested...
   oh yes, the dreaded notes...
   this was supposed to be a:
a 3 week break, bam! a whole session
of writing it out in one go,
beginning with: the first question
i was asked as the Western Warsaw coach station:
do Kijova? i.e. to Kiev?
       oh sure, plenty of Ukranian merchants
down the western side of Warsaw...
   a Ukranian family of only women
sitting eating 3 while chickens among other
things: polskie chlopachki nie placzy...
and if you're lucky! you might even spot
a Mongolian!
                    it was never going to be an easy
transition...
i left Poland when it was -18°C...
                   sunny... bitter...
   walking on snow was like either
hearing a meow purr every time the foot impressed
itself on the snow, or i was wearing latex...
                 and to come into this abysmall
+7°C "winter" that England is?
   gothica... rain in winter... only in England...
and yes, if i were born here
i would be making awckward jokes about
the rain... but i wasn't.... i inherited it
from some unforseen discourse about
     Saint Gorbachev and how bloodless it all
became... prized piglets of Kazakh:
   dollar baby koo chi go go west and buys
usés a Lambro-jini... plight of the Sinking Belgian:
and all he did was sail to Congo on a waffle...
   pity the man! pity the man!
    i have no romance with England...
the grey skies and the constant rain
are like toenails to my heart... they're just there...
but you just see me walk in that pine
forest... in my natural element...
                              -18°C...
why did only German poets philosophise?
   and why did only Shakespeare make
poetry indistinguishable from philosophy and
why did the French turn to pastries
                                rather than the dry
and cough infused pages of bookworm time-donning
yella spaniel sepia waggle waggle
                  Sorbone          
   & Pavlov... pretty girls and pretty boys in
the Erasmus programme... to Rome!
to Antwerp! to Brioche! ... to a brioche...
                      Bruges!
                                               Kiev aflame...
Cracow a mind-game...
            Prague merely an INXS postcard from
the early 1990s...
                    Berlin a wall...
   Munich a litre of gods' **** and company of a dog:
of a dog's intuitive measure of man's
competence with regards to a desire for gods...
                   Lvov... thankfully Lvov
will never be the Istambul of Byzantines' nostalgia...
   so too Vilno...
                                                well...
that's for starters.

— The End —