.via ghana: i iz welcome the haiku poetic extractionz of the maxim: full-on potentiality of - few words maximum effortz! one wishes to almost die from feng shui minimalism! chinese geomancy and european chiromancy (reading balzac et al.) - but the sigh poetic of pepsi max effort iz wot iz the breaking of the camel bonk and backß... last time i heard from a kenyan bartender... all the timber comes from ghana... as does the wheat from ukraine and the salt from poland... coal is always "elsewhere"... or no coal... wind... the wind comes from: far far away... beyond the language of the seven vowels...

it took much of an effort to have to overcome
a reading of Stendhal...
esp. when you find him in your teens..
almost impossible...

it's enough to visit a brothel:
once a year... perhaps skipping a year...
and there's enough body,
and skin, and warmth...
to contrast... what i'm yet to read about...
otherwise have read, i.e.:

2010s through the 2020 summary...
lucy holden now 29...
sexting, dating apps, bisexual flings
flatmates with benefits...
millenial serial dater...

all the details are already known...
mine? that strip-clup in athens on a whim
with two strippers either arm
burrowing my face solving the mole
in their cleavage...
the goodmayes borthel with the romanians
that said a very bulgarian word, once...

and who can ever forget
the south african cocoon ****-accusation
of: not unde the bed-sheets and please
oil up rather than dry-******* me...
or the thai surprise picked up
in a park and that a little bit of heavyweight
beer and some jazz and a garden shed will allow...
the number of times i've had ***...
well... what are fingers for?

the black girl with a coccyx like an iron maiden
attempting to tattoo itself onto my pelvis...
2nd time round?
i heard she had a child and his daddy
would be bringing him home the morning to come...
and this other black woman,
oh i mean: full detail - woman...
two children sleeping on the bed...
get dragged off...
thrown to the bed...
and i'm there to **** an imitation ******
of... a tight fold of legs...

it's not exactly **** but even with that:
i'm not a best fitter...
so tell her: it's not going to happen...
we pretend to sleep or at least i do...
when this afro-fur-ball with a plucking sound
of a smooch is standing at the end of the bird...
he's naked i'm naked everyone's naked
i pick him up like i pick up maine *****
and lay him on my chest...
i can't allow a river of fingers through
his afro tangles... so i pat them down...
and he falls asleep...

***... oh no ***** word about it monsieur!
just this *******...
oh but i'm glad that some girl nearing
her 30s has made up her mind up...
only recently i've heard that my mother was
attempting to woo a married man
who was part of the Solidary movement
and probably waiting for a greencard...
i heard this... from my grandmother...

i'm still pampering on the sly for
a Mary Antoinette...
Ilona was wrong... i wouldn't become
a child strapped to a hellhole of a teenager's bedroom...
i'd become a leech hybrid...
as along as i have enough excuses
to return for "the word"... and never rap it...
i'm fine fine... best be on my optimal behaviour...
to never find myself in a baptists' church choir...

- there's also a quick fix procedure...
the match of the day is watched
with the mascots on screen...
the ben-hur's not making it to
prophetic status... yes the bread...
yes the circus... and all those cul de sac...
soap operas of parking scenes...

and there's always language...
best expressed when drunk...
never sober because is what delves into
the formality of: dear sir / madam,
kind regards...

the day when i stopped combing my fair
and peered at the beard...
uncombed hair: almost reminds
me of donning a pineapple on it...
an ancient buddhist balancing act...
like performing the act of gravity...
without copernican mathematics...
as simple as finding the CENTER on
a bicycle... or like finding
buoyancy in a swimming pool...
perhaps i am more water than flesh...
but i'm also a fraction of fat...

i can float on water if i can find
the balance... i don't need to play
the drunkard treading water surviving
to stay afloat.... i... relax...
then i float.... or bob-on-the-surface
teasing an unexpected shark-bite-attack...
although: swimming in a sea
is not my thing...
i very much appreciate seeing
the bottom i can dive down toward
and touch... the chernobyl stink of chlorine...
is almost a parisian perfumery...

heat breeds diseases it breeds...
insects...
i abhor the heat...
the zenith of winter is yet,
is yet to arrive... and for the help of god:
i can't arrive at... writing sober...
should "poo'etry" ever be written sober
to begin with?
i mind: that i don't mind...

i can find 8pm and 9pm quite:
which implores you to not quit - curb colt...
i was making a sponge apple stuffing
roulade...
after having made some biscuit
with brown sugar and diadems of hazelnuts...
and prior to some sausage rolls...
three fillings...
cranberries with some peppers and
chillies...
fennel seeds with apple...
and the third... the third...
i don't quiet remember...

my head was exploding with a brain being
towed and all was:
i am yet to grieve a passing,
a tax of death...
i am yet to be left half imbecile and half
of any other texas hold-up poker game...
i'm wishing for...
that quarter of a million of a bet
i placed on:
one team wins...
but both have to score...
ergo... catching a mosquito by the testciles
donning boxing gloves chance...
2 - 1 etc. victories...

i don't want to blame women...
the last one i was serious about...
she's on her 3rd marriage or whatever...
and i'm still in woad: in deep blue
coinciding with...
god's roulette...

as a testiment of man...
there's the ambition to find: the void...
to find nothing...
and from that... find the thinking thing...
res vanus: the emptiness
that can be fathomed with more or less
thinking, than a yawn's presence...
because...
descartes doesn't really exact ontological,
whatever...
i can't be and be:
when i churn out a day-dream and
a day-dream is all that is...

thankfuly i have nothing to "work"
with... most women only have boredom to begin
with....
at exactly 20 minutes to 1am...
i'm not so sure...
a mother can say: you stink...
then you go and buy something from
a convenience store...
and the cashier stresses how fresh you smell...
that's quiet something...
a woman likes the way to smell to her...
in between doing these *******
tribunals of sweating over
apple roulades...

and Stendhal... it's only my mother...
i just have to gnash my teeth
and apply the burden of sober...
this canvas... no other...
i drink for the 1 hour pleasure
of disorientation...
a shot in the head in some Ukranian
prison...
stiched to the next to be executed...
chikatilo...
i'm not exactly fond of the company...
but i'm pretty sure...
kurt cobain... and his shotgun antics...

and how the prolonged death appeal
of Christine Chubbuck lasted much longer...
Kafka said it right:
a stab at the heart...
**** colt and boyo... don't aim for the head!
that's how Ukranian convicts die...
shot in the back of the head...
in a cell... never in the open...
it's not like the brain delves into
the automated unconscious of the pump
that's the heart... how do you think
the urban myth of the cockroach that lived
for 2 weeks more was born?
the head didn't have a mouth to ingest
food with...

shot in the back of the head is an execution
that, done in an Ukranian prison cell...
is pretty much all of Dante not visiting
either heaven or a hell...
but two weeks with... in the presence
of death... the body starving...
that magic finger-pointing exercise
of seeing death in movies?

well thank god they did a movie about
Christine Chubbuck's (rage against the machine):
bullet in the 'ed!
i was lied to, no matter...
i'm here to hush and sweep the leftovers...
because why would you march
a man into a prison cell...
shoot him in the head and close the door
and wait... because no: in the open...
with a chance for rabid dogs to feast on...
in the darkened night just shy of Kiev
would ever matter...

Christine Chubbuck was left dying on
life-support machines after her half-high Kiev
attempt to pop the balloon...
psych- myth of the brain as source
of the sigma soul...
my left toe has more soul than this
rubric forever explained as forever to be explored
goose-fat sponge...
come to think of it...
after a haemorrhage that no one believes
beside me, some neurologist and a dementia
riddled grandfather who easily forgot...

what's this brain this brain this nought?!
**** it... kamikaze cockroach!
as ever oh but always so much when
someone has to mention...
has to mention: with no exacting details
of fancy...

also called the drought period when pakistani
gangs are up in Leeds and i'm strapped
to the outlier Loon'don culture:
as ever playing the obedient schizoid...
because that's, just fair game...
centuries behind what the youth
of Denmark have to offer...
the mutterzunge and the l'inglese of:
any future of tourism with Jack's flag...

heavy influences stemming from
st. andrew and all the worth of wordworth
with a tinge of punk...
but never a baron of lexicon coming from
just shy of 4 hours away from
the lisp of masovian warsaw...

what could possibly be wrong?
how about... stemming it down to the root
of... sober people and the lacklustre of
when writing: under no influence at all...
apparently "now" the high moral ground!
the sobers usher in the words
that we are abide by when the football hooligans
their casual Tuesday mundane,
their casual Tuesday mundane custard
splodge of oats in regurgitation...

i can almost but not quiet...
imagine myself being the cameo in this dear diary
of these "free" women of the western world...
give me a feral black woman pulling
two kids from her bed in order
to imitate a ****** by folding her legs to
pretend...

it's still a bullet in the back of the head
for some, minor or major
andrei "cain" chikatilo -
no... with a full crop of cranium of hair...
and a grandmother that says...
well... how busy your chin hairs are...
that you are able to lodge a pencil in there
and it doesn't fall out...
hair here and all other hair elsewhere...
chest and... where the antioch identifier
of achilles ought to be of a six in sixes
packaged...

since who is buddha... or a christ when...
an thích quang duc "oops" happens...
the people will never leave their unison...
their get-together "happening"...
but what's to be celebrated should...
the crucifix be turned into that "other"
torture ordeal of being: piked...
crucifixion the tsunami wave of history...
when one can expect the fate
of being piked by the more imaginative
sorts?
if only the antichrist was gay
and was sentenced to levitate on a pike...
passion and ecstasy via
the Walhalla doing ****... again:
sorry if the pike missed the **** baptism
of ecstasy... and instead aimed
at ripping apart the flesh and bone at:
whatever pivot was made available
to work from reverse ingestion:
beginning with the pelvis...

i'm just tired and cooking and shooing
shadows for the past month and i know that it's
just an exaggerate lounge period...
and all i want is an added arm...
and the serenity leg to take the step to return to...
footsteps... with a bulging echo to command...

it needs to be stressed that these women were black...
i call them ivory beauties of chocolate come
quicksilver moon glistening...
i can't remember... no... "you're" right...
i never managed to **** anything
of an ethno-centric "perspective"...
i'd be arrested for that...
as if starting a hitlerjungen movement or
some other random "****"...

i'd package myself with a mexican strapped into
alcatraz...
the Louis of the Aztecs and some
long lost St. Juan of the Mayans...
leash me... Russian or Prussian or...
what's that third otherwise power of influence
that this body was allowed to morph into?

perhaps i once was allowed to control these words...
but that's how drinking goes...
it's a homocodie when you **** someone
when under the influence of alcohol when driving
a car...
this is a sort of homocide...
i trully gave my hands away to the devil...
and the brain: oh forget that old fabble of a pickle...
what's in brine was always supposed
to be in brine and pickled...

- and what were the chances of me becoming
a sentimental drunk... listening to some
crowded house - weather with you?
the la's - the la's... no... not merely the 1990s
epitome of h'american tourism lodged in london
of myth... as any ******... that myth translated
itself into paris... there she goes...
i mean the whole album...

whale! whale! a beached whale!
Grindadráp...
and some want to go on the Hajj...
and die in a human stampede at the Mecca...
but... well... some want to...
of all of Europe...
Venice, Paris, Rome, Athens,
Amsterdam, perhaps Edinburgh
(wink-wink nudge-nudge)...
Barcelona...
or... Grindadráp of the Faroe Islands...

capture a polyphony in language that is hardly
ever going to be much more
than a chance to... to do that...
shove three fingers into your gob...
expect an elevated volume of sounds...
call the hounds! a mile away!
i was never allowed to learn that
whistling "trick"...
perhaps that's why i never managed
to play the trombone or the clarinet...
the ****-poor leftover guitar...
which is as much as having to read
braille!

reality: i live in england but i'm a ******...
i haven't ****** an english girl...
or a ****** girl...
i was close! a ****** girl licked my face
like a cow, once...
chin, lips, nose and forehead...
i was actually waiting for e.t. when that
happened...
the pakistanis have all the english girls...
sorry... it's sad...
but... the australia...
the fwench... the russian...
it's a decent rubric...
crude... nuanced...
so is buying fwesh meat at the butchers...
the perfect crime is less severe...
fiddling with a tombstone...
then towing it for 2 miles...
to bury the remains of your cat...
after your neighbour "accidently" killed him
when you were away...
and of course they deny it...

after all... i live in a society...
innocent until proven guilty...
said jimmy saville...
it's not the old... european "misunderstanding"..
of guilty until proven innocent...
if not a real story of Tomasz Komenda...
there's the Shawshank Redemption...
or there's... the Count de Monte Cristo...

if all are innocent until proven guilty...
what's that? the genesis story never happens...
it's hardly a moral deterent...
isn't it? people will do as any aleister crowley
would command them to do:
do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law;
this is a naive presupposition of
fudge-packed jurisprudence...
what should have been egg-whites..
it merely some sugar dissolved in water...

statistical counts aside...
i would be more inclined to... fear...
being held guilty... to then be allowed "innocence"...
that to being held innocent...
to then be forced as a doubly-culprit!
how does the double jeopardy paradox arise...
from the high pillar of: innocent until
proven guilty?!
law is at one's own leisure...
should all be bound to an innocence...
revisions of the biblical metaphor...

if we can all be innocent...
wouldn't we at least all fathom an innocent
attempt to break some law?
for a matter of: testing the waters?
even if innocent until proven guilty is true...
there's no narrative of redemption...
why is it that the shawshank redemption
is such a popular movie?
since it adopts the continental motiff of:
guilty... until proven innocent...
it offers... redemption...
it's a popular movie because it's unfair
for the basis of a single individual...
not some amassing of victims of a jimmy saville
recount... that have... none... zilch...
no redemption!
their redemption: ist tod!

because if i were to be found guilty...
with no chance of defence...
i would exercise a double-think in relation to this...
rather than exercise this leisure into
grieving the orwellian zeitgeist monstrosity of
but the one novel...

i'm not convinced of the english model...
this... innocent until proven guilty...
this pontius pilate argument...
i'm not for it! this sinking to the core of my heart
and hopefuly, prevents me from a heartbeat...
perhaps so fewer examples of
the #metoo would come to the fore...
if... one were not so easily allowed
a ststus of innocence...
perhaps... guilty until proven innocent...
doesn't allow...
so readily accessed accusations...
perhaps this modern, english model of
jurisprudence...
is missing a medieval lisp?

as law abiding as would suggest...
i would be much more deterred from inacting
a grievance should i be found guilty...
without a benefit of a doubt of a jury...
than if i were to be given the a priori: innocent
status...

i don't like this: england and greenwich in tow
is the bellybutton of the world
demand of... all else is less than we...
no... did i come from Algiers?!
what has Algiers to do with it and Leeds
shouldn't?!

at least that's how a man sobers up...
while still drinking...
he might focus on sober demands...
of topics that only drunks should speak of...
and since neither of the two meet...

because i have stood as a witness
in a court...
and i was given a photograph to...
"compare" having identified him in a mugshot...
the photograph i was shown still
had a date imprinted on it...
and this was the ******* argument...
the photograph was years old...
i identified the culprit in the police mugshot...
but the case was "won"... for no apparent reason...
the witness said: i...
this photograph is years old...
i can grow a beard and hippy attire in a year's time...
of course i was the witness that said:
note down the registration plate
of the car this camel-jockey jumped out of
and grabbed m'ah fwends mobile...

i've seen how: innocent until proven guilty works...
i'm not conviced...
i can't be... there's something instinctual preventing
me from adhering to this english...
jurisprudent sensbility...
it's hardly a ******* charles dickens novel...
if it were... and i greatly underestimated
charles dickens... no... really...
i shouldn't have read any of dostoyevsky...
i should have read charlie ****'oh'ends...
believe me when i say that is hould have...
since... heidegger's ponderings VII - XI
will retain their shelf-status as... the book most
probably unread...

such is the sobering process...
am i, in no way, allowed to sacrifice my 'ed
on the premise that: innocent until
proven guilty is the right categorial imperstive
to buckle on... since...
the anglophonic world buckles on it...
like a spectacular breakdance feat of
a penguin on steroids...
doing the diving header tsunami
of chore: the crowd goes wild!
it's no operatic applause and being
"superficially" reminded as to how...
find your proper seat...
before the castrato peacock does his
singing bit...
apparently finding one's seat
when it's never going to be a maggot-pit
at a slipknot concert is all that's
about to happen...

come by the butcher's and let's attempt
in finding you some oysters
among the volume of red boisterous...
to replica your genital parts
and sordid caviar letfovers...

perhaps i could be angry...
but la ilah illa blah'lah...
i am... halway bound between
being simulation circumcised
and being castrated...
i never which is which...
notably, given...
circumcised men are not allowed
the impetus of taking up
web-cam Susan on promise of...
also pleasing themselves
without wanting to earn some money...

it's a real problem though:
innocent until proven guilty versus
guilty until proven innocent...
relish...
the english indiosyncratic
wishing they were scandinavian iceland...
no... honey too sweet tooth bear...
this is not how the GMP affair that exends
with its genesis in the jimmy saville affair
looks like...
this quest for: apparently "superior"
is not going to work on me...
kin of a kind-of luvvie dubby...
bon voyage!

the entire continent is listening...
individualistic rights...
innocent until proven guilty...
the more i reiterate these words...
the more i sober up...
because i can't see how...
i am: a thief...
until i am proved to be... a thief...
by having performed the act
of thieving...
or not even an "after"...

sorry... please expose your divine
rational intelligence and tell me
via a reiteration that 2 + 2 = 4...

i am not a thief,
but i am a thief...
only if the act of stealing is proved...
and if "the" act of stealing is not proved...
i'm way more than a thief...
i'm a thief with a baby driver!
this anglican logic *****...
if innocent until proven guilty...
is to sustain the individual flourishing...
i'd rather make theatre of the original,
biblical deterrent...
a queen of this sort of popish claims
and her duaghters of yorkshire because...
the pawns of justitia...

conventionality of continetal thinking...
there's not even a "what if" or
"it would be better" should... allow,
extended into:
guilty until proven innocent...
rather than... innocent until proven guilty...

i sometimes find myself chattering...
in the cold...
but i'm not chewing anything...
i'm pretending to pivot the piano on a ghost...
being played as some per se magician's
excavation of: whatever time...
thus it was spent...

i call it chattering chopin...
bite marks available... like the multitude
of signature most willing to be...
allocated a collection foreseeable...

the would the artichokes of arabia...
or the fennel roasted roots of Italy...
there's something to be had of a woman
sporting the "cherokee" leopard-skin prints
on something that's...
90% cotton and 10% lycra?!

and the reason why i visited a brothel
in the past ten years was because?
if i want to play poker...
i'll play poker...
easy ***? it's not so easy in the act
and you want to find a kiss and...
she tells you: it's against the laws
of this sort of nunnery...
but you still manage to slurp a lip or two
of a shy pluck of the tulips of the sea...
or however this thing that
language is works...
if it's not going to be a hammer and nail...
forever... this "excuse" to allow nothing
more than YA novels...
metaphors and... pedantry of elswhere
from punctuation?

herioglyphic assumptions of :) emoji?
wink barrel baron! oi!
non-responsive...
black also implies: ivory beauty...
i started to admire their teeth...
since mine were always going to be
custard yellow death grin...
like bone to the rot...

no... i'm pretty sure tonight ends
here; now;
the prodigy - destroy...
given how... keith flint...
and that horse... and it was never a tale
of the stormy badger...
and how the fox is my aid and will
never make it to...
transcend the red coat hunting parties...
because... just because.

Chapter 1

There was a woman. The cost to love her was your life. No other payment but a sending off, a revolver cocked to your temple’s side.
There was no spite in your death, just business.
Hell of a business to run.

I was protecting someone. Never been one to stick around, but this drag had carried for the past year. That gang-owned joint lay but two doors and a cold alley away. Popular place, maybe not the classiest but it had its patrons. Packed with your essentials: pool tables, dirt-licked walls and chairs, mean folk mixed in with the nice. Old fashioned joint with a history. You could almost feel it when you walked in. That small pressure when it’s about to rain? Felt like that had been building up for a decade there.
Some Madonna owned it. Names elude me, but she was just another front; as was the barkeep, the hired bouncers and those mean-eyed slingers that spoke loud in company, silent alone. Heh, almost like an old-fashioned saloon. Who the hell am I in this tale of cowboys and crooks?
I was holed up in that apartment block for the winter. Stiff drapes covering a stiff cold that seeped through the cracks anyway. Cold chills to wake to, and the whiskey don’t warm a **** thing. Maybe it was the ache of a past flame that led me to her. That old touch had languished and misted away in the night of some long dead memory, leaving an old kiss from a young lover on my shivering body. It grew faint with every year’s passing. I struggle to remember this keepsake.
Every night.
I was a no name protector protecting a no name ghost of a man. Yeah we knew each other. I’m no stranger to keep past talking terms . . . but, hell if I remember his name, how we got into this **** situation and why. Mind’s a little off. Been like that for years.

It was a stumble through the wrong door at the wrong time. Some spiteful voices in the back of the joint or the back of my mind telling me I’m headed for hell and ain’t coming back. See, every day is a crossroad, and I happened upon the worst one yet.
I remember that flaking paint; grime-covered white on a moulding door **** near off its hinges. That suited me, and I hated it. Maybe I grew sick of wandering the same way and turned my life on its spinning head. Spun me all the ways I couldn’t face. Saw a glimmer that fate had readied for me. Don’t think I’ve looked at anything with such eyes since; nor have they looked back at me.
The room was a cramped, dilapidated hellhole like every other room, but with her laying on that bed of hers . . . she was the only clean thing in the whole of this cursed city. Save, she wasn’t clean. No such thing exists; no such thing as clean since your adolescent innocence, and even that went up in flames. Hell, in a city like this I wouldn’t be surprised if the skeletons we kept so tightly locked in our closets outnumbered us ten to one.
Should have remembered that when I saw her, but my mind lay a blank canvas and I couldn’t help but fill it with all the details of this pretty bird. Even those that weren’t there.
No Name yanked me out quick. Never seen him so pale, ghosting further and further from a human being. He’d been running so long I don’t think he even knew what he was running from anymore. His past? Some cop chase from years back, ending with blood stains and shaky hands? A dead kid in the arms of a suicidal wife? Maybe he’s running from himself. Fear in the capacity we contain, and fear in the ways we unleash it around loved ones. I don’t blame him for running. If I was a worse man I’d run from him as well.
Now No Name has it all figured out, even if he won’t let on; and that bird in there ain’t part of the plan. Cash cash, first train out to some no name city for this no name man. In this together, he keeps repeating, like some broke down record player that only plays one song. Well I guess we share more similarities than I’d like to think so.

One night, about a month after settling in that old apartment, I hear raised voices. Not uncommon, but something about this still night woke some fear inside me. A fear I needed to meet with my eyes, a score to settle with myself. Sounded like some ******* outside was hoping to bring down the sky with volume alone. No type of gentleman, just a no ***** kid who doesn’t know the difference between command and screaming like a babe.
One gets you respect. Now, the other. . . .
I open those stiff drapes with stiffer fingers. Brush that layer of frozen breath and mist to find some mid-twenty good for nothing punk holding a struggling figure. The apartment ain’t exactly ground floor but even up here I can spot the difference between a gent and a sally. Some broad was in trouble.
Grab that six shooter, old man. The holster smooth from years of wear, small frays on the weathered jacket rubbing against goose-pricked skin. Comfort clothing that never really brings comfort. Not anymore. Guess I’m as bad as No Name. I’m just repeating routine.
Out the hall, no doors left in this apartment block. Stolen, broken, ain’t exactly your family fun lifestyle we’re living. No Name’s holed up in this fortress of upturned furniture and dresser-barred doorways. Lights flicker from between the cracks. The devil ain’t gonna bother with the door, I tell him. He doesn’t reply. Maybe he’s a religious man with one too many sins above his head.
There’s another yell and I feel my blood rise, hairs picking up static, a storm brewing inside that clenched stomach of mine. Take a tumble down the stairs in my haste. **** crooked balsa wood. Those stairs are gonna end me one day, I swear.
Ground floor. I slam that kitchen door and it cracks against the brick wall outside. ****. No Name’s gonna burst an artery. Call out for that ******* punk but he’s already eyeing me up. Only a few steps away and I can see the white in his eyes. No . . . those are his pupils. Wide, all cloud-like, he’s ******* dusted up. . . . Almost like looking into the past. Thrice-cursed ****. I’m in trouble.
This ain’t some lover’s quarrel, some twisted ****’s thought of a good way to end the night. This is a dusthead addict and I’m out of my league. His mid-snarl distorts and stretches past his cheeks and that devil grin sends an electric jolt from the wires of my brain to my heart.
This six shooter is as good as a pea gun against a Smiley.
He’s spouting some glossolalia drifts, layering it like an abominable duet. The coked-up boy in me yearns to understand again, but stiff joints and washed-out dreams have made me a cynic. Ain’t no beauty when you’re tearing things apart to see it. ******* Smiley’s on the edge and he’s ready to pounce right off. If that broad’s sobbing didn’t **** at those heart strings of mine I’d be running for my ******* life.
I lift that pea shooter and aim it straight at that devil smile.
He howls. Glass shatters from above. Some black monstrous thing comes speeding at me. I leap through that apartment doorway in time to see ******* Smiley consumed by it. All sharp, all solid that beast slams into Smiley, screaming loud enough to wake this dead city twice over. Smiley thrashes, he splays out to the ground, the beast’s seared flesh erupting in front of me. A piece slices past my cheek and I’m on the ground in tears. I hear No Name scream an incomprehensible curse above. I’m bawling now. Through my tears I spot that chunk of flesh. ******* balsa wood. Thrice-cursed balsa wood.
No Name had thrown a piano out that barricaded window of his. Tears of pure comedy, that’s what left my face. A Smiley taken out by No Name, I’ll never live this down. His mangled body lies under polished wood. Someone’s yearly worth gone in a second of frantic panic, reduced to twisted wires and cracked ivory. To see something so beautiful destroyed in seconds makes me wonder if the Smiley had gotten the better of us after all.
That broad’s in shock. Splinters covered every inch of ground save that around her; looked like a comet, trailing emptiness behind.  Should have noticed it then that something wasn’t right with that scene. Perfectly unscathed beauty sitting there with not a single scratch nor splinter on her, but I was too **** amazed I was alive. Knelt close to her and caught a whiff of some exotic scent on her skin. Some flower. Saw her face and it added another colour to that filling canvas of mine. This pretty bird from the joint. The one men died for. At least No Name had saved one life worth saving, funny it happened to be the one who could take yours in a night.
Names elude me, but the way I remember her . . . the way I remember her is Blossom, for when she came into my life she gave colours to my black and white memory, colours I didn’t know existed, and my black and white morals took a turn down some dawning grey-blurred alley.
So I’m a ******* gentleman and I walk Blossom home while No Name shifts furniture above us. Scrapes of hard wood against wood, filling that void in his once impenetrable bastion. I told you No Name’s got it all planned out already. Guess I’m just here for the ride.

Millay Has Her Way with a Vassar Professor
by Michael R. Burch

After a night of hard drinking and spreading her legs,
Millay hits the dorm, where the Vassar don begs:
“Please act more chastely, more discretely, more seemly!”
(His name, let’s assume, was, er ... Percival Queemly.)

“Expel me! Expel me!”—She flashes her eyes.
“Oh! Please! No! I couldn’t! That wouldn’t be wise,
for a great banished Shelley would tarnish my name ...
Eek! My game will be lame if I can’t milque your fame!”

“Continue to live here—carouse as you please!”
the beleaguered don sighs as he sags to his knees.
Millay grinds her crotch half an inch from his nose:
“I can live in your hellhole, strange man, I suppose ...
but the price is your firstborn, whom I’ll sacrifice to Moloch.”
(Which explains what became of pale Percy’s son, Enoch.)

Originally published by Lucid Rhythms. This poem is based on an account of Edna St. Vincent Millay being confronted by a male Vassar authority about her rogue behavior. However, there is a some poetic license involved, for the sake of humor. It was actually Vassar President Henry Noble MacCracken who mentioned Shelley. Here is his account in a response to a question about Millay cutting classes: "She cut everything. I once called her in and told her, 'I want you to know that you couldn't break any rule that would make me vote for your expulsion. I don't want to have any dead Shelleys on my doorstep, and I don't care what you do.' She went to the window and looked out and she said, 'Well on those terms I think I can continue to live in this hellhole.'" The stuff about Enoch and Moloch is, of course, pure fabrication on my part.
Keywords/Tags: Millay, dead, Shelley, Vassar, dorm, hellhole, drinking, partying, ***, cutting classes

Every person has a personal hellhole
where they hide under the sheets of dark
and share their sorrows with the unknown.
A place where they feel welcomed when
the whole world seems to fall apart.
A place where all the depressed and lonely
meet each other with broken hearts.
There's a hellhole that's far away from this world
that feels like heaven despite all the wrath.

Commitment issues
This again?
Yes but this time these are my words
Not the labels thrown at me by exes
Like arrows attempting to pierce me into place
I thought it was meant to trap me
But I think they just wanted me to stop
To think
To really evaluate myself
To see the truth
Im afraid of commitment.

When I've been told this in the past
I read it with the understanding that
Commitment issues meant I
Just couldn't have or didn't want a relationship
And that just couldn't be true
I mean just check my track record

No, see
My having commitment issues
Is rooted deeply within my past
These problems originate in an exciting mix of
Trust issues
Abandonment issues
And a variety of other traumas

I am not afraid to enter relationships
And I do not avoid love
Actually, I am obsessed with finding love
With being loved
All the while trying to love another
Thinking I'm succeeding
While subtly sabotaging myself in the process

When I was small
I did not receive the respect and care
Needed to show I was loved
Though my parent said they cared
They didn't protect me the way they should have
I had to take care of myself
Look out for myself
Because I was the only one I could trust

Anytime I got close to someone
They'd either decide to leave
Or get ripped away by outside forces
I was alone a lot
And not great at making friends
With the abuse happening at one house
And some solace found at the other
I was constantly fluctuating between
Hellhole and liberation
All while trying to have a childhood
And survive adolescence

So when they say I have commitment issues
They're probably right
But not for the reasons they think
Not because I'm polyamorous
Not because I don't want to commit
Not because I don't love and
Not because of who I am as a person
My issues come from a long line of
Different abuses by people who
Were supposed to protect me
But didn't

So if you think to judge me
For the trouble I have with trusting you
And trusting you won't hurt me
Or decide to leave when I'm "too much"
Understand that I did not choose to be like this
I didn't choose the pain that led me to love
In such a haphazard way

But I am choosing to do something about it

Grey is this town,
A never ending spiral of hate and violence.
Depression is contagious here.
Why haven't we been quarantined.

.              Part One               .

January
I wake up in a hungover haze that seems
Irrevocably unending. All the places I threw up,
That stiffness in my neck, the emptiness in my love;
There is too much to feel
So I feel numbness
And I feel remnants
Of ***** in my throat, only manifested fully
When my friends and I make fortune cookies,
Singing along to songs that we’re hearing for the first time
Amidst the chaos of exploding poinsettia plants and nascent tattoos,
All of which litter your mom’s otherwise bare counter.
I don’t make much mention, in my fortune cookies,
Of that girl who still leaves me hungover;
I fill them instead with cruel jokes
That send me cackling
Until my dehydrated headaches pass into

February
When I’m moonlit tipsy stumbling
Through a campus-wide coniferous forest in Washington State
With two strangers that I soberly think
Might be my future.
We arrive at the clear polluted waters
Of the Puget Sound, our boots all
Sinking into deep-mud as we walk past broken bits of shells
To low tide.
Even as the full moon sinks and I realize
That those two strangers can never be my future
(That Athens, Ohio is my future)
I still walk forward
Into the Puget Sound
Knowing that the water will stay with me
In my lungs, on my skin,
In my mind, and although I don’t tell a single person, I fear,
So rightly,
That the water from the Puget Sound,
Set to perpetually accumulate in my lungs,
Will one day come to drown me.
Even as I cry to my mom in our kitchen,
Relieved from that seemingly endless indecision
I’m not surprised. I’m not surprised
By the choice I’ve made, I’m not surprised
By the fears I still have, all that surprises me
About any of this
Is the immediacy with which
My conclusion’s future culmination begins, as I begin
And continue
While always feeling like I’m concluding,
An infinite

March
In spirals, spirals, spirals, leaving trails
In subconscious sands, someone paints
Blue spirals on my body, and when
I drive back to Lake Erie later,
To retrieve abandoned items and moments,
The road looks much different.
Less swirly, less threatening at first, and when we get there
We eat pineapple/onion pizza on my ****** cottage’s front porch,
Just barely shielded from the snow, and just barely
Shielded from one another. And even those
Slim shields between us begin to fall
When we stand on our melting Lake Erie.
Because the whole world
Calls to us.
The sky screams, the wind explodes,
The thin layer of water above ice rushes
Blissfully, almost hallucinogenically, towards you and towards I
And I am howling
Into the face of it all,
Fearing nothing—not even
The absence of that girl’s palm in mine
Or the water from the Puget Sound
Or the cold of the air
That is tearing at my scalp; that is tearing
At my whole being and

April
Is best described by a rampage
Home from a campsite
That I only ever saw
Drunkenly, in the dark, and under the pressure
Of Allan Ginsberg’s poetry and an ultimately failed ****.
On that rampage we steal tombstones,
We steal memories for ourselves,
And we steal crass glances
With crass jokes that sound sort of
Like the crass fortune cookies which somehow
Never went bad.
Someone notes during that drive
That the air is getting warmer
With regularity now,
And while I somehow can’t bring myself to cry when my cousin is shot to death,
I have to struggle to hold back tears
In our high school’s only classroom when you tell me
That you’re quitting that play we signed up for together.
I guess it’s cuz I’m concerned—
Cuz I’m deeply
Deeply
Deeply concerned—
That it’s a lack of dedication
To me, to what we do together, to everything
That will prevent my rampage from concluding quietly
Amidst the smells of Indian food and the soft light
In your future dorm room
Where I will hug you
And where I

May
Finally
Let all the tears
Flow freely.
I guess it’s the unnecessary intensity
Of this collective celebratory anticipation
That preemptively reveals to me
That the moment of walking across a stage
To receive my high-school diploma
Won’t be quite as transformative as I’d hoped it might be,
And when I make out with that girl who still has me hungover
In the bed at my dad’s house where I lost my virginity
Almost exactly one year prior, I realize that in fact,
I’m still marching the same march, and
Both magic moments of idealized transformation in that bed
Were just as illusory.
Somehow though
Your no longer nascent tattoos have not yet faded
And I can’t help but worry,
(As sweat pours from my forehead and drenches these bedsheets;
As my finger nestles itself tiredly between the folds of her ******)
That I have, and in

June
When all my anticipation is realized,
People clap in the audience despite the fact
That it’s the same stream of sweat
That’s trickling down along my spine
To reach my ***.
I stare into the spotlight
For just a moment, amidst those stale applause
And in my squint, I think briefly
That none of it ******* mattered. I mean,
Despite this perspiration, I’m
Dehydrated. Hungover. I guess
Drinking more alcohol
Isn’t the best way to get over it, but I can think of nothing else,
So even when I acknowledge
That all my attempts have not even been half-assed,
But, like, one-quarter-assed
The only resolve I find is in distraction, in
******* my other ex-girlfriend instead
And not until that distant

July
When I’m ascending through Never Sink,
Does my head finally
Feel clear, yes,
In that glowing blue pit
Of bioluminescence,
I feel the whole world slow to a stop,
Embrace my body with its taproots
And whisper
Playfully and
In a child’s voice,
“You are the whole world” and I know that I
Am the whole world.
I breathe heavily, the only sound for miles around,
And for a moment I feel that the Puget Sound,
Along with everything else that is so ******,
Has fallen away.
For it is not my body
That is climbing on-rope through the stars and galaxies of this great sinkhole
But my mind,
But my soul,
Because Never Sink
Is not a landscape
But a mind-scape,
A soul-scape,
And it is one which is never dark
Thanks to the blue lights of soulful- (not bio-) luminescence—
A glow that is strong enough to see
Finally
A singularity
In the form of an unlocked lock,
Appearing with grace upon my driveway
After I return home
From ******* my other ex-girlfriend
For the last time.
It is only when I stop the car,
Open the door,
And hold that unlocked lock in my hand that I realize the extent to which
I am being
Un-defined.
The ethereal being in Never Sink’s soul-scape,
Alone in the blue grace of the night,
With nothing in my breath.
The thought is terrifying.
So in

August
On the night of my eighteenth birthday,
The girl I’m hung over and I
Send magical, sparkling lanterns into the sky
With a wish so brilliantly bright and simultaneous
That even I am able dismiss the slurring drunk words spoken next to us—
“Here’s hopin’ that you two get married some day”—
As superfluous.

.                Part Two               .

The winds above Lake Erie carry me,
Along with that lantern, into the foreignness
Which Never Sink foreshadowed.
But with the lantern as my very being
And the Puget Sound in my every breath,
Athens, Ohio does not become my soul-scape;
Even its gorgeous autumnal rolling hills
Are just land-scape, and I don’t know
Whether things would have been different
Had I not walked into that stranger’s party
For that terrible beer
On one of my first nights there, but regardless in

September
I walk up endless hills and stairs daily
To get around this hellhole where the only genuine people I’ve yet found
Were prepared to leave from day one, like I
Wasn’t. I wasn’t preparing for that at all, but the Puget Sound,
Lingers like phlegm in my lungs and distorts my regular refrain
Of “I can be happy here, I can be happy here,” keeping it
From ever loosing its hypothetical but eventually forcing it
To loose its conclusion:
I can be…
I can be…
I can be anything that I want to be and I am still here,
Sitting on the top terrace of this weird-assed biker bar with some girl
I just met, with some guy
Who seems cool, but in both cases
I drink one too many Blue Moon’s because I know
That neither of these people
Will ever loose their hypotheticals and will only ever
Loose their conclusions.
Gazing upwards towards the stars in the fading summer,
I try to ignore the physicality of all that’s around me,
But the alcohol churns in my stomach like violent waves, like in

October
How I rock like tides between the shores
Of two continents, of two
Acid trips.
One, on the floor of my dorm room, staring at my ceiling
In an attempt to make patterns
Out of patternless white paint, all the while holding hands
With that guy who seems cool, who has been dancing
In and out of hypothetical.
And the other acid trip with you,
Who somehow in the face of everything
Became one of my only certainties.
You, with whom I stood on Lake Erie
Howling into the wind in an unrealized epiphany.
An epiphany
That is now realized
Because the beers on that top terrace didn’t matter.
The white speckles on my dorm room ceiling during that first acid trip
Didn’t matter.
Hell, that girl I am in love with
Didn’t (doesn’t, can’t, won’t) matter.
What matters to me,
As I’m dressed in drag on Halloween,
Lying in your dorm room that smells of Indian food
With 120 dollars of drug money in my pocket,
Is what’s ultimately present. Right there.
Right here. But then, lying there, the time
Clicks over into

November
And at two in the morning it becomes
One in the morning.
I don’t know which of those hours wasn’t real
But when I hug you and cry in the soft light
It is a moment too brief.
It is a moment from which I am pulled straight
Into a hotel bed halfway to New York City,
Where I lie with that girl who I guess I’m in love with
And I’m kissing her, and I realize
That blue spirals still linger on my body, but when she groans,
So softly
That “we shouldn’t be doing this”
I pause before saying “I know,”
And in that pause, my pixelated, televised, and falsified image of reality
Briefly turns to fuzzy grey static, its finite infinity like the trance
Of meat on a rotisserie; I’m waiting
For this turkey to cook
In my friend’s mom’s home—funny
Because I’m still a vegetarian
Who sometimes likes to think of himself, in quest for definition,
As a vegan, but man
I’m beyond definition, I’m beyond anything,
I’m beyond even my darkest imaginings of myself, so when I get wasted
At a 2am that doesn’t click back on Thanksgiving morning,
I have a slice of that ******* turkey,
Cuz the vegan chili my friend and I made at school was good and all,
But I had to bike through freezing rain to get the peppers
And even though I’m starting to feel
Like I’ve found a few people who I can take in with permanence
Nothing feels more like permanence
Than this home-cooked meal
Of turkey and cranberries and sweet potatoes at a granite counter
Where, on January 1st when the ball dropped,
We all took shots, leaving me drunk, stumbling
And eventually
Hungover.
And of course in

December
I’m still
Hung over it all.
Part one, part two,
The futility of that division is so obvious now.
It’s the same poem, same sentence,
And when two not-so-new-anymore friends and I sit on a rooftop in Athens
With a bunch of still so-new I-guess-friends
Right before exam week,
Right before this emotionally excruciating semester comes to a close,
Right before I prepare to head home,
I realize that even though this place
Hasn’t quite become home yet,
My ‘home’ isn’t really at home now either.
I am without a bed in which I feel comfortable,
Without a body next to which my whole life makes sense,
And I am driving to go swing dancing—
An activity I can’t believe I’m still trying to like—
When I finally tell her that I’m in love with her:
Words that don’t matter despite
How much they do. Ultimately,
To me, to her, it’s just
A quick red-light phrase
And this poem is, without too many layers of resonance,
Not even addressed to her,
But to that girl with whom I stood on Lake Erie,
Howling into the wind,
Imagining part two but preparing
For part three, so
With that lantern still floating skyward, “here’s hopin’ that”—
                                         (No. No. No. Start over.)
Here’s hoping that
At midnight
On this New Year’s Eve,
When the ball drops and when we all take shots,
Perhaps around that same granite counter-top,
These clocks
Won’t click back again.
These spirals
Will fade.

On a Tuesday afternoon
we are all in one place so
an outing is long over-due.
Let’s go out for drinks, I suggest
and we agree—as long as we can wear whatever.

On a Tuesday night
I pick the girls up, avidly
avoiding the gaze of your window
in a building forced to live above you.

In Geronimo’s on a Tuesday night
I order ‘Red Sun’, she orders ‘Spicy Blood Orange’
& the other orders wine.
Mine is pink—it’s too strong, no more please.
Well you said ‘for drinks’! they complain
as if I’ve betrayed a pact.

She orders another, ‘Appaloosa Sangria’
and she’s so tiny when the waitress looks at my full glass
—Embarrassing.
I hate the sliding bathroom door where I am
alone with my thoughts for 2.7 minutes but
I’m antsy—time to go

In my Audi on a Tuesday night
I want dessert; I want a donut.
Dunkin it is.

In Dunkin Donuts on a Tuesday night
Tiny tells me she wants to cuddle
sometimes. She’s drunk.
I order a chocolate glazed donut to a poor man with Hispanic features
who is working alone
The homeless lady won’t stop talking and we wont stop laughing
in the Dunkin bathroom.
I heard everything, she says as we leave and giggle in terror.

In my Audi on a late Tuesday night
I don’t want to go back to school yet—I have an idea.
Post Road is empty; I’m hyper-aware
of the black Dodge pick-up driving past.
I don’t question if it’s you.
Did you see me?
Of course you saw me, my car is
unavoidable; it’s **** & white.

In The Grape on a late Tuesday night
there is no one I know so I trail
Wine and Tiny trails me.
I know friends of friends, say Hi, hi, hi
You look cute, so do you! Yay! hug Okay bye, bye, bye
Tiny drinks another with Wine and I’m still
sober where I want to be,
making memories without you, ha.
But it’s time to go back to hellhole and these people kinda ****.

In my Audi for the last time on a late Tuesday night
Mahan lot full, duh.
Quick Center lot full, duh.
Bellarmine lot full, ****!
Regis lot—Where’s your car? It’s got to be here . . .
black Dodge pick-up backed in nicely, I wish I could park beside.
What did you do on a Tuesday night?
Regis lot full, are you kidding?
Tiny has motion sickness, she’s quite a drag
I wonder if my friend nearby, with the golf cart, can drive us back
But **** it, we can walk ten minutes in the cold ‘cuz
I’ve got my jacket and gloves.

In McInnes on a late Tuesday night
Wine goes to bed, Tiny calls for a reinforcement
who is waiting at our door.
Questions with an upward inflection fill my bedroom as if she can’t
take care of herself—her support can barely support himself.
I write a long note to you on my computer on my bed because you ****.
I get a Do you mind if Support sleeps over just this once to make sure I’m okay? text
Which means I won’t get sleep due to overweight heavy breathing
Fine, I’m backed into a corner.
& I know that after my third attempt of slumber, I will end up crying
on the couch in the living room. I should have stayed home.

On an early Wednesday morning
I stuff a bag of clothes, my retainer case, and Berner & Holes and
I power-walk to my car in Jogues—7 minutes, probably or less
& drive the 5 minutes home before the tears fall.
There’s a cop parked beside Pine Creek Deli,
I wonder if he wonders why an Audi is up so late.

In [address] on an early Wednesday morning
my dad is in his boxers in the middle of the stairs.
What are you doing? he asks and I snap back because
Isn’t it obvious what someone would be doing at 2:43 am?
My bed is quiet and my mind is loud wondering—
Did you have fun tonight? for the both of us.

so... i know that i will not be richer than
my parents...
they're heading off for two weeks
to Costa Rica,
while i'm heading back to Poland...
a tourist hellhole,
back to the town of my birth,
a ****-hole (once communism collapsed,
the steel industry collapsed)
to spend five masochistic weeks
with a neurotic grandmother,
who hums a lot,
a song i'm still to decipher...
and a dementia riddled grandfather,
to read a book,
       not drink, not use the internet:
on that point... thank ****!
i'll need about 5 weeks to forget how
**** youtube became in the past year!
it's not exactly a, "holiday"...
when i think of the tropics i think...
that one time in Kenya...
looking for shade...
why do these people travel
to the most obscene destinations
for a ******* suntan?
or some, other **** and *******?!
go somewhere colder...
i said to them... go to Norway...
you'll come back to England...
hey presto! the tropics!
instead, going to a tropical region,
and then experiencing holiday
blues, shell-shocked by the return
to the cold...
   it's like you're in an ice-bath one
minute... foo! into the sauna with
you....           eh?!
but i appreciate the offer...
it's not like enjoyed Kenya that much...
what, a, waste, of, time...
the macaque monkeys and
the pirate baboon were the only fun
bits staying at this tourist resort...
the rest?
bland bland blah blah...
i was so bored that i just pretended
to sleep most of the time...
just give me the ******* basics,
a book to read, long nights,
and two old people,
and enough recipes to cook for them...
i'll be fine...
    i'm not exactly the type
easily distracted like a cat might
be with a laser pointer...
5 weeks? a 3 volume book?
over 1000+ pages?
                smithy...
                   ****... it's more
than a holiday, it's a hiatus...
i can leave this garbage lewd language
behind and turn to the high-brow
19th century *******...
no, i think this time, i'll cut off
the internet completely,
i'll not buy credit...
i'll not drink for five weeks,
i'll certainly not ******* for five weeks...
i'll not smuggle in bottles
of ***** and drink and write
at the kitchen table during the night...
**** it, i'll make this classic...
i'll be armed with 70cl of liquor
for the trip,
that should do it,
the alcohol ought to run out by
the time i'm as Warsaw Western
train-station...
so me cooking dinners for two old
people for a month...
obviously i'll take a book in English,
so i don't, "forget" the language...
Heidegger's ponderings VII - XI...
plus... i sleep better in the fellow
land...
   i don't need alcohol to lullaby
me...
   which is a nice relief...
one thing you find out,
after doing a self-imposed rehab...
you appetite comes back,
you actually eat three meals
a day...
given the day's genesis of
a coffee and 2 hour's worth of reading...
i guess that's why i wouldn't
bother going on holiday
to some exotic location,
sieving through two weeks of
a tourists' resort...
         who the **** expects to read,
on the beech?
  in Kenya i could hardly breathe
in the sun... shade shade... show me the shade!
i almost can't wait...
a hiatus mingling with a reading
holiday...
  a neurotic grandmother
and a dementia prone grandfather...
match made in heaven...
  i just can't wait for the nights
were he attempts to wander out
from the apartment wearing his
pajamas... working on calming him
down and getting him back to bed...
oh, don't worry...
dementia isn't that bad...
it doesn't involve any
   hostile proteins... that eat the brain
away... he's just super-charged
with memories...
that, yes, that flaw of being
mortal...
the cameo cinema floods
the old mind...
                           but i do like
the fact that my presence uplifts him...
i still feel pretty ****** not
bothering to read a book suggestion
he's nudging me to read...
what?
  Leopold Tyrmand's
      book zły,
and i'm like... but when you die...
i won't have any meaningful association
with this country, or these people?
if you're into the vlogging scene
you'll know this...
tim pool / tim cast...
'they're just, economic migrants...
oh? so... that makes me less than
what is a, "genuine" migrant...
a refugee...
you know, the Kosovo refugees
that came to England in the late 1990s...
and were prominent around
the Ilford train-station?
they ****** off!
   but the economic migrants remained,
integrated...
  just economic migrants...
yeah, because economic migrants
were not just the same old migrants
with not language skills they had to learn
as, muted 8 year old kids in
a primary school...
     oh no... economic migration is
privy to all the benefits of...
"other" migrations...
      oh yeah... i was ready, economically...
oomph...
             i had it easy... all the way through,
having my *** smeared with
honey sitting on a laurel wreath!
we're just economic migrants...
           **** it... let's call Pol ***
and get this party started...
we can even groove out
to the brian jonestown massacre's
song fingertips...
                        while we're at it!
god... 5 weeks... no internet...
the rekindled fascination
with the texture of paper in my hands...
this is more than a holiday...
     this is a well earned hiatus;
where i'm going to, isn't my "home"...
all it is, is a memory...
of a child leaving it aged 8...
there is no longing of me for it...
i'm not some czesław miłosz...
who left with a longing...
   economic migration has that aspect
worth its worth...
you... have no emotional investment,
in either the place you left,
or the place you went to...
Poland gave birth to me,
but England isn't a home either...
    this... this language?
this isn't ownership of the British people,
since anyone can acquire it...
conquer it, without even wanting
an inch of the language's geographic
extensions...
  i, i own, this, language...
because, it, is, mine!
this is my home...
            and sure as ****...
Poland is a vague recollection,
the day my grandparents die,
the die when i have no one to speak
Polak to...
                that will be my first death...
i'm, white, you see, i'm privileged,
i get to experience more than one death!
   i really have a vague sense
of identity...
         the best assumption i can
make of myself is... to be... rōnin;
i pledge no allegiance to either camps,
i have a certain critique of both...
i have my reasons...
but it's not like i'm going to tell people
what they are.

I feel so trapped and I can’t escape.
I really am stuck in this godforsaken place.
The walls are closing in,
pushing me down and holding me back.
I could scream for hours,
but no one would ever hear me.
The lid of this box is taped shut
and I’m suffocating in here.
The pain bites into my arm,
criss-crossed streets painted crimson red.
I can’t handle living in this hellhole anymore.

Is this what you wanted?
Did you want something more?
Even in this moment of weakness
I will never live up to your high expectations.
You are a fly that gets stuck in my head,
yelling out insults while my subconscious shudders.

I’m worthless and pathetic?
Are you talking to the mirror again?
Take a long hard look at the girl you destroyed.
While she’s standing there bleeding,
you still demand so much more.

“You deserve everything that’s happened,
you’re an ungrateful, useless *****.”
Just shout your obscenities one more time.
Where will you be without your emotional punching bag?
You are nothing without your words.
A big hulk of a man with darkness behind your eyes.

Just hit me one more time,
I relish in that instant pain.
This agony preferred over your emotional slurs.
You are nothing but a poor excuse for a father.

True Stories #1

This is the first of what will be a series of little vignettes.


When I was fourteen,
I was the alienate hipster rebel
In a private school hellhole.

Hair long, tie knot never pushed up,
Unbuttoned button-down shirts,
Camus lover,
Siddhartha disciple,
Small acts of disdain,
Expressions of teenage hell-pain.

One day, the principal
Threw me out to get a haircut.
Went to the nearby barbershop,
Which was in the underground,
Subway stop.

Returned to school where It was
Pronounced unacceptable.
Twice more this charade-escapade,
Went on, till the barber cried and would not
Charge me anymore.

Shorn like a lamb,
My mother roared like a lion.

The next day, the man in charge,
Who would marry my second son,
Three decades later,
Called me in and sort-of-apologized.

From that day, I never respected authority,
Only learned to fear tyranny.

See photo of my latest protest!

promise me! promise me to get me out of this hell-hole i put myself in! promise me! i don't know why i put myself through, several days of transcribing a snippet, this was merely a snippet from Kierkegaard's oeuvre, but, how unbelievable! each word was a labour, prop up the book in the right place, read, don't look at the keyboard, let the devil find work for idle hands... look for the devil who would be able to write like he might read Braille! my god, the punctuation, ****** an elephant's ***...the essential Kierkegaard - edited by howard v. hong & edna h. hong: hurt my sensibilities, or, rather, my pedantry, when it comes to punctuation... transcribing is not plagiarism... its brick-layer toils... one word, after another... if i were translating from Danish, i think i'd punctuate the text better: to give it some... panache! some: oomph! you know? this is my dedication, i'm supposed to be awake at 7am... i already shined my shoes, i've already prepped my white shirt, black trousers, black clip on tie, i have my papers (credentials) in order... tomorrow i'll be at the London Stadium overlooking West Ham take on Leeds United in the FA cup... like always, i'll be more interested in the crowd... spotting a pretty girl among the "yobs"... because i truly care about football when it's on the t.v.: in real life... i once stood with three cans of beer and watched a non-league / non-professional match compromising of enthusiasts in a park, at a distance... i couldn't see much... i still don't see much difference... unless it's on the t.v.: the stadium doesnt really "frighten" me... but this one time in the park, i sort of looked the Michael Myers part... headphones in... one young woman was trying to... communicate to this older woman: also walking her dog... about confronting me... i think i "said": gaze... i looked at them... the younger woman was trying to tell the older woman about confronting me... the older woman told the younger woman: YOU, HAVE, NOTHING, TO TALK ABOUT, WITH THIS, MAN! i was drinking a beer, standing... a decent distance from the football match: but i also remember that... that 1995 Charity Shield game at the Old Wembley between Manchester United & Newcastle: ants kicking a grain of sand... obviously i didn't understand why i might pretend to be a *****... my new favorite word... *****... alias for paedohpile... if i don't look menacing and some woman can "think" she stands a chance against me: merely posturing... then we have issues... oh **** me... transcribing... that's worse than plagiarism.... i once did the most pristine plagiarism job on some... social-science course up in Edinburgh... i was having to make up credit scores, being the romantic idiot... losing my virginity to Isabella of Grenoble... oh, get a French girlfriend, take up French... i hate the language... they write what they don't speak: phonetically... which is sort of in line with my prior ambition for the plunge - to transcribe some Kierkegaard, but also translate some SZYMON STAROWOLSKI observations... circa... 1650... the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth... sorry.. it's not going to happen... i've done enough transcribing enough *******'s worth of: this punctuation needs to... "go"... to better understand myself... through this iron maiden of: someone else wrote: what someone else wrote... i'll leave ol' SIMON for another take... given... transcribing is a labour... writing, freely... idiosyncratically: appealing to my, appeal...  how, why, when... oh i can deal with that, these days... it's not even concerning what sort of thesaurus peacocking exfoliation is being used / abused by the writer... i'm... more allured... by... punctuation... since i don't bother to rhyme, since i find all lyricism a tad bit... crass... what else is there? the measure of: how to stop... how to begin... how to "objectify" the conjunction-intermediacy of... punctuation... no manner of human speech can be / could be encapsulated by comparing it to a river... point being... i'd rather write as freely as i can, about the most mundane events in my own life: prop up my subjectivity than... somehow... "somehow"... succumb to some sensible objective reality... objectivity does not give me a drive... it does not equip me with a manly persevence... it's antithetical to what i understand as human nature simply because... ha ha... objectivity has been owned by the English... it's their lot of being sensible... like watching would-be journalists looking at what's currently happening in Kazakhstan... then trying to compare it to... the posturing: the civilian security of protests in Ham-Ham-H'America... and it's like... so what? the people are simply, expected to, take it?! the liberty's of the individual that believes himself to be outside the collective will... sure... well... sounds nice... unless of course... the hive really does come after you... i'm all for individual liberties, after all... i own a private library that could put the public library where i live to shame... although... i'll give them a sly one: Thomas Mann's Dr. Faustus... they owned it, i simply loaned it... fair enough... but i'd rather write about women... i was having my haircut done... closed my eyes... because... hell... the mirror and ****... with my eyes closed i was stroked by this blonde bombshell... we talked about owning dogs, about owning cats... Alsatians? oh, i really have a hard-on for them... i used to own a dobberman... prior to it being illegal to snip their ears and cut their tails... she was a cat that does that to her? like she looks to be self-harming? perhaps she should nickname him Freddy Krueger?! my maine ****? oh... it's rainy, he just sleeps in my bed... he usually sleeps with me.. what?! the bed's big enough for the both of us... i'd love to own a boxer... i'd love to own a rottweiler... i'd also love to own a Triumph bike...

one of my replies... you know, a liter of whiskey can go down well... i get double drunk from good conversation, i rarely encounter what i'd consider a good conversation... that's why... i much prefer to drink alone, of note... i had more fun pretending to talk to myself than expecting "talking" to be an anti-canvas with some, living, breathing: might have kidney failure, etc. punk or, sociopathic? here's the script:

see you now,, i'm just about to rewrite a Kierkegaard transcript.... i can't imagine it being much fun... the whole process is so unoriginal... but oh, oh so necessary... that i sort of don't want to live without it... bonus points... i''ve drank enough to make it... bearable... trans-scripting....i danced a little in my bedroom, donned my cat with a pair of sunglasses.... thank god i'm not kind of a sort of H'american version of a... "winner"... so much of life can be tolerated when it's not being competed for!...

i've just filled out an induction form for the West Ham stadium, played niceties with my supervisor, sent her an emoticon, LOLz back... i'm pumped up, ready to smack a few teenage boys into shape, what, could possibly go wrong? speaking below the depth of breath / audibility, watching the birds... i want, i want to give them a second, a third, a fourth... chance... let me give these people a chance... i know their failures... but... the possibility of being loved by one of them, whether man, or woman, whether pseudo-woman... i'll go as far as to say... i wouldn't mind a "Thai surprise"... i know they're capable of it... give me this already acquired heart of stone... and i'll show you... that they'll bleed rivers of honesty... just a little while... that is all i ask...

this is all, of course, before the plunge begins...
wait...l of course there's more, there have to be constellations
involved!

it was originally titled: Private Library Allure...
now, i'm "thinking": two ripe mangoes...
a mango curry or a mango chutney,
or perhaps, both?!

i have this one particular constellation in mind, that's visible to the naked eye, don't worry about - wait... let me take a second look:

•
                  •


                    •
      •



           •

•
    

            •          (circa)... the big wheel...
the grizzly she... in terms of gods & men...
there's an replica: much smaller...
so i guess this is the microscope: since it is enlarged
while the identical constellation
is a telescope...
       no matter... i'm thinking of this constellation

                                 •
                          
                          •
      
                   •
                       •
                    

                          •
                             •
                                •



              •
          ­                                            •

the scorpion constellation, it only appeared once
(to my knowledge) in pop culture,
in Dreamworks' the Prince of Egypt...

now wouldn't that be a waste... me simply drinking,
not allowing alcohol to be the extra calorie intake
that might require me to scribble...
waste of a good whiskey: should i simply drink it
and not focus on scribbling...

point being, i'm about to undertake something
i'm not very keen on, to prove a point,
i'm about to transcript two of the most profound pieces
of writing that recently caught my attention...

not to mention i'm reserving bragging rights...
my private library is... richer...
than the public library of the town of Romford...
i might be an alcoholic,
but i'm also a bibliophile...
there's nothing more precious thank a book...
perhaps a tonne of bricks...

why did i decide to cycle in these temperatures...
****'s sake... i'm old school,
i don't "trust" wi-fi cordless earphones...
the temperature dipped so low that
now the wires are performing at sub-optimal standards...
sort of hushed...
mind you... i love the cold of the January nights...
******* get such a hard-on for the wind
that they almost feel like they've been pierced...

none of the following will be original content,
but i just have to transcript it...
maybe a whiskey refill... a cigarette...
i need to get into the groove of typing up
someone else's work...
oh ****, there are two of them...
well... at least one of them i will not have to translate...
however: do i want to include the original...
all those diacritical markers (ctrl + c / ctrl + p)
will be rather fiddly... do i have the time?

- oh, right... i'm here... the above was...
"somewhere" / "sometime" else...
a sort of... quantum-dasein...
past-participle... black hole... blah blah...
i'm still gearing up for the transcript
of Kierkegaard...
the translation of that ****** equivalent
of the Czech: YAN HUß

-------------------------------------- (pending line)

the pending line is not moving... i've already
written a pre-scriptum a day "late"...
i think i'll manage the Kierkegaard...
but none of the ****** "crap": since...
i'm not about to translate...

once more, please refer to the essential Kierkegaard...
edited by howard. v. hong...
& edna h. hong...
            hong? i too have a terrible surname...
a bit like ******, or Stalin...
people see Elert... they immediately prompt me
with: so... you're AH-LERT?!
i never hit them back with with...
you sort of missed this zeppelin...
it's etymologically german...
in earnest... it's missing: SCH...
that's... ESCHLERT...
          but i have no trouble with people
who like... low hanging fruit...
pedestrian interactions...
         a peasant among among peasants...
a peasant who can discriminate against
peasants...
my given surname at birth was no much better...
fellow countrymen...
oh... i remember it... this one time...
tricked me...
open your mouth...
so i opened my mouth...
then quickly closed it...
i was spat at... a fellow countryman spat
in my face...
although he was aiming at my mouth...
i hold... not allegiance to the English...
1997... why was i deported?
for being an economical migrant?!
oh... the world is now, somehow, ******* welcome?!
i hold not allegiance to the English:
to the tongue: all...
but i also hold not allegiance to my inherent
****** reference... i'd rather just call it
a "reference"...

i abhor both parties... one for sort of telling me to
******* because:
they're now the church-going party of people
and my grandfather was conflated with being
a communist party member:
sure... since... socialism in a soviet
satellite was very much the same sort of shin-dig
as it was in RaSHa... ROSIYA...
*******... wanking me off a little...
**** Poland... **** England...
both can sink... to... whatever they deem
to be acceptable by their standards of...
oh... in England... peer Lord Ahmed... *****...
Rotherham... fun times!
i don't even want to know anything about
Poland.... my ethnic class by birth...
i'd rather ******* and create trans-ethnic mongrel
gremlins with a a girl from Kenya...
in Kenya...
yeah... me... in Kenya... creating a pseudo-Brazillian
republic of... copper-skinned polymaths &
multilingual freaks!
sign me up!
                  
i really didn't expect to mind much of me...
it's nice that... they read so little nd watch so much regurgitation
of a t.v...

like i once pointed out: objectivity is...
overrated... hell... it's more than that...
by now it has been hijacked by fake-news and
anti-science pseudo-narratives...

which tells you a lot about a people who
seemingly tolerate Muslims...
tolerating Muslims that don't tolerate Sufism...
i'm good with the Turkish barbers...
anything else... you better ask a Hindu...
how do Hindus "tolerate" Islam... if, at all?

these are not my words... they are a verbatim
transcript that most public libraries will not own,
but i own... ergo...

the subjective existing thinker is aware of the dialectic of communication. whereas objective thinking is indifferent to the thinking subject and his existence, the subjective thinker as existing is essentially interested in his own thinking, is existing in it.

(insert: my own questioning furthered from the genesis of this 19th century Danish thinker... point aside... i am... the queen's subject... i am not, the queen's object... the queen is not forcing me to be subjectively objectionable to... say... building a new wing for Windsor Castle... i can't be, regarded as the queen's object... constitutional monarchy doesn't work through the expedience of extension... i am the queen's subject, i am not her object... i am subjected to the queen... the monarch... but i'm not... "objected"? i'm not objecting to the hierarchy she presupposes, predisposes with... it's almost a "paradox"... but as a subject... in the most immediacy... as a subject... i am not her object... i am not her servant! that some people, within her immediacy are her objects, by regal extension, her guards, her... ******* tea nannies... sure... but... i am beyond her claim for being objectified... i am "subjectified"... how? i can fester... concern for the monarch, i can adorn her with "dasein": care... but her regal extension dilutes itself... her regal power... the cut-off point... is... when she can no longer objectify me... i can be no more her ******* tea-*****-nanny... her soldier... hell... a police officer is not made a police officer by some royal decree.... a police officer is a subject of the regal authority... a soldier? an object of the regal authority... why? the soldier serves the crown... the police officer? serves the public: the subject of the subject(s)... not... like the solider: the object of the object... to be subjected to "something": is hardly demeaning when otherwise the supposed stance of being "demeaned" is to be: objectified... counter to any sort of "argument": to be objectified... is to be spared... the experience of being: subjected to... i.e. / e.g. to objectify a woman... is a synonymous expression for... not subjecting a woman to... what objectifying her in the first place might... entail... by objectifying a woman... you're at least not subjecting her to... the undercurrents of objectification per se...

even i am thinking to myself: this sounds stupid...
the fox is currently having an asthmatic fit of giggles
come 2:20am...
if i am objectifying a woman as a "thinking thing"...
then... i'll be less likely to subject her to: think...
if i am objectifying a woman as a hammer...
then... i'll be less likely to ask her to:
also bring some nails along...
that's the positive on the micro-scale...
because on the macro-scale?
i'd rather be the queen's subject than...
be her... well... the extension of the queen:
her object... her tea-*****-nanny...
her soldier... her... prime minister...
it's a ******* weird dynamic... but...
it's the most pristine that has ever existed... period...

constitutional monarchy ought to be
the envy of the world, for some of the bad apples...
it still i... it should never be undermined...
should it ever be... i'd call that... treason!
to the very fabric of reality!
and as someone who was diagnosed as schizophrenic?!
go figure... but don't come cryuig to me...
make, sure...
you have some "ice-cream" **** readily available
to sa e you, some Rotherham **** heart-throb...
why oh why... having lived n these Isles...
for as long as i have...
the would me mothers of my would be children...
i'm not even going to beg to, ask...
low i.q. breeds low i.q.:
naive... people(s)...
           genius is an aberration...
it's a  mutation...better stuid and reproductive...
work along: plenty for the ants..
*******, ants...
and once they age?
darts?! football matches?

i can't blame them!
i have yet to cite them proper...
although: thank god the filter
of having to invest in having to read...
in people actually reading

therefore, his thinking has another kind of reflection, specifically, that of inwardness, of possession, whereby it belongs to the subject and to no one else. whereas objective thinking invests everything in the result and assists all humankind  to cheat by copying and reeling off the results and answers, subjective thinking invests everything in the process of becoming and omits the result, partly because this belongs to him, since he possesses the way, partly because he as existing is continually in the process of becoming, as is every human being who has not permitted himself to be tricked into becoming objective, into inhumanly becoming speculative thought.

the reflection of inwardness is the subjective thinker's double-reflection. in thinking, he thinks the universal, but, as existing in this thinking, as acquiring this in his inwardness, he becomes more and more subjectively isolated.

the difference between subjective and objective thinking must also manifest itself in the form of communication ˣ. this means that the subjective thinker must promptly become aware that the form of communication must artistically possess just as much reflection as he himself, existing in his thinking, possesses. artistically, please note, for the secret does not consist in his enunciating the double-reflection directly, since such an enunciation is a direct contradiction.

ordinary communication between one human being and another is entirely immediate, because people ordinarily exist in immediacy. when one person sttes something and another acknowledges the same thing verbatim, they are assumed to be in agreement and to have understood each other. yet because the one making the statement is unware of the duplexity (dobbelthed) of thought-existence, he is also unable to be aware of the double-reflection of communication. therefore, he has no intimation that this kind of agreement can be the greatest misunderstanding and naturally has no intimation that, just as the subjective existing thinker has set himself free by the duplexity, so the secret of communication specifically hinges on setting the other free, and for that very reason he must not communicate himself directly; indeed, it is even irreligious to do so. this latter applies in proportion to the essentiality of the subjective and consequently applies first and foremost within the religious domain, that is, if the communicator is not god himself or does not presume to appeal to the miraculous authority of an apostle but is just a human being and also cares to have meaning in what he says and what he does.

objective thinking is completely indifferent to subjectivity and thereby to inwardness and appropriation; its communication is therefore direct. it is obvious that it does not therefore have to be easy. but it is direct, it does not have the illusiveness and the art of double-reflection. it does not have that god-fearing and humane soliciude of subjective thinking in communicating itself; it can be understood directly; it can be reeled off. objective thinking is therefore aware only of itself and is therefore no communication, at least no artistic communication, inasmuch as it would always be required to think of the receiver and to pay attention to the form of communication in relation to the receiver's misunderstanding. objective thinking is, like most people, so fervently kind and communicative; it communicates right away and at most resorts to assurances about its truth, to recommendations and promises about how all people someday will accept this truth - so sure is it. or perhaps rather so unsure, because the assurances are recommendations are the promises, which are indeed for the sake of those others who are supposed to accept this truth, might also be for the sake of the teacher, who needs the security and dependability of a majority vote. if his contemporaries deny him this, he will draw on posterity - so sure is he. this security has something in common with the independence that, independent of the world, needs the world as witness to one's independenceso as to be certain of being independent.

ˣ double-reflection is already implicit in the ideas of communication itself: that the subjective individual (why by inwardness wants to express the life of the eternal, in which all sociality and all companionship are inconceivable because the existence-category, movement, is inconceivable here, and hence essential communication is also inconceivable because everyone must be assumed to possess everything essentially), existing in the isolation of inwardness, wants to communicate himself, consequently that he simultaneously wants to keep his thinking in the inwardness of his subjective existence and yet wants to communicate himself. it is not possible (except for thoughtlessness, for which ll things are indeed possible) for this contradiction to become manifest in a direct form. - it is not so difficult, however, to understand that a subject existing in this way may want to communicate himself. a person in love, for instance, to whom his ****** love is his very inwardness, may well want to communicate himself, but not directly, just because the inwardness of ****** love is the main thing for him. essentially occupied with continually acquiring the inwardness of ****** love, he has no result and is never finished, but he may nevertheless want to communicate; yet for that very reason he can never use a direct form, since that presupposes results and completion. so it is also in a god-relationship. just because he himself is continually in the process of becoming in an inward direction, that is, in inwardness, he can never communicate himself directly, since the movement is here the very opposite. direct communication requires certainty, but certainty is impossible for a person in the process of becoming, and it is indeed a deception. thus, to employ an ****** relationship, if a maiden in love yearns for the wedding day because this would give her assured certainty, if she wanted to make herself comfortable in legal security as a spouse, if she preferred marital yawning to maidenly yearning, then the man would rightfully deplore her unfaithfulness, although she indeed did not love anyone else, because she would have lost the idea and actually did not love him. and this, after all, is the essential unfaithfulness in an ****** relationship, the incidental unfaithfulness is to love someone else.

as a side-note... these impossible, to my mind:
imaginary "problems"...
say, for example...
the racist... the non-racist... and the... anti-racist...
do i use racial slurs, sure, but i always tend
to "translate" them to by implicitly urban scenario
tokens... i'm a "******" if i don't get on time,
i'm supposed to work for free...
i think of racism along the lines...
well... you, know... that Pakistani grooming
gang in Rotherham...
it doesn't affect me personally,
i'm a bachelor, i don't have a daughter...
but... even on my level, since i'm so far away
from the issue... i start to get affected...
**** is the lowest of the low...
i once ****** a *******... all giggly and drunk
at first... but then... she started crying during *******...
a burn-out moment on her behalf...
i had to stop... o.k. you're selling yourself... willingly...
but... i'm not going to... whatever...
if she might have claimed p.t.s.d.
i could also claim the same...

*** is ugly... just before perching myself on the windowsill
once the night arrived...
i heard a voice in the darkness... thanking me...
at the end of my garden... i wasn't exactly listening:
i never listen... but these words of: thank you
sort of penetrated me...
where is the supposed "Ummah"
when it comes to the Uyghurs?!
the fond fellows of Arabia... would rather send
their suicide virgins to the western land
with prospect of conquest, with prospect of seeking
our proselytes... than...
keep their Ummah intact... do the Arabs really think
that their Chinese believers are...
worth so little to them?
           where are the attacks on China?!
eh... Pakistani uncle said grandma
then decided to **** some cousin...
  sorry... low... hanging... fruit...
   i need a drink...
                            
        i can understand racism... esp. given the attempt
at a multicultural society...
i rather think of myself as a non-racist...
****** a black girl, ****** a Thai girl...
****** an Indian girl...
but... this... white, female, anti-racism stance?
i don't get it... daddy issues?
they must be daddy issues... parental issues...
you have to purposively make yourself anti-racist...
affirmative action buzzwords...
you can never be: the highest pinnacle of negation:
not-racist... you have to be actively: anti-racist...
you can never be passively: non-racist...
you have to... do... "x, y & z"...

these words shouldn't even see the light of day...
so much *******...
all of it... crass...
as much as the Brazil-Project of interracial
new-Arab interbreeding sounds great...
newly tanned "Spaniards"... "Arabs"...
"Indians"... if you've ever visited Kenya...
i remember being approached by these three gorgeous
Kenyan girls working the pandering circuit...
black skin glistening in the moonlight...
as if someone rubbed them with butter...
plump... one of the local Kenyan boys asked whether
i'd like to visit a local bar... i declined...
i forgot myself... took to the hammock...
slept the whole night in the open...
some ****** stole my cognac while i was asleep...
me? we best interact...
but... interracial breeding sort of disrespects...
the seeming aeons of... what allowed black people
to be black... what allowed white people to be
white...
it's no good, like... black girls are not angry
when the white girls are giving up so much ***
to their male counterparts?

if i'm supposed to "think" about race... sure... i'll give
it a short shot... because i'm expected...
i have a furry river and.. by now:
i'm more res vanus than res cogitans...
i don't think i need to think on the basis of
narration... i'll just be reactionary...
not because it's easier... it just seems rather...
necessary...

anti-racist: tropes! they are just that... people try
so hard to not-be... X... that they almost forget that...
they are X... because they are compensating for
the environment they were brought up in...
daddy's sins... mother's opinions...
by now a racist is better suited for conversation
than an anti-racist... who the ****** bleached "us"?
it's like: i can't the difference between people...
like... Somalis don't look more ancient than the rest
of the Africans?! maybe i should find more Ethiopians...

i sometimes think of "existing" in a way that...
elevates the posit of: exiting...
sure... cogito, ergo... blah blah...
but that's not enough... to exist is also readying
yourself to exit... existing is a pseudo-continuum
of rented... time, body... in order to...
make the banal finalities of / for an exit...