in my family conversation is seldom thoughtful questioning filled with wonder quiet pauses instead it is sociable banter teasing goading spontaneous gratuitous remarks clever embellishment excessive flattery it is an ancient system passed down patronage pecking order nepotism sycophancy near to impossible for me to be honest in presence of their overwhelming vanity when it comes to family gatherings my voice isn’t very strong my family’s joking squelches my chirp they are each and all more loud sarcastic faster wittier more crude outrageous more funny loud gregarious sanguine Mom embarrasses herself with uncalled for flirtations (her mental state rapidly deteriorating) everyone laughs boisterously they snap kid exaggerate amplify taunt i can hardly get word in i need to repeat myself several times or more to be heard my voice is minor i struggle to tell story they listen politely then rush back into their rowdy repartee i am way too sincere way too naked in my ineptitude my stomach ties in knots biting lip shivering from cold fear what’s going to happen pitch black in front of me voice inside screams please i need help so bad please make it easier i’m lost in all this commotion drama hunger lack of clarity

Chicago 1980 Odysseus always revered cousin Chris is taller tan-skinned handsomer stronger protective of Odysseus knowing he is frivolous liability tags along with Chris and his prosperous trader friends advantaged echelon inherited wealth educated white young men they float above everyone else their tastes in clothes furnishings run Brooks Brothers Burberry Giorgio Armani Ralph Lauren John-Paul Gautier Paul Smith Emile Zegna Salvatore Ferragamo their preference in women run typically blonde large ******* tight butts make-up painted nails they think Odysseus is a freak because he usually chooses females none of them want Odysseus likes skinny girls flat chests glasses he knows he is an extraneous art pet to Chris and his group

Chris joins newly built state of art fitness facility pricey membership accesses all of Chicago’s fast track shakers movers politicians lawyers pretty people Odysseus has his limits he does not have money to join also he dislikes snooty elitism several times Chris invites Odysseus as guest Odysseus feels insecure outsider Chris always includes Odysseus pays for dinners they begin with round of doubles then 2nd round of doubles before glancing at menu Chris drinks Canadian Club on the rocks Odysseus follows they raucously order extravagant meals with appetizers 3rd 4th 5th rounds of doubles after pricey dinner at chic restaurant Chris’s group rendezvous at bar or club they order round of drinks tip lavishly sip drink glare around room leave barely touched drinks walk out with look of disdain they scavenge more bars in search of females or some intangible attraction Odysseus is never certain what they are looking for or what is the source of their contempt each wears black leather jacket carries huge wads of cash $20s $50s $100s folded stuffed in front pockets no wallets or clips

the Red Meat palace or Chang’s Szechwan grill are their favorite restaurants as many as 8 men sit at table pack mentality prevails for dessert course they pull out small brown bottles filled with ******* if it is Friday night Chris’s pad is frequently elected females other arrangements settle bill depart restaurant one night Odysseus arrives early at Chang’s wanders downstairs into women’s boutique salesgirl named Fiona greets him they hit it off he invites her to join him and his hosts upstairs after her shift is done Fiona arrives as dessert is about to be served table of men look desirously at Fiona beams Odysseus and Fiona along with Chris Phil Tom go to Odysseus’s place Fiona is perhaps 22 petite lovely with deep blue eyes set wide apart long eyelashes brown thick hair cut to shoulders high ******* pink ******* fragrance of linden flowers delighted by male attention Fiona ***** fondles each men are quite intoxicated Odysseus and Phil are only capable to sustain erections Odysseus stares mesmerized at Fiona’s extraordinarily swollen ***** she notices his fixation grins blushing men shout commands but in actuality Fiona is in charge reducing each of them to little boys vying for her attention near conclusion she requests they form circle around her ******* on her chest she fondles them touches herself men laugh mockingly as if to compensate for their lack of performance Tom picks up plastic dart gun aims it at Fiona she laughs crawls on all fours Tom fires dart hitting her on **** Phil grabs gun from Tom reloads another dart suddenly it feels like fraternity stunt Odysseus goes along offended by his own complicity to him episode feels more like men having *** with each other than being with a woman telephone rings it is Odysseus’s latest love pursuit she tells him she is on her way over everyone rushes to put on clothes change bed sheets they depart within minutes she arrives finally ready after weeks of romancing to put out for him after that night when Chris and Odysseus get buzzed in bar Chris routinely speaks the line to women have you ever been done by 2 cousins one night at Green River tavern woman squeezes milk from her ****** into shot glass dares cousins to drink Chris laughing turns down her offer Odysseus shoots back shot of milk then takes swig of Irish whiskey cousins go see Billy Idol at Odysseus’s insistence they stand near front stage young girls screaming after show driving home in Chris’s Fiat Spider Chris complains his ears are ringing i don’t know how i’ll be able to work tomorrow Odysseus nods like he hears hollers out window hey little sister shotgun!

Mom and Dad want their son to enjoy fruits of burgeoning affluence they feel certain what they are doing is best for him they rent quarter seat at Chicago Mercantile Exchange they originally promised full seat but they are overextended Odysseus enrolls in trading course he learns to trade Certificates of Deposit and Eurodollars which are recently established markets suddenly Odysseus has lots of cash his parents are dishing out he does not know what he is doing newly launched markets lack investment and fleece young men of their parent’s money his friends surroundings change he loses sight of himself he is a thoroughly incompetent trader bleeding cash scatters money between harebrained panicked trades or ******* girls $1000. wristwatch when Mom and Dad see jewelry they become furious in a way he represents his parent’s design for how to build successful son yet their plan is going dreadfully wrong he wants to stand up speak out against Dad and Mom he is not courageous enough to counter their weight he wants to express with more assurance his passion to pursue painting and writing isn’t fact he graduated from art school evidence enough of his aspirations commodities exchange is last place in the world he belongs Odysseus is risk taker but he is not aggressive or entrepreneurial only lesson he has learned with respect to his parents is how to run away

by all appearances cousin Chris is brilliant trader in reality Chris is hooked up with powerful crooked brokers they use him as their bagman he covers losing trades and is compensated or offsets winning side of profitable trades subsequently dealt his share Chris is not a criminal he stumbles into profit-making situation when certain conditions are flexible to advantages Chris is diligent hard worker the vast sums of money he earns do not distort his personality he is always generous shielding of Odysseus gold trading pit becomes so shady S.E.C. intervenes relinquishing exchange’s contract Chris and his bosses walk away unscathed having made their bundles

Mom and Aunt Rita run social itinerary for family including birthdays holidays all other gatherings where family will meet changes by the minute depending on Mom and Aunt Rita’s caprice checking in by telephone at least an hour before is mandatory arriving at destination Mom and Aunt Rita insist on specific table location seating arrangement it is important they be seen viewed by others at restaurant they never sit near kitchen or washrooms or where there is too much noise light away from drafts who sits next to who is crucial round tables are their favorite preferring backs to wall looking out so they can nod wave Mom rules from proud pedestal Dad upholds chain of command sometimes he irritably gripes Aunt Rita immediately comes to Mom’s defense Dad points finger back off Rita you’re way out of line where do you come up with a remark like that Mom mediates Max that’s enough in a way the sisters are spoiled little girls over-indulged by their father they believe their opinions and tastes are the best most correct everyone in family are subordinate to their no and don’t Mom and Aunt Rita routinely criticize Odysseus’s semantics oppose his observations critical of his clothes conduct they handily misconstrue his comments to mean fodder for their amusement Mom and Aunt Rita’s efforts to keep prim proper decorum cause resentment Odysseus feels constricted by his subservient role in drama of family he fails to understand their care

Odysseus busts out of markets leaving behind alarming debts for family to pay off he feels humiliation disgrace plunges into bottomless sleepless despair hides in house door locked window shutters shut phone rings unanswered hates life willfully wants to destroy himself there is no way out after week Chris comes by to see if he is all right Odysseus is reluctant to let Chris in Chris commands be a man get a grip on yourself Odysseus replies maybe i’m not a man he feels failure shame realizes he has become traitor to himself he wants to look at existence head on embrace it but all he knows are dishonor regret deception he conceives his being has been stolen he wants his life back but knows not how to recover it he feels deep in obligation to Mom and Dad thinks to escape from Chicago but his parent’s control is crushing he wakes late drinks black coffee smokes cigarettes marijuana hangs out alone sky changes from light to dark to light phone rings he reads Nietzsche Sartre frequents ***** Hole punk rock dive several blocks from residence becomes orphan of night drinking drugging

January 5 2011 30 years have passed Chris marries fathers son becomes best father to his child he can be leaves markets in late 80’s Dad dies in ’91 Odysseus leaves Chicago in 1994 he manages to paint some paintings write some words stomach ties in knots biting lip shivering from cold fear what’s going to happen ***** pink gray skies behind pitch black in front sometimes you need to take a step back in order to move forward Mom says she worried enough about money when she was younger and isn’t going to worry about it anymore her entire life she boasted i’m saving for my children but in the end she saved solely for herself Odysseus never learned to stand on his own all he ever wanted is to love and be loved he wonders what will happen next

Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus
Both atheists
Both French (sort of - Camus from Algeria)
Both live through the horror of World War 2
Both believe life is meaningless.
Absurd.
Both have lots of affairs
(But Camus is handsome
And Sartre is, um, not)

Both resist the Nazis
But Camus says Sartre
Was a writer who resisted
Not a resister who wrote.

Sartre's titles: Nausea, No Exit, Being and Nothingness. And he believes that
Hell is other people.

Camus: I rebel; therefore, we exist.

i only started collecting a library, because, would you believe it, my local library was a pauper in rags and tatters; apologies for omitting necessary diacritic marks, the whiskey was ******* on icecubes to a shrivel.*

ernest hemingway, e.m. forster, mary shelley,
aesop, r. l. stevenson, jean-paul sartre,
jack kerouac, sylvia plath, evelyn waugh,
chekhov, cortazar, freud, virginia woolf,
philip k. ****, dostoyevsky, aleksandr solzhenitsyn,
oscar wilde, malcolm x, kafka, nabokov,
bukowski, sacher-masoch, thomas a kempis,
yevgeny zamyatin, alexandre dumas,
will self, j. r. r. tolkien, richard b. bentall,
james joyce, william burroughs, truman capote,
herman hesse, thomas mann, j. d. salinger,
nikos kazantzakis, george orwell,
philip roth, joseph roth, bulgakov, huxley,
marquis de sade, john milton, samuel beckett,
huysmans, michel de montaigne, walter benjamin,
sienkiewicz, rilke, lipton, harold norse,
alfred jarry, miguel de cervantes, von krafft-ebing,
kierkegaard, julian jaynes, bynum porter & shephred,
r. d. laing, c. g. jung, spinoza, hegel, kant, artistotle,
plato, josephus, korner, la rochefoucauld, stendhal,
nietzsche, bertrand russell, irwin edman,
faucault, anwicenna, descartes, voltaire, rousseau,
popper,  heidegger, tatarkiewicz, kolakowski,
seneca, cycero, milan kundera, g. j. warnock,
stefan zweig, the pre-socratics, julian tuwim,
ezra pound, gregory corso, ted hughes,
guiseppe gioacchino belli, dante, peshwari women,
e. e. cummings, ginsberg, will alexander, max jacob,
schwob, william blake, comte de lautreamont,
jack spicer, zbigniew herbert, frank o'hara,
richard brautigan, miroslav holub, al purdy,
tzara, ted berrigan, fady joudah, nikolai leskov,
anna kavan, jean genet, albert camus, gunter grass,
susan hill, katherine dunn, gil scott-heron,
kleist, irvine welsh, clarice lispector, hunter thompson,
machado de assisi, reymont, tolstoy, jim bradbury,
norman davies, shakespeare, balzac, dickens,
jasienica, mary fulbrook, stuart t. miller,
walter la feber, jan wimmer, terry jones & alan ereira,
kenneth clark, edward robinson, heinrich harrer,
gombrowicz, a. krawczuk, andrzej stasiuk, ivan bunin,
joseph heller, goethe, mcmurry, atkins & de paula,
bernard shaw, horace, ovid, virgil, aeschyles,
rumi, omar khayyam, humbert wolfe, e. h. bickersteth,
asnyk, witkacy, mickiewicz, slowacki, lesmian,
lechon, lep szarzynski, victor alexandrov, gogol,
william styron, krasznahorkai, robert graves,
defoe, tim burton, antoine de saint-exupery,
christiane f., salman rushdie, hazlitt, marcus aurelius,
nick hornby, emily bronte, walt whitman,
aryeh kaplan, rolf g. renner, j. p. hodin, tim hilton... etc.

Of Sartre and Camus
and the rest of the host
(too many besides)
to them should we toast?

I am a Zen-man
struggle in reason
I'll not-- what life metes
humbly I accept---it's prison

to live in the mind
questioning is dumb
ten thousand doubts
emerge---what a dreadful outcome!

all that's in life is
pure such-ness
call a rose by ten other names
it will still but be its intrinsic loveliness

the river is the river
the hill is the hill
the hour is the hour
that which is still is still

of the universe I am part
without me it's not integral or whole
only in this blend will my heart
find its peace--we are the substance of the same pole

drawn from the field of void's mystery
in the eons of time-- beyond any intelligent telling
self is delusion, we are one of the Many
which is the meaning beyond all meaning

that which is truth
has no name to it attached
the Tao is the way
to nothing attached

of Sartre and Camus, also all those in the Restless Band
the clamour for understanding, the angst and the anguish
in the existential absurdity--from that I walk far away
in Zen's teachings I abide which all doubts extinguish.

No matter how much I shiver
I can't seem to cool
The heat in the pit of my stomach

having just finished reading heidegger's
ponderings II -VI -
   i still i can't believe i spent over 30 quid
on a book -
i peered i to the shelf that has stacks of
books from the floor right up to nearly
touching the ceiling...
so the interrogation began: which one you
inanimate objects, requires animation?!
huh?! which one of you deserves my
attention, been wasting the longest?
       seems pretty obvious after a while,
it needs to be a work of aphorisms -
   i'll pass on nietzche, i am a monarch with
a library, and i have ensured in being
democratic, in having many varying
"advisers" - plus with drinking being
my foremost enterprise, i require: "snippets"...
ah!
        spinoza's "liber scriptum in infernum"
(a book written in hell) -
the theological-political treatise
will do just fine...
        it is written in aphorisms -
       i'm starting to take to the style -
                     i abhor the anglophonic
regurgitation of maxims,
                regurgitated as hypotheses
rather than theories... ugh,
excruciating...
                              plus the necessary
interludes of glug glug glug of
ms. amber with some caramel fizz...
  it'll do...
          mind you, i have to stress an observation...
and it's most shocking...
so i walked into my local library...
the central library of romford -
             and believe me when i state
my bewilderment:
i invested and subsequently accumulated
a more meaty library than the entire,
*******, town!
                        it's almost, scary?
sure, they had thomas mann's doctor
faustus... but that's about it!
   i've never seen a poorer public
library in my life!
                            i still can't
fudge-pack this fact into my head!
i'm trying to push it in, but every time
i try to push a square object through
    a triangular hole i get the same result!
won't go through!
                   to think that some people
aspire to a contentment of owning books,
that some even desire the facade of
owning books, as to dupe the opposite ***
in "being" well-read...
                       staggering to think that
people dare to collect books and pretend
to have read them!
    perhaps i write "poetry" because
i read... perhaps my struggle with:
  why can't i write a single novel(?!) stems
from the fact that: novelists probably
read scarcely?
                i can't imagine a novelist reading
a lot...
as i once heard, this one novelist didn't
read jack(****), because he had the phobia
of un-originality / temptation of plagiarism...
maybe my frustration at being unable
to provide a novel, a "creative" writing piece
is that i have the libra maxim:
  never read as much as your write,
  and never find yourself having read: enough.
maybe you can only become a poet
  when you become a reader: proper -
democratic... a democratic reader:
  and never the monarch of fictional puppets,
ever pulling the strings...
  how does that sound?
              - so,
in poetry a hyphen is like a new paragraph,
but, given the limited space, the cascade,
you have to excuse me when i want to
suddenly change course:
        from aphorism of 1 - 7 of
spinoza's preface i'm already hooked...
the style? it's antithetical to narrative,
  language is very mandible,
   i mean: extremely mandible -
words act like punctuation marks,
even though punctuation marks are missing,
they are ingested by words shyly
   being invested in dance-impromptu of
choice, i.e. when to punctuate / take a breath /
a cognitive moment of self-release-into-deviating
narration of one's own choice / accord...
sure, it was later replicated by joyce in
ulysses: too obviously, and immediately
plagiarised by sartre -
               but as literary traditions go:
too obvious, since both joyce and sartre
didn't use words as punctuation marks -
sartre still encompassed the paragraph,
  joyce just spewed an amalgam of a:
a honest attempt at being dishonest about
allowing razor incisions into
          - which doesn't make much
sense to me at present...
what was it, at the end of ulysses?
          ah... like a sculptor working backwards
from a sculpted piece of work,
back into its raw state: a block of stone,
perhaps rectangular, but not necessarily so...
yes, but spinoza toys with words as
being punctuation marks... even if
a few punctuation are invoked:
  too few, too few...
       the words back up the reading style...
i still can't believe that the majority
of books in my private library do not
entertain the shelves of the public library,
in a town, that is nearing the half-million
mark of its populace.

a. aristotle's nonchalance in comparison to his other ideas when investigating the lagoon (although wrong on the no. of teeth in a woman's mouth and the origin of flies from rotting fish - two jars, one open, the other covered - he treated his theory of adaptation of an animal / in humans on an individual basis - with less concentration of necessity for the theory to be expanded than his logic or poetics) - i.e. it was not good enough to be made dogmatic, like darwinism, therefore aristotelian darwinism does not exact a necessity to put the theory akin to a theological standpoint.

b. 'the darkened mind, whether that be by illness or some other cause illuminates in reverse to the mind of the plateaus: the stark difference is that the darkened mind attracts light like a moth into it, although it does this attraction without ever revealing the pin-point, the last revealing point of what the light has to illuminate, it's no good providing this point in a reference to psychology searching for the "ego" of that known existential notative abstraction working on the basis of the pro-verb: know your self. the darkened mind is in fact providing the basis for the search of nothing, and a subsequent of offshoot of what knowledge nothing provides: whether that's geology, pharmacology, chemistry, physics, or any of the humanities - although the humanities actually provided the basis for scientific study, since it was poetry that was criticised, and provided the basis for the two socratic pillars: knowledge of your self | knowledge of nothing - without a critique of poetry none of the subsequent investigations beginning with a non-empirical study that's philosophy would still be among the crumbs of history and stone of the parthenon. subsequently the mind of the plateaus simply regurgitates via regression to a known origin, it illuminates with knowledge that was hidden for a while, esp. during the times of illiteracy, which made it easier, although these days almost every man is literate, he is still illiterate in the sense that he prefers images to words / symbols... he's being fed a second illiteracy even though he is literate, therefore whatever knowledge is provided, it's immediately hidden, hidden via the use of images to distract, because words and the symbols that create them are not of an ontology of distraction, but harsh / labouring engagement - esp. if they are not used for the utility of speech, but made solely cognitively optical, they resonate with a double decker bus filled with about 90 people and only one person reading a book.

c. ah the introduction is over, and then the actual poem,
if i could remember it exactly,
it dealt with a cartesian contemplation
dealing with an extension from the trinity model,
what was the extension model? what was the basis
of it? i remember noting that the mind of the plateaus
originality came only with coinage of phrases,
i.e. coining a phrase, or simply crafting a
new compound from words rather than chemical
derivatives... the philological monstrum
of a fixed prefix like sub- or un-
and then the all encompassing suffix
like -conscious - and then some grand complication,
like the word oedipus becoming a complex,
and this complexity reaching a point
where no original idea can be encompassed,
because what's required is the practice
of creating and using an analogue,
so that those in the range of the intended
gesture do not have to go further in their reading
but further their practice: a draw of stars...
none longer or shorter than the other,
all uniform... one shoe fits all story...
i mean how can words conjure ideas
(esp. original ideas) if words are intended
for meaning, and solely that?
ideas come when the intended usage of
such symbols as a - z are not expressed in
how they were intended to be expressed:
pre vox. if you spend a long time with these
symbols in the optic area rather than the
larynx area... you'll find the holy grail of
crafting and fathoming ideas...
philosophy begins here... seeing rather than
the utility of these symbols... to see with them
rather than to speak with them... after all...
think twice before saying something stupid.
i'm still bothered by that cartesian connection,
how did i manage to tangle in the one third
of the equation: substance, thought, extension?
what the hell was i comparing to make that
analogy? surely it wasn't a way of working
from the way existentialists abstracted
something concrete as an identity and decided
to do the pontius pilate of washing their
hands clean of any responsibility using the ditto
marks? sure this abstract enclosure for an identity
(in phonetic units expressed as ego)
cannot have stable if not merely sane grounding
in all serious theoretic engagement by the logic
of being a possessor of a soul;
first they dispossess the people's confines
of the soul's existence, later they come after thought,
and it's there, the proof, like today in the supermarket,
me waltzing for my intended purchase,
and a horde of zombies bewildered by
the abundance of products... standing about the aisles
mouths open, ready for the wind to change
direction and their mouths perpetually opened
with the medussa wind... or simply waiting for
the next pigeon to do his duty on a copper statue
of churchill outside parliament sq., bleached crop
of hair with **** in it.
honestly... the zombies are coming...
first they fool the people that they have no soul,
backed up by the logic of a soul that, when
compounded (i.e. psychology) makes it sounds
important, like an edict by the house of windsor
about to make rise to the 2nd lord protector
via a re-emergence of oliver cromwell...
then they decide to invade the parameters of thought,
they used psychology (the existent non-existence
of the soul) to banish all original thinking...
thought has become banished into hades...
if the soul is not allowed in the body, then
thinking surely isn't either, and how did they do it?
they said: the existent non-existence of the soul
will convince thought to disappear, making
the body virtually mirror like invisible -
like a black kid before the social revolutions
at the back of the bus, before the old lady stepped up,
and yet in the 21st century, the old minotaur is there
at the gate of the new labyrinth; in my school days
all the black boys sat... well... you guest it...
at the back of the bus... so much for the old lady
making a stand.

d. as the title suggests i was working up to a crescendo,
i was about to mention the sort of confusion cuneiform
might have provided had it existed in writing
but not in thought, although we write with latin symbols,
i'm sure that our thinking is still ingrained in
the coming of the three magi and the loss of cuneiform,
all the many offshoots of christianity you'd think
we were living in babylon, where the king went
mad, and the hebrew architects scratched their heads
so hard and so long that it caused the babylonian
king to become sensitive to scratching sounds,
he ran out of the palace screaming:
'cockroaches! cockroaches everywhere!'
then the enslaved hebrew architects just said:
but sire... gardens upside down? earth above sky?
how will that work... we did the pyramids,
perfect geometry, perfectly understandable geometry,
but garden that grow trees upside down?
didn't you hear the greek theory of how trees grow
by eating the earth from below, rather than above?
'cockroaches! cockroaches are nibbling!'
so i did end the poem i lost via a message on the screen...
jimi is dead, forget jim.
i ended it by noting the admiration of the romans
when it came to the mausoleum at halicarnassus,
persian design, intended for mausolus,
so admired that the word mausoleum gained
popular public everyday usage status,
a bit like a war-pig / war-dog in the legionnaire army,
above the general's servant: does battle...
doesn't do pampering with perfumes.
seems fair enough, got the warring grunts / barks,
runs miles with the horses, has a piquant snout and tongue
for human flesh... plays dead, finds mushrooms
beneath the slain... speaks broken german war-cry...
perfect for combat... not really perfect for my quarters of rest.

e. what does it really matter, this 200,000 million
or thousand year old historical co-ordinate?
the chinese were drawing dragons with the welsh
concerned with st. george long before dinosaur
bones were unearthed; if this isn't an example
of the jungian collective unconscious of being
"clued-in" then i don't know what is...
esp. given that not even 2000 thousand years of
history fits into my brain when i boil
a kettle filled with water in 5 minutes...
smoke a cigarette in the same amount of time,
it makes no sense to "pump iron" so much
when practising history to go as far back as that,
it makes in-the-moment living so far detached
from life per se, that you begin to wonder
why we went further than the epic of galgamesh
(where all western take on history begins)
or the upanishads... when the caste system
became operational: from dark skinned sri lankans
to the masters on the boarder of the himalayas:
un-believable... racism within a society
that did not expand into colonialism...
strange to have kept the blue indians in mint condition
due to the cuisine... and have slaughtered the red
indians keeping them a minority to such an
extent as to keep them in nature reserve parks...
black president is a phenomenon? a slave, former,
is a phenomenon? i puppet i suspect...
get a native on the top seat and their will be
less jubilation i gather.
but that blue indian word for demon: rakshasa...
from the serialisation on the t.v. entitled indian summer...
the h as silent as in dhaal?

f. if something profound has happened to you,
and you want to speak about it,
remember to take hold of the psychiatric buffer,
this buffer zone will enable you to see
an atypical sociological reactive compound
of the ****** expression, it will reveal
who you can reveal a secret to,
after all, psychiatry is all about listening,
therefore not thinking, therefore not doubting,
therefore actively engaging with the precursor
negation... sartre to descartes:
i use too many punctuation and "punctuation"
marks, therefore i can't couple thinking with
doubting, i must therefore couple thinking
with negation... descartes to sartre:
i always knew that even though we salvaged
the latin alphabet by adding the diacritical marks,
our punctuation and style would get the better of us...
what's the point of ć ń ś ó if we have
the capsule of " " to mind in terms of what words
are allowed a blessed disunion from meaning
when over-used esp. when you to deceive rather
than covey orthodox meaning?

or how to make the eclectic concentrated,
how to make a zemstwa potion (revenge
potion) - long are the days of educated
Germans citing Grecian words -
my bilingualism gives me a patriotism
to use a language foreign to me,
and still embrace importing Church Slavonic:
                 but what a simple word
zemstwa is: less revenge and more retribution.

karakan: a ****** / dwarf -
but in an inoffensive sentence.
    people in the anglo realm always say
the phrases: where're are you from, originally?
and... how do you say it, properly?
        you first employ a knowledge of
syllable butchery: prophets of the surgical
procedure -
                 macron and umlaut both
akin in arithmetics -
                                  for what's later a comma.
Sartre plagiarised Joyce with *iron in the soul,
     left out all forms of punctuation,
akin to the English language leaving out all
forms of syllable punctuation in reverse -
      which goes against Socrates doing the
Kabbalistic methodology of sounds as atoms,
cut up?      so-  -crat- -es.
                                 Dr. Satan said: it's so.
        i already said that language is the most volatile
substance known to man...
             and that the only people who get to write
books in the west: are people who are asked to write
books in the first place.
      there's me, in a darkened corner:
a coroner's phrase -
                i would be a true idle drunk had i no
tenacity to write and drink...
   by now i'm halfway through a bottle of *** -
Bacardi - or Bacardí - acute iota to get a stress /
prolonging into an ee         - because
you rarely hear someone say Afrikaan: or
   Afrikān - they taught you punctuation of words /
compounds - but they didn't teach you
how diacritical marks are also incisors
    stating that there are two hydrogen atoms and
an oxygen bound to in a reaction with potassium -
or such guises lost or forgotten.
                    it's aesthetic in the informal sense,
in the formal sense: power.
                 no one wants a flower-power hippy cuddle
moment these days, it's true:
                   they want fierce knowing -
people want glasses -
                to possess the Galilean power struggle
stated with cyclops Jupiter being noticed
and saintly Saturn -
                      a different spirit rummages through me
and hence the differential vibration of
the hushed lynx: named Larry.
                     in flames: metaphor -
well, you know, you begin the night with
a change of tone: former barley murky gods' ****
                    amber - to Caribbean clarity -
you're bound to find a difference in shaky "the shadow"
stevens of your hands - i'm way past
the absinthe romanticism - sugar cubes alight
are like latex gimp masks: you start yearning for
the countryside hiatus of forever:
    David Attenborough-esque narrated *** scenes,
birds and the bees, and storks.
                       as sure as Moonday in a
monocle i say: the world events shouldn't drag you
into their narrative - avoid them - avoid them at all
costs: you're not a power broker in their final
summit - you can't change them, turn your attention
elsewhere, into niche topography of interest:
with a very minor demographic of shared coagulation
to express it... back when fame was less of a harrowing:
back when there was no personality cult activation:
a banker said to me once, randomly on a walk:
Newton, what a load of *******!
        and hence the ballistic missiles and that thing
about global warming: for every action there's an
equal and opposite reaction (3rd law) -
     Descartes thought would be part of the
conspiracy theorist columnal dogma reiteration -
doubt is wrong (albeit good faith)
         and negation is right (albeit bad faith,
as Sartre already said) -
     so in turn the tongue: the doubters turn the tongue
into the four limbs with boxing gloves included -
  waggle all you want, the pessimism is already
there - the deniers? they had clothes for their tongue
to make the most spectacular claims about
being naked, when actually dressed at Harrods
in that cheap **** that says: all pharaoh cool, cool.
i'll find more pearls in the reflection of the moon
upon an ocean than i'll ever see donned by pearl
necklace ladies at a fashion week goose-step stomping
anorexics show in London - and that's the truth.
     i'm not a biblical literalist - but **** me!
we were given a poisoned fruit, and told we would
be able to tell apart good & evil, but never from
the two divergent stances, hence the bundled up salad
of like for like -
                     this is Moses as poet, rather than
a general - before telling me he didn't exist
and was mere fiction: tell me he was a cunning poet
before being a cunnin general -
                  in a hundred years' time: you too will
be a myth, that's logically applied history after
being ignored for too long it cannot attract
september the 1st, 1939 - because mythology is
a form of history that detests exactness of dating
and hindsight - it happened: people didn't
really give a **** when it did, done!
     we really do not have a capacity to censor
*******...  not in life, on the street, on t.v., or in a courtroom,
           we don't!
                                   i treat it as a puzzle
rather than a fruit though, otherwise, to be stark-naked
honest: we'd be ****** gorilla boring and that would
be the end of our self-projection as questioning
the void we're in: it would have been blindly
nodded to - and ours': such a pivotal and yet also
pathetic rebellion -
                                 yet again, the world is going
into the shredder - looks elsewhere:
i'm looking at a poem by jack spicer -
he's not a great poet, meaning? he has a decency to
be one... which means he's not oratory
therefore he's implosive, therefore he's part of
the magnetic-enzyme strand of writing:
he attracts people to write -
                    he's not a Bukowski or a Ginsberg -
god no...
                  the seemingly mediocre is there
because of the paparazzi sentiment toe-ward
the greats (on purpose) -
                    you end up feeling:
i need to say something - instead of feeling:
a heckler! shut, the, ****, up!
      that's being perceived as mediocre goes:
it's a fatality of what not to adopt and improve;
like that line about the doubter's tongue being
dressed in fists and knees -
   and the denier's tongue being dressed in Gucci
and Dolce to look the part and
         hardly spread a cup of sweated over panic.
      pro-me-thee-us
      pro-me-thee-us
      five years
      the song singing from its black throat (Jack)
  sure... but it's pro-me-fee-oose - right?
this goes back to not having "punctuation"
flint sharpenings on atoms of lingua -
                 sure, have them between compounds,
but never ascribe them to letters?
  bound to be trouble....
             d'eh very point of fought over is to be
count, unawares: thinking.
then i picked up a very ancient text,
ibn sina / abū alī al-husayn ibn sīnā:
variation, properly?
i'd put a macron over y in al-husaȳn -
     otherwise it's almost like a question of
practising punctuation: which is a variation of
constructing from syllables, rather than
alphabetical beginnings - now let's look
at the variation "how do you pronounce it?"
         e-bin   c-n'ah       ah-boo       a'h-lee
              who-sane         e-bin         see-n'ah
this is how English looks like when undressed
from its lack of applying diacritical marks -
god it's ugly,
               get that Texan gunslinger drawl with
it too: like i'll ever be a cowboy: pff!
yes, there are people out there who enjoy
t.v. shows and look at them fish-eyed glassy -
then there are those that like football games -
but then the few of us look at something like the
following as means for transcendental mind-games
above crosswording:
(Kantian 0 = negation,                1 must therefore
                    mean affirmation, and 2 doubt:
as in: being of two minds)
   ibn Sana (tome of wisdom) -

            R  H
A  0  0  0  0  0  0  B
C  0  0  0  0  0  0  D­
            T  G
                                     this diagram is so idiosyncratic
it would well be a diaphragm -
                                   it's a scematic:
but it's certainly not a need to make language
trivia, in a sense trivial:
             it is a metaphysical translation of a pearl -
the same triviality can be applied to it
as our bewilderment ascribed toward the
analogous translation of it via avaricious people
and precious gems -
             it's not even a Xeno's paradox type of
looky-looky -
                 it's a sort of complete human being type
of scenario: an X marks the spot where you
     grow dumb with: does it matter?
      well: logic that's not restrained (on holiday)
produces such things -
                 such schematics:
   they are artefacts of a way to forget the daily
function of language between people:
as way to suggest: there is a way to get things done
by not getting them done.
                   i could have replaced the original
with a higher tier abstract, namely using less meaningful
encoding symbols, given that 0 - 9 are incompetent
of the 26 variabilities, and the why & i
            yumper and jumper,
   cat and kilogram                    cue, q, kappa -
skewers -     which makes it less than 26,
or the said: ∞      and a - z variation limit from
aardvark                    and   zyzzogeton -
zoo... in between.
                            i don't know what ibn is
trivialising / doing an original antidote to a crossword,
but i can say, given that i found the punctuation
scalpel in non-applied punctuation within letters
in the End-leash language - what i found stark
naked: by the way - the reason that philosophers
never applied grammatically categorising words
in their systems, is why we have that sort of
momentum of applicability in the field of robotics:
to categorise words by their noun or verb
is a reason why philosophy books never applied
such words in their reasoning - therefore the need
to write a book with such words being relevant
as translated into their precise irrelevance
and the relevance of the field of robotics.
never mind, i could have written
          
                     <  ≥
£           .   .   .   .   .   .  ≠ (÷)
= (x)     .   .   .   .   .   .  $
                     ≤  >                        thus the denial
of all plausible conversation on the matter:
and Herr Grinch and the rags to riches
fairytale - and the lottery, and the otherwise
grim simga of the yawning grey plateau;
did i get something wrong?
                 this is an example of an alter-crossword,
and the reason that mathematicians aren't
good at mental arithmetic is because
they have to learn mathematical shorthand
for their arguments, they become kindred spirits
of courtroom stenographers.

Why are we conscious?
Why life?
The universe
infinite flux
Epic Smashing parts together
Brains splattered by speeding bullets
Simple physics
Described in abstract numbers
Sublime
It’s so plain
So regular
How Life is extinguished without emotion
In an instant
Unseen and unremembered
Why did we even bother?
To become conscious at all
To perceive futilely the world
And despair in the flux
Anguish in the face
Of pure entropy
Absurdity is the only legitimate feeling
And yet there are so many more
Why? I want to know!
Why this fait?
Why could I not be a chair?
Simply sitting, never thinking the thoughts
My bane and my bone
My plagued thoughts
In pursuit of clarity
Like a sore that would go away
If you would
Just
Stop
Picking it

it’s been foggy for the past two days,
i blamed fireworks on halloween
rather than guy fawkes’ celebration to
burn the magna carta... i still prefer the beltane
festival of burning rubber skin tires of pensioners
extending for a plastic surgeon’s career;
it was foggy these two past years,
i can almost start an art movement or set-up an art school
ensuring all paintings are painted with fog-overtones,
as i blow cigarette smoke into the air...
but this is the zenith of autumn,
the earth has started to breathe, the muddy field soil
has started to turn into mush, to mush,
it’s begging the plughole sepias of a hectare into easing into
moisture so the boots land a footprint into flemish tired in the trenches
for the toilet plop...i’ll dismember onomatopoeia spelling
and retrace the origins of dyslexia... i will!
insert this anti-intellectualism of england laughing at the words
sartre and *****... piston... etc.,
then become content with en masse surveillance.. everyone’s happy!
win win situation!
he he he... giggles for rounds of ***** shots and double-glazing...
keep the van gogh canvases... we need pristine voyeurism sights
across the street and never bothering to chip in to the gallery funds.
it’s autumn at its zenith with two foggy nests of the moon exposed
and i’m forcing cigarette smoke into the air to match up...
i’ve heard news that a lady psychologist and a professor are interested
in my works... back home in poland,
they are announcing a secret reading of my work
in the underground chambers of a church in szewna, akin me to a gombrowicz,
i’m about to become a merchant of poetry.... here’s cinnamon for words,
here’s chilli for specified terms that tingle the tongue.
back home i can reclaim this misunderstanding of all necessary jokes
in england...
so this article comes along... stresses the difference between england and france...
the difference?
in england: a. i’m trying to write a book... b. how much money did you get upfront?
typical of bank of england signatures being given with a safe investment...
in france? a. i’m writing a book... b. what’s it about?
that’s europe, cross-continental, with the isolationism of england
like the isolationism of england if f.d.r. was the prime minister
and everyone spoke gaelic, so there...
frogs are princes... with such cares the article mentioned...
it mentioned rousseau as the joker card of blames
for the french revolution...
well i know that scientist is a misnomer of intellectual,
after all, the scientist is the man with a ruler and centimetre
and the intellectual doesn’t bother to count up the centimetres
of welsh words... but a scientist is hardly a cobbler...
so i give darwin... the english intellectual exploit surfacing as
the modus operandi of the holocaust...
‘it’s almost like a darwinian pact,’ said faust,
'i peered into the monkey and knew of the trouble it would translate,
this collective categorical translation that didn’t say:
orangutan is chinese and chimpanzee is greek, the gorilla is italian...
how the hell could we have evolved from the monkey
if there is no single species of monkey, we’re already as diverse
as the ****** monkeys! so a chimpanzee ****** a gorilla
and the first humanoid was spawned?' ******* you english colonial
******* and your limb-for-limb relativity, oh wait...
i’m writing in english... now isn’t that paradoxical...
but the f.d.r. akin isolationism craves for artists that not only perform
with their backup cognitive singers, i.e. song writers...
(like the song by vanessa paradis - joe le taxi -
being almost like ellie goulding's on my mind)...
how did it all become defaced with karaoke and a prenuptial of fame...
i just want the original rolling stones... i don’t want people turned
into adverts... i don’t want artists turned into slogan pushers...
i rather keep the kites of drugs.... i can’t do this... my heart’s broken,
but that's because the audience that's being sold
the art is too young to respect the go-along practice of drug use with the arts.

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.

My friend Gerard, (who is alive), looks like an Arabian slave-boy, though swarthier and longer of hair than Tony Curtis; an olive –skinned Mowgli, ape boy of Kipling’s  “Jungle Book”, although I have never seen Gerard swinging through any trees, nor eating any insects, nor even kissing a sultan’s foot. But looks can be deceiving, or receiving, with the proper pen, the zen pen of a poet, this proper poet who lives upstairs with his multitude of books piled on the floors, walking on Whitman, sitting on Shakespeare; tripping over Ginsberg, sleeping on Sartre; not a single shelf for this Jung man.
“A place for everything, and for everything it’s place”, he stands and stares out of a window overlooking the jungle of five-foot high weeds that serves as our backyard and wonders aloud “whither Oregon?”; questions our alleged enlightened sense of awareness, his disposition toward liberalness in a world gone madder than usual. Have I convinced him yet, my naïve, trusting neighbor? Yes, he realizes with a sigh that it is so, now that he has finally succumbed and bought a thirteen inch, black & white television of his own, now he can see with his own brown eyes in his own living room, far off wars, instant coffee & instant karma, depersonalized tragedies, faceless fatalities, insidious soap operas and humorless sitcoms, adverse advertisements, Howard Stern; “whither sanity?” we both cry and laugh out loud at this mediocre media, the global sewage, the Marshall McClueless, me and Gerard Rizza, my friend who is alive.

Gerard, (who is healthy), is gay, yet straighter than most men, and has been complaining quite a bit about the ferry service lately; contemplating a move off of Staten Island, and leaving his sporadic substitute teaching gig at a nearby high school, a mere six block walk from our house atop Winter Hill, where he is trying to convince me, a wide-eyed cynic, that a blank, white, unused canvas, surrounded by a wooden picture frame hung upon his wall is indeed a work of art; the job is very convenient, but again the ******* about the ferry, not the boat ride per se, but the incongruities of the ****** schedule, which anybody who has ever just missed a three a.m. boat and had to wait for an hour in the Hierynomous Bosch triptych known as the Whitehall Ferry terminal ,will definitely attest to; and Gerard has this thing about Staten Islanders, like the homophobes at a recent anti-peace rally in New Dorp, supporting the carpet bombing of an oil rich yet still poor third-world country, throwing beer cans at him and his companions while shouting “we know where you live, *******!”. Rizz came home that evening, visibly shaken and pale, (not his usual olive-skinned self), knocked on my door and pleaded “whither ******?”. I went upstairs, sat on his couch and rolled a joint. Gerard puts on the new 10,000 Maniacs tape and tries, once again, to bait me in a conversation about his “work of art”, my work of naught; he speaks of the horrific details of his day. “Isn’t this picture of Doc Gooden on my refrigerator door proof enough of my manhood, my patriotic intent, for those *******? The ******’ Mets, fuh chrissakes!” We sit out on his porch, watching the sun set over our backyard jungle as Natalie sings wireless Verdi cries, and I pass the burning joint to Gerard, my friend who is still healthy.

My friend Gerard, who is *** positive, was quite possibly a cat in a former life, probably a Siamese, thin, dark and aloof; yes, I can see ol’ Rizz now, sprawled out on an old tapestry rug, getting his belly scratched by his owner, perhaps Emily Dickinson or Georgia O’Keefe, Rizz purring like the engine of an old bi-winged barnstormer; abruptly rolls over, gets on all fours, tail waving *****, slinks over to lap water out of a bowl marked “Gerard”. He’d sleep all day on books and original manuscripts, and play all night amongst oil & acrylic, knocking over an occasional blank canvas, which he, in a future incarnation, will try to convince me, in his feline manner, is art. Sitting and staring from his usual spot on the windowsill, his cat eyes blink slowly as he wonders, “whither dinner?”; and begins to clean himself with tongue and paw, this cat who might be Gerard, my friend who is *** positive.

Gerard, who is sick, recently moved to Manhattan, Chelsea, to be precise, in with his best friend; and has stopped ******* about the Staten Island ferry, having far more pressing matters to ***** about, i.e. the ever-rising cost of homeopathic medicine and the lack of coverage for holistic and alternative care; any number of political and social concerns (Gerard was never the silent type); the lateness of his first published book of poems, entitled “Regard for Junction”; his rapidly deteriorating health, etc., etc.; and is now a true city dweller, a zen denizen, a proper poet with high regard for junction. That’s all that remains when it’s all over anyway, this junction, that junction, petticoat junction, petticoat junction – “I always wanted to **** the brunette sister”, I’d once told him; “I prefer uncle Joe!”, he laughingly replied; dejection, rejection, reclamation, defamation, cremation, conjecture, conjunction, all junctions happening at the same time, at now, a single place, a single moment, this forever junction with Gerard, my friend who is dying.

My friend Gerard, who is dead, officially passed from this life on a Saturday morning in early April, a mere two weeks before his junction with publication, although Gerard my friend passed away much earlier, leaving a sick and emaciated body behind to play host to his bedside guests, to help bear the pain of his family and friends; so doped-up on morphine, no longer able to remember any names, he called me “*****” when I entered the hospital room, where this barely physical manifestation of what had once been Gerard Rizza was being kept alive like the barest glimmer of hope, and displayed like some recently fallen leader, lying in state;  “whither Gerard withers” I thought, saying goodbye to this Rizza impersonator, this imposter, this visitor from a shadow world, an abstraction of a friend, whom the nurses told us, his disbelieving visitors, was our friend Gerard, who though technically still alive, was already dead.

My friend Gerard, who is laughing
My friend Gerard, who is singing
My friend Gerard, who is coughing
My friend Gerard, who is sleeping
My friend Gerard, who is holy
My friend Gerard, who is missed.