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DJ Thomas May 2010
We each have a voice and life, it is how we use them not how we might!  

Stop glaciers melting
Huge population movements
Death of progeny


The small reductions in carbon emissions being targeted for 2020 or 2050 - are thought to little to late to slow global warming.  The melting polar ice and glaciers together with our changing weather patterns are now fact. The resulting loss of river systems and rising sea levels will mean the desertification or flooding of agricultural lands and famine, then the migration of populations - starting with the skilled and rich seeking safety, to escalate into the terror of armed bands
warring over water, food, women and land.

By 20 20
Lets hope for twenty twenty
A 20 20


There is now the thought that the huge physical change wrought by global warming can be charted by the escalation in earthquake and volcanic activity.  And that this may eventually trigger huge eruptions in the American and Asian continents,
destroying civilisations to create a planetary volcanic winter.

Again fire and cold
The cycle repeats itself
Destroying nature


Was there a civilisation in deep history before the flood, prior to and during the last ice-age?
This has been researched and written about in great detail during the last twenty years
and many now believe it already proven by scientific review of documents and
thousands of archaeological finds, also by scientists having used the exactness
in the astronomical alignments of ancient monuments
to recalculate there greater age.  

Dead sold souls herd us
Lost mindless finger puppets
Vapid witless words


Sadly, the majority put their reliance and faith in
the actions of lawyer-ed politicians, most of whom evidence
a fixation on their own welfare,  selfish self-glorification needs
and an unwillingness to rock-the-boat once in power*

Politicians thwart
Party politics deafen
Propaganda’s herd


Putting off all radical action required until after the next election.  
Many have gifted away the necessary legal control and power to take national radical action
to a political or trade grouping of nations - in effect retaining only national rights
to go to war, put up taxes, borrow and spend monies.

Please no rhetoric
Complete local transition
Forget politics


We each have a voice and life, it is how we use them not how we might!

Living we give voice
So one voice might yet be heard
All being, believe!


We are left holding our eco-inheritance and children’s future in the palm of our hand.
Please let our love and imagination drive us each forward to make change.


Biosphere a greenhouse 
Target the impossible
Please gift some life soon?


So, we each of us have hard personal choices to make, which will encompass both positive and negative
benefits in terms of our time, lifestyle, health and wealth.  I chose to base my choices solely on how it
might benefit the eco-system and the lives of our children.

My choices are grouped under five headings: transport, food, home, lifestyle and further action. They are:
-  

Transport: Rail; Bus; Coach; Bike;
(I pass woods in bud - a Red Kite hunting twisting, unhurried moments).  
To give up ownership of electric / motor vehicles
and to avoid air travel where possible.


Highly vaporous.
Emissions farting -
barrelling vipers
.

Food: To eat meat/fish only once a week at most;
(Slaughteramas greed - industrial carcase-ed meals. Sheep full of cancer)
To study fast methods of vegetarian cooking; buy local organic foodstuffs;
visit local farmers markets and farm shops; grow my own when possible
and help friends establish vegetable/herb gardens.
To not ever feed, cleave and eat!


Fat shopaholics,
a deadly consumerism.
Cancers meat to eat


Home:   A cottage sized for me, friends and neighbours,
overlooking a wooded valley and trout stream.
Like me a little untidy and basic
.

Crossing the shallows
trout fingerling feed at dawn
White dots steep hill path

Dusk - eight painted queue
river paired mare and foal
Foliage lined dark black


Well positioned to capture the morning sun, airy and light.  
Yet insulated to stay cool or warm. With easy access to mountain bike trails
and long distance bus routes, plus several end-of-line train stations
in energetic cycling distance over the mountains


A differing beat
Quickly fading doubled steps -
pulling separate


Life Style:* A thinking poet mountain biker, living organic
not part of the great noisious noxious ribbons of hurtling tired.

Pressured paced life -
impossible  commitments.
Organic living


Further Action: *I intend to give up meat not because of the terrible cruelty involved in ten billion or more animals
being slaughtered every year to feed the human race, but due to
: 1)  animal farming being a major factor in the burning of 50 million year old rainforests at a rate of one and half acres per second to generate huge volumes of greenhouse gases, destroying the richest habitats on Earth and a principal source of oxygen; and 2)  that these billions of farmed animals
are themselves a major source of greenhouse gases
.

Burning rainforests
Feeding to cleave open and eat
Subsistence farming


With ongoing intensive fishing, the world's fisheries already in crisis and climate change,
it could be that we will run out of wild-caught seafood much earlier than 2030!


Conserve energy -
and natural resources
Don’t waste foolishly


Each of us might have a different view of what globalisation is,
for some this word encapsulates the dangers of our global fast food culture, omnipresent brands,
popular culture, changing diets and the growing use of packaged processed foods
.

Freedom to act sought
Globalisation's curses
Octopus suckers!


For many it is the illegal international trade in endangered species of flora and fauna,  
second only in value to the $350 billion a year global drug trafficking trade that now services
perhaps more than 50 million regular users of ******, ******* and synthetic drugs
.

The label 'globalization' can cover the: spread and integration of different cultures;  
industry moving to low per capita income countries; sweatshops supplying this seasons branded goods
to retail outlets worldwide;  complex international interleaved financial trading instruments being developed
by banks and financial institutions to trade worldwide, create profits and pay huge bonuses, without risk to themselves
.

Globalisation -
orchestrated profiteers,
betting our losses


Many see globalisation as being the beneficial spread of free trade, liberty, democracy and capitalism,
involving the efficient allocation of resources and capital through the spread of technology.
Unelected international bodies and institutions such the World Bank actively promulgate globalisation,
a '‘world government’ promoting close economic ties between nations
.

Enculturation
Our sad indoctrination
Globalization
  

The anti-globalisation movements dislike the corporate and political nature of globalisation,
protesting the resultant harm done to the biosphere, a more rapid and extensive deterioration of the environment
and the unintended but very real consequences of globalisation: the erosion of traditional culture
resulting in social disintegration; a breakdown of democracy; the spread of new diseases;
changes in diet; increasing poverty.
.

I view globalisation and it's propagation as leading to the final destruction
of the world's cultures and civilisations by locked us into a
dogmatic world political doctrine secured through
trade and political alliances of states, institutions
and corporations that remain hell bent on
imposing this world governance. Such
that individual countries governments
cannot consider making substantive
radical change to avert the planet
being pushed into a natural cycle
that will end the human race
.

Caged in Fools World
The people hear heroic call  
Each one a hero
!

The peoples and cultures of the world need perhaps just one western country to
break the legal chains of globalisation and adopt a radical economic regeneration program
designed to make the total transition to a dynamic culture of localised
clean communities centred on the individual not competition*  

Only one tool
National taxation for -
economic change.


Here I begin discussing how global, regional and national economies might
be based on the growth of small organic local economies.
not the repeated foolishness involved in chasing lower cost base manufacture -
each time at great cost to the economy it has migrated from!
Then a further culture becoming totally reliant
on the transport of foodstuffs and goods -
I can here you saying
:

"Oh **** this guy is -
talking about change, changing -
the world we live in!"


Yes, I am and do we have a choice?  But such change will be organic and involve business
in the restructuring and regeneration of economies till we share green economies.  
In small part his is already happening slowly!


Unlock taxation,  
survivals powerful tool.  
Needed now for change!


This is why we need to consider doing something that many of today's
plutocrats, economists, bureaucrats and politicians, would dismiss out of hand or
discuss endlessly in terms of perfectly competitive markets, perverse economic incentives etc


Major solution
National taxation change
Human extinction



WORK in HAND

This haiku sequenced eco-haibun is an ongoing project being penned day-by-day by many that care and take action. Your reactions are all welcome, thank you


**Take back control now.  
Cease all squabbling, achieve act - decisively!

Globalisation's, global control cut away.
Diversity sought

Promote well being.  Act with imagination -
for ecology!

Creating employment -
with local utilities, local food and transport

Incentivise tax,  to create local benefits.
Gain prosperity

Income taxation -  value added tax, aged -
dangerous mistake

Local licensing.  Lead don't follow excuses.
Saviour taxation

Imaginative - energy, food and transport -
local licensing

An alternative - energetic strategy,
greening business

Organic foodstuffs - out compete processed food.
Life promoting health

Healthy government - a healthy population. 
Zero income tax!

Locally taxed - by distance it travelled -
and category

Products bar coded.  Point of agreed production -
and category

Local added tax, by distance it travelled -
and category

Local energy, initiatives supplant.  
Replacing at risk

User energy, capture and storage.  
Eco-dwelling plan

Local water works,  supplanting initiative.
Replace the at risk

User water need.  Capturing and storing half.
Securing supply

Communications, local initiatives.
Protecting our needs

Local healthy food, life saving initiative.
Planting guaranteed

Sort unemployment, local work available.
Agriculture base

Radical transport - initiatives needed.
Change made possible

Season’s colours blur - in ageing contemplation
chilling warm breezes

Ganges dried mud - dust
Armed hungry thirsty tide
Generations despair,  lost

Our politicians -
squabble condemn progeny.
Flee panic and die

HAIKU SEQUENCE FINISHED

HAIBUN PROSE BEING ADDED
Day by Day
This haiku sequenced eco-haibun needs prose and additional haiku added day by day.  Contributing comment and reactions considered for inclusion...

copyright©DJThomas@inbox.com 2010
Mateuš Conrad Feb 2017
apologies, but i will not be abstracting people
as mere pronoun users,
i know i should, but i kinda like "painting"
and giving peoeple race, and differences,
i can't really establish what pronoun-bleaching
would do to, oh i don't know,
perhaps i'd be writing this...

back when i still worked as a roofer and was doing
a project in Greenwich,
  nice try, construction industry men don't
go to the gym... what a joy to remember my roots...
anyway...
    what was i saying?
   so i commuted from north east london
this this little village...
and it really has a feel about it that it is a village...
i went into the Greenwich waterstones
bookshop and spotted something interesting...
    a j. k. huysmans trilogy (beginning with la bas)
and ending with *cathedral
, or something like that,
if i knew what the internet was saying,
i'd buy all three books...
     but i did the dumb thing of buying
the first book of the trilogy, that's always in print...
anyway, no small loss...
   and there stood sideways joseph roth's
the antichrist...
              i can't compare it to nietzsche work,
even though i should, given roth was jewish...
and i figured: if the concept is not originally
jewish and greek, and anti- is a prefix much
more easily understood these days with
the existence of anti-matter...
            than say... armilus...
    well... so i was commuting day to day,
and over the course of the project probably read
two of three books, roth's was one of them,
alongside nikos kazantzakis' blockbuster...
but something weird happened when i read roth
for the first time...
     sitting in this dockland train heading south
of the thames, a group of muslim "women"
spotted that i was literate,
     they sat, about 10 metres away from me...
but the word antichrist must have prompted them,
one just said out-loud: you're satan's *****...
huh?
   there i am, reading my own book not raving
mad reading it aloud, and there she has the prank
of associating a book to a very mysterious person
who riddles the bible being completed...
      mein gott: two world wars ever since nietzsche
wrote he was the person with the title kept
sorta on a whim for nearly 2000 years...
     and then two days ago my father has a car accident
and this hijab clad woman is driving,
  but she does a Pilate and doesn't take responsibility,
the passenger that's with her jumps out
   and gives my father his details
and the woman is pristine...
     a *******, what do you call it: sacred cow?
most pedestrians in england are treated as such...
  so she phones her son and gives the phone to my father
and her son says to my father: it's against
the law to phone the police, you can't phone them...
well... hey presto! we're in Saudi Arabia!
and this is what's worrying me...
no... nope... this is what pains me...
    i had to take my ego for a walk tonight...
i had to think a lot of ******* out,
how the ego would whimper and whine like a dog...
there's your "janus" / "contronym"...
ego... dog...
   the leash? i'm thinking with it...
and suddenly, clarifty, i can pierce it's *******
narrative and think about it... as any id might...
what i experienced was an ego-dispossesion...
   i lost it, it turned into an automaton,
robotic misery... hardly the angry Frankenstein monster...
i lost the care for an ego-embodiment...
i was dispossessed by it, robbed, thief! thief!
i needed to come back home and read
heidegger's aphorisms 174 through to 178 from
the ponderings (it would help that you read the
ponderings... after reading being & time)...
the pain i felt was very much akin to being British,
even though it's something i assimilated into...
which could mean that's it's the odd bit...
should i, shouldn't i feel some sentiment for my host
culture?
word are flying around the place,
they're calling it cultural marxism...
well... i come from a culture that had stated
marxism, period, i.e. supported by an economic model,
that worked, and would have worked,
had capitalism not done what capitalism does
naturally: compete!
   i'm watching these cultural marxists and, i think,
i'm watching penguins in a zoo...
  i don't know what to make of these marxists,
who aren't even leninists...
            where's the economic model?!
  
that's the problem of going to a catholic school
in england, attempting to stress multi-culturalism,
i even ojected to being confirmed ritually,
with a bishop from Brentwood,
sorry, too much Irish around the place....
i too thought i was about to say something in Gaelic...
outer-east london: a complete ******* jungle
of biodiversity...
     so did i misplace my allegiences?
to the tongue? to faking an ethnicity?
    of course i'm pisssed off, i spent the past 2 hours
walking the most mundane of walks,
bewildered why this woman in a hijab wouldn't
own up to causing a traffic accident...
i helped him will out the police forms,
and there she is, on paper, smug like some ****** mary
because i'm the one that really doesn't think
that Islam got Project Hair wrong,
me? personally? i think that woman's hands ought to
be covered,
     in thinking terms, a woman's hands could
get me more excited than a woman's foot...
but sure... hell... why not hair?!
              the last time i checked, normal people
have an aversion toward hair...
ever see that person almost vomiting when they found
a stranger's hair in their soup?
  that **** that grows on your hair is the only silk
you've got... how about a few toenail clippings
to boot? first thing a sane would think: ****! ****!
oh, we're going to get on... just fine, just fine...
   the next time i think about encouraging
an **** ******* position's worth of prayer
i'll be a ******* cardinal.
   what's wrong with taking responsibility?
why are Islamic women so immune to the tractātus
of law? where's the jurisprudence?
   i'd call it something more than diabolical...
you can really become a vampire when you're told
the lesson: those that thirst for justice...
  lesser leech...
            who gives a **** whether it was: "but a scratch"?
woman! take responsibility!
  pampered little coconut jugglers...
   now to think of it... leave those curtains,
and this one time: she was walking with a buggy
and a small child and she unveiled herself from
a niqab before me...
           the perfect arabian nightmare i could
have ever witnessed...
             i had long hair back then...
what she revealed from under that niqab?
wait... am i writing this in the times
when the French occupied the Holy Land and had
the first thirst / idea of a colony?
  
this is me, imitating punching a brick wall...
this is me... in a boxing ring...
bashing myself...
            this is me thinking about how man
has no capacity to usher in karma,
how man's concept of law is hardly cosmic,
how man is a kniving ******* that
deserves something beyond a heaven and a hell:
rather: a return to his self...
that's what i keep telling myself:
i don't want heaven, i don't want hell...
i, just, want, to, return, to, my, self...
    yes, that's a reflection,
hence the pronoun has no compound, i.e. isn't
a reflexive understanding for the fluidity of language
expressed by the concerning compound: myself.
perhaps that's just the beginning of understanding
the noumenon / thing in itself, or rather to counter
the fluidity of the word itself, since, evidently
it self makes no sense that could ever produce
a concept akin to the noumenon...

why wouldn't this woman care to give an inkling into
her concept of right and wrong...
she's driving the ******* car, she makes a doo doo...
pauper... **** up!
            i still don't know why it was about hair...
you like a stranger's **** in a soup?
   what's with this middle eastern fetish for covering it?
hey! beginning from 1986, am i sorta automatically
involved in a cult that has a vintage of ageing from
a **** of a camel a long time ago?
  no wonder the knighthood ceremony was initiated
by slapping a newly initiated knight across the cheek,
like i said, a woman's hand is more ******
than her hair...
      i'd say: take up ye care to don gloves!
and that, i'm sure, will never happen.

it's probably the most delicate thing a woman can possess...
a hand...
the rest is what darwinism cared to provide us with:
a black widow, a mantis;
and that's talking pure earnest about the matter...

listen, i spent the past two hours having the ordeal of
an ego... which i had to anti-narrate into theory...
yes, the id was helpful, is actually told me, or rather,
interrupted the ego from the narrative
to give me this *******'s worth of profanity
(and yes, with due reason; ever fill out a police form
concerning some accident? do that, then you'll be equipped
to read Tolstoy)...

so it was ego-possessiveness,
      the ego already thinks its eternally subject...
that's one of the implants...
eternity and god are inherent in ego,
   your heart means absolutely nothing when the ego
has been given certainity that it can't shake off...
what the ego isn't given is a unit of reason
that sees past it... the id...
in relation to dualism and the much active dichotomy
as alternative to an equilibrium of dualism
i will outrightly exclude the superego
  as nothing but antithesis to the ubermann theory
of overcoming man...
  and on their shoulder they once had
the epitomes of cartoon conscience, an angel and a demon...
but thanks to the superego: they had mama
on their left shoulder, and papa on their right shoulder...

just the mere act of shutting that thing up
was enough, and it was apparent,
that writing fiction could be to blame,
   writing fiction can be rightly guessed at
for levitating a condition of medical proportion
into the realm of mythology,
    we have already depersonalised the unit
of ego to the extent that it has become polarised,
bipolar, e.g., comes from a depersonalised
gravity of ego,
we're no longer in need to write books,
we're in a dire need to write our own psyches...
and it all stems from making the basic human unit,
bound to the privacy of thought,
as needing a system that outweighs the moral
stratum,
           what can a person actually be or become
to even dream about asserting that there is
a da-sein (i.e. something, somethingness)
          "happening"?
i feel that there's something worse than a second
nakedness emerging,
         it's this incapacity to move on,
it's a mental nakedness, i am more easily prone
to dress my body in clothes
than i am able to dress my ego in thoughts,
than can correlate adequately, and peacefully...
toward something akin to a symbiosis
that can reach a = status, rather than an
   ≠ or an ≈ status... ****! Aquarius!
isn't the ≈ symbol the basis for it?
oh hell, back into the zodiac...
              
     i know my ego can be a downer,
but at least that's who i am talking about...
aphorisms no. 174 through to 178?
i do odd experiments with books,
     this is the first of its kind,
i'm actually going to rattle-******* this book out
till it feels like having wanked it 20 times
in a single day... i'll write what i "feel",
funny word, that word feel...
you never get to use it these days,
man is more about hammering in nails than
saying: ooh... that hurts...
and we all know what happened to Jesus'
teaching... forgive strangers...
     make sure your former friends are
crucified up-side down...
                 that really went far...
                      i can just see him...
an oasis of bullet-proof clauses...
              about how to handle people...
give them l.s.d. unconsciously!
         then wait for actual l.s.d. to arrive
and then worry...
when they took to their Swiss bicycles...
and writing poetry... and eating a soft-boiled
egg... given the concern for cholesterol:
a hard concept to fathom: that runny yoke...
     never ate mine with salt, i always like
that idea of legalised abortion...
                and we can be just that...
so imaginative to consolidate being mammal
that we can fathom eating chicken eggs
as easily as abortions... runny yokes have no basis
for a morality, or a compass...
they just are... runny... yummy...
             i call yokes the male version of
a woman's fascination with chocolate...
  i think egg yokes are the equivalent of cholocate
for men as chocolate is for women...
or so the advert said...

aphorism 174: as language...

          aphorism 175:
              philosophy catching up to science,
akin to theology catching up to philosophy,
both condescending extracts
that end up with both of the extreme parties
dressing up funny.

aphorism 176: such that newspapers are
the natural preservers? i.e. the idea of historical
escapism.

      (toilet paper does, much much more,
than a newspaper actually provides,
   press freedom is a bit boring to be honest,
beginning with the need for a moral agent
that's less and less moral, and more prone to
darwinism, i.e. selective, which is also said via:
what's natural, in a more and more techno-savvy culture?)

aphorism 177: only as, a rural thinker unto
a rural thinker... a case of describing a perfume
of those thinking about a day after tomorrow,
   but more precisely:
  the day before yesterday that didn't involve them...
say, on the ethnicity basis,
  the talk of being inheriting from the form
of ancestry... how we cultivate cucumbers,
tomatoes, prejudices...
   which is why i'm a slav happily talking a tongue
that's germanic, an off-shoot saxon,
and hopefuly defending it.

aphorism 178:
         "everything great wavers and wobbles,
stands in a storm. the beautiful is difficult."
   Ezra too, with the last, alas.
     but it's true... what happened in england in the second
part of the 20th century was great,
  and it did indeed wobble past the storm into
a desert of retirement...
            a peaceful coming toward terms of
a natural agreement...
   the generation preceding mine enshrined in their
psyche an england they heard over the radio...
king crimson... all such artistic expressions
found a case to take root...
     how parasites never attack a feeble creature
and only take roost in a strong symbiotic partner...
once it was said england could resemble ancient greece,
and it did, from the second part of the 20th century...
but that ended...
               it's gone, i have inherited a communist
past, a marxism with a concept of money,
and economic policy that wasn't inherently competitive,
but it also wasn't a welfare policy of the Marshall Plan,
and all i get is this freakish counter-movement
known as marxism in culture...
   that's worse than marxism in economy!

it should be heartbreaking to say this,
but coming from a monochromatic society,
watching the death of communism...
     i could say it was perfect... but then i can't
given my grandparents have a secure pension plan
that the state provides... i like that joke,
i just said it, and it makes perfect sense...
there is much more of Pilate in the history
of the peoples than there is of Jesus...
washing my hands clean, the companies said,
meaning self-employment...
     unless you have a really hungry libido
you actually do start worrying about keeping up
the numbers...
  companies don't...
      it's a bit of a bollocking...
i come from what could be imagined as a safety
economics of marxism into a marxism of culture
that i simply can't comprehend...
              well: it did give "us" a sense of pride,
and a will to rebuild warsaw without any american
money...
        the russians just said: where's your pride?
do you want to take their money and have it easy?
and when i ask that question:
i just start thinking about arabs without their oily diapers...
oil diaper... not exactly black gold:
oil diapers...
             Ahmed gonna poo poo?
              &nbsp
Wide Eyes Sep 2016
(Part 1: http://hellopoetry.com/poem/738250/almond-eyes/)

Come spring, she leaped across the grassy dune.
In her ageing almond eyes, fresh wisdom strewn.
Unthought of now- he who had once been her all.
In a forbidden forest, a smiling lean buck stood tall.

Come summer, standing afar she did quietly spy;
Studying his ways from the curious corner of her eye-
How chilled he liked his water, how green his grass…
A polite little nod if ever he happened to pass.

Come monsoon, away she cast the lessons of the past.
Throughout their graze, on him her gaze.
Playful fights they feign; adorable moments in the rain.
She’d fallen tame; her clumsy hooves not to blame.

Come winter, cold truths in the icy winds blew her way.
Her lean, smiling buck wasn’t really hers per se.
He smiled much the same at myriad doe and antelope,
Yet, in her shivering heart flickered the scantiest of hope.

Come fall, she finally forsake her futile trail.
Turned her back with a swish of her bushy tail.
Beaming with sheer joy, she hummed a halcyon tune twice over.
For bucks would come and bucks would go, but the river’d go on forever.
A sequel.
Mateuš Conrad Apr 2019
.you can never really write any poetry by not covering the "heartbreak" the loss of your own "printed" words: how much different is the internet, from "real" life? just asking... since: internet banking & internet shopping... to lose a poem / pre-scriptum is not exactly the same as losing a person to mind: father's day... i cooked the dinner, i took out the trash, i wrote an invoice... i guess that's much better than leaving a card of greetings... and, come to think of it? why are we the sort of people subjugated to nostalgia, with but also "without" a history? aren't we subjugated to nostalgia and a history as a "fiction"? the beginning of the 21st century, the end of the 20th century... the 19th century germans associated themselves with a nostalgia for ancient greece, we're the only people who have an inbuilt nostalgia "safety-mechanism"... the only people in time who are nostalgic about the life surrounding their own existence slot, which doesn't have a trans-temporal dynamic... i remember times when we would be teenagers... spitting on people from car-parks on imaginary tonsures, buying *****-magazines from indian cornershops, or belgian freebies of non-insinuations, white lightning cider while sleeping over at youth centers playing snooker throughout the night... even at school: attending a catholic school with the irish east enders... uniforms, sure... a chequered shirt: blue, red, white... tag? made in canada... and if only capitalism worked as it once did, made in canada? lifetime of a shirt? 20 years... now? made in china... not exactly real cotton, is it? 2 years... before ironing the shirt *****... once upon in gants hill, st. valentine's park, and the pub, recently closed, decent karaoke... in the park? golf, basketball, rowing boats in the large ponds... when the jews were there... gants hill roundabout... the hanukkah torches... jews scuttling wearing trainers come rosh hashanah: jews can't wear leather on rosh hashanah (judgement day)... shy like rats... when the jews were there (gants hill, ilford)... the park looked great... tennis courts... now, when neo-Bangladesh moved in? ****** place. what else do i remember from my original pre-scriptum that i lost? oh, that once time in gants hill... walking into a kosher bakery with ****** knuckles, having tested them on a canvas of a brick wall, buying some dough-fused-sweets? with the girl selling the sweets bewildered by fear? i like the look of fear in people when tested by uncertainty, and bleeding knuckles? later? climbing over the park fence, taking a **** while squatting in the darkened palace of the park, walking into a brothel, having my wallet stolen, not reacting in what would have been justified... high school... we wore uniforms... so no high school h'american culture trap / culture... school uniforms are the best idea, there's no chance to "shine" in telling apart the rich kids from the poor kids... there's only the standard... walking to a supermarket, past a thai surprise... sports bra, short hair... walking back... she's still there pretending to talk on her mobile to someone... you take her home with a few beers... play her some jazz... take her into the garden, the moon is a beauty... you **** her... hand in her underwear and you're still gambling... before the emergence of the nag hammadi library and the whole androgynous vogue, the thai were already readied with the lady-boys... when i reached in and found nothing but oyster... would i have stopped finding a wink-wink slouching worm? slap a trans in the face? no, not really... a thai surprise is, a thai surprise... i would have considered doing my first ****... "lucky" for me she was a she... a girl... ****** her in the garden under the moonlight... gave her my hoodie, which she drowned in... finally... the level of interaction where the female is not a mantis, i.e. a female larger than the male... she drowned into my hoodie as i walked her home... i like the familiarity with the mammalian, not resorting to insect superiority of females... these days... i find that males are strictly mammalian... while females? they are borrowing insect-esque ontologies... well, darwinism allowed the time-frame... males are mammals... females are insects, behaviour-wise... two time frame i do not appreciate the english for... darwinism is prime.... cultural-marxism my ***... what about cultural-darwinism?! no?! that doesn't exist?! cultural-darwinism is as real as cultural-marxism, and, in the former sense? it really does belong to the conservative right-wing politico spectrum! might i add? isn't psychology merely pop philosophy? i find psychology riddled with rubric cohesion, it's all oh so "self"-evident! i abhor psychologists... these gypsy philosophers... medicine-men with no pharmacological shadow of power... to prescribe drugs... arguments, persuasions, but no dialectics... psychology will forever be, for me, a philosophy primer, short-cut... pop philosophy... psychologists can treat people who have never read a philosophy book... r. d. laing... i remember this one instace... me and a fwend of mine travelled into central london, went into a bookshop shy of trafalgar sq., i spotted an edition of: the scarlet and the black by stendhal... i told him: i will trade you linkin park's debut album, if you buy me this... the transaction was made... the one book i read after seeing a film adaptation starring rachel (rakhel) weisz and ewan mcgregor... ra-kh-el: not ray-chel... we used to be humans once... at high school getting bullied back... putting pins on chairs once we got up, sitting on them... playing bulldog in primary school, slap-ball, tag, playing cards at lunchtime... 16 fatty boy... one summer in poland, comes back aged 17... the irish girls take an interest while eating a pomegranate... what was the success of your diet? don't go to the gym... excess skin, an aesthetic surgeon is not what you need... there are only two ways to lose weight... either via swimming or by cycling... cycling is the best... lose weight by also toning your body... gym is a bad idea... by going to the gym you are straining exclusive parts of your body, either the torso, your hands, etc., jogging? unless on soft ground, bad idea on concrete, arthritis... cycling or swimming... lose weight... tone at the same time, the skin is allowed the required time to adapt to shrink, and forget what propped it up in plump form with all that excess flab... ugh... i hated being attractive to the opposite ***, i never used it to my advantage! imagine... an irish lad comes up to me, on behalf of some girl while i'm donning a french braid: you look just like johnny depp in blow, impersonating george jung... 14 year old girls walk up to you asking what shampoo you're using... herbal essences... i never used my looks... *******... now i'm a heavy drinker... so much for looks... first girlfriend? a fwend had to call me telling me she called him that she felt butterflies when i dropped her at the train platform after a day's worth of dating: tate modern, edward hopper exhibitions, cinema: troy, starring rose byrne (briseis) - honestly, a man can go crazy over curly hair... and then a restaurant date... that **** just flew over my head... i wouldn't have noticed... honestly though... i missed the whole h'american cultural excavation genesis in high school... catholic... uniforms... jesuit army-esque formation... now, i'm ageing... i'm starting to find the company of cats to be: clingy... my shadow included... i once thought that dogs were needy... i'm starting to think that cats are worse, esp. the maine **** breed... "lonely" or "loneliness" doesn't really resonate with me, esp. when thinking something "feels" like a variation of claustrophobia: hence i write... without a dialectic in place, ever since plato wrote his dialogues... what is philosophy, primarily? isn't it an off-shoot of "claustrophobia"? we write because we are seeking escape from congested thinking, a variation of "claustrophobia"... now imagine a schizoid character... having to focus on an imaginary dialectic, actually... having dialectics enforced on him, with no clarifying exodus to posit a gensis with! now, a clingy dog i could understand, given the overpowering status of the leash... but a clingy cat, when there's no leash involved?! shoom! right over my head... gone, somewhere into the distance!

what, this is the part...
were i cite...
   the weimar ******
critical condition...
       a daft punk troop
of a song,
  end of line....
blow-up a hot air balloon...
worth of blaire whire...
play the tambourine
like a ******* video...
there are,
quiet, simply,
no nazis coming...
fashionista faux pas
examples...
i'm alive,
but i'm dead,
i just forget to don
a strap-on...
  "oops"?
   that **** go down well
with
the "in"-crowd...
usual... metropolitan...
verbiage surge of answers....
   many a fetish after...
we arrive at the sensible
aspect,
"toxic masculinity"...
when guns n roses wasn't,
and nirvana was just plain
gay...
              and then...
whatever that happened,
happened..
                 and people were like:
come to the "new" tomorrow,
there's always a yesterday,
in a dream,
in some phil collins
wannabe
studio...
or... some other random ****
that
excluded peter gabriel.

                 i died:
and just about right:
my harvest had come.

great book reviews...
"toxic masculinity"...
so all masculinity is
about a clockwork orange?
   if it is?
can i be pro abortion
anti mongolian horde?
yes? no?
  which is it?!
neither...
   **** me... that's just bad
luck...

                               sundbeds,
sunflowers,
tulips,
sunglasses,
    plenty of staged
eager nights...
boring political affairs...
and...
         when gaming was
more about the narrative...
and never,
ever, about the microtransactions...

point being...
it's a game within a game...
time, is the prime concern...
you play a game,
by waiting...
you wait: by playing a game...

  microtransactions
are...
you ever move a sim3 avatar
to a computer,
and make it play a computer game?
what's on the macrocosmos spectrum?
you....

               "back in the day"...
you'd spend a saturday morning
engrossed in a gaming narrative...
metal gear solid,
tenchu, final fantasy solid...
20 quid...
and you played the narrative...
and a game became equivalent
to the worth of a book,
resident evil,

            you paid for a month's worth
of gaming,
you exchanged tips,
you sometimes bought a cheat book
because of the homework,
and that was your saturday morning
before hitting the shopping mall
or, whatever...

the current dynamic of
microtransactions in gaming?
i never, ever, do...
i'm an old gamer type...
i see the potential of extending
the life-expectancy
of a game...

   as long as you don't buy into
the microtransactions gambling habit?
as long as you play the "game"
within the game?
the game is an assured classic,
akin to chess...

              you have to play
the waiting "game"...
             time...
                           that's all it is...
whether war robots,
    or dawn of titans...
        comparison...
  you know that the best fruit,
is fruit, allocated
to the geography of it being sourced
seasonally...
you can't actually get better
strawberries,
than english strawberries...
from england, come june / july...
no ******* point sourcing them
from spain in late march / april....

    same thing with gaming...
the modern games haven't made any
elaboration...
apart from dislodging the player
from the concept of narrative...
**** me... that's almost an improvement...
given that now: time is the counter
measure, and the gamer...
   is having to invest,
in a narrative, outside of the confines
of the game,
once upon a time,
games had time-narrative
constraints...
     now: there's time,
and there are gamer narratives,
excluding them from time-narratives,
of a game...
         it's almost a faux pas...
more like a wet-*****...
****** pinky lodged into an ear,
an april fools' day scant...

        if you hacked passed
the microtransactions hype...
and didn't?
and instead took to patience?
it's free...
   where once,
a game would cost you 20 quid,
and a month's worth
of narrative,
back then, when games
resembled books,
when the gaming industry
was heavily influenced
by literature...
and now?
   the game's free...
sure...
it's "unfair", it's biased...
when you don't engage
in imported gambling
of succumbing to what, this is the part...
were i cite...
   the weimar ******
critical condition...
       a daft punk troop
of a song,
  end of line....
blow-up a hot air balloon...
worth of blaire whire...
play the tambourine
like a ******* video...
there are,
quiet, simply,
no nazis coming...
fashionista faux pas
examples...
i'm alive,
but i'm dead,
i just forget to don
a strap-on...
  "oops"?
   that **** go down well
with
the "in"-crowd...
usual... metropolitan...
verbiage surge of answers....
   many a fetish after...
we arrive at the sensible
aspect,
"toxic masculinity"...
when guns n roses wasn't,
and nirvana was just plain
gay...
              and then...
whatever that happened,
happened..
                 and people were like:
come to the "new" tomorrow,
there's always a yesterday,
in a dream,
in some phil collins
wannabe
studio...
or... some other random ****
that
excluded peter gabriel.

                 i died:
and just about right:
my harvest had come.

great book reviews...
"toxic masculinity"...
so all masculinity is
about a clockwork orange?
   if it is?
can i be pro abortion
anti mongolian horde?
yes? no?
  which is it?!
neither...
   **** me... that's just bad
luck...

                               sundbeds,
sunflowers,
tulips,
sunglasses,
    plenty of staged
eager nights...
boring political affairs...
and...
         when gaming was
more about the narrative...
and never,
ever, about the microtransactions...

point being...
it's a game within a game...
time, is the prime concern...
you play a game,
by waiting...
you wait: by playing a game...

  microtransactions
are...
you ever move a sim3 avatar
to a computer,
and make it play a computer game?
what's on the macrocosmos spectrum?
you....

               "back in the day"...
you'd spend a saturday morning
engrossed in a gaming narrative...
metal gear solid,
tenchu, final fantasy solid...
20 quid...
and you played the narrative...
and a game became equivalent
to the worth of a book,
resident evil,

            you paid for a month's worth
of gaming,
you exchanged tips,
you sometimes bought a cheat book
because of the homework,
and that was your saturday morning
before hitting the shopping mall
or, whatever...

the current dynamic of
microtransactions in gaming?
i never, ever, do...
i'm an old gamer type...
i see the potential of extending
the life-expectancy
of a game...

   as long as you don't buy into
the microtransactions gambling habit?
as long as you play the "game"
within the game?
the game is an assured classic,
akin to chess...

              you have to play
the waiting "game"...
             time...
                           that's all it is...
whether war robots,
    or dawn of titans...
        comparison...
  you know that the best fruit,
is fruit, allocated
to the geography of it being sourced
seasonally...
you can't actually get better
strawberries,
than english strawberries...
from england, come june / july...
no ******* point sourcing them
from spain in late march / april....

    same thing with gaming...
the modern games haven't made any
elaboration...
apart from dislodging the player
from the concept of narrative...
**** me... that's almost an improvement...
given that now: time is the counter
measure, and the gamer...
   is having to invest,
in a narrative, outside of the confines
of the game,
once upon a time,
games had time-narrative
constraints...
     now: there's time,
and there are gamer narratives,
excluding them from time-narratives,
of a game...
         it's almost a faux pas...
more like a wet-*****...
****** pinky lodged into an ear,
an april fools' day scant...

        if you hacked passed
the microtransactions...
       and didn't have the chance...
microtransactions are like
the old school cheat hacks...
but not quiet, but somehow quasi-,
       a modern microtransactions,
would be a cheat magazine
thorough-through
a game like final fantasy VII...
you have homework,
but you still want to complete the game...
modern games...
modern games...
there's an "end gole"?
  what modern game is worth
"completing"?
    
   again: tron, ready player one,
back to the future...
star wars just became dead
to me...
   sick people will plague hard-working
people, with a quasi-gambling
addiction,
needing to make microtransactions...
and they will,
my father was plagued by
an impostor, claiming to be a
tax office official:
and what if, that person had
an authentic position at the tax office?!

when gaming was for gamers,
the games were bought...
there was a narrative...
but now... now games don't have a narrative...
why would they?!
   who the hell plays games for
the narrative these days?
i know that on the crapper,
i need a game that allows me
to experience live-stream
interaction with non-bots...

       and these old gamers,
who still invest their money
in literature-esque-games?
so i was the sad one,
investing in vinyl?
   aren't the classic ******* gamers
just as bad,
investing in prepackaged
narrative gaming
experiences?
             a game with a narrative...
yeah... me buying vinyl
is: b'ah b'ah bad...
       what sort of game is alive and well...
when there isn't a crowd pushback
for the currency of microtransaction?

the narrative is time,
   the longer you endure the inadequacy...
the more you realise:
you're basically playing
the same game,
but in your scenario:
it's free...
   in some other ******'s scenario:
it cost him 70 hundred quid...

personally?
   i love this microtransaction dynamic...
concerning the people who
do not engage with it...
it's the perfect antithesis
   of what ruined the music industry
with genesis: napster...

you really are, playing the ultimate
game,
time...
         the one sort of commodity
that games,
without a clear narrative construct,
"forgot" to mention in terms
of them being exploited...
to their full capacity
of the one "commodity"
they "forgot", or rather,
couldn't "sell"...

              a tenchu PS1 game could
have lasted me a month...
now? a free game,
like war robots...
with absolutely no NPC?
hell... i'll be 90 and still be playing it;

what else? applause!
Nigel Morgan Nov 2012
As a woman, and in the service of my Lord the Emperor Wu, my life is governed by his command. At twenty I was summoned to this life at court and have made of it what I can, within the limitations of the courtesan I am supposed to be, and the poet I have now become. Unlike my male counterparts, some of whom have lately found seclusion in the wilderness of rivers and mountains, I have only my personal court of three rooms and its tiny garden and ornamental pond. But I live close to the surrounding walls of the Zu-lin Gardens with its astronomical observatories and bold attempts at recreating illusions of celebrated locations in the Tai mountains. There, walking with my cat Xi-Lu in the afternoons, I imagine a solitary life, a life suffused with the emptiness I crave.
 
In the hot, dry summer days my maid Mei-Lim and I have sought a temporary retreat in the pine forests above Lingzhi. Carried in a litter up the mountain paths we are left in a commodious hut, its open walls making those simple pleasures of drinking, eating and sleeping more acute, intense. For a few precious days I rest and meditate, breathe the mountain air and the resinous scents of the trees. I escape the daily commerce of the court and belong to a world that for the rest of the year I have to imagine, the world of the recluse. To gain the status of the recluse, open to my male counterparts, is forbidden to women of the court. I am woman first, a poet and calligrapher second. My brother, should he so wish, could present a petition to revoke his position as a man of letters, an official commentator on the affairs of state. But he is not so inclined. He has already achieved notoriety and influence through his writing on the social conditions of town and city. He revels in a world of chatter, gossip and intrigue; he appears to fear the wilderness life.  
 
I must be thankful that my own life is maintained on the periphery. I am physically distant from the hub of daily ceremonial. I only participate at my Lord’s express command. I regularly feign illness and fatigue to avoid petty conflict and difficulty. Yet I receive commissions I cannot waver: to honour a departed official; to celebrate a son’s birth to the Second Wife; to fulfil in verse my Lord’s curious need to know about the intimate sorrows of his young concubines, their loneliness and heartache.
 
Occasionally a Rhapsody is requested for an important visitor. The Emperor Wu is proud to present as welcome gifts such poetic creations executed in fine calligraphy, and from a woman of his court. Surely a sign of enlightment and progress he boasts! Yet in these creations my observations are parochial: early morning frost on the cabbage leaves in my garden; the sound of geese on their late afternoon flight to Star Lake; the disposition of the heavens on an Autumn night. I live by the Tao of Lao-Tzu, perceiving the whole world from my doorstep.
 
But I long for the reclusive life, to leave this court for my family’s estate in the valley my peasant mother lived as a child. At fourteen she was chosen to sustain the Emperor’s annual wish for young girls to be groomed for concubinage. Like her daughter she is tall, though not as plain as I; she put her past behind her and conceded her adolescence to the training required by the court. At twenty she was recommended to my father, the court archivist, as second wife. When she first met this quiet, dedicated man on the day before her marriage she closed her eyes in blessing. My father taught her the arts of the library and schooled her well. From her I have received keen eyes of jade green and a prestigious memory, a memory developed she said from my father’s joy of reading to her in their private hours, and before she could read herself. Each morning he would examine her to discover what she had remembered of the text read the night before. When I was a little child she would quote to me the Confucian texts on which she had been ****** schooled, and she then would tell me of her childhood home. She primed my imagination and my poetic world with descriptions of a domestic rural life.
 
Sometimes in the arms of my Lord I have freely rhapsodized in chusi metre these delicate word paintings of my mother’s home. She would say ‘We will walk now to the ruined tower beside the lake. Listen to the carolling birds. As the sparse clouds move across the sky the warm sun strokes the winter grass. Across the deep lake the forests are empty. Now we are climbing the narrow steps to the platform from which you and I will look towards the sun setting in the west. See the shadows are lengthening and the air becomes colder. The blackbird’s solitary song heralds the evening.  Look, an owl glides silently beneath us.’
 
My Lord will then quote from Hsieh Ling-yun,.
 
‘I meet sky, unable to soar among clouds,
face a lake, call those depths beyond me.’
 
And I will match this quotation, as he will expect.
 
‘Too simple-minded to perfect Integrity,
and too feeble to plough fields in seclusion.’
 
He will then gaze into my eyes in wonder that this obscure poem rests in my memory and that I will decode the minimal grammar of these early characters with such poetry. His characters: Sky – Bird – Cloud – Lake – Depth. My characters: Fool – Truth – Child – Winter field – Isolation.
 
Our combined invention seems to take him out of his Emperor-self. He is for a while the poet-scholar-sage he imagines he would like to be, and I his foot-sore companion following his wilderness journey. And then we turn our attention to our bodies, and I surprise him with my admonitions to gentleness, to patience, to arousing my pleasure. After such poetry he is all pleasure, sensitive to the slightest touch, and I have my pleasure in knowing I can control this powerful man with words and the stroke of my fingertips rather than by delicate youthful beauty or the guile and perverse ingenuity of an ****** act. He is still learning to recognise the nature and particularness of my desires. I am not as his other women: who confuse pleasure with pain.
 
Thoughts of my mother. Without my dear father, dead ten years, she is a boat without a rudder sailing on a distant lake. She greets each day as a gift she must honour with good humour despite the pain of her limbs, the difficulty of walking, of sitting, of eating, even talking. Such is the hurt that governs her ageing. She has always understood that my position has forbidden marriage and children, though the latter might be a possibility I have not wished it and made it known to my Lord that it must not be. My mother remains in limbo, neither son or daughter seeking to further her lineage, she has returned to her sister’s home in the distant village of her birth, a thatched house of twenty rooms,
 
‘Elms and willows shading the eaves at the back,
and, in front,  peach and plum spread wide.
 
Villages lost across mist-haze distances,
Kitchen smoke drifting wide-open country,
 
Dogs bark deep among the back roads out here
And cockerels crow from mulberry treetops.
 
My esteemed colleague T’ao Ch’ien made this poetry. After a distinguished career in government service he returned to the life of a recluse-farmer on his family farm. Living alone in a three-roomed hut he lives out his life as a recluse and has endured considerable poverty. One poem I know tells of him begging for food. His world is fields-and-gardens in contrast to Hsieh Ling-yin who is rivers-and-mountains. Ch’ien’s commitment to the recluse life has brought forth words that confront death and the reality of human experience without delusion.
 
‘At home here in what lasts, I wait out life.’
 
Thus my mother waits out her life, frail, crumbling more with each turning year.
 
To live beyond the need to organise daily commitments due to others, to step out into my garden and only consider the dew glistening on the loropetalum. My mind is forever full of what is to be done, what must be completed, what has to be said to this visitor who will today come to my court at the Wu hour. Only at my desk does this incessant chattering in the mind cease, as I move my brush to shape a character, or as the needle enters the cloth, all is stilled, the world retreats; there is the inner silence I crave.
 
I long to see with my own eyes those scenes my mother painted for me with her words. I only know them in my mind’s eye having travelled so little these past fifteen years. I look out from this still dark room onto my small garden to see the morning gathering its light above the rooftops. My camellia bush is in flower though a thin frost covers the garden stones.
 
And so I must imagine how it might be, how I might live the recluse life. How much can I jettison? These fine clothes, this silken nightgown beneath the furs I wrap myself in against the early morning air. My maid is sleeping. Who will make my tea? Minister to me when I take to my bed? What would become of my cat, my books, the choice-haired brushes? Like T’ao Ch’ien could I leave the court wearing a single robe and with one bag over my shoulders? Could I walk for ten days into the mountains? I would disguise myself as a man perhaps. I am tall for a woman, and though my body flows in broad curves there are ways this might be assuaged, enough perhaps to survive unmolested on the road.
 
Such dreams! My Lord would see me returned within hours and send a servant to remain at my gate thereafter. I will compose a rhapsody about a concubine of standing, who has even occupied the purple chamber, but now seeks to relinquish her privileged life, who coverts the uncertainty of nature, who would endure pain and privation in a hut on some distant mountain, who will sleep on a mat on its earth floor. Perhaps this will excite my Lord, light a fire in his imagination. As though in preparation for this task I remove my furs, I loose the knot of my silk gown. Naked, I reach for an old under shift letting it fall around my still-slender body and imagine myself tying the lacings myself in the open air, imagine making my toilet alone as the sun appears from behind a distant mountain on a new day. My mind occupies itself with the tiny detail of living thus: bare feet on cold earth, a walk to nearby stream, the gathering of berries and mountain herbs, the making of fire, the washing of my few clothes, imagining. Imagining. To live alone will see every moment filled with the tasks of keeping alive. I will become in tune with my surroundings. I will take only what I need and rely on no one. Dreaming will end and reality will be the slug on my mat, the bone-chilling incessant mists of winter, the thorn in the foot, the wild winds of autumn. My hands will become stained and rough, my long limbs tanned and scratched, my delicate complexion freckled and wind-pocked, my hair tied roughly back. I will become an animal foraging on a dank hillside. Such thoughts fill me with deep longing and a ****** desire to be tzu-jan  - with what surrounds me, ablaze with ****** self.
 
It is not thought the custom of a woman to hold such desires. We are creatures of order and comfort. We do not live on the edge of things, but crave security and well-being. We learn to endure the privations of being at the behest of others. Husbands, children, lovers, our relatives take our bodies to them as places of comfort, rest and desire. We work at maintaining an ordered flow of existence. Whatever our station, mistress or servant we compliment, we keep things in order, whether that is the common hearth or the accounts of our husband’s court. Now my rhapsody begins:
 
A Rhapsody on a woman wishing to live as a recluse
 
As a lady of my Emperor’s court I am bound in service.
My court is not my own, I have the barest of means.
My rooms are full of gifts I am forced barter for bread.
Though the artefacts of my hands and mind
Are valued and widely renown,
Their commissioning is an expectation of my station,
With no direct reward attached.
To dress appropriately for my Lord’s convocations and assemblies
I am forced to negotiate with chamberlains and treasurers.
A bolt of silk, gold thread, the services of a needlewoman
Require formal entreaties and may lie dormant for weeks
Before acknowledgement and release.
 
I was chosen for my literary skills, my prestigious memory,
Not for my ****** beauty, though I have been called
‘Lady of the most gracious movement’ and
My speaking voice has clarity and is capable of many colours.
I sing, but plainly and without passion
Lest I interfere with the truth of music’s message.
 
Since I was a child in my father’s library
I have sought out the works of those whose words
Paint visions of a world that as a woman
I may never see, the world of the wilderness,
Of rivers and mountains,
Of fields and gardens.
Yet I am denied by my *** and my station
To experience passing amongst these wonders
Except as contrived imitations in the palace gardens.
 
Each day I struggle to tease from the small corner
Of my enclosed eye-space some enrichment
Some elemental thing to colour meaning:
To extend the bounds of my home
Across the walls of this palace
Into the world beyond.
 
I have let it be known that I welcome interviews
With officials from distant courts to hear of their journeying,
To gather word images if only at second-hand.
Only yesterday an emissary recounted
His travels to Stone Lake in the far South-West,
Beyond the gorges of the Yang-tze.
With his eyes I have seen the mountains of Suchan:
With his ears I have heard the oars crackling
Like shattering jade in the freezing water.
Images and sounds from a thousand miles
Of travel are extract from this man’s memory.
 
Such a sharing of experience leaves me
Excited but dismayed: that I shall never
Visit this vast expanse of water and hear
Its wild cranes sing from their floating nests
In the summer moonlight.
 
I seek to disappear into a distant landscape
Where the self and its constructions of the world may
Dissolve away until nothing remains but the no-mind.
My thoughts are full of the practicalities of journeying
Of an imagined location, that lonely place
Where I may be at one with myself.
Where I may delight in the everyday Way,
Myself among mist and vine, rock and cave.
Not this lady of many parts and purposes whose poems must
Speak of lives, sorrow and joy, pleasure and pain
Set amongst personal conflict and intrigue
That in containing these things, bring order to disorder;
Salve the conscience, bathe hurt, soothe sleight.
Arlene Corwin Jan 2020
Clearing up and out I came upon this, “The Personal Joys Og Ageing from 2016.  Now totally rewritten.

              The Personal Joys Of Ageing

I enjoy not being steered by ardour’s ***** drive,
The appetite for lots of food and varied such:
I enjoy not wanting much of much
Which qualities all counteract, exacerbate
The facts of fate.

It’s late.
I cannot sleep
But revel in the hours I keep.
Awake at night,
It is a most creative time to write.

In younger days there was so much I’d have denied,
Tried to get out of, lied about,
Taboos and mores* certifying,
Classifying wrong and right.

Sleep, food, *** vacate the drives,
Each space replaced by something fitter.
Without daily nose dives
Life is definitely better.
                                                      
Say, dear reader
What you’re free from.
I would love to hear from
Any reader sitting there.

The Personal Joys Of Ageing 12.6.2016/rewritten 1.16.2020
Circling Round Eros II; Nature Of Reality; Circling Round Ageing; Arlene Nover Corwin

*mores (pronounced morays) customs, conventions, ways, way of life, way of doing things, traditions, practices, custom and practice, procedures, habits, usages; formal praxis.
Mateuš Conrad Jul 2018
.    like cardinal Leto remarked, having received news from Versailles... why is it always the ******* French?

perhaps in a less crude manner,
drinking wine,
while eating raw fruits -

  always a bad combination...
no *****, no meat?
   bad idea... wine, and raw fruit
akin to strawberries?
    irritable bowel movements...

- and that's because Einstein
didn't discover the concept of
gravity, in the format of: sideways?
in the form of orbits?
   expansive waves...
   that allowed for the elliptical interpretation?
like the old
              argument:
      (heliocentric) oval...
             contra the (geocentric) circular
"concern" for...
   whatever is up / down
            sideways in
      the Copernican terminology...
because there was ever a "shape"
concerning the universe,
  and not a medium,
            an extraction for the metaphor
for water,
   gas, liquid, solid...
              and the fourth aspect
of ancient elements:
   its existence in a vacuous "space"?

- but i can't fathom the French at this point...
once upon a time...
one Frenchman equated the motivation
for a "summa summarum"
    to be bound with a thinking,
and a curiosity...

            the current fashion of Latin
abbreviations...
   this... cogito ergo sum?
   it's nonsense...
    speak it long enough...
   and you'll find yourself inclined
to suppose that cogitans per se:
is a motivation, an impetus to exist...
yet... so much of thought it "wasted"
or, rather, to craft an impetus to
"doubt", within the confines of fiction...
but the motivation has lost its
origin within the confines of doubt,
and has been replaced by
the Freudian unconscious,
   a serialized phobia fest... notably
including a, clown...

originally, thought (per se) was
a secondary motivational outlet
that precipitated into being...
    first came... doubt...
   but... these days?
               doubt is a conspiracy theory,
no longer an emotional thrill
to prop-up thinking...
   and we have the French existentialists
to thank for this...
for they subverted their own
idea...

             negation has replaced doubt
as the origin, and motivation
for thinking...
        yet... this sort of "thinking",
has made, its materialization, so, so...
obscene...
    i can hardly find it surprising while
i took to propping two worthwhile
economic outlets...
   prostitution (since they will spend
the money i give them...
on things... i wouldn't even care
for propping up)...

    and... alcohol (scotch whiskey,
russian standard *****...
    shveedish cider...
                     german beer)...

but how can you even claim an existence,
if...
       there is no thrill...
of what is the secular expression of faith:
i.e. doubt?
  how can you replace doubt -
a motivation for thinking, materialized
into being... with negation?
  jean-paul Sartre attempted this inversion -

doubt has been replaced with negation
in his system...
             it's like that cliche of an English
1960s ***-joke / ***-like...
       this... frivolity over a blatant lie...
a lie so... bogus...
    so ineffectual in translating a hidden truth
that... you allow it...
   to care for the cheap comic aspect
of the execution...

but how can the French suddenly
feign to disbelieve their secularism -
   resorting to the antithesis,
namely:

  original

  doubt motivates thinking,
  which subsequently motivates
   being within the confines of reason,
or rather, reasonableness...

20th century existentialists

negation "motifs" thinking,
   which subsequently motifs
"being" within the freedom of non-reason,
or rather, unreasonableness...

   and by negation,
   i don't mean the atomic conceived softening
blow...
   akin to: dis-ease...
    i.e. (as i explained it to one old man
in a park, walking his dog):
  a negation, or ease... a denial of...

how can the Cartesian model work,
when the 20th century French existentialists
began with the presupposition:

   i deny, i think, therefore i exist?
where is the original thrill of
the secular aspect of faith, within the boundaries
of doubt?
              gone... vanished!
****! a **** on the London tube,
during the rush hour,
  during the heatwave
                of the past month!

                   perhaps this only comes
as a method of assimilating an increased population,
within the confines of the Taoist maxim:
the best way to aid the world,
is to forget the world, and let the world
forget about you...

             perhaps... the Andy Warhol 15 minutes
analogy...
      that in order to encompass the individual,
the world, and the individual within it...
   the approach had to change
from the original, exciting, exploration
genesis of thought, bound to the genesis
of doubt...
             having to be replaced by
a genesis of denial...
      the second tier of a secular society...
    the zeitgeist of Herr Censor...
to filter through what we see so often,
faces, bodies...
  but would be much more comfortable
having been bound to Plato's cave,
         of complete shadow theater...

perhaps... but the original tier of
secular societies' alternative to church prescribed
articles of faith...
                     to have replaced
the thrill of doubt...
      with this... Byzantine pillar of denial
as motivational groundwork for
thinking impetus
   that becomes an article of being?
am i the only one to see the frustration,
how, people abhor their being,
being founded upon an act of denial,
rather than an act of doubt?

     the once thrilling maybe (gnostic):
   has become the stale, "i don't know"
    (agnostic) - as if... people can't tell you
whether zebras have stripes!
   where there was once an article
of secular faith (doubt) -
   now?
                        there's not even that!

p.s.
  there has to be a much needed new mantra,
all publicity: is bad publicity -
unless of course you're riding that
fame juggernaut and are paying
for your all-inclusive status akin
   to madonna: since fame dies off
and you, none-the-less invest in the momentum...

one day where i drink a bottle of wine,
half a liter of whiskey,
   and i'm apparently not "screaming" in
my sleep from the heat,
the whole, "apparently", as i retorted:
at 5:15am? i was alseep! i was asleep!
how can i stop screaming in my sleep
like a banshee:
the sleeper and the blind man both see
eye to eye regarding the future to come...

one day without engaging in internet
content: of my own accord,
next day? this... this... lethargy builds
up in me... i end up thinking:
i can't do this any more,
this insomnia culture globalism of
24h news reels is tirying me,
i pick up the sunday newspaper
which i found to be respecteable...
the sunday times,
  i peer into the magazines...
toxic masculinity,
    desire: what three women want...
i'm bored...
well more tired than bored,
bored-tired...
                 what women want:
what an exhausting question...
**** fantasy, beta-male provideer...
yada-yada-yada...
                    
    the only relaxing aspect of the day
(apart from the shade) is watching
england beat india in the cricket...
i always loved cricket sport terminology:
50 overs... innings...
wickets... 6 throws of the ball in an over...
the rest? i'm no atlas...
i don't like the world crashing in on
me with all its problems...
not because i don't have the right
advice to give,
but i remember the most modern secular
motto about giving advice borrowed
from Athos of the creation of alexandre dumas:

the best advice? to not give advice...
you cannot be held accountable
for giving bad advice: and people complaining,
or good advice and leaving
people in your sphere of influence...
asking for more - non verbatim... of course...

second categorical imperative?
tao...
              the best way you can help
the world: is to forget the world,
and let the world forget you...

                        you only need two absolute
maxim vectors to orientate yourself
in this world,
a third is nice, but: it can be kept loose...
at least two on a tight leash...

but one night spent drinking,
not writing anything:
and i am... spent!

                            the boogieman of england's
persistent complaints...
the muslims are not integrating,
the english: we should give them more
ground...
           o.k., o.k.... joe peshi in the role
leo getz in lethal weapon II...
            i too had to integrate!
i said: like **** if you think i'll give up
my native tongue when spoken in private...
you're not getting it...
i'll spreschen ihre zunge, no problem,
i'll even write you pwetty free verses to boot!
but, guess what?
  i will not force you to eat my
sauerkraut, my schnitzels,
                           my smoked sausages,
my raw herrings etc.,
                      integration does not work
within the confines of: pampering to a people
expected to meet you half-way...
what happened when the polonaise attempted
to meet the english half-way?
brexit...
oh come on guv'... is there a ******* tram
echoing its way out of my eye
when you peer into it while i attach
an index finger to the bottom lid to give
you a clearer picture?
           25 years in england: no englush girlfriend:
i guess all the english girls just love, just love love
being ***** by 9 pakistanis
daubed in gasoline...
                   hey: they **** thrill...

i'm tired of the weakness of the english,
the humpty-dumpty nature they are imposing,
self-cencorship,
    appeasing, like neville chamberlain...
bringing back the munich agreement...
not on a piece of paper,
instead... waving a scrap of a toilet roll...
so the english could wipe their own *****
on the promises of the germans...
if this really hurts the northern monkies...
guess how much it hurts the sourthern fairies...
(well... fairy, is a designated region surrounding
devon, bristol, hardly a ******* fairy in essex)...

   why am i foreigner and i share
the same nausea of the natives,
                     exhausted by the narratives?
i guess the english didn't like the polonaise:
but the polonaise are to blame...
came here with a list of benefits they could claim:
without having even lived 5 years among
the natives... housing benefits, child benefits...
believe me: the polonaise are the only
people in the world that hate each other...
to the extent of citing bitter criticisms...
whenever i pass through warsaw to see my grandparents
i am gripped with a sickness:
this homogeneity is too much for me...
shove me back into the east end of London...
too much of the same genetic material...
and that's when the language i am keeping
(seemingly for vanity reasons) fizzles out
into your basic encounter and that basic reminder
that circa 40 million speak it too,
better or worse, but they speak it...

of all the festivals? download...
                                   i wish...
    glastonbury?       not my thing...
kylie? i'll concede: slow? live, with instruments,
rather than the studio original...
wasn't that a cover of
   bowie's fashion?
                  sure as hell sounded similar...
but i heard the cure were playing...
so while writing my father's invoice
i made myself a paperclip bracelet...
   i figured... "let's just pretend to be there"...
and no, the 1980s weren't that bad when
it comes to music,
not now, by comparison...
the cure's kiss me, kiss me, kiss me (1987)
release?
one of those rare albums you can
listen to akin to reading a book...

                       but there's still that persisting
exhaustion... i came from under communism,
from under the iron curtain,
but at least there was the economic aspect
of communism involved...

   only today i watched the story
of the terrible inversion of english jursprudence,
i.e.: guilty until proven innocent...
the 1975 case of the silesian vampire...
an innocent man was hanged...
the original vampire?
    smashed his wive's head in,
then his childrens', then he set himself
on fire...
              then again: the tragedy of those
rare cases of being presumed guilty
rather than innocent...
then the reverse: presumed innocent rather
than guilty and getting away with it,
through the parody of death
and the non existent god...

   there could not be anything more exhausting
than communism without a communist
economic model...
this current state of affairs in the west:
cultural marxism and the yet to be discovered
antithesis of cultural darwinism...

i'll use the cartesian chirality for a moment:
sum ergo cogito...
i don't like using political terms...
but... liberal (classical) - i don't even know
what sort of thinking goes into the label -
in the east? the liberals are exhausted
by a resurgent nationalism within
   the newly acquired capitalist system...
in the west? the liberals are exhausted
by an insurgent communism within
an ageing capitalist system...

         on a side: seriously, why even bother
engaging in any sort of "public intellectual"
debates when the public are only
discussing two books: 1984 and brave new world...
**** it, might as well talk to a camel jockey
who only own and rides the waves of
time in this world only using one...
muhammad...
   whom Khadija **** Khuwaylid
would probably whip into his young
respectable shape...

                  and this is how Ezra Pound comes
into rememberance:
usura... at least the muslims do not
play into the game of usury:
of interest... borrow a quid,
pay back £2.33...
            that's the only way you can
gain respect of the muslims:
if they truly were the money lenders
of this world: which they aren't...
unless a newly blessed...

   among the philistines and the proselytes...
england is such a tiresome project,
even on the outskirts of London...
i'm being dragged down by this intervention
of marxism: on a whim,
on a whimsical projection...
of "adding" values...
            
           communism would have worked...
in exceptional circumstances...
poland... circa 1945 - 1990...
syria: the current year...
  to whatever year is demanded...
exceptional as in: war torn...
where was the marshall plan
   for poland, when there was one
for sweden (neutral) and switzerland
(also neutral)?!
        black youths bothered about
the summer holidays,
having to live in council flats,
  concrete goliaths...
           want to know what it feels like
when entire cities are like council
estates,
with only pockets of remaining
   free-standing houses among
overshadowing council flats?
                                    nee bother...
sure... in a country where:
the house is the castle and there's a labyrinth
of castles constituting outer suburbia...
balconies... that's what the soviet
models had... balconies...
where women could grow flowers...
concrete staccato gardens in the sky...
the blocks of flats in england
didn't have balconies (sky gardens,
          esp. the early ones, massive fault)...
i spent one summer reading
bertnard russell's history of western philosophy...
lying in my grandparent's balcony,
in the shade...
watching passerbys among
          the barking dogs of the neighbours...

one day, one ******* day!
   and i'm already exhausted from the castrato
english narrative...
pandering to the people you expected
to integrate...
  no! you're not changing your standards...
your standards are perfectly reasonable!
i'm tired of the english pandering
to the sort of people who, will, not,
integrate!
               i integrated in a way
of respecting both the english culture,
as well as hiding / preserving my own...
why don't i just do the following:
   pisać po polsku?
                      like some czesław miłosz?

ah... good point... at what point
is the standard of integration appreciated?
when nothing is preserved?
surely integration is supposed to
accommodate some variation
of preservation?
     i might add: that's a fine line...
preserve all? no integration...
preserve some? integration...
                    preserve none? no integration...
food is a cheap target to example
with...
                   it's a low hanging fruit...
given that even i find indian cuisine
   the most superior in the world...
food is a cheap target concerning integration...
but the niqab?
  when the local english authorities
are employing face-recognition
technology and when testing it...
are forcing people to uncover their faces,
subsequently arresting them out of protest...
but not the women wearing the niqab...
out of? out of what?
   a secular society shouldn't be allowed
to discriminate against any religion...
it should discriminate against: all religions!

                isn't that what the secular ideology
is all about? the... softcore version
of soviet atheism?
        secularism of the west (miltary-industrial
complex)...
"vs." soviet atheism of the east
  (scientific-industrial complex)...
           i'm still so ******* tired
               of this bogus trap of "necessary"
                       commentary.
Tom Balch Jun 2018
Fly so fast the years they do
and my mind is not as once it was,
forgetting things such as dates and names
and going round as though I´m lost,
in every room I stop and wonder
why did I come in here,
what is it, that I´m looking for,
not a clue I fear.

Have you seen my reading glasses
Yes! she says, you´ve got them on your head,
and what about my car keys
I´ve looked everywhere, including in the shed,
and when I bend, why is it
that I always grunt and groan,
and my back today, is not the best of backs
I am so racked with aches and pains.

My eyesight´s not as sharp these days
and my hearing, Sorry, what d´you say,
no longer do I walk upright
and my thinning hair is turning grey,
but although the body´s ageing
and the memory´s fading fast,
my brain still thinks I´m eighteen
and I can do things, as I did in the past.

So I´m off to run a marathon
and the channel I shall swim
and when I get home from clubbing
I´ll be heading for the gym,
I´ve parked my zimmer in the corner
and my pillows I have plumped,
the douvet I have pulled up tight
as I start to snore and dream, and trump.
Lewis Hyden Nov 2018
"Getting sick of married life?
Tired of your ageing wife?
Well, you can create her face anew
With plastic skin and pink tissue!"

"Yes, in only three short days,
She'll be worthy of your praise.
Just send a cheque to this address
And trust us, friend, we'll sort the rest!"

The bill-boards scream in the night
As wolves in the canopy.
Like lasers, they seethe and cut
Through the diamonds of your wet eyes,
Convincing you all too soon that
You are not already perfect.
A poem about impossible standards.
#4 in the Distant Dystopia anthology.

© Lewis Hyden, 2018
Mateuš Conrad Aug 2016
now i know why i might engage with writing obscene
poems, chauvinism included, but still there
is no burning excuse in my mind with the way
western society actively desires censorship of certain
words, i already attributed censoring obscene
words as worse than what this tactic precipitates into:
the apathetic spread of *******, and violence
in general... it crosses my mind that sparring with violent
language cushions people from violet action...
to utilise violent language with that: pardon my French
attitude does more good than evil on the users...
how many road rage incidents could have been avoided
if people were unable to watch their tongue:
somehow we're making language sterile, by actively
pursuing this sort of censorship: which is not even
remotely politically related / motivated, we're bringing
an anaemic status quo in how fluidly we speak -
we desire to not hear the sometimes funny and the sometimes
awful... but we choose to see the god-fearing horrific...
ask any blind-man about music and he'd say:
well, i can dance to it in a nucleus position, centrally
gravitational pull - but ask the deaf man about
what he has to say when seeing **** written to counter
obscenity, as in cartoon-like: f&%£! it's just plain silly,
pocket-sized expression of psychotic behaviours,
rummaging through them i find only one source of inspiration:
the fact that we're in this blind-man's garden of innocence,
somehow dressed in the camouflage of censorship such
a tiny problem, that it does indeed require 23 mattresses
for the princess to not feel the frozen *** agitating her...
this sort of censorship in its application is under
a false sense of purpose, it really doesn't change people's
behaviour for the better, it doesn't pacify them, in does
the reverse: it infuriates, it makes violence more potent...
i'm still trying to figure out why such words
will make our perceptions saintly... unless of course
that's the reason behind them, as way of invoking an
anaesthetic placebo, a placebo that's actually active rather
than passive - presuming the anaesthetic placebo gives
way to an aesthetic active apathy-inducing ingredient...
meaning we can't bare to hear swear words, but we can
gladly watch 20 hours of 20 : 1 ****... censoring **** ****
**** **** will not escape Newtonian physics...
given our current scenario, Newtonian physics is far
more important than Einstein's relativity, i'd hate to be
in denial about cause & effect... as began with Socrates,
i too abhor moral relativism... of course Newton got
the gravity bit wrong, but i like the simpler version...
plus... there was no Romance with Einstein...
no apple, no tree, no Voltaire... meaning we don't necessarily
write history collectively, with all of us starting from
the big bang or the view from the Galapagos islands...
we don't... we continue writing history not from a
collective consciousness genesis... or from the collective
unconscious genesis - that's Jung with his archetypes
(devil, god, wise man, mother, father etc.) rather than
dreams (Freud) - we can chose were to write the future...
it's not so much ignorance as arm-chair intellectualism,
it's not about the safety of understanding something,
but the comfort of choosing to understand something...
which is pretty much to my excuse for my previous poems...
Heidegger... and that concept of Dasein -
i never bothered to understand it to the point of
reacting subjectively to it, by that i mean an interest
in writing about it, an interpolation of the subject with
alternative variations... i objectified it, i also countered it
when objectifying the concept turned out to be an
everyday object, shortening my quest.
the counter? hiersein, i.e. being here, here denoting a
solipsistic classification of awareness with / in the world -
which is basically me in my room, admiring my library,
my record collection, my torn sneakers, everything that
is classified exclusive to what dasein evolves into
when all its grammatical weaving only express a verb,
i.e. concern... so i thought, given this what can hiersein
(being here / nonchalance) actually show me as
my lack of interest in: "changing the world".
it became obvious yesterday, i had a hard time when i
didn't read the day's copy of the times (more on this later),
instead i had to suffice with construction site media,
you might have heard of this newspaper: the daily star,
at 20 pence a pop, you will see what £1.20 makes to
your psyche... but that's basically it, i objectified Heidegger's
concept and made it into an everyday object, in this
case and as the only case available: a newspaper -
and the trick is? well, with a newspaper like daily star
you don't actually experience dasein - it's completely
missing in this style of media, and that's worrying given
my barbaric poetry of yesterday... it's missing, not there,
such object-for-object chirality is what gives birth to
hiersein (being here); but today i returned to my usual
media diet, a flicked through the times and the natural
balance of personal objects and a fresh impersonal object
coexisted - the newspaper is truly the most adequate
compounded expression of Heidegger's dasein -
which i attribute to the constant need to emphasise an
empathy with others... empathising is a neutral form
of sympathising, since sympathy is sourced in shared
experiences: **** victims (e.g.) - therefore empathy is
something that in the ontological structuring of dasein,
which opposes the ontological structuring of hiersein,
which is structured by apathy; there is nothing else for
me to write, apart from the compendium proof
of the disparity of sources, i.e. headlines and subheadings:

- prior compendium -

i will never understand the point of autobiographies,
the majority of autobiographies are written
on a p.s. basis, after the facts / actions,
never immediately, concerning ideas /
solidified thoughts, thoughts condensed into idea
that allow thinking / cognitive narration to
continue regardless with what's being achieved...
i haven't anything autobiographical dissimilar
with something biographical...
Plato wrote that wonderful biography like
Shakespearean theatre, but i guess his critics felt
the claustrophobic tug & pull of mermaids...
still the problem ascends heights unparalleled -
even with ghost writers doing the leg-work...
cheap-buggers never learned to write, let alone read,
and here they are writing biographies...
ah, **** it... they're only sketches... whether biographic
or autobiographic... they're still mere sketches...
if this was the art world the revenue would come
posthumously, when it comes to literacy
nothing really distinguishes poets from
those prescribing pedestrian signs...
the Olympians can moan at the vacant stadium...
that there's a hierarchy in sports,
with the favoured monochrome idealisation
of where the bunny money is in the whirlpool
of the rabbit hole investment: football, volleyball...
but the literary events are the same...
people love to lie that they read the bestseller to
its full extent... but treat books like chairs and tables...
inertia prone half finished, sat on for 2 weeks of
the entire year... the Olympians are very much
like poets, and i care to distance myself from either
demand for more interest being invoked...
i like esoteric sports, i like esoteric writing...
but that's how it stand: poets are Olympians where
novelists are footballers, who retire at 30 and
then think about what to do with their wages
that are 10x higher than the everyday labourer...
start a restaurant, buy a strip of houses in Liverpool
like Michael Owen? good guess, here's to exploiting
youth disgracefully... that's what they're getting,
and these are the dilemma points to consider...
they're the equivalent gladiators of our time,
Rome was just a sleeper before it awoke once more...
but i'll never understand why these
people decided to exploit literature for gain...
all these academics with their pristine purity of discovery
are pacified when dictating print,
what poet, has a chance in hell, to appear gladly
excavated from Plato's cave of television?
about none.
i too was focusing on 20th century literature,
before 21st literature came about...
and i thought, oh god: they're really going to create
a totalitarian democracy, every artist will be
strip-searched for adding cinnamon and chilli to their
writing to bounce away from conformist
sober and sane extraction of alter wordings...
this 21st scene will become polarised...
we'll have the extinction of One Direction over a joint,
while the Rolling Stones drank a keg of whiskey
and pulled off a show... we'll have moralisation
of the fans to subdue the artists, which will mean
no artist will ably create a zeitgeist to rebel... everyone
will suddenly experience a weird sort of communism...
the worst kind... it will mean having
all the mental freedoms without the ability to
economise a coup... basically an inertia, an immediate
fatality... we can't economise a coup...
which boils down to why so many autobiographies
aren't really biographic, but rather consolidating,
by the meaning: autobiographic i intended to relate
the everyday... the most secretive account of life:
the everyday... this is stressing Proust,
even though i preferred Joyce over Proust i keep
the everyday the prime ideal: the only detail,
so that an autobiography can make sense,
automation of writing, like breathing or sneezing...
not some monetary-spinning device 20 years after
the facts... 20 years later you're pretty much writing
fiction... i am all for the biosphere of expanding
Alveoli... but when did you ever read an autobiography
that mentioned the taste of weak coffee
from the Friday of 20th of August 2016? never;
you read autobiographies
like you read self-help books...  waiting for
all that experience regurgitating motivational talk
about reaching a plateau of comparative success...
i can understand autobiographies written by the elders,
i understand biographies written about people
posthumously - but the tragedy is, given the spinning
wheel of money? we're getting "auto" biographies
written toward their 3rd volume renditions of
people aged 30... let alone 40... so much for
western society having the upper hand on political matters...
just saying: sort your own **** before trying
to sort other people's problems...
i could understand if these autobiographies were written
as described: automaton solo... but they're not...
before the compendium it's this everlasting presence
of a desired body of power being depicted:
prior the monopoly of knowledge, there was a monopoly
of literacy... given that 99% of us are literate, it
actually doesn't mean a third donkey's *******
whether we can read, or write, we got shelved in controlling
this once priestly vanity, we got taught bureaucracy alongside...
but the monopoly of literacy is way past us,
we're being convened in the ability to monopolise knowledge,
(oh please, don't let the paranoia seep in,
remember yourself when reading me, once in a while,
i don't drag you to phantasmagorical heights, even if i could,
i'd prefer you being agile in learning how to be bored
than letting your repel the same boredom i too share,
well... but **** me if you want to be the next Lenin) -
and the easiest way to monopolise knowledge? the media...
you basically need a lot of facts, and an evolved version
of dialectics, dialectics being the prime enemy of democracy
(it's not an alternative political model like despotism as
we are held to believe, it's actually dialectics,
suppressing other forms of collectivisation is the one
sure method of suppressing the attempt at dialectics
(individualism) - by making people overly opinionated,
ergo: the inability to engage with opinions, blind-alleys
throughout all plausible attempts to do so) -
so once you have enough facts to fiddle with the Rubik's cube
of juxtaposition, you end up with the ultra-scientific
form of dialectics... the matter of opinion in relation
to truth without a relative uniformity that prescribes
the status quo stasis is a debate about how accurate
we all are: i.e., is that true to the closest centimetre,
or the closest millimetre? it's a bit like watching a Zeno
paradox:
                 10.1                           and 10.01
      which one's tortoise and which is Achilles?
well, you know; ah ****! the compendium of the two
newspapers which got me slightly depressed...

- the compendium -

a. daily star

- B. BRO SAM'S SECRET 'NERVOUS BREAKDOWN'
- Laura & Jason's baby joy
- Robbie (Williams) £1.6M a night!
- BREXIT BOOST ON JOB FRONT
- ANGE DAD BACKS TRUMP
- JR'S wife Linda set to Holly
- Edd's no Beverly Hills flop
(Lana among cow *******)
- LAURA: OUR TINY TROTTS WILL BE WORLD-BEATERS
- FURY AT BAD LOSERS' SLURS
- 'Jealous sis' jibes
- MAKE YOUR KID AN OLYMPICS ACE
- Peaty: I want to be a rapper
- TV girl really ill
- **** SAM, 'ON THE BRINK OF BREAKDOWN'
- COSTA ***** HELL
- CAGING ANJEM WILL INSPIRE NEW JIHADIS
- POG'S LOADED AGENT BUYS CAPONE'S LAIR
- I'll make Kylie a pop star
- JEZ DOESN'T KNOW ANT FROM HIS DEC
- GUILTY OF DEMONIC SAVAGERY
- Great British Rake In
- Britain is *******
- BAYWATCH U.K.
- Va Va Vroom
- JUST JANE: My lover snubs plea to get wed
- HART: I'LL DECIDE WHEN TO GO.

b. the times

- Boy victim becomes a symbol of Assad's war
- US Olympics swimmers invented robbery tale, say Rio police
- Make us sell healthy food, supermarkets implore May (P.M.)
- Lost weekend of the lying best man
- fears over free speech delay law to silence hate preacher
- Met's 'commuter cops' live in France
- Husbands happiest when they earn half as much as wives
- Socialists plot to drive Britain left
- Fake human sacrifice filmed at European high altar of physics
- Officers investigated over ex-footballer's Taser death
- Number of pupils taking languages at record low
   (Mandarin @ 2,849 - % decrease of 8.1,
    alarmingly religious studies 27,032 up by 4.9%
    and psychology of status 59,469 up by 4.3%....
    meaning the mad will soon be diagnosing the sane
   as mad, just because the curriculum said so)
- Top grades add up to 100% at the school for maths prodigies
- Deprived sixth formers thrive on competition
- European students rush to get into British universities
- DVLA earns £10m selling driver's details
- Mystery over Kenyan death of aristocrat
- Journalist who voted twice reported to police for
  'fraud'
- Tomato tax threatens European trade war
- Love story of the Pantomime
- Homeless conmen fleeced widow, 81
- Brownlee brothers at the Olympics...
- Hopeful shoppers give sales a lift after Brexit vote
- MoD guard could be stood down despite terrot threat
- Owners spit mansion after failing to sell
- The job with international appeal: saving our hedgehogs
- Finch warns unborn chicks if weather gets warm
- Migrant violence rises after decline in policing around Jungle
- Longest road tunnel promises a relaxing ride under Pennines
- Mothers step up to drive Tube trains through night
(rowdy teens ageing exponentially on a Saturday night
when not getting a lift, ******...)
-MP's deal with bookmaker to be investigated
- Ebola nurse 'hid high temperature'
- Shoesmith's ex-huspand kept child *******
- Morpurgo war tale springs into life
- Supergran fights off teenage muggers
- IVF is more successful for white women
OPINION SECTION
- Great political fiction is good for democracy
- the BBC is leaving its audiences in the dark
- airline food? just pass me the gin and tonic
- Modern Olympics began on the fields of Rugby
/ greasy polls, holding firm, tongue tied,
  call for compulsory targets to tackle obesity,
second in line, mindfulness course, cost of planning,
puffins v. ship rats.... and all future letters to the editor /
- Moscow presses Turkey for access to US airbases
- Hundreds killed each month in Assad's jails
- Putin bans celebration of defeated KGB coup
(another James Bond movie on the cards,
i'm assured, and with a moral carte blanche) -
Hollande clams Carla Bruni spied concerning his
use of diapers...
- Euthanasia tourists flock Belgian A & E from France,
  where a revival of ****** made people dress shark-fin
  sharp on the catwalk...
- Mosquito pesticide linkage application = intersex /
   East German women
- Haiti cholera linked to Nepalese **** and ***** via
  the
Jane dale Apr 2014
I appreciate I'm ageing , and I'm glad I'm still alive,
Tell that to my muddled mind, it thinks I'm twenty five,
The driver in the car in front, has grey hair I can see,
Oh hurry up you slow old ***, does not apply to me,
My ageing skin has wrinkles now, it gives me quite a fright,
Mother Nature in her kindness helped, by weakening my sight,
Perhaps I ought to go to Church to kiss some Godly ****,
To ensure safe passage up to heaven, not downwards, when I pass,
I'm really not quite ready yet, to become a sad old codger,
I'm turning into one of those, I've called a *******!
In truth I'm happy in my mind, but one thing I'd like to change,
Ideally to LOOK twenty five, yet maintain the knowledge gained.
Arlene Corwin Sep 2018
Ageing

Ageing is the strangest ****** phenomenon.
It’s sneaky, going ‘long
With universe’s basic law of change.
We hate it cause we cannot change the change
With choice, with voice in matters
Dealing with each atom looming over time.
You watch a documentary of a famous person you once loved.
What you see is change or interchange.
Voice now gravely, hairs now straggly,
Mind not gaga (maybe),
But the teeth, fat, skin itself deranged.
It’s all so strange.

Invisible the first half century,
(If you’ve been so lucky)
Then they come: the boom of bombs begun in womb.
The stealthy hum of failing health a-zooming in,
The forms of  everything you took for granted
Changed from light to odium
Enchanted idioms of youth now faint or quaint.
And the damnedest twist of all
Besides what’s going on outside,
Visible and tactile,
Is that life has lied.
You thought it stretched ahead forever,
That it never stopped
And then you’re bopped on your old head:
You’re dead.

One’s left to speculate and ponder
Where does life go on from here?
Where and if…

Ageing 9.11.2018 Birth, Death & In Between III; Nature Of & In Reality; Circling Round Reality; Arlene Nover Corwin

I’m often asked by readers whose native language is not English.  Here are a few words of which they might like to know the meaning:
odium;  general or widespread hatred or disgust incurred by someone as a result of their actions:
tactile;  of or connected with the sense of touch: vocal and visual signals
bop;  verb (bops, bopping, bopped) [with object] hit or punch quickly: Rex bopped him on the head
Olivia Kent Jan 2015
Ageing so  beautifully.
Classically as diamonds do, never ageing gracefully
Her eyes fire her up, fire you up too,
This Goddess,brings forth the huntress, out on the ****, for a thrill.
Never cheap.
This individual will never ever weep.
Just a kindly miss, not lonely,
So don't take the Michael.
Nourishment needed.
Overtly she's principled.
Quintessential English,
Rapturous as summer days and Sundays.
This trusting Utopian dreamer.
Vehement pen.
Wicked humour full of woman.
X rated at times,youthful and zany.
(C)Livvi
Mymai Yuan Sep 2010
I was born a sickly, screeching baby, two months earlier than expected. The doctor and midwife did everything they could to keep my little limbs moving and to keep my tiny heart beating, fluttering like the wings of butterfly.
“Is it a boy?” my mother whispered through her pale lips, as they bathed my naked body in hot water.
“No, ma’am, it’s a girl” The midwife struggled to add on something that would make the wailing creature seem more desirable. “With exquisitely shaped feet, so perfectly miniature”
She let out a croak of conflicting emotions: the joy and pride of a newly-founded motherly love, the fear of presenting a girl as a first-born, the relief that the hours of agony in childbirth were over and the dread of facing her husband once he found out about me.

My mother was not healthy after my birth for a long time; and when I was only one and two months old she fell dangerously ill, and the house whispered footsteps running to her room late at night and muffled voices of different doctors. Mercifully, she survived but was left barren and forever unfertile.
I can not imagine my father’s fury. He believed in having sons to carry on his old last name of thirty-one generations; it was his religion and had I been a son, I would have been worshipped as a god. I can imagine how my mother prayed and thanked her ancestors that her dowry was of a large one.

He could barely tolerate being in the same room as me during my toddler years. Every time he entered a room I was playing in, nurse would sweep me to our garden out side; answering to my startled queries, “Be an obedient daughter, don’t bother your father and don’t ask questions”
My body had been born frail, but my natural spirit was as healthy as could be, full of inquiries, wonders of the world around me and everyday I would learn something new just wandering around the neighborhood observing things, with my nurse trailing with a worried eye behind me muttering, “Girls are not supposed to be exposed to this” she spoke the words as if they were sour, “you should be sitting at home and accompanying your mother.”

Every day at dinner, the two females of the house, me and my mother, were silent while my father ranted on and on. My appetite being very delicate, I often just sat there as still as I possibly could and listened to my father talking about politics, jobs, money. Things he called ‘men business’. I longed to ask questions about these ‘men business’, especially ‘university’ for I had an inquisitive sort-of nature but was refrained with a sharp, piercing look from my mother every time I opened my mouth and sometimes, she pinched me under the table leaving purple splotches which flashed, “Don’t question your father”
Sometimes, he would talk about the future he had decided for me, “You will marry off, sixteen at the latest, to some one rich and beneficial to our family. You will do as I say till I marry you off, and then you will do as your husband tells you.”
“Yes father, for I should repay everything you have done for me” I replied as sweetly as I could.
“Yes, you’re a good daughter. Bear lots of sons for him and your house will be one of happiness.”
I was proud that he had given me a compliment. “Yes father, for it will make you joyful as I always wish to make you so”
My childish heart did not understand why my mother turned her head down while her left eyebrow twitched, and why that night, as she tucked me into bed, I thought I saw a tear roll down her cheek and why as she kissed me that night she whispered, “Do not love me so; love your father. The men in your life are your gods.”

My physical health would constantly limit the desires of my free spirit. I could not to do what others who were as free of spirit as I was could do, and couldn’t socialize with them and the rest of the children in my neighborhood had their siblings to mingle with, causing me to become the pitiful outcast.
I saw children around my age, around seven or eight, climbing trees and wanted to do so as well, but my white feet did not have grip enough to grasp onto the fat branches.
Father caught me once trying to propel myself up a tree and his expression was both of a resigned anger and sadness before he turned him and his face away and back into the house without a word.
That night, mother told me not to climb trees ever again. I noticed a faint bruise on her cheek bone that had been covered with white powder.

When I was eleven or twelve, and was allowed to wander further out into the neighborhood with my nurse I saw the boys fishing in the nearby pond and wanted to do so as well. Starting that day, every week I pocketed the three coins mother gave me until I could buy the best fishing rod in the little store and ran as fast as my skinny, weak legs could carry me to the pond. I mimicked the way the boys flung the fishing rod out over the water but the metal pole was too heavy for my pale, shaking arms. I tried over and over again as my nurse watched, biting her lip in anxiety. I held the fishing rod with trembling sore arms till  I felt a bite; I pumped my small arms to reel it in, but they were so tired and I was far too slow, losing the fish I had spent half the day trying to catch. “Ah, just bad luck, don’t worry! It was a smart fish, I tell you!” nurse exclaimed, though her eyes flashed a look of pity and I knew she knew it wasn’t just bad luck or a smart fish.
In anger, I sold the fishing rod to one of the boys for two-thirds of the price I had bought it for. He was delighted with the bargain and I watched with a lump in my throat as he caught three fish with the tug of his healthy, muscular arm within fifteen minutes. “This is a beautiful rod, and the pond is just filled with fish today, Little Sister!”
Wanting to spend the money jingling inside my pocket, money that to me was just a reminder of a painful memory, I headed off to the collection of little shops close to my house where I was guaranteed distraction. Nurse, sweating and complaining of the heat, followed me.
An ageing man with a bunch of filthy hair working away on a piece of thick, rough paper with wondrous colors inside a shop caught my eye as I peered inside the window. He turned the picture upside down and continued blending in the dark colors of the shape to create a shadow along the curve of it. I entered the shop. “What is that?” I asked of him.
“A face” he replied back absentmindedly.
“Doesn’t look like one to me” I confessed with my honesty.
He looked up at me, “No, it does not to you, and maybe, neither will it at the end. To me, it looks like an angle of a faded face. But slowly, with time, it will become clearer and clearer, yet only to me, and as it does, I will be able to choose more colors to make it yet more beautiful. The outcome of this painting is entirely up to me.”
I felt my challenging self rising up. “But what if you imagined a certain color in your head but couldn’t find it or be able to mix it to your mind’s perfection?”
“Then I would create my own paint color.”
“You know how?”
“No, but if I could not find the paint color already made I would make it myself, and no matter what, would learn how to. So far I have always been able to compromise and mix different colors to please me.”
“You do an awful lot of shadowing light colors with dark colors”
“Why do you think I do so?” he questioned me this time, with bright eyes.
I pondered for a moment to give as good an answer as he had given me and then told him my answer.
He nodded with impress, “Yes, yes, absolutely right. I never thought I’d hear that from a child” and looked at me with his head cocked in curiosity.
“What would you like to buy from here, Little Sister?”
Still deeply interested in our conversation I pulled out the coins I had in my pocket. “How much stuff can I buy with all this money? I’d like those crayons, I’ve tried them once before and they are so creamy and smooth.”
“Oil pastels?” he asked, a little confusedly.
Feeling ashamed of my ignorance, I nodded. The tutor father hired evidently bent to father’s strict rules of what should be taught and what would not be taught. Father disapproved of women painting, and would’ve dismissed nurse had he known that instead of taking me out for a little walk to smell the blooming daffodils, she in fact let me explore the environment around me to the best of my ability even in disgruntle.
The man gave my red-patched cheeks and undeveloped translucent frame a sympathetic look and when he spoke, his voice was gentle. “Little Sister, I’ve a whole basket of oil paints that I’ve used but rarely and so are still in perfect condition. Would you like to carry the whole basket home for all the money you have in your pockets?”
I handed him all my golden coins, “But first I must see if I like it.”
“You won’t be disappointed” he chuckled and walked with an imbalanced limp to the back of the store. I noticed a wooden stump protruding from the bottom of his long, black pants. My heart throbbed achingly; he was ****** limited too. I turned to his painting and smiled from deep inside, a smile I rarely wore.
He came back tugging a huge brown basket filled to the brim with sticks of oil pastels, some longer or thicker than others. He lifted an orange one up and showed the tip of it to me, which was stained with a black mark. “Sometimes when you blend colors this will happen, but it’s easy to rid off. Just softly, and patiently rub it off on a cloth until it disappears.” He demonstrated upon his black pants.
“Thank you. It’s kind of you. But...I can’t carry this home myself. It’s heavy.”
I turned to nurse and smiled my best pleading smile.

The basket was toiled up as nurse undressed me from my shower and father and mother were otherwise occupied. That night, with my precious basket safely under my bed, I cleaned all the multi-colored oil pastels on an old shirt, and as soon as the house was ringing with silence, I locked my door and flicked on the lamp light, and started pressing the smooth colors into the paper to blend and make a picture of kissing colors on a relatively large piece of white paper. A thrill ran from my finger tips and along my arm, and made my palms tingle as I held the colorful sticks in my hand to the paper. I hid it underneath my bed just as a rosy sun was rising.
*
I was sixteen, and I was thought beautiful: for now, at this age, it was considered beautiful to be so pale of skin, so small of feet and hands, graceful to have tiny limbs and charming to have little strength for it was now considered ‘feminine’.
It was three weeks after I had turned sixteen and for dinner, father had brought over an ugly man with a bulging waist and shiny bald head who continually made ****** jokes at the dinner table while he believed I did not understand them. He was infamous for the two wives he had had (before they died from sickness), and how he not only hit them but kept other lovers too. Yet he was desirable for his vast richness. He leered at me obnoxiously, in an attempt to smile.
Father caught him looking at me, “She’s incredibly silent, never says a word of defiance and will be a most dutiful wife.”
“Yes, she is beautiful”
My heart froze and my brain was stimulated to work twice as fast. Him?! Him?! The man who’s wives were killed through an illness called ‘abuse, neglect and disloyalty?!’
I cast my eyelashes down in order to appear a calm, modest young lady while my heart hammered in fury, disgust and a rising hysterical panic. I shot a look at my mother whose left eyebrow was twitching as she stared down at her dinner plate, and I knew she was having the same thoughts as I.
“I would be glad to have you as my son-in-law. You would have no trouble with her, and would be embraced with open arms into our family.”
They continued this path of talk through dinner while he eyeballed me in a way that made me cringe. I felt his foot nudge mine under the table and in haste tucked it under the chair with a little gasp. His eyes glittered at my gasp and I was furious with myself for letting him feel a rotten triumph. Though I had always felt an extremely strong dislike towards him from what I knew of him and sometimes saw of him with an immoral lady, something pushed in the pit of my tummy, and I knew it was pure hatred.
When mother tucked me in she was being strange. On closing my door she whispered, “I love you… so I wish you to know… don’t ever contradict men”

As I was secretly drawing a picture as I did every night till dawn, I heard my father’s voice roar in the dead of the night. In a sudden, I shoved my portrait under the bed and threw all my oil pastels into the basket, hid it, and switched the light off. I heard his voice roar again, accompanied by a thud. I was wild with fear as I crept to my door and pressed my ear against it, barely even shocked at my own daringness as my instinct, love, took over- my instinct of must knowing what was happening to my mother.
“How dare you say I’m wrong!?” there was another thud, and this time I heard a soft whimper. “She is worthless to me, not a son. And I will marry her off to a rich man who can actually benefit this family.” He roared.
There was a whisper which I strained to hear, “He will **** her”
“From the moment she was born she wasn’t made to live!” he yelled.
A hiss escaped my tongue and I coiled like a serpent, flinching as a thud was heard yet again and an immediate cry of pain escaped from both my lips and my mothers’.
A fire awoke inside me, burning my temples and my whole body and my eyes stung with hot tears; tears that burned my face as they splashed down. My whole body was shaking and my tightly squeezed eyes were going through spasms. I was no longer wild with fear, but with anger.
I turned my light back on and tugged my basket of oil pastels out. I yanked my portrait off from a thick of pile of different pictures I had drawn.
My breath was coming in quick short breaths as I finished my portrait to the utmost perfection, using every oil pastel in the basket. Every time I heard a thud, I colored with more fiery… shadowing my jaw line with the fat black oil pastel, in the crook of my ear, the corner of my mouth… where the light shone upon my fore head, how it reflected in the color of my eye and glowed on my cheeks.
When I was finished, the house was deadly quiet again and dawn was breaking. I looked down upon it and realized something that changed my life.
In frenzy I swatted out all the things I had ever drawn and stared at them in an awakening.
The colors on them were the events of my life, the things that characterized it, the decisions. They were beautiful for they had been chosen and controlled by me … I had chosen the colors I wanted and thought best for my pictures; and spent thought over how to blend different colors to the color I wanted.
And everyday, as I worked into the drawings with time, they became clearer and clearer on what was the right thing to do, and how it should possibly look like in the next stage.
I leaned over and kissed the thin lips of my portrait that didn’t look exactly like me for not even the most skilled artists have complete control over what they draw.

Then I remembered what I had told the one-legged man in the shop a few years go:
“Lights not only illuminate, they also cast shadows. The contrast makes you able to appreciate the power of both.”
Now it was time to truly let the light illuminate my life, and let the shadows let me appreciate the light that shines upon me; I color my own life, and choose my own colors.

To pull out the colors underneath the darkness of my bed…
And spill it to the world outside.
Kenya83 Mar 2017
Oozing charm and fluency, over exuberantly, without vanity or pride or an arrogance of mind
remaining humble and kind
looking just fine
Not with the fittest physic or perfect teeth, manicured hands drenched in gold leaf
Or a sharp suit and tie which underneath emptiness lies
But a beauty that shines bright like a beacon
signalling hardship, success, failure, determination
Strong and truthful
Unapologetically flawed
Lost youth and adult gains
Ageing memories and hunger pains
slight wrinkles, cheeks with dimples
passion,
it's quite simple
perfection is meaningless
It lacks personality and taste
Humility, humour and good grace
The hard times you stared point-blank in the face
However, on the other hand
It's like you're from another land
Im lost
In your perfect imperfections
Filters and airbrush aren't a true reflection
Of the life you've lived of the story you've told
When you've been weak when you've been bold
what made you happy or caused you stress
How you like to chill and rest
Or put your mind and body to the test
I want to see what makes you, you
I long to see it all
For its what makes you beautiful
Nigel Morgan Jul 2013
It was their first time, their first time ever. Of course neither would admit to it, and neither knew, about the other that is, that they had never done this before. Life had sheltered them, and they had sheltered from life.

Their biographies put them in their sixties. Never mind the Guardian magazine proclaiming sixty to be the new fifty. Albert and Sally were resolutely sixty – ish. To be fair, neither looked their age, but then they had led such sheltered lives, hadn’t they. He had a mother, she had a father, and that pretty much wrapped it up. They had spent respective lives being their parents’ companions, then carers, and now, suddenly this. This intimacy, and it being their first time.

When their contemporaries were befriending and marrying and procreating, and home-making and care-giving and child-minding, and developing their first career, being forced to start a second, overseeing teenagers and suddenly being parents again, but grandparents this time – with evenings and some weekends allowed – Albert and Sally had spent their time writing. They wrote poetry in their respective spaces, at respective tables, in almost solitude, Sally against the onslaught of TV noise as her father became deaf. Albert had the refuge of his childhood bedroom and the table he’d studied at – O levels, A levels, a degree and a further degree, and a little later on that PhD. Poetry had been his friend, his constant companion, rarely fickle, always there when needed. If Albert met a nice-looking woman in the library and lost his heart to her, he would write verse to quench not so much desire of a physical nature, but a desire to meet and to know and to love, and to live the dream of being a published poet.

Oh Sally, such a treasure; a kind heart, a sweet nature, a lovely disposition. Confused at just seventeen when suddenly she seemed to mature, properly, when school friends had been through all that at thirteen. She was passed over, and then suddenly, her body became something she could hardly deal with, and shyness enveloped her because her mother would say such things . . . but, but she had her bookshelf, her grandfather’s, and his books (Keats and Wordsworth saved from the skip) and then her books. Ted Hughes, Dylan Thomas (oh to have been Kaitlin, so wild and free and uninhibited and whose mother didn’t care), Stevie Smith, U.E. Fanthorpe, and then, having taken her OU degree, the lure of the small presses and the feminist canon, the subversive and the down-right weird.

Albert and Sally knew the comfort of settling ageing parents for the night and opening (and firmly closing) the respective doors of their own rooms, in Albert’s case his bedroom, with Sally, a box room in which her mother had once kept her sewing machine. Sally resolutely did not sew, nor did she knit. She wrote, constantly, in notebook after notebook, in old diaries, on discarded paper from the office of the charity she worked for. Always in conversation with herself as she moulded the poem, draft after draft after draft. And then? She went once to writers’ workshop at the local library, but never again. Who were these strange people who wrote only about themselves? Confessional poets. And she? Did she never write about herself? Well, occasionally, out of frustration sometimes, to remind herself she was a woman, who had not married, had not borne children, had only her father’s friends (who tried to force their unmarried sons on her). She did write a long sequence of poems (in bouts-rimés) about the man she imagined she would meet one day and how life might be, and of course would never be. No, Sally, mostly wrote about things, the mystery and beauty and wonder of things you could touch, see or hear, not imagine or feel for. She wrote about poppies in a field, penguins in a painting (Birmingham Art Gallery), the seashore (one glorious week in North Norfolk twenty years ago – and she could still close her eyes and be there on Holkham beach).  Publication? Her first collection went the rounds and was returned, or not, as is the wont of publishers. There was one comment: keep writing. She had kept writing.

Tide Marks

The sea had given its all to the land
and retreated to a far distant curve.
I stand where the waves once broke.

Only the marks remain of its coming,
its going. The underlying sand at my feet
is a desert of dunes seen from the air.

Beyond the wet strand lies, a vast mirror
to a sky laundered full of haze, full of blue,
rinsed distances and shining clouds.


When Albert entered his bedroom he drew the curtains, even on a summer’s evening when still light. He turned on his CD player choosing Mozart, or Bach, sometimes Debussy. Those three masters of the piano were his favoured companions in the act of writing. He would and did listen to other music, but he had to listen with attention, not have music ‘on’ as a background. That Mozart Rondo in A minor K511, usually the first piece he would listen to, was a recording of Andras Schiff from a concert at the Edinburgh Festival. You could hear the atmosphere of a capacity audience, such a quietness that the music seemed to feed and enter and then surround and become wondrous.

He’d had a history teacher in his VI form years who allowed him the run of his LP collection. It had been revelation after revelation, and that had been when the poetry began. They had listened to Tristan & Isolde into the early hours. It was late June, A levels over, a small celebration with Wagner, a bottle of champagne and a bowl of cherries. As the final disc ended they had sat in silence for – he could not remember how long, only from his deeply comfortable chair he had watched the sky turn and turn lighter over the tall pine trees outside. And then, his dear teacher, his one true friend, a young man only a few years out of Cambridge, rose and went to his record collection and chose The Third Symphony by Vaughan-Williams, his Pastoral Symphony, his farewell to those fallen in the Great War  – so many friends and music-makers. As the second movement began Albert wept, and left abruptly, without the thanks his teacher deserved. He went home, to the fury of his father who imagined Albert had been propositioned and assaulted by his kind teacher – and would personally see to it that he would never teach again. Albert was so shocked at this declaration he barely ever spoke to his father again. By eight o’clock that June morning he was a poet.

For Ralph

A sea voyage in the arms of Iseult
and now the bowl of cherries
is empty and the Perrier Jouet
just a stain on the glass.

Dawn is a mottled sky
resting above the dark pines.
Late June and roses glimmer
in a deep sea of green.

In the still near darkness,
and with the volume low,
we listen to an afterword:
a Pastoral Symphony for the fallen.

From its opening I know I belong
to this music and it belongs to me.
Wholly. It whelms me over
and my face is wet with tears.


There is so much to a name, Sally thought, Albert, a name from the Victorian era. In the 1950s whoever named their first born Albert? Now Sally, that was very fifties, comfortably post-war. It was a bright and breezy, summer holiday kind of name. Saying it made you smile (try it). But Light-foot (with a hyphen) she could do without, and had hoped to be without it one day. She was not light-footed despite being slim and well proportioned. Her feet were too big and she did not move gracefully. Clothes had always been such a nuisance; an indicator of uncertainty, of indecision. Clothes said who you were, and she was? a tallish woman who hid her still firm shape and good legs in loose tops and not quite right linen trousers (from M & S). Hair? Still a colour, not yet grey, she was a shale blond with grey eyes. She had felt Albert’s ‘look’ when they met in The Barton, when they had been gathered together like show dogs by the wonderful, bubbly (I know exactly what to wear – and say) Annabel. They had arrived at Totnes by the same train and had not given each other a second glance on the platform. Too apprehensive, scared really, of what was to come. But now, like show dogs, they looked each other over.

‘This is an experiment for us,’ said the festival director, ‘New voices, but from a generation so seldom represented here as ‘emerging’, don’t you think?’

You mean, thought Albert, it’s all a bit quaint this being published and winning prizes for the first time – in your sixties. Sally was somewhere else altogether, wondering if she really could bring off the vocal character of a Palestinian woman she was to give voice to in her poem about Ramallah.

Incredibly, Albert or Sally had never read their poems to an audience, and here they were, about to enter Dartington’s Great Hall, with its banners and vast fireplace, to read their work to ‘a capacity audience’ (according to Annabel – all the tickets went weeks ago). What were Carcanet thinking about asking them to be ‘visible’ at this seriously serious event? Annabel parroted on and on about who’d stood on this stage before them in previous years, and there was such interest in their work, both winning prizes The Forward and The Eliot. Yet these fledgling authors had remained stoically silent as approaches from literary journalists took them almost daily by surprise. Wanting to know their backstory. Why so long a wait for recognition? Neither had sought it. Neither had wanted it. Or rather they’d stopped hoping for it until . . . well that was a story all of its own, and not to be told here.

Curiosity had beckoned both of them to read each other’s work. Sally remembered Taking Heart arriving in its Amazon envelope. She brought it to her writing desk and carefully opened it.  On the back cover it said Albert Loosestrife is a lecturer in History at the University of Northumberland. Inside, there was a life, and Sally had learnt to read between the lines. Albert had seen Sally’s slim volume Surface and Depth in Blackwell’s. It seemed so slight, the poems so short, but when he got on the Metro to Whitesands Bay and opened the bag he read and became mesmerised.  Instead of going home he had walked down to the front, to his favourite bench with the lighthouse on his left and read it through, twice.

Standing in the dark hallway ready to be summoned to read Albert took out his running order from his jacket pocket, flawlessly typed on his Elite portable typewriter (a 21st birthday present from his mother). He saw the titles and wondered if his voice could give voice to these intensely personal poems: the horror of his mother’s illness and demise, his loneliness, his fear of being gay, the nastiness and bullying experienced in his minor university post, his observations of acquaintances and complete strangers, train rides to distant cities to ‘gather’ material, visit to galleries and museums, homages to authors, artists and composers he loved. His voice echoed in his head. Could he manage the microphone? Would the after-reading discussion be bearable? He looked at Sally thinking for a moment he could not be in better company. Her very name cheered him. Somehow names could do that. He imagined her walking on a beach with him, in conversation. Yes, he’d like that, and right now. He reckoned they might have much to share with each other, after they’d discussed poetry of course. He felt a warm glow and smiled his best smile as she in astonishing synchronicity smiled at him. The door opened and applause beckoned.
MSE Jan 2013
Surgery, surely not?
Botox, why not stop the rot?
Either way, ageing is reversed,
Cuts, stitches and injections all the more,
Before we knock on Heaven's door,
Anything done for perfection,
Why you may ask yourself?
We all cry “Because we fear rejection!”
It's something we must do, we must, we must,
That is, before it's our time to turn to dust!!!

>>> Copyright MSE 02/01/2013 <<<
Zywa Apr 2021
My skin is ageing,

it is my unseen secret –


I'm undercover.
Collection "Different times"
i looked in the mirror the other day
noticed my hair was turning grey
the lines were there up on my face
here there and every place
i was ageing it was  plain to see
by the face in front of me
there were wrinkles coming fast
as the years were rolling past
but in my mind im still a kid
and do now what i aways did.
V.B. Wigglesworth wakes at noon,
Washes, shaves and very soon
Is at the lab; he reads his mail,
Swings a tadpole by the tail,
Undoes his coat, removes his hat,

Dips a spider in a vat
Of alkaline, phones the press,
Tells them he is F.R.S.,
Subdivides six protocells,
Kills a rat by ringing bells,

Writes a treatise, edits two
Symposia on "Will man do?,"
Gives a lecture, audits three,
Has the ***** club in for tea,
Pensions off an ageing spore,

Cracks a test tube, takes some pure
Science and applies it, finds,
His hat, adjusts it, pulls the blinds,
Instructs the jellyfish to spawn,
And, by one o'clock, is gone.
Mateuš Conrad Jan 2017
what's with this hobby of keeping friends?
i've got two friends that
only say meow...
          and i'm kinda not rooting for
a Colombian hottie for a wife...
                 i abhor this idea of a "loner",
i haven't heard any monks being called that...
  but then again monks do live in a monastery...
why do people always seek each other's
company? what's wrong with liking your own?
it really bothers me... i mean, by current
standards of denoting this man a loner
would make Spinoza laugh...
                  is it because you need to be the quintessential
hermit living in a clay urn or in a hole
in a desert?
                              each night i drink something,
without fail: i feel better for it...
               i'm hoping it'll **** me...
but so many times people who don't known
how to drink get so ******* melodramatic
that i think about ensuring they are banned from
abusing the amber...
                        i hate melodramatic drinkers,
you either utilise the sedative of the amber to
an overcoming potential... short: Kant's
transcendental methodology... you you won't
drink and whine... or bash people about...
and that, i must say: is a rare art.
     1 litre of amber and i'm as silent as a mouse...
i'll say it again:
    there are too many melodramatic whinge-bags
out there... i don't get them...
    i mean i get them: but i abhor them...
                i could really do with a pupil,
nietzsche would do, about time he stopped dropping
those barbiturates and learned to dance!
         tanz! tanz herz im freuer!
yes, sometimes the trip was long
the N86 from romford to goodmayes and
into the brothel near the train station...
but every time i played a folk song,
usually dikanda's ketrin ketrin i'd sit on the bus
for about 40 minutes... aflame...
                i find that prostitutes are only fed the myth
of a tender touch and a complete lack
of experimental perversity... even a kiss is
the beginning of their myth-making...
   ordinary girls are fed the myth of movies,
and how it all works out...
    each time i went to the brothel i sat for the journey
time like a Sufi meditation with the
              dervish dance in my mind...
                 and that's the truth... mind you,
i have a grandfather that supports my work
and buys me cigarettes... then again he lived in a time
when he could age and get a state-pension,
as he does... he's not ailing in any sense, and he lives
in a post-communist country... and i just spent
3 weeks over there... which means my state-sponsorship
in england has amounted: that i could take out
110 quid and give it for a *******...
                and i could remember myself aflame...
  on a bus with a dervish dance in my mind...
           drunk, as usual: but that's the fun part of it...
i could wave my *** at all those
melodramatic drunks you get at parties and in other
public places who suddenly speak and only moan
how unfair it all is...
                      first time i went? well... i did go to
uni after all, the sacred land of getting a good score
for later life... what a sahara when it comes to ***!
   like with prostitutes it still turns out to be a case
of hard facts and harder choices...
                  money...
                        and­ the white historians and who else
in the etc. cul de sac are wondering why our ethnicity is
in decline... it's quiet a thing to be bemused by the freedom
of women and not addressing the point fairly...
                   the women are so free i had to find my own
freedom with a *******...
                         i got bored of too many darwinian examples
being incorporated into the act... once it's the peacock,
next it's the mantis and the black widow...
of sure... there's so much to gain if endorsing some sort
of chivarly, when next door lives a babe with a sugar daddy...
   ***-starved ******* can go elsewhere,
       wild-eyed logic and no manifesto...
literally: there's no hope for a manifesto here...
             there's no manifesto...
                    this is absolutely not a manifesto...
         i'm actually happy that as an ethnicity we're in decline...
  i found talking to other ethnicities a bit restrictive
and boring... i had to censor vocab fluidity with dams
and other ****** architectural constructs...
    so i looked at the shows on television,
a bunch of child-genuises were on...
   i never thought that spelling was like arithmetic...
   but it is... it is, oh hell it is...
  the judge says the word in that odd jumble that a word
is when you have alphabetical distinctions
   in vowel, consonant and syllable form...
    but the languasge is so different, after all
language is not really an optical language as such,
mathematical language is truly anti-phonetic...
and it comes down to the simple example:
      spell the word: onomatopoeia
  start saying the alphabet and it sounds nothing like
this word put together,
   the syllable ono-                
                       then -ma-
                               -to-        and now the tricky bit...
peya...          but what of the grapheme œ?
                you'd really be able to break your tongue
on that syllable suffix...
                       and when the children started spelling
the word: it look as if they were going cross-eyed
   trying to translate the sound into image...
    mathematical language doesn't have that problem,
do the following airthmetic (e.g.)  
   1 + 2 - 5 + 6 - 4 = ?
                                          0...
but that's different when you are told to spell the word
   renaissance -
                                  doubly more difficult if
you are told to create syllables without diacritical mark
distinctions...
               back to drink, like being asked for
a wine connoisseur's palette, when the wine you've been
given has been diluted...
   or in this case fudge packed so there are no
clear distinctions, too much french influence
      and siamese twin graphemes seperated...
excess vowel that i've heard means: kissing...
i'm sorry how the story goes,
i just can't be forced to **** a kenyan penny-picking
                tragedy with my humour...
        i'm bewildered by the arithematic
and the "arithmetic" of putting words together...
                  the internet has quietly become a war
for a freedom to talk... it's more a freedom to think
than talk...
                  and god forgive me feeling so obscure in
what i wanted to think, but given the social structure of
events happening, i had to do a minority report on
it being said, and me not typing this on
a medium of defeat, that i ended up on a warring stance...
i mean, i can understand obscurity per se,
i can't see how i can attach myself to it on a basis
of a phenomenon...
                          so unearthed we are from a structure
that a rebellion against
                  the szlachta was viable...
what the hell grows on concrete? coconuts?!
      i already said: this is hardly a manifesto...
and i truly demand it to be thoroughly agreed to...
                   then comes the shortcoming
barrage of: i knight you the nigh of not worthy...
                        and then the recycling process
bombards you with: many more squint-eyed *****
to come where you did, come from.
       urbanity has forsaken man attached to an organism,
but is feeling it right now,
                 he's attached to an inorganic farbic of testament...
i haven't walked the soil or toiled in it
to feel it's breath between winter or summer..
           i once had so much one-dimensional inclusion
in this world, then my sight was diverted,
and i came across the numbers, who took to being
***** whales and gulped me in one cascade of
the feeding...
              and i was told to walk it alone.
once actors were abhorred by society,
but then there was no office folk to compete for
utility biases when it came to giving gratitude to
pristine plumbing...
                          back when man was highly
economical... and thus actors had to be abhorred...
  to create a tsunami of sadism to keep them
staged... and true enough:
         if christ was crucified in the colliseum
there would have been fewer than none churches to
establish that event... given the colliseum is
made into a subject-trophy cabinet of holiness -
               and how the colliseum did morph...
it's sad talking about being human as excluding humanity,
as it's sad talking being human by including humanity...
               but thankfully (or not)
there's still that case of the arithmetic of the two tongues...
        say the word colliseum
                             co- -lli- -se'um.
      i mean, that means something...
  take to numbers and of the 26, care to call c = 3
               18 + 33 + 24 13 21
                            +                      2 1 2 = 5
                                                    4 3 1 = 8
                            + 58
                                    = 109
    
kabbalah is *******... mysticism was squandered with
gematria... but islam has no alternative either...
sure... if you have to establish a mirror image
of having a care for theological parasites...
   then you turn a into 1, and b into 2 and z in 26...
and then fiddle about until you get a *******'s worth
of bashing about because you couldn't write
a play entitle Macbeth...
               did any of these holy alternatives die
in Auschwitz? most of them living in America didn't
serve in the Israeli army...
                 who wonders whether they died in
Auschwitz?
                 no! they didn't!
       they were bemused by this correlation of
numbers and letters, thankfully we already can read
the opposite of the kabbalistic practices
prostate in the Deutronomy...
           say 10 a thousand times... adds a few more zeros
but leaves the 1 intact...
            please enlighten me as to who wrote the first
koranic recitation if not khadira? please! for the love
of god tell me it wasn't khadira!
         oh wait... given the hispanic um...
it's khadija - the h is silent and the j is actually a hatch...
          a bit like in the west, with y and j trying to
be a grapheme... a load of ******* *******:
and yes: i have to be crude on the matter...
   so we have the first verse written by a woman...
  or was it a bit like saying...
Aisha wrote surah no. 114... i can just picture it...
the young wife said to her ageing husband:
pray with these words, you lecherous *****!
say: say it you ageing carcass!
i seek refuge in the lord of manking,
the sovereign of mankind...
      the god of mankind...
     from the whisper of the retreating whisperer
(gabriel must have left him once the 13th wife arrived,
of god! the symmetry with jesus' disciples!)
     who whispers into the ******* of makind
(evil is in the brackets) -
from among the jinn and mankind.
conscience really can be a ****** to master.
but the geometry of the koran (glutton the q if you want,
makes no impressions on me) -
is that it starts thick... ends up anorexic...
           so much to say at the start,
but then shrinks... it's beautiful in that sense...
given the miracle of muhammad was that he was
illiterate...
  so someone had to write the words for him...
            i'm guessing khadija wrote the best part of it...
i like to think of her writing the first revelations...
    but i also like to muse that aisha wrote the latter
half of the: how do they stress the ******* q k c so much
that it sounds like it's not coming from the mouth
but coming from the nose?! qu-ran... i need
a hanky and snorkel that **** out... qu sneeze! i-ran...
          it's glutton and it's nasal, and it's almost like:
the back of the throat... and then comes the la la la all-hubris
in that song five times a day...
                but seriously... you tell me the man was illiterate
an this book exists... so who wrote it?
   women!
                                         the merchant of mecca in
Finland... left the scandinavian penninsula after one year
and never came back...
                   but how can you have so much
at the beginning and so little at the end?
   a different woman, who was literate (and the man
wasn't) wrote what needed to be said...
    i just look at the surah an-nas as a way to suggest
that the prophet: al suma mal ley *** blah blah
had been asked to repent... repent you paedo!
          that's crude, i know... and i'm drunk,
i'll wake up sober tomorrow and cook a pork curry
and think about leather shoes and shoelaces and belt...
and how camels are dirtier than pigs and how you
can eat almost all of pork offal and when i see a camel
i just think of chewing tobbacco and spitting into
a copper tin... or camel-jockeys...
        or how i think arabs are cursed with oil
and dyslexia and diabetes... how most of them will
end blind or amputee due to their diabetes...
      how a lot of them would like something more
than turkish coffee and baklava, and how
it stops looking cool after a while...
           arab oil, dyslexia and diabetes...
which probably means a palestinian balaclava
at the end of the sequence...
   i'll never know: i'm not planning to have
a stop-over shopping spree in Dubai, any time soon.
Mateuš Conrad May 2016
i know, rubbed off reading Pound, but scout's honour, but scout's honour, yet again: but on scout's honour it was a collage, and and and that's what could make Ezra's too a moment of weakness with a rainbow of subjects, a page ripped out from an encyclopaedia.

night cinema, and films from to preceding decades
this the current, 2nd of decade of a seemingly
never-ending September -
first - the disappearance of alice creed (a british
                                                         ­                            film),
second - the firm (                                            "           "   ),
the other two american, one an ageing classic -
sleepless in Seattle, and the last one the devil wears Prada -
already the differences are so relentless,
modern british cinema loves to capture grit,
graffiti on estates, meaningful f-off conjunctions,
and boy the slang in *the firm
is as good as any -
one of the few films worth rummaging with at sunrise
with it fresh in memory (preferred it to
trainspotting given one face value:
Bex is way more sociopathic than Begpie, and
he doesn't end up living the easy life in
Miami or whether he is being an artist),
but the problem is... the library is too big, it's the sort
of library you'd find in heaven, although less grand,
already outside the realm of sensible reality,
beyond 2 to the power of 83 (named yogibyte),
we have this library, right now,
the 2 to the power of 3.321928 of a googol,
i.e. a Nikolai Gogolplex... but! it's not technically
a library, it's also a stock market, a phonebox,
a ***** booth, a casino... HMR & Customs, banking,
so technically we're not talking a heavenly library
(add to the list cyber warfare,
everything apart from a librarian's shush
is acceptable here)... but it got me
thinking, that film the firm (set in the 80s)...
three strands of music that interest me from the 80s,
synthesiser music (sounds really cheap now, i know)
but at least it sounds better than castrato rock
of the 80s... the synthesiser music of pseudo echo e.g.,
but these instruments were picked up by kiddies and
it was like a harpsichord to them, given previously
Bach's organs and the grand piano: a pool table
compared to a snooker table...          
and the third strand of music from the 80s... post-punk,
Joy Division (i'm not exact on the dates, blurry lines)...
Bauhaus (the man with x-ray eyes)... Staatliches...
well... post-punk... punk-entrenchment, all that
pre- post- proto- pre-fixation post-fixation...
the darker side of punk...
                                              god, this library is too big!
it's a bit like walking into a bookshop and falling
on your knees in desperation:
you can watch the aesthetic of winter through
to autumn no problem, hell, you might get a mystical insight
into this recycling bin... but when it comes to
the aesthetic of mankind's recycling bin, everyone
breaks down not having read or bothered to
read Melville or something: the price of creating
civilisation and moving away from tribalism -
and again onto cinema... cinematic warfare with
gaming, or cartoon cinema, gaming cinema,
in Seattle in 1993 they still used babysitters, now
the grown-ups sit at home while the babies
go out swinging - games less about joystick
button indentations on the fingers and more about
cinema... cinema more about games than about
meaningful conversations - take that word
games in two ways: social gaming, you know
what i mean: ******* people over;
but seriously, can you believe a band like
the soft moon exists and released an album in
2010 with such seminal songs as
parallels and sewer sickness among others?
two thousand and twelve... i was as much
gob-smacked when i realised
that godspeed, you black emperor! released
their album f# a# ∞ in nineteen ninety eight! 1998! i thought
progressive music from any genre died with punk
and the impatience at yet another solo from
robert fripp when no one wanted to do an air guitar
version of his solos (which largely borrowed from jazz).
Pagan Paul Feb 2018
.
The forced tangent of life
became an adventure that lost
and so this shell sits on air
reflecting a balance of the cost.

There was an instant in time
where the physical held its sway,
pushing back the dark of years
and emerging into a sunny day.

But the blush of an eye moment
rebuilds a visage of ancients.
The turbulence of discord asserts
the demise and sin of patience.


© Pagan Paul (02/02/18)
.
Bina Mukherjee May 2020
Your tresses are not smooth and silky
Lady..you have got grey hair!!
Your skin is breaking
There are lines on your forehead.
Why you are so skinny?
Don't you eat well...


You don't seem pristine,
Just look at your ravishing friend.

Yes...i do agree to the above delineation
But ...you don't know many facts.

That I was wide-awake uncountable nights
for my little ones,
Be it the school project or making that perfect attire for my princess's fancy dress
Or those sleepless nights with ear ache , fever or growing pains.

I have sometimes heard you talking about me from behind.
But have that golden heart to come and know my plight....
I would share with you the story of my pale visage
As  I have always loved my family more before self.

Ageing is a natural phenomena
Come to me I will guide you
Know that those lines and silver strands are signs of my eternal beauty,
But I can't blame your ignorance,as it is known by few.

Bina Mukherjee
Jasmine Reid Mar 2021
Proudly he handles the bottle, bellowing about her as if she were a person

She's not fine wine, she's aged wine.
kept in the dark; alone with her thoughts
low in the earth; like a corpse
and given all the time in the world to ferment; she's rotting

Her glass is smooth you see, and cool to the touch; like the pavement on which she fell
The curves are unique to every bottle; her carcass so pretty
And the deepest green you'll ever see on a bottle; like her eyes

I have preserved her so! To keep her how she should be!
that's how he wanted to see me

She has aged well, for almost 20 years you see.
still as young as ever

But this is a special occasion; they found me
Go fetch some glasses; I can hear them digging
And we'll celebrate her.
what happened in this story?
Mateuš Conrad Jan 2017
i once loved, and it's a shame to
agree to: better have loved and lost,
than to have not loved at all.
and as i browse the pages of
a saturday newspaper article
i like to think about virology applied
to mental illness...
and how they: life is ****
   story could really be a viral infection...
i don't know, it's not exactly
h.i.v.,
                oh i can contain my own
*******, i'm writing it on the flag
of colour white,
next time you get a brain haemorrhage
and then get diagnoses as schizophrenic:
i'll take you the crucifix on golgotha:
and imbed your head into
the cross... silent anger, contained:
and all the more concern for inhibited
humour... because as Borat said: jak sie mash:
i like. so please, don't tell me
you weren't gagging for the new golgotha...
because i wasn't...
         and i know, most of the time i have
my mouth attached to a head of a struś
gagging himself in a pit of sand...
yes an ostrich, the grand inspiration for
francis bacon attempts to redefine geometry...
oh coming out of communism and into
capitalism, for a kid?, can be a rough ride...
you don't know what ideology to appease
and what ideology to dictate...
         but i'm wondering whether or not
mental illness can have the potency to
        become virus-like...
     and drain,
and i mean: drain the soul out of you...
or whether man as mammal ever did exist...
or whether this new fashion of
feline existentialism can ever take off,
narratives about spending time with your
bonsai tiger... you'd really think japan was
a bit freakish... but it just has a large
ageing population and no one thinks
that euthanasia is a standard of humanism,
unlike ******* ***** into a face of
a woman... because right there, no
one died... if had any of those anemic
tadpoles actually lived...
    which brings this about to concern me:
so... we live for nine months, in, let's
basically say: in an environment without
oxygen, you got gills stashed in there
with that umbilical chord...
how can it ever be a miracle of birth...
that's what a god might say...
a human would look at it and say:
huh? you joking? i'm part of this horror?
     but not until you have a brain
haemorrhage and get diagnosed as schizoid
and then you think: so what was the point
of forgiving your enemies come into this?
      i can't believe it has become so, so personal,
to actually have this nagging, decapitated
doll-head on your shoulder telling you to:
repeat! repeat!
       i could literally be writing this in
Auschwitz and be like: Neddy needs a jumper
and a diaper... cos like that really needs
you to fathom the logic of assembling an
Ikea chair...
                          i mean, talking in the west
is a bit like farting into a hippotamous' nostril
for a ******* jackuzi effect...
  jack! i said ***! what's with this jacuzzi?
English, mein gott... confusion everywhere
you pigeon **** onto a top-hat.
by the way: everyone becomes
dyslexic on the word hippopotamus -
there's a reason why hippos exist...
        you want acronyms, you get shortening...
and yes, since english society has abolished
asylums, the society has become a breeding
ground for asylum instigators,
rich russians, bewildered chienese...
it's en masse, one, massive, cesspit...
   i mean the part where you don't get the brown
steamturd floating about like some
  celebrity you'd love to slap with much
more than mere paparazzi epilepsy...
because violence matters, esp into language games...
i was just asking, because there i was,
working on a roof on some construction site,
and she calls me up and says that
she hears voices...
          that's what i mean certain mental
delinquents and their choice of Samaritan...
  what does a roofer know about "voices"
if it doesn't equate to a bad conscience?
    that's why i'm wondering whether certain mental
illnesses have a virus-like profanity attached to them...
oh yes yes, the unison: bob marley: we're one
type of ******* to boot, like i'm supposed to get
a hardy and a 'ard on about it...
               ******* spoof of a light-bulb moment: PING!
and there... ain't that just dazzling?
phantasmagorical blurp at the feet of
Eros at Piccadilly Circus... my ego is a canon
that just simply shoots out viagras! and questions.
and yes... that's what we call being part
of the clown...
    and if there's a lord of flies...
what's the guy mentioned by beelzebub drunk
doing about the mosquitos?
           ah... boundless at the crucix, once more!
i'm just wondering where
does mental illness become solipsism,
  and when in fact it becomes a sort of virology...
   i can romanticise mental illness as a type
of solipsism, that it has a cage, that it can be contained...
but when mental illness goes outside of the novel,
strolls outside its cage and becomes
something akin to kissing a *****,
     i want to know.... because i swear i have been
affected by someone's mental illness being
hidden in the shadow of taboo...
   look... i'm ******* exfoliating with vocab!
        how can you become normal after someone
exposes you the symptom of "voices"...
that's demeaning given the past history of
having relationships with angels and demons,
that's like a neuter noun.... voices brings up
more concern for a pronoun-****-up than
a clear, noun association... angels, sure,
i could start looking more closely at pigeons...
demons, doubly sure, i could start
chasing bats...
              but i need to know whether mental
illness is worthy of taboo, i.e. it's worth
the category of being physical, in that it can be
contagious... whether it can act like a virus....
whether it can become an epidemic...
    and to be honest, i think it can,
but that seems pointless, since western society
has exchanged asylums for taboo...
                  look at me now,
a once budding roofer, reduced to writing poetry,
i might as well be an ******...
            safe-guarding king Solomon's harem...
oh sure, eunuchs were able to **** his *** slaves...
they were slaves themselves,
what they weren't allowed is to usurp
    the ******* crown of the king passing his
d.n.a., mind the frivolity, never the seriousness
of geneticist, yawning when their genesis was to come...
    i'd love to see hans andersen on the trail of
dolly... the sheep... and dolly really does become
a trinity of animal prior to human in the out-reaches...
what with laika (man's best friend)
and later fiztgerald... oh wait (man's worst enemy,
the money) Baker....
   thanks to de Sade and baron Sacher-Masoch
we could truly begin the orthodox occult of science...
   how the two patron "saints"
interpolate... it really is a dualism worthy of
dangling a crucifix... shame the first monkey in
space wasn't called Brian...
    i don't know, then, perhaps, the Caesars at
the coliseum wouldn't boast so much about
   the: lacking the ambidable thumb
(yes!) googlewhack no. 4 / 5 -
mandible thumb you idiot! d'uh...
but still, a googlewhack at the end of it...
type in: lacking the ambidable thumb
and, yes = 1 result in the google algorithm...
http://www.experienceproject.com/stories/Have-Thumb-Deformity/728760,
i call this the alternative version of, or rather,
the digital version of fishing...
     a tail like a thumb, the grip baron...
   but my peacocking the tongue shouldn't
be deemed as: straitjacket panic button prone...
  why would it?
****! he used the colour azure in his blue period,
that picasso did! chain him! gag him!
stash him in a kitchen stove!
i mean the inspection of genuine viriology
dynamic concerning mental illness,
the anti-thesis of solipsism, as the proper counter...
or should i say: membrane / barrier?
    can mental illness make ranks, i.e. spread?
like a virus can?
            well, if you take to explaining a zeitgeist...
ideology akin to communism and ****** can
become virus-akin... so i guess... yes...
it had to become a self-serving question easily
answered... mental illness can be very much
akin to a common cold... it's not really a case of taboo
being the lock-and-key to contain it...
nor the asylum... i suppose the best prescription
is the idea of solipsism...
              but isn't this grand,
i'm actually lethargic, coinciding with
    a tax on robots... and the French slashing
their 35 hour working weeks to 32 hours...
    and the Finns paying their unemployed
    (2K, placebo dosage for the actual
   237,000 unemployed) - a random €560 a month...
such are the times...
           it really has become a sort of
year 0 orientation lesson... because it's just
gagging for a guillotine to snap it awake,
so a decapitated head of Charles I at Whitehall might
say it's final farewell...
              and is mental illness capable of
being akin to a viral infection...
     it probably can... you probe the waters in an
environment of poets... they're good enough
to succumb to a white rabbit experiment...
              question is: do you apply the rule
of solipsism or an actual asylum? in a post-asylum
society, i don't think there's an option
whether solipsism should, or shouldn't be used
to counter the more serious form of the flu...
   but, as ever, it comes down to the age-old
cartesian model of dualism... or as any siamese twin
might attest: i'm not that further away from
my sister as you might think...
  the dualism that served so well for so many years
to appear "peaceful" became a real dichotomy...
  the ergo suddenly failed... when people realised
that the fact "i think" didn't necessarily
precipiate into "i am"... given what the media is
interested in, and how many people become missing
and all that... the numbers were too much
for player uno to simply give up the canvas
of newspapers and t.v. to some poor schmuck
trying to impregnate his canvas on which he worked
his paint-brush (power) and paint (wealth) onto...
   the cartesian ergo simply failed...
    oh sure, the other two facts worked... but they
didn't necessarily congregate universally
in the crux of ergo,
        i was told it would be a monsoon of thought
established on earth... instead i got a light-shower
   and the Gobi desert.
in the same way the subconscious exists
as a fake of the trinity...
           to me it has no need for a chisel...
as a realm... treat the conscious as a realm
akin to Hades, and it becomes wholly
de-personalised... there's not individual in it
that might require it... it's a covert mechanism
of subterfuge... but if we're talking
making rabbit heads with our hands
   in the shadow form... we're talking
nothing but puppeteering...
   or like saying, let's create an evolved
version of the definite (the) and the indefinite (a)
article...
                      well... there must be
a direct and an indirect article...
                well there is...
con                                 and sub-con,
       un-con is an indiscriminate article...
meaning: what are the evolutionary gains
of dreaming, given the cinema?
Jellyfish Nov 2014
It's inevitable.
So why do I fear it?
Why am I drowning in an ocean of thorns whenever I think about it?
It's as if my heart is having an earthquake when I realise I'm ageing,
Because I don't want to grow up.
But time goes by so fast,
Maybe if I look the other way it'll all pass?
Sara Apr 2018
Cover up the mirrors and I'll find somewhere to look,
rip me into pieces like the pages of an old notebook,
smudge me into ink stains, stick a needle in my eye,
scribble over my mistakes and cross me out with lines.

Turn me inside out to wash and
hang me out to dry,
drown me in a dried up lake
and cool me down by fire,

spit me out like sour grapes,
then leave me like an ageing wine,
just now, I've quite the bitter taste
but I still need a little time.
Catharsis in a poem- felt very grounded after spitting this out
Oliver Philip Nov 2018
Worst part of loneliness is being without you
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Worst part of loneliness is being without you.
On most days I can fill my life with something
Rather than nothing or feeling sorry for myself
Sorry that now my Darling has gone pain free
Trouble is that we thought we’d live forever

Pausing seldom to think of a reality of ageing
Ageing is deadly. Parts wear out and die off
Reality dawns on us too late. Missed the bus
Typically missed spent youth comes to haunt

On those occasions when tobacco was king
From that day on. The fuse had been lit.

Loneliness now is your legacy to me as I lay
On those days in Queensland when it pours
Never in small droplets. No it really rains. !!  
Engulfing the storm drains and rivers n lakes
Like the whole heavens are crying “She’s gone
I ache from the loneliness. I am so missing you
Now I appear to the outside world I cope well
Every holistic solution know to man do I try
So many all the days of the week do I count
Some say they are a great remedy for grief

I argue not ,I think this does work well for me
So in my opinion the loneliness is the worst

Because you were always there to praise me
Exciting my day by your loving exclamation
I love you my darling , I love you , do you know
No doubt in our minds. We loved each other.
God knows how long he plans for me to suffer

Worst part of loneliness is being without you.
I start my day with a sort of positive stance.
Thinking I know exactly what’s in store today.
Having logged all appointments methodically
Only I do it alone. So very alone , very alone.
Unless I come to grips with this I’ll be very sad
Though I hate the loneliness this without you.

You my darling meant so very much to me.
Only through the tribute do I place thoughts
Unnecessary for anyone but you to hear.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Written by Philip. 12 th October 2018.
It’s getting easier at November 26th 2018
With the aid of Gods guidance and Poetry
Worst part of loneliness is being without you
Marshal Gebbie Feb 2010
Transferred attention some where else
Then lost my train of thought,
Added an item to my list
Of stuff I should have bought.
Forgot to say those silly things
That make it all worth while,
And found myself in jockey shorts
With a lost and vacant smile.


Left the toothbrush in the toilet
And the razor in the lounge,
Fed the dog the ****** cat food
And the goldfish had to scrounge.
Woke up early on the weekend
And slept in late for work,
Is it really any wonder
That my  wife has gone beserk ?



Distracted moments come and go
As life progresses on,
But in these periods of bewilderment
Have I come or have I gone ?
The confusion is annoying
It's like emerging from the mist
And embarrassed explanations
Leave my kid's expression ******.


Conversations breeze along
I'm having trouble with the terms
The children utter gibberish
Which I've no desire to learn.
My old friends speak in whispers
Quite impossible to hear
And the clink of moving cutlery
Keeps dinner parties from my ear.


I guess a change is needed
Maybe, a less demanding day,
Where physicality is really secondary
Where exhaustion doesn't play.
Where the bodies limitations
Are tempered to the task
And a moderated output
Is, perhaps, the best that you can ask.


I've lost my sense of humour
The world is racing by too fast,
This mobile phone's a nightmare
And ****** TV remotes I'm past.
And whatever happened to coffee
At my favourite Bridge cafe ?
Now the order is for decaff,
No cream, half strength, moccha frappe !!


Age is such a ******
It's asset is it's stealth,
One moment you're a titan
The next you've lost your health.
One moment you've got flowing locks
The next you're bald and grim,
Is it any ****** wonder
That growing old is such a sin.

Marshalg
Grumping@theBach
Mangere Bridge
10 August 2009

— The End —