Some introductory 'food' for thought...

"When people say they prefer organic food, what they often seem to mean is they don't want their food tainted with pesticides and their meat shot full of hormones or antibiotics. Many object to the way a few companies - Monsanto is the most famous of them - control so many of the seeds we grow."
  - Michael Specter

"My grandfather used to say that once in your life you need a doctor, a lawyer, a policeman and a preacher but every day, three times a day, you need a farmer"
  - Brenda Schoepp

"Economically, many folks don't feel they can afford organic. While this may be true in some cases, I think more often than not it's a question of priority. I feel it's one of the most important areas of concern ecologically, because the petrochemical giants - DuPont, Monsanto - make huge money by poisoning us."
  - Woody Harrelson


Who is Monsanto?
Monsanto is a Chemicals/Pharmaceutical/Agriculture company that was established in 1901 in the United States, and over the last century has occupied a particularly interesting and questionable history that has within recent times took to the global scale, growing into a multinational corporation, well nigh on the complete monopolisation of the Agriculture industry whilst having established connections to the chemical and pharmaceutical industry. They are less well known for their creation of Agent Orange, of which they claimed had no harmful effects on the human body, which was utilised very predominantly during the Vietnam War by the U.S. military as a defoliant, however, caused hundreds of thousands of deaths by poisoning, and has now led to an epidemic of birth deformities in the regions of use. Monsanto experienced more involvement in war through their involvement in the Manhattan Project, which resulted in the creation of the first nuclear bombs to be tested on Japanese civilian populations. They also have a background in their production of PCB's (Polychlorinated biphenyls) which once again, had the negative human and environmental effects ignored and misrepresented hitherto 1977 when they were banned, however, was not before many fresh water supplies and the air had been contaminated and was a known carcinogen in humans, along with other health damages. There was then of course their production of DDT's in the post war period that was advertised as a 'wonder-chemical' to be used in agricultural pesticides. However, it was later uncovered that its spraying caused a high percentage of food breakdown in crop and in humans caused breast cancer, male infertility, miscarriage, developmental delay and nervous system/liver damage. They even tested the effects of radioactive Iron on 829 pregnant women in a bizarre experiment. Having no shortage of scandalous and often at times frequenting blatantly corrupt behaviour on their dubious track record, with an abundance of data and study arising in protest of the company's use of dangerous chemicals and genetic modifications in food, it is surely best to question the activity and history of this company.


What chemical poisons are being used?
Some of you are probably aware as to the fact that within many food products today there are various chemicals being used in modification, cultivation and in processing, many of which are harmful, often deadly to the human body and to the ecosystem. So harmful in fact that in cultivation workers are required to wear bio-hazard suits and due to the toxicity of the area in farming these GM crops, are required to ***** signs in the surrounding area warning of the danger.

So one chemical that has been pushed into foods and drink by Monsanto since the early 20th Century is Saccharin, an artificial sweetener made from coal tar which is used predominantly in Soda, Coke and processed foods, and is 700 times sweeter than sugar. In 1907 when Saccharin was first investigated by the USDA it was quoted as,"a coal tar product totally devoid of food value and extremely injurious to health" , and by the 1970's, when the chemical began to garner greater use, the FDA attempted to ban its use in products after discovering it causes cancers (particularly bladder cancer) in animals and humans, however, today is still used as an artificial sweetener, and between 1973-1994 the National Cancer Institute saw a 10% increase in bladder cancers.

Monsanto are also responsible for the pushing of another artificial sweetener onto the market to be consumed by humans, that being Aspartame, even more harmful than Saccharin, and since being used in Coke, particularly Diet Coke, since 1983, the rest of industry followed suit. When melted down at 30°C into its liquid form in use for soft drinks, it become far deadlier than in its powdered state. It was found that it caused tumours and holes in the brains of rats and is more addictive than crack *******. After a multitude of independent scientific studies arose in protest of the use of Aspartame, Monsanto bribed the National Cancer Institute to produce fabricated data. Here are some of the know side effects of Aspartame consumption in humans according to the US Food and Drug Administration:

• mania  
• blindness
• joint-pain
• fatigue
• weight-gain
• chest-pain
• coma
• insomnia
• numbness
• depression
• tinnitus
• weakness
• spasms
• irritability
• nausea
• deafness
• memory-loss
• rashes
• dizziness
• headaches
• seizures
• anxiety
• palpitations
• fainting
• cramps
• diarrhoea
• panic
• burning in the mouth
• diabetes
• MS
• lupus
• epilepsy
• Parkinson’s
• tumours
• miscarriage
• infertility
• fibromyalgia
• infant death
• Alzheimer’s

As is quite evident, Aspartame not only lacks any nutritional value, it also can have grave effects on humans when consumed. In fact, over 80% of complaints made to the FDA concern Aspartame and is now used in over 5000 products, yet facts are still being misrepresented and as primary producers of Aspartame such as Monsanto produce false data to cover their tracks.


How is their monopoly being secured?
Monsanto within recent decades has somewhat become the archetype of corruption and corporatism, devoting many millions to Government lobbying in order to maintain its hegemony over agriculture, its use of harmful chemicals and to maintain restrictions of food labelling of GM products. In fact, the company seems to have a revolving door between itself and Government now, one example being the FDAs Arthur Hull resigning due to controversy and going straight to an employee at Monsanto as a Public Relations representative. This means that the FDA, the central official force against the use and proliferation of harmful products is in bed with Monsanto, the main proliferator.

Another creation Monsanto have pushed into pastoral agriculture is their Synthetic Bovine Growth Hormone which is a genetic modification of the E-coli virus to be used in dairy products and cows. And in order to make sure this product is pushed onto farmers, Monsanto sues any that do not use it with teams of lawyers. They also, in a far more cunning and destructive method, are able to and have destroyed other, natural crop cultivation by the use of their Genetically Modified crops themselves. What they have done is modified their crops in order that they self pollinate, and that bees that come into contact with their crops are killed, causing mass hive collapses, which then means any natural crop in surrounding farms die off due to a lack of bees to pollinate them, forcing them to join the monopoly of Monsanto's GM supply.

Also, before the aerial spraying aluminium and barium into the skies began in 1998, that has seen a rise in the content of aluminium particles per/cm from near 0 to 30,000 in many areas, Monsanto patented crops that are resistant to soil with such high concentrations, meaning they now have legal ownership over crops, whereas the natural produce may be ungrowable in a number of places where the spraying concentration is high. On a side not, the spraying of aluminium into the sky since 1998 has also caused a massive spike in Alzheimer disease and lung cancers, rising from the tens of thousands to the millions of cases per year.

To Conclude, Monsanto has recently made a very big merger deal with the Pharmaceutical company Bayer, the ones who produced Zyklon-B for the **** extermination chambers. Sure sounds like some safe operations.


- an essay by JDH

for Jennie in gratitude*

For days afterwards he was preoccupied by what he’d collected into himself from the gallery viewing. He could say it was just painting, but there was a variety of media present in the many surrounding images and artefacts. Certainly there were all kinds of objects: found and gathered, captured and brought into a frame, some filling transparent boxes on a window ledge or simply hung frameless on the wall; sand, fixed foam, paper sea-water stained, a beaten sheet of aluminium; a significant stone standing on a mantelpiece, strange warped pieces of metal with no clue to what they were or had been, a sketchbook with brooding pencilled drawings made fast and thick, filling the page, colour like an echo, and yes, paintings.
 
Three paintings had surprised him; they did not seem to fit until (and this was sometime later) their form and content, their working, had very gradually begun to make a sort of sense.  Possible interpretations – though tenuous – surreptitiously intervened. There were words scrawled across each canvas summoning the viewer into emotional space, a space where suggestions of marks and colour floated on a white surface. These scrawled words were like writing in seaside sand with a finger: the following bird and hiraeth. He couldn’t remember the third exactly. He had a feeling about it – a date or description. But he had forgotten. And this following bird? One of Coleridge’s birds of the Ancient Mariner perhaps? Hiraeth he knew was a difficult Welsh word similar to saudade. It meant variously longing, sometimes passionate (was longing ever not passionate?), a home-sickness, the physical pain of nostalgia. It was said that a well-loved location in conjunction with a point in time could cause such feelings. This small exhibition seemed full of longing, full of something beyond the place and the time and the variousness of colour and texture, of elements captured, collected and represented. And as the distance in time and memory from his experience of the show in a small provincial gallery increased, so did his own thoughts of and about the nature of longing become more acute.
 
He knew he was fortunate to have had the special experience of being alone with ‘the work’ just prior to the gallery opening. His partner was also showing and he had accompanied her as a friendly presence, someone to talk to when the throng of viewers might deplete. But he knew he was surplus to requirements as she’d also brought along a girlfriend making a short film on this emerging, soon to be successful artist. So he’d wandered into the adjoining spaces and without expectation had come upon this very different show: just the title Four Tides to guide him in and around the small white space in which the art work had been distributed. Even the striking miniature catalogue, solely photographs, no text, did little to betray the hand and eye that had brought together what was being shown. Beyond the artist’s name there were only faint traces – a phone number and an email address, no voluminous self-congratulatory CV, no list of previous exhibitions, awards or academic provenance. A light blue bicycle figured in some of her catalogue photographs and on her contact card. One photo in particular had caught the artist very distant, cycling along the curve of a beach. It was this photo that helped him to identify the location – because for twenty years he had passed across this meeting of land and water on a railway journey. This place she had chosen for the coming and going of four tides he had viewed from a train window. The aspect down the estuary guarded by mountains had been a highpoint of a six-hour journey he had once taken several times a year, occasionally and gratefully with his children for whom crossing the long, low wooden bridge across the estuary remained into their teens an adventure, always something telling.
 
He found himself wishing this work into a studio setting, the artist’s studio. It seemed too stark placed on white walls, above the stripped pine floor and the punctuation of reflective glass of two windows facing onto a wet street. Yes, a studio would be good because the pictures, the paintings, the assemblages might relate to what daily surrounded the artist and thus describe her. He had thought at first he was looking at the work of a young woman, perhaps mid-thirties at most. The self-curation was not wholly assured: it held a temporary nature. It was as if she hadn’t finished with the subject and or done with its experience. It was either on-going and promised more, or represented a stage she would put aside (but with love and affection) on her journey as an artist. She wouldn’t milk it for more than it was. And it was full of longing.
 
There was a heaviness, a weight, an inconclusiveness, an echo of reverence about what had been brought together ‘to show’. Had he thought about these aspects more closely, he would not have been so surprised to discovered the artist was closer to his own age, in her fifties. She in turn had been surprised by his attention, by his carefully written comment in her guest book. She seemed pleased to talk intimately and openly, to tell her story of the work. She didn’t need to do this because it was there in the room to be read. It was apparent; it was not oblique or difficult, but caught the viewer in a questioning loop. Was this estuary location somehow at the core of her longing-centred self?  She had admitted that, working in her home or studio, she would find herself facing westward and into the distance both in place and time?
 
On the following day he made time to write, to look through this artist’s window on a creative engagement with a place he was familiar. The experience of viewing her work had affected him. He was not sure yet whether it was the representation of the place or the artist’s engagement with it. In writing about it he might find out. It seemed so deeply personal. It was perhaps better not to know but to imagine. So he imagined her making the journey, possibly by train, finding a place to stay the night – a cheerful B & B - and cycling early in the morning across the long bridge to her previously chosen spot on the estuary: to catch the first of the tides. He already understood from his own experience how an artist can enter trance-like into an environment, absorb its particularness, respond to the uncertainty of its weather, feel surrounded by its elements and textures, and most of all be governed by the continuous and ever-complex play of light.
 
He knew all about longing for a place. For nearly twenty years a similar longing had grown and all but consumed him: his cottage on a mountain overlooking the sea. It had become a place where he had regularly faced up to his created and invented thoughts, his soon-to-be-music and more recently possible poetry and prose. He had done so in silence and solitude.
 
But now he was experiencing a different longing, a longing born from an intensity of love for a young woman, an intensity that circled him about. Her physical self had become a rich landscape to explore and celebrate in gaze, and stroke and caress. It seemed extraordinary that a single person could hold to herself such a habitat of wonder, a rich geography of desire to know and understand. For so many years his longing was bound to the memory of walking cliff paths and empty beaches, the hypnotic viewing of seascaped horizons and the persistent chaos of the sea and wild weather. But gradually this longing for a coming together of land, sea and sky had migrated to settle on a woman who graced his daily, hourly thoughts; who was able to touch and caress him as rain and wind and sun can act upon the body in ever-changing ways. So when he was apart from her it was with such a longing that he found himself weighed down, filled brimfull.
 
In writing, in attempting to consider longing as a something the creative spirit might address, he felt profoundly grateful to the artist on the light blue bicycle whose her observations and invention had kept open a door he felt was closing on him. She had faced her own longing by bringing it into form, and through form into colour and texture, and then into a very particular play: an arrangement of objects and images for the mind to engage with – or not. He dared to feel an affinity with this artist because, like his own work, it did not seem wholly confident. It contained flaws of a most subtle kind, flaws that lent it a conviction and strength that he warmed to. It had not been massaged into correctness. The images and the textures, the directness of it, flowed through him back and forward just like the tides she had come far to observe on just a single day. He remembered then, when looking closely at the unprotected pieces on the walls, how his hand had moved to just touch its surfaces in exactly the way he would bring his fingers close to the body of the woman he loved so much, adored beyond any poetry, and longed for with all his heart and mind.

.perhaps in my company we wouldn't be... opening a bottle of red wine... to let it breathe... or pouring it into a bowl to give it more air to breathe with: otherwise on life-support machine through the bottle-neck... right here, right now, we have... a glass bottle of beer (13, guinness hop lager) and 4 cans of stella artois (the wife beater's lager, so they say)... yes... beer in cans... for all intesive purposes - a good way to transport beer... in aluminium cans... but we're not bums... we don't drink beer straight from cans... we pour our beer into a tall glass and wait... so the beer can exfoliate like aladdin's jinn in the glass... away from the confines of the can... we don't drink beer from a can... we can drink it straight from a bottle... but if it comes in a can... we pour it into a tall glass... just so... so there's some head on top... we're not english in that respect either... of cutting the head (of foam) off the beer... which is probably why i always order a stout in a pub... you can't pull one without the creme de la creme on top... a head on a beer is what makes it look less like carbonated **** or concentrated lemonade... we're not bums... we drink beer from glasses... never directly from cans - the metal gets in the way... a beer like a wine needs to breathe too.

i found that there are only two types of music styles
that are suitable for drinking -
that's... drinking and not going out -
playing a cat with an imaginary fireplace...
the less imaginary fireplace being:
a stare confined to... watching a pillow...
and the general schematic of a bed...
and sitting hunched in imitation: all crow because
no crow doesn't get you far
on golgotha of daydreams: if only i...
humble servant of dusty feet - the tourist,
the pilgrim - would set off...
         on an amphetamine riddled skew into
a messiah complex adventure...

                     but not me...
                once upon a time the only music
worth drinking to was the blues...
            a long, long time ago...
                hell: once upon a time any music
would do if we all decided to go dancing...
or at least waited for the dance to come of its own
volition and not mine: i.e. the me in i would
just be dragged under the teasing waves
and slurped out to sea...

                   a thousand waves are all but the single
tongue of some swindling kraken...
drinking and random shamanic interludes in
the youth of the night-club...
when there wasn't a tally for score or...
the ones shot down by manfred...
good thing he was called manfred...
   and not some swabian helmut! oi oi!
                                             von Richthofen!
and that was when...
           until came the five beers and on
the 4th it became apparent...
                                  the red garland quintet...
soul junction...

   and it's not... a gerry mulligan's night lights...
piano sentimentality and the ode
to all things urban, cosmopolitan...
                        yes... it's not grenadine in that
sulk of yours... it's cranberry juice...
the city and... the sewers and...
                                 jazz for the urban scenes
of: anywhere but the park...
the graveyard... a choo-choo slowing into
a station... and billy joel come:
mid-life crisis and a new york state of mind...
while over 'ere we have...
     teasing the woods: where concrete ends
and mud begins... thus we can have our Adam...
and...

only today i was walking past his bride...
doing my odd citizen duty of recycling glass...
and buying the amber sedatives (carbonated)
for an evening with some cannonball adderley
or some donnie byrd... or a horace silver...
that's the beauty of jazz...
the music is all there is... the names come and go...
sonny rollins and the story behind
the bridge... and how he would pretend to
but not pretend to... retire and go off and practice
on the bridge so as to not disturb his neighbours...
all the details are there: on the vinyl sleeve
from 1963...

now that's jazz... i don't even want to mind
how pretentious this might sound...
but... it doesn't in that: jazz is jazz in that there
might come some great improv. -
after all: it's all somewhat improv. -
   but you can't really make such basic
generalißations...
        speedy-shoom-of-a-choo-choo whizzing past...
schematic!
   classical music is all a priori...
                              jazz... it's all a posteriori...
how? when people phone in between
1pm and 5pm to classic.fm and they make requests...
they sometimes ask for something specific...
but usually... they vaguely allude to... a feeling...
something "uplifting" - play something "uplifting"...
ergo... there's this... a priori "item"(?)
in the music that's... an expectation...

          i do know what jazz sounds like
a quintent: drums, bass, piano, trumpet, sax...
yes... the guitar... asking the algorithm:
a quintet is five - what is six?
        sixtet - d'uh... sextet... well that's the basic
"i know what jazz sounds like"...
but with jazz there's always this lag...
it's this lagging behind:
    i don't exactly know what i'll feel until
only after i've heard it and in the meantime too...
jazz is all a posteriori -

while classical music for me is all a priori...
given that... it's not exactly improvised:
there's the orchestra, the movie, the script...
   and it's such a music that doesn't worship
itchy fingers of improv. - the stale or rather:
the head-about-to-explode of scoring the music like
a dissected **** of beef...
the cuts for the violins the cuts for the woodwinds...
more so: the almost shy drumming...
the wet-drumming... like rain playing
rattle fingers on tin (roofs)... or what rain would
sound like... if it was made from sand...
either way... jazz is a baggage...

hardly any sort of envisioning a journey from
(a) priori through to (b) posteriori -
and at least with jazz... you never have to really
cite who's playing... in a passing gesture
for all necessary bookmark purposes
of: where i am in the library of jazz...
unlike in classical music... where...
it's either Mozart, Beethoven or then again...
some obscure composer... perhaps ola glejlo...
but it's less about the music per se:
it's about the music of THE composer...
bonus marks for keeping to a rigid diet of one
and completing the herculean task of digesting
his entire oeuvre...

-       so i was walking past the most usual scene...
a car stopped... and she got out...
she must have been no more than 16 pushing 18...
the heavy make-up hid her otherwise boyish
contorts... a short black dress...
and as she got out of the cab...
she had her high-heel shoes in her hands...
   she was walking the cement barefoot...
i peered into her eyes... the lights were out...
perhaps her soul was screaming - perhaps this was
her first disappointment - and it was only... what...
not even 10pm on a saturday night...
my nights of youthful regret usually came after 3am
having to wrestle a berserker...
or how a dog looks like when it takes
to beer with a fond heart and only three legs...
god forbid but "they" would also cut my tail off
to further throw me off balance...
the walked passed and i looked into the cab...
a very, very nervous asian was looking at me
and then her... this didn't exactly look like...
she was ***** or was fighting to escape...
           aren't those scenarios usually stage in and around
woods - without any pedestrians walking past?
call it a trainwreck a carwreck...
                      or just running mascara...
that bad, eh?
at this point... society is a cruise ship...
and i'm stuck with ottis and none of that sentimentality
of the dock: running away with a bag of
chips wrapped in newspaper away from
seagulls... who... are apparently prone
to kleptoparasitism - a real thing... i swear to god...
the animals that want to eat in the realm
of trans-species... dogs have had their
kleptoparasistism repressed: crumbs from the table...
the chicken bones with hopes for
cartilege and someone who... is bad at
cleaning the flesh off the bone: pucker up...
move aside leech... watch this slurp...
ol' hank mobley and wayne shorter...
        one cascade after another...
5th beer in and...

yeah... so that's what a carwreck looks like...
for a girl in her late teens...
the cute black dress...
   getting out of the cab holding her high heels...
walking home barefoot...
she wasn't crying just yet...
but i could see puffy tender demon baron
of the soft cheeks readying to turn into
medussa's stare-grip... but not there yet...
this must have been her first time at "life"
and the night life and saturday...
         the cab driver looked scared shitless...
as if frozen in time... about to have his photograph
taken by a more sensible shadow of his...
i did think she just escaped a bad
session of prostitution...
but not even prostitutes look so ******* gloomy
as she did...

the ******* ***** it up -
the pundit ***** it up - the show goes on...
stage or no stage... an audience or no audience...
those eyes though... not yet crying...
but they felt... like wheeping oysters nonetheless...
you know when eyes are like that...
teasing bulging out... they appear dimmed
at first... but that's a dimming before
the sparkle of tears...
it's the 29th of febuary - yes...
mr. zodiac wasn't kind to those who still believe
in the horoscope but never tried
gambling on a winning team or horse...
it's still winter and those poor feet of hers...
she must have told the cab driver to stop...
hell... half a mile before she would get home...
a 6ft2 115kg sore thumb up with a beard
up ahead: stop! let me walk past him...
that's why i gave an inquisitive stare at the cab driver...
the cab driver was looking at me...
aren't the **** victims the ones jumping
out of the cab as it speeds off or whatnot?
so this was... staged?
              i read the "situation" wrong...
well no... i didn't find a lancelot in me...
there was no door to be held open...
           not tonight...
                                           i was in a mood for
beer and jazz... and luckily for me...
marvel of all marvels...
     haig club (1627) was sold at a bargain...
                        down from 25 quid to 16 quid...
goodbye excessive drinking the cheap *****...
hello: clubman haig... is it whiskey...
is it ms. amber... or is it chanel no. 5 -
                   is it whiskey or is it a perfume?
a snapper of a dinner standing-up...
   the scent of the last bite still on my moustache
even though i had washed my teeth...
the beer bottle opened - a drizzle on the hand
and then the hand smearing the liquid all over
the stinking hairs from an unwelcome scent...
i don't mind stinking like hops...
                  but hops is better than smelly food...

- regrets? ah yes... the "what if" universe at large...
that "whaf if" this and "what if" not...
"what if" yes and... when a man takes to walk
the street at night... he's only looking for empty
streets and... the hope of not seeing his reflection:
which is never about abruptly stopping
a cab and taking your shoes off
and walking in a tight-knit black dress
having met the world and...
                     was it heartbreak or just...
disappointment that... there are no unicorns
and she isn't daddy's precious?

any of the rudy van gelder editions...
                      "what if" i had more than just these
words... a barren wasteland of a flat
with no furnishings, not a book to call it a genesis
of a private library... not a single record
to play... no bed no curtains...
and she was the: honey-catch and snare and...
what if i were still in my late teens and
didn't have these invisible tattoos of historical
dates and the tattoos that riddle bones
that are... "habits of hygiene"...
      by hygiene i imply: ontological fixtures...
immoveable objects of accumulating my mortal
years for this formal circumstance of
the worst magic trick of all...
                   transient and... packaged elsewhere...
apparently going nowhere...

if this was a truly urban scenario...
but we're talking essex...
the outskirts of greater london...
if i bothered myself tonight i might go
to a place where i'd sit on a throne of a stump
of oak and listen to owls...
spot a rabbit, spot a badger... the foxes would
come of their own accord...
and perhaps even a deer or two... or three...
there's no glit of a picaddily circus romance:
when a girl decides to get out of a cab early
and put her porcelain toes on the wintry cement...
as if: supposing she be enticing me...
as i was thinking about the scared-shitless
cab driver...        

to have once upon a time believe in love:
the sort of love you'd see in movies...
but that's of course...
before you'd get a chance to see love...
in opera...
blue pill red pill... spiderweb of fiction...
blah blah...
watch the sort of love in movies...
then go and see an opera...
most notably verdi's la traviata...
  the movies fizzle out and you don't really
need to read this to begin with...
        i was in love once...
it was a love that was in love with itself...
          a mirage a carrot on a stick...
probably something akin to this sort of impromptu...
rescuing a girl walking barefoot home...
oh sure... happens almost every other saturday...

- the beer is for these musings, for the jazz
and for... cleaning the kidneys and a work-out
for the bladder... the shot-at-a-crescendo
will come with the haig club whiskey...
is 70cl really worth 25 quid?

- there's a difference between food with a USE BY date
and food with a BEST BEFORE date...
most notably goat's cheese...
once the best before date expires...
which is way way down the line from
the use by date... the cheese starts to taste
like... ash...

i should know since i know of the alternative
to doing shots of tequilla...
the salt is replaced with licking some cigarette
ash...
the tequilla is replaced with *****...
and the slice of lemon is replaced with
black peppercorns...

so i do know what ash tastes like...
piquant tastes: this omelette of an octopus and
of tongue...

- society is a cruise ship and i'm waving it goodbye...
welcoming a sunset of a sea as calm
as a mirror... telling my feet to take root
and stand... inaccessible...
otherwise... i am barren when it comes to having
some (h. p.) lovecraftian sensibilities from
maine... aloof and anemic... anemic with bloodshot
eyes...

- of course she isn't a mystery...
the narrative would run: the little match girl...
hans... hans! hans?! hans andersen is drilling
a hole into my head about... a woman walking
home barefoot...
yes... but she is walkig home...
unlike the little match girl...
and unlike the little match girl...
this girl was carrying a pair of shoes with her...
it's not my problem whether
i'm the sore thumb that "got in the way"...
a fork in the road: like any other fork...
like any other road...

do you have to reach being 34 to see these
teenage break-ups and regrets come and bump into
you after you've done...
that most spectacular feat of towing a backpack
full of glass for recycling?
where is one to recycle bones?!

- right not all the ***** in the world is...
something of an adhesive... a hitchhiker pollen...
a hard-on of: ****** yourself for a hard-on
just because even flapping a pancake will do right now...
to ease constipation whenever necessary...

- it's a torilla... but it's wrapped like a burrito...
well... it's a torilla... kultur shock -
sarajevo - the entry level shock-awe and
blitzkrieg of drinking from the fountain
of the Haig...

- second tier... to treat pornographic movies
like... early cinema... silent...
otherwise a return to the magazine form...
and the ripe imagination readied for:
improv... or... when was the last time
my left hand didn't feel like an oyster...
and an oyster didn't feel like a leash...
and a woman's ****** stopped being
an hour worth 120 quid? -

             - third tier... the haig club whiskey
is not worth 25 quid... it's over-rated...
you're basically paying for the bottle...
i'll stick to my guns...
only the irish know how to make whiskey
on these isles... bushmills: mellow, tame...
the picts have decided to lodge
a smoking salmon into their barrels to die...
i'm supposed to have an aftertaste of vanilla...
with all that smoke... i'd be happy to taste
hungary and smoked paprika! that would
be a bonus to boot! -

- i can appreciate the picts for trying...
but let's just leave brewing whiskey to the irish...
and let's keep the english away from hops...
they'll make an undrinkable ale from it...
never the lager...

   - armed with balkan rock... standing before
the h'american monolith of tongue and culture...
or... just before what's filtered for the export...

- no... of course i don't think h'americans are dumb...
i just think there's only a naive majority...
i'm going to find the vermin and huddle among
them...

- sooner or later we'll be calling the germans
come spring... for winter provisions...
"keeshond" or: hund... i much prefer the latter...
from under the iron curtain forged from
a broken jaw when biting the curb of:
under the silicon veil... nowhere else to go...
beside Ishrael...
                        
          remains of the ottoman - which is hardly
me put into an iron maiden of akimbo...
where's the geisha and the samurai?!

- is your beard long enough?
      like mine... i tease it... catch it with braille
cardinals: the thumb the index and middle fingers...
twirl it... wait for some thread to tie it together
into a hanging ******* of a bundle...
while at the same time:
          before you... a throng of vermin...
this beard... a magic flute!
the zenith of my thinking...
and ultimately: the nadir of any narrative
that might be inclined to escape and
not become 3D...

- i listen to songs in german...
i put on airs of pride - my chin starts to contort into
the moon's scythe and sickle...
even if the night is overcast with beard,
or cloud...

- then i put on a record that's 20 years old...
deftones' white pony...
and i remember being a teen...
hungry for hormonal diet...
a diet to stop the bones from aching
as they grew extra sprouts:
adverse to the skin and photosynthesis...
bones that were expected to grow
entombed... not in flesh...

- sketches from the gasoline additive when
it comes to a beer, starter...
otherwise: elite... gonna breed on top
of the general... pucker up the tremor for a vibrato
kiss and leech her lips off...
to expose her most pristine:
todlächeln -
                           not a chelsea grin...
the joker lapse... i mean... extending the shaving
lines and just, completely, forgetting there's
any botox involved to grow a peach
from a duck of the reinvention of
the deflating balloon...

   leave no selfie without it...
                   herr grinsen: die / das / die / das...
i keep forgetting the definite plural and
the definite singular... feelz... feels...
maximum impromptu: das bösartigwimmern...
anything in german at this point...
sounds better than...
wenigbruder englisch...
                       dies, mein krawatte beste...
alle schwarz alle weiß:
      say to me... nein pinguine willkommen...

anything to keep these mosquitos these
zeppelins away... alt vater großartig Schwab
from this... herd of minor dicta
of the children of the house of ßaß...
translated nomad from the high pressure
***** basin of:
later, trajectory... later... the yawn and canyon...
and the sky above...

- beer first... whiskey after...
shrapnel... and gasoline... no car... no speeding...
fast but otherwise still walking...

            - a hurrah and the cohort of a hum...
to match the echo of the centipede...
         the silence and otherwise the simplified
complications of a conversation...
the bed torn between *** and sleep...
between saturday sunday and monday through
to friday...
   and the need to drink with someone else...
"the need"...
          
the skulls breaks at the sight of sea-riddled-and-*****
cliffs... daggers persuaded to be forever sharpened...
the fiddly parts of ***** as accountants when
it came to the pennies, copper, and granules
of sand... seized: the rivers of time...
constipated shock value elevated...
                            
                                am i to find a lover when
the orchestra tells me...
these words will never find a dear sir / madam
or circle round for a yours sincerely...
                godzilla... the theme i remember from
the days when the japanese still had control over the beast...
otherwise... an overweight t-rex with...
arm extensions... the lotus feet of the chinese...
which also includes...
the savory diet of... tendering dog meat...
i.e. beating the dog to a plum softening...
which is: then again... not curing the already dead
curated meat...
life aware needs to be involved...
brick by brick brick on brick...
the status quo: made in china...

         cheap whiskey... although in an expensive bottle...
that is the haig club whiskey...
        so much for ezra pound admiring
the ******* ideograms...
what's to admire... when...
it ends up being a crude...
current latin emoji-infiltrated grafitti
equivalent to: CUL8R...
               chow-chuckle-mein-hong-shui-chew?
all that intricacy into the ideogram...
and all that remains is...
bat soup... and an advantage at playing
poker... omnivores...
you'd think that Islam would be...
more geared to break ranks among the omnivores...
like all the fickle gods... a good joke...
they abhor / are told to herd sheep
because: what sort of pig would survive the desert
and not become crispy bacon...
camels are fine too... as are their testicles...
never mind the pork leather shoes and pork
leather belts...
but the chinese omnivores are fine by
Allah: Muhammad & Co....

                               khadijah **** khuwaylid..
wrote the first surahs of the quran...
she was the literate:
the stephen vizinczey epitome:
                          in praise of older women...
last time i heard... muhammad was illiterate...
pray! that i've exhausted sympathy on
him being an orphan...
but not a ******* oliver twist thrown into
an orphanage! b'ooh h'oo...

                     the end... the whiskey isn't going
to drink itself;
as i have exhausted the patience of my bladder...
while there's the remaining concern
for a bewildering and a simultaneously
bewildered peacock... on the hunt for coy;
which is not exactly the darwinian daydream
of the short-hand greek alphabet...
the α-β male thermodynamic...
          the Σ-Δ female harem...
salmon swimming up-stream to spawn...
                             and... Ω-man / unicorn...
                     sha! schtil!

only today i felt this strange fear from boredom, i don't expect housewives to feel it, although i'm certain they do, brain-draining watching some Jurassic adaptation where man's imagination really did a runner - not into the fantastical but into the absurd - like in science fiction, did a runner, completely off the mark given chemists making shampoos and toothpastes and fertilisers... ethically-free science fiction - but this housebound fear from boredom, greater than a fear of death it seized me and rattled me, i had to go out to buy a few beers; just like it happens to really rich people, they make their homes into micro-units of what's out there, in society, a swimming pool when there's a communal one elsewhere, a massive library of unread books, when there are plenty of those elsewhere, home cinema, snooker table... it's the entire spectrum of social pastimes condensed into a single household... anyway, i got hot and bothered, i'm starting to think it was not a fear of boredom, but what to do with the piri-piri chicken i was marinating: tomato puree, 1tbsp balsamic vinegar, half a large lemon squeezed, 1sp sugar, 1tsp paprika, 1/2 tsp cajun pepper, 14g of parsley, mint, oil, 2 chillies, 2 tsp of garlic puree, salt to taste - whisked in a food processor; ~1kg of chicken - because i thought whether i should shove the chicken marinate in an oven bag and cook it for a while, or whether to take the chicken out from the marinate and place it on a baking tray... ****!

poems and book reviews these days, nothing more,
get someone else to do the legwork -
a thoroughly modern malaise -
social anthropology - titled *tribe -
the pros and cons of modern life and our
search for tribal mythology -
the 8x more chance of depression and
other mental deviations in wealthier
societies than poorer ones -
once it was called adventure, now
it's called tourism - after a while you sort
of get bored of the naked ego
and the clothing range your thought
provides you - unless you keep thinking
out the same thing, over and over again,
dressed like Armani, all black, nothing else -
odd, isn't it? they're playing the cat game,
cat wakes up, same ****, different cover,
well, the same cover - same fur - can't
change - the paradox or parody of
the fashion industry, i.e. that the designers
wear the same thing over and over again
and insist people require a spring collection,
the latest autumn trend.... parody.
so back to this piri-piri chicken      n'ah, not really,
i was thinking about what we already did,
this anti-tribalism, to have given ourselves
the opportunity to experience the least
amount of pain, the anaesthetic, sleep inducing
on the butcher's table more or less -
but we also created another anaesthetic,
this anaesthetic is not so subtle - it concerns beauty -
ever see it? ever walk into Tate Modern and
think about Raphael or Michelangelo?
you could tell me i'm overly nostalgic -
but what i see in plain sight is an anaesthetic in place,
against beauty, esp. in architecture -
who'd think of building a new Coliseum or
a St. Paul's - the Tate Modern (as you might
or might not know) is inside a power station,
big massive chimney - would have worked
better in the Battersea (Pink Floyd's Animals
album sleeve), but then St. Paul's is right opposite
and what a staggering dichotomy it is -
i'm sure that's what you call an anaesthetic in art,
the sort of art you have to get or not get
because, frankly, admiring a tin-can of tomato soup
even by Warhol's standards isn't exactly appetising -
i know, conveyor belt necessity and all, once
artists painted on commission for some duke or
duchess, or king to be adorning lavish palaces,
but as according to Walter Benjamin - the work
of art in the age of mechanical reproduction -
some could once claim the original to be worth
a stupendous amount of dosh, but with the above
mentioned essay, the original is worth diddly-squat,
because there is no actual original these days,
because artists don't necessarily have to invest
in raw materials - and the copying process is 100%
perfect, what with photocopying and all...
but **** me over once more, how am i going
to cook this piri-piri chicken?
the few beers took the problem off my hands,
i ended up marinating the chicken in a bag
but then shoved it into a baking tray
an covered with aluminium foil, forty odd
minutes and the chicken was tender - ~5 minutes
without the aluminium foil covering while
the oven was switched off and the temperature
was descending - the carbs? couscous -
alt. North African semolina - and extra cucumber
in tzatziki - a few hours later and i'm a little
buddha not thinking an ounce or a continent's worth
of suggestion... one of those rare albums
salmonella dub's  inside the dub plates,
i'm a real provincial with this album,
tumble **** here, tumble **** there,
never settling for a ****-garden -
i told you i'm just borrowing the language, in fact,
given my alcoholic and status as vermin among
the bulldog rigid British (Londoners can have
their little gay pride parade, whatever, they
better give me up for surgery to a veterinarian than
a human doctor, after all, i'm all ******* gerbil from
now on in, it doesn't take enough pacifists to turn
my attitude into a Neo-**** and bulldozer the Union
Jack into a shallow grave, i don't expect the Caribbeans
and the Pakistanis to usher words of: it's how it is,
a rite of passage, **** your cumin and your ****,
battle of Britain, who among the R.A.F. flew and spat fire?
us) i'm more Apache in a bigger zoo than the one in
Reagents Park, i'm in a conservation zoone -
i'm Aboriginal - shaman of the fire water -
i'll be as ******* ridiculous as i want - go chant
you little kirtan get together mantras going,
i'm sure you'll *****-fight-those-pigeons dead without
a single coo being ushered in - and your little yoga stints
asking questions about the flexibility of the skeleton
not pulverised by scientific eyes for a schematic and
a schooling rubric to domino up the cranium with mandible,
ulna and radius etc. -
but at least i know what sort of country i live in,
and what country is wandering into political apology that's
too late, in ratio 27:1, soon to be Turkey + the Yugoslavian
gape, Albanian and Macedonia by 2020 -
>30:1 - great Welsh ratio that is, oh ****, wait, Scotland too?
i never thought about it coming - there's my 2 cents
on the topic, and that England is becoming more American
by the day? that's good? really?! i thought the
aim of England was to inspire America rather than
vice versa... what a ****-storm these few days ended
up being; ol' McDonald didn't have a farm, but
had the slogan - *i'm lovin' it!

Swift punt to the soda pop tin
Littering the low lit path before me
Flash back to kick the can
And hopscotch jumping rope
To wittled cans from which to smoke
And losing family to knotted rope

Years pile on tense shoulders
Bearing zirconium smiling teeth
Finding diamonds in my grief
But always pacing forward

To flash back on bronze days
Glowing like bonfire embers
Finishing the last of the thirty rack
Never realizing I was drowning
Just sad and aloof and smiling
Smoking bad **** from a PBR can

Do we need
material-prosperity
to be joyful and happy?
Yes we do.

Do we need
material-objects
like plastic-bottles and aluminium-cans
to be prosperous
joyful and happy?
Yes we do.

Is there a finite-supply
on the Earth
of many materials we use to enjoy prosperity
like plastic and aluminium?
Yes, many materials are finite.

Therefore,
do we have to recycle
finite-materials
like plastic-bottles and aluminium-cans
to maintain sufficient supply
to achieve joyful and happy prosperity
into the future?

collector of iron and all things metal
carried without slightest lament
by
beautiful brown-and-white nag with overflowing mane
clip-clops up and down
every road there is
and even beyond



1.
little doubt exists
of fine ingenuity
of said collector
who wastes no moment nor chance
to scour every luck’s platform
with sharp intuition and assiduous eyes
          an old stove with absent racks
          a precious copper geyser gutted with no fittings
          pine-planks discarded due to skew-cuts
          aluminium pipes abandoned with twisted ends
          old screws with rusty whorls from an recently bucket-kicked geezer’s garage
          parts of a car . . . an ****** gearbox and ancient exhausts
heaps of junk and piles of crap clang on cart
a veritable dump in some eyes but those of
the cool collector who takes all the sweepings in gracious stride
cast-off penalties and chaffs of society’s unwanted

2.
once a week on Saturdays
these wares are parked near the parking lot
for all to approach
to see
a fine spread of legend and lore
     bric-à-brac and books to browse
so many things of interest
     magazines and manuals with miscellany-topics under the sun
     hipflasks of silver and clear-cut carafes
     unused greeting-cards with dressed-up paper-dolls
     rare literature well-thumbed with care
and things you’d sure chuck out
mechanical entrails and shiny things
yet
quite a spectacle to behold
costing a joke but for you
a fraction of today's ha'penny

3.
nobody knows why the quiet collector takes the time of day
to re-inforce that fixture-presence
a kindly soul with half-smile always flirting round the lips
and greets with old-century warmth o'er book-edge, markedly a poem-spine
walking closer to peep curiosity around
relaxed eyes let one be
          no compulsive sales-talk
          no eager-****** hopping
just sitting back in deep hiker’s green fold-up chair
easy posture and half-drooped eyes with soft drink close at hand

4.
the collector really watches all who pass
     who go by on their daily trails with rituals oft unchanged
     who fuss ever-plaintive over facetious deets like school-tasks
as they return their books long overdue while whistling smasher-hit tunes (never to be heard)
     who rush to catch an ever-noisy taxi with their own raucous guards
     who help heaving housewives cursing under breath climb on board
as their groceries groan and nearly drop from overladen plastic bags
     who ignore for now with studious intent the hobos on the pavement there
     who beg lost coins for empty-belly from the tattered purses in bosoms
while others cry out impatient at peripheral nuisances
     who act as indiscreet ‘car-guards’ ostensibly guarding cars, even with folk in it

yes, he watches
and observes with keen eyes yet never obvious
even those who saunter by
with pondering glance and walking stick
even as years have graciously touched their brow
he sees them *tut-tut the ******* on the wall
like stray-dogs in a pound

5.
once in an often while
this collector who loves a rediscovered hypothesis
to explore the myriad facets of humanity
does an odd turn now and then
when walking to the toilet at the local library
which has parked itself adjacent to this lot
drops a twenty-buck note near the side
and soon joyful sees the utter surprise
when tired high-school kids with sullen backpacks
do a double-take
espy their luck . . . whoo-hoo, look!
their gloomy cloaks of learning plain melts
they take off sure-footed and lighter of heart
and repair to the fish-and-chips shop
they share their vinegary ***** in a finger-licking circle
and amity strong-cemented in a cool memory
that they’d recall with fondness many years later
at their 20th school-reunion
and as grand-dads visiting a dying pal

pangs of hunger satisfied
and
not only by them


next time
that note will be dropped in the park nearby
where effete winos sleep their lives away
     who ken much and give not a care
     a kind long not recognised
educated derelicts debate on war-merits and erstwhile musicians play melodic arpeggios
sitting in the gentle arbour-shade of mutual acceptance
with chess-mad players
working out strategy in rapt blade-moves
which belie and scorn the forgotten titles to their name
along with Ph.D to boot

6.
when night-time hails - all grows still again
and settles, though just for a nibble of time
it’s pack-up time
the listening collector hears the owl-hoot’s call
and knows the time has come to rest a bit
     for when the morrow dawns
     all neatly packaged in a brand-new gift called day
it’s back on the road again
to observe once more
with trusted nag in tow
clip-clop . . . clip-CLOP

7.
and the collector is the one
the housewives invite with alacrity to Xmas-lunch
the taxi-drivers offer gifts of goodwill
the school-kids give their chips and last treats
the vagrants seek out to share a ciggie and sympa-chat
the grown men visit for esoteric slim-tomes and philosophical advice
the shopkeepers welcome reassuring presence of

yes, this quiet collector
is the inadvertent guest
to shores of the lonely
the too-busy and life-ridden folk
who seek a sweet smile
just once in a while
in a world
where compassion is not justified by its deep-touches of poverty





no fruitless labour
in one who sees little detriment
but senses the full value of
every item’s moment in vanilla-time
while trying always
to catch
the finest one can be


supreme harvest, indeed
yes :)
love . . . love . . . love . . .





S T, 1 September

After a lot to negotiate
toing and froing
you exchanged your teeny heart
for my bag of 18-something stones

I carried it home in a hurry
much lighter than I expected
for what looked like a big cherry
it was shaking when I checked it
I worried at its odd little quivering
a bit timid and nervy
like a leaf blown from its tree
but happy to have a new owner in me

I nestled it carefully
in my mother's best white sheets
but was scared to see
it start to bleed quite a bit
not that it might die
but about what my mother would say
about the red in the laundry
and what she might tell her mother
if she got it back needing a doctor

I decided to pat it
with a towel to keep it dry
no even better
shower it each day
keep it a bit moist
sprinkle it with Eau de Toilette
every morning blow it a kiss
like having a sweet pet
to greet after I shave
I wanted to rub my hands with glee
but it needed treating with kid gloves
and exercised in carefree handling

but first I had to squeeze it
not hard in case it burst
just in the middle bit
around its plumped up waist
it felt soft and squidgy
and beat quite quickly
not like my stones

I wrapped it up in a cooler
using styrofoam
aluminium foil
and a brown paper bag...

Styrofoam is a good insulator
and will keep the love from oozing out
the aluminium foil is a heat reflector
and the paper bag  I am not sure about
but grocery stores offer them
to put your ice cream in
so it doesn't melt as fast

I had a meal of cheese on toast
then returned to check my box
your heart was not there to be seen
isolated in polystyrene
O dear I wished I'd cut a window
giving it room to see it grow

but then I spied you in the garden
painting stones to a wondrous glow
so lovely I traded back my carton
and your heart lit up inside for me

I.
There will be a day, you say,
where the world stops and all that ever was
and all there ever will be would cease.

                                                                     Trust.

There will be a time, he says,
when I will no longer love like how
you built the moon for me, balancing
upon a staircase of wooden boxes.

                                                                    Trust.

You don’t care. You let him weave
with string, then with your soul,
your heart the ball of yarn at the end.

                                                                   Trust in him.

You are a lover. You are a fool.

II.
Light. Soft light and harsh light and lantern lights
and fairy lights and neon lights and flashlights.

Light, like that which comes on in his eyes
when you tell him you want Honey Stars, and
you two spend the night picking at those overhead.
He tells you that when you drop stars into the
Pacific, they become sweet, like honey.

All you wanted was cereal, but you are a fool
one that picks at stars that have long since died,
one that can’t tell a corpse from a sparkle.

You don’t get any stars in the end, except for the
ones in his eyes.

A fool.

III.
This is where you grew poppies,
expecting to harvest the seeds and
crush,
thinking that maybe,
just maybe,
the dust will help you sleep, like the
sand of the Golden man.
You teeter on the edge that separates
wanting and needing,
You walk on a slowly fraying tightrope.

Tight,
        like your heart.
Rope,
          like how you rope
souls into believing you,
how you rope in friends
and demand their faith.

This is where you rearranged
his little soldier boys, where the
ceramic crashed against the wood
and refused to break.

Not like you, then.

This is where you kissed him,
over
       and
             over, because
air is useless without oxygen
and oxygen is useless to a pair of collapsed lungs.

IV.
You hate him. You hate his strength,
how he bangs the table and it snaps in two.

You hate his laughter, scratching against the walls
in tune with your sobbing.

You hate how you have to scan his eyes before you sit,
have to look before you make the metaphorical leap.

You hate how you let him force open your legs,
hate his pride at being in control, and his guilt
for the purple and blue spots on your skin,
like garish children’s make-up,
a clown at the party of life.

You hate how he holds onto your sides till
you hear the crack, and how you tell the doctors
you fell, because you did.

You are still falling, every time he looks at you,
Honey Stars in his eyes.

You don’t hate him. You love him,
that’s why you come back to be destroyed.

You hate yourself.
That’s also why you come back, to be destroyed.

You can’t repair hurt like that
but you try anyway, because the best part of building
is when you knock down.

V.
It is painful, but pain is a symptom of life.
You let him hurt you, let him crush your
bones and self-esteem, because no one
taught you how to love and if it means giving,

then you must be doing it right.

VI.
Wake, from the best sleep you’ve had,
wake from a nightmare, to a nightmare.
He is gazing out of the window, with
suspenders to hold up his pants
and his courage.
Your canines sink into your thumb, as
he turns to you and he says, “Hera,
I love you, but–”

The memory ends there.

Hera was the wife of Zeus,
goddess of women and marriage.
Your parents made a mistake,
more than once.

VII.
You are alone.
Quiet was never your thing, silence the most
deafening noise in the world.

This is your hand, a hand that once
rested against his neck, a hand that
felt his blood pulsing in his veins.

This is your hand and it is green
not from gardening but with envy.

These are your shoulders, shoulders that once
carried backpacks stuffed with Honey Stars
and sour things like love.

These are your shoulders, and even Atlas
cannot carry the weight on them.

This is your heart, and it is red.
This is your soul, and it is aluminium,
his words like sandpaper, polishing
until your soul tears and can be collected,
filtered and cross-examined under a microscope.
It will be reactive with the acid of his absence,
but only for a while.

This is your neck, and the rope feels rough
compared to your memories of his hands.

Tomorrow we'll run and the day will soon come when
the gatling, rattling, battling of guns will be done.
Today where aluminium wings hold dominion over
occupied lands and we don't even know whose hands hold the stick,
when the sick are just trying to not be among the dying,where the old seek the young and the young seek to be old,
who do we hold to be Kings?
aluminium wings?

If his will be done,tell me when will that be,and
will there be anyone left to see it?
Angels in choirs but who's pulling the wires,
who's fixing the scale
why is it that success seems to hinge on doors made to fail
who's derailing the train
why not try fixing the track
who wants to go back to an earlier age before rage took the lead?

If you read it must be true,the printed word would not lie to you but on
aluminium wings it now flies to you
what can you have faith in when the world you know caves in and the lights go out?

a porcelain grizzly bear is on my desk table
I stole it from a gas station in Oklahoma
driving 100 miles per hour
in the hope for something hopeful
a tiny minuet grasp of freedom of the road
of the cigarette endlessly burning
endlessly producing knowledge
imagination
little scroll stories that flash through the mind like rain drops or
shooting stars at night
or the clock on the microwave turning from 4:00
to 4:01

A subconscious journey
a path
a walkway
a minor walkway into the many hallway'd mind
perhaps there are no doors
no official room or building
simply hallways binding into one another like ******* eye lashes on a woman of 47
and in these hallways there are rats that like to chew on the soles of your high heeled boots
leaving you
bare foot
then the hallway floors turn into your stomach
flabby
filled with chicken skin and peanuts
A subconscious dilemma
dementia
the dogs got loose
I'll trace them by the foot prints left in the desert like snow

“Ah” my money brother told me
a snow storm
I cover my eyes only to see that I am starving from the wind
and food is scarce in my belly
everyone is dying of hunger
but the poet eats on his fingernails and the poems he abortions through the vaginal mind imagination that creates in his skull made up of glue metal objects and pizza boxes left out on side streets for hounds cats and old serial killer'd military men have left the war only to find trash on the side street and windows with yellow lanterns flaming up in the night like a forest fire
or a **** girl of 16 running through the city streets high on methamphetamines
I called the doctor he's drunk on something I made up in my mind
and Beethoven is on the bathroom shooting up ****** which isn't mine
where is the poem heading
only the humming bird and and ant on the wall will because they do not care
I am hiding something beneath the crevasses of my fingernails of 5
of 10
of 20
of 15
“there's nothing to whisper about” I told her sleeping ear in the midst of drunk A.M. night with nothing to do but make love smoke cigarettes and comment on the noises outside city of sirens that do not attract but chase the negros of criminal car thieves and the drug dealers of KCMO

she took off her dress
something glowed in her eyes
on her belly
in her *******
her legs that grew like plants in a swamp
or in a pond where the deer feed and drink
I kissed her lightly
I saw the moon shake in jealousy
so I left the room through the window
I crawled on my highheeled knees onto the roof and sang
I sang
I sang a song that didn't make sense  and I puked up tiny words of
misleading information to the past of my life
van
desert city Michigan land of
rusting
rusted
old broken toyed up frozen over
antiques
the pond is frozen over
winter won't leave me alone
poking at my eyes
the wind plays a sad song
I miss the tree of life
I want to taste the forbidden apple
but I burnt my tongue on a hot iron
or was it boiling whiskey that I drank from the oven

I took a step into a hole
the subconscious mind began the breath like a young man that crashed in a blue volvo in 1963 on a street next to a ***** house and the lights were loud and the women were thin with
thin
thin
thin
thin
and their ******* pointed
and there eyes shifted only to God
only to 1 dollar bills and the 1 whiskey and 1 more pill of the serene night
of that
hope of finding beauty in a high
but the Trees burn
and the soil is over used
bare no child dirt
the children are deaf and blind and cant run up a mountain
reach the stars
reach the ravens
reach for the
violin
that corrodes the mind like lice
like bleach on the bathroom floor
like termites in the basement
chewing on a sound
gnawing on the night's temple
this may be a problem
painting you
I'm out of oils
and the fridge is warm
that is where I keep my pistol
turn the heat on
turn the water off
lets go out dancing
lets make love
lets ****
lets kiss
lets talk about the sky
as we sit
on our bellies
drinking wine
drinking the dogs breath
drinking the hands sweat
drinking the intellectual thoughts of a book
the book is dead
Savio stands with a sword and cuts his own throat
yet nothing pours out
what is next
where does the Van go from here
where is the next highway thought
the next Used Car Dealer Ship
where is aluminium bathroom
the dishwasher with no dishes
the light bulb that dangles like a child's loose tooth in his molding to man mouth

Look over there
child
mother
indian man with no hair
old?
80?
50 probably
look over there God
look over there
look over there
behind those strange purple white blue trees
I think I see myself
standing in water
with toes
with fingers and fish circling my ankles
look over there
a deer spine
a dogs leash
an unwashed sweater that cost 50 dollars

all my pants have holes in them
all the paintings in my house are fake

her bodied was patina'd
by a kiss of lipstick

soothing
the ride back home
a swig of alcohol
as the city night ***** dominated
quietly burns
where is the loud jazz?
bursting like ******* through windows
where is the passion?
where is the drooling for a womans touch?
where is the television with a baseball in it's skull?

where is the wisdom?
I can only hold onto this rope for so long
my hands are soft
and sore
and this hole is deep
this hole smells like New Mexico
this place stinks of dog and a man who cannot wake up from a dream
because the woman he loves
is in an ocean
and he's chasing her
his eyes are strong and wide
his mouth is full of salt water
and as he looks up
there is snow
there is snow and the water freezes over
and his lover is far
she is on the other side of the shore
she is beautiful in the snow
and his eyes grasp onto that beauty
before he is frozen still


a seagull in winter flies with the crows
what a beautiful sight
I once met an ant
on a leaf of a tomato garden
the ant didn't say much
I complemented him on his life span of a day
I asked him if he ever contemplated suicide
but I guess he never got the chance
the garden dies
the tomatoes grew ill colored
and the stems
that were once straight
like young women in sun dresses
now bends
like an old man reaching for his glasses on the pavement in a sand storm of pain
he hollers out in his used up antique washed out voice of time and too many cigarettes too many women's lips and too much coffee at 5 Am
cursing death
to come
cursing god
to reveal himself
like *******
and the Garden begins to decompose
like that of a squirrel in a suburb street
or a mouse in the cats feline belly
the garden descends bent-wardly to death
to the ground
to the origin of life
of  seed.

A journey into a subconscious mind
or maybe the glance through a dying man's eye glasses.

To those men who are always behind us, though sometimes we may not see them.
To those men who are too busy flying fighter jets to teach their daughters to make paper planes.
To those sons who will point at every aeroplane that skims the horizon to proudly claim, “that’s my father!”.
To those women whose hearts will return wrapped in the tricolour and chipped aluminium; Who will place dented helmets beside faded polaroids of days gone by.
To those youth who will break solemn promises- “I’ll come back soon.”
To those families that will stare out of windows, refusing to draw down curtains as they hope against hope.
To those men who can truly say the sky is the limit.
To those men who fly above us yet are so rooted to the cause of their motherland.
Those brave hearts whose faces are lined with sweat and determination as they kiss the ground beneath their feet before they embrace the heavens for the last time.
To the men who take every sortie with a last salute.
To the white saris and navy-blue shirts stashed away and medals hung on rusted nails. To survival and martyrdom and the presence of absences. To commodores and flight lieutenants and wingmen. To parades and memoirs and sacrifices and soldiers in the sky.
The Eighth of October is for them.
To those men who are always behind us, though sometimes we may not see them.
To those men who are too busy flying fighter jets to teach their daughters to make paper planes.
To those sons who will point at every aeroplane that skims the horizon to proudly claim, “that’s my father!”.
To those women whose hearts will return wrapped in the tricolour and chipped aluminium; Who will place dented helmets beside faded polaroids of days gone by.
To those youth who will break solemn promises- “I’ll come back soon.”
To those families that will stare out of windows, refusing to draw down curtains as they hope against hope.
To those men who can truly say the sky is the limit.
To those men who fly above us yet are so rooted to the cause of their motherland.
Those brave hearts whose faces are lined with sweat and determination as they kiss the ground beneath their feet before they embrace the heavens for the last time.
To the men who take every sortie with a last salute.
To the white saris and navy-blue shirts stashed away and medals hung on rusted nails. To survival and martyrdom and the presence of absences. To commodores and flight lieutenants and wingmen. To parades and memoirs and sacrifices and soldiers in the sky.
The Eighth of October is for them.

Crew cut kiss curl stood
above the goose steeping generals
with empty heads and olive green
jackets
dangling aluminium  war medals
for shooting ducks across the border
flying over Seoul

“Nfeuirok2fmdfiwe384194u3ujriwejm"
crew-cut kiss curl yelled.
“I told you 091874874814729”
( his swedish education was now showing!)

The train pulled out of pyongyang
with two thousand dead
that fed the famine. Only the driver
was alive clutching a loaf of bread.

stacked with cardboard cutout missiles
atop 1920s tanks and
painted with bloodred honesty
the entire nation goose stepped
to crew cuts orders.

He was as nutty as a fruitcake
but nobody laughed when he loaded
his only nuclear missile to bring down
the last remaining duck heading to Siberia.

Ha ha!

Author Notes
This is not a joke. Or is it?
© Marshall Gass. All rights reserved, a month ago

Dark branches dance against an aluminium sky
as dusk taints the edges with blue.
The last crow warns of death as it passes,
it's cry echoing along the shoeless streets
and down to the brook where once laughter played.
Storm clouds gather in furious array
shaking thunderous fists at the earth below,
their forked tongues tearing the atmosphere
as the first droplets spew forth from their ragged mouths.

mini

[=small car]

mal

[=preface
as in 'malformed']

minim

[=musical note]

al

[=aluminium]

minimalism

is

art
in
its
simplest
form­
its
fundamental
features

in
words

[start again from the top]
[read beckett]

in
art

[look at stella]
[look at judd]


in
music

[listen]
[hear]
[each]
[note]

It was 3:30 in the morning
The aunt died, heart attack they said.
I only have a pale memory of her
The pink-house, protest and abuse.
Grandfather plucked us from there
the next day
The pink hibiscus my mother planted
did not depart.

She is dead today
I went to see her in black clothes,
The house, an empty aluminium box-
With kids playing ‘ring around the roses’,
Uncles debated politics and aunts gossiped
And some moaned inside.
I waited outside with few strange women,
They asked me questions
plenty of them
The anti-social me smiled.

The morning was usual
Mother made noises in the kitchen
with her steel plates and old radio,
Father forgot the fish on his
green kinetic honda,
Cats had a feast that evening
I did yoga, read newspaper and did-
not take a wash.

The dead body arrived late noon
in an ambulance with her expatriate son.
There was a sudden burst of cry-
inside- her daughter and grandchildren.
She looked like the fish to me,
The fish my father brought that morning
from the market, cold and dead.
Her daughter’s cry reminded me of-
an elapsed day in my pink house.

My father kept pink flowers on her feet
and prayed
I did not move, sat with the same chitchatting
women
The chanting became loud and it reverberated.
The body was finally taken to the fire
My mother came late, she wept.
The body burned down in minutes,
Dear relatives decamped.

I sat on the same chair
with my cousins
drawing the family tree, locating stories
and laughed over family jokes.
Then we sat tight lipped with brandy fumes
and cashews.
I came back home with my father
in the green kinetic honda,
I looked for the fish and the cat
I could not find both.

the devil in hell is constant, reminding as a tombstone -
each and every knock-knock - my imagination resides
in this hellish equivalent of life lived elsewhere -
for the devil in hell is merely a tombstone with
a living inscription that's a clock rather than epitaph and
insignificant dates given Darwinism
and the Big Bag - i.e. 1779 and August
and the 7th makes little difference - or none at all -
oh how welcome buried to be imprinted within
minding anonymous - hell and the tombstone -
an enlarging of life not lived -
or heaven, well, even Dante described Hell
with prefrontal cortex exactness -
Dante's inferno dealt with more detail -
the paradise left to abstracts;
and so the netherworld spoke toward
mortal interests incubated as apt resource
for expression in what aerodynamic was to be
in a lepidopteris catching magritte umbrellas
with accented whirls - like pebble skipping
on the shattering of the Narcissus mirror
to hold sway of reality, worded: how you aged,
while the lake remained standstill intact -
whenever the philosopher inspected you even
more frequently than Sisyphus;
many climbed the highest peak
to only watch the Sisyphus boulder roll with their
bravery downhill -
but so few sat like stones about to be thrown
across the pristine mirage of the awaited
plagiarism of your first inkling into the shallow
depths - for indeed demigod assured -
embryo of thought, missing artist,
missing a self-portrait - what say you
to claim near-role of Poseidon?
i expect you'd only quack van Gogh -
and feel less inclined to imbue thought of mirror
as thought of beauty as self-worth and
the mind preserving it - rather than a mind
inclined to translate the stillness of the lake
into compressed aluminium and chewed sand for
the seen-through; a paradoxical world:
so much worth ascribed to so little -
and so little worth ascribed to so much -
this world is not worth a human zenith -
nor the nadir of insect savagery -
not the curtail phantom of scientific theatrical excavations,
nor the complaint of humanism attached similarly to
the same theatre -
mine assured the Chinese fairy-tale of a poet-drinker -
restless in metabolism, but when auburn comes named
Autumn, or spring and the Japanese cherry trees
of hanami - the low-caste infuriates mindful spectacles
of how to cross a busy urban crossroad of traffic
and look less at app. with additions for a minute's
silence among 15 minutes of modern crave of holy grail fame,
long lost among the objective success no
individual can profess - but specie kindred ha-yah,
ohayō - manga sigh you - conning chihuahua -
they **** and the English limit of theology, pronoun
debacle he v. she - V-she - mate, an E! an E! if theology
is to be so debated no longer the existence is to be debased
and atheism acquired - albeit not Oriental atheism of
Jackie Chew kangaroo karate - more like
addicts in a gym with fast-food exercises joining the
granny club of arthritis and bad joints;
'cos you're a bunch of wankers and that's that -
you smoke those opiates! you do! never was a Pole
more vocal than with the European Union -
embark on inviting the Turk! the coup is over!
invite the Turk! invite the Albanian! invite the Serb!
the Brit is leaving! hello Scootland!

Spiralling downwards,
Bitter taste of coke slipping in between the bumps on your tongue
And months from now when I try to think about you
I will remember the way you looked at me
And how time stood still
So it felt just like you were standing across from me
Throwing your unsaid medals at my throat
I let them slide down to my chest
It burns
Like the acid streams of coke surfacing my lungs
And I cannot breathe
All I can think about is why do I cross paths with people I am not supposed to fall in love with
Coke sliding down your throat
Swallow your golden apologies you never were brave enough to say
Crackling fizzling drink
I have been in love with you since May
And every look out has been a habit, I still try to find you in a crowd
I still try to swallow the bitter fizzy only slightly sweet taste of coke down my throat
The same way I choke
On every apology I never said to you and how I almost but never did tell you how much your cheekbones remind me of the sunset.
Timeless
This drink will never age and neither will your eyes
Visceral bubbling youthful
I have been waiting on nothing
I feel the acid burn in my throat in my chest and it erupts as I ***** every scent I’ve had of you, every gaze we have exchanged while she looks at you and smiles
Electric
Like the fizz that touches the insides of my stomach
I want to look at you and smile
And all you do is watch me
Sipping through your straw
I am drinking coke
And your eyes say it has been a while and look at me, look at what I do I want to show you what I do because it has been far too long
Child
I am not a child I am a hazy incense drifting through hollow walls, corridors and people infested places
Everywhere I turn I cannot breathe
I need something to quench this thirst of longing
I have collected from every instance I never get to see you, every moment you look at me and she is with you
I want to keep these aluminium tabs
I want to push the bubbles down your throat, tell you this is how I feel every time I look at you and you look at me and we say nothing
I want to tell you I have been doing just fine
And that you are wearing the same shade of red I’ve been feeling and this coke can shares the red we are crying
I want to say I am sorry I looked back and I wished so very hard
Sohrab
You are between these lines the coke can holds, every droplet that condenses on this metal surface, cool
I have something to hold and I don’t know what to feel
Only the acid taste of coke

The displays

Half-a-commode....
salvaged from
construction-site debris, in an enclosure;

Corrugated tin...
inverted containers,
shop-floor seats, hollow from the inside;

Squashed up...
aluminium coke-cans
and bottle-lids, stashed by the dozens;

Rusting old pair...
of dented batteries -
A-class, from discarded torch lights;

Mounted rectangle...
sketch-canvas
half-a-diagonal triangle coloured black;

Foreground*

Expanse of water...
mirage lit by
a deceptive lamp playing evening sun.

bitterness of iron:
remove the milk
in bate of oxen blood spills

a bovine scent coagulates --
two membranes,
five and nine in aluminium

warp the boiling point --
two hundred, ninety degrees Celsius,
left standing, half a day:
cardboard instruction sets carbon constriction

imprinting
burnt hair, burnt hooves  --
the taste of not eating
a liver, raw --

Where is the nameless face
carrying cups of coffee, bought
on a journey
somewhere, and nowhere et al . . .
kindreds, wrapped in the smell of decay:
the uncured hide around his hips,
or was it his wrists, never touching?

I choose not to be defensive under constructive criticism offered by good counsel
I also choose to believe that what drove me then remains what I'm about still
But...
Maybe my idea is aluminium and they're talking about steel
I choose to realize that as talented as I happen to be, I still...
Need guidance around skill
Medicinal advice to take me higher than a drug
Capsule or a round pill
But then again I also choose...
To be realistic
Sever certain loyalties and lose...
Those that are pessimistic
I choose to see the bigger picture painted in a snow storm
Cold and artistic
Bring about a new wave of doing things... futuristic
Reflecting back... I should have seen the message on the mirror written in red lipstick
'REDRUM!'
But I was disillusioned, detached back then, I was dead... numb
Then I heard a voice tell me to accept the guidance...
I needed to get out of this maze, follow the bread crumbs
While still swaying to my own tune, moving to my dance
And start anew
So, to an impoverished way of thinking I say 'adieu'.

Undo my buttons
and let the soul breathe
for the body to freeze
or scorch! I am done
with each attempt to see
with wistful bras
and weeping knickers
Sulked by sore heads
that lay on pvc pillows
And aluminium beds
Mouths that drink blood
chew mud
Lips that never kissed the moonlight
Eyes that never waved to the sunbeam
All talk of love to redeem
this mass of jagged insanity
“La vie est un sommeil,
l'amour en est le rêve."
Undo my buttons
and caress all the scars
it took to believe
I am as dead
as my cigars.

There may have been a time I was soft
There may have been a time I cared
But that time is over.
You say if I don't start caring again I'm going to loose you
They say if I don't start feeling again their going to leave
But no one sees
No one sees that I do care just not in the open anymore
No one sees that I do feel just not as easily as before
Not many know that to fix a broken heart you have to mend it with iron but iron melts , so I tried aluminium
But its shiny appearance attracts to many theives, so I tried steel but its weak ability left me open than I remembered what I was once told , what the hardest metal can hold so I covered my heart with titanium.
Once you've been hurt by love its hard going back, and once your trust in love has been broken its hard to trust it again , I was once forced to play a game where I lost everything and a man who lost everything has nothing left to loose so leave or stay but my attitude will remain and my Titanium heart will never again feel all that pain of love.

love is like a fungus
beautiful like an umbrella mushroom
and sticky like mould on bread
and nefarious mad like psilobycin
and scary like an aluminium cage .conditions apply.

thread hangs dewy bright
oxidized aluminium contrasts
grey glassy grey

crumpled in doorway a song
through whiskers licked
yellow and smoke flecked
black ash.

notes
float
coats the space
between a boy
silver bits
(remnants of magic cards move
moving Mother)
from pocket to pocket

"silver linings, eh "

scaffolding reached a little higher
and somehow mucus trails
had a musical movement

I am Marhteena
I come from a small village in southern Cameroon where people use kerosene lamps at night and store drinking water in large aluminium pots.
where neighbors share kitchen utensils on a daily basis and eat from the same bowls of soup with one another.
where children go to the streams in the morning to fetch some water for cooking and rake the woods for some firewood.
where women go to their farms to plant corn, yams and vegetables while the men tap fresh palm wine and tend the goats and pigs.
where children play under the scorching sun and eat roasted grasshoppers for lunch.
where children make their own toys from rafiagrass and abandoned wires
where children climb trees and hunt birds with their catapults
where children go fishing with small bowls and learn how to swim by themselves
where children sat around fireplaces at night to tell folktales and ancient stories
I am Marhteena, i come from a very small clan but these experiences have shaped me into who i am today
I AM PROUDLY AFRICAN!!!

I sit here in the local laundromat
on a aluminium park bench
amongst the fish eyed dryers
and icberg washing machines
that rumble with never siated
coin fed hunger, the smell of
artificial spring and wet dog
swelling on the humid breeze

In the corner an o.d lady sits
reading a mills and boon love story
two young men  stand
leaning against the door frame,
smoking cigarettes, they look
like casual warrior guards, on their day off
all surfer dude tan and body buff
guarding the inner sanctum of local cleanliness

Another mother, you can, tell by the handbag
is playing a game on her tablet, some tinny music
wafts over, and she glances at me with apology in her eyes
I have brought nothing except my phone
on which I am writing this, and carkeys and wallet
I watch the tumble dryers tumble, and am mesmerized
by the kaleidoscope of linens,playing at being acrobats
it is warm and cozy in the evening light, a world apart

Out side on the still warm sidewalk and old dog lounges
his eyes focused on old Mrs Mills and Boon, her load finishes
and as she gets up, so does the dog, both slow and methodical
as she folds her washing the dog noses the air, comes to the doorway, where one of the young blokes offers his hand
for a pat, the dog allows the contact, but his eyes remain on the old lady as she packs her wasing into a wheeled bag,
the pair then leave, walking down the street into the dusk,
the dog's nose mere inches from the old ladies gnarled hand
and his tail wagging furiously. I fell I have witnessed something
beautiful and intimate, as they wander away...

If death did not wear black would he be taken so seriously?

If one literally wore one's heart on one's sleeve what would be the medical implications and would your friends still take you seriously?

If it is true that 'the beat goes on', is it any wonder that 'the rhythm is gonna get ya'?

When Dana sang 'All kinds of everything remind me of you', did she include rubella and death metal in this?

If a tree falls in a forest and there is no one to hear it fall does it make a sound? If a man plays cello in a forest do the trees mark him out of ten?

If the simulacra is real then surely all one needs to do is to pay more attention?  If one pays more attention, how much should one tip?

Descartes stated "I think therefore I am".  What on earth was he thinking?

Mans awareness of his mortality created the need for a divine being in order to facilitate the concept that there is life after death.  No one can say definitively if there is life after death.  Does this paradox create a dizzying confusion?  Is this confusion a lot like spending too much money in a carnival?

Britain's Got Talent: in a population of approximately 60 million, one would certainly hope so.

Is the concept of the omnipotence of god applicable if priests are unavailable for confession?

Is this a question?

Is the presence of a question mark the only thing required to ensure that something is a question?  Seven cherubs aluminium?  Is that a question!

The concept of 'keeping ones feet on the ground', by which we mean to not get carried away with success, for example, can never be difficult if one accepts the laws of gravity.

What sounds lie in the spaces between keys on a piano?

Any identifiable stimuli?

No social *******
no discourse on current affairs,
on who's doing what or where or to whom
and that's why you will always be
the silence in the silent room.

In aluminium doorways where the sun's rays reflect
I have always suspected a hoax,
japery that capers about my head,
is it me or the sun that is dead?

Victorian cobblestone paths made from grandad's dry bones
and shells off the front line on the Somme
meandering,
Picardy's never that far from me and
Tipperary just goes on and on.

I sit here in reverie and the world
pebbledashes me
I am becoming a scroll lost to history
a paint *** full of scenery
the brush with the bristles
all gone.