In frames as large as rooms that face all ways
And block the ends of streets with giant loaves,
Screen graves with custard, cover slums with praise
Of motor-oil and cuts of salmon, shine
Perpetually these sharply-pictured groves
Of how life should be. High above the gutter
A silver knife sinks into golden butter,
A glass of milk stands in a meadow, and
Well-balanced families, in fine
Midsummer weather, owe their smiles, their cars,
Even their youth, to that small cube each hand
Stretches towards. These, and the deep armchairs
Aligned to cups at bedtime, radiant bars
(Gas or electric), quarter-profile cats
By slippers on warm mats,
Reflect none of the rained-on streets and squares

They dominate outdoors. Rather, they rise
Serenely to proclaim pure crust, pure foam,
Pure coldness to our live imperfect eyes
That stare beyond this world, where nothing's made
As new or washed quite clean, seeking the home
All such inhabit. There, dark raftered pubs
Are filled with white-clothed ones from tennis-clubs,
And the boy puking his heart out in the Gents
Just missed them, as the pensioner paid
A halfpenny more for Granny Graveclothes' Tea
To taste old age, and dying smokers sense
Walking towards them through some dappled park
As if on water that unfocused she
No match lit up, nor drag ever brought near,
Who now stands newly clear,
Smiling, and recognising, and going dark.

To my innocence, naivety, and viridity
Childish ways, high school days.
A mere three weeks, I say good bye
With a cry, a tear, a sigh.

To blue slacks, and a polo
Black shoes and white socks
To my pink skirt, and white blouse,
Pleated, soon to be folded.

To the OHS rooms of our first and second years:
The broken windows, and tantrum-kicked chairs,
The broom box behind the spider webbed chalkboard,
Messages on the wall hand printed in red and green.

The broken doorknobs, and broken floorboards,
Carved armchairs, and eaten chalks,
Missing brooms and dustpans and garbage cans and rugs
That show up in who knows where
Stolen by jani- we know who.

The witnesses and victims
To our random laughter (from some Chinese-looking girl’s corny joke).
Our random tears.
Our not so random learnings.
The pillars of our memories.

To the PF rooms of our third year:
The storage room turned gigantic garbage can and dressing room (maybe because ours keep being stolen)
The exploding socket causing sparks to fly (and us to fly away from it), and
The amazing “alambre” lock; who knows who installed (as if that could keep us away).
The earthquake resistant rooms would be missed.

To the New High School Building of our last years:
The kicked door (not our fault!), and cancerous blinds (like hairs falling after chemo),
The jigsaw floor (not sure if better than broken floorboards),
The “Halayan 2012”, and
The mind-boggling “no key needed” lockers.


The UTMT with its fair share of mango sentences,
The old guidance office now turned “tambayan”, and
The Computer lab with its fragile yellow chairs and bruised bums.

To Ibong Adarna plays, and the half cooked uncooked Teriyaki,
Generation X (and Generation NOW! and Generation Facebook),
Jai ** dances, and cheerleading,
Kalagon Kamo Namon,
And Mickey Mickey Mouse Kabit-bintana memories.

To the NikJep Tandem,
Kanlaon Boys Behind the Flowers,
D.H.A.I.N.G. (not sure if they remember this),
Fred vs Gino version
And DewBheRhieTart.

Keep the volcanoes of memories burning.

To blue paint, and blue shirts,
And Geometry teaching us
“There are a lot of solutions to a problem.
We just have to find one that suits us.”

To saying “***”,
And cooking imbutido.
And wearing (for some designing) reduced,
Reused, recycled clothing.
And dissecting.
And parrot-Filipino teachers (she gave me P30 for load though).

Keep the river of rumination flowing.

To being scared of one whole sheet of paper,
Two becoming one,
Party rocking to make up for the tears,
And knowing we should have won.

To the hand sanitizer girls,
The Cream-o-holics,
The Canterbury Crusaders,
The Valenciana eaters.

May our tree of friendship continue growing.

To our winnings!

The glow in the dark madness,
The Lakan at Mutya clutch-heart-moments,
The Sports Fest *******,
Basketball girls’ coronation!

To the fieldtrips and failed trips,
To air conditioned crammings,
And space and time bending
To comparing notes (and sometimes other things)
Copying notes, sometimes photocopying
(Not Xeroxing)
Sharing words, phrases, sentences
And giving pictures (via Bluetooth).

May you keep walking on the right direction,

To the expectations achived,
Broken, overtaken.
All the skepticism,
Constructive criticism.

All of it.

The in-your-face-we-did-it-baby-
We-are-awesome-you-can’t-bring-us-do­wn-
Coz-we-rise-back-up-attitude.

To Arielle
And Mhae

To Amica
Marie
Narzcisa
Cyan
Fred
Theo
Alvinson
Anthony
Faith
Karmil­la
Matt
Jeffson
Lourince

To Carolyn

To Makayla

To the thirty-five castaways in this room
The thirty-five castaways who struggled
The thirty-five castaways who persevered
The thirty-five castaways who fought, cried, made up, laughed, shared, gave, back-stabbed, and front-stabbed, celebrated, suffered, passed
Thirty-five
Thirty-five castaways who loved,
Thirty-five

Thirty-five castaways who made it, who did it.

To Nikki
Hazel
Alyssa
Gef
Veni
Alex
Jaykee
Bernard
Myra
Vince
Chanta­lle
Josen
Jerian
Shaira
J
Uriah
Ihra
Renz
Bless
Steffany
Angel
Fl­orey
Bernadine
Antonette
Rency
Owen
Majah
Gino
Marcelo
Ney
Keith
­Joselle
And Jessa,

We did it guys.
We really did.

Ground smolders and smokes

Luminescent men, humps at the front

**** and poke

The air acrid, the smell of burning stone

On a wall three boys

Gaze, eyes wide, mouths

Marleyesque, dropping

Bewitched as the florescent men

Smooth and calm the steaming earth

Spraying water from a can

To quench its thirst

The seething, black

And exhausted ground

Murmurs in sick response

To its own fragmented curse

A yellow dragon near by

Belches black blood

Oozing from its innards

Through Gothic gargoyle mouth

The lime coloured men shovel

This toxic *****, smear it

Across the gasping earth

That lies, ripped like a jagged

Wound on a dying man

The lime colored men

Mount the yellow dragon

Speed off, leaving

The scorched ground

Burning and hissing,

With sulphurous smoke

A million sizzling angry snakes

The three boys run away in freight

Dropping playthings as they fumble

And tumble in their horrified flight

The black earth cries, bubbles

And consumes their toys

Passes sentence

Makes them L'Enfant Commune

The lost boys

Then there is a quiver

A tedious tremble, a treble;

That played like stretched

Elastic flicked with

Forefinger and thumb

Making the heart numb

Extracting false confessions

A stench of putrid untruth

*** charades of delicate

Ravaged faced youth

A drole de ménage

Slave to the hunger

Of the unknown demand

The French grooming

Of horses, that may charm

The curious but leaves curiosity

Still smouldering in the

Hidden depths of the

Universal mind

Sanumbolists in the

Fullness of a dream of

Ineffable torture consume need

The boys cry out, for the

Earth has stolen a liars tongue

Branded them abominable

With decaying enormities

Detestable, enamelled eyes

Lurk and peer from

Behind gauzed curtains

A corpse of understanding

That inspects the invisible

Images of imbeciles

Parchments dripping in powdered

Crystalline drops smear the pavements

The boys wave their arms

But no-one sees them

There is the rise and fall of cryptic waves

That ebb and flow scorching

A shore of silent sorrows

Lapping feverously at the

Arc of a whirlpool

Whose decreasing concentric

Circles **** the boys down

Into an eternity of hot tears

Leaves them without parents

Gives their brothers and sisters

Into a slavery of barbarous belief

A ferocious language

Banning the boys from all beaches

Provides tyrannical pilgrimages

To black robbed priests

Possessors' of serpents' hearts

The yellow dragon returns

Lemon coloured men spill

From its foaming mouth

The boys hide behind

Dead rose bushes

Ah, but their tenebrous

Trembles creak in the

Blotched and bloodied

Butchers sawdust

A fabulous elegance cradles them

Making the smoking dragon angry

It spews molten bile taken

From the bloated stomachs

Of white beasts

The luminosity of the

Lemon coloured men

Increases to blindness

They wave tattered antediluvian

Bark and scream from

Their dark, deceitful, anchored armchairs

From railed and spiked alters

Spitting bitterest gall

The lemon coloured men

Butcher the fabulous elegance

Leaving the boys naked

Prey to the perfections of

Puerile generosities

That vows to extinguish

Their human desire

Vacant eyes with

Nauseating sight strut

A cruel distortion

Terrifying voices offer

Demonic destruction

The boys weep, but

no-one hears them

A violent paradise

Of popular poses tries,

But fails to caress them

The dragon burns the boys

But no-one smells them

Their terror turns to molten flesh

The lemon coloured men

Spread it over the earth

The beast' heart beats

Joyfully in its bulbous belly

Sacred men smile while

Pitiless priests provide

A comedy

The boys become a hallow

Antique night their left

Legs held up for all

To see

Delirium devours the minds

Of a subjugated people

The deadly hissing of the earth

Like a silken spectre rises

Making scintillating shudders

Through the spiked splinters

Of time

Intelligence is reduced

To the rubble of religious

Intolerance

Lime, yellow, lemon drips

Heated plastic from false eyes

There are cries, sights and sounds

But no-one hears, sees or speaks

No real people are left

Similar boys watch from a wall

Huddle together and weep

So let us now place monetary value on information.
Let us return to the source,
Mining & prospecting that fertile intel seam.
To wit: WWII and G-2 shenanigans.
Wild Bill and OSS-capades,
Artificial disseminations.
Partial recriminations.
And PSYOPS:
A literary nightmare--
THE CYCLOPS from The Odyssey,
For example,
If you lack your own,
Your own personal Bogey Man.
Or men. For me:
Allen Dulles or Richard Helms.

The Intelligence Community:
It was a small tightly knit crew,
Less than battalion strength in 1942;
A few myopic soldiers,
Who, although could barely type,
Were still too cerebral to
Waste as infantry fodder.
It was a huge converted Army-green warehouse,
Space strategically partitioned,
Sectioned off into cubicle-like spaces,
By giant 4-drawer file cabinets
Standing tall like MPs,
Sentinels & Guardians,
Monuments to pre-electronic storage,
Data relatively comprehensive, and an
Archive secretive & intimidating.

Within the Army-green incunabula,
Scattered throughout the intel landscape,
Here and there a few commissioned officers,
A smattering of college psychology majors,
Personalities with predilections,
And penchants for mind games.
These self same WWII vets,
Would morph into Cold War Mad Men.
Stalwart, stouthearted men of Eisenhower,
And J. Walter Thompson,
De-mobbed, as they say in the UK.
Consumptive.
Self-indulgent,
Particularly when it came to the kids;
Children of the peace,
Called Baby-Boomers,
An entire generation enabled & destroyed.
Who would produce little of value
Except medical marijuana and
Coupons, clipped by that sober ruling class—
Fat interest-bearing college-loan portfolios
Held by that neo-Calvinist Elect: The 1%.
Fat cats one and all,
Loaded dice & canasta cronies--
In concert a stacked deck,
“Una mano lava l'altra.”
The words of my namesake--
My grandfather Giuseppe--
His vowels reverberating,
Rattling in my dreams.
Not friends, but
Fiends in high places, like
The Fed and dark liquid pools.
Thank you, Barack, for
Fooling us again.
For giving us
“Belief we can believe in.”

But I digress.
It was when the Government Secrecy Act,
In all its transnational incarnations,
Embraced capitalism in a big way,
Elevating the ideology to whole-Earth saturation,
Systemizing the ethos of Darwin,
Into one global Moby ****,
One solitary leviathan,
A multi-level marketing labyrinth,
Where wealth is the end game--
Greed: pure, unbridled & unrestrained.
Bond--James Bond—
Did his bit, supplying catchy
Slogans & tag-lines:
“For Your Eyes Only.”
“On a need to know basis.”
“Confidential Information.”
“Top & Ultra-Top Secret.”
“Hush, Hush & a Bag of Chips.”

The sealed letter sits in a locked drawer,
In that stout desk,
In the Oval Office
In The White House,
“To be opened by my VP in the event of my death.”
Another staggering work,
Of achy-achy-heart breaking genius,
The culture commoditized,
A disease containing its own cure,
Assayed, graded,
Portioned & packaged.
Priced accordingly,
To a logic that goes something like:
“Anything this tightly controlled,
Anything the government deems to be
This illegitimate and/or & secret
Must be really, really God-awesome,
Must really be Da ******* Bomb.”

Brother Coolidge was right:
“The Business of America is Business.”
And INFORMATION:
“The Most Valuable Commodity on Earth.”
So said Stanford Stuyvesant Whitehead III,
19th Century robber baron, and
Consummate Fat Cat.
Get the picture:
We were smoking cigars and sipping cognac,
Mighty comfortable in leather armchairs,
Muted billiard clicks,
Punctuating the atmosphere
In this spacious lounge,
His East Side
Downtown & private
Manhattan club.
I, his guest, had not the slightest idea
Why I was there.
"By God, man," he went on,
My eyes speared by his laser gaze,
His bushy eyebrows,
His monocle.
His bulbous nose;
His thick wet mustache.
And those EYES:  
Those crazy,
Insane eyes.

"I am talking about a profound change,” he continued.
“Back when the steamship
Gave way to electronic wireless radio."
He puffed smoke,
Removing the cigar from his mouth,
Holding it,
Examining it critically for a moment.
"I'm talking about communication,
Instant communication
With business associates, &
Cronies far away,
Way out there,
Far beyond the places we know well.
Picture it:
You're running a fleet of
Ramshackle Filipino banana boats,
Out of some nameless cove,
Indenting the south coast of Mindanao.
A cyclone comes out of nowhere.
Good God--there’s sixteen banana-packed
Coal burners lying on the bottom of the Celebes Sea.
Think about it:
You've got telegraph radio.
Everyone else has the post office.
Now, I ask you:
‘Who's going long,
Who’s getting rich on the
Caracas Banana Exchange?’
Good Lord, man, it would be
Like being omniscient!"
“This very conversation,” he went on,
“Could well be a verbatim transcription
Of a conversation right here in this very room,
Between people like: J. Pierpont Morgan
And some lesser Gilded Age nabob;
Some Astor, some Rockefeller,
A Gould or Vanderbilt,
Whitney or Duke,
Some Frick or Warburg--
To name just a few, old sport.”
He stopped suddenly.
He looked down at his hands,
As we both realized he had counted these names
Out on his fat curled fingers.
He looked at me and smiled.
I was afraid.
Why had I been invited to this meeting?
I smiled back at him,
Doing my best to mirror his
Carnivorous menace.

I knew it.
He knew it.
He knew I knew it.
Mr. Whitehead’s growling rabid jowls,
His slobbering canine smile held me steady.
“Okay. Touché. ‘Ya got me.”
He shook off the phony smile,
An absence, accentuating
His stare: lethal, carnal & rare.
“I never had much formal schooling.
I’ve been hungry.
Hungry enough to know for sure
That the correct fork,
Don’t mean ***** from shinola.
When I’m dining out, fancy-like,
Me manners is the least of me problems,
Far less important than
The dinner chit they
Hand me after I slake
My thirst & appetite.”
Again, he stopped suddenly,
Recognizing that, perhaps,
He’d revealed too much of his
Bedford-Stuyvesant pedigree.
He turned again and stared at me.
“None of that,” he said.
“None of that means squat to me, Boyo.
What matters now is I’m rich.
I’ve got mine, By God,
And ******* It!
Tough ***** on the rest of you losers;
The rest of you fecking whiners can go
**** yourselves over at Zuccotti Park.”
He pounded the armrest,
The padded armrest of the rich Corinthian leather—
( . . . ***, Ricardo?
Get your Montalbán
Mexicano ***, back in
Random Access Memory Land,
Where you belong.
**** ya’ Fantasy Island
Hospitality, Mr. Roarke,
Go be wrathful Khan Noon Singh,
Somewhere else.
Now is not the time, or,
Let me rephrase that:
This narrative will not allow your meme here . . .)    

Whitehead pounds the armrest again.
“My point is this:  
None of JP Morgan’s decidedly,
un-nattering lesser nabobs of negativity . . .”
BAM!  Again, he pounded the leather . . .

(Back in your ******* hole, Spiro!
Do you realize just how far back,
Just how far back
Maryland’s reputation
Has been set back by your venality?
Not to mention any shot at ethnic assimilation,
The rest of us grease ball non-Wasps
Have in this country?
You ******* Greek!)

I stopped thinking
When I realized Stanford Stuyvesant Whitehead III
Was reading my mind.
“So that’s what it’s really all about,” he said,
Rank smugness in his voice.
“So, I’m just a nouveau riche upstart,
A socially inept parvenu,
Yet they still let me
Join their tony clubs.
It chaps your ***, Boyo, don’t it?
I’m still Scotch-Irish, and
A WASP, Laddie.
Something your skinny
Greaser-Guinea-****-Spaghetti-*** ***,
Ain’t ever gonna be.”
But I digress, again.

So I joined one of Uncle Sam’s
Lesser-known clandestine services,
An assignment appropriate to my ethnic identity,
Namely GLADIO in Italy,
A NATO stay-behind operation &
Cold-War comedy.
I infiltrated the Brigate Rosse.
I drove the Aldo Moro kidnap vehicle.
I cooked minestrone for General Dozier.
I sliced off J. Paul Getty’s ear in Calabria.
Ironically, I lost my hearing during
The Stazione Bologna bombing.
I am consequently pensioned off,
Off both the radar and the payroll.
Years later now,
I live in one of those gated, golf-coursed,
Over-55, sunny southern California
Lunatic asylums.

Most days I am drunk at 9 AM.
I fill Bukowski mornings,
Conjuring up Jane Fonda,
Jazzercised in camo spandex.
She is high atop a Vietcong tank in Hanoi.
Or Daniel Ellsberg
Enjoying a second act in American politics,
Praising Snowden & Assange,
& Bradley Manning,
I summon up the ghosts of
Julius & Ethel,
Benedict Arnold,
Rose of Tokyo & Mata Hari—
And Ezra exiled at Rapallo,
And John Walker Lindh,
A Yankee Doodle Dandy,
Born in Washington,
District of Columbia,
By way of Afghanistan,
Taliban Americano,
Kangaroo-courted,
Presently residing at the
Federal Correctional Institution
At Terre Haute, Indiana.
Spies.
Traitors.
Saboteurs.
And Poets?
No longer capable of keeping secrets.
Desperate now to tell
The truth.

(In response to "Howl" by Allen Ginsberg)

I have seen the best minds of my generation destroyed by sanity,
seen bold new visionaries resign themselves to clinical long-haul deaths,
drug-numbed to their own suffering, and everyone else’s;
seen raving revolutionaries give up, retire to minimalist Swedish-designed armchairs,
and never move again;
seen the horizon dim and draw ever closer,
and the tenacious lunatics with the wanderlust to stray beyond
become fewer and further between.

There are uglier destructive forces than madness:
Consider cognitive rehabilitation.
Consider absolutely nothing immeasurable.
Consider utter rationality.

Ritalin, lithium, risperidone, duloxatine. [I thought I heard a man speaking in tongues,
then I realised he was simply reading out loud from a pharmaceutical directory.]
Imagine a generation of loan brokers and loss adjustors;
Hicks gone these past seventeen years and Leary still alive;
sharks floating in formaldehyde;
all true human significance lost in pretentious symbols,
and repetition
and repetition
and repetition,
and no one raging.
No one raging for real.

Where are Plato’s maniacs now?
Where are their lunatic songs?
I hear only the steady, rational tapping of the accountants’ calculators,
occasionally, some lost and lonely *** crying out for one more shot,
and the PA system calling the next patient through, the doctor will see you now,
or asking would the owner of a light blue Honda Civic please move their vehicle,
as it’s blocking in a black Lexus full of lawyers with an ambulance to chase.

Is there really nowhere between here
and the bellow and buzz, the shiver and shriek of the asylum?
Someplace between this sterile, static, silent, windowless room
and the fizzing frenzy of the electroconvulsion suite,
there must be somewhere we might have paused and breathed and set up shop,
where we could have been happy – if we’d wanted to be –
and no more or less sane than we chose.

Dr Thompson saw it coming: the dawn of this new Age of Equilibrium.
He knew that football season was over, for good this time, and made his ballistic decision
to go stalk peacocks and hound Nixon through the Kingdom Hereafter,
assuring us, ‘Relax – This won’t hurt’.
He was right.

Safe and stable and sanitized, we can no longer follow your desperate, ***** verse.
Straitjacketed by reason, we perceive our world only in terms
of quantum and co-efficiency, of the logical and logistical,
of what can be conjured in the duration of the average commercial break,
of what can be computed to at least two decimal places.

We are the chemically castrated.
We are lobotomised by mutual consent.
We are the perfect ones: regular and moderate and so healthy, so functional.
We are the white strobing smiles of the toothpaste ads,
the poster children for good mental hygiene,
the footsoldiers of no more conflict.

We have lost our skill for the alchemy
that once distilled genius from the seething crucible of lunacy.
We medicate those whose vision would otherwise put our own to shame,
leave them as myopic and blinkered as the rest of us,
the breadth and depth and distance of their sight no longer a worry to anyone.

Give us back our madmen: we need them.
Give us back our crazed anthems, our burning shrouds, our leprous one-man-bands.
Give us back the fire and the filth and the fornication that kept us howling through
those endlessly polluted nights of Windscale and Watergate, McCarthy and motorcades, Hanoi and Hiroshima.

Please.  Give us back our madmen.
I have seen the best minds of my generation destroyed by sanity.

The decaying mansions of English language
Rot and recede
into teenage grasses
with each unspoken year

The hired help have left their hair unmown and surrendered their uniform dress
Content with the neglect of nature
taking its timely course

When the architects and master masons of linguistics
Survey their forgotten plans in the heaven of English literature
They are not dismayed
but patiently sit and sit

The pristine edifices of the classics
Once grand and clad in deferential brick
Stand scaffolded and unread
The doors unlocked, ajar and hopelessly inviting
Into the library of the English canon
The dusty cloak on the carpets of grammar
Sheets thrown over the disused armchairs of archaic words
Echoing the plink of the out-of-tune pianoforte of the perfectly crafted short story
Bathrooms of formal poetry
With the rusty plumbing of metre and rhyme

Whereas the temporary outhouses,
hastily arranged huts of slang and idiom
are adorned by the living grasses of new forms,
creepers  of half remembered dreams
mulching leaves of half formed thoughts
forests of half forgotten loves
writhing in living incompleteness
Which will in turn harden and fossilize

And we can then rue the passing of our once organic lingo

"Neither heaven nor earth will be at peace if
I don't find it on my ******* desk
before six," snarled Julius Caesar into his cell
To the smell of ubiquitous coffee.
I was blended in line, and could see all:
Caesar's smart sharkskin-grey suit clearly
Some modern beguilement to help him blend, too.
Gone were silks linens and laurels,
I only knew him from the meridians of his face
And the crash of command in his baritone;
I had known that heartfelt stone and all its loss
Grown from titanic achievement. This man
Had scaled Olympuses to clasp his wreaths
And wore them well, though stonewise. Then,

She took my shriveled paper president
Apparently to fund her mascara habit
And I went to wait in the amorphous collective
For those done waiting in line.
From even across the establishment,
Opposite the opulent armchairs,
His muffled business-curses floated with aroma
And I realized the importance of blending.
(One of their machines had broken
Which is why I had time to wonder at all.)
Without a blended beverage, beans and water are
All I'd own: one taste would destroy the other.

I can become the air and sometimes do,
When I am sick from being bean or broth,
And this was how I saw so well
His snakeskin tongue and his eagle's claws
And plights of Gaul that his face told.
All this I saw while blended, so,
He saw me not. If a bean in his coffee,
No doubt he'd grind me to clay
To better insulate his office from the wind.
(It's not that I despise malleability
But that sometimes a gust can be helpful
When waging ****** campaigns.
Also, clay cannot sing.) I sing,
When I can. I wonder what a tactician
Could know of that fragile thing called music
That graces us best when half at-rest.
Though some say that Caesar shook, thus
He may have been mad; he may have had music.

"That's not what concerns me Karen,"
Intoned the Emperor of Rome,
"You don't take responsibility when you ***** up. Yesterday--"
But I didn't hear about that because
My blended beverage was ready. So out
Into the fresh of air with my cup of cardboard,
I snuck a farewell glance through the glass
At that gracious lionskin monarch
Unblended in the coffee shop.
It seems his damning sin was zeal
And possession of a mighty stature --
And deafness to Calpurnia's fear.
Her ugly dreams I carry with me now
And hope I passed none stealthier than I,
Perhaps some well-cloaked Cassius
Or Brutus lost in hidden bravado waiting
To penetrate Caesar in the parking lot.

Creased lines in your cancer bed sheets
and red wine spills still remain
from that time you celebrated
your chemotherapy success.

Drug-blue cocktails were swapped
for beers from cans,
needles for straws and hospital-stock-
comfortable-armchairs for the advertised sofa in your part furnished floor.

Friends came with warm welcomes prepared
in the back of taxis coming from the city,
they came in wide eyed staring,
holding wine bottles remembering your once real wig of hair.

i.
We've seen armchairs yarned in factories
as they take away great grandmother
with cancer of the lungs, a string of long
fluid woven into her assembly

apt for a tapestry, a long room
that is woven of her memorized thread of choice.

A Volta television swamp floats until breath emerges
gentleman like, heated from its length of rope nerve.
Six looping pythons in one belt

4:44, a tilted mirror and
a bookshelf.

Bukowski, Cash and Dylan
Whiskey, twisted cigarettes and Thai take away.
How much can fit inside a room?
Boxes, armchairs, carpets and glasses.
I count them on my fingers, weight them, bump into them.
All based in the laws of physics, - space and volume.

The sheets on which you laid upon.
The mirrors that showed you forms and figures
-forms that meant to replace emotional loss.

The lips of glasses you used to bite.
-body movements as the expression of an inner void.
Repeated patterns of disorders - food for my poetry.
The plumes of countless cigarettes,
that offered the necessary filling for my insides.

Background noise that comes from the TV
Content: Chlamydia and young people in excitement
-reality show for cowards.
Your manhood spread all over like an octopus
expanding his 8 legs.
Open legs, so that your testosterone can take some air.

A packet of cigarettes, a mobile phone, lighter and a cotton swab.
All in line: from the largest to the smallest object.
Absolute symmetry of declining placement.

I walk naked to the shower,
Winking to your manhood
While you remain
looking at me with your legs wide open.

I pass through you like a ghost
ghosts as you are.
Just like if I never existed
-just like you never existed too.

I tiptoe hence from
crack to crack in the
asphalt of our parking lot
trying not to hit the yardlines like
we did in marching band
practice, carefully, steadily
with six steps to a stripe
six-to-five six-to-five
left right left

and I'm trying not to notice
that the trees, their leaves are
turning now to the colors of
the hairs upon my head

copper
and ash
blonde brownish
honey
and the sweetest of
auburn
on my left
right left

and I'm not doing a very good job
of not noticing these things
like how I pretend not to notice how
you smile when I'm not looking but
you are, you're smiling, you're
looking at me and perhaps catching
glimpse of the rainbow of follicles
emerging from my scalp

which is great and all, but still it
makes me nervous makes me jittery
pocketwatch in my ribcage
tickticktick

I scuff my foot across the yellow
paint of parking spaces and joke that
we would have pretty children
because that's always been a topic
that's one of those half-joking, half-not
topics that all
boy and girl friends have even if
they aren't boyfriends or girlfriends they're
just friends, it's still a tender subject
and today I'm feeling
brave except for when I
trip over a word and widen my
eyeballs in embarrassment
until they can see the very
tips of my eyelashes and I
feel very odd indeed
because I realize no one thinks of that
except of course for
six-to-five six-to-five

and I've mapped out my life in bottle caps
and those pepperminty things you
can only find at wedding receptions

and I ****** them in a jar until I stir
them into prophecy and they tell me
if you were another boy if you had a signet
for a seal and possibly a stallion or at
very least a cloak
or a practicality for inventions more useful
than those of divinities
but you aren't no you aren't

and in another life were you a
nine-to-five nine-to-five
and in another time you could've passed
and we could laugh our days away by
the fires and read Whitman to our
Siamese and drape ourselves with kaleidoscope
quilts in lavish armchairs and just
breathed

honey, honey for your toast

breathe, don't cry
crying is for
the weak

and in another life I could've smiled
without abandon I could've
let your fingers brush my jawline let
you read over my shoulder and occasionally
turn the pages for me and I
could've seen our future and let you tell
me I was beautiful and possibly loved you
...but I can't love you.
This is not another life.
this is mine I tiptoe fragilely
from crack to crack and breath to
breath to keep myself from falling off
the edge and so I murmur quietly in my brain

ash blonde brown auburn burgundy and
six-to-five
yes, six-to-five
and let me close my eyes to blink

you tell me
you're not foolish enough to tell me
what you really think
and you laugh and I tell you I'm stopping this
train
of thought before it derails itself and causes those
catastrophes where thousands die
of head-on collisions and
butterfly feelings
and stricken-through unfinished

like I'm in a game of hide
and seek but you're pretending
not to know where I am hiding
so I can be the last one
left
right left

so I halt myself at six-to-five
and let you kiss me anyway

you don't know that in those
few choice words
you've given myself away

Melancholy,
I stay behind these guarded windows
Staring out at all the commercials
And noisy car horns
And people
That covet and pervert
with their greedy, grasping eyes-
That revel in their desire and need
to possess everything new
And exciting.
They slowly peel away their humanity
Like expired bananas,
Left on the table too long,
Exposing the rotten fruits of their labors
That haunts them in their dreams.
I have no need of phones,
Or appliances,
Or whatever they're selling
At sales where everyone is
Shopping
   Pushing
     Stepping
        Shoving
           Grasping
              Stealing-
Where everyone is lying to themselves.
I'm not a crazed housewife,
Or a greedy collector,
Or a corporate sales exec;
I'm just a quiet observer,
Hiding from the spiraled descent of mankind.
I'm just thankful that these events,
That these sad, depraved people
are can't touch me in my quiet corner of heaven.
They are unimportant,
And in their chaotic rush
for power and possession,
They've forgotten the reason we draw close around the fire,
Why we share food and drink and memories;
Why we celebrate the sacred bonds of friendship
And family.
They've forgotten the smell of cider,
Boiling on the stove,
The taste of roast turkey,
watched and checked with patience absolute,
The comfy armchairs next to the window
That looks out on the freshly fallen snow.
They can't remember the warmth of a house
On a  bitter cold night,
filled with laughter and love,
Where stories and tales spring from lips to ear,
Recounting the years long past.
They can't stand still to cherish the beauty in the simple moments,
The richness of the holidays,
when the only thing you want to possess
Is a wide smile,
And a special hand to hold.
Yes indeed,
I look out my window at this day,
a day so dark it deserves is nickname,
And I pity then-
The sad souls that have forgotten
why this holiday is called
Thanksgiving.

your poetry is the
timid surgeon's
blade

your brainwashed disfigured filth
posing as poetry, glitter sprinkled
over horse ****

parasitic eager beavers
rattling off hollow sanitary words
from suburban armchairs

when you speak of passion...
I want the ivory joy
of licking teeth in black
cold nights of February
grabbing fistfuls of flesh
and desire

not your stiff ******* advertisement,
marketing zombie climaxes and red roses
of compulsion

when you speak of loss...
I want the acrid smell of burnt
hair, a scene of cinder and ashes,
a house of dreams smoked
by the arsons of addiction
and stupidity

not your camouflaged metaphors
of two dollar sunrises and legislated
loneliness, echoing off the empty walls
of narcissism

when you speak of hate...
I want cold bacon grease and blood
stuck to my tongue and dripping from
my mouth, to become a carnivore of ******
and liberated violence

not your confused assault
of cheap mouthwashed words
spat in basins of shallow
*******

ah, **** it,
write what you will
but give more
poetry should

In our subset of society we
worship sweet caramel syrup and
double tall soy lattes with extra foam
and extra shots of whatever
can keep us pumping through
marathon long meetings
where we meddle
in our market’s perception
of health savings accounts,
a muddle of mindless
power point presentations
and persistent pencil tapping
on a cold granite table top.

We cannot blame the
young baristas with tattooed
arms and early morning
smiles for simply slipping
us the goods- we must blame
the comfortable coffee pushing
peddlers with heavy pockets,

the evil executives
who sit in their soft leather
armchairs and export
expensive beans from South America.

They empty our leather wallets
but fill our bladders;
offer less calories for
a slightly heavier price-
only $4.15 for a Grande
Caramel Frapuccino Light,
so many in our stomach
that we undoubtedly
will email ourselves into a
caffeine induced coma.

If we could see the constant account
debiting that swarms cyberspace-
millions of dollars transferring
between molecules-
we would drown in
the onslaught of dollar bills into
the hungry
Starbucks black hole that is
never full.

It started well, so cleanly
Soaked in Lush stuff she soothed the aches
Whilst wife was meanwhile cooking a treat
Cider soaked pork and apples
The taste was tremendous
Precedent set for the night ahead

Feeling cool as ganstas we bopped and grinded
To hip-hop only Jurassic 5 could please me with
We were few female amongst a crowd of masculinity
And we relished the imbalance
Flirting my way to the front of the bar
I reignited my relationship with the favourite Jaegar-Bomb
And there dust settled upon the cleanliness

Things turned hazy but in a good way
Post gig we flooded onto the streets of Brixton
And drank the finest foreign beers from an overflowing alehouse
The company was our long-missed men-friends
And yet we still meeting more
As we shared the ingredients to ***** our lungs
They asked for 50 shades of grey in return for rizla
So I rose to the challenge in my half-cut state

This time is was always my intention to wash the weekend down wildly
And starting Thursday this premature session could progress to only place
…the Queens Head
Where dust turned to grime as snapshots of evidence
Prove it was on the credit card that those Jaegar-Bombs were paid
Time and time again
We had become team-mates and it was time I fed them
So we muddled back to my place
Trumpeting our voices through the building
As I served slow roasted pork from glasses
Apparently felt good choice
But next day our melted fingerprints disagree
Our heads also disagree with the antics
And it takes two rounds of tablets to numb the pain

Before later forcing recovery as in Shoreditch we start again
Gathered at Bettys we watched music played
Our rumps rested on armchairs upon the pavement
We continued drinking until the early hours of the day
Then searched for somewhere to take us on the dance floor longer
After only brief grimes of movement and Jaegar
Our night ended abruptly to our dismay
Instead had my first take of kebab
And went north where *** took the night away

Once again woke next morn in bed with man-friend
No memory but surely not in a **** way
Now the skies ******* a mocking mirror of our livers
It seemed a sign to sink further
And the finest ****** Mary led the way
And together sat on sofas we philosophised subjects that we deemed great
Then we ogled sparkly get ups
With prices that we couldn’t afford to pay
So went south to join more friends whose film we met to celebrate

The beginning of the end of madness
Needed cocktails-all we could tolerate
We had formed a tribe of friendship
And we hunted somewhere to prolong the rave
By now all sense of cleanliness long-time washed away
So a downstairs dive provided venue fit for our friendships to extenuate

Then outside met a generous stranger
Who offered tastings that lead our minds astray
Our insides dirtied beyond belief
But sprits high so when we stumbled upon a private party
We were welcome guests to join their birthday

What happened next I needn’t say
For inevitably it had become Sunday
So ***** now we were beyond grey
In wife’s bed I lay
Whilst my insides showed their dismay

This would take some cleaning

She was little, smart and brave. Barely five
her thoughts reflected an older woman.
My sister looking at me to survive,
Her silly smile asking me this question…

Whatcha  gonna do when the day turns blue?
When the sky fills with the many lonely tears,
You ask and beg then nobody comes through.
You're left soaked to the bone when no one hears.

The day becomes all time, slowly filling
with blue. Overwhelming and contagious.
You can’t stop it, but you are not trying.
That’s what you have to do, fly when wingless.

Not because you can, but because you must.
Fill the world with the light inside your soul.
This is what I told her, and I began
to tell her of how a mare loves her foal.

The honey smell of thunder clouds, the feel
of a dog’s soft wet tongue rinsing your cares
down the drain. Every wound can start to heal.
Of sitting by a fire in big armchairs.

These are feelings she has yet to know. Soon
she will touch the velvet of a lambs ear.
My wise butterfly leaving her cocoon.
Of all I wish for you, one thing is clear.

Never feel the blue, and think no one will
break through.  Because you will be forever
laughing in sun. At last your worries still.
I will always be there your one anchor

(はっけよい)
HAKKEYOI !


two stout armchairs squat
like Sumo wrestlers
the room holds its breath

  "PUT SOME SPIRIT IN IT!"

The phrase shouted by a sumo referee during a bout, specifically when the action has stalled and the wrestlers have reached a stand-off.

the sky was purple tonight.
i thought that maybe you'd littered the clouds
with the parma violets you never used to be without.
i remember how you always tasted like them
and i'd occasionally find one under your tongue,
and you'd say you were saving it, just for me.

our song started playing today
in that little cafe you used to take me to,
the one with the soft wooden tables
and those armchairs that seemed perfectly made for me and you.
do you remember all the times we went?
sat together and hummed the tune to that song.
and you never looked more beautiful
than when that milkshake was pressed against your lips,
and the bright red cherry tickled your delicate skin.

the sky was purple tonight
and i miss you.

All shrubbery around is shaken by the wind
As smoking grey clouds threaten rain.
But I sit snugly in my lounge
Idly contemplating a chicken-breast tea.

The long heatwave is over
For now.
Atlantic air has swept the mugginess
Aside.
Thermometers have settled down
While cooler moisture sooths our very souls.

This lounge of mine presents a landscape too:
Of settee, armchairs and table
Along with dining chairs and TV:
Mountains over carpet savannas.

But the kitchen calls me from next door
So no matter how lazy I feel
I really have to eat now.
This interlude must end
So very soon.

Paul Butters

© PB 29/7/2018.

Armchairs and whiskey.
Bottle on the side table.
Eyes open wide, unable
to sleep. Thoughts creep
into his shaking skull.
Hands shake and grip the bow.
He pulls his scream across a string,
because his throat won't voice his wearied woe.

The sound's more than just pain,
and it tells more of his aching bones
than it should.
He plays the tears he can't show,
and it's understood
as the instrument moans.
That's all he needs to show a world
that doesn't know what his pain sounds like.
He'd talk about it if he could. Rachmaninov understood.

the only book you can plagiarise from is the dictionary; enter plagiarism: platonic definitions of a single sound.*

spa spa spawn a spandex bubble on the rims for elongating width
in french inches of the waist.
but i liked my walk, took the scenic: empty street, night, solo,
solo, night, empty street -
not many donkeys sweating tears -
not many relations to see: i understand money in
the manual labour professions, but outside
of manual professions? don't have a clue... have a poker though
for a *****: you randomise whatever you want in that:
never read a philosophy book that utilised grammatical categorisation
efficiently: aristotle started it all off with nouns (proper names),
naming and layering as i might call it:
but who the hell needs plato these days given television:
oh right, that's why: shout into a cave the worded nuance...
what do you get? ecce echo.
i appreciate god as an omni-relevant vocabulary / shouting into plato's cave
provided me with thus:
noun, plural i's or is, i's or is.
1. the ninth letter of the english alphabet, a vowel.
2. any spoken sound represented by the letter i or i, as in big, nice, orski.
3. something having the shape of an i (floating head on a total amputee).
4. a written or printed representation of the letter (sound) i or i.
5. a device, as a printer's type, for reproducing the letter i or i.
well so much for those paper folding idiots of shadow:
i shout i into plato's cave the idiots are still talking in sign language
having been fed images throughout and no phonetic symbols
of breaking knuckles.
pronoun, nominative i, possessive my or mine, objective me;
plural nominative we, possessive our or ours, objective us.
1. the nominative singular pronoun, used by a speaker in referring to himself or herself.
noun, plural i's.
2. (used to denote the narrator of a literary work written in the first person singular).
3. metaphysics. the ego.
that's many more echoes to come - plato was ridiculous counting
six fingers on the shadow hand doing all the masturbatory
talking into rabbit population truths in australia.
oh ****... i just shouted red into plato's cave and i heard synonymity come out!
what's crimson? words with many meanings have rats in the armpits of armchairs,
those eager dental riggers of bucktooth chew
made fudge into glue within dental analysis conclusive in lance stance
of a knight in rusty armour wishing it was oiled up copper.

It's all I've ever wanted.

A 50 year, deep and true love.
A sweet, romantic old style courtship.
A walk to my front door and a lingering kiss goodnight.
I wish for a beautiful, love filled wedding.
A porch swing hung under the shaded awning of our charming home.
A slow dance to a Frank Sinatra in our kitchen while making dinner.
Two aged and worn armchairs in our cozy living room.

The idea of it all clouds my head with the sweet and heady haze of a fairy tale romance.

And yet, I will admit, I am the first to scoff at the very thought.

My heart is a library.
Not a large gaudy intricate room, with
Spiral stairs and frumpy armchairs;
It is more of a smallish nook
The walls covered in shelves of
The people I have loved,
and lost opportunities.
But you sit in the corner,
The only person I have ever let in-
the only one with a library card:
Temporary handling.
You can read the books, smell the bindings,
Flip the pages.
Maybe one day, there will be one written
Of you

do i feel a moral superiority? of course i do,
why wouldn't i?
                      i'm sort of bored,
you know the type of bored: i am  white
but i have no colonial history to boot
or shy away  from...
               there are two Europes,
let me be frank about that...
                            i don't necessarily like what
Polish immigration did to the place,
primarily there's no commonwealth surgeon
to put the pieces together...
                 but the English started a war
over the invasion of Poland,
                     oh right, blame me,
and shut the **** up about the ******* being treated
like cattle?
                            honestly, the only book
i'll ever read by Dickens will be the volume xviii
american notes, pictures from Italy, contributions
to "the examiner" - prior to entering the field
of transcendental methodology via Kant
              i'll just say: there's no point reading
phonetic encoding of a narrative once the images are
produced - once a book is turned into a movie,
there's no point reading it...
          i'm was never favourable of Dickens,
like i was never favourable of Popper...
    but the obscure works demand attention...
i''ll be moving from France to England
(via Voltaire) and from England to America
via Dickens... once i finish Kant;
once i finish Kant.
                                      and a rare day, i made a purchase,
cage the elephant's album melophobia arrived today,
two singles (after listening to the album twice,
it's safe, under 40 minutes and ten tracks),
track no. 4 - it's just forever and track no. 7 -
black window - this is why i feel morally superior,
i'm actually investing in art...
                       lucky me born in the 20th century,
i actually desire the need to buy art,
      and not be some chimp pirate of the Napster Caribbean,
i really don't know where my contemporaries are
coming from, and to be honest? i, don't, want, to, know.
       **** them and their armchairs!
              their idea of art is non-representative of
the general vocation of necessarily having a: view.
     to me they're a bit like:
mr. spandex telling people it's stretch-Armstrong elastic -
but it ******* ain't!
                                  the once defended Poles are
dubbed vermin, oh sure, it makes sense
to keep a lid on former colonials as sacred Hindu
cows - and do i sometimes wish i came to England
aged 2 and not aged 8 and never heard of
the Kashubian dialect? or the Silesian?
               or the pan-Serbian of the Sorbian language?
i probably wish that to be true...
            i cut my thumb and pinky fingers on the culinary
guillotine known as the mandolin when beheading
cabbage for a cold-Slough
                      (easier done than accurate spelling)
  even better: coal-slow
              (plus the carrot and the onion
and plenty of mayo) -
                             i wish i could fully become British,
say a golden ******* to Poland, as Poland already
served it... which is why i'm in England....
           but England isn't exactly a daffodil -
        the past haunts it, which i'm not a part of,
when i say: i'm a citizen of the world i mean:
globalisation, and i mean: when i was in Africa
i was a tourist in Kenya, i enjoyed the presence
of those little cherub monkeys on the balcony,
and i hid from from the sun and couldn't stand the heat...
saints? we? better ask the Lithuanians and the Ukrainians...
but they're a bit busy these days...
    that's why i don't feature in the global politics of
the trinity that's England, France and Spain...
                   i am not really into Polish catholic antics either...
i just don't understand why i need to have to acquire
all these ******* identifiers in order to speak the ****** tongue:
maybe i am, after all, redefining what speaking English
actually means...
                             you can never really escape a revision of
the language...
                                as a citizen of the world, i am against
those famed idioms, later pronounced as: idiosyncratic -
   i'm neither Polish nor am i ******* English -
i took to the assertion: conquering the use of a language
is more pristine in encouraged effort to assimilate
than writing a Domesday Book analysis...
                        but i simply cannot shy away from
addressing the insults while the holy cows of the former
empire walk freely and to a violin tune of necessary
revolutions taking place...
                  the argument goes along the line:
the Soviets had a bigger empire than the British...
                   landmass and what not aside...
i just can't be the two together...
                      all i have it two more purchases...
the debut album by cage the elephant with the song
that made me purchase is soil to the sun -
and the notes volume ii - vi by Heidegger -
do i feel morally superior? well, i'm actually investing
in art... in a world providing the ratio 100:1 =
100 streams = 1 equivalent purchase...
                i find it damnable that so few people invest
in art these days...
            and yes, i do feel morally superior, why the **** no?!
but i will never rid myself of my foremost tongue
to look pretty in a society that's verging on the most
utterly ugly...
                            i'll never be at home either here (England)
or there (Poland) - i feel no affiliation
   of a desired patriotic demand in either place -
                                          both countries can burn for
all i care: Poland for its catholic demands,
                  England for its political correctness:
if i already didn't mention: the most despotic quote
came from democracy in the French Enlightenment period:
all men are born equal...
                                        if ever a greater falsification
was ever uttered - in that realm of political science -
                 men are not born equal,
                               the Olympics proves this foremost -
trying to make this saying the norm
             will only, eventually, make a large number of
good men into debilitated lunatics -
          all of this without the mouth that spoke the utterance,
no Saddam Hussein will hang as being attributed with this
maxim... still the many good men will be turned into
debilitated lunatics to ensure the invisible dictator has his sway
in ensuring the conformist agenda is met with
             due nod-whether-vote-or-veto approval...
                        democracy at its most human,
mob rule overpowers a singled out agenda...
                                       third party Pilates washing their
hands clean off the implementation of the zeitgeist agendas
but nonetheless keeping the profits.

You've finally got the life you always wanted, but never had.
And now you're apparently happy and I believe you.
Happy, but without us.

We don't mention the times when you were with us any more,
the times when you held our hands, whispered goodnight to us, tucked us in.
The easy times when you laughed at something funny, sitting there in the living room or standing in the kitchen.

We thought you were happy,
but behind the gentle warm smile and pool of blue eyes that reflected our own back at yours,
you were harbouring a secret.
A secret you'd likely held onto for a good, long and 'apparent' 17 years, possibly more.

Who knows.

It's hard to mention you at home now,
because it's always met with a stone cold silence or, even worse,
a harsh, bitter remark, that can render itself so easily from the one man you thought you loved's lips.

But how easy it is to remember.
To remember you before the outbreak of change, of a new life.
Easy to remember you lounging on the armchairs watching television in the evenings,
to hear you talking and laughing on the telephone out in the hallway,
back in those days when landlines were the norm,
as if nothing was wrong,
as if you were happy.

Now, I see you in the brief few minutes of the mornings,
when you drop me off to college.
A snatching of an encounter, and even then it's in secrecy.
But it's nice to have that private time with you;
it's even more special.

Our time.

But I'm really glad you're happy,
and that you're able to live life free.
I'm glad you've got the life you wanted.

Maybe, one day, he will too.