It was easy to love him. Maybe because his heart sounded honest when I pressed my ear against his chest. Kah-thump. Kah-thump. I will never leave you. Kah-thump. Kah-thump. We could lay here forever. Kah-thump. Kah-thump. We can turn into a pile of entangled bones and dust. Kah-thump. Kah-thump.

Maybe it was because I have always believed in happy endings. I like to shut off Titanic right in the middle and pretend it never sank; pretend Rose and Jack got off that ship and had ten cute, artistic, red-headed babies and spent their lives laughing and drinking beer and reminiscing of the time they met on that great big boat. I never let myself watch the end. The romantic in me won’t allow it.

Or it could have just been the fact that he was the first boy I ever loved, and there’s something really intoxicating about the first time you fall in love. It’s like chugging a whole bottle of whiskey – it burns and it tingles and you feel kind of sick and the world becomes a huge blur of laughter and inhibition.

I remember the exact moment I realized I loved him. We were laying in his bed and a song by George Barnett came on. The one about Thor, angles and heaven above. I loved this song, and he knew that so he started to sing. He started to sing and it sounded like a cat that was being slowly strangled and I laughed and pressed my palms against my ears and he just sang louder. When I went to escape the awful droning of his off-key melody, he pressed me tightly against himself and nibbled lightly on my ear and I knew in that moment that if I could be anywhere with anyone – if I could stand on the Eiffel Tower with Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley and lightly sip champagne as we discussed the good ol’ days of Hollywood-- I wouldn’t. I would be right there in that tiny twin sized bed that just barely had room enough for both of us as long as he held me close, listening to this gangly boy sing this wonderful song.

It was in that moment I knew I was in love. I knew I was ******.

After that all I wanted to do was say it. We would be ordering chinese food and I’d think “I feel like having something other than seseame chicken. I love you.” We’d be driving down the road and he’d be ******* about construction and I’d think “Yeah, it is annoying that it takes thirty minutes just to get down 33rd but I love you.” My love for him infected everything I did. He was the most beautiful virus I had ever been plagued by.

Relatively speaking, it was barely a blimp on the vast radar of a lifetime. I can’t remember the start and end dates exactly. I don’t remember much about that year at all, actually, except that it was filled with breathless kisses and nervous firsts. I remember that he always smelled of laundry detergent. He lived in the basement, which was also where the washer and dryer was kept. and the smell of fresh clean clothes and Tide stayed embedded in his skin. I still breathe in deeply when I walk into the detergent isle at smiths. Habit, I suppose. It always transports me back to then. It was one of the best years of my life.

We broke up eventually. He never told me why. But in the end it was really just life. Life has a way of changing the most permanent things into temporary ones. Thankfully, it can do the same with a broken heart.

I’d like to know he ended up happy.

I plan on falling in love again, too. Each time its own masterpiece. My heart is my romantic Michelangelo. Every time it beats it produces a new and beautiful Sistine Chapel, but instead of paint, it is pain and pleasure that spatters against the ceiling.

He is still my favorite piece, though. Our love is my most treasured creation, even if it only lives through memories. It lives in a young girl’s laughter, in an awkward boy’s terrible singing voice, in the innocence of two teenage lovers between the sheets, who haven’t yet experienced the pain that echoes within the terrible truth that love is sometimes not enough.

Every now and then when I’m feeling old or unoriginal or just depressed, I pull out the memory of my first love and his strong, honest heart. I replay my favorite parts in my head. I smile at what I see. I’d like to think he does too.

.the better part of a Friday night

grim.. times... what better way to pass a drinking session than to translate some Horace... i see no other worthy time-consuming scoop of any events to follow, this:

humano capiti cervicem pictor equinam iungere si velit et varitas
inducere plumas undique conlatis membris, ut turpiter atrum
desinat in piscem mulier formosa superne,
spectatum admissi risum teneatis, amici?
credite, Pisones, isti tabulae fore librum persimilem,
cuius, velut aegri somnia, vanae fingentur species,
ut nec pes nec caput uni reddatur formae.
scimus, et hanc veniam
petimusque damusque vicissim;
sed non ut placidis coeant inmitia, non ut serpentes
avibus geminentur, tigribus agni.

some first reading... sounds like chasing a chimera...

with a human head on a horses' neck: should a painter
tie the two together on a whim, and other limbs
collected from everywhere: puff up duck feathers into
a pillow or a bed cover - from "nothing"... hey presto!
that a beautiful woman from the torso up with a
fish's black tail below to boot...
on exhibition: would you, friends,
not burst burst out with laughter? believe: Paisans!
similar to this image will be the book:
in which as in an ill man's dream, in delirium,
the head and the feet belong to different
forms
i use this law and i recommend others to use it too,
but not to equate gentleness with a wildness:
with a bird a serpent, a lamb with a tiger...

angels and mermaids... what is no less or... no more:
improbable? perhaps neither...
but in the guise of monotheism... everything is still
somehow sensible...
where there was: half and half...
what angel of monotheism is a half and half
when contending for existence among unicorns...
mermaids or centaurs?
a chimera and a cyclops... **** with a minotaur...
but... such events of monotheistic grandeour are...
supposedly the better respected...
for all the respect i gave unto Knausgård -
because it comes from monotheism:
an angel is to be seen as more than a mermaid...
perhaps... if the angel is of my form...
has the wings... but for its mouth?
a pecker mask... a 50:50 share ratio of...
what a racial "mongrel" would otherwise burden his
shadows with...
a pecker mask akin to those masks
worn at the Venice carnival:
doctor doctor black plague masks...
with a muffed-up speech... as if shouting into
cotton puffed up...
esp. cotton candy...

and this is a sort of friday where i'd much prefer
translating latin... god... where did all these modern
prepositions and conjunctions from from:
into the fore?! there's only one song of worthy summary...
the specials - ghost town.

- Autorank Total 10 ( higher is reduced to 10 ), professional similarity 10 (of 10), concrete vs abstract 2 (of 2), noun/verb/etc order -0.7 (of 1) -

poetry and order... yes...
yes... very much akin to rhymes...
and very formal language...
but this is hardly a "micro-aggression",
on my part...

it's funny that i never paid any attention to this detail...

hoc erat in votis

i was never into brian jonestown massacre, more of a dandy warhols' fan, but then brian jonestown released the album aufheben and pawns of the palette started picking up not only seminal citric acids and kashmir's spices, but sharp grooves of some distant geography, which of course, all in all: to my liking.

there's nothing like listening to the opening
track of the aufheben album (panic
in babylon, instrumental) and reciting a
bit of horace; should i be accused of sounding
pompous, here's horace himself

    hoc erat in votis: modus agri non ita magnus,
    hortus ubi et tecto vicinus iugis aquae fons
    et paulum silvae super his foret. auctius atque
    di melius fecere. bene est. nil amplius oro,
    maia nate, nisi ut propria haec mihi munera faxis.

    it was the aim of my wishes: a snippet of arable land,
    a garden, in the vicinity of my house a source of
    fresh water and a grove upon a ***** of a hilly eminence.
    the gods beyond their intentions bestowed upon me
    the loot of my thus lived fate. i have enough!
    i do not implore for more either in this heart of mine
    or among incense or blood of sacrificed bulls at the altar
    where worship is prescribed unto them, but only give me,
    son of May, the chance to use these bestowals.

(translated from polish, and, as would be expected of me,
involved in translation, adding something of my own,
as you can see, the latin prepositions and conjunctions
are reflective of the number apparent in the english language,
but it's hardly a concern with other words,
awaiting a unanimous - not necessarily an N between
two vowels, or because of H, as is exampled by
a great alphabetical distancing of the vowels,
or simply because of the latin tongue-twisters of
the grapheme æ and œ - awaiting a unanimous
decision of the compound words stalled by the hyphen
form, e.g. light-bulb / lightbulb (underlined as a spelling
mistake) by the oxford dictionary committee...
but let's not get as crazy as german spelling
glue... it would make james joyce pale even by finnegans
wake standards of the 100 letter word... i know... english
is a language spelled like shotgun shrapnel, and german is spelled
like a wedding cake or scottish fudge, thick and bulging;
what was i going to say? i took a step into the heraclitean
river and the river took me elsewhere, the ice cubes
in my whiskey citric barley are melting, and i dream
of venice being the modern atlantis along with the maldives).

elsewhere in a grammar lesson:

people think the pinnacle of poetry is coupling
adjectives with nouns, but of course,
given adjective & verb coupling is commonplace:
and when they say poetic v. practical,
they then say the hidden practicality of poetry
via, e.g. 'nicely said;' but of course!
we need a sombre musicality of the tongue
with so much dead machinery around us!
the elders complain about headphone "zombies,"
marching like urban myth lemmings on zebras
toward death... but have you actually listened
to those mechanical sounds on concrete?
horrid! when was the last time you heard an owl's
call in the dead of night in a forest? me!
about a year ago: three by my count.

- Autorank Total 9.9, professional similarity 10 (of 10), concrete vs abstract 2 (of 2), noun/verb/etc order -0.1 (of 1), cliches -2 (of -3) -

the Cyber Pavlov Experiment

and my favorite "poem" in this ranking system,
which, i guess is an a.i. calculator...
i'm most interested in the professional similarity,
i can understand the concrete vs abstract ranking...
but the noun/verb/etc order?
in poetry? again... this is not a "micro-aggression"...

so, i'm on this page, and i meet my ****** pusher,
sure as hell he's pushing ******,
although it's digital, the site / street corner?
allpoetry.com i get to publish 2 poems,
but can't publish more, i have to comment,
and comment positively,
'allo comrade Stalin! then comment on
2 poems, and get this message:
Congratulations, you've achieved level 2,
and are now an "emerald cat"!
To reach the next level you need:
7 x comments, 1 x enter a contest, 1 x favorites,
1 x edit an item. • What are levels?
i am not playing candy-crush saga!
i'm not! i'm not even kidding you,
what is this ****?!
we've been ****** by paedophiles
anonymous?!
                      please get me off
this ****** grid of the Cyber Pavlov Experiment...
likes and comments and saliva and cookies...
    or premeditated minority reports -
  akin to Orwell's thought crime gestapo -
    god it sounds **** when said: g'eh'sh'tap'oh.
                    or how to use the internet
akin to deciphering and censoring established
media outlets...
                              obviously social media
can't replicate socialism, it's a media outlet,
                  but it can for sure ******* with
all the little capitalistic mind games that lead
to nothing but the Pavlov experiment -
            and that was with dogs...
try that with a ******* Gorilla and i'll watch you
cradle prosthetic limbs while
he rips your original limbs off like he's playing
                a harp:
            then you can rhyme: twinkle twinkle little thumb,
    how i wished you were attached to my hand to my arm
to my torso...
                        that's the same story
we had recently concerning a Mr. Kumbuka...
  who escaped enclosure, and proved the a.d.h.d.
        complex correlation with exposure to
sugar... ****** drank 5 litres of concentrated blackcurrant
squash replying: i'm mad at the keepers for keeping
me on a diet! i do king kong and you do the frenzied
blonde maiden.
              it's still a concern for me that they herded the poets
into an area worthy of zoological inspection,
                meaning that they base their worth on
    deplorable points system: like they're immigrants
waiting for visas to Canada -
                          comment, like, blag and blabber your
way into that new country, known to all of us present
              as Si S / Silicon State... by my count that's
the 51st, or the secular version of the Vatican.

- Autorank Total 2.3, professional similarity 1 (of 10), concrete vs abstract 2 (of 2), noun/verb/etc order -0.7 (of 1) -

but now... i'll just post the most "pop" poem from
here-on-in there... for that hard-on autorank...

clues as precursor:
- Strong words: army, audience, beef, box, brick, canvas, cubes, eating, fan, fares, football, lines, match, minced, outside, people, poem, poets, river, scrabble, scroll, short, slab, song, steak, striking, stripes, tartar, tomatoes, wave, writing  
-Weak words: albeit, always, answer, any, bad, be, become, bothered, circa, coherency, could, critic, deliberate, effect, eh, elsewhere, enough, escape, event, form, gather, get, had, happen, hardly, impact, intent, international, invent, long, merely, mind, modest, national, never, nice, nothing, perhaps, personally, presume, question, rarely, reason, recluse, repeating, repetition, somehow, sometimes, started, subconscious, subsequently, succumb, tender, thinking, translation, treat, understand, version, very, want, was, well, what, will, worth, would
- Cliches: to be a, i want

****... too early for an autorank...
so here's a pre-scriptum i wrote for...
what i wanted to feed the autoranking system...

this poem has circa 11 thousand views, "elsewhere"...
and i just... would like... to see the score for it...
the very and repeating: twist on the rotten tomatoes' score
"leverage" between audience and "critic" scores...
i gather that the autorank on this canvas is not...
somehow "deliberate"... i presume i have this slab
of minced beef... and when i put it through...
i'll get... a nice cubism version of a ripe steak: medium rare...

then again: i was always a fan of rare...
mind you... it's never raw, it's not tartar cubes...
it's rare... like the person eating... a rarified recluse example:
like a recluse of a rarified worth of all examples given...
this noun/verb/etc. "coherency" score...
perhaps this a.i. scrutiny hasn't bothered to answer
to no asked question... people can still "un-scramble"
or... un-scrabble bad grammar and understand it...
nothing ever has to be: brick on brick like a long
winding river...
it sometimes can arrive at us...
"lost in translation"... some people speak some
languages with no ill-intent...
they just can't escape the pedagogy rubrics of
subconscious grammar layer upon layer upon layer...
is this... a reason to subsequently rhyme?
personally? i treat rhyme as a phenomenon...
a phenomenon that has to happen rarely...
and when it does: it has to be a striking "pose"...
but enough of the pre-scriptum...
i want to see how this poem fares in the autorank filter...
albeit, this given: this pre-scriptum will have had
an impact on the score...

line repetition, eh? the lines are too long or too short?
what was that poem... when you could somehow
invent: "thinking outside the box" of any form,
or when tender poets started to succumb to the cascade
effect of writing - to merely fill-up scroll speed and space?
it's hardly an event like the mexican wave at
a football match... or how...
the white stripes' song: seven nation army
has become the international... well... that's modest...
the national (english) football clubs' anthem...
when a goal is scored... or whatever you like, otherwise...

or cliches... really?!
how about... oh... i remember this one most fondly...
visual poetry...
fallen... by... jörg piringer...
and unlike any modern painting...
this one really does require a description,
as cited on poetryfoundation.com:

/jörg piringer works in many forms, including visual, digital, and sound poetry, as well as music. In "fallen," piringer combines a visual sensibility with computer programming skills to tumble text from the English translation of The Communist Manifesto into a pile at the bottom of the page. The result is a mass of letters stripped of their original meaning and representing the failure of an idea./ Geof Huth

and no, by no kind reprint...
perhaps modern painting is what it is...
because... there's an alternative, like fallen?
if you can "paint" with words in adverts...
and paint i imply: stress the psychological impact
of coca-cola written in circa: formal scripts -
(why no italics? you can't... just can't,
write a colon and in italics after...
the colon represents emphasis,
as does the italics... tautology or something -esque)
derived from 17th century handwriting...
or... say... volkswagen... written in blackletter &
lombardic scripts... esp. circa 1935...
while all the propaganda posters were on
display...

given all of this? well... do i have to somehow:
bemoan how terrible modern art is?
cubism is not cricitißed - but dada is -
or let's call it... the most bloated
menu of culture citationand)
Barnett Newman painted this masterpiece,
‘Onement VI’, in 1953.
it sold for close to US$44 million...

i can't say such painting is "good" or "bad"...
after a while you just have to call a spoon a spoon...
a knife a knife, a table a table...
onement vi? blue canvas with a straight line
down the middle; form? rectangular...
and that's when thinking can take place...
i gather than modern art is trying to depict:
primodial man acquiring geometry...
after all... only recently i cound the difference
between the western man and slavs...
how the afro-european now lives in germany
and the west... including italy...
and how the indo-european lives east of germany
in some parts of scandinavia and greece...
a totally new discovery...

but... but... i can compensate for modern art...
with what is visual poetry...
if jorgen schmoorgen can do an abstract of a communist
manifesto... here's my take on...
John Constable... because... frankly...
i have yet to properly deal with this particular piece
of writing - as it's fresh... to subsequently aspire
for... a j. m. w. turner... not yet... not yet...
as ascribed to Juba...

the poem itself is... good grief...
always the same with me...
i go to kenya and i'd want to **** all the ivory
beauties...
a mother is in hospital and all the nurses
are black and i'm like...
what a clean and sterile environment this
is... unlike my today which began
finding an acne dot on my little richard...
(i get the joke... spotty ****)...
having to defrost a fridge freezer in
the shed because:
'z przybytku głowa nie boli'
oh yes it does...
not when what someone deems to be
"enough" do you have to count the trivial...
unnecessary things...
which is not a shame regarding my ***
winning a pulitzer price for... never mind...
i claim lack of sun...
black privelege... impeccable skin...
and... ivory beauties...
n'est ce pas?
alternative i have found an outlet to...
it's become brutally boring...
*******...
i found it... in... japanese gravure...
i had to... esp. when 1970s italian *****
classic died... and everyone is doing
this act older than beer and the giza
pyramids... phellatio and you're like:
so when did the ice-cream dream go away...
the peeling the banana...
and all this ******* gagging begin like
there's everyone with their third tonsils
removed... where mouth is no different
from *** or **** to be RAMMED!
lucky for me i still have my third tonsil...
which means i can drink cold beer in winter
and not get a soar throat...
- lucky for me i still have my *******...
god... if i didn't... i don't think i'd have
the "moral compass" to "get away with it"...
unless i was a woman with a web-cam...
in which: it almost becomes akin to reading
a book... it's like: it's there for the sole use of
pleasuring yourself or... as i like to call it on
throne of thrones (the toilet)...
first you do the no. 1, then the no. 2...
then you start doing the no. 3 to see...
whether you've done no. 2 completely...
it sometimes happens that having an *******
dilates the **** to the point where:
there's a shady **** loitering in the "back"
somewhere... which would explain ****-erotica...
in reverse to the act of ****-erotica of being
penetrated... i.e. in this scenario...
finishing doing a no. 2...
after that? downhill a quick side-step for
a no. 4 in the shower - baptism...
but... yeah... the men that shame men with
regards to *******?
they must be circumcised men...
shaming other circumcised men...
i think to think how a circumcised man
could shame an uncircumcised man for this act...
that's like... circumcised women...
shaming uncircumised women...
for jerking off with a web-cam...
uncircumcised women and...
explosive libido... whatever the stereotypes
are... circumcised men...
uncircumcised men...
there has to be a: a priest a rabbi and an imam
walk into a bar joke around here somewhere...
i'm trying to find it...
but i have found that: circumcised men
shame other circumcised men over *******...
while the uncircumcised men are like...
if only i were a woman and had a webcam...
if society had a niche consumer base for that...
"sort of thing"...
i'd be making money from one
genocide of a fraction of myself ever so often...
i.e. it's killing when the ***** is owned
by a woman (sensible... sensible...
i don't mean the former chinese 1 child
state policy of: statistics at all costs...
even at 8 months old)...
but if that's the case...
then a session of hanky-panky...
sterile... washing under the ******* etc.,
i'm practically doing erotica-genocide
slim film no. 3890... ever since it started aged
8... when i discovered Onan...
way before the white nation army came out
from the hades of the *******...
how the ******* of ***** has nothing
to do with the ******...
the muscles and nerves are wired so to the brain...
that i'm pretty sure a castrato feels
the same...
**** chicken shaming...
it must be circumcised men against
circumcised men: ******* missing olympics...
no wonder... you peel a ******* potato...
you have to throw it in some water
to prevent it from darkening...
that's of course: prior to cooking...
so you have to find the ****** cushion
brigade from time to time...
a "sword" without a "sheath"...
rust or egomania or: motivational talk talks...
because Kant was never going to be my:
bachelor of the year for the 215th time in a row...
kierkegaard famously didn't marry...
erectile "dysfunction":
not a real problem in my own company
or in the company of prostitutes...
but a serious ******* problem among
the "free women" of western europe...
it's like one of those vague "superpowers"...
women speak of turn-ons and turn-offs...
yeah: i too have my limp switch too...
somehow... this "thing" is not automated...
it's not like spam-mail... it doesn't always:
"rise to the occassion"...
the mood swings of my *****...
i'm starting to think that perhaps neurology will
explain more about my brain
than my suma summarum will ever tell me
about this excess of the 21st digit (which
of course includes the 10 precursor toes)...

as i haven't read marquis de sade in a long while...
and i'm not touching any modern erotica,
and ******* bores me
and how japenese gravure is the next best
all-spice of brain fever...
and how: if this little harlot went to sudan
for her nitty-picking a tartan lover,
or if she decided for rwanda...
i have to guess the fiction and fantasy...
for me, at least... has to rely on...
a bull in a porcelain shop...
or as the kama sutra says:
a rabbit **** is hardly going to ****
an elephant ****... lengths and depths...
all round!
which makes you wonder...
genghis khan must have been...
or has to be... the ***** envy shitlord
of a whole lot of people with the surname
Khan in pakistan.

never quiet the proper arrangement,
watching a cat miscarry his strengths of
perfect balance on a fence
deciding to structure his escapism further
from fence to the safety of gravity’s plateau,
and i know this is not a crowd pleaser,
no gladiator blood sewn onto a caesar’s face for a smile,
but as amusements go:
choose the simpler ones and watch them multiply
exponentially... choose the complex ones and watch them
mutilate you with anticipatory nostalgia once they pass
and have fed you.
so unless you think it’s cheap to state
that william burroughs would have a lot in common with bukowski...
you’re probably right... but once you embark on the alcoholic metabolism
parabola there’s no going back... you can have
irritable bowel syndrome in the morning...
diarrhoea x4 before the seas just below the hydrochloric sea settle
and the sailors are spared another barnett newman smear
into the toilet.... quarter of bottled whiskey usually does the trick
for the calmed metabolism...
i know burroughs and bukowski used different mediums...
but it’s better than staging a ghost fight between vegans and vegetarians...
same **** different cover story all over again...
and it sounds less sinister, doesn’t it? let’s repeat:
metabolism & alcoholism;
and in all serious soberness i put my efforts in taking interest in philosophy...
like observing from spinoza’s ethics... well spinoza drank...
heavily... which explains why he put it into his ethics,
that explanatory ref. i will definitely mishandle (misquote):
never come between a drinker and a newspaper
or a blank page, even if it's a pixelated blank.

who am i to deny signs?
footprints in the snow,
a sign that someone has
walked this path in
the cold, alone, before i did.
everywhere scattered, these worldly signs.
who am i to deny signs?
this midnight blue on
Barnett Newman's canvas
is not blue, but a blueness embodied—
not some scattered object or
amorphous person, but the open, what it is
to see, the difference
between this instance and the beyond,
this sensuous encounter.
who am i to deny signs?
these eyes, that look at me and see
me seeing what it is to be
seen, not as footprints
in the snow, nor even a work
of art, as no thing among
other things, but outside, outside this
universe of interpretation,
signs that speak of
an entirely other world of
experience, perception, possibility, of
love
that i can never
really know, for all that,
but still it calls and
demands that i decide
if i'll risk what is precious to me for
what could be precious to me or
nothing in the least.
but who am i to deny signs?

these fire escape bars subdivide

space like a Barnett Newman painting.

stripes running down for a signal,

across these windows.

a thirty eight degree rain, with steely

grey whisks of snowy blind eyes.

shook off somewhere in this full frontal

depth perception, dripping the cagey

dynamics of backdrops.

a present tense of forseeable future

harkening back.