Submit your work, meet writers and drop the ads. Become a member
Lawrence Hall Oct 2017
A Statement Solo and a Response Choral in Existential Whine Mode*

Solo: Before we end for today – do begin thinking about a topic for your research paper due in December.

Chorus: I don’t understand…but you said...are you talking about the persuasive essay…what does “expository” mean…oh, this is not expository…but we’ve never written a persuasive paper…is this the persuasive research paper you’re talking about…what is the difference between “expository” and “persuasive”…but what are we going to write about…I mean like why don’t you give us a topic…I don’t understand…when is this due…but that’s the pro and con, right…it’s not…but you said…what does “bibliography” mean…so when is this due…but how many pages…so you just want the bibliography and the first page…I don’t know what you mean by a thesis that can be argued either way…I don’t understand why you don’t give us a topic…I’m confused…what do you want us to write about…but when is this due… I don’t understand…but you said...are you talking about the persuasive essay…what does “expository” mean…but we’ve never written a persuasive paper…is this the persuasive research paper you’re talking about…but what are we going to write about…I mean like why don’t you give us a topic…I don’t understand when is this due…but that’s the pro and con, right…it’s not…but you said…we’ve never written a research paper before…what does “bibliography” mean…so when is this due…but how many pages…so you just want the bibliography and the first page…I don’t know what you mean by a thesis that can be argued either way…I don’t understand why you don’t give us a topic…I’m confused…what do you want us to write about…but when is this due… I don’t understand…we’ve never written papers like this before…but you said...are you talking about the persuasive essay…what does “expository” mean…but we’ve never written a persuasive paper…is this the persuasive research paper you’re talking about…but what are we going to write about…I mean like why don’t you give us a topic…I don’t understand when is this due…but that’s the pro and con, right…it’s not…but you said…what does “bibliography” mean…so when is this due…but how many pages…so you just want the bibliography and the first page…I don’t know what you mean by a thesis that can be supported with authoritative sources and logic…I don’t understand why you don’t give us a topic…I’m confused…what do you want us to write about…but when is this due…!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!????????????­
Kaleigh O Jun 2017
This is the bibliography of a lonely women:
In a crowded room I stand
Voices from end to end
I see but I cannot hear
For I have realized my biggest fear
In a crowded room
I am alone.

In your arms I lay
Soft kisses on every inch of my skin
And here I am thinking again
In your arms
I am alone.
This is the bibliography of a lonely women.
Mateuš Conrad Jan 2020
.how  dignified it is, to simply take a walk at night...

)            that's all i wanted to disclose...
what comes now,
is all the unnecessary details
that would constitute a prose piece...
albeit in cascade - for the ease
of the eyes bunddled up in a
claustrophobia of a paragraph:

i know: the mere word 'dignified'
seems rather obnoxious...
but... how dignified it is,
to take a walk at night...
esp. when one is recycling leftover
bottles of whiskey, whiskey,
beer... whiskey...

after reading Knausgård vol. 1 -
with his father strapped to the house
with his mother drinking himself
to death...
perhaps i'm also akin...

but... there's "****" to do in between...
good god! mein gott!
greta thunberg! run! i said run idiot!
run to the recycling center with
those glass bottles!
success though: cutting the ingestion
by over a half...

current bank balance?
nearing 2 thousand pounds...
and there's the garbage to sort between
the recyclable and the non-recyclable...
there's the tending to keeping
the house clean...

there's a remnant spark about giving
a toss about some sporting event...
there's cooking a dinner...
but... it seems i miss the man who would
find about an hour and a half
to walk the streets at night...

somehow i missed it -
but... i imagine the sight of a week's worth
of empty bottles in the wardrobe...
i've had enough and...
i call the dog that's the dignity to take
a walk at night...
to never overthink anything except
thinking - that i can leave in the basket
of nothing...

sometimes the ego-automaton jumps
in and makes my walking meditation
fuzzy... that's where i find this mythological
ego of psychology -
ego the anti-narrator...

which implies: not myself... reflexive...
not my, self... the reflective circumstance...

and there's no familiar presence
of an mp3 player (broken, ****** lasted
for 3 years, good enough lifespan)
and no headphones...

perhaps i was anti-radio some time ago...
i've amassed a decent personal library
of audio... but now i rarely use it
having made a discovery of the gramaphone
and vinyls...
and being the late 20th century colt...
i should still be ripping c.d.s onto
mp3... but...
i just wanted to check out what i was
missing...
perhaps... the crazed sound of passing
cars, will indeed, never replace
the cobblestones and hooves...
but... there's a right to heave a sigh...
for no apparent reason other than:
i've met myself this very first time
having aged...

this is not a time for west coast
1990s pop punk or punk rock or whatever
they called it... when you would
either run in gallop jumping
in a jonathan edwards style...
or looking down and walking into
a lamp-post... this is no time to be
refreshing the cinema of youth...
with the offspring's ignition...

not when you're walking: and trying not to think...

also of today: my jewish newly converted
to islam neighbour came round
asking about my mother's slight bout
of depression concerning...
her recent hip-replacement...
and what's still in the post...
the aesthetic surgery...
after all: what surgery, proper...
is also a plastic surgery - an aesthetic...
obviously the muscles and the bones
are intact... but there is always a chance
that waste tissue will be removed...
fat... etc. and it hasn't even been 2 weeks
since the surgery...
and she said: your mum should look
at my surgery scars...
i lifted up my t-shirt and turned
to show her my back... namely my
right shoulder-blade...

and i said to her: you know why i didn't
get aesthetic surgery on this mark
of cain? that's the same reason why i don't
have tattoos...
nothing against tattoos...
i have the only tattoo i need:
a mark of cain and some historical tattoos...
dates... that i keep close to me
from my time in the pedagogy meat-mincer
effort... how it began with the romans: per se...
later began with hastings 1066...
but it would never begin with:
the first battle of Tannenberg (1410)...
so you don't know how i think my mother
is exaggerating?
it's a good thing she's my mother...
she can have her ******* pass...
i'd give her the same ******* pass if...
we were married for 35 years and...
she was a woman i could grow with...
otherwise? the ******* pass i reserve for
children...

i subsequently signed her will...
yes... she came round looking for a second
witness for her will being made official...
or ****** bureucratic paper...
but nonetheless official...
i didn't mention the fact that...
the two witnesses that have signed the paper:
need to be present simultaneously...
i asked her... what's my occupation?
oh... right... i'm a scribbler...
a chicken-scratcher... writer of no
guild... a writ pusher...  

but all i wanted to write was...
i'm not a fan of the haiku...
esp. the western haiku... or a maxim:
i abhor maxims...
but if you put Kant into the juicer
and you spit out the congested
categorical imperative...
and it doesn't sound like the original, should:

act only according to that maxim whereby you can,
at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.

id est:

act only according to that haiku whereby you can...
at some distant point of time,
convene for it be a shared experience
in the ratio of a 1:2 point of seperation...
2:4 4:8 8:16...
but that's not really a categorical imperative
to begin with... what sort of "idiot" would strive
for a maxim to become a universal law...
universal laws are maxim spin-offs...
or i'm just blah-blahing too much...
waiting dear god: for the razor's edge (and drowning)...
or a punchline on stage in front of a dumb / mute
audience...

o.k. 5-7-5...
syllables... given the japanese don't use
letter but have syllables instead...
again: i'm not a fan...
if it took my long enough...
i'd find my 5 syllables and my 7 and again
my 5 syllables...
but i am a westerner...
i deal with letters... i don't deal with syllables...
unless they are prefixes akin to trans-...
meta-... anti-... post-...
the western adoption of the haiku implies
the boredom achieved from too many
sonnets... is the haiku the new sonnet?

i'll try... but i'll need to open a dictionary
for this effort...

water knee deep truce (5)
to the drowning man imploring (8)
signature the soul with this last breath (9)

or however many... it's just a passing thought:
i don't know how it would be worthwhile
to think inside a box... standing outside it
to begin with...
a haiku and no punctuation:
if you're going to be puritanical about it...
no punctuation?!
no diacritical markers?!

the Kant reference is just to ease up on:
who the hell would live by a maxim,
a stand-alone maxim at that...
one maxim to make it into the realm
of gravity...

there's the plethora of aphorisms that
are observations that... well...
let's just say it's no an imitation game... (

since how the hell does:
how dignified it is, to simply take a walk at night...
all of the above?
darwinism in images:

stopped climbing trees...
stopped being furry...
stopped dreaming about snakes...
stopped fearing snakes...
stopped wrestling with tigers...
stopped king kong versus tiger gorgon...
jumped into a whale...
came out sonar Jonah with hell'io Job
to boot...
stopped climbing trees...
took toward the complexity
of climbing rocks...
esp. boulders... later desired
the great big button of a cookie i.e.;
desired the moon...
brewed some moonshine...
build the mirror corridor
at Versailles...
dug up lazy dinosaur bones of
that thick glutton splodge and...
retired the horse... drove a car...
etc. etc.: came across
the happy birthday of death by
gregory corso and said:
that be one of the best recitations
of poetry i have ever heard...
in youth and Paris and Paris was
the signature...

all of this but there's still...
how dignified it is, to simply take a walk at night...
more to the point...
how dignified it is, to walk at one's own
leisure...
a bottle of england's finest ale...
theakston's the old peculier in one hand...
a marlboro cigarette in the other...
how dignified it is...
to walk: but to also walk... at one's leisure...
not running a marathon...
not... running the concrete or the tarmac
dry with new year's even resolutions
to loße mass... (yes... since weight involves
gravity blah blah)...

this auto-correct science factoid rubric
around each corner...
i can only admit that walking...
is a sport for gentlemen...
cognitive ping pong ensues...
a solo game... perhaps...
it's not a matter of sport...
or attempting gentlemanly stature...
which could be the case...
say... if i were 75... years old...
but...

that's all fine and dandy... the psychology
behind darwinism 2.0
not even copernicus made it that far
with his "revolutionary discovery"...
or not that Ptolemy was still...
index... bibliography and historical
constipation when attempting to be
democratic and historical...
in a single poo'em... with no rhyme...
and certainly no overt-technique biases
to: "identify with"...

it's still an image burning in my head...
the gorilla that would / could wrestle
a lion to sleep with a ripped-off jaw...
the thumb-king of the jungle
and the savannah...
and of course the donning of the conquered's
mane...

but beside all the discoveries in the past
and the present...
i will find myself smirking...
laughing to myself...
that someone will find this too...
i can't stress it enough:

when i see people driving their cars...
some fast, some slow...
walking onto a bus is not a leisure activity...
it's not even a dignity...
it's a time-warp... a short-cut...
besides the point...

even this brain sometimes allow for
the dignity of walking to be eclipsed...
what its sometimes-odd bursts of egomania /
megalomania or all those other:
traits of the rational man...

perhaps this is the first day i've truly
appreciated the sensibility of walking -
much more in that: it became a dignity...
like the time i found the antithesis of narcissus
in my shadow...
once upon a nightly promenade
in the english outer-suburban labyrinth...
20 minutes walk from the fields,
grazing horses... foxes, badgers and...
no wordsworthian naturalism... i.e. the idyll...

superior intelligence, the fork,
the knife, the screwdriver the *****...
the hammer and the nail...
the scythe, the sickle and the lollipop...
the telephone the radio the television
the soap opera addicts...
the bedsheets the bed the cushion
the shampoo and soap...
all of it... but none of it at the same time...
with what comes a priori and with
what comes a posteriori...
the dignity of walking...
perhaps the only state of grace...

perhaps less "abilism" and more - upon reflection...
a mother strapped to a bed
after a hip-replacement surgery?
i.e. in a personal, very personal,
non-Teheran specific vicinity?!

perhaps the most basic meditation is required...
nothing grandiose...
nothing temporal or non-temporal...
something basic...
i.e. spatial... a meditation on cross the street
like a mindful hedgehog that you are...
and not panic driven like a mother goose
with her nursery...

walk long enough and you can even
experience bouts of spontaneous amnesia...
which is not related to actual memories
and their totality...
more in the immediacy: amnesia ex cogitans...
amnesia out of thinking...
10 minutes apart and you can almost
forget what you were thinking of...
10 minutes more pass... the labyrinth spits
you out and you recover from that temp.
bout of crucible amnesia: to forget what you
were thinking about...
which is a variant to that other escapism
of day-dreaming...
since you're walking... and no day-dreamer
is synonym of the thinker who also walks...

this variant of escapism comes of its own
accord... perhaps it's an ontological built-in-mechanism
that when you couple walking with thinking...
you'll most certainly experience these
bouts of "amnesia"... which of course doesn't
include walking in circles... but in a labyrinth
of your unconscious motives...
that the body is dissociated from a conscious will...

since... what sort of thinking exists
on a treadmill... or during running... to begin with?

how  dignified it is, to simply take a walk at night...
dignified in that: one is not so much able
to come across one's best ideas there...
but that one can simply come across... cogitans per se
-

yes... i.e.: to be free from cogito ergo sum...
to come across the res cogitans medium...
only while walking...
and not like Descartes imagining oneself
sitting at a desk of doubt...

i find no better alternative: walking opens up...
thinking-in-itself... sometimes that's merely translated
as: being... it does not specify / reveal itself
as a: necessity of narration...
thinking is not narration is not thinking...
if you have experienced the ugly spontaneity of
the ego... in that vein of psychology's
three-tier meta-brain dissection of the mind:
subsequently the soul... blah blah...

now i see... this has become a sit-down meditation...
it has to end...
now that the arms have been employed for
a period longer, than the legs were employed
for, prior.
emmaline Apr 2016
Kurt Queller uses narrative criticism to analyze Mark 3:1-6, the healing miracle story in the gospel of Mark.  Queller’s narrative criticism includes “echoes of the Exodus liberation narrative” , echoes of Deuteronomy’s covenant language and Sabbatical provisions , intratextual echoes in Mark , and independent echoes in the other synoptic gospels.  Queller uses these echoes to fill in the gaps he finds in the story of Jesus healing the man with the withered hand on the Sabbath.
In the beginning of his criticism, Queller lists the gaps in Mark 3:1-6’s narrative that he seeks to fill: the meaning of the withered hand, Jesus’ reason for healing on the Sabbath, His reason for considering the withered hand life-threatening, why it is a choice between good and evil, et cetera.  He begins filling these gaps by referencing intertextual echoes of Mark 3:1-6 in Exodus.  Jesus’ command to the man with the withered hand in Mark 3:5, “Stretch out your hand,” is echoed in Exodus 14:16 where God commands Moses, “stretch out your hand.” When the man with the withered hand stretches out his hand, his hand is restored. Likewise, when Moses stretches out his hand, the Reed Sea parts, resulting in the restoration of the Israelites’ freedom.
Queller’s reference to this echo in Exodus, paired with other echoes he mentions in Deuteronomy, helped me begin to understand Jesus’ insistence on healing the withered hand. Queller was able to use the echoes to fill in the gaps I previously could not fill. In Deuteronomy 15, God’s covenant requires liberal lending and debt forgiveness to the poor on the Sabbath year. God reminds the Israelites that He delivered them from Egypt in verse 15, and He claims that this is the reason for His liberal Sabbatical law. Thus, this Deuteronomic prescription for Sabbath observance is a continuation of the Exodus liberation narrative. Queller mentions these echoes in Exodus and Deuteronomy to draw a larger narrative framework for understanding Mark’s controversial healing story.
In my initial reading, I recognized that a withered hand is not necessarily a matter of life and death. Like Queller, this was a gap that I initially set out to fill. However, I was unable to fill this gap in a way that completely satisfied my confusion on the matter. Queller’s larger narrative framework for this passage led me to a better understanding of why Jesus considered the withered hand worthy to heal on the Sabbath.
According to Queller’s filling of the gaps, the withered hand is an affliction that can be compared to the Israelites’ enslavement in Egypt. The withered hand also embodies the economic predicament of the poor, who remain enslaved to their debt to the rich.  Such enslavement could be a death sentence, which is why the Sabbath requires the liberation of slaves and debt forgiveness of the poor. It seems plausible to me that a withered hand could cause a man to be enslaved and/or perpetually poor. This line of reasoning, provided by Queller’s larger narrative framework, allowed me to truly see how the Sabbath could require Jesus’ healing of the withered hand.
Another gap Queller and I similarly set out to fill is the question of what constitutes as doing good and what constitutes as doing evil on the Sabbath. This gap also arises from Mark 3:4, in which Jesus asks, “Which is lawful on the Sabbath: to do good or to do evil, to save life or to ****?” (Mark 3:4 NIV). In his analysis of this particular part of this particular verse, Queller points out a small important detail that I originally missed. Mark 3:4 does not set the frame for a passive, inner choice between good and evil.  The literal wording says, “to do good or to do evil.” The choice between good and evil on the Sabbath thereby requires action.
While recognizing that required action is problematic for the restful nature of the Sabbath, Queller supports his assertion by referencing Deuteronomy 30. Deuteronomy 30’s prescription for obedience of the Sabbath repeats the active command, “do it.”  Queller illustrates the parallelism between Mark and Deuteronomy by placing Deuteronomy 30:14 and Mark 3:4-5 in a figure side-by-side.  Deuteronomy 30:14 says, “The word is very near to you, in your mouth, and in your heart, and in your hands, to do it.” With this commandment as the framework, Mark 3:4-5 spells out the Pharisees’ failure to do good; It says, “But they were silent . . . grieved at their hardness of heart, he said to the man: ‘Stretch out your hand.’ And he stretched it out.”
From this, Queller concludes, “The ‘word’ to be done is already ‘in [their] mouth’ – but they refuse to say anything in response; it is ‘in [their] heart’ – but their heart is hardened against it. It is ‘in [their] hands, to do it’ – but as Jesus turns again to address the man, our attention is directed back to an inert hand, that, in its current withered state, seems unlikely to do anything.”  From this I am now able to conclude that which constitutes as doing “good” on the Sabbath is acting on the word. The word is completely accessible to us, and we must use our mouths, hearts, and hands to act upon it.
This gap of good and evil action that Queller helps fill also provides further evidence for the necessity of Jesus’ healing of the withered hand. Since the hands are required to carry out good action in obedience of the covenant, the withered hand is an affliction that can breach said covenant. Queller asserts that the withered hand symbolizes “the tangible embodiment of [the Pharisees] unwillingness, despite the ‘nearness’ of the word, to do it.”  Jesus, by necessity, must heal this affliction to show the Pharisees how to act according to the law of the Sabbath; “The stretching out of the hand then becomes a ‘witness against’ those who have chosen to forgo or even prohibit action because of exclusively sacral concerns.”  Without the preceding narrative frame of Deuteronomy, such significance of the withered hand for the Sabbath covenant was impossible for me to comprehend.
Though Queller is certainly helpful in providing evidence that enables understanding of the withered hand’s significance, there are parts of his criticism that I find contradictory and unhelpful. This occurs when he references echoes in Exodus and Deuteronomy to provide a framework for understanding the Pharisees’ silence in Mark 3:4 and hardness of hearts in Mark 3:5. He first relates the Pharisees’ hardened heart in response to Jesus’ plea in Mark to the Pharaoh’s hardened heart in response to Moses’ numerous pleas in Exodus. In my concordance work, I also made this connection. However, Queller and I differ in the conclusions we draw from this observation.
Queller draws from Deuteronomy to provide framework in conjunction with Exodus for understanding Mark’s interpretation of the Sabbatical law. He references Deuteronomy 29:19, which warns against thinking one can receive the blessings of the covenant while breaching it in the inner wanderings of the heart. This passive infidelity of the covenant brings God’s curse to the innocent as well as the guilty. Queller uses this context to explain why his literal translation says Jesus “co-aggrieved”  with the Pharisees because of their silence and hard hearts. The Pharisees’ passive, inner breach of the covenant invoked God’s curse on them, as well as the innocent Jesus, according to Queller.  
When I analyzed Jesus’ reaction to the hard hearts of the Pharisees in comparison to God’s reaction to that of the Pharaoh, I realized that the same Greek word was used to describe Jesus’ anger and God’s wrath. However, the consequences of Jesus’ anger and God’s wrath do not relate as clearly as Queller would lead one to believe. As a result of the Pharaoh’s hard heart, God’s wrath leads to the Pharaoh’s ultimate demise. Jesus’ resulting anger from the Pharisees’ hard hearts, on the other hand, catalyzes his decision to heal the withered hand. This action ultimately leads to Jesus’ destruction alone. Jesus, the innocent character, does not fall to the mutual destruction of the Pharisees, per Queller’s argument. I see no destruction of the Pharisees at all. Instead, Jesus restores God’s blessing of the guilty by becoming the recipient of God’s wrath in their place.
This conclusion, though differing from Queller, is consistent with his interpretation of the withered hand. Queller writes, “The withered hand embodies covenant curses invoked against those refusing to ‘open [their] hands’ in liberal lending, instead killing the poor by freezing credit in view of an impending sabbatical debt amnesty” . If the withered hand embodies God’s curse against the Pharisees, then Jesus revokes this curse when he cures the withered hand. Furthermore, the larger narrative framework of Mark’s gospel echoes this conclusion. Jesus’ crucifixion ultimately pays the debt of sinners and liberates them from God’s wrath.
Kurt Queller’s narrative criticism uses intertextuality, a narrative tool that “evokes resonances of the earlier text beyond those explicitly cited”  and “requires the reader to recover unstated or suppressed correspondences between the two texts.”  Such intertextual echoes he references from Deuteronomy and Exodus provide a larger background for interpreting Mark’s healing controversy. This granted me the ability to fill many gaps in the narrative that I was unable to fill prior to reading Queller’s criticism. In a footnote, he explains that his “metalepsis” uses such intertextual echoes for analysis, and, “In narrative, the resultant new figuration operates at what Robert M. Fowler calls the ‘discourse level.’ Metaleptic signification is thus transacted between an implied narrator and an implied audience – as it were, behind the backs of the narrative’s ‘story-level’ participants.”
The intertextual and metaleptic tools that Queller uses for his narrative criticism have proven to be very insightful and helpful for my understanding Mark 3:1-6 in an entirely new way. Even as I disagree with Queller on certain parts of his argument, these points of disagreement pushed me to deepen my own individual reading of the text. In comparing my argument to Queller’s, I realized just how far my initial interpretation was able to go. This narrative criticism answered a lot of my questions and filled many gaps. However, most of my conclusions about the implications and ultimate consequences of the text remain unshaken.  
Bibliography
Queller, Kurt. “Stretch Out Your Hand!” Echo and Metalepsis in Mark’s Sabbath Healing Controversy. Journal of Biblical Literature 129, no. 4 (2010): 737-58.
This is a narrative criticism in conversation with Kurt Queller's criticism. The in-text footnotes didn't transfer to this website but all quotes are referencing his work, which is cited at the end.
Nigel Morgan Apr 2013
It took him a week to master thought-diversion. He would leave home to walk to work and the moment the door was shut it was as though she followed him like a shadow on snow. If he wasn’t careful the ten-minute walk would be swallowed up in an imagined conversation. He had already allowed himself too many dark thoughts of tears and silences. He saw her befreckled by weeks in a light he had only read about. She would be a stranger for a while, a visitor from another world (until she gradually lost the glow on her skin and the smell of Africa became an elusive memory). He was frightened that he would be overwhelmed by her physical grace enriched by   southern summer and the weight of her experience, having so little to offer in return. So he practised thought diversion: as her shadow entered his consciousness he would divert his attention to China of the Third Century and what he would write next about Zuo Fen and her illustrious brother.

Sister and brother Zou gradually took on a fictional life. This he fuelled by reading poetry of the period and his daily beachcombing along the shores of the Internet. He built up an impressive bibliography for his next visit to the university library. Even in the Han Dynasty there was so much material to study, though much of it the stuff of secondary sources.

One morning he took down from his library shelf Max Loehr’s The Great Painters of China and immediately became seduced by the court images of Ku Kai’chih. This painter is the only artist of this period of Chinese antiquity to be represented today by extant copies. There was also a possible original, a handscroll in The British Museum. It is said Ku was the first portrait artist to give a psychological interpretation of the person portrayed. Before him there seems in portraiture to have been little differentiation in the characterization of figures. His images hold a wonder all their own.

As David looked at the book’s illustrative plates, showing details from The Admonitions of the Instructress to the Palace Ladies, the world of Zuo Fen began to reveal itself. A ‘palace lady’ she certainly was, and so possibly similar to the image before him: a concubine reclines in her bamboo screen and silk-curtained bed; her Lord sits respectively at right-angles to her and half-way down her bed. The artist has captured his feet deftly lifting themselves out of square-toed slippers, whilst Zuo Fen drapes one arm over the painted bamboo screen, her manner resolute and confident. Perhaps she has taken note of those admonitions of her instructress. Her Lord has turned his head to gaze at her directly and to listen. Restless hands hide beneath his gown.

        ‘Honoured Lord, as we have talked lately of flowing water and the symmetry of love I am reminded of the god and goddess of Xiang River’.
       ‘In the Nine Songs of Qu Yaun?’
       ‘Yes, my Lord. The opening verse has the Prince of Xiang say: You have not come; I wait with apprehension / And wonder who makes you prevaricate on your island / When I am so splendidly and perfectly attired in your honour?
       ‘Hmm. . . so you favour this new gown.’
       ‘It is finely made, but perhaps does not suit the light of this hour’.
       ‘Let the Yangzi River flow calmly, / I look for you, but you have not come.’
      ‘I gaze at the distance in a trance, /  Only to see the grey green waters run by.

        ‘Honourable Companion, I fear you feel my mind lies elsewhere . ‘
       ‘I know you ride the cassia boat downstream.’
       ‘Indeed, my oar is of cassia and my rudder of orchid’.
        ‘I fancy that you build a house underwater, thatching it with a roof of lotus leaves . . .’
       ‘Well, if that is so, drop your sleeves into the Yangzi River and present the thin dress you wear to the bay of Li.’
       ‘I am in awe of my Lord’s recall of such verses . . . I love the Lady of Xiang’s description of the underwater house . . . with its curtains of fig leaves and screens of split basil.’
      ‘But will you send me all the spirits of Juiyi mountains to bring me to your side . . . will they come together as numerous as clouds?’
      ‘My Lord, my nose perspires . . .’
      ‘I offer my jade ring to the Yangzi River / and yield my jade pendant to the bay of Li. / I gather galingale fronds on an islet of fragrant grasses, / still hoping to present them to you. / If I leave, I might not have another chance. / So I’d rather stay here and linger a little longer.’
        ‘I gather the powerful roots of galingale / hoping to offer them to you who are still far away. / If I leave, I might not have another chance. / So I’d rather stay here and linger a little longer
.’
      ‘Even though your nose perspires and your ******* harden . . .’
        ‘Kind Lord, you have taken the wrong role in the dialogue. Surely it is the Plain Girl who gives such advise to the Yellow Emperor.’
        ‘And I thought only men read the Sunujing . . .’
        ‘You forget I have a dear brother . . .’
       ‘With whom you have read the Sunujing! . . and no I have not forgotten . . . he sought permission to travel to the Tai mountains, some fool’s errand my minister states.’
         ‘He may surprise you on his return.’
        ‘Only you can surprise me now.’
       ‘My Lord, you know I lack such gifts . . . I hear your sandals dropping to the floor’.
      ‘I sail my boat ever closer to the wind / and the waves are
stirred like drifting snow.’
     ‘I can hear my beloved calling my name. / I shall hasten so that I can ride beside him.



She seemed so child-like in that singular room of the garden annex. Her head had buried itself between the two pillows so only her ever-curling hair was visible. Opening a small portion of the curtains drawn across the blue metalled-framed French windows, he gazed at her sleeping in the dull light of just dawn. Outside a river-mist lay across the autumnal garden where they had walked yesterday before their tour of the estate. Unable to sleep he had sat in their hosts’ kitchen and mapped their guided walk in the rain, noting down his observations of this remote valley in a sprawling narrative. On the edge of moorland it was a world constrained and contained, with its brooding batchelor-owned farms and the silent legacy everywhere of a Victorian hagiographer and antiquarian. As he wrote and drew, snapshot-like images of her intervened unbidden. She both entranced and purposeful in a physical landscape she delighted in and knew how to read. Although longing to lie next to her he had sat gently for a moment on her bed, feeling the weight of her sleeping form move towards him as the mattress sagged, his bare feet cold on the stone floor. He placed his poem on the empty companion pillow, and returned through the chill of unheated rooms to the desert warmth of the Agared kitchen.


Lying in your arms
I am surprised to hear a voice
That seems in the right key
To sing what is in my heart.

After so many dark
inarticulate hours
I,  desperate
To express this love
That drowns me,
Suddenly come up for breath
(after floundering in
the cold water of night)
to find there were words
like little boats of paper
carrying a tea light,
a vivid yellow flame
on the black depths,
floating gently towards you . . .

Oh log of memory
record these sailing messages
So carefully placed, rehearsed,
Launched and found complete.

Knowing I must not talk of love,
Knowing no other word
(feeling the shape of your knee
with my right hand),
knowing this time will not
come again, I summon
to myself one last intimacy
before the diary of reason closes.


Zou Fen often wrote about herself as a rustic illiterate, country-born in a thatched hut, but given (inexplicably) the purple chamber at the Palace. As the daughter of a significant officer of the Imperial Court she appears to have developed a fictional persona to induce and taste the extremes of melancholy. Otherwise she is mind-travelling the natural world from her courtyard garden, observing in the growth of a tiny plant or the flight of distant bird, the whole pattern of nature. These things fill her rhapsodies and fu poems.

As a young man Zuo Si had wild flights of fantasy. He imagined himself as a warrior. In verse he recalls reading Precepts on the Art of War by Ssu-ma Jang Chu. With a scholar’s knife he writes of quelling the barbarian hordes (the Tibetans) in their incursions along the Yang-tze. When triumphant he would not accept the Emperor’s gift of a title and estate, but would retire to a cottage in the country. Then again, as a student scholar, he describes failure, penury and isolation ‘left stranded like a fish in a pond, without – he hasn’t a single penny in his account: within – not a peck of grain in the larder.’ He was never thus.

Like all good writers sister and brother Zou were the keenest observers. They took into and upon themselves what they saw and gathered from the lives of others, and so often their playful painted characters hide the truth of their real lives. David looks at his dishevelled poetry and wonders about its veracity. He always thought of Rachel as his first (and only) reader; but what if she were not? What would he write? What would his poems say?

*I lie on my back in her bed.
On her stomach, her arm on my chest,
She props herself against me
so that I see her face in close up.
She gazes
out of the window

I don’t think I have slept at all,
My own bed was so cold.
She warms me for a while.

All night
I’ve been thinking
what to say to her,
and now I am too weary
to speak.

I am in despair,
Yet I ache with joy
At having her so close.

I wish I knew who I was,
What I could be,
What I might become.

A voice tells me
that such intimacy
will not come again.
Perspective
Judgement
From domesticated genocide
Judicial branches
Standing dead wood
Burning keep warm
Social justice intoxicated
Fleeting eye contact
Sugar ******
Eye contact in liquor stores
Touch starved
While smothered by bodies
Fleeting what is common
Human
Preaching domesticated genocide
Through word of mouth
Autographed accounting
Bibliography bully
Of desperate
Domesticated genocide
Plagiarized status quo
Extensions of corruption
Woven web
Insecticide companies
Invest in domesticated genocide
Deep ecology grinding its gears
Intensifying it’s failure
The side business
Oil and gasoline
Highly flammable
Like minds longing
For the names of betrayal
Where it lives all over imperialism
Social mediums psychic
Meredith Dec 2013
You taught me what this feels like
and then how it feels to lose it
You showed me who I wanted
and then who I wasn't.
You ticked every box
and drew a line.
You weren't mine to begin with
and then not to end with.
You looked like everything I wanted
and then became something I hated.
You get thought of almost every day
and at that
not in a good way.
You let me leave
and I'm happy you did.
Then you almost killed me
but I didn't die.
You broke my heart into pieces
but I put them back together.
And now it's a shield
it keeps the bad feelings out.
You threw my trust in the dirt
stomped on it and spit.
I picked it up off the ground
washed it's scars and
hung it to dry.
And it's still scarred forever.
And so am I.
And it's still hard.
But I didn't die.
egghead Mar 2018
What is the point in
Poignancy?

Fragment,
you tell me.
Another one in paragraph three.


What do words matter?

I have spelled love with Lilacs instead of an “L”
I have drawn the curve of my “O” with the chill of a
Sweeping breeze.
A “V” can only appear as the violet of a
sparkling sky, or I will be unable to read it,
and every “E” will amount to nothing more than
emptiness if the voice it has been given
does not epitomize song.

Comma-splice,
Replace it with a semicolon.


I am trying live freely.
I want to breathe in color,
to inhale an orange Savannah sky
And exhale green which
shows through the translucent dew
of grass.

Unnecessary use of description.
Limit it, Lidiah. Limit it.


My fingers itch with the ferocity of
A vengeful army.
They are waiting to trample pages with
The lead of my pencil, the bayonet
of a Revolutionary-War-era rifle.

The word limit sounds like tragedy.
A single word that can somehow act as
a precursor,
To the death of passion.

Your words have put you in a box.

People always say
“Actions speak louder than words.”
In a way that is true.
But I also know it to be
a tremendous piece of fiction.

Lidiah,
Please watch your run-ons.


Why can our words and our actions
not be the same thing?
Isn’t the act of speaking,
the act of raising your voice,
the act of being heard,
isn’t that an action?

Lidiah,
how many times do I have to remind you?
Clarification throughout.


Why have we decided that our words
Mean nothing more than
stepping stones on the road to action?

When did we decide that our voices
which rise like clarion calls,
forever instilling our promises,
are to be left on silent?

Precious jewels set into rings.

Poison in a water tank.

Lidiah,
what you say is irrelevant
if your MLA bibliography isn’t in
alphabetical order.


Our words are our actions.
They mean the same.
Words are the distinctions of our beliefs
Illustrations of our personas
They are not mosquitos to be slapped away
and forgotten.

Lidiah,
paragraph five is too long.
Stop rambling.
Be concise.


Please tell me,
what is the point of being concise?

Lidiah,
stop rambling.


Why do we let justification
equate to useless rambling?

Lidiah,
you have to detach yourself from the narrative.


Feelings mean more
than a couple of sentences.

More than a good or a bad.

A mad or a sad.

Comma-splice

What about ferocity?

Never end with a preposition.

What about passion?

Replace this with a conjunctive adverb.

What about the discernable strife
that follows even indifference?

What about that?

Lidiah,
what is the point of
Poignancy?


What are we without it?
What does the human soul matter
if we have forsaken the parts of ourselves that
remind us of what a soul is for?

Lidiah,
you will never be heard
if you do not learn to follow the rules
.
Olivia Kent Jan 2014
Life’s much too Short
For another million years I’d love to write.
Burning passion inside.
Death, the night of life will take me away too soon.
Carry me into the doom.
Into the dark land of once was life.

Keep my poems safe and sound.
While I’m sleeping underground.
Want no more to live and breed.
Just to write and read.
Find my name in a bibliography upon the shelf.
Maybe In the library of heaven, should I find the truth inside?
Does heaven truly exist?
(c) Livvi
Liz And Lilacs Oct 2014
Bloodlust is all I see.
These droplets, like cranberry constellations,
dotting my bibliography.

I am nobody's fool,
yet you've bamboozled me.
A walking contradiction.

Demented or balanced,
I no longer know.
Your bloodlust concerns me.
Mateuš Conrad Feb 2016
and i too thought the english banknotes were big,
but by god... have you seen imperial russian's
banknotes?! you could wipe you entire **** with one.

no, i don't own an imperial russia's
banknote,
or a kopek dating pre 20th century
that Dostoevsky might have used to
gamble,
no, i don't own an imperial russia's
banknote with tsar Nicholas the 2nd's
face on it;
you can rob me all you want,
i think the banknote to be cursed...
a cursed luck of lost reason and logic...
but when i look at that all familiar face
and stare into the ageing face of elizabeth the 2nd...
i see papered ****** gravitating
to forfeit a chance of excelling in Olympics...
Olympics indeed, of muscles turned
into oyster mush... about to be exercised
in breathing exercises of forgotten
oxygen toxins...
no... i don't own imperial russia's banknote
with Tsar Nicholas 2nd's face on it;
i did tell you my maternal great-grandfather
spoke 7 languages, didn't i?
only bothersome and subsequently fake
nobleness stresses its point...
the true aristocrats suffer with enforced
ailments that only breed an exaggerated libido,
to quote myself... *i'd **** anything that moves
within the framework of the trinity of mouth
**** and ****... my ******* are always
goosebumps frolicking to a tingle and i
just want to relax with an unloading of the content,

i didn't read marquis de sade for no reason,
other than the quoted bibliography of
the marquis himself, having read books
using only one arm, with the other...
"making bookmarks", ha.
Mateuš Conrad Sep 2015
yeah, let's compose the alphabet in music for each letter we try to sound like a wine bottle cork unplugged from vintage; it won't work, i known, but it might get a few skidding on gizmo go go, trying to democratise iran: try turning iran sunni first, you, you defrosted snowman worth a carrot and two chalk coal ******* writing: hardboiled into sight of believable. oh here comes a white man talking privy aloud with the rapper loosing breath, but keeping it up and replacing the pelvic hinges with easy, drool, rhymes; a kind of rubric tablature of scores for rodeo with alternative sounds to: moo, ow, ah, broomstick shoo, take the cow for a milking home from the dead bull dazzled into genesis on t.v.; or that other literati spectator sport of not reading but talking oneself into academic bibliography for an intro.

the great thing about being an alcoholic...
you never quiet know
when you're drunk or hungover;
but it makes up for great twilight sunsets
pooh lonely; ah ooh smooch -
kisses a honey stick stuck to ****
in a hollywood crescendo of
                     paparazzi and applause;
and anorexia; and dyslexic oiling for a facelift:
that's called smiling i have you know -
                          enter michael jackson - hippie hip he;
if i die aged thirty, i'll be happy to have
            been frisky twenty-nine into a thong.

or, alt., tell ****** about the swimming pool and the tadpole kenyans sprinting into impregnated landownerships of priests: sounds like this: pst - herr führer - die schwimmin poolst erst niener jessy ovens geeignet. no one said that african buttocks couldn't bayou the ships ashore, but they did; what?! i'm not the 12" dangle! you keep up racism, i'll keep up mozart's austria; alt. please see how censoring adjectives in relation to objects gives you a false moral subjectivity that's only a matter of pleasantries.
Redshift Nov 2014
purple broken lantern lights
in the finger numbing cold of this cement cage
white buzzing lights in my face.

mental strain:
an annotated bibliography
name,
class,
professor,
date.

intro.

i believe i am quite burnt out.

conclusion,
bibliography.
footnote
Mateuš Conrad Apr 2019
before i begin, a pre-scriptum...
         in my hand, this minute?
                   what a rare delight...
the Beauties of Sterne:
                                with some account of his life...
printed for J. Walker,
published by J. Walker, Paternoster Row &
   J. Harris, St. Paul's Church Yard...
London... 1811!
    and being a big "fan boy" of the fiction
that a bibliophile might have an adventure:
Roman Polanski's the Ninth Gate...
   now, for a book that's... 208 years old?!
it's not in bad shape... sure...
the hardcover is missing by a half...
but all the text is intact...
              obviously colouring of the pages...
but hey... i'm not a museum...
             the book is still fiddled with...
ha ha, the opening page with a picture
reads as follows:
   there are worse occupations in this world,
than feeling a woman's pulse...
perhaps a quote about... insensibility?
   it reads as follows:
       it is the fate of mankind, too often,
to insensible of what they may enjoy at
the easiest rate (sermon XLII)...
   besides, lucky for me youtube continues
to glitch from time to time...
    now looking more in line with channels
than individual artists...
   notably? Harakiri Diat (channel)...
eh... :wumpscut, the soft machine,
demdike stare, vomito *****, feindflug
weren't enough...
          turns out... there's more...
beyond penta, matutero and GloOMy
PhAntOM... well, please, allow me:
   filmmaker - the love market,
              la ***** bianca - demian...
hell... if you want to venture into the past?
i know one band that freaked out
my ex-girlfriend... gong - flying teapot...
or that song by greenskeepers, lotion...
               i thought i'd never see someone
become freaked out about music...
curios and also highly curious, yes...
but freaked out?
                 primitive knot - puritan...
demolition group - you better...
          1986 Yugoslav minimal electro...
Bruce Roach - Gut...
              and as it turns out...
    i look from this corner of the internet and find
absolutely no need to delve into
the dark web... install Tor...
           if you really want to...
  you'll find all you need... but you need
to sift through a bibliography of a book prior
to... it's all here... this sort of material
has an inbuilt filter... it filters out
             mainstream consumers of content...
i should know...
    3 websites that banned me,
1 suspended me...
                   i crossed the threshold...
    normie poetic: outcast *****...
           yet i still sometimes happened to chance
upon a will...
           lao che - soundtrack (the whole album
is decent) -
              


.i once heard it was based upon the following maxims: bogatemu wszystko wolno (the rich are allowed anything), siła razy gwałt (force multiplied by ****)... well... over the years, that much was true... but then i conjured a reply: nie wszystko wolno bogatemu (not everything is given an allowance to be expressed by the rich) and wola odiąć gwałt (will, having substracted ****): otherwise it's still wola razy gwałt (will, multiplied by ****).

****, i only just "woke" up from
this game,
you know that game...
oh i'm pretty sure you know it...
it's called
   pass the jew along...
   rudolf höss
      cited, among the list:
ibrahim ibn yaqub,
         radhanites (there's a surd
H in there, rad-'anites)
    casimir III...
esp. the latter...
           so.. give the current h'americans,
we're still playing the globalist
nomad game of: juggling the jews,
yes, no, maybe?
so my mother tended to
two old jewish women,
because, just "because"
their sons were active in
the "economics" of passing law
and techno-literacy?
oh... right... i "see"...
                            i... "see"...
in defence, of the "neglected" ones...
makes perfect sense,
de facto 51,
                  area 51 was always
a propaganda convert term
for Israel, rather than some area
bound to Nevada, wansn't it?
wasn't it?
                      ask me again
one year from now,
did we live peacefully among the jews?
they'll tell you the joke...
didn't the jews shoot,
with riffles,
   with bent barrels / sights
aiming at themselves rather
than the nazis?
       no, no soap jokes when
it comes to yews...
the yids...
      everyone in poland just
wondered: why so pacified?
        so blatant in walking into
an inferno?
                      you know...
it took Poland longer to surrender,
while being attacked by both
the Germans and the Russians,
than it took for the Fwench
to be attacked by the sole effort
of the Germans?
    funny... that...
                               i truly admire
some nazis, for their ingenuity...
notably? erwin rommel...
   lothar von arnauld de la periè(re)...
(subtle, i give you that one,
per-y'eh...
                 'old 'ack 'old 'ck
   h-b-h-b,
                                    rein in...
otherwise perié... ergo without
                                           the -re)...
michael wittmann...
and i'm a ******...
      **** me...
they didn't bomb paris,
might as well state:
they also didn't bomb
  marienburg or most of danzig...
Warsaw? taken down,
levelled, brick by brick,
        until no brick stood on brick...
              what?!
i thought the western capitalist-ico
communist insurgents
wanted target practice?
          i thought these people
wanted nazis, no?
          i'll admit... tiki torches?
you must have never looked
at european football hooligans...
tiki torches?!
you having a bbq?
            never heard of flares?        
- mind you...
you know what's worse beside
beind ridiculed?
having your intelligence
insulted...
i.e. do i look like someone
who managed to ****
your mother with a *******
harmonica,
or, am i, bound to the responsibility,
of your parents playing
the irresponsibility card,
attempting to convey a child
into existence aged circa 50
circa 45,
and what comes out is
an autistic cucumber?!
    **** me...
try giving ****** lessons
to circa 50 year olds;
and now the paradox...
   "i'm" the "schizophrenic"...
cool cool, coolio...
     i'll just hide in that "harem's"
worth of a brothel with
the prostitutes who tell
me they get s.t.d. checks on
a regular basis, o.k.?
_____

what am i to add to this?
not much, is there...
was the great gatsby by f. scott fitzgerald
ever great?!
  how satisfying it is to be unable
to please the crowd....
words, after all, are not bread...
how one wishes
for an anathema rather than
a martyr's embrace...
            one begins to imagine...
then one loses interest...
then...
                    peering through
the eye of a needle
watching a camel walk through...
one spots something outside
the realm of the metaphorical miracle...
do i have to?
      what if i remain to this side
of the eye of the needle?
what riches do i have that i cling to...
books & music...
does that make me rich?
what are the sort of riches where either
people plunder readily (music),
or do not engage with to begin
with?
who are ready to read...
i can claim to be a book thief...
i stole two books from my high school
library... the quran and the scarlet &
the black by stendhal...
            "stole"... i extended their
licance of being borrowed...
how am i rich: if my riches are the riches
no one would want to steal?!
i am rich... though...
               but i am rich in a both
materialistic / non-materialistic paradox
frame...
                what i own no one wants to
steal! why steal a first cheap edition
of a dickens' novel if you're not going
to read it!
              
       **** **** ****.... if they were such
philistines... when blitzing London,
why did st. paul's remain intact?
   "coinicidence"? i don't think so...
and why did they steal all those
art-works? again, "coincidence"?

                    they were people:
i find it uncomfortable to suit them up
in transcendence,
to be: epitome evil...
  to be the übermensch...
                   they loved art as much
as they loved being the antithesis
of the golden horde: gucci, dolce & gabbana
zz top: well dressed men...

     nazis loved art and fashion,
by far the best dressed army in the world
and history...

   ol' herman and otto came back
from the eastern front to a scared wife and mother...
people! they weren't mythical creatures...
the nazis can hardly become
chimeras as they become in the minds
of pseudo-communists of the western lands...

they are hardly the epitome of evil,
i know the 21st century narrative
deems them: "the perfect example"...
come on... they're not evil embodied
with not subsequent examples to be given
to... historical capitalism of evil:
there's always someone waiting,
some group of people to stage
a competition libra... and they will...
overcome the nazis...
it's only a question of ingenuity /
imagination...
           gas chambers was only industrial...
it will become personal in the years to come...
methodologically trained cultured
barbarians woken from a slumber...

the nazis were not: philistines...
   in no defence: didn't they speed up the creation
of the state of israel?
   didn't they? **** uncle:
   lavrentiy pavlovich Beria is going to state
the matters differently?
like hell he is...

        my family also suffered in that war...
sure, not in a concentration camp:
but on the front...
             there's even a joke that my
grandfather remembers:
the jews were shooting with bent nozzles
of riffles...
   as he also remembers two ss-men
who he asked for sweets,
and they would give them to him,
he'd as them: herr! bitte bon-bon!
   sweets so sweet that he would have
to rinse his hands under water
to unglue them from the sickly in-between...
how all the insurgent soviet soldiers
were teenagers and preferred to
sleep in pigstys and among the goats
in the hay...

how did the nazis become mythological
i will never understand,
at uni i had a **** history teacher,
canadian, she really liked my essay
on napoleon... how he was a great
strategist...
akin to?  

   erwin rommel wasn't a ****...
erwin rommel was, erwin rommel...
a great strategist...
        am i supposed to thrive in this
current year of polarized *******?
it's the current topic,
i can't escape it,
  sure, i'd love to have a Wordsworth
moment, lurking in me,
or an anna akhmatova breakthough...
instead?! i'm given this sort of *******
on a platter,
  and all that's missing are the wedges
of lemon and the eager oysters to
be gulped down... lucky me!

no, i don't like how the nazis are misrepresented
as both the übermenschen:
these mythological epitomes of evil
(no greater evil is to come? really?!)
and at the same time
as philistines: they stole art,
they ensured that critically cultural
documents of architecture were left
undisturbed... st. paul's cathedral...

         it's not like some otto or moritz
didn't come back home to a wife
and children... no...
he came back to the shadow cult
of the ******* hanging over him...

you know what the most haunting experience
i have ever experienced was?
Ypres... world war I site...
visiting a german cemetary...
compared to the allies cemetary?
**** me, what a meagre sight!
           the allies were burried with marked
graves, each man to his own cross...
the german burial ground?!
  mass graves....
eh: one marker: 200 bodies in one pit...
                 and here's the 21st century with
games about shooting: zee nat'zees...

   just visit the world war I cemetaries...
the ally cemetaries? square miles...
each man with his white cross...
german cemetaries? as mass graves go...
one marker per 200+ troops...
so... not that much space required...
less: bombast!
               pride & prejudice /
   pomp & circumstance...
   which the english speaking world is...
of the latter convenience to suit the narrative.

to reiterate...
   as a ******... the whole german fetish
isn't my kind of gig...
what with my grandmother being born
on the front... given opiates at an early
age so she would not cry and allow
the soldiers to locate her and my gread-grandparents...
but...
   they were the best dressed army in
the history of warfare...
they were not philistines and they certainly
weren't the mongolian golden horde...
i.e. they stole art, notably jewish artwork...
and if a luftwaffe squadron were to drop
a bomb on st. paul's? they'd probably
be shot...
  after all... Posen wasn't destroyed,
Breslau wasn't destroyed...
        Danzig wasn't destroyed...
Cracow wasn't destroyed...
             o.k., half of Warsaw was,
but we know why that happened
(or at least i do... idealist students who
thought they could fight the enemy
with slingshots and air-pistols)...
why? the Germans were simply thinking:
oh... we'll just be moving back...
i once explained it to myself...
they weren't exactly some mythological
grand evil template...
so i started thinking about them as:
Hans von Seeckt...
  or Otto Hertz...
              or some other german random
soldier...
      well... you should travel to Ypres,
Belgium... and visit a German cemetary
from war world I... then visit
the allies graveyard...
       each soldier, individually buried...
with his pwetty pwetty weißkreuz -
mostly named...
                 now visit a german cemetary...
mass.... graves...
                they just dumped them,
heaped them...
                        to me they were people...
you can't exactly reason with a mythological
evil - an archeological evil,
   an archetypical evil...
          for an archetypical evil?
try the nuclear family...
                         ******... that sort of thing...
child abuse... too many actors
were involved in this story,
too many mistakes, too many naive blunders...
evil on this scale is easily diluted...
which is why it's taught as history,
in schools...
   no one will teach children about...
oh... say... the Wiener Blut scenario...
   Josef Fritzl...
                    i'm pretty sure this will not be
taught in a history class...
                or... the H. H. Holmes Hotel story...
but it might become a jack the ripper
tourist-fetish... might it not? well, it already is.
daniela Mar 2015
my mother is a journalist
and my father is out of work
she’s spinning stories
and he’s just staring out the window
you are recording my mistakes
and i am selling yours onstage.
so i’ll give myself to strangers,
and flinch away when you touch me
it’s always too much and not enough.
i’ll plaster my heart all over the world,
and refuse to read you anything.
i write too much and i don’t speak enough,
my entire bibliography a tour de force of silence
and the things i wish i’d said.
you could cut out my tongue and
not notice the difference.
sewn shut lips with a poem slipping out,
i'm too scared to read it out aloud.
but i’ve been learning that being scared
just means that you give a ****.
words have always been easy,
saying them is so much harder.
and i’m not looking for anybody to color me in
but i’ll keep writing you poems until you feel something.
i love like somebody’s always
looking over my shoulder
and i know, i know
that’s no way to live.
how should i expect to bare my soul
if i’m still scared of it,
don’t i know that half-truths will
never compare to it?
cause and effect, expose and protect
i’ve got a notebooks full of ****
i wish i was brave enough to say to you.
but i'm tongued tied;
half of me is still in my head,
and the other half is stuck in my heart
and i’m trying not fall apart,
i’m trying to keep my ******* head
separated from my ******* heart.
i’m trying, i am, but i think there will always
be part of me that sees you
and memorizes everything new like a line in a poem.
it’s a song without a chorus
it’s an anthem without a single verse
we are actors with no lines to rehearse
we are missing everything we were supposed to find.
but if i tried to tell you this
i’d just stutter my way through
and all the sentiment would get lost in the  
“um, but, uh, like, i, er”
on its way to you,
my nervous system’s got anxiety
and i want to be seen but not scrutinized.
i am in the room full of my mistakes
and they are telling me ghost stories about you.
i’m stuck so deep inside my own head
i can’t find my way out,
i’m just hiding out in the ruins of my own life.
my mouth’s not good at small talk
when gravity’s holding me down,
these words are loaded but the gun is empty.
and i remember the way
you used to talk about your dreams
like you’d forgotten them, tongue heavy
with nostalgia as you told me
about all these bright-eyed ideas
that you now called delusions of grandeur
with a shake of your head and a grim set in your mouth.
and i remember how you looked at me;
i don’t want to be just another thing you regret.
and i’m tired of being less afraid
to shed my skin onstage than in front of you,
i’m tired of choking all the things i’ve never said.
a penny for your thoughts and
a dollar for your heart
ask me what i’m thinking,
i swear i won’t flinch.
to be real, this poem isn't about anyone in particular just some musings on how i find it easier to share parts of myself like my writing with strangers than the people i'm closest to. life's funny like that.
Laurens Mar 2017
Lessons that’d keep coming throw me against rocks and stars
Vacuum the space of stories I cherished
the bibliography of another misunderstood wanderer

Fresh is today, yet dusty is mind’s wraparound
Begging the soul to hold on to the noose
to paint the portrait with wounds’ blood

Dissonance thrives
Yet roots are growing

Flurried, awaiting the washaway
from someone lovingly reaching out, understanding, acknowledging
giving nothing more but a smile of compassion

The dance awaits
for dissolution of sown death

No future will come for the waiting ones

I’ll sculpt all within and without that I can
I’ll keep on refusing to stop at the mask
I’ll strengthen what needs to become stronger
and tear down all which was never meant to be

In the end there’s only one direction
norris rolle Oct 2012
A big mistake
We propagate
Unthoughtfully.
We need to shake
Away from the
Philosophy
That we can hate,
Because of our
Geography,
Or we can take
The truth from all
Our progeny.
Give us a break!
With all your
Religiosity.
You bunch of fakes!
Confusing
Bibliography.
For goodness sake
Cut out the hypocrisy!
It is too late,
There is no more
Monopoly.
Just keep the faith,
And if you do it
Properly
You will escape
The owner of
The property.
Francie Lynch Mar 2017
I'm not so sure about you,
As I am of me;
But I'm a Wikipedia Poet:
You don't need to believe what I write,
I just fabricate,
All of it.
No annotated bibliography,
No reliable footnotes,
No discerning endnotes,
With few promising references.
I don't expect believers,
Just read,
For what it's worth.
Take what you want,
Leave the rest.
Just give me a nod.
It could be true;
It's on the Internet.
Mateuš Conrad Aug 2016
among the dead, two heroes, Octavian, and Philip Augustus
(from the house of Capet)... to all hopes of a revived Hollywood
encircling them, fermenting as many credible names -
strange people, poisons that smell like perfume - what?
lord anthony is dead - is that how one says it?
simply as that... mark anthony is dead -
the soup is hot, the soup is cold - anthony is living, anthony is dead -
SHAKE WITH TERROR WHEN SUCH WORDS
PASS YOUR LIPS... FOR FEAR THEY BE UNTRUE
AND ANTHONY CUT-OUT YOUR TONGUE FOR A LIE...
AND IF TRUE... FOR YOUR LIFETIME BOAST
THAT YOU WERE ABLE TO SPEAK HIS NAME
IN HIS DEATH... A DYING OF SUCH A MAN
MUST BE SHOUTED... SCREAMED!
IT MUST ECHO BACK FROM THE CORNERS OF
THE UNIVERSE!
ANTHONY IS DEAD! MARK ANTHONY OF ROME
LIVES NO MORE!
i know of only two men be worth a taxing memory,
a taxman's assertion worth of bookkeeping...
that one was Octavian, and the latter remnant of Charlemagne,
namely Philip Augustus, father of the Magna Carta...
beyond the celebrated procession of Westminster Abbey...
there the minded tear...
they binding i admire most... keen puppeteers,
such that i too suffer sufficing to be with the smallest army of
exercise in the demand of owning land bereaved
from ever being lost, as sufficient demand for
posthumous reenactment of the up-kept bibliography.
Mateuš Conrad Feb 2023
502 bad gateway bypass:

title - veil-machine
body - otherwise no curtains
found.


perhaps: aujourd'hui, maman est morte sounds better in German... heute, mein mutter ist gestorben... maybe: at least in my eyes that have inverted themselves from hearing external sounds and summon thought to the hall of music and said: thinking is a sound, mind you: thinking is all the sense jumbled up - never mind "hearing" oneself "think" or for that matter... without hearing: on the broken bones in fingertips of gesticulating frantically the same as: could you please spread butter on my toast to... i'm drowning! help me!

i very much like the opening line from one of my favourite books... favourite is sort of stretching it, i picked it up by accident in a Barnardo's second hand book store on Nicholson St. in Edinburgh during the Fresher's Week, when i lost my virginity to Isabella and decided that i would adamantly learn French... although i hated French in high school i thought: well... if we started slow and she introduced me to Japanese Anime of a kind i didn't know before... i remember she scolded me for having three picures on the wall, one of Plato, one of Napoleon and one of Marquis de Sade... she didn't mind Marquis de Sade... but virginity for a man is nothing to be kept... it's something that one wants to get rid off... so i started this French course, failed it, because... i didn't attend any of the classes... except for the literature classes... were... to no "oddly enough" we were studying The Stranger... seeing as i "pre-meditatively" bought the book in english... i had to buy the book in French...

oh, the French language... it's almost as bad as English when it comes to surds, i.e. silent letters that are not heard when spoken but clearly visible when written... like in English... little words: to and no vs. too, row "vs." row... to row in a boat... with oars... and a row of birds sitting on a telephone line... a horse is a horse is a gallop and a stirrup and there's also a hoarse... throat... glug glug... a hoarse throat... there's a soar throat too and that's different to i saw and sea-saw and Warsaw and soaring... which is a terrible way of saying: sorry...

rigid was never a language for me... but love is stupid and losing your virginity to an older girl is stupid and... well... i might as well have went to the oral exam at the end of the year and spoken Polish... or tried German... pretending to forget what course i took... instead i just sat there like an idiot... a castrated ... + an idiot... but hell! i aced the literary side of things... i got a 1st for my interpretation of The Outsider... grades being grades... not everything in life that you learn within the confines of: that acid-riddled memory-erosion cesspit of pedagogy has any market value trans-evaluation of: good grades equals better pay... this was a lesson for life...

mother died today. or maybe it was yesterday, i don't know...

for one? terrible punctuation,
i once heard my English teacher tell me...
never begin a sentence in a paragraph of a journalistic
column with a conjunction, akin to OR or AND...
it's bad grammatical etiquette:
it's one thing to reinvent sushi by mixing it up
with some dried, fried onions and a sriracha mayonnaise
and another to serve the same fried dried onions
with a sickly sweet almost Hoisin resembling sauce...
with slices of raw salmon on a bed of rice
rather than those rolls with still the raw salmon
but with some cucumber and creamy cheese
and black sesame to go with it...

maybe i can rewrite that aujourd'hui in German again,
returning to English for German LEGO...
mutter gestorben heute; oder veilleicht
    es war gestern: ich weiß nicht....

i like this: ich weiß nicht...
        it's not... i repeat... it's not:
                         es ist mir egal...
i.e. it's not: i don't care... care... no wonder it's so
pivotal in the German tongue that
Heidegger made CARE so pivotal in his thinking
since: it's so pivotal in the German language
when the German language is translated...
there is no simple, word-for-word,
i.e.  i don't know: ich weiß nicht.
i worry: ich bin besorgt
   eh? i worry is indefinite...
   i is indefinite... there is no definite i...
i struggle is an indefinite phrase...
which i made a joke of once: mein kampf is a definite
expression via ownership...
ich kampf: i struggle is an indefinite expression
of "ownership": since... at any given time
my ego is swayed to "think" of "its" own "existence"
through a muddle of personal memory,
memory erased by pedagogy,
dreams... other people's thoughts...
mein: definitely, since own...
ich? indefinitely, since hey presto here one minute...
hey presto... Houdini pulled a rabbit out
of a top hat not by the ears but by the tail...

today within the confines of tomorrow...
but what is a "today" when you wake up
and remember a dream...
was the dream from yesterday?
was the dream related to yesterday?
just because you went to sleep yesterday
and woke up today... doesn't mean
the interlude of dreaming you had
might make any linear sense relating yesterday
to today or for that matter tomorrow...
so... muddling the yesterday with today
given the accenting of dreams on the psyche...
well... ich weiß nicht (i don't know)
is a rather "passive" attempt... hell: a most proactive
attempt to compartmentalize grief...
it's not: I DON'T CARE...
oh... i do care... but i want to be numb to
the reality that comes first and the knowledge
that comes after of the fact that... there's...
i swear German as a tongue would require
another Heidegger to explore the word
ABSENCE... FEHLEN...
   Abwesenheit is too close, synonymously,
with Abstrahieren...
                heit (-ness)
                   hieren (here)
    hereness... hierenheit... counter to da-sein?
that Dasein is: there-being... me asking: there's being
and be subsequently conjuring hierenheit?!
coincidence... unless that £60 i spent on the black notebooks
and another £30+ more i will spend on the final volume?
maybe?!

maybe that's why i'm so attracted to the continental
mode of thinking, Germanic or otherwise...
i find that, as much as the English adore pressurising
people as atoms into an atomised stated of:
suddenly! the individual was born!
out of thin air! out rebellion!
out of... the demands for everyone else getting
their fair share of intellectual growth...
there is no intellectual growth in the English mind:
the English are too sensible a people to complicate
the matters of thought if there's no:
******* COMMON SENSE FOR THEM AT THE END!
"they" even have a word for it...
it amazes me how sometimes i forget specified nouns
for their destined use... ergonomics?
that will do for a while...

the English don't tend to deal with reality by creating
pockets of abstract reality of:
nicht-sein-da...
            which is a splendid joke that can't be
unravelled by translating Dasein from Deutsche...
for me there is either: sein-da und nicht-sein-da...
a future of a concern, a care...
a waiting pit of that carefully adjusted performance
art of doing the bit of the mortal lot...
i sometimes wake up at night woken up
by the simple fact of mortality:
and i'm glad to be snuggling in bed, alone
with only thinking as my companion...
at least with the thinking my ego can walk through
and peer at mirrors... see its grotesque nature
it's parasitic gluing to a "me" together with
all those wasted daydreams and acts of
non-fruition...
  
i find nothing in English thought that might give
me architecture or backbone to complete
individuality: a process of individuation...
nothing in Locke... i have not bothered with English
"thinking"... the infrastructure is too sensible...
of transport of taxes of... whatever the:
kleinmann erachten unbedingt!

for the simple fact... what is a public intellectual
in the anglo-sphere? a person who goes into
the public domain with a ******* bibliography?
seriously?
backlog of ideas or, something?
regurgitating ideas of the more shy of the intellectual
heap of dung that once could be called
the iq herd?
        at least by reading continental thinkers i
have enriched my private life...
perhaps i enjoy my work perhaps i don't...
i find it absolutely unnecessary to find friendship...
if i can at least stand myself,
conquer this barrage of randomness coming
from an otherwise untameable ego...
let it pass let is pass i say to the innermost "not-i"
while the outermost "i-i" shouts belligerent day-mares
of.... e.g. being cut-short in a queue to a bus...
let that ****** slide... wait... until i bring
forth the reigns of scribbling finger-tips
and all thinking stop! when there's a clear graphic
for grammar, construction, punctuation
and abbreviations (if necessary) of seen sentences:
seen sentences not some ghosts of mere thought!

gut... mein mutter ist nicht tot...
nicht heute, nicht gestern: noch nicht morgen...
i just thought it was weird,
the comparison...
the dimmed lights of the hospital room
she was wheeled into...
and... the dimmed lights of the brothel room
i usually **** prostitutes in...
dimmed lights...
i carefully plucked the grapes off the vines
for her and placed them before her...
i pinched pieces of brownie dough
and dropped them into a bucket of vanilla ice
cream for her... which she gladly ate...
i watched as she ate that baked potato with
an inverted gluttonous pain from coming out
of the anaesthesia...
forgetting she was half alive half head...
some other quarter falling asleep another missing
quarter talkative...
those dimmed lights and the sarcastic green of
the demands of Hippocrates charming the serpent
as: to no avail... the usurper of the sexualised
metaphor, aged throughout Europe,
serpent, the bringer of temptation and hardly
the wisdom...
long before dinosaur bones were discovered
the people were conjuring up fire breathing dragons...
like... pre-meditatively... what?
the fire born was not the meteor and the fall-out
and yet some dinosaur remains
remained alive while the bigger breeds died?!

to think i might have read Kant or Heidegger or anyone
for the purpose of quasi-pedagogy and not have
read said authors for gains in the realm
of personal gains of obstructing access to
the sort of: puddle-people: pfützemenschen...
people who like to see life's point as:
one complication after another
by allow less than complicated people complicate
their already simple lives...
isn't a simple life worth salvaging?
isn't it?!

as they rolled her in from the hysterectomy operation...
in some, rare, cases... a woman's womb acts
like a man's hernia...
i suffered from a hernia as a toddler...
unlike in men... the female version pushes
a piece of tissue inwards... rather than outwards...
my great-grandmother walked with a bulging sack
of a third ******* of a disused womb until her death
because she was too old to have an operation
guided by the Hippocratic concerns:
her heart her stomach might not salvage her
morality with the applied anaesthetic...

but it felt very much like going to a brothel...
i was looking at my mother drifting in and out of a morphine
15min snooze button...
my father looking morbidly worried...
me? smiling face... giggling... trying to fill a space...
my father is a morbidly worried
swan... i sometimes wonder...
would i be worse off caring for my old father
if my mother died before him...
or would i be better off if my father died off
before my mother... i sometimes wonder...
it's still a coin flip... since the reality is yet to come
and i'm having the abstract ready...
this is me looking at my mother in a secure environment
secured by prescribed injections of morphine...
she has also seen me in my "prime"...
what's 40 units x 7 days a week?
280 units of alcohol in a week...
40 units? one bottle of 1 litre of whiskey per day...
when i was at my highest borne Berserker in scribbling
for people who are yet to be born...

we came home i heated up some leftover pasta,
some leftover chicken wings...
some clear chicken soup... it would be considered
a chicken stock by western culinary standards...
ROSÓŁ... but were carrots added?
was celeriac, was celery, was a leek, was root parsley
and fresh parsley, garlic added?
served with vermicelli?
           i watched him relax and watch West Ham beast
Derby in the FA cup... calmly...
the cats were fed... already sleeping in each
of our two beds...

            oh sure sure... romance... like that isn't too impossible
these days...
the congestion of older generations?
to replace them with what?
we cucks united bridging gaps with the already
satiated single-mommies and puppies
of: cuck...
             jeez... headaches from no known sources...

well i can tell you how similar a visit to a hospital
is similar to a visit to a brothel...
you're chasing...
i found myself chasing the queuing of mortality
with my mother today...
only three days ago i was chasing the queuing of
****** experience with a *******...
i'm yet to join the queue of
losing my father...
i know of losing my great-grandfather: vaguely,
i certainly know of losing my great-grandmother
and i know of losing my grandfather...
i'm yet to experience the loss of a friend,
or... "friend"... someone i used to know in high school...
by then it will be almost like losing
someone equivalent to
Michael Schumacher... or... Nelson ******* Mandela...
importance of whatever and that sniff of ZILCH...

a ******* cat with less to say than already said
will have more to say upon its passing than
Neil Armstrong's theatre for the global populace
and the moon conquered... one step for...
some dared not blink some slept through it...
just as long as the technology of it being televised was
real: it doesn't matter whether it was real...
if reinventing the canvas for a painting was
to be translated into the modern world...
television, per se, as the canvas... would... and is...
more important... than whether
it' a comparison of... the laziest example...
Leonardo's Mona Lisa or Picasso's the Weeping Woman...
NIQAB and the BEAUTY
NAKEDNESS and the BEAST...
or rather... NIQAB and the forever thirst for MYTH
of Woman as once, only then and ever...
faking to decipher by a Flaubert...
the ***** in my mind is the Madame Bovary
for women to pretend to be...
obviously they won't... but? does that matter?

hmm... first in german, then in english

i'm under the impression, that this breed of cats
i'm given the authority of: Maine *****...
behave like dogs... and unlike cats...
how clingy they are, less to me and more to my abodes...
they simply recognise me as the possessor
of space and not a timing of space:
with the requirement of others to fill the void...

katzen sich benehmen wie ***̄DE!
absolve all use of diacritical usage
within the staged, up! "lifting" of h to H...
keep i dotted from above within the confines
of I... or J...
are those speckled "hens" necessary

     ah what fun i could have with this
tongue so barren with the implosion of Latin
with what fellow European tongues ascribed
their idiosyncrasy to...
but of course:
           aber natürlich!
Ęnglisch nicht!
                   ßo! die welt überflutet diese inseln!

sie kam mit ihr zeppeline...
mit ihr senf...
mich? mich?!
ich kam mit die trauer...
keine hure könnte verstehe...

the grey the old the white and the black:
the night and the death to come!

der graue das alte das weiß und das Schwarze:
die  nacht und der tod, kommen.

death before life seems so less not-welcome
when speaking just a little bit of German!
mein gott! what a relief to have found
such miserably happy people allocated
a step-by-step realism of abstracting
pocketed-senses of... to **** with
that "umlaut of Hinduism"!
Heinrich... *******... Tibet suits you oh so well!
******* skiing in that crisp-cut welcoming bond with
the Buddha to serve no future Buddha under the Chinese
regime...

       tat ich vergessen etwas?
                          möglicherweise... sie?

me never think i think this tongue through...
mich noch nie denken ich denken diese zunge durch...

moren bein quartal nach elf...

getoastet roggen-brot:
             pochiert-ei
         spitzen... klacks von
hähnchenspermaeigelbpapst...

                  n'est ce'pas: die toten sind tot?
Ken Pepiton Apr 2021
This is possible.
Soul possession in owned patience, no mortgage,
no refi,
pieced together idle words,
used and abused, reused
food for thought
gleaned and horded patience.
All redeemed, for full worth in your eye.

What all we know, forms, in patience
fire,
for instance,
not long ago, you know, fire
was
craft, the making of it, was magic
as anything
witnessed, seen and attested to by two
or twelve or twenty, however many

five hundred, okeh, 500 miles walking,
while 2 seemed too far,
patience, life is a test, you are the best at
resisting
the gottabe this
way
mine,
my child, my future seed sown, grown wild,
twisted
espelliered, oh so, there was a wall
around the garden, which
was there for a reason
in the story,

oh, so many stories in ever are untold.
s'cool, we got contingency mods

we are ready, right? You read a whole lot to be
ready, when now happens

as if the story took a million years to arrive at
now, your page, or chapter, or name, just

your name, after your ears fell off, there
you found it, in the bibliography of the book of life

as listed in the amazon cloud. Chronos order.

First test to ever after now, what is the Gebser handle on it?
The Ever-Present Origin.

-- stop flash 2021 link to the as youwere a mazda, the name,
thing spread-winged thing on a wheel with a stiffened spiral,
****** media image in ever now, that symbol, bird with too wide wings
on a unicycle with spiral spokes in some
iterations, then
leafing branch tree structuring shape
spokes
in a wheel in a wheel,
gears and wheels to balance time and worth
the ef- fort if I can okeh
I kan das  sig gefun den
dat
dare
straight center outer way oomphala always starts
in any seed or ideal encompassing all the information needed
the zoroastrian symbol is related… at the avian level of sci-use, lizard brain, where t-cells train,
art instituted entertain ment, tthis is us sorta
see the totem, see the flag, see the fire, see us dance
see the shadows,
those dance too.

to form a piece of every theory of everything with words in it.
Word.
We be all that ever matters, at moments like this.
Doncha love the cheesiness,
ripe, , message
says
it still smells like food.
Stomach rumbles, there is a word for that, bunny trail,
brain bubble,
been there done that and the whole gang from 10-18, the novel,

all of em, Notacrook, the whole cast, on that stage
in this book of my life with you in it.

We can work some wonders with 2014 tec + the connection
Ai ai ai, I say, I love to say I love living now

time is as always, changing, to the beat of my own tin drum.
We won.
We do not study war, we study life, and life is a story all its own.

---------------------


Pure, mere realm of mind in time
immaterial ever origin fin ginfinginfingin
imagine
an engine that starts
but but but you never knew such things were known

as common sensed events, shadows shown on walls
for all the seers, in the shade of this wall
arising in the book of life I am involving in my solution…

FTA… to this day it does mean find the answer,
but you can reinterpret am-big-u-is-us words say
FTA always think first first to attack, sir

it means, first to attack, t' me.

soon's I see the whites of those eyes comin' up my
bunker's hill,
if I have to -- glitch have hold to of -- must say
he's too old to cuss the mustard any more,
let all the seed blowwildwisht away

Peace, in my time. DID I imagine this?
In a way, I did, I think.
I made a way this could happen, and it did,
because I did not do something wrong
at one of the right times to do
something in the former
time-state-stage e re en
volvement in humus re-entropication, getting old
maturing adul-tatifity
this idea of dying, so slow
I can see trees grow, and the crow in the momma pine
musta died, he never came back after that last big ******
in february, I think, around the time
my house ate a tab of acid, 2021.

Tep. Yep. could be we stretch a point and make some
thing be
real enough to feel if there was a 10 wpm to 2 or 3 each
breath
or beat of your heart, as mine
stops
- thinks back to the ori-gin fin gin
- point
- spark
in the stretching, on the rack, you know the image, stretch
FREEDOM
splat.

Not that. This realm of timeless reason being.

Thinking iferies you must imagine
or not sense, not sense as non
presence
in time to glimpse the if that winks at you and laughs,

you saw, says this other, joy-driven, you can feel it,
feel it, this is
eu-daemonical ha, I knew it, we have a recipe for this,
I wrote it down

---------- but this works if you stir it in with the rest
at the end of your last war, you can make a fine rest
with just this little bit of patience built by reading this, twice.
Possession of one's own soul, patience, all you can muster, that's the price. Or I can sell you seed for one holy cow, in the dna of a bull I rode in on. Piled here.
Juliana Apr 2021
I am bamboozled.
The instructions are
a monotonous contradiction.

For every tale
I read of traitorous bloodlust,
of holy hypocrisy,
my motivation to finish
this ****** bibliography
escapes my body,
flailing itself into
the constellations.

I am left nothing more
then a gelatinous sack,
a sorrowful student
resembling some
squashed cranberries.
Lawrence Hall Oct 2021
Lawrence Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

                           The Poets of Rapallo, a Review

The Poets of Rapallo, Lauren Arrington, Oxford University Press is a brilliant first draft; one looks forward to reading the completed work.

As it is, Dr. Arrington has accomplished brilliant research on the poets -  Yeats, Bunting, Pound, Aldington, MacGreevy, Zukofsky - and their acquaintances who happened to be in the Italian resort town Rapallo (they were not a coterie) in the 1920s and 1930s. The notes alone run to 54 pages of too-small type, and the bibliography to 8.

Unhappily, the text appears to have been rushed, possibly by an impatient publisher, and along with numerous small mistakes there are some serious failures in stereotyping, hasty generalizations predicated on little evidence, and a few condemnations more redolent of Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor than a scholar.

One of the best things about The Poets of Rapallo is the exposition explaining why a great many intellectuals were attracted to Italian Fascism as it was idealistically presented through propaganda early on and not as the moral and ethical disaster it soon proved to be.

Mussolini cleverly promoted his program as primarily cultural, a reach-back to the artistic and architectural unities of an imagined ancient Rome restored and enhanced with modern science and technology. He promoted the arts for his own purposes, of course, but deceptively. In almost any context the construction of schools, libraries, museums, theatres, and cinema studios would be perceived as a good, and absent any close examination accepted by everyone. But in Mussolini’s scheme these cultural artifacts, like Lady Macbeth’s “innocent flower,” concealed the lurking serpent: wars of conquest, poison gas, bombings of undefended cities, death camps, institutionalized racism, mass murders, and other enormities.

The Fascist sympathies of W. B. Yeats and other influencers (as we would say now) in the Irish Republic, including Eamon de Valera, are certainly revelatory. That the new nation came close to goose-stepping through The Celtic Twilight might help explain Ireland’s curious neutrality during the Second World War.

Professor Arrington explains all this very well, and initially is professionally objective. Most of the Rapallo set were not long in learning what Fascism was really about and quickly distanced themselves from it in some embarrassment.  Some were later even more of an embarrassment in their denials and deflections; few seemed to have been able to admit that, yes, they were suckered, as we all have been from time to time

But with the exception of the unrepentant and odious Pound, who was himself a metaphorical serpent to his death, Professor Arrington seems to lose her objectivity with the others.

And why Pound?

As with Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, it is difficult to take seriously someone who considers Pound’s pretentious, pompous, show-off word-soup Cantos to be literature. Pound is now famous only for being famous, and while Arrington appears to forgive Pound for his adamant and malevolent anti-Semitism and his pathetic subservience to Mussolini, in the end she is ruthless toward anyone else who, under Pound’s influence, in his or her naivete even once told an inappropriate joke, appreciated Graeco-Roman architecture, or perhaps saw Mussolini at a distance. This is inexplicable in a text that is otherwise professional and compassionate in avoiding what C. S. Lewis identifies as chronological snobbery.

One also wishes the author had discussed Pound’s post-war appeal as a fashionable prisoner adored or at least pitied by a new generation (Elizabeth Bishop, how could you?).

The book ends abruptly, as if the author were interrupted by a demand by the printers for it now, and so, yes, one hopes for a complete work to follow.

The Poets of Rapallo is not served well by the Oxford University Press, who appear to have been more interested in cutting costs than in presenting a work of scholarship to the world. The print is far too small, the garish spine lettering is more suited to a sale-table ****** mystery, and the retro-1930s holiday cover would be fine for an Agatha Christie yarn but not for a book of literary scholarship.

A question outside the scope of this book but more important is this: why, in a free nation, do so many people feel the desperate need almost to worship a leader? Yes, of course we have presidents and chiefs of police (some of whom love sport shiny admiral’s stars on their collars, and what’s that about?) and bosses and so on, and we depend upon their wise leadership. But why do people wear pictures of some Dear Leader or other on their clothing and chant his name?

I think the president or the famous movie star should wear YOUR name on his shirt and pay YOU for the privilege.

                                                      -30-
The Poets of Rapallo
Masego Pitso Mar 2019
In loving memory of:  Love

Born :BBC died: 21st century

A connotation of redundancy has been linked between the name of the corpse and false prophets who claim to have studied the bibliography of his name.

Feeding the hearts of the weary and weak with a plate full of lies and deceit.. all in his name.

Love had suffered from severe depression and chronic Cancer. The false accusations were like dark carbonic acid ripping every piece of his lungs and self esteem.

He had witnessed  what we'd call the shock of Africa.

A blazing hot human furnace across the street of which was the body of the innocent.

He reeks parrafin and the blazing  flames on this body were bursting with bits and bits of his inner organs high up in the air.

Filling up the entire neighborhood like it's confetti. The smoke from the human fumes were running away, higher and higher it went to catch the first plane to freedom.

Alongside it spelled out " free my brothers and sisters from xenophobia!".

The raw lies spread into different continents like grapevines. This set
A trend we still see today, one we're all victims of.

His sacrifices aren't respected anymore. His death brings along thousands of feminine murders carrying along ****** weapons in their wombs, men who lash their rage on weak spirits who try by all means to build a home.

Countries raging back and forth with gigantic pistols and nuclear power. No mercy from the perpetrators or consolations for their ruthless acts.

Their eyes are filled with aggression, hate , anger and bitterness.
The brittle innocent beings left homeless on the side of a sewage stream.

No food for the day, just nothing but mealie meal and water.
Squatter camps are all plugged together like small pieces of puzzles.

Humanity knows no peace, no love and affection. 

 Our generation has stabbed the word love with an iron sword and has left it bleeding untill it could no longer take the pain any more.

He was a friend , father and a grandfather  .
Rest in eternal peace.
Mateuš Conrad Apr 2018
/because you could really get a square, or any coherent mundane geometric narrative of re- re- re-... out of a *******... or tell someone with a size 11 shoe, that a size 9 will be, just as comfortable... and while the English language goes to ****, thank **** it has no mother and has no son in the guise of me... with the current lexi- of non-cis non-binary yadda yadda abracadabra... a return to stern, dog breeding terminology... pedigree, mongrel... hybrid... can't really as the semite for an authentic opinion, came from a people that sat on their ***** for long watching chickens walk down a village dirt road... anything to redefine, those half-***** screaming into a tin-can tied to a string... after all, Greenwich... outside of the English speaking world, we like to call the natives: Greenwich bellybuttons, or rather,  bellybuttons of the world: pępki świata... as a person of acquired tastes, it's turning into a heartache, seeing english so deformed... perhaps by both technology and youth... a Frankenstein to behold... and when in Paris, did I speak any french? not really, but I had the audacity to cling to an Italian girl who could, and a Russo-Canadian girl, who also could... but you still managed to meet people who understood that english,  not french, was and is the lingua franca of tourism... obviously not so much when it comes to commerce... and banking, is not exactly a commerce... neither is the media... e.g.? re.: Münster... on the first day 3 people (not including the attacker) were killed and 30 injured... on the second day 2 people were killed (including the killer) and 20 injured... who the hell still thinks that the media juggernaut is a trebuchet to fling a Meursault into the limelight? it's naive to think that such people are seeking fame... a ******* butter knife and a glass of beer will always be more "famous"... and the man who discovered beer, well... good luck reading Plato... comes the staring into the abyss, and the abyss not staring back, whispering a words: ad absurdum counter ad nauseam...


too much love poetry, too much love
poetry that isn't risqué,
plain mundane out of fear...
a fear of being found dead 2 weeks
later...
not mundane to say the leat,
just: a zoological observation
of a lion, rather than stark naked
on th savannah...
or thereabouts...
                but to have to exhaust
poetry for love? this sort of love?
i prefer the memory of candyfloss
sitting on a stump of wood...
        maybe that's why i find the current
movies exhausting,
           bankrupt writing,
or rather,  current movies an modern
art, minimalism, minimalism,
large open spaces replaced by
   strobe c.g.i.
point being, when did the fallacy
of subjectivity come into
contact with dialectics?
   just asking,  because i somehow
cannot conceive an objectivity of one,
in that,  not having to cite
a bibliography, third part sources...
can't a subjective opinion
be just as true as an objective
herd nod?
    mesmerising that
     subjectivity should be deemed
as sub-dialectics,
           bellow engagement...
somehow contaminated...
are pronouns in that respect
subjective? silly question...
chess pro noun: or solving crosswords...
pro nouns, meaning:
in favour of remembering
  names of objects...
            and further into the exposed
muddle of atomised grammar...
objectivity is when you stress
   pre nouns...
   otherwise, someone is to be found
vehemently stressing a pivot
word, and that gives him or her away?
all of a sudden objectivity is
regarded with more respect,
      objectively, perhaps talking
about things with a blank canvas,
orientating oneself where
you're not allowed to use nouns...
the closest you can get to asking
a co-worker for a hammer on
a construction site is to hum a hmm...
is that objectivity?
        hence the classically mundane
narrative...
   because i just wanted to say
that a richness of one's own memory
creates a cinematic void...
i can't estimate how many hours
I've sat drinking, more entertained
by my memories, than any recent film...
just like today, having refreshed
a pale nectarine kitchen with
lemon peel... i already started thinking
about the corridor...
                  but before that, during
the day...
    why is spring in England,
why is summer in England...
  so... ******?! i wish there was
a better word for it...
     god i've missed continental spring...
i haven't experienced, continental
spring for... 22 years...
                  deep continental spring,
past Germany,  above the Balkans
below the Baltic...
      22 years of 22 springs,
spent on that bog of a sinking ship
known as England...
rain... rain... more rain...
     dampness and 21 Beehive Ln.
Gants Hill just across the synagogue
above the estate agent...
    dampness and those *******
   woodlice...
          22 years having spent each mid
April to late May under
earl Grey the ******* ponce...
                     no one I sleep better
in this part of the world,
the body has synchronised itself
with the fauna and a heritage past
and the mind seems revived...
to the scents of waking trees,
   to the sight on national news
of bears waking from their wintry
hibernation in the Tatra mountains...
ecologists testing mosquito repellents,
anti-rabies snacks dropped into forests
for foxes to eat...
         and only the one direction
traffic of English... comes a headache
having to listen to it, comes easier writing
about it...
              hence the old woman decided
to take my case of the presidium...
tomorrow i'll have my photo taken,
take my British passport,
declare myself as myself before
a bureaucratic piece of paper
with a signature, wait less than two weeks
and get my Polish citizen identification card...
plan B...
       just in case...
          just in case it becomes normal
for spring and seeing so many
children playing outside the 2nd level
balcony overlooking a graveyard...
boys as old as 6 / 7 playing with
wooden swords...
     teenagers sitting on benches
in the cool night till 10:30 pm...
                               and everything else
worth living for, lived in a small town...
far away from the London rats...
     far away from a country that understands
bilingualism as schizophrenia...
              maybe i am mad,
but the ones who think I am, are no more
sane...
                than me...
                                first thing's first...
with a snap of the fingers,
i can retain my dual-nationality,
and perhaps, after a while,
after I stop finding the study of psychiatry
by studying psychiatric blunders
a bit boring...
            and say auf wiedersehen to
ol' ***** 'n' Charlie Ambrose...
                                                 honestly,
england's worth of its very misery...
    its hardball when attached to the mainland,
a nation of thespians,
     hard this, soft that,
                   nuns instead of frisky youth...
or at least: for the joy of life
at first, prior to the sentiments of
adulthood, and shackles,
as was once done in a spring field
or on top of a hay stack;
              which... makes it doubly
uncomprehensive...
     ad to why someone's father might
force himself to forget his mother tongue. ..
with his son not being able to speak it,
suddenly reaching for
         a bomb making kit, a knife,
a car or an assault rifle...
            that sort of grievance?
as the old testament ends with a hope...
not till the heart of the son
turns to the father, and likewise
reciprocated...
                       shame for the collateral
damage... truly, shameful...
but you'd think that a son could
realise his beef,  is with his immigrant father
and not the host nation...
            because a return to the past
or, the body to the land,
the land to the mind, and mind to
the tongue, and the tongue to the breath,
and the breath to the soul,
   and the soul to the forefathers...
          kinda amrican, wouldn't you say so,
Herr Jefferson?
Mateuš Conrad Jun 2022
what a ****-show...
    i don't have the luxury of renting... not in London...
i know that in Anglo-Saxon culture living
with your parents in your 30s is a bit weird...
and well into your 40s... probably your 50s...
magically weird...
     i truly understand it...
         how could a boy "love" his parents so much?
love?! what the **** is that?
i loved my grandfather, maternal...
my paternal 'un abandoned my father...
i don't even know what my paternal grandmother
looks like... or looked like... is she dead?
don't know...
            i have a fond memory of my maternal
great-grandmother...
she used to feed my grandmother: toddler...
opiates on the front in between the warring
Germans and Russians so she would shut up...
opiates... makowina... a poppy-seed milk...
my maternal great-grandfather?
oh... i remember him too...
a shadow... a shadow-form...
probably my first memory...
   he used to be a security guard at a nursery...
so one time he took me on a shift...
he played the big piano... i played the little piano...

it does look weird... it feels weird...
but me renting a house with random flatmates
while making some Pakistani landlord rich?!
sorry... what?!
       and living with five random strangers would
make it easier to go out and bring some poor
girl round for a one-night stand?
would it? could it?!
    as much as i abhor English egalitarianism...
i'm going to have to side with the Japanese
and the love-hotels:

learn from the outsiders... of all Asians the Japanese
are most likely to feed into the beloved state
of European queer... in-ness...
the isolated "genius"...
    of all the Asian people... the Japanese feel as much
isolation as the Europeans...
why do you think they competing with "us"
in ski-jumping events?!
  eh?!   any Thai any Chinese ski-jumpers?!
the eternal smile of Noriaki Kasai...
                                  ノリアキ   カサイ...
i love sport... i love sports...
   female tennis... ++... Olympic judo... Olympic wrestling...
Olympic pingpong... Olympic archery...
i love sport because i'm not a fanatic
football hooligan...
           i like kissing rough...
sometimes biting lips... sometimes smashing teeth
against teeth...

point being?
                   ラブ ホテル
(rabu hoteru) - love hotel...
                     well... we don't have that in Europe...
we just have brothels...
and the alternative being?
is there an alternative?
                  
i couldn't love just one woman...
which makes me smiles whenever, yet another Muslim
colt decides to be all brass-***** and blow himself up
for a reward he hasn't tested in owning...
hmm... hmph... ah ha ha...
it's as if none of them sat in a waiting room
of a brothel with a carriage of... line in sight...
folded, naked legs...

or ****** two at a time...
   i'm wondering about these supposed "martyrs"...
these involuntary-celibate frustrations...
sure... some ego-boost if i had my own condo...
revenue of a corporate lawyer blah blah...
eh... life's cheap... no need to buy dinner
or cocktails... we used to do that
in our teens... an art gallery ticket: bought by me...
a cinema ticket... bought by me...
a sushi bar finish off... bought by me...
then the grand disappointment...
a blow-job on the bunk-bed... she shared with her
sister... telling me while she was doing
the deed: what would by daddy think
if he saw me...

     **** your daddy... and i'm ******* off...
talk during *** is a bit like...
a bit like... ******* out a tapeworm when you're
also constipated...
i don't understand talk during ***...
can't eyes just speak for eyes...
eyes eat eyes... and... onomatopoeias...
can't we just pretend like we want to say
something: but can't?!

of course it's weird that i still live with my parents...
down the road an Asian household
undermined the English architectural sensibility
with three-generations of Asians living under
one roof: "Baroque" ugliness...
sorry... forgot the hyphens...

                 i get it... angry living among white people...
angry whittle-Asian kids... don't blame me...
blame your parents... for abducting you:
for not teaching you your mother tongue...
it's so funny when they become angry
in a tongue that's not theirs'...
akin to Asian Dub Foundation's: La Haine...
oh sure... because the Japanese are on board...
******... Pan-Asian reinterpretation of
of the Pan-Slavic movement that was Communism...

reiterated with the ****** left in the west...
pink hair: rainbows! rainbows! unicorns! unicorns!
not all Asians are Pakistanis...
some are Japanese folk that like
competing with Europeans: ski-jumping...
because we share: winters...
******* copper-necks...
        RE-TAR-DO PRIMO DELUXE!

it's not enough for a Genghis Khan to ****
your women once...
it takes a mind like me to **** your
women twice...
thank you: Manchester bombing...
yeah... thanks... Bangalore and
Lahore is: waiting with open arms!
Darwinism and the leftover of logic...

                 funny how these angry youths
are not speaking their own tongue:
oh... i have a retainer...
i was spreading it concerning the conflict in
Ukraine... brat brata pocharata...
i still have my tongue:
i was born into it...
                 too bad for these metaphysical nomads...
who probably require psychiatric care...
since... they can't be evaluated as quantifiably
believable...
   no... most of them? i've seen
the "process": INBREDS...

awkward looking people...
         INBREDS... they look comfortable...
but if i were adorned in Hugo Boss **** uniform...
eh?!
  would i, think, twice?!
i like the idea of dangling a stick... while eating a carrot...
but i also like dangling a carrot and...
using the stick for kink...

my mind warped... sorry...
you don't come near me...
even i don't want to come near me...
no one comes near me, unless it's trying to **** me...

ha ha... Muslim colt martyrs
wishing for a harem...
the same ones... that... never visited a brothel?!
wow!
o.k. let's test the waters... and of the supposed 72 virgins
how many would: could: would:
cut the phallus off of the dear: "adventurer"?!
dearest... Odysseus?!

how many could bed the said "satyr" for eternity?!
i'm... *******... waiting!
Asian my ***...

yeah... it's weird that i still live with my parents...
do they have to pay mortgage payments?!
no...
do i own Nicholas II banknotes...
and gold coins with the effigy... yeah...
but i'm "poor"... so?
do i own a rare bibliography... yeah...
but do women look beyond the stated obvious...
no? so? i'll be 70 years old looking at a 20 year old girlfriend...

i'll become a true artist!
        or i'll just simply **** myself...
    because... why the hassle? why the bother...
              i like blinking at a blankness and nothing
and something resembling a tree...
and that's because:
sometimes... people seem...
oh seem... oh so very... "borrowed";

can't tell the difference whether i want to **** on them,
**** on them or simply ***** on them;
hell... maybe all three... or perhaps the one...
finding that marvelous medieval cure using
leeches... bleeding out... maybe that's my first choicest
of choices.

aren't the dentists in England forcing people to
drink too much whiskey and perform the "detail"
using pliers?!
    really?! it's that bad?! the herald state of capitalism
is hiding dentistry issues?!
           thank god that i don't need anyone
to do my nail-clipping.

this one girl i was trying to date...
beautiful auburn ginger hued NPC...
her dog started licking my wounds on my knuckles...
weeks passed... i turned into a dog...
and started to nibble on my wounds...

father, dearest... mother's not dead!
first day she's gone...
he comes home and i get a shouting down...
why isn't the fence painted?!
why why why...
but the hockey stick is still a hockey stick...
ice is still ice...
i cooked  medium rare steak...
and the chips...
and i poached the pepper just about right
with the green beans?

i will never fall in love with q woman:
i can't allow myself to belong to somone
so much...
       no! nein! niet! nie!
         we were eating steaks come 5pm...
in absolute silence...
              you love her too much: you miss her too much:
i can't lace myself to love a woman like that...
let's just put it plain: YOU'RE WEIRD...
not fantasy weird akin to...
              NORMAN BATES....
   just ******* weird...
               normal weird...

i'm not you father...
i need to **** more women and love them
even less... i need to die with a heart of stone!
call me night... call me wind... call me the defeaning
wilting of all things confined to a skull.
Emil Cerda Jun 2020
"What else could I ask from you, Sofia?
Knowing that loving you is a challenge.
Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy,
And I don't trust my foolish brain.

"It's that I have had girlfriends in my biography.
And in the beauty I distrust,
I better do you a tomography,
Because I trust your brain the most.

"When love is gone comes the epitaph,
That it is buried in Philadelphia.
The memory becomes the cenotaph,
When she remembers you weren't ****.

"Remember when you inhaled gofio?
... pretending to own the mob,
And Elifio's lover,
But the doctor detected you an atrophy.

"That you are Ecuadorian, it is because of the geography!
That you make references, is for the bibliography!
What do you know how to write it's because of the orthography!
That you «*******» a lot it's the fault of *******!

"«I feel» something for you; take me an x-ray;
Don't worry, I photograph my heart.
For you to understand the video, Sofia;
My heart beats like white-crested elaenia.

"The dance your betrayal didn't choreographed.
I laugh, since maybe it filmographed
In another part of the scenography.
I saw you in bed with him, Sofia,
And with your mobile, I took a picture of you.

"Anyway: if I am born again, Sofia,
I will study ethnography
To evade you; love wrote:
Emil doesn't believe in your «love», and that stunted him."
Poem written on the back of the book Modification of Conduct, by Garry Martín. A book that Emil had bought.
Mateuš Conrad Mar 2018
in response to lauren southern
fiasco:

woops:

  Tāj al-Dīn Abū'l-Faḍl Aḥmad ibn Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Karīm ibn ʿAṭā Allāh al-Iskandarī al-Shādhilī

which is probably akin to one of
the Madagascar penguins...

   kowalski!

       Wah wah...

and as one Spaniard from Barcelona
informed me that his name was:
   Hey Zeus!
    
                    Jesus...

never ever met an allah ibn Muhammad...
never seen a gorilla the size of King Kong
Either...

mess with the names and give em nick's
demunative forms,
  Matthew becomes matt...
  Allah becomes what? all sigh all go aah?
with a right just around the corner?

oh I'm not afraid of a man with only one
Book, I bothered about people who
Didn't write that one book with the man
Who wrote being busy in other of life's cares...

An Islamic average reader: the shortest
Bibliography in the world.

well hell, if it's in the name conjunction
Of the son of vs. The gift of doesn't really
Make that much difference
When you have a Spanish guy named
Jesus, and twice as many Muhammads...

Apparently it's profane to name someone
Jesus outside of Spain,
         But it isn't
Profane to have clone Muhammads
With a reading list consisting of one
Book...
                 Do not take your gods name
In vain... just sing the adhan, you'll be fine!
Allah gave Arabs the desert
   And the Dino cematorium compression
Chamber,  rich in oil...
    Now run along, and fetch me a fez...
I'm about to look real smart smoking a hookah
And getting diabetic from all that baklava.
fatemadememortal Sep 2017
when introspection goes wrong:
i thought too much and now i'm sad
should be the name of my autobiography
though there will be nothing but your name in the bibliography
as i tell my life's story interspersed with your wisdom
and hope that sharing your thoughts might help others as a mechanism
to living their best life and knowing
the difference between someone holding them back and someone promoting
them reevaluating the weight they give society's expectations
and instead taking that energy and devoting
it to self improvement and things that matter connoting
that they should be their own priority
something i could stand to learn from you
or at least take to heart when you tell me yet again

i guess
if i'm being honest
my "tired" looks an awful lot like
depression
if you hold it up to the light

and i suppose if truth be told
my "insomnia" looks more like
introspection turned anxiety
from late night over-thinking

and honestly, it's not that i'm "not feeling well"
it's that my executive dysfunction is getting bad
and that means it's hard for me to even function
on the most basic level that there is
and as much as it scares me to tell you all this
i promised i would always be honest
so here's the truth

i am just a ****** up girl
standing in front of a ****** up guy
asking him to hold her hand and tell her it will be okay
because
for some reason
i believe you when you say it
Henry Sep 2021
I think we're on a dark road
Use at least 2 pieces of evidence to support your conclusion
Remember you have a glossary
This is a writing assignment not a research paper
My phone is too important to me
And too important for those around me for that matter
It's weird to disconnect
Weird to unwire
Remember class no plagiarism or you will be violating the school's code of academic honesty
I wish I could throw my phone into the sky-colored sea
Feed the electric eels as it were
And people would say 'okay'
But the soul is as digital as our pictures these days
Not photographs but pictures
Pictures and memes and nonsense for nonsense sake
Convenience and luxury at an impossible cost
If you feel absolutely convinced you need to do outside research,
You need to make a bibliography
And cite your sources
9/8/21
Wrote this in my architectural history class while thinking about technology and how much I hate it
Satsih Verma Apr 2018
Depression―
was deep blue.

In zero-reflux, I was
intimately involved―
with your pride. The conflict
was rising.

Human mind
like shutting off the ***,
was making a bibliography.

Purity of link will
describe a yellow hollyhock,
waiting to be crushed.

It becomes a burden
when I spend on you― my poems.
Chemotherapy had failed.
Satsih Verma Jul 2023
This was an acquisition,
What I am not, you are hostile and
revengeful. A honey badger will climb the colossus.

A red line was my bibliography.
The business continues in a ***** way.
Selling the truth in broad daylight.

The alliance tells the story.
Everyone becomes a god. You are throwing
water before the blaze starts.

— The End —