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Mateuš Conrad Jan 2020
someone once said: only the natives can be designated
free speech...
the immigrants can have their dog
and let it bark, along with whatever thinking comes
their way...

exploring the last remains of thought -
well then... suit and boot me up for some "thinking"
as i extend it into writing...

if i were of the native stock... "elsewhere":
most probably h'america or australia... even in italy
having tea with mussolini i'd be:
an expat... as an outsider among outsiders
but among my sameness-namesakes of surnames
akin to jones and smith:

i will never be an "immigrant" among...
it's not even a voice of cocern, this little voice of
mine...
an englishman who decides to move
to h'america is an expatriate for the native
englishman who stayed behind...
he's never an immigrant...

perhaps other nations view the people that left
them in such a positive light?
where else to emigrate to that doesn't
speak basic english with a tinge of
a "welcoming" plethora of accents?

proudly having expatriated...
or having to have had to humbly emigrated...
bark bite and tail in tow...
my the luck of being an expatriate...
readily prepared with a francophile basis...
e.g., or some other: less frost-bitten
idealism as the work ethic of:
work work work...

we know the english immigrants
as expatriates... but i doubt that people
from where i from would call me...
an expatriate... they'd call me...
eh... hangman noose... a deserter...
god forbid the fact that i somehow managed
to integrate... but then found myself wondering...

have, have integrated into... "what"?!
today i was truly astounded...
after all... Romford, Essex... England...
can boast about a few things...
notably? it's the past place you can buy vinyl
without amazon.co.uk...
you can actually play the buyer and the person
that loiters with his shadow...
flicking through a dictionary of sorts...
finding a record...

i actually left the house for ulterior motives...
but i succumbed to the allure...
and as i walked the January 2nd 2020 highstreet
in Romford...
i heard english... as a spoken language...
twice in the pedestrian commute...
and of course when it came to a lingua franca
scenario of buying or selling something...
otherwise:

perhaps i retained my primitive instincts
and the tongue and should have left it with a ghost
of me back in the clarifying vicinity of
an airport 50 miles from Warsaw...
i have bigger things to worry about though:
how i should start learning Romanian...
even though: i thought bilingualism was a good
idea?
it's not?

not among the natives could i ever be
an expatriate...
an ever: never... like any more thesaurus
sharpening would do the trick to balance
the optics of "perspective"...

if it wasn't a mistake...
it has still been a purchase:
freddie hubbard on the trumpet,
jackie mclean on the alto sax,
kenny drew on piano,
doug watkins on bass
and pete la roca on drums...

the only reason as to why i bought
a gramaphone was to buy the only cheap vinyl
there is... jazz...
to escape the earphones...
to find the complete volume of space
that would later be deemed:
confined to a room... cell... or some alternative
variation: but... oh jeez...
how wrong it was of me...

make a note: alto sax jazz is not for you...
remember: alto sax jazz is not for you...

a sensation of being a foreigner in
an already double-dutch foreign sense of land...
anything that drops from clinching
to the London transport system
with the trains and the tubes and buses
is: england...
the england of my youth where i remained
like that... dunce in the ****** tunes cartoons
interlude...

and what of my citizenship on paper?
wave a passport around
like a benchmark or an otherwise easy
accent-identifier?
perhaps i don't even know:
Bristolian - my best guess with this acquired
tongue...

but at least buying jazz is getting easier...
freddie hubbard a known name...
but... no... alto sax jazz is not for me...
now it figures...
i can get away on a whim when
a trumpet solos... but not when an alto sax
solos... i really can't stomach it...
will i give this Bluesnik record back?
no, i need a testament -
i have bought something
but the self-reflection is free...

there's only so much classical music escapism
you can try -
before long you realise that the people
listening to classical music...
mostly... when they make requests...
want "something soothing"...
want "something jovial"...
or usually it's a piece of music that has
been attached to a movie...
classical music - apparently doesn't feed
people a subtle stream of images...
and it's obvious: those requests are not phoned
in on by blind people...

imagine... the ****** of F... when you have ⠋
to work with...
what is an sunrise... a sunset but a dash
of colour... a spring of the heavens
an autumn of the heavens...
but my my... in this inverted listening of jazz...
⠙⠑⠑⠏
⠃⠇⠥ ⠑    DEEP BLUE...

if i were blind: and came to the pearly gates...
i'd ask for letters: primo pronto!
later i'd worry about colours and shapes...
as i'd probably stick to my first passion
and hearing this fathomless shapeless
sounds that... abide to no lineage with a recant
of a triangle's use of 90°...

otherwise... what if you've been fed
the: classical music when listened to when a child
will increase your i.q. -
but what are the chances that you will:
"regress" from listening to classical
music and take to jazz?
perhaps because jazz has to be felt,
it has to be heard, first,
rather than... the silence and scribbles
of a composer at his desk -
where a classical music composition
is very much like writing:
that whole a prior shabang!
none of the a posteriori zigzagging
of impromptu and jazz?

one thing is certain... i'm not going to
be a fan of alto sax jazz...
sonny clark on piano - yes...
art blakey on drums - yes...
kenny burrell on guitar - yes...
alto sax no... ah... but give me tenor sax
and... no please no big bang jazz
equivalent to thelonious monk...
at least jazz gives you pedestrian tastes
and whims...
nothing akin to bowing at the altar
of a Beethoven: or talking lightly of
the man - "the man"...

and who the hell said that being
objectivity "works all the time"
that objectivity "runs the marathon"...
alto sax jazz is pedestrian music...
don't get me wrong...
you want to walk down a busy street
and you want to drown the sounds
of progress: no horses sneezing,
no horses' hooves playing tic-tac-toe
chess on cobweb stones...
alto sax jazz is your take-out
walk-through...
but when you're hunched in a chair
and pecking at a keyboard with
ten good beaks of the tips of your fingers...

again: how do the hands rest before
the keyboard?
the right hand:
index middle, pinky and thumb...
the ring finger is used for the: delete button...
a revision - the pinky does the enter -
and the cascade follows...
the left hand?

primarily the index and *******...
the thumb is always attached to space...
shared with the right hand's *******
to space,
i can't remember if i ever used my ring
or pinky finger of my left arm...

so much for inverted chiromancy...
the polacks will never give me the wings
to be an expatriate...
i will be forever: he who abandoned
that land running with milk and honey...
but... look at how they stand behind those
from england that decided to go "elsewhere"...
they are not immigrants...
they are... expatriates...
have nothing filthy them it comes to
the connotation...
it's not sad it's not funny it's: somewhere
"in between"...

because we know that the only russians
that ever make it out of russia
are the oligarchs... and by that standard
of "sentiment": they're always welcome...
who wouldn't welcome the pharaohs without
giza pyramid ambitions of construction?!
passing chalk as cheese -
and passing... ink for blood...
perhaps i haven't sweated enough to be allowed
to write but as little as this...

there's always this sense of alienation
among the germanic tribes of "israel":
europe... even if they are the scots or the welsh
suckling at the teats of romulus & remus' lupa...
as the old saying goes among the slavic people
when "integrating" into a germanic-esque society -
by the time you have integrated...
there's this dog-**** pile of Babylon left...
and the germans are: "nowhere"!

the saying goes via:
if you go among the crows...
you must croak their croak...

here's to flying high as an imitation seagull!
brazen: into this arable land...
that's being teased by the Thames estuary...

passing through a Warsaw train station
i noticed the immigrants / the expatriates
on the eastern front...
mostly mongols...
notably the ukrainians...
but now in england i'm starting to think
in concrete terms... better start learning
Romanians...
and on the street: you can't see a focus of
who's here and who isn't here...
back east the Roma people stood out
like a sore thumb or a voodoo plum and...
that didn't bother the locals since they were
meshed like glue...
but, here, in england?
everyone's a sore thumb a voodoo plum...
because the natives,
the blessed idiosyncratic professional
eccentrics have left and...
i'm not going to be the first chasing them down...

London the only and last bastion is
overrun with the whole lot of us...
well: the "us" vs. "them" mentality...
don't get me wrong... i'll still listen to the concerns
of the peripheries... in this cest pool
of immigrants, degenerates...
old people who "forgot" to move...
the lunatics the in-betweeners and the old guard
clinging on...
perhaps, after all... english was a very
accomodating language...
it wouldn't take a genius to learn it from scratch
being thrown into the deep end of the pool
aged 8...
who was mute aged 8 going to school
being moved from "east" europe to this island
with... no prior to linguistic connection?
moi...

and now look at me... i'm teasing myself
with... sordid welsh as if i were ever the posterboy
for welsh nationalism...
scottish nationalism? eh... if they were to retain
their gaellic roots...

expansion:
the longing for those who have left:
in the anglo-sphere - expatriate...
the abhoring sense of those who arrive -
immigrant...
otherwise... the english are always
and everywhere: welcome...
hence the expatriate status of those
who have left their native land...
even in h'america: a shared language:
to be an immigrant... while speaking
the same language?! how preposterous!

the difference between eastern style
comedy presentation and western style
comedy presentation: on stage...

the eastern folk prefer cabaret: theatre dialogue
montages...
the western folk prefer stand-up:
monologue samuel beckett esque
performances...
'woe i... stand alone in this infinite
space and... find others to laugh with...'

- perhaps we're not being less funny because
we're lowering our "i.q.": yes, the we are...
we are... lowering...
i find lee evans to be funny...
a laurel and hardy weren't exactly funny
by modern comedy standards that:
it's only funny if it's intelligent...
if there's a crossword puzzle at the end of "it"...

perhaps pride is the shackle...
and ham... what ever happened to self-depreciating
humor that managed to somehow
elevate you as also having a sense
of humor:
do intelligent men even laugh
at something that isn't a word-play or
a corset of wit?
perhaps we're experiencing a drying of wip...
perhaps the jokes are only supposed
to come: days after as a form of
reflection on the sigma canvas:
the joke has to exist outside the performer
and the stage... it needs to be: a live-experience...
it has to take on DASEIN qualities?
it has to be internalised?

that: oh yeah... that's funny...
perhaps the same thing has to be observed
and it can't be retold in an impromptu
fashion shackled to a stage?
the stage is the new camp-fire?
i thought so too... about the television...

as: here's to slagging off everything that's
being published online bypassing
the editorial process of selection...
well... if it weren't for all the seriousness
surrounding internet banking...
and internet shopping...
pen to paper...
******* clinching a ripped roll
of cushioning paper
and a pseudo-***** imitation
for a wipe while massaging my prostate
over the enlightened prospect
of dropping the blitzkrieg plump-dump-plum
into an echoing lake in the ceramic basin...
otherwise...

a seanse with that moment of realisation:
"something is happening to us
collectively"... it's as if: we're under a spell...
oh i was under a spell today...
watching alec guinness in the fall of the roman
empire...
and as coming from a people
that were never conquered by rome?
on this fine fine island that was...
well... my hopes were also high for
the conquests of the mongol empire...
and the remains of it in the form of the tatars
in crimea...

here are my tattoos... it's hard to break from them,
it's hard to wash them away...
but at least i can attest:
my brain might be all fat and sponge and
electricity... but there's some skull and skin
to be had of it...
otherwise... why would the year 1066
be important for me... why would the magna carta
be important for me?
i too have my years in tattoos on this big brian
of mine...

otherwise there's that copernico-darwinian
surge of: journalistic science...
i still find it staggering that darwinism continues
to capture the imagination of people...
"of people"... only in Wittgenstein was left
alone in finding that Copernicus did something
astounding... this surge of "awakening"
via darwinism: this statistical bombardment
like it was some tabloid journalism:
throwing a pebble at a mountain while
also ushering in a mantra: grow by
a poppy's seed added height! grow!

perhaps i'm just jealous...
among the polacks i will never be an expatriate...
what a jealous people...
an englishman who moves to france...
comes 20 year later...
he will have never experienced
the mark of cain: immigration "humphrey bogart"...
he or she moved to france...
perhaps to italy...
i remember being in greece and...
i was nothing when i said i was ******:
but with british citizenship! to add...
so what?
well... so what greece...
i latched onto some north africans
and went to **** away the night
in some strip-bar where i had
two strippers either head o' mine...
and it was constellations galore...
grandmother Etna said:
rest here, among the smooches poor child...

i borrowed Etna from when Aeneas
"left off"...
****'s sake... this is the Meditarrean
and not the Baltic? where is the amber
the whiskey and the leverage of gratations
of time?!

i will agree. Macedonia come night traffic
of quicksilver tinging?
if the metal is cheap and you douse it in some gold?
a mountain dripping fresh from some quicksilver
from the moon peering at it?
objectivity what?

the finite plateau of snow-riddled Serbia...
and perhaps that's because these people
speak their own language...
and have so... and i'm just the next
"english" tourist...
a jack kerouac americanism and:
oh sure! sure!
spectacular fly-over country tourism!
everything's so so different!
and yet all so oh so much the same!

darwinism was going to run the 5000 meter
race... it's currently running the 10000 meter
race... god help it in running the marathon
of still pretending: old news is new news...
i can't distinguish between darwinism
and copernican discovery...
only in the english-speaking world
would this discovery not escape a criticism
from ancient greece and some, some predecesor!

wouldn't anyone just bore of darwinism
if they were told: over and over again:
the copernican "reality"?
a scientific fact is... akin to a religious dogma...
until... it becomes regurgitated with
enough time, with enough journalism and...
tabloid wind... and after a while...
it's only worthwhile to be spoken to
amnesia peoples of the world: unite!
it's hardly "stupid" or "intelligent"...
more or less overlooked...
because a pebble thrown at a mountain:
is... no added mountain to behold...
conventional wisdom is the only wisdom
that there ever was made to be made:
available...

nonetheless, the circumstance stands...
unless from the slavic hemisphere
of europe...
unlike any other circumstance: other than
the one given, among islanders...
among continent builders akin
to australia and h'america...
the post-racial societies of post-colonial
spain in south america?
ever wonder why the brazillians don't
look for inspiration from the portugese
when it comes to football?
you'd think: those yanks better have
the best football team in the world...
they haven't exactly looked back...
back at "us": oh god... tea afternoon and cricket...
baseball wha'?
basketball? "football"?
why are "we" looking forward and "they're"
looking back?
perhaps i should learn some spanish and
get some insinuation about:
the argentinian sense of lack when looking
back into spain...

or what else is there to be had?
move to Greenland... admire Denmark...
**** it: do the whole stretch and find
some locals on the Faroe Islands...
perhaps i too will find a tomorrow...
but tomorrow i will find: sobering up
and having to deal with: everything beside jazz...

mmm... "delayed gratification" prospects...
seven kings: canon palmer catholic school...
when boys are educated alongside girls...
what if i went to Ilford County High?
what if i were born to immigrant parents
and wasn't an 8 year old immigrant?
what if i went to the Ilford Ursulines?
the all-girls school... the former, Ilford County High?
what chances of me being an intellectual
******?

what, oh the chances!
perhaps praying: segregated... is a tad extreme?
but perhaps ******-exclusion policies:
teaching boys throughout their puberty
as segregated from girls in the same hormonal
development "range" is...
well! how else! you take a boy and girl
and you put them into the hormonal cocktail!
just because it's in a shared educational
environment... why these teenage pregnacies
you ask?
i wouldn't ask such blunt questions...
not since the genius of Copernicus
couldn't attract these...
psychological left-over intelligenstia clingers...
that darwinism has allowed...
what it darwinism and journalism?
everything! the ant as the ego
inside the mind of an ape...
the dormant tapeworm embryo
inside the mind of an ant:
with siesmic consequence of a disturbance
of the collective hive network...

borrow too much from an ape...
borrowing from an ape is one thing...
it's the borrowing from all other
animals: with the ape as the backdrop
that's truly bothersome!
at least religious spew the same facts
over and over again...
scientific dogma? who keeps track?
tomorrow might be the next:
butter vs. margarine controversy!
what sort of "religion" is science
(it's not a religion... if it's not...
why does it have to cohabit a bed
with journalism then, to spew "new",
"improved" facts, then?!)
when... it's so ******* finicky!

look via the ape long enough:
it won't matter whether it's a geocentric
of a heliocentric system that
reigns above your head, no torso,
a pickled spine...
legs and arms floating about like:
an octopus experiencing spasms
pickled in brine...

perhaps these are the zenith years of
darwinistic popularity...
perhaps like the copernican popularity...
there will come a time of:
fatalism... that somehow all of this
is... inevitable...

i see one answer: this cage of grammar
this cage of whatever this god made human
pressures me into complying to...
to the last typo! i will stand against it!
without caging me into a use of emoji or
some other hieroglyphic purse of:
shortened "thinking"...

the "seven silences" might have passed
around my presence that i dare not
call it: in concrete - figure...
and still my eigth silence to unmask
nothing more than a mask...

who are these immigrants, these tight brewed
broods, these furrow brows
representing the native pensive "squint":
of anything beside the eyes and a thought
of h. p. lovecraft?
perhaps inside of europe:
but as ever... without a russian passport...
without a russophobia that's
a tickling hard-on... the "in-between-land"...
perhaps the balkans...
who are we... to these germans and quasi-germans?

we use their tongue, their zunge...
their everything they will otherwise allow themselves
to deny: perhaps this is not Dublin,
this is not Glasgow this is not Cardiff...
perhaps this is not Italy,
this is not France...
perhaps this is "europe" as long as
Scandinavia is involved...

woe a we unto us: the viking Rus...
or some lent word of lost vogue...
last time i heard:
these northern ******* are in no favour
of treating the Spaniards or the Greeks
as their equals...
as long as they have rich arab pimps
race their lamborghini brute ******
down... knightsbridge...

then! and only then! iz ist europa "reconquista"!
"reconquista"... i'll defend these poor polacks
that didn't think it...
"necessary" to only learn english in order
to comply to the global dictum of neu-communist
internationalism...
- what, they didn't teach you you stupid
**** that it only took to learn from english?!
- last time i heard... not teachings polish
to a canape of anything beside the french,
the spanish... also worked!

english as a language is oh so accomodating...
the people will react like antibiotics,
naturally... enough of darwinism and you'll
be found, bound, to having to reference it...
past a de facto menu:
and more like a subjectivity...
there's only so much truth that can be stated...
before fiction has to reply...
because... how many regurgitated facts
can be regurgitated...
before the desert of fiction and...
there's only the fact of a bottle of water...
that remains...
and there's not impetus to walk toward
an oasis...
a fata morgana is hardly a scientific experience...
when experienced...
it's something associated with
a desert and within the desert must either:
live... or die...

what if etymology was to become the new
standard for journalism...
what if one were to escape this contant
bombardment of darwinism...
like it wasn't the next new vogue akin
to the copernican "revolution"?

is that even possible?
whenever i return to Poland...
esp. in Warsaw... i'm a deserter...
i'm not an expatriate...
the native english call those who left
with a sense of longing...
somehow: or at least that's the leftover...
the expatriates from the inside-out
perspective... never the immigrants...

i'm an immigrant and...
a paper citizenship is: no citizenship at all...
a passport is only worth a passport
at a border crossing...
in between the everyday daily affairs?
'where are you from?'
****... 'Bristol?!'...
i'm hardly going to speak
the cockney cockers or an essex schlang...
am i? ***!
all but ******* plumbers and church pulpit
mongers... and some over-ripe
riddle fruits: if not simply left
bottles of wine for the bears...

the first part though, bothers me...

someone once said: only the natives can be designated
free speech...
the immigrants can have their dog
and let it bark, along with whatever thinking comes
their way... in mere thinking...
and a dog barking...

the natives will only have a freedom of speech...
what if an immigrant becomes a citizen?
just asking...
what if an immigrant is granted a citizen
status?
well then... i am your humble example
of a civic nationalist...
such a confusing term...
it must be: for the natives...

oh ****... what language am i using?
the language of the... natives!
rubric civitas!
civic nationalism is reserved for:
those that came from abroad...
i guess the ethno-nationalists never made
this distinction clear:
watching their contemporaries leave their
native pit of woe...
and they would never call them:
deserters... only... only... expatriates...
after all... aren't we in the postmortem of ancient Rome?!
isn't this the time when the remnant
english come out and glorify being
the conquered people of this: lettering?

what is civic nationalism?
what is learnt, integrated nationalism...
this is civic nationalism...
how about the english forget about something,
like solving crosswords...
esp. among the middle-classes...
and let's envision their globalist dream!
let them learn a second language
and let us all become bilingual!
oh no... not polyglots... just bilingual!

i can't be an ethno-nationalist...
em... because (a) (b) and (c)?
aren't the post-colonial commonwealth
remnants of the empire the sort
civic-nationalists there's talk of?
what language am i writing in?
hebrew?! mandarin?!

ethno-natioanlism and its tribalism...
civic-nationalism and its state...
where does the church fit into all of this?
it's like not being an amuptee but
nonetheless being prescribed a "missing limb"...
the **** would i need a third arm for?
wilt the third leg allow me to run faster?!

i guess the term ethno-nationalist is
conflated with civic-nationalist in the ethno-nationalist
realm of "debate"...
a civic-nationalist is your casual parlance
h'american patriot...
patriotism in h'america: nationalism (still)...
in europe...
if we have to: hello, my name is: bob
do it all over again with the squares
and dictum assertions and what not attached...
between the ethno-nationalists and
the civic-nationalists...
the inter-nationalists...

i'm a civic-nationalist because:
i fear people need concrete examples...
i will not move back to Poland...
except on the holidays...
to visit my grandparents...
which is why i have retained the labour
of a native tongue... and "identity"...
i will remain in England...
until England becomes: Alle-Land...
and even when all these
ethno-nationalists ******* to Australia...
and become civic-nationalists over there...
well: over there good luck!

why would anyone ask an ethno-nationalist
the question: are you a civic-nationalist or?
civic- implies:
i'm a Brit from a grand "beyond":
circa 3000km away...
civic is a bewildering prefix for the nationalist
of a ethno- persuasion...
it really is... esp. when this ethno-nationalist
doesn't believe in the existence of
expatriates... that he would remain... "stuck"...
and that somehow... ethno-kin could come
and replace... those kin that left: "in good faith"...

savvy?!
Mateuš Conrad Aug 2018
.i'm pretty sure that someone like Mozart, composed, in total silence, didn't hum out a tune, given that he had to micromanage symphony, or rather, the latter stage of polyphony - synchronization of all subsequent parts... whereby music was more optical in its genesis than people might like to believe... of course auditory in its exodus from the godhead, but... i'm pretty sure the composition process for classical music, would never amount to the sort of fun impromptu of jazz... must be a black privilege sort of, "thing" to have found jazz lying around...

how did the beatniks even believe that
a cross-generational mongrel of an art
form, fusing poetry with jazz could ever work?
robert pinsky still has the dream -
but it's a bit like:
      you think you can smoke marijuana
and listen to blues?
              not drink a drop of the devil liquor
and take blues seriously?
       just like sonny clark would have
said: 'if you don't shoot it,
     you don't smoke it'...
         given that... this is not stoner rock
type of wasp hive droning, humming,
heavily repeated rhythm...
              nothing wacky like
thievery corporation doing a live
rendition of the forgotten people
                                             live on KEXP...
what's that phrase?
    i feel monged -
   i.e. so ****** that you don't know
if it's a brain or a jelly,
         a stomach or krāng...
an 8th of an ounce could last me a week...
never mind...
   but how could they even suppose
that, somehow... jazz would dissolve
into acid jazz...
   that ****** variant you don't hear
in a jazz club...
   sure... the one up in Edinburgh was
jazz by name only...
       instead?
   one night i heard the cover
of neil young's song old man...
yeah... very ******* jazzy...
                what's next, a banjo quartet?
first jazz song i ever heard was
art blakey & the jazz messangers'
      opening track from the album
   of the same name - moanin'...
          SOLD...
           had to stash on some of the records...
but did i really want to speak over
the music?
             did i want to contaminate
the music and produce some ****** mash-up
akin to the beatnik experiment?
     *******... high on dope...
              never bothered to call jazz...
the black man's equivalent status of
what white man's classical music is...
     and where's jazz now?
joshua redman isn't exactly a lifejacket
when a boat with 20 is sinking...
jazz has been neglected...
    relegated as posh black boy music
heading off to Yale... wap... or wrap it up...
talk with a mouth but forget playing
the ******* horns, the sax...
              can't exactly see a revival...
   but would i really want to speak to this music?
feels a bit like talking over an opera...
made sense back then, makes little or no sense
now...
                    beside the point...
      there's still a heatwave in england...
every morning i wake up in a furnace -
    or as if attired in a metallurgy suit working
raw metals...
       and i always ask myself the question...
to rehydrate...
   would i rather eat half a watermelon,
or drink a big glass of water?
                         it's always the first.
JR Rhine Jun 2016
Thomas, Tommy baby,
you are both hot,
and sweet.

Tom Cat you’re red hot--
when I catch you in your Tom Cat Strut,
sauntering across campus,
strolling like it ain’t no thing,

cuz it don’t meant a thing
if it ain’t got that swing baby.

So dig this, Tommy Gun,
you groove with the best of ‘em
when I spot you strollin’—

Your head, teetering left and right like a seesaw, boppin’ baby,
arms hangin’ loosely, swinging freely, wildly, go! go!
legs scooping forward in boisterous trombone slides--
Groooooove Tommy baby!

You’re Louis’s best blows--
ten feet from the mic and the Fives baby,
you’re hot, red hot,
any closer and I'll burn up!
Go!

But you’re cool, real cool,
and oh so sweet.
Super sweet--

in your beard like a pepper and salt shaker tossed across the table,
I look to see those rosy lips part,
and peep those pearly whites shinin' like the bell of Louis’s cornet
brandished in the air, under those ballroom lights--
you’re screamin’ Tommy!

Let me hear that laugh that shakes the room,
punches like Blakey’s bass drum,
thumps like Mingus--

T-Bird you’ve got that hard bop in your soul,
you’re gonna bop to the top TB,
into the third heaven where the angels fall in line to your swing,
that incessant strut that keeps the devil at bay,
Blow! Blow! Blow!

And I see you now Tom Cat,
up there in the clouds,
digging your way across eternity,
bopping and jiving, swinging and blowing,

in your faded khaki pants and worn tennis shoes,
loosely buttoned collared shirt,
tight rectangular glasses that glistened the bell of your eyes even more--
I gotta stand twenty feet away Tommy baby!

You glance down at me and wink,
rearing your head back to let loose that Mingus and Blakey
bottom-end laugh,
guffaw guffaw guffaw!!!

--so hearty and rich,
the backbone of every nervous first-year classroom,
and the sniggering seniors you continued to befuddle and dazzle
with your mysterious ways
and insatiable swing.

So blow, Tommy Gun, blow!
Go Tom Cat go!
Dig T-Bird dig!
Let loose Tommy boy!

Swing for us, swing swing swing--
Hot and Sweet, Tommy baby,
hot and sweet.
For my professor, mentor, and dear friend, Thomas Barrett. You're hot and sweet Tommy baby, rest easy. Keep boppin. Thanks for everything.
Alexander Doss Apr 2010
Sipping espresso, double affogato of course, topped with cream and
Chatting with Miles, I saw Calliope sauntered in from the rain.
Her dark mascara limped away from her crystal blue eyes
As she waited for the barrister to turn his head.
And when taking her cup,
Somewhere between Bird’s schizophrenic riffs
And Blakey's syncopation.
I fell in love
As I watched  her lips purse and
Blow casually at the lid, cooling the
Fiery liquids inside but igniting mine.
I decided to ask what brought  her in from the
Rain.
My words  queued in my throat as I stood
To speak.
My knees cracked, testifying to the years I stood on them.
My heart tapped out a cadence as I strode
Over to her  table.
I could smell spice and ginger of  a perfume I knew so well.
Her chestnut hair fell in damp tendrils across her forehead.
Extending my hand with a napkin on the end I said, “ I would love if you joined
Me for a biscotti.”
With a sparkle in her eye her painted lips slid across her teeth,
“I am waiting for a friend.”
Walking away I sat dejected but not rejected because as she
Conversed with him she peeked at me
My Calliope
And all was well.

~AD~
Mateuš Conrad Aug 2016
as with any plaster work, or draping muscles and bones and
organs in skin - i knew i reached a zenith of some sort:
forever introspective, that chance momentum
that never reaches a museum of retrospective
finalised banalities -
and with that's happening in America,
i get a chance glimpse into that part of the world
so bogus, so *****-like, so haphazardly
put together - the chance to see the rats (artists)
jump ship and head to Tangiers, Paris, London
(for the pillars of the movement to come,
London especially, but might i suggest Edinburgh?
the capital of the offshoot that's to come
from Scandinavian novels?) -
i wouldn't suggest heading to Prague -
or Budapest - never to tourist hot-spots, obscurity is
what you need - Edinburgh out of season,
then the theatrical circus isn't there -
***** poetics: poncy monologues and Annabel
art-house flea markets... but that's the beauty,
flea markets in France, charity shops in England...
but i did exhaust this one musical avenue,
i dropped the ᚱᚢᚾᛖᛋ - it got boring after a while:
all that charged up mythological feeling -
the way we always wanted: myths to feel with,
to eat, rather than the sterile scientific facts...
i've learned enough to later ditch them,
even a Professor of Chemistry will have a postcard
of Edward Hopper's painting by his desk,
that window to view the world that doesn't
necessarily encompass sun moon and constellations...
how anyone would be foolish to scrub off
some inspiration from such things bemuses me,
the lowest of the low of poetic expressions is
sung to things that manage too much: the moon
and the sea tides, the sun and the seasons and
phototropism - it's a double edged sword...
only from one art to another do we get to see
our labourers of attention, else the same old deficit:
god... who in his glee took offence at anyone
having more awe-inspiring sense to please such
things... no alone can you master contemplating
both the beauty and the utilisation behind such
objects as a single man... however well...
it's impossible... you're sharing the bronze platform
with those that simply wrote of the shallow
beauty, and those that found these objects
were not simply aesthetic, but meaningful in
the machinery of things... it was never up to
us to find that electric genius of combining the aesthetics
with the machinery as one...
for in that sense god is a form as fraction
of 9/1, 8/1, 7/1, 6/1, 5/1, 4/1...
the fraction of wholeness... a complete set to start with...
man has already proved the limit as a fraction
with the base 3... 9/3, and that didn't really end well...
at best man is composed of a fraction base of 2...
by sharing the world through marriage to a woman,
or through a learned devotion, a crumb of what a woman
is, a philia (love) of his interests, a soloist voyage...
some just say: you will either take to being faithful
to philology and yourself as its devotee,
or you'll take up a wife... oddly enough chemists are
defilers of marriage having any purpose other than
to distract... but as i said: you can rarely write
decent things when trying to admire celestial spheres...
more ambition comes from the distraction of the zodiac
"prophets" and astrologers... a poem about the moon
is just a poem that is levelled with a poem
about a dustbin... but hey... Top Cat lives in the dustbin,
Neil Armstrong bopped along the lessened gravity
surface... but which is easier to acquire for a smile?
Benny... cue the violin theatrics of lamenting to a comic
end.
well... we have to juggle each other's impressions,
taking at hacking the raw meat will not give any of us
medium-rare barbecue steaks marinated...
taking the moon as something else is: nice...
and you know how nice things end up as... as tacky
suburban *******... if you're going to tackle the
thing with all the rawness... i'd first spend looking
looking at that thing of your attention in a graveyard...
just to get the feel to the idea: well... my fellow daisies
sniffed from the roots up would probably have
said something sulky similar.
but it's like that, you get to exhaust certain musical avenues...
i'm currently at a period where i have enough
stash of jazz records to rekindle my interest in it...
on today's menu? the real McCoy (McCoy Tyner,
Joe Henderson, Ron Carter and Elvin Flynn -
Flynn makes his mark, even though not the star
of the album, Art Blakey has a match) -
then onto the tragedy of Sonny Clark with his
cool struttin' alongside Art Farmer, Jackie McLean,
Paul Chambers and Philly Joe Jones...
i must admit that after watching the film whiplash
my ear-buds staged a coup to move from a certain
type of music into this... and even though
i already said that the climate in America at the moment
is very a second attempt at a Beat movement...
it's very much different... i guess jazz makes all the sense
in a pure urban environment...
jazz and urbanity, the hipster parties where wine flows
like poetry and people get to do their wild marijuana
******... but Bukowski changed everything
by bringing a taste of the classical into the scene...
it feels just like that these days...
there's no jazz on the radio...
going back to watches and radios, mono-utility things
that are the glamours of the inoffensive cluttering of a room...
no digital screen... the radio position at the back
of my head, behind me, the little fly-eye Rubik cube
ahead of me...
that's the odd thing with coming with jazz these days...
it's like Bukowski in the shadows of the beat movement
back when it was the beaten track...
so i said that jazz and urbanity are perfect partners...
well... take jazz from an urban environment and put it
in a outer-suburban environment, in a place
about 30 minute walk from farming fields with bulls
and horses... foxes the thieves rummaging in people's
trash... and... as classical music took to
teaching us the language of celestial bodies,
Holst... in this kind of environment jazz does the same...
jazz becomes equal to classical music with celestial
bodies... i'm just wondering if there are enough
instruments to arrange the solar system...
Mercury the Trumpet...
         Venus the Double Bass
Earth the Piano
                       Mars the Drums
Jupiter the Tenor Sax                                   (comparatively,
                Saturn the Soprano Sax                using a Holst
                                                           ­        schematic, the reverse,
                                             yet citing Jupiter, not as a planet,
                                           well, the bellowing voice of paternal fury)
Uranus the Clarinet
                                           (takes sheer magic to play that thing)
so that just leaves us with an Neptune as either
   Alto Sax or Trombone...
but that's how jazz morphed since it last came across
poetry... someone stole it from its urban environment
of busy streets and ugly manners and quick quick snappy
and the millionth time i could compare it to a spontaneous
encounter with someone in a bar... jazz lost its cool there...
people said the same thing about jazz
as Kaiser Joseph II did of Mozart... "too many notes"...
translate this urbanity into an outer-suburban environment
and put it against that kind of backdrop?
well... personally, there are just enough notes in each piece...
you looked outside the window? you could hear
a **** from a mile away and no tree would even sway
in nodding approval even with a galeforce wind slapping
them... jazz lost its synchronisation with the urban environment
it emerged from... but in so doing, it managed to mature
like good wine on the outskirts of large cities,
where it literally became the only thing that could ably
make a Kandinsky moment from semi-detached houses.
NEWSFLASH... what is this concern about art being
subjective? i don't see where these arguments go...
i thought art was about revealing the intimate,
not revealing the objective shallows of a method...
of limited scope like any philosophical systematisation...
if Christopher Columbus ever did things
objectively he might have discovered Lisbon or the Canary Islands...
art can't be objective... trying to argue that art is
"only a subjective" expression... well, if it was to be
a "greater" expression objectively, an artist would
walk into an art gallery, take all the paintings from
the canvases, and turn to the public and say:
now let's see your subjectivity, otherwise go ponce
off the art critics to take something they said to your
date about how: the light contorts the features of expressions
blah blah blah blah blah... the point of art being
superior as a subjective vehicle is so that i can feel someone
else's feelings... as opposed to thinking someone else's thoughts...
art is the sensual, not the premeditated dogmatic funeral -
which all philosophers attend: they're objective to the
point that they're afraid of having a personal attachment
to their outputs - they will hardly ever want to invite
a criticism of their objectivity, because they're such emotional
paupers - they fear criticism of their subjectivity to such
a point, that you can simply look at their pronoun usage
strategy, they really do use these words like kings -
but when Mozart is criticised by the Kaiser... he thought
nothing of it... he actually thought, nothing of it,
perhaps his vanity was wounded, but his virtue wasn't...
which is why he remains with us...
for the fatal wound incurred is not that of virtue,
but that of vanity... and true virtue is unafraid of criticism,
there's this cognitive blockage that enriches the
heart and leaves the mind blank... the sort of blank
that accommodates the Pyramid of Vanity:
bishops, priests, doctors, kings, queens, portrait artists,
Versailles... such things are so ****** void of anything
but scare-mongers, sycophants, leeches and finally tourists...
for whatever you take from the realm of Hades,
there's a stamp-duty on each precious element from that
realm... each thing is stamped: worthless...
you couldn't extract penicillin from Hades...
changing gold into a ring is worthless if such symbolism
of a union of monogamy end with the ring being
nothing more than a thing disputed over the divorce settlement.
Messy, 'specially on Sundays.
Feet a'shamble from stumblin' drunkhappy.
"It's all good, baby," Blakey yells over the drums.

Bourbon flavored women hard to swallow
with their jagged softness. Smoking section (whites) stares
down dance floor (everyone else) with guilt induced jealousy.

Coltrane's back in Philly studyin.'
Pinstriped chuckle from the Rosenbergs;
kinetic energy giving birth to the cool.

The trumpeter's high turns his tool into a weapon.
The sound briefly stealing him from his demons.
"I'll find a guy when I finish my set."

Black and white televisions: blacks in white suites
Smiling china white for an all white audience.
The movers, to this point, have only been black.

Little hero Harry thinks
  blacks and whites should die on the battlefield together.
Everyone's starting to get it.

"That guitar sweeter than my old lady."
Charlie and Miles holding each other's needles
while Thelonious and his hard candy go bad.

Leanin' on bricks in a back alley.
The circle passes the joint around like the good times.
"Just keep em rollin."

The skirts expand and deflate wildly to the rhythm.
Pure sweat melting into the floors like drops of water on roots.
A melody never heard before.
bitter winds bite
a desperate heart

as early darkness
unsheathes winter's
slivering moon

the perfect
celestial sickle
threatens to thresh
exposed digits

wayward trundlers
heaving bulky
sacks of woe

scutter down
the city's
darkest
side streets

making haste
to the only
lighted room
that still
welcomes them

cots boast
lumpy clots
of errant springs
and jagged hooks

grappling the lodger
atop a mattress
in bumpy knots of
institutional green

coughs and snores
cusses and laughter
sighs and tears
all ceaseless
prayers

some mumbled
some shouted
some thought
some roared
some farted
some cried
some sung

speaking mutely of
the weighty day

resenting new
hard memories

hoping for a
dreamless sleep


Friends Shelter
NYC
12/31/08
jbm

Music Selection: Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers: Moanin
Terry Collett Jul 2012
It was a Saturday morning
And you were 19

and you were racing along
Victoria Street having just left

Victoria Railway Station
on your way to Dobell’s

Jazz Record Shop
moving quickly

through the sea
of humanity

thinking of jazz
and what record

you were going to buy
at the shop that day

imaging yourself
******* through LP sleeves

taking a mental note
of which one

you might buy
a John Coltrane or Miles Davis

an Art Blakey or maybe
a Dizzy Gillespie

a jazz record being played
over the loudspeakers

in the shop
you mingling with others

in the crowded place
when this hobo stopped you

taking hold of your jacket gently
and said

have you got some small change
for a sandwich?

no
you replied

I haven’t
and rushed on

through the crowd
******* in your pocket

loose change
silvery coins

and his voice
in your head  

as you raced along
and your conscience

nagging you
maybe the voice

of the believed in Christ
so you stopped

and turned around
and made your journey back

through the people
passing by

your fingers taking hold
of the coins

the silvery loose change
and there he was

the hobo asking others
the same question

and they too went by
shaking their heads

or saying
no sorry no change

and you took his hand
and put in the loose silver

into his open palm
and said

here go buy yourself
a sandwich or whatever

and you turned
and left looking over

your shoulder
and he stood there

staring at his palm
and the coins shining

in the morning sun
and then you looked ahead

thinking of the record shop
and the LPs and the jazz music

being played
but deep down

in some other part of you
you knew you’d given

to one who maybe
was hungry

and had unconsciously
prayed.
Mateuš Conrad May 2016
i don't why, but it just happens sometimes,
one minute you're listening to Ryan Adams'
self-titled album with that pillar of
rock stay with me reading the Sunday Times
style magazine after having digested
the culture magazine and the Sunday Times
magazine, bobbing along to an article about
the singer Ariana Grande, seeing her almost
kissing a pooch on a skyscraper (*****,
that tongue's been up my ***, so said the pooch)
and you don't get Ryan Adams,
****'s a gridlock, a traffic jam, it doesn't
have a care for Pearl Jam and the wilderness of
Canada... so you switch listening material
to Herbie Hancock's cantaloupe island,
and suddenly you're in Philip Larkin territory...
it's funny to say that slavery of the africans
by the english to colonise the American continent
gave us fewer princes bored by Mozart
stating 'too many notes' - well jazz has enough
too many, notes, because there's this whole impromptu
going on; in my collection of the genre?
a decent list: sonny clark's complete works,
sonny clark's cool struttin',
cannonball aderley's somethin' else,
cedric 'im' brooks united africa,
booker t & the m.g.'s green onions (~jazz),
thelonious monk's monk's blues,
thelonious monk's criss-cross,
egberto gismonti's solo, eric dolphy's out to lunch,
donald byrd's royal flush, duke ellington's soul call,
terry callier's occasional rain, guru's jazzmatazz vol. 1,
miles davis' ******* brew / sketches of spain /
kind of blue / porgy and bess / the complete birth of the cool,
hurbie hancock's takin' off / my point of view,
steve kuhn trio's wisteria, joshua redman's back east,
freddie hubbard's hub-tones, john coltraine's blue train /
a love supreme, nina simone's nina simone at the village gate,
bobby mcferrin's spontaneous innovations,
chet baker's my funny valentine, dexter gordon's go!,
us3's hand on the torch, sonny rollins' ballads,
freddie hubbard's ready for freddie,
art blakey's moanin', kenny burrell's midnight blue,
chick corea's now he sings now he sobs,
mccoy tyner's the real mccoy, dianne reeve's i remember,
duke ellington's money jungle, horace silver's song
for my father, jimmy smith's back at the chicken shack,
wayne shorter's ju lu...
so with this mind, from bukowski the baton was
passed, don't get me wrong, i appreciate classical
music, but jazz is too much poetry,
not really the makings of coupling the two like
the Beats... just that they originate with a sentiment
best stated: 'what the **** was that?'
reverse aerodynamics: actually, no, proper
aerodynamics: you see the plane and then get the score
sheet... those European composers must have
been literally mad, so many instruments encoded,
pitches, larks, stresses of a violin's specific accenting
that wouldn't never sound like a nail scratching
blackboard... i know it's horrid to compliment
slavery... but hell... without it no jazz,
just stuck in a rut with classical whitey boys...
and no jazz no blues... no future rock or pop...
if there's anything to redeem the trade it's this music,
and, let me tell you, jazz is urbanity a soul of
frank o'hara's new york, it's amplified in
a suburban environment, never did suburbia
bordering on countryside feel so cosmopolitan,
but i'm adding this amplification to have been
aided by the number of birds i can spot, lazily
from my window...
and god, i love the fact that in jazz you can
have a specific bloom for each instrument used,
you can have a horn, a sax, a drum a bass solo
all in one go, so it's not as monochromatic as in
rock music (primarily occupied with
lead guitar solos, in the 1970s the drum solos
of john bonham) - all in one go i.e.
the tactful representation of each instrument,
the sort of football match analogy where every
player gets a touch of the ball / limelight.
Mateuš Conrad Dec 2015
usually when i begin drinking, after the day's
sober stretch, sometimes unbearable, sometimes tense,
but then the night comes, one of the cats
keeps watch with me (head out of the open
bathroom window, me on the steps into the garden),
making sure the moon doesn't suddenly
change into a sickle of red, while the exhausted
clouds buckle their would be hoofs,
with mickiewicz eyeing castles in them, but not here,
not now.*

with a bias for theology, i say ol' chap,
would that be a toast of making things appear
rationally adequate should they be two words
expressing one word? like **** sapiens
for mankind? i dare say ol' chap by jove
you are right!
well then, a conclusion:
all the greek gods were crafted by
the greek poets as scandalous and immoral,
slowly losing their immortality
by mingling with a one too many mortal women
to give us demigods like hercules and perseus...
but then socrates came and said: 'why
the gods immoral if we aspire to be kindred
with them, and ourselves immoral justify
our immorally forced nature by being fed
the immorality of the gods? what if gods are
moral: deus sapiens (the compounding trick,
seems rational enough) - and we simply fear them
so, and use poetic illusion to justify our immorality
by the blasphemy of poetry to justify it in the gods?'
a bunch of cinema goers i presume.
well that would explain a lot, like the origin of
madness - with deus sapiens, we can get momentary
flashes of **** insapiens, the supra-moral beings,
who without genitalia crafted the biggest existential
choke... sorry, joke of our lives: holes, pistons, trains,
lollipops - but your mouth where your ****** is / ****;
after all, jesus died for ****, not that i particularly care:
better an honest insult than brown nosing myself
with his fake delight in it;
but given that the greeks took delight in writing
the new testament, all that olympian philandering
paid off as nonsense - after all irrational gods
gave man reason, gave us the genesis of philosophy,
for only irrational gods can provide man with reason
and respectability... rational gods can't do that,
they can make fluctuations in man's reasoning
(however sensible)... but then there are the gods of
continuum, of tradition, or a hierarchy that's rarely
shaken to rubble... i look towards india and see it...
there's also the inverse-nihilism of the far east...
i don't know why i attributed the word nihilism
to what i am about to define, but i define it with
an example, so it might be easier to change the word
and not use the horrid ditto marks of ambiguity...
the japanese perfecting ensō sumi-e(h) / not ***, eh /
uvula back of the throat e; or brewing tea for a
very long time, longer than the english i'm assured;
but i derived nihilism from the etymological origin,
latin nihil, i.e. nothing: i.e., if there's nothing, no deity
not heavenly encore... we might as well take our
time about it... live to a hundred and twenty.
in conclusion i was thinking of a taking out something
from quantum physics, and put it into a theory
of linguistic (call yourself a theoretical languor
of phonetics you might say, sure, why not):

quantum         qua-                     -ntum
                      as being              don't know,
                                           looks pretty though

now the best bit, re-coupling the prefix qua-
with vox (voiced, voice), and akin to quantum
must but another letter in the word to make it
exotica of belgian farmland... hey presto!

                          quaevox (kwe vox),

i realised that the latin ae provides not only an
interchange (but because no one really uses it),
but also a w wound, if there's a u involved,
obviously because we say w is a double-u.
so what did i just create? definition...
drum roll please!

in the english alphabet there are 26 phonetic symbols,
but there are less quaevox in that realm,
the symmetry of c and k is a good example to have,
basically: different symbols that have the same
amount of "energy" in them, but are of different
open-geometry (straight lines bended that do not
confine to provide the pythagorean c (squared) =
a (squared) + b (squared) - where c is the length
of the hippo... hippopotamus... hypotenuse...
ah you see! i knew that c & k weren't alone...
there's also q... and queue... y why and lie and i;
obviously this term quaevox is still in its infancy,
but that also means it's in its prime.
don't say i didn't warn you... there's
art blakey & the jazz messengers playing in
the background... the classical music of the africans
if mozart et al. are to the europeans.
Mateuš Conrad Feb 2020
there should be easier ways to buy jazz records...
perhaps i should be more familiar
with black literature... perhaps will alexander
is not enough... oh god: i just stepped into
a reverse psychology faux pas...

  again...

there should be easier ways to buy jazz records...
but clearly there aren't...
for years and years i sat on the tube as it rolled
between leytonstone and leyton...
they now have a grand mount... for the new graves...
prior to... the graveyard stretched...
almost the entire distance from one station
of the central line to the next...

i did plan to go into london before
lying myself to sleep... once upon a time i would
go all the way... into tourist central...
i'd go and do the usual... tate modern...
tate national...
i even dressed myself for the occassion...
well... "dressed"...
does a dog change its fur...
i had to capture the sensation of wearing
the same clothes for long enough...
washing, personal hygiene -
change of t-shirts... of course...
but today i was going to buy myself some
jazz records...

i couldn't just hop on the bus (when was
the last time i used a bus -
rather the centipede of my own legs?
you never forget to swim or ride a bicycle -
when was the the last time
i used the tube?) -  and just head to the shop...

that would be so boring...
and i'm not a female to window-shop either...
what ensured a diversion?
immaculate timing...
   walking up to the bus stop...
a girl... probably 16... sitting and waiting...
bus pulls up... i gesticulate: ladies first...
and she gives me a smile...

that decided... winter! it's winter!
and Freya's daughter took a needle's eye
and brought me before the altar of my original
whim...
jumped on the 66 bus and then on
the central line... newbury park,
gants hill, redbridge, wanstead,
leytonstone... leyton... and onto st. patrick's
roman catholic cemetary...

just before spring comes...
to find the absolute nadir of winter -
perhaps autumn is when romance novels
are written about death...
but i much prefer graveyard in winter...
i would have gone further into london:
but those jazz vinyls are not going
to buy themselves...
plus... i find graveyards... well...
hardly morbid... i like them because...
esp. the roman catholic ones...
have statues... and...
well... who wouldn't want to see
a museum of statues: al fresco!

reiteration - because i can't mumble
or metaphor myself or make this succinct...
graveyards are museums al fresco...
whoever was the sculptor... of the crude stone...
the second artist... the weatherer has also
done his bit... coy wind... a splattering
of "paint" with rain...
the... basking in the sun...
the drop in temperature...
i like to see the "other" artist at work...
give me this one life's span a peek into
the deeds of this almost eternal sculpture
baron...

whether god or: death personified...
               the theological god can return to his
origins story... the sun the moon the stars
the: what came first the chicken or the egg...
what came first... the spiderweb or the spider?
pointless hamsterwheel questions:
a priori this... a posteriori that...
museums are stuffy... they might hold
under their roof... in pristine vacuum...
the Elgin marbles... but i want to visit a museum
that breathes! these gravestone statues...
breathe! if you're not careful enough...
you might see a wandering eye...
as if someone transcendent has touched them...

graveyards: museums al fresco...
and in winter? and it's your typical sodden...
overcast... london clepsydra of drool and dire
and the scent of wet dog fair...
and there is no chance to intoxicate yourself
with the decomposition of autumn's fall:
banquet of leaves... and that sickly sweet
botanical scent of decay...
it's winter and raindrops become piercing
needles of sensation...
you wouldn't even dare... to blink.
                    
- of course i had to take a few photographs...
it would be weird if i didn't...
once upon a time even death was due
man's concern for beauty...
in these grave statues... whether it's a 1000th
jesus or some obscure saint...
whatever it was... it was certainly worth...
imitating a ******... getting all wet with
goosebumps on the ******* sack tickling you...
no hard-on... whenever you'd want
to gasp and spew some variation whale
sonar: morse onomatopoeia: coy cooing an ooh...

so back on the tube and to the record store...
****... need to ****...
to the pub and half a pint of guinness...
again: a woman's smile is so up-lifting...
and that surprise as you're only there for half
a pint... up the stairs to the toilet and...
out the pub...

the thing about buying jazz records...
why would i buy a gramaphone...
if i didn't intend to only buy jazz records for it?
why buy, modern vinyl?
the thing about buying jazz records...
you need to know a few names...
you always look at the... "starring"...
i know there's another term for what i'm
looking for... "starring" is easy...
and it's in no way related to the word:
repetroire... but it is french etymologically:
although mutated from: ensemble...

i'm pretty sure there is an english equivalent
to ensemble: which is not "starring"...
accompanied by...
                 that sort of mid-way introductory
statement by the vocalist...
on the piano we have...
on the guitar we have... and each band member
does a little accent impromptu:
accent impromptu: which is not a full-on
hair-metal solo 2 hour slow bbq **** chicken
strutting send-off into the stratosphere...

never mind... can't a white guy just appreciate
jazz... i'm tired of the sycophants of classical music...
including charles bukowski...
the japanese have covered this sycophancy
and elevated it to virtuosity of the drum-kit
monkey... fair play...
but jazz never allows you to... over-think...
anything... a head without thought
and all that sea of feel...
logic is over-rated... i like my cushion of
the antithesis of descartes: res cogitans in that
i find pleasure... in res vanus...
- and classical music is over-thought...
to me at least... it's a falling piano of notes
and no breather... no feel for bass drums or pause...
for an accent of sorts...
no real idiosyncracy - beside the idiosyncracy
of the oeuvre...

jazz says to me: i don't want to over-think:
not-thinking...
it's as simple as that... i hardly think a cat
allows that onomatopoeia: meow...
i hardly think a dog allows that onomatopoeia:
bark / woof... to enter and govern his mind...
this imitation of being: surrounded
by beings with complex prompts and
a car-wreck of sounding verbiage...
hardly a woof or a meow to be "deconstructed"
in those furry-heads of theirs...
how does a sax sound in my head...
when i can't hear a sax outside of it...
i'm not a composer... letters would congest
the sponge... soapy water instead
of live-young evian... pristine cool and crisp...

drums and all their ambience...
when there's the intro by the horn...
before the protagonist sax takes over...
sly little horn...
jazz... i don't like to over-think not-thinking...
classical music?
i tend to over-think not-thinking...
with jazz i can never over-think not-thinking...
because: feelz... and what-not...
it's hardly an armchair of apathy...
it's hardly a sofa of tolerance...
it's a cushion for a head that sometimes
feels like a tonne of lead...
and the air doesn't become water: "magically"
to even wish for a sinking sensation...
blurps of bubbles no...
there's only the almighty fall or an explosion...

feelz... (this will be addressed...
the Z... in german... that i do promise...)

- again, not again, again... i can't buy the same old
stale **** narrative behind the slave trade...
there's a jack of spades in here somewhere...
no blacks in h'america: no jazz...
it's that simple... god forbid where i'd be at if
i were to still praise the suffocating confines
of classical music...
this is classical music to me...
this is... everything that's suffocating about
Bach's innovative polyphony...
polyphony sure... but what jazz allows and
what classical music doesn't...
it's hardly called a solo if only the piano gets
it... a chopin or a liszt...
any... famous violinists sharing the stage
with the pianists... the piano is the only instrument
that's allowed a solo: proper...
but in jazz... you can get all the instruments
in the ensemble given a fair share...
no africans coming over to h'america...
no jazz... instead:
       pirouettes in corsets and crinolines!
ugh...
               liberated into: chain-smoking
and giggling why pulling an imaginary chain
saying: choo! choo! this train has nowhere
to stop... beside a tomorrow...
and should tomorrow come...
                                      that's still only a gamble!

jazz because there is no singing...
            well... 'my funny valentine'... chet baker...
better known on screen as ethan hawke...
astronaut... thespian... at large chameleon...
dat dere: the disappointment from
having chamelon leather shoes...
that will riddle... should ever a pair be made...
no fluorescence no change in the weather...
just at the time of the killing...
would the pigment remain: "thus desired"?
well... i don't know what the muslims
and the yids have against pork...
i'm pretty sure most standards of belts
and shoes are... made from pork skin...
which is... well... leather...
perhaps they should don the orthodox ***
yom kippur statement of running
into the synagogue wearing sneakers!

just saying... porky pink and whitey sneaked
in with a guitar and a piano...
sonny clark also tip-toed on the black
and white cascade...
                                  interludes from absence...
or the myth of the custard -
               it boils like a voice unearthed from
mud... tinged with surprises of a canary...
gloating glutton of the stove...
               jazz in the kitchen,
jazz in the bedroom... jazz in the living room...
jazz sitting up, jazz sitting down,
jazz drinking a hop-heavy lager...
jazz sober...
                                        it's not jazz:
because i live in new york and i have a feel
for the romance with frank o'hara and all things
gay and otherwise cosmopolitan...
romford is probably like hull...
and i'm the antithesis of phil larkin...
my verse is more scribbles and scrabble than
his neat: your parents ****** you...

jazz is a rebellion akin to 'my parents ****** me'
when they fed me a classical music diet
as a child... rock guns 'n' roses grunge and punk
were minor rebellions: teasing pop...
but nothing to match to the diet of classical music
ingested early on in life...
                          jazz was and is, though...

- when buy a jazz record... you have to look for
the usual suspects...
sometimes you look what the lead protagonist
is playing... after hearing Grachan Moncur III's
avant-garde... i'm not convinced...
but there is a list of the usual suspects...
evolution just reminded me of everything
i didn't like about eric dolphy's out to lunch...
but there's a list of usual suspects...

'i can't believe i almost bought a vinyl of a c.d.
i already own... money jungle by duke ellington...
good that i didn't...'

the usual suspects of an ensemble alternating:
eric dolphy, paul chambers, freddie hubbard,
sonny clark, joe chambers, herbie hancock,
john coltraine, sonny rollins, kenny burnell,
art blakey...            wayne shorter...
what would probably become equivalent to...
sitting through a ****** movie...
but otherwise finding the end-credits more
entertaining... the ******-movie of what's not
remembered as that golden fleece of mid-20th
century nostalgia...
i once placed my nostalgia in h'american
hippy culture... come to think of it...
i guess my nostalgia is: the coming out of
1950s america and no quiet going the full mile
into beatnik poetry recitations with jazz
in the background...
no one would **** the poets:
instead the jazz musicians...
                     somewhere cowering under
an umbrella sown together from moth wings...
assuring himself a lightbulb was
the sun... evidently no formality of language
genesis: dear sir / madam
exodus: yours sincerely / yours faithfully...
and all of this... in between?

                         shoes shoes...
two jazz records is hardly an extravagance...
these days...
oliver nelson - the blues and the abstract truth...
sonny rollins - the bridge (jim hall on guitar)...
well... because sonny rollins and: colossus...
24 quid...
                why am i supposed to remember
the slave trade... am i a native of these parts?
i thought i was the "dumb ******" industrial n-----
joke? don't shoot the messanger...
do i look like i've just killed your grandma'
by playing a ******* harmonica?
not everyone is going to be listening to rap...
what jazz gave rap... isn't gonna give
that easily for me to ingest... *****-nilly...
sonny rollins... looks like a well attired man...
even if it is 1963... perhaps my own ambitions are lax...
i'm the son that wouldn't become
his father... and he was always the son
that was going to overshadow his father...
and that leaves me with my paternal grandfather...
all that remains to be said...
by my maternal grandfather: we has a hard worker...
well... stick that as an epitaph for
anyone without an epitaph on their grave...
i'm sure those dates will look like
candy dripping from a ******* rainbow
any day soon!

thighs, legs in total, comic sanskirt of the brains
between the gallows of *******....
and hands: all those geisha hands...
are the erotica canvas for my no-thrills
genocide *****-and-tic canvas work of a tissue...
because... even if i "cant get any"...
any is just as plenty...
i shared a moment in a supermarket with
a guy who was buying...
wine and bread... honest to god...
he was buying wine and bread...
i missed the last supper and that magic
of a philosopher's stone of:
the wood of all metaphors...
that great driftwood of history...
the postage stamp of contemp. african
get-togethers in europe...

                       an eric dolphy or an bobby hutcherson
on cymbals... "vibes"
   ("vibes" could also be made synonymous
with a prog rock artifact...
a Hammond E-112 ***** too)
                            could work...
the cymbals or the xylophone or whatever
that elevator muzak attache is...
could work... in synch...
on something like grant green's idle moments...
as forrest gump would have said it...
the gi(t)ar is in symbiosis...
but please no horns no sax...
well... sax ever so slightly...
just below the drums...
most certainly beneath the bass...
keep it clean with the guitar and the piano...
only then... some sort of equilibrium...

otherwise what's 120 quid?
something my hands can touch and the sort
of money that i would never spend:
how much vinyl can a man eat
before he realises... this **** isn't liquorice!
from pocket to pocket...
from hand to hand...
                  i never gave that money 10 quid
short with a box of chocolates or a bunch
of flowers... so i guess...
that's money best swept under the rug
of daily needs... flowers wither and chocolate...
eh... chocolate...
                                it's not the thought
of liquorice when playing a vinyl record on
a gramophone... anise amber anise amber anise...
cinnamon and...
and and and and... the raven hair of
bulgarian prostitutes... fingertips...
if only the tongue could read braille...

       i'd ensure that if i went into a brothel
i'd spend a good ten minutes moving my fingertips
ferocious against a brickwall...
some might say: i wanted to experience
of feeling oysters under my fingertips...
when caressing the otherwise sandpaper of skin...
and time...

beer becomes an elevated circumstance
of some leftover whiskey...
and this... cameo cinema of my memories...
yes... rubbing my fingertips against
a brickwall... before walking into
a brothel...

- the germans have been lying!
they have another "secret" letter in their arsenal...
although they will not outright admit it!
perhaps the ß (eszet) is interchangeable in
younger brother ßaß (saxon) english...
surprise: surpriße!
                
             most of the arabs flock around
the nationalflaggehandelsflaggeparteiflagge...

perhaps there was an S-to-Z-to-S-to-Z
interchange bound to the ß...
aber...

wo alle straßen enden...
                     hört unser weg nicht auf,
wohin wir uns auch wenden,
die Zeit nimmt ihren lauf...

         yep... that german "z"... which is more like...
a "russian" c... a ****** c... most certainly
a wet snare sizzle of... a ... Ц...

   das herц, verbrannt...
                   im schmerц, verbannt...
so цiehen wir verloren durch gas graue
niemandsland.

              then again... that all depends which german
dialect you're talking about...
and that russian spy ц is most certainly missing
upon a: schwarzdeutsche
             richtigerdepflugdeutsche rendition of:
zu...

and that's the compensation dynamic...
i'll reach into the zenith of jazz...
but come into the nadir of german army songs...
i'll squeeze a horn but then
come and drop a stone dipped in honey
into a hornet's nest...

              perhaps i haven't been the best
tourist when it comes to the concentration camps...
but i have visited the mass graves of the germans
from the first world war around Ypres...
and i have been to the graveyards of the allies...
a sparrow or a robin always seems
to sing each individual german soldier's lot
in the graveyards of the sleeping en masse...
the silence always breaks...
seeing how they were piled up...
                 compared to the individual graves
of the allied soldiers?
it's almost like going to see the end product
of the contracetion camps...
              a heap of bodies readied for a mass grave...

let's not riddle a liking for folk songs into this...
folk songs are non-negotiable details in all of this...
a black man can call another black man
a n-----... well...
i might as well call another white man...
carelessly and with ridicule... a ****...
sorry... hehe... "oops"... a... naцi...
                                                                a нaци...
         beware the german Z given the ß und Ц...
eh... don't mind the S... it's hardly a caron (š) S...
you'd need to compound -sch- into the whole affair...
and still the east germans would write
ich... их... but... somehow make-out to say:
isch... iś... which is not a caron (š) S...
nor saшa...            it's... somewhere "in between":
                                 š   ś
                     via rammstein's ich will...
well... it's not french... so there's no grave S
          to compliment... so... das ist das... yener...
                    
so much for a friday night...
              before the altar of Moloch...
and his resurrection... busy body demon deity
of the abortion clinic...
and these are the old gods united
under the single Mammon facade of the semites...
Moloch is alive and well...
perhaps the babies sacrificed to him
are not still-born or otherwise...
perhaps the strain of the argument from
the conservatives whispered a retort for me
to utter: that each ******* if a microcosm
genocide... i will not utter the name...
call it an elevated sort of superstition...
or rather... i don't have to say the racial
slur... because... i'm pandering to
                                   porцellanmenшen -
that's two russians "spies" in already...
                                       regarding the иɐzᴉ...
at what point...
                                     under what authority...
it's a **** good metaphor though...
"metaphor"...
          that Moloch is awake once more...
as a deity in his own right -
no longer the "fallen angel" in the pantheon
of semitic gods brought to heed...
before ha-shem.
the
Sid Lollan Jun 2017
Drive ‘round town; Nostalgia
                                        color me voodoo.
The oranged-pink hue of the sunshine
                                        feeds me mellow.
Head on the road ’n’ off the rodeo,
        Blakey on the radio — “Please give me
                               a pretty overdose with othello dayglow”
Mansions mate with motorhomes. Methane skies gas burnt-out residents.
Tiredthoughts&drymouth; Think it’s a drought—
                                                             Could be a pestilence.
       “****, it’s too hot out
                                  for the middle-of-September!..Ach-urr!”
I cough&choked on a memory—Remember-
                                                ­            ing youth’s relentless attention
                                                       ­ to nothing in particular but
                                                             ­   its boundless pursuit of every-
                                                        th­ing in-between.

I used to look to the Blue and think I’d float away
                                  but
             that’s when I believed in miracles.
Nowadays, reality has no sympathy just a noose — tighter leash,
                       anchored soles to a meanconcretecaprice
                                                with
                                 no abstract release — (still)
I drive ‘round Podunk & keep away from po-lice.

I stop in the corner-market
    to cop some energy&fillup on gasoline;
    at the pumps
tilt my bushy-brunette crown back to admire
            the delicious slices of tangerine evening-sky
                  topped by thick whippingcream clouds...
...Remiss though;
     futile, in wild aims to pause Time
                   and repossess my myself: immobilized
          I was separated from body centuries ago
                                   & today (i) continue
                                    a microstep behind (my) experience...
...Wait inside my 99 Suzuki Esteem
        cigarette cherried, Brubeck on NPR;
Waiting for my man, he’s always late.
                   Waiting, so I can buy it.
                   then smoke it.
                   then hide myself;
          Stow-ed a-way
& it’s almost fall,
        I find peace in the fallen leaves,
           the stoic desperation in the liberation
              of those sweet Autumn trees.

Drive ‘round town; Nostalgia is a solitary perfume;
         let it take the wheel&lead the way —
I can see silhouettes
         through the fog of cigarettes, hologram faces.
Drive ‘round town over bridges I forgot to burn
            and
      instead, just let decay...

Drive ‘round town — let
        the music choose my destination, let
                                       the rhythm lead the way, let
               the groove shake the memories loose.
Sometimes I drive for hours, sometimes
                                                I let my mind wander for days.
Sometimes I roll the world on my tongue,
                                                sometimes­ I have nothing to say.


Drive ‘round town; Nostalgia
                                         color my contempt;
       Deadwood&drygrass&nomoneyforent.
                  Sanity is counted in dollars&cents
       & This place always stinks like ****.

I love the beauty of the lake
                                 but
                            I hate what it reflects.
Hushed earth-tones and
                pastel humanity,
Vanity injected with a tie-around-the-neck.

Drive ‘round town; Nostalgia
                                 keeps me from sober.
        The sun feeds my head
                                 and the roads are now my owner.
“**** it’s too cold out
                                 for the middle-of-October!”

Hushed earth-tones
                        and pastel humanity;
Blush'd guru trance O how petty I’ve be-come!
 ... isolation is intoxicating.
           “No more, no more…”
I’m already dumb,
           Shouldn’t I be happy?

Drive ‘round town; Nostalgia
                                        color me voodoo,
                the faded twilight feeds my melancholy;

In spring I plant my harvest in fall I reap the seeds.

Nothing much else to do.

But
Drive ‘round town & let the countryside woo me.
Lived here for 15 years,
           (turns out)
nobody ever knew me.
Sid Lollan Sep 2017
this always happens:
sitting at tombstone
desk—blood clots from hours in this twobuck
torture-chair;
4AM? can barely read
my own thoughts,
neatly arranged,
painstakingly painted a
cross ether
glare of the computer screen.
Seven stanzas devolved
from the act
ual epiphany
of the p o e m;
chest tight,stomach churning acid from
cheap *** cheap cigarettes and cheap
grass rolled up in
99 cent Dutchmaster cigars—
Forgot to eat, forgot to hydrate, forgot to remember
the truth i was trying to forget
—forgot the point i was struggling to articulate;
Did i have a point?
I’m beginning to note tiny
Beings of Light
out’ve the corner of buzzing eyes,
all too familiar friends
friends of fiends, vampire junkies,
raving mad x-politicians,
and nocturnal suicide poets—
who after failing to get laid
in college bars
and drinking too much, too many boring conversations
with dull goons;
Get home, pour another glass,
cigarette      to dry lip     in perpetuum; beatiful Miles,
Porgy and Bess, sit down to
computer and write p o e t r y
not prose,
not prose—Man’s revelation of
histories to come, histories manifest.
not prose which brings Man’s higher-self
        into the great
        Universe-at-Large
but p o e t r y, pretentious,
narcissistic, self-important,
which alienates man from his tools of realities;
enemy of machine—but Man is machine;
no poetry is Man!
no poetry is animal,
primal, instinctive;

Well, **** me, half
way thru another cigar,
“maybe i’m not learned enough
to write a story, a **** good one at that…a novel
i’d say
-good luck you simple sloth…How
could you? just a regular self-loathing chimp
who writes — p o e t r y.”
really pondering
hard; thinking: i can’t be [that] dumb,
i'll admit what i don’t know,
(but Hell, least i’m smarter than the next guy, the
       next guy, the next guy…til the next guy makes
me a **** fool; time to relocate and read some books.)

return my eyes to the computer screen,
re read what,
an hour ago,
i was, prematurely awarding myself the pulitzer prize for
as i see it now: pure
*******.
Devil’s attorney
slinking on slouched and grim drunken shoulder,
“hmm…and you say this is your forte?…
I wouldn’t kid yourself…kid.”



Warnings
in grave visions
of a desperate worm of a man
hunched at resin-stained desktop, scribbling away
His fancifull abstractions, broken man— Mad
and scared; shriveled,
scarred by regret—
Thought he was a talker;
witty, true like Bukowski,
        or Heron;
Fresh,
inventive as cummings
        or essential as Pound.
Simple
and brilliantly smooth
        as W.C.A  or W.C.W.
elegant, smart
and far-reaching as Eliot,
        or the Old Romantics;
could have sworn his musings
Rapturous! no Thoreau, he,
        nor as damaged as Poe be
under the Impression
He could stitch his Soul
into the seams of American Divine, direct such
spirits into p o e t r y as ***** ol Ginsberg did
so bravely, beautifully
as
Wherefore art
thou loving father? in Heavens is Walt
Whitman—
He
sure was;
He
was sure,
******* sure he
possessed a nugget of gold, mined
          from inside each of these masterful
Mountains. panned entire sunsoaked cordillera;
yet
each night
would ‘finish’ a
p o e m,
clock out, tho
always would feel, incomplete,
nevermind how many p o e m s he wrote
hundreds, maybe thousands of
bottomless wells
        of words;
Great Idea! Necessary Idea,
take action, he, in prose,
a form of action the action of wit,
to give human
body to formless, ex-humed soul—
Give soul to formless body of philosophy by god!

alas,
the schmuck
never
witty never
potent enough to pen a real
mother-****** of a story,
certainly
never could imbue a plot
with significance, endow with subtext
or builda character out of his p o e t r y,
        Then give it the legs to run for two-
         hundred pages—
He had the ****, just
not the ***** of it-all…
toiled, silly
in his nebulous, castrated,
dimlit room—swelling
whiskey or gin
cigarette glued to his dry lips, attempting
to romance the grey gods so
that thay mey spit mustard-seed
onto humbled holy head—
pray that it may grow, Flower
to full Bloom
even without
ever learning
his Biology.
…never
realizing what he had there—right
in front of him. Poor *******.
-Dumb. he was.
Cursed to be a P O E T.
and doomed to fail as one.




I hate the sound of the Sunrise
when i’ve been up, writing all night; it’s
an alarm like bones in a blender
thru an endless
waking dreamscape;
Sitting, thinking loosely,
wildly, loose-
change two-cent thoughts—
This
this is when regulatory bodies
are disabled, de
funded; radioactive runoff (operational hazards)
contaminates
pure streams;
...random billboard pop
t-r-a-s-h drift in
and out of mind(probably from
        the endless drone of those same 3 chords in
any store or restaurant you enter. How about some Classical?
        Math: the food ain’t rot ‘em enough, let’s assault
   their other senses of taste. Quick. while
        we’ve got them swine trapped!)
politcal memes, halftruths and
newsday buzzwords flash, bright and
silly then recede into obscurity;
only to discover, the next morning,
their greasy finger-prints
given gimcrack shine to deeppurple dawn
Gibberish. trife piffle. bunkum and balderdash,
gobbledygook, mumbojumbo jackshit slangspit
hogwash, ** lotta raspyutintutyncomman nonsensses hoosis mut nowago sayawahhesay too dum for dada…
My
yawns
are now childish giggling;
My concentrated writings. none of it makes any sense to me.
Searching for a distraction
To regain my focus, composure…
biting
nails, tapping Art Blakey grooves on tired desk,
inspecting burning cigarette, forensically.
Oh—
look around for my cat, come here, co
me here kitty. (ah yea, comforted
by familiar purring, a hum from under the bed;

-Close my eyes,
to centralize
to meditate
to ***** out
inanimate,moving parts
to put finger
to pulse of programmed nub;
to create value
for a dying currency of language;
to whisper sweet nothings
in the ears of tender muses
and meaty hookers.
-At this juncture:
reconciled
where the finish line is
strung,
how it appears to me…only snag:
by the time i get here—none
of these
nothing have no meaning
writing,this,that? what? be
low my paygrade *******;
Let stew; sleepy,
delirious, suicidal, anxious, sorta
*****, deadly confident;
Let stew...
…then it hit me like a Point of Intoxication!
brilliantly constructed
Words,
words hanging,
hanging
like a,
Renaissance-style portrait
above a fireplace in an enlightened *****-den,
    -for a moment, seen clearly thru parting
    of deadeye yellowsmoke sea.
Maladroit,
hallucinatory, went to type,
thought better,
no doubt would ****** such
sudden genius,
fumbled for recorder, gotcha
click:
closed my eyes oncemore
to review this epiphany, to record it.
relayed, recited
like a prayer;
perfectly—this must be what the body
of Christ feels like…
when done, i, exhausted,
smiled like a son a *****
how fine
that P O E M is gonna look,
when written
down all nice and neatly.
it was close(but i knew i'd pull
something revelatory out’ve
my ***.)
satisfied,
if my pants weren’t dry
i'd swear i came.

...the following afternoon,
Upon waking, coffee, cigarette, news
in the background,
grab the recorder to listen to this opus;
well,



**** ME!
if
i didn’t make sure there was any space left
on the ****** thing!
bye bye my petty kubla khan
Smart Boy.

ah well...
it’s just
P O E T R Y ya know.
If we do build Jerusalem
people like you and me
won't get a look see,

we couldn't afford to live there in
the rarified atmosphere
we'd just be a
nuisance
to the gentry

elementary my dear Watson,
******* Sherlock,
was my reply.
Mateuš Conrad Oct 2017
given the zeitgeist, well, what can you expect, bad punctuation, even worse grammar, and a complete of "raining from above" diacritical appropriation, can make anyone quasi-dyslexic, even if they are said to champion a high-level of proficiency in a native tongue; which always made me wonder: why did i turn into a speedy gonzales, outrunning the majority of natives in the tongue? i guess it came to a dedication to a craft, like any carpenter with a block of wood, english, represented by a block of:
                                               a b c d e f g
                                               h i j k l m n
                                               o p q r s t u
                                               v x w x y z.

sorry, i'm taking over, i've had enough,
enough of these poncy natives speaking
their native language as badly written
as a rap, or as naive as a *simon & garfunkel

song, i don't care for your little english degree,
i know your little scheme,
to ensure the H is mutilated, mainly bound
by promethean chains of surd -
only apparent in laughter...
that alphabet you see before you?
it's my version of sudoku -
i look at that "square" and get **** out -
i never write from the heart,
i write from the perspective of my *** -
**** it out, forget about it, move on,
move on...
            i rearrange what i see and don't see...
and yes: you learn from the best,
and the best being? the ones that allow
you to think, make-up your own little narrative,
you pepper the writing with nuance,
with ambiguity, with a: huh?
   along the the day you also channel in
a tarantula's bite of disorientation -
narrative has seized to be worth a linear
geometry -
  there's no point (a) through to point (b) -
we're talking literature in einsteinian terms,
not newtonian projectiles...
           any ******* idiot can draw a straight
line, this deformed kid i knew from being
a child: hugged the **** out of me,
could have made a brussels pâté out of me,
i liked the ******: his ****** ****** his
wife's sister, and, being a ******,
he supported the whole family with
the benefit cheques...
          couldn't say a word without a ******'s
grin... but i do remember his favourite
pastime - precision of a pair of scissors,
he would sit and tear up newspapers all
day long, sometimes walk the dog,
  but you couldn't cut paper the way he ripped
it in streaks like spaghetti...
       hell: nature abhors a vacuum;
ah, ol' robbie.
                but that's beside the point,
what i learned from my pict english teacher
was: digress... he always digressed,
i learned the art of english is via: digression -
he's the one who got me into jazz -
i can't say i listen to jazz all the time like
some pompous aragonite of catalonia -
       but when the mood is right,
and there's no woman, and there's no wine,
and there's only the identical twins
ms. & ms. pepsi & amber - and it's october,
and the wind is warm in the night,
and i feel like: these headphones are becoming
too claustrophobic, i put on some miles davis
and feel like: like a politician in davos...
   still, i don't believe in linearity of dialogue -
after all, the earth doesn't travel in a straight line...
so why bother with a "beginning, middle & end"
style of storytelling? why not tell a tale high
on a tarantula bite, completely disorientated?
the best english you're going to hear is:
via digression -
     and as i recall, up to the age of 16 -
the pict made us sit through about 2 / 3 hours
of curriculum, i.e. in english class that means
learning grammar...
     ****, we learned about 0's worth of grammar:
his motto was something like:
  hey, if you speak it grammatically,
there's no point learning any grammatically
grammatically grammar, written, or spoken.
fair point.
     so he taught us by digression -
and no one can teach you better english,
  than a glaswegian... hey, you want a great memory
of school, and not turn into some soppy
         morrissey? learn to build up an
affection with your teachers...
           ****, i even remember the teachers
in primary school, everyone feared mrs. hetherington;
she once told us a story of being shipped out
from london (due to the blitz) into
the countryside... the old "hag" is dead by now,
but, although the rumours: she was a gem;
school wasn't a problem, as long as you
didn't buy into this whole famous obscure,
weird yada yada yada, frozen prune on
a popsicle *******, you did fine...
                as long as you had respect and
some sort of weird admiration for a teacher,
or +2, the other kids just, seemingly, drifted
into the song of ambient music - akin
to refrigerator humming.
seriously - the best time of your life is
the time you have in school, esp. given the currency
is nothing more than brownie points / peanuts...
no, i know a teacher's pet when i see one -
but dabbing into the personal life of a teacher,
say, seer thomas! what's your jazz collection
like? and then you get a c.d. to burn
the next day jazz on a summer's day album,
with the opening track being
    art blakey's song moanin'...
but that's beside the point (once more) -
let's just say that solving the sudoku allows you
to clear through the claustrophobia of thinking,
notably, given that all mental illness is
a form of cognitive claustrophobia -
     well...
    there once came an argument against
the godfather of existentialism, JP sartre -
who said: existence comes prior to essence...
so we live a life (borrowing from kant's rigidity)
             vita est a priori
  subsequently esse est a posteriori -
  i need to degrade everything into cartesian
terms, with that eternal formula
that has reached a mathematical pinnacle
of 1 + 1 = 2, i.e. 1 (cogito) + (ergo) 1 (sum) = id,
no matter how much you'd like to shake
it off, you can't! everything in philosophy
zeniths and nadirs on the cartesian sly cat
of expression...
                 what are we though?
do we exist to think, or do we simply,
                           essentially think?
well, if we exist to think, we'd be nothing
more than a brain in a pickle jar...
and we wouldn't get up to moral transgressions
and general idiocy of making mistakes...
    and given the aura and the fauna of
our environment, and the number of sport
disciplines available for us to practice:
thinking is non-essential,
it's a byproduct of existence per se.
before writing this i was actually going to
channel an argument against sartre,
  but given the ongoing arithmetic of the end
product of this writing...
  i kinda agree with him...
       existence is a priori to essence,
as essence is a posteriori to existence -
   nice, look at 'em siamese twins, butter-rubbed
greasy and all...
                 could slide into a chimney
prior to santa (anagram of satan)
          prior to santa saying: bishquits und quackers
and a handful of rollie-pollies to add the
extra, crunch!
    thinking is essential, i admit,
       but it's not exactly an existential absolute
i.e. uniform in: the omni sphere of things,
plants don't think, parasites don't think...
    hence the antithesis of the cartesian
res cogitans is the res impetus -
   phototropism being the best example...
           shlime of a honeybee in the ear
of krampus...
                    how can essence come prior to
existence, given the cartesian reductionism of
pivoting the argument on thought?
  thought doesn't even enter the picture,
once the senses are fully formed,
  and that lesser celebrated cognitive faculty
of memory finally lodges itself on the hamster wheel...
first we memorise, then we imagine (so many
games in childhood) - and we start to think: lastly.
as the world around us suggests:
   thinking isn't exactly essential -
   it's existential...
      wait wait, too many O 0 O 0 O 0 O squashing
of doughnuts and rollings wheels...
                      essence comes prior to existence...
so, by saying that: i am to be born an
essentially good person?
              this is theologically speaking an
inversion of the protestant concept of
  predestination...
        now the spaghetti muddling revision...
       i had it! i swear, i had it!
                         essence can't "predate" existence
since existence has no universal analogue replica,
no uniform coercion of all given examples...
yes, in essence we should all be universally
well off, rich, beautiful, perfect skin etc.,
that would be the "utopian" essential component
in arguing: essence comes prior to existence...
but the reality is: existence comes prior to
the essence of things - given we experience
the odd bouts of daydreaming...
        essentially that, but existentially: this...
trouble with certain counter-arguments
      to doctrines is that they leave the argument
in the jaw of a chimera,
   and never bother with real-life examples of
counter,
          like in poetry,
            with its array of technique,
   philosophy has but one sunshine moment -
   take the abstract road up to a point,
and then ask that age old question:
give a man a fish and feed him for a day,
or teach a man how to fish?
               as any parasitic business model will
tell you: give the man a fish, make him
indebted, and then tell him to mine for diamonds
to make for the first, and subsequently
second fish you're going to give him;
as was my concern:
  if no idea, no concept, can't be made
infantile, or rather, to be reduced to a level assertive:
well, you know, that "serious" thinker was
also, once a kid... what's the point
of taking yourself seriously?
kfaye Aug 2018
hair in faCe-

lids, part covered over like gauze on a wound

as your zipper eyes are caught in my [ shirt]
3/4s of the way down

a metallic taste
like ******* on a cashier's finger-[tips]

the sandpaper strips at the edge of each stair
as  your head tilts . like
a broken PA speaker on a subway car
pushing static like a jazz drummer

art blakey and the
hiss.

superrich .  call they say,
                      savory as
sputnik sounds through hamradios
in every other basement
in a time [and place]where things are still
in bed
The lights are switched on, a bit like me although it's been said, I am dull.

The jubilee line train is starting to fill and now it's full.

This is the early show for those in the know that the early bird catches the worm.

It's eyes down in the smart phone town where contact is just an adhesive.

A mustachioed man much older than I am
playing candy crush
slowly.

I've seen
those what sniffs
some with quiffs
and them what whiffs
of wintergreen.

I sit here taking it in
can't hear a pin drop.

Terminating at Stanmore?
well
I won't be going there.

Unlikely,
but mustachioed man
looks a bit like
Blakey!
on a bus man's
holiday?
on Tuesday?
unlikely.

Some guy just got on
he smells of
Old Spice,
I wanna say nice
but
I won't.
Mateuš Conrad Sep 2017
my english teacher, a pict, of all people, massive fan of led zeppelin, introduced me to jazz... he just said: if you don't own miles davis' kind of blue by the age you're 30, you're in a shambo (knee deep in ****)... well, a ferocious over-zealous teen like any, i made the purchase aged 16.

after that, it was easy... i borrowed a compilation -
jazz on a summer's day: hot bun these days...
   selling, new, for £61.47... my, that's not bad...
   it might or it might not have
opened with
art blakey & the messangers'
song *moanin'
...
if someone doesn't like this song,
let's just say: trying to convince this
person for more jazz is,
     a "bit" pointless;
if this gold standard doesn't
convince the person in question,
where you can feel each of
the instrument's solos...
hmm...
  pontius pilate moment:
snap-chat the rest.
still... i'm thinking of this saxophone
player that played the jazz
standard how deep is the ocean
with such a distinct technique;
ever heard a wheezing out of
breath saxophone player?
the wheezing one,
      the trembling-f-f-f-f one...
god, the name escapes me,
feels like i minding what
lionel nation might provide
with due anecdotes...
         this is going to **** me...
i want to remember his name,
i know i copied the c.d. -
  and mind you, why buy compact discs
these days?
  headphones are too portable,
at at times: to claustrophobic,
cultural appropriation yet? we hit
the high tide watermark?
  oh, i'm not worried about the spaghetti,
just asking, because i was just
going to say: classical music sounds
great in a concert hall, a bit ******
on the radio with all the adverts news
and weather...
    jazz?
         shady bars and certainly the radio...
i've been trying to find a jazz-only
radio station on the english FM / AM scale...
nothing, not even an s.o.s.;
come on, *******-it!
what was that saxophone player?!
**** it, whatever, the trembling-f-f-f-f
         bordering on asthma blowing guy...
can't be bothered enough to make the classy
anecdote...
         get lisa simpson on the case...
       i heard that robbie pinsky is still
on the case, hat off to you mate,
for those nostalgia pieces,
    or reviving the beatnik **** of poetry
& jazz...
           i wouldn't know where to begin:
i talk into the **** thing,
i don't talk over it...
  looks a "bit" crap, given rap...
  then again rap has become a mono-syllable
rhyming machine: ye yeah ye yeah um yeah
ye um yeah...
              mr. boombastic?
          mr. luvva luvva... ooh...
      slobbering mr. spastic, mr. fantastic,
diaper donning, hush ooh, shoo hugs shoo...
give up the buttocks for...
      white self-consciousness just kicked in,
and i feel like a middle-aged dad of three kids
and embarrassing a niece at her wedding...
****...
   even i know that ini kamoze
        made relative sense, by comparison.

— The End —