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Mateuš Conrad Nov 2016
.i. if Kant could have his von Kleist... well... who else to juggle juggernauts if not me? as a task of redeeming that poor soul who succumbed to the terminator of all poetic ambitions, with his systematisation off-the-page, as eccentric and punctual as a sunset on a sundial at 16:11... and in case either the spring of sunrise, or the autumn of sunset... but so many hours after exacting a sunset... that gluttony of the eyes to stare at it... 16:11 is the zenith of a sunset in november the 15th... much prolonged when warmer... supersized sun when setting in summer, and all that whiskey-copper wiring for the eyes to stare at it: oh for goodness sake, who really cares for Ikea likened assembling of words... we're not putting together a coffee table, we're looking for Darwinistic entrapment, we're scared of the aeons and yawns... we're trying to create a Darwinistic entrapment saying what segregates us from apes! that's how anti-Darwinism works - if they can easily call you a poet and a technophobe... then that hardly makes you a merchant with a Quran... to encapsulate the language of our modernity we're doing everything against writing the onomatopoeia of our beginning... monkey ooo! monkey ooo ah ah! or a gorilla grunting and then snorkeling... we're encapsulating our language more and more... because beginning with ape and then looking at history, and then looking at the consensus of the contemporary: Darwinism's greatest enemy is not theology... it's history... Darwinism and history are not compatible... oddly enough Darwinism and theology are compatible, simply because they are dynamically equal for the case of furthering both arguments in debate... but Darwinism is an odd starting point to argue, given that physicists argue from the perspective of prior to dinosaurs, prior to all things formed.

how can i begin this? it will leave me having to
write it for two days,
the anti-narrative sketch first, then filling in
the gaps sober... just to get second opinions...
i might have to cook a quasi-Hungarian borscht
and fry up a few potato flattenings to a crispy
yum... first the narrator comes in to describe what's
in store, a bit like a translator comes in and says
of Joyce: that's Irish... well, yeah.
               hence the italic preface...
as some would say, the person who wrote these
sketches worked quicker that an algorithm in asking
and also quicker to copy & paste the required
atomic encoding... e.g. ч and ch
                   э and euro and epsilon...
      once upon a time there was nothing prior
to Copernicus, then the somersaults came,
    h ч y        what coordinates where?
    well of course perfecting the encoding of something,
if things weren't stated awry there would be
no optometrists either...
                  it's not hard to read, it's hard to
remember how to read, given that being literate reached
the omnipresent velocity, the new powers had to
include some new power struggle...
mingling Latin and Runes, Greek and Cyrillic...
     and the proto-Latin of additional diacritical marks...
they exposed the entirety of humanity to literacy
within the framework of post-industrial society,
after hitchhiking a ride on the 19th century donkeys
they suddenly had to reveal their power-secret of
being literate, and by the account of women:
corset bound and bored in salons...
      but something else appeared that didn't really fascinate
them: that over-complication of Latin with
punctuation marks above letters: or diacritical
distinction, crowns over letters, subatomic particularisation
of once favoured: universal applicability...
as a narrator? i have to make a complicated
introduction, the sketch lends itself to do so,
it suggests that not all writing can be as simple as
a nursery rhyme, not all writing can actually
    **** memory, not all writing desires being remembered,
not all writing can be remembered,
                in the mediation of the two chiral opposites
there's fiction, which is suspended in an armchair of
pleasurability... but on the opposite side of a nursery rhyme
or a well versed poem? writing akin to arithmetic...
  something truly painful for those competent with
lettering, but not really competent with ten digits...
      as a narrator who has already read the sketch,
i'm trying to not write a "filling in the gaps" to the sketch
like an art-critic might do to a painting deviating from:
brushstrokes were employed. well... d'uh!
variation of italics as in transcending the pause that
implies a condescending variation of taking a pause,
also excluded are: dot, comma, hyphen, semicolon
and colon.                         dot-dot-dot is not joining up
the dots: it implies a variation of how to anticipate
a punchline: drummed: tu-dum wet snare!
     i am actually a narrator who is trying to find
that other part of me that might digest this sketch properly,
     and return fully competent to pick up another
sketch... if ever there was a narrator in this sketch,
it has to be me, after the sketch has been scripted,
and i am left to suggest a need for a dot-dot-dot connectivity
of the strokes of the pen...
i warned myself: do not overdo the introduction in italics,
you know how picky people are...
whether pickled pineapple of cucumber...
i swear Turks invented pickling chillies...
         oh look! an inflatable gazebo filled with helium!
no one's laughing: only because i didn't mention vegina.
narrative puritanism? you get distracted a lot...
but this sketch is really a thesis for narration,
all i have to do is find the antithesis of narration in it:
an actual narrative!          it stretches for ~30 pages...
   well that's me turned archaeologist with a Grecian urn
with a snap of the finger... because that's how this
sketch looks like: ancient -
                         but understandably modern.
              so .  ,  - and ;
        were racing... out came the world record
             9.58(0)         the full-stop is the bracket-bound
0... i.e. it actually happened: hence the pinpoint...
or in Formula 1 a timed nonsense of ave. m/ph
     noted to three decimal points: 130.703...
                                    or chicane cha chicane cha cha!
as said, this is an actual representation of a narrator
encountering this sketch: so before you lose your head...
i've lost mine!
  look at the correlation though!
we've gone way past atoms with the atomic bomb
and encountered subatomic particles...
    we're not going to get beyond subatomic particles
because we're going to encounter the already apparent
reality of obatomic particle: namely our bodies,
   the perceived ******* (ob- is the antonym
                                                  prefixation of sub-):
             that's were the microscope adventure ends,
    and this is parallel to cutting up a second with
three decimal points, as the safetynet suggests:
                                                              π / 3.14;
yep, the obstructive - hence we can't spontaneously
combust... but then again Goethe's Werther did:
  out of love... down the spiral: you sweet little *******.

~ii. i'm actually too lazy to write the sketch and fill
in the blanks... so i'm going to fill in the blanks as i go along,
  or that's what's called the rebellious stance of narrator: mmm,
work in progress, could you see that coming?


ii. a beer in between glugs of whiskey - runes
combined in the ******* / sigma, variant of agliz or
the rune-zeta extended toward a dark shadow of the rebirth
of Ishrael: zoological enclosure; sigma *******
sigma ******* sigma *******, sigma *******...
rune-zeta... we cannot say there are ******
mathematicians and poets akin,
not then one optic encoding states
     a b c d e
         another states f u þ a r
yet another а б (ρ) в г
  α β γ δ:
for worth of gamma into a trill only because of
   a wave, that's ~ approx. on the side of the letter
   e.g. г & r.
   or rho upside down? what the ****?
did Voltaire write this? reading Candide,
i hope he ****** did!
you the problem is pixelated paper? if you know
how you enter a deciphering mode...
                    but you require a personal library to boot,
all that dos formatting,
                       well there's formatting in the humanity
outstretch of this white medium too...
after it isn't all ******* white when all the psychiatric
pills are white too... i have really found something better
than the Bermuda Δ...
       Greek, Latin, Cyrillic and Runes...
i could say neo or proto otherwise,
but i still haven't unearthed the sketch, that
is probably puzzling the Danes, with Cnut on the forefront...
                    but the arrangement of numbers is universal,
but it's not universal, given the particularity of
how language is encoded and why some people are
richer than others...
            but it's still a beer between glugs of whiskey that
makes more sense...
i said, retype the sketch and go to bed...
and i figured: that's probably the wisest of all possible
events stemming from this...
    that's ~27 pages of notes to retype... and i'm already
in a disclosure mode as to expect what's to be jargoned...


p. 1        cкεтч       /      σкεтχ
   necessity of                        (acute
a-       -the           (ism)
is that of language structure,
          only from the use of one's language does
a deity present itself: from within the noumenon
ground work, not the reverse, as in from
(pp. 2, 3)
                 a phenomenological exercise in
the use of language: Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, (etc.)...
       e.g. Islam is a phenomenon,
  it's not a noumenon: or a thing-in-itself...
  for the Islamic god to emerge from Islam's-in-itself
Islam will have to prevent itself from being-outside-itself...
or overpowering other in-itself contentions
but still: to no apparent success narrative of true intention
as satisfactory appropriation and hence lending itself
to a widespread nod of approval.
  challenging space: word compounding, or the space
between conjunctional deficiencies: nod-of-approval (e.g.).

p. 2    concussion (great film, Alec and Will, 2015, NFL)
concussion... Blitzkrieg Alzheimer's....
brain is fat.... dementia = attacking proteins...
  steroids... the noumenological use of language:
e.g. that ****** is an enigma,
therefore his views will not go viral,
and he'll not become fashion trendy...
it's not individualistic idealism, it's reality.
as will die sonne satan - orbis reach more than 5K
views... so... clap clap... clap, clap.
           what i meant about the a-     and -the
and the ism is following a sentence that sort of
does away with conjunctional fluidity,
apart from the big words, i treat all minor words as
categorically conunctional... and, the, a, is, to, too...
given the sentence: brain fatty *****,
brian organic giraffe wall... ******* hieroglyphic...
           stood above the rest, rest assured.
  dementia: invading protein cells
   (bulging prune of the opportune: purely
digestion?) no thought to eat or eat itself like,
cannibalistically. the brain is fatty...
not fat in muscle for mmm, schmile and flex
for the selfie. how about a protein inhibitor?
(by now, rewriting the sketch, i've lost the page count,
it's actually p. 5 of note paged toward 27).
how about the explanation that we're living in
times of post-industrialisation and thanksgiving
feminism? to me post-industrialisation has created
a class of meaningless white-collar workers
and no blues... it's what the Chinese blues call
the Amazonian nomads: ******* happy...
no amount of crosswords or sudoku will exert
your body to do things for others...
   no amount of mind games will actually tell your
brain to be equipped with: a bunch of hyenas... run!
dementia is a result of creating too many
white-collar jobs (thanks to feminism)
and exporting the blues to China (thanks to feminism
and: oh i broke a nail, can i get a Ching plumber to
fix my heating while i get a ****** to **** me up my
****?!) - maybe i'm just dreaming...
it's great to censor dreaming, i mean: you stop dreaming,
you get to see reality, and you don't even need to
read Proust on a ricochet.
  - so we have brain as fat, and invader cells as protein...
protein digests fat... and creates cucumbers out
of people... where do the carbohydrates come into play?
it can't be at the point of a.d.h.d., can it?
     i'm blaming post-industrialisation, the complete
disappearance of the blues (formerly known as the reds,
in the east) for the whites...
or that old chestnut of: my god you're goon'ah luv it!
   to till for worth from the sweat of yer brow -
funny funny funny... to earn your loaf of bread
you will toil...
                   and toil until you are physically assured
that not ghostly / mental life can enter your world /
books... that went well... didn't it?
   i should be tilling a potato plateau rather than
be bound to be writing this epic (by modern standards)
poem...
             but that's the curse of exporting all the blue
collar jobs to China, then importing mindless
white collar jobs to the west, what the hell do you think
would happen, not the pandemic of dementia?
if you do not exert the body, and then you do not
exert / exhaust the mind... do you think
you can secure a narrative with a post-industrial
westerner on the premise of that person simply being
able to solve a crossword? well... i believe in santa
claus too... but i don't believe in him giving out
presents... because to me, in my oh-so-called maturity
that's called an anagram of satan's clause: which is a legal
term for: i can turn civilisation into shrapnel
of what's said and what's to be said: and what's not to be
said. people can't expect to turn honest labour
for the recreational run on the treadmill in a gym...
and they can't expect photocopying in an office space
to replace Newton's curiosity, and then compensate
all this distraction with mind-games...
          can they? well... they did!

poets are gagged by writers of prose,
no wonder they write so sparingly,
      they are gagged in the sense that they write
as if asphyxiated: they need breathing room.


well sure, if he can revive the Polish steel industry
and i can go back to steel plates and pillars,
then the rust belt will get a polishing also.

or what's called: shrapnel before the waterfall of
narration: darting eyes, and poncy **** all the way through...

     muse... muse...

        well, how about we take the fluidity out of language?
declassify certain words into one grammatical broth,
say words like i and they
                              a  and the    are all conjunctions?
how about that? let's strip it bare, after all: what categories
of words exist for us to primarily speak (let alone think)?
     nouns, verbs, adjectives... adverbs?
       but all those words in between are so jungly classified
into a tangle that i'm about to sprout a handshake
          of a Japanese vine grip: and never let go...

an actual extract from the sketch:

      https that doesn't recognise UCS
                   and insists on IPA cannot be deemed
       encyclopaedic


              i need runes for this! i need runes for this idea!
i don't need transliteration right now...
                but hey! that's an idea, etymological transliteration...
bugly term, sure, but the previous night i was thinking
  of transcendental etymology, as you do, likened to
carbohydrates... so it was transliteration after all...
but a dead end when it comes to geometry and Pythagoras...
      
    three words... and they are computerised (i guess you
have to buy a decent book to decode this), a bit like
buying paint in a d.i.y. shop...
       16DE (dagaz / d) 16DC (ingwaz / ŋ / grapheme of n & j)
                  16DF (ōþala / Valhalla / o / ō = oo),
in total d'njoo / d'nyoo - even i concede the fact that this
is a ******* mind-******... it's a ****** congregation of
four optic encodings of phonos... i moved away from
the ancient greek fetish for the logos... i'm looking at
the phonos... not the logos with Heraclitus et al.
               φº θ þ фª f

ªgreek
  ºcyrillic                ever see a prettier pentagram?
                      i haven't.

(false original title:
škic / cкэтч / φº θ þ фª f: thespian pandemic - pending)

looking at the phonos is painful, actually painful,
it's like reading a book with a myopic pair of glasses:
a ******* aquarium blurry right there, befor...

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

'e'? were you: was i, looking for an 'e'?

i can say this much...
what do you get when you mix a shot
of whiskey with a shot of bourbon:
i'm moving between bottles...
it's nearing christmas eve and i'm a ripe
taoist... i.e. i better this world:
by not having the world mind me...
on the odd occasion: oh... you're still here?!

yeah... i'm still here... i have glued-to-fascination
with my shadow... i'm just waiting
for the atom bomb to relieve me of a body
but ensuring my shadow is kept intact...
as if it were a Monet signature on a wall...

but i lament... the momentum has vanished...
i don't even know why i'm so idiotic as
to presume that: from the hour 22:00GMT
to the hours 00:00 circa 00:30GMT...
something will land into my lap,
my lisp... my cranium the oyster shell
my tongue the oyster...

it will not... i can't simply **** anything into
an existence that doesn't want to exist...
perhaps lurking in a canvas of:
"lost luggage" in an airport...
perhaps "there"...
i could be excused my... lethargy...

when was this written? back in 2018?
so i was thinking about teasing cyrillic even then?
wasn't i?
sketch cкэтч or?

what do you get when you mix a shot of whiskey
with some bourbon?
a Burguandian whisker...
i am not going to sound witty...
Ron's key...

that's still a cyrillic "or"... isn't it?
шкиц: škic...

i'm... deflated... nothing "new" has come my way...
i would have thought that...
reading some Knausgård would have /
could have... invigorated me:
reading him was supposed to be my:
dialysis my transfusion!
my zombie-go-to-literature...
it has proven an exhaustive enterprise
to begin writing again:
i became too comfortable
in reading - i almost forgot
the agony of writing...

alas... a contemporary of mine...
and someone well adjusted to prose...

notably: who would have thought
that death in june - the calling (MK II)
was something to be recorded in 1985...
for one: i wouldn't...

but i did begin: back in november 2016...
begin what? to tickle the cyrillic alphabet...
which is way before i discovered my reply
to the runes... to the ancient greek...
and this... "ancient", ahem... still in use...
latin script...

that script that went into the molloch couldron
of being invested in to code...
pristine as the hebrews cited:
how many holes in it?
to write onto a canvas of 0?
q Q R O o p P A a D d g b B...
which leaves...
W E T Y U I S F H J K L
Z X C V N and M "out of the equation"...

škic / cкэтч / φº θ þ фª f: thespian pandemic (pending):
i better rename it as... circa 2016...
that's way before i even acknowledged
the cyrillic text applying diacritical markers...
i thought them too crude at the time...

beside borrowing outright from greek...
the already at hand oddities of glagolitic,
notably: Ⱎ...Ⱋ...

it's only a single word i'm using...
i have abandoned all notions of metaphysics
in favor for orthography...
i'm not going to burden myself
with: what's after the physics...
i'm after: what's now...
in the respective tongues...
2 tongue deviations from
the original latin and greek...

what came with the runes and what
came with the glagolitic scripts...
what was ****** and had to succumb
to inter-breeding...

come 2020... i will have one clarification
to base my existence on...
pronouncing the growth of my ****** hair...
i will hope to aim at a length of beard
that will forever hide the neck...
i will aim at... somewhere to the level
of my heart... when i will then manage
to turn my beard into an orchestra's
nieche of violins when i procrastinate with it...

since 2016...
i have identified russian in ******...
i've seen it... finally!
зъaрт... i.e. żart
and the "hard sign" becoming a "soft sign"
in źrenica: зьрeницa...

i still think the russian orthography
is... as... primitive as the western slavic...

after all... зъ = ż...
зь = ź...
the balkan slavs have a caron...
which is neither a hard or a soft sign / acute...

their caron is... ч (č) or cz...
CHeaper in english...
and their caron is ш (š) or sz...
SHeep...
or the two together...
and always шч (šč): szczekam...
i'm barking...

pu-shch-air... a rare example in english
of the puщair...
but then lookie lookie 'ere:

CZACHA... skull...
ЧAХA...

perhaps this is my "revenge ****" on russia?
hey! boris the kremlin mascoot...
come and 'ave a look...
with how i disect your orthography
on the / with the language that asks
too many metaphysical questions and no
orthographic curiosities!

i'll meet you in Warsaw... given that you're
probably moving from Novosibirsk...
and i'm either in Stockholm...
Edinburgh or the outskirts of London:
Warsaw will be halfway for both of us...
you don't have to like Warsaw...
i only like it when the Ukrainian smugglers
and the Mongols appear
in the West Warsaw coach station...

smart as who? i am discovering this for
the first time myself...
i was only teasing it back in 2016...
way before i found the right sort of accents
in mother russian...

i do know that that crescent oddity:
above the ja: йa... is what it is...
if you only cut off the head in english... ȷ...
again: it's я given that most russians
are pulled toward an anglophile world-view...
they all see the window to europe...
the baltic and st. petersburg is somehow...
London... and the atlantic...
like hell it is...

i guess i feel it was a waste of time to
have re(a)d Kant, simply because:
i'm not here for the schematics...
i want to know how my thought my labyrinth
building architecture is coming along...
but with no one to talk to about it?

i found the categorical imperative most
dissatisfying... i didn't want to abide by universal laws...
poetry is already shoved out of waiting room
of the republic...
if my "poetry" is not a categorical imperative...
and it's not quiet a a hypothetical imperative...
it needs to be sharpened on a thesaurus
and some grammar...

categorical (adjective)... imperative (adjective)...
well two adjectives never imply much
if there's no noun involved...
and i'm pretty sure that... if i sharpen
the next word i'll compound with categorical-
in that hyphen construct that's only
allowed in oxford dictionary english:
since it's not: propergermannonhyphenfaustian:
i.e. carboxylic (carbo-xylic) acidity...

poetry doesn't belong in either
the categorical imperative focus...
nor the hypothetical imperative focus...

i.e. i must write a poem... to feel better...
i must write a poem... to organise my thoughts...
no! a poem is not a maxim is not a categorical
imperative! a language of poetry is not
a language of morality: it's a language
of experience - or a lack / a lackey's "sentiment"...

i need a... categorical: impetus!
it's not enough to have read kant's critique of pure
reason... it must also involved
having re(a)d the: groundwork of
the metaphysics of morals...
but i'm a democratic reader...
i need to hear the other voices...
i can't be a kantian scholar...
a snippet 'ere, a snippet v'ere (funny how
THETA disappears when making the posit:
THERE - ver!)

who needs metaphysical absolutes...
when orthography (or a lack of it)
in english... spreads open its legs...
and the tongue remembers its tongue-brain-phallus
stage of co-existence in the oyster?!

i'm pretty sure that a categorical imperative
is by no means a categorical impetus...
this had to be written,
but it had to be written in order to disregard
anything a priori... prior to it...
a poem is a shady concern for action or inaction...
it's a deviation from the cartesian crux:
res cogitans (thinking thing)...
into the cartesian levy (res extensa)...
it's an action of inactivity...
as much as it's an inactive activity...
"the rest"...

impetus is not an imperative...
an impetus sources its meaning in a per se
investement... of itself - in itself - for itself...
an imperative?
in pronouns... impetus: i want... i will...
imperative? you want... you will...

an impetus is self-dictative...
an imperative is: indicative...
someone would rightly claim...
those that mourn indicatively...
will don the right garments for the process
of mourning...
which is indicative and devoid of
the per se manifestation of mourning...
it is an imperative when compared to
the impetus to mourn -
which is self-dictative...
which does now shallow itself in
grief by making a socially agreed to fiasco
of a very specific choice of wardrobe...

basically: however you like it...
an IMPERATIVE ≠ IMPETUS...
the year is almost over and i want to break-off
the dust from the thoughts that fudge-packed themselves
as worthy of occupying the minor instance
of having to count a depth of:
not dead within the year of being written.
Sam Temple Jul 2015
Not since the days
of shooting ******
into the artery in my armpit
(too many blown out veins
in my arms and feet),
have I spent multiple nights
pacing and sweating…..
******* simple carbohydrates. –
In the first months
of being a non-cigarette smoker
I would see folks light up
and near instantly collect
a chilled film on my back
and fingernails…
forget about it;
but the other day I drove
by a pizzeria
and had thoughts of ski masks
and 45 caliber pistols…
******* simple carbohydrates. –
Once upon a time
I drank near 200 ounces of
Mountain Dew
each and every day.
If I missed a day,
I would have massive headaches
combined with serious irritation;
while it has been more than 5 years
since this body ingested caffeine,
last night I could not fall asleep for anything
and no amount of cannabis oil
or ibuprofen
had the ability to curb
my aching noggin….
******* simple carbohydrates –
change is the only constant
and humanity has evolved
amazing adaptability
while I know I will be fine
at this moment only one thing
really runs through my head:
******* simple carbohydrates! –
Mateuš Conrad Apr 2019
.comes the floundering over foul language, like it's a sin to speak with a cascade of oath taken words, to: never mind the beat and rhythm, that will continue, as long, as long you play the solo... never you mind keeping-up-appearances, why be distracted, better yet: why talk during ***? isn't that worse than saying ****, casually, in a conversation of: pardon my french? i will tell you, it's far worse dragging "god" (words) into the "satanic" pit of actual procreation, than it is to say **** and let it be treated as a conjunction, akin to: and... since what words are sacrificed on the altar of *****-*****? bad, boy, who's your yummy, mummy... who's your daddy... i tell you: **** in between some jane austin snippets, and those prunes would be on, fire, should any words be uttered from their mouths having been staged completely ****... no... foul language is free language with all the chanel and gucci to attire you with away from furr-skins... but talking, uttering words, while procreating? that's just plain scandalous! i bet those prim goodie-two-shoes care more for: pardon my french during conversation, yet they probably squeal like about to be castrated pigs in a slaughterhouse come the synagogue of ******... ******* never wish to accomplish syllables or vowel cubism with contorted mouths during ***... but they say: brush your teeth while speaking... if hey-zeus saw hypocrisy in the jewish sects... full circle... who are the modern day pharisees? somewhere in h'america... beastly contortions... if not pedophiles, then at least the sort of pedantic hypocrites that could share the same tier of Dante's inferno... why talk, during ***? why not eat the ****** during the zenith? wow, don't you think? because bukowski might call me a star-gazer... well... if you look up and see what i see? you too would be looking up... but just in order for you to get a feel of what i feel? three song summary when i look up at night at the sky:
   penta - come in,
     gloOMy PhAntOM - only the beginning,
Matutero - pure evil...
             hell... a fourth song: matutero - exorcist...
i'm no ******* copernicus...
   or a galileo...
                              still: to keep one's mouth clean
is to not utter god: words during the wedding
of "satan" to his shadow...
                                 to keep one's mouth clean
is to not speak during *******,
     *****-stars know the deal...
   tell me what you want, and i will not give it...
don't tell me what i want: and i will surprise you...
even after the act, she said...
'this has only happened to me once'...
when she was paid,
   and didn't expect to reach ******...
                    2nd man in...
  1st man with a hydra in his mouth for paying
an extra 10 quid to perform oral ***
on a *******...
                      good... evil...
well: good is as good as it gets,
but good can also imply: the purity of evil...
evil of the highest quality is in a position
to move down an incremental path toward
good: as spectator...
       as a tease of what is itching the incremental
path toward evil: the omniscient, omnipotent etc.
god...
      oh sure... night sky *******, romance my this
that and whatever *** looks more like:
pork chop cleopatra meets
   cherry 16 tight trim of milk and quicksilver
reflection teasing...
                      you'd be gagging for the goosebumps
and the prickled tiny hairs... performing...
what plant-speciments do with their...
   phototropism...
                                    against all: stereotypes...
            this, lunar base of imagining, not otherwise.
so this is to be my antithesis Golgotha?
for who stands on Har Megiddo
certainly not the skull-baron of the crucifixion...
   blitzkrieg imagery: and suddenly...
   the words... become...
   s               a
h             r                                       l
                   p                   e
                           n      
simply?
      for the supposed foul language used
as barrier between flow and conjunction
necessity... a rhetorical tool of the modern use
of language: no one is standing in any
oratory pulpit speaking to the "masses"...
      but... if i could invent an inverted niqab
for the tongues of christians during ***?
reduce them to moans, groans,
exfoliations of an onomatopoeia...
               less daddy please, who's the naughty boy
*****-***** *** tantrums of:
having ****** so much, the next ****
acts like an anaesthetic to numb what's already
become a numbed pain / pleasure non-differential...
well!
                like i really might need to venture
into the dark-web...
   i'll just bring myself to the party on the "safe" web...
and some poo'em i wrote once,
which doesn't even compliment what i just,
just now: pulled out from my bowels...
again: there's zero-net-worth of feeling in the heart...
emotions? bowels...
   the heart is too preoccupied with rhythm...
akin to how:
    the brain was a metaphor for the soul,
even though the soul is a sigma,
of all known organs and its preoccupation with them,
or not...
    given the current explanation of the brain?
coordination and what not?
evidently the soul is, equivalent to a metaphysical
and biological definition of an *****,
given: the brain doesn't entertain the existence
of thought...
       so... if the brain is not responsible for
thinking, then nothing else in the body is...
                  so soul, or the sigma "conundrum" /
is a metaphysical *****, or whatever you want it to be...
brain = fatty sponge... that can die...
when attacked by killer proteins in the light
of Alzheimer's... like a sort of inverted anorexia...
weird... starvation? fat goes first,
then the carbohydrates... no, wait...
carbohydrates first, fats second...
and then... proteins cannibalise themselves...
that's starvation... in Alzheimer's?
the proteins attack the brain sponge-fatty-blob...
so the brain is not involved in thinking...
so... well, mein gott: god i guess...
   some external source of "inspiration"...
motivation, will... oddly enough?
that coincides with both the + and the - of
such a source of thinking...
             both sides: theistic and atheistic have it
covered... right now? chosing the middle ground
is the only sensible posit to succumb to
...

what's the difference between
a polyamorous society
and a polygamous society?
  well... there's not much
of a difference...
   i've been a subject to the former,
and the "covert" latter...
suddenly prostitutes are
above priests and psychiatrists...
well...
  either being sold the body,
or being bribed with
prayer or the pharmacological cocktail...
only because:
i was...
         "being uncomfortable"
for the rest of society...
    polyamorous societies
descend into make-shift
polygamous societies...
             the whole incel problem...
that's really representative
of a polygamous society....
  20% of men get 80%...
    sure... lesbian frolicking
in a harem,
    strap-on-******...
     and eunuchs are missing...
but...
akin to a manic street preachers'
song:
   the walking abortions...
   in all honesty...
the top-down influence
of a polygamous society has crept in
and created
the polyamorous society buffer zone,
so shy right up to now,
but:
before the **** hits the fan
   waiting game...
and how much
of the madonna-***** complex
is currently true,
and how much of ******* dysfunction
is due to...
  being pulverißed
by overtly sexualißed material
exposure?
                 hell...
  if i'm always going to be stitched
into a frankenstein hard-on
potential...
when it comes to the actual deed?
why wouldn't the answer suffice
mostly associated with a *******
and not a woman on her third date?
because i'm pretty sure
that erectile dysfunction isn't
a problem with my experience
of prostitutes...
    but it is... with "free" women...
given that i'm no psychopath...
  and when *** is staged,
it follows that there's a case for relationship,
intimacy...
           a ******* hard-on
is an objective fact...
which is why prostitutes rarely
fail to "conjure" it...
         the violence is simmering...
it's... titillating, nibbling at the toes
of Venus like some
sado-******* fetishist...
        **** me...
   the nazis dropped less bombs
on London via the world war I
zeppelin raids than
how many ****** insinuations
leave me quasi-limp-**** / ******...
   well... not so much ******...
***** just keep bulging with
goosebumps,
   i sometimes forget the ******...
which isn't even associated with
the actual *******...
   it's neurologically associated
with tingling sensation
            of the shaft...
    ***** has nothing to do with it...
    should have asked
me when i was 8...
                  "self-harm",
or...
                 what others rarely see...
no wonder i gravitated to
reading marquis de sade in my early teens...
but like chuck rhodes
said in billions...
             truth...
            if it's not comfortable,
and if its not a wager...
a shadow compensation...
  if its not the intellectuals'
demise of truth being treated
  as a fluctuation,
  a perpetual change,
   bias one minute,
        critique another,
                         a noumenon,
                                  then... what is it?

oh i'm pretty sure
that the current society,
the current:
polyamorous society
is a direct consequence
of a polygamous society's influence...

i don't even want to begin thinking
that man,
was the pinnacle of all lifeforms
on earth...
   notably in this region of "debate"...
because there's no "debate"...
is there?
     not with the elevated mating
norms of... say...
swans... how you actually can...
find widows and widowers
in the swan populace...

          with man having evolved
from monkey:
  well no surprises...
swans have devolved from
dinosaurs...
   the feathers are the fake...
but like lizards...
  born from an egg...
no?
                 swans understand
monogamy...
           humans?
    not so much...
         well... if you're lucky...

but i'm pretty sure:
oh i'm pretty sure
that the current society,
the current:
polyamorous society
is a direct consequence
of a polygamous society's influence...

am i, bothered?
clue me in...
    revolting *****' song: *****...
could a **** ****
a ****...
         without a strap-on?
n
Mateuš Conrad Nov 2015
sample precursor: there are three binding directions of a chemical group (e.g. CH3) to the benzene ring - the ortho-, the meta- and the para-... but i'll ask a different question: what is copernican north what is copernican east a copernican west or a copernican west without a "flat-earth" / how else to read / navigate a 2D map going from point (a) via vector (c) to point (b) along the short-cut of the hypotenuse - which, isn't a short-cut, but the logical conclusion of walking neither the middle path nor the right path, but the logical path? we're no astronauts... we didn't see the proof... we can only entertain the "idea" of a 3D object we live on, but we're still strapped to a "flat earth" in order to navigate... endless stories of how GPS tech. fooled people off the edge of a cliff... "flat earth" is no reverse psychology ploy... i'm no ******* astronaut... i never stood left right or center on the moon to have the foggiest sense of admiration for that awe-balancing moment that leaves so many deluded in it being otherwise: first come first served, last come: what's there's to serve that last man if not merely the drudge-report of a commute? besides... trans- and cis-, why are people borrowing from chemistry and attaching gender to what is exlusive to chemical compounds? look at them... pop chemistry... cis-trans isomerism... fine, let these people have that... my new n.e.w.s. (north, east, west, south): orthography, something clearly missing in the anglophone world (no diacritical markers, i and j do not count)... ergo? orthography = east... paranormal = west... since the west is obsessed with either aliens or hush-hush military projects... now... both north and south are meta- coordinates... on the basis, on the basis of what? two words really work well to establish a foundation: from ars poetica? metaphor (borrowed from a change of mind - meta- and -phren - mind, a change of mind, all mental illnesses are changes of the mind, alternatives to alleviate the stranglehold of the commune of the greater picture known as society)... but... there's also metaphysics... which is in the interest of philosophy... how else not to explain the obvious, how else to treat both the reader / audience as the well informed genius(es) but mistreat them as would be grander genius(es) if the socratic endeavour of "pretense ignorance" was not to be established? it's a hard juggle... east is already well established in orthography, west in paranomal... literally: metaphor - a change of mind, literally metaphysics - a change of groundwork physicality of things... a rock remains a rock in either "heaven" or in "hell"... metaphysically there seems to be a direct translation... this is why i'm terrible at crosswords, this whole puzzle structure of either working from a direct definition to the word itself, some random geographical posists, some historical posits, some outdated out-of-vogue words related to specified period idiosyncracy, a tinge of the therausus... my current crossword is an interchange: meta-phor, meta-physics, meta-phot, meta-physics and on and on it goes: even with the isolated prefix of meta-, if i return to the words: as they are... would: denoting a change of thinking (state of mind) or... denoting a change of physics, i'm met with metaphysics, i.e.: a branch of philosophy that deals with the first principles... sounds like a priori physics, yet all i can fathom if i wrestle this word to its casual use: isn't it a posteriori physics?! the what comes after physics? i should think that most people understand metaphysics on an a posteriori basis rather than an a priori basis... hence the question: what happens when we die? last time i checked: death happens last... birth happens first... any question-worthiness (according to heidegger) should begin at: the beginning rather than begin at the end, in the same way that all questions should be sought in a medium of predating the dates of events, rather than with a spirit of hindsight, hindsight belongs to the "what if" of history in that dynamism of expressed time... on the canvas of an infinitely expanding space: we seem to be riddled by a very cul de sac concept / expression of time: our quill - given that ****** didn't learn from napoleon when it came to russia... perhaps finding out what copernicus found out: "we" figured: get me off this ******* celestial carousel where i can't even feel the dizzy immediate of a ferris wheel! again: i'm terrible at crosswords, sudoku? no problem... but words: if not gushing out of me, waiting like a lizard predator for a linear narrative spew? count me out... i don't play with words, i use words... i'm a wordsmith, hence the ethnic origin denote: słowianin: slav - i don't know where these west-saxon punks derived their etymology from: słowo = word... *****-liquor juice teens thought it was: oh fo' sho' smart... still: metaphor, metaphysics... metaphor... metaphysics... disgruntled with the immediate compound readied for pop use... meta-physics... the vector is the prefix... why do philosophers push metaphysics so much, but in turn rely on the crutch of metaphor? to change their mind, if metaphysics is an abstract theory with no basis in reality, then the schizoid / metaphorical mind is an abstract in an abstracted theory of the mind - which has "no" knowledge of reality, or rather: "reality" excludes such a mind from ever absorbing an expression in it... a schizophrenic can't explain the reality of a person who can solve crossword puzzles... just as someone who solves crossword puzzles with a fear of alzheimer's: who treats the fatty tissue that's the brain as a muscle... given that the cells of alzheimer's disease are killer proteins... proteins as the antithesis of white blood-cells that feed of fat tissue... after all: what else could the brain be if not fat and water? slow burner... first the sugars, then the more complex carbohydrates, then the fat: last? the proteins... the process of starvation... you want up? you want down? again: metaphysics / metaphor... ta meta ta phusika... the things after the physics... so what's with the inverted: prior things? hence people associated a life after death... hence how philosophers have to escape into the poetic realm to quickly change their minds on the definition... a change of mind is much easier than a change of what physicality entails... most spew metaphors but keep on course... after all: given the genesis of the metaphor, a metaphor is just a tool, a humble stop-off pause... born from humble poetics: it's only a literary tool, it's not some grand pillar of morality associated metaphysics, which nonetheless dictates: first principles come last and last principles come first... here's my crossword puzzle: metaphor, metaphysics, meta-alpha, meta-beta, metaphor and the meta-alpha, metaphysics and the meta-beta... etc. etc., i will not solve this crossword puzzle, even though it doesn't look like a crossword puzzle... it's a narrative crossword puzzle, i'm just looking for the sort of fixed point people associate with prime words: red, left, blue, right, up, fox, dog... words of readied vocabulary, readied vocabulary dissociated from puzzled vocabulary... i want to established a fixed permanence of the dissociated close proximity grounded in the meta- prefix of the words meta-phor and, meta-physics... i'm starting to find this impossible, given how the words have dissociated themselves from the grounding in the meta- prefix... phor alias phren (mind) and the whole gush of isolated metaphysics of beginnings: meta a priori vs. meta a posteriori - and of course: meta a- apriori... hell if i can't solve crossword puzzles: since i already have a crossword puzzle in my head... what am i to do? try writing pop?! a dog does what his master orders, a jester tells a joke his king would find amusing... i'll just treat this enclave of an audience as a bunch of people subscribed to ulterior forms of voyeurism (dissociated from pain / pleasure gratification, esp. that of a ****** nature).

.you know like in latin you had the interchangeable tongue twisters æ and œ? well... english resurrected one more... au... oh stralia... auntie; ******* hell i've been speaking this since aged ate and i still can't get my tongue into that phonetic plughole... or what's that onomatopoeia for: it really hurts? awe... nah... aw... aw... well no cute kitten about to say aww.

well it began with the usual... i wish i didn’t...
sitting in the autumnal garden
drinking coffee and eating a nicotine croissant,
watching the fog recede into nothing
while the earth showed its naked cleavage
after what seems like centuries of arcane dryness
befitting a story of an egyptian idol...
then the panic set in...
what to cook?! what to cook?!
my mother is away visiting her parents in poland,
who celebrate the feast of all saints with the usual
tackle formidable in poland:
forget the paris fashion week, forget the london fashion week...
forget the next gucci advert...
all the action happens in poland’s annual all saints’ fashion week...
through the cemetery (ahem) cat walks
(more like death on rollerblades donning a tutu
and looking fatter than size 0 models)...
because that’s when the fur coats are worn,
the make-up is heavier and everyone comes
to discuss the materialistic jealousy of a small town...
it is a small town after all...
death knocks with all the nine cat’s lives just to prove
the point...
anyway, so i’m the head chef, and in panic
i search for a recipe... i’ve only got pork on the ready
in the recognisable frozen state...
but i also have shrimps... tiger prawns...
so i look through the usual suspects... thai green curry...
ah ****! no coconut milk!
what’s it going to be? prawn korma curry
(better mild than hot i say, with all this maple syrup
and honey colours about... talk about decay),
active ingredients? chilli powder (1/2 tsp), cinnamon
(1/2 tsp), turmeric (1/2 tsp) and ground almonds (2 tbsp),
there ready... looking suntanned my gorgeous twirls of seabed manure...
enough to spare my father making himself sandwiches (i always
disguised my “dyslexia” by associations... sandy witches...
the t broke the barriers and the floods entered)...
with toasted nannies / au pairs... relatives of some sort...
then onto writing my father’s invoices:
project plaistow hospital and some housing development near
the city airport... beckton we call it... backwards and forwards
stink crowned with drinkers regurgitating on the pave...
now that is a *******... recycling centre or horse manure?
then to tesco... for the nightcap...
oddly enough tesco has become a friend of mine once more,
i divorced the turkish shop, they added 10 pence to the polish beers,
now i’m on the sedative medication of this bottle bavaria beer
and whiskey... 1 quid for the former... 10 quid for the latter -
i’ve sold my soul! never mind...
then to the beacon that’s home... it’s night... it’s spooky...
it’s essex: that non-touristy place in england people with passports
never dare to visit, shambles.
well one thing came out true... none of the above though:
you ever consider the theory of the aeroplane syndrome in writers?
you know, like with rock stars you get the full package,
you get the aeroplane and the retrieved delay of the engine mushroom,
but with poetry (which is competing with music,
philosophers just wait in that queue for the cheese, wink, whine and wrinkle)
you only get the sound... that delayed mushroom...
you see the poet but never hear him...
it’s a typical delusion i’d call parallel or even adjacent to narcissism,
you walk down the street and the closest you come
to someone recognising you is a stranger uttering out: ‘hey richard!’
‘name’s matt mate.’
‘oh... sorry.’
it’s this aeroplane syndrome theory... it’s perfectly acceptable...
you have the image but don’t have the delayed sound...
you have the delayed sound... but you only get a photograph...
you have the english national health service mental health unit crisis...
and then you have people shunning intellectualism
trying to cure people by burning / not reading philosophical books;
the day ends with drinking and reading
an article about keith richard’s antics in the sunday times’ supplement
and the thought: well i gave her a stabbing chance
at feminism... she thought the active ingredient in anti-contraception
pills was placebo... she phoned and gave birth to me...
i said abort... you’re no post-teen mum at university, you won’t be...
******* was great but i’m not that much of a match from a cosmopolitan magazine quiz
(as duly taken on my way from st. pestersburg to moscow to see
metallica play), plus there are no roofing jobs in scotland...
the scots have mountains already... there’s no point building
scratched sky skylines with mountain ranges nearby...
so even though i went to a catholic school...
i did my first redemptive act by reading about gnostic heretics...
and not getting confirmed being the second...
i would have not taken first communion... but playing the xylophone
at the nativity play was too much fun...
plus it is the only salvador dali bit of the story...
after that you have st. sebastian...
plus you see where this is going... the greeks translated
the tetragrammaton into the gospels
of st. matthew, luke, mark and john...
and the romans were duped into the legality of
things... first name, second name, confirmation name...
surname.
Mateuš Conrad Apr 2017
you had your shrove thursday! you celebrated it with frying pancakes! celebrate harvesting crops by returning to eating like wild animals... no carbohydrates on good friday! carbohydrates? complex sugars... you can ingest fructose and lactose... come on... keep up with the poetics of the religion!

well... it's easter... whatever the hell that means these days,
    in protestant lands there is more commotion around christmas
time anyway... you can literally glance over
   the concept of easter in england; i'm not sure how it
looks or feels like in either *lutheran
or calvinist countries:
   germany in the former (category), switzerland in the latter...
        category...
but easter is **** hard to pick on...
                 it's supposed to be "celebrated"...
  but to be honest...                            **** all happens!
so yeah... coming from a nation that became ultra-catholic
because one of their countrymen became a pope...
     you get this fervour back there:
                           people really get to the grit of things,
and they do! i swear, they do! take it seriously -
          when you hear a bunch of poles stating their
creed: father son and the holy ghost etc.,
                         they sound like an army of satanists!
you have to hear it... it's what i call the...    murmur effect.
holy murmur... mmm and probably as much comparison
as putting your ear to a belly of a bear and listening
   in on the grumbling noises of the bear's intenstines
  doing their magic of the latter stages of digestion...
  so... coming from a culture that got duped by having
a pope's ethnicity overly-stated as: foundation! tradition!
you get an exodus of those who firmly believed that
communism was working... because they didn't get
the marshall plan hand-outs / benefits...
                         a bit like that analogy:
  give a man a fish?          or give a man a fishing-bow?
                       anyway... so you have this pope
that didn't have the human decency to become
                                                          ­            emeritus
slobbering, drooling all over the sanctity of st. peter's
humble beginnings...
                                 and you have what's called: "tradition"
of celebrating this "festival" -
                                  you don't eat meat on good friday,
also called: quasi-ramadam without any mammal proteins...
   saturday you go to the cinema...
                    sunday you go and sanctify
  eggs... that are painted, and hard boiled...
                            and you have what drunks call:
the morning after...
                                           monday? by now you're in
heaven... having risen from the dead!
                       or what's called the melancholia of winter.
but you know what really bothers me about all this?
     the holy sacraments...
                     and the ****** greek poetry that comes along
with it... and how it's misunderstood, when applicable
to the lunatic acts of "celebration"...
                                      so "fasting" is invoked by
not eating mammalian proteins... meat...
                                   meat... meat...
surely it should be about not eating bread / all forms
of carbohydrates! eh?  surely fasting would be about not
eating breads of all sorts... croissants, pancakes,
buns... crumpets... scoans...
                               after all, flesh into bread blood
into wine?
                             or bread into flesh, wine into blood?
water into wine, oysters into genitals?
                                                 lemons into oranges?
the ancient greek critique of poetry provided us
with an artefact that's probably the best joke on the planet...
thank you plato... for giving as a laughing-stock
of a political movement...
                              clearly what beats it with a club
with nails sticking out of it is:
                           a religion that's like, ultra-kumbaya -
the clerics can sing the whole shabang from
minarets - while the dutiful adherents whisper their
                                                 five-a-day, five-a-day...
that's when you get into why milton wrote what
he wrote, and then had his eyes "gauged" out -
                             nothing less than the equivalent of
the homer of the north... i.e. went blind.
                      me? i'm drinking today... whiskey was
not specified...                 now i'm going to an apache
shamanic rant and say...       whiskey! fire! fire + water!
firewater!                and just ****** greek poetry,
because you know that ancient egyptians also had
a sense for poetry, but it had to be translated into
hebrew to have potency... egyptian princes spoke
the slave tongue? it's a bit like prince charles speaking
some slavic language... say... russian....
     i'd be surprised if he could speak french, never mind
the so called "exotica".
Torak May 2014
Calories.
When I was 6 years old,
my mother told me I would consume
too many calories.
I would consume them by the hundreds,
by the thousands.
I was Godzilla and they were the people I dominated.
When my parents left one another
I had to fill myself with some other source of affection.
And the insulin rushes were tremendous.
When I was 11,
I had to see the doctor to be in fear of getting Diabetes,
and being grossly overweight.
At at age of 15, I was over 280 pounds
of walking disappointments.
I had always believed my stomach carried my happiness
and the fat under my chin kept my head high.
But after being rejected for so long,
I snapped.
I always had an attachment to food,
a sort of inseperable bond.
But I remember looking at myself in the mirror one night,
completely disgusted, tears welling in my eyes,
and I puked from the anger I felt inside of me.
So don't tell me the calories I consume today
don't burn more
than the bleach Amanda Todd drank,
or that the more hollow my stomach becomes,
I am not able to better hide my sorrows.
Do not dare tell me eat something,
because I've craved biting the bullet for the past 8
******* years, and carbohydrates
has caused more sadness in my heart than anything else.

Do not tell me other teenagers do not cut open their arms,
to let calories out,
because they are scared to Christ that someone may judge them,
if they eat an apple.
Because the first woman that ate an apple, ****** humankind.
And by having a sip of your Iced Tea,
or a french fry, might just dissolve the earth from beneath us.
Why we hide from nutrition labels,
and run from anything with a number greater than
ZERO
on it.

I was taught that happiness comes from a nutrition label,
and how many servings one consumes,
not the smile on ones face,
or the good in one's heart.

Calories have ruined my life,
and I will never forgive any nutrition label for that.
Rusty McCormick Aug 2013
I have migraine headaches quite often.

Stress could be a factor as
I am a fifty-one year old father of three;
a retiree with too many chits, too many broken nest eggs...

Or it could possibly be my diet:
lots of carbohydrates and complex sugars,
mixed well with large quantities of
diet soda and inactivity...

Or perhaps the trouble lies with allergens;
for my life is inundated with pet dander, pollen,
dust, and grass clippings. Add to that
humidity levels and mold blooms -
who wouldn’t be allergic?

Or maybe it’s just a brain tumor.
Chuck Jan 2013
Cycling
High cadence
Low resistance
Tight corners
Horse class climbs
Mountainous descents
     Back up!
Horse class climbs?
At my current weight
More like fat *** climbs!

Cycling
No high calories
Low carbohydrates
Tight spandex
More practice climbs
Mountains want destroyed
      Go forward!
At my cycling weight
More like what climb?
This poem is inspired by Spooner but in noway a Spoonerism. It was also inspired by all the Christmas cookies. Haha
Ruth Forberg Jul 2012
So here I am.
Sitting on my couch
and eating potato chips
and thinking about you
and what might have been.
Wallowing in self-pity
and artificial flavors
and carbohydrates.
The only things comforting me
are my fast metabolism
and the hum of the air conditioning.
Cody Edwards Apr 2010
"And Abraham drew near, and said,
Wilt thou also destroy the righteous with the wicked?"
- Genesis 18:23

I

There are about four thousand people
Here.
They throng in blasted heat like
Little arid wasps.
Gasping summer rain,
Like the opposite of fish.
Of their individual character
I can give no generality.

They are men and women,
They stand on roofs and
Sleep on their words.
They are hot and cold
And they hate and scold.
They are devils and stars
And ***** and priests
And children of priests.
Orators, they are also:
The speakers of the state (which
Is hotter than they could
Ever know); they steal
And reel and impose their
Splitting fingernails deep into
The varnish of the
Wishing well.

They are men and women,
They stand on roofs and
Smother dreams by spitting on the sky.

II

Fox. Come and light my little room
With your brilliant breath. Have you
Come very far? From the eye of the trees?

I should leave this little town if I were you.
It has its ways and leeches from our
Dangling hands. A tongue named Lethe.

Wake early and flee back to your dark,
Summon that green corpus shell that
You came from and follow its outlying root.

You should know the power of the vine.
It crawls in the blinding night and
Strangles what it cannot feed upon.

Oh my little fox, I beg you turn back,
For in familiarity lies strength and nothing
In this wilderness will give you nourishment.

III

He walks in waterways and crunches bone.
He watches moonlight play on open wounds.
He wishes dearly for the ends of weeks.
I heard him live his life without a sound.

The high school band with a treble clef. The year
Of empty penmanship in which he wrote
A thousand notes and mailed them underground
About which neither parent knew a thing.

Encounters best discovered some years later
Work to redden ears in coffee shops,
Or rather as I’m talking to him now,
With darting speech and halting eyes and all.

Perhaps the atmosphere could lend itself to blame,
The hormones and the collusive ennui.
But little charms the tear ducts quite like saying,
“Why am I this way, do you suppose?”

I haven’t got the heart to make reply
And often pose myself the same question
Before the mirror thinking of my whims,
The muddied roads that led me where they did.

My time has run itself to pieces in
The hope of spreading my horizons, but
Some sand runs faster in the way, some gains
More ground. And mine? This distance is unknown.

I licked the shelves of Hardy, Plath, and Keats.
I lorded over idiots with glee.
I lured the fathoms of my mind to float.
And oh, the things that he must think of me.

IV

The doors know I am coming,
They dart out of my way.
My telekinesis stops there
But I troll forward
And brandish my little iron steed.

****. Adjust my strap
And push the cart onward.
My purse like a little leather
Bundle of swaddling.
I nuzzle it close to my breast.

Frozen foods. Diet says
No carbohydrates, so I adjust
My tastes. In a little town
Like this, they’ll notice if
I don’t.

Magazine aisle. Nothing
But ***-endorsing rags
And godless photo sessions fit
For lining shelves and
little else.

Lord, this vast store!
Give me strength to bet back
To my car. God, look at
That **** at the pharmacy
Asking for birth control.

And I can’t help but
Cluck my tongue at her:
I just tell Ray I have a headache
And turn on my back.
Ha, as if she’s married.

No decency any more.
Men getting married, women too!
God supposedly “Banging” us out of
Star dust. Who are those atheists
To judge my truth?

Checkout. No, self-checkout.
I don’t like that clerk
Staring at me. Receipt.
Probably a ******* anyway.
And for a moment my mind controls the doors and all things.

V

She’s gone a bit insane.
Yesterday in class, she asked
To go to the lavatory
And just went straight home.
(Poor thing, I can’t blame
Her after all that has happened.)

She’s told me about her
Father before. Whether she’ll
End up as warped remains
To be seen. She’s got my sympathy.
(Mother dead at four, brother at
Seven and something else at twelve.)

Senior year is more than
Freedom from Dad, she says.
It’s freedom from myself,
Whatever that means.
(It is her father’s profound wish
That she memorize all of Revelations.)

From the grass, she tells me
That her father explained to her
That non-dairy creamer kills
Ants. She does it with a smile.
(We don’t have to say much more,
Suffice it to say he’s a very loud man.)

She still has an averse reaction
To stories about car crashes.
And I never read her her
Early July horoscope.
(Nightmares are too kind.
Panic sifts through windowpanes.)

Her uncle doesn’t call from
The old hometown, he was
Grabbed from her life and her
Father never says why they moved here.
(Two years her junior, she jokingly
Calls me Grandma because)

She hates her real one. Prom
And graduation. A candle
Ceremony and she’s gone.
Her father left before it was over.
(I’ll miss her, but I made
Her promise not to visit.)

VI

Hot like a miracle breath.
The two seasons: Summer
And February.
We taste the heat
And drive away for the weekend.
Of course the world ends
And the “Welcome to” sign.

Unsurprisingly,
The radio dies as we
Head back to town.
Why should the death of
An intangible surprise me?
Everything else
Dies here.

Pessimism like a mockingbird.
The smoking trees
Ripple like an Ella
Fitzgerald vowel.
Hold your
Miraculous breath
And it still won’t rain.

Our abortion
Welcomes the needle heat
with a  horrifying
Little finger.
That smile,
That smile.
Jesus.

How can it stay so
Hot? No reply,
But I forgot who
Was asking.
The irony of this ****
Town sparks my
Smile.

VII

So where are you from?

        I lived up north
Before I moved down here.
They needed teachers and
I thought “Why not?” Turns
Out this place is a lot
Slower than up where I
Came from. No offense.

(Laughs) None taken.
So what are you teaching?

Senior English. Pretty cool
Subject but I was shocked
How little the kids had been
Exposed to. I hope to remedy
That soon. (Mumbles something)
Any more problems, you know?

The parents have complained?

Oh, just the usual nitpicky
Silliness: “I don’t want my
Christa or Johnny reading
Such-and-such a book.”
After a few years, I’m
Sure the parents will lighten up.
Or, (Laughs) at least I hope.

How are the kids?

Can I actually answer that one?
One or two brights but most
Just seem ready to get out.
They’d better be willing to put
In some actual thought if
They really hope to. (Pause)
It’s not all about sports.

(Laughs) I hope you’re not too
******* the athletes. They do their best.

Well, I certainly hope
They do. I won’t play
Favorites or anything like
That. Hardly fair to the
Others, right? (Laughs,
A pause, tape ends.)

VIII

He can’t breathe.

He’s been running for
Hours.
The trees. The brush.

Wonderful veins blast
Away at their work
To preserve him;
Great fibrous tendons
Work to carry him
Away from the noise.

The murderous streets with
Scoured buildings
And trees inviting the
Convening crowds to lay
Out their burdens, to
String them up and
Ease their hard frustrations.

They have not seen him as yet.
He follows Polaris,
god of the irreverent,
Meager candle for a
Drowning man.

Exposed road; he flags
A car like a madman.
Well, we shan’t go
So far as to call him that.
And has he any bags?
No.
And which way is he going?
North.

Procession. Silence.

The coolish progress
Of a blackish
Summerish
Night.
How many minutes
out of town? and how
many moments in the
rounding cruelty of acting?
The driver smiles in his driver’s
Seat, eyes lit by the green
Display, ears filled suddenly with
Static.

The bruised night
Raises its single, white eye
Like the ponderous pitch
Of a bird.

I suppose he knew from
The second he saw the car:
There was never any sanctuary
In this little cloister.

The towns spreads like
Botulism over both windows.
He stops before the courthouse.
Stops before his jury,
Hanging judges.
And you needn‘t ask yourself
“Who are they?”

I’ll tell you.

They are men and women,
They stand on roofs.

They are boys from California
Who ran like foxes but refused
To run away.

They are musicians who lived
Their lives without a sound.

They are hopeless hags who
Speak in blinding grocery stores
And **** the gossip air.

They are girls with opportunities
Burst like an innocent cell
And violated by the heavy hand
That tucks them deep to sleep.

They are cruel little ******* who
Only wanted something to listen to
While the seasons spun around them.

They are teachers who never learned.
They are hearts that never burned.
They are heads that never cooled.
Not when it’s so hot outside.

They grew uneven like a story
Written in celebration of a meaningless title.
They have every right to be angry,
And yet they level their stones
At one another instead of the
Hell a glass house can become.

They walk so slow the sun
Can stoop and eat them up
Without the briefest guilt.
© Cody Edwards 2010 (Note: The stanzas in section seven should be eight lines with the question hanging and the answer indented in. I couldn't edit it that way on this page but ******, I try.)
Marshal Gebbie Aug 2012
For my mate Chris*

To sit around in anger…does no favours,
To bellyache to me… It’s all unfair,
To hope somebody else… comes up with answers,
To see the world’s shortcomings… flaunted there.


A lack of motivation keeps you grounded
Friends and family try to keep you at arm’s length,
You loathe the Government’s lack of comprehension
In that joblessness depletes your hope and strength.


You feel those carbohydrates clog your arteries
And see your muscled body turn to flab,
Discipline’s resolve flies to oblivion
And you curse all that… which makes your life so drab.


Disappointment curbs the high expectations,
You feel the planet owes you that, to which you seek,
Aghast to comprehend your own misgivings,
You feel the need to say…but then, you never speak.


Then suddenly… a stark, clear realization
That NOTHING HERE WILL CHANGE…UNTIL YOU DO,
Until you turn around your thinking to endeavour,
Till then that something that you seek… shall hide from you.


So look, my sweetness, look into the mirror
Shed the worry lines that always cloud your brow,
Kick your sorry **** profoundly to tomorrow
And lose the ****** shards of bitterness….RIGHT NOW!



Marshalg
Endeavouring to re-motivate a lost cause.
18 August 2012




© 2012 Marshal Gebbie
Iris Rebry Jul 2014
Considered the staple of life
Is nothing more than ground up
Grain from
The ground.
Bread,
What so many peasants fought for in
France and Russia
Is nothing more than
Carbohydrates smushed together
Bread,
What everyone eats today,
Is nothing more than gluten free,
Wheat or multigrain.

But could some thing so simple
Be so important?
Mateuš Conrad Feb 2016
.the crows' persistent croak undermines all attempts at man's adventure into universal fame, or one that might distinguish man's composition, from earth, as intended for adam, to air, as intended for odin, to water as intended for poseidon, to fire as intended for the tetragrammaton.

it fails, most of the time,
poetry is scarce,
too much fondness of the abstract,
hence residues of
distracted verse, whimsical,
overburdened pronoun usage -
such likes - complex punctuation
to replace diacritical marks in
france or germany or norway,
poetry doesn't have the impetus,
just doesn't have the impetus to
package fudge, package fudge paragraphs
of fiction, poetry isn't anything
unless it's anti-fiction,
there's no point idealising
how you would fit into a glass stiletto
when it doesn't allow a fitting: cindarella was first
two jealous sisters got their heel
and big toe cut off, you want to encode
that as .pdf or .jpeg?
technophobes ***-standing:
is that enough for a start-up religious cult?!
i'm just wishy washy wondering,
all bets on it taking off - congregation of
en masse suicide seems a fanciful expression,
mind you, i have no excuse.
where there's a middle there ain't no finger,
no message evaluation and furthered to
an execution, the middle has an eroteme:
not exactly erotically thematic, just
a hunch off huh...
so... poetry... it's scarce, tumble **** practice
of a lost joke...
poetry exhibits itself sometimes in tight-tangle prose
of a knausgård - fancy wording a mile apart
would make traffic accidents aplenty,
and it happens... ramble ramble ramble (worded),
then some poetic ecstasy like an unguided tour
of a gallery making you kneel in anti-catholic
gesticulation of a painting by francis bacon...
shouldn't happen, but it did...
so while prose writers are like things infused
with packaged designation of the right
digestion and right diet content of carbohydrates,
poets are like: what sustenance from air?
we ramble sometimes, **** naked i presume,
but we do, and when we do, we draft novels
for other people, we're not into nation building
or writing novels... we're the anorexia of prose...
and that's grand... because it means
that our readers have to be self-involved,
not ready to grasp the rooting of prose diction...
more fused to the open airs
of writings' scarcity...
we need strong readers not numbers...
we need people who are self-involved,
who would spit and kick a copper statue of
the poet represented in a public square with
people of the spoken tongue the real tourists
wondering: who's that?

that aside...
          i went to sleep thinking about chess...
into bed at around 1am
woke up at around 9am...
past two nights? interludes of
perhaps 2 / 3 hours...
    cutting on the alcohol is one thing...
keeping a tally?
proof: co-op sells 1liter labelled bottles
of scotch,
but as it turns out, according to my braille tally?
it's: ⠷⠷ (500ml) + ⠷⠷ (500ml) + ⠷ (250ml)...
they label it as a liter...
but it's actually 1.25liters...
three days later: you get the full picture:
-esque akin to 'and on the third day he rose
again, according to the scriptures...'

good luck to the men and their vanity
projects...
   i will never become as famous as
the man who "invented" stumbled upon
fermentation to produce beer / wine...
distillation to produce whiskey / *****...
dom perignon and albert hofmann
are known now... give it a few centuries later...
****! gone!
       but to overshadow the universal
stability of a woodland pigeon cooing,
a crow croaking, a fox laughing?
   my words are here: yet these examples
retain the future unchanged...
by void, crook, vogue or folly...

so i went to sleep thinking about chess...
there's the king: the point
of the game...
              to topple the king...
get ol' charlie firsty on the chopper...
distract charlie zee 'eck'und
with pseudo-harems and handel...
and fireworks on the thames...
little learning tool offshoot of louis XIV...
the king is just an elevated pawn...
it seems the king only controls the pawns
given his own movement rules...
the queen though?
   she's the bishop and the rook combined,
as she's also the king and pawn, combined...
the knight is the only odd piece
on the whole board...
   why? didn't queens feast their eyes
upon knights of old, at tournaments...
chivalry: the dropped oopsie handerchief moment
when the king wasn't looking?
the knight piece is the only outsider piece
on the board... hence it's ontological
grasshopper routine of jumping
outside the line of pawns and then
jumping back into line...
the king is a king in name only:
it would appear...
  while the most powerful piece on the board
is the queen: since if the king merely
control the pawns:
   at a battlefield a king command pawns
(soldiers)...
  in the background...
the queen will command...
   the bishops, the knights,
   the rooks (houses, castles) -
she's not on the battlefield with with pawns...
and soon knights become judges
and lawyers - merge with the bishops...
i never like playing chess -
but i liked thinking about chess...
  from the perspective of: the queen is
the most powerful piece on the board...

you could even rewrite chess by expanding
the board... so it would look like so:

1. denotes pawn         9. denotes king

2. denotes bishop        6. denotes queen
3. denotes knight        4. denotes rook.


1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1
         9 3               (battlefield formation)
      2 4 4 2             (behind the scenes formation)
        3 6    

but the board would have to be expanded from
64 to say... 100 squares... per board...
it's still chess... but with a twist...
it's what real life would look like...
one knight would be faithful to the king
and stand behind his army on the battlefield...
the other knight would be *******
the queen in secret surrounded
by castles and the clergy / the judicial system...
well: so many people have become so good
at the game of chess...
   kasparov vs. deep blue...
         so smart: and yet no imagination.

besides... i had more important things to do
today than remember what i fell asleep with...

1. making the perfect sausage rolls...
the most pristine invention of the english
and how the french fumed when their puff
pastry was "degraded"...
never use meat from sausages...
always minced pork...
and instead of adding carrots...
celery... and who would have thought
that fennel seeds are the secret ingredient...

2. watching india get their *******'
whipped and their ***** put into
a meat grinder by the new zealand side
at the cricket world cup...
**** me the last 5 overs!

3. lamenting the state of cinema...
the pursuit of "being" via distraction
with the end goal of fulfilling "happiness"...
so much for "being" and so much for "happiness"...
take two prime examples...
it only took 8 years to spare all the details
that seperate them...
1958's the inn of the sixth happiness
starring ingrid bergman...
those movies! mmm hmm!
i would gladly take away all the current
heavy editing and metallurgy scaled
CGI for a classical western panoramic view...
no dialogue... just an expansive camera
distance where the characters are dwarfed
by the grander scheme of things:
even if it's just a valley or a field...
cinema dropped the paranoramic
   interlude, resorting for the clausto-****
of heavy editing with multiple cameras
switching backwards and forwards
like watching a game of tennis...
    actually: both genres degraded themselves
dropping the panoramic view at times...
less in sport, more in cinema...
but this is 1958... the 1950s! the glory days of cinema...
fast-forward to 1966... and the film:
ALFIE...
       what's the difference between a lothario
and a ****? a self-employed ******...
or some other weird combition of 'not-a-joke'...
wait a minute... why are the women
so ******* dumb come the mid-1960s in cinema...
while back in 1958: they were so admirable?!
ingrid bergman learned mandarin,
she was ambitious, she was stubborn...
she was bossy...
  come the 1960s we're talking about
    beings without either soul or will
simply orientated at being dumpster *** toys...
i don't even know where the men
did that to them...
           the women in 1950s cinema
gained respected... they were commanding...
or at least decisive in giving
the least expected virtue: generosity
and on top - a sense of fairness -
                             a merit pyramid...
1960s cinema women, "women" are nothing
more than sloppy teenagers...
these women are not women...
1960s cinema doesn't depict women...
it's starting to depict one direction:
  pissy-pants teen girls...
               ******* at the sight of harvey styles
sighing and ****...
        plus... back in the day:
cinema used to be... engaging...
ben-hur? how long? 5 hours?
  gone with the wind? how long? 7 hours?!
cinema like opera: 15 minute interludes,
toilet breaks before the next part went on...
now? a quckie 1.5 hours long CGI ***** fest
of minimal dialogue and the heavy editing
juxtapositions of "angles"...
       people don't watch modern cinema
because it's engaging...
they watch it... because it's... distracting...
pretty bright lights! ooh! aah!
i love the fact that i'm being snarky
           and sarcastic... what else can you be?!
   i don't even think is missed that much
when it comes to the sub-culture of drugs...
psychadellic or otherwise...
i ****** well missed on a decent amount
of cinema...
   and when that happens...
       look at me...
                            what's that phrase...
a bitter old man... aged 33...
bitter doesn't even cut it...
              it's not even a bitterness...
it's an elevated sense of nostalgia...
   for me nostalgia is something i was present
at when it started going to ****...
late 1990s... cartoon network, early internet...
etc.,
              1990s date night movie quality
requiring adults to employ babysitters...
i was there...
1950s cinema? yeah: i wish i was nostalgic
about that... but i wasn't there...
hence the technical observations...
and how, objectively: movies were...
oh god so much better.
Mateuš Conrad Dec 2016
mmm, palce lizać, albo wsadzić je w dúpe i nadawać sygnał wriggly-wriggly alter: wriggly-pigglety; counter-alt? calling it: the miracle of five croutons, and two pieces of sushi... c'mon, let's go crazy! and take it to the excesses permitted by the original feat! (yes, i mean the fish parts of sushi, there's enough carbohydrates in the croutons, so yes, no rice-bed for the tartars).
                                       ć is the puritan's aversion to cz / chai;
                                       or at least an exfoliation curbor.
i write honey,
honey honey honey,
i write honey,
honey honey honey
p'ooh bear
droned in on it.
when i write,
i write honey,
honey honey O'Milee.
from serving in the US and A
navy, to a beach-buggy
accident.
when i write, i write
honey -
       *** e -
Atilla styled liquorice -
  lee co reesh - not
liquidated rice -
ghosts of latin almost everywhere;
quadruple that.
convene and converse -
contrary             collective.
some say this might as well
be the famous goldberg *sardines
;
when i write, i write honey,
i write: honey honey honey...
      will you be my Duracell bunny?
honey, will you be my
   ******* par excellance?
i see... no, you won't be.
the museum of Greek sculpture
was vandalised!
    guess what they took,
the ****** fiendish crooks!
with a wet splash of colour
comes the cold marble artifice -
a bit like the cool-mouth
refrigerator of a woman during
felatio... still don't know
how she gets that gob down
below room temperature.
    (heresy input, never start a
sentence with an)          and
there you have it,
                  writing, catering for
abstractionism,
just after he said: they're on a diet.
Mateuš Conrad Jan 2016
i started smoking cigarettes
with my ex fiancé (olé!),
after i started smoking ****,
aged 21,
i was so anti smoke
that i remember my tobacco stink
clothes being aired
after a night out at the disco (ha ha,
oldie, discotheque quack -
albeit disco tech', not disco phi reek
of sweat and elongating cheese limp
limbs doing the dance of pharaonic
irony to banana ram boom bomb la la lamb),
so i moved to the quickie of all addictions,
as one jazz fem soul said:
a cigarette is the most satisfying dissatisfaction,
in a span of five minutes...
so i see the young poets mention coffee...
where's the cigarette though?
oh right, you left it at the gym, on the treadmill
along with don quixote? i bet.
so i started smoking aged 21...
vocally i went from angelic soprano
among the mule smog thickening over cities
to a personal base baritone of a personalised
exhaust engine...
but when i reached the reach of the rhapsodic
thespian choking on his own ***** of
un-originality i started sounding like darth vader
playing the didgeridoo -
i know the smokers' cough tuberculosis,
but lack of nicotine does that,
and active ingredient missing, head spinning
carousel of carbon monoxide...
as they say... take in the carbohydrates...
off the top of my head nietzsche said:
god is dead... yep... true that, esp. now...
and the replacement? diet...
centimetres of calorie intake:
drain the fat from yoghurt and fix it up
with sugar tax...
you do that while i relearn brushing
my teeth, once a day,
with a pea sized dollop of fluoride paste,
~20 seconds of brush and rinsing,
my teeth don't look like worthy of
twice a year visit to the dentist to get the nicotine
stains off my mandible bones - clean as norwegian
rain... shame the beetles didn't write a song
about norwegian rain of acid, export from
old coal england on the industrial complex
pacified without a warring-industrial complex just yet,
awaiting u.s.a.
otherwise it's a compositional irony,
i like walt whitman, i do, i like ****-****** literature,
but then walter becomes pompous bombastic
when writing about a *******: the damnation
of all homosexuals: i.e. writing about prostitutes -
spare the details of your identity... tell me
the parts where you squeezed the orange out
into goose pimpled juice.
Mateuš Conrad Mar 2016
obviously to think and enjoy it
you have to turn your mind
into a mollusc in an oyster shell,
slow... slow... (yawn)... slower...
then you suddenly get electrocuted!
boom! now you're thinking,
you're not as tense as a running
cheetah, hard rock heart muscle,
not too eager on karaoke of karate,
you're the tortoise outrunning
achilles; because the brain enables
such functioning, it's not exactly
an eager heart in the university of
the body - and why is it that domestic
life has completely succumbed to
the gratifications of chemistry with
toothpaste and bleach and other
cleaning materials; i wouldn't
be against doping athletes, i'd tell them
to embrace it... let's synthesise another
world record sprint in the olympics,
because an analysis would mean
talking about 9.58 / 9.51...
and that would be as interesting as looking
at the rosetta stone for clarification
of ancient egyptian: owl, big fish, little fish
carbohydrates boxed;
and still a flea could outrun you,
a flea, yeah, never mind the cheetah.
Nat Lipstadt Nov 2015
How Many Calories in a Poem?


visualizing the invisible,
we deconstruct the content,
the in-titled label reviewed,
querying,
is this one worth the cost?

looking for true fiber,
then further inquire,
perchance,
are there grams of
kick-starting emotive proteins,
stored and lurking within,
homes for the cells
that will inspire, transform,
mere readers into mountainous writers

lean on those scripts,
injected with just hints,
resting ribbons of flavorful fat equipped,
for there will always be
the tyranny
of the those of the sparse faith,
those writers of haiku brevity,
believers that
fat free,
is the only,
but lonely,
bene of beauty

death from ignorance to those
who would poison the fruit
of the alphabet tree,
coat produce, with glossy chemicals,
that preserve the shiny exteriors,
cooking up false feasts interior,
saturating us with the trans-fats of trite,
oily verbosity and labels of organic,
that conceal the risks of
hyper-pretensivity

an every poem, seasoned for taste,
a dash of diamond sea salts,
scatter on pinches of pearls
of Caribbean cane sugar,
sprinkle human sins and cinnamon
for zest and tang,
for inspiration and flavoring,
for the souls tonguing tastebuds,
needy for reasons
to celebrate  commissioning
the enticing exhalations of appreciative
oohs and ahs!

Warning!
this poem was processed
in a old, out-of-date factory,
that is most assuredly not,
nat-nut free*

but even if allergic,
be unafraid to taste the acerbic,
for there are
poems
suited for everyones, even your
peculiarities

you want your essayed poems
to brim healthy caloric,
grow them as offshoots
of your very own organs

you need not seek anothers certification,
if filled they are
with the mettle of iron,
built to be
calcium-fortified structures,
with the perpetual strong bones
of rhyme and sonnet

let each worded edifice
be the food,
stored to be gifted
to our progeny,
by their ever living on,
marking us,
marking them

omit the trite,
we ken no need,
for it is the false emptiness of
misleading carbohydrates,
that only fatten,
for the briefest satisfaction,
purposed for the killing of fulfilling,
dulling that which only
a well prepared
dish poetic,
can bring to healthy enliven
the human spirit




Nov. 12, 2015
Aboard Delta #2499
5:10 pm
when you are trying to lose weight, you obsess about bad calories
in everything...
SG Holter Jun 2014
I woke up from snoring.
I'm a light sleeper
When carbohydrates and
Fats roam my
Temple.

Sometimes I drink three pints
Of water before I sleep.
It's as good an alarm in the morning
As any.

So much in my life is
Food and drink.

You may kiss me as sweetly
As you can, or slap
A bitter palm across my face.
It's all dessert and dinner to me,

In any order you wish.
I'll never sleep with you
Hungry.
Andrew Rueter May 2020
In the 1970s there was a wave of soft pop that struck America
one band at the crest of that wave was The Carpenters
formed by Richard and Karen Carpenter
they were wildly successful
their song We’ve Only Just Begun is still a ubiquitous wedding song
Karen’s smooth and pure voice drew giant crowds
but despite how timeless her music is
it is equally contrasted by the briefness of her life.

Karen captivated a worldwide audience with her music
but some people just can’t be reached
indoctrinated by our superficial society
thinking every celebrity should be a supermodel
critics made snide comments about her being Richard’s chubby sister
even though she wasn’t overweight
and Richard was addicted to Quaaludes
but even more important than the public was Karen’s own mother
who worried of the public’s feelings more than her own daughter’s.

Karen felt pushed to lose weight
so she hired a nutritionist
who loaded her down with carbohydrates
which obviously made her fatter
crushing her faith in nutrition
turning her towards unhealthy methods
...which worked...at first...
but unfortunately it kept working
and she refused to change, unlike her body.

Fans who once cheered for her
now gasped when they saw her emaciated skeleton take the stage
they thought she might’ve had cancer
and were concerned about her weight
but to her it was the same crowd telling her to lose weight
now telling her to gain weight
she was done hearing it
and stuck in her ways.

Her friends were worried about her
and pleaded for her to seek help
but her mother’s profession was repression
so Karen hid her depression
while her mother told her psychiatrists were for crazy people.

Karen tried using a man to make her problems disappear
and married Tom Burris two months after meeting him in 1980
he would verbally abuse her; calling her a bag of bones
then he’d *** money off her; amounts up to $50,000 at a time
needless to say the relationship was ill fated
and they divorced in 1981.

Finally Karen’s friends convinced her to see a therapist
who brought her family into a counseling session
and urged them to tell Karen they love her
of course Richard was willing to say so, they were always really close
especially after Karen had helped him with his own addiction issues
but Karen’s mother refused
berating the therapist for using her first name; Agnes
and informing him that wasn’t how their family did things.

Karen Carpenter passed away February 4, 1982 at the age of 32
she died from ipecac poisoning
she used the substance to induce vomiting every day
and it slowly dissolved her heart.

Richard was devastated.

There’s not much I can add
I guess Karen’s story speaks for itself
it just ****** me off critics jeer with impunity and without empathy
they’re free to cajole great artists while having no value themselves
driving artists away until we’re only left with negativity
it makes me want to cut out all the demons’ razor sharp tongues
before they get a taste of another angel’s wings
but would that really protect those angels
if they’re born to demons?
Mateuš Conrad Nov 2016
i hate it when a ~haiku is forced upon me, but such
is the case, and it's not a case of dittoing out
a mechanical aspect of that body that's
known as vocabulary:
thus, suddenly, as if a ****, or
a reflex the tongue commanded
the entire body -
left-wing obstructions gave way to
right-wing rebelliousness -
    the left said the tongue was no dagger,
the right said: merely a dagger -
the gyroid: or the muscles we never thought
existed! lanky tendons, etc.
    never the microscopic proof reductionism
and never the telescopic proof           ",
always somewhere in the middle:
and that's about right.
               i wrote a poem, it sounded about right
and then i get the wanked-over shoulder
calling it life-support dandruff
because of the many sprouts possible -
as ever: some come and give a voice unto
the people, and some come and give an ought
unto the people.
               a choice that's mutually inclusive
of thought and choice as a battleground
for the mechanisation of language into
sulphur gas and bayonets
and a thousand wildcards charging and screaming
lost toward the bewilderment of
   forgotten sexting.
      what a mighty affair:
the only country delving the prospect of
an atom bomb being dropped again doesn't believe
in munition economics and doesn't see
that the paranoia can be stopped when the capitalist
sober-heads enter and say: but where's the profit?
there's not profit in an atom bomb:
it ends too soon,
     you never got a Hollywood chapter yoyo
      concerning Hiroshima or Nagasaki...
you got one about Pearl Harbor...
a competent act of war... but not like our
civilians really matter: we civilians got the treatment
of being active members of the army,
while the army personnel were given civilian
Pilate status, the army was given civilian status
and the Japanese civilians were given army status...
oh forget the noodle swindler -
that handwritten hoola-hoop spinster of
carbohydrates is long gone...
          or the greatest paranoia against all other
nations comes from a nation that actually used the weapon!
       i could write a haiku version of what i lost,
but i'll still have to write something about you-tube
vloggers and how they are the newest version
of the objective propaganda machine that's in
the Islamic camp of merchants...
       prophet-merchant? give me a break:
if his word doesn't sell, then who's does?
my endorsement? less of a cosmetic light-touch surgeon
attitude, my endorsement is that of
Morphy Richards' Soup Maker...
cooking pumpkin soup...
  pumpkin... well: it's hardly an easy peel when it
comes to cooking butternut squash...
it's a disaster! a hell to endure! no wonder it's the veg
that frighten offs the ghouls and the ghost
you can't peel it, you have to Apache skin it
like getting a colonial wig: scalping your way into
the high court, albeit minus the greyish curls -
******* is a king of culinary demises
that were sought out expeditions -
you have to knife your way beneath the snail-like
shell and then there's that cobweb of mush
with intrinsic fake seeds / flies lodged in
the orange cobweb - for all that effort
i appreciate it more as a lampshade than a food
source... but then the advertised starving Africans
as anti-colonial compensation for "our"
grandfather's recollection of monochromatic cultures,
before globalisation took off.. hmm.
the soup? pumpkin, potato, onion, garlic,
nutmeg, paprika, chicken stock,
salt and pepper to taste...
tomorrow? a pumpkin risotto...
hey! seasonal abundance, Spanish strawberries
in late winter are too watery anyway...
   people forgot that certain things taste better
in season, that's namely fruits and vegetables...
   go outside your fancy, outside your whim,
you'll finally have to say: my eyes eat
at the very credibility of such things being
there without the season... but my tongue does not
taste the thing that requires a pentagonal sense
honing in toward an agreed to democracy:
it ain't there... as ever autumnal fruits make their
way toward the culinary redcarpet -
                   apples, pears....
     but the real ice brokers remain tangled in
the gnostics of dairy *****: you only see the *****
when the milk turns sour...
              and the two segregate
their cauliflower bergs and that pristine seethrough
        matrix -
then it's like watching the 1054 schism:
          aquasal herring
                               and aquadulci tench -
as painful as listening to my father speak english:
it's just ****** painful,
i write english and speak it like an Anglo
   and he speaks it like an Arab:
with me it's: left right left right left right
and his is an ancient form of actual Latin
              right left right left right left -
of the tongues that appropriated the Latin lingua
optics that weren't conquered it's the same as it was
for Seneca of Virgil, e.g. red beast / proof of all
scientific generic category principle: **** sapiens
                  upright man / bestia rufus -
and that's still orange beast - then aliq for yellow:
then liquid and runny khaki - a monetary equivalent
of money.
          but of the tongues
                      which is why i kept my mother tongue,
i can't imagine what would have been the case
had i not kept it intact... i'd be whitey boy bleached
into an anaemic Arian with those rubbery red
             lost for words rabbit crazy irises that
albinos sport when on the sociopathic treadmill:
that's a daily commute for most people.
i should have anticipated something better coming
out of a forced bad gateway message when
i tried to published and didn't save the outcry...
but it was never a reality when defined by a few
people... it always necessarily the many,
the market square, the hustle and bustle,
     then again few took to ****** to say love...
understandable: if something is called private
it's not called reality, because so many people
have so much **** to say in public that they
treat private life as a tabernacle -
reverse that and suddenly you find people
who possess a "voice for the multitude",
but not (not oddly enough) a thought -
ah the caring scream when not bound to
the horror genre of politics: it's too late!
               end here: a prior to rather than, a
desirably said to appease and conform:
by now we're all cited as having only said
an onomatopoeia of what words should sound like -
we're found hacking a door to shreds with
an axe, rather than merely curling our hands
so the knuckles can be used to knock on the door.
still, i made pumpkin soup today,
tomorrow i'll make a pumpkin risotto -
and the pumpkin is, rightfully, the halloween king
of all vegetables: i am not surprised it's the perfect
lampshade people leave outdoors -
hell of a thing to peel, a butternut squash
would have been simpler to make...
but for the first time in my life:
  i actually appreciate the colour orange...
as said: cooker orange is beyond that fluorescent
acidity of a citrus fruit:
  cooked orange is actually grand...
raw citrus orange?                and a handful
of creepy crawlies.
    funny how the spectrum necessarily made me
endorse a soup maker, rather than the next
big thing in the realm of toothpaste and mascara.
Mateuš Conrad Mar 2017
i actually blame the outbreak of dementia in western society as sourced within a fat-free diet... you need to ingest fat! for ****'s sake! the brain is primarily fat! how can you just simply overdose on sugars?! sugar is like crack-******* compared to more complex sugars, i.e. carbohydrates! how can you do this to your own people?! smalec / lard... with pork trimmings and garlic (czosnek / ch)... how can western society "think" it has the upper-hand in the argument, when it pushes out fat-free yogurt?! the brain needs fat, it's fat... you need to ingest fat! point is: people in the west don't know how rare dementia is in "eastern" europe... avocado on toast? what's the problem with you? it's supposed to be guacamole! or at least eaten with a trickle of lemon juice with spicy food! retards... retards! you need to ingest fat... giving your body too much sugar makes you: either fat... or absolutely dumb... demented... dementia... eh, see the correlation? you need to ingest fat, simple as: your brain isn't a muscle, the argument: oh, we need to flex our cognitive muscle... what the **** is this? what sort of argument is this?! it's fat, it's probably once fat, twice jelly... in a city of about 60 thousand i've known only one example of alzheimer's... my auntie... sure, it's a dementia epidemic: because you're draining all the fat out of the foods that should have it!!! fat feeds the brain, since the brain is primarily fat... ****** dodo started speaking: woah abouh the omega-3 arguments? dunno... you catch the sardines and the mackerels. dunno(h)... i once knew this ****** that spent his days ripping newspapers... he could rip a newspaper better than i could cut it up with a pair of scissors... you know the scottish patent? you fold a piece of paper, lick the edge, then you fold it in the opposite fold, and lick the edge once more... and then the paper tears away as smoothly as melting butter on a hot piece of toast... but this ****** could tear pieces of newspaper in one smooth stroke... apparently typing these "offensive" words in a country of inbreds is "offensive"... i think i'll just call her: katherine die neu blut middleton... hardly a mary, but the blood matters, nonetheless.

8 6 9 4 1 7 3 2 5
5 3 *4
8 2 6 7 1 9
1 2 7 5 3 9 8 4 6
6 1 8 9 4 5 2 7 3
7 4 3 2 6 1 9 5 8
2 9 5 3 7 8 1 6 4
4 7 2 6 8 3 5 9 1
9 8 6 1 5 2 4 3 7
3 5 1 7 9 4 6 8 2

                              no. 8930
                                                      perhap­s i could have
done a more difficult puzzle, but then i was
relaxing, drinking ***...
             i made two mistakes...
as indicated, the first one in italics 4
  and the second in bold 1, which i implanted
as 9...
         even though a 9 was already in the sequence...
to correct myself i had to write out
the alphabet... even though i'm really terrible
at memorising the alphabet (hence i'm
a vocab millionaire),
                so to revise looking at 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9
i had to write the letters out...
thinking: imagine su doku using neun briefe,
like so:
(a) b (c) d (e) f (g) h (î) j (k) l (m) n (o) p (q) | r s t u v
                                                               ­           w       |x y z|
i'm terrible at remembering the alphabet sequence,
     the cut-off point comes along like this, in sing-along:
a b c d e f g, h i j, k, l m n en oh p... q r s; t u v...
                             blah....
but i thought: i'd love to write a letter imbued su doku...
just for the kicks...
thankfully, having written the alphabet out
                i managed to salvage and complete
the puzzle...
                                    *** and tunnel vision?
more like double vision;
                            and two cats distracting me,
                               pretending to fall asleep like a pair
of pensioners, sitting down.
sweet ridicule Mar 2015
how could I ever explain
the hiccups in my brain
(what was i just thinking)
writing 'bubblegum tongue '
degrades
the act of kissing

and I am full of carbohydrates caffeine almond milk
(vegetarian yes)
unmotivated to go vegan alone
sitting against a wall
with pink pig headphones in--my sister's I swear
reading grand hopeful endless infinite
quotes
oblivious to everything
fake
around me--I'm too preoccupied with
finding my alter-ego

                                                      ­                   was machst mich so glucklich

you can kiss
all the boys you want
pretty girl
but naproxen sodium doesn't
numb my pain
anymore than empty touch
will numb yours
but maybe you shouldn't want to feel numb?
David Hall Jun 2014
I am dying
The thought occurs to me every now and then
Jolting my psyche like a bucket of cold water on a sleeping drunk

I just turned 32 this year
I can already feel the cold tendrils of deaths advance
Some days I can even smell its putrid breath on the back of my neck

I’m not dying of anything immediate
No nothing as glamorous as a drug overdose or a gunshot wound
My death more than likely won’t make national news

I am dying
It is a slow and pitiful death
Caused by a lethal mix of age, apathy and neglect

Every day I poison myself a little more
Complex carbohydrates and processed sugars in every meal
Caffeine carcinogens and aspartame to wash the poison down

I can feel my muscle waste away
As I sit 10 hours a day answering the same inane questions
Over and over again to earn the right to what’s left of my meager existence

I am dying
This must be the case because I am certainly not living
At best I am merely surviving, simply continuing to exist

Maybe tomorrow or maybe in 20 years
Even if I quit my job and start an organic vegan diet
Even if I exercise, meditate and confess my sins

I am dying
david mungoshi Jan 2016
here they go again , these experts
telling us things to sadden the heart:
game may not be that safe to eat
running river water is never a treat
for it carries upstream decadence

here they go again, these stuffed-shirt experts:
water is two to one hyydrogen and oxygen
boiled, the oxygen steams away into the air
and your cappuccino has a hydrogen flavour
we endanger our lives when it we drink and savour

here they go again, the learned heralds of demise
they tell us that nothing we can ever devise
can avert the armageddon that's surely coming
the entropy or second law of thermodynamics
transforms physicists into latterday prophets

here they go again on prime media, the erudite experts
talking about free radicals, anti-oxidants, titanium utensils
and the havoc that excess proteins, fats and carbohydrates can cause
it’s time to go puritan and vegetarian in this new poisonous present
where fun is frowned upon and barbecues are a deadly pastime

in this age of dietary enlightenment and forced moderation
we must eventually go raw in our cuisine and be natural about it
or perhaps be as creative as possible before the nutritionists come in
to tell us how not to cook our food and how not to eat it
living was great fun before this age of detoxification and cancer!
Lydia Apr 2017
"I don't feel strong enough."
"Well, at least you have a flat stomach."
Let's damage each other
Let's replace another meal with a bottle of water or unsweetened tea
Let's pray to be beautiful
Let's sit in five minute planks and run five miles and hope we throw up
Let's pretend that I've eaten three meals today, or yesterday, or the day before
Let's define myself by calories and carbohydrates and questionable decisions
Let me rot from my bone marrow to my skin which are just inches apart
Let me fade away until I am reborn


But I'm lucky and so the story doesn't end there
I left the scale under the cabinet
I went for a run because I love to feel my feet on the ground
I came home and ordered takeout
I'm not going to let my body rot
I've chosen life
I've chosen to be whole and real again
My girlfriend can touch me because I am more than skin and bones
I am more than a statistic
And I will always pray to be beautiful
But I will never starve to death.
This seemed like it was supposed to be a positive and inspirational prompt, but I've always had trouble accepting compliments and I've always had trouble feeling good enough so I thought that this would be more meaningful and true to who I am. Please comment :)
Nat Lipstadt Jun 2017
transitional times

midst the ordinaries, not paying close attention,
the yet to be baked batter of chatter while driving past the familiar,
a plain pasta with butter conversation,
the human carbohydrates of our racing consuming energy,
she slips me up, by slipping in two words,
her icing on the cake phrasing

"transitional times"

pull over to the side of Menantic Road
in the early of the late afternoon, Saturday's reclining sunlight,
question her closely, CIA taping her words to my brain:

did she mean the late afternoon hours of our lives when
reflection of sun sprinkles on our bay voyages us as voyeurs
past the old longings and into the future recalling?

perhaps, the au contraire, the steady stepping,
sneaking away of the sheltering night so that the earth's
inhabitants and organs may be revived in yellow golden greens of damp grasses and the whiteness of a Sunday's fresh milk?

of course, of course, the times when the horizon calls,
saying come to me, cross the transition to the newness
of everything, in the ages and days of celebration of
unfamiliar entrances?


No, no, she answers, bemusedly grinning,
not everything is a poem,
you thieving wordsmith, simply did I observe
that having an extra pair of sunglasses in the car for
transitional times*
was a good idea!

pulling back on the road that goes past the
Tuck Ice Cream Shoppe, the island treasure hunt Dump, the ordinary homes on the range, all  along the way to the boatyard where are kept and stored and stockpiled each summer colored sunset evening along with the drinkable French pink Rose wines and gleaming yellow Sancerre and golden ales of Nantucket,
I think to myself,
nuh uh,
every transition,
every glorious mindless conversation,
even in the town dump,
treasures in each word, in everything, especially the
extra extra-ordinaries,
is a poem*

June 25. 2017
5:20am
wordvango Apr 2015
never are we
when the sounds of words keep
our hearts \beating\
of the hard\ way\
one howls\
or still sings to the yellow moon\
as long as oxygen\
as long as carbohydrates drown\
as long as cactus survives\
or in the desert the sun rises\
whenever\
a heart beats\
we will be there\
or an eye looks\
where it should not\
in the dark\
in the soft pink shoulder biting\
are us\
in the silk sheets\ trying is all\
it will  take\
for us\
to resuscitate revive be there\
in words we will all be there\
forever/
HUNGER

When I think of you
I marvel at your fragility,
How little you sustain yourself with.
If I could do what I would, I would,
I would bring you coq au vin with carrots glazed in brown sugar,
And onions glaces a brun, ringed with pommes duchesse;
And saffron pistachio rissotto with lobster ravioli
Bathed in a tomato champagne reduction sauce;
Or salmon poached in Alsatian Riesling,
Smothered in a rich Hollandaise, on a queen-sized bed of spinach.
I'd fatten you up,
Feed your body;
But of course it isn’t proteins, calories, fats, carbohydrates
That you quest for:
That would be so easy.
Mateuš Conrad Nov 2016
i find it scary that people
who claim sanity
and drink coffee puffy-eyed
at 5a.m.
are the relative answer to
make those, drinking whiskey
at 7 minutes to midnight,
as being insane...*

forthrightly to obscure and to make make words archaic
would never make sense in geometry...
or what's the archaic standard
diacritical model of: yeß, prime minißter!
when you don't apply orthodox diacritical syllable
incision you'll make nonsense adjustments:
for a trill (or rolling)
we range from "r" alveolar "trill"
    and ʙ / v in Cyrillic (acute w)
           into bilabial?
я-Alice... uvular?
                  voiceless epiglottal trill,
or n, or ...  or surd?
                     you really have to word it
or over-word it when a few punctuation
marks aren't ascribed to phonetic units
that letters are:
rather than phonetic equivalents of ethanol
as attaches of carbohydrates
to be later stressed in the discussion:
which never took place...
    i'm still baffled by the conesus that
someone drinking coffee at 5a.m. is considered
sane compared with someone drinking whiskey
at five-past midnight...
the former is sane because in his state he will
embrace the state and craft a future plan for
making change... and the latter will
have to inherit the estate of the asylum
and craft a future plan that says: you, will,
not, be, able, to, congest, this, world,
with, your, dreams; even, if, your, dreams,
are, equatable, with, demeaning, ambitions,
to overcome, the stereotypes,
                 for they speak the drooling R...
when others hark or trill it...
                            and they say: power
exacted from an "ambiguity" of what's necessarily
stressed when a word is cut apart into
syllables, which cannot be further exposed to be
under-the-scalpel of letters having "punctuation"
marks (diacritical marks)...
as some might say, i'm colourblind given
the medium i use that's dichromatic sentenced to
be polarised by that, which is in between...
council-flat tenants complaining to the builders that
their kitchens don't represent Kuwait hotels
in Newham... or how to address post-colonialism
in how to represent modernity and moderation
and a disfranchise of ethnicity being the original
model for exploitation...
             i remember a time in England when
it was a happy place to be... prior to 2004...
          talk in Poland? mongrels amid stern
nationalism that represses homegrown terrorism,
given the historicity of Pole and Turk...
        and someone in the Philippines is to
address the question of justifiable censorship?
the Englishman is overtly prudish,
or let us say: overtly too polite...
   the Englishman is towing politeness when
he's actually towing a rotting corpse of a titan
he once was...
there was no chance to teach people
diacritical syllable punctuation, hence that
pseudo-science of leveraging a simple diacritical
representation into a dynamic of a Rosetta stone...
what could ʢ ever represent other than
a voiced episteme gluttony without a drill to
concede a need to repeat summer follows spring?
yes, after 2004, my status of a minority was left
blemished by those who i account for as my
"brethren", but, who have dragged me down,
to worthily accept a quote from Isaiah,
to some obscure circumstance of having an ethnicity
to begin with, and so unlearn my use of English
into a hostile psychological stance that simply said:
globalisation, and war against all and none:
within a framework of none? myself.
now i'm jealous of a snoopy-eyed garcon
and i know he's not jealous of me...
but i am jealous of the idea that capitalism actually
implants in the garcon's hope the idea of
a "state" pension... there are no states within
globalisation... the other "Japanese" time-bomb
in western society is not old age... it's pensions:
pray to god you don't reach old age...
the productivity of an expendable billion of Chinese
means you are entrusted with a brief hiatus
from work, and an slight existential bewilderment:
before jumping into the yawning lava pit of Etna.
The large pretzels
from the mall
taste delicious.

However, I do not
order my pretzel
with dipping sauce.

For the dipping sauce
contains too many
carbohydrates.
Pramod Shinde Apr 2015
The situtation shaken, he hampered
he destroyed , he bankrupted
he lost, he is dead, alively

Hope is there
Sunrays, Sunshines
Whirlpols
agendas
and the aims

Nothing can beat and take
the pop and genre of music
hips and hops of dances
lights and nights of a day

you have to live
and show
how one
must have to live

days might be brutal
nights might be cruel
worstness may **** you
****** the future of your wills
but don't worry
this time will go
to come true time

luck and chance
walk hand by hand
luck might have ******
but you will get another chance

that time
people might have said you
“Murderer ! Killer !”
But remember
you killed the insane
who must have to get killed

he destroyed your family
one by one
he finished you as being
step by step
you became demon from civilian
second by second



you are now in prison
your life is black
your surrounding is black
your oxygen, your carbohydrates
your **** , your blood
just black , black  and black!
but don't forget
black is also color
from where universe has began

there was nothing
still there is nothing
you born as and with nothing
you have to make a change
in everything

society , your country
needs you
let your thoughts
influence and allow
them to taste of freedom

you have to set free
your body and soul
you have to live for
them as a member
of their extended family


Post Script

They killed his and like his
thousands of other families
he fought the freedom movement
against inhumanity and demons

the thought of change
has changed everything
prison bars have never
stopped his thoughts
but *supported in building them
Julie Grenness Mar 2017
Once upon a lifetime,
An underage student in this rhyme,
I gazed at the cafeteria, great,
With thousands of folk, no one to relate,
It became a norm, I was never late,
Now such colleges are up to date,
Way back when, the good old days,
When carbohydrates were our fave,
Did all students get fat hips,
From eating hot pies and chips?
A land of confusion, so it appears,
An ivory tower of blue stockings, my dears.....
But chubby, let's face it, cheers!
Feedback welcome.
Mateuš Conrad May 2017
you do know hat haggis
isn't even, remotely original,
as sourced in scotland...
as aren't bagpipes, i.e.
dudy - bagpies... sorry,
                               bagpipes;
but it really isn't the case!
            haggis?
   it's called black pudding
in england, served at breakast
with baked beans -
which, if was a sauce,
would be so much better than
ketchup;
      and it's closest cousin?
       bound / found in eastern europe...
less barley in that mix...
but it's called czarná kiszká....
  black... mingle.
     so i said less barley...
in eastern europe you entertain
kaszka... kasia... kate... catherine...
in the mix... i.e.porridge...
that's the difference between the scots
and the poles and the english...
the english don't add
the carbohydrates...
        which is why their version of "events"
is served at breakfast...
and can't constitute a "happy meal"
base for something eaten, in the afternoon,
or in the evening.
          black pudding?
      it's like looking at black fudge...
it's not exactly scot pub-grub
of haggis, neeps & tatties...
    (haggis... turnips and potatoes)...
or the charná kíshká variant...
       fried with onions and some garlic.
Alek Mielnikow Aug 2018
Outside the sounds of
gunfire are ringing through
the night. This is wartime,
and my partner just stepped
on a landmine that blew
him to bits. I had shifted
just out of reach of the
blast, and only caught some
hot shrapnel in my arm. A
bar, still intact, sat next
to the blast site, so I ran
inside as bullets poured down
from the enemy’s higher ground.
A plane overhead dropped
a few bombs down onto their
heads, and their building crumbled
apart into a heap of rubble.
Dust kicked up and swallowed up
the street, swallowing sandbags
and grenade craters and dead bodies.
Some of it seeps into the bar
through the bullet holes in the walls
and windows. I scuttle over to the
bar, throw my rifle on it and
fall to the ground, slamming back
against it. I flip my pack around,
adjusting myself, and pull out
a canteen of water and a can with
some much needed carbohydrates
and protein in it. Pulling my knife out
of its sheaf, I sink it into the top
of the can, and I twist and turn
the blade until the top bends over,
and scoop the food up
with my ***** fingers. The water
tastes good, the minerals swirling
around as I swish it in my mouth.
I finish my little meal, throw the
can down, and stand up and
walk around behind the bar.
An old bottle of whiskey sits
on the dusty shelf. I twist the top
off and take a large swig.
It’s rough and cheap and hits
me hard. I take my jacket off,
and unbutton and remove
my shirt. I wipe dirt off a mirror
on the shelf and cover the knife
with whiskey, and look in the mirror
as I sink my knife into the skin
of my arm, twisting and turning until
the shrapnel from the landmine
pops out. My vision almost clouds
up from the pain, but I remain
determined until all the pieces
are removed. I throw some whiskey
on my wounds, grunting, and pull
a bandage from my pack and wrap
my arm with it, nice and tight. I
button up my shirt and throw
my jacket back on, and then
I notice in the mirror someone
sitting on a stool at the bar.
I turn to see a small girl, a child,
staring ahead with dead eyes,
her mouth slightly agape. She’s
covered in dirt, crusted onto
her skin and red hair, and I
can barely tell her dress is
pink through all the gray. She’s
looking at my chest, but I can
tell she’s not really seeing me.
There’s nothing in front of her,
or around her. She hardly moves,
only her shallow breaths making
her back and chest slowly rise and fall.
I look at her, wanting to say
something, but can’t think of
anything right. But I get an idea.
I look beneath the bar and pull out
two glasses. I wipe them out with
a cloth, barely removing any
dust, and place one in front
of her and the other in front of me,
and I grab the whiskey. I pour just
a bit for her, not knowing how much
her little body can take, and I fill
mine nearly to the brim. I lift my
glass up and grin, and she finally
looks up at me. She looks down
at her cup, picks it up, and looks back
at me, and I ****** my glass towards
her. She smiles as she understands,
and we clink our glasses, like her
mother and father must have. I
throw mine back, and have to gasp
and cough, but she sips hers slowly,
only giving a slight sigh once she’s
done. We lock eyes again, and
hers are no longer dead, and she
smiles a lovely smile, as if a stranger
just gave her water in the desert.
Gunfire erupts from a plane above,
slipping some bullets in through
the windows, and I hear a round
ricochet off a table. Blood and
brains coat the bar as her body
is flung from the stool. I close my
eyes. I wish I was in disbelief.
Picking up my pack and my rifle,
I walk around the bar to her.
I move her mangled little body
around until she’s flat on
her back with her arms to
her side. Her eyes are dead
again, and I close them and
cover them with a nickel
and a penny, hoping that’s
enough pay for the ferry. I
move towards the backdoor of
the bar, **** my rifle, and take
a long, slow, deep breath. And
then I kick the door down and
go outside, once more into the
fray. Once more into the war.
Once more into Hell.

— The End —