Here’s a secret about me:
I always look into mirrors whenever someone leaves
When a piece of me is locked outside my doors
Or when tears starts falling, I don’t know what to do anymore
I like seeing myself in my most vulnerable state
A time when I feel like mist let out of a tightly sealed jar,
I involuntarily tear myself apart until I am fanned out into nothingness
I like looking into mirrors to remind myself that my body did not disintegrate like how this feeling made it seem

I like staring at myself as I cry
Maybe to see the soldier who fired the first shot that started this whole war
Maybe to feel a little sympathy for the girl sitting on the ground
Maybe to realize that my tears will not reduce the reality of my existence
Maybe to assure that I may feel like shattered glass on the inside but it hasn’t surfaced onto my skin for everyone else to see

Because just when you think that it’s all over,
When the fighting and the screaming
The pointing and the blaming
The aiming and the shooting has been done more than it should have
And everyone else goes home to show off the skulls they killed their souls for or to simply lay their bones and pride to rest,
You get to stare at someone familiar right in the eye after washing the blood off your face
And you realize who your enemy truly is

And you start to fight a war no one really knows about
A battle that sets no time or date or emotion- one that simply comes
And it’s the most dangerous of all because it happens in your head and in your heart while you’ve been smiling all day long
It’s twisted and confusing because it canplllppidu happen even when you’re listening to your favorite song
And sometimes, it seems as if it’s over because you can’t hear the bombs go off
But truth is, you can’t really hit pause
People come along when the bullet holes start showing exit wounds and they ask you where they came from
You try to tell them but you think to yourself that the war doesn’t have to extend to another’s home
But even if you did, no one would really get it
And there you are with front row seats, paralyzed in your confinement cell you once called home, helplessly watching as the war rages on

And you scream for it to stop
But it won’t stop, it won’t stop, it wouldn’t stop
You’ve been screaming with your eyes closed for so long
That when you finally open them, you realize that you have brought the war inside of you out into this world because your heart could not contain it anymore
And you ask for forgiveness from the people that have fallen from the crossfire of your thoughts and your hands
You ask and you ask and you ask
But darling, maybe their forgiveness is not what we must ask for first
But yours
It’s time to shed truth to the lie that there are two sides gunning it out inside of you
Honey, there are no two factions, it’s all just you

So please, forgive yourself.
Forgive yourself for never trying hard enough because you finally started listening to the lies that say you were never meant for greater things
Forgive yourself for hurting other people because no one really showed you any better
Forgive yourself for failing to love because you’ve run out of heart to give
Forgive yourself for settling for less because you’ve grown tired of walking around
Forgive yourself for not always knowing how to fix yourself because who in the world knows how
It is only when you have come to terms with yourself that the peace you find can finally settle in
Forgive yourself because not everything's your fault
Forgive yourself because you have been forgiven
Find your worth in the One who calls you by name
You are beautiful, strong, capable, saved, redeemed, sought for, enough, and whole
You are a masterpiece, a warrior, a prince, a princess, and an ambassador of the Most High
You have been picked out of love to start a movement that will open the eyes of those who have glued them shut and chose to live in darkness rather than to see the war in this world

Let’s start a revolution of peace from the inside out
Where the young and old finally announce ceasefires within themselves
War becomes a foreign concept, no one would dare seek it with anyone else
Battles start when we begin becoming someone we were never designed to be
Find yourself in your Father and know you will be if you let it be
So if you want to call for peace in a world that has forgotten,
Child, first remember that you cannot give what you do not have

I know you always saw yourself a knight
But I did not realize for a long time
That I was a page.
You were my sparring partner
Who taught me to come at the world
Gun drawn
So no one could out-shoot me.
You told me,
And I know,
That Justice wears a blindfold because
She slashes her sword indiscriminately,
And looks at that scale
Never.

You always saw yourself a lawman
I always saw you as a fool.
I never realized I learned law
At your feet.
Fallacies and ways of
Drawing out argument and diatribe,
Loopholes of morality through which
We spin.
You taught me to be technically correct,
The best kind of correct,
Always exploiting but
Always within my jurisdiction.
I only know now I was a deputy
To a sheriff of ridiculous stature.

You taught me THE ART OF WAR.
It was engraved in stone for me
Like an all-caps Roman monument.
THE ART OF WAR
Is sprawled across a stone archway in my mind
Where you came, and you saw.
It marks your conquest.

You made it my way of loving,
Of relating to the world and the people around me.
You made me a martyr and mercenary,
Standing atop a hill in golden armor,
Sunlight behind me and wind in my hair,
An avatar of Durga,
A disciple of Joan of Arc,
A four-year-old poses in chainmail
You wrought for her.
Illusions of grandeur such as your own
Come with this territory.

You taught me
As your mother and father
And grandparents
Taught you,
THE ART OF WAR-
That love is just begrudging words of sweetness
Issued only after ruins lay all around
And both parties are sufficiently vulnerable,
Their bricks having been pried away with crowbars.
Love is only an apology given to mollify
The wounds you have already wrought.
The only privilege loved-ones are afforded,
Is the bandage that covers up the customary
Destruction
That is your normal face.

You and I only ever knew love as
You clipping my wings
And I breaking free to spray
The shrapnel of those chains
Into your face.
We added to each others' pile of scars.
It was so rare for us to run into battle together,
On the same side,
Voices as one in a battlecry.
I don't even know how long it's been since
Us soldiers-for-hire got hired
By the same team at once.

You cast me out of steel
Like a sword.
And now I am the legendary blade
Destined to clash against you for all eternity.
We will only ever know ceasefires
Of a day in length.
We will run through the flame,
And we will practice the art
You taught me.

before i sit down to the... how (is it)
   how my mother usually
words it: pięknie, ślicznie, prozaicznie...

  beautifully, beautifully, prosaically...    

            (how how = howl)

śliniak - baby bib...
  ślimak - snail: a garden essential
if cabbages get chopped on the guillotine...

etymology or rather: the similarity of spelling
of words...

piekło - hell...

                      i'm thinking hard about soft machines,
i was trying to find william burroughs'
the soft machine
    in my library, stashed it somewhere deep
so had to resort to mind-bending alterations
to cite his style:

but not yet...
    from the river Jordan to the Mediterranean sea...
of what is known at least i know
a Palestinian is a Philistine is a Philistine
  
geb nodrap, nodrap, said watt, geb nodrap
dis yb, nem owt. yad la...

        such is Beckett...

thinking about the soft machines in hard machines:
about algorithms in computers
no modern novelist with a clue
as to programming, coding...
   bullet shining and diamond biting quality testing

a hack in googlewhacking and
years ago i hacked an iPod the wrong way...
had a bunch of scratched CDs... copied them
into an mp4 format, shoved them into the iPod
and what happened?

the iPod crashed... ****** it right there
right done and proper...
did the same with some lesser known player
with an mp3 format... scratches audible
but the hardware was intact...

like now, hacking my samsung s8....
   get frequent messages about moisture getting into
my USB port... hardly...
the phone is old and by "capitalistic" standards
of new **** newer **** newest ****
"needs" replacement... no... it doesn't...

(all misnomers in "quotes": have to air them out
like ***** sheets)

hit the restart button and once the the second
loading screen comes on
plug in the USB and the phone recharges just fine...
but (i) still have to hack the hardware
while the soft machines update themselves: pronto...

i'm using chatGPT to do the custard churning
of content for me...
and i use sololearn for stretching
punctuation marks
into flying paper rides into 3D...
like so:

<p>paraphrasing</p>
<button>grease</button>
    {else
/^exchanging results>/
            ]wormholes[
but that's still basic trimming:
i'd rather be in the garden
doing so autumnal cleaning -
spring cleaning in the house
while the garden requires autumnal cleaning:
pretty neat...

             oh the joy of knowing a slavic language
and a germanic language: perfect fusion...
for nuancing furthest apart, historically speaking:
borrowing from the 20th century...

щ is szcz is also šč
  (******* pressed on qwerty s then
ring finger pressing down on 3
index finger pressing down on
c and the ring finger again pressing down on 3
for the crowns)

    the only languages where these sounds
couple together (or at least, that i know of) -
дeщ - deszcz -
but there's something inherently wrong with
the Russian script -
you actually want for the transliteration
to be complete...
as was the case with the transliteration
of Greek into Latin...

namely the following letters:
a e m
              i mean: kudos on transliterating
iota into и...
      
but a bit lazy, drunk almost,
          having left a and e intact... and m (μ)
α ε.

       evidently you wouldn't use ε if you already
used it for з ζ (zet o zet)
and i understand that O is infinitely
un-transliterate-able...

л λ...

             sore sight for sore eyes... this unfinished
Russian script...
it could be finished like so:

    ɐ ǝ         borrowing from я

which would leave m in the hands of...
well...

if not the myslite or something akin...
given the mu is hμ

hunch: i.e. hmm...
                ღ           (georgian ghani
or ო            oni
     or even ლ    lasi)

then again... how about armenian?
ah... borrowing the armenian π:

պ...

   boy...

  мальчик could become

պɐльчик

                        all hypothetical stuff...

դեշճ

                   or via mkhedruli (st. george)
ᲓᲔᲷ (schva - ooh... ease in a sh for heaven's sake,
welcome the reaper) -

which is still rain... implying it was a happy sunny
day in England and i'm scribbling this down

brzeg: the shoreline.... a marriage of george
and armenia...

                                                      բᲯեᲒ

so much for ceasefires and fanatical marches
with ******* star of david "transliteration"
placards are brandished by supposedly very sensible
people...

to alleviate my confusion i had to watch a historical
programme on t.v. about the history of the ᛋᛋ
because i'm quite frankly a little confused
like i might be with a quiet quite...
                                                  easy mistake...
oh yes, i do mean the glam black Hugo Boss ᛋᛋ...

but still in some wintry part of the world
a journalistic yawn:
                                   a bit like the narrative structure
is awry or the wrong sort of gambling
with memory
given the fright of pan am flight 103, 1988...
in the same year
       iran air flight 655...

                                           it's only a question of:
as a people with what narratives do we go forward,
i'm thinking of what narratives i keep...
clearly memory is a fickle beast
and eroded by memorising spelling
and basic arithmetic from an early age
my personal memory hoard is limited
as it should be: or shouldn't?

                    absolutely zero imagination...
   so switched from watching history to watching
charlie and the chocolate history
and became flooded with the memory of
Samuel - how we used to walk to school
almost every single day for a year or so...

how he loved Roald Dahl and how reading
really wasn't my thing...
maybe i was neglected as a child for not reading
books for children: out of self-neglect
because i passed straight into the minds
of Stendhal and Marquis de Sade...
                                and Plato... oddly enough...

ah... it would appear i'm ready:
to sit down to the mind-custard of prosaic
NVQ level 3 coursework in
spectator safety... officially supervising teams:
on paper... since technically already doing
the practice.

Does this mean much to you,
Force fed at Yuletide too?
Unsure if Jesus meant all this,
Tinsel town of retail bliss,
Beginning to feel like Yuletide,
Snow in Aussie ocean tide,
Swimming and drinking,
What is Santa thinking?
Overfeeding everyone,
Overstuffed games in the sun,
Does Jesus think we're crude?
Groaning, here's more food,
Gimme more gifts and a card,
Graft at Christmas, that's so hard,
No matter who's to blame,
Megastores feel  no shame,
Buy, buy, buy, right away,
Rather ceasefires this festive day,
Despite Bing Crosby, okay,
That's what Jesus would really say!

‘They’

Who are ‘They’? You know,
the ones who said it would rain
today. Are they the same ‘They’
that claim a glass of red wine
a day is good for you? Or are
they the ‘They’ that decided
quinoa, blueberries and chia
seeds needed a superlative?

‘They’ said the pandemic would
change everything, ‘They’
promised a new normal. But
then again, ‘They’ promised
to be carbon neutral by 2030.
‘They’ say mental illness is on
the rise yet ‘They’ are spending
unprecedented resources on it.

Which ‘They’ is it who are
calling for Peace? The ‘They’ that
call for ceasefires? Surely not the
same ‘They’ that are profiting
from arms sales to rich warlords
and using hateful speech on
‘Their’ platforms?

[Oh, you mean the ‘They’ who raise wages?
Or the ‘They’ who let inflation spiral?]

These are the ‘They’ who hide
behind a pronoun when
delivering news of death, poverty,
corruption and failure. The same
‘They’ who suddenly personify
when plaudits, praise and
popularity are the order of the day.

Is it time that ‘They’ took a back seat
and ‘We’ became more responsible?
But who are ‘We’, if not just not ‘They’?
Whether we ignore it or not, there is a thread
which connects each ‘I’ to each other ‘I’.
There’s no unity in ‘We’ and ‘They’.
Realise your ‘I’ in someone else’s ‘I’
and maybe we can start to reconcile.

corridors were promised that was just a lie
ceasefires never happened more people had to die
putin wants revenge no matter what it takes
for his failing war  and all of his mistakes

thought it would be easy but he got it wrong
the courage of ukraine now is far to strong
fighting for the country with there bravery
the power of the people putin didnt see

they will fight and fight for there victory
turn it all around till the russians flee
and a broken man putin he we will be
ukraine and all its people can once again be free