Submit your work, meet writers and drop the ads. Become a member
Mateuš Conrad Aug 2018
. 'as for those poets, only the perverse follow them. do you not see that they go too far in every direction and say things, which they cannot do?' (ash-shu'ara / the poets 26:224-226).

call them what you like,
the Huguenots,
for all i care...

   you always side with
the "heretics"...
  
   given that, "said" heretics
retain some cultural value
relativism of other cultures,
namely in the form of
depiction -

    since why would, "the word"
be deemed holy,
    ****-naked,
                rather than donning
a bikini of "iconoclasm"...
         when words... are at
the meat-market of copyright -
what with © coca cola?

                 sunni islam would have
never allowed sufism...
  but Farsi does...
  and will continue...
since no Iranian will bow
before an Arab within the schematics
of history...

          Sunni Islam, it's Wahhabi sentimentality...
so why persist in signing
the Adhan?
   why not speak in a honing like
drone sentiment of plain speech?
i thought all music was banned?
the current Adhan is a form
of music... isn't it? BAN IT!

    you never side with these Sunni
muslims, exploiting Bangladeshi labor,
you side with the heretics of Iran...
these *******, i can at least respect...
  
      no fast cars, convenient ongoing
cultural insurrections -
   Sufism...
       Afghan women's poetry,
and all that much closer to Hindu mysticism...
    
yeah... "islamophobia":
but only against Sunni Islam...
   but Shia Islam?
   no problem...
   i could stomach these peoples
like i could stomach the in-between
of the Turkish variant -
no ideology - simply, pure, power throttle...

i could make a great Janissary -
with a Turkish barber...
         for a great trim of hair and beard...
i'd cast a shadow on some
obscure chocolatier of Brussels
who thinks himself a politician...

     but there are certain aspect of Islam
i am willing to tolerate...
   what happened to the son in law
of Muhammad, namely, Ali...
was raw ******* kicking...

               promises, promises...
no promises...
           Shia Islam, as an European,
i can tolerate, Turkish Islam, i can tolerate...
Turkey is incrementally shy
of being treated at the 2nd variant of Iran...
at least with Iran, we share a history
via the insurrection into the ancient
texts through Greece...

  come to think of it...
whenever i listen to
matta's song echo babylon...
i start feeding myself goosebumps,
reminding myself
of Cyrus... Nebuchadnezzar...
and the dim-wit that was
   Belshazzar...

always siding with the heretics...
if not on economic groundwork,
then at least motivating,
rather than monetizing an idea...

and the Shia muslims are...
    one way or another...
   unlike the gluttons of Dubai...
the barbie dolls of postage stamp
"proof" of progress,
in size, and worth...

   Sunni Islam would have
never allowed poetics to remain
a viable form of expression -
the Persian tradition that is,
far beyond the western concern
for a comment section...

         Shia Islam allows patronage
of the arts, notably poetry,
without concern for monetary
funding, it, at least, doesn't prohibit it...
given the pride of the Persians...
Sunnis and their continual quest
for finding water...
    sure... poetry is pointless within
such restrictions of
existential concerns...
    but... given the current, civilized
establishment?
   sky-scrapers in *******
sand dunes?

         the qu'ran should have
forbidden the architectural ambitions
equivalent to the tower of babel
being erected, in environments,
that could never sustain said projects...

    and who originally spewed the term
islamophobia?
Sunni Islam...
        i never liked this strand of belief...
i hate the Sunnis like
a Shia partisan...

p.s. it's called patriotism is America...
but nationalism in Europe...
    you sure that's not a synonym?
Europeans can't be patriotic,
and Americans are never nationalistic?

...

   well: how could i ever convert to islam,
i do enjoy the adhan from time to time,
"sorry", but i do...
  i can't help it:
if i'm a sucker for pop songs,
i'm also a sucker for the adhan...
   crusader songs, templar songs become
stuffy after a while...
and last time i checked:
     there were the northern crusades
against the baltic people:
notably prussians, lithuanians...
with that cushion of: mediating the
escalation of war by the polacks...
coming from the east:
  last time i checked the mongols
didn't reach leipzig...
               buffer zone people...
and what of the ottoman onsalught
of vienna 1529: the ****** winged hussars
won the charge...

so, coming back to heidegger... aphorism 26
ponderings IX... how am i to not be
the historical animal?
         perhaps in german, in germany
i might become a non-historical animal,
to begin: anew, but with a terrible
past to hide, to negate...
   i could do that: if i were a german,
speaking german, in germany...
but i'm in england:
            i might have some roots in
Silesia, but it's "hard" to not be a historical
animal, an "animal" with a sense of time,
i.e. a future a past a present...
esp. under the english conditions
of: the biological animal momentum narrative,
like a tsunami, like an earthquake...
ripples throughout...
              i can't move forward with
the english championing darwinism every
single ******* step of the way...
why can't they hide darwin like the polacks
hid copernicus...
given the motto: copernicus -
who moved the earth, and stopped the sun...
why wouldn't i escape into history
if the current biological reality is:
(a) a yawn... the cruel nature of per se?
   the courting of pigeons on a t.v. antenna...
pigeons get rejected all the time,
lesson learned, he bows and bows,
coos... expands his tail feathers upon
the bow then folds them... she flies away...
repeat...
    (b) i can't escape being a historical
animal in the way that what the current
facts are being repeated have encountered
a whiff of Chernobyll...
              history is inclided to answer reality...
biology? not so much... not from what i've
seen and heard...
             truly a schizophrenics disney dream:
to walk among the newly insane feeling
like the only sane among them...
beau-ti-ful!
                   well... given the current criteria
of being bilingual as being synonymous
with being a schizophrenic...
           magic!
                    
   now the crescendo...aphorism 24
ponderings X:

              the word designates, the word signifies,
the word says, the word is (heidegger)...

i found that you can only write
"philosophy" with a neat, fixed vocab. regime,
clarity of boundaries...
    quadratic events in vocab.:

i.e. the reflexive: yourself, himself, itself etc.
and the reflective: your, self....
                       his, self...
                                  it, and the self...
                    ergo? atheistic scissors,
  the two articles, indefinite and definite
                                 a / the "self"...

i'm not playing "identity politics",
when i say that only two peoples ever managed
to sack Moscau... the mongols and the polacks
with the help of lithuanians,
"identity politics" only happens in
post-colonial society, akin to the english,
i'll speak the english,
but i will not be a cucked indian of
the former raj: i will eat the fish & chips,
i will eat the sunday roast,
   i will eat the english breakfast with great
delight...
            but i will not do what these former
colonial masters expect of me:
integrate at the expense of making my
mutterzunge into hubris!
stubborness contra pride...
                hard to tell the difference...

and why do i like heidegger so much?
i'm not into the ad homine arguments...
my grandfather, was, a communist party member...
so?
       i like heidegger... because he appreciates
poetics, i like that poets can share the same
values as philosophers,
thanks to heidegger: we have been requested
back into the republic...
if plato and islam didn't like us, hanging around,
some offshoot german thinker / promenade
enthusiast like used enough to,
i suppose: ban the theatre puppeteers...

i am not playing identity politics...
biological reality is not enough...
but archeological reality?
       can you really advance to counter?
i was born near:
Krzemionki Opatowskie, a Neolithic and
early Bronze Age complex of flint mines
for the extraction of Upper Jurassic (Oxfordian)
banded flints...
  personally? i don't believe in
the African genesis conundrum...
i believe "my" people originated from
the Indian sub-continent,
as, associated with the complex:
Indo-European categorization of language;
i'm still to see an African phonetic
encoding system, beside the hieroglyphics...

i, was, born, there! i'm not a displaced
post-colonial debacle between former master
and former slave...
i have: roots... i'm not ******* up to the fish & chips
brigade with a friday night's worth of curry...
i cook my own curry,
and by god: it is the food of the gods...
i'll give the blue indians that counter...
but sure as **** not the worth of mead
or whiskey...

if they only tolerated themselves,
sure, learn the english language,
but know this much:
           english is the modern lingua franca...
it's the language of economics,
forget the natives, too ignorant to learn
either deutsche or française:
island-folk...
                what else, what other attitude?
even the russians are like:
that land of the weirdos? the idiosyncratics?
yes, we know that land...
the only "thing" that shelters the english
are the h'americans, the south africans,
the australians etc.,
  sure as **** the scots aren't sheltering them...
and, mind you?
   if the i.r.a. really wanted to plant
a bomb?
   a real bomb? they'd revert from speaking
any english to begin with... resorting
to revising their usage of gàidhlig:
ga-id-hlig... gaelic...
   like the welsh, stubborn people, proud people,
retaining their Çymraeg...
celt: said kelt...
the glaswegian football team?
       Çeltic... not: keltic...
  borrowed from the greek: sigma (ς: cedilla to ****)...
   wow! all the particulars in the english tongue!
guess it would take an ausländer to spot them!

U-21 european championships,
england versus romania:
                           a magnificent match...
the youngsters playing better football
than the oldies in their mid to late / early 30s...

i'm trying to tolerate Islam,
               it's not in my nature...
            hell... i enjoyed visiting a turkish barber
shop, i still have an unflinching opinion that,
the turks are the best barbers in the world...
but...

              this quote, is going to **** you:
same aphorism / pondering (24 / X) -


*** fight videos - count dankula...
you know what i'd love to do to these little
snarky *****?
the french revolution isn't enough...
n'ah, them hanging, is not enough....
ever heard of the butchers' hook?
                 it's also callled close-up fishing...
imitation hang-man...
   you insert a fishing hook...
and you let the sweeney todd ****** dangle...
on a hook, rather than a noose...
lords of salem come your way?
i'd rather the snarky teen hanging off
a fisherman's hook than dangle
like some lynched ******...
beside the suffocation,
i'd like them with a fisherman's hook entombed
in their hard palette...
         i don't want them hanging...
what am i? a sadist?
  i want them on the fisherman's hook!
when suffocating without a broken spine absorbed
by the neck isn't enough!
  fisherman's hook gallows is a
masterpiece... of suffering...
  most certain...
  when cheap comedy is being towed...
making fun of bums, or homeless people...
the current society is so welcome
to bypass all the "adventures" of Loki...
but akin to the lords of Salem...
burn!? such a limitated imagination!

ah... right... digressing...
        the reflexive / reflective quadratic...
language - only if speech  has acquired
the highest univocity of the word does it
become strong (enough) for the hidden
              play of its essential multivocity
(as withdrawn from all "logic"),
             of which poets and thinkers alone
are capable, in their own respective modes
and their own directions of sovreignty.

we do live in a time of a lost sense
of dialectic, since we do not live in a time
of etertaining dialogue,
perfectly sensible opinions,
that's all we have...

                       if one of these snarky *******
came up to me...
they'd get a chance to experience a rubric
of 4, knuckles...
what's 189 centimeters in empirical?
6ft2...      oh!
                   see where imagination takes you?
and here i was: thinking i was without it!
butcher's hangman...
oh, not so easy...
                  
                fame by no association to fame...
just the tears of parents who raised their children
to be nothing more than rugrats...
annoying gnat like bothersomes;
and nothing quiet special to be associated
with weimar berlin...
     just, these,
   h'american mall onlookers
with pwetty-guy-for-a-white-fly-mentality,
as borrowed from californian
1990s punk;

re-used ****** losers.

mad-hatter's fraction: 10/6....
      0.666...
      well: to the given extent:
1.666666(7)....
     1, 0, /6,
no number is divisible by 0,
every number, divisible by 1:
is the same number...
    mad hatter's 10/6...

   re-used ****** losers...
i like that phrase...
        7 for every 6, 7 for every 6...
until the 0. fraction comes
a 1.: exponential serf of 0...
0 being the multiplier...
          
         i really am growing a beard to less
don it, but rather to experience
a relief from patience...
war robots?
the first non n.p.c. game...
i like that, very much...
      and when i did:

you know my first experience of
love at first sight?
the younger sister of my then girlfriend...
****** up ****...

love at first sight is a terrible phenomenon...
i was nearing 18, she was barely 13...
i was dating her older sister...
but it was love at first sight,
the trouble with: love at first sight:
it doesn't lie...
it tries to lie...
          but it can't lie...

   paedophilia? a bit... untouched bodies
though... bodies of people who were
never supposed to touch...
i once said to a fwend:
well wouldn't it be ****** up if i touched
her?
   she's a muse, which doesn't translate
into vacating her as a busy body
worth of a touch, does it?
     if only my old friend samuel said
otherwise:
sylvester "contra" tweety:
my first girlfriend...
but her sister?
         i was nearing 18, she was about 13...
love at first sight...
untouched, cradled, unscathed...
and so she remained...
   until she did what every girl would
have done...thank god she remained
a figment of my imagination...
   rammstein: rosernrot...
    
           i have seen love at first...
such a load of ******* that it had to be
the younger sister of a girl i was dating...
and the **** that i had to be 18 and see
was just beginning her teenage transition...
the world unfair i grant
the most justifications... as being
the (just - unnecessary adjective) arbiter...

love at first sight becomes a forbidden love...
love at first sight was always a forbidden
love...
           and the sort of "love" that achieves
a perspctive of change that doesn't
translate into old age...
love at first sight is soon translated
into a love of affairs closely associated
with middle-age disenfranchised
state of affairs...
i.e. to love again...
            how else to feel relief from
having lost both one's inhibitions
               as well as one's ambitions?!
in the conundrum of the mortal
"question" of the continuum being
preserved?
Tiger Striped Sep 2019
when he grows up
he'll be a chocolatier, he supposes.
yes, a chocolatier.
what dim light holds money
compared with the brilliance of cocoa's richness?
many times he traded a crisp dollar bill
to the cashier, for a Hershey's bar —
the cashier, he knew, had drawn the shorter straw.
he could not understand big people
in their big buildings
with their big cups of coffee,
aching with bitterness all day long.
what they needed, after all, was a bar of chocolate.
what do you like to do? they'd ask him, those big bitter people.
sometimes he wondered the same thing —
what did they like to do?
did they like to sit at their big desks
and hope for bigger checks, someday?
he knew what he liked to do.
“i like to make people happy,” he told them,
“and i like to eat chocolate.”
they laughed at him, sometimes.
he didn't think it was funny,
but he liked to see them smile.
"would you like some chocolate?" he'd ask.
they would look confused, almost
like they weren't sure he was talking to them.
they said sure, they wouldn't mind some
chocolate, and he
would give those big people
a little piece of chocolate.
but their eyes would ask him what their
mouths would not:
why?
he was practicing, he said,
to be a chocolatier.
Sarah Feb 2015
I want to go to Austria
and taste the cake

visit every stone-
wedged cafe
and watch the
chocolatier

Oh this life is
wonderful
where I can fall
asleep and
meet you in
Vienna
Margo Mar 2013
this girl I know
who always wears summer dresses
and a smile
lent me a book on awareness
but wants it back before
she goes to work in a conflict zone
for the red cross in september

she travelled in a big red bus
to a surfers festival in donegal
where she worked
in the big red bus café
on her breaks she surfed
smoked loads of ****
listened to reggae and ate falafel

last Wednesday she received a
back payment from the social welfare
and felt guilty about it
so she donated half of it to charity
bought donkeys for three Ethiopian families
spent a small fortune on ingredients for a friends dinner
and paid for my vegetable soup

she stopped at a chocolatier
to buy one solitary chocolate
and then ate it hurriedly
while she chatted to
a circus guy she knew
about a party she had missed when she
was on the big red bus

while skimming through books
in the spirituality section
wearing her summer dress and a smile
she said she felt sick
from having eaten the chocolate too
quickly and was sad that she hadn’t
taken the time to enjoy it

today the red cross sent her for
a chest x-ray
Chris Saitta Aug 2020
The horse breathes in the city, the world of unrelenting pistons
And steam from the jingling harness, and the jangling windows
That reflect the bolting sparrows like fire arrows in the coming night,
Viennese darkness is like the smell of the chocolatier mixed with snow,
Sealed in a sachertorte with the alley-crack of the riding whip on coach,
Viennese sunshine is like the baker’s soul, rising on flashing coppers and tins.
Sachertorte is the famed dark chocolate Viennese cake.
Mateuš Conrad Jun 2016
concerning an English lass... i rather 'ave a kebab than eat that **** to be honest: she's had more ****- than me -stani! well yeah, thank **** for that, i don't need gangrene on my mouth as necessary lipstick; i liked Queen and Freddy Mercury too! but that ain't the point!

shady concerns for East Europe by
feminists concerned with
prostitution are only subvert assertions
of post-colonialism; one
***** doesn't mind another,
write like a **** darling,
you'll get anywhere - the *******
are from England or Corseted France,
uptight *****, let's face it,
real* "rebels", instead revellers of Ibiza,
and nothing more, Brussel's toothpicks
rather than chopsticks fidgeting over
some other worthy capitol; i mean, who needs
a chocolatier nation to govern us
when we're all suddenly diabetic?
turn my women into ****** i turn your
men into ******* ****-users un-necessarily
circumcised by the St. Paul's doctrine on
his way to Damascus - because those
retards should have, have your feminism's worth
of **** to boot - index and thumb
insignia on the Ire forehead: L: LOSER;
cos' you are - fudge-pack those sheep
off **** off the Dover cliffs and i'll won't
******* you silly with a Welsh tongue,
ole V!
Mateuš Conrad Mar 2019
.yeah, cultural darwinism, cultural relativism, moral relativism, and the inherent outcome of jurisprudence subjecitivity akin to the jussie smollett case... i once travelled to kenya, didn't grow an afro... hard a complerte hard-on for this ivory beauty, than looked like melting chocolate in the moonlight, and you know, it being africa, east africans are much lighter than west africans, and i spent an entire night, on a hammock, admiring the indian ocean battering the coast, crying... **** me, it was beautiful, i guess i needed no better outlet to justify my claim of reserving myself the chance to experience beauty; some "things", are just better experienced during the night, anti-voyeurism, i.e. when you're aware of other people being asleep. ivory beauty? what?! i wasn't looking for a ******* belgian chocolatier, i was looking at the pearls in her mouth... what?! that's suddenly "bad"? so there's no variant of, said language, to be subject to the expression of finding the crux of endearing?! no? none... no wonder i spent most of the time shying from the sun, emerging for a game of ping-pong, some coffee and cognac, while spending most of the time on the balcony, feeding macaques peanuts, while also admiring a pirate baboon's hemorrhoids double-*** pink, ***... no, not other humanoid comparisons, actual macaques, baboons, and ivory beauties smoking ****... i wish i stayed, and sang along to a verse from t.o.t.o., but the heat got to me, i don't even want to know how the colonial english managed to survive the heat... cognac, coffee, and looking for a shaded place; i met a Muhammad though... he wanted to show me his crocodile farm, i guessed he was a shoe guy, i declined... i only encountered the paranoia of being inclined to take up the proposition a year later... now it's just funny, compared with the current ******* intra ****? being placed back on the food-chain hierarchy, doesn't feel, that bad... i'd rather be eaten by some animal, than be forced into an eating-machine of a person's Minotaur's worth of ego, in a labyrinth of "thought" and social credentials, associated to a hierarchy / pyramid... "repenting" white guy... said the afro-american who would never visit africa, because of the whole fiasco... surrounded by a tourist-status, mentality; **** me, i went to Kenya, to play hide & seek roulette with the sun.

that god-awful moment when
you have just lit
a cigarette,
   but then some random thought
falls into your lap of a day's
   worth of thought...
thought, yeah: rarity verb,
shapeless void, when in the act,
of thinking:
absolutely zero
geometric explanation,
other than a: big 'ed....
and that only sticks for
a while, before you're subjected
to peruse further...
        why is it coincidental,
that, the current,
existential crisis,
   in the anglophonic-sphere
of "things",
is weighed down,
so heavily,
   with darwinian poetics?
   cultural-darwinism is
rife, in its format of expression...
this isn't individualistic
existential pointers to be
minded, akin to Kierkegaard,
Nietzsche, late-bloomers
akin to Sartre or Heidegger...
the former?
      quantum mechanics,
****** quest...
           lived with his mother,
had a partner ***
              ****...
and the rest of the jazz...
if asked to
  draw a straight line:
he'd digress into a mimic
of james joyce,
   literature, no paragraph:
but that was just
hte tip of the ice-berg...
no punctuation markers...
sober as a judge:
but ego "tripping"...
    back when existentialism
was sourced in individuals,
it attracted a frictive delay
on the en masse scale...
but now there's a hive
mentality,
            pushing against
any individualistic endeavours
that might stand-out,
since when was
continental existentialism,
compatible with darwinism?
ever?
     before i finish writing this,
that once lit,
but suddenly put-out
out cigarette will translate
itself into a slightly wet
tobacco fusion of my lips,
saliva, and a soaked filter...
and it will almost resemble
the first gulp of an english
ale, i.e. bitter...
  which i like...
after all... budweiser?
   honestly? not a decent beer,
where are the hops,
the bitterness?
   it must be due to the asian
influence, fermenting from
rice...
          beer?                  rice?
oh thank god i don't really
have that much to brag about...
being exposed to the cultural
undercurrents,
while satisfying myself
to the counter-culture
of the 1960s with the Beatniks...
my my,
    like wearing a mismatched
pair of socks...
but what is pervading...
is to source darwinism as the sole
poetics available,
the only explanation to counter
the rigidity of 20th century's
existentialism...
     how the "debate" has shifted,
it's no longer a question of
free will, but whether choice
is free...
     i drink,
   i don't know how to drive
a car, i know how to ride
a horse,
i don't gamble,
           i'm a parody uncle...
rather than a nagging aunt...
it's still bewildering,
   the current grip on the anglophone
culture...
  when the continental thinkers
were at their zenith,
in the 20th century,
everything was just plain dandy
over in england and england's
"elsewhere"...
    now? a catch-up game
for intellectuals, journalists
and all pseudo- and anti-
          of the respected fields...
i just don't think that darwinism
is a worthwhile estimate
of a crutch, a crux,
a walking stick...
        the almost deity status
of darwinism:
   as the sole explanatory
tour de force...
   all i'm seeing is:
not the dissatisfaction of
making an argument,
   rather:
    a dissatisfying argument
to begin with!
   reality escapism is not exactly
on the cards,
   what is on the cards,
is a lost sense of
   reasonableness,
    "oddly" enough,
   i too see the whole prospect
of a judgement of solomon,
the manic woman
throwing herself at the child
to be a lie,
    i would have went
for the woman pointing to
her stone cold heart,
in that gustave doré
etching...
            **** the baby,
given the modern climate
of abortion and
me thinking i just performed
a genocide, ******* into
toilet paper while doing
the no. 1, 2: and the subsequent 3
on the throne of thrones...
   this movement,
mgtow?
       it's an extension akin
to that manic street preachers
lyric: walking abortion(s)...
looks like 20th century
existentialsm wasn't ugly enough,
sure, sure, playing a waiting
game from the 19th century
instigators,
   now, oh hell,
   now we get to reap the benefits
of their angst!
but does darwinism help?
no... not really...
it just bypasses dialectics,
shortens the route for both
argument (thesis)
   and counter-argument (antithesis),
seemingly obvious,
but this blatant need make "revisions",
upon the canvas of
the natural order...
   was man, ever the justifiable
entanglement of nature,
standing before a mirror
of that nature,
    and not made certain
counters, at best,
justifying them with counterfeit?
        how will darwinism
suddenly extract an existential
solution to all the current
    existential qualms,
i will never know,
   but to me?
   darwinism is simply, nothing more,
than poetics for the up-coming
existentialists in the anglophone
world...
          the easily available...
also:  
     bother,
   why bother with opinions,
unshakeable facts,
when you have to be made
to be: excused?
             where's the dialectic?
rather: where's all that
requires there to be conversation,
i.e. reasonableness?
    right, right,
the madmen of a given society
are supposed to be
the reasonable ones,
while the children of sanity
play their little games,
until,
     there are no longer
any worthwhile games
                                          to play?
i tried, i failed,
time for another shot of bourbon,
or as i like to call it...
the perfumery apex of
translation -
   the whiff of scents,
       from a brothel.
Saint Jimmy May 2018
The real fairy tale life

Christmas eve, cuddled up with blankets and homemade hot chocolate (it's chocolatier and creamier than normal hot chocolate) and marshmallows, with a stupid old chick-flick that you've watched every year for the last 10 years, because it's become your tradition, and then putting the kids to bed early and hiding their presents and getting everything ready for them, because even though you'll be tired all day it's worth it to see them smile.

Going to the grandparents and the in-laws on boxing day because Christmas day is your day with the family, and having fun, playing board games because you can't beat the classics, sitting down for a dinner and laughing at ****** ******* jokes.

And then when the kids fall asleep, loading them into the car and going home, ready to go back to work the next day, because you work a full time job just to support your family to make sure they're never missing anything. Only to get ready for new years eve and partying the night away with your friends before escaping to kiss at midnight...

That's the real fairy tale life, not the marrying royalty and becoming a princess but marrying the one you love and starting a family, because not everything has to be perfect, just as long as you're together

— The End —