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RAJ NANDY Feb 2015
AN INTRODUCTION TO INDIAN ART IN VERSE  
By Raj Nandy : Part One

INTRODUCTION
Background :
The India subcontinent and her diverse physical features,
influenced her dynamic history, religion, and culture!
The fertile basin of the Sapta-Sindu Rivers* cradled one of
world’s most ancient civilization, (seven rivers)
Contemporary to the Sumerians and the Egyptians, popularly
known as the Indus Valley Civilization!
The Sindu (Indus), Jhelum, Chenab, Ravi, Sutlej, Bias, along
with the sacred river Saraswati, shaped India’s early History;
Where once flourished the urban settlements of Harappa and
Mohenjodaro, which lay buried for several centuries;
For our archaeologists and scholars to unravel their many
secrets and hidden mysteries!
Modern scholars refer to it as ‘Indus-Saraswati Civilization’;
By interpreting the text of the Rig Veda which mentions
eclipses, equinoxes, and other astronomical conjunctions,
They date the origin of the Vedas as earlier as 3000 BC;
Thereby lifting the fog which shrouds Ancient History! +
(+ Two broad schools of thoughts prevail; Max Mullar refers
to 1500 BC as the date for origin of the Vedas, but modern scientific findings point to a much earlier date for their Oral composition and
their long oral tradition!)

On the banks of the sacred Saraswati River the holy sages
did once meditate, *
When their third eye opened, as all earthly bonds they did
transcend !
From their lips flowed the sacred chants of the Vedas, as
they sang the creator Brahma’s unending praise!
These Vedic chants and incantations survived many
centuries of an oral tradition,
When Indian Art began to blossom into exotic flowers like
Brahma’s divine manifestations;
With all subsequent art forms following the model of
Brahma’s manifold creations!
The Vedas got written down during the later Vedic Age
with commentaries and interpolations,
And remain as India’s indigenous composition, forming a
part of her sacred religious tradition! *
(
Rig Veda the oldest, had hymns in praise of the creator;
Yajur Veda spelled the ritual procedures; Sama Veda sets
the hymns for melodious chanting, & is the source of seven
notes of music; Artha Veda had hymns for warding off evil
& hardship, giving us a glimpse of early Vedic life.)

IMPACT OF FOREIGN INVASIONS:
Through the winding Khyber Pass cutting through the rugged
Hindu Kush Range,
Came the Persians, Greeks, Muslims, the Moguls, and many
bounty hunters storming through north-western frontier gate;
Consisting of varied racial groups and cultures, they entered
India’s fertile alluvial plains!
Therefore, while tracing 5000 years of Art Story, one cannot
divorce Art from India’s exotic cultural history.
From the Cave Art of Bhimbetka, to the dancing girl of Harappa,
To the frescoes and the evocative figures of Ajanta and Ellora;
Many marvelous and exquisitely carved temples of the South,
And Muslim and Mogul architecture and frescoes along with
India’s rich Folk Art, enriched her artistic heritage no doubt!
Yet for a long time Indian Art had been the least known of
the Oriental Arts,
Perhaps because from Western point of view it was difficult
to understand the spirit behind Indian Art!
For Indian Art is at once aesthetic and sensual, also passionate,
symbolic, and spiritual !
It both celebrates and denies the individual’s love of life,
where free instinct with rigid reason combine !
These contradictory elements are found side by side due to
her culturally mixed conditions, as I had earlier mentioned!
Now, if we add to this the constant religious exaltation,
With the extensive use of symbolic presentation, from the
early days of Indian civilization;
We have the basic elements of an Art, which has gradually
aroused the interest of Western Civilization!

The further we get back in time, we only begin to find,
That religion, philosophy, art and architecture,
Had all merged into an unified whole to form India’s
composite culture!
But while moving forward in time, we once again find,
That art, architecture, music, poetry and dance, all begin to
gradually emerge, with their separate identities,
Where Indian Art is seen as a rich mosaic of cultural diversity!

(NOTES:-In the ancient days, the Saraswati River flowed from the Siwalik Range of Hills (foothills of the Himalayas) between Sutlej & the Yamuna rivers, through the present day Rann of Kutch into the Arabian Sea, when Rajasthan was a fertile place! Indus settlements like Kalibangan, Banawalli, Ganwaiwala, were situated on the banks of Sarsawati River, which was longer than the Indus & ran parallel, and is mentioned around50 times in the Rig Veda! Scientists say that due to tectonic plate movements, and climatic changes, Saraswati dried up around 1700BC ! The people settled there shifted east and the south, during the course of history! Some of those Indo-Aryan speaking people were already settled there, & others joined later. Max Muller’s theory of an Aryan Invasion which destroyed the Indus Valley Civilization during 1500BC, supported by Colonial Rulers, was subsequently proved wrong ! Indo-Aryans were a Language group of the Indo- European
Language Family, & not a racial group as mistaken by Max Mullar! Therefore Dr.Romila Thapar calls it a gradual migration, & not an invasion! The Vedas were indigenous composition of India. However, they got compiled & written down for the first time with commentaries, at a much later date! I have maintained this position since it has been proved by modern scholars scientifically!)

SYMBOLISM IN INDIAN ART
From the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic to the Cretan Bull
of Greece,
Symbols have conveyed ideas and messages, fulfilling
artistic needs.
The ‘Da Vinci Code’ speaks of Leonardo’s art works as
symbolic subterfuge with encrypted messages for a secret
society!
While Indian art is replete with many sacred symbols to
attract good fortune, for the benefit of the community!
The symbols of the Dot or ‘Bindu’, the Lotus, the Trident,
the Conch shell, the sign and chant of ‘OM’, are all sacred
and divine;
For at the root of Indian artistic symbolism lies the Indian
concept of Time!
The West tends to think of time as a dynamic process which
is forward moving and linear;
Commencing with the ‘Big Bang’, moving towards a ‘Big
Crunch’, when ‘there shall be no more time’, or a state of
total inertia !
Indian art and sculpture is influenced by the cyclic concept
of time unfolding a series of ages or ‘yugas’;
Where creation, destruction and recreation, becomes a
dynamic and an unending phenomena!
This has been artistically and symbolically expressed in the
figure of Shiva-Nataraja’s cosmic dance,
Which portrays the entire kinetic universe in a state of
eternal flux!
The hour-glass drum in Nataraja’s right hand symbolizes
all creation;
Fire in his left hand the cyclic time frame of destruction!
The raised third hand is in a gesture of infinite benediction;
And the fourth hand pointing to his upraised foot shows the
path of liberation!

It was easier to teach the vast untutored population through
symbols, images, and paintings in the form of Art;
For a picture is more effective than a thousand words!
The Dot or ‘bindu’ becomes the focus for meditation,
Where the mental energies are focused on a single point of
creation,
As seen in the cotemporary art works of SH Raza’s
artistic representations!
Yet the same dot when expanded as a circle becomes
wholeness and infinity;
The shape of celestial bodies of the cyclic universe in its
creativity!
The Lotus seen in many sculptures, on temple walls, and
majestic columns, denotes purity;
A symbol of non-attachment rising above the muddy waters,
retaining its pristine color and beauty!
The Lotus is a powerful and transformational symbol in
Buddhist Art,
Where pink lotus is for height of enlightenment, blue for
wisdom, white for spiritual perfection, and the red lotus
symbolizing the heart!
This Lotus symbol also finds a place in Mughal sculptural
carvings and miniatures;
The inverted lotus dome resting on its petals, forms the
crown of Taj Mahal’s white marble architecture!
The trident or ‘trishul’ symbolizes the three god-heads
Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva;
As the Creator, Preserver and Destroyer, in that cyclic
chain which goes on forever!
The ***** stone of Shiva-lingam surrounded by the oval
female yoni symbolizes fertility and creation,
Usually found in the inner sanctuary of Hindu temples!
Finally, the symbol of ‘OM’ and its vibrating sound,
Echoes the primordial vibrations with which space and
time abounds!
All matter comes from energy vibrations manifesting
cosmic creation;
Also symbolized in Einstein’s famous matter-energy equation!
The Conch Shell a gift of the sea when blown, sounds the
ancient primordial vibration of ‘OM’!
It’s hallowed auspicious sound accompanies marriage
ceremonies and rituals whenever occasion demands;
And pacifies mother earth during Shiva-Nataraja’s sudden
seismic dance! (earthquakes)
Dear readers the symbols mentioned here are very few,
Mainly to curb the length, while I pay Indian Art my
artistic due!

A BRIEF COMPARISON OF ART:
Despite the many foreign influences which entered India
through the Khyber and Bholan pass,
India displayed marvelous adaptability and resilience, in
the development of her indigenous Art!
The aesthetic objectivity of Western Art was replaced by
the Indian vision of spiritual subjectivity,
For the transitory world around was only a ‘Maya’ or an
Illusion,- lacking material reality!
Therefore life-like representation was not always the aim
of Indian art,
But to lift that veil and reveal the life of the spirit, - was
the objective from the very start!
Egyptian funerary art was more occupied with after-life
and death;
While the Greeks portrayed youthful vigor and idealized
beauty, celebrating the joys of life instead!
The proud Roman Emperors to outshine their predecessors
erected even bigger statues, monuments, and columns
draped in glory;
Only in the long run to drain the Roman treasury, - a sad
downfall story!
Indian art gradually evolved over centuries with elements
both religious and secular,
As seen from the period of King Chandragupta Maurya,
Who defeated the Greek Seleucus, to carve out the first
united Indian Empire ! (app. 322 BC)

SECULAR AND SPIRITUAL FUSION IN ART:
Ancient Indian ‘stupas’
and temples were not like churches
or synagogues purely spiritual and religious,
But were cultural centers depicting secular images which
were also non-religious!
The Buddhist ‘stupa’ at Amravati (1stcentury BC), and the
gateways at Sanchi (1stcentury AD), display wealth of carvings
from the life of Buddha;
Also warriors on horseback, royal procession, trader’s caravans,
farmers with produce, - all secular by far!
Indian temples from the 8th Century AD onwards depicted
images of musicians, dancers, acrobats and romantic couples,
along with a variety of Deities;
But after 10th Century ****** themes began to make their mark
with depiction of sensuality!
Sensuality and ****** interaction in temples of Khajuraho and
Konarak has been displayed without inhibition;
As Tantric ideas on compatibility of human sexuality with
human spirituality, fused into artistic depictions!
Religion got based on a healthy and egalitarian acceptance
of all activities without ****** starvation;
For the emotional health and well-being of society, without
hypocritical denial or inhibition!
(’Stupas’= originated from ancient burial mounds, later became devotional Buddhist sites with holy relics, & external decorative gateways and carvings!)

KHJURAHO TEMPLE COMPLEX (950 - 1040 AD) :
Was built by the Chandela Rajputs in Central India,
When Khajuraho, the land of the moon gods, was the first
capital city of the Chandelas!
****** art covers ten percent of the temple sculptures,
Where both Hindu and Jain temples were built in the north-Indian
Nagara style of Architecture.
Out of the 85 temples only 22 have stood the vagaries of time,
Where a perfect fusion of aesthetic elegance and evocative
Kama-Sutra like ****** sculptural brilliance, - dazzle the eyes!

KONARAK SUN TEMPLE OF ORISSA - EAST COAST:
From the Khajuraho temple of love, we now move to the
Konark temple of *** in stones - as art!
Built around 1250 AD in the form of a temple mounted on
a huge cosmic chariot for the Sun God;
With twelve pairs of stone-carved wheels pulled by seven
galloping horses, symbolizing the passage of time under
the Solar God !
Seven horses for each day of the week, pulls the chariot
east wards towards dawn;
With twelve pairs of wheels representing the twelve calendar
months, as each cyclic day ushers in a new morn !
The friezes above and below the chariot wheels show military
processions, with elephants and hunting scenes;
Celebrating the victory of King Narasimhadeva-I over the
invading Muslims!
The ****** art and voluptuous carvings symbolizes aesthetic
bliss when uniting with the divine;
Following yogic postures and breathing techniques, which
Tantric Art alone defines!
(
Both Khjuraho & Konark temples were re-discovered by the
British, & are now World Heritage Sites!)

Artistic invention followed the model of cosmic creation;
Ancient Vedic tradition visualized the spirit of a joyous
self-offering with chants and incantations!
The world was understood to be a structured arrangement
of five elements of earth, water, fire, air, and ethereal space;
Where each element brought forth a distinct art-expression
with artistic grace!
Element of Sculpture was earth, Painting the fluidity of water,
Dance was transformative fire, Music flowed through the air,
and Poetry vibrated in ethereal space!

CONCLUDING INTRODUCTION TO INDIAN ART:

Indian Art is like a prism with many dazzling facets,
I have only introduced the subject with its symbolism,
- without covering its complete assets!
After my Part Three on ‘Etruscan and Roman Art’,
Christian and Byzantine Art was to follow;
But following request from my few poet friends I have
postponed it for the morrow!
Traditional Indian Art survives through its sculptures,
architecture, paintings and folk art, ever evolving with
the passing of time and age;
Influenced by Buddhist, Jain, Muslim, Mogul, and many
indigenous art forms, enriching India’s cultural heritage!
While the art of our modern times constitutes a separate
Contemporary phase !
The juxtaposition of certain concepts and forms might
have appeared a bit intriguing,
But the spiritual content and symbolism in art answers
our basic artistic seeking!
The other aspects of Indian Art I plan to cover at a later
date,
Hope you liked my Introduction, being posted after
almost forty days!
ALL COPY RIGHTS ARE WITH RAJ NANDY
E-Mail: rajnandy21@yahoo.
    FEW COMMENTS BY POETS ON 'POETFREAK.COM' :-
I have a vicarious pleasure going through your historical journey of Indian art! Thanks for sharing this here! 2 Mar 2013 by Ramesh T A | Reply

The prism of Indian Art is indeed has myriads of facets and is an awesome mixture of many influences some of which you list here so clearly - a very understandable presentation of symbolism too - -thank you for your fine effort Raj. 2 Mar 2013 by Fay Slimm | Reply

Oh what an interesting read with immense information capturing every single detail. You painted this piece of art with utmost care. Truly, it's works Raj…tfs 2 Mar 2013 by John Thomas Tharayil | Reply

First, I have to say, the part about the lotus symbolism reminds me – My name ‘NILOTPAL’ can be split into ‘NIL’ meaning BLUE and ‘UTPAL’ meaning LOTUS. So my name represents wisdom (although it contradicts ME.. LOL). A lot of things were mentioned in the veda and other ancient Indian texts that were way ahead of the time Like the idea of ‘velocity of light’ got considerable mention in the rig veda-Sahan bhasya, ‘Elliptical order of planets, ‘Black holes’ , although these are the scientific aspects. The emphasis on contradictory elements or even the idea of opposites in Indian art is interesting because India developed the mathematical concept of ‘Zero’ and ‘infinity’. Hard to believe Rajasthan was a fertile place but now it possesses its own beauty. It was great to read about the Natraja, ‘OM’ and the trident(Trishul). Among symbolisms, Lord Ganseha is my favorite because a lot is portrayed in that one image like the MOOSHIK representing
When I composed the History of Western Art in Verse & posted the series on 'Poetfreak.com', few Indian poet friends requested me to compose on Indian Art separately. I am posting part one of my composition here for those who may like to know about Indian Art. Thanks & best wishes, -Raj
Scott M Reamer Apr 2013
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You are what your reading lady. Now would you hold this gun?
Nigel Morgan Nov 2012
She said, ‘You are funny, the way you set yourself up the moment we arrive. You look into every room to see if it’s suitable as a place to work. Is there a table? Where are the plugs? Is there a good chair at the right height? If there isn’t, are there cushions to make it so? You are funny.’
 
He countered this, but his excuse didn’t sound very convincing. He knew exactly what she meant, but it hurt him a little that she should think it ‘funny’. There’s nothing funny about trying to compose music, he thought. It’s not ‘radio in the head’ you know – this was a favourite expression he’d once heard an American composer use. You don’t just turn a switch and the music’s playing, waiting for you to write it down. You have to find it – though he believed it was usually there, somewhere, waiting to be found. But it’s elusive. You have to work hard to detect what might be there, there in the silence of your imagination.
 
Later over their first meal in this large cottage she said, ‘How do you stop hearing all those settings of the Mass that you must have heard or sung since childhood?’ She’d been rehearsing Verdi’s Requiem recently and was full of snippets of this stirring piece. He was a) writing a Mass to celebrate a cathedral’s reordering after a year as a building site, and b) he’d been a boy chorister and the form and order of the Mass was deeply engrained in his aural memory. He only had to hear the plainsong introduction Gloria in Excelsis Deo to be back in the Queen’s chapel singing Palestrina, or Byrd or Poulenc.
 
His ‘found’ corner was in the living room. The table wasn’t a table but a long cabinet she’d kindly covered with a tablecloth. You couldn’t get your feet under the thing, but with his little portable drawing board there was space to sit properly because the board jutted out beyond the cabinet’s top. It was the right length and its depth was OK, enough space for the board and, next to it, his laptop computer. On the floor beside his chair he placed a few of his reference scores and a box of necessary ‘bits’.
 
The room had two large sofas, an equally large television, some unexplainable and instantly dismissible items of decoration, a standard lamp, and a wood burning stove. The stove was wonderful, and on their second evening in the cottage, when clear skies and a stiff breeze promised a cold night, she’d lit it and, as the evening progressed, they basked in its warmth, she filling envelopes with her cards, he struggling with sleep over a book.
 
Despite and because this was a new, though temporary, location he had got up at 5.0am. This is a usual time for composers who need their daily fix of absolute quiet. And here, in this cottage set amidst autumn fields, within sight of a river estuary, under vast, panoramic uninterrupted skies, there was the distinct possibility of silence – all day. The double-glazing made doubly sure of that.
 
He had sat with a mug of tea at 5.10 and contemplated the silence, or rather what infiltrated the stillness of the cottage as sound. In the kitchen the clock ticked, the refrigerator seemed to need a period of machine noise once its door had been opened. At 6.0am the central heating fired up for a while. Outside, the small fruit trees in the garden moved vigorously in the wind, but he couldn’t hear either the wind or a rustle of leaves.  A car droned past on the nearby road. The clear sky began to lighten promising a fine day. This would certainly do for silence.
 
His thoughts returned to her question of the previous evening, and his answer. He was about to face up to his explanation. ‘I empty myself of all musical sound’, he’d said, ‘I imagine an empty space into which I might bring a single note, a long held drone of a note, a ‘d’ above middle ‘c’ on a chamber ***** (seeing it’s a Mass I’m writing).  Harrison Birtwistle always starts on an ‘e’. A ‘d’ to me seems older and kinder. An ‘e’ is too modern and progressive, slightly brash and noisy.’
 
He can see she is quizzical with this anecdotal stuff. Is he having me on? But no, he is not having her on. Such choices are important. Without them progress would be difficult when the thinking and planning has to stop and the composing has to begin. His notebook, sitting on his drawing board with some first sketches, plays testament to that. In this book glimpses of music appear in rhythmic abstracts, though rarely any pitches, and there are pages of written description. He likes to imagine what a new work is, and what it is not. This he writes down. Composer Paul Hindemith reckoned you had first to address the ‘conditions of performance’. That meant thinking about the performers, the location, above all the context. A Mass can be, for a composer, so many things. There were certainly requirements and constraints. The commission had to fulfil a number of criteria, some imposed by circumstance, some self-imposed by desire. All this goes into the melting ***, or rather the notebook. And after the notebook, he takes a large piece of A3 paper and clarifies this thinking and planning onto (if possible) a single sheet.
 
And so, to the task in hand. His objective, he had decided, is to focus on the whole rather than the particular. Don’t think about the Kyrie on its own, but consider how it lies with the Gloria. And so with the Sanctus & Benedictus. How do they connect to the Agnus Dei. He begins on the A3 sheet of plain paper ‘making a map of connections’. Kyrie to Gloria, Gloria to Credo and so on. Then what about Agnus Dei and the Gloria? Is there going to be any commonality – in rhythm, pace and tempo (we’ll leave melody and harmony for now)? Steady, he finds himself saying, aren’t we going back over old ground? His notebook has pages of attempts at rhythmizing the text. There are just so many ways to do this. Each rhythmic solution begets a different slant of meaning.
 
This is to be a congregational Mass, but one that has a role for a 4-part choir and ***** and a ‘jazz instrument’. Impatient to see notes on paper, he composes a new introduction to a Kyrie as a rhythmic sketch, then, experimentally, adds pitches. He scores it fully, just 10 bars or so, but it is barely finished before his critical inner voice says, ‘What’s this for? Do you all need this? This is showing off.’ So the filled-out sketch drops to the floor and he examines this element of ‘beginning’ the incipit.
 
He remembers how a meditation on that word inhabits the opening chapter of George Steiner’s great book Grammars of Creation. He sees in his mind’s eye the complex, colourful and ornate letter that begins the Lindesfarne Gospels. His beginnings for each movement, he decides, might be two chords, one overlaying the other: two ‘simple’ diatonic chords when sounded separately, but complex and with a measure of mystery when played together. The Mass is often described as a mystery. It is that ritual of a meal undertaken by a community of people who in the breaking of bread and wine wish to bring God’s presence amongst them. So it is a mystery. And so, he tells himself, his music will aim to hold something of mystery. It should not be a comment on that mystery, but be a mystery itself. It should not be homely and comfortable; it should be as minimal and sparing of musical commentary as possible.
 
When, as a teenager, he first began to set words to music he quickly experienced the need (it seemed) to fashion accompaniments that were commentaries on the text the voice was singing. These accompaniments did not underpin the words so much as add a commentary upon them. What lay beneath the words was his reaction, indeed imaginative extension of the words. He eschewed then both melisma and repetition. He sought an extreme independence between word and music, even though the word became the scenario of the music. Any musical setting was derived from the composition of the vocal line.  It was all about finding the ‘key’ to a song, what unlocked the door to the room of life it occupied. The music was the room where the poem’s utterance lived.
 
With a Mass you were in trouble for the outset. There was a poetry of sorts, but poetry that, in the countless versions of the vernacular, had lost (perhaps had never had) the resonance of the Latin. He thought suddenly of the supposed words of William Byrd, ‘He who sings prays twice’. Yes, such commonplace words are intercessional, but when sung become more than they are. But he knew he had to be careful here.
 
Why do we sing the words of the Mass he asks himself? Do we need to sing these words of the Mass? Are they the words that Christ spoke as he broke bread and poured wine to his friends and disciples at his last supper? The answer is no. Certainly these words of the Mass we usually sing surround the most intimate words of that final meal, words only the priest in Christ’s name may articulate.
 
Write out the words of the Mass that represent its collective worship and what do you have? Rather non-descript poetry? A kind of formula for collective incantation during worship? Can we read these words and not hear a surrounding music? He thinks for a moment of being asked to put new music to words of The Beatles. All you need is love. Yesterday all my troubles seemed so far away. Oh bla dee oh bla da life goes on. Now, now this is silliness, his Critical Voice complains. And yet it’s not. When you compose a popular song the gap between some words scribbled on the back of an envelope and the hook of chords and melody developed in an accidental moment (that becomes a way of clothing such words) is often minimal. Apart, words and music seem like orphans in a storm. Together they are home and dry.
 
He realises, and not for the first time, that he is seeking a total musical solution to the whole of the setting of those words collectively given voice to by those participating in the Mass.
 
And so: to the task in hand. His objective: to focus on the whole rather than the particular.  Where had he heard that thought before? - when he had sat down at his drawing board an hour and half previously. He’d gone in a circle of thought, and with his sketch on the floor at his feet, nothing to show for all that effort.
 
Meanwhile the sun had risen. He could hear her moving about in the bathroom. He went to the kitchen and laid out what they would need to breakfast together. As he poured milk into a jug, primed the toaster, filled the kettle, the business of what might constitute a whole solution to this setting of the Mass followed him around the kitchen and breakfast room like a demanding child. He knew all about demanding children. How often had he come home from his studio to prepare breakfast and see small people to school? - more often than he cared to remember. And when he remembered he became sad that it was no more.  His children had so often provided a welcome buffer from sessions of intense thought and activity. He loved the walk to school, the first quarter of a mile through the park, a long avenue of chestnut trees. It was always the end of April and pink and white blossoms were appearing, or it was September and there were conkers everywhere. It was under these trees his daughter would skip and even his sons would hold hands with him; he would feel their warmth, their livingness.
 
But now, preparing breakfast, his Critical Voice was that demanding child and he realised when she appeared in the kitchen he spoke to her with a voice of an artist in conversation with his critics, not the voice of the man who had the previous night lost himself to joy in her dear embrace. And he was ashamed it was so.
 
How he loved her gentle manner as she negotiated his ‘coming too’ after those two hours of concentration and inner dialogue. Gradually, by the second cup of coffee he felt a right person, and the hours ahead did not seem too impossible.
 
When she’d gone off to her work, silence reasserted itself. He played his viola for half an hour, just scales and exercises and a few folk songs he was learning by heart. This gathering habit was, he would say if asked, to reassert his musicianship, the link between his body and making sound musically. That the viola seemed to resonate throughout his whole body gave him pleasure. He liked the ****** movement required to produce a flowing sequence of bow strokes. The trick at the end of this daily practice was to put the instrument in its case and move immediately to his desk. No pause to check email – that blight on a morning’s work. No pause to look at today’s list. Back to the work in hand: the Mass.
 
But instead his mind and intention seemed to slip sideways and almost unconsciously he found himself sketching (on the few remaining staves of a vocal experiment) what appeared to be a piano piece. The rhythmic flow of it seemed to dance across the page to be halted only when the few empty staves were filled. He knew this was one of those pieces that addressed the pianist, not the listener. He sat back in his chair and imagined a scenario of a pianist opening this music and after a few minutes’ reflection and reading through allowing her hands to move very slowly and silently a few millimetres over the keys.  Such imagining led him to hear possible harmonic simultaneities, dynamics and articulations, though he knew such things would probably be lost or reinvented on a second imagined ‘performance’. No matter. Now his make-believe pianist sounded the first bar out. It had a depth and a richness that surprised him – it was a fine piano. He was touched by its affect. He felt the possibilities of extending what he’d written. So he did. And for the next half an hour lived in the pastures of good continuation, those rich luxuriant meadows reached by a rickerty rackerty bridge and guarded by a troll who today was nowhere to be seen.
 
It was a curious piece. It came to a halt on an enigmatic, go-nowhere / go-anywhere chord after what seemed a short declamatory coda (he later added the marking deliberamente). Then, after a few minutes reflection he wrote a rising arpeggio, a broken chord in which the consonant elements gradually acquired a rising sequence of dissonance pitches until halted by a repetition. As he wrote this ending he realised that the repeated note, an ‘a’ flat, was a kind of fulcrum around which the whole of the music moved. It held an enigmatic presence in the harmony, being sometimes a g# sometimes an ‘a’ flat, and its function often different. It made the music take on a wistful quality.
 
At that point he thought of her little artists’ book series she had titled Tide Marks. Many of these were made of a concertina of folded pages revealing - as your eyes moved through its pages - something akin to the tide’s longitudinal mark. This centred on the page and spread away both upwards and downwards, just like those mirror images of coloured glass seen in a child’s kaleidoscope. No moment of view was ever quite the same, but there were commonalities born of the conditions of a certain day and time.  His ‘Tide Mark’ was just like that. He’d followed a mark made in his imagination from one point to another point a little distant. The musical working out also had a reflection mechanism: what started in one hand became mirrored in the other. He had unexpectedly supplied an ending, this arpegiated gesture of finality that wasn’t properly final but faded away. When he thought further about the role of the ending, he added a few more notes to the arpeggio, but notes that were not be sounded but ghosted, the player miming a press of the keys.
 
He looked at the clock. Nearly five o’clock. The afternoon had all but disappeared. Time had retreated into glorious silence . There had been three whole hours of it. How wonderful that was after months of battling with the incessant and draining turbulence of sound that was ever present in his city life. To be here in this quiet cottage he could now get thoroughly lost – in silence. Even when she was here he could be a few rooms apart, and find silence.
 
A week more of this, a fortnight even . . . but he knew he might only manage a few days before visitors arrived and his long day would be squeezed into the early morning hours and occasional uncertain periods when people were out and about.
 
When she returned, very soon now, she would make tea and cut cake, and they’d sit (like old people they wer
Mateuš Conrad Aug 2018
where was i? right, anywhere but here,
listening to some medieval music,
i sometimes sit in one place,
fade, and then find myself sitting
in the same place with a question
on the tip of my tongue: where am i?!

hard not to notice:
heaven reigns supreme with
a "st." michael coming down
with the sword...
depiction, please!
where's satan?
  coming from below armed only
with a tongue...
fair fight, by anyone's standard:
i'm dripping sweat from both
ridicule and sarcasm...

st. michael comes down with a sword...
satan rises up with a flaming tongue,
does satan lick michael's sword
to draw the blood required for
running the heart factory?

               medieval people and their
"nuanced" explanation...
so many images contra words
contra literacy of the people outside
the realm of monks...

   satan rises from the depths of
     hell saying: i wish a socratic dialectic
with god...
god replies: michael i will send armed
with swords...
who ever said: the quill is mightier than
than the sword,
implied: when the tongue has
to be necessarily silenced? then!

      das schwart,
          das feder,
    das zunge...

       how many definite articles are
there in deutsche? das, der, die?
too many or too few?

         always with "st." michael armed
with a sword...
and satan... armed with only his tongue!
i guess, the tongue becomes a tank,
while the sword becomes a feather's
tickling effect...

    angehoben das teufel von der
    tiefe: und gab sie namen...

  (raised the devils from the depths:
  and gave them names)...

why is satan only armed with a flaming tongue,
while "st." michael is armed with a sword?
is god, the god-dialectic / theology
so afraid that it has to remain topped
with unchallenged imagery
                         of sword contra tongue?

ich werden anfangen:
   ich werden treffen du hälfteweg...
            im schreiben...

                  satan rose to a depiction
with "st." michael: disarmed...
  tongue in mouth: which should have been
his hand, "st." michael descended with
a sword... come to think of it,
with satan's tongue cut off...
it still spoke to "st." michael within his
hand...
  the sword overcame the medium...
and so writing was born...
once upon a time when satan's tongue
in his hand began licking the sword
of michael...
            and? if the contemporaries
should hope to know:
writing is the res extensa medium
of res cogitans:
            writing is an extension of thinking:
it's not an invitation to speak...

writing cannot be speaking,
however much commentaries you leave
behind...
writing is an extension of thinking:
it's not an invitation to speak...

it's no disguise...
    in terms of the depiction...
enough of Milton and Dante and...
satan came to the summit
  without his armour without his weapons...
the summit of the plateau...
tongue in gob and joke in cheek...
while "st." michael descended
wit a sword and a missing tongue...
it would appear that god cut out
"st." michael's tongue before his descent
while arming him with a sword to
cut the conversation even shorter
than it was supposed to be, to take place...

the aspired to monotheistic monogamy
of king Solomon,
to imitate swans...
    Muhammad's lost enterprise of
the: greatest harem the world has ever
seen... sorry... Muo-Mo-Hammie:
the macedonian alexander beat you to
the count of 365 concubines...
as did genghis khan...
           so many pakistanis with khan
as a surname...
             your failed harem ambition?
compared to the otherwise world "greats"?
with the ******* promise of 72 virgins
post-mortem? that ship is sinking in my head...
muhammad failed in the ambition
of averaging a 100+ concunbine **** fest...
so he promised 72 for those that believed in
him...
   and if he was ever competing with
king solomon? look at solomon...
         he chose monogamy in the end...
i guess it's a noble enterprise to come back
among the lizards...
to spawn from an egg: from an womb
made external by an egg in the form of a bird...
birds: half mammal half lizard...
            muhammad failed at having
an envious harem...
                which makes me a little bit envious
of him... compared to the others...
he's quiet honest...
        but if he was illiterate...
    who the **** wrote the Quran?
    what's that book, in praise of older women?
andrás vajda...
   who would have written the first
verses (if not the last) of the Quran if not
khadijah **** khuwaylid?

i'm sorry to say: the feeling of conversation
soon turns into a feeling of conversion,
me, beer in hand, park, bench,
an old pakistani walks up to me...
flips out a digital Quran,
tries to convert me...
     opens the book on surah al-baqarah...
i point at three words...
what are these, i ask?
he replies: oh... only allah knows...
really?! really?! i ask myself...

    the three words?
   alif. lam. meem.

           allah knows?!
guess i'm allah then...
given alif: أَلِف  (α, א) a-lif
                 lam: لاَم (λ, ל) l-am
   and meem: مِيم (μ, מ) m'eem...

so yeah, "god" knows...
   how was this old pakistani going to convert
me, supposing i was simply some european
"drunk" sitting on a bench, drinking beer,
assuming i was ease target for
isis propaganda?!

    "god knows"... when it comes
to old pakistanis trying to
             recruit young europeans...
god knows ****!

if this old pakistani was seeking an easy target
like some paedo, he was much mistaken,
what does a pumpernickle (has) to do with
a windmill?! zilch!
i'm not going to exactly crawl out
of my walther von der vogelweider:
        palästinalied
that much easier...
i won't....
   i just think:
the yids have tight defences
against proselytes... they abhor converts...
islam, welcomes them,
at their own peril...
          and there i was thinking that
urdu was "superior" to sanskrit...
an old pakistani tells me "god knows"
in relation to alif. lam. meem.

             i guess the quran has an inbuilt
proselyte defence mechanism:
in reverse... ask a muslim what alif. lam. meem.
means... if they tell you: only god knows...
ha ha...
              hello stupid...
                            is the islamic world playing
a jewish game of gematria?
are the three letters supposed to represent
some sort of "covert" message?
A.L.M.?
        what, based on the hebrew alphabet
where "a" is not an an A but a consonant(s)
akin to ayin and aleph?!
the gay genesis?
          
                really?
                 we: the europeans were perhaps
the barbarians in the medieval years,
harrowed by the cold...
lucky us: lucky me: we did learn to read...
so ignorant of the pakis to presume
such and such...

             that we are still unable to read
and will fall for the next sort of *******...
look at us! we even began to question
christianity with the unearthing of
the nag hammadi library where
jesus played chinese whispers with
st. thomas!

   next time i'll be listening to a camel jockey
or a magic carpet ride aladdin
i'll ask them: you dehydrated, or something?!
oh forget h'america,
their evangelical ******* is worth
as much as a free microwave or a toaster...

_

hell man...
    i mean my neighbor smokes
16 8ths in a spare of the week...

wha?
    ****...
   i remember i used to smoke
an 8th over the week...

yeah... an 1/8... of an ounce...
he smokes two ounces
in a week,
  
gets the **** on discount...
but still has to cough up
over 100 quid for the stash...

but... but... these organic
cigarettes you're pushing?

ha ha... **** me... holy basil
(tulsi leaves) -
and the peppermint and green
tea leaves?
   in ******, whatever you want
to call it, rolling paper...

i've seen the inner sleeve -
big fan of hunter s. thompson,
i suspect...
   otherwise you wouldn't
have used the second, plastic
filter...
  
   tell you what... don't put
that plastic filter on every cigarette -
halve it...
     or provide two or three...
it's reusable -
        i smoked one of your
placebo marijuana joints...
  and then i'm going to smoke
a red Indian cough-up...

   ah... these blue Indians...
Vishnu centrists -
   beyond blue blooded,
more blue skinned herbalists...

dunno... the effects are subtle...
you can only tell the difference
if you actually smoke tobacco...

but sure as hot **** on a street
in Calcutta -
    it beats the Arabic portable
hookah pipe...
   i.e.?  
         vapping - or vapourißing -

i'd say less a cure for tobacco smokers,
and more a cure for
the dope-heads...
    he (my neighbor) smokes
2 ounces a week,
   and somehow manages to stay
down on a job...

    no ******* way...
    he says it helps him to sleep...
like me...
   a liter of ***** and two
paracetamols,
    or one naproxen (if i'm lucky),
or two paracetamols
  and one amitriptyline (25mg)...

sorry, what? sound of mind?
sound of mind to the point
where i'm mindful of grammar
and spelling?

            **** man...
  the content is transcendent
    of whatever the receiving end deems
it to be...

i might actually buy into
this... placebo marijuana -
given that i am a tobacco smoker...
  ha ha! holy basil:
  like Basil Fawlty...

   as you see...
there are people, and there are "people",
there are neighbors,
    and there are "neighbors",
i don't see how the natives
can dictate universal laws of
     private property ownership...
esp. over such... trivial...
meaningless...
          sitting down on a cactus
****-naked "problems"...

i hate being mean,
   i hate telling someone to *******...
i really do...
    i compromised -
i stopped smoking cigarettes
out of my window...
  but yesterday's confrontation?
over a ******* barbeque...
    oops... the compromise
has just been revoked...
  
   music blasting into my ears
through my earphones...
the next thing my cuntish neighbor
will "hear" is sign language...
  
oh yeah... that primary school
lesson:

(a) WHY     (b) DON'T  
        (c) YOU    (d) ****    (e) OFF

(a) index + middle fingers
    slapped on the left palm knuckles up

(b) index + middle fingers
    slapped on the left palm knuckles down

(c) scissor index + *******
   into the side of the left hand

(d) fist, vertical slam onto the left
  palm

(e) thumb's up moving away from
  the palm of the left hand...

because?
      i just can't be bothered trying
to reason with some people...
     they might as well be put in zoological
confinement, and put under observation...
but i'd feel sorry for the chimps
and other animals, have to share a close
proximity.
A nineteen-year-old drug connoisseur,
That fiend on the roam, just the next player
making moves on his cell-phone.
Sometimes you gotta race
but you always gotta play,

Revel in The Apotheon;
Welcome to The Game.

Stoner to the bone,
Raver at heart;
Yet everthrough always the psychonaut.

Been a speed-freak, a pill-head
and almost got stuck in the k-hole,
All 'cause one day
life caught me double-dosed;
You never intend to be any of these things,
It just all happens
while your eyes are closed.
Note:
Drug dealing's primarily a male sport,
Not to say females don't play.
Mateuš Conrad Aug 2018
well... between listening
to the INFO WARS ban...
by the mainstream...

and listening
to Greig's
perfecto
   in the hall of the mountain king...

and john williams...
london symphony orchestra

for the emperor's throne room
scene
?

            youtube was always my
testing alternative to
            ****** megastore listening
booths...
like replacing my ears with
a tongue...

               i never actually tuned
in on youtube,
for the indie commentators...
i was always there for the music...
      listening to these
content creators,
grovel a penny,
like some Oxfam offshoot?
   not cool...
    
                i was always there for
the foraging of music...
         never the commentaries...
who said anything about
the commentaries?!
        
          can't be bothered,
won't be bothered,
given that i've been doing this
scribbling for over 10 years,
and hven't been paid a
barnado's penny...
can't be ******* bothered,
mate...
        burn in hell;

at this point, you don't dictate,
and... i don't tell you
what you must do...
           welcome! free fall!

oh no... like my english neighbor,
he doesn't tell me when i can or can't
light my barbeque...
  just so he can hang his washing!

*******!
       the only respected violence is
that against private property rights...
i'd cut his limbs off,
and then hang him off in a noose
composed of, his ******* tongue,
the next time,
he tells me i'm to inform him of
when i do my next barbeque,
prior to him doing his washing...

PRIVATE... PROPERTY... RIGHTS...
YOU *******! ENGLISH! ****!
nor king, nor Buckingham Palace
janitor!
*******!

you even know what itchy teeth
implies?
     i beg to differ:
you don't want to know,
but i'll let you know;
it implies a desire to own
a pig farm;
   and we known what the economics
of pork looks likes...
now apply that in reverse,
to hide, cannibalism.
Scott M Reamer Mar 2013
I knew this man because I was this man
So it must be said; I was this man because I knew this man
And never did I faultier when he reached with his trusting hand
Bound by intent, his grip stowed the tension of promise and fruition
His is a lifetime laden with the cogs of internal creation
This is the summons, the congenial placement of his offer
Beckoning the self to again be rendered upon the plane of the psychotropic wood
Through this sanctified exchange the divergent union assumes singular being
A spiral of fleeting connectivity, lapsing as the hesitant tide breaks upon neither shore nor sea
So the invitation reciprocates moment to moment by way of residual eternity
The soul twists and skips in both agony and ecstasy
Bearing a jagged tolerance for lingering wait and the flash of re-entry
Thus begun my endless stroll within the confinement of mind
I am birthed each day anew in the cradling mist blanketing the forest floor
With shy eyes one surrenders to this emergent rim
Sentenced to wake beneath the towering monoliths, the fossil redwoods
Who lull my attentive ear with the ambient groans of their interned memory
Joined in chorus only by the hushed breathe of the creborus crows
These birds, these deities hung inverted from gray and rotted limbs
Whispering their imbuement to the aggregate dirge of pardon
This is the swallowing of supposed sensory
Set in impetus, this final paradigm may forever possess the gift of awareness.
Mateuš Conrad Nov 2018
.here's a schematic representation of the changes to the youtube algorithm... the changes look as follows A(c) B(b) C(a)... or perhaps even Ab Bc Ca... or even A(b) B(a) C(c)... there are variants, all in the same vein of argument... the dictionary / thesaurus standard of the algorithmic categorical impetus... which "miraculously" disappeared... sure... the alphabetic order is somehow intact... but the synonym aspect of expansion is lost... i have lost access to, say A... and subsequent (a), synonyms... and instead "gained" access to the antonyms (b / c)... there's literally a linguistic explanation to the conundrum of the current algorithm... A doesn't follow with (a), but rather (b / c)... B doesn't follow with (b), but rather (a / c); and C doesn't follow with (c), bur rather (a / b)... if this new youtube algorithm were akin to a dictionary.... i'd be looking up a word like aardvark, and subsequently finding an word like chipmunk next to it... (a) contradicts (c)... although both are synonyms in the category B, i.e. burrowing (mammals)... but an *aardvark is not a chipmunk... this new youtube algorithm is *******... never try to fix something that's not broken... but given how this current guise of the algorithm, will not be fixed... the fun of the internet died this year... and it's not like the high street has music shops... how many ******* shoes, clothes and mobile phones do i actually need?!

why would i put myself through all this...
listening to online political
commentary response videos?
now i can't find *rob zombie
's song
michael on the jukebox...
         first they took the music shops.
and then they went after
the internet jukebox...
        i have to lament these changes...
"improvements"...
   spending a night engrossed in
brick walls while drinking
has become the most exciting
"revision" of: things to do when drinking...
2 hours of cramming
undisturbed rhetoric,
  and no dialectics in sight...
           a ******* brain-drain...
custard / fudge for thought...
          two seagulls regurgitating
food from the stomachs to feed their chicks...
i couldn't care about
these youtube political commentators...
i'm sorry...
    i can't give a ****...
     whoever is to blame,
i blame both sides...
                  "my" jukebox is ****** up!
the only recommendations
are what i've already seen!
   once it looked like:
           the thesaurus project...
in terms of the ontology of algorithms...
something synonymous was
always suggest...
  e.g.?
             the song helvegen
by the Nordic band wardruna
would be associated with
   the song federkleid
by a band faun...
               or the song lifa
by the band heilung...
             the ruck has only girl (in the world)
by rihanna have to do with
project thesaurus?!
or ke$ha's song die young?!
the internet media commentators
have...
   i've spent the past two hours...
equally zombie-prone like i might
watch the mainstream...
  the jukebox's ******!
          i can peruse the music scene like
i used to...
  clearly, in a classical music shop...
you wouldn't have a Britney Spears
record lodged in the punk category...
whatever they did...
  the current algorithm has
not categorical imperative...
              it's all jumbled up...
   pop sits alongside black metal...
jazz sits alongside classical music...
  rock is mingling with rap...
how did these people **** up
a formerly pristine algorithm?!
  that had the knowledge of a categorical
imperative...
   a hyena was a mammal,
a whale was an aquatic mammal...
a pig was a mammal...
              a spider was an insect,
    and a cod was a ******* fish...
the end...
      i've reached the critical sentiment
of, either a nihilist or a cynic that...
who gives a **** if you can speak
freely..
        hell... it's not even revelatory or
simply plain obvious what you're saying...
the ******* jukebox is down,
and you're partially to blame!
             what?! no cause: no effect?
   the algorithm has lost its knowledge of
proper coordination of categories...
these days...
    red is no longer a noun...
it's... a verb...
                     the current algorithm
is transgender...
you made a ******* transgender algorithm...
well done!
i need music to think,
    the current tirades of youtube commentary
make my brain turn into
fudge for about two hours...
after i snap out from the mantra...
free speech this... hate speech that...
what was once the only site to explore...
and subsequently buy the music...
this is the only reason i've succumbed
to the statement: the internet is dead...
well... because internet banking,
nor internet retail will not be affected...
working pristine...
             but the experience of finding
new music?
                that's affected...
and it's affected by youtube commentaries
antagonizing mainstream media...
sure, great...
    but the jukebox is ******...
      and because of that?
        i'll care, sure i'll care...
                  when a get to play
the xylophone on my rib-cage
with the embodiment of a ghost form...
on my post-decomposing skeleton!
having gained so little,
we've lost so much...
      what, a comment section on one of
these videos will, "somehow"
compete with my enjoying some decent
music?
         FAT CHANCE.
Dev A Jun 2013
It's been a year since you left,
Six months since you last visited,
(But I didn't see you then).
When you left,
I thought I'd never see you again.
But when you came to visit
I thought that that would be my last chance
But you barely even left the house.

When I heard you were finally coming back
I figured that you'd be lazy
And not want to leave you house.
But your brother dragged you out
And I finally saw you.

As I turned down the road
And saw you for the first time
All I could think was
"Oh God!  Not again!"
An infinite amount of emotions
Slammed into my heart
All at once

It was all I could do
Not to throw myself into your arms
And cry tears of joy.
We fell into our comfortable insults and jokes
Just as soon as we saw each other.
It felt like you had never left;
Like it was any other weekend.

The next few days we just hung out
Talking, joking, insulting one another.
It seemed like we were thrown into the past
When nothing had pulled us apart
Before either of us made the mistake
Of telling the truth.
Watching movies
And giving commentaries
While eating pizza and soda
As we lay of the bed.

I wish we could rewind time
Just so we can relive those amazing moments.
But looking back on the past few days
And all those years we were together
I realized
I really do love you.
Never before
(Or after)
Have I ever been so close to someone
(ANYONE!)
Never have I told somebody so many secrets
Never has someone known me so well
Never has someone been able to say
"Oh she would say this"
Or "Don't say that, it'll make her mad"
Never have I been able to be myself and not feel uncomfortable
Never except when I'm with you.

I wish we still lived in the same country.
I wish there weren't oceans separating us.
I wish that I had the courage to give you these poems.
I wish you were here to help me through this move.
I wish I was in Sweden with you
(Or you were here in America with me)
I wish
I wish
I wish.
Only wishes are left.

I wish I could tell you I love you
I wish you knew how much!
I wish you knew I never loved someone as much as I love you.
I wish I had the courage
The courage to send you all the poems
I've ever written about you
Because there are so many
With so many words
That you'll never hear.

I wish
I wish
I wish
david mungoshi Sep 2015
On this my happy and blessed day
fondly I remember what Mother always said
upon some naughty day when I made her sad
stalling on her bidding and not being a good boy
Son, live straight and be easy to interpret
Life is a complex menu of choices. Still -
you can cruise along if there’s love in your life

I remember the wistful poetry from my father’s lips
Creamy words spoken in jest or in epic tales
and untutored philosophy when he spoke of his going:
Death has come and it’s time for last words
My life has dragged by but now how it hurries!
Be the person that you must and **** the rest!
A truly rich person shares what they value most

And so it is that I’ve shared my heart and my mind
In numerous lines of poetry that has dared me to write it

On this my 66th birthday I read no ills in this number
For I’m just a wayfarer looking for words along my route
I pick the gems that sparkle and dazzle as I stroll to eternity
The landmarks on my route are
The friends I made and lost along the way
The doleful souls that brought tears to my eyes
The pretty girls that taught me I could never have them all

I remember too the places I’ve been to
And the songs of my people – lively commentaries on everything
And how life always lay waiting to be lived

My day of birth is my day of possibilities
And I keep hearing the line from the jazz classic:
Get your kicks on Route 66!
Today is my Birthday and I offer you some of my thoughts and experiences in lines of poetry
Tommy N Oct 2010
On advice from a friend

I’m sure that “plenty of ******* in the world”
and “Love me some freckly *******”
were said with the best intentions


On Physics

While I watched a woman Hoola-hoop
and take off her clothes I was fascinated,
but when she laid down on the ground
and took off her stockings, while the hoola-hoop
twirled on, I lost all belief in science.


On painting a brown dormitory ceiling white**

“You really have to use both arms to get up in there
Just push it up in the brown
Get it all until it is covered in white
Come on Tom, use your muscles.”

That’s what she said
*After Susan Buffman’s “Little Commentaries”

Written as an exercise for the MFA program at Columbia College Chicago
Lawrence Hall Jun 2019
My dad was on Omaha Beach but he
didn’t talk much about it so now
I’m going to take the rest of the day
to tell you all that he didn’t much talk about
we broke the Enigma code yeah we did
you can always tell a real veteran by
his thousand-yard stare, yessir, I know stuff
we kicked the Germans’ butts but he didn’t talk
much about it if not for us the French
would be speaking German yeah man yeah
when I was in graduate school but he
didn’t talk much about it we saved the world
when I was in graduate school when I
saw Patton those liberals in academia
he had this thousand-yard stare them snowflakes
wouldn’t hit Omaha Beach now they’d be browning
their pants when I was in graduate school
but he didn’t talk much about it yeah
that M-1 was the best battle implement
ever devised I got me one and boy
it’s got some serious stopping power yessir
I just love to go out to the range and pop some caps
with that bad boy the French are cheese-eating
surrender monkeys we can’t depend on the Italians
but he didn’t talk much about it when I
was in graduate school thousand-yard stare
my dad was there he didn’t talk much about it
here is a youtube about it if only
those snowflakes would watch Patton they’d learn something
left-wing academia he didn’t talk much about it
when I was in graduate school yeah man
I seen it on Band of Brothers liberal elites
Macron Macron Macron first front second front
‘cause I know stuff I got a whole liberry
but he didn’t talk much about it if not
for us yeah you’d all be speaking German
we saved France’s **** when DeGaulle told us
he wanted all American soldiers out of France
we asked him if that included the thousands
of American soldiers in French cemeteries
and that sure shut him up ha ha ha
bet you never heard that before and then
there was these old veterans at the airport
and this Frenchy asked them for their passports
and this old man had to look for his
and this Frenchy asked this veteran if he
had been in France before and this veteran
said he had and then this Frenchy he said
then you know you need to have your passport
ready and this here old veteran said that he
was at Normandy and there wasn’t no Frenchies
to give it to and you could hear a pin drop
ha ha I bet you never heard that one before
When I was in graduate school when I
was on my gap year but he didn’t talk much about it
snowflake liberal elites in academia
I love me my AK-47 that son
spits out some serious lead but he didn’t
talk much about it…


Me? Like, I had this deferment, my feet,
but I know all about it ‘cause I watch John Wayne
and my dad was in it so I guess he ought to know
and he was in a real war; you were only in
like you know them A-rabs and stuff…
Anonymouse Jun 2017
I call myself a feminist.
I call myself proud.
I see "big and beautiful" or "***" marked along the walls.
I see "plus size" as a label for a woman with hips.
I watch loving compliments,
but..
I also watch heartless hateful commentaries.
We label everything between fruit, office supplies, or people.
That's how humans understand, to categorize.
How can we call ourselves people if we label to give pain and not for simple understanding.
People are not plus sized.
We are all sizes.
We are all skinny for we are all covered in skin.
Thin and thick are not meant to be judgements.
We are all beautiful.
We should all spread love.
Label to learn.
Leave hate for hell.
Mateuš Conrad Apr 2020
i remember the meningitis scare:
   oh... it was very real...
i guess it was supposed to affect a niche
proportion of the population...

so much for the "scare":
they would vaccinate us in the schools:
since children were more prone
to succumb to: and inflammation of
the lining around your brain and spinal cord...

and all that: press a thumb against
a skin... and if the skin returns to its original
colouring: there's no blemish of applied
pressure... pressing glasses onto the skin too...

the aesthetics have changed so drastically:
what can **** you is so subtle these days...
it's hardly a case of leprosy...
or... eczema of the zombie plague:
or miniature lilal mushrooms growing
out from your armpits:
suddenly breaking into song:
  'steve told us to sing... so we have
sprouted: to sing!'
       no... celeriac sized warts... hell...
i haven't seen any pictures of covid-19...
as i never saw pictures of ebola...

            death has been given: an anonymity...
but what's still kept in reserve?
shingles...
     like: hyper-eczema...
                i'm having to consolidate myself
on the luck of being 30+ and still having...
a skin on my face that i can't peel:
but i'm sure that belzeebub took a dump on...

they're either dead maggots
or dead white blood-cells...
        i guess i have so many of the latter that...
my immune system is constantly
on a over-charge mode...
          
    where are the lilac mushrooms about to grow
out from out of my armpits:
when will death become visible again:
outside her womb:
without any anonymity to behold:
when will everything... "ev'fing"
  return to the obviousness of a guillotine...
a hangman...
      a... hanged, drawn and... quartered?

the improved aesthetics of the threat is hardly
be sitting in an armchair...
welcoming this: paranoia precursor...
there's no phosphorescent yellow-green phlegm
being shot through the air with a sneeze...

i'm quite disturbed about all this...
        "sterility"...
                      well thankfuly i know that
a schizophrenic can't beget a drone-replica:
dead'ed brain: "schizz"... zombie-cult-esque
   brain: riddled with parasites like...
a disciple of burrough's fever might provide:
subsequently... by...
   by caughing a splitting-headache that might:
somehow: "later": arrive at some variation
of bilingualism...
          but never will... perhaps it should...

because: right now: i want to wrong about everything...
i want to ****** with a hard-on of doubt...
and perhaps: tease negation a little...
or rub-rub-'er very much...
but i do: most honestly...
    want to be wrong about everything...
esp. when it comes to...
   the aesthetics of the "problem":
    it's a problem-solution: solution-problem
  quadratic...
           i mean: if it was truly cosmic... and original...
would it really care for much of aesthetics...
can viruses becomes stealth assassins?
   is a virus a misnomer of plague?
or is... a virus a former case of plague...
  that couldn't be: prior... weaponized?
   the rampant exfoliation of: the obliterated
concern for aesthetics...
   oh sure... it's clean cut...
           god knows what happened to those old
curiosities of medicine...

otherwise...

   what will 3 hours spent reading nothing but
Dickens do to you...
me? i "somehow" managed to miss / forget
about a sunset...
   came the night and... yeah: when meningitis
hit...
   and i guess after the mad-cow disease...
break-dancing limp feet cows...
drunk cows... morbidly drunk cows...

      there was always that postcard reference:
now?
you could obviously see the bubonic plague
from a mile away...
you could see eczema...
you can sure as **** see a shingles belt...
        would a virus even care...
to appease the aesthetic concerns of man?
how doesn't cancer do that...
well... i just start thinking about...
the botanical cancer... viscum...
hardly seen in western europe: tree-foundation
societies... etc.
   half an hour on the road outside of warsaw...
that's enough...

oh sure: because of covid-19:
who could, "somehow" forget about...
                  metastatic tumors!
oh the joys of... <cough cough> the carousel
or that ol' chestnut!
            come to think of it...
    would ingesting a tapeworm make thinks and things
more real?
what wouldn't be bad
about acquiring a symbiote these days?
     all: postulations of the mundane...
without yet within the science-fiction universe...
the facts will simply not stand the test
of time... or will... but will be shelved...
given to the bookworms and their placenta
worm-queen...

it's actually becoming a sieving tool for acquiring
nothing lost: of the old mundane...
the sterile aesthetics of the whole under-taking...
it's too: invisible: too pure...
to be... a freakish byproduct of nature...
sending us back in time...
as the original: single-cell organism
about to usurp the crown of creation...

    my list of conspiracy theories begins
with: catcher in the rye "coincidences" and...
that david copperfield sort of *******...
      because if it's not Pickwican...
it's certainly not an account of count
smorltork:
        peek - christian name
                weeks - surname; good, ver good...

otherwise these days:
the intellect has become a sponge...
and the supposed underlying:
because it is "supposed" and there's an
"underlying" aspect to all of this...
that there is a "dialectic" and...
otherwise: the bestest of the best kind
of...            soap...

is it a revival of an "empire"...
when at the height of its decline...
there was that motto:

     panem et circenses...

     what's underlying in Dickensian prose?
well... some of the words used...
i'd sit with a page and check the dictionary
3 times on average...
because there's still that underlying:
we, Britons, prior to the "english"...
the anglo-saxons... are the Afghanistan
oopsies of the ancient world...
there are so many words with direct
connection: etymologically "speaking"
with latin...

now: the bread is still "here"...
   of the 20th century... you could see a ****
coming way back in 1933...
and the communist... whenever that happened...
and you could subsequently trickle the "evil"
archetype into movies... into gaming...
and have people hooked on a bullseye of evil...

now? greyish blips and blobs of
Kantian bureaucracy...
    
o.k. panem et circenses...
looks to me...
like the circuses are long gone...
the bread is still here...
but... of all the seismic shifts this is...
hardly a ffffffffffff-ucking Pompeii!
riddle me this: riddle me that...
what can possibly become so... overly entertaining...
about eating a slice of bread?
why are the vermin: multiplying:
what's with all this: "huddling" at a distance?
need a cape with that: herr ubermensch?

last time i checked: rats do no operated
under herd scriptures...
there's not need for a shepherd...
there is: fire! scramble!
peep-squeak and more!
          
    an impeding confrontation with a pack of wolves...
a vegetarian lion convert...
                 the bubonic plague: lack of aesthetic...
and now this...
this supreme aesthetic of: when the ancient greeks
thirsted to conceive of the existence
of atoms...
          not that i require proof...
what so of circus: though...
      is, this?!

- yes folks... in the current climate of labyrinths...
the Minotaur isn't here...
and we're out of stock on smoke...
and... mirrors...

citations of a possible prediction to allign with
some variation of borrowed horrors:
to usurp the status quo and sentences us for:
there's no "third time lucky" therein...

all that's happened though:
mental people who would never allow
their minds to riddle them...
become claustrophobic by mere thought...
can you?
translate thinking into claustrophobia?
oh god... no... we haven't reached this nadir...
have we?
thought didn't imply θ(ought)!
that erotica of a would be pronoun:
the moral quest...
                  not because i did something bad
in the past...
but because:
i did what others didn't do prior to me...
i ride the wave of what a *******
said to me once:
after an ******:
this is only the second time it has happened
to me: hello ***** envy thrown out of the window!
hello sisters of mercy in some convent
in Limerick!
'allo! 'allo!

beside the moral conundrum of θ(ought): ought i?
this narrative of the ol' 'ed...
is... claustrophobic?
             spread this negation-of-ease further:
dear kin!
   dis- prefix that denotes negation...
ah... and -ease! the suffix that complete the circle:
no contemplation is necessary!

i'm still seeing bread, though...
oh mein gott! die zirkusse! die zirkusse!
what can be done about the circuses?!

people are coupling thinking with claustrophobia...
people are implored to read
for at least 3 hours a day!
a dickens! a tolstoy! a dumas!
and then relax from congesting paragraph strain
and explore the airy side of what was
written into prose and paragraph with
the aid of poetics: that non-exclusivity of rhyme:
always missing... best missing!

i too abhor this synonym:
poetry is what rhymes...
            a set list of: knock-knock jokes...
about as tasteful as...
               roast beef: done well done...
eating the bark of wood:
now that's an adventure!

            or what's... the adjective riddle / riddled...
of: now...
permanent - adjective... these days a host
of "calling scheitmeiser for all his worth"
and what not...      
                               now: the experimental
history of yesterday and "oops"
now: the cameo cinema of yesterday...
and god willing:
you have a "savings account"
of: memories that can...
suffocate the future: the imagining...
of and for the nought of nothing...
the "conundrum": of being...
such and such... and somehow...
retain: personhood...
rather than... a mere... citizentry "status"...
of the ebbing flow of cattle meat and dung:
itsy-bitsy spider teeth itching...
before the bone!
and... after the bones!

load of crock-**** Lombardy is not
Italy... mantra...
and those rites of rats from
the sinking ship that's Wenice...
much too... quasi-important...

      H - surd of a letter...
but the skeleton supposed to behind:
laughter...

the hibernian folk know it...
the english: eh... somewhat...
          bound to θ and bound to φ...
in t'ought... but not in: t'aught...
who needs the apostrophe?
no me: not "you"...
         third: or... θird:
or... ****... or τ(au) says: "herd"...
                             and what's "spezial"...
the surd worth of π (pi)
     in ψ...
                    or      'sychology...
              then there's "all that" with...
chrome: the χ that becomes a kappa (κ)...
but not... exactly the...
the...      ah!                   CHisel!
chasing dog's tails?

                            but a hardy: hibernian:
it's not an F... it's a T...
we have to expose the H-surd! primo
pronto!

    but ψ can afford...
          πσι in that...
                      either the π... or the π...
is treated as a surd..
cited: the whittle canyon of eta (Ηη)..
            ha: if it's a definite article in 'ebrew...
or ha: if... you need a consonant
skeleton... to breathe when laughing...

toes when marching: chin ching chatter...
otherwise "K / kappa" the matter...
taught to think it all but a massive:
****!
   or... a θurd... which is exfoliating in
the gaellic concept of: third...

i'm not from 'ere...
              mind you...
              this is all disneyland for m'eh et moi...
hello whittle atom me...
hello whittle atom you...
hello: hyvä aamu... susie 'ere...
       rakastaa... että ulvonta...
                 "unohti" haukkua:
fins... drawfs... and other whittle people...
eskimos of the "narrative":
   "kaikki alkaen apinamaa"!
    pωl pυt ***...
             and there's "3" of 'em!
exactly... what about the V'em...
             perhaps a F'ought...
      but: V'ere!
            V'em!
                            who the **** gets to
assure me: this language "ving" or "thin"...
sure hands... sure hands...
it's not all grafitti from chernobyll!

and what if... Joycean would 'ave to begin
its pilgrimage toward Dickensian?
this Ezra of ours: what of this...Ezra of
Fahrenheit of "ours"?

           my atom "versus" your... "atomized" man?
my spaghetti english
versus your... i'll sooner choke on ß...
or SuS...
         or SaS
                  SeS...          sayß...
h'american spaghetti english... *** riddled:
ghetto crown-tongue...


me and finding a juggling of chuckles
with: wit... hiding the ha ha...
when θ = τ...
hibernian...
poland the playground of god:
greek... the plaground of men...
esp. those as being cited:
with origin of the barbarian tinge...

  exatly! what of WH when TH are....
thought of "wen":
this grafitti phpneticism...
this barbarism...
no code of "conduct":
what should have:
and did "have": a happen to...
when it came to the ratio
of consonants to vowels...
  of the latter there was a supposed more...
or the latter a less...

    h.i.v. vampirism romances
would have to die...
  a death... most... closely associated with:
psychopaths: or...
the general pathology is: soul-quests...
all "things" considered...
there is no "grand-Σ"
        "past-participle":
of the unconscious-conscious liver...
does the part: actor... functions
of... i robot: you, not here...

the liver does what a liver does:
even if: i r woke...
and i r: sleepz...
               eyes only on when...
orientating myself around:
a failure of a distinct "individual":
moi foie premier...
   moi estomac premier...
and of "me" or... a me...
given that... there's no: "the me"...
            load of ******* and a chewing tube
of "worded"... "circumstances"...
as: "the alternative" to...
sorry... no other alternative...
was... or would ever... be given...
errror message 404 commences: as of: now!

- or... can you?
compensate a word like... draconian...
with a word... the periphery word...
akin to... byzantine?!
the kite's high up in the ******* air
my dear lad...
can you? "compensate" this...
marry of all other:
never-poppin' up 'ins?!

that's one way of minding:
a grey-ginger...
or an albino-masai...
for "good luck"... of all t'ings:
the lerprechaun 'ucking charm brigade!
that's just 'ucking necessary: that is!

as.... the people have already mentioned
their freedom: to cite and keep up to
the rigours of salutations...
they said and they said... and they:
sad but nonetheless: they sad-***-made-"truth"-of...
"it": 'ucking wombat
multiverse l.s.d.: me typing on an old... cranky...
soviet "qwerty" imitation...

the freedom prior to the plague:
i am yet to see...
the **** covid... and the leprechaun...
and the tarantula...
and the... leech...
   **** me: raining cats and dogs:
what a scenario!
     i was supposed to get...
               not leech: not *****...
those fidgeting terse quizzes...
          *****... no... leech... no...
leprechauns: double no...
             szarańcza... old mother-tongue:
ah yes... "these":
                                 locust!

the third of the lard off the herd of the most:
"likely"... nosense to me:
something for you:              up!
otherwise know as:
quiet a bollocking... wouldn't you,
somehow... please... stage:
an agreed to?
               ****'s sake...

  tyrd the triddle twiddle torn und
towing: dublin the sorry-eye: und sore...
you freckled maverick salt
burner you... and... it's a ginger:
stick-prone... keep y'er eager distance...

eh? that's true: is what's through...
**** paddy **** and a poor ******
walk into a bar...
and the bartender is... a kippah-don
of a rastafarian:
the jokes end...
and there was never a conversation
to begin with... ha ha!
now that's a joke... to wake up...
a frankenstein!

      ginger pleb: ginger poodle!
the new africa: the new eskimo...
or... the finnish gateway: etymologically speaking...
an alternative to... *** and...
              the leftover mongols
stranded by the waters
of the empire: receding...
          the...        no: not the croats...
the...
          a very much elongating concept
of pause....
              "d" or the "v" of: v'eh...: the...
the  immortal savages
of: crimea...
      ah yes!
                  those...            tar-tars!
like the tartare steak:
or what was forever available as
the alibi for: sushi!

        because tokyo is just one of those...
forever huan: new... beijing chicken shacks...
and "tokyo"...
or some other anime typo *******...

irish catholic intellectuals...
and... the none existence of whatever
would have required a magna carta:
believe it or... eat **** sort of
mentality...
            the russian doctors
are already abiding to be hunted
if not huddling in churches...
because: co-vex said: co-vid...
co-vid: sharing blockbuster intrusion
pokes was: that last resort to
mortality: and oh...

          this should have happened a long...
a long long time ago...
  transparency tourism...
where you going?
nowhere...
  and "where" is "going"... "nowhere"...
a bit like france... and the eiffel tower...
and there's no speaking french to have
to be resolved...
because like: "**** it" and what?

the ginger-ninja... the ginger-ninja...
the ginger-ninja and...
when the reality of *****...
reaches... an escalation "reality"
of: synonym with... oh god! beards!
ugh!           vot                          ven?!

yep... and the irish were always:
the horse-breeders..
they always were...
always the catholic-intellect juggernauts...
because the hey'talians and
the spoon-innards...
and... mon deu: zee: fwench!
forget the ****** cathos-pathos...
*******-of-os...

and in me:
the gravitas for a disconcerting ambivalence...
almost a compound:
misnomer... but no...
i like the spaghetti though...
yeah: it looks nice on paper...
and off paper...
and anything to cite: the godfather with...
because: boo is a ghost story
that a solo would sell... and ******* like
that...                   yup...
which is a word: to replace the ideal trajectory of:
would be: ghost limb...
james bond...
                          roulette...
you the actors "faking it": no of course...
dylan thomas bob dylan...
"faking it" i.e. stunt actors!
what's "bob": when there's a ******* roulette:
and a devil's dozen of rich, russian...
oligarchal chick... pretending plastic is not...
new world... ******: comb-over...
creaking chair... stlye-on... style-off...
plastico-supermanoh... dynamo-oh-oh...
those "soz" and "whatsevers"...
works well...
the times column...
when your parents are... conscripted...

             mammoth playdough oh oh oh...
irish is cheap...
catholic is cheap-oh...
******...
ha ha... let's not go there...
becauße that's like...
   goldberg variations: the bwv 988 aria...
   yeah: "soz"... but... i'll ******* eat you:
if i have to: for the purpose assigned
to a hard-on... most associated with...
sparrows...
and... the pirates of the confines...
the magpies...
          
             in every period of congregational
"sanity" there's that interlude into:
madness...
howl how! oh dear world of:
that lost appetite of surprise!
        you begin to wither... and die off:
by the slow culmination of hours...
like... a picture to entomb the perfecting
affair of a decaying pear... or apple...
               and...

            and....                 and...
trickling of sentiments...
and sounds...

                           and there are commentaries...
and there are... catholic bishops...
and protestant cardinals...
and ****** popes!             ah ha!
am i to.. truly... die... from laughter?!
Mateuš Conrad Nov 2018
.it turns out German, is a language worthy of opera... but, my god... to my surprised liking, who would have thought that Peter O'Toole could play a baddy, in the **** fetish TCM film from 1967... the night of the Generals... great... but i still think movies were better in Technicolor... i haste CGI... give me a Technicolor film and i'm like: agape... someone telling me to shut my mouth, so that a passing seagull cannot drop a dump into it... yeah yeah, Jack Lemon, Shirley MacLaine (god, she was hot... those dreamy eyes, akin to Claire Forlani) in the Apartment... but the ultimate Technicolor classic has to be Bell, Book and Candle... James Stewart, Kim Novak... sure, sure, the coloring seems excessive, but it's the excessive aspect of Technicolor that's so... comic book... eh... modern films... like the Artist or Schindler's List attempting to revive black & white... how about... reviving Technicolor?!

a recurring theme of internet usage...
lately i've been having
a problem taking a **** in one
sessions...
    oh god, i tried playing video games,
listening to music
while reading some Heidegger...
but it's like... i need to go back,
and sit on the throne of thrones...
and expect some inverted **** ***...
mind you...
i really admire the homosexuals...
i wouldn't have the ***** to ****
****, or there lack of...
kudos gents, kudos...
         but the whole drama ends while
i massage my **** while sitting
on my heel on a windowsill...
ha ha! that rhymes!
        and i obviously need to do the following...
preliminary drinking...
a beer, two shots of ms. amber,
another beer...
   and some alt. media political
commentary videos...
       and when i'm done... the menu comes
to my attention...
  and that sweet, sweet grand release
of not giving a **** about freedoms like
the freedom of speech...
crescendo cascada...
   cascade of sounds, ambivalences...
music becomes water...
   ars musica, est aqua repraesentatio...
you'd think of ventus...
how European music could be
described as representing the winds...
well... prior to the African-import
revision and incorporation of the drums...
you could see it as such...
but...
    when you counter the H'american
freedom of speech...
                 argumentation...
        and listen to some of the internet
commentaries...
  have enough drink in you...
and abruptly put on some Beethoven?
the ******* dam bursts...
   aqua, anti claudo...
                    so while the Africans are
all smug about their melatonin
concentration, their perfected skin
not riddle by acne...
           who's who in the lactose race?
you can contain almost all other elements...
but water?
    compared to these internet
commentaries, with a shy intake of drinks
in me... i put on Beethoven and
explode into a fury of joviality and hope...
music is the representation of water...
oddly enough...
with all the brass and woodwinds it
ought to be wind...
               but come the crescendo...
what do i see?
  or a preliminary crescendo teaser
without the choir, in Beethoven?
                    the bursting Hoover dam...
oddly enough... the addition
of the African accent of excessive drumming?
i think loop, i think tornado,
i think...
           there story of the reel...
repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat...
the end sounds just like the beginning...
with some sort of variant in the middle...
well...
   here's to that second beer.
jeffrey conyers Dec 2013
How to fit it?
Be fake.
Put on a pretense.
Like those anchor peoples on the newscast.

Hold your opinions.
They don't like opinionated folks.
And if they are they called personal commentaries.

How to fit in?
Put on that smile.
In life we all are actors.
It's a trait of our character.
Unless we get selected to heaven.
Then that's another matter.
We required to be real because the love of God is there.

How to fit in?
Embrace the concept of your surroundings.
Just sit back and take it all in.
Like a shy person you'll be able to describe everything.
From those that fake to the backstabbers.

Now, you can be a rogue.
Just realize renegades doesn't last in the fakeness for long.
But that's how you fit in?

You just need to ask yourself?
Is this your quest?
Wuji Seshat Oct 2014
To write poetry is
To create philosophical memory
To adjust the commentaries

Of all souls, to just one voice
To strip the inequalities
Of existence, of their mass
To write poetry is
To erase the written

Transforming what we have read
Making alphabets contemporary
Fluid, mystical

To write poetry is not just art
It’s neurological reprogramming
A quantum gesture to
The nature of beauty
And Meaning itself

To write poetry is
To return to an absence of meaning
The meddlesome mind forgets

The natural order of nature
To reduce layers of narrative
And return to a total peace
And a grand vision of the universe
As a talking thing, exchanging energy

In a physics of existence
To write poetry is to love the unwritten
Endings that all concur

To identify with the sudden
Rupture of beginnings
From which all thought originates
To write poetry is thus
The silence in between the words

And a solace beyond thought
To free oneself form the memory
That is an impression or a scar

On the mind, blankness is an ideal state
To observe time and space without attachment
To love existence independently
Of the personal conditions of one’s life
On the letters of your poems

I observe a black walking cat
A woman that must question her heart
To find the answers, without
Speaking we are a language
All we feel and do is a kind of vocabulary.
Jack Ghaven Oct 2015
I've been raised in a generation...That has lost the meaning of love.  At least, the idea of lasting love.  This generation has been fed the ideas of constant upgrades.  They've been brainwashed to believe that something better is always out there.  Change after change, to the next channel.  We're a channel surfing generation.  Swipe left, swipe right, like after like, up on our social media pages.  We don't nurture, we don't grow our souls.  We feed our egos based on so called friends' clicks or lack thereof.  I've romanticized every relationship I've ever had.  Whether they be friendships or significant others, I have always given all of myself.  Witnessing others around me, I wonder if they ever do the same.  I wonder if they ever truly stop and engage in NOW.  Do we ever stop waiting for the next text, tweet, like, or comment?  Do we ever fully appreciate who and what is here and now?  Sometimes I think we've just lost our focus on what the point is.  That's alright though I suppose.  We are, after all, a medicated generation.  Got a problem?  Here's a bottle, here's a pill, just wait til the joint rolls back around.  This'll make it all better, or at least numb your reality temporarily.  This is not to say I don't fall guilty to the same sins as my peers.  My closest friends will tell you I self-medicate frequently when lost.  My panic due to being alone and at a loss happens so frequently.  My calm and collected side is such a rare occurrence.  I over analyze anything and everything so much I feel delusional.  Even writing this seems like an empty release.  No matter how much I write, I can't get the voices out of my head.  I'm stuck thinking of who is or what is next.  I begin to not exist in the now.  All I seek is to give myself.  Yet I get so trapped in that it becomes vague who I even am anymore.  This isn't supposed to be some cry for help, this isn't some pity party.  I'd really just like to be someone's priority.  My own wants all seem so selfish though.  Isn't that all of humanity?  I really like to think not.  I like to think that most of us have the ability to care about others.  Though right now, that dream seems so distant.  Nothing significant in my life has taught me that people care enough to stay.  There's no point to risk one's self for another.  Yet, I constantly find myself doing so, in a generation of human beings so dehumanized.  Love isn't love.  It's money, jobs, taxes, work, frustration, ownership, and responsibility.  We wonder why we don't have families anymore?  Why our divorce rate is so pathetically and shamefully high?  We don't like responsibility!  Everything's supposed to be instant and easy.  No "thick and thin".  No "in sickness and health".  CERTAINLY no "til death do us part".  Whatever works for me now, and when it doesn't, on to the next.  Like a ******* playlist on shuffle of people and places we think we'll experience again somewhere down the line.  It's all such *******.  I'm over the not-so-distant future.  I want to live now.  I want to love now...  It's all just so **** hard when love is simply a fantasy that exists somewhere outside of so many people's capabilities and capacities.  To give your all is the best anyone could and should ever expect.  Expect to be shot down, but never hesitate to get back up.  Love and passion exist.  Find who sparks your fire, and spark theirs...  It'll all makes sense then...
Not really a poem, really just a flow of thought from my consciousness I guess.  Really just want this out there somewhere other than my notebook.
Lyra Brown Oct 2013
i inherited an entire library
full of books that offer explanations
as to why you are incapable of loving me.

the romance section was laughable,
giving me bullet point commentaries
as to why i am doomed to never
be loved or feel loved again,
reasons why i settle for beautiful boys who
enjoy my company because i'm quirky, cute, time killer material,
not anchored, solid, strong, soulmate material.
but that's just it, i guess, no one can deny it-
(everyone knows when they are in the presence of precariousness.)

the mystery section offered me nothing but
a full buffet  of questions i already had,
questions that always seemed to give clues to future answers,
delicious questions that tasted sweet at first
then turned suddenly sour,
questions that made me understand the meaning
of a deceptive cadence.
(these books made me wish i didn't leave fingerprints
on everything i touch.)

the fiction section made me feel like a child again,
these were the books that reminded me why hope
is and has always been my favourite bedtime snack.
(these were the books that reminded me that just
because i couldn't make you love me did not mean
that i couldn't make believe you love me.)
since i've stepped out of my fins every step has made me wish
for the courage to throw myself into the sea,
to dissolve in an instant,
to be a daughter of the air forevermore.
(perhaps Hans Christian Anderson was the only person in the world
who knew just how much it hurts to be a human being.)

the self help section gave the illusion of answers,
the way a fortune teller with a foreign accent
doused in flattery and jewelry might seem.
i have spent hours of my existence with these books,
laying on my stomach, furrowed brow, fingers turning white
from clutching the ballpoint pen for dear life thinking
maybe if i just keep
underliningunderliningunderlining
things will start to make sense again.
(because, don't you know? the more you underline
the parts of your life that are relevant on paper,
the closer you are to having figured out your life so perfectly
you eventually will walk by these books wondering
which unfortunate person you should donate them to.)

i inherited an entire library
full of books that offer explanations
as to why you are incapable of loving me.
i think maybe there are some things
that we are never meant
to know.
Yenson Oct 2021
Truly.........
the charisma
beguiles and challenges them
truly the sublime force is too irresistible
in attraction and confusion they fake faux condemnation
and in awe the artificialities of superficiality offers sanguine solace
as dim counterfeit pundits give counterfeit commentaries
for who dares say this is one like no other
when to be real is a crime per se
wow! that charisma
truly..........


Truly..........
his charisma
exceedingly shades all others
no one and nothing compares we know
God threw the mould away after making him
cry me a river and build that bridge over troubled waters
for a David walks head and shoulder above most
in truth we see his light but lie we must
when passion voltage overwhelms
its ebb is the afterglow
we live to die
truly.........
Lucan Mar 2011
A gesture's worth a thousand words,
intimations of the body articulate:
my gas-passing interrogatives,
your inquisitive belches, remember?

At first, such unspoken jokes seemed crude,
though useful. So we refined them,
and from trees at night mock owl-calls homed you in.
Do you remember eyebrows, intelligent as lips?

In time, I developed tics, snarls, an expert shrug,
a professional groan. And I grew to resent
your sighs, your phony, irritated coughing fits,
the critical commentaries of your silences.
Dora Joe Dec 2014
The two boys.
Of course, they know.
But all they do is laugh.
At the players.
At the tackles.
At the appeals.
And everything else.

Mother.
Always the one who sympathizes.
If the Reds are up by two.
"Oh, I pity the opposition. May they score one."
She says.
"Awh, MUM?!"

Same goes with the eldest.
It would make it more intense.
She thinks.
Me thinks, I should pray for a cleansheet.

Hah!
The two blabbering baboons.
Knows nothing.
Gives running commentaries.
Predicts that the others win the match.
Such support I get.

The next one is a Kop in the making.
I-am-****-proud.

The lil one thinks Ozil is good looking. -_-

-Doey
Chandra S Nov 2019
It took years for the physicist
and the meta-physicist
to reluctantly agree.

They took opposing alleys:
One looked into matter
and arrived at its intrinsic energy.
The other looked at energy
and saw matter as incidental analogy;
just a random criss-cross
of cosmic puissance.

They made much ado
in arriving where my good old
three-band radio
catapulted me years ago.

Since my teens;
she had faithfully been
my worthy companion.
With sweet melodies,
thoughtful talks,
rousing commentaries....
she kept me company
through thick and thin.
For a scanty eternity,
she was the only tie with humanity
in my plain, flat life;
lonesome, sickly and solitary.

We knew each other closely;
fondly and dearly
and I would talk to her,
some would say foolishly,
and though strangely,
she always responded readily.

For years sixteen
that Philips machine
was with me
and I saw
into her inherent energy
that underlies every material entity.

#

When she died suddenly
without warning....abruptly,
I knew a friend had gone
but the essence lived on.

We had perfect camaraderie:
She was all intricacy;
body, battery and circuitry,
and the spark that came from me;
ah!!! my art of tuning adeptly.

Though I got newer models and makes,
the heart still beats with a dull ache
for the one who began as mortal matter
and bonded timelessly with my being;
...merged and mingled...
as an undying memory,
in what they call
my imperishable, impregnable spirit.
Inspired by: Loneliness, sickness, contemplation, nostalgia, longing and a Philips radio set.

The radio set was purchased by my father when I was a year old. It was a 3-band radio and came with a leather case that had a shoulder string. My parents would take a walk after supper and I would be perched on one of their arms while the radio would be slung on the other shoulder. I grew up with it. It kept me company for as long as it lasted and remained a true companion in my varyingly solitary moments.
epictails May 2015
words ****
tightening the noose on the neck
stabbing  anyone in their safest places
firing invisible bullets in chests

hate stays at the corners of death
while you are in front of it
shooting arrows aimed at the heart
laced with spoken disdain
cowardly commentaries turned solemn eulogies

he falls to eternal silence
his pained voice echoes in you forever
you walked him to his grave
quietly, convincingly
...

it' getting dark
in your disturbed slumbers, his dying face waits,
uttering that it's now his turn
to bring you to your grave
****....the....
New age rappers
Nigguhs sounds like slaves
Tryna bring plantations
Back
Aint no power in owning gats ?
Stupid nigguhs
Talkin' hard
But scared to pull the trigger
In the 90s we talked about silly ****
Drugs n **** but
Along with commentaries
Now it seem the young revolts only
See the cemetery early
If you catch on early
To the ******* two ******* to the pulpits
How can i follow God when im a God?
Image of a man dont understand
Confusion was made from us
But since i got no heart
I got no one to trust
But myslef so **** the drug cartels
Snitches ******* glitches
N ******* who was sent from Hell
Is it me or the industry?
Trying to take away black males masculinity
Women is the new men
I say **** that !
Men hold yo guard
And bump that !
New age ******* out the way
Cuz if you stay wit it the courts will say
You cant do this or that
But i fire back
Wither it be clinched fist or
Firin' a gat
Dont care the game is changed
Nigguhs sellin' out for a lil fame
Got everybody actin' black?
Cultural Jacks?
Spittin' wack tracks now thats a fact?
How is em deemed the rap god ?
When **** was handed to him how odd?
Is that ignorance is bliss
What happened to the real lyricist
Most will think of this as a diss
Dont care i stop n stare
Lookin' into the eternal sunshine
I see marley easy pac n biggie
Speakin' to me
Through the blunts n Hennessey
Maybe im passed drunk POD'd
Or is just me reachin' a new spirituality
Reals labelled fakes fakes labelled real
Now nigguhs dont even ****
Only over mass appeal
Tight dresses lookin' gay muslims
And the media loves to surpress us
We still joking about slavery
Butwhat would happened if they came to present day
And i seen one of the slaves with a cut off foot Would he laugh?
At us sayin' nigguh or will he provoke a bloodbath?
Smile now ya **** sho will cry later
Im not a hater just an intellectual debater
And if you got beef with me
Line up but its going to cost ya
Cuz aint nothing for free
So to my trues paying they dues
To society do ya time quietly
And when you break out time due
Im going to send the crew
Minorities against the world
Silence the elite soon to delete
There souls off the atmosphere here me clear
Dont ever fear
A nigguh that breaths the same air as you
******* gone do?
When them.boys in blue come for you?
Imma stay heavily heated and bust shots
Til the judicial system departed
Put a strain on there chain links
Now im spiritually awarded

Shooting stars fare well in the moonlit aura of some incessant…broad.

Encapsulated wouldnt be the word,
Evoking…No. Only negative commentaries on that front.

Oh but how, such damsels, such dames that none of them can seem to fit as well here.

One more and one more and slowly
the constellations begin to form and

Ive made my cosmos of empty love.
Star dust, Ma Cherie...

Pixelated lust fall'n over concrete waterfalls.
Granulated moments of barely glowing skin.

Youve dulled, dear.
Just like the others.
-P.S.
Scott M Reamer Apr 2013
Call out the demons, rearrange the seedlings
Commentaries read to command
Spead out ******; it's the doing of ones hands
Shift slits in steely aperture wholly fail to capture
Awake from your nap now sir.
Nat Lipstadt Jul 2019
so Olson (#2), Honorarium

around here,
poets have been advised and disclaimed
the genuine praise of others get repaid
in kind, in k i n d

no, nope, not in
succinct pithy praiseworthy commentaries
that pays the quid pro quo bills

no ******* it,
a full blown poem is your honorarium,
you have torn open that envelope, and gosh ****, golly gee...
debts must be paid for the scales can not exist imbalanced,
until pieces of me equal pieces of you,

and I hate owing (for one never can be owning) poems...

Honorarium

this lonely business, never paid the rent,
at best, I hear them whisper, leave him be,
he’s entranced in other galaxies, breathing
words of nitrous oxygen, which has oft
produced excitable effects, copious weeping, hysteria,
and uncontrollable hyena laughter and
a sadness so deep, we fear for his retrieval


while
conversing with others in his head,
but when he writes of honor & love,
beware his bewitched bewitchments,
when all flu-like symptoms starburst all at once
the words are corded and stacked.
for fiery consumption in a hearth hearted fireplace,
word fries with aioli spice tendered in repayment


not a one lost, for those poems, though up in smoke,
lung imprinted, and breathed out into the clouded atmospheres,
dragon exhaling, poems roaring, stored and restored
honorarium in the crematorium of word debtor prison


an “the end” sigh dot dot dots the bitter end,
the anchor resting on sandy bottom,
at last, the last word, debt paid, honor restored


this, this
he loves best, when the beast released
and then returns to rest-in-chest and
await his next self imposed commission,
immolation in isolation
...
Mateuš Conrad Apr 2019
.murky are the forces, behind man's origins of intent, what freedom to succumb to a will, when the contradiction is in plain sight... the contradiction of competing wills, what inverted revision of the iron curtain must become apparent... man's inherent "concern" for free will, is nothing but the inherent desire to express it, by trampling on the "free will" of others... and then, the bonding servitude on the platitudes of concepts, akin to power, if not a slave unto a man, a slave unto an idea, a phantom man, a tier higher... and then unto the gods, who were never such a bothersome invention, as being invented to strive... but then the tier below, the phantom man, the crux of thinking, not of will unto the gods... the phantom man of: when thinking itself, because a claustrophobia... origins, intent, hierarchy... have only the jews ever liberated themselves from both the physical reality of the pyramid, and the metaphysical realism of the pyramid's shadow... how feeble, in man's attempt: to conquer mountain, given his predicament, of the scarcity allowance of his own time.

the samsung "collusion", wow, a big boys' word,

             well it must be...
perfect song
to listen to, while writing
something akin
to this?

        ex_machina soundtrack,
song?
                                   hacking / cutting...

do i own a samsung tablet,
yes?
what do i use it for...
the simple convenience...
of being perched on
a windowsill,
drinking, smoking a cagerette
out of the window...
into the night...
"star gazing"...

          is it a luxury?
what, for mostly listening to music
videos on youtube,
given that by the time i finish
writing this,
   there will only be about 2 physical
music outlets in London
(i.e. shops, i just mean shops)...
where you travel, mingle with people...

how many ******* shoes
or mobile phones do i need?
the number of vinyl records
i might "need"
are akin to the old autobahn
speed-limits...
       they're: inexhaustible...

it's just a ******* samsung tablet
from god knows when...
but samsung, i'm sorry to say,
has been calluding with
the powers at be
in terms of youtube video
commentaries...

  first i thought it was a viewing
count...
watched a 300+ video commentary,
watched a 30,000+ video commentary...
same ****, no different cover...

then watched a music video,
which wasn't exactly a music video,
since, i don't really like: music videos...
just a static screen,
with an album cover...

you know... when you listen
to radio, broadcast on the internet,
and the screen flashes up,
dims the lighting,
then switches off...
but the audio continues?

      see... i have a problem...
with samsung tablets...
                   these commentary
videos...
        "controversial"...
  i have to repeat the action
of touching the screen,
which i'm not exactly looking at...
mind elsewhere: ears honing in...
it's not like these youtubers
are working the radio over the internet
broadcast system...

once the samsung tablet's
light turn on,
dim down,
   then turn off completely...
the audio cuts off...

                but not, unless...
you're listening to a song,
    whether a real video fetish fest,
or a static screen of an album cover...

it's no "big" thing...
it's not like this tablet is anything
than an utility tool for
the new form of walkman,
a portable c.d. player,
an mp3 player...
      because... that's primarily what
it is to me...
10 minute interludes
on the windowsill,
cigarette in tow,
       "star-gazing" or whatever
you want to call: "introspection"...

       but music videos on youtube
do not put the device into
a "sleep-mode"...
         or at least...
not in the mode associate
primarily with listening to
radio stations working
their way past the device of
radio, to compensate their
transmission focus...

                  how can you listen
to a commentary video,
on a device...
that deems the video...
               well: "null"?
     the device is about 10 years old,
but somehow,
it has been updated...
to convey the current political
climate...
    music videos are fine...
the device doesn't go
              into "sleep mode",
any current social commentary
and the device does its prime duty,
bright lights of the screen,
dimmed lights of the screen,
snooze.

             prop machine, say are you,
say i, say we are non you,
        say i,
       and then come to the synthetic
conclusion...
              that other a.i. -
artifice intelligence,
   which is what intelligence was
to begin with.

                 ever talk to siri
on twitter...
                    i once did... apparently
"she" sent out a barage of messages to
slow down... or calm down...
or whatever made the "news"
         of this niche segment of society.

isn't that what the artificiality of
intelligence actually is, and is supposed to be?
i.e. artifice?
   aren't we supposed to be crafting
something as intelligent as ourselves,
in order to fool ourselves
within the confines of its over-invested
capacity?
          
   artificial intelligence is vague...
as a term, a concept, an ideology...
         a thorough-running thought project...
i know that intelligence reflects
such associate elements as: trust...
to be trust-worthy...
                            but the sort of
intelligence invested, into creating,
   "intelligence"... something inherited...
nuanced...
                  it's not artificial...
artificial as in: just because a lot of
nerds congregated and thought smart
in unison...
                     a lot of passionate
people also congregated at one point,
       and: gas, gas the...      ...chambers.  

only a simple example of how a.i. behaves...
it mimics savoured criticism
of the cul de sac,
                             a commentary video
akin to sargon of akkad
will do just that, when transmitted
on a samsung device...
                 but a music video won't:
(a) lights are on
(b) lights dim
(c) the device "switches off"...
    (sub-c) the device continues
its transmission, with a radio station
translated into a post-radio device
   "phantom"...

                i stopped calling it artificial
intelligence after a while...
            it's artifice...
                              as blatant as c.g.i.
graphics...  
           if there was an iron curtain...
                 another curtain has come in its place.
CharlesC Dec 2013
So often engaged
With our attending
All of those
Editorials
And commentaries
And sermons..
Of which often
Side-track and delay
That awakening
Transformation
Quiet watching
Of this Now
Which is passing…
Giuseppe Stokes Jul 2019
I remember the T.T on the front screen tv,
I remember the wooden table outside, with perched prose inscribed
I remember knocking myself out on the door ****, **** that I am adorned.
The video games
Plastered on the monitor
Excessive violence on demand.
I remember Sunday lunches
And the soggy Yorkshire pudding bases
And the ham, bear shaped and broken out from plastic cages on demand.

I remember the late nights playing board games,
The laughter cacophony ensuing
The vivid images and 3D activity represented on the big wooden table top purview,
I can't remember what the tabletop looks like...                       A shame

I remember sitting in the car unable to breathe,
I remember the recycled oxygen,
The time we nearly died on the roundabout,
The times we looked at air rifle paraphernalia.
The times we smiled together.

The arguments,
And conversations,
The silence

And sleep...
And questioning glares everytime I asked permission to make myself a drink
The awkwardness
The times we walked to the corner shop

Or took a drive somewhere or someplace,
The time I picked flowers and got a bollocking
The skin that felt empty and conceited.

The blooded scratch marks hidden under sleeves,
The scratching, allergies,
Dripping noses, headaches,
The mass of energy in front of me.
The unconscious predispositions,
The illness that came every morning,
The return home to certainty
And mostly the fluctuating sense of existential ambiguity.

The times we went on holiday and flooded the car with gear,
I remember the constant uneasiness,
The commentaries that rounded every corner

The time you turned yellow,
The overwhelming desire for love,
I remember the attempts to connect
The feelings of rejection and isolation
The awkwardness.
And love,
And memories that die with me.

I remember you daily, live you eternally,
I find myself caught in a web spun,
And thus
I try not to remember you
Too much.

I apologise for these thoughts,
But not to you,
But to the others I love,
Whom it may hurt.
Abraham Esang Oct 2017
MY EYES ON THE SURFACE

Your penumbra gleams with little print

in Papyrus text style, elucidations for the most part, live-

bolster passionate updates, amendments in your

shadow's edges. Your shadow is an idea

paper wrote broadcasting live, eradicated and re-composed

by everything you might do, recommendations stick-scribbled

in the sand as the following wave licks its finger

to flip the shoreline. For you, genuineness is consistent

correction: your position shifts and new

notes spool out from your feet – commentaries,

updated, an assortment of dissolving documentation

I endeavor to speed-read sufficiently quick to know you.
Mateuš Conrad Sep 2018
.                  am i really 32?
  seriously?
have i lived a live
most insulated...
did i forget something?!
did visiting a
brothel do this to me,
that i do not speak
the lingo,
and have no idea,
what these people are talking
about, or have any desire
to find out?
   i was never a big fan
of graffiti art...
and since the current
internet lingo is very
much akin to graffiti art...
i'm quasi-old:
qua-sigh old...
            i'm not in on it...
have i really lived
such an insulated life?
      perhaps i enjoyed
drinking too much,
and blacked out too often
to catch-up with the trends...
point being?
NO, *******, CLUE...
    perhaps i fell asleep
listening to too many
horror movie soundtracks...
perhaps i was asleep
prior to waking up as a man,
as was, somehow yesterday's
gorilla...
     but i guess it began with
no attache of moral superiority...
but there is...
a concept of aesthetic
etiquette...
   what sort of man sends
a picture of his genitals to a girl?
no moral question:
an aesthetic etiquette question:
and that's a biggie...
  life-sized hot air balloon!
can't miss it...
   or if you do...
you're ******* your own
**** with your eyes closed...
or attempting Olympic quality
gymnastics...
i missed something...
didn't i?
       the missing transaction...
if you pay a woman
to have ***, she can't claim
a **** allegation...
  she can claim not being
payed...
   oh sure...
it's so sad, yet somehow *****
when she starts crying
in the thick of it...
     what is confusing is
the clarity of the transaction...
   wait...
did i pay for an ice-cream cone?
did i "say" this, "out-loud"?
   go figure...
ask the Turkish mafia...
who? the Turkish pimps
who run the Bulgarian ****-show...
   i'm still missing something...
4chaan... what did i miss?
is this some sort quasi
rekindling
of the Microsoft chat rooms from
the early 2000s?
   they must be...
they look like those chat rooms...
crude, rude,
and ready to ensure a begetting
of guillotined head,
rolling... like a pair...
of dice...
   did i miss something?!
   you can't experience a **** allegation
with a *******...
       not that **** is involved...
like the bloodhound gang song:
a lap dance is so much better
when the stripper is crying...
      can't say the same when she is,
having revealed she drank herself silly
and is ******* you...

herr metzger, treffen frau fleisch...

i should really stop watching these
youtube channels regarding
social / political commentaries...
drama seeped in...
    ****'s becoming tedious...
i'm losing appetite for these whining
******* and gimps...
     my drinking habit is turning sour...
i'm watching
teenage girls make videos about
their readings habits while
tuning off from
the   thron von throne exercise of...

taking a ****...
massaging my prostate by
relaxing my **** muscle contraction,
taking a ****,
then jerking off...
1, 2... and 3...
   no. 1, no. 2, no. 3...

          so... no one in western Europe
is worried about
the... Ukrainian application
to the European Union?
  Turkey came first?
really?!
  you sure?
           oh i'm pretty sure the Veesteern
Poowers... were more abject
about the power 8...
than about some aboriginals
from former colonies...
          
but i missed something on 4chan...
the gegenwärtigsprechen?
  missed it, by an internet mile...
which is like from here...
  to              here...
and it's actually from here to Jupiter...


about that...
when you **** a ******* that's crying?
and you can't stop...
and you made the monetary exchange...
Alice in Wonderland...
      so... where's the ****?
not having paid her...
or the fact that she's so drunk
that all her hidden emotions overflow
into a rainbow of tears?

crude ******* that i am...
     left with only a metzger
(butcher) appreciation of fleisch (flesh)...
   yet i remember this one
instance...
   being laughed at for my medical
condition...
however politicized,
or however actualized....

       i didn't like it...
        i didn't like it,
because once i did likewise,
but retracted my original jest,
made an apology,
   and later talked with the original
aggrieved party over
a pint of beer in a pub...
and we managed to coerce ourselves
into mutually respectable civility...

but... there are simply some *****...
who keep grudges...
jealousy is a *****-god
of the Hebrews who...
oddly enough...
have arisen... and who always
levitate...
    above their God...
the Hebrews are above their God...
of other people:
their God or (s) is
a motivational tool to surpass
themselves...
the people are little
when compensated by their gods...

but the Hebrews?!
their God: is an abomination...
   what sort of envy is... jealousy?
skiving, ignoble latitude of
envious brewing sentiment...

now...
the Hebrews lie about their God...
they lie about their God,
they lie about their God
because their God...
has no attributes worth
emulating...
   nothing worth replicating...
nothing worth considering a mimic...

and i agree...
true wisdom comes from a God
"despised", or rather shunned...
but more or less borderline
kept on a leash of memory...

   wisdom from a fear of a despicable god,
rather than "wisdom" from a love
of a desirable god, father- or mother-figure.

that's how the Hebrews worked it out...
their god is not the most existent god,
the god apparent...
   it's that...
   they cannot claim a theological pride
in their deity,
  or claim it was culturally sound
to keep his visage beyond anything more
than four letters...

Muhammad is but a man...
the TETRAGRAMMATON?
the tetragrammaton is not a man!

oh... right... the other thing...
making fun of medical conditions...
supposing a hierarchy...
   depression... ha ha!
schizophrenia... ha ha!

well then...
                   cancer... HA HA!
Mateuš Conrad Oct 2017
i always find that one can still find a worthwhile bit of verse at night, provided one dips into daytime writing, as i also find not having written anything during the day, makes verses conjured in the night: a slightly (to be ironically mild) desperate endeavour.

to begin from where i left off...
   why do i make such large portions when cooking?
ah... the fact that my breakfast consists of
two glasses of milk, and that i only eat once
a day, it's nonetheless inexcusable -
   which ends up with me feeling like a boa
with about two weeks worth digestion and sleeping
like a cat,
     although i'm starting to think,
given that serpents do not have eyelids
(which in reality a much more evil curse upon
the serpent of eden who was told to slither) -
but saying that, i think that once the serpents
have feasted, they are allowed to sleep,
even if they don't have eyelids,
     perhaps as perfectly adapted as bears in
hibernation, but i'm suspicious of the notion
that once a serpent has began digesting its food
it falls asleep for two or however many weeks
it takes to digest a prey...
me and my giant homemade hamburgers
and homemade chips?
     i asked myself the question:
how do you actually cut up a potato to make
the perfect chip? sideways first, about the thickness
of a pinky finger, and then horizontally,
the ol' chippie down the road can't beat these
mean spuds, sprinkled with paprika and
cajun pepper, salted and... booyakasha!
oh, and they have to be cooked slowly, i mean,
slowly...  obviously adding a bit of olive oil...
but after eating this meal i felt bloated,
so i had to come up with an answer to ensure
i could feel a slight tickle of ms. amber in
my stomach, so i walked it off for an hour,
easing out farts, which was a good sign...
made it through the english suburban maze
of windy streets, and found myself:
  perfectly sound...
     in the hamburgers? beef, gouda cheese,
lettuce, fresh tahmahtees, pickled cucumbers,
pickled chillies, fresh spanish onions,
    slightly toasted buns, and two sauces:
a hamburger sauce + sweet mustard...
   brilliant combo;
but that's the boring, i guess the interesting
bit is that the sky is murky rather than overcast
and there's a full moon visible as if
addressing you from behind a hookah pipe...
if ever there was a night for strolling along
not looking for a caterpillar, it was tonight;
the obvious religious sudoku,
   and no, i don't buy the ******* that you can
call no. 9354 (in the times supplement)
   difficult, or mild, as it sometimes happens,
not with 1/9 of the squares being completely
blank! that **** is fiendish, i just proved
the point solving no. 9359 (difficult) -
only aided by killing a few brain-cells during
interludes of watching pop vlog videos,
some static music videos,
     and the more i drank the more i became
impressed with the effort,
  at one point inserting an obvious 7 into a square
making a face of a ****** exclaiming:
better get a pair of glasses you dummy!
so that's what i found: blind-spots in sudoku,
sure there's some logic behind it,
   but in the blind-spots just frustrate,
and frustrate, and irritate.
          the whole:

   either 1 or 7 | 2 5 8 4 9 | either 3 or 6
                             1, 3, 6, 7

didn't help, but ms. amber sharpshooter
later, and some youtube vlog video about
drunk advice or how to do make up,  
   and i finished the **** puzzle feeling
like someone injected me with steroids;

while some famous rich dummy complained
about the perils of mixing ******* with
alcohol... how about i teach you about
the not so perilous adventure of nicotine &
alcohol, high enough for just a tiny bit,
making hitting the "low": a smirking endeavour,
self-satisfying, if not self-congratulating:
to the last sip.

obvious some sort of bookish reference culminated...
yeah... the hebrew *sefirot
diagram...
  i looked at it, started swaying for a bit
and then came with an answer...
   fool be he who aims at the keter (crown)
in this entire schematic, for the sefirot
is a schematic (apologies for the paraphrasing
away from diagram, but sometimes
you just have to sharpen the tools) -
    
the most famous e.g.?
    look who's hanging at golgotha...
      he who claims a crown over but one of
the other elements of the schematic,
has not understood the dynamism between
keter & malkhut (kingship) -
crowns are put on both kings and fools,
   notably alan ginsberg in prague in the 1960s...
see how the two relate?

  the real trinity embedded in the sefirot
is based, primarily, upon wisely disregarding
both keter & malkhut in terms of:
i'm aiming for that,
   no! always with a genesis always with a beginning
and always revising that beginning,
only at one's peril desire the ultimate crown
and the ultimate kingship, which belongs
to death alone...

          the sefirot can only be understood on
the base of yesod, i.e. foundation...

after all, you have: binah (understanding),
chokhmah (wisdom), gevurah (strength),
   chesed (love), tiferet (beauty),
hod (splendor) & netzach (victory) to choose
from, or if not by choice,
  then by the slow realisation of
not known the yesod (foundation) endeavoured
upon, to have gained

either the prize (keter) of said attributes,
or the authority (malkhut) of said attributes...
and this could be best described in secular
terms as the formulation of unconscious drives...

me? i crafted the combination
  based on yesod -
  i made it my foundation to stress my capacity for
gevurah (strength)... and it would have
been just that, but my efforts in verse
were acknowledged with the compliment of
tiferet (beauty) from the least of expected
of places... the mouth of a former lover:
god give peace unto her turbulent soul;

for i known i can't be king of wisdom,
  nor of understanding,
    nor all other attributes...

hence the foolishness, in kantian terms,
and the sefirot has kantian elements in it,
i can already see
   that keter is an a priori term -
  and that malkhut is an a posteriori term...
first comes the crown, then comes
the kingship...

                         i can't see how
it can be sensible any more to reverse that,
i.e. malkhut is an a posteriori term,
   while keter is an a priori term...
it's illogical to think the latter, since we already
known what sort of crown,
  and what sort of throne precipitated into
history...

               and why is it that these self-lacerating
attacks akin to christianity do indeed dare
to mention the men as "mentally unwell" -
do you even know how castrating that terminology
is? they're crusaders of the wake-up call...
because if you call the other group by
the term jihad "warrior" the moral boost it gives
them? no one calls them mentally ill,
   but suddenly someone comes along and
is included in the "mentally deranged category"
grouped with anxiety-prone teens,
  depressed teenage girls, socially-shy schizophrenics,
and the rest of the psychotic brady bunch?
i look at these cases and think of vanilla ice...
these other guys, these crusaders?
               you can't call one the jihad martyrs
and the other: enigmas of the fruition
       of the castrato complex "losers"...
        losers? losers work part time jobs or
whatever category of existence might tick
all the boxes of the criteria...
            there's still no proper term for it,
  but this self-mutilating culture of christianity
began with a man riding into jerusalem
on a donkey... so donkey's years...
   the more the media smears them as that,
the more secular "identities" are attributed
to certain instances of their emergence,
   the more it agitates the next psychotic wasp
hive of swarming thoughts in an another "loser"...

when behring breivik did what he did,
   the russian nationalists encored him as a hero...
and i still don't know why the message
he sent was such an "enigma"...
          pay up for your decadence or your
children (of the ruling class) get it...
         sometimes these real world commentaries
of events that have happened are
so unnecessary in my part of the world,
they are there because these events happened...

even though we bypassed the publishing
authorities,
   it has just become a case of
                   **** vitro in domus vitro -
which is why i never intended to make any
internet profiling based upon the faux pas of façade.
Nat Lipstadt Feb 2020
love gripped light

~ for r, sleuth of life ~

you sleep with a metal detector,
unearthing dreamed artifacts,
that messenger many fates of many young,
belongings of dead men living again

and

of a living solitary man, a vision of him, envisioning,
dancing on a property line dividing
immortality dreams
and finality schemes

dead men living,
these different men, haunting and roaring, sighing pointlessly,
speaking to you alone, pithy commentaries, they, predecessor poets,
someone’s ancestors inhabiting a soil world familiar, awaiting we too

you whip yourself over life’s lost campaigns,
where strategy proved insufficient,
lost to men and materiel superior in numbers,
the hearts that were captured, imprisoned, stolen,
and worst, lost by grievous bad judgement human weak,
your dreams are you own artifacts, recovered

long after the battle smoke clears, you remain,
questioning not the how, where or when, only
was it worth it? and so sadly,
you answer yes.

you keep a record of your poems, losses,
each battlefield has no victors, only losses,
each poemfield has no victors, only losses,
it tires you so, to be guardian, the promise keeper,
you asked for burdens, you got just desserts awarded,
you share some, the ones under the pillow,
gripped lightly and tightly, simultaneously

with long distance lovers of your soul,
those you barely know, until met in red soil someday,
what matters it, they ken a kinship bond, and
love you oh so lightly

and they are

gripping you so lightly/tightly with the lightness/tightness
of words,
two book bound souls.
one shared spine...

2/10/20
100 Centre St.
NY Criminal Court
1:38
Tint Jan 2019
Suicide this, suicide that
all I hear is how they know it
how much knowledge they can tell
because they have the purpose to say it
and their commentaries of hate

Did you know?
Do you know?
How it felt when the voices
when their words are on repeat
and my soul made up of paper
is scribbled by ***** names

When the darkeness is my lover
and it embraces me with hate
no place to run to
no person to care
All I could do is be in a corner
I sat and rocked myself to sleep
hoping the scary lullabies
will give me a little peace

It hurts. Did you know
My head hurts with all I'm thinking
and my resolve is frozen in
I was touched by coldness of a monster
but I found a warmth instead
for it gave me a little vision
that everything will end

That is suicide, it is self-free
a one way road to run to
if the void inside ablaze
and yes, maybe it is selfish
but let me think and breathe
for many years I have been fighting
don't I have a right to wish?
for all the pain to be over
for a freedom to embrace

Did you know?
Do you know?
Suicide this, suicide that
Stop. Stop your happy endings
there is no cure to my self-hate
I just hear too much and nobody listens to mine.
Mateuš Conrad Oct 2018
i still can't forgive the fact that someone
has ****** up "my" jukebox
that youtube once represented...
i know that i'll have to adapt...
start using last.fm again...
   but it's still ****-poor an excuse...
   i will stream fatoumata diawara's
enough times, but then i will actually
but the compact disk...
for the concept of the internet
becoming a transactional medium
of commerce: the new algorithmic
revisions aren't helping...
a music video should play with
a recommendation to a political video...
the whole thing is bogus,
and a mess...
            before i discovered all these
alternative commentaries...
it was the jukebox and staring at a blank
pixel paper become randomly
impregnated with pixel ink...
        mind you...
you know how uber looks like in
Russia?
        not like in the western world...
there's not tracking technology involved,
no: i spy on you so you spy on me
*******...
           hitchhiking in an urban area...
the trust of people among people
and between strangers is so high among
Russians...
you know how an uber ride looks like?
you stick your hand out into the street
from the pavement, thumbs up,
   and you play the roulette,
someone either stops, or someone doesn't...
you give them the directions of where
you're going, and if the stranger is
passing past it... you get in...
and pay them a taxi fee...
no apps... no *******...
                 but people trust each other...
nasty ******* otherwise...
"uber" in Russia is so different to the uber
in the Anglophone world...
it's not even worth relating as
comparable...
                  it's called:
   hitchhiking in the urban schematic
of traffic...
                    strangers trust strangers...
well... if you don't manage to call a taxi...
you hold your hand out on
the street... and there's someone who
will drive you to where you want to go...
no questions asked, a small fee agreed
upon... less than a taxi, perhaps a small
deviance...
   once i walked for about 10 miles
on the M25... counting how many bees
were dead on the pavement...
a lot...
   did anyone stop on the hard shoulder
and ask me if i wanted a lift to
Barking?
   nope... the English pretend they're
not solipsists, but actually are...
     no one stopped once...
i returned home with blisters on my feet...

p.s. i've never used a dating app.
not once not ever ever...
               i don't think i'd like to,
to begin with...
             slice or left, slide to the right...
whatever that is...
               i am bound to instant
gratification when i take a ****
or sit down to take a ****...
   really? it's as pleasurable for
something going in,
with what i feel when something is
coming out?!
           really? but the in-and-out part?
i could suppose: in = out,
              but in-and-out ≠ in ≠ out...
so much for living under a pile
of rubble...
                        with the way technology
advanced i must be, roughly 70...
   or playing a dumb-*** 32 year old...
whatever it was...
*** twice a year with a *******
seems to be enough...
          i'm surprised i didn't venture
to stay in Taizé-Graz...
                 as much as the world of
cosmopolitanism arrives at and provides
you with...
                 sorry...
                        i'm just thinking of her...
19... 'i think i'm pregnant'...
      you know what you should do?
get an abortion...
              you have a university career
ahead of you...
  but i didn't ask:
  is it mine? i am sure i wore a ******,
and you told me you were on
anti-contraceptive pills?
  ****** her in the bath while she
was on her period with the rubber...
and then... 7 hours in the night on
the night i left St. Petersburg, just after
her period ended
  (i'm guessing... the best time to
impregnate a woman is just after
her period)...
    i didn't ask whether it was mine...
i assumed the facts she gave me...
mind you...
              i'm more worried about
S.T.D.s being prescribed by
women outside of the *******
profession, than the women
within the ******* profession...
at least a ***** will tell you she
received regular S.T.D. checks...
  which is encouraging...
                     so...
  i can do intimate for an hour...
     but outside the hour...
i prefer to consume...
   the aura of my body...
infused with the perfume of a woman's
body sticking to me...
twice a year it might happen,
always after i return from
Poland...
               i'm thinking...
next time i visit them...
i'll take a decent bottle of bourbon
with me, trim my *****...
       and **** a her, silly.

— The End —