As a woman, and in the service of my Lord the Emperor Wu, my life is governed by his command. At twenty I was summoned to this life at court and have made of it what I can, within the limitations of the courtesan I am supposed to be, and the poet I have now become. Unlike my male counterparts, some of whom have lately found seclusion in the wilderness of rivers and mountains, I have only my personal court of three rooms and its tiny garden and ornamental pond. But I live close to the surrounding walls of the Zu-lin Gardens with its astronomical observatories and bold attempts at recreating illusions of celebrated locations in the Tai mountains. There, walking with my cat Xi-Lu in the afternoons, I imagine a solitary life, a life suffused with the emptiness I crave.
 
In the hot, dry summer days my maid Mei-Lim and I have sought a temporary retreat in the pine forests above Lingzhi. Carried in a litter up the mountain paths we are left in a commodious hut, its open walls making those simple pleasures of drinking, eating and sleeping more acute, intense. For a few precious days I rest and meditate, breathe the mountain air and the resinous scents of the trees. I escape the daily commerce of the court and belong to a world that for the rest of the year I have to imagine, the world of the recluse. To gain the status of the recluse, open to my male counterparts, is forbidden to women of the court. I am woman first, a poet and calligrapher second. My brother, should he so wish, could present a petition to revoke his position as a man of letters, an official commentator on the affairs of state. But he is not so inclined. He has already achieved notoriety and influence through his writing on the social conditions of town and city. He revels in a world of chatter, gossip and intrigue; he appears to fear the wilderness life.  
 
I must be thankful that my own life is maintained on the periphery. I am physically distant from the hub of daily ceremonial. I only participate at my Lord’s express command. I regularly feign illness and fatigue to avoid petty conflict and difficulty. Yet I receive commissions I cannot waver: to honour a departed official; to celebrate a son’s birth to the Second Wife; to fulfil in verse my Lord’s curious need to know about the intimate sorrows of his young concubines, their loneliness and heartache.
 
Occasionally a Rhapsody is requested for an important visitor. The Emperor Wu is proud to present as welcome gifts such poetic creations executed in fine calligraphy, and from a woman of his court. Surely a sign of enlightment and progress he boasts! Yet in these creations my observations are parochial: early morning frost on the cabbage leaves in my garden; the sound of geese on their late afternoon flight to Star Lake; the disposition of the heavens on an Autumn night. I live by the Tao of Lao-Tzu, perceiving the whole world from my doorstep.
 
But I long for the reclusive life, to leave this court for my family’s estate in the valley my peasant mother lived as a child. At fourteen she was chosen to sustain the Emperor’s annual wish for young girls to be groomed for concubinage. Like her daughter she is tall, though not as plain as I; she put her past behind her and conceded her adolescence to the training required by the court. At twenty she was recommended to my father, the court archivist, as second wife. When she first met this quiet, dedicated man on the day before her marriage she closed her eyes in blessing. My father taught her the arts of the library and schooled her well. From her I have received keen eyes of jade green and a prestigious memory, a memory developed she said from my father’s joy of reading to her in their private hours, and before she could read herself. Each morning he would examine her to discover what she had remembered of the text read the night before. When I was a little child she would quote to me the Confucian texts on which she had been ****** schooled, and she then would tell me of her childhood home. She primed my imagination and my poetic world with descriptions of a domestic rural life.
 
Sometimes in the arms of my Lord I have freely rhapsodized in chusi metre these delicate word paintings of my mother’s home. She would say ‘We will walk now to the ruined tower beside the lake. Listen to the carolling birds. As the sparse clouds move across the sky the warm sun strokes the winter grass. Across the deep lake the forests are empty. Now we are climbing the narrow steps to the platform from which you and I will look towards the sun setting in the west. See the shadows are lengthening and the air becomes colder. The blackbird’s solitary song heralds the evening.  Look, an owl glides silently beneath us.’
 
My Lord will then quote from Hsieh Ling-yun,.
 
‘I meet sky, unable to soar among clouds,
face a lake, call those depths beyond me.’
 
And I will match this quotation, as he will expect.
 
‘Too simple-minded to perfect Integrity,
and too feeble to plough fields in seclusion.’
 
He will then gaze into my eyes in wonder that this obscure poem rests in my memory and that I will decode the minimal grammar of these early characters with such poetry. His characters: Sky – Bird – Cloud – Lake – Depth. My characters: Fool – Truth – Child – Winter field – Isolation.
 
Our combined invention seems to take him out of his Emperor-self. He is for a while the poet-scholar-sage he imagines he would like to be, and I his foot-sore companion following his wilderness journey. And then we turn our attention to our bodies, and I surprise him with my admonitions to gentleness, to patience, to arousing my pleasure. After such poetry he is all pleasure, sensitive to the slightest touch, and I have my pleasure in knowing I can control this powerful man with words and the stroke of my fingertips rather than by delicate youthful beauty or the guile and perverse ingenuity of an ****** act. He is still learning to recognise the nature and particularness of my desires. I am not as his other women: who confuse pleasure with pain.
 
Thoughts of my mother. Without my dear father, dead ten years, she is a boat without a rudder sailing on a distant lake. She greets each day as a gift she must honour with good humour despite the pain of her limbs, the difficulty of walking, of sitting, of eating, even talking. Such is the hurt that governs her ageing. She has always understood that my position has forbidden marriage and children, though the latter might be a possibility I have not wished it and made it known to my Lord that it must not be. My mother remains in limbo, neither son or daughter seeking to further her lineage, she has returned to her sister’s home in the distant village of her birth, a thatched house of twenty rooms,
 
‘Elms and willows shading the eaves at the back,
and, in front,  peach and plum spread wide.
 
Villages lost across mist-haze distances,
Kitchen smoke drifting wide-open country,
 
Dogs bark deep among the back roads out here
And cockerels crow from mulberry treetops.
 
My esteemed colleague T’ao Ch’ien made this poetry. After a distinguished career in government service he returned to the life of a recluse-farmer on his family farm. Living alone in a three-roomed hut he lives out his life as a recluse and has endured considerable poverty. One poem I know tells of him begging for food. His world is fields-and-gardens in contrast to Hsieh Ling-yin who is rivers-and-mountains. Ch’ien’s commitment to the recluse life has brought forth words that confront death and the reality of human experience without delusion.
 
‘At home here in what lasts, I wait out life.’
 
Thus my mother waits out her life, frail, crumbling more with each turning year.
 
To live beyond the need to organise daily commitments due to others, to step out into my garden and only consider the dew glistening on the loropetalum. My mind is forever full of what is to be done, what must be completed, what has to be said to this visitor who will today come to my court at the Wu hour. Only at my desk does this incessant chattering in the mind cease, as I move my brush to shape a character, or as the needle enters the cloth, all is stilled, the world retreats; there is the inner silence I crave.
 
I long to see with my own eyes those scenes my mother painted for me with her words. I only know them in my mind’s eye having travelled so little these past fifteen years. I look out from this still dark room onto my small garden to see the morning gathering its light above the rooftops. My camellia bush is in flower though a thin frost covers the garden stones.
 
And so I must imagine how it might be, how I might live the recluse life. How much can I jettison? These fine clothes, this silken nightgown beneath the furs I wrap myself in against the early morning air. My maid is sleeping. Who will make my tea? Minister to me when I take to my bed? What would become of my cat, my books, the choice-haired brushes? Like T’ao Ch’ien could I leave the court wearing a single robe and with one bag over my shoulders? Could I walk for ten days into the mountains? I would disguise myself as a man perhaps. I am tall for a woman, and though my body flows in broad curves there are ways this might be assuaged, enough perhaps to survive unmolested on the road.
 
Such dreams! My Lord would see me returned within hours and send a servant to remain at my gate thereafter. I will compose a rhapsody about a concubine of standing, who has even occupied the purple chamber, but now seeks to relinquish her privileged life, who coverts the uncertainty of nature, who would endure pain and privation in a hut on some distant mountain, who will sleep on a mat on its earth floor. Perhaps this will excite my Lord, light a fire in his imagination. As though in preparation for this task I remove my furs, I loose the knot of my silk gown. Naked, I reach for an old under shift letting it fall around my still-slender body and imagine myself tying the lacings myself in the open air, imagine making my toilet alone as the sun appears from behind a distant mountain on a new day. My mind occupies itself with the tiny detail of living thus: bare feet on cold earth, a walk to nearby stream, the gathering of berries and mountain herbs, the making of fire, the washing of my few clothes, imagining. Imagining. To live alone will see every moment filled with the tasks of keeping alive. I will become in tune with my surroundings. I will take only what I need and rely on no one. Dreaming will end and reality will be the slug on my mat, the bone-chilling incessant mists of winter, the thorn in the foot, the wild winds of autumn. My hands will become stained and rough, my long limbs tanned and scratched, my delicate complexion freckled and wind-pocked, my hair tied roughly back. I will become an animal foraging on a dank hillside. Such thoughts fill me with deep longing and a ****** desire to be tzu-jan  - with what surrounds me, ablaze with ****** self.
 
It is not thought the custom of a woman to hold such desires. We are creatures of order and comfort. We do not live on the edge of things, but crave security and well-being. We learn to endure the privations of being at the behest of others. Husbands, children, lovers, our relatives take our bodies to them as places of comfort, rest and desire. We work at maintaining an ordered flow of existence. Whatever our station, mistress or servant we compliment, we keep things in order, whether that is the common hearth or the accounts of our husband’s court. Now my rhapsody begins:
 
A Rhapsody on a woman wishing to live as a recluse
 
As a lady of my Emperor’s court I am bound in service.
My court is not my own, I have the barest of means.
My rooms are full of gifts I am forced barter for bread.
Though the artefacts of my hands and mind
Are valued and widely renown,
Their commissioning is an expectation of my station,
With no direct reward attached.
To dress appropriately for my Lord’s convocations and assemblies
I am forced to negotiate with chamberlains and treasurers.
A bolt of silk, gold thread, the services of a needlewoman
Require formal entreaties and may lie dormant for weeks
Before acknowledgement and release.
 
I was chosen for my literary skills, my prestigious memory,
Not for my ****** beauty, though I have been called
‘Lady of the most gracious movement’ and
My speaking voice has clarity and is capable of many colours.
I sing, but plainly and without passion
Lest I interfere with the truth of music’s message.
 
Since I was a child in my father’s library
I have sought out the works of those whose words
Paint visions of a world that as a woman
I may never see, the world of the wilderness,
Of rivers and mountains,
Of fields and gardens.
Yet I am denied by my *** and my station
To experience passing amongst these wonders
Except as contrived imitations in the palace gardens.
 
Each day I struggle to tease from the small corner
Of my enclosed eye-space some enrichment
Some elemental thing to colour meaning:
To extend the bounds of my home
Across the walls of this palace
Into the world beyond.
 
I have let it be known that I welcome interviews
With officials from distant courts to hear of their journeying,
To gather word images if only at second-hand.
Only yesterday an emissary recounted
His travels to Stone Lake in the far South-West,
Beyond the gorges of the Yang-tze.
With his eyes I have seen the mountains of Suchan:
With his ears I have heard the oars crackling
Like shattering jade in the freezing water.
Images and sounds from a thousand miles
Of travel are extract from this man’s memory.
 
Such a sharing of experience leaves me
Excited but dismayed: that I shall never
Visit this vast expanse of water and hear
Its wild cranes sing from their floating nests
In the summer moonlight.
 
I seek to disappear into a distant landscape
Where the self and its constructions of the world may
Dissolve away until nothing remains but the no-mind.
My thoughts are full of the practicalities of journeying
Of an imagined location, that lonely place
Where I may be at one with myself.
Where I may delight in the everyday Way,
Myself among mist and vine, rock and cave.
Not this lady of many parts and purposes whose poems must
Speak of lives, sorrow and joy, pleasure and pain
Set amongst personal conflict and intrigue
That in containing these things, bring order to disorder;
Salve the conscience, bathe hurt, soothe sleight.

When Zuo Fen woke day was well advanced into the Horse hour. In her darkened room a frame of the brightest light pulsed around the shuttered window. A breeze of scents from her herb garden brought sage, motherwort and lovage to cleanse the confined air, what remained of his visit, those rare aromatic oils from a body freed from its robes. Turning her head into the pillow that odour of him embraced her once more as in the deepest and most prolonged kiss , when with no space to breathe passion displaces reason in the mind.
 
The goat cart had brought him silently to her court in the Tiger hour, as was his custom in these summer days when, tired of his women’s attention, he seeks her company. In the vestibule her maid leaves a bowl of fresh water scented with lemon juice, a towel, her late uncle’s comb, a salve for his hands. Without removing his shoes, an Emperor’s privilege, he enters her study pausing momentarily while Xi-Lu removes himself from the exalted presence, his long tail *****, his walk provocative, dismissive. Zuo Fen is at her desk, brush in hand she finishes a copy of  ‘A Rhapsody for my Lord’. She has submitted herself to enter yet again that persona of the young concubine taken from her family to serve that community from which there seems no escape.
 
I was born in a humble, isolated, thatched house,
And was never well-versed in writing.
I never saw the marvellous pictures of books,
Nor had I heard of the classics of ancient sages.
I am dim-witted, humble and ignorant,
But was mistakenly placed in the Purple Palace . . .
 
He loves to hear her read such words, to imagine this fragile girl, and see her life at court described in the poet’s elegant characters. Zuo Fen’s scrolls lie on his second desk. Touching them, as he does frequently, is to touch her, is to feel mystery of her long body with its disregard of the courtly customs of his many, many women; the soft hair on her legs, the deep forest guarding her hidden ***, her peasant feet, her long fingers with their scent of ink and herbs.
 
He kneels beside her, gradually opening his ringed hand wide on her gowned thigh, then closing, then opening. A habit: an affectation. His head is bent in an obeisance he has no need to make, only, as he desires her he does this, so she knows this is so. She is prepared, as always, to act the part, or be this self she has opened to him, in all innocence at first, then in quiet delight that this is so and no more.
 
‘A rhapsody for me perhaps?’
‘What does Liu Xie say? The rhapsody is a fork in the road . . .
‘ . . . a different line’, he interrupts and quotes,’ it describes people and objects. It pictures appearance with a brilliance akin to sculpture or painting.’
‘What is clogged and confined it invariably opens. It depicts the commonplace with unbounded charm.’
‘But the goal of the form is beauty well-ordered . . . . as you are, dearest poet.’
‘You spoilt the richness of Lui Xie’s ending . . .’
‘I would rather speak of your beauty than Xie’s talk of gardening.’
‘Weeding is not gardening my Lord.’
 
And with that he summons her to read her rhapsody whilst his hands part her gown . . .
 
Over the years since he took her maidenhead, brusquely, with the impatience of his station, and she, on their second encounter deflowered him in turn with her poem about the pleasure due to woman, they had become as one branch on the same tree. She sought to be, and was, his equal in the prowess of scholastic memory. She had honed such facility with the word: years of training from her father in the palace archives and later in the mind games invented by and played with her brother. Then, as she entered womanhood and feared oblivion in an arranged marriage, she invented the persona of the pale girl, a fiction, who, with great gentleness and poetry, guided the male reader into the secrets of a woman’s ****** pleasure and fulfilment. In disguise, and with her brother’s help, she had sought those outside concubinage - for whom the congress of the male and female is rarely negotiable. She listened and transcribed, then gradually drew the Emperor into a web of new experience to which he readily succumbed, and the like of which he could have hardly imagined. He wished to promote her to the first lady of his Purple Chamber. She declined, insisting he provide her with a court distant from his palace rooms, yet close to the Zu-lin gardens, a place of quiet, meditation and the study of astronomy.
 
But today, this hot summer’s day, she had reckoned to be her birthday. She expected due recognition for one whose days moved closer to that age when a birthday is traditionally and lavishly celebrated. Her maid Mei-Lim would have already prepared the egg dishes associated with this special day. Her brother Zuo-Si may have penned a celebratory ode, and later would visit her with his lute to caress his subtle words of invention.
 
Your green eyes reflect a world apart
Where into silence words are formed dew-like,
Glistening as the sun rises on this precious day.
As a stony spring washes over precious jade,
delicate fishes swim in its depths
dancing to your reflection on the cool surface.
No need of strings, or bamboo instruments
When mountains and waters give forth their pure notes . . .
 
Her lord had left on her desk his own Confucian-led offering, in brushstrokes of his time-stretched hand, but his own hand nevertheless, and then in salutation the flower-like character leh (joy)
 
‘Wheresoever you go, go with all your heart’.
 
Meanwhile Xi-Lu stirred on the coverlet reminding Zuo Fen that the day was advancing and he had received no attention or conversation. It was whispered abroad that this lady spoke with her cat whom each afternoon would accompany his mistress on a walk through the adjacent gardens. It was true, Zuo Fen had taught Xi-Lu to converse in the dialect of her late mother’s province, but that is another story.
 
Lying on her back, eyes firmly shut, Zuo Fen surveyed the past year, a year of her brother’s pilgrimage to the Tai Mountains, his subsequent disappearance at the onset of winter, her Lord’s anger then indulgence as he allowed her to seek Zuo Si’s whereabouts. She thought of her sojourn in Ryzoki, the village of stone, where she discovered the blind servant girl who had revealed not only her brother’s whereabouts but her undying love for this strange, ungainly, uncomfortably ugly man who, with the experience gained from his sister’s persistent research had finally learned to love and be loved in equal measure for his gentle and tender actions. And together, their triumph: in ‘summoning the recluse’, and not one alone but a community of five living harmoniously in caves of the limestone heights. Now returned they had worked in ever secret ways to serve their Emperor in his conflict against the war-lord Tang.
 
She now resolved to take a brief holiday from this espionage, her stroking of the Emperor’s mind and body, and those caring sisterly duties she so readily performed. She would remove herself and her maid to a forest cabin: to lie in the dry mottled grass of summer and listen to the rustle of leaves, the chatter of birds, the sounds of insects and the creak-crack of the forest in the summer heat. She would plan a new chapter in her work as a poet and writer: she would be the pale girl no longer but a woman of strength and confidence made beautiful by good fortune, wise management and a generosity of spirit. She needed to prepare herself for her Lord’s demise, when their joyful hours living the lives of Prince and Lady of Xiang, he with his stallion gathering galingales, she with her dreams of an underwater house, would no longer be. She would study the ways of the old. She would seek to learn how peace and serenity might overcome those afflictions of age and circumstance, and when it is said that love’s chemistry distils pure joy through the intense refinement of memory.

The courtesan and poet Zuo Fen had two cats Xe Ming and Xi Ming. Living in her distant court with only her maid Hu Yin, her cats were often her closest companions and, like herself, of a crepuscular nature.
      It was the very depths of winter and the first moon of the Solstice had risen. The old year had nearly passed.
      The day itself was almost over. Most of the inner courts retired before the new day began (at about 11.0pm), but not Zuo Fen. She summoned her maid to dress her in her winter furs, gathered her cats on a long chain leash, and walked out into the Haulin Gardens.
      These large and semi-wild gardens were adjacent to the walls of her personal court. The father of the present Emperor had created there a forest once stocked with game, a lake to the brim with carp and rich in waterfowl, and a series of tall structures surrounded by a moat from which astronomers were able to observe the firmament.
      Emperor Wu liked to think of Zuo Fen walking at night in his father’s park, though he rarely saw her there. He knew that she valued that time alone to prepare herself for his visits, visits that rarely occurred until the Tiger hours between 3.0am and 6.0am when his goat-drawn carriage would find its way to her court unbidden. She herself would welcome him with steaming chai and sometimes a new rhapsody. They would recline on her bed and discuss the content and significance of certain writings they knew and loved. Discussion sometimes became an elaborate game when a favoured Classical text would be taken as the starting point for an exchange of quotation. Gradually quotation would be displaced by subtle invention and Zuo Fen would find the Emperor manoeuvring her into making declarations of a passionate or ****** nature.
       It seemed her very voice captivated him and despite herself and her inclinations they would join as lovers with an intensity of purpose, a great tenderness, and deep joy. He would rest his head inside her cloak and allow her lips to caress his ears with tales of river and mountain, descriptions of the flights of birds and the opening of flowers. He spoke to her ******* of the rising moon, its myriad reflections on the waters of Ling Lake, and of its trees whose winter branches caressed the cold surface.

Whilst Zuo Fen walked in the midnight park with her cats she reflected on an afternoon of frustration. She had attempted to assemble a new poem for her Lord.  Despite being himself an accomplished poet and having an extraordinary memory for Classical verse, the Emperor retained a penchant for stories about Mei-Lim, a young Suchan girl dragged from her family to serve as a courtesan at his court.
      Zuo Fen had invented this girl to articulate some of her own expressions of homesickness, despair, periods of constant tearfulness, and abject loneliness. Such things seemed to touch something in the Emperor. It was as though he enjoyed wallowing in these descriptions and his favourite A Rhapsody on Being far from Home he loved to hear from the poet’s own lips, again and again. Zuo Fen felt she was tempting providence not to compose something new, before being ordered to do so.
      As she struggled through the afternoon to inject some fresh and meaningful content into a story already milked dry Zuo Fen became aware of her cats. Xi Ming lay languorously across her folded feet. Xe Ming perched like an immutable porcelain figure on a stool beside her low writing table.
Zuo Fen often consulted her cats. ‘Xi Ming, will my Lord like this stanza?’

“The stones that ring out from your pony’s hooves
announce your path through the cloud forest”

She would always wait patiently for Xi Ming’s reply, playing a game with her imagination to extract an answer from the cinnamon scented air of her winter chamber.
      ‘He will think his pony’s hooves will flash with sparks kindling the fire of his passion as he prepares to meet his beloved’.
      ‘Oh such a wise cat, Xi Ming’, and she would press his warm body further into her lap. But today, as she imagined this dialogue, a second voice appeared in her thoughts.
      ‘Gracious Lady, your Xe Ming knows his under-standing is poor, his education weak, but surely this image, taken as it is from the poet Lu Ji, suggests how unlikely it would be for the spark of love and passion to take hold without nurture and care, impossible on a hard journey’.
       This was unprecedented. What had brought such a response from her imagination? And before she could elicit an answer it was as though Xe Ming spoke with these words of Confucius.

“Do not be concerned about others not appreciating you, be concerned about you not appreciating others”

Being the very sensible woman she was, Zuo Fen dismissed such admonition (from a cat) and called for tea.

Later as she walked her beauties by the frozen lake, the golden carp nosing around just beneath the ice, she recalled the moment and wondered. A thought came to her  . . .
       She would petition Xe Ming’s help to write a new rhapsody, perhaps titled Rhapsody on the Thought of Separation.

Both Zuo Fen’s cats came from her parental home in Lingzhi. They were large, big-***** mountain cats; strong animals with bear-like paws, short whiskered and big eared. Their coats were a glassy grey, the hairs tipped with a sprinkling of white giving the fur an impression of being wet with dew or caught by a brief shower.
       When she thought of her esteemed father, the Imperial Archivist, there was always a cat somewhere; in his study at home, in the official archives where he worked. There was always a cat close at hand, listening?
       What texts did her father know by heart that she did not know? What about the Lu Yu – the Confucian text book of advice and etiquette for court officials. She had never bothered to learn it, even read it seemed unnecessary, but through her brother Zuo Si she knew something of its contents and purpose.

Confucius was once asked what were the qualifications of public office. ‘Revere the five forms of goodness and abandon the four vices and you can qualify for public office’.
       For the life of her Zuo Fen could not remember these five forms of goodness (although she could make a stab at guessing them). As for those vices? No, she was without an idea. If she had ever known, their detail had totally passed from her memory.
       Settled once again in her chamber she called Hu Yin and asked her to remove Xi Ming for the night. She had three hours or so before the Emperor might appear. There was time.
        Xe Ming was by nature a distant cat, aloof, never seeking affection. He would look the other way if regarded, pace to the corner of a room if spoken to. In summer he would hide himself in the deep undergrowth of Zuo Fen’s garden.
       Tonight Zuo Fen picked him up and placed him on her left shoulder. She walked around her room stroking him gently with her small strong fingers, so different from the manicured talons of her colleagues in the Purple Palace. Embroidery, of which she was an accomplished exponent, was impossible with long nails.
       From her scroll cupboard she selected her brother’s annotated copy of the Lun Yu, placing it unrolled on her desk. It would be those questions from the disciple Tzu Chang, she thought, so the final chapters perhaps. She sat down carefully on the thick fleece and Mongolian rug in front of her desk letting Xe Ming spill over her arms into a space beside her.
       This was strange indeed. As she sat beside Xe Ming in the light of the butter lamps holding his flickering gaze it was as though a veil began to lift between them.
       ‘At last you understand’, a voice appeared to whisper,’ after all this time you have realised . . .’
      Zuo Fen lost track of time. The cat was completely motionless. She could hear Hu Yin snoring lightly next door, no doubt glad to have Xi Ming beside her on her mat.
      ‘Xe Ming’, she said softly, ‘today I heard you quote from Confucius’.
      The cat remained inscrutable, completely still.
      ‘I think you may be able to help me write a new poem for my Lord. Heaven knows I need something or he will tire of me and this court will cease to enjoy his favour’.
      ‘Xe Ming, I have to test you. I think you can ‘speak’ to me, but I need to learn to talk to you’.
      ‘Tzu Chang once asked Confucius what were the qualifications needed for public office? Confucius said, I believe, that there were five forms of goodness to revere, and four vices to abandon’.
       ‘Can you tell me what they are?’
      Xe Ming turned his back on Zuo Fen and stepped gently away from the table and into a dark and distant corner of the chamber.
      ‘The gentle man is generous but not extravagant, works without complaint, has desires without being greedy, is at peace, but not arrogant, and commands respect but not fear’.
      Zuo Fen felt her breathing come short and fast. This voice inside her; richly-texture, male, so close it could be from a lover at the epicentre of a passionate entanglement; it caressed her.
      She heard herself say aloud, ‘and the four vices’.
      ‘To cause a death or imprisonment without teaching can be called cruelty; to judge results without prerequisites can be called tyranny; to impose deadlines on improper orders can be thievery; and when giving in the procedure of receipt and disbursement, to stint can be called officious’.
       Xe Ming then appeared out of the darkness and came and sat in the folds of her night cloak, between her legs. She stroked his glistening fur.
       Zuo Fen didn’t need to consult the Lu Yu on her desk. She knew this was unnecessary. She got to her feet and stepped through the curtains into an antechamber to relieve herself.
       When she returned Xe Ming had assumed his porcelain figure pose. So she gathered a fresh scroll, her writing brushes, her inks, her wax stamps, and wrote:

‘I was born in a humble, isolated, thatched house,
and was never well versed in writing.
I never saw the marvellous pictures of books,
nor had I heard of the classics of earlier sages.
I am dimwitted, humble and ignorant . . ‘

As she stopped to consider the next chain of characters she saw in her mind’s eye the Purple Palace, the palace of the concubines of the Emperor. Sitting next to the Purple Chamber there was a large grey cat, its fur sprinkled with tiny flecks of white looking as though the animal had been caught in a shower of rain.
       Zuo Fen turned from her script to see where Xe Ming had got to, but he had gone. She knew however that he would always be there. Wherever her imagination took her, she could seek out this cat and the words would flow.

Before returning to her new text Zuo Fen thought she might remind herself of Liu Xie’s words on the form of the Rhapsody. If Emperor Wu appeared later she would quote it (to his astonishment) from The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons.

*The rhapsody derives from poetry,
A fork in the road, a different line of development;
It describes objects, pictures and their appearance,
With a brilliance akin to sculpture and painting.
What is clogged and confined it invariably opens up;
It depicts the commonplace with unbounded charm;
But the goal of the form is of beauty well ordered,
Words retained for their loveliness when weeds have been cut away.

"Twenty years before current time, the Spear Sect, known for only taking one student had its Sect Head accused of practicing Demonic Martial Arts by the leaders of the Murim Orthodox Union and was given the judgment of death."

I.

"A team of horses will struggle to chase down a spoken word. From the Analects of Confucius"

And when they died, their life ebbed away.
The maws of dogma forcing their daggers
To blot out the truth with the blood of the lost.
The orthodox sect's swords painting an old wall
With thin veneer of paint, haphazardly done.

In an unmarked grave lies the spear sect.
Where two died, another lived on.

II.

"An old warhorse in the stable still longs to gallop a thousand li. From the Analects of Confucius."

And they pierced his ribs,
his flesh threshed by deceit and
The facade of the pharisees
forcing him down. In the dark caves
he was placed with the heavy stone.

The shroud is a white sheet
Covering his scarred body.

His life lived on with the sinful:
the tax collectors and the courtesans;
the uncouth and uneducated,
the murderers and drunkards,
the gentiles of the other sects.

Though he lived not as others did.

From one spear he died,
with another he lived,
Leading them with the sacred fire.
Fishing for followers
among the many hungry.

December 2021

(I)
So concretey, these jungles
but not like this
Glass shards shoot up 45 stories
only to have tarp covered markets
populated by shouters

Oh, Powerpuff Girls on backpacks
one green
one purple
one pink
And 10 dollar Gucci bags
these people have it made
Four blocks from the world stock exchange
these people have it made

(II)
You ain't had won ton noodle soup
Or chicken feet
Or shrimp stuffed eggplant
Or food from Chinese franchise Pizza Huts
which happens to be an escargot joint
What does that say about US?
hopefully not much

(III)
Red taxis between every other car
Double decker busses
more common than city pigeons
Still the city finds time for trees
whiskery ents rising out of
ancient volcanic soil

You would think it's a city full of sin
Seven million souls, what-
that's higher than I can count
It's not
Everyone here is cute and wrinkly
Confucian
except for the young
These people have it made

(IV)
In this city, you're expected to stay
home with mom and dad
As they get cute and wrinkly
you're to return the love
Confucian
these people have it made
11 seated dinners
these people have it made

(V)*
Here in this ancient city
the gravestones dot the hills
coat the hills
And then the cremation jars bury the hills
(yes, they're dead)
cough*

Here's how a Chinese name is structured:
[family name] [given name]
Confucianism
and then these names fade too
These people have it made
but it's alright.

Ancient people, ancient ways
Protracting back through time,
The culture of the Chinese race
Far predates Roman line.
Before the Huns and Visigoths
Cascaded forth to burn,
Confucian bred conformity
Did budding scholars learn.
Astronomy, anatomy,
Philosophy and law,
The ancients sought the knowledge path
Wide open lay the door
To secrets, mystic and arcane,
They plied their trade craft well
...Then broke into another age
Of red chaos and hell.

Swarming by the millions
And dying by the score,
Brother slaughtered brother
Until Chiang said,"No more!"
To Taiwan's craggy shores he fled,
He fortified it then
And left the Marxist mainland
In the hands of Mao's men.
The red tide swept the nation.
To militarily expand
And the cruelty of a massive force
Descended on the land.

Oh your heart should weep for China
The sensitivity and grace,
Is lost forever in the ******
To revolutionize this place.
The educated strangled,
The policemen didn't care,
And the little children running
With that red book in the air.
Oh your heart should weep for China
With her golden history torn
And her future in the sewer
Where the filthy vermin spawn.

The Chairman died without a God
Praise Allah, let it be.
And Jiang Qing, his willful wife,
Was jailed for treachery.
Deng Xiaoping rose from the dead
An elderly, wise man
Who galvanized the nations will
With a workable great plan.
Gradually, the people breathed,
The terror disappeared,
And hard repression from the top
Was nervously unfeared.
The cogs began to mesh again,
Commerce began to flow
The Red Brigade was over
And NEW CHINA was on show.

In recent years the old men
Still retain the reigns of power.
The Communistic system
Commands to this very hour.
But the rigid hand of commerce
Has loosened up a lot
And the capitalistic system
Allows profits to be got.
And the flow of information
Issues freely from the west
Influencing aspirations,
Putting systems to the test.
And the leaders know with certainty
That just around the bend,
There will be younger challengers
Who plan a different end.

The Olympics are in Beijing
In the coming August moon,
A showcase for the nations best
A demonstration soon
Of advancements that will show the world
Just how well that we have done
And that the hand of friendly comradeship
Is well and truly won.

But there is trouble in Tibet!
The saffron runs with blood.
The monks and soldiers trading blows
Are dying in the mud.
Agitation to be free
Is Tibet's distant call
And the rage of hot embarrassment
Demands the brutal fall
Of the troublemakers...Old men say

The saffron legions die.....

The howling Prayer flags scream their rage
To a lonely, cold, blue sky.





Marshalg
Mangere Bridge
1st April 2008

Mao Zedong’s revolution deposed the ancient, 5000 year old rule of Dynastic China.
In doing so he espoused the continuous violent struggle by contradictory forces within society to produce a perpetual disequilibrium of revolt against intellectualism and Confucian principle and practice.

With the global collapse of Communistic systems, the wily genius of the diminutive, Deng Xiaoping, breathed new life into the faltering rule
With a cunning rebranding of “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics”, he maintained the stability of Chinese Communist kleptocracy until relatively recent times.
But the middle class awakening of Tiananmen Square and the recent Hong Kong massed protest, has brought into focus the demands of an increasingly educated, increasingly affluent, Chinese society’s expectation and demand for increased democratic rights and freedom and a more just system of the Rule of Law.

The day of the old, strong arm, autocratic rule is over.

China is emerging, quite naturally, into a world of increased information freedom, where the seeking of each individual’s betterment and independence promises a brighter future of personal dignity, increased self-esteem and an emerging sense of high anticipation.

President Xi Jinping’s Chinese Communist Party is now presented with the challenge to moderate in order to survive. To endeavour to embrace and meld the old concepts of Confucian harmony to the vaulting expectations of China’s new world beckoning.

M.
Denmark, Western Australia.
5 October 2014

** Xuan Huong English Translations by Michael R. Burch

** Xuan Huong (1772-1882) was a risqué Vietnamese poetess. Her verse, replete with nods, winks, ****** innuendo and a rich eroticism, was shocking to many readers of her day and will probably remain so to some of ours. Huong has been described as "the candid voice of a liberal female in a male-dominated society." Her output has been called "coy, often ***** lyrics." I would add "suggestive to graphic." More information about this provocative poet follows these modern English translations of her poems.

Ốc Nhồi  ("The Snail")
by ** Xuan Huong
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

My parents produced a snail,
Night and day it slithers through slimy grass.
If you love me, remove my shell,
But please don't jiggle my little hole!

The Breadfruit or Jackfruit
by ** Xuan Huong
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

My body's like a breadfruit ripening on a tree:
My skin coarse, my pulp thick.
My lord, if you want me, pierce me with your stick,
But please don't squeeze or the sap will sully your fingers!

Bánh trôi nước ("Floating Sweet Dumpling")
by ** Xuan Huong
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

My powdered body is white and round.
Now I bob. Now I sink.
The hand that kneads me may be rough,
But my heart at the center remains untouched.

The Cake That Drifts In Water
by ** Xuan Huong
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

I was born virginal and beautiful,
Yet my life's been full of struggles.
My fate rests entirely in the hands of the elites.
Yet still I shall keep my heart pure.

Ode to a Paper Fan
by ** Xuan Huong
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

One ring receptive enough for any rod,
Coyly alluring since ancient times…
Your employment is to cool down sweating heroes,
To cover gentlemen’s heads whenever it rains.
Behind the bed-curtain, let’s tenderly ask him:
Panting like a dog in heat, are you satisfied?

***** You!
by ** Xuan Huong
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

***** the rule that makes you share a man!
You slave like maids but without pay.

Unplanned Pregnancy
by ** Xuan Huong
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

My yielding resulted in this chaos;
Who can understand my anguish? …
However, this love-load I’ll soon be lugging,
Despite the world’s condemnation
(To have child, without a husband)
Is a an exceptional feat!

The Unfortunate Plight of Women
by ** Xuan Huong
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Hey sisters, do you know?
The baby bawls at your breast
While your husband slides onto your stomach.
Both demanding your attention,
Both endlessly tugging.
All must be put in order.
“Hurry up with the flowers!”
Such are the demands of husbands and children.
Hey sisters, do you know?

Questions for the Moon
by ** Xuan Huong
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

How many eons have you been there,
Endlessly transposing from slender to pregnant? …
Why do you orbit, aloof, the loneliness of night,
yet blush — so pale! — when seen by the sun?
Awake, long past midnight, whom do you seek?
Why so enchanted with hills, rivers and dales?

At the Chinese General's Tomb
by ** Xuan Huong
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

I see it there — looming, alone —
the General's tomb, so impressive!
But if I could be reborn, become a man,
with such advantages, couldn't I do better?

Advice to a Lamenting Widow
by ** Xuan Huong
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Why are you wailing, boo-hoo-ing, mourning a man?
Can it sister! Desist! Don't shame yourself!
O my ear sister, I should have warned you:
Don't eat meat, if it makes you ***** blood!

Wasps
by ** Xuan Huong
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Where and why are you wandering, foolish wasps?
Come, your big sister will teach you to compose!
Silly baby wasps suckle from rotting stamens;
***** ewes **** fences when there’s freedom in the gaps.

Lament for Hô Xuân Huong
by Nguyen Emperor Thieu Tri's brother
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Here the lake overflows with lotuses;
Allow the flower girls to gather some,
While not trampling Hô Xuân Huong's grave!
For in the Golden Springs beyond,
She still anguishes over lost love.
Her lipstick desiccate, her rouge faded, her tomb unattended,
Xuân Huong is gone…

Most of Huong's poems were written in Nôm script, a complex Vietnamese adaptation of Chinese characters employed from the 15th to 19th centuries. Through her Nôm poems, Huong helped elevate the status of Vietnamese poetry. A century later, she was called "the Queen of Nôm poetry" by Xuan Dieu, one of Vietnam’s greatest poets.

Huong was more than a mere penner of ****** verse; she was an "outspoken proto-feminist: an irreverent wild card bringing a new voice to Vietnamese poetry while marking out a bolder trail for what it means to be a woman."

"** Xuan Huong is an improbable figure in Vietnamese literature. Vietnamese historians are virtually unanimous in acclaiming her as the 'most special ' poetry writer who ever lived in Vietnam. … She wrote poetry which, for all its playfulness, may have been the darkest assault upon Confucian ethics ever delivered by a literate scholar of a classical East Asian society. Most modern Vietnamese writers agree that she often went too far, to the point where her contemporaries regarded her as a 'monster ' whose influence should be obliterated. — Alexander Woodside, Vietnam and the Chinese Model

Confucian ethics decreed that a female should obey: first her father, then her husband, then her son after her husband’s death.

Huong was apparently born in the Quynh Luu district of the north-central province of Nghe An. Xuan Huong means "Spring Fragrance," "Spring Essence," or "Scent of Springtime." Her father, a scholar named ** Phi Dien, died young. Her mother remarried, as a concubine. Huong grew up near Thang Long (modern Ha Noi), in a male-dominated society in which polygamy was permitted and men were more privileged than women. Huong may or may not have been a concubine herself. Very little is known with any certainty about her life.

In 1962, Nguyễn Đức Bính admitted, "I don't know anything about the poetess Hồ Xuân Hương and other people don't know any more than I do." And yet legends do take on lives of their own!

Keywords/Tags: ** Xuan Huong, Vietnamese, English translations, snail, grass, shell, hole, breadfruit, jackfruit, tree, skin, hands, sap, stain, dumpling, body, powder, powdered, sink, bob, swim, pond, heart, center, red, nom script, spring fragrance, spring essence, concubine

Dear friends , this is an old poem of mine which was composed after I learnt that one of my favourite Hollywood actor Richard Gere had become a Buddhist and believed in Zen Philosophy. So having read about Zen, I composed in a simple format about the same. Hope you like it. Thanks, - Raj.


                    ZEN PHILOSOPHY
With roots buried deep in soils of Ancient India,
And watered by the exotic blend of three different
cultures;
Reflecting the mysticism of India, the pragmatism
of the Confucian mind, and the Taoist’s love of
naturalness and spontaneity,
Buddhism bloomed and blossomed into an exotic
flower called 'Zen Philosophy'!

In 475 AD a pupil of Buddha called Bodhidharma
went to China.
There the Mahayana School of Buddhism mingled
with Chinese Taoism, which evolved into Chan
Philosophy!
'Chan ' derived from the Sanskrit  word 'dhyana',
which meant 'silent meditation',  -
Through which the Buddha attained enlightenment
and salvation!
Later, in 1200 AD this Chan philosophy travelled to
the shores of Japan,
Where 'Chan' got translated to 'Zen' by its many
followers and fans!
ZEN is the art of meditation to achieve inner awakening,
To gain intuitive knowledge, highlighting the inadequacy
of logical reasoning!
It therefore advocates the practice of 'zazen' or 'sitting
meditation',
For acquiring inner awakening through silent
contemplation!

ZEN could be practised in our daily life,
Without entering a hermitage, leaving behind your
family or wife!
'Gain the naturalness of your original true nature',
-  preaches the Zen Teacher through meditation,
'Rather than through mere faith and devotion,
which is contrary to Zen notion.'
'One must awaken to this present moment to feel
this life,
And not waste time in speculations of an Elusive
After-Life’!
The 'Enso' or the ‘circle’, is the Zen symbol which is
often deployed,
Symbolising Enlightenment, Strength, the Universe,
and the Void!
With this 'expression of the moment ' the Zen Philosophy
starts,
And today the ‘Enso’ is also the symbol of Expressionist
Art!
Never ask the Zen Master 'What is Zen, when, or how? ',
For he will always tell you, - 'Zen Is The Instant Now'!
                                                      - Raj Nandy, New Delhi.

He Lead the Chinese people against the Imperialist Japanese
Chiang symbolized China's resistance against Japan
In 1938 he received the title of Tsung -tsai (party leader)

For 8 years he kept 2/3 of the Chinese people
And 3/4 of the  Chinese land
Free of the Japanese
He was fighting a defensive war
Against a more powerful Japanese army

He believed in one China
In his life
He hoped to restore the unity of China

Committed to Confucianism
A united strong prosperous stable society
Is achieved by freeing up the industrious economy

A mixed economy
With a strong central government
With noble firm leaders
Keeping control

His vision of China is reflected in modern china
Much more than Mao's
He hoped for a modern Confucian China


His vision is closer to China than Taiwan

The interview asked," Would the Chinese people be better off
If Chiang had won and ruled instead of Mao?"

Yes, the thirty million people would not have died
And China would not have suffered the setbacks
In their education and economy

Dear Friends , this is an old poem of mine which was composed after I learnt that Richard Gere, one of my favourite Hollywood actors had become a Buddhist and believed in Zen Philosophy. So having read about Zen I composed this simple verse. Hope you like it. If you like it kindly re-post this poem. Thanks, - Raj.

                      ZEN PHILOSOPHY
With roots buried deep in soils of Ancient India,
And watered by the exotic blend of three different
cultures;
Reflecting the mysticism of India, the pragmatism
of the Confucian mind, and the Taoist’s love of
naturalness and spontaneity,
Buddhism bloomed and blossomed into an exotic
flower called 'Zen Philosophy'!

In 475 AD a pupil of Buddha called Bodhidharma
went to China.
There the Mahayana School of Buddhism mingled
with Chinese Taoism, which evolved into Chan
Philosophy!
'Chan ' derived from the Sanskrit  word 'dhyana',
which meant 'silent meditation',  -
Through which the Buddha attained enlightenment
and salvation!
Later, in 1200 AD this Chan philosophy travelled to
the shores of Japan,
Where 'Chan' got translated to 'Zen' by its many
followers and fans!
ZEN is the art of meditation to achieve inner awakening,
To gain intuitive knowledge, highlighting the inadequacy
of logical reasoning!
It therefore advocates the practice of 'Zazen' or 'sitting
meditation',
For acquiring inner awakening through silent
contemplation!

ZEN could be practiced in our daily life,
Without entering a hermitage, leaving behind your
family or wife!
'Gain the naturalness of your original true nature',
-  preaches the Zen Teacher through meditation,
'Rather than through mere faith and devotion,
which is contrary to Zen notion.'
'One must awaken to this present moment to feel
this life,
And not waste time in speculations of an ‘elusive
After-Life’.
The 'Enso' or the ‘circle’, is the Zen symbol which is
often deployed,
Symbolizing Enlightenment, Strength, the Universe,
and the Void!
With this 'expression of the moment ' the Zen Philosophy
starts,
And today the ‘Enso’ is also the symbol of Expressionist
Art!
Never ask the Zen Master 'What is Zen, When, or How? ' ,
For he will always tell you, - 'Zen Is The Instant Now'!
                                                      - Raj Nandy, New Delhi.

Mahayana in Sanskrit means 'Great Vehicle', and is the largest major tradition of Buddhism existing today. The other branch is called Hinayana, meaning the ‘Lesser Vehicle’.

there's a common "saying" in the realm of thinkers: i'm thinking about thought - and it's so common that it deserves an answer: that doubling-up of a two tier manifestation of consciousness... thought is a verb that seemingly has not translatory outlet akin to a limb, yet thinking is, very much akin to magnetism, thinking is a sixth sense - in that thought it mandible, and is attracted to almost anything, and can make something out of nothing, the mere act of thinking is obviously superficial, mere thought does not produce a tolstoy moment with a war & peace end product, but whatever they call "mindfulness" is a load of crock-****... the prime ingredient is not res cogitans (thinking thing) - you only become mindful when you stop to think... i have to admit, the least spectacular element of thinking is ethics... the ought i vs. the i ought not... thinking is hardly an "ethical" judgement medium.

thinking about thought:
    cogitans circa cogito* can sometimes
be debilitating,
to be honest: it's actually debilitating -
i find thinking a phenomenon -
or rather the soul (as concept)
an unexplained phenomenon,
  with thinking being a noumenon -
       i find that we're closer
to being the kantian revisionism of
cartesian "spandex" than we really
believe: i stopped believing in
the cartesian res cogitans -
i even stopped believing in my own
res vanus thing emptied, ready to be
filled,
      the spontaneity of thought,
its originality, even with a repetitive
narrative leaves me bewildered by
kant's res per se: a thing in itself...
       lodge a person in a stranger's pair of
shoes, lodge a person in a stranger's
cognitive "pattern" -
the result is: you'd still cling to your own,
however better the other's is
by comparison.
                  but there's a reason why
there's an antithesis to the cartesian res cogitans:
we do not perpetually think,
    there's no chance in hell to suggest
that thinking as perpetuated,
without holes of "meditation" where
no narrative emerges...
     i like thinking, i call it cognitive cinematics,
i actually prefer thinking than
           watching cinema -
      most people abhor the riddle of thought,
i find the existence of thought to be
as ridiculous as the "existence" of a soul...
    thought is alien to me,
      its mere existence is alienating,
in that it does not possess all the verb requirements,
yet nonetheless is the crucial moral
compass...
            i thought that i ought to do /
i thought that i ought not to, do...
                   thought is a protruding limb
made invisible by the disguise of its psychic origins...
i understand that extroverts abhor thinking,
and introverts bask in the "sunshine" of about
10 minutes of a decent narrative,
without a book...
            point being: i break down when
a súdòkū doesn't clarify into an ensō...
you **** up once, you **** up the whole puzzle...
actually, cogitans circa cogito is debilitating,
its a consciousness of a conscious,
  trying to limitate conscience -
      i.e. thinking is partially ethics, but mostly
narrative...
but there comes a time when it's useful,
           notably when you fucl up a súdòkū
puzzle and read some heidegger...
      something about aphorism 87 ponderings VI...
for a person so invested in sein und zeit -
so invested in being, and notably in time -
to produce the spatial rather than a temporal
concept of dasein?
  staggering...
                  even though heidegger is more
interested in space, rather than time,
                  to nonetheless write what he did...
mind you, what's the antithesis of the heilig geist?
the zeitgeist -
                and the father?
  the status quo: the un-moveable rock solid
presence of a deity.
                      i'm still bewildered
that heidegger was so obsessed with the temporal
realm, yet produced a spatial concept of
existence...
             why do i think about thinking?
how many mindless acts do people perform
that magnetises other peoples' interest to
"explain" the irrational?
  too many... better to think about thought,
than to think about not thinking.
people act so mindlessly on so many occasions
that it somehow makes sense,
to think about the sixth sense: which is thought.
entertainment wise? well, it's not
exactly skydiving,
       but if you find thinking entertaining,
almost toying with the ethical
dimension aspect of this rubix cube
of unsolvable curiosities among the general
venomous bite of indignities...
    the film's just started...
            and as long as you don't think
that it's all going to turn out into a telekinetic /
telepathic freak-show...
         strange, even the most sensible of
people manage to believe in a god
       in the realm of philosophy, or a soul...
that's a heresy and also abhorred is a belief
that thinking can translate into
telekinesis, or telepathy.
           i like to think about thought -
because it eradicates all ethical questions of
the θ-δει / θ-πρεπει -
        all moral actions stem from having
the capacity to invert thinking-as-narrating into
thinking-about-thought...
             it's almost like: licking the membrane
of the unconscious, to agitate it
into "speaking" confucian, i.e. the golden
motto: not unto others, as not unto yourself.
this, amazing to finally realise that
the primary concept emerging from heidegger
is a spatial rather a temporal orientation
of existence...
                more importantly: the so called
"ambiguity", or rather inconsistency?
so necessary in writing,
  if i was given a book as rigid as a rubric
of the times table of 2 x 1 trough to 2 x 9...
     i wouldn't be reading and immediately
"revising" / innovating -
   i'd be reading a well polished novel that
does not require my input, or subsequent
desires for an impetus to write...
        i'd quite simply settle for the end-score...
and grind out the meat of the narrative
into a session of commuting back home
on the tube, perhaps once in a while falling
asleep...
               there's essentially time,
as there's essentially space,
       and there's quintessentially thought...
where the two essential extremes converge
is already ****** obvious -
               actually, it's not like this:
there's the quintessential time -
   as there's the quintessential space -
    so uncorrupt-able as they are on their own,
than even when merged:
  there's the quintessential space-time continuum...
  thought? it's essential, but it's not
quintessential -
          thinking never was, and never will be,
the most perfect un-embodiment of man;
        sure, thinking is essential -
but it will never be quintessential...
                            thought can become corrupt,
time only becomes "corrupt"
      by nostalgia -
   as space becomes "corrupt" by claustrophobia /
agoraphobia.

Someone suggests that, "It is not wisdom
But authority that makes a law." Al,
With an obvious emphasis on the but, but,
As Confucius relates, people should be free.
With that all Americans agree, authority
That isn't wizened breaks life's Spirit,
Espirit de vie, instead of fostering it,
Realizing a people like the autocratic
Oligarchic narcissistic nihilist-in-chief,
Self-possessed to the point of being
A king-kong sized terrible-two, like his
Executive branch, which he's molded
Into rot, and it's attempting to destroy
The tree, this country, 'Turtle Island'.

So the as backwards remocrat approach,
While in ascendancy, because dempublicans
Didn't fight their hacking of our elections
Hard enough, isn't real or right, and
'Though it has come to pass, it's not
To stay, so say one and All. "..We(e),.."
Will not be undone, by the mediocracy
That thinks with spooned nose, speaks
With forked tongue, destroying democracy.
A society, fostered by progressing
Civilization, not a cleptocracy fueled
By technocracies' ravaging of the Earth.
For e.g., Confucian's 'Hanfu', "Heaven
Above, Earth below", manifests harmony.

Where man is betwixt, plumb, in balance.
It starts with individuals and "discipline,
Being the art of feeling awe..", Casteneda,
A combination of Jung's integrated self,
With Adler's integration into community,
A Sartrean freedom: "..we are free because
We are not a self, but a presence-to-self,
The transcendence, nihilation of our self.
We're other to our selves, that whatever we
Are or whatever others may ascribe to us,
We are in the manner of not being it.", no
Longer ego ridden, a tool in la machine's
Hand, rather, as it began, man weilding
Tools to better life, in nature's balance.

We can't go back to the righteousness of
Chief Seattle's, "..no one can own the land",
We can tread lightly, stalking ourselves,
Giving back to nature's abundance, a healthy
Skepticism, it's not the self-sacrificed when
We do what needs to be done, rather the false
Ego sacrificed at Thee's altar within.  Then,
As we left no footprints that followed none,
They will echo in all ways, and on, always.
So, on this tragic 50 th Memorial of the
Assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.,
Let us remember his shining example, and his
Spirits, "...judging not lest ye be judged's"
Compassion for his neighbor, "...treated as

He wanted to be", for he wanted to be more,
Ever studiously growing.  His dream was for
All who choose awakening.  So too, those who
Suffer, and suffer from false-ego, and
Its projections, in mental cells, built of
Walls of delusions, with bricks of illusions,
Their personal hells, shouldn't be judged
Autocratically, as laws can work and be
Compassionately applied.  Also, even
Though, King pulled "..the arc of the moral
Universe bends towards justice" out of his
As, we know, if we take bullets we aren't
Making them, addressing personal injustices
Stops them from becoming global ones too.

If we don't exercise our responsibilities
Their Siamese twin sisters, freedoms,
Will wither like unused muscles, as well.
"You can't dismantle the man's house with the
Man's tools (materialism)", Audrey, Gandhi's,
"Be the change you want to see in the world,
The root of all oppression lies in (supposed)
Science", though he pulled "Satyagraha", out
Of his as.  What we don't matters as much as
What we do, the manner in which we don't or
Do things brings light, life to them or it
Doesn't, those most attached to life or
Death are more closely death, live on your
Feet or die continually on your knees.  
  
You see, while might might make right, it
Always makes wrong, and fraternity rules.
Just because the invisible coup's lie,
"Hillary's not perfect", was let fly by some
Dinos, linos, sinos, ginos, ainos, hackers,
Kremlin kronies now in the kluckahouse, wicked
Leaks, 20 % of Bernie or bust bots, the US
Intelligence/police industrial complex, (who,
Like king george + his ****, cheney, purposely
Didn't prevent the attacks on 9-11-01, they
Didn't prevent the hacking of our 11-8-16
Elections, installing Trumpler, attempting to
Realize a borne again cold war, extreme theft
Of tax $, etc.) doesn't mean the world must

Fall to Ebony, ivory, the Black and white
Supremacies' cannibalizing the future, tax
Dolla's, in perfect harmony, to replicate the
Past's supposed: profits, pleasures + powers.
"..We(e),.." can stop ivory's: removal of DACA,
Reproductive, healthcare, and voting rights,
Blacks not having to wait till 2040 to get
Another President, instead they can get one in
2020, potentially, etc., for Ebony, and stop
Ebony's getting: rid of zero-tolerance in
Public school + harsh law, shorter sentences,
Earlier releases + paroles, waving of crack
Convictions, extreme war funding, gutting of
EPA's work, etc., for ivory, by dispelling the

Delusional construct of materialism, that
Actual religion, bi-headed, of the false gods
Of mammon, wealth, avarice, and mollock,
Extreme violence, grinding up seed (behind
The masks of Christians, Hindus, Atheists,
Etc.), exemplified in those merx for more's
Through to mercs for unnecessary unending
War's war machine, oiled by the blood of non:
United **** of assassins citizens, white,
Upper-middle-class to rich, supposed
Christians, which most worship, separating
"It from of the state", which is demanded by
The Constitution.  Then we can struggle to
Denotseefy the rest of the 21 flavors of, in

This 'baskin and robbins' of, supremacy.
Only then will this criminal conspiracy of
Criminal conspiracies again resemble a
Nation.  For e.g., take the trillion ton ice-
Cube that just dropped in the drink, coasts
Flooded costing us billions, so oil corps.
Can make even more $, making the egg shaped
Planet into a sphere, denaturing the Earth's
Defenses against the astronomical forces of
The Sun, Moon and continually degrading the
Earth's orbit around them.  It's God's tear,
And as a single tears story is seldom told,
That flood will wipe us out, like the lose
Of $ to get a photo of a golfer on Mars will.

Gynecology appeals to the rooting instinct and not just among pigs,
apartment-dwellers too crave the spotlight especially in cheap digs
A tree puts strength in its cambium membrane, seeds, bark & twigs
whilst outgrowing the imperilment of remaining grounded as sprigs
It was not long before the Rolling Stones were being paid for gigs,
in the day when greasy Guineas plugged sheenies & cultivated figs,
decades before sainted negroes thrived as reactionary brillos & nigs
when a schweinehund on par with Club of Rome's lard-*** Al Gore
was realistic enough to accept his natural vocation as a male *****
even though no Avon salve could rescue him from being still sore,
he collected for prostitutional services that there existed no bill for,
while at Sea World Shamu can't fit through a pinniped or seal door,
as whale flesh ain't no antidote for pill-heads on America's pill tour
Keep whacking the side of your head to hammer out doubt till sure
you become of religious piety while acting out a radio-active story
that destroys tumors and fecundity while rewarding war-won glory,
for critical menticide administered to each Margaret Thatcher Tory,
to render brains slack so that each id's reduced to a formless slurry,
and made denser & dumber than the dumb-*** mind of Ann Curry,
who sits around picking fleas off her pet rats calmly with no worry
like a pederast whose name is Marion but likes to be called Murray
because of thickset hair that was as curly as Bill Clinton's was furry
it made Hillary's perverse predilection into a ****-emergency hurry
as she faced extortion rackets entailing mucho homosexy potpourri
It's I.T.T., A.T. & T., F.P. & L. and A. & P. in lieu of slave-holder
In a demi-godly role of being everyplace looking over my shoulder
Like advice taken to heart by a ***** the tenth time you told her
On the occasion of the hundredth time that a ****** **** sold her
Put down that rifle and also that cup as there are doggedly two ratty
trees of wood: wood I stole & wood I shoplifted as doggy eats pup
Congratulations *******, you won the Nobel prize for shutting up
Move from a hovel & put down that shovel as there are 2 unkindly
kinds of wood: stolen & discounted as my rabid ***** eats her pup
****** Mary Jane Christmas to Quakers winning gifts for rutting up
Return my shovel and **** a guppy as there are 2 hunks of wood:
wood I stole & wood shoplifted as a dog ***** eats a hungry puppy
Cheers cancer-ridden surgeon, here's the Shaw prize for cutting up
The tall first wife, who was fleet of feet, was the easiest to book for
she preferred rat tail over bat wing and won as a dream to cook for
she hid herself very obviously therefore she wasn't hard to look for
her manifold athletic talents made her the leanest witch to hook for
Give me your hirsute/textile/hombre love you lovely hairy rag man,
with your pointy nose, unlimbered leg & warts from Larry Hagman
who from the horse's mountable side snuck up like an airy stag ram
Don't take what little's left via state Santa Christmas merry bag ban
Let's dress like women in debt at the oldest Chuck Berry drag stand
My happiness is easily seen in blood-letting cirques as corpuscular
while my rippling backwards frontage is of a physique so muscular
that it is known by fat aunt Joan as socked-in and highly avuncular
In icy Florida I pine for Klondike my favorite Alaskan lesbian lover
who, in our gay igloo, resembled that big oily ****** Danny Glover
whose **** buddy Mel Gibson made him half less pockless gaining
☹a little more of plenty above Kenai's northern-lit blinding darkness,
and punctuated by those empty promises of ****-driving starkness
that were dogged by monster sightings quite common to Loch Ness
where **** Welshmen smoke Scottish-spiced cigarillos smockless
Fear not as chronically-starved people are traditionally not so tough
so feed the hungry & while they are eating steal their bags and stuff
as unarmed Cymry won't do more than storm off in a Goidelic huff,
akin to a Tom Jones hissy fit of ***-wriggling dancing and gay fluff
This normal man wonders: How much public ******* is enough?
Pushing Fukushima scenarios beyond the point of a no-return bluff
and extraneous of a federal Continuity of Government powder puff
while parked on a decrepitly-reliable-ever-burgeoning-lard-*** duff
white men, like coal miners, mine mineable depths of Filipina ****
gynecologically like the average gynecology enthusiast off the cuff,
rejecting Bicol pathogenetic carpet chaw to dip Copenhagen *****,
a sprinkling 'tween lip & gum proves that no slanted ****'s too tuff
A trans-orbital lobotomy's necessitated when plants are root-bound,
Hello Addisonian crisis dysfunction when adrenal glands are found
insufficient when production of adrenaline is diagnosed as unsound
Mormons note the absent look of foremen in the Book of Mormon
and an absence of the Book of Mormon in the outlook of foremen
You hid it 'cause I can't find it every elsewhere a package for string
this catastrophe that threatens tragedy above the tryst below a fling
With cords knotted tightly around something tumorous I won't sing
It is the chlorine that cancels detergent in that electric washer thing
beneath cellar steps that David Niven's wife fell down while hiding
I lost her you found her, it's a dollar for riding plus a fee for finding
all broads blinded to inequity and to chick Nazis' unguided guiding
Oh Lord with such ease the slippery have slid into slipshod sliding!
The frailties of free men're exploited by N.S.A.'s jingoistic deriding
General Ike exposed the military-industrial-congressional complex
which strikes against the citizenry by venomous rattle snake reflex
faster than a dope-crazy Marilyn Monroe could reach for a Kleenex
thru curvatures in a third-dimensional, spatially-pornographic helix
that approximated the Mexi-milkers of actriz: la doña María Félix
rutting elephants in musth must respect advisory: kneel-harm-****,
to honor the moon-hoaxing memory of chronic liar Neil Armstrong
as obviously for **** Rosie O'Donnell her gay meal alarm's wrong
Johns familiarized themselves with Lillian Russell by buyin' ** Lil
as masochists meet masochistic needs with movies of Ryan O'Neal
Sadists satiate sadistic surges sharing sermons sold Séamus Ó Néill
& beheld-redemptive pleasures for patrons of free mass soul appeal
I'm nailed in my sub-par carpentry by all do-gooders of the nail ban
to the point where I'm willing to mail my big sister to the mail man
who's part & parcel of a mail-fraud plot & brother's can't-fail plan
Escaped & uncaught I will be no prison monkey's cell-mate-jail-fan
'Cause shorts clothe Richard Simmons' lard *** he has a pale can as
oil-from-rock Daniel's been given the pétrole epithet Ol' Shale Dan
Latino block & cinder create distortive Hispano-Américano rubble
'cause stirring up spics & greasy wetbacks invites N.C.L.R. trouble
Stand back anti-pope as I am about to burst your pederastic bubble!
Your egg-shell-thick pate's no match for a black jack as this club'll
smash its way thru cardinals, reverends, ministers, priests & dukes
to make cream taste like ***** and turn cake into what a dog pukes
Under U.S./Euro socialism there'll be no guy who's a young codger
and popular forenames will be banned including Preston and Roger
Trans-national entities whip horse dung into curdled cottage cheese
while denying rescue inhalers to asthmatics enjoying a bad wheeze
so as to avail publicly purpled aureolae of ready women who tease
Now is the time to release the promised South American killer bees
as the hour's passed to exact vengeance for a beheaded Robert Lees
Mafiosos contract that Joseph Valachi-types be capped at the knees
then hanged by their what's-her-names from il duce poles and trees
in such a fashion that'll tighten the ropes by cough, belch or sneeze
Long legs, wrong eggs, strong pegs, King Kong begs with a song of kegs
Let us dog dealers of wieners & corporate schemers: those 2-bit reamers
extend a left leg into the sacred space of my right one for time remaining
It's easy to harp on topics commiserate with crap profitably entertaining
A man who courts dogs & a court manned by dogs quibbles over kibble
Dogs devoid of canine teeth are not as happy to gnaw and to nibble
The Arc of the Covenant bestowed ancient promises metaphysical
shedding cockroach-scattering illumination that set courses tragical
on a populace & citizenry that were more attuned to an era magical
Before Zionistic Elders prepared an Order within cabals strategical
Beneath plum sunsets & catchy maladies that deafened folks lyrical
“Turn me on dead man” the Beatles backwardly warbled mystically
as the means and the method to sexcite vampresses gynecologically
For all shoulder-locked movements sway men anthropomorphically
Let us seek bi-lesbians who fear concerted opposition diametrically
as their prized packages remain barren, as they spawn ineffectually
Sappho's ovarian host pouch is barren as ***** meld ineffectually
as Western, Fallopian-tubed freakazoids are ****-probed habitually
Sapphic ovarian balloons shrink when hens ******* reciprocally
On Pearl Harbor Loch a false flag blackened Mister Moto's beacon
by shadowy, white manipulators under a U.S. sinister, proto-deacon
who, as a cousin-marrying-pipe-******* *******, emulated Lincoln,
the war-loving queer who went above & beyond his task to weaken
the will of sovereign states to sustain free-market economic health,
by exacting confiscatory taxes resulting in punishing capital wealth
The Beatles were creatures of M.K. Ultra's institution at Tavistock,
lost to a shocking future as shown by Alvin Toffler in Future Shock
whereas nothing can help us from taking an epidemiological knock
by Mao a la Trotsky, a la starvation wages via phony-baloney stock
in the image of Pol *** a la Lenin contrary to righteous John Locke
Our fused-egg brothers gestate together, flying as a migratory flock
dolled up in vestry wardrobe: papal bikini brassier, ******* & frock
awaiting George Orwell's 1984 English socialism known as Ingsoc
X number of years before Nancy Kwan wed ski champ Peter Pock,
& after Bob Ripley's Oriental/Occidental miscegenation ****** talk
as it was curlier than was Nimoy while he portrayed Vulcan Spock,
whose sweetness was unrehearsed, unrestrained & of a sickly mock
once taken, out of time as taken twice daily on any ol' broken clock
flesh stripped & exploited as the flightless relic of Earth's great auk
enjoying the laze of Sunday oblivious to extinct Darwinian schlock
as chastised love is Leonard Nimoy-pitiable with chastity-belt lock
Upon a Massachusettsian shore puritans purified Plymouth's Rock!
Forever amounts to nothing in betrayal of Heinlein's empathic grok
Back off quack as I'll **** the next 1 of you applying scalpel to ****
as a dad must regarding neo-Kantian, fatherless-**** Johann Bach
Deep in hell's bowels fricassees Jew Elizabeth/***-to-Death Taylor
who did every Joe Nobody from Captain Crunch to Norman Mailer
A harlot ***** was she from 10 niggerly toes to scary mulatto tone
as hellishly deep in Liz's brain was a splinter of hamster wish bone
& her ***-end was broad from fat foods Safeway to her would loan
Beneath her 3rd world-chiding heft Larry F's lawn chairs did groan
as this princess of whales never said no to hog jowls and corn pone
which made an interesting cut-out to novices of the porpoise prone
There won't be another Liz till Rockefeller perfects a Warner clone
with the aid of sewing machines to hem-stitch hems that need sewn
& a positronic brain stem to achieve mortality previously unknown
since Alex Bell pilfered **** inventor Antonio Meucci's telephone
Truth is light that Illuminists keep shadowed, darkened & unshown
for Hank & Phoebe Snow and Johnny Winter who would not atone
Thomas Edison stole or bought the patents to ingenious inventions
that he was more than happy to claim as his brilliant contributions
to the wealth & state of inquisitive Mankind's Earthen conventions,
also he took credit for Biblical allusions to immaculate conceptions
Which Bible books Tom Edison wrote no G.E. employee mentions
as stealing, purloining and commandeering were his 3 predilections
True historians know well charlatan Edison's dastardly elaborations
To pinch a hairy, chapped man is wrong as it puts him in more pain
For century-old Harry Chapman Pincher pinching made him insane
His unholy joy was to lay prone with mouth open to catch acid rain
& then hop into the commode to affect a toilet-related ankle sprain,
not too unlike Richard called **** & Jean who liked the name Jane
whose corpulence demands a piano coffin burial with crawler crane
Formaldehyde replaced 7 quarts of blood that went down a drain as
the proverb fits: when there's nothing to lose there's nothing to gain
Alan Ladd snuffed himself over a self-destructive hatred for Shane
and because Sue Carol preferred men of height Ladd couldn't attain
without elevator shoes & leading-lady actresses walking in ditches,
the love-life that humbles a netted shrimp into paralytic twitches as
Alan often got nothing from Brentwood ****** & witches because
****** pimps don't scrape **** off them Hollywood swanky *******
Tragically it's true that God's in the details & Satan's in the glitches
when Hippocratic Oath-denying doctors say don't bandage stitches,
it promotes infection needing treatment that add to a quack's riches
Apply no anti-bacterial salve unless your unbandaged wound itches
Amerika will be a Marxian paradise after we guillotine the snitches
harvest their organs, cremate & consign their ashes to crude niches
Give me, give me, give me, I can subsist not on a mere, single bean
Hey cheapo, get off your greasy ***, take me to Dairy Queen as my
**** is shaved, bra's padded & all kinks are relaxed by Afro Sheen
Western ***** are fattened for slaughter as sloped slants grow lean,
for lack of appendix, tonsils, adenoids, warts, piles, moles & spleen
Refugees flee what's so repressively dangerous that it's forever fled
The bloodied blood biz passes pathogens to bleeders bloodily bled
It is a dreadful situation that ****** folks find difficult not to dread
A gent is obliged to face conflict face first short of living in a shed,
plying the rough trade, rough-necking with ******* or playing dead
When my cruddy teeth are encrusted I brush the crud off with Crest
while working drainward with this golden cake of soap called Zest
Like a woman on public assistance I refuse to let my choppers rest
There was a time when talk of quiz was a precursor to an Iowa test
My basic skills are determinedly under-cutting my housewife guest
whose stems run north to her malignant tissue free mammae breast
In movies shooting orphans with high-powered rifles is done in jest
'cause in Amerika making ammunition is what wage-slaves do best
When I'm not utilizing forks for recreational after-meal dog-jabbin'
I am staking out hog farms for the planning of gainful hog-nabbin'
or making log-planing modifications on my pine-logged log cabin,
before crossing teamster picket lines for wage-earning job scabbin,'
I take pains to avoid being skinned in a Jimmy Hoffa mob stabbin'
A thousand Confucian truths drive my happy dreams to nightmares
as bi-****** pass out on Calexico-Mexicali-low-calorie light beers
I haven't the moxie to skate through hydrants of fate terminological
as those 78 crumb-bums behind T.V. “comedies” wax scatological
Ernie killed Chip & Robby to stamp his father a cipher biological
He hadn't room for women for production smacking gynecological
The last time he looked skyward his thoughts weren't cosmological
S.O.B. Ernest cursed routinely at arthritis diagnosed gerontological
He gives not a harlot's hello for innumerable faults anthropological
nor to lend his energies to scopes that abuse harmonics hormonical
as he stumblingly falls prey to meanderings sickishly trophological
Lord of Hostesses salvage carcass mine from insults cancrological
Redeem me in sudden form humanoid of activities pathogenetical
We mourn in Gettysburg's city as unrepentant lesbians on probation
Defying errors inflicted upon soldiers who forsook proper vocation
Anti-poping Argentine Francis as he's ****** to Satan's invocation
It remains the best course to abide by stellar laws of spatial rotation
Whether one's nationality is Romanian, Finnish, British or Croatian
Lost people will eat food outside their region &

Silver armour defeating deafening silence,
Arrow heads impaling against metal,
He stood there withstanding the violence,
As war and gore on soil starts to settle.

Fatal finish for violence over words,
As the sound armour dings and rings,
The only noise the soldiers heard,
Were the sound of death, violence brings.

He was dressed like a soldier in battle,
But he had a gentle beating heart,
His mind never once did rattle,
When they used violence to tear him apart.

His words resonate in the soldiers soul,
'You don't have to use violence to fight,
And in this world being whole,
Means finding the bright light'.

"Violence is never the solution,
  It's a lesson that never changes,
  It should not belong to confucian,
  But then again humanity rarely changes"

i know that just by drinking i will not feel good
with myself, i need to write something:
drinking alone never made much sense...
drinking when partying and socialising...
drinking when going to night-clubs almost:
almost always failing to pick up girls...
**** me... at my lowest i still managed to flirt
with a girl, kiss her dance with her...
   i even walked her to the bus-stop...
before she asked me what i did:
i said i was unemployed... i sort of forgot to say
that i was a poet in the making...
perhaps that's why i don't think i'm an alcoholic:
although... in a week's worth?
    i probably drink... how many units is a bottle
of whiskey?! 40... 4 x 7 =... ****... 3 x 7 = 21...
add a 7... that's 28... then add a zero...
i drink close to about 300 units of alcohol per week...
ha ha... and on the bottles?
   it reads: chief medical examiner for England
suggests that adults do not exceed drinking no more
than 14 units per week...
ha ha ha...                             ah ha...
i have a worried mind... i already said to myself:
like Prometheus... i'll sacrifice my liver to salvage
my mind...

and i'm willing to sacrifice years of my life into
my mortality's "winter" for the current ride...
i know the risks... i'm just really worried about being
constipated... and... eternity... eternity is a dawn
with a night before a day...
it's scaring me... should all of it be true...
well... the thought started scary... eternity?!
while all these insects live only days...
with infanticide and the neunormen

new-norms and old-taboos...
and then back to new-taboos and old-norms...
some people think time is linear... given history...
some people think time is cyclic...
we read history with a grain of salt and hindsight
and repeat our mistakes...
i? i think time is a sea-saw...
we're like a tide... a tide comes in...
a tide goes out... sometimes we appear
spectacular... like at the height of the Roman Empire
of the zenith of Greek intellectual curiosity...
then we fall back... allow for barbarian invasions...
what was spectacular about Ancient Greece
became Byzantine: i.e. bureaucratic...
muddled... the only great aspect of Byzantine
culture was the chants...
oh sure... the Greco-Judeo pact did undermine
the Latin influence...
the New Testament is a testament of the Greco-Judeo
pact: to undermine the Roman Empire...
no?

     it isn't? oh... come on... the myths because over time
myths: given time...
go along the pyramid "scheme" of:
mythology "<" history "<" journalism "<"...
          aha! now poetry comes to the fore...
which way are we going to go? "<" or ">"?
  what a wonky looking L... or Γ (gamma)...
then again... maybe it's one of those weird
"Copernican" Vs....
   right... how now: write the plural of vvvvvv...
without the apostrophe that's also
suggestive of v's... i.e. V owns a lawnmower?
right... move the apostrophe along... Vs'...
because... it's not versus: hence no vs. <---
  the full stop...

to reiterate: i learned to constrain my frustrations
on Samuel Beckett's Watt...
i remember one sunny afternoon
lying in a park and laughing from frustration
at the complications of the language...
laughing out loud: getting a wave hello from a small
boy walking back from school with his mother...
i wasn't laughing at anything particular
or for that matter universal, just the per se...

how else? vs' or vees or vvvvvvv etc.?
plenty of v v v v v v v
                 < < < < < < < <
                > > > > > > > > > ?

we haven't moved that much from the ancient
world... where letters had a duality of being used
as phonetic encoding symbols and mathematical
constants after all...
VI + IX = XV
    6 (b) + 9 (P) = 15 (IS)

now i would to being an alcoholic is i simply
drank to drink...
but i'm writing... i need creative juices...
if i'm not jerking off to pictures of mature
women... Ava Lauren... come on...
it's a Porsche of a body...
i don't need to watch anything... just the photograph
and i leave the rest to the imagination:
although compared to the cinema of memory:
the cinema of my imagination lasts at outbursts...
sure... if i were simply drinking...
to "cope": drinking before a mirror
and falling asleep with a hand placed in a bucket
of water to wet my bed...
yeah... then i'd join some A.A.... ahem...
midday "group therapy session"...

but i'm busy... well into the morning hours...
scribbling like "mad" like... the monk who wrote
the Codex Gigas...
       me? devil or my own ego? i like my garden...
only today before my expedition i offered
two plums to my neighbour and my mother...
i brought these kind fallings in my hand outstretched
in my palm... washed... obviously...
but i didn't usher in any confusion:
no conflation of knowledge
regarding: what's good (universal)
   with what's evil (particular)... hello!
                       Greco-Judeo conspiracy...

wow! Δ delta... that's not the "letter"
Pythagoras worked with... is it?
   he was working out why either L or Γ
have either \ or / missing respectively, no?
          but delta? Δ? that's an isoscoles...
now... i dare to wonder: akin to Heidegger:
  question-worthiness arises from a spontaneity...
questions asks themselves...
people just need to find them...
this is but one example...

you know when you're sitting in a garden...
and you hear a shoom echo in the sky...
but can't see anything...
right... there's a jumbo-jet flying over your
garden... you hear it first...
seconds later you see you...
**** the chicken and the egg dynamic for normal
people saluting the mantra of passive
curiosity...

what came first?
Δ or the triangle?! that's a big question:
a question that Wittgenstein could only appreciate...
since he wrote so sparingly:
but i have to admit... his stance on tautology:
the thesaurus... mine: on thesaurus rex...
and the dictionary omnibus...
                          i want to repay Samuel Beckett
with the same frustrations he poured onto me...
this is my revenge... i want to fry brains and then:
freeze them...
            
what came first? Δ (the letter) the sound...
Da da da or the triangle?
my guess is: ****... i've already answered it...
with what?! the use of ******* pyramids...
but how Δ morphed into D and how did the pyramids
become abstract "all of a sudden"?
ah... the glory days of Greek intellectual curiosity...
its genesis... oh too suddenly ***** by:

the myth of the origins of Rome...
the Aeneid: a Trojan holiday in Tuscany after the fall
of Troy...
    
but no... i couldn't simply drink and pretend
to look into a mirror...
i wish i could have been a painter:
then again: no...
i can't leave "****" to abstracts: to some "suppose so...."
"suppose" he "thought" this blah blah blah-*******...
ever get "*****" by a South African
with ****-friction that was so bad
you thought you were getting circumcised
of putting your phallus inside an enlarged earthworm's
mouth-gut?
    i have... it's not a pleasant experience...
knock-knock on wood... ****... not wood:
knock-knock on bone: i.e. my forehead...
               what a terrible **** that was...
and she was raised in society... a teacher at some
boarding school... all boys...
******* cocoon ***... in the dark...
under the bed-sheets... never... ever! again!
but at least i now know what a slightly timid
beached whale of a ****-blonde stereotype looks
like...
           dry ***** are the worst...
seriously: it felt like ****...
on to occasions i had problems with getting a hard
on with prostitutes...
this one time: fair enough...
it was my first time having a *******...
obviously i was nervous...
but when i was... ahem #metoo "*****"...
i was as hard as a fiddle...
   what the **** did she spike the food with?!

well.. what's done is done... Johnny Depp was believed:
a fully documented affair...
ah... this conflation on the basis of the word AND...
it's not like "he" said: and you will know
the difference between either good or evil...
that "we" will know the difference between
good AND evil... knowing our ontology:
we'd be prone to entertain good as evil...
and evil as good... in the latter instance:
the more lasting, entertaining prospect...
               aligned with our hoarding sentimentalities...

Kierkegaard was onto something...
but he just didn't have the bilingual or the "autistic" /
"schizophrenic" focus to drill the baron of 90
into a corner and establish grandiose architecture...

it's one bad "thing" after another...
the fact that i might be drinking and not scribbling:
an opportunity wasted...
but the fact that i can't find the right sort of music
to listen to while i scribble...
hell... if i could write in silence...
but it usually takes one song...
a song passed down...
BRYGADA KRYZYS - to co czujesz, to wiesz:
Crisis Brigade - what you feel, is what you know...
sampled from an album from 1992...
Poland... i never imagined them being
so bilingual... how did i arrive at the song choice?
i was revisiting Edinburgh trying to get back together
with my ex-Russian lass...
  failure... she was already on a "different " path...

three nights in a hostel... left to a ****** couple...
i was only "scouted" when talking to some Slovak...
i got drunk and my English veneer drooped...
**** me... i had a wild night in Cracow
a day after...
i was fending myself from this waggling tongue
taxi driver who caught me
squeezing at my "major-phlegm" residue tool
trying to find an alley-way...
scary story... teenage girls not invited...

but i was in a hostel with this couple from Warsaw...
best name for a capital anywhere...
compare War-Saw with Bang-****...
ha ha... so she was this tall girl...
pristine like a ballerina...
played netball or whatever the hell tall girls play...
we were roaming Edinburgh and we
came across a charity shin-dig
and i exclaimed: oh.. what a nice acoustic (guitar)...
immediately... she retorted:
i hope you return to Warsaw and find
a nice girl for yourself...
i.e.                      not her?!

what a hyper-democratic reality we're all living in
right now...
   i'm not going to see her again...
i can see her like i can see my great-grandad...
a shadow... a figment of my imgation: almost...
"almost" being the fact that she recommended
this song for me: feeding me this idiotic self-worth-sence
delusion of comparative "literarture":
i'm John Peel...
  but my speciality is outside the realm of
the English speaking world...

wasn't today spectacular?
   it sort of began... "it sort of": began with me cringing
at an accident waiting to happen...
some white-van man was exiting a Tesco carpark...
too high... too high... jeeze!
sraped his ladder clean: proof off of this roof...
helped him out... became a 5 minute part-time
traffic warden... he ease back...
i picked up the pieces... you alright mate?
we had it sorted...

then on a whim... roughly... from Havering Road
to Edgware Road?
****... if i was going to cycle down Oxford St...
i would be cycling with a copy of Ovid to read in Hyde
Park.... instead? i cycled via Central London...
Chancery Lane: just before Holborn... and *******
Holborn Circus...
**** me... London looks weird without a tube-map...
it's 4-D geography...

if Donald Trump was playing 4D chess...
then i'm orientating myself around 4D geography...
on a bicycle... having formerly used
the buses and trains and the tube of London...
to hell with that load of trans-Atlantic *******...
sure sure...
you say one more ******* thing
along the lines of SLAV(e)... say it...
say it's "etymologically" sound...
say it... now that you have? ****** ****** ****** ******...
not the same?!
you have a problem? i don't have a problem...
i can tell the difference between a Somalian
a Nigerian and a Kenyan?
we're? having? spelling? issues?

English "public intellectuals"; them!
you add that ******* epsilon to the word Slav-
and? i'll just cut off the suffix -an
from the word GERMAN...
           ******* filth! GERMS!
    **** or ****** is not an isolated
instance... but then again: i trust the Russian
to use their bayonets more than i trust them
to use their tongues...
and that's wrong... since... they could readily
people the shadow-people of the shadows
of people...

    i've been ******* for quiet some time....
i'm ready to pounce... bite at something pulsating...
i ask the song i'm listening to on repeat:
what's my problem?
i can't say ******...
but some English ******* can add
an E to my ethnicity and equate me
to SLAVE... what etymological guarantee
does he: GERM...have?
                            i'm currently in the process
of eradicating a rat from my house...
GERMANIC PEOPLES ARE VERMIN...
THEIR WOMEN ARE EASY TARGET ****...
what?!

the "situation" is a lot different from what
it was under the deconstruction of the Soviet Empire...
now all i see... the deconstruction of
the Capitalistic hegemony...
hell... i bet that even Vietnam is on board!

Slav(e)?! NIGGERNIGGERNIGGERNIGGER...
what he **** are you going to, do?!
sure... you're not a racist..
you're just an etnicist! ETHNICIST!
inter-racial biases: Russophobia:
all Russians are "bad": when they say they are...
you...

   sie fickin rattekeimemesch.....

'__'
''     ''      Li - i.e. fire... as a trigram
'__'       ******* toaf-face "smile":
to suggest "fire"...

i completely abhor leaving poems began one evening
and not finished:
squatting thoughts enter this abandoned housed...
and i can't strain my desire to keep
with the concept of Ensо̄:
                                                  エンソー

a poem completed in one sitting: i'm not a novelist:
i'm a "poet"... i don't have the luxury to retain
days and days on a composition:
what i start i must finish... i can't allow myself
this luxury of a novelist...
hit the iron while its hot comes to mind...

mind you: what's the difference between a proverb
and a maxim?
    i think that... maxims are conjured up whims...
half-truths... statements without justifications
or if they are grounded in any justifications:
they are for French ballrooms
for Confucian strict MING obligations...

                        maxims are untested truths...
maxims are: to say the least: not proverbs in that
they are hardly mystifying...
like this Slavic proverb:
   better a sparrow in your hand than a dove
upon your roof...
      oh: i know what that means...
better your own happiness than the happiness
of your household: and not out of selfish reasons?
if you are content... the contenteness can seep out
of you... and into the household...
why? you have a ******* sparrow in your hand...
who cares about a dove on your roof?

problem... i forgot what i was writing about yesterday...
i made notes:

- Mashiter's Hill
- King Rat
- щ "vs.": -ść                       me?!
invent a letter?! ha?!

well... i was so close so close to finishing...
Godsmack is touring... i think i'm going to try to get a ticket
for one of their gigs...
they're currently my favourite rock band...

Mashiter's Hill... oh... this little hill with a park...
i can walk up it and i usually drink a beer on
one of the benches... from it...
i have a pristine panorama of London...
   me? i'm at the utmost north-eastern tip of Greater
London...
                  it's London and it's "London"...
anything outside of the A406 is hardly anything beside
the Home Counties...
i wish other English people would cut the Essex
folk some slack... esp. the women...
     to me they're nuns...
or... as i recently found out... i'm unapproachable by
women... unless they're really drunk...
i'm just recounting what i hear:
a ******* will tell me i'm beautiful
a drunken woman in her 40s will tell me i'm ****...
do i make any moves on that?
    hardly... i like su doku puzzles: not headaches
caused by women...

but only yesterday i did a 50+ mile journey there
and back to Edgware Road to... hmm...
drink a Thai beer...
                    there's no point having a cycling session
less than the length of a marathon...
i stopped off at Chadwell Heath and bought myself
some fish sticks (45% Surimi - Alaskan *******,
   Hake and some crab) - of the 16 in the packet
i gulped down 14... it's such a bad idea
to cycle that sort of distance without having eating
anything... toward Edgware Road i was cycling
in a trance... literally i was honing in on an abstract
black hole as an ink blotch just ahead of me...
   but coming back? the low sugar levels kicked in...
i lost concentration... ah... i'm burning fat resources...

well... i tried cycling drunk once... Francis Bacon
painting-esque sort of bruising... never again...
but that didn't stop me from cycling...
in heavy traffic...
    on top of Mashiter's Hill i admired the distance
i covered... oh look... cycled past the Docklands
and Canary Wharf... went past the Shard...
all the way up to Hyde Park...
tomorrow i'm going to repeat the journey...
maybe i'll get a chance to meet up with Dan
and he might sneak me in to watch some Pearl Jam...
i was sent a text today about a possible shift...

**** me... hierarchies... SIA licensing...
no stewards welcome...
              fair enough, no problem read my reply...
i'd love to see that band... but i'll cycle there anyway
and maybe get a whiff of the music...

king rat? yeah... that one...
    i'm currently working on getting rid of a rat in my kitchen...
had to removed all the foods from the cupcoards
near to the ground...
  smart *** *******... or fatherfucker...
either Oedipus or Electra... either way...
i have smart cats...
but i never thought i'd have a smart rat...
falling asleep feels sort of weird...
    it's not like having a parasite in your body...
i have a rodent in my house...
   the party starts circa 12am... it starts moving...
i tried cheddar in mouse traps...
i.e. why do i think this rat is smart?
         well... em...
                (s)he doesn't simply eat the cheese
and doesn't get caught...
   (s)he ***** off with the mousetraps!
             i had to buy / replace the mousetraps
with rat traps... basically guillotine equivalent machinery...
if that "thing" snapped at my fingers
i think i'd be left with a broken finger, or two...
but what sort of rat takes the cheese
and the mousetrap with it into the darkness
of his hiding Eden?!

            i'm reluctant to use rat poison...
i'm sort of hoping for a Robespierre's clean cut...
snap... i don't want to **** the poor ******
by snapping its snout... i want to **** it
by crushing its neck... i don't want it bleeding from
its snout: to dead...
            sure... i'd love the Disney adventure
of Mickey... but if it only ate the food... but chewing
on cables... i have a ******* washing machine
and a dishwasher... it starts chewing on that:
i'm ******... smartest rat i've ever encountered:
courtesy of my Nigerian neighbour performing some
voodoo rituals at night leaving food
in the garden thinking he was feeding pigeons...
even one of my cats brought me two dead younglings
after catching them...
i know a rat is a rat and a mouse is a mouse...
mice are timid... rats? the i.q. shoots up...
****'s sake... it's not enough to take the cheese
and not get caught... it also has to take the trap
with him... what? knowing rats...

even if its tail was caught... it'd chew it off...
   it would mane itself in order to scuttle into shadow
and dust into a future...
two songs come to mind:
Pearl Jam vs. Ghost: RATS...
                  of course i prefer the former...
but a rat's a rat... and a washing machine is a washing
machine... i feel bad about killing it...
please don't let me use poison pebbles...
but?

   **** me... last point... right... the English point
about "too many vowels" in the ****** lingo?
sure... well... if the Serbs could incorporate the Latin J...
i think i can make a bypass...

what's rat in ******? szczur...
exactly... what instances allows me to...
first of replace the Z with H and use it in Ing-leash?
CHeap... ****... but not together...
the idiosyncrancy of the tongue that belongs
to itself...

but there's an alternative... borrowed from Cyrillic...
personally? i don't mind using it...
spares me "details"...
i know that Hebrew hides letters:
notably vowels... like diacritical marks...
i know certain languages hide letters...
this is perfect...

   щur = szczur...
                  less consonants for you?! happy?!
there are plenty of words that couple
the SH+CH / SZ+CZ dynamic...
щotka: brush...
          ah... i can do away with SZCZ via (щ)...
but there's a doubled conundrum...
with a word like:

sincerity: szczerość....
          see... i can do away with the "excesses" of Z)
щero

but even Russian Cyrillic doesn't have
a compounding... diphthong...
****... we're not talking about diphthongs... are we?
diphthongs require two vowels...
we're not talking about vowel "transgenderism"...
we're talking about 3 consonants merging...
so...
   it's not a diphthong... not that i care to look
for the SHCH curiosity... but i haven't found
a name for it...
   but we're talking about letters without diacritical
markers... well... "technically":
you could...

                         šč-        
                                     but that doesn't appear in Czech...
only in ****** and Russian...

                     šč- = щ
          
           yes... the prefix hyphen is necessary...

because that's exactly my point:

   dość!                   enough!

where: šč- = щ does exist?
                 -ść = ?          yeah... there's not Cyrillic equivalent...
i would have to invent a letter!
and i don't have the capacity to just conjure such
a letter up...

i've mentioned this before: it's annoying me...
the etymological crux of falsehood...
among the Anglo-Saxons...
that the etymological root of Slav is written
with a missing "e" via "slave"...
sacred words? niggerniggernigger...
hard to giggle?! the extra G too much?!
i'm offended, too...
           let me relay this message to the Russians...
they might rough up some UPA Ukranians...
no matter... better warring among "ourselves"
than having foreign influencces...
Communism was only born out of Pan-Slavism...
we tried... we failed: good to know we failed...
now the western world is playing the fools' bargaining
chips... i'm just looking on and thinking:
it's just a matter of time... before there will come
a canyon, a crater from what would otherwise
dispel the dinosaur's and leave us with
nothing but crocodiles and serpents...

i'm looking for ingenuity in creating a letter...
akin to

šč- = щ
                                                                ­ -ść = ?          
                     i want
more wounds to lick... or rather:
i want a single mum's dog to lick m knuckles...
i want to listen to more Godsmack: pretend angry...
i want anger: i want furore:
i want energy... i want sweets...
i don't really think i need that much fibre...
that much fat... that many high-tier carbohydrates
to take more time to break down:
i think i need to look for a different brothel...

all the Chinese ideas... but written without ideograms...
without ******* traffic colours...
why is it green and not blue to imply: GO!
blue? water?!
           then again... makes sense...
"sense"... i feel autistic by now...
mix blue with yellow... what do you get? green?
two-birds with one stone motto...
              
i can't just create a letter... on the spot...
it will take years to counter the Cyrillic prefix
with a Pollack suffix...
   like my inability to paint the fence...
i just can't do it...
              i'm painting a fence... i'm not painting
a worth of canvas...
i can't: i'll blame it one the roses...
but the roses are not the problem...
the painting itself is the problem...
                    
       all the Chinese ideas...
but... without the ideograms...
written in Katakana... or best.. in Hanguel...
without the ideograms...
"emoticons"...
            death is not a respiting fellow;
death is a harrower of an inevitable harvest.

i just wrote a corruption of what i should
have believe in with
a contending contentment.

Neither excess
    nor deficiency
    this is equilibrium
    the point of rest


*. 'Doctrine of the Mean' in the Sage's THE ANALECTS, 600 BCE

You hid it 'cause I can't find it every elsewhere a package for string
this catastrophe that threatens tragedy above the tryst below a fling
With cords knotted tightly around something tumorous I won't sing
It is the chlorine that cancels detergent in that electric washer thing
beneath cellar steps that David Niven's wife fell down while hiding
I lost her you found her, it's a dollar for riding plus a fee for finding
all broads blinded to inequity and to chick Nazis' unguided guiding
Oh Lord with such ease the slippery have slid into slipshod sliding!
The frailties of free men're exploited by N.S.A.'s jingoistic deriding
General Ike exposed the military-industrial-congressional complex
which strikes against the citizenry by venomous rattle snake reflex
faster than a dope-crazy Marilyn Monroe could reach for a Kleenex
thru curvatures in a third-dimensional, spatially-pornographic helix
that approximated the Mexi-milkers of actriz: la doña María Félix
rutting elephants in musth must respect advisory: kneel-harm-****,
to honor the moon-hoaxing memory of chronic liar Neil Armstrong
as obviously for **** Rosie O'Donnell her gay meal alarm's wrong
Johns familiarized themselves with Lillian Russell by buyin' ** Lil
as masochists meet masochistic needs with movies of Ryan O'Neal
Sadists satiate sadistic surges sharing sermons sold Séamus Ó Néill
& beheld-redemptive pleasures for patrons of free mass soul appeal
I'm nailed in my sub-par carpentry by all do-gooders of the nail ban
to the point where I'm willing to mail my big sister to the mail man
who's part & parcel of a mail-fraud plot & brother's can't-fail plan
Escaped & uncaught I will be no prison monkey's cell-mate-jail-fan
'Cause shorts clothe Richard Simmons' lard *** he has a pale can as
oil-from-rock Daniel's been given the pétrole epithet Ol' Shale Dan
Latino block & cinder create distortive Hispano-Américano rubble
'cause stirring up spics & greasy wetbacks invites N.C.L.R. trouble
Stand back anti-pope as I am about to burst your pederastic bubble!
Your egg-shell-thick pate's no match for a black jack as this club'll
smash its way thru cardinals, reverends, ministers, priests & dukes
to make cream taste like ***** and turn cake into what a dog pukes
Under U.S./Euro socialism there'll be no guy who's a young codger
and popular forenames will be banned including Preston and Roger
Trans-national entities whip horse dung into curdled cottage cheese
while denying rescue inhalers to asthmatics enjoying a bad wheeze
so as to avail publicly purpled aureolae of ready women who tease
Now is the time to release the promised South American killer bees
as the hour's passed to exact vengeance for a beheaded Robert Lees
Mafiosos contract that Joseph Valachi-types be capped at the knees
then hanged by their what's-her-names from il duce poles and trees
in such a fashion that'll tighten the ropes by cough, belch or sneeze
Long legs, wrong eggs, strong pegs, King Kong begs with a song of kegs
Let us dog dealers of wieners & corporate schemers: those 2-bit reamers
extend a left leg into the sacred space of my right one for time remaining
It's easy to harp on topics commiserate with crap profitably entertaining
A man who courts dogs & a court manned by dogs quibbles over kibble
Dogs devoid of canine teeth are not as happy to gnaw and to nibble
The Arc of the Covenant bestowed ancient promises metaphysical
shedding cockroach-scattering illumination that set courses tragical
on a populace & citizenry that were more attuned to an era magical
Before Zionistic Elders prepared an Order within cabals strategical
Beneath plum sunsets & catchy maladies that deafened folks lyrical
“Turn me on dead man” the Beatles backwardly warbled mystically
as the means and the method to sexcite vampresses gynecologically
For all shoulder-locked movements sway men anthropomorphically
Let us seek bi-lesbians who fear concerted opposition diametrically
as their prized packages remain barren, as they spawn ineffectually
Sappho's ovarian host pouch is barren as ***** meld ineffectually
as Western, Fallopian-tubed freakazoids are ****-probed habitually
Sapphic ovarian balloons shrink when hens ******* reciprocally
On Pearl Harbor Loch a false flag blackened Mister Moto's beacon
by shadowy, white manipulators under a U.S. sinister, proto-deacon
who, as a cousin-marrying-pipe-******* *******, emulated Lincoln,
the war-loving queer who went above & beyond his task to weaken
the will of sovereign states to sustain free-market economic health,
by exacting confiscatory taxes resulting in punishing capital wealth
The Beatles were creatures of M.K. Ultra's institution at Tavistock,
groomed as constructs to transmogrify youth into an immoral block
lost to a shocking future as shown by Alvin Toffler in Future Shock
whereas nothing can help us from taking an epidemiological knock
by Mao a la Trotsky, a la starvation wages via phony-baloney stock
in the image of Pol *** a la Lenin contrary to righteous John Locke
Our fused-egg brothers gestate together, flying as a migratory flock
dolled up in vestry wardrobe: papal bikini brassier, ******* & frock
awaiting George Orwell's 1984 English socialism known as Ingsoc
X number of years before Nancy Kwan wed ski champ Peter Pock,
& after Bob Ripley's Oriental/Occidental miscegenation ****** talk
as it was curlier than was Nimoy while he portrayed Vulcan Spock,
whose sweetness was unrehearsed, unrestrained & of a sickly mock
once taken, out of time as taken twice daily on any ol' broken clock
flesh stripped & exploited as the flightless relic of Earth's great auk
enjoying the laze of Sunday oblivious to extinct Darwinian schlock
as chastised love is Leonard Nimoy-pitiable with chastity-belt lock
Upon a Massachusettsian shore puritans purified Plymouth's Rock!
Forever amounts to nothing in betrayal of Heinlein's empathic grok
Back off quack as I'll **** the next 1 of you applying scalpel to ****
as a dad must regarding neo-Kantian, fatherless-**** Johann Bach
Deep in hell's bowels fricassees Jew Elizabeth/***-to-Death Taylor
who did every Joe Nobody from Captain Crunch to Norman Mailer
A harlot ***** was she from 10 niggerly toes to scary mulatto tone
as hellishly deep in Liz's brain was a splinter of hamster wish bone
& her ***-end was broad from fat foods Safeway to her would loan
Beneath her 3rd world-chiding heft Larry F's lawn chairs did groan
as this princess of whales never said no to hog jowls and corn pone
which made an interesting cut-out to novices of the porpoise prone
There won't be another Liz till Rockefeller perfects a Warner clone
with the aid of sewing machines to hem-stitch hems that need sewn
& a positronic brain stem to achieve mortality previously unknown
since Alex Bell pilfered **** inventor Antonio Meucci's telephone
Truth is light that Illuminists keep shadowed, darkened & unshown
for Hank & Phoebe Snow and Johnny Winter who would not atone
Thomas Edison stole or bought the patents to ingenious inventions
that he was more than happy to claim as his brilliant contributions
to the wealth & state of inquisitive Mankind's Earthen conventions,
also he took credit for Biblical allusions to immaculate conceptions
Which Bible books Tom Edison wrote no G.E. employee mentions
as stealing, purloining and commandeering were his 3 predilections
True historians know well charlatan Edison's dastardly elaborations
To pinch a hairy, chapped man is wrong as it puts him in more pain
For century-old Harry Chapman Pincher pinching made him insane
His unholy joy was to lay prone with mouth open to catch acid rain
& then hop into the commode to affect a toilet-related ankle sprain,
not too unlike Richard called **** & Jean who liked the name Jane
whose corpulence demands a piano coffin burial with crawler crane
Formaldehyde replaced 7 quarts of blood that went down a drain as
the proverb fits: when there's nothing to lose there's nothing to gain
Alan Ladd snuffed himself over a self-destructive hatred for Shane
and because Sue Carol preferred men of height Ladd couldn't attain
without elevator shoes & leading-lady actresses walking in ditches,
the love-life that humbles a netted shrimp into paralytic twitches as
Alan often got nothing from Brentwood ****** & witches because
****** pimps don't scrape **** off them Hollywood swanky *******
Tragically it's true that God's in the details & Satan's in the glitches
when Hippocratic Oath-denying doctors say don't bandage stitches,
it promotes infection needing treatment that add to a quack's riches
Apply no anti-bacterial salve unless your unbandaged wound itches
Amerika will be a Marxian paradise after we guillotine the snitches
harvest their organs, cremate & consign their ashes to crude niches
Give me, give me, give me, I can subsist not on a mere, single bean
Hey cheapo, get off your greasy ***, take me to Dairy Queen as my
**** is shaved, bra's padded & all kinks are relaxed by Afro Sheen
Western ***** are fattened for slaughter as sloped slants grow lean,
for lack of appendix, tonsils, adenoids, warts, piles, moles & spleen
Refugees flee what's so repressively dangerous that it's forever fled
The bloodied blood biz passes pathogens to bleeders bloodily bled
It is a dreadful situation that ****** folks find difficult not to dread
A gent is obliged to face conflict face first short of living in a shed,
plying the rough trade, rough-necking with ******* or playing dead
When my cruddy teeth are encrusted I brush the crud off with Crest
while working drainward with this golden cake of soap called Zest
Like a woman on public assistance I refuse to let my choppers rest
There was a time when talk of quiz was a precursor to an Iowa test
My basic skills are determinedly under-cutting my housewife guest
whose stems run north to her malignant tissue free mammae breast
In movies shooting orphans with high-powered rifles is done in jest
'cause in Amerika making ammunition is what wage-slaves do best
When I'm not utilizing forks for recreational after-meal dog-jabbin'
I am staking out hog farms for the planning of gainful hog-nabbin'
or making log-planing modifications on my pine-logged log cabin,
before crossing teamster picket lines for wage-earning job scabbin,'
I take pains to avoid being skinned in a Jimmy Hoffa mob stabbin'
A thousand Confucian truths drive my happy dreams to nightmares
as bi-****** pass out on Calexico-Mexicali-low-calorie light beers
I haven't the moxie to skate through hydrants of fate terminological
as those 78 crumb-bums behind T.V. “comedies” wax scatological
Ernie killed Chip & Robby to stamp his father a cipher biological
He hadn't room for women for production smacking gynecological
The last time he looked skyward his thoughts weren't cosmological
S.O.B. Ernest cursed routinely at arthritis diagnosed gerontological
He gives not a harlot's hello for innumerable faults anthropological
nor to lend his energies to scopes that abuse harmonics hormonical
as he stumblingly falls prey to meanderings sickishly trophological
Lord of Hostesses salvage carcass mine from insults cancrological
Redeem me in sudden form humanoid of activities pathogenetical
We mourn in Gettysburg's city as unrepentant lesbians on probation
Defying errors inflicted upon soldiers who forsook proper vocation
Anti-poping Argentine Francis as he's ****** to Satan's invocation
It remains the best course to abide by stellar laws of spatial rotation
Whether one's nationality is Romanian, Finnish, British or Croatian
Lost people will eat food outside their region & of course: location
They'll surely theorize on arcana that's weakly deemed postulation
Worshiping Sunday is as heathenish as a Roman Catholic sunburst
Be better, be worse, be it ham fatted on toast or mayo in liverwurst
F.E.M.A.'s big plan to ****** 200 million citizens is planned first
Our fate is the guillotine & Chinese torture for we who are cursed
Beneath a deluge of a radioactive Pacific California'll be immersed
as Fukushima's boiling cooling towers are centrally timed to burst
Save it untainted as radiological-free water is better to slake thirst
For it's less desirable to be formula bottle-fed than it is to be nursed
January 14, 1957 : 57 years ago today Humphrey Bogart died at 57
His engine has stopped, his gas pedal is capable of no more revvin'

i put the index and ******* of my right
hand... the tips... in a V (5) shape...
and i see a third eye...

then i count the number of holes in my body...
two nostrils...
one mouth... 3...
two eyes... 5...
two ears 7...
                    one ***... ha ha... one *******
/ **** duct...       grand total? 9...
what does it in "mean"? P...

i've returned to the land of jokers...
seriously... i never appreciated Greek philosophy...
ancient Greek philosophy:
because? there was no Byzantine philosophy:
well... there was...
the New Testament...
which had it's ******* pride whitewashed
by the Turks sacking Constantinople...

see... i don't believe in any Judeo-Christian
ethnical trap craps...
i don't... it's a load of dog-whistles and
bigger dog *******...

i believe the New Testament was crafted
as a Greco-Judeo "conspiracy theory" against
the Roman Empire...
i'm actually thrilled that my heart
entertains this idea...
why else would the Greeks keep the notion
of empire alive far longer than the Latins?
they would become Byzantines and not Greeks?
they would... morph the Glagolitic script
into Cyrillic?

mein gott! and i'm sort of like an Arab...
the Teutonic / northern crusades against
the last pagans of Europe:
who "we" coupled with with the ******-Lithuanian
Commonwealth... **** me... "we" probably
even employed the use of Tartars to defeat
the iron-numb-skulls on horseback...

i think i'm lucky: i haven't won the lottery:
but: boy... i have...
the historical lottery...
    ZERO post-colonial guilt tripping...
last time i heard: it took **** Germany &
Soviet Russia longer to dismantle Poland
than it took **** Germany to conquer France...

eh?! the memory of Napoleon went missing?!
maybe the French girls just love to ****
foreigners... maybe they're easily approachable...
i'll blow a bubble-gun at them...
surely they'll submit... ha ha...

no no... i just did a U-turn today...
i became drunk on my own "intellect" / memory...
i remember buying this book as a teenager...
Tao... huh? and this one passage stuck with me:
a categorical imperative unlike any
German thinking:

the best way to aid the world:
is to forget the world
   and for the world to forget you...

it might have been a hardcover exemplar of what
Tao was about... but it didn't cite anyone...
only yesterday i was listening to a podcast
by Carefree Wandering... this Barbarossa shackled
by / in Shanghai...

a name dropped...  Zhoung Zhou... ergo?
the Zhoungzi...
     it was a really hot day today... today was a really
hot day... i "forgot" about painting the fence...
instead i did the ironing inside... shirt off...
then i prepped the bbq...
   turns out... my female cat likes music...
she loves the Red Hot Chilli Peppers...
  i love the Red Hot Chilli Peppers...
     **** me: i hate the Beatles and i hate the Rolling Stones...
to me there's only one FAB 4...

i'm like a giddy... chirpy sparrow singing...
albeit with a poker face...
when i worked security watching them live...
but with an element of retrospect...
because... that wasn't me at the gig:
that's me ironing shirts...
and watching my VERONIYA relaxing
with the music being played...

there are two greatest compliments in this world...
another person likes your cooking skills...
yeah: they actually eat the food you cooked
for them...
and?
an animal enjoys the music you're listening to...
the animal is not freaked out by the noise
that's the transcendence of a tap-dripping tap 'ap ap ap...

i don't know which is better... probably
the latter...
            you know: when you listen to music...
have a memory of a gig... you worked security on...
then you're ironing shirts...
and your female Maine **** is not ******* off...
and you're sort of: all "itchy": but it's not an "itch"...
it's a "feeling": a feels...
            i was born with it...
                    when i was younger and my father ******
off to England to better our economic prospects and
i didn't see him from age 4 through to 8...
my mother through the age of 6 through to 8...
grandparents... two dogs...
Bella... Axel...
                            Joseph and Hella...

i'd get gifts sent back to me...
a Nintendo this and that...
        i was generous... i shared...
but when i shared...
i had this numbing-excitement sensation...
whenever i witnessed people using my "stuff"...
i can't explain it... it just felt much better than
an *******...

like the case of scent in the film Perfume...
i can't capture this feeling... this tip-of-the-fingers
sensation...
excited mingling with numbing...

**** me... Veroniya loves AROUND THE WORLD...
it has become my new favourite
Red Hot Chilli Pepper song...
and they are my "peers": i hate the Beatles...
i hate the Rolling Stones...
but? i love Bob Dylan...
   best way to appreciate Bobby?
on a train from St. Petersburg to Moscow...
overnight...

Metallica or Godsmack... once upon a time...
the former... but these days?
the latter...

that's where i parked "my horse":
because i wasn't going to unwind with ego-tripping
***** pageant mechanisms
for allowing competition:
why is it that all the pretty girls
become prostitutes...

please tell me it's untrue: but... it's true...
all the pretty women become prostitutes...
all the "ugly" men are leftovers...
shadows... but hum in on some beached whales
and it's more than likely that she
will replicate... itch... ooze... ugh...
fair enough...
      i need my mind to be crisp...
i need to be getting numb and drunk with
the sages of Chinas... yeah... the plural...
from 600 years before Chrissy..

         i'll blame it on the fact that it was a hot day...
or i'll blame it on... ****...
i got intellectually drunk today...
i knew about Tao a long long time ago...
but i was never told the pinpoint
the anti-Confucian element...
really?! ZHUANGZI?!

                         that helps...
   i never liked ancient Greek thinking to begin
with...
            German thinking? yes...
esp. correlating an antithesis to **** ideology...
i loved that part... Heidegger above Beethoven...

the dead rest: the living live as if resting...
the dead are NOT: at rest...
the dead are resting...
while the living are simply living and resting
at the same time...

i have made a 180 return to to Tao...
today i became drunk from the intellectual
play on what could be a...
play on words: more... a play on word-idea...

who did i support?
in the Wimbledon final?
i am an anti-racist... but when i heard....
she's playing tennis for the Arabs...
for the Blacks... blah blah...
i switched off... please... sport?!
no politics...
   ******* of narrative..
  you just destroyed Afghanistan...
   Iraq... Libya...
        why do you suddenly summon
a care for Ukraine?!

                                  *******!
nahts steht hunger starr in unsern traum!
ja... ich... hassen mein haben menschen!
das letzte サムライ....

              alle letzte! ah! was ist verloren?!
beste zu tanz! beste zu tanz!
beste zu singen!
             mein herz... mein: werden...
mein: etwas...
               mein: letzte hoffung und liebe...

kommen sie mein am wenigsten
      wollen von ein kind...

         mein kind... mein kind...
mein einfrieren luft...
                     mein: hämmern erde...
das tanzen freuer...
        mit wasser: irgendetwas...

shift shaft: shuffle... SH...
wechsel... welle... mischen...

                   das ist gut?!
                       men born for merely a grave...
menschen geboren für
    nur ein graB...
                             nein nein: niet: ein sharpened S...
you saw it! ein B'eh!
graB...
                
                              i think i will die a happy man...
i think i will die a happy man because i
anticipate so many people dying unhappy...
the guilt-tripping-gripping...
i wish i lived a long time ago...
i wish i lived years ahead of stated times...
me?!
i'm trying out Daoism...
   or rather... returning to it...
           this be the zenith:

i must stress it in German:

dies sein die zenit! das ende...
                         the wind fills the pillows...
while my thoughts clamour for hiking
clouds!

Since I know myself
why would I want
to be known by anyone else?

I know they think I'm strange
My son likes Stranger Things
We watch in the library
I study **** Yangming

My son born in Taipei
Confucian Temple sings
Dragons fly at night
Destinies they bring

                    Protection.

In the mid 90s
Wrote to Jesuit Walter Ong
Baltimore in 46
Am I late along?

First day of school
Mr. Harry Wong
Taipei Confucian temple
Drums, robes, gong

Confucius at GMU
I say a prayer for Taiwan
Beauty Baltic Sea
Scifi Gamla Stan

Gunmetal gray
An email? Susansan.
Jokic throws the lob
Hither and anon

       2 bucks. 1 fawn.

I left my home in West Lake
        in the sunshine of my youth
        the world to discover-
        mum wept and said: 'Do be good'.

       I consoled her and dad:
      'Your ways I'll follow in my sojourn
      a letter home I'll send every week
      I'll do you both proud--be of no concern'.

     A village -school I became
     Confucian culture I taught
      also the best of Tang and Sung poetry
      all my pupils found in rapture wrapped.

     The salary was poor
     in a abandoned barn I slept
     reading at night in candle-light
     hardship I did endure and accept.

    The beautiful daughter of the headmaster
    by the green summer- field I met
   ' So delightful are the poems you wrote':
     (to me with beaming eyes) she lovingly said.
  
     Her picture I sent to mum and dad gladly
      'Ming, you're no longer young'. they confided
     ' it 's time you settled down- Mei is so pretty-
     we hope you'll be married ere we're dead'

    Mei came to the barn one early night
    to her my poems I read:
    her eyes welled in tears
   '  I love you- so very  much' she suddenly said.
      
     Two years quickly passed by
     Mei's dad from cancer suffered
     ' Ming, you're like a son to me
       take over from me'  he pleaded with a look so sad.
      
     On a  sunny day Mei and I tied the knot
     mum and dad travelled 8,000 li* and attended
     we had the village's Chief and all the dignitaries' patronage
     the event was the most ever celebrated.
    
  * the Chinese mile, 500 metres

Carnival in town now
Eerie empty night
Gonna get a new psychiatrist
Things won't work out right

I want to die into it
Please, Life, protect my boys
The moon was a ghostly galleon
According to Alfred Noyes

I'm not an academic
But once I was a teacher
Taipei American School
I just cannot quite reach her

Dragons on the temples
Taipei 101
Prayers for Confucian caring
2 daughters and 3 sons

         Un pequito fun!

gout flareup
i limp along

Cautious Man
beauty Bruce in song

Confucian temple
drums and gong

London calling
Hong Kong

     ****!!!

Me in the Taipei early morning
Super excited
Confucian temple begins

Drums, robes, motion, music
Attentive, I listen

The Taiwanese people so good to me
My middle son born downtown

Rectify names. Taiwan's fame.
Island of renown.

The professors are pretenders
Though it took me long to see it

Ain't got no *****
They never want to be it

I taught in old Taipei
I went to Confucian temples

Not sure what to say
The students were an example

I'm ambiguous
And I have few true friends

But I'm gonna plant a mustard seed
Before my strange tale ends

Religion is sacrality
And religion is pretends

Maybe Jacob Von Hogflume
His time machine to me lends?

So there is a statue of Confucius
On the campus of my alma mater
George Mason University
In Fairfax, Virginia.

It was given to GMU
From an Institute in Hong Kong.
Hong Kong
Where my roommate from another school
James Madison University
Works for Business for Social Respinsibility

When I was a teacher in Taipei
I attended a ceremony
At the Confucian temple
In honor of Confucius on his birthday.
National Teacher's Day in Taiwan

Probably because I was brought up Catholic
I talk to statues.
So I stop by to talk with Confucius:

Taiwan is a wonderful country
My second son born there
People very welcoming and kind to me
Excellent, respectful students.

Now also a democracy and prosperous.

China is a great ancient civilization
Beautiful architecture, great food,
Amazing achievements in science, art, dance,
Fire works, kung fu, the poetry of Cold Mountain, delicious dim sum, the Way, etc...

But not always so respectful of the freedom and dignity of ordinary Chinese people

                Please protect Taiwan!

                   Xie Xie, Master Kong

American commandos in Taiwan
Preparing for the fight
Hope it does not happen
But democracy just might

Transform ancient China
I watch the Buddha light
Ordinary people
Confucian the insight

                   101!

In response to a post on Norman Vincent Peale:


Norman Vincent Peale whom we read in our youth was a motivator, not a thinker.  A proponent of positive thinking, he was able to sway thousands but he never had depth.  


His thinking and standing have been over-estimated.


The same applies to the thinking of William Clement Stone and Napoleon Hill and many undistinguished  others'.


The first positive thinking founders were Confucius and his most ardent discipline, Mencius. Re: THE ANALECTS of Confucius and THE BOOK OF MENCIUS.


They both upheld these thoughts:

human nature is inherently good; it can be perfected by self-cultivation which leads to 'ren' ( benevolence/ human-heartedness); this makes the 'superior man' (junzi) who excels in love, compassion, virtue,righteousness, decorum, altruism, selflessness, sincerity, loyalty, wisdom, filial piety, respect for elders and others, who serve as role-model for people and who is qualified to serve as ***** servant and contribute to the well-being of society and the nation.  He seeks morality while the xiaoren (the inferior person) who seeks only profit or benefit.


It is evident from the above that such a philosophy is life-affirming and brings out the best postiof human goodness.  This indisputably is the root of positive thinking long before modern thinking on the subject.


There is much merit in cognitive behavioural therapy founded by Alan Beck with Albert Ellis and Martin Seligman as exponents.  CBT is based on positive psychology and its influence will continue ti grow in these days of stress, anxiety, depression and existential angst.

Bearing Confucian psychology on the subject enriches our understanding and also throws light on the similarity of Eastern and Western thinking in this regard.

Poetry to evoke, provoke, revoke
      Taipei Confucian Temple
                   typhoons!

American women are faithless
Best to leave them be
San Francisco morning
Stockholm by the Sea

One man against
Sleep. Quiet nights.
Taipei Confucian temple
Still see two green lights

Satellite High School
Not Harvard. JMU.
The perhaps less than idle speculation
That Columbus was a Jew

                 Who knew?

The water between women and men
Just too wide to cross
But in my letter too you
I'm the listener. He's the Boss.

Nightly now my loneliness
Once again the deer
Go to sleep at 2 a.m.
Empty Diamond clear

Halloween is coming
Yes indeed I'm haunted
Solitude is second best
I join the woe unwanted

Chinese food tonight
Taipei 101
Confucian temples resonate
Please protect my sons

A little Polish peace
A little Swedish sun
A little basketball
A little freshman fun

              2021