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Prabhu Iyer Apr 2015
Your shy smile, in the buds
blooming late by mellow winds;

distant in the leaves turned golden
your fiery hair;

the city below, still asleep,
stuttering in the lanes, your voice,
in the coffee morning shop.

my heart, all the butterflies.

Your dreamy smile, in
the toast maker lady at the kiosk.

You said I should go to Primrose Hill
So I went to Primrose Hill.

and I found you everywhere.
Someone sent me to Primrose Hill. Someone I lost and may never find again. Except in these memories. This is neo-cubist in the sense of Pierre Reverdy.

.
Mateuš Conrad Dec 2016
if you can find c. g. jung writing an answer to the biblical Hiob, i can be found writing this... or as the Lad Bible states: be your superficial you... so when she's not her superficial self... you can just play the awkward monotone speaking caveman that you weren't before she played you that superficial card of hers to tone down your interests.

you know why i'm fascinated with schizophrenics?
primarily because they are concerned with
an inorganic medical condition,
there are, absolutely, no reasons to suggests they
are organically prone to premature degeneracy,
they are what the Alzheimer old man calls an angel,
and what the "angel" experiences from time to time...
to cite a non-typical schizoid experience -
a splinter in the mind?
when i wrote my previous poem, i was listening
to the song *the parting glass
throughout,
on and on and on... the rhythm took over...
and when the "poem" was finished i retracted myself
into my room and first played auld lang syne
(with lyrics and English translation)
...
                           and then... the pure instrumental
of knee-deep-bagpie... bagpipes, sure, horrid,
screeching drowning-lungs of magpie
cackling cut short into a carbonated highland water...
     oh don't worry, what this comes down to
is personal experience, such negations of ease
are not like the black plague, or a.i.d.s.,
they don't come into contact with purely-riddle
human incompetence... it takes more than that...
certain conditions are not viral...
you can't interpreted them as political malevolence
akin to a political movement... primarily because
the numbers don't add up...
                    the complexity of thought is
the complexity of regarding the mind as an abstract
of the brain, given the brain has no accuracies
concerning abstraction when stated against being automated
to a pair of kidneys... i too wish for a La La Land sometimes...
but that's not the reason people allow ***** donations...
     but you know, it really gripped me,
i wrote that poem, listening to the parting glass,
and felt nothing, nothing... because i was so
formulated to write what i wrote...
  i wrote the last bit, walked into my room,
and played the second version of auld lang syne...
the royal scots dragoon guards pure instrumental...
   and you get to weep these cold tears
after an insomniac cold shivers getting warmer with whiskey...
              and whimper and bite your bottom lips...
because you're hardly a woman fainting
and the drama isn't in you...
               and it's actual tears...
people laugh and cry saharan tears, meaning: it never
rains over it...   i see Sahara as the ancient version
of the Himalayan mountain range, suddenly reduced
because god is fickle and well, aren't we all?
           if any of us are alive to read or speak such
encodings... there will be a desert made from
the Himalayas that will be called the Himalaya -
but that's really being optimistic.
       there used to be mountains, mountains in
north Africa, Gandalf! but they crumbled in deserts!
where once a mountain range, subsequently a desert...
where now a desert, once a mountain range.
can i please get a taxi to leave this current
history and Darwinistic revisionism of it as telling
us ape Adam had more psychology about him than
Charles XIV? i want to hear the geological version
of Darwinism! but am i hearing any of it? n'ah ah.
       so yes, upon hearing the scotch dragoon guards
pipe a full whiskey sodden breath into the
         bagpi - i heard the word counter to my scrambled
narrative... king... king?!
                   which is what's bewildering about
a medical term deemed premature dementia...
   it's an organic impossibility...
but given society is an inorganic organism
and all our socio-political mechanisms aren't exactly
organic, there might be some sense in this piquant
dabble in an auditory hallucinogenic experience -
which, evidently, people find frightening,
since they occupy defining their thinking with
hearing so much, and when seeing a homeless man
think so little...
                     logic? a particular arrangement of words
that does not provide kind rubrics for the testimony of
the many...
                    i can hallucinate this auditory "addition"
and competently go on my daily business,
or my nightly business finishing a bottle of scottish amber...
some people cannot...
                 what i see it western society predicating
their poor knowledge of Alzheimer's as if searching
for some genius to explain what happens to the abstract
functions of what the brain represents
                 in terms of how the brain and abstraction
can't be cleanly separated, i.e. to treat the degeneracy
of the brain as succumbed to, but not succumbing to
the elaborated foundations of the "brain"
within the trans-physical functions of the "brain"
within a framework of memory, vocabulary, memory.
people first attribute the brain with too much
           concern for abstraction when in fast the driving
force for abstraction is the now-vogue zeitgeist
"psyche does not exist" -
                            and when the brain degenerates like
a heart or a kidney can... people start to freak
out propping out a Frankenstein revival that brain
cannot in-act upon...
                                 they told us the brain is fat...
          then they tell us only 0%, or fat-free yoghurts are
good... isn't the case for the epidemic of dementia
due to the fact that we're censoring fat?
what feeds the brain? fat! what are we censoring from
our diets? fat! fat free ******* yoghurt!
                             where does the modern epidemic
stem from? censoring fat! you anorexic ******* morons!
  you know why i put extra fat in the way i cook
meals, you know what orthodox cooks tend to
like a sizzle of a lump of lard? brain food...
     and yes, some call it eating a lot of nuts...
well then... fry me a ribs-eye steak on a handful of
cashew nuts you crazy *******!
            this is what drives me crazy concerning
auditory hallucinogenic experiences...
there are no drugs that you could ever sell that people
would buy to experience an auditory hallucination...
primarily because people made thought
   an auditory experience...
                  that's the norm, i'm not talking Walt Disney
here... and people enjoy music because it feeds the heart
in a way averse to images that feed the libido
or dreaming...
    the point being, my "hallucinatory" experience lasted
for less than a second... some ***** on l.s.d. trips
for half a day because he finds modern movies boring
and finally gets to appreciate cubist contortion
mechanisations... i can do more damage with a second's
worth of "auditory" hallucination than that little
hippy can do away with 12 hours, and only end up
writing a haiku thinking he can suddenly conjure up
spirits of Shinto like some Gilgamesh *** Bruce Springsteen;
then he shaves his hair and travels to Mongolia
to learn the index against the lips motorboating
harmonica... and i end up saying: thank you;
cos it wouldn't be twangy without that kind of a tranquiliser
to stabilise excitement beyond encoding sounds.
          i can tell you how ******-up my internal
narrative has become, so i'm defeatist,
here's how it looks like when i get agitated...
               writing on a white flag...
      oh look: wavy! wavy! i'm waving it...
going boats full of nuts and bananas!
             you ever hear the story of a psychiatrist
jumping on a table and barking when a conscription
  cadet tried to fake being mad?
      she did what i just wrote and asked H. Clinton
to reiterate on the campaign trail.
                    inauguration 2017:
   i solemnly swear, that H. Clinton barked like a ruffian
poodle on the campaign trail.
  beside the point though, schizophrenia is an inorganic
manifestation of an actual organic degeneracy -
it's a negation-of-ease for dangerous people...
     people who probably have a music taste outside
the top 40 best selling albums (let alone singles)...
                   and they're quick to pick up on this grey area
concerning premature depression...
                it's trendy these days... people who are melancholic
are people who are like Homer, wrote the Odyssey
went blind from making too much heroism from
      the cannibalism at the gates of Troy and couldn't
handle telling a single lie after having written such an epic...
   or as Virgil convened: Paris didn't escape,
Aeneid did... no one knows what happened to Paris,
       probably choked on a raisin or something:
it's ancient history, if you're not going to talk about it
in a callous manner, then be prepared for careless mannerisms:
pout, **** *** cheek, shelfie!
               what i am seeing is this quote:
a butterfly on the Galapagos Islands... a Tornado in
Colorado... the poetics of quantum physics,
or misplaced potentials of counter-quantifiable
simultaneous counter-interpretations...
    the butterfly effect? under the umbrella corporate
otherwise known, from ancient times: a metaphor.
hey, we started reading into hydrocarbons,
there's no way to talk easy for us...
                           for all my love for one inspiration,
i lost my love for him when he said that not tying your
shoelaces (i.e. spelling) was because he thought it was
indoctrination... you know who i mean: Mr. Chow Chewski...
   spelling? that's like tying your shoelaces!
         question is... who would ingest a hallucinogenic
drug that didn't utilise the multi-coloured world to
an excessive amount to be prescribed, say, an U.V.
phosphorescent spectrum of seeing... when, given all
that... sound occupies this realm of b & w?
               who could create an auditory hallucinogenic?
can you imagine it?
                             most people with a weakened cognitive
membrane would go nuts... as the case has been proven
many a times...
        but given the fact that no such hallucinogenic exists,
or that "auditory" / cognitive hallucinations are
disregarded even though Descartes stressed this
   notion of a substance / thought, and an extension /
       sensual disparities with regards to cohesive uniformity,
i.e. regarding over-stressing a particular sense
      and never reaching a former cohesion...
           can only mean a circumstance later described
by Kant within the framework of the noumenon -
    i.e. perhaps you've seen too much, but heard too little...
perhaps you've tasted too much, but had barely a sniff of
                  more...
        the original thought when exposed to a cohesion
of uniformed senses, experiencing a discohesion of
             a presupposed sensual "uniformity",
returns back into a form of thought, i.e. an extension...
                only because the thing in question is a
presupposition, not a supposition that can be countered
with a proposition, i.e. since we all made mistakes
presupposing, we have become prone to propositions to
suppose otherwise... in terse terms: invent politics.
so what i termed "auditory" and "hallucination"
and conflated them in a prefix of cognitive-, in consolidation
i meant to say that: once all presuppositions (thoughts)
disappear by the miraculous ape that man either is
or wishes himself to still be... and we deem to say:
   reality...                 we only have suppositions (extensions)
               that appear...
                         by the miraculous ape that man never
was and wishes himself to nonetheless be:
  in that consolidatory ref. to the last trinity of Cartesian
thought: substance - in the former the formation
of will... in the latter the complete lack of it -
                              to the simpler scenarios,
we already have knowledge of prisons and asylums...
            because internalising such possible scenarios
never leaves the many to be grafting such possibilities
with enough calm as to persevere for the sole purpose
of understanding, as what point can a noumenon-unit
enter the argument if not from a reflex
                       as this continued narration explains...
none of this was reflected upon...
reflection in such circumstances usually means weaving
a machete at your neighbour...
                                  the noumenon-unit
the ping-pong factor in all of this is a reflex action...
         not a reflective action...
               i am no king no more than i am a pauper...
   now imagine if i tripped for 12 hours on l.s.d.,
having extracted so much, from an "auditory" "hallucination",
that, in the realm of the mind, is neither a minute,
nor a second, nor a nanosecond...
               it's unitary equivalent is simply that of: a word.
Nigel Morgan Apr 2013
As he walked through the maze of streets from the tube station he wondered just how long it had been since he had last visited this tall red-bricked house. For so many years it had been for him a pied à terre. Those years when the care of infant children dominated his days, when coming up to London for 48 hours seemed such a relief, an escape from the daily round that small people demand. Since his first visits twenty years ago the area bristled with new enterprise. An abandoned Victorian hospital had been turned into expensive apartments; small enterprising businesses had taken over what had been residential property of the pre-war years. Looking up he was conscious of imaginative conversions of roof and loft spaces. What had seemed a wide-ranging community of ages and incomes appeared to have disappeared. Only the Middle Eastern corner shops and restaurants gave back to the area something of its former character: a place where people worked and lived.

It was a tall thin house on four floors. Two rooms at most of each floor, but of a good-size. The ground floor was her London workshop, but as always the blinds were down. In fact, he realised, he’d never been invited into her working space. Over the years she’d come to the door a few times, but like many artists and craftspeople he knew, she fiercely guarded her working space. The door to her studio was never left open as he passed through the hallway to climb the three flights of stairs to her husband’s domain. There was never a chance of the barest peek inside.

Today, she was in New York, and from outside the front door he could hear her husband descend from his fourth floor eyrie. The door was flung open and they greeted each other with the fervour of a long absence of friends. It had been a long time, really too long. Their lives had changed inexplicably. One, living almost permanently in that Italian marvel of waterways and sea-reflected light, the other, still in the drab West Yorkshire city from where their first acquaintance had begun from an email correspondence.

They had far too much to say to one another - on a hundred subjects. Of course the current project dominated, but as coffee (and a bowl of figs and mandarin oranges) was arranged, and they had moved almost immediately he arrived in the attic studio to the minimalist kitchen two floors below, questions were thrown out about partners and children, his activities, and sadly, his recent illness (the stairs had seemed much steeper than he remembered and he was a little breathless when he reached the top). As a guest he answered with a brevity that surprised him. Usually he found such questions needed roundabout answers to feel satisfactory - but he was learning to answer more directly, and being brief, suddenly thought of her and her always-direct questions. She wanted to know something, get something straight, so she asked  - straight - with no ‘going about things’ first. He wanted to get on with the business at hand, the business that preoccupied him, almost to the exclusion of everything else, for the last two days.

When they were settled in what was J’s working space ten years ago now he was immediately conscious that although the custom-made furniture had remained the Yamaha MIDI grand piano and the rack of samplers were elsewhere, along with most of the scores and books. The vast collection of CDs was still there, and so too the pictures and photographs. But there was one painting that was new to this attic room, a Cézanne. He was taken aback for a moment because it looked so like the real thing he’d seen in a museum just weeks before. He thought of the film Notting Hill when William Thacker questions the provenance of the Chagall ‘violin-playing goat’. The size of this Cézanne seemed accurate and it was placed in a similar rather ornate frame to what he knew had framed the museum original. It was placed on right-hand wall as he had entered the room, but some way from the pair of windows that ran almost the length of this studio. The view across the rooftops took in the Tower of London, a mile or so distant. If he turned the office chair in which he was sitting just slightly he could see it easily whilst still paying attention to J. The painting’s play of colours and composition compelled him to stare, as if he had never seen the painting before. But he had, and he remembered that his first sight of it had marked his memory.

He had been alone. He had arrived at the gallery just 15 minutes before it was due to close for the day.  He’d been told about this wonderful must-see octagonal room where around the walls you could view a particularly fine and comprehensive collection of Impressionist paintings. All the great artists were represented. One of Van Gogh’s many Olive Trees, two studies of domestic interiors by Vuillard, some dancing Degas, two magnificent Gaugins, a Seurat field of flowers, a Singer-Sergeant portrait, two Monets - one of a pair of haystacks in a blaze of high-summer light. He had been able to stay in that room just 10 minutes before he was politely asked to leave by an overweight attendant, but afterwards it was as if he knew the contents intimately. But of all these treasures it was Les Grands Arbres by Cézanne that had captured his imagination. He was to find it later and inevitably on the Internet and had it printed and pinned to his notice board. He consulted his own book of Cézanne’s letters and discovered it was a late work and one of several of the same scene. This version, it was said, was unfinished. He disagreed. Those unpainted patches he’d interpreted as pools of dappled light, and no expert was going to convince him otherwise! And here it was again. In an attic studio J. only frequented occasionally when necessity brought him to London.

When the coffee and fruit had been consumed it was time to eat more substantially, for he knew they would work late into the night, despite a whole day tomorrow to be given over to their discussions. J. was full of nervous energy and during the walk to a nearby Iraqi restaurant didn’t waver in his flow of conversation about the project. It was as though he knew he must eat, but no longer had the patience to take the kind of necessary break having a meal offered. His guest, his old friend, his now-being-consulted expert and former associate, was beginning to reel from the overload of ‘difficulties’ that were being put before him. In fact, he was already close to suggesting that it would be in J’s interest if, when they returned to the attic studio, they agreed to draw up an agenda for tomorrow so there could be some semblance of order to their discussions. He found himself wishing for her presence at the meal, her calm lovely smile he knew would charm J. out of his focused self and lighten the rush and tension that infused their current dialogue. But she was elsewhere, at home with her children and her own and many preoccupations, though it was easy to imagine how much, at least for a little while, she might enjoy meeting someone new, someone she’d heard much about, someone really rather exotic and (it must be said) commanding and handsome. He would probably charm her as much as he knew she would charm J.

J. was all and more beyond his guest’s thought-description. He had an intensity and a confidence that came from being in company with intense, confident and, it had to be said, very wealthy individuals. His origins, his beginnings his guest and old friend could only guess at, because they’d never discussed it. The time was probably past for such questions. But his guest had his own ideas, he surmised from a chanced remark that his roots were not amongst the affluent. He had been a free-jazz musician from Poland who’d made waves in the German jazz scene and married the daughter of an arts journalist who happened to be the wife of the CEO of a seriously significant media empire. This happy association enabled him to get off the road and devote himself to educating himself as a composer of avant-garde art music - which he desired and which he had achieved. His guest remembered J’s passion for the music of Luigi Nono (curiously, a former resident of the city in which J. now lived) and Helmut Lachenmann, then hardly known in the UK. J. was already composing, and with an infinite slowness and care that his guest marvelled at. He was painstakingly creating intricate and timbrally experimental string quartets as well as devising music for theatre and experimental film. But over the past fifteen years J. had become increasingly more obsessed with devising software from which his musical ideas might emanate. And it had been to his guest that, all that time ago, J. had turned to find a generous guide into this world of algorithms and complex mathematics, a composer himself who had already been seduced by the promise of new musical fields of possibility that desktop computer technology offered.

In so many ways, when it came to the hard edge of devising solutions to the digital generation of music, J. was now leagues ahead of his former tutor, whose skills in this area were once in the ascendant but had declined in inverse proportion to J’s, as he wished to spend more time composing and less time investigating the means through which he might compose. So the guest was acting now as a kind of Devil’s Advocate, able to ask those awkward disarming questions creative people don’t wish to hear too loudly and too often.

And so it turned out during the next few hours as J. got out some expensive cigars and brandy, which his guest, inhabiting a different body seemingly, now declined in favour of bottled water and dry biscuits. His guest, who had been up since 5.0am, finally suggested that, if he was to be any use on the morrow, bed was necessary. But when he got in amongst the Egyptian cotton sheets and the goose down duvet, sleep was impossible. He tried thinking of her, their last walk together by the sea, breakfast à deux before he left, other things that seemed beautiful and tender by turn . . . But it was no good. He wouldn’t sleep.

The house could have been as silent as the excellent double-glazing allowed. Only the windows of the attic studio next door to his bedroom were open to the night, to clear the room of the smoke of several cigars. He was conscious of that continuous flow of traffic and machine noise that he knew would only subside for a brief hour or so around 4.0am. So he went into the studio and pulled up a chair in front of the painting by Cézanne, in front of this painting of a woodland scene. There were two intertwining arboreal forms, trees of course, but their trunks and branches appeared to suggest the kind of cubist shapes he recognized from Braque. These two forms pulled the viewer towards a single slim and more distant tree backlit by sunlight of a late afternoon. There was a suggestion, in the further distance, of the shapes of the hills and mountains that had so preoccupied the artist. But in the foreground, there on the floor of this woodland glade, were all the colours of autumn set against the still greens of summer. It seemed wholly wrong, yet wholly right. It was as comforting and restful a painting as he could ever remember viewing. Even if he shut his eyes he could wander about the picture in sheer delight. And now he focused on the play of brush strokes of this painting in oils, the way the edge and border of one colour touched against another. Surprisingly, imagined sounds of this woodland scene entered his reverie - a late afternoon in a late summer not yet autumn. He was Olivier Messiaen en vacances with his perpetual notebook recording the magical birdsong in this luminous place. Here, even in this reproduction, lay the joy of entering into a painting. Jeanette Winterson’s plea to look at length at paintings, and then look again passed through his thoughts. How right that seemed. How very difficult to achieve. But that night he sat comfortably in J’s attic and let Cézanne deliver the artist’s promise of a world beyond nature, a world that is not about constant change and tension, but rests in a stillness all its own.
Prabhu Iyer Nov 2014
Surrealist Cut-up

    boatman       Purple haze
contemplative pouring
the sky as lone
              rides the horizon.
       islanding
into the lake,

Cubist

Arc to the horizon
apparition, brooding figure,
a form rides in twilight haze
junction of the worlds
into a slither of light.

Literal**

Purple haze islanding the sky
pouring into the lake,
as lone boatman
rides contemplative
into the horizon.
http://artmight.com/Artists/Monet-Claude-Oscar/Monet-Claude-Impression-sunset-Sun-268673p.html
Prabhu Iyer Aug 2013
Flame-tree abloom: dabbing red,
the distance paling green -
from the half-open window
to a dreary room;

Horizon waves bathed in gold dust -
from a vessel floating
in deep, enveloping seas;

Smudged streetlamp ayonder
a dark, rainy night;

Love, blooming silent, outlying mundane life.
An attempt at a 'cubist poem' : multiple perspectives, emerging out of reflections on a single theme - in the three scenes depicted, something is outlying, and yet is in utter contrast to the nominal view, as implied in the last line as well.
JoJo Nguyen Sep 2014
Change is necessary.
Change is require.
But is change sufficient?

Change is a diversifier.
Change is a niche filler.
But is change transformative?

Change is not good.
Change is not bad.
But then what changes do we keep?

Heuristic small change we like?
Perpetuating idiosyncratic Absurdities?
Selecting traits for "survival"
in a world of our own creation.

Do you understand the Michael Jackson trap?

Real Evolution is easy.
Diversity + Mobility = Survival
But cosmetics is much harder.

What will the monkey see in the mirror?
Will he like my face?
Will I have diversified my humanity,
change my BIOS for faces,
to an arbitrary Facebook,
Unrecognizable to a nostalgic monkey?
lonelybagel Feb 2018
I don't think I actually know what I look like.

I feel like pieces of me are these really ugly misshapen puzzle pieces I stitch together to make a cubist painting of what I could be. The mirror sometimes shows me a girl that's worth something but in pictures, I see a pair of arms, legs, eyes, ears, a nose, a body. Someone's body. Out of 380 photos I take, maybe there's one good picture, but that one picture usually doesn't even look like what I think I look like. Is that weird? Once in a while I catch a glimpse of myself and get a little startled because I don't look like what I thought I did... but then that moment passes and I turn back into the puzzle pieces that don't make sense, even to me. I then return to the cycle of piecing them together again, trying to figure out what the hell I actually look like.
J J Jan 2020
I pose high my chest of ragged ribbons
And unravel a fist to stretch out fingers in search
Of a hand glimmering pale like a lantern
throughout this grey
        empty space. Once a pavement, now as good as

Cloud. Frozen lake. Dust. Boiling ashes. Skeletons.

I am walking on the slashed frames of waves
As jesus once must have. Propelled to a miracle unwitnessned
To anyone but myself. I am impelled to corrode
Into a statue; to remain a rigamortic rotting jade jewel in the sun
Until I no longer can.
Until they found me...

Perhaps they'd dust me off, thaw the ice from my shoulders,
Rehydrate me and gorge me,
Restart the blinking light in my brain
And refrain me evermore from having to seek.

But seek I must, for the lonliness weighs me down
Further by the day. I take half as many steps now as when I began my voyage.
My memories are like ghosts of flames that play
Snakes and ladders and hide and seek.
I am the lighthouse man and I sail drunken--
A rubicund mishape of bone and scuffed thoughts,
I can feel every soul which once embodied and huddled this place.

It's like they are trying so hard to posses me but even
Their souls have been smouldered to whispers
So thin they ring as mutely as the surrounding mist,
So soft they vibrate akin to an infant’s pulse
Throughout these walls, these scrapyards, these crumbling arcades, this sandbox grey that begs for a scream.
The spirit of a tarantula trembles along my back and grazes it teeth against my shoulderblade,
Praying that I turn to confirm it's being –but it's a game I’ve long grown sick of–


I am the lighthouse man and I ceased having a face long ago.
What I recall of my reflection was a child so young and so sure
Of a different life that

I cannot be sure it's even me.

I am the lighthouse man; a puckered bulb balancing on too-big shoulders, that walked
  through barren flat closes and exited empty handed, the lonely poltergeist,
a bitter flab of skin.

I am the lighthouse man and I am the final Aspen leaf in the pond of the universe,
I see myself reflected in a sole star twirling underfoot and overhead
rowing my ears so thick with disfigured silence so that I wished I was born deaf.
I am the lighthouse man and my mind is a spinning fragment
    my eyes can merely follow and my floating steps merely trail.

It never changes tone here, I can only vaguely trace the time
By the occasional moon. Tonight it shines half chewed,
  Befitting the levelled star a sideways crown.
It is beautiful but I mustn't stop to admire, lest a survivor
Scavenger loses patience withholding the last of their scran.

I am the lighthouse man and I haven't eaten in years.

I am the lighthouse man and I bled for the first time yestardy.
I am the lighthouse man and my bulb ricocheted off the base of my skull
In a telling fairy tale dream. I felt static in my head
And my light's ink spilled across my hands and for a minute I thought
My light had gone out. I tasted blood,
Trickled down from my stinging nose and I had never been so scared.

I am the lighthouse man and I never knew I could die.

I am the lighthouse man. Once the world danced with magic and I was
A walking satellite that grew to want to dissapear.
I am the lighthouse man and my decrepitude is casted in my hands:
Black as the night from the dirt collected over the years.
The few slashes of skin clear enough to see look rust-like and obtrusive, outdone only by
My veins like wonky bruises that vine across the silhouetted bone;
Bridging gear to gear, clinking shivering knuckles
         That want nothing more than to surrender.

But I am only frostbit, not frozen.
Life was and thus must still be.
I am a raindrop, not the whole ocean.

I am a walking lighthouse inspecting and guiding empty seas,
A form without virtue
That ceased feeling it's metallic steps too long ago to recall.
A cubist teardrop falling down a grey giant's cheek,
Waiting to be captured and swallowed.

Or perhaps I am climbing uphill, slowly along the circumference of his forehead.
So slowly I cannot notice the rise. Perhaps I was destined to amble in hypnosis,
En route on this colourless limboid curve until I forget the concept of
             a destination, a soul, a matryr jester to rouse me awake...
             and perhaps it is then that I will be blessed with the heavenly bulb

Of the weeping giant on whom's flesh I disturb.
I am the lighthouse man and I dream of purpose.

I am the the lighthouse man with a penchant to levitate
I am the lighthouse man and I am a God without tool or reason.
I am the lighthouse man and I'll walk this limbo until my feet dissapear.

I am the lighthouse man and I am cursed.
I am the lighthouse man transitioning between lives and never knowing
Causality nor the answer. There are no questions to have;

I am the lighthouse man and I must have been a murderer in my past life.
I am the lighthouse man and I can feel my inner fuses twist,
Falling fainter and fainter by the second.
I am the lighthouse man and I will not make it another night.
I am the lighthouse man and I am a memory-bank full of nothing remarkable.
If I felt this months ago then perhaps I would make do with the my sojourn of an empty house, atop a parked car, and perhaps I would be content with rotting.

But now the moon shines so luminously bright and full and close! So very close!
I am the lighthouse man and I chase the moon.
I am the lighthouse man and I vaguely recall my mother saying 'do not eat the moon,
It will give you nightmares!’ and it all suddenly makes sense now.

The stars are all out tonight and they await my company. I am the lighthouse man and now I run.
I run run run run for the sky in ode to the rest of the bodies that abandoned this place.
Onoma Feb 2019
a song of secrets,

a twisted hum--

builds till it splits a

witch's speculo, speculo

on the wall.

into silver spiders--

her

cubist vanity of jumbled

pose.

cockeyed with the ugly

beautification of truth.
a mcvicar Apr 2019
if the hand outline has been emptied,
i'll say sorry in advance.
call the emergency mind-repair system
(please never ever call me back).
quiet down the thoughts now,
if seems your time has come:
to be cast into oblivion
with the rest of the mortal ones.
GR Oct 2017
A cosmic tiger
Now turned
Cubist cat
Hangs on a wall

Proudly recounting
The tale of when
He served
As a vehicle bearer,
For the most
Potent energy form
Known
To human kind
In the entire cosmos

© 2017
Prabhu Iyer Feb 2013
I. Prologue

Splash words across: images on canvas.
Before Abraham was, I am:
the cubist of poets. Mangled and tangled;
Here thoughts emerge, in reverent perspectives.
The real world: how many dimensions,
depends on who you ask; Monotone
in my unidimensions. Filter. Baritone.
Coffee-brown is the best colour around.

II. Love

Here we sit by two-arms distance. To north,
to south. Facing opposing poles.
There is an attraction.

Here are images from the industrial world
gone post-industrial. Broken commodes.
Outsource your misery here. The sky can afford
a hole from on here. As long as
there's none in my shoe.

Sometimes, I roll over in waves.
Sometimes, you wave over.
Questions still hidden in the corners.

III. Peace

All that's passed remains flickering
green like the wireless router
silently at nights: recover, play it over.

Flush it all up. Splash it all around. Cubism.
Art nouveau. Portmanteau. Now fruck the world.
Neon shades rippling through the smoke
riding out dancing to metal clang;
Crazy laughter like that of an empty skull:
smoke the pipe, brother,
spread the peace around.  2013, stupid.
Idealism died in 1967. And many times since.
Repeats always a farce.

IV. Spirit

Only one man died for the poor.
Who called the dead to life.
All other stories are about barons and hedgehats:
while the millions were ground over
to oil the world. While they roiled the world.
How the poor die under the heels
of those that claim to love that man?
Disagree? Drone. Agree? The throne.

Yes, we can, brother, we can defeat this
****** corruption. Brother,
be not corrupt.

V. Prospect

A sigh of disapproval, soft in sleep.
I come and lie, back to your back,
waiting for love to seep over.

Yes, we can, brother, we can overcome
bigotry vile. Brother,
say not, mine, the only way ever.

Happy lovers day. Shout out aloud,
peans more to the meek women's rights.
Forget not, there's some in your sights.

Two arms' distance is about the right in the day.
There are two faces seen in this bubble,
formed at the mouth of the tooth paste tube.
Peace to the world, every morning after.
Every little home by home.
Art, love and the spirit - a poet's charter for world peace!

Neologisms I have coined and used in this piece:

1. Unidimensions - uni-dimension as an opposite to multi-dimensions!
2. Hedgehats - a somewhat derisive word for those who divide the land into hedges for their own fiefdoms and the such :)
Mateuš Conrad Nov 2016
if god is dead,
then poetry is nought: but suicide.

could it be the evermore question, a year from now
the same autumn will rinse the lands of once budding colour,
and stretch, as the eye can see, the witry skeletons,
where once the birds nested their young in bulbs of harvested
twigs  bundled up? for what if the wintry tree, if not
the last remnants of the airs of spring,
a lizardly womb of flight...
   so the paupers of Rome argue
about the benefits of monogamy,
as they might about monotheism...
and they say monogamy is not "natural",
but what is? why take the burden of
a widower swan, why extract monogamy from
swans and later find the harem of monkeys?
and then simply say: it be unnatural... why?
we were never gracious enough to mirror
swans, hence the brothers Grimm and the
ugly duckling mistook...
        oh wagers of the translated Graeae
of Scotland, where it Hamlet on the couch,
or where it Macbeth?
what matters is how populist media makes
a franchise of a form of athletics that cannot bed
a guised look of despondency -
      puritan saxon conference on sexuality
that gone beyond the ******* use:
***** therefore thinking,
            flaccid therefore not thinking...
you can utilise language to a point where mathematical
certainty is given, as is the missing blemish of
woad... no wonder the Saxon maidens
    retain their virginity at home,
but treat themselves for a nibble of the Magdalene
on the isle of Malaga... puritanism disintegrates
2 weeks in...
                   and still they bemoan,
if they have been growing more and more depressed
since the second world war...
                why allow them to create this viral infection
that's like a virus ingested by unsuspecting
       victims... are they not the ones
prescribing premature depression since they
heaved no foetus in their womb?
          and having done so, are clear of the command:
remove that alien **** from me!
   aren't they?
       if god is dead... all those who write poetry
have committed suicide...
           i once made a lament statement:
given that god is dead, then so is poetry,
i don't which is more lamentable...
but i'm sure to spot a few more eager-beavers of
kneeling and prayer than i'm to see poets...
and can i return to the heights having sunk so low?
      evidently i didn't sulk on my way down,
could poetry ever be tamed with no populist
acrimony? no *auld lang syne
?
      i doubt it...              i very much doubt
a care for anything else sing-along astute than that,
for all i can compete with, is, some sort
of individual... a shadowy statuette...
         it's what's called the reverse of having a heart
for the cardiologist, a brain for the neurosurgeon,
a pathology for the psychiatrists,
  an ambition for the philosopher (mistook them
as humanists you have, for those that are simply
relegated from the realms of language by linguists) -
  for the oncologist that's hardly an ontologist....
swans epitome monogamy with the widower...
apes are Islam with the harem...
          and they say gods do not exist...
but if one sees no god, how is one to replica
a god's existence, if man borrows from the purest
sense of plagiarism that hides no legal documents
enforcing a slack on plagiarism, namely that of anima /
animal? man cannot grasp a concept of god
by sacrificing himself on the altar of imitable animal...
swans have their monogamy... man too presumptuous
also chose swans as the guiding beacon...
softened core, a mongrel of mammal and lizard
that the birds became... furry but borne from
a cracking of the eggshell... man too presumptuous...
he looked elsewhere to no visionary guide since
Narcissus: for mythology is the guiding hand of
new poetry, should god be indeed dead, and poetry
akin to that statement be merely suicide...
then at least mythology is equivalent of history
for poetry... at least there is a logic involved..
   for assuredly should god be dead,
and chlorophyll as pointless as the logic of bio:
be that of life outside one's own graphic or within
one's graphic... should life be nothing more
than the tactless usurping of history that is merely
a blank hole between the omni toward a speciem,
then why have we bothered recording history?
of all scientific theories, of all that rampantly
degrade all human dignity, why create a despotism
within science, that constantly repeats itself
to be overvalued, for reasons that suggests:
en masse applicability due to its pictorial invigoration
for a cruising simplicity? i gather this be a reason
for the emergence of technophobes, or men equipped
to war armed with nothing but sticks!
it's one thing to popularise an idea, later morphed
into a theory, then morphed into an ideology
(an idea that recurs persistently and has no
theoretical basis to not succumb to its theoretical
premise of becoming dodo - the theory of evolution
doesn't take into context the notion that it too can
become extinct... surpassed by something more
invigorating)... later morphed into a shiva
construct that destroys itself...
          we've seen 20th century's pinnacle of this
idea... we've seen eugenics emerge from a pristine
monkish background that said: how best
to economise the case of: the accurate *****-count...
is Darwinism the zenith of invigorating man?
              i find it's too arrogant to even imagine
a square tilting into a rhombus...
       suggesting a rectangle...
       but the days of roaming the Savannah are long gone
and past us... the dependency on oil and gas
and central heating has created a prison-like Akeley...
from what we've inherited, toward what we can
expect, or with suspicion: demand.
            and to think having begun erasing history,
and to think, having erased history of what's noteworthy,
we turned the slapped cheek into a cubist abstraction:
it seems pointless naming pubs after Charlemagne
(shar-le-maine) let alone singing about them...
let's all celebrate running ****-naked on a Kenyan
plateau... and rather than dealing with the past
on a poetic scale... rather: on a literalist scaling of things...
it's almost like biblical literalism kinetics....
     in either case: everyday poetry dies...
or as the case is minded to refresh the argument:
    with the death of god, poetry committed suicide...
i don't know which is the more tragic evidence
of what language has become...
                     this doesn't even invoke an analysis
of the marketplace use of language that politics is...
god forbid it should ever come to that...
  aren't we supposed to feel something otherworldly
at some point in our lives?
                     it's not that i can't rationalise my existence
into this world alone... and feel all the contentment
i need by mere concern for thought trickling into my
being within it...
            it's just that i can't rationalise my existence within
this world alone, based upon a hierarchical
          symptom... much akin to Guy "Lucifer" Fawkes
tried to state by blowing the houses of parliament...
which doesn't suggest a need for a celestial conjuring
of dictator... man has already encouraged that
with English 24/7 c.c.t.v.,
                                                   and as might be suggested...
the point you reach when catching yourself trying
to persuade or enforce a point...
         that lacks all emotive sensitivity hoping for
a romantic excavation invoking the zeitgeist of the times...
neo-romantics are on the rise...
                            we do live in a time of neo-romanticism,
as a few might have suggested: globalisation's
and the audaciousness of militant Islam's offspring:
lying dormant, like a speech by Pope Urban II:
     it just lay there, under a fog of submerged Calvinism
and secular sensibility... waiting patiently
        till the nibbling stopped and it had a chance
to counter... it truly was a case of Damocles' seconds...
tick-tock, tick-tock... and thus the guillotine dropped;
you could feel the carcass stench in the air
         or what cultural-marxisim would make of
an economy that attacked its own economic model...
  it would be deemed dead economically,
but culturally? resurgent...
         you could sniff it out in the air, that rotting
carcass menu: providing a wake of vultures,
                                  or a comedy house of hyenas.
Mateuš Conrad Nov 2015
that's what i found so problematic in
understanding thought,
but concerning the idea of a flux
i found the stasis point in it,
it was better translated by the cartesian basis
of inquiry, i can't negate thinking
because the ontology of thought
is primarily synthetic to pass the time,
rarely analytic unless professional,
so i dropped the a priori / a posteriori
compounding crap and came up with
good enough reasons for cognitive analysis
and cognitive synthesis...
i can relax now, i guess...
so wrote something in a hardcover by horace
to remind me of the origins of biases and bases...
kindergarden swing tactic and pendulum continuum,
i hate to break it to you, but my thought
has no megaphone in the 18th century,
but my words have a place in the 22nd century
given the 21st century provide the images
i'm bound to decipher...
i guessed the asian girl was a robot...
and subsequently i thought all those things
i wrote in the poem prior...
imagination is hard to insist with regards to successful
usage... it uses no patent geometry or
skeletal phoneticism of reminder...
you will not remember a picasso to say something...
but i bet you'll remember an m to utter the sound
em em mmm mumble, funny how it works.
we're not in art gallery... we're just buying
potatoes for home-made *****...
we're living under martial law in poland
before the anticipated soviet invasion and we're happy...
not like now... the silicon god of the microchip
chopped our limbs and we lost the amazon
green for london grey cement and cemetery...
we're here, there's not point poking fun at my grimace
with a flashlight.
so losing the timing of knowledge... the spacing
of knowledge is an onion metaphor for a working
car engine: drilling team in arabia,
the pirates of somalia,
the cargo ships from scandinavia,
the flirty whipping rich boy scouts asking for
a next **** mojito of fever...
well... i did the opposite to english...
i allowed "*****" words into the vocabulary i use
rather than allow dirt images to weave a spiderweb
enclosing the spider...
i rather censor images than censor words...
poor tactic to censor images...
sometimes a nibble of sadism will penetrate
this whole provision of safe *****,
censor "*****" word usage and you'll only
allow dirtier than the ***** words to enter via
images... my god... you must be a sensitive cubist!
we'll allow **** cannibalism and squares...
but we won't allow the representative of
seasonal cannibalism of spring eating autumn
with the tetragrammaton's H & H (twinned temperament
in coordinate starting vector 0ºC
then donning the appropriate clothes while
the trees change their muscles leaving the skeletal exposed),
or acknowledging that there's only a definite
capital delta / y in writing -
we synthesised the square the circle the triangle...
we got π and pythagorean equation...
we gave these shapes the thesis categorisation of scalpel...
we cut with them...
but then they cut us... mathematicians committing
suicide with drills over the π-continuum
that's anti-trigonometric surrounding anti-matter...
but as society goes... courtesy in speech
doesn't necessarily provide courtesy and chivalry
in action...
censor the words ****... and then watch the emerging show
that's antonymous to the majority of time
spent in commute: dumb gloom & grey fancy
to create a rainbow like a shaman.
K Balachandran Nov 2013
Dali's brush, she has
in her expressive tongue;
his cubist sensibility,
laps up that dense macabre
as if it's cadence par excellence.
Tim Knight Nov 2012
Too many frown lines to be certain
whether or not those lips
are worth a kiss.
Face paint cracks,
middle school onion skin effect,
on pale forehead hide, that
covers bare bone and brain.
Costume falls down at the shoulders,
waist and shin, only to reveal
more paint, Picasso paint,
blue and rose, cubist painted prose.
Your dance is little more than
a jig, left foot to right foot, Newton’s Cradle-
strings attached.
Connor Jul 2015
The night is breathing apartment aroma
and the drunks are tumbling
d o
w n
w a
r d
through marina side
alleys
where the
Jamaican trumpeter
sharpens the brickwork
with clamor
brass rifle bullet sounds.

I get my depression half price at the supermarket,
that man made melancholia/
dehydrating all senses/
gunpowder to a broken barrel.
Sleepless for that distant girl explosive!
She's moving to the big city,
yeah there she goes!
To live in a place where many go to die.

Mango the sky
and ashclouds-
autumnal daisy/
center sunshine/
opalescent ecstasy
reminding one of Indonesia
and Darjeeling balcony evening
on the cubist block
on Kuta
on dreams and nightmares simultaneous
(THE PARANOIA OF PARASITES)
wet air
vapor rain
February pain
in the July bone!
Celebration VOICENOISE
passing phantom
thru paisley sheet
corridor.

Life is strange..
the strangeness of days
receding via the mattress
to time
and memories and
remembering the happenings
of ceremonies
this year
past year
CAVALCADE!
SPECTACULAR STARLIGHT!
OVERVIEW THE FIELD OF TENTS
AND LOVERS!

Life is an unrecognizable chameleon
T R A N S M U T E
to some other color
iridescent
(Where do I go? where do I go?)
Say by December the
name of my Valentine
by boardwalk boreal
and I recall
the current
Summersun
pearl/red
beautiful and beating

(BEDAZZLED LIKE
THE HEART)
like pieces of a jigsaw
their faces were joined
interlocked in places
overlapping at others
like Picasso himself
had painted them
with linocut or oils
an imperfect portrait
harmoniously
                  asymmetrical
created by these two
fragmented profiles
lips interdependent
remaining in want
fulfilled for a moment
in this "their moment"
a cubist vision of beauty
not in appearance
or form necessarily
but in what it shows
JV Beaupre Apr 2016
Paintings delight my eye and ignite my imagination: Devotional icons, the omni cubist view, the brazen eyes of Whistler and Manet; and Monet's lilies.

The perspectives of the renaissance and the violence of Caravaggio; the lush glowing skin of Rubens' nudes; and more!

I celebrate the intellects that created these.
Just name-dropping.
Mateuš Conrad Feb 2022
502 bad gateway bypass...
title: shattering of stone
body:
in the rubble: a mountain could
be found;
as might be suggested...
given enough time and there's plenty
of it, as there is of space...
the now known deserts of the world...
were once great mountain ranges...
the ancient Egyptians even tried
to replicate this truth by erecting pyramids...
as if implying: look! look!
there were once mountains here!
now! there's nothing but sand!
how the gods, grunted at the idea of mountains
in what is not Sahara... fickle creatures
like the creatures they created are...
who knows... perhaps there will one day
be the desert of Himalaya...


i felt it coming at me like a freight train...
i was going in for work sharp...
woke up at 6am, had a coffee and ate the prepared
bun with pickles and liver pate...
but couldn't finish it... drank a coffee and smoked
a cigarette... had a shower, pampered myself
with about 7 different pampering products...
usually i'm obviously to how i smell like...
but on the bus i could quiz myself:
who here smells like soap and who here smells
like either stale bread or a curry / eggs?
that's the 86 route for you...
it's the immigrant bus... and... funnily enough...
i'm an immigrant myself... although...
it's different when you come to foreign shores
aged 8... and thrown into the education system
rather than bypass all that jazz & enter the work
force... by immigrant status i'm a veteran of sorts...
by 7am the pains and spasms in my abdomen were
becoming excruciating... i could feel
a plug-hole of a **** building up...
      like a bear before retiring to hibernation...
i wouldn't be able to just simply, **** this plug-hole
of a **** out before or on the job...
why? because there would be more to come...
dizzying effects of focus...

i was nervous... she said she would be coming to
do a shift today... who? Jeminah...
she sent me a text telling me how anxious she was...
i figured... the best... blatant: covert question
would be... you worried the trains are not working?
oh... you can get the 86 bus... the tube might be open...
pulling a long long stick...
a lever even... something Archimedes would
use to lift a mountain off the ground...
she felt anxious... oh... because of those two storms?
Eunice - the worst for 30 years...
red weather alerts? you worried about that?
i was seriously stroking a massive bear silly...
she felt anxious for all the reasons i wanted her
to feel anxious about...
n'ah... the way to get to the venue wasn't on her mind...
neither was the weather...
she was found out... she didn't want to be in
the company of the other girls...
and because i put my foot down:
this is getting silly... i'm not going to get blamed
for your son's and her son's friendship fallout...
telling the truth...
    what a recurrent theme with me these days...
well... at least its not a soap opera style of
a multiverse of competing dramas...
there's only one... and i'm fortifying myself with
all the right answers... i need to play this out
like an opera... petty **** that can grow and grow like
that must be explored from many angles...
down the line...

she didn't show up... the other two girls involved
acted slightly funny... she must have passed on
my Pontius Pilate messages: i'm washing my hands clean
of the matter... you girls created this issue...
you sort it... those two boys are not falling out
over something their mums did...

handshakes all round... two clingers...
one ****** with a nervous tick but one guy with
cerebral palsy... well... oddly enough...
having been a recluse for almost a decade...
i have managed to surprise myself by fitting the role
of a people person... i don't know where i was storing
this confidence... self-assurance... stoic silence...
i don't feel the need to talk unless talked to...
sure... i might say an anecdote or two:
how Millwall fans at Fulham told me a joke
about a West Ham player who's fond of kicking
cats... cat lives matter...

the shift itself... West Ham are back to their usual
antics of not respecting lesser opponents...
Newcastle are on a campaign trail to survive
in the Premier League... two of their best players weren't
playing: yet they still managed to draw 1 - 1...

who do you think are going to fall?
i says: Burnley had it coming for the past two years...
yeah... Watford is a boomerang team...
one season on the Premier level...
the next on the Championship level...

seems i can have much fun with people,
whether coworkers or the actual public...
the freaks among the coworkers follow me like
dogs, while the public?

an old lady wanted me to use her camera to take
photographs with the West Ham mascots:
some bear mascot was first, then Harry the Hammer...
i had to tap Harry's shoulder when a father asked me
to call him back while he moved along the stand
so he could go back and have a photograph taken
with his kid: so heavily padded he almost didn't feel
my touch...
but he went back...
then that retired police officer that took my side
when some busy-body ***** of a: not my supervisor
kept on demanding i put on a face mask...
that infernal: secular niqqab...
the retired police officer noted: he's distraught...
**** the club: if they can think they can get away
imposing their own rules: all staff must wear ******
coverings... this busy-body even said:
i don't you not covering your nose...
so, what then? my chin is capable of breathing?!
scale of escalation... the from me to the supervisor
to the busy-body third part...
the ex-police officer used the hypothetical
argument: but i have a deaf person, friend,
sitting next to me: he needs to lip read...
how is he going to read my instructions if he can't
see my mouth...
and then... well... i wasn't bothered...
wearing these nappies always brings back
memories of my grandfather's funeral...
he was a big deal in a small-town where i was
born... a foreman in the metallurgy industry...
he knew a lot of people...
but how many showed up to his funeral?
not even the half that i'd have expected...

we kept chatting... my supervisor later came up
and asker me... so...   ?!
oh... you know, we just talked about life...
his father was a widower... living in Cornwall...
he used to get free grub from the local (pub),
but when the pandemic hit...
he lost all WILL to live...
and me says: you know how people say that
you can die from a broken heart,
i guess you can also die from being denied
WILL... we agreed... we shook hands about x3...
like a post-scriptum he asked me for my name
and i asked for his... Mark...
now living in East Sussex... but originally from
Dartford...

Mark said he had thick skin... and i told him...
your eyes are watering... i don't believe it...
looking at them feels like watching a very bountiful
aquarium... you're not going to fool me mate...
life... plus, it's not against the law to not wear
the *****... as i later said:
now you get to see who the people with OCD
and the hypochondriacs are...
yeah: it feels weird... i'm walking around without
the "*****" while my wife is still paying
servitude to outlaw rules...
but if they want to... why deny them the right...
sure sure...

but i had to use a member of the public
to infiltrate the hierarchy on the job...
he used the proper arguments... i was just thinking:
perhaps people just want to see my face...
recognise it... see ****** expressions...
after all: we've been playing a game of pretending
to be Muslim women for two years...
how about we start playing hide & seek once more?

what happened later... the curiosity of the children...
i looked at them, smiled, they smiled back...
they felt so comforted... they felt like:
well... thank god this cubist-esque freak-show is
running and hiding... little girls, little boys...

like i told Mark: but the young 'ung suffered... too...
you need to see people faces,
i might have slouched with the expression
of "****** recognition"... but expressions matter...
you sometimes have to out the tongue to the face...
you want to see someone laugh,
at ease... nowhere near the culture & the people
of Afghanistan... this might have to be the building
block of the supposed "great" restart...
seeing people's faces...
esp. when it comes to children...
they want to see faces they can trust...

but it's outright blatant...
i'm not going to make a comparison between
The Beatles "vs." The Rolling Stones...
for me it always been
Bruce Springsteen "vs." Chris Rea...
no... can't choose...
who the **** do i couple Bob Dylan with?
i'm currently sipping some whiskey while
in the company of ol' Bruce...
ah... Bob Dylan vs. Tom Waits...
        Tommy 'ol boyo...
                    live circus... going out west (live)...
Tom Petty though...

there was one expulsion... a ginger she-male...
all the fans were laughing: don't give her out...
the SIA guys were playing gorillas while
i was on my break... putting my hand on the shoulder
of the hurt party... calm... calm... you ginger ostrich...
stop pandering to the parade of:
already lost teenage hormones...
it sort of worked... i giggled... and no one
became involved... i chewed on my gum like i
like might have been found chewing on a broomstick
or a horses' mane...
i chewed so hard until my jaw hurt...

Tom Waits - going out west (live)...
now we're talking...
prior to Prince dying: you had not access to
songs like Party-man... Trust... all copyrighted
material... yeah.... but i own the best of CD...
why can't i stream it?!
oh, right... he's dead... free-for-all...
free meat for the crows...

why oh why would someone walk up to me
and ask to take a selfie with me?
yeah... this American accented dude...
i watched him through the second half...
off his nuts...
but at half time he walks up to me and asks...
can i take a selfie with you?
sure... weird...
am i famous?! or am i just ****** approachable...
all the other stewards are like bricks in
a mountain: but mountains don't have bricks...
or they're over-anxious busy bodies...
it's like people never learned their NVQ training...

safety, security, service....
the service part is the building part...
you pass off being attired in safety / security tactics...
but... service comes first...
you talk, you interact... you learn to be human...
one year of this, before i ask for being given references...
that's when i'll work toward looking toward a more
permanent employment as a chemistry
teacher... even though... scribbling this sort of *******:
i'd love to become an English teacher...
ha ha... an English teacher... even though i'm not
English...

i need the references... working with my father in
roofing... no, can, do...
they don't want familial ties in references...
one year... i'd still do these gigs on the weekend...
but one year...
you get a chance to deal with a football crowd...
you got a belt... when it might come to dealing
with a classroom of rowdy children...
like Louis XIV stated... it's the trick of the eye...
look the authoritative type...
there's nothing more to it...

then these three supporters at the front...
when they first started singing the song for the cat-lives-matter
footballer who was more into... kicking
cats than a football... how did the lyrics go?
almost Dr. Seuss...
he kicks with his right foot... he kicks with his
left foot... i pursed my lips... i tried to cover my
face with my hand... all the while trying to as
instructed: not taking sides... not showing emotions...

but their remarks came fast... i must have looked
interesting...
so where are you from?
Russia? guess again... Ukraine? nope...
Czech Republic? nope... ******! yep...
but i've been living here since the age of 8...
and i'm 35...
have a nice life: she said... one of them was
ginger... presuppositions of Irish... the beard was
pulled... oh my god, the girl looked proper, proper,
drunk...
i went on a break... i came back:
oh! he's back! you know you're the only one
without a hood on! all the other stewards...
the guy who's usually here is somewhat asleep
while prying open his phone...
where's your pancho against the rain?
oh... i gave it to a spectator... blah blah...

point being... i was actually waiting for her...
Jeminah... all the time... she didn't show up...
i've just received a text from her...
what is... drotaverini hydrochloridum?
i had to take it today...
a rubric of buzzwords...
it sells alongside suggestions akin to the morning-after
pill...

well, it will be a rubric of buzzwords...
i had to take some pills for the cramps in my stomach...
it just felt like one of those Sprintsteen,
Chris Rea, Bob Dylan, Tom Petty sort of nights:
when you feel nervous about thinking bout
a girl while simultaneously feeling nervous
about taking a ****... so you feel like taking a ****
at 7am but delay it to until 5pm... 6pm...
because the girl's easting away at your mind...
you're getting cramps in your abdomen
like you you're about to do a clown trick
with balloons turning them into theoretical poodles...
because you just love the girl:
you just love the girl...
she might be a single mother, she might think
she's a woman... but she's just a girl to you...
even though you're not her father...

oh right... the buzz... words... as someone who studied
chemistry i should know what drotaverini hydrochloridum
is... it's for the abdomen cramps...
for: i ought to have taken a ****...
but here's me stalling...
will she, will you come?
DROVATERINE....
an antispasmodic drug...
   used to enhance cervical dilation during child-birth...
i'm giving birth: to a feeling...
i think i'm in love... she's all anxious...
Bruce's: Maria's Bed... yeah... i'm on that same page
in this story...
esp. noted use in Asia and Central Europe...
i'll be lazy: i'll cite it verbatim:
it's structurally related to papaverine,
is a selective inhibitor of phosphodiesterase 4
and has no anticholinergic effects...

the way i see it... i'm giving birth to love....
i want her fat **** to sit on my face...
sorry... what?!
i'm being absolutely serious...
just looks up the article on Anticholinergics...
i don't have a womb...
but i have a heart that seems to have
sunken into the levels of the intestines...
while i get all spaghetti tangles
for brains...
i'm in love... i can't help it...
she a cougar red head... a deep red...
a mahogany red...
i can't stop thinking about her...
it's exactly impossible to live:
without having to think about her...
anxious cluck by cluck...
if she's not going to abide by failures in life
then... no... life's not worth living without her:
when she's at her pinnacle of failure...
let me pick her up...
let's pretend there's an old world
worth looking at... that there might be a world war
in the theatre... none of these proxies in
the H'American department of... up-keeping
hard-ons and kaleidoscope coyotes...
now for the text messages... why weren't you around?!

i wrote this yesterday, i went downstairs for sone grub
because i couldn't fall asleep...
my mother came down... saw me in my TOMBSTONE
mode... drunk... what? you want me to punch
myself in the face? lucky for her, lucky for me
i remained silent, because the night was silent...
she ****** off i ****** off... today i made mein vater
und mein mutter some ******
chicken broth with vermicelli...
all the usual suspects were used...
the leek, the parsley root, the carrot,
the garlic (skin on), the celery... chicken... d'uh...
although i didn't use the chicken *******...
that's going to be used for a curry...
  
and what are my other options? living alone?
paying rent to a landlord from hell?!
shame... sure... but the attic is full of clutter
and there is no basement...
plus i have a private library the deservedly might
need a proper: HEAVE! HEAVE!
50 oars...

i'm in love and not for all the right reasons...
if my youth took the route of an atypical man...
starting from 20 working my way up...
yeah... but i went mad at the age of 21...
******* invisible choir, great wind dispersing it...
psychiatry that tried to attempt its regression
tactics of implanting me with false memories...
giving me anti-psychotic drugs that fattened me up
until a nurse said:
you either loose weight... or you'll be put
on high-blood pressure tablets...
so... i bought a bicycle... lost 20kg... cycled off
into the sunset...
now... 35... years old... oh... look...
they're looking... they're actually interested...
the young girls have: "woken up"...
yeah... by now? i'm not interested...
i don't and i didn't pay much attention
to the game of genes... it's a fractional impossibility...
unless you're cloning yourself...
by the time you're a grandfather...
only a quarter of you remains...
  why bother with the argument?
        it's silly...Darwinistic unrealism has always been
a thorn in my side...
eh?                            my genes have my consciousness?
i'm... translatable to future generations?
sure... but they can't be my own...
why would i be interested in young girls...
if things worked out for me like they might have
worked out for other men...
a walking *****... and spare parts of monetary dough...
i never wanted to make money...
i took the principle left around for others to see...
between the aesthetic and the ascetic...
well... St. Francis of Assisi...
other men in my position: who have hungered and
been left out in their 20s... now in their 30s can have
their comeback...
their revenge... me? i'm trying to court
a woman 4 years older than me... with a boy
that's 11 years old...
i said: bully them into teaching your German...
you know, it's the mother tongue of English...
grammatically the two languages are very much
aligned... Fredrick... "bully" them into making
you learn Deutsche... i said BULLY i implied:
persuade... do i need to use sign language...
finally... though... a third head on the Hydra...
if i had a little Frankenstein in my possession...
i could be learning Deutsche proper with him....
a youngling like that... sponge for brains...
maybe i could teach him some of my ****** zunge...
wow... no no... that's the whole point of turning
toward art... by 35 i could have been earning
100+ £... yawn... no, truly...
playing this to-and-fro with younger girls
because i now might have status...
not much fun... to be exacting...
single mum... problems at school...
you should learn German rather than French...
he understood it splendidly...

             just you wait... i'll get him into modern German
folk music... did i buy her off with my homemade wine
and him with my own made banana loaf with hazelnuts?!
here's to me!
salute!

              - on these isles for most of my life...
35 - 8 = 27... twenty-seven ******* years!
and no chance at a pluck at the Rose...
up north she was giving it up to grooming gangs
from Pakistan... down south...
shy ******* nunnery: "all of a sudden"!
but now... ah... this... hybrid of Scotch and English
stock... i'm shuddering... i'm still getting these
cramps in my abdomen that says:
you have a womb... what?! i'm transgender?!
what the ****?!

that's why i didn't want to earn money...
well... it's not that i didn't want to...
you see what happens when you go mad aged
21... and how you figure things out...
at least now i'm not a target...
i don't have anything to offer expect for...
knowledge...
it's a blessing...
since... it's hardly what any woman wants...
women tend to want only their own advice...
they conjure this advice like witches conjure up...
perhaps the rosemary herb
goes well with lamb... but like the Turkish
broads suggested... but if you add it to beef...
oh! mein! gott! the Turkish lavash!
with that red onion & parsley roughage of
a side salad... mouth-watering stuff...
i don't really need to see the competitive hard-on
of whatever Sultan to counter the Hagia Sophia...
just that beef lavash...
and yes, you'd be wrong... English cheddar
works just as well...

but... i'm no Frank O'Hara... there's no qualm in
me about not being a painter...
why i'm not a painter translates to me as:
why am i not a painter?
i abhor colours... well... i like some more than
others... the amber and the auburn...
the greens... whiskey... autumn...
but when it comes to movies?
i prefer them to be black & white... less strain
on the eyes...
if images are moving? black & white...
sure... no one is expected to paint in black & white...
like no one is expected to write in
rainbow hieroglyphics... i can stand for an hour
beside a colour painting...
it doesn't move, i don't move...
time, the world: moves...
fair enough...
but colour-riddled movies?
a strain on the eyes...
    why am i not a painter?
                     why am i not a narrator?!
i'm clearly neither... what's the middle ground?
priest? psychiatrist? *******... poet?!
oh you have to be choking me to make me joke...
let alone laugh... but i'm not rhyming...
but there was a time and a place
when people identified this art with
a need for mathematics... measure... ticture...
rhyme... music...
like **** that's happening now: proper...

- perhaps it's not painting, i think it;s painting,
perhaps lacking in colour, perhaps lacking in contorts..
in shapes, in disguises...
what? no traffic light: goes green?
no traffic light remains red?
no middle ground for the amber?
no cyclist prepped to be the shepherd of traffic?
to leech onto a truck where he might be
visible... to orientate the roundabout congestion?
no one, ever, minded, this?!
before moi!
           oh... what shame... what utter shame...
we were supposed to help each other out...
not be these... petty demigods...
silly ******* idiots...

             i might have to reiterate my stance...
she's giving me the love-ups making me feel like a woman...
i'm getting cramps in my abdomen...
sure... i ought to have taken a **** 7 hour prior...
but i keep it in... like a bear about to hibernate:
a plug-hole ****...

- anticholinergic agent are substances that block the action of the neurotransmitter called acetylcholine (ACh) at synapses in the central and peripheral nervous system...

-  anticholinergics are divided into two categories in accordance with their specific targets in the central and peripheral nervous system and at the neuromuscular junction: antimuscarinic agents, and antinicotinic agents (ganglionic blockers, neuromuscular blockers...

she says she's anxious... i'm nervous too!
i'm getting cramps in my stomach...
i'm giving birth to love...
i want access to her son... i want to learn Deutsche
with him... is that too much to ask?
i don't have the sort of money
to access younger, fertile, girls...
i'm left with single mothers... MUFFAS...
oh... she's rounded... like the earth ought to be...

i'm still shy on one reply...

Apologies for the lateness of this message, came home and "had to", i.e. wanted to make some Silesian gnocchi with beef in a dill and a horseradish sauce... cooking for three, it takes time, then I fought up on some footie... was soaked at West Ham, but it was a good shift.... so what happened to you? Weren't you supposed to come? I found out late that the tube was working, managed to use it on the way back... so what happened? What were you anxious about? The bad weather the day before? I took a walk for a newspaper when the storms hit... it was almost fun-windy... at one point I stood rooted in one place for about 3sec being unable to move... the winds almost roared, i even stopped listening to music on my headphones as I listened to the wind whizz by and ruffle the trees... sort of like ASMR but with a loud speaker... I imagined the wind ruffling the trees like someone brushing their hair on an ASMR video... you feeling better though, yes? You doing Fulham this week?

but we're talking about a psychotic girl...
one layer of narrative against another...
she might as well conjure up
a missing 13 year old cousin
to just test you...
thar's how it works...
this reality, this ugly "thing"...
and the deviances of how much
i want to sleep with her...
there... i said it... beautiful view.
Rebecca Gismondi Sep 2015
I. Café
the waiter has the kindest eyes
when he goes home after his shift he probably finds coffee beans tucked into his pockets
the whirring of the machine doesn't faze him as it did when he first started
he has become accustomed to the grooves of wood and the abstract art above the bar
he glances at the clock every hour on the hour, counting down the minutes until he is released
catching a glimpse of his face in the mirror is a reminder he exists
every time I see myself in it, my eyes disappear from reflection
I wish I spoke Portuguese – these tourists behind me make me embarrassed to be English:
man, loudly: She wants ORANGE JUICE!
waiter nods – such patience
for a moment I think of what it would be like to go downstairs to the restaurant
past the mahogany wood and chessboard floor
and **** on one of the tables
the next patrons would have no idea they were eating off of passion and stunted breath
“Enjoy: homesickness tossed with overwhelming contentment and a dressing of lust.”
I could drink every bottle of Campari, Bacardi and Jameson lining the wall and I still wouldn't have the courage to tell him how kind I think his eyes are
I really want him to drape me over the golden chandelier so I can be reminded of what it feels like to have an all-seeing eye
he has such routine with the way he places sugar packets on plates and lays them down for sleep-deprived and cranky patrons
maybe I should've ordered something
we should have an object at each corner of the octagon table – a spell, a hex
I need to be fed pastries to continue breathing
I would like for him to walk me home
it's just around the corner and I know its name and number are marked on the street but I have a terrible sense of direction
one false turn and I may end up in the water
and I won't ever see the waiter’s kind eyes again.

II. Ruins
if you held me the way you held that camera I'd melt into an exalted sigh
you told me you only take pictures of things you love but you never took any of me
I mean, I know the height and decomposition of this building is breathtaking but I could give you some air if you kissed me by the rusted trellis
your orange sunglasses look ridiculous
I would rather drape you in a cloak, like the Statue of St. John Nepomucene
two bells, like us, drone
as you speak, the sound of the Chinese couple is louder:
“We should go into this room… filled with artefacts…”
“No, here, let's stay…”
******* for saying you're leaving.
I have the urge to pound you with one of those rocks on a ledge so you are trapped here
“Can you imagine this place filled with people?”
you wouldn't belong anyway
you have no affinity for red tiles scattered amongst grey
or the all-encompassing silence of the venue
there is a concrete slab on the left where I could lay you down and take off those glasses
and pour myself into you
so you would take pictures of me
so you wouldn't move to New York
I can't fathom people filling this place
because it should really house two souls instead.

III. Mirador
the number on the floor by the fountain is the amount of times I've said no to you while standing out here
I'll tag another 0 on, just to be safe
the red roofs look like my skin after I've sat all day at the beach at Sperlonga
you almost drowned
your footsteps on the gravel are ominous and even when I look through the telescope I can't see you
I pick a point on the horizon – the blue cubist building; the odd one out – and stare blankly
that guitarist playing “Oh Darling” reminds me of the first time you called me that and I want to smash it so violently
I find myself staring at the trio of scruffy young bearded men instead of you
“What are you saying?! It was at least this big…” one of them says.
he looks like you but the you before you moved to New York
you lean on the upside down heart iron fence and say for the 15th time that you still love me
I'm pushing you over the fence now onto the path below
the garden will still look lovely after you fall
instead I pick another building – pink with white windows and a black roof – and stare
it blinks its eyes and speaks: “Leave.”
you're in the middle of saying how much you loved the fish last night and I break:
“I'm gone.”
Terry Collett Jun 2012
Mamie met you
in the base camp bar

in Malaga
her curly red hair

damp from a recent shower
and said

Picasso was born here  
In this bar?

you said
No

she moaned
In the city

in 1881
and she took the drink

you’d bought her
I like Picasso don’t you?

she asked
taking a sip

of the drink
and you noticed

the tight tee shirt
snugly holding

her firm *******
and her eyes bright

as sunlight’s breaking dawn
yes

you said
I like his later work

not the Blue
or Pink period or

that Cubist *****
and your eyes

slipped downwards
along her slender frame

the tight blue jeans
caressing her small

but plumpish ***
her fingers holding

the glass
and you thinking

of other things
far removed

from Picasso‘s art
though knowing he

would understand
where your mind

had wandered
and what the scene

your mind had set
like some dramatist

preparing for a play
she sipped more

of the drink
her head thrown back

the nice turn
of the neck

the chin
the nose

the ears protruding slight
between her red

and curly hair
and wondered deep

as you drank your own
if the other hair below

between her thighs
was as red and tight

as that above
and she said

breaking through
your thoughts

Was it lust or love
that moved his brush

Picasso I mean?
and oh you mused

taking on her words
and squeezing

the meaning
from each syllable

that was uttered
on her breath

to lay my head
upon her breast

not to sleep
but dreaming rest

and you turning to her
said High love or low lust

fed by his fond muse
moved his brush I trust.
Shrinking Violet Mar 2017
i.

the bones of your face
are long and defined.
i parse you
into geometry:
the firm lean lines of your
nose, your jaw
as a child's drawing,
as a cubist's dream.

ii.

you linger in my mind.
the way your hands
peel apart a question
as an artichoke falls open
barbed layer by layer until
you bare its redolent heart
which is also the answer.
Yes.

iii.

lulling, your words are calm
drops falling into the ocean
of our mutual silence. i feel
only contentment, only
contentment.
david mungoshi Dec 2015
the museums
the art galleries
all had he visited
     van gough
     rembrandt
     dali
    picasso
knew he all
and their works
   paintings
   drawings
  sculptures
 and etchings
surrealist and  cubist
and he dazzled his audiences
with his vast store of fact and opinion
        till the sorry drunk
        troubled his thoughts
       with accounts of john next door
the man who visited
      when our man was on  his rounds
      giving erudite talks
and bargaining with dealers in antiques
poem now in final-version form
Mateuš Conrad Jan 2023
it's not like i was away from society,
sure, i crawled into my room and stockpiled on books,
the Tibetan Book of the Dead was never something
i was going to finish reading and find translatable
insights to compliment...
but there were plenty of books...
enough newspapers too... all the culture sections
written by critics: just today i was reading
up on two reviews in the culture section of
yesterday's the Sunday Times:
  poetry reviews! wow! wow! poetry is being
criticised in a mainstream media publication: still?
isn't poetry dead? last time i heard
TS Eliot killed poetry...
    well: if anything needs a killing -
i imagine trying to **** a dead person...
**** a dead person by mime?
**** a corpse by propping him in a chair...
talking to him, it, her,
pouring her, it, him a glass of whiskey...
dealing cards to them?
pretending the dead thing is somehow still
a body and all the mechanisation process of SIGMA
we dare to call soul or a seal of falling leaves or self?

horrors of the novel and all things
flashy and pop... i could if not for the autobiographical
drip drip drip...
   today i stood in the kitchen and imagined
myself: the demon cook of hell...
tomorrow i'll be making a Turkish dish
of finely cut beef... rosemary (oddly more complimentary
of beef than lamb), chillies, garlic,
sumac, pepper... cheese... white wine vinegar
to cure the meat...
                        black pepper... salt...
eaten with LAVASH...
                                          gorge of all gorges of
the thirst -
      but i will also be making two curries for the day
after tomorrow... to give myself more time for:
more time...

i went away from society: but didn't...
society tried to cement my ear into a lunatic asylum:
how i wished i made it among the madmen,
truly... how i wished i was at one point sectioned:
i tried my luck, i tried and tried but failed...
i never was... pop pill X white as nerves
and the bleaching of aluminium -
   pop pill Y... no result... the desired result...
the world span forward and still the same world
i returned to... although with quaked psyches
reaching out for hands instead of receiving
pointing fingers... exclude you: exclude i and you:
you-not-you i-not-i: or even:
i as "i" and you as "you"...
                    
in this kitchen: this, not this: any kitchen...
what was playing in the background? a spin on vampirism,
a blood-disease romance...
i thought about: if i wrote a YA novel about
vampires in the decadent period of the 1980s
with the height of the AIDS epidemic?
imagine: i "said" to myself...
    imagine vampires with AIDS... i started to imagine
vampires suffering from AIDS...
    not the sort of pristine vampires that needed
virgins or children to survive...
just a wild-thought: an unnecessary thought...
i'd be better off thinking of windmills...
    like that one coming up to Upminster from
Hornchurch...
               because this book, will never be written by
me... but a theme exists...
vampirism at the height of the AIDS pandemic...
vampires with AIDS...
             the homosexuality of vampires is yet
to be explored... seems these creatures might want
to exchange blood, spit and *****...
perhaps vampires would be immune to AIDS...
but then again: that's irrelevant since there's a cure
for ***: the virus that designated the past-"redemption"
state of AIDS...
or at least: this is what i "think" i "know":
point being - i don't care to know...
                              
the following rubric also came up...
on the topic of gravity...
swimming - ∇ (you find gravity in the top part
of your body... in the torso)...
the feet are slackers... they come in for the swim...
cycling - (again) ∇ nabla schematic...
your torso actually manages the coordination
of the body on the bicycle...
your feet do all the work... peddling...
but your upper body needs to coordinate
the centre point of gravity being: you're not falling...
you're not falling when either swimming
or cycling...
you're not falling when walking...
you're not falling when climbing, rock or tree...
∇... the legs are only there for the "ride"...

but? ice-skating... it should be the same!
it should be a ∇-schematic...
but is it?! is it?!
hardly some darkened mysterious, poetic O...
oh god... not another of those O O's...
like O is ****** or O is orbit
or O is eye or: whatever happened in Ur
and why not Oor for up-sigh-alone
   is not different to oh-mega-n: oh Meghan?
not a name in the tabloids... just
a coincidence, a little coincidence...

i can't be blamed for underachieving in the second
wave of literacy: basic example i can give:
frightoffreedom = "FRIGHTOFFREEDOM"
print(f"{frightoffreedom.lower()}")
who write so complicated but still performs
magic in 2D and can't translate 2D into 3D?
did every child start speaking said, any said
language to an unsaid capacity of a Buddha's
silence? gate-keepers some say,
a new literacy i say: i too could learn if
there was someone willing to teach...
but as the first pigs to the trough...
first learners come first and the rest "struggle"...
that's me sorting out the basics of ever used
EXCEL twice, properly...
HTML building blocks once...
sorting out my father's change of accountant:
three years prior to his retirement:
quick-books confuses everyday tax-payers
except for the intended audience of accountants...
but... how happy i was... filling out the rubrics
finding math fun without doing any math...
my new favourite expressions
are =SUM(D3:D34)
   that's for the total of money spent...
next column... =(D3*1.2)
   that's the rubric for the Netto (without VAT)
slide the mouse down from D3 through to D34...
next column the VAT (Brutto)..
    =(D3-E3)
             ergo... the VAT in cell F3... scroll down
to F34... then at F35 type in:
    =SUM(F3:24)...

                   modern poets are yet to have discovered
or used the internet or computers...
Poet-Luddite... conflated language:
i want to forget outside of the immediacy of having to
know an elephant is an elephant and
there are five blind men trying to tell apart
a chair from a table...
                 perhaps seeing each item represented
by a cubist painting would leave them
the same blind men if they were only given
a snippet of sight to tell a chair from table apart...

conkers left on windowsill and other locations
in the household allow you to spend the winter
months: freed from feeling spiders...
spiders apparently abhor the scent of oak seeds:
i've been huddling in my winter abode
freed from spider bites... in winter...
when spiders morph into mosquitos and draw
blood from mammalian flesh...

- i can't believe it though! it was so easy!
but... it had to take a lesbian to ask me out on a date!
it took me from the age of 21 through
to the age of teasing 37, done so casually...
hey: do you want to go ice-skating with me
after the shift is over? sure! why not!
today i paid for it... however many hours
i spent cycling, today i felt muscles i never thought
i had... but it took a lesbian to ask me on a date...
a coworker mingling scenario...
we worked the shift, we went ice-skating...
she filmed me trying my best not to fall over...
her laughter, or rather, her giggling reminded
me of Ilona... that masculine-feminine aura
of self-assurance...
i'm not attracted to these women:
they just seem to be attracted to me...
tattoos, piercings, bully-boy butch-Toms...
standing a proud 5ft4 eyeing up a 6ft2 example
trying to kick punch and kiss all at the same time...
well... it was so easy, so much fun...

it should follow that finding the centre of gravity
within the confines of ice skating
should be the same as that of finding the centre
of gravity while swimming or cycling...
i.e. ∇... that's the schematic...
upper-body: the torso is giving prime psychological
concerns... the legs are secondary...
but no... it's counter-intuitively: "intuitive"...
you can't exactly begin finding gravity while
either swimming or cycling by flapping your
arms about pretending to learn to fly:
but you do! you do!

            a drowning man is flapping his arms about
but his legs... his legs...
i'm starting to think i'm getting this theory all wrong...
swimming = cycling = ice skating = ∇...
i kept looking at my legs
pretending to walk while simultaneously trying to glide...

Δ schematic insinuates: don't look at your legs...
no one who walks upright looks down
asking the legs to do the walking...
one looks down to resemble a humbling
expression of grace: thank you: mechanisms of
what binds water to a tide and the mountain
to itch for rising above the setting sun...
thank you...
no one looks at one's legs insinuating:
you're not performing my unconscious demands
of moving from X to Y...
but on ice? ice skating...
it's a fake schematic... ice skating is truly like
swimming and cycling...
next time? my 3rd time on the ice? i will have to let go...
i will have to fall the nth number of times...
what's scary is generating a momentum
so easily without any obstacles of a hill
of grit of grind...
     it's a bit like: people exercising in the gym...
performance art... they can lift weights as a spectacle...
they can create a sexed-up physique, body-shape...
but throw the same people into a manual-labour
environment: with the drudgery of manual labour...
the bulkiest of them will stumble...
tell them to lift, perform "art work" on a roll of
      felt in the roofing industry...
lifting weights is an abstract compared to actual
physical labour...

still... aged 36 and the first "date": it wasn't a date...
was with a female who just so happened to be a lesbian...
what sort of heterosexual woman would go on
a date with me so simple... she asked to go ice-skating
i would have asked: want to go cycling with me?
want to go to an art gallery with me?
was there any talk about what job i have?
was there any talk about what living arrangements
i'm living "under": more like over given
the current climate of renting in London:
12 months upfront rent?!
             of course i still live with my parents...
i clean the house, i cook, i sort out my father's invoices...
i do the VAT for the accountant,
i tend to the garden...
                              i pay "rent"... well...
thankfully i didn't have hopes to get married...
so... my parents didn't have to fork out from their savings
for some grand fakery parade of ceremonial pomp
of ****** white: bride to be...
easier with the prostitutes in the brothel...
but i figured: if the the 8 year old me figured out
how to ******* before he could produce *****
he could also have an inkling into the current debacle
of men who *******: like that was ever a hindering
"problem": because women are all pristine
because they rarely talk about it:
cipher: Madame Bovary...

         two bad experiences having *** in one brothel
and i'm thinking about curing my ills seeking out
another brothel... but it's winter and my libido is
obviously not up to scratch...
so? three times daily... jerking off to the point
where i: i don't have to actually enjoy it...
no movies... just pictures... cleavage... ***...
eyes... mostly eyes...
                           bacon, butcher, bacon,
tenderising meat, curing meat with acids...
spices... herbs...
                 the more i do it the less i think of it...
worried about communal hot topics about loss
of testosterone?
                   i have hair on my chest
my stomach, my back and on my chin...
                  blah blah some parrot said...
seagulls dived in for a *******... the Kraken yawned...
Norse mythologies crept up on dying Christianity
and all was well... meadows covered by frost come
late January somewhere in the open green patches
of Edinburgh...

                - the labour and the pains of the crucified-foetus....
some say it's like waking into a world
where women perform the splinter-membrane
argument of what's living and what's not...
how ancient male mammals performed infanticide...
yet how chemistry and the abstract allowed
a new-mammalian-wave of female infanticide:
because: early birds in the dynamic of ***
made their first falls the fault in the opposite ***...
while some of us waited and waited and
by waiting became freed from ugly brides
and social expectation: Darwinism's pressures
to procreate...

i can't listen to both Darwinism and Buddhism
at the same time: i simply can't knife through
to the fork to subsequently spoon up and gulp down
this sort of duality...
like i can't stomach the dualism: if there is one
of consolidating the aesthetic with the ascetic...
i can't consolidate the AESTHETIC with the ASCETIC!
Christianity did just that! Christianity
married the AESTHETIC with the ASCETIC"
AT Talbott Feb 2015
Wail 'n' whine of the saxman's blues
The syncopated sizzle of the drum kit
Trinkle, ****** of fingers fervent
The jigsaw jazz of a cubist portrait
Ripped off Monk and Beck, but let's call it an "homage."
Barton D Smock May 2016
the below is a tentatively titled and finished companion piece to my recent chapbook, infant cinema (**** Press, dinkpress.com, April 2016)

infant cinema can be purchased here: http://www.dinkpress.com/store/infant-cinema-by-barton-smock



shut-eye (in the land of the sacred commoner)

~
poetry and god share the same quick death.

I’m on what you’re on;
the eighth day of the world.

~
it’s all in your head. the newborn we had on a mountaintop. the word it knew from memory. its hand that stuck to everything but the dog our dog ate. the cold our dog died from. the tent we called aquarium. that we filled with diapers. that was never full.

~
existence is the wrong inquiry.

I was destroyed by an angel

for having
taste buds.

/ a pinkness

went on
without me.

~
if touch is all it can manage

the hand is poor.

I am the new face
of baby
doorstep.

when lightning
has emptiness
to burn

feed
the fasting
doll.

~
I am old and nothing brings me joy.

I did
good things
but I
was asked.

drunk
outside
of a dog
shelter
I am likely
to remember
a library
pyros
love.

my uncle
he is probably
still
west of me
able

to open
a bottle
with the mouth
of a living
frog.

~
and what
would forgiveness
do?

my kids were never born. yours
they hide
from the number
of people
god
made.

when dead, I was not
a bird
yet
my mother
asks
what kind.

I can’t tell
by looking
if he’s seen
the future
or seen
the future
again. I strip

when my stomach
hurts.

~
it puts me on my stomach

this grief
you have
for the switched
at death



god’s color has returned



the male
animals
in the grey
barn

knew



first

~
I want to say it is yes yes

puberty’s
painted
egg, the island

clock, the genitalia

of alarm…

I want to say it is orange

like bees
like
not all

the hymns
not all

condoms…

~
he says we are men
not because a raccoon
chased a bone
into the factory
of shadows.

he says it’s me
or the bag
of trash
and gives me
a knife.

he says before I was borned
we took
the same
bullet. he says mouth.

I kick
he says
in my sleep
and it puts
a belly button
on a bird
one
bird.

he says them animals
ain’t so wild
as a dog
in drag

and your mother
is the outside
world.

~
the robot is a ******.

the baby
it goes
from baby
to baby
with no
message.



I want your work to matter.

~
subtitles, ghost
pollen / I sit

facing
my father

he strokes
a large
bumblebee…

~
eating behind the mirror’s back
it was all
hick lore
to me

a scratch
in scar’s
nakedness, a loss

of infancy
awarded
only
to the deaf
who dug up
the ears
of god
for nothing
more
than the sound

of depression
going blind
in the garden
of the hairdresser’s

hair

~
death
my way
of saying
goodbye
to god



had you lived
or enjoyed
amnesia…

~
when asked
I say
I see
on the floor
of a mudhut
a *** toy
having
a seizure.

I kiss the feet
you’re the future
of.

~
not
for devouring
the mannequin
but for eating
the seeds, it was

(in a coloring
book
for cigarettes)

beaten

by a baby
a baby
could love

~
I go with dove to high

dives / I am on

the pill
the swimmer’s
pill / for nine

months
I’ve hidden
a rabbit
from no one’s

hormonal
christ

~
it was for healing the hand of the plain hand
that I
was touched / well blood

on a bread
crumb
massage me
a brainwashed
worm / well comb

all you want
the eyesight
of god / swallow

a hair
in the house
birth
built…



can’t
this once
a thing
die
in the sanctuary
of its double

~
hell is a book.

she reads it
in a room
that’s alive.

attic or no, I want
to miss
my father.

~
nakedness,

give it time
to recover

~
into something from his childhood
a man
is born. never

far off
what crawls
her way.

~
she reaches into the same hat for the rabbit he’s made disappear.

I sleep and the dark takes me for the bone

lightning
straightens.

~
church of intermission. church of the rolled-away church my fever follows. church of it ain’t a baby until it spits. church of the lawnmower left running. of the space you give the grieving horse. church of you when you die in my sleep. of musical suicides. church of the disinfected high chair. of the false bruise. of how to become a balloon in the church of touch.

~
in the library’s dream, the abortion clinic is no bigger than a fingerprint.

~
this is me
praying
for a photo
of my father’s
last meal.

me

praying
to have
the allergic
reaction
my mother
faked.

for proof
of animal
suicide.

a mirror for my toys. dirt for my brother.

~
and we touch to abridge doom in the bed of a headless man. and we struggle to hear a father verbatim. and we ask in a fierce wind a phone booth to please be a fireplace. and a starfish consoles a handprint.

~
/ I was spotted covering my eyes by a dentist whose childhood had stopped disappearing. how big is your family and who wears the mouth? is it true your dad sold to a city gargoyle a spray-can of ****? that your mom had no baby tired of being born? that their suicides filled a madhouse with cubist maids?

/ year nine: your birthday spider is put on film for biting. your sister takes one look at my brain and remembers what to feed and how to clean a cricket.

/ year eight:

~
my son doesn’t want the circle he’s drawing to touch the circle he’s drawing.

the dog
is a heartbroken
wolf.

~
she checks her teeth in the door glass of the oven.

the egg is dropped
and the owl
******.

~
when
did your caterpillar
become
a syringe?

I want to hide the clothes I’m wearing.

something touched
is something
mourned.

~
the woman had the suicidal absence of a man who’d just broken to his body that his blood was not the rooster patience devoured. if I peeled a potato, I did so in egg’s hell.

~
praise headgear, worship eyewear.

adore nostalgia, forgive

memorial’s
constant
vigil.

say god
three times, then

say mirror.

~
this is what you mean, kiddo

what you mean
to a bomb

/ it doesn’t help god

that god
is awake

~
for what
does the torso
pray?

the cocoon is music
to the mannequin’s
ear.

sister
she ain’t
been calm.

~
when grief
was password
and not
codename

when gift
horse
was horse
fly

when baby
little baby
shorthand
went all
stork-****

(on who)

to remember
god

~
outside the dream, I had written the most heartbreakingly clear poem about brotherhood. inside

was this boy
was discovering
god’s thumb
is never
clean. a boy whose mouth

was never
here. all those I’ve met

I’ve left
alone.

~
asleep in the pickpocket’s bed, the baby is a mirage.

I’m so fat
I’m fat
in the dark. I compose

at my lowest
a crucifixion
story

from the basements
my father
wired.

~
putting the meat
back together
in an unfilled
pool

we yawned
at the same
time / brief

painless
the unmothered

between

~
as overcome as I was to be gifted a hospital gown, I had nothing on the angel whose brain / for visiting the eye / was banished…

we are the dead
we’re here
to return

~
by death I mean nothing was beautiful for a very long time.

that, and when did you know.
David Bojay Feb 2021
lost in mysterious shades
no aid to what I have played
(myself)
falling into an illusion
the pursuit of love
there's no need to desire if it's all around
yet, I'm alone in bed wanting to hold someone to sleep
the memories are deep
I question what I truly seek
practicing everyday to communicate feelings
art is the result
expression through mediums
I've always known.. this is what I would do
there's no room for people like me, so I'll remain in solitude
(i have so many new posters to hang up)
my week has been weird, I sleep a lot these days... it's not that I want to... I wake up and lay... think... long for her...
my eyes slowly begin to close until...
IT'S ******* 1 PM AND I THINK TO MYSELF... I COULD'VE BEEN DOING ****...
(I reason with myself..."you do work from 10 to 3am...every night of the week)
I'm not used to my schedule
growing up after college kind of *****... where I want to be will take some work
(mostly financially)
a stable job... my own place... solitude... good ****...
soon.. I hope
I've been doing my best to overcome yesterdays "self"
even though I know ultimately there is no "self"
little day by day accomplishments drives the human
let me be human with inconsistent reasoning and carelessnes... I'll learn from it
... and also be nothing.. at the same time?
isn't it all the same
anyway, it's 4:39 am and I always wonder why I'm so drawn to specifying the time in some of my poems
it's not that deep... I promise
maybe I should be the first person to introduce cubist poetry??
could that be a thing??
just write about different times in my life in a "poetic manner" and jumping to when I was 10 years old busting my first nut
the internet was weird for me those days
soccer compilation vids of my idols and ****
(writer later on becomes a monster and commits suicide)
(in my dreams)
anyway
these days... I feel alive, I was talking to this girl but I know... it won't work
time requires some entertainment and I'm just... a ******* when it comes to feeling something for someone other than who I'd want to... start a family with...
I know right
those hopes have evaporated into nothingness and I'm here... I'm capable
different people make me realize different things about myself
that's why I choose to expose myself... their way of being changes when I let them know... it's okay to be, no pressure
no ego
we're just a **** load of atoms... communicating
(I don't want to believe in anything)
I want to learn so many instruments
stringed
percussion
****
I'm on a good track.... I believe
I wan't to write my parents symphonies
and the girl I miss...
I always comeback to that
thinking about what to type
live for my wrongs to make them right
go through the dark to get to the light
fear no repercussions, out of perspective sight
I feel like I've gone off track
it's been a long day
I can't wait to wake up tomorrow
I might go get some kolaches later... my spot opens in 4 minutes
should.. I leave now???
mm.... I'll give it 30 minutes
after I post this I may lay down and fall asleep though
I never have the desire to eat in the morning
gives me more time to plan what I'm going to stuff my face in later on
intermittent fasting bro
I hear you can sell your art via crypto currency...I've also made research about how it's bad for the environment???
weird... but I want to give the future generations more time to solve modern day dilemmas... like that ****
it'd be dumb if I fell asleep mid sentence and my computer died... I'm actually pretty tired... I closed my eyes for 10 seconds and thought 30 minutes had gone by... I'm... hungry though (lol)
I think I will go out for those kolaches after ******* all (as my eyes close slowly)
I'm here... awake...listening to Polyphia
getting hype
this solo
how the ****??
my days are numbered
so are yours
we will all vanish... every word people say about us after we're gone means nothing but will be missed somehow
I'm going to end it here
the poem
hahaha
I have... a lot to live for
finally
Mateuš Conrad Apr 2021
you have caught up to my drift, dear unicorn... i've been elsewhere the past few days... perhaps i drank too much... perhaps... but then cycling into central London feels surreal every time things fall off from the everyday in the vicinity of Bow, Stratford and Mile End... and i enter... tourist brick-on-bricks... it's surreal that... once upon a time the whole affair of taking a bus, the tube... while cycling to those desired destinations is... well... surreal... you can't even begin to fathom how much i appreciate this little dialectical corner we have started... for ourselves... how little we know of each other yet still pursue... you know... i wanted to write something before i wrote my little tirade... oral traditions... passing on the tongue... i was going to suggest: not everyone can be a Julien Sorel... or... hafiz... my scatter brain also suggested noting a need to denounce onomatopoeia: should we even allow encoding a woof or a meow... unless it's a noun denotation of... what a dog / cat does when prescribing us with seeking attention? a wolf doesn't woof woof: it howls... a lion doesn't meow... i could "understand" barking... then again: what's not to understand? true: i have those drowning thoughts... none of them are concerns for moral ought-i-have(?) though... then again... being impregnated with a gravity that allows me to stand: firm-rooted... and still persist in falling...if we only have sounds: touch wood... who's: one of those knock-knock: who's there, lineage of joke-chokes... i figured... no one remembers how certain places give off this particular whiff... this "accent"... like Barkingside still has a whiff of old Jewish ladies... Ilford is lost from having any Hebrew influence... the Jewish flight is in plain sight... how the synagogue on Coventry St. was dismantled... yet here i am: still... cycling through little Bengal...i hope i'm not too imposing giving both of us coordinates that we are engaged in a dialectic... cult-convincing fabric: how crude mere sounds... ą: is? you said you love sounds... what's ą? i'll be surprised whether your defence of sounds allows you to make this phonetic encoding resound... it's somewhere lodged between a: moan & an oh...Ą... in defence of sounds... so when written? not much... to look at? almost cubist takes on the aesthetic of spelling... no? hell... that's not even cubist... it's dada... do people still read newspapers? i was going to stash this reply until tomorrow having reread it sober... but then again i like taking the most *******-whipping sort of chances out of good-luck-stupidity because: tomorrow i'll be... like i am today come 12am: sooner dead than living in my prime... of course i love your poem... the superiority of sounds... i am a most probably a male and as a stereotypical male i find closure in using my eyes to their fulll potential... your sounds look b'ah b'ah as words... you can't exactly call them aesthetically appealing? perhaps if they were written in braille... or in katakana... let's see.. well... i can't conjoin two consonants together... there's this XOXO rule in speaking ***., while only N is allowed free-reign and an almost unique status... バ (ba): but here's laughter, i suppose laughter is ha, ha... ha ha, ha (ハ)... you tell me sounds are superior: i abhor rap... how freely sounds trickle forth from the fountain of rap... nonsense at the end of the spectrum of: the sound a door performs when not propaerly oiled: creaking... but i'm too much of a visual creature... i like to see what will prompt me: almost like a thespian... how else, would you ever convene to come together with all resourcefulness, in being so convincing... without an otherwise worth of: predictable script? i like seeing what i'll say... are sounds superior because... they are? undecipherable? close  approximates... there is not infinity of sounds that can't be congested into an encoding... to allow a free-roaming of the cinema of memory to take fold... to be allowed...  ha is a definite article in hebrew: so... depicting laughter in hebrew is like writing: thethethethe... point? the spaniards have it just as bad: jajaja... a pronoun to some: a yes to others... laughter is hardly a mere sound... it's a ****** expression to boot... no?  you know why you're so adamantly in my focus? after this coleslaw of verbiage... i've just spewed... you will return without much: "concern"... after all... you won't be reading a spew... a ****-piece of... tabloid opinion-pressuring... this is a self-critical scoop of observation, though: i know i can write *******-riddled amnesiac squat too... oh look... it TAP... became... TAN... タン... we'd be in on pinched mongol *****... ******* parties and white women ***** guilt reprise... no? gloat as i might: i've heard that... come the 2nd / 3rd generation of interracial breeding? the original "sin" is diluted... that i am drunk and writing this... but... best this tired, old soak... of... ripe... raw. onion... it's not like the Russians would mind... mind you: i once dated a Russian girl who... swear to god... thought it was of being a lesser social class if one donned a suntan... you were a serf for having a suntan... that's the whole lot of 'er... to have this onion turn copper turn auburn... no... suntans were not aligned with her thinking of being of the tsarist Russia.... she also adored petting spiders... and serpents... i was more into... foxes... deer... cats....herding heaps of dung: because: there's no better whiff of air than the scent of a refreshing attire of horseshit, in the morning... now... i've written this much... your "superiority" of sounds still stands... but.. on what? write me smash smash... write me Ao (/) アオ blue... sky then 空 (ソラ).... how feeble sounds are... when staged in the theatre of lettering...  you know how pointless a mandarin sounds? as pointless as... until... the point of revealing his phonetic encoding technique... a sound is a sound is perhaps an echo... i'll end there: i don't need to **** further.
Barton D Smock May 2016
15% off all print books and free mail shipping at Lulu today with coupon code of MAYMAIL15

~

some poems:

~

[raise god]

it’s a nice enough baby with an inability to emit. the adult world worries but no more than than it does for the television’s volume during bouts of ceasefire. parents divorce or parents agree on the same support group. siblings form a circle around a one trick pony. some believe the jack-in-the-box is broken while others believe it’s patient.

[taunts]

death is never early. take the first bite of every meal in front of a mirror. chase the kid while pulling a plastic bag over your head. invent a sibling schoolmates blind. know poverty, know moon. shampoo the elderly from a distance. baby no one. they have looked like hell since before you were born.

[pathos]

our fighting
determines
which of us
is more
sonsick.  

relic child, town crier.

I take what I’m given, beating.

cerecloth, snow
on snow
before and after

it buries.

me of course
as I position
myself
to hum

above
a basket.

me as I marry homeward
and kick

ball, stone, stiff
bird

stiff bird in death
doubling as
the rat
of an angel

yes
kick
for reasons known
to another’s

pet cobra

skin to skin
in an unmarked
life.

[costume]

we’re here to ****** the head of the boy who put a clown’s red nose on the girl playing jesus for stopped traffic. if I spoke your language, I would tell you.

[poor lighting]

a plastic doll with a human right hand distracts us from the parrot’s empty cage. we have been writing in unison instead of eating. our poverty is so advanced it keeps a fake diary and a real diary but hides them in the same spot. we are dying in two of our mother’s arms. our mother is elsewhere repeating after the man who does our stunts.

[collapse]

how
on a clear day  
my father
is the face
of absence.

how what I mean
cuts the finger

my mother
sips.

how porch blood
is not the same blood
the body
faints with.

how copperhead, how rattlesnake, how lisp

says I myth
my sister
who is still

vanishing
to shoplift
god

from the thunderstorm
we gave her.

[southern treehouse]

as my sister
inspects
her *******
in the white
piece of paper
we both
refer to
as the one
and only
ghost
mirror

I fry
god’s egg
in the plastic
shovel
I took
from a sandbox
shaped
like a coffin

and shiver
like the psychic
who with
the controllable
sobbing
of her hands
gave our seizures

to animals

[bait]

I didn’t see it
like some kids
saw it-

pain
as clay.

a swat here or there
to the back
of a mother’s
mind.

a man who took a bowling ball
into a closed garage
had no sadness
I could pray
over.

...Santa smoked on the roof
of my father’s house
while I
with a noiseless
stomach

touched
that hunger.

[how to live in the country dark]

toss frogs
into a fire
your father made.

find a woman
who’s abandoned herself
to being led
by a stick

let her blind mongrel
lick your palm.

bury a handful
of gravel
call it
the moon’s
grave.

hide in houses
hidden
from road.

make at least one friend
whose night vision
is a glass of milk.

double your body
by walking
drunk.

[outside the body it is always procession]

I may have lied about being pregnant but I know my ******* kid.

her father quells *******.

ants are quiet.

-

his teeth make sense.

our yell is I’m gonna shoot you in the blood.

-

elsewhere
is a light dusting
of downfall.  sleepily

legal

are the sunbathing sad.

[crown]

i.

a hand towel
over the lid
of any
stubborn
jar-

a mother to a father
or less frequently
a father to a mother
I don’t know why this is
but either way
a gentle admittance

to couple

as if passing beneath
the singing voice
of statue…

ii.

that stage
where a baby
is all
head

[mendicant]

this doorbell
is for the inside
of your house

-

to some
you’re the giant
you’re not

-

hearing isn’t for everyone  

-

a fog-softened man
with a baby
might experience
a sense
of boat
loss…

-

hurt

what you know

[crystal]

a foster boy using an alias teaches my son to shoot.

it’s the tooth fairy on a sad day finds
under my pillow
a handgun.

you know your father
is a night owl.

[dog years]

the longer
I grieve

the more

~

below is an unpublished companion piece {shuteye in the land of the sacred commoner} to my recent chapbook, infant*cinema (**** Press, April 2016)  

as such:

~~~~~

[shut-eye in the land of the sacred commoner]

~
poetry and god share the same quick death.

I’m on what you’re on;
the eighth day of the world.



~
it’s all in your head.  the newborn we had on a mountaintop.  the word it knew from memory.  its hand that stuck to everything but the dog our dog ate.  the cold our dog died from.  the tent we called aquarium. that we filled with diapers.  that was never full.



~
existence is the wrong inquiry.  

I was destroyed by an angel

for having
taste buds.  

/ a pinkness

went on
without me.



~
if touch is all it can manage

the hand is poor.

I am the new face
of baby
doorstep.

when lightning
has emptiness
to burn

feed
the fasting
doll.



~
I am old and nothing brings me joy.

I did
good things
but I
was asked.

drunk
outside
of a dog
shelter
I am likely
to remember
a library
pyros
love.

my uncle
he is probably
still
west of me
able

to open
a bottle
with the mouth
of a living
frog.



~
and what
would forgiveness
do?  

my kids were never born.  yours
they hide
from the number
of people
god
made.

when dead, I was not
a bird
yet
my mother
asks
what kind.

I can’t tell
by looking
if he’s seen
the future
or seen
the future
again.  I strip

when my stomach
hurts.



~
it puts me on my stomach

this grief
you have
for the switched
at death

-

god’s color has returned

-

the male
animals
in the grey
barn

knew

-

first



~
I want to say it is yes yes

puberty’s
painted
egg, the island

clock, the genitalia

of alarm…

I want to say it is orange

like bees
like
not all

the hymns
not all

condoms…



~
he says we are men
not because a raccoon
chased a bone
into the factory
of shadows.

he says it’s me
or the bag
of trash
and gives me
a knife.

he says before I was borned
we took
the same
bullet.  he says mouth.

I kick
he says
in my sleep
and it puts
a belly button
on a bird
one
bird.

he says them animals
ain’t so wild
as a dog
in drag

and your mother
is the outside
world.



~
the robot is a ******.

the baby
it goes
from baby
to baby
with no
message.

-

I want your work to matter.



~
subtitles, ghost
pollen / I sit

facing
my father

he strokes
a large
bumblebee…



~
eating behind the mirror’s back
it was all
hick lore
to me

a scratch
in scar’s
nakedness, a loss

of infancy
awarded
only
to the deaf
who dug up
the ears
of god
for nothing
more
than the sound

of depression
going blind
in the garden
of the hairdresser’s

hair



~
death
my way
of saying
goodbye
to god

-

had you lived
or enjoyed
amnesia...



~
when asked
I say
I see
on the floor
of a mudhut
a *** toy
having
a seizure.

I kiss the feet
you’re the future
of.



~
not
for devouring
the mannequin
but for eating
the seeds, it was

(in a coloring
  book
  for cigarettes)

beaten

by a baby
a baby
could love



~
I go with dove to high

dives / I am on

the pill
the swimmer’s
pill / for nine

months
I’ve hidden
a rabbit
from no one’s

hormonal
christ



~
it was for healing the hand of the plain hand
that I
was touched / well blood

on a bread
crumb
massage me
a brainwashed
worm / well comb

all you want
the eyesight
of god / swallow

a hair
in the house
birth
built…

-

can’t
this once
a thing
die
in the sanctuary
of its double




~
hell is a book.

she reads it
in a room
that’s alive.

attic or no, I want
to miss
my father.



~
nakedness,

give it time
to recover



~
into something from his childhood
a man
is born.  never

far off
what crawls
her way.



~
she reaches into the same hat for the rabbit he’s made disappear.

I sleep and the dark takes me for the bone

lightning
straightens.



~
church of intermission.  church of the rolled-away church my fever follows.  church of it ain’t a baby until it spits.  church of the lawnmower left running.  of the space you give the grieving horse.  church of you when you die in my sleep.  of musical suicides.  church of the disinfected high chair.  of the false bruise.  of how to become a balloon in the church of touch.



~
in the library’s dream, the abortion clinic is no bigger than a fingerprint.



~
this is me
praying
for a photo
of my father’s
last meal.

me

praying
to have
the allergic
reaction
my mother
faked.

for proof
of animal
suicide.

a mirror for my toys.  dirt for my brother.



~
and we touch to abridge doom in the bed of a headless man.  and we struggle to hear a father verbatim.  and we ask in a fierce wind a phone booth to please be a fireplace.  and a starfish consoles a handprint.



~
/ I was spotted covering my eyes by a dentist whose childhood had stopped disappearing.  how big is your family and who wears the mouth?  is it true your dad sold to a city gargoyle a spray-can of ****?  that your mom had no baby tired of being born?  that their suicides filled a madhouse with cubist maids?  

/ year nine:  your birthday spider is put on film for biting.  your sister takes one look at my brain and remembers what to feed and how to clean a cricket.

/ year eight:



~
my son doesn’t want the circle he’s drawing to touch the circle he’s drawing.

the dog
is a heartbroken
wolf.



~
she checks her teeth in the door glass of the oven.

the egg is dropped
and the owl
******.



~
when
did your caterpillar
become
a syringe?

I want to hide the clothes I’m wearing.

something touched
is something
mourned.



~
the woman had the suicidal absence of a man who’d just broken to his body that his blood was not the rooster patience devoured. if I peeled a potato, I did so in egg’s hell.



~
praise headgear, worship eyewear.

adore nostalgia, forgive

memorial’s
constant
vigil.

say god
three times, then

say mirror.



~
this is what you mean, kiddo

what you mean
to a bomb

/ it doesn’t help god

that god
is awake



~
for what
does the torso
pray?

the cocoon is music
to the mannequin’s
ear.

sister
she ain’t
been calm.



~
when grief
was password
and not
codename

when gift
horse
was horse
fly

when baby
little baby
shorthand
went all
stork-****

(on who)

to remember
god



~
outside the dream, I had written the most heartbreakingly clear poem about brotherhood.  inside

was this boy
was discovering
god’s thumb
is never
clean.  a boy whose mouth

was never
here.  all those I’ve met

I’ve left
alone.



~
asleep in the pickpocket’s bed, the baby is a mirage.  

I’m so fat
I’m fat
in the dark.  I compose

at my lowest
a crucifixion
story

from the basements
my father
wired.



~
putting the meat
back together
in an unfilled
pool

we yawned
at the same
time / brief

painless
the unmothered

between



~
as overcome as I was to be gifted a hospital gown, I had nothing on the angel whose brain / for visiting the eye / was banished…

we are the dead
we’re here
to return



~
by death I mean nothing was beautiful for a very long time.

that, and when did you know.
Laokos Jul 2019
i never seem
to get enough
rest
these days
always waking
up
tired

to start coffee,
****,
fix my hair,
sit in bed drinking
the coffee
plumbing the depths
for
ways to get through
another day,
****,

try to remember ways
that worked
before

maybe a quote
or a character
a poem
a song
a memory
an illusion
could even be
another person

but time draws
ever nearer
ever closer
until
at last
that silent cheetah
is sprinting

before i know it
i'm sitting
in my car
turning the key
with whatever
semblance and steel
i finally gathered

-a real live
cubist representation
of my
self
driving to work
at 3:49 a.m.

passing  
three black cats
in
the street
that watch me
carefully,
the glowing night
white-hot
in their eyes


satellites of some
indifferent future

hidden with
the devils
on the horizon
Aaron Mullin Mar 2019
Caught a moonbeam to Muskogee with a dark angel
Where it started, it's hard to know. Maybe I was a traveller
hitching a ride on an ideology maybe I was trying to find my space,
then she was there and we were sharing space

She was all anodyne and icicles with a presence magnetic and
manner so soothing,
she allowed me to forget
from where I had never
                                          come
                 ­                                  from

And from our first tryst
she was careful to explain that
it is never the shadow bringing the light.
This, of course, illuminated nothing

I was hooked, however, on her ominous banter
Lack of curves, and cubist edges
Hooked and ready for processing:
In her presence, I allowed myself to feel

That I was such a pretty thing
while she kept me under wing...
kept me as her play thing, and
this I allowed for much to long

With her I felt
but could not see
thus I paid the price for wading
into the shallow end of identity

We journeyed through the desert
for a thousand years while I satisfied
my thirst with a state of dementia and
was rewarded with emptiness for doing the time

This infatuation transformed my youth into
disenchanted wisdom and I finally understood that
It’s never the shadow that brings the light
Which for some reason, illuminated everything

Once you know that
you can find freedom in addiction,
wealth in poverty, purity in excess,
then step by step, ferociously

you can find peace
at the top of the mountain
while losing your identity
and finding your self
1, 2, 1, 2, 3...
Wk kortas Dec 2016
They sit in the humblest of frames,
Faux wood-grained plastic grotesqueries
Purchased long ago from some doomed Grants or Bradlees,
Though one or two enjoy something nicer,
Left behind by some long-timer taking a buyout
Or a sympathetic youngster denied tenure
(She has, for the better part of three decades,
Cleaned up the detritus of middle-school children,
A bit stooped from the work,
Not to mention the burden
Of any number of she’s just  or she’s only
Tossed like so much bric-a-brac in her direction.)
The approximations of old masters equally eclectic in origin:
One or two gallery-quality reproductions
Blithely abandoned by some haughty faculty matron
Mentoring children through noblesse oblige,
The odd promotional piece from a scholastic publisher,
Mostly things she has cut from magazines or discarded texts.
She studiously avoids pieces tending to the dark or muted,
No Stuart portraiture or pensive Vermeers;
She has a strong predilection for bold, boisterous Gaugins,
Mad cubist Picassos, lush Cezanne still-lifes,
Even the odd blocky *******.
If you pressed her to explain her fetish
For the brightest of the great masters,
She would likely be at a loss to explain,
Having no academic bent for such things
(Though she has been known to curse the shortcomings
Of lithographers and pressmen under her breath)
And, as she freely admits, I’m not much good with words.
There would be the uncharitable suggestion
That their purpose is to mask cracks and pockmarks in her walls
(She has, to be sure, lived in a long series of such places)
But she has never, consciously or otherwise,
Used them for such pedestrian and utilitarian purposes;
They are, to her anyway, beautiful, and that is all they need be.
i'msorryit'snotbetter
Mateuš Conrad Feb 2021
i'm not someone who's all too willing to regurgitate
maxims...
it's quiet impossible to have to
vouch for so many observational (not objective,
really) truths...
   after all... the height of the maxim came
with (not Nietzsche) - came with
                       la Rochefoucauld...
                - chance and caprice rule the world
   - we are lazier in mind than (in) body...
to pick but a pair...
a western emphasis for all things
    a posteriori...
              to circumstance oneself in a stance:
akimbo...
or at least akin to Pontius Pilate having
nothing to do with the drilling in of mea culpa:
even for him... something about a lottery
of time and an inescapable round of chores...
that some things are certain is enough
to give a day one's privacy...
but everything else: so agitated and in the tier
of meaningful encounters...
always the "matter"...

unlike those ?? maxims -
which mostly dictate things with an a priori
tinge of "sentiment"...
a verb pure suppose: no prior encounter
like that one that i kept and figured:
keep the sponge of a brain suckling up to it:

the only way to aid the world
is to forget the world
and for the world to forget you -

                crazy for that chance: anon. as
being credited to me, though...
   there's another maxim, though,
i must ascribe it to Socrates because it's most
befitting...

some people live to eat...
others... eat to live...

that's a real conundrum for me...
well... why wouldn't it be?
     if i were to take into account something
archaic as the Pythagorean diet schematic...

god-like eating: vegetables,
                     spices, cereals, dry food...
although some distinctions
if eating meat pork > goat > offal >
mutton > beef...
spices are the extreme to beans
(although... a diet without fibre...
and "we" know that beans
are high in protein)
            dry food: well between
burnt offerings and something rotten...

i was surprised... given the status
of pork to the pagans...
then again: it's the most pristine creature
as it's wholly edible...
beside the oink and the hoofs...
and ol' porkies wouldn't survive in
a desert to begin with...
so i don't understand allah's "beef" with
this pristine creature...
child's play of talk...
      no mention of eating crab meat:
scavenger meat... yet most pristine...

yes... but it's a return from my little
hiatus in katakana, hiragana & hangul...
i'm tired of this custard brain splodge
of curating these symbols
of syllable encoding...

back to the atoms of Latin script...
that these letters are as they are...
mostly because
of the Greek eye...
imitation: the latin script doesn't
have names for its letters...
sing-along stipends (etc.)
no clearly defining A a a(lpha)
which denotes a name and a cipher
like a(lpha) male etc.

a "quicker" root: conserved time...
Hebrew, Phoenician, Greek, Latin...
chicken scratching later...
hopes to elevated to pelican... somewhat...

but still the maxim:
some people live to eat
while others eat to live...
it is a double-edged sword...
i can spot the obvious:
when and where people eat
to survive...
it's more important to eat...
than not to:
how this maxim deciphers fussy-eaters
among the Mandarin omnivores...
well...

but then there's also this attention
to detail surrounding:
some people live to eat:
so they will treat their food with
knowledge and tenderness...
that will make eating a pleasure...
who here might quest to make
the antonym of eating a pleasure...
a spell of diarrhoea, for example?
unless of course bombarded
with **** *** imagery:
one would have to quest to find pleasure
in easing out a loaf:
best in one piece...
  than have to imagine the same...
being reversed back into
one's "glory hole" with a pump action
of agitated vibrations...

and there i was thinking about
being in the possession
of a strap-on phallus made from
ice...
some people live to eat
whole others eat to live...

i thought it less to be in the category
of people who live to eat:
then i gave it some "thought"
and figured out...
the people that eat to live
are the ones that will not prepare
their own food...
oddly enough...

i too thought it was a sustenance
statement...
but given that ******* out
is hardly pleasurable...
chewing is hardly too...
digestion can put you to sleep...
preparation of food is most associated
with the sentiment: some live to eat...
it's not a statement of gluttony...

what's the best easy breakfast i could
think of, sparingly... today...
with revision?
when frying an egg
letting it fry just shy of completely
while dressing it with a slice
of chorizo and finishing it off
with a slice of cheese...
placing it on a toast...

   that i eat to live: well i'm not starving...
animals eat to live...
which is why they don't cook their food...
they eat it raw...
and some people have become
wild animal esque...
in the fast food joints...
lazily being... some people are fed...
to take care for what's to be eaten...
i love this maxim because
it's not so ****** obvious
as to why: some people live to eat...
that there's a concern for what is eaten...
you can't exactly expect yourself
to find substance in tree bark
and grass...

to eat to live is out of desperation...
to live to eat comes from
something more aesthetic than...
       previously thought...
not to the extent of treating food as some
Cezanne - humble origins more, please...
rustic - yes... that's another word for it!

i came across this thought as i came across
a memory of her...
it's a real shame... really...
i was so young then...
she was so young then...
i was 21 she was 19...
   a weird year where i suddenly had
attention of a few girls...
but this one in particular...
what sort of girl proposes to a guy
and choses an engagement ring...
the sort of girl that subsequently
gives it back...
because - well where's Edinburgh
and where's London...
but it's not like she would go down south
with me... she went all the way west
with a previous boyfriend...
from Novosibirsk to St. Petersburg...
then again prior bf had a daddy well
situated and i'm still equivalent
to being a carpenter's son...
  
     out of no less... when the heliocentric
revolution happened...
and geocentric us-and-us-alone
and wish the gods real...
the gynocentrism prevailed as did...
           hypergamy -
                       it's no shock it's nothing new
it's like there was no Copernican
adventure to begin with...
since... everything on earth stayed:
pretty much the same...
now there are only about 3 million
a posteriori walking abortions that
could have taken place
but since... the argument came from:
use... the ****** had to be...
used... and there was all the free time...
and everyone else was doing it...
but not these sons are placebo solipsists
and they have to sort of:
give back the existential tax
of having a life on loan...

            hello... world...
but god the *** was good...
   the most thrill from the memory was...
eating her out like i might
divulge - burrow my face in
greasy beef... i would like a comparison
with oysters or... eating flowers...
but that was the best part...
oral *** and a little ******* sgt. pepper
of the index middle and thumb
working with my thumb to grease
myself up before the whole hallelujah
of the genitals in symphony...

i've been to several brothels and
about a dozen ****** and...
well... well...
                 it's not the same when
one of you is faking payment
and the payment is not as clear
as literally for an hour...
she stayed in my flat rent free...
etc.

          my youth... and she...
oh... plus the chance conversation about
liking Milan Kundera's
the unbearable likeness of being...
although i doubt she read it...
she was most concerned with swans...
i remembered swans from the film adaptation
more than from the book...
then again: memory is a fickle creature...
even now as i'm enjoying
this little cameo project of existentialism
(i.e. memory) -
well... i don't exactly have a choice
in what i can and cannot remember...
beside the anti-dyslexic / numeral-savvy
2 + 2 and a + b + s + o + l + u + t + e...

when she broke up with me
she had this way of insinuating i'd miss
the *** with: when we had ***
and listened to music
the dandy warhols' good morning:
play it when you're missing the "****"...
sure as ****
when i think about eating chicken
meat off the bone...
esp. at the tenderness of the chicken
neck with all the intricacies
of suckling and "plucking"...
i do think about...
a fleshy fruit that i cannot nibble...
or eat...

well that was me zenith of ****** endeavours:
i must adored the heart
of the **** i was eating out
since her onomatopoeia of sorts
is still ringing in my ear:
along with her face in cubist contortions:
i still haven't found relief in
having been pleasured:
some variation of an agony of a martyr
having given pleasure:

not state-holding of a saint's repertoire...
but as i now look it...
a life of restraint:
beside the prostitutes and the brothels:
hell... even the Teutonic Knights
had a brothel in their citadel...
if only i were as willing as
to give my heart up...
to weave in
     a sacrament of giving her a pink
rose... no...
i didn't come across something
just as good:
and this "just as good" is too firmly
lodged in my memory-cinema
for me to blink away from it...
i count myself lucky...
how pristine it all was...

a good shaking of the bag
and out popped out a ****'s depth
enough of wriggling for me
to not appeal to some
*****-envy buckle... after that i grew
a beard and forgot to want to play
the fiddle...
but it was a must, something necessary...
me writing about it now, a decade later
might appear as a vanity project...
then again: i wasn't as busy...
she took off and became
"devoted" twice...
the 2nd time a failure the third i'm still
praying for the poor buck to not
buckle...
i mean: she can boast that she drove
one boy mad...
but what a strange man he came out
to be...
a half-baked loaf of bread: with
teeth for a crust...

summa summarum: it was worth it...
i was ruining my time
in bed, of late...
i came across a ref. to the Noyades...
which was of "concern" for me...
but i also came across an entry: GENUG

the last words spoken...
by certain people of "concern"...
kant (genug) - enough...
              agrippina (nero's mother) -
smite my womb...
thomas hobbes - a great leap in the dark;

if i were the latter i'd also like
to reiterate: into the dark...
unless it be the already sentencing of:
a dark of night...
i find nothing universal in the day
but at least by night
i would simply imply:
beside the darkening mechanisation
of life by toil of body
and the fickleness of mind...
ah... pedantry and chastisement
of self-
(yes... prefixing attachment ready)
for whatever requires
automation and scythe...
and rude workings of
   a digestive system...

besides... there's an easier demand
of argument to be met:
some people live to ****...
others **** to live...
i never liked the Anglophonic line
or argumentation from existentialism:
for the masses from within Darwinism
solves all little interludes...
how it's necessary to equate everything
with squared root of ape...

it can't be this whole narrative...
even the ancient pagan had knowledge
of: **** similis...
i'm still searching for this...
vanguard hope of **** sapiens...
i'm yet to find one...
esp. one with strict etymological
obligations that can distinguish
a word like Slav from Slave...
a Germ from..          -an...
mute from niemy... chwek... etc.

this narrative though: concerning genes:
genes are blind like atoms of sodium are
unless pushed out
from extremes of hereditary cul de sacs
of non-replica...
lineage of cancerous-growth-prone-examples...
etc.
but why oh why...
have this baggage of concerns...
these atomic-attachments:
this hiding of hearth...
it's not predicate of genius...
vain hope bound to horoscopic tension
to spit out a desirable temperament
of a man?

character is all Lego...
crafted from both an a priori and an a posteriori
and an a- priori and: summa posteriori
litany of shelved secrecies...
(a-? without)

each time i return to this little scrap:
this little memory of her...
i also return to myself...
what an idealistic ****-lord
of presence i was...
i was the sort of guy that could buy
a girl oysters for a single date...
well... given the "nature" of life...
the "narrative"...

i will relinquish my fascination with
the eastern arts...
the katakana, the hiragana, the hangul...
when someone teases me
wrong... as i show them...

the cedilla in C and the greek
sigma
  i.e. ç
         i.e. there are many sigmas...
there are... satires...
    there are... all opera is tragedy...
there are loan-words! even in english!
sights to see
  si(gh)t?... ******* surds...
   (g)nome... diaGnostic...
                  (k)night... night, nought...
GH & proud...
   it's almost my...
  meine besitzen zunge, das ich liebe
     so viel...

watch the zeppelins rain down blitzkrieg
in slow-motion while
the Danube rummages with
flow vs. tide... and Birmingham is
without tide... and everything else
is everything else with a spare
tire of metaphor...

- some people eat to live...
while other live to eat...
            i much prefer to cook my own food...
i take pride in owning an arsenal
of spices...
along with a black cardamom
that's the equivalent of a
Laphroaig glug...
  since mead: was yet to be
a drank mythological concern for truths...

oh this little vanity project that it
is... when i loved...
when i was in love...
  when i wasn't this beastly secured
in things that would either blush
or frown at things upkept
in the cosmopolitan lineage
of affairs...
  "conversation":
  that it was Paris and me and
these two Catelonian girls went
to the grave of "desperate Michael"...
well, no... who was it...
it wasn't Bill Murray...
the doors' frontman...

        such a revealing proximity
of: my given names i most associate
with...
   konrad von wallenrode...
konrad of masovia...
  mateusz: tax-collector...
       40 ******* months
itching before what remained
Giza... and that's before the dwarf
Napoleon shifted rules of rank...

it was a great ****...
i still love the idea we didn't become
so bored as to be bored
with orthodoxy that we might
have to delve into
****... *** toys...
or... i would love to have
donned a latex gimp... open mouth...
hell... all that gwory hole-ing a limited
status of halo...
i retracted my ambitions...
didn't... i?

i didn't find replacements...
physicality strict-dentures of: failure count?
i made my metaphysical investment?
didn't i...

two weeks without walking...
chant des templiers...
i "thought" myself more a Hospitalier(s)
son in bud...
salve regina...
two weeks without walking
i "decide" to write...
it's not enough:
memory
overcomes me...

the best **** i've had and it's not
something i want
to remember for a *******...
mind you i found alternatives...
donning my hair long enough
and a new found riddle in
a beard...
and a Turk that dealt in
Caucasian memorabilia..
of living extensions...
               you see...
a visit to the barber with overgrown
bush...
of hair and stubble...
became more frankly... pleasurable...
than... what was to be done
with...

         that statue by
            apollonius of athens...
i ****** off to Bronzino's
   venus, cupid, folly & time:
beside the cupping of the breast
the teasing tenderness of the ******
prone tongues...
all ***** on silent mode...
or at least only gesticulating
at marble statues in the process
of being erected:
without promise of a public
ordeal to overthrow (the publics)
Punic details of slou... slow...
slouch... and brittle... karma: wood...

toward an excruciation of justified
meaning: this arrangement of lettering:
how feeble and toothpick prone
this brittle groove & ground...
my harvest of dislodged ease...
sensibly: antithesis grammatical pseudo...
sssssssssssss
side-winding... slithering...
side-accost...
***-seer-Saracen...

          becau­se of some pope
with a name like Urban...
              a finicky genesis...
             from memory
a white serpent of light
   in a crest of illuminate azure
giving border upon the Firth of Forth...
when two creasing crows
staged themselves
on the pinnacle of the Old College,
Edinburgh...
the nights were aflame with
youth...
the nights were... gott-gegeben...

miraculous? no!
    just aided by a stealth variation
and with life...
this mediocre surmounted...

pointer: when is... "it", i.e.:
enough is enough vs.
enough is "it"?
  i'm hardly poignancy prone
to state the difference, proper...
i've levitated toward slouch
for a week or so...
i find not pleasure in writing:
not as much as i arrived at
finding it, once more:
in walking...
boyo... you should have seen
me gear up to a bicycle...

         god what time it was to be gladly
*******!
to be so Darwinistically excated
with purpose!
but also so blind... so unhappy!
no wonder i had to fathom
a retraction: this everyday
into day-by-day...
und grey-labour & tedium &
"good"...
        
but it wasn't a waisting
of a "crown"...
i didn't live up to the expectations of:
the greatest ***** that ever
"lived"...
i wouldn't have...
lived to spar with agony aunt
commentary...
i would be the least believed *******
child of variation of
a prosthetic progeny of "sowing":
all gladly encountered metaphors...
some as ugly as necessarily ugly to breed...
most high i.q. is bred out
and is left to individualistic chancing
of revision...

then again: there's no revision...
the one who i lost my virginity with...
i "tried" to get in touch with her...
5 loads in the basin later...
she's an insomniac of reproduction...
of course she was all defensive...
when i asked her why she was so sad:
five daughters: no son...
she put it down on exhausted from...
she didn't notice i was making
a henry VIII remark...

i can't and therefore will not wish it upon
myself:
merry me: marry me i too were
that father when je suis and hey zeus
asked upon the crucifix dangling:
father...
yes... perpetual bachelor, i...
entombed existentially: no escapee
planning: processed...
            
      alles ist gott: und nothing too...
  my words: before i die...
i'm sure i'll be drunk as a saber
with blood not spilt...
as heavily worked
as a currency of horse
currently on display in the fields
where i walk...
ditto grazing and ditto:
  grass-heaping chewing-heave
          anecdotal.

before the "prized ******* bull" &
entourage of fizzing waters started to throttle
any further mentioning of
libido limbo:
        that's the scarcity of my
****** ambitions...
   mind you: i'm glad i suckled on that
wet oyster pouch before
i was sent back to the "gulag"
of skeleton teasing an imitation hollow...
before the kama sutra provision
***** envy might have taken over...

very impossibly: it's a conundrum
of reiteration of sort
that's not worth more erosion
of memory since it doesn't rhyme...
i wouldn't have lived
enough of the already given
"this" if i haven't thought about "that"...

today i found some compensation
for years drilling ego into abstract
and smiling at nothing
and all things / manners of ape:
everclear's debute e.p.
        marylin manson's holywood...

i still want that king crimson debut
vinyl to adorn my loan space
of a room of a life...
because i have to hide all that jazzy *******
on the side...

stone temple pilots -
that album with the song: art school girlfriend...
anything more -esque to capture
the sentiments of pulp and that
other song: wickerman...
for d'ah bass...

   impossibly delightful to heave
a wounding of a lung with
a morning's daily brief of
harking up excess phlegm
stuck to the wall...
how there's a heart and i call it
a sparrow and how it flusters
and flutter with a difficulty
when i've presented it with
a caging like so...

             Baltic sushi: which involves...
primarily... soaked herring in
spirit vinegar...
with mustard seeds...
bay leaf... allspice... onions & garlic...
tender... fish meat...
curated by curing
by acid alone rather than heat...
evil in the beans: perhaps too much
"roughage" / fibre...
but a constipation of world renown
for 3 days solid...

because of the full-english-fry-up...
which makes you wonder
how it can be served thrice
in a day
if one's lazy about "details":
the same quote revised...
some people live to eat...
while other eat to live...

it's not a statement of gluttony...
it's... some people will eat anything...
while others will tend to curate
what they eat to make
expensive remarks on what's
allowed to expand and what has to...
inevitably... shrink into non alias
null alias nil alias shrugging feline...
bothersome quick-essential...
practice of dangling a kite...
toward (rather than against) the wind...

GLAYVA - a liquer...
          ****... a... liqueur - a L'CUR
   a lee cwuer...
         velsh?!
               simply *******...
          a li'kwer... ditto ditto this that
and anything in between...
i'm rehashing a fancy for sleeping
with a foreign body in the same
bed i leave open to satire: tomb...
begins with cat...
given all my whimsical demands
and idiosyncratic scrutiny+plural..
highten-ed
                what first was a believable
oyster gorge and...
floral patterns agitated:
pound upon pound of flesh...

no... impossible...
some people live to eat
while other eat to live:
statement of not so desperate times...
perhaps...
if necessary i might nibble on
some grasshoppers...
or any insects fried...
but the statement alludes
to... some people will eat anything...
it's not a statement of / for gluttonous
mishandling of...
some people live to eat:
nutritionists...
the statement is clearly abstract towing
so it expand with each reitertion
as any maxim given enough
mantra status...

said true: but prior to...
blindly-being-followed...
it can revise itself...

        rekindle: ashes and all manners of
said... truant...
         bigger no  bigger than
a hyphen interjection within
the confines of conjunction:
Big-Giza... troublesome 1st and omega
sentencing... echoes of melancholy
in a rush to satiate
forests turning into bureaucratic
pyre structures...

      these burning effigies of time
best wasted... off what was readily available:
scrutiny at best:
all that surfaced was to heave...
an amalgamation of prods, touching,
prodding... juxtaposing junctions...
hinterland of diacritical marker demands...
something "Ukrainian"...

something Moldova-esque... old haunts
older grievances...
newly arrived at carpets with
them being cleaned...
a grandfather most impressionable:
death so last random
that it could only have leverage
with(in) the cofines of
a stomach confined to:
squid ink squirt...

misunderstood lyrics...
slipknot's eyeless...
               i heard...
   you can't see California without
Marlon Brando's eyes...
you can't see California without
Marlon Brando's eyes...
you can't see California without
Marlon Brando's eyes...
you can't see California without
Marlon Brando's eyes...

i'm pretty sure that's not Tsar: i.e.
"it"... yeah... that one...
bothersome brother at the till
of a brothel... less chasing chequers
at the hyper-inflated curiosity of need
of a supermarket...
till... cashier... sooner me dead there
with a death prior...
how ignited in the case:
most futile...
not ignited by some plumber credentials
etc.
stash of leftovers...
basin of sudokus...
              crazing over scalp shaves
rite of bone...
"my" kindred... touch-tease a halving of
bone of Iowa...
riddle this scuttle of nuance...

this leftover cold sure: beef
i heaved for a closure for:
the innocent expanse for furthering of "love":
what was made edible..
what was kept indigestible...
this riddle of words...
              these words half kept
as w(h)iddle...
    beg....       big...      Giz'ah...
sigh of relief or give one's purpose...
vowel-catching... within the confines
of sighs... otherwise
the exclamation markings...
letter to the "bone"...
                   hardly anything of note
ex the Iberian peninsula...
a Hebrew would know...

       thank you gimp suited &
boot licking worth maggot spew....
i have outlived my purpose of riddle...
i'm hardly going to appease
the throng of "doubt"
when it comes to clinging to something
"bilateral":
queasy without dizzy...

what's that?
qu-easy
  vs. -izzy..
                        forget it...
letters like lumberjack praise of
pork,,
something to market: sizzle...
gimp suits and all things best kept
tinged with... bride... horror...
my bride.., not some angry african
who-man'ood...
   conservative little hooded
monsters prior to the Levant practice of
the snippet...
skin left so bare...
the eagerly waiting *****
of whitey...
angry baking half angry "noir"..
the women the challenge...

i pretend to dance before mirrors...
my elongation of the hand
looks more like a crab
than what i want it to depict:
i.e. a spider...
the 2oth century is a house
of haunting:
it's not a circa... esp. one might
wish to be born in...

that there was ever an "expectation"
and it allowed itself
a summary... with excuses...
if we are all...
pointing & turning...
the Polacks were not given... TS...
Oreii mama....
Ayyababoyi ... navvesindirooo....
.
.
Nuvvante naakishtam, nee navvante naakishtam

Sachin ki thana straight drive antha na?
Na galli lo Farhaan ki thana leg spin antha na?
Veetikante ekkuva,
Nuvvante naakishtam.

MF Husain ki thana modified cubist style antha na?
Zakir Hussain ki thana pakhawaj antha na?
Veetikante ekkuva,
Nuvvante naakishtam.

Shakespeare ki thana kalam antha na?
Math sir ki thana blackboard duster antha na?
Veetikante ekkuva,
Nuvvante naakishtam.

Amma pette goru muddha antha na?
Nanna cheyyi pattukoni nadipinche anthe na?
Veetikante ekkuva!!
Nuvvante naakishtam.

Oreii babai...
Siggu padthundiroo...
David Zavala Dec 2018
To begin to end a line not finished: I want you happy not sad to be.

River

The kitten is small painting near, it had many days to await,

  Our a real painting, it is a man woman man relationship us and thank you.

      & White & White & Black & whitening greyhound does that did

Room

Held back a bed to view waiting room I love you. I need that girl less and less each day. I need my family less and less each day.

I need that woman more than I need my family I don’t want mustard on my hotdog what’s after two?

Hmm, three that was a turn table as we were leaving our house more like to be able to afford it and it will cost you money for your own payment of course I do of course you don’t know that why would I expect you to understand? Will you still love me?

If a nice affordable apartment loves dog friendly can’t she love dogs friendly in the next 5 years? Hmm we’re possible that would down time and less more more need less.

I love the turn table like if cassette deck, had a lot of knobs me you to determine.

I want my peace back baby I just want you so much I won’t have you, yours ohh “yours” I get it they’re charms it’s not community they’re charms dumbo I love she and she she I love she

Blurrr

It would take a while to figure out how to work it.

Like it’s thinking at least you are beautiful and young not young and beautiful movie and the love of you guys all day good night hope all you good with the day love, yours.

She has long hair and is thin, doesn’t mind my interests and will leave and no longer certainly will leave or definedly will leave or definitely will leave, she will leave and that makes it all the way better, sorry about your car accident and I hope you because I know you will improve your bank accounts too ambitious no name for more than five years at least it sounds good, we don’t steal that’s not right to see that a book award plaque was stolen,

In The Library

I got it: Hunter S Thompson painted the house, hmmmmm,

The interior walls are sound proof and healthy,

The walls of her house are dark brown and are rich and flavorful. They remind me of coffee.

I want you that way and actually I am big enough and am capable and yes, you are right this will not happen.

That way: I only want them that way

The Beach

Okay, I found several diamond shaped pieces and waited for eternity in parks I wore a white shirt which reminded me of a neon light bulb. It’s okay it’s not your light bulb. It’s your light bulb.

-

A Mountainous Future

Somewhere in San Antonio sit three mice dressed in Spanish dresses and ponchos,

Rights, we care for your small RV for another and yes your career is important and surprising and that what we want, we want something surprising and new and have not been able to find that, I have 10 friends on Hello Poetry.

Yes, we know the definition of socialism.
The another city was hot in that month and  less broadly defined less than it was in Fiji like we were in the other day/way or in Argentina like we were in the other day/way and which both we value and are nice and reminded us of waterfalls in one way or another.

In the way we were directly pouring universities and colleges

There are tables near the beach and you don’t care about gender norms just want the best for me too, I want the best for you too knowing something will not happen, let’s make something happen, whatever.

Without her valor we in water ripple of memories of old friends like an was image of time zone and arrived at our third trashcan yes you didn’t count yes I counted that’s a benefit we are all different you don’t have to use his voice and can insert here that you don’t have to use he voice but if you want something you could because like his job description and the concept of his as a catalyst is in the microwave not on the microwave. One of the other screens which yes, in fact, we did paint I know you understand and sheets with yellow stripes, a whole families that are really only like a single man who on the ground in a red sweater surrounded by fifth said hey, I’ve got to clean this up but I’m growing old of Thai food I want to cry writing that I’m growing old of Thai food, what’s a new city?

It’s a citywide call to do better - I do better all the time citywide call to do better. You’re such a little boy and sure, in the one new city mentioned in our apartment we spoke about recently and agreed on that I do actually care for your heath and I do not like them or think their nice, I guess the bigger big

At least I think you are gorgeous.

I want to be thin.

I want you to be my girlfriend.

I want a house.

I’ve honestly had enough coffee and beer to last a lifetime, I just get headaches. It’s actually not that bad when than singular way perspective is what I want a girlfriend in another state, in another country, on another continent.

Just then the University of Southern California emailed me and yes I have talked to them and if your experience is college is anything like my experience at one college where I spent two years then I may not might I may know more than you.

I came to mind from you, independent
and a visual of an Indian woman on the painted screen this is how it is painted, who considered working for a nonprofit to educate primary school aged children in India came to your mind and I was down on you while looking at a piece of plastic like Benjamin Franklin’s a horse, this is the will happen in my imagination because it won’t happen, but to me, this is the way it would happen, it won’t happen.

I’m upset that I haven’t met her yet but I hope we will be happy, unmarried, let’s talk about how it will happen so we can get married and then both both smile, not dumb smile, smile, not dumb smile, smile. Woah, privacy.  

We woke and thought about what to eat: the microwave.

The stove is nice. I am quiet, smart, and determined and you want me so I hit the switch on the wall hurt after thinking man, I get to walk to the light socket thinking that I know you want me I know you want me.

I’m the queen bee in the store lost for my money. He’s not that tall, is he and yes I can pay.

Fine, you’re was handsome, got it? I’m better now.

I don't like football though and at 22 I saw my shadow on the way home from the university and I saw just that, my shadow I had gotten a haircut and was probably writing emails and reading so I was reading and writing emails. This is the way. This is the way. This is the way. How much do you weigh? My mother doesn’t care how much she weights and how she doesn’t wright herself my mother doesn’t care about how much I weigh or how I don’t weigh myself. This is life defined. I want better for myself. I need to go home to quickly make it right quick. My mom is here.  

back in the mirror, see our shadows and pass a muslim woman, the mountains were large, we went to a movie and took him home to his pink house. Plus or minus it’s plus or minus only please be a pink house and will hold my arms out when I can’t afford them?

  ironic before me that’s present,
    asking myself how the white clouds          which reflect the
green grass could juxtapose my middle-class house.

Your shoes were Asiscs - the expensive kinds and our malls are mysterious, I think I should share with you, though it’s better if I know you and share with you then after discussion such that we were young and left the better for a three story building in Miami, but I enjoyed it. It’s cool. The people in San Francisco were nice but I remember playing guitar in a corner by myself and it’s that that I want to change.

I stayed in a hostel and the flowers in the hostel were so beautiful I took a picture on the third floor of them when I arrived to the third floor.

The front desk male licked his lips.

                                  why did he lick his lips? I was enamored by the magazines
offered by the U.S. mailbox and HEB produce and I do not have a sad face mother why can't you see?

“In the backseat is a
mountain less window
with pictures
on the wall
and chairs
I sit on, books to my right, camera, reefs above chimney, and tons of token stuffs, from all the places we've
visited.

Outside the wind finally blows.

Months passed windowless park.

Little homes made of puzzles and angels.

Be silent yellow-legged hippie, sandals on beach, yellow book of pianos. I thought we were modern? Wrapped in blankets, blondes, unshaven with my wrist watch on John Cage says he's frightened by old ideas so we push forward.

You an artist damp sheet synapse connecting me to old bird houses and streets canary to birthday parties basically participation.

We walked together to the theme park roller coaster and saw sandy rocks and tumbleweed. There was a home theater made by blue collar workers from Mexico who came to America and were loveless so we decided to take a plane to Fiji again after talking about it.

The plastic on the trees because there’s plastic on the trees and it’s someone’s job to know the right way to do things basically basically bad snakes under rocks, loud sound of Darfur!

We were models with beers cans on the walls, shelves, broken light fixtures, paintings of two, empty baskets, bar stools, doorways to our room.

An interlude! I hear it and see it. I can see it.

My sister eating cake, I swear!

It's a cubist painting! Beethoven is playing. So, A cubist painting!! Look at the geometry on the walls, it’s kind of so complex like that song. We’re too different. The end. Our tools were our background, the sky was empty, it needed more color I said walking through the university, "I need a big gallon of water and a lot of money."

“Can you protect me?"

I certainly can't - I can’t I cannot.

Are we ignorant or is Argentina *****?

The dirt on the ground, flag blue and white,
the walls that border the sheet lights
white wedding gowns, candles lit to a
blessed Mars, every scene is an image
of you can you please shut up? Come here, dummy, I’m dumb and going somewhere.

I only speak in Allen Ginsberg’s voice and you can and will write essays about each scene!

Beautiful women standing outside red building with slightly open windows in Arizona.

A medium sized Neil Postman - the message is you! You’re that beautiful.

The fire sits behind the phone booth.

An old lady in a grey sweater: “why would you take me here?"

(My apartment)
This is all my apartment lets arrange it.

The pintails in Austin are purple and hot somewhere else this too is old like the space is a colorless skyrocket in bright blue skies I want to marry you I want to marry you. For you, something inexpensive and sea bass and definitely decide sea, got it?

What I’m trying to say is that vial is not vale and that is very sad and makes me very upset that my promise made to you to fold the sheets will take that much longer

Oh, you are strong. This entire piece of prose is messed up and not the singular yes that singular unpublished unplural: Oh, you are strong. This is the way onto development developing devices righttt so start development want more synonyms? This entire piece of prose is sad, there entire piece of prose and so can you. Hi, you are strong enough to make good decisions and trust yourself and collaborate physically and expect thanks for the voices, you are strong and safe and have a community if you need them, you are it and I will gladly take your call and make you feel stronger if I have time,

— The End —