You’re too used to your blunted ways
Worn habits of reason is why you stay
So tired of hearing the same arcane
From a heart that cashes in on pain
Grab your Sufi sluicing pan,
Ya Allah, let’s pull the gold of soul by hand
From this parched and grinning desert creek
Sift the dust and graveled speech
Unlearn the ways you understood
Mine the vein, the pay is good.
Trade the bone china we can’t afford
For tin cans, wool, and a Damascene sword.

have you ever made a spider a Palestinian? i have, today, refreshing the paint-job on the back of my house, a whole family strutting away from fresh paint being applied (poets cure boredom, they simply don't know it), the cardigans erase & rewind, my uncle would be perfect with his age to work out the demographics - my age circuit, 30 and listening to the palette of those in full-throttle of the 1990s - anyway, refreshing the paint on the back of my house, not for dough, but for the sweat of my brow - learning i succumb to acrophobia on the ladder - but i did it anyway... i love phobias, they're not the fear, they're like a box of chocolates... you never know what will make you startle... it's not permanent, phobias shouldn't be considered permanent, they're too reflexive... and we all know that nibbling them in the reflective realm immediately suggests irrationality, not to a reaction, but to a continuum of a reaction: a ladder, a giant spider to boot. but i never watched a spider eat fresh paint... watched the ******* do the nibble on paint... ***** - a getty cardinal spider shooting paint pollutants with its leg, eating the Chernobyl cocktail, the rainbow melt in a puddle of oil spill... junkies everywhere; so that done, a beer and a quick look at the Olympics...

if table tennis was as relevant as table tennis -
i prefer table tennis,
judo is too cool too - classic Greek wrestling
with feet to match the hands -
i think in terms of the Olympics we're in
the Gobi desert - so many sports are shown only
once every 4 years, the once that don't make the dough...
i'd prefer the Olympics without the pop culture
exponents that keep us hungry for spectacles
during the 4 years apart -
hand-ball, Romania thrashed by Angola -
ladies first, of course,
and weight-lifting, weighs in at 48kg and lifts
80+kg... well Jihad John versus G.I. Jane...
a pretty match up... look, i came from a certain background
i won't be making politically correct statements,
if it weren't for my personal initiative i'd be scooping
grub from an industrial flat surface roof like my father...
i don't mind getting paid... i just love the fact that i will
and if ending up homeless, i have enough heart already
to start a religion, or something.
of course i'll miss my personal library of books and albums,
who wouldn't? i'll join the divorcee crew and it'll be
like it always was supposed to be.
but am i really that ridiculous? think about it,
i use ridiculous words in my vocabulary, after all i went
to a catholic school, it was bound to happen -
not true secular cool, sorry -
but is my usage of certain words completely penniless
more ridiculous in the form of an oligarch buying
a pearl entombed in a custard pie? of a yacht for a month
at Monte Carlo? seriously? if i utilise the words
Paraclete or Antichrist after just skimmed rereading of
a psychiatrist's religious venture in Jung's *answer to Job
am i as ridiculous as those barons?
i don't think so... i read that book like Flaubert instructed
concerning all books: read in order to live it -
a book is a transplant, some leave a heart, come a ****,
some a brain, some a pint of blood with a book...
i hope to leave the worm of hell licking your ear for a sloppy
Jim - read Jung... almost atypical German Christian
intelligentsia byproduct, neutral Swiss just after the second
world war... Freud read Nietzsche and so did Mussolini...
****** was very much Jung... it's a strange book...
we all know that the Greeks hijacked Judaism...
the Romans were like: whatever that meant...
shoved it into a cauldron of the prefix omni-
and attributed to the prefix geographies and geometries
all inclusive (herr deutsche came along though) -
but the Greeks hijacked the oddity of Judea at that
special time because they had scientific inclinations
rather than aesthetic inclinations of the Romans,
and they wanted answers... got **** all...
it's not the Jews that thought the Greek involvement
ridiculous, it was the Romans... hence the omni-
and -presence, -potency, etc. - the Greeks just had
those mythical names for ****... Logos, Sophia...
that's the funny thing with mythology and history -
the book of Revelation by the looks of it simply looks
like a redemption of Oedipus... mythology is a logic
of history where either none was recorded on papyrus
since no one required hush-hush intrigue talk and people
spoke to each other face to face rather than to a profile -
mugs and mustard seeds -
you can always buy the book, C. G. Jung answer to Job,
it's peppered with too much Greek, and very little
Roman care... the theological addition of a globalised world
(under monotheism, failed and thriving, whichever)
is bound to play the montage of omni- and simply add -
God = omnivocab - i have my limitations of words -
i had to censor or rather select a vocabulary in order
to process the interchanges to reach a conclusive churning
without an ultimate goal other than to preserve a continuum,
like Balzac boring everybody with the 19th instalment of
the human comedy. so after reading this book on religious
matters by a psychiatrists i'm sorta bothered...
i'm tripping... obviously not seeing any hyper-geometry
of your choice... i just think the Greeks did the most horrid
hoarding and looting know to man... which reflected
the looting of Byzantium and never reaching the Holy Land...
the barbarians never cared to be honest, they only
started caring when they started to castrate the boys
for the "holy" choir rather than circumcise them...
then they went Berserk... the book of revelation can only
mean the quantum mechanics of history, bound to
mythology - Oedipus was very real... the blackened
heart of Greeks even though Aristotle, Socrates, Plato...
that intellectual import and expression didn't help...
after all Eddie Gein gave birth to the latter part of the 20th
century pop culture... Texas Chainsaw... Haemorrhoid Hannibal,
House of a 1000 Corpses.. history and journalism
dismisses mythology, i dismiss journalism as simply
a hyper-sensitivity that keeps dialectics out of the picture,
a monologue of opinions... mythology just doesn't seem
that insensible given our perspective into history with Darwin
and millions of years ago with the sea-turtles... you know
how gossip works... it sooth the reality of it had happened...
because we prefer oysters and chicken thighs to digest than
the tales of Eddie, oh yeah... Fe Maiden... d'uh!
the Greeks looted the Hebrews to purge themselves of
Oedipus... the weakness came by keeping estranged with
Narcissus and iconoclasm... you want an extract?
bombshell blonde at your bidding -
assumptio mariae: mary as the bride is united with the son
in the heavenly-chamber, and as sophia, with the godhead.
basically Mary is a schizophrenic ****-child of lust
for a Roman centurion who makes the story of a ****** birth
her wish to bed-wet her son (Jesus) into joining **** John
and Toe into her ****** (***** *****, like her already)
in heaven - she thinks her body will **** her "******-birth"
son and her wisdom (Sophia is her alias, or nickname)
will **** god in the head. oh hell this is sacrilege -
i'm not afraid of it... boo! ha! caught you mouth dry with the
boogie man. so this is a psychiatrist reasoning his religion...
as i said, the Greeks had no omni- Roman put the **** back
into his boots before he starts river-dancing...
all these quizzical ultra-mythical words that the Greeks
used starting with the Logos and Hippocrates were attached
to the failed Platonism of the unconverted Damocles principle
and the tyrant succumbing to drink and never bound to
a sober wish for anything more - (i'm guessing his intentions
were laid with Nietzsche as source of discipleship) - in short
let's just say that Platonism failed in practice,
and it needed a populist movement, a redemption from
the curse of Oedipus came from Hebrew with the schizoid-birth,
Joseph bin Adam was: better bite that ****** of the cow-fruit
and remind her of the stoning practices around here -
oh it's all pretty much Eastenders around here, it's
not the ******* Vatican marble corridors, we're talking
Gaza dust sneezing while whipping the donkey's *** to
move along... split-mind: beautiful metaphor... premature
dementia, obviously misunderstood... if premature "dementia"
while so much creativity among the split-minded...
it's like all the zodiac signs became jealous of Gemini,
incorporating Gemini-Solipsism... well, i have a neck like a bull
and a *****-count like a charging bull... but the thinking
behind the 3.a.m. is kinda staggering... oh right, you want
more quirky clues from Jung's book:
- silvia loret
- maritza mendez
- aria giovanni             (get a hybrid and i'll believe in Disneyland) -
****, that ain't what i was going to write, never mind,
you get a chance to see the palette of what's fudge for
fucky-fucky sized 16+ and what the Renaissance men
knew would be better than duck-feathers in pillows;
- meister eckhart: gott ist selig in der seele
- puer aeternus: vultu mutabilis albus et ater
    (of changeful countenance, both white and black)
- pius XII's apostolic constitution (munificentissimus dei)
   words like muni-imus really make you train in
    grammatical arithmetic, don't they? playing doctor with
   them as to where to cut them for a aqua format of rivers
   is quiet like reciting a 5x table up to 30 (sometimes)
- oportebat sponsam, quam pater desponsaverat, in θalmis caelestibus habitare (the bride whom the father had espoused had to abide in the heavenly bridal-chambers): st. john damascene (encomium in dormitionem);

summa summarum?
Nietzsche answered Job... this is my answer to Jung as also an answer to Lot - **** your daughters, your wife turns into a pillar of salt... and i equate that as a precursor to the man of sorrows on the ****** crucifix - salt is a metaphor for misery (that's etymology for you); and the Roman phonetic encoding survived over the fates of Egyptian and Babylonian is precisely why the adopted son of Caesar later made his uncle's adopted nephew his successor - as with the four dogma canon gospels, we're replicas of the tetragrammaton... well... i was never confirmed, i'm one short of joining the god-men that came out from catholic school after choosing a name for themselves they could have changed not having wished to be known by the two names given to them by their parents... few did... i just ended up an acronym of Einstein: M C E.

SAINT JOHN THE DAMASCENE

John Damascene, great eastern saint,
Your hand was cut for wrongs undone.
You took your hand; near Mary knelt.
The icon could your hand regain.

They cleared you from the wrongs, supposed
That had been done, and pardon asked,
But you refused your post restored
And as a hermit your life spent.

You wrote a praise for Mother saint
That still enchants us till these days.
That miracle can us acquaint
How God can always show His rays.

Saint John, how much l envy you:
A miracle restored your hand,
And you God's work with your eyes view.
How happy your life was on land.

BY JOSEPH ZENIEH
____________

Celebrate the invisible embrace.
You will be quite alone,
When the altruistic deed is done.

Content your heart in silence.
No choir will raise its voice
To sing your praises.

Consign your life to anonymity.
History no longer needs
Martyrs to fill anthologies.

Comfort your dreams in oleander.
Flowers are an appropriate caress,
For love conferred in obscurity.

Cultivate a flair for solitude.
Isolation is the purifying fire
That steels a damascene soul.

Gobbing and thrashing
       To Jello Biafra,
Before your damascene conversion into
        Something from Kafka,
The feminist utopia -
        A left wing theocracy,
You should have read Forster's
   Two Cheers for Democracy,
With red dead Cortez
      In her little white coat,
Where only lunatics and women
     Bother to vote.
The boys get a mantra
    A three syllable jingle,
The reason he topped himself?
    The reason you're single?

That we
are even here,
in this strange
existence, is
incredible enough

but of our peculiarities,

consider love...


You see,
I'll wager
love needs more...

and,
despite knowledge
to the contrary,

when our time comes,

when all
that I have shunned
and scorned, comes
home to haunt...

I will convince

myself, some part
of us endures,

that we go on,

reformed...

Its perspective skewed,
the lie of this land
is all tilts and angles.
Black-thorned hedges
rise in white clouds
to the hilltop farm.
On this Damson Day
it is a damp-mist morning,
the horizon a grey smudge.

Up forest trail and fell-ward,
on the left, a winter-laid hedge,
to the right, a mossy wall.
A riot of new growth lies
at the feet, by the hand:
wild garlic, wilder strawberry,
fresh ferns, and the tiniest violets
hiding on this old path.
Steep steps climb
to a four-acre orchard
primrosed under the pint-sized
trunks of its wiry trees.

There’s the blossom, white as snow.

Hard to imagine
five months hence,
fully plummed and picked,
Bullace and Damascene
driven by the cartload
to Kendal market.
250 tons they’d reckoned
once, taken by train
to the Preston canners.
Nearer home the fruit
was gined and beered,
cheesed and chucknied.

Then into the forest,
a plantation girdled
by a dry stone wall
tall on the moorland edge
where beyond
the grey limestone shards
have broken through what
little grass is left  
for absent cattle.

Wild with wind
up here today,
so down to reclaim
the forest’s shelter,
and down through fields
to a farm en fête
all cars and crowds.

This, a damson day of best-judged jam,
with artisan breads, Morris with swords,
fiddling folk, agility dogs, St Kilda sheep,
blue eggs and tents of crafts galore.

In the mist and drizzle
homeward and facing west,
there across the valley lie
outposts of blossoming,
fields embroidered,
and the farms necklaced.

She plays a mystic & speaks in secrets,
hypnotizes men with her sensuous-gait,
musk floats in strong streams behind her.

Her mouth tastes like succulent dates
ripened under the Damascene sun,
her ******* are perfect orbs
formed by the hands of the gods,
the curvature of her buttocks sways
like elusive cobras, her bite
can poison the soul of the weak ones
& in her hair lies fresh flowers.

I pray for her fervently
night & day
to come take me away
on a magic-carpet ride,
across an ocean of stars
twinkling in the glorious
infinite heavens above.

Beneath the salvaged chandelier from a great ocean, liner,
I sip Earl Grey tea from the finest, bone china
With a polite little man in half-moon specs
In the warehouse of treasures that he collects:
Of hallmarked silver in glass, display cases,
Porcelain figures with colourless faces,
Pearls, ivory,  pallid pieces of jade,
Diamonds set in a Damascene blade
And before a naked Apollo in snow white stone
Plundered by the Goths from his temple in Rome,
The polite little man in his tidy bow tie
Kisses me on the lips as he
Unzips my fly.

I had dreamed of gentle hills who cloaked themselves
in emerald green, swathed in capes of moss
and bejeweled by Time with tumbled stone.
Sitting in a high window looking east,
Over damascene forests crowding,
I saw the waves hurl themselves on rocky shores
where hopeful pilgrims and adventurers
once landed, timorous at first
their linear minds and loud weapons braced
for battle with those who watched
from under shade of guarded forest.
I knew their history now, how they grew bold
and mowed down the ancients, wrecking paradise
until, for a time, it resembled the land they'd fled.
Decades rolled past with the confidence of the victor,
his rewriting of progress and the careless tramping
of feet, horses and railroads over human souls.
At last, what was forged by the invaders
became brief peace and prosperity for a time,
but descended into dictators and their subjects,
and people were mesmerized by moving pictures,
their brains turned to porridge with radio waves.
lulled by sweet, starry-eyed promises from the rich.
The chance of revolution has weakened
to the point of desperation.
La resistance lies in shadow, like a lion crouching
waiting for people to awaken, for the **** that frees.