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Maia Chisholm Oct 2011
I want to sit
  in the autumn-orange
    of an old apple tree
Climb into the
  golden heart
     of winter coming
Watch yesterday's leaves
  edy in the wind,
    then swirl to shape
Crisp yellow carpets
   too soon to lie
     beneath the snow...
Fairview, Pennsylvania;  October 2011
Mateuš Conrad May 2021
Dear(?) Hello, Editors!

For the longest time imaginable I've been writing under a gratification of being able to bypass any and all editorial scrutiny by deploying my content on "platforms" - seeing how certain flukes were managed over history by public appreciation: without the need for an alignment of critic & / editor - I thought I'd try this approach... i.e. throw a loaf of bread into the circus and wait for the furore.

Yet I have also learned that, bypassing the editorial scrutiny process, of being somehow, "miraculously" graced by publication also left my, publications without... editorial authority from any *****-nilly reader who might object to the content... proof of this lay in me being censored on some "platforms": hell... if you can't settle for multiple rejections and the editorial scrutiny... at least appreciate mob rule of "platforms"... the rubric: wattpad, poetfreak, hellopoetry (although I have been reinstated), my-poetic-side... kicked off by some Stasi vegetable brain-snooze button... although... I have to admit... I was waiting for a site that would allow me an editorial membrane:  scrutiny prior to publication... in defence of the author... rather than the usual details of my postings gone awry... settled in kangaroo courts and sometimes left with... poems that I didn't save onto a private hard-drive...

What does one include in a covering letter? I'm a University of Edinburgh alumni - bachelor's degree in Chemistry - 2007... I dropped out of a History degree at UCL around 2008 when I experienced a psychotic dislodgement from "reality": imagine me, now... given the past year... what "reality"? The reality of busy-bodies? I was working part time as a roofer on industrial scale projects... the Scottish Widows HQ roof (near St. Paul's) is partially my doing...  come to think of it... since even the HRH the Queen mentions "mental health" in her address of opening Parliament as one of her points of interests... that film about concussion... why should a bout of psychosis... psychosis, osmosis... it's not a strict obligation to suddenly be / become sociopathic / psychopathic... rarer than a cold... but most certainly nothing self-aggrandizing - disorientating and building up a membrane of self-depreciating humour is one possible leftover...

- Yet do I want to focus on that? One part of me whispers: the editors want... all the "unique" voices to come together in a democracy of fair-representation... 31.1k · Jul 2018
cameo cinema: memory: view-count, date of publication, title of the poem... and this is without me doing much about this poo'em... this sorry doodle that would never be allowed to grace the temples of prose... I just... left it... abandoned... and how it built up momentum over time... on this one platform I had the most view counts in the circa of over 10,000... then, what? The Streisand effect? Of being dragged through a kangaroo court where my "defence" was: in absentia? Ha!

I have also managed to print my own book... yes, it's small press... P.U. COMPUS in Starachowice (Poland) - that I am native to that land and that tongue is sometimes a subconscious momentum... to... say... discourage myself from "taking the knee" or putting crisps in my sandwich... almost like me adding: I feel no inclination towards... p.c.s.d.: post-colonial stress-disorder... the Polacks jumbled up with the Irish... the least distressed people in the world of grievance Olympics... reparations blah blah... thank you very much... the only time communism worked was when a nation & it's people on its knees were... manage that... circa 1945 through to 1990... before the iron curtain (skirt) bonanza took over and hey presto... plateau history... everyone's the same, everywhere's the same... everything's the same...

I understand what a cover letter is, but in the context of... there's that not-yet famous quote I've heard... poets get paid every 50 years... so Bukowski's time of earning is up? Will the already ****** please be more than already dead? Major influences... Ezra Pound, Louis Zukofsky, Miroslav Holub, Tristan Tzara, Horace, Julian Tuwim... E.E. Cummings... I'd mention so many more... I will not go through the philosophers I've read... well... 2 years worth of reading and thinking and the everyday thought-experiments using up Heidegger's Sein und Zeit... but in all honesty? My personal library is missing one major artefact... Charles Olson's Maximus poems... I've attempted to get a copy... I'd steal one from a public library if I had to... it's not like I didn't steal a copy of Stendhal's the Scarlet & Black from my old school library... I did... eh... the burnout digital is not like... teeth... skin... ink... blood... pages... words... tattoos...

If this is a "covering" letter: i expect that it's not to be filled with: veneer... no? So when I'm prompted to write I as the question: quo vadis? Just as I asked an aesthetician (when I had my wisdom teeth pulled out)... I guess I'd reply with a: qua vadis - as "being" going... i.e. imagining myself via some "elsewhere"... the per se prospect of momentum... of my lift of readers' "digest"...Will Alexander is the only living writer I've yet to admire... well... having bought copies of the Sri Lankan Loxodrome, Compression and Purity & the Kaleidoscopic Omniscience... just as much: I abhor rap music and am half-way sold on the mantras of spontaneity of jazz that came after the period of the: "pretty young things" of the 1920s and 1930s...

currently I'm looking into, well: sorry not sorry... ethnically exclusionary expressions of identity... Norse myths, Norse music... if I were Russian... I wouldn't be gravitating toward having such bogus slack on expression, I'd just: "plough the field"... and... "bulldozer the rest"... how much of a hope in the concept of the universal man is there? the man to fulfil the role of: experiment... not that man can be transcend... rather... sampled... incrementally... toward a whole... for me there's not super-man... no over-man... for me there's a nuance of the sigma-man... the totality of man... and how... well... my shortcomings of not becoming a father... right, "shortcomings"? I would have more beef, about, "shortcomings" should I leverage the tiresome pinnacle yet existentially unsound years circa 25 - 35 as a genesis story of a patriarch...

I'm still writing a "covering" letter aren't I?
Who's who and who's not, naked... no?
Otherwise the crass: where's the ****?!
Everyone is "thinking" it: insinuations aside
the obvious still stands: who built those ferk-king:
pyramids!
Slave labour of gorillas from the yet
invested body-parts that could understand
brain-undermining toward
a construct of supra-hierarchies
worth of crown, pandemonium and peacocking?!

This supposed "cover letter": is this that
quo vadis / qua vadis question?
well it's not like it's unusual to not be paid for
content... slavery... ah... ha ha...
oh... apparently the mind doesn't acknowledge "it"...
what is it that the mind doesn't acknowledge? eh?
in the past decade+ I was paid...
em... ****-all for my outpourings...
I'm starting to to think ll my scribbling is biblically
protected as important... gratifying prank...
if it's not: hail the in-breds!

        something though, otherwise...
enough to pass into: an allowance for plumbing...
for ****'s sake...
the tabloid press gets more for stirring up:
"confession"...
yes... because what sells...
is what's looked at and not read...
how the Chinese countered the myopia of hieroglyphs...

the editorial scaffold still stands... no?
it has to be impossible to wake the vectors...
there's nothing to sell...
there's nothing of a ordwde umjebl
to jump-start?
                no genesis in the zunge
of the Faraoe Isles?
        nufffin- a great ******* muffin of sort
to begin with, then?
nothing to animate this clamour of
servitude toward a comforting third part...
"reality"?
nothing adventurous? just this... "platitude"?

If this was supposed to be a covering letter...
I know i failed... death's more pleasing...
when one's a failure in the eyes of the other;
it's a hard-on... this inconsequential scrutiny of the dead
of the living.

Yours Readily Available...
    hardly the Editor...

   is that's how covering letters are coerced
into existence?!
i said... i also said yes...
50 bucks is by no means:
certified... soy.

— The End —