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Bailey B Apr 2010
I stand on the gleaming rocks
and gaze out toward the pond.
I've been coming here for years now,
ever since I could throw
bread crusts to the mallards without
screaming and running away.

Across the lake are mansions
dripping with frosting and gumdrops,
but their pretention gets no heed.

I dream of inhabiting the island between us
that measures about six steps wide and just as far long.
There's a "no boating,
no fishing,
no swimming" sign to my left,
so I don't know how the dilapidated shack sits
between two steps and four, but I
want to sit there forever and
stare back at the people
who stand on the gleaming rocks
and stare out at me and
don't run away from the shrieking mallards
or the East Eggers on their gingerbread balconies
who rock back on their heels
and laugh at the show as birds
rip open their sandwiches
then turn to top off their schnappes.

I'd pay attention to that island, though.
I think it's made of breadcrumbs.

I don't own a boat,
fishing is useless,
and I'm too afraid to break the rules.
So I let the waves lap my feet
and convince myself that I'll come back
and do the deed at sundown,
even though I know I won't.
Marie Christine Apr 2014
I want to know you moved and breathed the same world as me.
says Fitzgerald
but everyone disappears, no matter who loves them
says eggers
let us forget, with generosity, those who cannot love us
says Neruda
they say. they say. they say.
they speak.
and they change me.
poets poetry power change
Timothy H May 2016
I went to the Bookstore today
    (can't do tablets or laptops
    when smoking cigars
    and
    ...also hate tv...don't like
    the way it makes me feel
    or other people look)
In downtown Boulder, Colo
Which, if you've never been
Displays fresh prints of Dave Eggers
And Edward Abbey
    In an 1899 erected structure
        That formerly hosted
            Ballroom dances
                Orchestras
                    And secret societies
It's not Powells in Portland, Ore
    (old school state abbreviations...
    deal with it)
But it's better for me
    Because I'm here
And it was a beautiful day
Even after losing at chess
    to a brilliant fool
    just outside
I couldn't help myself
    From browsing the poetry section
        In its entirety
(Only here for the $3.75 copy of the Poetry Foundation's monthly)
And I noticed an increase
    In fresh copies of Hafiz
    Same for Bukowski
    And Ginsberg
Keats was nowhere to be found
Typically, Shakespeare, Whitman,
    Wordsworth...are everywhere
I wondered if the American compilation
    by Garrison Keillor
    is worhwhile
There were dozens
    And dozens
        Of masters
            That I have not spent time with
Not "spent time"
Perhaps read a bit
    But not, connected with enough
    that I could say...I got it
    Not a fully aligned get
    But an education
        And appreciation
            To one who has pushed the craft
            in their own way
Or left me weeping
    at brilliance of love and language
But I resisted said temptation
    Of rampant reckless bookbuying
        And got my magazine
But on my drive home
    In the far East reaches of the county
        (Boulder's real estate no longer
        grants us commons much access)
    I stopped at tiny used book shop
        Bought an old copy of
            D. H. Lawrence poetry
                for a few bucks
And by the time I got home
To take inventory of tea
    Of coffee
        Of wine and cigars

I was rather pleased
    Pleased with myself
For I looked forward
    To the read
        To the sky
        To living soul free
            Once again
Mateuš Conrad Oct 2021
anything that's young and small is usually fun to have,
fun to care for, tend to... whether a dog...
a flower... or a child... esp. a child...


i'm not into typifying anything racially...
although... with enough experience cycling...
you come across racial stereotypes...
it's unavoidable...
i don't mind black drivers... i don't mind
white drivers: hell...
the stereotype of the white van man:
who's usually white is a blessing on the road...
these guys are a blessing to cyclists...
they care enough to pass you by with the minimum
amount of space required...
but they're not nervy... jerky...
they don't stalk you for a ******* minute
before making a move to overtake you...
but if i see a ******* "ninja" behind the wheel...
or some pompous Asian who blasts his
horn at me... i'm giving him the finger
that'll elaborate into the index-middle-and-ring
and shout at him: *******! read between
the lines!
i can't help myself:
the guy is usually driving a ******* VW polo
and he think's he's driving a ******* TANK...
i can squeeze past... no problem...
i've come across two instances where my
thigh glanced the surface of the exterior of a car...
i once had a collision with one of those
Ronin with an L placard attached to their rear...
******* mileage... doing 30mph... tears in their eyes
from the wind... blah blah...
i never thought i'd say this but...
Heidegger... dasein... where else if not when cycling?!
- a Sunday newspaper...
oh yeah... i'm a "boomer" in that sort of way...
i love the printed press... esp. on a Sunday...
Sunday newspapers are the best...
they have the magazines... they do a News Review...
it's almost as if... the culmination of all things
relevant arrives on a Sunday...
Monday newspapers are pointless...
i believe there should be a media sabbath...
and it would be a Monday since...
the newspapers are most slim on a Monday
and... no one does anything important on
a Monday anyway...
but the following article really did catch my eye...
'Machete gangs on the hunt for flashy Mamils'
(the sunday times, page 15,
october 10, 2021... nicholas hellen, transport editor)
so that's 'x' not "x" since it's a direct quote
and not a metaphor, misnomer or airy-*******-fairy
ambiguity...
the jyst... jist... whatever: the zest of the story
is... a cyclist was rammed and had his £15,000
road-bicycle stolen from him in daylight...
in an affluent part of Loon-dun... Richmond Park...
MAMIL? it's an acronym...
i hate acronyms... it's a H'american "thing"...
middle-aged-men-in-Lycra...
like i said: i too cycle... i'm a nut for cycling...
and i too wear Lycra shorts...
but i cover those Lycra long-shorts with something
breezy... other than that... no helmet...
no Lycra top...
   but it's the closest a man can get to what
women wear underneath...
if Lycra is not equivalent to the finest sort of lingerie
(phonetically... that... lan-jar-ray... not quite...
almost)
a woman can wear... then...
my ******* are not currently tingling
to a point of me thinking i have a ******...
290,000 is the number of bicycles stolen each
year in England & Wales...
funny that... i don't spot so many cyclists
to not have this number properly scrutinised...
i'm guess... scrap metal? scrap rubber?
- it's Lycra it could as well be something sexed-up
like lace... but... it has to be covered with
some sensible material...
i'd sooner be dead than don a ******* helmet...
cycling gloves and that pseudo-yoga-pants look
that women are pulling off...
sure... your *** looks fine woman...
thanks for that libido insomnia i've been having
with a Marquis de Sade hard-on for the past:
20 years!
started ******* aged 8... or 7...
even managed to teach another boy how to *******...
what's the ******* for?
not that? solo projects with ref. to...
no... never... i was never fond of the Egyptian gods...
but this one... so i asked this girl what deity she'd prefer
to... hardly pray to... at least keep in mind:
well... her counterpart... Atum... who spawned
his... offspring through self-*******...
so... hardly a taboo...
of course if i were a woman and had my
decapitated ******* toys and a web-cam...
i'd be milking it...
oh hello plumber... hello... electrician...
it's hardly something to do before a camera & broadcast
it... it's someone one does
on the throne of thrones...
once you do the no. 1 & 2...
that's no. 3 and there's no. 4 that comes up
while baptising yourself in the shower... a proper wash down...
but never in a scented candles spread on the bed
sort of way...
well: if you have to milk it:
i guess you have to milk it...
the sort of erotica associated with pregnant women...
- i never liked Talking Heads...
but this song... qu'est ce que? f'ah f'ah f'ah...
i was sold when watching Bloodshot with van Petrol...
that dance...
i'm shimmy... simmering... hell:
brought right up to the boil...
- so yeah... i can racially profile certain traffic
behaviours...
"ninjas" are not that bad...
but Asian... sorry... not Orientals:
i'll call red red, o.k.?
           Hindus... although i like this slur...
CIAPATY...
          borrowed from japatti...
in my native spreschen it denotes...
eating with your mouth open...
the MLASK... the audible sound of food being
chewed...
but i'll still "secretly" envision a world
where... we ate something French for breakfast...
or just poultry abortions...
something omni- for lunch
and a curry for dinner...
           i can't get over the superiority
of the blue Indian cuisine...
    lucky them: lucky for some to have
stockpiles of salt... but lucky for them to have had
cardamom... green or black... cumin, coriander...
chilly for all this time!
- but when it comes to reincarnation...
sure... i remarked that time sort of stopped being tinged
with a metaphysically: linear and
adorned a cyclic nature...
but... reincarnation implies:
only a fixed number of souls... while the rest of us
are zombies... empty vessels...
i'm not saying it's wrong... but ******* scary...
imagine... it's like the Catholic ELECT...
the Jewish CHOSEN few...
                            it doesn't breed much...
sympathy for your fellow man...
i like sympathy...
a symbiosis of pathology...
i once could quote myself as saying:
apathy breeds no pathology...
a quote staged when someone remarked:
there's nothing worse than apathy...
          dis-ease: a negation of ease... one more scrutiny
with etymological tinges... or hue...

always the two necessary lubricants when
writing... since i never feel like talking:
breathing is fine... but talking?!
refocus of a subject matter: Kandinsky...
talking-head... news anchor...
or merely a ditto-head...
i.e. one half of the "air-quote" i.e.
                                                      " id est... as above...

****... there's some dehydrating washing
in the attic... i need to get that ironed...
there's a decent chicken broth slowly cooking:
i'll need to boil some vermicelli for it
as a starch accompaniment...

i too hate the masochists running riot in...
m'ah race... i hate them...
i don't mind this whole world that has congregated
in Loon'dun...
i feel queasy in a monochromatic society
to begin with...
Poland & Cheltenham are like-for-like...
it's that i've grown among so many hues that...
it's impossible to otherwise an "otherwise"...
but... for a people that espouse so much Darwinism...
but at the same time... trickle down
English... "pragmatic" sensibilities?
sorry... something is going to awake in me
something primordial... something most associated
with the evil genius of the Russians...

you simply can't sell me Darwinism and
behave like ******* dodos!

my Salinger year... my new york year...
whichever name...
a very accomplished movie...
quirky... very quirky...
it's almost like watching...
Bell, Book & Candle starring
Kim Novak & James Stewart...
tamed existentialism: nothing remotely connected
to Robert Eggers' the lighthouse...
a movie on par with Ingmar Bergman's
the seventh seal... or Samuel Beckett's Watt...

i still haven't finished watching the movie...
the night i started watching it
i ended up drinking myself to a silly state
of lying on the floor...
then... attacking my cat with caresses while
crawling without using my legs...
like that cenobite in Hellrasiser: Inferno...
i was head, torso... arms...
a waking nightmare of what watching serious
movies & drinking does to you:
the waking grip of: delirium!

oh i know... a little... w.h. auden famously remarked
that all the Hitlers of the world wrote at night...
the above i wrote during the day:
having forgotten to put on the washing
of bathroom towels...
as you do... gearing up to cooking
the most pristine beef steak...
some french fries... a mushroom sauce...
leftover coleslaw...
you really can't butcher the beef meat twice...
you need to cook it for its final purpose:
tender medium rare...
i'd east blue... i'd eat rare...
but doubly butchering it to a well done?
i guess only the English have this
horrid palette...
they'll make chalk out
of chicken *******! a bit like my grandmother!
no... exactly like my grandmother!

come to think of it... a narrative is a cascade...
a river... a waterfall... something that lends
itself to Heraclitus...
then the cut-up "technique" came
beginning with the Dada movement
and later... fro Tristan Tzara
through to William Burroughs and his
"comrade"... Gregory Corso...
i'm more into juxtapositions...
let's call it...
          Kandinsky's anarchy with the subtlety
of either Satie or Debussy...
i sometimes walk into the forest
drunk... come a special place in my heart...
the highest autumn... the genesis of winter...
with a naked torso: because
i have to take all the clothes of my upper body
and sit... scouting for the moon
on some throne of bark...
peering from behind the branches...
listening to: as a branch is broken...
and something nears...
            
i need this night... it's such an annual event...
a seasonal ****...
like the period it takes me to make my own wine...
i need the trees as skeletons...
it's hard: when... you don't have any colour
to work with...
some might say i write a "word salad":
which is a derogatory term in psychiatry for
those who are familiar with it...
i'm speaking nonsense or...
i'm trying something new...
post-post-modernism...

      does it even matter, right now?
           i don't know my neighbours...
the ones i supposedly knew managed to invent
a tall tale concerning my Arctic hued Maine ****...
kidney failure... sorry... you what?
i was visiting my grandparents while being
traumatized by an advent of future events...
i begged and begged to return home...
if these Asiatic people love themselves so much:
and their community...
how much they might abhor tending
to westerners' pets...
say it... don't fake it...
"neighbours"...

well... that sheikh party... sorry... Punjab?
why do i require all these unnecessary
explanations... why do i need to be schooled?
that party of Sikhs went down well...
i spotted a few of them looking at me sitting
on the windowsill... waiting for an insomniac crow
to crow in the nacht...
  the party was going fine for a few hours...
until 1am hit and... i could hear the aruing through
my headphones...
in the morning a car was parked by
the garden fence that read: DOCTOR
on the front...
so... someone overdid it?

listen, friend... if you don't know how to drink!
don't drink!
i drink because i'm bored...
and i like to... dribble a little scribble...
i am: a harrowing...

     i'm sorry: these aren't my neighbours...
i can tell you why they're not my neighbours...
those Nigerians that moved next door...
where once an English woman... post-wall...
and her pseudo-Lithuanian bulldog of a bf moved in...
the one who told me i needed to ask
his permission when making a bbq...
because he had his washing drying in the garden
and he didn't want a smoked salmon fest...
or the woman that lived two doors down...
with her autistic boy...
i don't know how many men went
in and out after the boy's father left...

i'm not saying i'm better than...
but i like... what is it that i like?
a sensible... polite society...
a society where i can drink a Franziskaner beer
on a park bench, in the shade... and not bark
obscenities...
i like politeness... i like... this most pristine of social
contracts...
i still believe there are...
unwritten... social contracts...
like today... a woman was walking with her
two daughters riding bicycles...
i finished my beer and smoked my cigarette...
i was on my way
riding the bicycle without
holding the handlebars...

LOOK! LOOK! the man is not holding them!
well... i should come up with
some soppy story about being 35 and not having
children...
chances are... society would only allow me
to breed female prostitutes...
and male suicides...
i'm doing the next best "thing"...
nodding my head like a pigeon walking...
pretend dancing while perched on a windowsill...
listening to Talking Heads' ****** killer...

i'm out... the chimp in me checked out...
oh it must be so great to have little girls
and boys...
the ones that spot a man with a beard
and exclaim: LOOK! LOOK! he's not holding
the handle-bars...
he's almost riding a unicycle!
look at the clown in disguise of...
not having any ****** paint!

i'm also jealous... i can make a corner without
holding the handle-bars of a bicycle...
it's like... gravity 2.0: two-point-oh...
but the stuff the English colts in Essex get up to...
gearing up... doing wheelies...
i'm jealous... all i can do is...
turn corners without holding the handlebars....
whey hay! presto!
it's like... gravity can be used outside the realm
of planetary orbit...
it can have its own micro-cosmos! wow!

at this point i ought to be like:
i want to raise young girls...
teach them how to ride a bicycle without
them needing to use the handlebars...
only for acute turns...
i'm sorry... the chimpanzee in me
is sleeping...
i'm Harold... can i help you?

               i'm ******* grooving to Talking Heads'
****** killer bass line...
like a pigeon... strutting... instead
lodged with a leg folded sitting on it
on a windwosill...
              believe me... the world's great!
it's almost as if i never left it:
it's almost as if i arrived to watch its sunrise!

the drink is hear... the absence of any decent narrative too...
talking heads' psychology killer vs.
fleetwood mac's: the chain...
to hell with African-esque...
the European-solo projects...
if it's not about the bass... it's not about anything...

imagine a pigeon strutting...
and my giggling... imitating dancing while rooted...
those two girls on bicycles...
LOOK! LOOK! a man is riding a bicycle
without holding the handlebars!
as much as that might have: ought to...
bring me sorrow...
the sun was shining...
i wish i could... tap into that sort of
research material...
hello dead end... hello project dodo...
for all the right reasons...
for ****'s sake...
my mother loved her father...
but my grandfather "sold" her... the worst of the worst
of genes...
i'm also invested in them...
i'm evolved in that:
i know... when it's desirable to stop...
i want to stop...
i don't want a future i dispose of to
come back to me with... ******* complaints...

i adore the children of strangers...
LOOK! LOOK! the man!
ha ha... the first time i was scrutinised as
a man... i... never remembered being a boy...
LOOK! he's riding his bicycle without using
the handlebars!
it's the little that makes the most...
like... catering to your feline companions...
making them teased... but now abhorring you
up to the point of:
how, the, ****... do, you... arrive... at...
"lost" cats?! dogs i can understand...
i saw this one instance where a guy...
roped a dog to a bench... then ****** off...
for some... strange ******* reason...
the same dog was... running around with
another stray... ******* magic...
a stray dog a "lost" dog i can understand...
but... what sort of a *******... what sort of *****
do you have to be / become...
to conjure up a... ******* stray cat?!
seriously?!

believe me: i've lived a little: to know... a little...
it's not that i know nothing:
which is... that infamous Socratic negation positive
statement....
you can't just... conjure up...
"lost" cats... what terrible people they must be...
dogs i can understand...
leashed...
cats... i imagine cats ******* off on their own...
then i start thinking about
the milk-toast...
the... overcooked beef...
beef that's not... medium-rare... or blue /
i.e. doubly butchered...

the bicycle isn't simply "owned"
by =a: pataphyscian: alfred jarry....
               a cyclist is somehow...
sometimes... a buffer....

hello... the end.

— The End —