I. You wrote no manuscripts but somehow, whenever I move to inch myself over the sofa, I can feel your soft blow indent me over the edge of this quiet. The quiet disquiets the quiet – is something you would have said over *******, over lamenting the death of a lamppost outside, over wanting to be stranded underneath the awning of a dilapidated canopy of trees outside. Over the slowdance and the turntable, over Belle and Sebastian.

II. I left the faucet running just in case you were to be awakened by a myoclonic ****. It helps to hear the sound of water gushing as it protrudes calmness. I would have intruded you, but your absence first lifted into the vacuity of rooms unspoken of. I inspected the impressions left on the bed and left the tousled sheets as they were. Questions discerned. Answers disarmed. Somewhere between inquiry and certainty, there is a body hauled right out of the alarming bedazzlement. We were both gutting each other as the light from the television spilled right onto our naked bodies, stuck in a fucklock. And then I got up to the slain body of the morning.

III. I muse you over Wittgenstein – separated by a makeshift bookshelf. I felt a revulsion for slender straps for watches. The face you wore that day was white. Now you’re as pale as a July tapestry.

IV. I bought new venetian blinds today.

V. Somewhere along the steep ***** I heard the machination of an arrival. The dogs were randy outside. It must be you, approaching. I fingered the slats to reveal a little source of Sun. It was the daily paper. I have forgotten all arrivals are the same.

VI. If I were to blueprint this house with my sentiments – we would be sleeping apart. Your bed, of cold metal. Mine, of sandalwood. Erasures last longer than revisions. I know your presence as the familiar clangor of the same instruments you use for preparations are the same ones fondled. Right after the investigation, your immaculate neglect transfers itself into a sly translation of perfume from a day’s work, winnowing my faculties.

VII. I made a blueprint of this house with my sentiments – you somewhere in the outskirts of town, I deep within the suburban. I have a question for balconies I do not want to answer. At what height should be a balcony situated? What if the scrumptious fall is but elevation?  Will the intensity of the Sun pulverize the very fixated shadow on the corner of my parched shoulder? If not, should I take the balcony down?

I wanted to revise the blueprint, but no. Erasures last longer than revision – I dream of cities expunged
when the day ends.

The tyranny of this empty room
will always be the underlying comfort of no one.

These books left unread, has been the taste of my inglorious pursuit of happiness.

A guitar hanging on the wall collecting dust and rust, is a product of my unremarkable trust with myself.

A single bed that will be slept on later, will be filled with imaginative thoughts of grandeur,
Combined with the thoughts that betrayed me compiled with,
"I should've and could've".

Only this pen latched on to my hand to carve the honest words,
This paper to produce erasures of beautiful sentences.
The writer that will bear the coming of tomorrow.

reverse engineering:

tomorrow
i will know still your voice,
how your silence splits words
into pieces, as you break me
with your collared sweaters and polka dot
socks: tell me i am floating,
question my Gods, forbid me
from touching your church elders; your parents’
Lord.

today
i will know your laughter, a tad frail:
the voice of an unsteady
deity - your fingers - never stilling a pen,
nor sketching a hand - whittling
my own: your chin trembling as you chide me
for their largeness; i show you their erasures:
your lack of wayward lines; your work
of an artist.

yesterday
i tell you to sing, you tell me not to -
you arm yourself and lock away in your room,
say your poetry terrible,
wrong, un-joyful, cross-averted; they cracks
in all the wrong places like your flimsy
hands, like your hopes massive-disintegrating
like the feebleness in your dust-allergic bodies; your lack

of lungs: brittled long by heavy-handed
words and thin brushes: you with death -
the un-wayward stroke: You
who are sickly, whose quiet breaths reach
where we cannot find

and find the places where
our gods long to be touchable.

Not sure when all of this started
Maybe the day sanity departed
But now I find that I like to chew
On anything the color of blue

The transition was rather simple
Erasures from colored pencils
Of course you know the color I choose
Do I need to keep reminding you

And who in their right mind would not pack lunch
Without the world of Crayola in a colorful box
They even give the crayons fancy names
Although all the shades of blue taste the same

And for a chew with a bite without the bark
I always do blue from the Play-Doh jar
To be fair other colors I've tried
But haven't I told you it's the blue that I like

Don't dare get me wrong there is normal I find
Why I'm a softy for good a blueberry pie

Then there's blue Pixie sticks
And blue Kool-Aid mix
Blue frozen pops
Blue chewy gum drops
Blue Gatorade
Blue frosted cupcakes
Who ever knew
There was so much color blue

And I know what you think
Call it a hunch
But the Permanent Marker
I needed only try once

Like I said
I'm not sure when all of this started
Maybe the day sanity departed...

My behaviour erratic
My speech far from smooth
These days I can't wait to cut down anyone
Who thinks life is a bed of roses on a cloud
Life is not effortless like the rainbow you so seek
These days people are afraid
The spark dying
The fire extinguishable
Do not be depressed from what I say
There is family to hold you up
And words to console
These things are meant to be
There is a correctness in some rare person
But Me? I am far from right
I am twisted
Like a crooked spine, I hurt
If someone out there feels as I do
That no consolation may come due to uncorrectable mistakes
Please let me not feel so alone
Hopeless cases that we are
Erasures all over our life's draft
I can see my follies plain as day
I can see you clearly
There is a correctness in some rare person
Judgement, I pray you be far from swift and close to gentle
I plan to live out my days trying
Best efforts are like flower buds blooming
I plan to be celebrated for my triumphs over my trials
When I have died trying

Alien’s heaven

poems

Barton Smock
June 2015
 

 
pilot light

baby, baby talk, and pilot light.

kitchens everywhere,
god is alone.
 
no brain

father smokes to make something disappear. he says he’s no brain but can pass for touched each time the bug is resurrected. when he rolls out of a blanket and into the side of a building, I believe again in the man mistaken for god’s pencil. mother can’t leave him anymore than she can leave her ears. terrify no one your childhood knows.
 
son

it was born in a bath of milk when there was milk to burn.  it drew with daylight.  when asked for details, it pulled a shadow’s tooth.  we took it to a movie, a war movie, where it made its first noise.  its pain went everywhere.  it sold, it sold until it ran out of clothes.  its mothers had fight.      
 
knees

visiting hours are set by a god who knows I smoke.  leaving my mark means I’ve pressed the barrel of a cap gun into my brother’s temple because the ****** keeps scooping into his ballcap the same toad.  my two fathers are here to bounce things off my mother when she prays.  sit long enough and ***** will dry them together.        
 
yearly

our collective identity is a sick child. some say fever, some say welcome to the loop of the biblically speechless. people are for others. are for making eyes at the gender of the god as it oversleeps in the coma we slip from. the child prays. the child causes a stir in the pastoral urgency of a moral imagination. we pray. we miss yearly the showdown between the town drunk and the town ghost. I trace a finger to put my finger on. the television belonging to our lady of snowy reception has fallen on our little angel more than once. nothing in the world is the world.
 
boy and gun

it entered my heart
to take a bird
from the world.
I felt nothing.    

the recent absence
of nothing.  
 
vernal

when you begin
to show
say
instead
you’ve a soft

spot
for god
 
race

says poverty
someone
at this table
has nothing to hide.

says father
touching
a UFO
cures frostbite.

says mother
open
the stomach
of the winning
monster.
 
area

somewhere, the mostly boy body pretends to be explored.  we are not we.  my mother ruins a sketch of my mother.  my father smokes two packs a day because online he was called prematurely haunted.  the name of your existence

is

priest retires to make umbrella for jack-in-the-box.  (her bus

is rain)
 
barbaric terms

each twin
slower
than the last, she spits

over my dead body

baby
after baby
out.

as news
of the massacre
spreads, the young
call it mother
by word

of mouth.
 
longing*     *for Gen

the baby boy stiffens at the sight of unrolled dough.  we say he is pointing the way to god.  crippled by the sadness in her hand, his mother keeps a claw mark like one keeps diary.
 
closings

trespassers
shoot themselves.

your son gets hired
by city

to illustrate
a book on mirrors
for households
with one
adult.

my son
dies
before the machine
that keeps him
alive

turns on.

a doll in doll country
burns its nose
trying to enter
the future
museum
of racist
oddities.

my hand tries my hand at forming
firstborn
erasures
using only
redactions.

god is exiled
for bringing
the animal
its childlike
behavior.

I am far too animated.

your body is the notice
eyes

give.
 
ins

night
the land
of a single
unseen
settler  

-

father
half eye, half oil    

-

self, self panic
 
bloodless     for Noah

my brother was blinded by a crow.

I’d tell you the story
but know
you hate it.

*******.

brother’s darkroom
became
the crow’s.
 
breathing spells

I chased only
the brother
I’d dreamed
of beating.

I told my sister
she didn’t have
a tail. told mother
it’s not suicide

unless you ask
to be born. I had a hand
for the year
father

went quiet
a hand
for the year
father

went quiet
for good. had dolls
over which

dying
out of character
held sway.
 
intelligence

magic amplifies in my loneliness a single flaw.

a bird, a high window. sound of a brain cell.

hunger and its unremarkable kitchen.

as a doctor I hammered the baby’s knee.

bio, and the undisclosed location of god’s recovery.

harm is harm’s audience.
 
disability jargon

i.

when it opens the bomb
it knows
like my brain knows
what it sees

ii.

homicide grief
is a recording
god’s message
speaks to

iii.

eight years old
she leaves the trampoline
in her body’s
fearful
accounting
of self
 
concord

cap gun.  swag from an uncle’s suicide.  

the daughter
the ghost
cartoonist.

voodoo dolls
in isolation.  isolation

in its prime.    
 
altar

the baby is too light.  its mother puts it on a scale that reminds her of a plate her empty childhood couldn’t break.  its mother invites neighbor boys to punch her in the stomach.  some of the boys bail.  some don’t.  the mother’s nickname doubles as her real.  the baby is not called bricks.


 
zero

when I couldn’t get my head around the surrender of my body to the flotation device of an immaculate conception, I’d simply swallow a baby that had swallowed a pill.  years go by and I am zero.  the number arrested for suicide.        



 
basics

because he is asleep, he does not find himself sleeping in the tub.  something slides from his belly and becomes wedged.  his dream business goes under even in dream.  he makes eyes at CPR manikins.  his son, his life, pushes for legs.
 
preparedness

you look like you’ve just been given permission to sleep in your clothes.

it’s a **** whistle only crows can hear.

it’ll put sheep
on the moon.
 
outlet

depression is a non-starter.  depression is depression unknowingly cured.  it is like I have this shirt because it exists and not because it invites everyone whose shirt it’s not to enjoy joy.  I don’t want to hear you say you’re sad to say.  I ******* to reappear and think it might be why my father vanished.  it’s enough during foreplay to flicker.

 
viewership

my youth spent trying to see the devil as a young man.  my motherly youth.  my **** scene a return to form.  cut from yours, you have your baby’s eyes.  I went unborn.  I went beaten.  we went together in broad daylight when broad daylight was god’s elevator.


 
pressure

the original thought in my head was to be postdated by god until god learned he had a baby on the way.  I had children until I could only have four.  what I say to self-harm is pay attention.  my daughter raises her hand on the off chance she buried something in her teacher’s body.  (we have stopped talking

but I can squeeze her anorexia into a phone booth)  poverty myth:  I groom my sons with the beak of bird abandoned.  real time I tell my tongue it’s ******* curtains for the mouth I’m getting.  full circle my daughter surrounds those brothers of hers that mine clone.        
 
high

mother, in the early stages of her food fight with god.

father, I can’t bury
my face.

in lieu    
of the lord’s
dog, raise

the lord’s
bone.
 
the mice

the conditions for mentally composing a suicide note for his sister are less than perfect. she’s sitting on his bed with a cigarette in one hand and his baseball glove on the other. both hear three traps snap shut in the kitchen. sister gags and it makes him think about gagging. now no more, these were the heart of the note.
 
signal

as my face
will one day
correct
my body
I expose

the elements
to my
ugliness  

-

my son is my search

history

-

headlights
when headlights
emerge
emerge
from a period
of non
worship

-

(wave your arms
long enough
you’ll have sticks
for arms)

-

they don’t  
happen
in my
lifetime
the terrible
things
I’ve done  
 
observance

when drought came
to my brother
I left
for the city
where I found myself
blanketing
manhole covers
with my coat
for women
who gathered
on rooftops
with men
whose daughters
had been killed
for jumping
rope
 
peril

I bit my tongue
when my tongue
was a cloud.

take cover, bones,
says my daughter
dancing.

I crushed my son
like a gift
and offered
god
my tactile
outlook.

stay small, future.  

persuade
a peephole
to show
some blood.      
 
no devil

the knock knock joke in need of my father’s skull is all that’s left of the outside world. hell was always the preparing of hell.
 
inseparable

mother is watching a show that keeps her from picturing the gods who portray us.  father is choosing an ice cube to bury.  myself I am very close to stripping for the cigarette my sister rescued from a baby’s crayon box in a dream that smelled like her clothes.      
 
masters

I have just had it written down for me how I am not classically racist. I am alone. I am brief stay of bullet. god is using each hair on my head to scribble on my son’s thought process. when I think of crab legs I think in color of the lightning bolt it snows inside. I miss mom. gospel, gospel that I hang these rags for invisible crows.
 
was

ask now my father if it still believes the present to be the future of a past life.  

ask then if it unscrewed one day each inessential light bulb that my party would have balloons.  

-

violence in movies.  also, food.  my mistake.  I glue myself

to nothing.  my shyness

-

is kind of
my angel.  

-

the body invents the soul it recalls.
 
gauze

the boy’s mother is biting off less than he can chew.  her insomnia
has put her inside a worm
her body
tries
to fill.  her milky eyed

-

husband
revs a tow truck
to death
in a heavy fog.  it is possible, humanly

-

possible

-

there’s nothing
to see here.  that her god

-

is, in a sense,
seizure activity
in the boy’s
spirit

-

animal.  
 
image

and do not
believe, as such, that yours
is a body

leads god
to inquire
 
godless

godless
balloon
animal
 
root effects     for Miles J. Bell

like he’s laying
yellow
on his road
out of grief
brother
takes a drag
and keeps it
until his head
is underwater
is what they call
with apples.

his eyes
have always been
two poverties
unexplored.  he is old, alien’s

heaven
he is old
but not before
he knows it.
 
the alien wept but was not heard weeping

not all
drones
dream
of you

a love letter in the sand


she implores me at my weakest,
early morn, when sleep and sorrow
yet linger on my eyelids and dreamt stories
still have not been replaced by the careworn,
life’s erasures that ***** sparks of creativity

write me a love letter, a forever composition,
resistant to aging, time and weathering, a poetics
stamped with a maker’s mark, a signet, a hallmark
to our love that will be read unceasingly, a party to eternal
preserve our sharing, under glass, in paint, in this ink,
in this atmosphere

deny not my request, for it is holy tinged, reddish singed,
the best of us to become immortalized,
for all other lovers to follow, in garden planted,
a peony’s blooming upon request, whenever needed,  
be ready seeded, to salve and save, to be given and gotten,
in a single act jointed

no matter if our names brown edge to faded,
our love revived when it is voiced, witnessed, taken,
our love refreshed upon renewal by others eyes, lips, sensations,
make it an oath, a promising, combining our combination,
bless it for everyone, to be a blessing, a dressing of loving

poet rose from prone, our templar bed, bathed his face,
bid his woman, follow, her bidding to be won, for this now
is the moment precise that such a need be immediacy met,
a task such, cannot be denied, temporized, delayed by delicacy,
a challenge so eloquently stated, must be instantly sated

to the sandy beach I took her, for she would be the first witness
to her creation, her inspirational must become perpetual,
with forefinger in the sand drew the words she had chosen,
for in every respect, he gave grandeur, preservation worthy, now encapsulated as “I will be yours forevermore”

“how can this be eternal, in minutes, the tides arrival,
it’s erasure a certainty” she laments...

not true, I soothed, the tide will take each grain of our anthem,
with our bodies ash, to every seventh corner, where lovers gather,
to be rewritten, melded together, soft spoken unison,
spreading our tale, forevermore...

it will take 100 years for a single grain to cross the ocean,
and then, when all are as one, as we begun, this day,
our love letter in the sand perpetual

If I had a map of your body,
I would erase all of the places I love.

So that I could never get hurt,
and I could never hurt you.

You would float off the page,
and I would fly too.

Souls intertwining above, scattered from erasures
below.

Collect your favorite body parts and
Etch-a-sketch them together.

Before you get too attached,
shake the pieces and restart.

Hardest among parts to find is the brain.
Easiest, the heart.

You didn’t break my heart,
you broke my brain.

And now all I can do is process you,
think about what we did,
and what we won’t do.

If I had a map of your body,
I would erase all of the places I love.

It may be my weakness
That I write and live
Without revisions
Or blend endlessly
My painted blue
white horizons.
It may mean I am
True or careless yet
I don't care
A bit. Just trying
To live
Honorably
Speak truth
May I someday
Make all the words
Arrange in a flow
That portrays
How a man with
Heart needs no erasures
No fan brush
Or cleaners
Just a bit of spit
To wet his finger
As he composes.

Backspace means nobody will see
Paper tears bit by bit with erasures
but on MS Word there are no consequences
My poems are full of backspaces
There was one right when I types backsapce
When you don[t backspqace notjng makes sense
Bu t what is life withoiut mistakes?
Silence is a life without any sound
Did I stutter? Then sing with me
Beautiful babies are something mistaken
Mother's are sometimes mistaken
Blasphemies are sometimes mistaken
The flat earth is something mistaken
I can be mistaken

Ink blots,
Words blur...
I can still
see the
pieces
of your own
person-
written between
the lines I've
penned when
I still have
the heart to love.

Torn pages,
erasures here and there-
I have tried to
write you off,
but it seems
I cannot ****
what's immortal.
More so, I cannot
erase what I
have written.

Tear stained,
scratched papers-
I have bled
enough blood
to tamper
the words I've
written...
But you...
You, I cannot
replace.
and I, I was
the only one
at fault...
It was my own
words
that made
you immortal.

*When a writer falls in love with you, YOU CAN NEVER DIE.

1 “Pursue not with accolade in mind. The hand will remain blank, if not black – blacker at that notion of conflagration. There is a fine line between infinite and obsequiousness. It is all disappearance, isn’t it?” she humbly quipped sotto voce.

2 Whenever I look at a dog, I lose my metaphors. Say, when he gnaws a wall for no reason. Or when I watch the indefatigable motion of his tail. Is it all redundancy?

3 I’d like to think that I sold myself a long time ago, mistaken as hurling a stone into the deep setting of repugnant waters, my body assuming fragrance, or a fall of feather – half-mast at that, in conscious space.

4 I want myself bought back from the dark, oblivion, the constancy of salt in the sea.

5 I fear that when the Sun cleaves through hills, light would be but two bodies never finding each other.
   Depth is wedded to loss, cobwebbed into abeyance.

6 Who do you see when you see a shadow? A movement of identity? Or the identity of movement?
    And whose land does it continually mark with longing? Or an insistence of feeling? A dearth of space is made aware of its vastness. We must all hide in the night so as to minimize its feat.

7 Speak boldly about memory. Its incandescence, its liminal end. Its forgotten thresholds. How it felt at first light to grasp but not sense out ownership. Be silenced over entrails. I will sojourn into the infinite quiet of your throbbing presence and fade out, the same way you lilted away like a blather of a child in the heat of a haranguing mother, or the predictable yet sudden erasures of sea.

8 I have not, the discovery of landscapes. My next door neighbor’s home is being renovated. I have a fascination for unfinished structures.

9 I look at my image in the mirror: A scruple of metal-reticence. A mangle of scaffolds. I am a home that cannot be assuaged.

10  Disappearance.

crude
but the shape
of things to come

the Seine
Notre Dame
in pencil rubbings and erasures

the mind
a potter's wheel
with clay raw and ready to be tossed

Whit Howland © 2019

defined by daily chores responsibilities
next months rent payment
fear of utilities cut off
how to eat on $10 a month,
I rather would buy milk for the stray cat
I  adopted
a cuddly friend
that had four cute kittens who
so far with me have
a roof and water and a place to meow
explore
and a slice of my baloney
my bare feet to play with
so, am I wrong to play make believe?
To spend my off time from
the daily grind, the labors of surviving,
enraptured by the beautiful sunsets,
is it wrong for me to dream?
I clipped a rose from a bush today,
brought it home, in water in a plastic cup on
this cluttered desk full of pen and papers, erasures
cigarette ashes aspirin and allergy capsules,
It the one bud glows in true beauty,
hope and nature and memories,
her petals a new play toy for my imagination,
and the kitties paws.

Dramaturgy

1

I believe in the sound of the fall but before the annunciation, a force did not see the brink of all ends. The polarizing image before us: this wall that has no hue. This wall that seeks to be tarnished. To tether a name. To spring it open with premise.

It is coming face to face with a familiar haunt. Strange that it has no name but you remember it from the feel of its touch, the malaise of hands upon stroking the contour, the catatonic stupor of time in fluid standstill when it is said that "It does not get any better than this.", the belief of questions and the faithlessness of answers. He is ready.

2

Thus is the physiognomy: a look so dismantled. The fragile bent of its source. A body, a body of sound treading a straight path backed by centrifugal inertia -- of speed so full and tender with blurs, the end is seen and will soon be met: patience, patience is all and the skies are impossible. She sees all this, takes cues as pain makes him more so, the one anxiously flailing in space.

3

Confess in utter space that the absolute is ideal. The process distills the heavy water of this revenge. There is nothing like this, as there is nothing the identical in your side of the Earth now, or your bed, where you are cut above yourself and across. This is the body realized. To quantify space, to resign to its bleakness, to take all of this and let it flow into the river, to the brink of all the noise, to where light will fall squarely without tremors or erasures.

4

Intent runs with me this evening straight to a place where nothing will be found, no one will be marked in this map. This light so insufficient still guiding, bleeding a borrowed sheen from the **** of evening. Intent is everything, be it a consignment to void.

5

He will repeat what was written in solemnity, in front of the mirror.

6

They will see it falsely, take it as heavy dreaming when he should have convinced himself to be awake.  A laudable insistence may be perceived as a conscious labour to survivability, alone, together -- no difference will be met, no criteria to victories will be set. This is all for disappearance, the pursuit is a lie, and to continue this, the irony.

7

Desired impression: tomorrow you will emerge naked and wear me as something a perfume does to skin, or warmth does to bones. Look, when the Sun rises from its deep grave of hills, its vertical crawl will leave no trace in other regions of land, of body. Somewhere in the ornate someone washes the surrounding with a recognizable fragrance. This is all drawn to a possibility: something the world has no use for

the rest of the lights before you
slid into erasures. we have become
everything the city is in its precocity;

from the wind that gallops, the dog
howling into a crossfade, even underneath
the already dead lampposts that give

in to the velocity of such departure,
a divisible line. a border I cannot cross.
I dip my body into the thick dark

and become bendable light through
the crevice of doors. the gnawing silence,
your leitmotif. something the wind is still

all beautiful things passing and I become
nothing more but a dank memory in the muck
of forgetting – whatever it was, that I conversed with,

stars their dereliction, all across the flagrant void,
I am beating with more life than ever,
dancing around your leftover moon.

trespassers
shoot themselves.

your son gets hired
by city

to illustrate
a book on mirrors
for households
with one
adult.

my son
dies
before the machine
that keeps him
alive

turns on.

a doll in doll country
burns its nose
trying to enter
the future
museum
of racist
oddities.

my hand tries my hand at forming
firstborn
erasures

using only
redactions.

god is exiled
for bringing
the animal
its childlike
behavior.

I am far too animated.

your body is the notice
eyes

give.

Drafts
    and
       erasures
             outlines
                    and
                    pencil stains
                     bits
                        of
                              lea­d
                                                        scatter­ed
                           across
                                  the floor
                              so
                          ­       does
                                       my
                                            thoughts
           ­                                whenever
                                       I'm with you

writing is torture for some people...
i can cite two pristine examples of this being the case:
Walt Whitman and Jack Spicer;
fair enough...

                          i find it torturous that i best
sing Mongolian throat-singing...
anything else? i have my odd moments -
but most of the time if i'm singing in front of
someone: i self-sabotage my voice
and it sounds: beyond tone-deaf...
it feels like an elephant stuck its trunk into
my ear and sneezed...

          oh i hear the bells... bells bells... fuzzy
feelings and what not...
all those poems i threw to the wind and into
darkness into any deity willing to listen
to my "de profundis":
de profundis ad nihil:
   from the depths toward nothing...

i don't think i'll ever want to finish reading
Charles Dickens' the Pickwick Papers...
i don't think i will...
    i want to leave something unfinished...
i think i'll leave the Pickwick Papers unfinished...
after all: it was his first novel:
a novel serialised in a newspaper / magazine...
he only managed to jump of the publishing
ladder by marrying the daughter of the owner
of the publisher: non-verbatim...

               but of all the books i've read:
i couldn't do what my grandmother did
i.e.: reread them...
     i wish i could reread James Joyce's Finnegans
Wake... Ulysses...
   i wish i could reread William Burroughs'
naked lunch...
                  
   while music and movies are circular...
books are linear...
         at least for me...
                      oh no ******* chance of me rereading
Heidegger's black notebooks or Zeit und Sein:
it took two years out of my life
bound to reading-meditating...
     Kant's critique of pure reason too...
a year? reading-meditating...
                           i was ingesting the content...
i read it for personal gains...
                      i was never going to read that
material in order to regurgitate it back...
to show or "pretend" that i might know what
i'm talking about, if asked...

       what i learned i'm taking to the grave...
but it's literally torture for some people to write...
i find a similarity to... wait for it: wait for it...
constipation... almost like a headache...
then irritable bowel movements...
have to go: i'm seeing flashes of waterfalls!
and spew!
          
    i sometimes catch myself tongue tied...
sitting in silence with itchy fingertips / idle hands
does that to you... two tongues and a split
mind might also do that to you...
the major difficulty of being an entrenched
bilingual? nouns...
    they're mismatched...
sometimes a hammer is a młotek (diminutive -
which is never attached to English words)
               i.e. rather młot...

what's a bang?! it's not even an onomatopoeia:
HUK! or: hook...
            which isn't etymologically borrowed
from Huracan... although...
                aesthetically, though? hook vs. HUK...
obviously the latter makes sense...
        if i were to give two words to a German
and say both with an angry emphasis:
he might agree that HUK is as phonetically
liberating as KURVA... *****... *****... oh ****...
conjunction...

    maybe i should be "embarrassed" about my past...
everyone else seems so proud of their heritage...
i just had to look up...
hmm...  the topic of the North Sea Empire
of Cnut...
             what did i find? hmm...
               nice looking map... allies in yellow...
Poland... perhaps Swedish Vikings founded Kiev...
nerve endings at being teased...

how much history have we hoarded?
how much is to be left un-forgivably forgotten?

oh there's still good music around...
but it's not in the English speaking world...
anything from Scandinavia... Germany...
you just have to look for it...

**** me... i'm drinking and drinking and i want
to get drunk... but it's not helping...
if Americans can constitute their present
identity on the "holy bible" of the decleration
of independence and the constitution
and the holy bible...
the English can cite their origins with the Magna Carta...
so me doing this? i.e. sieving through
history is not me playing into the modern
fable of comic books?! this is not me being...
somewhat childish, is it?

not that modernity doesn't have its perks...
but i feel an unease coming...
a strange unease...
           only recently i heard about an event
in Italy... the... ahem... Lago di Garda "incident"...

"Africa in Peschiera": weird... huh?
peschiera? fresh water... fish farming area...
well then... no problems me getting laid or not
getting laid...
     it's just in the back of my mind...
cucks... helpful that "us" Slavs don't have
a colonial-past to censure...
maybe this Ukrainian "crisis" is a blessing in disguise:

as the saying goes:

brat brata pocharata...
(brother will brother hurt)...
   i think it's a smart tactic...
              no one from Africa or the Middle East
will want to venture into a warzone...
no?
              Poland was judged for not applying
Germanic sympathy for the destruction
of Libya and the onslaught of migrants that
came with silly geo-politics...
   the rapes of Cologne...
       but now Poland is to be judged for
entertaining over a million war-refugees from
Ukraine?!

brat brata pocharata...

            it's a Slavic thing... i just need some
"public intellectuals" to change their etymological
studies concerning the SACREDNESS OF WORDS...

****** ****** ******...
and what? Slav is just short of an E?!
for SLAVE?!
  ****** ****** ******, ******...
GIGGLE...
******* English "intellectuals"...
it's tactical! of course it is... war among ourselves
so that it repels any foreigners to come
and settle and abuse our fair systems!
    i wish the war will spill into Poland...
i abhor the liberal minded ****** feminists of
"my land"...
   cosmopolitan *******... no! nein! niet!
i live in a democracy...
                just a few need to hear my voice...
i'm not here for a popular listening sessions...
this is the heart speaking... the mind has been
absent for some time...
  
              i know why i'm not getting drunk
while still drinking... my heart is throbbing
like a drum-beat...

      cucks!
            the import of walking ******...
                 it's a good "thing" that the Slavs
are warring between each other...
the Germanic tribes never understood us...
sensibilities of the English...
their pride of conscience and consequence(s)...
the airs, their prides... their consequences...
their ****** warring... with the Germans...
their love for the Italians...
their abhorring of the French...
their sub-human attitude toward the Spaniard...
their glorification of the rebel Americans...
their pet Canadians and Australians...

their plot of anti-racism...
just sacrifice their Sabine women...

brat brata pocharata!
a brother will hurt a brother...

                the message is clear... the Russian
had to send it... don't come near us...
it's almost like
Copernicus never existed... esp. in the west...
Copernicus has always been undermined
by Galileo...
fair enough...
   but couple the Copernican inversion...
a geocentric model became a heliocentric model...
until... Darwin...
   hey! it's open season!
with Darwin: the survival of the species...
last time i heard there were both white swans
as there were black swans...
grey squirrels and red squirrels...
either black swan or white swan...
whether grey squirrel or red squirrel...
Darwinism is discriminatory...
i know my genes are fated to a cul de sac...
but my ideas perhaps might...
impregnated a mind of "someone"...

point being... Darwinism has...
uprooted the transcendental aspect of
Copernicus of shifting the focus from
a geocentric model to a heliocentric focus...
back to a geocentric focus...

on this earth, with this earth: with these seas...
these rivers... full circle:
ouroboros: ∞ (lemniscate) - Buddha-8...
reclining... as 8 was a better refined B-eta...
when VII implied 7... a sort of gamma
peering into a lake: Γ... looking
into a mirror looking into a lake of the Latin L...

i have no sympathy for Ukraine...
like Ukrainians had no sympathy for Poland
when **** Germany invaded...

Darwinism is a tool...
we're back to a geocentric model of the world...
don't you know? didn't you know?!
Darwinism exposed the frivolity of
seeking a world "better" / "beyond" this one
beside the promises of religion
with one's death...
    
Darwinism is the antithesis of
   the Copernican imagination...
              then again: even William Burroughs
once cited: oh sure... sure...
the ancient Egyptians knew all about it...
they knew about taxidermy long before...
they "tried" to make their mummies look
pretty...
               sorry... did they talk to Norman Bates?!

taxidermy did not precede mummification...
sorry...  it didn't...
me?! i feel infuriated...
i feel... consecrated on balancing:
i feel... i don't need to think!
i feel persuaded as having been invaded...
i need to retaliate...
   as a member of the ****** ****** SLAVE
Slav tribes... i feel violated...
now the feeling is over:
i'll start thinking...

   best we bore a fight amogst each other than
allow this dilution of race in Western Cultures...
this "invitation" of post-colonial pasts...
these multiple narratives of a polyglot
of narratives that serve as erasures
of the origins of tongues within the confines
of copper-necks and their "Lingua Franca"
of the horrid English that's neo-Neo-Babylonian...

better your kindred war against
your kindred than invite a people you treat
with double standards to invite
synthetic expectations...
        
i didn't need a war in either Afghanistan or
Iraq... or Libya... Syria...
but i need a war in Ukraine...
why? to move people is to pretend
a Xerxes madness of lashing out anger
at the waves of the Aegean...
               sea be still as a lake!

that's what Darwinism gifted me with:
a return to the geocentric model of the world...
i too have my interests...
like tarantulas have an interest
in scuttling & their inability
to fathom... procuring spider-webs...

i can forgo thinking about the stars...
i must look down:
re-affirm my presence...
             i'll hang your racist accusations...
no.. i will not crucify them....
i'll just impale them...
                 hyperbolic **** "frolicking"...

what?!
             if i were to wield the sort of power
that might give you the scare...
i'd give you more: than a mere scare:
i'd give you the reality.

i am a blank page
not in the way
that means a new beginning
but in the way
that a scribbled note
disappears from the paper
through erasures and spills
that seep away the words
as if they never were

Spirit Led
Our Bodies forget
The Soul Formulates
But cannot forget
When it remembers
The Spirit of it's own creativity

Erasures from a past turning inward
The present is the “as if” the could be of what might have been
It shifted
It changed
A reenactment
of past choices I made

Made me new
A thought
An act of habit
Repeated over time
Became the resolve

To change my life.
That was all I ever needed to
Bring me back down to grounding.

“What will change me cannot do me harm.”

We were dreaming
were we not

this didn't happen
did it not

a garden with an apple
tree

a woman

a snake

charcoal smudges
and erasures

we were dreaming
were we not

Whit Howland © 2020