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Kìùra Kabiri Jan 2017
Shepherds in haste are hurrying to Bethlehem
Their sandals on, their staffs in hand, their flocks alone  
Shepherds what have you heard from the plains?
In the distant meadow fields-you haste to Jerusalem  

Glo-ri-a, in Excelsis Deo! Glory be to God on High!

We have seen a bright star heading east
We are hurrying to where we saw the bright star
From mountains and moorlands far
We have heard whole heaven sing all this silent night:  

Glo-ri-a, in Excelsis Deo! Glory be to God on High!

Shepherds what have you found in the east?
Now that you return to your fields jubilant
We have seen and adored the Holy Child
Now we return jubilant to our wild

Glo-ri-a, in Excelsis Deo! Glory be to God on High!

Magi, Wise men what have you seen?
You hurry east carrying gifts
Gold-Frankincense-Myrrh-Kingly have been
What a choice of symbolic gifts!

Glo-ri-a, in Excelsis Deo! Glory be to God on High!

We have heard the King of the Universe is born
One foretold longtime ago by your Prophets
We hurry to Bethlehem with our gifts
To worship and adore him, this Holy Newborn

Glo-ri-a, in Excelsis Deo! Glory be to God on High!

Herod, what have you heard you look vicious?
Herod, what have you heard you look jealous?
The Magi are seen hurrying east carrying kingly gift
The Shepherd have passed here in haste to praise Christ
They say He is the said to come-King of the Universe

Glo-ri-a, in Excelsis Deo! Glory be to God on High!

Joseph what have you heard in a dream?
What has the angel said while in slumber you stream?
‘Rise, take the Holy Child and the ****** Mother
And to the Land of Egypt, there take refuge
Until such a time dies, he who seek him to damage

Glo-ri-a, in Excelsis Deo! Glory be to God on High!

© Kìùra Kabiri. All rights reserved.
https://youtu.be/mHQJReaAmfM
Nigel Morgan Nov 2012
She said, ‘You are funny, the way you set yourself up the moment we arrive. You look into every room to see if it’s suitable as a place to work. Is there a table? Where are the plugs? Is there a good chair at the right height? If there isn’t, are there cushions to make it so? You are funny.’
 
He countered this, but his excuse didn’t sound very convincing. He knew exactly what she meant, but it hurt him a little that she should think it ‘funny’. There’s nothing funny about trying to compose music, he thought. It’s not ‘radio in the head’ you know – this was a favourite expression he’d once heard an American composer use. You don’t just turn a switch and the music’s playing, waiting for you to write it down. You have to find it – though he believed it was usually there, somewhere, waiting to be found. But it’s elusive. You have to work hard to detect what might be there, there in the silence of your imagination.
 
Later over their first meal in this large cottage she said, ‘How do you stop hearing all those settings of the Mass that you must have heard or sung since childhood?’ She’d been rehearsing Verdi’s Requiem recently and was full of snippets of this stirring piece. He was a) writing a Mass to celebrate a cathedral’s reordering after a year as a building site, and b) he’d been a boy chorister and the form and order of the Mass was deeply engrained in his aural memory. He only had to hear the plainsong introduction Gloria in Excelsis Deo to be back in the Queen’s chapel singing Palestrina, or Byrd or Poulenc.
 
His ‘found’ corner was in the living room. The table wasn’t a table but a long cabinet she’d kindly covered with a tablecloth. You couldn’t get your feet under the thing, but with his little portable drawing board there was space to sit properly because the board jutted out beyond the cabinet’s top. It was the right length and its depth was OK, enough space for the board and, next to it, his laptop computer. On the floor beside his chair he placed a few of his reference scores and a box of necessary ‘bits’.
 
The room had two large sofas, an equally large television, some unexplainable and instantly dismissible items of decoration, a standard lamp, and a wood burning stove. The stove was wonderful, and on their second evening in the cottage, when clear skies and a stiff breeze promised a cold night, she’d lit it and, as the evening progressed, they basked in its warmth, she filling envelopes with her cards, he struggling with sleep over a book.
 
Despite and because this was a new, though temporary, location he had got up at 5.0am. This is a usual time for composers who need their daily fix of absolute quiet. And here, in this cottage set amidst autumn fields, within sight of a river estuary, under vast, panoramic uninterrupted skies, there was the distinct possibility of silence – all day. The double-glazing made doubly sure of that.
 
He had sat with a mug of tea at 5.10 and contemplated the silence, or rather what infiltrated the stillness of the cottage as sound. In the kitchen the clock ticked, the refrigerator seemed to need a period of machine noise once its door had been opened. At 6.0am the central heating fired up for a while. Outside, the small fruit trees in the garden moved vigorously in the wind, but he couldn’t hear either the wind or a rustle of leaves.  A car droned past on the nearby road. The clear sky began to lighten promising a fine day. This would certainly do for silence.
 
His thoughts returned to her question of the previous evening, and his answer. He was about to face up to his explanation. ‘I empty myself of all musical sound’, he’d said, ‘I imagine an empty space into which I might bring a single note, a long held drone of a note, a ‘d’ above middle ‘c’ on a chamber ***** (seeing it’s a Mass I’m writing).  Harrison Birtwistle always starts on an ‘e’. A ‘d’ to me seems older and kinder. An ‘e’ is too modern and progressive, slightly brash and noisy.’
 
He can see she is quizzical with this anecdotal stuff. Is he having me on? But no, he is not having her on. Such choices are important. Without them progress would be difficult when the thinking and planning has to stop and the composing has to begin. His notebook, sitting on his drawing board with some first sketches, plays testament to that. In this book glimpses of music appear in rhythmic abstracts, though rarely any pitches, and there are pages of written description. He likes to imagine what a new work is, and what it is not. This he writes down. Composer Paul Hindemith reckoned you had first to address the ‘conditions of performance’. That meant thinking about the performers, the location, above all the context. A Mass can be, for a composer, so many things. There were certainly requirements and constraints. The commission had to fulfil a number of criteria, some imposed by circumstance, some self-imposed by desire. All this goes into the melting ***, or rather the notebook. And after the notebook, he takes a large piece of A3 paper and clarifies this thinking and planning onto (if possible) a single sheet.
 
And so, to the task in hand. His objective, he had decided, is to focus on the whole rather than the particular. Don’t think about the Kyrie on its own, but consider how it lies with the Gloria. And so with the Sanctus & Benedictus. How do they connect to the Agnus Dei. He begins on the A3 sheet of plain paper ‘making a map of connections’. Kyrie to Gloria, Gloria to Credo and so on. Then what about Agnus Dei and the Gloria? Is there going to be any commonality – in rhythm, pace and tempo (we’ll leave melody and harmony for now)? Steady, he finds himself saying, aren’t we going back over old ground? His notebook has pages of attempts at rhythmizing the text. There are just so many ways to do this. Each rhythmic solution begets a different slant of meaning.
 
This is to be a congregational Mass, but one that has a role for a 4-part choir and ***** and a ‘jazz instrument’. Impatient to see notes on paper, he composes a new introduction to a Kyrie as a rhythmic sketch, then, experimentally, adds pitches. He scores it fully, just 10 bars or so, but it is barely finished before his critical inner voice says, ‘What’s this for? Do you all need this? This is showing off.’ So the filled-out sketch drops to the floor and he examines this element of ‘beginning’ the incipit.
 
He remembers how a meditation on that word inhabits the opening chapter of George Steiner’s great book Grammars of Creation. He sees in his mind’s eye the complex, colourful and ornate letter that begins the Lindesfarne Gospels. His beginnings for each movement, he decides, might be two chords, one overlaying the other: two ‘simple’ diatonic chords when sounded separately, but complex and with a measure of mystery when played together. The Mass is often described as a mystery. It is that ritual of a meal undertaken by a community of people who in the breaking of bread and wine wish to bring God’s presence amongst them. So it is a mystery. And so, he tells himself, his music will aim to hold something of mystery. It should not be a comment on that mystery, but be a mystery itself. It should not be homely and comfortable; it should be as minimal and sparing of musical commentary as possible.
 
When, as a teenager, he first began to set words to music he quickly experienced the need (it seemed) to fashion accompaniments that were commentaries on the text the voice was singing. These accompaniments did not underpin the words so much as add a commentary upon them. What lay beneath the words was his reaction, indeed imaginative extension of the words. He eschewed then both melisma and repetition. He sought an extreme independence between word and music, even though the word became the scenario of the music. Any musical setting was derived from the composition of the vocal line.  It was all about finding the ‘key’ to a song, what unlocked the door to the room of life it occupied. The music was the room where the poem’s utterance lived.
 
With a Mass you were in trouble for the outset. There was a poetry of sorts, but poetry that, in the countless versions of the vernacular, had lost (perhaps had never had) the resonance of the Latin. He thought suddenly of the supposed words of William Byrd, ‘He who sings prays twice’. Yes, such commonplace words are intercessional, but when sung become more than they are. But he knew he had to be careful here.
 
Why do we sing the words of the Mass he asks himself? Do we need to sing these words of the Mass? Are they the words that Christ spoke as he broke bread and poured wine to his friends and disciples at his last supper? The answer is no. Certainly these words of the Mass we usually sing surround the most intimate words of that final meal, words only the priest in Christ’s name may articulate.
 
Write out the words of the Mass that represent its collective worship and what do you have? Rather non-descript poetry? A kind of formula for collective incantation during worship? Can we read these words and not hear a surrounding music? He thinks for a moment of being asked to put new music to words of The Beatles. All you need is love. Yesterday all my troubles seemed so far away. Oh bla dee oh bla da life goes on. Now, now this is silliness, his Critical Voice complains. And yet it’s not. When you compose a popular song the gap between some words scribbled on the back of an envelope and the hook of chords and melody developed in an accidental moment (that becomes a way of clothing such words) is often minimal. Apart, words and music seem like orphans in a storm. Together they are home and dry.
 
He realises, and not for the first time, that he is seeking a total musical solution to the whole of the setting of those words collectively given voice to by those participating in the Mass.
 
And so: to the task in hand. His objective: to focus on the whole rather than the particular.  Where had he heard that thought before? - when he had sat down at his drawing board an hour and half previously. He’d gone in a circle of thought, and with his sketch on the floor at his feet, nothing to show for all that effort.
 
Meanwhile the sun had risen. He could hear her moving about in the bathroom. He went to the kitchen and laid out what they would need to breakfast together. As he poured milk into a jug, primed the toaster, filled the kettle, the business of what might constitute a whole solution to this setting of the Mass followed him around the kitchen and breakfast room like a demanding child. He knew all about demanding children. How often had he come home from his studio to prepare breakfast and see small people to school? - more often than he cared to remember. And when he remembered he became sad that it was no more.  His children had so often provided a welcome buffer from sessions of intense thought and activity. He loved the walk to school, the first quarter of a mile through the park, a long avenue of chestnut trees. It was always the end of April and pink and white blossoms were appearing, or it was September and there were conkers everywhere. It was under these trees his daughter would skip and even his sons would hold hands with him; he would feel their warmth, their livingness.
 
But now, preparing breakfast, his Critical Voice was that demanding child and he realised when she appeared in the kitchen he spoke to her with a voice of an artist in conversation with his critics, not the voice of the man who had the previous night lost himself to joy in her dear embrace. And he was ashamed it was so.
 
How he loved her gentle manner as she negotiated his ‘coming too’ after those two hours of concentration and inner dialogue. Gradually, by the second cup of coffee he felt a right person, and the hours ahead did not seem too impossible.
 
When she’d gone off to her work, silence reasserted itself. He played his viola for half an hour, just scales and exercises and a few folk songs he was learning by heart. This gathering habit was, he would say if asked, to reassert his musicianship, the link between his body and making sound musically. That the viola seemed to resonate throughout his whole body gave him pleasure. He liked the ****** movement required to produce a flowing sequence of bow strokes. The trick at the end of this daily practice was to put the instrument in its case and move immediately to his desk. No pause to check email – that blight on a morning’s work. No pause to look at today’s list. Back to the work in hand: the Mass.
 
But instead his mind and intention seemed to slip sideways and almost unconsciously he found himself sketching (on the few remaining staves of a vocal experiment) what appeared to be a piano piece. The rhythmic flow of it seemed to dance across the page to be halted only when the few empty staves were filled. He knew this was one of those pieces that addressed the pianist, not the listener. He sat back in his chair and imagined a scenario of a pianist opening this music and after a few minutes’ reflection and reading through allowing her hands to move very slowly and silently a few millimetres over the keys.  Such imagining led him to hear possible harmonic simultaneities, dynamics and articulations, though he knew such things would probably be lost or reinvented on a second imagined ‘performance’. No matter. Now his make-believe pianist sounded the first bar out. It had a depth and a richness that surprised him – it was a fine piano. He was touched by its affect. He felt the possibilities of extending what he’d written. So he did. And for the next half an hour lived in the pastures of good continuation, those rich luxuriant meadows reached by a rickerty rackerty bridge and guarded by a troll who today was nowhere to be seen.
 
It was a curious piece. It came to a halt on an enigmatic, go-nowhere / go-anywhere chord after what seemed a short declamatory coda (he later added the marking deliberamente). Then, after a few minutes reflection he wrote a rising arpeggio, a broken chord in which the consonant elements gradually acquired a rising sequence of dissonance pitches until halted by a repetition. As he wrote this ending he realised that the repeated note, an ‘a’ flat, was a kind of fulcrum around which the whole of the music moved. It held an enigmatic presence in the harmony, being sometimes a g# sometimes an ‘a’ flat, and its function often different. It made the music take on a wistful quality.
 
At that point he thought of her little artists’ book series she had titled Tide Marks. Many of these were made of a concertina of folded pages revealing - as your eyes moved through its pages - something akin to the tide’s longitudinal mark. This centred on the page and spread away both upwards and downwards, just like those mirror images of coloured glass seen in a child’s kaleidoscope. No moment of view was ever quite the same, but there were commonalities born of the conditions of a certain day and time.  His ‘Tide Mark’ was just like that. He’d followed a mark made in his imagination from one point to another point a little distant. The musical working out also had a reflection mechanism: what started in one hand became mirrored in the other. He had unexpectedly supplied an ending, this arpegiated gesture of finality that wasn’t properly final but faded away. When he thought further about the role of the ending, he added a few more notes to the arpeggio, but notes that were not be sounded but ghosted, the player miming a press of the keys.
 
He looked at the clock. Nearly five o’clock. The afternoon had all but disappeared. Time had retreated into glorious silence . There had been three whole hours of it. How wonderful that was after months of battling with the incessant and draining turbulence of sound that was ever present in his city life. To be here in this quiet cottage he could now get thoroughly lost – in silence. Even when she was here he could be a few rooms apart, and find silence.
 
A week more of this, a fortnight even . . . but he knew he might only manage a few days before visitors arrived and his long day would be squeezed into the early morning hours and occasional uncertain periods when people were out and about.
 
When she returned, very soon now, she would make tea and cut cake, and they’d sit (like old people they wer
It is half winter, half spring,
and Barbara and I are standing
confronting the ocean.
Its mouth is open very wide,
and it has dug up its green,
throwing it, throwing it at the shore.
You say it is angry.
I say it is like a kicked Madonna.
Its womb collapses, drunk with its fever.
We breathe in its fury.

I, the inlander,
am here with you for just a small space.
I am almost afraid,
so long gone from the sea.
I have seen her smooth as a cheek.
I have seen her easy,
doing her business,
lapping in.
I have seen her rolling her hoops of blue.
I have seen her tear the land off.
I have seen her drown me twice,
and yet not take me.
You tell me that as the green drains backward
it covers Britain,
but have you never stood on that shore
and seen it cover you?

We have come to worship,
the tongues of the surf are prayers,
and we vow,
the unspeakable vow.
Both silently.
Both differently.
I wish to enter her like a dream,
leaving my roots here on the beach
like a pan of knives.
And my past to unravel, with its knots and snarls,
and walk into ocean,
letting it explode over me
and outward, where I would drink the moon
and my clothes would slip away,
and I would sink into the great mother arms
I never had,
except here where the abyss
throws itself on the sand
blow by blow,
over and over,
and we stand on the shore
loving its pulse
as it swallows the stars,
and has since it all began
and will continue into oblivion,
past our knowing
and the wild toppling green that enters us today,
for a small time
in half winter, half spring.
preston Mar 2021

When Love's scalpel  comes
towards my beautiful Gloria--

  she leans in to it

What is it that makes  this one
  believe
at such a tremendous  cost
to to herself

and yet, so many others
turn and run..
turn and hide?

I was built-- from the ground,  up
to help  hold ones
such as yourself,  up

as the bright   healing light  
of loves ache

dismantles  the intricacies  of our
once-necessary, life-built  
war machines..

yes, my beauty--
down to the very  core

of  your  foundation,
where you can finally  
have the chance

     to become  rebuilt:

from the ground's  true bedrock,
up

xoxo
Mateuš Conrad Feb 2016
philosophia est scio nihil, continuum timor et taedium ego: actus automaton: in excelsis hospes.

in england the ad hominem principle
is easily brushed aside,
someone might have something
interesting to say, even though
all would agree to an abhorrence
in terms of moral relativism
which is an abhorrence-in-itself,
why make anything apart from
space & time relative? people change,
get with the grooves and your
free will and your freedom to commit
mistakes...
in england the ad hominem principle
is a farce... it doesn't exist...
that's why the english can't philosophise,
they can sing, but they can't philosophise,
because instead of ad hominem
we have the principle *ad populo
,
yeah, i'm an apologist of heidegger,
it took me 2 years and several other
books in between to finish his being and time,
because i believed he was onto something,
and the argument against him
on the principles of ad hominem is deflected
toward argumentation ad zeitgeist,
yet in england engaging with controversy
of the times is curbed and censored
by the principle ad populo, i.e.:
to the people.
Heavens,
Star Shining,
Angels singing Hallelujah !
The Saviour has come!

Merry Christmas
To all!

RLB
Carlo C Gomez Dec 2022
~
scarlet wind sails
upon an ultrasounding wave,
postcards from tiny islands;
nebulous, indefinable, floating,
fresh as a field
of crackerjacks;
nodding happily
from minute one,
celebrating the mountains
and valleys of being alive
in excelsis; irresistible and impish
in its understated insinuations.

~
Dianne Dec 2014
The cold festive wind blew;
Laughters, hollers of "Merry Christmas!"
Came along with the breeze.
Children, with their little toy drums
Bang, bang, banging away;
Choruses of "Gloria In Excelsis Deo";
Pine trees, Snow flakes, deformed Snowmen;

Houses are lined with
Blink, blink, blinking
Colorful lights and wreaths;
Somwhere among them,
in some living room,
"All I Want For Christmas" is on loop;
Cookies are laid for Santa Claus;
Presents are stacked
Under the Christmas tree--
With garlands and *****
And--

The Christmas lights
In a room in the middle of a second storey house,
Were shining as brightly as they could,
Being wrapped around the neck
Of a teenager misunderstood,
Hanging lifeless on the ceiling
With a note pinned that read,
"Happy Christmas from the dead."
A classmate of mine just died yesterday. I don't know how to look at this coming Christmas positively, anymore. Sorry.
Mateuš Conrad Dec 2019
i can clearly hear how english mutates...
a book review by a channel... better than food...
the book he's reviewing is goETHE's captain faust:
and the non-avengers...
but no...

i don't hear: stick an umlaut anywhere you please...
i, "for some reason"... do not hear
a: Θ... a göethe... or a goëthe (ladin alphabet -
the germans know about this)...
there is this... goe-ether association...
it's sometimes a riddle of goë, göe...
or quiet simply...
the remains of the ancient latin grapheme (œ)?

educated people make this distinction -
and they'll catch "you" out on it...
since... they represent the Hyacinth Bucket brigade...
gynocentrism doing a snail-trail:
one step forward... two steps back...
it's beside what the linguist "says":
a bucket is a bucket a ***** is a *****...
otherwise? glorifying such a harsh reality
of a surname like: bucket... but not beckett?
no... "samuel"? well then...
it's not a bucket if it's somehow
translated via chernobyll as: bouquet...
is it?! is it?
because even in french: they self-cannibalise...
i.e. they "eat" some letters...
they write one language: but speak another...
what isn't bucket what is nonetheless
bouquet? well... isn't it: bouque-?
it's not even that... boo-k for the ones that
still hear... and can write grafitti schlang...
in some variation of a german...

becuase educated people can get away
with treating GOETHE...
as?  '/ˈɡɜːrtə, ˈɡeɪtə'...
or in simple-me-and-you being bilingual...
fiddling around we arrive at:
Göerte... which is "said"...
but this "lunatic asylum" exception has
to be written: with a clarity of a *******
Greek THETA... a fin! the end!
which always makes lying easier...
when you can: say (a)... but... but...
imply (b)... like some "metaphor"...
some forever useful tool of nuance...
some "spectacle"...
it's easier to lie when... you say (a)
but are "implying" (b)...
then you can blame it on...
not allow the literacy of the masses:
quite as much... you require... exceptions
to the rule... to **** out the lesser educated
"people"...

don't get me started...
born? Ostrowiec Świętokrzyski...
perhaps i should have never left...
3 years in Edinburgh...
over a month in St. Petersburg...
somewhere in Paris, Stochholm, Venice...
Athens... Belgrade from a distance...
Amsterdam... two weeks in Kenya...
and a nonchalant attitude surrounding
London... a strong distaste for Warsaw...
a myth of Cracow...

and no, i haven't been everywhere...
but... after a while... does it really matter
where you go, if you're bringing
expectations with you?
expectations and postcards?
clichés? clichés expectations and postcards?
and... a whole lot of strangers
you haven't met?
tourism and: feeding the ghost town
mentality... perhaps a ghost town would be
something to behold... instead of this...
atypical metropolitan casualness of avoiding
each other... busier busier: and no more
busy than once pronounced dead...
but wait for it: you're at least given a "scene"...

but no... i know one language that
makes pedantic orthographical observations...
but i also know a language that...
write one way... speaks another...
whichever way, best, to suit it...

and you "know" it would only be Fa-Ber'g -
no... borrow the j- from je suis...
if that last E was not an acute É...
but an grave È (grave... or? gráve...
grrrr'av... not a hey hey grave...
GRA-Vity)...

hence? my point exactly..
if the diacritical markers are respected
in fwench... with an acute É and a grave È...
why do "we" need... I(i) and J(j)?
why not... I(ı) and J(ȷ)?

besides... ever imagine writing an autobiography
like a Knausgård... defender of the runes
for a sentence in volume 1...
major google-maps ****** *** volume 2...
i write that with a "glee"...
i mean... you can be immediately be put off
writing an autobiography...
just to avoid the mediocre descriptive elements
of using something more complicated
than a hammer...
for an otherwise... less than a hammer's worth
of banality: evaluation of modern banality /
procrastination...
no one we have been given these complicated
tools... and to the best of our abilities we
best procrastinate, using them...
i hardly think a hammer would be used
to... pretend to play the drums...
but yes: Knausgård... the defender of runes...
irony... but the mr. google-earth guy to turn to...

yes... and before i discovered a past...
there were the runes... and there was
forever this latin morph of the barbarians
"thieving"... but there was also the glagolitic script...
apparently! and before that there was the greek!
and... somehow... i did arrive at having
to master some vague understanding of
mother cyrillic!

- but prior to... did you know what
slavs love cabbage? all the pakistani point this
out: slav love cabbage!
today? i watched the film Layer Cake
and made some cabbage soup...
Layer Cake being? the pre-to-a-bond-film
taster for the actor Daniel Craig...
it was hardly a Guy ******* Ritchie film...
woz itz? but... a decent actor advert...
with "hindsight"...
if i watched the film then...
or as i whatched the now...
and all the known actors jumped the train...
well... cabbage soup... base?
a decent polish / jewish chicken broth...
most of the chicken goes into a ***...
except the *******: you make a *******
roulade with that...
and proper potato bakes...
potato bakes like Heston Blumethal
boils a soft egg...
tatties in cold water... until they start boiling...
then you hunch over them...
boil them for a decent fiver...
turn off the heat...
again... hunch over them...
like an inquistive condor waitig for
the water to stop bubbling...
asking the question: are we all ready...
for the oven? yes, my toy soldiers,
are we, ready?

apparently they taste like christmas
tatties in waistcoats!
my my... what a lovely affair!
cabbage soup? you really need a complete
lack of imagination and a work-around
using root veg...
the european way...
but what is preferred is ensuring
you make a cabbage soup like...
a slav treats a cabbage like a frenchman treats
an onion: you suffocate it...
an hour minimum...
until the crass ******* boils out...
and you're left with...
a sweetness... and softness...
bay leaf all-spice (english spice) included...
some kiełbasa (etymology?
root... kieł- derived from the plural?
kły... canines... suffix -basa?
baza - base... canine-base...
something that requires an understanding
that elevates the dog, "debases" the man...
no quran reader will understand this:
for lack of a better word: shaming food...

where would pakistani cuisine be...
without the pantheon of hindu spices?!
i'll eat like a dog and in so doing:
live a tier above a king...
i still find it highly unimaginative...
to call one fruit "forbidden"
and one meat: "impure"...
whatever Gabriel spoke to Muhammad...
never really explained crab meat...
crab meat crab meat...
the Maldive muslims eat crab meat...
what's crab meat again:
when it concentrates a comparison
with ol' porky porky? scavenger of the seas...
what's with the muslim beef on pork?
and god was critical...
of his perfected animal worthy of
consumption... looks pretty silly from
Beijing... so Beijing is ensuring that Muslims
"look silly"... well... "live"... silly...
so god was so... this that and the other...
then he lent his "all knowing wisdom" and said...
no... this one animal... which you can...
butcher and make use of...
all that's missing is the oink and the hoofs!
or whatever it was: i can't eat the oink,
the grunt remain's the bacon's owner...
and perhaps the "hoofs"...
but such a pristine animal...
tapeworms come... much larger in size...
from aquatic flesh... so...
tic-toc... tic-toc... pull a sly porky on me or...
Gabriel my ***...

the Pwophet sez!
much easier these days: to, "get away" with "it"...
camel jockeys turned oil barons...
yachts... whizzed-up-*******-white-****-****...
and never... the odd-ball from
that long extended lineage of the family
living with a cuddles *****, soft toys...
east of Beirut...
that pencil girth's woe explosion in the sky...
"built" by people...
who employ slave Bangladeshis for
a sunday's worth of sabbath cricket in the desert...
i thought that deserts were only good
for waiting for qurans and dinosaur blood
and myopia and... the odd dehydration
hallucinations?!

i'll eat some sushi to sober up before
i accompany my mother: circa 60 getting
a hip replacement surgery done on her...
i'll sober up: but first things first:
spew...

mind you... below you will find some
ancients inscriptions...
i had to wonder: if the precursor text
of the anglo-sphere people...
the germans and "celts" of the british isles...
the welsh... the scandinavians...
was bound to runes...
before the latin men came...
what did "we", the slavs, use?

before the greeks allowed us entry into
the realm of mediating the otherwise:
quasi-fathomable?
cyrillic is what came: AFTER...
but there was a prior...
i'm no longer interested in the prior...
no more than i am interested in greek...
i once slurred russian cyrillic
for not having any diacritical markers...
i knew they had them...
but that they were... crude...
for lack of a better word...

how does that theory sound?
the: ex Africae omnis est Africanus...
sorry... what?!
giving my scrutiny of phonetic encoding...
am i closer to speak...
or thinking, and if not thinking,
then, reading?!
by the looks of it...
i devolved from encoding in
chinese... perhaps not so much:
sanskrit... but i most certainly suffered
moving across Siberia: obviously: not "i"...

mind you: i've looked at "it" and thought...
me, reproduce? add a stranger to the equation
of my family? i'm just happy to end
the libeage... thank god i don't have
some inheritence complex abounding...
no expectation, no "legacy" akin
to a surname like Rhodes (circa NY)...
i was born with one ****** surname,
which changed... i'll die with another ******
surname: that never made it to a status
of Eshlert... nonetheless! i'll leave...
like a ******* Einstein of an acronym:
E = MC... good for me! bravo ty! bravo ja!

beside the egyptian hieroglyphs...
i'm yet to read something...
from... Congo... perhaps i'm just too ignorant...
or the -igger shade was just too much
that it... grabbed my attention and
i forgot that the victim olympics didn't
happen every 4 years...
but every... whimsical time-span of...
a quarter of the length of a fortnite...

whatever: all out of africa implies...
i'm writing in a devolved chinese...
frozen bits across the siberian fickle desert...
next stopover? Novosibirsk!
no need for pyramids in Novosibirsk...
no "awe" to be found...
when you're toe-dead numb from
frost bite.... is there?!

my letters are a sieve... they allow meaning
through like hands praying to cusp water!
it's, the, reality...
you have ****-wit socialists on one side...
and then... this hyper-inflated
darwinism is all historism on the other...
middle ground, people!
"democracy"! i stand stand both the marxism...
or the darwinism... but arguments failed...
or? we can have the extreme of both ends
of the argument! enough of reading
Pasternak will teach you...
hey... shhh shhh... the collective can
congregate any minute now...
they don't need that many intelligent people
to rally them...
what your, "your" side needs, though?
if enough brass people: stupid enough
to entertain, to lulluby...
em... that's now much to "go on"... is it?
the intelligent with pour gasoline
on a fire...
the entertainers will simply pour
cold milk into a saucepan that contains
milk you're warming to...
melt some butter some honey and an egg yolk
to self-remedy: devoid of big pharma influences...
a witches' brew for a cold and soar throat...

side note: do i "worry" about not having children?
if i lived on the Faroe islands,
Greeland, Iceland, Norway -
i most probably would probably mind...
small town mentality: enlarged...
then again: my family, "my" and "family"
is not exactly accomodating...
why am i not spending time with my grandparents?
at least one side... the "patriarchal" side
drops off: accomodating the madonna anyways...
a sister (my mother) and a brother (my uncle)
are waging a war...
this... "eastender" soap opera is...
i don't have the finances to grativate away
from it...
enter children? and they'd be more ******
up than i already am with my libido
and no outlet... i've stopped seeing prostitutes:
no because i felt "bad":
that one time we only pretended to be
leeching / kissing oysters just because
i forgot to trim my ***** hair:
like some western feminist argument
about the exploitation of romanian women "matters"...
when... the labourer drones of men
of building sites... coming in to work...
hangover... might perhaps... stop...
fuelling the english lush economy...
i didn't want to have children because:
family-wise? things, "things" are messy...
and there's no magic carpet to get me out
of here... not when the last surviving remnant
of a past... i.e. my grandmother,
talks to my dementia riddled grandfather
with the words...
and he stresses them: you no good...
skurwysyn!
elaborate? sure! z-kurwy-syn...
from-a-*****-son..
my grandfather's mother...
well... let's put it in facts...
my grandfather is an illegitimate (
oh **** me, i spelled that right, drunk)
son... his mamma then married...
the father of this illegitimate child...
was a polyglot... spoke 7 languages...
emigrated to the U.S. of A...
remarried, fostered some shards of glass...
and sent his last postcard...
from Niagara Falls... before jumping
into the kamikazee sun...
oh my family is perfect...
then this mother of his...
had two children with a man...
who would beat my grandfather...
which is why he became a "pioneer"
coal-miner aged 15 or 14 or 16...
then this one kid ended up being
fostered... then this "watermelon" of a kid
(nickname) came out...
from a love affair... and when the "*****" died...
his quasi-foster father lived with him...
and in this custard: he...
the father semi-god-know's what...
abused the old man for putting up with
him as a love-child: in wedlock...
and... well thank god there was
no epitaph to begin an end with...

me and children? i am gracious,
i am kind... i don't want them to inherit this
history... which is worse than
a history of germany... at least those *******
had the nazis... which is worthwhile
in terms of exploiting them via video games
as those: evilz badz guyz!

i always think: the sooner i'm dead -
the more chances i have
to either dream... or breathe...
currently i quasi the former and accept
the reality of the latter...
but me and children? my, own, brood?
em... for some capitalistic driven darwinism
pressure ploy of narrative?
taxes and retirement plans for
the western: placebo: aged?
grand'm'ah and gwand'p'ah not fit under
the same roof... set them on the butcher's
path toward the "shop" of wrinkle
and: pristine effortless economic
endeavor... the pig's the lot...
economic meat and... about as barren as a dinner
plate scooped up for examination
once a pauper sat before it to supper...
ingenious! if only, if only we were all born
into a Charlie ******* Dickens' lot of life!
then, only then, we could, we could
perhaps, perhaps: write about it!

i have seen how people have lived their lives...
how... they had wish to write about it...
which always involved a lot of other people -
movie scripts written by directors
and not... actual manuscripts of scripters...
they would write... but then:
started to gag from **** at the mere of thought
of being: brutal, honest, honing...

people either write an honest autobiography,
they ghost it: have someone write a biography,
they write an autobiography that's
designated as: tabloid...
but most importantly... they forget...
a "Moscow"...
when i was in Moscow... i felt like i was
in London for the very first time...
a last time...

i did mention that i didn't envy the russian
diacritical approach...
the odd: miss and "there"...
but no... i didn't envy them...
to me there was no russian orthography...
there is an orthography: which you mind
above any metaphysical discussion...
when, and only when... aesthetics comes
into play...
i.e. rz = ż and ó = u and ch (cerp i ha) = h (samo ha)
this is how orthography is born...
sorry... i'm too "busy" dealing with
orthographic ******* to even mind
your "metaphysics" or a death of (it): interim...

as i stood at the feet of the tower of babel...
i started to su doku the pieces that
pleased my eyes... and the pieces...
left in leftover arabic squiggles of
the remnants of the 20th century...
and the new emergence of environmental
beijing free-of-syndromes to spawn
the 21st... or...
the child of a one-child-state-policy
without a Beijing... only a gradual evaluation
of... concerns for...
not giving birth to yet another ****-wit
of the world's counter to: another
****** of a gullible persuasion...
given that law is blind...
he must have been born: deaf!

- you didn't see me coming;
i didn't even see you leave... -

since the greek letters i tend to most "forget"
are:
- gamma lower-case (γ) because
of the upper-case upsilon (Υ)
- lower-case zeta (ζ) becaue
of the lower-case "11" (ξ)
- eta, lower-case (η) is no real grief
with lower-case EPSILON (ε)
until... you enter the cyrillic
"debate" of е and э...
- lower-case NU (ν) and lower-case
UPSILON (υ)
- Ξ (Θ, Φ) i.e.: XI, PSI, CHI, PHI...
return: that first 'un' is an ale'ks...
alex... but it's not an X in the way that
CHI expresses itself in CHurCH...
lay-teΞ...
- then again... greek orthography begins
in SIGMA... those... quasi-germans...
those remnants of the northern / teutonic
crusade... those Pruσσianς...
or... Prußianς...
the greek F and the greek "F"...
key into a keyhole: Φ...
key turning in a keyhole: Θ...
the iota of four uses... Θ, Φ, Ξ... Ψ...

but that's only the greek... i will not touch
on the glagolitic... until, barely skimming
the draft months earlier...
until i come with my own diacritical markers
and show you: how i was wrong...
yes... the russians do use these markers...
but they, mostly... do not "accent" them...

because i'm no Ezra Pound i didn't have
to imagine going as far back
as the Taoist ideogram...
because i remained bound to the anchor
of europe and...
i really didn't find anything of worth
in africa encoding: silence into their
verbiage with anything:
beside the odd spell of hieroglyphs...
so? i am not an Idaho man...
or whatever mid-western miss-western
******* the genius came from...

i don't have an ideogram:
i have a synonym... the sound is exactly
the same... but Charon 'ave their eyes!
mind you...
ądam and ęwa are off limits...
as is: ł... then again: given that i write in english...
em... "yes, and no"...

but here's my rubric... a rubric implies:
i will not narrate this crap:

don't get me started on the russian variations
of Y... i once said... because the greeks had
names for their letters... and the romans didn't...
well... in western slavic: Y "why, I" has a name:
e'GREK... iGrek... e and i are interchanged
between the western slavs and the islanders...
but the russians?
let me Shakespeare that for you:
pre-scriptum - don't ask me...
how oh how a german umlaut infiltrated
the alphabet: i blame catherine the great...
you have...

е (ye)
ё (yo)
й (-y-) - which acts like a "ȷUDAS"
ы (ý) - alt. to? ıGREK
ю (yu)
я (ya)

all that's missing is a: иы variation?!
let me check my pentagram of vowels...
e, o... u, a... oh right... IO-T'AH-T'AH-T'AH...
sinking the ******* POTEMPKIN!

it's for the best: i'm entrenched in two languages...
which makes me "schizophrenic" /
bilingual... ergo? i have to write in at least:
four... pepper in some latin etc.....
and modern slang? i need that...
and some german... and perhaps a dash
of Gaelic... and some scandi-navigational
pseudo-romancing the rosetta stone...

the rest is quiet "simple"...
a french-atypical acute... because there's no gr'ah-v'eh!
grave ole...
and a dot... like the dot used for no real purpose
in english...

i.e. ь involves the acute...
while the ъ involes the "horde" symbol...
either the dot above the Z in ż or the caron
above the R: ř...
alternative interpretations invoke
even more: 'hide and seek" mechanisms
of the russian Y...
  объект: interJEct with an obJEct...
thus? there just seem to be gradations
of hiding a why (y) with its added vowel...
and its mutant й... crescent mongol moon...
and all the rest of "it"...
since when you "borrow": yew borrow...
you get something along the lines
of: e.g.:

ć.        ць: c.f. surnames ending with -CKI
ń.       нь
ó.      "u" or? Loonin...
ś.        cь
ź.        зь
dz.     ž (dzik - boar - the wild adjective is a tautology)    
ż.      ř       rz   (зъ) or? ж...
ł.       woad... łagodny (he - gentle)
                        łagodna (she - gentle)
š.      sz.      ш             (sh)
č.      cz.      ч               (ch... you're not foreign
to graphemes... mr. Æ ms. Œ...
you simply haven't seen it applied
to consonants... only vowels!)
щ     šč     (szczypta - pinch -
a germanic, saxon "ch" is a cz...
or a caron above the C...
ch' ch'.... akin to the caron above the S...
sh' sh'... so far away from "god": YHWH...
yet so close, so, close!)
ha ha... a "dangling bit"...
and i thought the russians weren't
good at hiding "things"... from ш to щ
you have hidden: a caron a "c"...
a ****'s CHeap... in a dangling "left-over"...
of an otherwise caron S... heap of SH SH ****...

in terms of the cerp and ha and samo ha?
the greek χ (chi) comes into play...
but not like a cheeze...
more like a vowel-catcher breath...
eerie as ****... a HA HA with...
cHA cHA! i.e. like the surds you allow
hindu words access to: gnostic -
'nostic... or... knife... i.e. 'nife...

it's no surprise for me, now...
out of all the black caribbean kids,
the indian and pakistani,
the africans... i was one of the first
to: come out swinging from under
the iron curtain:
distrust levels? high... near almighty...
not enough "japanese" in me
to squander a late debt from
Hiroshima or some other etc.

in some remote original draft...

as ever, i drink, and am a nobody, but then i find myself inclined to look upon the god of gods: whatever remains of worth for the phonetic encoding... whether latin, greek, rune, cyrillic, or ⰒⰑⰃⰀⰐ ⰒⰉⰔⰏ (another googlewhack)... the glagolitic phonetic encoding... sure, first they'll ban the runes in sweden, before realißing that... there's another alphabet... the glagolith...
                  Ⱉ = Ω, given Ѡ = ω...
         this alphabet has been suppressed, long enough!
to be honest? i've never seen a more beautiful letter,
anywhere, other than in the glatolith...
     Ⰿ = M = ᛗ...
                      maybe that's why i like my given names
so much...
                            ⰏⰀⰕⰅⰖⰞ
                 i too! i too have a past!
             i don't need to peer into pseudo-arab ***
the quran religiosity of hieroglyphs
of the northern africans, camel jockeys!
                             there's, oh there's so much
more at stake than the runes...
                what of the Kiev Rus vikings?
this, this is their language:
                ⰕⰑ          "ⰏⰑⰆⰅ"          (może = maybe)    
(to = this)
                                                   (ⰜⰀ = trzeba, trza /
                                                            tsa)­
            ⰕⰔⰑ (tsa)           ⰃⰀ (ga)     ⰂⰀⰓⰉ (vari)
               (gadać = converse... gavari)

    Ⰴ (d)                ⰆⰫⰕ (żyt = fathoming life)

                             ⰆⰫⰕ (worthwile noting:
this is out lot of, a, life)...

      ⰛⰫⰛⰍⰀ (szyszka = cone, of the ᚦᛁᚱ /
                                     ⰡⰑⰄⰟⰀ - fir /
                              jodła tree)

see, i can't solve crossword puzzles...
      i don't know where i would begin,
fathoming this sort of "plaything" thesaurus...
i can play a solitaire mahjong,
i can solve you a su doku puzzle
without wanting to compensate myself
by competing...
                  
   but i do know...
                    what conjured the atom,
the letter?
  what conjured the atom, the letter,
and subsequently, the alphabet?
        noun...
                  the cipher conceptualißation
of making a name, smaller,
so small, in fact...
that letter emerged, and names were
no longer indicative...
of a meaning...
  so much so, that units were
formed, fathomed...
and when merely giving names
to these units, akin to the greeks,
alpha...
        which had to become a-lpha...
and beta had to become b-eta...
          well... only thanks to the latin men...
they became songs...
sing-alongs...
   very much thanks for the H vowel
catcher of the hebrew god...
ah... said the castrato...
  b'eeh sang the castrato...
           em...
  obviously the devil managed to keep
some of the letters...
z'ed...
                 it's still bewildering...
how the latin men "reinterpreted"
the northern runes...
   as the greek men "reinterpreted"
the north eastern glagolitic script...
and to think! to think!
    Ⱃ = R = ρ = rho...
         but what happened, "elsewhere"?
ᚱ = R... but... but... where's the trill?
R, as a letter, looks like it's about
to hide a leg... and start rolling...
ripping apart all other onomatopeias
associated with the rattle of a rattlesnake,
or the sound it could make,
to associate itself with the sound
of water boiling... where did that "go"?
with the french hark "innovation",
and the english tongue...
being bitten and left numb by
a tarantula?!
                      
  point being... i never imagined myself
much of an archeologist...
i always found:
  if you state your "necessary" freedom
to speak?
you're a tongue inside one cranium,
at a particular time, in a universal space...
but, like kierkegaard,
you care more about a freedom to think?
i'm "here", i'm "there", i'm "i'm"
like heidegger might state...
                  using this very modern
language that's english...
          but then sliding back into...
an obscure region of history...
      in two places at once...
        at a universal moment in time,
in a particular space...
                   talking exhausts me,
whenever i start speaking for more than
ten minutes,
there is a cotton mouth infestation,
my tongue turns into a serpent about
to shed a layer of its skin,
and, if i'm lucky,
i will not swollow the tongue...

                    and why wouldn't the runes
be more protected, but currently under
siege -
             both the latin text and the greek
text (respectively),
had the ambition of performing an
x-ray on the runes and the glagolitic texts,
treating them as pseudo-hieroglyphics...

but they found similarities,
   which made this foreign phonetic
encoding systems relateable...

ᚠ = F
                ᚢ = U         (copernican "up-side-down")
ᚨ = A (strange sort of arithmetic, / \
                                              )
               ­ ᚱ = R (d'uh)
   ᚺ = H...
           ᛁ = I
               ᛋ = s
                ᛏ = t (what's with the "bending knee",
so much for the supposed: "arrow"),
               ᛒ = B...
           ᛖ = Σ = E...
                   ᛗ = M...
                   ᛚ = L...
                  ᛟ = o - crude version of circle...

so? the latin men had an easier way to
fathom the runes, and ingest them
into the x-ray vision of post-latin...
   the greeks with the glagolitic script?
much harder...

         Ⱂ = Π = P = ρ (rho)
                 Ⰰ = A = ᛉ = Z...
             Ⱇ = φ = ᚦ = θ...
                             Ѡ = ω...
                Ⱑ = A...
                          Ⱔ = ε....
                                            Ⱚ = θ...

but i agree... you couldn't get "our"
peoples to where we are now,
with these pseudo-hieroglyphics...
   after all: Ⰿ (M) is a beautiful letter...
in glagolitic terms...
          but... it's too complicated for us,
at this moment in time...
it might have had all the necessary
practicality in its necessary time...
that it was allocated to...
but... given people these days
are looking at X-|ɔ\
                              /
\ /_ / ?
                            how ******* hard must
it have been, when,
the phonetic encoding,
was as hard as it, to now, us,
it seems?!
                   so... whatever is happening
in sweden, right now?
       i'm not bemaoning it,
   i have a tattoo... it reads: Sienkiewicz...
the swedish deluge of 1626–29... a.d.,
          **** it, ban the runes...
i've "just" discovered the gagolitic phonetic
encoding, the sort of **** that
st. cyril and methodius had to work with,
and it wasn't as easy as translating /
incorporating the runes...

                     oh sure, i'm waiting...
                 first they ban the runes...
   then they'll have to learn something akin
to the glagolitic script...
             returning back to their x-ray
latin lettering...
                       i still can't believe that
james joyce got away with writing finnegans
wake... without ever employing a single
diacritical marker...
spewing out... what became the modern
english grafitti spreschen...
   e.g.: lolz...
                              und: L8ER...
it's like: the worst of the worst of what
already is the worst in the form
of the h'american demands for acronyms.          

after watching an old couple walk
past me into the supermarket:
    or unlike the men climbing
           the matterhorn:
   which from postcards seems so
much more majestic in its formidable
shape than the goliath everest
    (from postcards) -
                 5 miles, a dark forest,
  and i can show you where english
druids chant: satanus in excelsior!
   and i thought i spoke bad english:
it's: in excelsis satanus...
       i would have approached them,
but then i was alone,
      and there was one idiot shouting
and about a crowd of twenty disciples:
you could hear the murmur
   adhering to the chant from a distance
of about 300 metres...
                    i only had beer on me,
no goat blood, no woad pigment...
                crash a party when they
were having a party in complete
darkness?
                     it's a good thing there was
a song change on my headphones
               and for a minute i picked it up...
wait a minute: i thought i owned
these woods, walking at night?
               ragnarök blood of Hvalba:
unfortunately the norse founded
kiev,
           so if they founded kiev,
                they must have past where
i made mark as: the land immune to
                                       the black death...
if i were an academic with a stipend,
   i'd write another boorish book on the matter
to attract moths...
          but the old couple, hand in hand,
shrinking but not exactly disappearing...
     in me the inherent conceptualisation
of a twin, like a limb missing,
  but with all my limbs intact...
              yet still a twin gleaming in my mind,
as the story i was told in my childhood
no echoes like a behemoth ghouling:
    they said to me:
   did you know that in this world there exists
a person that looks exactly like you?
         what? so i started looking,
      not leonardo, not brad,
                    can't compete -
            if i really am the stronger twin
                 who sent my twin to the plough
and the hearth... am i not to suddenly
    lick ash?
                  but the old couple:
   what a rarity to see, dwarfs,
                                  of former majestic
forms... elsewhere the single mother with
a baby in a buggy at 10 minutes to 11 during
the week, bewildered by reading
frozen foods labels...
           oh... about the supermarket...
grr... mein gott!
                    Surabhis! Surabhis everywhere!
the joy of walking into a supermarket
last, aisles as spacious as any king's
    lonely castle...
        but in the hours 12 in the afternoon
till about 5 in the afternoon?
        traffic jams!
                   zombified shoppers, women,
of course, children to boot...
                           how many times i might
have bumped into them...
      gaze lost, hazy eyed...
                 sometimes i had to walk down one
aisle, emerge from another, just to pass
  a woman standing fiddling with her
hair...
           the new meeting place, apparently,
but that's beside the point,
   the more i listen to radio,
  the more i learned that i'm far from
a music snob...
            take for example:
       free deejays's song
                            el amor es un party...
what? cuba not pretty any more?
              but there's a worthwhile observation
in there:
        only rich men have the chance
        to play a woman's game of "the chase"...
        only rich men get to "chase" women...
        the poor schmucks?
                          ****! have to live with them.  
****... i need to find that
    one exchange in ingmar bergman's
film wild strawberries:
            when the old man wakes from
a dream-memory in which he is
the ****** of a **** scene...
        where a woman is teasing a man
to the point, until he transcendes
                   a teasing woman,
                       and finds a Jezebel...
so upon waking...
                the "children" are picking
flowers in the rain...
                          and there's talk of
abortion...
       at this point it's gone beyond
castration...
                      the conversation invokes
the death-mask of man,
    or man as tomb, and woman as
the robber -
                         apparently once impregnated
man cannot ask for his ***** back,
and in some twisted way:
           and as much as i'd like to "cheat"
having found the screenplay online,
   i have the misfortune of owning the ****
movie...
        and how i like returning
to silent cinema, black & white, foreign,
with subtitles...
                     at this point,
because didn't place the subtitles: on top
of the screen, but at the bottom...
   well, **** me: am i looking for
Cindarella, because focusing back
on those faces means i seem them without
lips and merely eyes and noses,
   and perhaps a chance to spot
   a wriggling, morphed into an insect
st. peter's, if not van gogh's ear!
              or the lost "art" of handwriting...
Cinderella? my focus is so low from
      the action, that i might as well be
  watching, either a ballet, or a *******
riverdance!
             dr. isak borg (a)
marianne borg (b)
        dr. evald borg (d)

such a weird and heart-numbing thinking
went into writing this...
i have a history, a past:
regardless of having children and with
their existence: some sort of guarantee
for a future...
that i have a past, a history,
and it exists... outside of its current
written format,
that i can escape with or without having
children: that i would have probably
later ***** mentally...
having ingested all this third party
quasi-history propaganda
for the only history that's being
salvaged: the insect prone libido
of a status quo... well then...
let my "failure" be the patent for all future
success.
for everything worth some sushi glue? this isn't part of it.
Dear dead Victoria
  Rotted cosily;
In excelsis gloria,
  And R. I. P.

And her shroud was buttoned neat,
  And her bones were clean and round,
And her soul was at her feet
  Like a bishop's marble hound.

Albert lay a-drying,
  Lavishly arrayed,
With his soul out flying
  Where his heart had stayed.

And there's some could tell you what land
  His spirit walks serene
(But I've heard them say in Scotland
  It's never been seen).
Mateuš Conrad May 2016
and now, i too, can jest, waving the brick,
the 20th century's Odyssey,
so too Ulysses, father of, this cantos poet,
it's a well worn book,
to make books like leather, the older
the better, lost the colt stink of freshly
peeled, leather rather than fur,
so too, i, can now close the book and leave
it's ancestry in lost conversation among
the living in cafés and pubs,
so now i can give you a bewilderment i too
am aware of: the chaos of kept Latin
geometrics, style, indeed orthography with
accent here and there, but to dwell on
the past like that, per se, prae se or any such
coercion to disregard the general public,
no surprises with such a pompous raucous,
elephants and stilettos, mass and weight,
bouncing on the moon, the sheer chaos
of how the barbarians lost runes and incorporated
the gaps, i.e.: a, e, o, p, R, b, B, Q, g, d...
                       with Hindu 0, 9, 8, 6, 4...
or as Arabs say: our ten commandments.
but still the chaos, once meaningful now meaningless,
hence programming, encoding, data structuring,
fish tanks think tanks, and SLANG, or SHLANG
as i call it, impromptu youth too cool for school:
still don't know what you're talking about...
the lettering survived because their arithmetic
that gave us beauty like the Coliseum and marble
testicles (later missing with castrato hosanna
in excelsis de
o - o took a baritone stance) -
the fall of the Roman empire? all due to
                      I + VI = VII
                      XI + V = XVI.
                                               everyone was like... huh?
can you really **** around with these symbols
in modern physics and mathematics?
... no thanks... we'll keep the alphabet but bring
you down on your mathematics...
but have you seen the Appleton Tower in
Edinburgh? or the library in George Sq.?
you haven't... both are hardly Islamic mosaics and
minarets. as many curves and glitches of beauty
as the models on a catwalk during London's fashion week;
anorexic imagination: keep it square and bony,
me and my godforsaken x-ray vision.
so suma summarum:
it began with: and then went down to the ship...
but ended up with the ship being a gondola
i.e. you in the dinghy (piccioletta) astern there!
i'm not even going to read the drafts & fragments
section (CX - CXVII - C X C V - or the curriculum vitae).
Bardo Aug 2023
< So how far back can you go then ?
How far down the Rope of Songs can you go ?
You were a Rocker weren't you, you liked Rock n' Roll
In the 80's you had a Walkman, you'd be listening to tapes and songs on the radio
You also wanted to be a drummer once, you loved the power and energy there
But what about the early days though, I'm interested particularly in the early days
How far back can you go I wonder
Yea! How far back and what memories do they bring up ? >

Back in the 70's watching Top of the Pops every Thursday evening on the BBC, essential viewing
With its exciting Whole Lotta Love intro
It was something exciting, thrilling
Waiting to see your favourite Band
And to see the Charts, how they were doing
In the Seventies there was Glam Rock, my eldest brother and me we were always arguing and fighting with one another, sibling rivalry I suppose
If he supported United then I'd have to support City...silly stuff
He liked the band Slade whereas I liked...I supported Marc Bolan and T-Rex
Solid Gold East Action I really liked that song
It was very fast, he rarely did fast songs Marc
Telegram Sam..."you're my main man"
Metal Guru..."is it true"
Twentieth Century Boy..."I wanna be your toy"
The hair on your neck would stand up when he'd come on...
Slade were good though, secretly I liked Slade too, they had great songs
*** on feel the Noise/ Girls grab the boys..
Coz I luv you...Mama we'er all crazy now...
Skweeze me Pleeze me "You know how to squeeze me..."
But there were lots of other good bands and so many great songs
We used to play cards for small money...pennies, a series of different card games, and we'd put on records while we played
We even learned to play Chess and we started a Chess League between us,
We'd always listen to the music as we played.

The Sweet's "Blockbuster" with its intro of police sirens, it spent about 5 weeks at No.1 in the UK Charts...
It reminds me of...of Fish that song...Fish on Fridays, we used to have fish every Friday, I didn't like fish there was bones in it
I wouldn't eat it then Mam would get angry
One time she took a mouthful of my fish trying to prove there were no bones in it
Then suddenly she started to cough and splutter and choke
A Bone had actually got caught in her throat
I thought it was my fault, I thought I'd killed her
She had to go to hospital to get it out
I was going to tell her "I told you the fish was dangerous"
That memory just came back to me when I thought of that song and that time

Yea! I liked Marc Bolan and T-Rex, songs like Metal Guru, Twentieth Century Boy
I remember I didn't like the lyric "Twentieth Century Boy/ I wanna be your toy"
It sounded silly to me that lyric, I suppose I wanted things to make sense
And when he did that song "New York City" with the lyric
"Did you ever see a woman coming out of New York City with a frog in her hand"
I thought then he was maybe losing it a bit
< You...you were a very serious child then weren't you ? >
I suppose I was...like a lot of children are...maybe I just wanted things to make sense.

< I'm interested in the early days, even the very early days and the memories you have
How far back can you go ? What about the funny novelty songs ? >
Chuck Berry had a No. 1 with "My Ding a Ling" playing with his Ding a Ling, we all thought it was very funny
Stayed at No. 1 for several weeks
"Gimme that thing, gimme gimme that thing (or Ding)" was another funny song
"Mouldy Old Dough" by Lieutenant Pigeon a keyboard song with the constant refrain of just "Mouldy Old Dough"
Cat Stevens had a song "I can't keep it in/ I gotta let it out/ gotta show the world..."
Novelty songs were important, they'd interest even your parents
They'd pass a comment "Ha! Ha! That's a funny song"
< And there were sad songs too, weren't there, really sad songs ? >
"Billy don't be a hero don't be a fool with your life" by Paper Lace about a young bride trying to talk her young fiancee out of going off to war, he doesn't listen and never comes back, he gets killed
The Government sends her a letter, she throws it away...
"Seasons in the Sun" by Terry Jacks, 'Goodbye Michelle my little one/
We've known each other since we were nine or ten/ We climbed hills and trees skinned our knees...ABC's / O! Michelle it's hard to die when all the birds are singing in the sky..."
You'd nearly be in tears listening to it.
We used to buy Top of the Pops compilation records with lots of hits on them
Sometimes Mom would like a song, 'Stay with me' by the band Blue Mink
"Stay with me, lay with me/ Love me for longer..."
Always reminds me of my Mom that song
'Killing me softly with your song' Roberta Flack was another
'Tie a yellow ribbon round the old oak tree..."
At school every Friday the teacher would have a spelling test, I used win it a lot, I was good at spelling
The teacher used to give some sweets as a prize, I used bring them home to my Mum.

The Eurovision Song contest (all the European countries would put forward a song), I remember being let stay up to watch Abba win in 1974 with 'Waterloo'
In their fabulous outfits...they looked like Stars, Giants to us, Norse legends from Sweden.  They were amazing!
And what about our own Dana, the young Irish girl from Derry who won the Eurovision for Ireland for the first time with 'All kinds of everything...remind me of you"
I was too young to be allowed to stay up to watch that one
But you could probably hear the adults shouting for Joy from the room below
Happy Nay amazed to see one of our own having done so well, being recognised, flying the flag for Ireland
And then there was seeing Thin Lizzy playing 'Whiskey in the Jar' on Top of the Pops, the first Irish Rock band ever to appear on the show
It was so exciting watching them on our old Black and white TV...an Irish Band one of your very own up there on the World stage
And what about Gilbert O'Sullivan from Waterford I think reaching No. 1 in the Charts with his lovely song 'Clair'
We thought it was a love song but at the end it was revealed it was in fact about a little girl he used babysit for...so sweet.
We used to get comics and magazines secondhand, bought at jumble sales (remember jumble sales)
There was a music magazine for young kids, mainly for girls I think
It was called 'Jackie', there'd be a few in our bundle
They'd have big pictures of all the current hearthrobs
Donny Osmond, David Cassidy, the Bay City Rollers
The young fans would go crazy for their idols
I remember Donny Osmond singing Puppy Love and his version of The Twelfth of Never...
"I'll love you till the bluebells forget to bloom
I'll love you till the clover has lost its perfume
I'll love you till the poets run out of rhyme
Until the Twelfth of Never/ And that's a long long time"...
They were beautiful words about loving, a forever love
And Baby I love you by The Ronettes "Baby I love you/ I love everything about you...
All singing about this wonderful mysterious thing called...called Love.

<Can you go back further than that?>
When we'd go up the village where the amusement arcade was
There'd be songs playing, there were dreamy songs
Albatross by Fleetwood Mac, A whiter shade of Pale by Procol Harum
There was an instrumental I remember called "Sylvia" by the Dutch band Focus
There was a lovely leggy blonde girl named Sylvia in my class at school
And yes! I think she was actually from Holland
(We had a few foreign girls in our class)
Y'know I think she fancied me...did Sylvia
She used to smile at me a lot.
I have a memory of being at the fairground in the Summer with its swing boats and bumper cars
It's roundabouts with the horses and swings, the shooting gallery, the stall for throwing rings over things and taking a prize home
I remember candy floss and ice cream cones
I remember playing the penny slot machines in the amusement arcade, all the different machines
I remember a song "California Man" by The Move... wonderful Summer days.

In the Sixties an Elvis or a Beatles film was a big deal
I remember A Hard Days Night in brilliant black and white
And then "Help" in wonderful colour
Trying to get a fabulous Ring off Ringo the drummer's finger... great songs
Watching The Banana Splits "One Banana Two Banana Three Banana Four/All Bananas going right through the door...
Remember The Monkees"Hey!Hey! We're The Monkees/You never know where we'll be found... We're the young generation and we got something to say"
Last Train to Clarksville, I'm a Believer... great songs too
Remember The Age of Aquarius "This is the age of Aquarius..."
The Sixties yeah!

<Did your Mom and Dad have a Singles collection, the old 45's. Do you remember?>
On our old Dansette record player Roy Orbison singing In Dreams and its B side Sharadoba a magical Egyptian sounding song
And also It's Over about a love affair breaking up
And its wonderful B side Indian Wedding, that was my favorite song among the 45's
It told the story of Yellow Hand and White Feather two Indians getting married
But then going off into the swirling snow never to return
Gone to the Land of the Rising Sun...
You'd listen to them over and over again those songs and that wonderful haunting voice.
<And what were you thinking about, what would be running through your mind when you'd be listening to those songs?>
I remember I wanted to be special that I'd have some special powers and be able to do great things
Something that would make me stand out and that people would be amazed
Maybe some of the girls too, would be very impressed.
My Dad he liked Jim Reeves, he had a lovely velvety smooth voice
He sang Billy Bayou 'Billy Billy Bayou watch where you go/ You're walking on quicksand/ Walk slow/ Billy Billy Bayou watch what you say/ A pretty girl is gonna get you one of these days...
He sang a lot of slow love songs "Put your sweet lips a little closer to the phone and let believe that we're together all alone...
Anna Marie... Anna Marie
Four Walls to know me...

<Tell me about Christmas, the Christmas songs?>
Christmas was a magical time in our house, we'd have the Christmas tree with all the decorations and coloured lights on it
We'd have long concertina like decorations going from wall to wall, so colourful
And lots of glittery things
The songs... Slade singing 'Happy Christmas Everybody', Wizard singing 'I wish it could be Christmas everyday', Mud singing 'It'll be lonely this Christmas (without you to hold)' sounded like Elvis
Johnny Mathis singing 'When a child is born',
'Little Drummer Boy'...
In those days because of school and family you had a strong sense of belonging, having friends, attending birthdays and sports and community events and church
I remember the Christmas party in Primary school (Kindergarten), you had to bring your own treats
I'd only have some biscuits and diluted orange juice
Most people were relatively poor in those days
I was a bit embarrassed having so little
There was one boy and all he had was a bottle of milk to bring
Some used make fun of him, kids could be cruel sometimes.

I remember the teacher brought in a tape recorder once and taped every boy and girl's voice and then he'd play them back
I used dread when my voice would come up
'Cos suddenly the whole class would erupt in laughter
For some reason my voice sounded funny when taped
Even the teacher used smile
I felt so humiliated nay destroyed with them all laughing at me...
I remember... I remember singing the Christmas Carol 'Angels we have heard on high' with its chorus
"Glo..ooria, Gloria in Excelsis Deo"
It was Latin I think but I didn't know this
I thought we were singing "Gloria in a Chelsea stable"
I thought to myself "Jesus must be a supporter of Chelsea football/soccer club" heh!
We had Perry Como's Christmas album with the story of 'Frosty the Snowman' and 'The Christmas Song' ...
"chestnuts roasting on an open fire/ Jack Frost nipping at your nose/ Yuletide carols being sung by a choir/ And folks dressed up like Eskimos..."
And Bing Crosby of course, singing White Christmas
I think we all dreamed of a White Christmas
At school we'd sing 'Away in a Manger' and 'The First Nowell'
Y'know if I sing those songs even now to myself, I can... I can almost remember...

<What about the other songs you learned at school, funny songs, sad songs and the memories they bring up? >
There was a song 'Those were the days (my friend we thought they'd never end)' it was in the Charts
I think the teacher taught us it
The people in the song would be having a great time laughing and drinking and dancing in the taverns
But as they'd grow older their lives would change and they'd get lonelier and sadder...
'Puff the Magic Dragon' I remember there was a very sad bit in this song
Puff and his childhood friend would have so many great adventures together
But then one day, his friend he came no more (he'd found other toys to play with)
Poor Puff was left bereft, he slowly slunk back into his cave... this used to make me sad...
We did patriotic songs 'Roddy McCorley' (goes to die on the Bridge of Toom today)
We had a songbook at school, I still have it
It had lots of old folk songs
Oh! Susanna, Skip to my Lou, The Camptown Races
"Michael Finnegan beginagin/ He had hairs on his chinagin/ Poor old Michael Finnegan"
We used laugh at that song
"What are we going to do with the drunken sailor... early in the morning "
'Marching through Georgia' "Hurra! Hurra! We bring the Jubilee/ Hurra! Hurra! The flag that sets us free...a rousing song
The teacher would play a musical instrument, a melodica I think it was called
She'd blow into it and it had keys on top that'd she'd finger to create the notes
She divided the class into those who could sing and the others, the Crows she called us who couldn't
I was among the Crows
It made me feel bad being called a Crow.
In Primary school we used to play soccer during the breaks
It was usually the Boys from the Housing Estate versus the rest of us from the Village
There was never any tactics, the whole team en masse would just run after the ball LoL
I remember I used to get angry sometimes probably because of something someone had said to me
When I was angry I'd become like The Incredible Hulk
I'd go through the whole lot of them, beat them all
I was Unstoppable
I was the first boy in my class to ever score a goal using my head
The school would also have soccer leagues and we'd get put onto teams
But we were so small compared to the bigger older boys we'd hardly ever get a touch of the ball
But I... I managed to get a goal once which was unheard of from someone in our year
I was so happy.... delighted! My teacher even announced it to the whole class
That I'd scored... I was so chuffed
When I went home and told my parents though they didn't seem to think it was anything special....
My Dad he liked accordion music, he liked The Alexander Brothers from Scotland
They had a song 'Nobody's Child'
"I'm Nobody's Child, no one to love me/ No mother's kisses no mother's smiles/ I'm like a flower just growing wild..."

I used to sleep alone in my room
You'd be afraid there in the Dark on your own
There'd be a nightlight on the wall all lit up
A religious picture, the ****** Mary holding the child Jesus
I'd get Mom to leave the door open so I could faintly hear the voices downstairs
Sometimes I couldn't hear anything and I'd be afraid everybody had gone and left me
So I'd get up and sit on the landing listening
There was a few times when I'd actually go down the stairs
I'd be so relieved to see them all still there
I used sing songs in the dark to keep the fear away, songs we learned at school
"We're going to the Zoo Zoo Zoo/ How about You You You/ You can come too too too..."
Old MacDonald had a farm E-I-E-I O! and on that farm he had some...
"10 green bottles standing on a wall/ And if one green bottle should accidentally fall/ There'd be nine green bottles standing on the wall...
Sometimes I used recite poems we'd learned
"Two little blackbirds singing in the sun/ One flew away and then there was one... One little brick wall lonely in the sun/ Waiting for the blackbirds to come and sing again "
I also remember trying to recite to myself the multiplication tables...

<There were funny rhymes and nursery rhymes wasn't there? >
Christmas is coming/ The Goose is getting fat/ Please put a penny in the old Man's hat/ If you haven't got a penny a halfpenny will do/ If you haven't got a halfpenny God bless you...
Hickory Dickery dock/ The mouse ran up the clock...
They could be strangely violent sounding
Jack and Jill went up the hill/To fetch a pail of water/ Jack fell down and broke his crown/ And Jill came tumbling after...
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall/ Humpty Dumpty had a great fall...
Three blind mice/ See how they run/ They all run after the farmer's wife/ She cuts off their tails with a carving knife...
Girls are made of all things nice... sugar and spice/What are little boys made of/ Frogs and snails and puppy dogs tails...
Adam and Eve went up my sleeve and never came down till Christmas Eve...
I remember the early games we played, Snakes and Ladders, Ludo, Tiddlywinks trying to flick little plastic counters into a tiny plastic bucket, also playing draughts and marbles...

<Can you go back any further ? >
My Mom singing in the kitchen doing her daily chores singing some song off the radio
Dickie Rock an Irish showband singer singing
"Come back to stay/ And promise me you'll never stray/ I promise that I'll be true...
Sean Dunphy another Irish singer singing "If I could choose" (came second in the Eurovision Song contest)
Tom Jones 'The Green green grass of Home '
There was a lot of easy listening type songs on the radio Burt Bacharach type songs
Andy Williams, Englebert Huberdinck (Please release me let me go/ I don't love you anymore), Doris Day maybe
There's a lot I can't remember now
Val Doonican another Irish singer who'd made it big in the UK
(Had his own TV program for many years on the BBC)
He had a big hit with the song "Walk Tall"
"Walk tall and look the world right in the eye/That's what my mother told me when I was about knee high...
I remember one magical Christmas we got a present of a plastic projector
It came with several slides, they had wonderfully colourful cartoony pictures on them that told a story
We'd turn off all the lights and project it onto the wall
I remember it was like magic, the colours they were so vivid, they were like the colors off stained Glass windows...
The colour of things was very important when you were a kid, they'd almost create feelings inside of you
Colours came first... before words ever did
We often didn't understand the grown ups with their big words...
I remember getting collections of different kinds of toy soldiers and then staging battles
I remember collecting little toy Dinky cars they were called, that was their brand
And Matchbox cars (another brand) ... even today when I see certain colours of cars I am reminded of those old toy cars I used to play with... strange

<What are your earliest memories then? >
There was a question I always wanted to ask the adults but I never did, I thought it kind of funny and didn't want them to laugh at me
The question was "Why does Life always show me ?" An existentialist question even then.

We lived by the sea so you'd be lulled to sleep every night by the flowing up and flowing back of the sea... the tide... its gentle swaying back and forth motion
We had a black cloth picture/painting on the wall, a night scene with swans on a lake and an exotic house in the background with the Moon shining
It was so quiet and peaceful to look at...
My bedroom wallpaper had lovely red or pinkish roses
There was a colourful flower design sewn onto my pillowcase
It used to be lovely getting into bed with fresh linen...
I remember I used to get funny dreams even then, sometimes scary dreams
But I remember you were always safe 'cos in the dream you had a special ring you could put on and then the scary dream would go away (I've often wondered after was that maybe where Tolkien got his inspiration for The Lord of the Rings and Wagner the music composer for his music opera "The Ring")

<Can you go back...any further ? >
Going back further, you're almost falling off the edge of the world there
To a time... to a time when there were no words
When a child comes into the world they have no words
There's only... only The Silence... The Great Silence,
Silence is a strange thing, you can hear Silence
The fact that you can hear it means it must be changing from moment to moment
It too is just like a music, it's probably the first music
Without it there could be no other
The Music of the Spheres someone once called it
It just stays there in the background... glistening... your constant companion
Probably the first sound you ever heard, and probably the last you'll ever hear
It can grow very loud
It wasn't threatening, there were no monsters in it
Not until you went to school and learned words and heard scary stories
Did the monsters come
Words they can cast shadows... sometimes very long shadows...
There was a cot with wooden bars, I remember having a blanket with lovely warm colors on it, soft light blues and yellows, wooly sheep, Bo Peep or Bears or something
We had a golden coloured curtain with lots of designs on it in the bedroom
I remember if you looked hard enough you'd start to see faces in the curtain
Sometimes they would frighten me, they'd look very sharp and angry looking or maybe very sad unhappy looking...
I suppose today I still see faces, in my mind, in the great curtain of all my memories, all those I ever met and knew...

I remember looking at my Mom's face and not knowing what she was
Babies their a complete clean slate, have no words, they know nothing of this world
Gradually they warm to their Mom's affections and come to trust her and bond with her.
Because you had no words when very young there'd be huge gaps in your consciousness
When your consciousness would be completely clear and still
The silence and stillness would envelop you
... and there was something else... something else there... something deep in the silence
Out of it would come something very strange and quite wonderful
It'd come upon you suddenly...it was like your consciousness was changing, opening up
It was like you were descending into some great... some great complex
Your eyes would be closed but still you could see it and feel it... you were part of it
And it was so natural and so familiar...it was where you came from...it was Home
There was a first part that would lead into another part... and then another, all different
Yea, it had several stages and you'd pass through each stage from the outside going inward right to the very last stage... the very Source of Life itself
And you'd be completely at ease with yourself, you'd be completely at Home there
It'd come every night... that Special thing.,. that Special Place
Y'know sometimes when I see a little baby asleep in its pram, I know... I know where they are
Their away now, away in that Special Place
Far faraway from this world of care, so peaceful and so quiet there
Guarded by unknowingness and the Great Silence
With no fear or confusion there to bedevil it
Knowing only a relaxation so deep and a great Stillness within...

But me! I was the youngest in my house, I was always fighting with my brothers
And I was a terrible worrier just like my Mother
I'd be worried about school and the teachers, and trying to understand my (school) lessons
And there'd always be problems, arguments, confusions... humiliations and cruel harsh words spoken
At night I remember I used shake my head vigorously as if trying to rid my mind
Of words that had been spoken, words that hurt or stung...or confused me
I used bump my head gently against the wall
But no! I couldn't escape them... my peace it was broken now...it was gone
And that Special Place just like in the song Puff the Magic Dragon
It came no more...it was lost to me.

I suppose this is all I can remember, all I can recall
I guess this is where I must have come in
I suppose I must have reached the end... the End of my Rope here.
More a series of reminiscences than a poem, a bit like a meditation. No one ever writes about the very early days of their lives, it's a closed door, written off, a time forgotten, that goes unvisited. But perhaps there was something magical incredible behind that door. Everyone should maybe take a trip down their Rope of Songs.
Ellis Reyes Dec 2014
Blood red tears streamed…
Coloring her face
Blue
Then yellow.

Looking forward she saw primates
Behind her screaming
“Excelsis!”
to no one in particular.

Listening carefully
she felt the chill
of a raging fire,
crunching,
down the gravel path.

Out of nowhere
Blinding light
Covered her in darkness.
Tossing her wildly against
a thousand razor quills,
soft against her skin.

Grasping the cacophony
the sweet smell of anger
glowed green upon her tongue.
Would radishes grow here?

Disoriented by the pedestrian world
swirling about
She consumed mind-altering substances.
And returned to the unreal events
of
everyday life.
Michael S Davis Mar 2013
In life she sowed God's Word with grace,
She sang, she taught, she cared, with smiling face;
Expressed with gifted hands her soul's great love,
As from her heart she shared a music born above.

In death she reaps a harvest gold,
And plays and sings a song of triumph, bold.
Then we note with hearts that pine and long,
Her name was praise, her life a song!

We face the night; she rises with the day,
We sing and play and send her on her way;
Secure and safe with the knowledge of Christ's hope,
She goes to God - Gloria In Excelsis Deo!

A tribute
to
Gloria Wilson Westmoreland
September 3, 1927 - March 7, 2003
©2003 Michael S. Davis
Robert C Howard Aug 2022
The magic of Glory unfurls in splendor -
     Shouting with glee from majestic mountains
     Or whispering noble truths in the
tranquil murmur of a sylvan spring.

Glory shines in the wrinkled brows
     Of our ancient ones - seasoned
By the patient school of time.

Glory trembles in the stormy roar
     Of a virulent summer shower
     That brings life - sustaining rain
To every strain of flora and fauna.

We hear Glory in the ecstasy of children
     Giggling down the grassy hills
Under a sun-splendored sky.

In deepest night we gaze upward
     At the mysterious canopy
     Where the moon dances between the stars
And tunes us to our grateful anthem:

Soli Deo Gloria!
Gloire à Dieu dans les hauteurs,

Paix aux hommes sur la terre !


Aux hommes qui l'attendaient

Dans leur bonne volonté.


Le salut vient sur la terre...

Gloire à Dieu dans les hauteurs


Nous te louons, bénissons,

Adorons, glorifions,


Te rendons grâce et merci

De cette gloire infinie !


Seigneur, Dieu, roi du ciel,

Père, Puissance éternelle,


Fils unique de Dieu,

Agneau de Dieu, Fils du père,


Vous effacez les péchés :

Vous aurez pitié de nous.


Vous effacez les péchés :

Vous écouterez nos vœux.


Vous, à la droite du Père,

Vous aurez pitié de nous.


Car vous êtes le seul Saint,

Seul Seigneur et seul Très Haut,


Jésus, qui fûtes oint

De très **** et de très haut,


Dieu des cieux, avec l'Esprit,

Dans le Père, ainsi soit-il.
Oh dear Aida ! Ma soprano lyrique
Je te mordille le lobule de l 'auricule
Je grignote l'hélix et je fouine dans l 'anthélix
Je visite ton auricule.
Ce soir je suis chaton de lynx
Ténor lyrique
Je te danse ma marche triomphale
Je suis Général cinq étoiles
Radamès l'Egyptien
Et je m'entortille la trompette dans le labyrinthe de tes cheveux
Comme dans une pelote de laine
Et je miaule et je ronronne :
"Aïda, mon éthiopienne,
Fille d'Amonasro,
Ci-devant esclave d'Amnéris, ta rivale,
Je suis ton esclave patenté
Ensevelis-moi vivant
Quand le moment viendra
et pends un de mes osselets à tes boucles d'oreille
Pour chanter ma mémoire "
Et joignant l'acte à la parole
Je t'administre un gentil piercing de mes griffes.
Et pendant que je te fais mon piercing
Toi tu joues aux osselets avec mon marteau,
Mon enclume et mon étrier.
Tu me dévores le vestige de mon oreille
Et tu me dis : "tu m'aimes maintenant !"

Je n'entends plus que le bruit de l'eau
Qui se mélange aux violons et aux cymbales
De l'orchestre philharmonique
Qui m'envahit comme le déluge
Et je te livre tous mes secrets

Et je m'accroche à tes cheveux
Soudain bleus avec des reflets verts
Comme tes ongles d'ailleurs
Tous verts sauf les pouces qui sont bleus
Pour combiner avec mes oreilles noyées.

N'est pas chaton de lynx qui veut
N'est pas maîtresse de chaton de lynx qui veut
Il faut accepter d'être lacérée de coups de griffes
Certes le félin se retient
Mais il a beau retenir ses griffes
Il est encore gamin
Il ne sait pas qu'il blesse
Il ignore que tu saignes
Il est innocent, le petiot,
Il a tout juste un mois bientôt
Et aux innocents les griffes pleines.

Et tu es maternelle
Tu lui prépares son lait
Et quand il pleure la nuit
Tu l'accueilles volontiers dans ta couche

Heureux les chatons de lynx
Gloria in excelsis deo
Car c'est enterrés vivants avec leur muse
Qu'ils connaîtront le paradis.
Allan Pangilinan Sep 2016
How would you look at her in her eyes
And tell her she's not happy?
How does one make her realize,
That her life is a pity party?
Though she'd say she's okay,
That she eventually had a reason,
Will she recognize such a priori?
Or sink in an afterlife of beacon?
God bless her and no one else,
May the angels, "In Excelsis Deo" eternally.
She could've had different shells,
Instead, she'd chosen her voice's echo.
How does one look into someone's life
And show her that she could be,
If only she knot a different tie,
A different world she could've seen.
Lauren Connolly Apr 2021
When you arrive the pristine gates open wide,
Gabriel and Lucifer uniting.
I finally understand
what those bible folks say
about believing in God.

An embrace like the dawn,
engulfing me in luminary beams of comfort.
Blinding me from surreptitious sins
that are now just an inkling
of the past.

The air surrounding us dances and mates,
rubbing our skin and shaking our souls.
Pushing us closer together
until it evaporates completely
and I am left gasping.

Static echoes our eardrums as the world vanishes,
tasting heaven and hell for ourselves.
Hues of blues and greens
heavenly halos
singing hungrily on our tongues.

Our own Garden of Eden,
between messy sheets and half eaten apples.
A chorus of serpents and lambs
stagnating the air and everything around
until we become one.

“Gloria in excelsis Deo”,
a brilliant halo illuminates your face.
Finally arriving at church
I am pulled to my knees
And wait
For the offering.
Denise Writes Jan 2018
miserere nobis
for pacem in terra
et Gloria in
Excelsis

Deo
is
Tott
experimental art
Mateuš Conrad Aug 2022
i don't know why it happens: the stuff i like that i've written falls on deaf ears... perhaps like Ezra Pound i'm about to lament: so few come to my fountain, thirst i guess is wasted on the people who'd rather hallucinate an oasis... i feel out of place... intellectually: i guess i have to be dead to get the sort of traction i deserve: but first death...

i wondered today, why did i buy this beast of a bicycle?
it's horrid: in that it's massive...
this Trek Merlin 5 is humungous...
i might as well tell people as i cycle past that i'm
donning a ride of a motorbike...

and for some reason i keep repeating listening
to Jane's Addiction's Three Days...
it's the bass... i'm a sucker for bass guitar...

then again: like today i woke up and something
ancient: inborn within me woke up
to count how many shadows i owned...
luckily just the one... although: two tongues...
my mother's tongue woke up
in my mind... it's always awake in speech...
but not awake enough to scribble
something down...

mind you: i found the only ideal imitation
of Hebrew in English... i'll show that later...
as i will something else...

mój głos jest przestrzeń -
    a moja myśl (jest) czas...
o tym so powstało w lesie pewnej nocy...


translation? my voice is space...
but my thought (is) time...
about what was created in the forest
a particular night...

  well... two nights...
one night i was drinking heavily on the bench
in Havering County Park...
the night summarised me with
not being surprised... i had
to walk through night, shadow, fog and blindness...
i ended up screaming an aria of bile:
of caged venom of absolute carnage...
mayhem: a tornado on my breath
an earthquake on my tongue...
a volcano in my lungs...
a crucifixion and the absolution of the moon
by a rain of meteors in my heart...
nothingness in my mind... i screamed: i... ROARED...

where have you gone? echo? where?!
that was one night... some other night
i walked back and became frightened...
someone in the woods was silly enough
to brush against an incantation...
i heard them: Satanus in Excelsis!
****... what did i just start? did i give someone
the benefit of doubt or rather: faith?
i was just ******* about a pebble...
i couldn't see... i was marching blind through
the forest... the moon failed me...
it was winter... i was cold...
that's what i mean: my voice was space...
if i were in a cave and i didn't hear
echo... the "shadow" of the voice...
my body is a form that's also a shadow....
stretching.... stretching... mind you:
Game of Thrones... i'm not a big fan...
iron is the currency of that universe?
in my universe? RUBBER is worth more than gold...
but at the same time... it used to be paper...

- let's just say my relationship with women
is... cordial... i heard whispers from a well forgotten
past... i has tattooed by Chernobyl...
a birth mark of plum on my shoulder blade...
as if someone were to remove a wing
and i should have been born an angel...
this nurse... tried to choke me: to spare my mother
the troubles: of what? a freak?!
i have witnessed better freaks live out their lives...
she tried to choke me... the story went along
the lines of: the **** of the milk-bottle
had a ****** too large for your to swallow...
you started choking: your heart enlarged...
plus the hernia... i was born out of agony...
it's all burred: unconscious in me....
but how are you going to treat women,
if the first women you encounter are... ******* willing
to **** you?
that's my relationship with women...
i love prostitutes... the only "class" of women
i love... i like sniffing out lies...
i like lip-reading... i've read enough to be able
to lip-read...
i abhor people who think they're smart
but? are dumb as doughnuts!
i can't insult donkeys...
    i smell fear.. i smell lies...
          as every chameleon ought to...

i should be less bothered:
i just missed the marker... those who are willing
to read me haven't been born yet...
it's best seeing it that way...
i'm not going to bemoan having written
the Great Gatsby... and then... ugh?! what now?!

i see the seat: SEDES...
that's... the part of the toilet that's the "rim"...
the plastic that closes in on the ceramics...
SEDES...
              i see...
write English with two variations:

(a)
  / (waɪt) /
              / (ˈɛlɪfənt) /
      / (nəʊ) /
                    / (ruːm, rʊm) /

wait for what? i thought i said: white: wide: white?!
phonetics my ***... the English version
is half-bad... still bad... but it's not h'american
hwyte bad: that's ******* teasing the Welsh
tongue to come forward!
you want sheep-shaggers in your midst?

that's what i love "naturalization"... you pick
up on local traditions... on local stereotypes and local
preferences and local discriminations...
although... i love the French... biggest bicycle freaks...
at university i had two portraits on my wall...
Napoleon and Marquis the Sade...
who do you think this French girl attacked?
Napoleon was the = of ******...
not a brilliant man... no... no... KO...
    i did manage to lose my virginity with her...
which was nice...
Isabella... third year psychology exchange student...
she looked like a Dracula's *****...
she had ills against Napoleon...
but no trouble stomaching Marquis de Sade...
then again: she probably didn't
recognise him...

but when it comes to the Frenchmen and
the Polacks... Napoleon created the satellite state
of the Duchy of Warsaw...
i... i can' give thanks?! i ought to! Napoleon
gave the Polacks a homeland back...
from that terrible experiment of theirs of their
elected monarchy...
great plan! applause! let the Polacks decide on
a king and make him the younger inheritor
of the throne of Sweden... then watch as brother
turns on brother and invades...
with Sweden bringing the deluge of an invasion
against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth!

these people are are either too free or too subordinate!
they can't decide...
i stopped caring...
there's nothing i can do...
i'm away from the land of my birth...
ii'm looking toward churning out
an imitation of Hebrew in English...
i'm sure i can... i can...
i can replace the NIQQUD...
    
Hebrews hide their vowels...
what you see are consonants...
you don't actually see the vowels...
i can do the same...
but i will not use the niqqud system...
i'll use the Braille methodology...

this language is mine!
                        i don't care whether i was or wasn't
born with it: i have inherited it!
this language is my dog on a leash!
this language is a cat sleeping freely in my bed!

i will not look into the squiggly nature of Arabic...
someone else is waiting for that
assortment of interest...
me?
i'm bound to investing interest in Hebrew...
the niqqud and Braille... and English...
you ******* smart orthofox Jews... "think"?!
i too think!

    (b)

          met the shadow baron and his host...
i.e.
              M⠑T TH⠑ SH⠁D⠕W
                            B⠁R⠕N
                        ­  ⠁ND H⠊S
  H⠕ST...

                            i see, i don't see...
ONOMATOPEIA:
U's missing...
    ⠕N⠕M⠁T⠕P⠕⠑⠊⠁(⠥ - y, o and u too!)

oh... you think... that just because
the Hebrews suffered a Holocaust they can be
freed from their deity: their
god eating god deity?! Moloch used to be a god!
Beelzeebub was a god!
Mammon and the whole lot of them!
Behemoth!
              Belial!
              right... your people hide their vowels...
i'll invested an idea too! to hide vowels among the blind...
i know it will have no decent traction...
i know it's a complete an utter failure:
but... i know you will see the momentary genious
of it!
hmm! America is... ripe! it's... Rrrrr-ipe!
i sat down at the end of the day
having spent it
tending to my garden:

so much emotion is in my stomach
i doubt that i even have
a heart

3.5 grams of marijuana can last
me about a month
and i'm wondering: where was i in my 20s
when i smoked so little
i hear
heavy smokers obliterated
by the discovery of the Stretch of Time
time non-linear not
history
i better: sink feel this:
send those emotions to my *****
my genitals:
kneel and speak with my ***: relax
my ***:

then i think sometimes
i imagine speaking through my ****
rather than my mouth
when i think i sometimes
imagine speaking through my ****
rather than my mouth
because i'm no politician rhetorician
and i'm getting the blues
afraid of myself:
why am i so stone so Sisyphus
why am i so nervy ******
playing an IDLE GAME

games were so different back in the day
of Mario Bros
now there are IDLE games...
you get fed adverts
your pocket sized DEEP BLUE
overheats
and then you have to start hacking
the phone
because there is apparently moisture
in the charging socket
but there isn't

because when you hit ON button
i smoked half a joint
tonight
and i want to write
so i also drank a whiskey...
or two...
no... best keep this Election Night
giggles under shades
i know who's going to win
when in Europe there is the Right
while in England it's: Conservatism
but random people
talked to me on the train about politics
and i was coming home
tired

but beside that: just reading habits:
who can spaghetti monster
and the custard clot Yellow King
of Hapsburg and Lovecraft
an Austrian monstrosity hanging
over the German people

bad habits: like really bad habits:
i have too much on my mind
that even summoning an *** for a mouth
will not do:
now i have three mouths in my head:
bleak Corinthian dynamic
oh jeez:
jazz? maybe:

                                Zukofsky's A
and when i heard that voice
bro: i was over-tell: myself that the silence:
oh those wind chimes bother
me why did we invent them
when not living on islands for most of the time
the voice bothered me
i'll finish the joint when i'll head
to bed:

the best anything is 1/3 bourbon and 2/3
whiskey
i created a mutant spirit: at 40% loading...

i'm scared of myself for not being a worldly man:
an ambitious man
a politician:

democracy is:
when in its infancy as an idea of governing people
by people
why so many loops and snakes and ladders?
i'm not an ambitious man
i have no world demands
although i'm sitting on wealth
and with that comes:
pips of cherries and trees in winter...
and *******: plenty of *******:

while Wimbledon is on
and the Euros
and the elections across Europe
and now England:
how many prime ministers?
elections are called in times of crisis
i saw Cameron, May, Sunak, Liz Trolley...
i saw Blair, Brown and... who?
ambitious men:
i am afraid of myself:
not being an ambitious man:

less but more Harold Norse contemplating
not being a male-man
(ha ha, politico automachine
spell edit, introductory
alliance with "woke" terminology:
old ****: geezer, gas baboon)
because not prone to violence
or appreciative of sports notably football
just mad about poetry

but mirage mirage:
what a combination on ***
and the trans train: of alphabets:

     LINDA DE SOUSA
    with / & WADE WILSON:

scary to think there are even people
there:
on the "other side" of tax collectors
and i've been with ******
and there are people there:

we're so dynamic in our dualism beside
the mind
that there are parallel lives being led
with parallel fates being fed
in the simplest of languages: by one: in one:

i had to escape: become schizophrenic-schizoid:
how?

i'm bilingual so...
backup banning floppy disks in Japan
(if you read the newspapers:
you'll know)
the 3"15            was that the t.n.t. detonative
ascribing ref.?

           i need to write in English but listen
to music in German:
notably folk: folklore bands
Faun: federkleid:

i just need to because otherwise
i can't stomach
the life of the one tongue
and this rabbit rabid ethnicity
based upon
nothing but the tongue:
or two:

now the flood
of memories: subtle:
when i laughed at my mother speaking
English over the telephone:
i was a terrible brat
but today i am old
and older and at least
she's not a language confrontation
of lackey: suite...

the bible and the quran can exist
and... whatever:
but i want to write a contender:
antitoxin...
or toxin:

ah the ambition awakes and i'm delusional
again with my lover...
tub tub... tub tub:
three little finger flickers
then her tasting herself
after i finger her and put my fingers
into her mouth...

but Heidegger became real:
schematics
of external security:
at Wembley: someone was flying
a renegade drone over the south
of the architecture:

FOOTPRINT? my ***...
charlie 1: olympic steps
charlies 2: oh jeez... never heard of
positions 2, 3, 4...
charlies 5: Atlantic Way
Charlies 6: north east staircase
Charlies 7: south east staircase
charlie 8: south east ramp
charlie 9 and charlies 10: gate 3
(with quadrant Romeo)
usually Frenchie: endearing?

charlie 11: zig-zag alley
charlie 12: Spanish steps:

da-sein: concern:

Om om: the Mongol? began winking at me:
did i look panicked?
pan-caked:
i thought i was going to enjoy
ACDC
when they came on: i did:

apparently i was working outside
and i heard the better acoustics
and i almost played my guitar the last
time i was bringing
salt and sugar and toilet paper from
the attics:
i once upon a time wanted
but was not fated with either guitar
or chemistry as supplier
of bogus narcotics and to alleviate
the softness of this world
while the primitive aspects were
concerned: of no concern...

                 but i didn't: one handshake
i wonder what that is in Katakana:
handshake...
ooh! no Cambridge Dictionary hyphen
assertion:
it only took Charlie 6 not note to
CONTROL:
medical emergency:
possible concussion
head split open
falling over traffic barriers
metal to calcium
infestation with iron: this calcium

what? call an ambulance?
am i the ******* patron Saint of the Hospitaller
or something?
the Wembley footprint?
judge of what? character?
the guy is bleeding like a monk:
tonsure...
the natural bird-line of his nesting hair:
call an ambulance?!

two quadrants showed up
*******:
three charlie call signs
then the External Manager:
LIMA ECHO...
how the **** was i supposed
to call an ambulance:
hell's bells was playing
in the background:
sure, i was at the ac/dc gig:
got two t-shirts:
for me and my father
but i was working:
getting paid for X
but not getting paid for
reinvigorating the reinterpretation
of Heidegger's Dasein...

not the ambitious man:
i "forgot" to text my availability to Lyndon:
***** Scouser: yar...
and i forgot to text back my lover
and that's just that:
if poetry:
well democracy works when you
have individuals like Damocles
and the swords of Saddam Hussein:

work... but when you have
democracy contra democracy:
people are not infringing on your way
in living:
today i was visited by a Conservative
minion campaigner
and there my ambition stumbled
and i became this
devilish little man
of little things
and that was just fine:
since god is not c.c.t.v.

              demonic in flavor or anything
more than the 1
in the eternal decimal pointer:
UNDIVISIBLE:
UNDIVISABLE:

   1
       not: rather: 0.111111111111111...

1/9:             there are NINE: nein?
NINE HORSES OF THE APOCALYPSE:
five are missing:

             boredom!
                  madness!
          technology!

i found at least 3: got kicked in the head
by a white horse in the moonlight: almost...

            PEACE!             that's four: the horse
of peace: peace is like a war:

         conquest?         contra the mortal quest?
from the Vatican:
what 7 deadly sins?
  how about the 8 realistic horses?

conquest i will do like the synoptic
readers did unto
the apocryphal readers:
i will: turn: the other cheek..

   you savvy: drop drool and lip
blossom: no? maybe spring in New York
and in central park...

the horses are running:
War Rower
             Peace Pacifier
  Famine Fetishes of Fat
Death the Central (Power)
Boredom and Brew Dogs

how many horses? i need a chariot:
no carriage: just two archers...
5...                      3 more?
borrowed from the classical
sense of geometry
Greco:HYMAN:HYMN
ITALICS:WOMEN:He:did':brew:'t

          HALF-DEATH: horses of dementia:
needle? thread: extension of grass?
so much *** of glitter... no?

      horse of TECHNOLOGY:
the Solipsist: the St. Augustine
with his Soliloquy: once: Soliloquies
like the injustices performed
upon Sisyphus by the gods:
while... the Titans were helpers:

Prometheus: and the un-ambitious man...
like: moi...

              have i covered more: not expected?
just the barrage of typo
and type: dot dot dot
while i watch a book burn unlike
a cross in the Chatter
Club Capitalism: wavering:
unsure where is Left Copernican
and Right Copernican:
north and summer
south and autumn
winter and east
and spring west:

                not sure: feel: disorientated...
slightly...
     almost got kicked in the head by a horse
but i was stupid enough to walk
in the woods
while angry at the blinding darkness
i had no ego for light-bulb
but instead overheard:
i will not be a **** enthusiast
i heard SATAN I N EXCELSIS...

                i must be a good enemy of man
if i am also the best friend of man:
however many times:
i try not to be one.
perhaps that's how it came to be:
to thus become:
learning how to pet animals:
minimizing talking to pets
like minimizing talking to lovers
during ***...
i make fun of my cats
automating onto onomatopoeia(s)
while they pretend to want to talk...

oh but i know animals can
talk the talk of humans:
i overheard my cat Oscar Darshan
tell me outright:
(ty) JABEŁ...

                i don't need to raise
children: people disbelieved me
i went to psychiatrists
*******
and your white powder SODA brain
freeze: powder! ambitious
sexed up men of grey: and suits!

          women can have children
and hear them speak all they want
but life for man?
when he hears a petted animal speak?
sorry:
aversions to your **** and
providing bus drivers and doctors:
i have mystique:
and my testosterone:

wasn't the fox at the Greenwich:
yeah: the hustler:
enough proof?
doubting Thomas you too?! not so much
a Peter?! Edie?
🎶  Ding **** merrily on high
in heaven the bells are ringing
Ding **** verily the sky
I can't stand Bertha's singing 🎶

Fat Bertha
bad headache in excelsis 🎶
Bertha's a lovely, scrumptious ***** but has the voice of a cat being force fed rotten bananas. I don't know how much more I can take of listening to Wham!'s Last Christmas before I stick my head in the oven.

— The End —