Love is but a word
Four letters on a page
Said a loud or written down
To me it's all the same

Love is but a feeling
The flutter in the gut
Hold my hand let's walk the sand
Till this feeling's all but none

Love is but a lie
A hope a dream a wish
An uttered word a feeling assured
Till worn and flavourless

True love is but an action
Something that makes no sense
Giving your all expecting nothing at all
In return for your loving gift

'Tis about time I said goodbye;
to thyself-t'at is but full of deceit, and lies.
Ah, just yesterday, rainbows wert snared by thy eyes;
but soon t'eir soul flickered like a flame, and died.

Ah, thee, th' son of night, and th' beauty of day;
My love for thee was, indeed, more t'an what poems canst say.
Oh, but why didst thou, with a smile so sweet,
flirt with me, as last Monday we w'rt fated t' meet?
My love, thou should'a stayed behind;
if thou wanted me not; with all t'ose secrets
thy so dearly kept and cherished, in thy mind.
I am now th' one to blame;
I am like one infinite morning, whose innocence
led me to believe in th' foreign falsehood of fame.
Ah, as how my heart jumped about like a selfish swan
Whenst thy lips silenced mine; oh, all wert just a good sign!
But how couldst thou stomp away and leave me alone?
Thou bask now, in my seedless cries, raw tears, and scorn;
Thou art cruel, cruel, cruel! Oh-thou filled me with disgust!
Thou art like disdain, and its mean garden;
Yes, thou art a semblance of whose ungratefulness!
Ungrateful and smeared with greedy terror;
Sending sane souls and spines about running with tremor;
And in which t'ere are neither flowers, nor hills, nor mountains
Everything is glaring; everything is burnt-
and under a nightless sky, a pitiful; yet irregular sky,
With rage thou shalt destruct my lavender;
thou art now an enemy, but yesterday a fake lover!
Ah, canst I believe it not-how I first came to love thee,
whenst thou wert just but a soulless entity!
Oh, how stupid I was-yes, too credulous and insipid;
for falling for a mask so infamous, and putrid.
I am now turning away-hopefully I am still late not,
and towards a better lover my whole conscience canst afford.

Ah, thee, but at today's moonless dawn
I sprang from sleep whenst I rigidly dreamed of thee;
I had hoped t'at thy shadow would never show
But kept it venturing to stay t'ere and haunt me.
How I would mock things t'at are stubborn;
t'ese hath I vowed, so deeply and heartily-
ever since I first was born.
Thou art a wicked, wicked witch;
thou treated me like litter;
like I was but a gouty piece of filth.
Thou art bright not, like th' river,
but th' sinned soil and clawed greenness under;
thou art not th' glow thou used to be,
ah, neither art thou th' angel t'at spoke and joked with me.
Thou art mean, mean, mean;
thou art a mean man and creature altogether;
Thou wert once part of my breath;
but now even thinking of thee
shalt goodly fill me with dread, and images
of erotically defeated triumph;
and flavourless, ye' anonymous, death.
But even if thou wert to die, I would grieve not;
for thou art not worthy of any more of my tears;
instead I would raise my hands and sweetly thank our dear Lord;
for returning my pride; and destroying my wounded fears.

Thou shalt from now on-liveth in my mind not,
and in which, in t'is most dignified, though absurd, conscience-
I sweareth t'at thee canst no more rejoice;
for I prefer stopping our unfinished story short;
and I detest now, every bit of thy flesh,
much less th' delusive meanness of thy voice.
Thou art to me but a bad dream,
and thy presence is even less meaningless
t'an a lad's pleading ghost;
Thou art trapped in stillness, as thou may seem,
ah, and may thy sins lead thee only, in th' years
to come, to thy worst.
Thou art worthy not of t'is grand earth!
In a marred graveyard should thy now dwellest,
'fore ruining thyself more, and makest all thy sins 'ven worse.
Ah, thou who art not a being of neither th' West nor East;
as even in God's mind, thou should be th' least,
I dread thee as how His Majesty spurns a fiend;
thou art neither my lover, nor playmate, nor any friend.

I hope by t'is poem th' world shalt see;
how notorious and vicious thou hath been
to one sinless me.
I am just a writer, with t'is poem in my hand-
but despite-I am just a woman, a fragile, and sometimes
infantile; lover and friend.
A lover, to a man worthy of my love;
a loyal friend, to all fellows-thoughtful and honest;
With whom my poetic soul shalt live;
and with whose courage,
t'is loving breath shalt ever thrive, in my left years-
and ever continue to joke, gather, and laugh.

(There’s something that I keep in my pocket, a piece of dental floss, flavourless now, chewed to a white nothing by my own mouth to wring out every strand of his DNA, but now it just tastes of me and nothing else.)

My sister was wearing a black dress made of crepe. I remember it so well, the way it scrunched up in my fingers like paper, my knuckles juxtaposed against the colour, white with tension, against a bottomless backdrop of black. I held onto that dress like a terrified child. For that moment, it was the only thing that existed for me.

gotta sit here, gotta stay, gotta sit here.

(Memories of bumblebees with their innards hanging out,
“make it start mama, make it start!” it’s a common reaction amongst children so I’m told.)

I did not feel his soul sliding past me. I didn’t feel a thing, not a single thing.
Is it the same as turning off a TV? Energy dispersing into the ether? A kettle boiling, bubbles stilling? How can he have just…stopped?

He stopped.

I have felt many things in my life. The whole spectrum, from dizzing highs to drug doped ecstasies, suicidal jaunts to white-edged nothingnesses. But I had never felt abandoned before. Not truly, sincerely, abandoned. Marooned. Bitter. Desperately bitter. Terribly, terribly frightened and deeply alone.

There’s nothing like the smell of flowers to jolt the senses.

I let go of my sister’s dress and walked – not ran -  but walked out into the daylight.
I remember that I had my head held high - I could have just been going for a smoke, going to make a phone call, going to check that the sky was still up in the air and not down on the floor like a carpet of bluebells , but when I reached the door of the church I started to run.
I ran right in front of cars – **** it! – across the road to a half deserted carpark, winding through the cars like a ******, and slunk down to the floor in front of a parked white van. I thumped my head against the cool metal of the bumper and started to shake. I remember my body feeling somehow too big and too small all at once, I remember laughing at one point because it seemed like the right thing to do. My shaved head hit my knees with a thwack.
I’m not here, I’m not real, I’m a black and white thing, I’m just a black and white thing...
But I was real, and there was no escaping it. All of it was real. The carpark was real. The flowers were real. The only thing that was not real was the thing that mattered the most.
“You ****.”
I got up. I started to kick the van, kick the wall behind me, and kick the air.
You read about it in stories and you see it in films, people losing their marbles and hitting out, heroically bleeding from the knuckles, stinging, saying ‘ah, ah.’ None of that happened for me. I hit so hard I thought I’d broken my hand, but my bones are ******* stubborn. The world is ******* stubborn. My mouth felt like it was bleeding, but it was just laced in a cobweb of spit.
“You ****! You ****! You ****!”
I took off my suit jacket and draped it over my head, pulling it tight; a black ghost in a carpark in the countryside.
I felt an arm wind its way around my waist, and the rustle of crepe.
I sobbed up my grief like catarrh, the lining of my jacket wet with spit and the inevitable chawing tempest of tears that caved in my stomach like a perfect punch.
“I’m losing my mind.”
My sister grabbed onto my hand and squeezed, hard.
“No you’re not, Arthur.” She said to me, with certainty.
“No you’re not.”

I  stroke a brand new page
and wonder if rage or
plight or a flight out of this age will
overtake these white spaces between
blue lines,
wonder if I’ve anything meaningful to tell, like
what I think about politics
or **** hips or chapped lips in this winter’s wrath.
I’m on this path, you see, to try
and gain a different perspective,
to learn a different language,
to try and send a message
instead of doing the usual clichés about love and death and
cleaning up an alcoholic mess and
everyone we know has aids but
we like *** and
we hate each other’s different colors and
pretend to be emotional,
you’ve heard this line before:
cry or bleed tears or blood through words or ink onto pages or..
what.ever.
I’m guilty, too, of course, it’s true:
the one who points it out is guilty most,
but now I’m tired of being boring,
tired of not telling a story,
let’s… try… this:
my name is: michal.
I am:
white
twenty one
female
bisexual
jewish
a traveller
open parentheses : a stranger (close parentheses)
I am:
Sitting in a room full of black Africans
in Africa
a stranger, young and white and
interested, and suddenly, it strikes me:
c o m f o r t a b l e .
sitting in a room full of bl-
no.
we are human beings being taught to see in colors and in genders
being taught to judge a person
by the accent by the nation by the actions of the past five minutes by the plan for the next three by the chemicals or plants he puts into his body but what about
personality?
I am:
sitting in a room full of:
POETS.
or people who want to hear poetry,
and though on the outside I’m so…
white – no, different, on the inside I’m so…
warm, feels right, so not
distant. for instance:
you get what it is to let words string themselves on your necklace
and choke you till you’re
breathless
and make you beg for more, you’re masochistic
like me, like that, you
get what it is to close your eyes
and let each others’ words overtake you
like going under a wave in the Indian Ocean
like being swept into the eye of a tornado
like hiding under three blankets in the dead of winter
like turning the engine off but keeping the battery on and parking with dad in the front to let Pink Floyd finish playing Wish You Were Here before we move to open the car door,
you get what it’s like
to open a blank page and let the pen use your fingers in ways you never knew
lingered through the smoke of the incense in your brain,
the drops of the tap of the thoughts
your mind thought it turned off,
those last few breaths you never knew existed,
exist in your head,
exhausted,
I am:
walking out of this segregated room and into the next part
of this interesting test where I find
brainwashed white folks brainwashing my mind and instantly
I’m watching every black guy that walks by
‘cause this is the most dangerous city in the world
and those coloreds and those blacks
commit all the crimes so lock the door and close the windows and
watch your back and clutch your bag tight even in the
daytime and do a double take a triple take and never
talk to strangers you never know who’s a neighbour or
who’s checkin’ out his next
victim ‘cause he’s been
evicted out of society’s boundaries,
out of the space God made for good people,
fair people, people like us who know how to watch out.
Wait! something smells
funny, not really funny:
sad. we must be mad
to buy into this it’s making us
crazy and angry and when was the last time you
smiled?
I am:
smiling, thinking about that last time,
I was in a room full of poets and there was
magic happening and we were
black and we were
white and we were
re(a)d all over, we were
blue with ink stains on our fingers, we were
pink with our vision of life, we were
yellow ‘cause the sun was paintin’ us bright, permanently
green from the grass on our
denim, brown from the earth that rooted our spirits back to our cores,
orange from the flames of our words,
purple like the royalty that shined
from our souls, we were:
rainbows,
black and white are just multitudes of rainbows, after all,
simply shades like the ones we use to cover our windows
out of fear of the next break-in, just
shades, just
shadows, remnants of painful pasts
that we must avoid in our bright & colourful futures –
if we let them be so.
let me catch my breath, I haven’t
been so out of it since that
lunar eclipse that lit up the galaxies,
let me catch
my
breath,
my
death,
my breath, my goodness catch
me now before I trip on your
hiccups before I slip on your
scattered makeup before I slip on your
shallow skirts and dresses,
catch me before I choke on your
grey flavourless cooking before i
regress to the levels of stress
that lead to all our health
deterioration our self-poisoning
medication catch me so I die with a pen in my hand,
righteous and trying to deliver
an emotional message of
love, of coexistence,
I forgot to mention I am:
Israeli,
plagued by hatred in another story,
by violence unnecessary like
painting over to hide the rotten parts,
like pain in modern art,
let’s just lie here together
add a little cliché, underneath the stars,
close your eyes,
feel the dark,
hear our breaths move the air
and start a steady chain reaction,
a journey towards a butterfly effect
(how powerful the breath is!)
let’s call this art.

everyone agrees that you're
tasteless and flavourless
when it comes to
choosing the ingredients
to make the dough for love.

similar to a slice of
cold, leftover pizza,
hated like pineapples
as the toppings,
slapped on like a can of
expired tomato sauce,
cut away like
unwanted crustings,
and being as cheap as
a low-quality mozzarella.

definitely
loved by me
but purely hated
by the entire world.

you put peace signs over bullet holes,
you kissed the wounds and you prayed;
oh you prayed!
you said darling, it’ll be O.K.
they laughed because they ******* knew
it would never be O.K.
(oh they'd make **** sure of that)
didn’t you put petunias in pistols?
and you sang and you danced and
begged
give love a chance!
yeah, times of true romance.
well my little flower child
you're all grown up, flavourless,
mild;
I'm looking but
where are you now?
(come back because we need you now)

There are certain people never meant to be written
with matching socks, or with expensive funerals.
Assume you can love me, even though I’m one of both.

No, take me by the shoulder. Tell me I’m ridiculous
in our own haunted, bony kind of language.
Here we go: most nights I want to miss your mouth
and kiss the hollows in your biceps. Listen.
I want you to see me cry so hard,
I flush out my nose with all the saltwater.
Everyone’s sick off of all these poems,
but a song made up of four chords can still be
some lonely kid’s messiah. I swear, I want to stop,
but you’re so ******* warm. Shh.
Lately, I think maybe that’s what art is all about.

I’m the lopsided inkwell, loving so hard
I can ******* stain you. I’ve got plenty of skills.
Surviving in the desert. Resisting atrophy. That’s right,
brag to your friends about my impressive
rate of infatuation. Make me a bumper sticker:
Your tightass honor student is never going
to love someone as disgustingly hard as I can,
*******, and yes, I’m going to glorify it.
I’m the original unrequited. I’m flavourless.
Dante got in a fight with Warhol and then I was born,
violently mass-producing poems about the hell
made up of your fingers. Take that, I can rhyme the life
out of the soup cans I found in your face.

I’m gonna need a pretty big truck to fit all of this.

Yeah, you’re gonna need a gap in your chest
like an eighteen-wheel semi, just to hold me.

and through the pane of glass,
beyond this musky scent developed from
my living secretions of skin and blood and *****;
is the pinnacle of a human condition lacking in my placid genes.
rusted fingers on clone-like machines, screens,
that scream into the ears of jaded men.
A new day!
it rings out through my entire street,
but they all drudge through grey hallways,
for cheap coffee and soggy flakes of flavourless cereal.
curtains closed to the sun.

the lines on their faces,
corrugated to match  the lines on their garage doors.
and with a well-worn-in suit
their car door and shed door open simultaneously.
"no time to breathe in the spring air filling their diesel-filled shed"
I thought.
And with the roaring of the engine,
and the car-port opening wider and wider to the world,
the rusted husks of decaying metal
recoiled into their greater-shells with dissonant creaks.
and it was then I noticed this scraping of steel
had become an orchestra,
or a dreary opera, so apathetically choreographed
for all the sagged faces and fatigued hearts
in the entire drone-army of identical town-houses.
all around me, like bees burdened with their bodies worth of pollen,
one by one, their diesel-pods and people movers
left their hives.
and one by one the rusted-razor blade howling of garage doors
ceased, and the engines had pursued the black tar-road
off further into the distance.
and though the sun shined with such benevolence,
one by one, each car's sun-roof closed,
shades pulled down, blinded willingly to the light.

Flavourless

You say you want me
To be the flavour of the month
And lick my ice cream cone.
You say you are a cherry popsicle,
Youthfully frozen in time to please me.

I say, I don‘t need to be
A tasty treat,
Because I am already "I Believe You But My Tommy Gun Don't"

Arrogant in faith and blind in sin,
Virtue without and hatred within,
Flavourless in taste and foulness in rhyming.
Crude in diction and metre-less in timing.
Headless in form and weightless in meaning.
They never sleep, they stay awake ( half heartedly dreaming).
Where have the poets gone?

Self Sickening Species

Title
The Human Craving

The Gummy Decay
We Favour For Our Mortar

Our Truth-less
Mated
Clunny Actions

Sweet Tooth
We Solder On
Feening
Indulging Our Senses
Till Everything Is Flavourless

this bitter green dawn
does not move the city

that in crisp antiquity
spreads her thighs, her palms

her fingertips licked
with drought and the soft sweet

stink of the night
rubbery skin

flavourless as a leaf;
her armpits and knees

gape with rasping mouths
and the basins of the neck

rugged stretch
striped and on

up the sloping stumbling face
gaunt as concrete

where carts and rickshaws
startle and snort

succulent bulbs part
mechanical and jagged and

through the gutter
sallow eyes watch

cement tunnels
tumble and twist

the taste of thick leather
mossy on their walls

there are feet too
thousand toes

with chipped windows,
stooping they swell, and

there are dry highways
of the calves

where nothing lingers.
it is morn now

the birds gargle
and a thin yellow kite

shivers like a hanged thing
on the spidery scaffold

of an electric tower.
her salty streetlights

stare like iron
in the urinary winds that shoo

crusty litter
in between *******, and crevices

of eyes, sills of the hips
the cracks of the elbows

butter sun scatters
and coats the houses viscid

flies come
torment the quiet awake

her men barge out
hasty and mad

and vehicles shake
a thousand breaths

exit: their CNG sweetness
caking in the nails

and jamming the doors;
pungent liquids churn

and ignite in taut-limbed engines;
now gears tick and click

sweating rancid
and thick

leaking on roads
and roiling canals

gruff huffs and coughs
now the sky is grey

and cool
a cadaver

now loud ears unfurl
bare as banners

and shrill winds
pound hot-metal on skin

—

the bark-wood body
turns

and reveals the moors
of a stoney back

where steel rods
bend

at silly angles
and where they protrude

their same old tang of DC
and the same old

tingling of it
now a sigh escapes

the latex lips
and shutters shudder

over spiced eyes
now all is red

like hot tea on tongue
and the tongue tinkles

with the sounds of the heart
that ripe an onion

pleads to be pulled
out out out

and peeled
layer by layer

until it is none
and now, the familiar viscosity

soothes it again
and it swoons limp

a fat still-born
in the womb

His rapidly regressing memory
Often leaves his mind
In a state
of utter shambles
While the ceaseless pain
in his arthiritic joints
Hardly alleviates
For more than a couple of hours
Even after ingesting
The strongest painkillers
His hollow bones
Continuously reverberate
with a crackling ache
That frequently disturbs
The meagre hours
Of his peaceful repose
And the flavourless diet
Decreed by his physicians
Warranted to keep
the increasingly fragile resilience
Of his mellow heart intact
Will undoubtedly
douse your desires
For any gastronomical adventures
As well as annihilate
your hearty appetite
Just by its vapid smell
Yet
The cheerful smile
On his eighty year old
Sagged deflated
And wrinkled beyond recognition face
Refuses to fade
Even by a single dismal shade
Cause he knows
That as long as he is able to breathe
Theres no reason at all
To believe
That the fleeting moments
Of his terribly unpredictable life
Cannot be spent
Happily

What good is all my love
If you wish not recieve it
Use it, use it till torn, cast it
Aside as coat to a hanger
Woolen soft and sagging in lone
When its body be far far

Far is beauty, in flavourless
Riches, halls of boney ceilings
And pillars of God, you
So glorious in your indifference
So irresistible: merciful your gaze
As it grazes me by – myself, meek
Cottage, of anticipation and dust

Myself mumble, mug of night-
Old melancholy. Throughout
the stars

***** at me, waiting for agony
To spill out its reticence
I paint, paint, cheap commodities
Fuel for your warmth in those
White countries. Rag-clothes,
Castoffs, rugs if you may
A fable for a table or two
A momentary exhibition
If you may. Yet I I warp
Over myself, restless in
Scarcity of grief... how you
Play at deprivation, clever
And careless, coy as a bird

Out out out to the blue with
Your pretty laughter and mist
And never again a flutter
To drag me from dream
Violent in your quiet, your
Absent saturation, running
A little red boy, alive as violins
Round and round and round
Me - nothing of you
To boil or brew, no leftover
Sight on which to chew

The fear of crazy.
Hides in a cloak.
It faces hazy.
Flavourless smoke.

A reaching hand burns to the touch,
Spite the hand, it doesn't mean much.
Yet.

Until it's silent, and the hood is off.
Revealing what you already knew.
Crazy isn't faceless, crazy is me
And crazy is you.

At it for five minutes, maybe six,
and we’re watching them both
from our go-to spot in the King’s Horses
across the street, transfixed
by this unscripted drama unfurling
before our eyes, a right old spat
between, presumably, students
on the lash, straight outta Camden.

I’m clutching my last fifth of pint
as if it’s the final swig I’ll ever savour,
the rest of the pub’s regulars and stragglers
oblivious, minds on the mundane,
such water-cooler coffee-machine gabble,
but we’ve tuned into the action,
silent theatre, much gesticulation,
coatless girls impervious to the chill.

I blink, I turn, a rookie blunder
for in that barely a second speck
you’ve flung the ready salted to one side,
a gasp spilling from your cherry-red mouth
as the chick on the left has arched back,
propelled a fist, thwacked her prey,
one hit and I missed it, the evening’s highlight
unrecorded with no live rewind.

Ten seconds pass. I have birthed a long sigh,
both felines having scarpered,
one nursing their wound, bruise to be.
I let the last, flavourless dreg of Carling
slide past the tonsils before we make to leave,
recover from the unexpected, single wallop
to the chops, Friday night morsel of excitement.
I chuckle about it, privately, as I head for a wazz.