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Keith J Collard Nov 2012
After the battle done did rage,
my spoil of war, a frenchman,
I put in my basement in a cage,
this rarity I would not relinquish,
my personal love adviosr and sage.

He called me a " fatty american"
even though I was slim,
and said it was torture that
I kept bothering him.
He counted time like Louey Pasteur,
that was how he pronounced "hour."

I told him I was french in lineage,
and he said " I don't think so,
" the french are biologists,
perhaps your mother was a fungus
that grew on oak."
so I sprayed him with some water very cold,
" be nice, or you'll get the hose."

I told him, for his advice I would pay,
his currency was cow's milk from Calais,
he brightened even more after
I installed an *** tickling bidet.
and he would make, then nibble cheese,
as he was lecturing me.

" If you want the girl, you must always whisper,
and she will lean closer, and then you kiss her,"
such advice, this frenchman delivered.

We became bon amis, with each other pleased,
but he needed more than a bidet and cheese.
" You can either have a french wife,
or an oven for cooking bread,"
before I  even finished what I said,
" Oui, a bread oven I'll have instead."

So every night, I spent by his iron side,
Descarte and Victor Hugo we would recite,
" and against the british we helped you fight"
" and you still owe us money," he said calmly,
as he offered me a baget and I took a bite.

" We french, know the power
of the mushroom and the bedroom,
that is why we avoid the scuffle,
would rather marinate our truffle."
I gobbled up his words,
so sweet and sauteed,
and admired the clothes he made,
and he made me some
so I  "could get laid."

Then the news came, a peace treaty,
war and my personal frenchman were finished,
the United States were now
at war with the Finland,
" Right when we just started to begin,"
I yelled and he nodded his chin,
" What the hell am I gunna do with a Finn."

So I released the frenchman back into the wild,
crying like a mother seeing off her child,
I had to push and shove, he would not go,
but we had to part for the sake of love,
he dillied and dallied and bent low,
picking mushrooms that wild grow.
" For the sake of love, just go,"
I yelled, and threw a baget at him,
and he retreated into the woods,
and I wiped the tears from my eye,
and everytime I see frills or  fungi,
I think of that time, I had a frenchman in a cage,
and as I talk to the finn,
****** ,.it just ain't the same.
Mateuš Conrad Jun 2016
preliminary explanation

before i really begin the project i have a few scatterings
of thought that made me do this, without real planning,
a different sort of impromptu that poetry's good at,
less Dionysian spur-of-the-moment with an already
completed poem entwined to a perfect ensō,
as quick as the decapitation of Mary Boleyn with the
executioner fooling her which side the swing would
be cast by taking of his hard-soled-shoes -
i mean this in an Apollonian sense - i know, sharp contrasts
at first, but the need to fuse them - i said these are
preliminary explanations, the rest will not be as haphazardly
composed, after all, i see the triangle i'm interested it
but drawing a triangle without Pythagorean explanation
i'm just writing Δ - i'll unravel what my project is
about, just give me this opportunity to blah blah for a
while like someone from an existential novel;
what beckoned me was the dichotomy of styles,
i mean, **** me, you can read poetry while in an awkward
yoga position, you can read it standing up, sitting down,
eating or whatever you want - obviously on the throne
of thrones taking a **** is preferred - the point being
what's called serious literature is so condensed for
economic reasons, font small, never-ending paragraphs,
you need an easy-chair and a bottle of cognac to get
through a chapter sometimes - or at least freshly mowed
grass in a park in summer - it's really uncomfortable because
of that, and the fact that poets hardly wish upon you
to be myopic - just look at the spacing on the page,
constantly refreshing, open-plan condos, eye-to-eye -
but it's not about that... the different styles of writing,
prose and the novel, the historical essay / encyclopedia
or a work of philosophy - what style of writing can
be best evolutionary and undermine each? only poetry.
poetry is a ballerina mandible entity, plastic skeletons,
but that's beside the point, when journalism writes history
so vehemently... the study of history writes it nonchalantly,
it's the truth, journalism is bombastic, sensationalist
every but what courting history involves -
a journalist will write about the death of a 100 people
more vehemently than a historian writing about the Holocaust...
or am i missing something? i never understood this dichotomy
of prose - it's most apparent between journalism and history...
as far as i am concerned, the most pleasurable style of
prose is involved in the history of philosophy, or learning per se,
but i'll now reveal to you the project at hand -
it's a collage... the parameters?

the subject of the collage

it weighs 1614 grams, or 3 lb. and 8 7/8ths oz.,
it's a single volume edition, published by Pimlico,
it's slightly larger than an A5 format,
3/4 inches more in length, and ~1 centimetre in
width more, it has a depth of 1 and 3/4 inches in depth,
a bicep iron-pumping session with it in bed -
i was lying with this behemoth of a book
in bed soothing out a semi-delirium state
listening to Ola Gjeilo's *northern lights

and flicking through the appendix, and i started thinking,
no would read this giant fully, would they?
the reason it's a one volume edition is because
the only place you'd read such an edition would
be in a library, at a desk, and you'd be taking snippets
out from it, quotes, authentic references points
for an essay, esp. if you were a history student,
such books aren't exactly built for leisure, as my arms
could testify... after the appendix i started flicking
through as to what point of interest would spur me
onto this audacious (and perhaps auspicious)
act of renegading against writing a novel (in the moment,
in the moment, i can't imagine myself rereading plot-lines
after a day or two, adding to it - that's a collage too,
but of a different kind - and no, i won't be plagiarising
as such, after all i'll be citing parallel, but utilising
poetry as the driving revision dynamic compared
to the chronologically stale prose of history) - i'll be
extracting key points that are already referenced and not
using the style of the author - the book in question?
Europe: a history by Norman Davies prof. emeritus
at U.C.L. - the point of entry that made me mad enough
to condense this 1335 page book (excluding the index)?

point of incision

Voltaire (or the man suspected of Guy Fawkes-likes spreading
of volatility in others) -
un polonais - c'est un charmeur; deux polonais - une
bagarre; trois polonais, eh bien, c'est la question polonaise

(one pole - a charmer, two poles - a brawl, three poles -
the polish question) - mind you, the subtler and gentler
precursor of the Jewish question, because the Frenchman
mused, and not a German, or a Russian brute...
and i can testify, two Polish immigrants in a pub,
one senior, the other minor, one with 22 years under
his belt of the integration purpose, one with 12 years,
the minor says to the senior about how Poles bring
the village life to cities, brutish drunkards and what not,
it was almost a brawl, prior to the senior was charming
a Lithuanian girl, before the minor's emphasis on
such a choice of conversation turned into idiotic Lithuanian
nostalgia about the disintegration of the Polish-Lithuanian
commonwealth, primarily due to the Polish nobility.

10,000 b.c.

looking that far back i don't know why you even
bother to celebrate the weekend -
i mean, 10,000 years back Denmark was
still attached to Sweden,
England was attached to France,
and there was a weird looking Aquatic landmass
that would become a myth of Atlantis
in the Chronicles of Norwich,
speedy ******* Gonzales with the equivalent
of south america detaching itself from Africa...
mind you, i'm sure the Carpathian ranges are
mountains. they're noted here are hills or uplands,
by categorising them as such i'm surprised
the majority of Carpathian elevations as scolded
bald rocky faced, a hill i imagine to have some
vegetation on it, not mountain goats with rock and roof
for a blacksmith in a population of one hundred...
at this point Darwinism really becomes a disorientating
pinpoint of whatever history takes your fancy,
Europe - mother of Minos, lord of Crete,
progenitrix / ******* and the leather curtains
of Zeus's harem (jealous? no, just the sarcasm
dominates the immortal museum of attachable
****** to suit the perfect elephant **** of depth
the gods sided with, by choice, excusing the Suez
duct tightening of a prostate gland... to ease the pain
upon ******* rather than *******); mentioned by Homer
the Blind tooth-fairy, the Europe and the bull,
Europoeus and the swan, same father of wisdom to mind,
on the shores of Loch Lomond -
attributes a lover to the bull, Moschus of Syracuse,
who said earring Plato cured him of where the ****
should not enter even if it shines a welcome
in the disguise of Dionysius... revisionists bound to Pompeii
named Titian, Rembrandt, Rubens Veronese
and Claude Lorrain revived the bulging bull's *******
and her mm hmm mm, too gracious my kind, hehee...
Phonecians from Tyre and Io - so too the Sibyl of ****** -
and unlike the great river civilisations of the Nile,
the Ganges, soon to be the Danubian civilisations
and gorged-out-eyes-that-once-sore-colour-but-lost-sight-of-
colours-­after-seeing-the-murk-of-the-Thames...
soon the seas overcame civilisations of the rivers,
as Cadmus, brother of the thus stated harlot said:
i bring you orbe pererrato - hieroglyphics of the cage,
but not an owl or a hawk inside it -
so let's perfect speaking to an encoding by first
rummaging into learning how to procure the perfect
forms of counting - i say left, you say I, i say right
you say II, left right left right, what do you say?
VI. bravo! the Hellenic world just crossed the Aegean
and civilisation bore twins within the cult of a lunar-mother,
Islam of Romulus and Remus, a she-wolf
a canine of the night - according to another -
tremulae sinuantur flamine vestes - or so the myth goes -
a cherished phantom of what became the fabled story
of sole Odysseus with his ears open and the remnant
sailor's ears waxed shut - as if the bankers of this world,
revelling in culprit universal fancy than nonetheless
bred the particular oddities - lest we forget,
the once bountiful call of the sirens to the oceanic
is but a fraction of what today's sirens claim to be song,
a fraction of it remains in this world, the onomatopoeia
of the once maddening song, the crude *******
arrangement of vowels bound to the jealous god's
déjà vu of the compounding second H.

from myth to perpetuating a modern sentiment

you can jump from 10,000 b.c. to the Munich Crisis
of 1938 - 9 with a snap of the fingers,
imitating quantum phenomenons like gesticulating
a game of mime with Chinese whispers necessary,
if Europe is a nymph, Naples her azure eyes,
Warsaw her heart, Sebastopol and Azoff,
Petersburg, Mitau, Odessa - these the thorns
in her feet - Paris the head, London the starched collar,
and Rome - the sepulchre
.
or... die handbuch der europaischen geschichte
notably from Charlemagne (the Illiterate)
to the Greek colonels (as apart from Constantine to
Thomas More in eight volumes, via Cambridge mid
1930s)... these and some other books of urgency
e.g. Eugene Weber's H. A. L. Fisher's, Sr. Walter Ralegh,
Jacob Bronowski... elsewhere excavated noun-obscurities
like gattopardo and konarmya had their
circas extended like shelved vegetables in modern
supermarket isles, for one reason or another...
prado, sonata sovkino also... some also mention
Thomas Carlyle (i'd make it sound like carried-away isle,
but never mind); so in this intro much theory,
how to sound politically correct, verifiable to suit
a coercion for a status quo... Europe as a modern idea,
replacing Imperum Romanun came Christendom,
ugly Venetian Pirates at Constantinople,
Barbarossa making it in pickled herring juice
in a barrel to Jerusalem... once called the pinkish-***-fluff
of Saxony, now called the pickled cucumber,
drowning in his armour in some river or Brosphorus...
alchemists, Luther and Copernicus were invited on
the same occasion as the bow-tie was invented,
apparently it was a marriage made for the Noir cinema,
beats me - hence the new concept of Europe,
reviving the idea of Imperium Romanun
meant, somehow including Judea in the Euro
championship of footie gladiator ***** whipped
narcissists, rejecting the already banished Carthage
(Libya / Tunisia by Cato's standards) and encouraging
the Huns, the Goths and the even more distant Slavs and
Vikings to accept not so much the crucifix as
the revised spine of the serpent but as the geometry of
human limbs, well, not so much that, but forgetting
Norse myths of the one-eyed and the runic alphabet
and settling for ah be'h c'eh d'ah.
dissident frenche stink abbe, charles castel de st pierre
(1658 - 1743) aand this work projet d'une paix perpetuelle
(1713) versus Питер Великий who just said:
never mind the city, the Winter Palace... i have aborted
fetus pickles in my bedroom, lava lamps i call them.
the last remaining reference to Christianity?
Nietzsche was late, the public was certain,
it was the Treaty of Utrecht, 1713, with public reference
to the republica christiana / commonwealth was last made.
to Edmund Burke: well, i too wish no exile
upon any European on his continent of birth,
but invigorate a Muslim to give birth on it
and you invigorate an exile nonetheless:
Ezra expatriate Pound / sorry, if born in eastern
europe a ***** Romanian immigrant, pristine
expatriate in western Europe, fascist radio has
my tongue and *****, so let's play a game:
Russian roulette for the Chinese cos there's
a billion of them, and no one would really mind
a missing Chow Mein... chu shoo'ah shaolin moo'n'kah!
or a cappuccino whenever you'd like to watch
classic Italian pornographic cinema with dubbing
with nuns involved... Willaim Blake and his
stark naked prophesy, pope pius II (treatise 1458)
even though Transylvania, Tharce and Hungary
shared the same phonetic encoding with diacritical
distinctions like any Frenchman, German,
or Pole at the Siege of Vienna (1683)
to counter the antagonising Ottoman - i swear historians
do this one purpose, juggle dates and head-of-state figures
prior to entering a chronology - they must first try out
a ******* carousel before playing with the toy-train...
broadcasting to a defeated Germany public, T. S. Eliot
(1945) ****** import to into Western Germany
and talk of the failing moral fabric, China laughing
after the ***** intricacies of warfare of trade,
what was once wool we wished to be silk...
instead of silk we received vegetarian wool, namely
hemp, and Amsterdam is to blame... nuke 'em!
that's how it sounds, how a historian approaches
writing a history from the annals, from circa and
circumstance and actual history, foremost the abbreviations,
the fishing hook standards, the parameters,
the limits, and then the mathematics of history,
one thing culminating into another... contra Lenin
N. S. Trubetskoy, P. N. Savitsky, G. Vernadsky
Russian at the perks of the Urals - steppe Tartar shamans
or salon pranced pretty **** boys? where to put
the intoxicant and where to put the mascara... hmm,
god knows, or by 21st calculations, a meteor;
they say the history of nations is a history of women,
then at least the history of individuation
and of men who succumb to its proliferation
is astoundingly misogynistic.
Seton-Watson, among the the tombstones too reminded
of remarkable esteem and accomplishment
with only one gravedigger to claim as father...
as many death ears as on two giraffe skeletons
stood Guizot, men of many letter and few fortunes,
or v. v., incubators of cousin ***** and none the kippah
before the arrogant saintly diminished to
a justly cause of recession, ha ha,
by nature's grace, and with true advent of her progression
as guard-worthy pre- to each pro-
and suggested courteous of the ****** fibre,
oh hey, the advent of masqueraded woofing,
a Venetian high-brow, and jealousy out of a forgotten
spirit of adventure that once was bound
to hunting and foraging... forever lost to write  history of
a king dubbed Louis the XIV...
crucibles and distastes for the state to be pleased,
once removed from Paris, forever to Angevin womb
accustomed once more, at Versailles released -
as cake be sown so too the aristocratic swan necks
for worth of mock and scorn - and the dampening rain
rattle the blood-thirst of the St. Bartholomew's Day
slaughter, to date, the rebirth of Burgundy,
of Anjou, and with the dead king presiding, to be
of no worth in judging himself a king before god or pauper...
saluer Antoine Quentin Fouquier-Tinville!
that i might too in stead rattle a few bones prior to burial
with the jaw that will laugh and chatter least
had it been to my kingly-stead a birth so lowly.
then at least in satisfactory temperament i procure a
judgement of the noble like of a *****
for an hour's worth of pistons and jarring tongues...
as if from a nobleman then indeed as if from a *****,
for who sold Europe and said: Arabia, if not the
Frenchman, the Englishman, the Spaniard?
the former colonial conquests served you not enough?
i imagine the reinstatement of Israel like
the Frankish states under Philippe-August...
precursors to a cathedral dubbed Urban the 2nd's..
there were only Norwegian motives in the Ukraine
and the black sea... Israel to me is like plagiarism
of the Frankish states of the middle-east, with Europe
slightly... oom'pah loom'pah mongolian harmonica.
some said Rudyard Kipling poems,
some said Mr. Kipling's afternoon tea cakes -
whichever made it first on Coronation St.
some also say the Teutonic barbecues -
it was a matter of example to feed them hog
and cannibalise the peasants for ourselves,
a Prussian standard worth an army standard of
rigour - Ave Maria - letztre abendessen nahrung -
mein besitzen, wenn in die Aden, i'd be the last
talking carcass...
gottes ist der orient!
gottes ist der okzident!
nord - und sudliches gelande
ruht im frieden seiner hande.

germany's lebensraum, inferiority and classification,
inferior slavs and jews, genetics and why my
hatred of Darwinism is persistent, you need
an explanatory noting to make it auto-suggestive
for Queen & Country? diseased elements,
Jewish Bolshevism, Polish patriotism,
Soviets, Teutons, the grand alliances of 1918
or 1945? Wilsonian testimony of national self-determi
by
Alexander K Opicho

(Eldoret, Kenya;aopicho@yahoo.com)

When I grow up I will seek permission
From my parents, my mother before my father
To travel to Russia the European land of dystopia
that has never known democracy in any tincture
I will beckon the tsar of Russia to open for me
Their classical cipher that Bogy visoky tsa dalyko
I will ask the daughters of Russia to oblivionize my dark skin
***** skin and make love to me the real pre-democratic love
Love that calls for ambers that will claw the fire of revolution,
I will ask my love from the land of Siberia to show me cradle of Rand
The European manger on which Ayn Rand was born during the Leninist census
I will exhume her umbilical cord plus the placenta to link me up
To her dystopian mind that germinated the vice
For shrugging the atlas for we the living ones,
In a full dint of my ***** libido I will ask her
With my African temerarious manner I will bother her
To show me the bronze statues of Alexander Pushkin
I hear it is at ******* of the city of Moscow; Petersburg
I will talk to my brother Pushkin, my fellow African born in Ethiopia
In the family of Godunov only taken to Europe in a slave raid
Ask the Frenchman Henri Troyat who stood with his ***** erected
As he watched an Ethiopian father fertilizing an Ethiopian mother
And child who was born was Dystopian Alexander Pushkin,
I will carry his remains; the bones, the skull and the skeleton in oily
Sisal threads made bag on my broad African shoulders back to Africa
I will re-bury him in the city of Omurate in southern Ethiopia at the buttocks
Of the fish venting beautiful summer waters of Lake Turkana,
I will ask Alexander Pushkin when in a sag on my back to sing for me
His famous poems in praise of thighs of women;

(I loved you: and, it may be, from my soul
The former love has never gone away,
But let it not recall to you my dole;
I wish not sadden you in any way.

I loved you silently, without hope, fully,
In diffidence, in jealousy, in pain;
I loved you so tenderly and truly,
As let you else be loved by any man.
I loved you because of your smooth thighs
They put my heart on fire like amber in gasoline)

I will leave the bronze statue of Alexander Pushkin in Moscow
For Lenin to look at, he will assign Mayakovski to guard it
Day and night as he sings for it the cacotopian
Poems of a slap in the face of public taste;

(I know the power of words, I know words' tocsin.
They're not the kind applauded by the boxes.
From words like these coffins burst from the earth
and on their own four oaken legs stride forth.
It happens they reject you, unpublished, unprinted.
But saddle-girths tightening words gallop ahead.
See how the centuries ring and trains crawl
to lick poetry's calloused hands.
I know the power of words. Seeming trifles that fall
like petals beneath the heel-taps of dance.
But man with his soul, his lips, his bones.)

I will come along to African city of Omurate
With the pedagogue of the thespic poet
The teacher of the poets, the teacher who taught
Alexander Sergeyvich Pushkin; I know his name
The name is Nikolai Vasileyvitch Gogol
I will caution him to carry only two books
From which he will teach the re-Africanized Pushkin
The first book is the Cloak and second book will be
The voluminous dead souls that have two sharp children of Russian dystopia;
The cactopia of Nosdrezv in his sadistic cult of betrayal
And utopia of Chichikov in his paranoid ownership of dead souls
Of the Russian peasants, muzhiks and serfs,
I will caution him not to carry the government inspector incognito
We don’t want the inspector general in the African city of Omurate
He will leave it behind for Lenin to read because he needs to know
What is to be done.
I don’t like the extreme badness of owning the dead souls
Let me run away to the city of Paris, where romance and poetry
Are utopian commanders of the dystopian orchestra
In which Victor Marie Hugo is haunted by
The ghost of Jean Val Jean; Le Miserable,
I will implore Hugo to take me to the Corsican Island
And chant for me one **** song of the French revolution;


       (  take heed of this small child of earth;
He is great; he hath in him God most high.
Children before their fleshly birth
Are lights alive in the blue sky.
  
In our light bitter world of wrong
They come; God gives us them awhile.
His speech is in their stammering tongue,
And his forgiveness in their smile.
  
Their sweet light rests upon our eyes.
Alas! their right to joy is plain.
If they are hungry Paradise
Weeps, and, if cold, Heaven thrills with pain.
  
The want that saps their sinless flower
Speaks judgment on sin's ministers.
Man holds an angel in his power.
Ah! deep in Heaven what thunder stirs,
  
When God seeks out these tender things
Whom in the shadow where we sleep
He sends us clothed about with wings,
And finds them ragged babes that we)

 From the Corsican I won’t go back to Paris
Because Napoleon Bonaparte and the proletariat
Has already taken over the municipal of Paris
I will dodge this city and maneuver my ways
Through Alsace and Lorraine
The Miginko islands of Europe
And cross the boundaries in to bundeslander
Into Germany, I will go to Berlin and beg the Gestapo
The State police not to shoot me as I climb the Berlin wall
I will balance dramatically on the top of Berlin wall
Like Eshu the Nigerian god of fate
With East Germany on my right; Die ossie
And West Germany on my left; Die wessie
Then like Jesus balancing and walking
On the waters of Lake Galilee
I will balance on Berlin wall
And call one of my faithful followers from Germany
The strong hearted Friedrich von Schiller
To climb the Berlin wall with me
So that we can sing his dystopic Cassandra as a duet
We shall sing and balance on the wall of Berlin
Schiller’s beauteous song of Cassandra;

(Mirth the halls of Troy was filling,
Ere its lofty ramparts fell;
From the golden lute so thrilling
Hymns of joy were heard to swell.
From the sad and tearful slaughter
All had laid their arms aside,
For Pelides Priam's daughter
Claimed then as his own fair bride.

Laurel branches with them bearing,
Troop on troop in bright array
To the temples were repairing,
Owning Thymbrius' sovereign sway.
Through the streets, with frantic measure,
Danced the bacchanal mad round,
And, amid the radiant pleasure,
Only one sad breast was found.

Joyless in the midst of gladness,
None to heed her, none to love,
Roamed Cassandra, plunged in sadness,
To Apollo's laurel grove.
To its dark and deep recesses
Swift the sorrowing priestess hied,
And from off her flowing tresses
Tore the sacred band, and cried:

"All around with joy is beaming,
Ev'ry heart is happy now,
And my sire is fondly dreaming,
Wreathed with flowers my sister's brow
I alone am doomed to wailing,
That sweet vision flies from me;
In my mind, these walls assailing,
Fierce destruction I can see."

"Though a torch I see all-glowing,
Yet 'tis not in *****'s hand;
Smoke across the skies is blowing,
Yet 'tis from no votive brand.
Yonder see I feasts entrancing,
But in my prophetic soul,
Hear I now the God advancing,
Who will steep in tears the bowl!"

"And they blame my lamentation,
And they laugh my grief to scorn;
To the haunts of desolation
I must bear my woes forlorn.
All who happy are, now shun me,
And my tears with laughter see;
Heavy lies thy hand upon me,
Cruel Pythian deity!"

"Thy divine decrees foretelling,
Wherefore hast thou thrown me here,
Where the ever-blind are dwelling,
With a mind, alas, too clear?
Wherefore hast thou power thus given,
What must needs occur to know?
Wrought must be the will of Heaven--
Onward come the hour of woe!"

"When impending fate strikes terror,
Why remove the covering?
Life we have alone in error,
Knowledge with it death must bring.
Take away this prescience tearful,
Take this sight of woe from me;
Of thy truths, alas! how fearful
'Tis the mouthpiece frail to be!"

"Veil my mind once more in slumbers
Let me heedlessly rejoice;
Never have I sung glad numbers
Since I've been thy chosen voice.
Knowledge of the future giving,
Thou hast stolen the present day,
Stolen the moment's joyous living,--
Take thy false gift, then, away!"

"Ne'er with bridal train around me,
Have I wreathed my radiant brow,
Since to serve thy fane I bound me--
Bound me with a solemn vow.
Evermore in grief I languish--
All my youth in tears was spent;
And with thoughts of bitter anguish
My too-feeling heart is rent."

"Joyously my friends are playing,
All around are blest and glad,
In the paths of pleasure straying,--
My poor heart alone is sad.
Spring in vain unfolds each treasure,
Filling all the earth with bliss;
Who in life can e'er take pleasure,
When is seen its dark abyss?"

"With her heart in vision burning,
Truly blest is Polyxene,
As a bride to clasp him yearning.
Him, the noblest, best Hellene!
And her breast with rapture swelling,
All its bliss can scarcely know;
E'en the Gods in heavenly dwelling
Envying not, when dreaming so."

"He to whom my heart is plighted
Stood before my ravished eye,
And his look, by passion lighted,
Toward me turned imploringly.
With the loved one, oh, how gladly
Homeward would I take my flight
But a Stygian shadow sadly
Steps between us every night."

"Cruel Proserpine is sending
All her spectres pale to me;
Ever on my steps attending
Those dread shadowy forms I see.
Though I seek, in mirth and laughter
Refuge from that ghastly train,
Still I see them hastening after,--
Ne'er shall I know joy again."

"And I see the death-steel glancing,
And the eye of ****** glare;
On, with hasty strides advancing,
Terror haunts me everywhere.
Vain I seek alleviation;--
Knowing, seeing, suffering all,
I must wait the consummation,
In a foreign land must fall."

While her solemn words are ringing,
Hark! a dull and wailing tone
From the temple's gate upspringing,--
Dead lies Thetis' mighty son!
Eris shakes her snake-locks hated,
Swiftly flies each deity,
And o'er Ilion's walls ill-fated
Thunder-clouds loom heavily!)

When the Gestapoes get impatient
We shall not climb down to walk on earth
Because by this time  of utopia
Thespis and Muse the gods of poetry
Would have given us the wings to fly
To fly high over England, I and schiller
We shall not land any where in London
Nor perch to any of the English tree
Wales, Scotland, Ireland and Thales
We shall not land there in these lands
The waters of river Thames we shall not drink
We shall fly higher over England
The queen of England we shall not commune
For she is my lender; has lend me the language
English language in which I am chanting
My dystopic songs, poor me! What a cacotopia!
If she takes her language away from
I will remain poetically dead
In the Universe of art and culture
I will form a huge palimpsest of African poetry
Friedrich son of schiller please understand me
Let us not land in England lest I loose
My borrowed tools of worker back to the owner,
But instead let us fly higher in to the azure
The zenith of the sky where the eagles never dare
And call the English bard
through  our high shrilled eagle’s contralto
William Shakespeare to come up
In the English sky; to our treat of poetic blitzkrieg
Please dear schiller we shall tell the bard of London
To come up with his three Luftwaffe
These will be; the deer he stole from the rich farmer
Once when he was a lad in the rural house of john the father,
Second in order is the Hamlet the price of Denmark
Thirdly is  his beautiful song of the **** of lucrece,
We shall ask the bard to return back the deer to the owner
Three of ourselves shall enjoy together dystopia in Hamlet
And ask Shakespeare to sing for us his song
In which he saw a man **** Lucrece; the **** of Lucrece;

( From the besieged Ardea all in post,
Borne by the trustless wings of false desire,
Lust-breathed Tarquin leaves the Roman host,
And to Collatium bears the lightless fire
Which, in pale embers hid, lurks to aspire
  And girdle with embracing flames the waist
  Of Collatine's fair love, Lucrece the chaste.

Haply that name of chaste unhapp'ly set
This bateless edge on his keen appetite;
When Collatine unwisely did not let
To praise the clear unmatched red and white
Which triumph'd in that sky of his delight,
  Where mortal stars, as bright as heaven's beauties,
  With pure aspects did him peculiar duties.

For he the night before, in Tarquin's tent,
Unlock'd the treasure of his happy state;
What priceless wealth the heavens had him lent
In the possession of his beauteous mate;
Reckoning his fortune at such high-proud rate,
  That kings might be espoused to more fame,
  But king nor peer to such a peerless dame.

O happiness enjoy'd but of a few!
And, if possess'd, as soon decay'd and done
As is the morning's silver-melting dew
Against the golden splendour of the sun!
An expir'd date, cancell'd ere well begun:
  Honour and beauty, in the owner's arms,
  Are weakly fortress'd from a world of harms.

Beauty itself doth of itself persuade
The eyes of men without an orator;
What needeth then apologies be made,
To set forth that which is so singular?
Or why is Collatine the publisher
  Of that rich jewel he should keep unknown
  From thievish ears, because it is his own?

Perchance his boast of Lucrece' sovereignty
Suggested this proud issue of a king;
For by our ears our hearts oft tainted be:
Perchance that envy of so rich a thing,
Braving compare, disdainfully did sting
  His high-pitch'd thoughts, that meaner men should vaunt
  That golden hap which their superiors want)

  
I and Schiller we shall be the audience
When Shakespeare will echo
The enemies of beauty as
It is weakly protected in the arms of Othello.

I and Schiller we don’t know places in Greece
But Shakespeare’s mother comes from Greece
And Shakespeare’s wife comes from Athens
Shakespeare thus knows Greece like Pericles,
We shall not land anywhere on the way
But straight we shall be let
By Shakespeare to Greece
Into the inner chamber of calypso
Lest the Cyclopes eat us whole meal
We want to redeem Homer from the
Love detention camp of calypso
Where he has dallied nine years in the wilderness
Wilderness of love without reaching home
I will ask Homer to introduce me
To Muse, Clio and Thespis
The three spiritualities of poetry
That gave Homer powers to graft the epics
Of Iliad and Odyssey centerpieces of Greece dystopia
I will ask Homer to chant and sing for us the epical
Songs of love, Grecian cradle of utopia
Where Cyclopes thrive on heavyweight cacotopia
Please dear Homer kindly sing for us;
(Thus through the livelong day to the going down of the sun we
feasted our fill on meat and drink, but when the sun went down and
it came on dark, we camped upon the beach. When the child of
morning, rosy-fingered Dawn, appeared, I bade my men on board and
loose the hawsers. Then they took their places and smote the grey
sea with their oars; so we sailed on with sorrow in our hearts, but
glad to have escaped death though we had lost our comrades)
                                  
From Greece to Africa the short route  is via India
The sub continent of India where humanity
Flocks like the oceans of women and men
The land in which Romesh Tulsi
Grafted Ramayana and Mahabharata
The handbook of slavery and caste prejudice
The land in which Gujarat Indian tongue
In the cheeks of Rabidranathe Tagore
Was awarded a Poetical honour
By Alfred Nobel minus any Nemesis
From the land of Scandinavia,
I will implore Tagore to sing for me
The poem which made Nobel to give him a prize
I will ask Tagore to sing in English
The cacotopia and utopia that made India
An oversized dystopia that man has ever seen,
Tagore sing please Tagore sing for me your beggarly heat;

(When the heart is hard and parched up,
come upon me with a shower of mercy.

When grace is lost from life,
come with a burst of song.

When tumultuous work raises its din on all sides shutting me out from
beyond, come to me, my lord of silence, with thy peace and rest.

When my beggarly heart sits crouched, shut up in a corner,
break open the door, my king, and come with the ceremony of a king.

When desire blinds the mind with delusion and dust, O thou holy one,
thou wakeful, come with thy light and thy thunder)



The heart of beggar must be
A hard heart for it to glorify in the art of begging,

I don’t like begging
This is knot my heart suffered
From my childhood experience
I saw my mother
Every night before I go to bed
I turn off the lights to kneel and pray
and looking up to our vast galaxies
I beseech them god's with hands clasped
please, I don't want to come back a frenchman

Oh I have nothing against them
just don't want to be one
most of them talk like....
well like they have a mouthful of phlegm
so I don't want to come back as a frenchman

The french language is utterly banal
it's like the poor ******* are punch drunk
so what ever happens to this poor sod
I pray to the god's
anything but a frenchman

By Christos Andreas Kourtis aka NeonSolaris
Well I am certainly not going to Paris for a while after that write ...lol
Mateuš Conrad Jul 2018
.    like cardinal Leto remarked, having received news from Versailles... why is it always the ******* French?

perhaps in a less crude manner,
drinking wine,
while eating raw fruits -

  always a bad combination...
no *****, no meat?
   bad idea... wine, and raw fruit
akin to strawberries?
    irritable bowel movements...

- and that's because Einstein
didn't discover the concept of
gravity, in the format of: sideways?
in the form of orbits?
   expansive waves...
   that allowed for the elliptical interpretation?
like the old
              argument:
      (heliocentric) oval...
             contra the (geocentric) circular
"concern" for...
   whatever is up / down
            sideways in
      the Copernican terminology...
because there was ever a "shape"
concerning the universe,
  and not a medium,
            an extraction for the metaphor
for water,
   gas, liquid, solid...
              and the fourth aspect
of ancient elements:
   its existence in a vacuous "space"?

- but i can't fathom the French at this point...
once upon a time...
one Frenchman equated the motivation
for a "summa summarum"
    to be bound with a thinking,
and a curiosity...

            the current fashion of Latin
abbreviations...
   this... cogito ergo sum?
   it's nonsense...
    speak it long enough...
   and you'll find yourself inclined
to suppose that cogitans per se:
is a motivation, an impetus to exist...
yet... so much of thought it "wasted"
or, rather, to craft an impetus to
"doubt", within the confines of fiction...
but the motivation has lost its
origin within the confines of doubt,
and has been replaced by
the Freudian unconscious,
   a serialized phobia fest... notably
including a, clown...

originally, thought (per se) was
a secondary motivational outlet
that precipitated into being...
    first came... doubt...
   but... these days?
               doubt is a conspiracy theory,
no longer an emotional thrill
to prop-up thinking...
   and we have the French existentialists
to thank for this...
for they subverted their own
idea...

             negation has replaced doubt
as the origin, and motivation
for thinking...
        yet... this sort of "thinking",
has made, its materialization, so, so...
obscene...
    i can hardly find it surprising while
i took to propping two worthwhile
economic outlets...
   prostitution (since they will spend
the money i give them...
on things... i wouldn't even care
for propping up)...

    and... alcohol (scotch whiskey,
russian standard *****...
    shveedish cider...
                     german beer)...

but how can you even claim an existence,
if...
       there is no thrill...
of what is the secular expression of faith:
i.e. doubt?
  how can you replace doubt -
a motivation for thinking, materialized
into being... with negation?
  jean-paul Sartre attempted this inversion -

doubt has been replaced with negation
in his system...
             it's like that cliche of an English
1960s ***-joke / ***-like...
       this... frivolity over a blatant lie...
a lie so... bogus...
    so ineffectual in translating a hidden truth
that... you allow it...
   to care for the cheap comic aspect
of the execution...

but how can the French suddenly
feign to disbelieve their secularism -
   resorting to the antithesis,
namely:

  original

  doubt motivates thinking,
  which subsequently motivates
   being within the confines of reason,
or rather, reasonableness...

20th century existentialists

negation "motifs" thinking,
   which subsequently motifs
"being" within the freedom of non-reason,
or rather, unreasonableness...

   and by negation,
   i don't mean the atomic conceived softening
blow...
   akin to: dis-ease...
    i.e. (as i explained it to one old man
in a park, walking his dog):
  a negation, or ease... a denial of...

how can the Cartesian model work,
when the 20th century French existentialists
began with the presupposition:

   i deny, i think, therefore i exist?
where is the original thrill of
the secular aspect of faith, within the boundaries
of doubt?
              gone... vanished!
****! a **** on the London tube,
during the rush hour,
  during the heatwave
                of the past month!

                   perhaps this only comes
as a method of assimilating an increased population,
within the confines of the Taoist maxim:
the best way to aid the world,
is to forget the world, and let the world
forget about you...

             perhaps... the Andy Warhol 15 minutes
analogy...
      that in order to encompass the individual,
the world, and the individual within it...
   the approach had to change
from the original, exciting, exploration
genesis of thought, bound to the genesis
of doubt...
             having to be replaced by
a genesis of denial...
      the second tier of a secular society...
    the zeitgeist of Herr Censor...
to filter through what we see so often,
faces, bodies...
  but would be much more comfortable
having been bound to Plato's cave,
         of complete shadow theater...

perhaps... but the original tier of
secular societies' alternative to church prescribed
articles of faith...
                     to have replaced
the thrill of doubt...
      with this... Byzantine pillar of denial
as motivational groundwork for
thinking impetus
   that becomes an article of being?
am i the only one to see the frustration,
how, people abhor their being,
being founded upon an act of denial,
rather than an act of doubt?

     the once thrilling maybe (gnostic):
   has become the stale, "i don't know"
    (agnostic) - as if... people can't tell you
whether zebras have stripes!
   where there was once an article
of secular faith (doubt) -
   now?
                        there's not even that!

p.s.
  there has to be a much needed new mantra,
all publicity: is bad publicity -
unless of course you're riding that
fame juggernaut and are paying
for your all-inclusive status akin
   to madonna: since fame dies off
and you, none-the-less invest in the momentum...

one day where i drink a bottle of wine,
half a liter of whiskey,
   and i'm apparently not "screaming" in
my sleep from the heat,
the whole, "apparently", as i retorted:
at 5:15am? i was alseep! i was asleep!
how can i stop screaming in my sleep
like a banshee:
the sleeper and the blind man both see
eye to eye regarding the future to come...

one day without engaging in internet
content: of my own accord,
next day? this... this... lethargy builds
up in me... i end up thinking:
i can't do this any more,
this insomnia culture globalism of
24h news reels is tirying me,
i pick up the sunday newspaper
which i found to be respecteable...
the sunday times,
  i peer into the magazines...
toxic masculinity,
    desire: what three women want...
i'm bored...
well more tired than bored,
bored-tired...
                 what women want:
what an exhausting question...
**** fantasy, beta-male provideer...
yada-yada-yada...
                    
    the only relaxing aspect of the day
(apart from the shade) is watching
england beat india in the cricket...
i always loved cricket sport terminology:
50 overs... innings...
wickets... 6 throws of the ball in an over...
the rest? i'm no atlas...
i don't like the world crashing in on
me with all its problems...
not because i don't have the right
advice to give,
but i remember the most modern secular
motto about giving advice borrowed
from Athos of the creation of alexandre dumas:

the best advice? to not give advice...
you cannot be held accountable
for giving bad advice: and people complaining,
or good advice and leaving
people in your sphere of influence...
asking for more - non verbatim... of course...

second categorical imperative?
tao...
              the best way you can help
the world: is to forget the world,
and let the world forget you...

                        you only need two absolute
maxim vectors to orientate yourself
in this world,
a third is nice, but: it can be kept loose...
at least two on a tight leash...

but one night spent drinking,
not writing anything:
and i am... spent!

                            the boogieman of england's
persistent complaints...
the muslims are not integrating,
the english: we should give them more
ground...
           o.k., o.k.... joe peshi in the role
leo getz in lethal weapon II...
            i too had to integrate!
i said: like **** if you think i'll give up
my native tongue when spoken in private...
you're not getting it...
i'll spreschen ihre zunge, no problem,
i'll even write you pwetty free verses to boot!
but, guess what?
  i will not force you to eat my
sauerkraut, my schnitzels,
                           my smoked sausages,
my raw herrings etc.,
                      integration does not work
within the confines of: pampering to a people
expected to meet you half-way...
what happened when the polonaise attempted
to meet the english half-way?
brexit...
oh come on guv'... is there a ******* tram
echoing its way out of my eye
when you peer into it while i attach
an index finger to the bottom lid to give
you a clearer picture?
           25 years in england: no englush girlfriend:
i guess all the english girls just love, just love love
being ***** by 9 pakistanis
daubed in gasoline...
                   hey: they **** thrill...

i'm tired of the weakness of the english,
the humpty-dumpty nature they are imposing,
self-cencorship,
    appeasing, like neville chamberlain...
bringing back the munich agreement...
not on a piece of paper,
instead... waving a scrap of a toilet roll...
so the english could wipe their own *****
on the promises of the germans...
if this really hurts the northern monkies...
guess how much it hurts the sourthern fairies...
(well... fairy, is a designated region surrounding
devon, bristol, hardly a ******* fairy in essex)...

   why am i foreigner and i share
the same nausea of the natives,
                     exhausted by the narratives?
i guess the english didn't like the polonaise:
but the polonaise are to blame...
came here with a list of benefits they could claim:
without having even lived 5 years among
the natives... housing benefits, child benefits...
believe me: the polonaise are the only
people in the world that hate each other...
to the extent of citing bitter criticisms...
whenever i pass through warsaw to see my grandparents
i am gripped with a sickness:
this homogeneity is too much for me...
shove me back into the east end of London...
too much of the same genetic material...
and that's when the language i am keeping
(seemingly for vanity reasons) fizzles out
into your basic encounter and that basic reminder
that circa 40 million speak it too,
better or worse, but they speak it...

of all the festivals? download...
                                   i wish...
    glastonbury?       not my thing...
kylie? i'll concede: slow? live, with instruments,
rather than the studio original...
wasn't that a cover of
   bowie's fashion?
                  sure as hell sounded similar...
but i heard the cure were playing...
so while writing my father's invoice
i made myself a paperclip bracelet...
   i figured... "let's just pretend to be there"...
and no, the 1980s weren't that bad when
it comes to music,
not now, by comparison...
the cure's kiss me, kiss me, kiss me (1987)
release?
one of those rare albums you can
listen to akin to reading a book...

                       but there's still that persisting
exhaustion... i came from under communism,
from under the iron curtain,
but at least there was the economic aspect
of communism involved...

   only today i watched the story
of the terrible inversion of english jursprudence,
i.e.: guilty until proven innocent...
the 1975 case of the silesian vampire...
an innocent man was hanged...
the original vampire?
    smashed his wive's head in,
then his childrens', then he set himself
on fire...
              then again: the tragedy of those
rare cases of being presumed guilty
rather than innocent...
then the reverse: presumed innocent rather
than guilty and getting away with it,
through the parody of death
and the non existent god...

   there could not be anything more exhausting
than communism without a communist
economic model...
this current state of affairs in the west:
cultural marxism and the yet to be discovered
antithesis of cultural darwinism...

i'll use the cartesian chirality for a moment:
sum ergo cogito...
i don't like using political terms...
but... liberal (classical) - i don't even know
what sort of thinking goes into the label -
in the east? the liberals are exhausted
by a resurgent nationalism within
   the newly acquired capitalist system...
in the west? the liberals are exhausted
by an insurgent communism within
an ageing capitalist system...

         on a side: seriously, why even bother
engaging in any sort of "public intellectual"
debates when the public are only
discussing two books: 1984 and brave new world...
**** it, might as well talk to a camel jockey
who only own and rides the waves of
time in this world only using one...
muhammad...
   whom Khadija **** Khuwaylid
would probably whip into his young
respectable shape...

                  and this is how Ezra Pound comes
into rememberance:
usura... at least the muslims do not
play into the game of usury:
of interest... borrow a quid,
pay back £2.33...
            that's the only way you can
gain respect of the muslims:
if they truly were the money lenders
of this world: which they aren't...
unless a newly blessed...

   among the philistines and the proselytes...
england is such a tiresome project,
even on the outskirts of London...
i'm being dragged down by this intervention
of marxism: on a whim,
on a whimsical projection...
of "adding" values...
            
           communism would have worked...
in exceptional circumstances...
poland... circa 1945 - 1990...
syria: the current year...
  to whatever year is demanded...
exceptional as in: war torn...
where was the marshall plan
   for poland, when there was one
for sweden (neutral) and switzerland
(also neutral)?!
        black youths bothered about
the summer holidays,
having to live in council flats,
  concrete goliaths...
           want to know what it feels like
when entire cities are like council
estates,
with only pockets of remaining
   free-standing houses among
overshadowing council flats?
                                    nee bother...
sure... in a country where:
the house is the castle and there's a labyrinth
of castles constituting outer suburbia...
balconies... that's what the soviet
models had... balconies...
where women could grow flowers...
concrete staccato gardens in the sky...
the blocks of flats in england
didn't have balconies (sky gardens,
          esp. the early ones, massive fault)...
i spent one summer reading
bertnard russell's history of western philosophy...
lying in my grandparent's balcony,
in the shade...
watching passerbys among
          the barking dogs of the neighbours...

one day, one ******* day!
   and i'm already exhausted from the castrato
english narrative...
pandering to the people you expected
to integrate...
  no! you're not changing your standards...
your standards are perfectly reasonable!
i'm tired of the english pandering
to the sort of people who, will, not,
integrate!
               i integrated in a way
of respecting both the english culture,
as well as hiding / preserving my own...
why don't i just do the following:
   pisać po polsku?
                      like some czesław miłosz?

ah... good point... at what point
is the standard of integration appreciated?
when nothing is preserved?
surely integration is supposed to
accommodate some variation
of preservation?
     i might add: that's a fine line...
preserve all? no integration...
preserve some? integration...
                    preserve none? no integration...
food is a cheap target to example
with...
                   it's a low hanging fruit...
given that even i find indian cuisine
   the most superior in the world...
food is a cheap target concerning integration...
but the niqab?
  when the local english authorities
are employing face-recognition
technology and when testing it...
are forcing people to uncover their faces,
subsequently arresting them out of protest...
but not the women wearing the niqab...
out of? out of what?
   a secular society shouldn't be allowed
to discriminate against any religion...
it should discriminate against: all religions!

                isn't that what the secular ideology
is all about? the... softcore version
of soviet atheism?
        secularism of the west (miltary-industrial
complex)...
"vs." soviet atheism of the east
  (scientific-industrial complex)...
           i'm still so ******* tired
               of this bogus trap of "necessary"
                       commentary.
ALEXANDER K OPICHO

(Eldoret, Kenya;aopicho@yahoo.com)

Poetry is a network of rivers
One river flowing into another
A big river into a small river
A small river into a big one
Some rivers are dead in the catacombs
Others are rapidly flowing down
And up their course making noisy
Roaring waterfalls and poetic whirlpools
Full of the ripple circumlocution as
The whirlwind of gales in the harmattan
And this is the spirit of poetry.

I will sing the songs of Schiller
Hugo, Shakespeare the bard
Alexander Pushkin and Mayakovski,
Homer and Dante the Frenchman son of Maugham
And Dante the Italian father of the divine comedy,
I will sing their songs as they are European rivulets
Of poetry flowing into huge water masses
Of African poemocracy in which
The poetic dystopia is clearly
Couched in the gears of black and white.

I will sing and chant the songs of India
Land of Tagore by shouting his name
Rabitranathe Tagore! Sing for me
The ways of the Indian baby
Your Indian voice is mellifluous like the
Zulu ****** dances Song in full watch
Of King Mswati with dint of libido.

I will sing the songs of revolution
From Bolivia and Chile, neighbours
Of Mexico and Brazil; Brazil in which
Pablo Neruda the dog burrier is a religion
In which was born Paul Freire who forgot
To sing for the world chants and the songs
Of pedagogy of the dystopian poet
Pedagogy of the utopian thespian
Pedagogy of the dystopian bourgeoisie
Pedagogy of the cacotopian capitalist
And pedagogy of the utopian Marxists
Who are mealy mouthied with mutton in  between their ears
Manufacturing and venting dystopian phantasmagoria
I will sing.

Poetry is the river Nile of Africa
Cradling from Uganda at Entebbe
Flowing to Egypt into the Mediterranean Sea
Leaving the statue of Mahatma Gandhi at the cradle
Chanting the pearls of the satyagra
That; in God there is truth and
In truth there is God,
As poetry of Nile flows upwards
Not carrying only poems of love
Or bourgeoisie cosmetic Haikus
Singing carols of summer and Christmas day
But its poetic fluvial is washing away
The heavy social **** of Globalectics
Fearing Pushkin and his love
Shakespeare and his **** of Lucrece
Vladimir Mayakovski and
His slap in the face of public taste,
Schiller and his Cassandra
Master Homer and his Odysseus Iliad
Mocking in an ugly  snook
The Albatross book of the English verse
In tune with Yeats and Rudyard Kipling
Reversing the stanzas to sing of
The world as the Whiteman’s burden.

I will sing everyman and his *****
Every woman and her *******
Every ****** and her flower
I will sing them all and their names
And duties of roles pertinent
In healing the world, abode of mankind
From the impish Mr. Hide of cacotopian streak
To pave way for the saintly Dr. Jekyll
To lull man to sleep in his Cinderella
Of social utopia
As Robert Louis Stevenson
Holds the world a stage
Of dystopia.



Thank you for your audience!
Foreigners are people somewhere else,
Natives are people at home;
If the place you’re at
Is your habitat,
You’re a foreigner, say in Rome.
But the scales of Justice balance true,
And *** leads into tat,
So the man who’s at home
When he stays in Rome
Is abroad when he’s where you’re at.

When we leave the limits of the land in which
Our birth certificates sat us,
It does not mean
Just a change of scene,
But also a change of status.
The Frenchman with his fetching beard,
The Scot with his kilt and sporran,
One moment he
May a native be,
And the next may find him foreign.

There’s many a difference quickly found
Between the different races,
But the only essential
Differential
Is living different places.
Yet such is the pride of prideful man,
From Austrians to Australians,
That wherever he is,
He regards as his,
And the natives there, as aliens.

Oh, I’ll be friends if you’ll be friends,
The foreigner tells the native,
And we’ll work together for our common ends
Like a preposition and a dative.
If our common ends seem mostly mine,
Why not, you ignorant foreigner?
And the native replies
Contrariwise;
And hence, my dears, the coroner.

So mind your manners when a native, please,
And doubly when you visit
And between us all
A rapport may fall
Ecstatically exquisite.
One simple thought, if you have it pat,
Will eliminate the coroner:
You may be a native in your habitat,
But to foreigners you’re just a foreigner.
“Nullus enim locus sine genio est.”

  Servius.

“La musique,” says Marmontel, in those “Contes
Moraux” which in all our translations we have insisted upon
calling “Moral Tales,” as if in mockery of their
spirit—”la musique est le seul des talens qui
jouisse de lui-meme: tous les autres veulent des
temoins.” He here confounds the pleasure derivable from
sweet sounds with the capacity for creating them. No more
than any other talent, is that for music susceptible
of complete enjoyment where there is no second party to
appreciate its exercise; and it is only in common with other
talents that it produces effects which may be fully
enjoyed in solitude. The idea which the raconteur has
either failed to entertain clearly, or has sacrificed in its
expression to his national love of point, is
doubtless the very tenable one that the higher order of
music is the most thoroughly estimated when we are
exclusively alone. The proposition in this form will be
admitted at once by those who love the lyre for its own sake
and for its spiritual uses. But there is one pleasure still
within the reach of fallen mortality, and perhaps only one,
which owes even more than does music to the accessory
sentiment of seclusion. I mean the happiness experienced in
the contemplation of natural scenery. In truth, the man who
would behold aright the glory of God upon earth must in
solitude behold that glory. To me at least the presence, not
of human life only, but of life, in any other form than that
of the green things which grow upon the soil and are
voiceless, is a stain upon the landscape, is at war with the
genius of the scene. I love, indeed, to regard the dark
valleys, and the gray rocks, and the waters that silently
smile, and the forests that sigh in uneasy slumbers, and the
proud watchful mountains that look down upon all,—I
love to regard these as themselves but the colossal members
of one vast animate and sentient whole—a whole whose
form (that of the sphere) is the most perfect and most
inclusive of all; whose path is among associate planets;
whose meek handmaiden is the moon; whose mediate sovereign
is the sun; whose life is eternity; whose thought is that of
a god; whose enjoyment is knowledge; whose destinies are
lost in immensity; whose cognizance of ourselves is akin
with our own cognizance of the animalculae which
infest the brain, a being which we in consequence regard as
purely inanimate and material, much in the same manner as
these animalculae must thus regard us.

Our telescopes and our mathematical investigations assure us
on every hand, notwithstanding the cant of the more ignorant
of the priesthood, that space, and therefore that bulk, is
an important consideration in the eyes of the Almighty. The
cycles in which the stars move are those best adapted for
the evolution, without collision, of the greatest possible
number of bodies. The forms of those bodies are accurately
such as within a given surface to include the greatest
possible amount of matter; while the surfaces themselves are
so disposed as to accommodate a denser population than could
be accommodated on the same surfaces otherwise arranged. Nor
is it any argument against bulk being an object with God
that space itself is infinite; for there may be an infinity
of matter to fill it; and since we see clearly that the
endowment of matter with vitality is a principle—
indeed, as far as our judgments extend, the leading
principle in the operations of Deity, it is scarcely logical
to imagine it confined to the regions of the minute, where
we daily trace it, and not extending to those of the august.
As we find cycle within cycle without end, yet all revolving
around one far-distant centre which is the Godhead, may we
not analogically suppose, in the same manner, life within
life, the less within the greater, and all within the Spirit
Divine? In short, we are madly erring through self-esteem in
believing man, in either his temporal or future destinies,
to be of more moment in the universe than that vast “clod of
the valley” which he tills and contemns, and to which he
denies a soul, for no more profound reason than that he does
not behold it in operation.

These fancies, and such as these, have always given to my
meditations among the mountains and the forests, by the
rivers and the ocean, a tinge of what the every-day world
would not fail to term the fantastic. My wanderings amid
such scenes have been many and far-searching, and often
solitary; and the interest with which I have strayed through
many a dim deep valley, or gazed into the reflected heaven
of many a bright lake, has been an interest greatly deepened
by the thought that I have strayed and gazed alone.
What flippant Frenchman was it who said, in allusion to the
well known work of Zimmermann, that “la solitude est une
belle chose; mais il faut quelqu’un pour vous dire que la
solitude est une belle chose”? The epigram cannot be
gainsaid; but the necessity is a thing that does not exist.

It was during one of my lonely journeyings, amid a far
distant region of mountain locked within mountain, and sad
rivers and melancholy tarns writhing or sleeping within all,
that I chanced upon a certain rivulet and island. I came
upon them suddenly in the leafy June, and threw myself upon
the turf beneath the branches of an unknown odorous shrub,
that I might doze as I contemplated the scene. I felt that
thus only should I look upon it, such was the character of
phantasm which it wore.

On all sides, save to the west where the sun was about
sinking, arose the verdant walls of the forest. The little
river which turned sharply in its course, and was thus
immediately lost to sight, seemed to have no exit from its
prison, but to be absorbed by the deep green foliage of the
trees to the east; while in the opposite quarter (so it
appeared to me as I lay at length and glanced upward) there
poured down noiselessly and continuously into the valley a
rich golden and crimson waterfall from the sunset fountains
of the sky.

About midway in the short vista which my dreamy vision took
in, one small circular island, profusely verdured, reposed
upon the ***** of the stream.

So blended bank and shadow there, That each seemed pendulous
in air—

so mirror-like was the glassy water, that it was scarcely
possible to say at what point upon the ***** of the emerald
turf its crystal dominion began. My position enabled me to
include in a single view both the eastern and western
extremities of the islet, and I observed a singularly-marked
difference in their aspects. The latter was all one radiant
harem of garden beauties. It glowed and blushed beneath the
eye of the slant sunlight, and fairly laughed with flowers.
The grass was short, springy, sweet-scented, and Asphodel-
interspersed. The trees were lithe, mirthful, *****, bright,
slender, and graceful, of eastern figure and foliage, with
bark smooth, glossy, and parti-colored. There seemed a deep
sense of life and joy about all, and although no airs blew
from out the heavens, yet everything had motion through the
gentle sweepings to and fro of innumerable butterflies, that
might have been mistaken for tulips with wings.

The other or eastern end of the isle was whelmed in the
blackest shade. A sombre, yet beautiful and peaceful gloom,
here pervaded all things. The trees were dark in color and
mournful in form and attitude— wreathing themselves
into sad, solemn, and spectral shapes, that conveyed ideas
of mortal sorrow and untimely death. The grass wore the deep
tint of the cypress, and the heads of its blades hung
droopingly, and hither and thither among it were many small
unsightly hillocks, low and narrow, and not very long, that
had the aspect of graves, but were not, although over and
all about them the rue and the rosemary clambered. The
shades of the trees fell heavily upon the water, and seemed
to bury itself therein, impregnating the depths of the
element with darkness. I fancied that each shadow, as the
sun descended lower and lower, separated itself sullenly
from the trunk that gave it birth, and thus became absorbed
by the stream, while other shadows issued momently from the
trees, taking the place of their predecessors thus entombed.

This idea having once seized upon my fancy greatly excited
it, and I lost myself forthwith in reverie. “If ever island
were enchanted,” said I to myself, “this is it. This is the
haunt of the few gentle Fays who remain from the wreck of
the race. Are these green tombs theirs?—or do they
yield up their sweet lives as mankind yield up their own? In
dying, do they not rather waste away mournfully, rendering
unto God little by little their existence, as these trees
render up shadow after shadow, exhausting their substance
unto dissolution? What the wasting tree is to the water that
imbibes its shade, growing thus blacker by what it preys
upon, may not the life of the Fay be to the death which
engulfs it?”

As I thus mused, with half-shut eyes, while the sun sank
rapidly to rest, and eddying currents careered round and
round the island, bearing upon their ***** large dazzling
white flakes of the bark of the sycamore, flakes which, in
their multiform positions upon the water, a quick
imagination might have converted into anything it pleased;
while I thus mused, it appeared to me that the form of one
of those very Fays about whom I had been pondering, made its
way slowly into the darkness from out the light at the
western end of the island. She stood ***** in a singularly
fragile canoe, and urged it with the mere phantom of an oar.
While within the influence of the lingering sunbeams, her
attitude seemed indicative of joy, but sorrow deformed it as
she passed within the shade. Slowly she glided along, and at
length rounded the islet and re-entered the region of light.
“The revolution which has just been made by the Fay,”
continued I musingly, “is the cycle of the brief year of her
life. She has floated through her winter and through her
summer. She is a year nearer unto death: for I did not fail
to see that as she came into the shade, her shadow fell from
her, and was swallowed up in the dark water, making its
blackness more black.”

And again the boat appeared and the Fay, but about the
attitude of the latter there was more of care and
uncertainty and less of elastic joy. She floated again from
out the light and into the gloom (which deepened momently),
and again her shadow fell from her into the ebony water, and
became absorbed into its blackness. And again and again she
made the circuit of the island (while the sun rushed down to
his slumbers), and at each issuing into the light there was
more sorrow about her person, while it grew feebler and far
fainter and more indistinct, and at each passage into the
gloom there fell from her a darker shade, which became
whelmed in a shadow more black. But at length, when the sun
had utterly departed, the Fay, now the mere ghost of her
former self, went disconsolately with her boat into the
region of the ebony flood, and that she issued thence at all
I cannot say, for darkness fell over all things, and I
beheld her magical figure no more.
Andrew T Apr 2016
Wimbledon’s playing on the TV in the living room. Dad and I are watching on the sofa.

In the kitchen, Mom cuts carrots and cucumbers with a long blade. She slices the vegetables one by one. Orange pieces. Green pieces.

I glance over Mom chops up the carrots and cucumbers without a cutting board, taking each long carrot and cucumber and slices it with precision, as though she’s a professional like the film with Natalie Portman and Jean Reno.

But she’s not a little girl and she’s not a Frenchman. She’s like a mix-in-between, like the asphalt in our driveway and the grass sprouting in between the cracks.

Dad is a computer engineer. He used to be an artist. Used to study technical drawing in a university in Saigon.

He met mom when he was working on a play. She was the lead actress. Shakespeare had said, “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts, his acts being seven ages.”

He’s right, but right now I can’t tell what act I’m in. Dad focuses on the TV. Watches Federer and Djokovic, his eyes, darting from left to right like the mood of a young boy that crosses back and forth from light to dark, and back again.

Blade in hand, Mom makes longer and deeper cuts across the cucumber, cutting away the skin, leaving deep cuts in the vegetable. Dad turns his head towards her, his neck cracking like the forehand swung by Federer.

He clears his throat, softly, soft as gas leaking out from a stovetop from a studio apartment, like the scene in Fight Club, a match about to be struck.

Mom sets the blade down on the table, and bites her lip. Her nostrils flare. I press down on the couch arm, and stand up, my head bent, my eyes wandering to the doorway.
mark john junor May 2016
the painting was literal
figure hunched walking a dirt road in rain
its hues and tone spoke
mute but vividly
each brush stroke matched the images birthplace
in the authors crippled heart

each leaf a burnished gold of autumn
each a dying fragment of the withered tree
even the mans footprints in muddy soil
one can almost feel the squalid mud underfoot
his uniform and helmet named him a frenchmen
from the great war
his boots rendered with bloodstain

figure hunched walking dirt road in rain
a great dying had come to france that day
swords drawn they charged into deaths embrace
this man and his comrades in this awful place

the painting hangs in some museum
an awkward moment for the viewer
is he going into the storm of battle
or going home after
the tale is left untold
it is just the tale of a man on a road in the rain
a frenchmen in the world war
a lone figure in rain
re-write of old piece
Queso Jun 2012
‘Twas but a rare, snowy day in Paris,
a January day, as all the lights of the city
rested, as dancers of the Moulin Rouge
fixed their make up during the intermission

And in the graveyard of Père Lachaise
there stood a solitary figure of an old man,
his hands gathered together politely,
in front, clenching on to a tattered flat cap

The man stood in front of a grey wall,
“a tomb without a cross or chapel,
or golden lilies, or sky-blue church windows,”
but with an equally lonesome little plaque
that read, ‘Aux mort de la commune,
21 28 Mai 1871’

He lit a cigarette, from which he took just one puff,
stuck it upside-down on a patch of dirt,
then notwithstanding the thunderstorm
of camera flashes from Japanese tourists,
he started to sing, with a hoarse yet firm voice,
“Debout, les damnés de la terre,
Debout, les forçats de la faim…”

As the wrinkle on his forehead began to stretch,
the dusty particles of ice piled higher and higher
on neighboring graves commemorating
French members of the International Brigades
and Spanish maquis of the French Resistance
-apparently the 3,400 meters height of Pyrenees
was merely a backyard *****
for ideas and fates to tread over barefooted-

His song was a ballad of unrequited passion;
when he got to the chorus about some final struggle
and the unity of human race in a silly hymn,
a song that was never played on a radio,
for which no cool kid would ever
spend $0.99 on iTunes store,
his voice started cracking in amorous choke

The old man was a lifetime lover
in the truest spirit of a Frenchman,
spent all his life trying to charm a girl named Emma Ries,
and whenever he dreamed of holding
the eloquently bruised hands of that sixteen years old seamstress,
his eyes swelled of nostalgic heart,

And he used to cry joyfully,
dropping tears of bullets back in the days,
whether by the guillotine in Place de la Concorde,
behind the barricades of Belleville amidst the cannonballs,
******* in front of the Gestapo firing squads,
or under the truncheons of gendarme in Quartier Latin

As the expired old ******* moaned wet dreams,
hallucinogic delusions of his bygone youth, however,
the chilly, soggy winter of 20th arrodissement piled on,
the ashen slums of Ménilmontant depressingly ugly as always
with brownish-grey molten snow spattered all over
the streets trotted by drug dealers and wife beaters,
and neither the fiery oratory of Maurice Thorez
nor the sanguine grenade of Colonel Fabien
was around to arson the frost into the proletarian spring

In the same winter that the old man sang
the first, only, and last lovesong of his life,
it had been more than two decades already
since the Berlin Wall had tumbled down
and the ruling parties in Greece and Spain,
both socialists,
had just driven 500,000 workers out of their jobs

-J.P. Proudhon, Marx and Engels, Jean Jaures, V.I. Lenin,
Leon Trotsky, Antonio Gramsci, Leon Blum, Abbie Hoffman-
by the time the old man muttered an old pop-song nobody cared for,
all of those names were as relevant as some Medieval knights,
characters from an obscure chronicle centuries ago,
who died by charging horseback into windmills,
mistaking them for giants that held whom they thought as
a princess of an ugly peasant woman,

Eventually, right before his voice cracked
into an embarrassing fuddle of choked-up tears,
impressive for a seventy something years old,
the man finished the song from his memory,
all the way up to the sixth stanza;
yet the curvaceously splintered palm of a seamstress,
it was still so far away from his hands that’s been pleading
since 1871 for that glorious *******
which once stood so proudly in the face of a Czernowitz magistrate

When the cigarette he stuck upside down on the dirt
burned all the way down, he reached into his coat,
took out a rose, laid it softly, like his own infant child,
in front of the plaque which golden inscriptions
turned grey from unwashed grimes of ages
and as the old fool walked away,
his back turned away from the solemn wall,
there was but one little patch of dirt in the whole of Paris
uncovered by snow, still hoping for the spring to come.
Alan McClure Dec 2010
Marie, I remember the last time we met
it was right here in Paris and you were upset
by a big, burly Frenchman whose insolent tone
had reminded you how far you were from your home
"Now don't worry, darling," I said with a smile,
"We need only look out for ourselves for a while!"
But you angrily told me our love was a goner
unless I turned round and defended your honour.

Well the Frenchman in question was not a small man
he'd a dangerous eye and piratical tan
my nerve sprang a leak with no sign of a plumber
I started to shake like an aspen in summer
"No, no," I suggested, " - a coffee, and then
"We could stroll arm in arm on the banks of the Seine!"
But you stood and you shouted, demanding to see
how seriously you mattered to me
and shaking with rage you began to aver
I was less of a man than the nearest Pierre,
or Jean-Paul or Jean-Charles, or Pepe, or Jacques
you threatened to leave me and never come back
Well there's only so much that a coward can take
so I ******* up my courage and made my mistake.

I could see the man's back as he moved down the street
and I fondly imagined he beat his retreat
so I followed him down there to make the man see
what becomes of the ones who insult my Marie
But the colour drained from the Parisian crowds,
they seemed to be wearing funereal shrowds
I moved in slow-motion, caught the man's shoulder
He swung round and punched with a fist like a boulder
Planets and satellites buzzed round my head
then he danced on my rib-cage and left me for dead
But through the concussion I managed to see
You were standing beside him and laughing at me
Then taking his mutton-shaped fist in your arm
you helped him avoid an approaching gendarme
As darkness descended I managed to cry,
"Oh Marie, gay Paree will not be where I will die!"

Well it's taken me several years to recover
but I've traced you right back here, my treacherous lover
You're taking communion, don't know where I am
But I'm hunched at the back of the great Notre Dame,
And you cannot see me, but I can see you,
I'm not even sure what it is I will do,
but one thing is certain - revenge will be sweet,
You'll know how it feels to be left in the street
Losing consciousness under Parisian skies,
Oh Marie, gay Paree is the place where you will die!

So I creep up the aisle, approaching the altar,
my hands do not tremble, my steps do not falter
Clearing my throat, but before I can speak,
You spin on your heel and you wallop my cheek
where a stain starts to grow like the stain in the glass
And I stagger backwards and land on my ***
This cannot be happening, how could you attack?
You hit me again and I'm back on my back,
Now standing above me, a gleam in your eye
Oh Marie, gay Paree,
Oh Marie gay Paree is the place where I will ........
This is a song.  A minor, G, F and E all the way through, in case you're interested!
Evan Stephens Nov 11
They build their gods by hand
on Frenchman Street -

cup by cup inside baroque bars
bearded by brine-iron galleries,

fronting veils of mourning-lace
over ruddy O-mouthed faces,

dotted with glitter-fizzed phone forms,
glass skins decanted into alleys

shoving light down cobbled brows
and back up the laddered spine of palms.

They fill their gods with song,
the hairy-starred sky a smoking mirror

that pushes the music back onto us
as we scroll night markets in slashes

of color and money, strangers dreaming
on each other, discharged from the dives.

They don't build their gods to last
on Frenchman Street -

every night is only walked the once -
dissolve your empires, let the words

plunge under the strange black lash
that drowns the eyes to sleep.
glass can Dec 2014
Deep as the motives of an empire,
his chest rises and falls
as quickly as kings through centuries.

---

You may be marooned in my bed,
     but of all the boys that have been lost
in the blueish depths left on my neck,
     I'm glad you lingered there
Ian C Prescott Aug 2011
He wished her ill the sweet Frenchman
As he descended the stair in fury
Leaving the rose embroidery of the carpet to
Extend its thorny clutch to ravage
The ruching of her dress

Later how it would unravel strand by strand along with her to the floor
The frailest of ladies that the Frenchman had adored

“How dare you refute me that which is not yours?”
He implored in anger as he locked her two front doors
JR Potts Sep 2015
It felt as though the humidity itself
carried a hint of liquor as we walked
out into the night, wanting only to escape
our lives for a little.
Deep down in Vieux Carre
twisted brass clashed with a piano
running half step from the crowded clubs
on Frenchman Street.
We filled our lungs with the city
and found her to be like certain kinds
of dangerous doses--
intoxicating.

It was our second night
and the more we drank
the more I began to see glimpses
of the specters spoken of by locals.
They linger in my peripheral,
watching me with their sunken eyes.
You could faintly hear them moan,
only in defeated tones
and their collective scowl danced
in the heavy air of summer
as though it were a part from
all that jazz.

In the stranger hours of morn
I was approached by a ghost
a few blocks off Bourbon.
He offered up nothing but his ***** palms
in hopes of some false salvation.
I wrestled a dollar from my pocket
and passed it on to him,
only to watch him fruitlessly grasp at it
before it slide through his ghostly hands
to the floor below.
He looked down at the dollar
all helpless-like and he said
"It’s been slipping through my fingers
like dat for years now
and ain't nobody help’n me."

I walked from him, realizing then
why I had needed this trip,
I needed to remember all the love in my life
because the only difference between
me and the ghosts of N'awlins
was someone cared about me,
and I cared enough about them
not to destroy myself.
"The iniquity of the fathers upon the children."


O the rose of keenest thorn!
One hidden summer morn
Under the rose I was born.

I do not guess his name
Who wrought my Mother's shame,
And gave me life forlorn,
But my Mother, Mother, Mother,
I know her from all other.
My Mother pale and mild,
Fair as ever was seen,
She was but scarce sixteen,
Little more than a child,
When I was born
To work her scorn.
With secret bitter throes,
In a passion of secret woes,
She bore me under the rose.

One who my Mother nursed
Took me from the first:--
"O nurse, let me look upon
This babe that cost so dear;
To-morrow she will be gone:
Other mothers may keep
Their babes awake and asleep,
But I must not keep her here."--
Whether I know or guess,
I know this not the less.

So I was sent away
That none might spy the truth:
And my childhood waxed to youth
And I left off childish play.
I never cared to play
With the village boys and girls;
And I think they thought me proud,
I found so little to say
And kept so from the crowd:
But I had the longest curls,
And I had the largest eyes,
And my teeth were small like pearls;
The girls might flout and scout me,
But the boys would hang about me
In sheepish mooning wise.

Our one-street village stood
A long mile from the town,
A mile of windy down
And bleak one-sided wood,
With not a single house.
Our town itself was small,
With just the common shops,
And throve in its small way.
Our neighboring gentry reared
The good old-fashioned crops,
And made old-fashioned boasts
Of what John Bull would do
If Frenchman Frog appeared,
And drank old-fashioned toasts,
And made old-fashioned bows
To my Lady at the Hall.

My Lady at the Hall
Is grander than they all:
Hers is the oldest name
In all the neighborhood;
But the race must die with her
Though she's a lofty dame,
For she's unmarried still.
Poor people say she's good
And has an open hand
As any in the land,
And she's the comforter
Of many sick and sad;
My nurse once said to me
That everything she had
Came of my Lady's bounty:
"Though she's greatest in the county
She's humble to the poor,
No beggar seeks her door
But finds help presently.
I pray both night and day
For her, and you must pray:
But she'll never feel distress
If needy folk can bless."
I was a little maid
When here we came to live
From somewhere by the sea.
Men spoke a foreign tongue
There where we used to be
When I was merry and young,
Too young to feel afraid;
The fisher-folk would give
A kind strange word to me,
There by the foreign sea:
I don't know where it was,
But I remember still
Our cottage on a hill,
And fields of flowering grass
On that fair foreign shore.

I liked my old home best,
But this was pleasant too:
So here we made our nest
And here I grew.
And now and then my Lady
In riding past our door
Would nod to nurse and speak,
Or stoop and pat my cheek;
And I was always ready
To hold the field-gate wide
For my Lady to go through;
My Lady in her veil
So seldom put aside,
My Lady grave and pale.

I often sat to wonder
Who might my parents be,
For I knew of something under
My simple-seeming state.
Nurse never talked to me
Of mother or of father,
But watched me early and late
With kind suspicious cares:
Or not suspicious, rather
Anxious, as if she knew
Some secret I might gather
And smart for unawares.
Thus I grew.

But Nurse waxed old and gray,
Bent and weak with years.
There came a certain day
That she lay upon her bed
Shaking her palsied head,
With words she gasped to say
Which had to stay unsaid.
Then with a jerking hand
Held out so piteously
She gave a ring to me
Of gold wrought curiously,
A ring which she had worn
Since the day that I was born,
She once had said to me:
I slipped it on my finger;
Her eyes were keen to linger
On my hand that slipped it on;
Then she sighed one rattling sigh
And stared on with sightless eye:--
The one who loved me was gone.

How long I stayed alone
With the corpse I never knew,
For I fainted dead as stone:
When I came to life once more
I was down upon the floor,
With neighbors making ado
To bring me back to life.
I heard the sexton's wife
Say: "Up, my lad, and run
To tell it at the Hall;
She was my Lady's nurse,
And done can't be undone.
I'll watch by this poor lamb.
I guess my Lady's purse
Is always open to such:
I'd run up on my crutch
A ******* as I am,"
(For cramps had vexed her much,)
"Rather than this dear heart
Lack one to take her part."

For days, day after day,
On my weary bed I lay,
Wishing the time would pass;
O, so wishing that I was
Likely to pass away:
For the one friend whom I knew
Was dead, I knew no other,
Neither father nor mother;
And I, what should I do?

One day the sexton's wife
Said: "Rouse yourself, my dear:
My Lady has driven down
From the Hall into the town,
And we think she's coming here.
Cheer up, for life is life."

But I would not look or speak,
Would not cheer up at all.
My tears were like to fall,
So I turned round to the wall
And hid my hollow cheek,
Making as if I slept,
As silent as a stone,
And no one knew I wept.
What was my Lady to me,
The grand lady from the Hall?
She might come, or stay away,
I was sick at heart that day:
The whole world seemed to be
Nothing, just nothing to me,
For aught that I could see.

Yet I listened where I lay:
A bustle came below,
A clear voice said: "I know;
I will see her first alone,
It may be less of a shock
If she's so weak to-day":--
A light hand turned the lock,
A light step crossed the floor,
One sat beside my bed:
But never a word she said.

For me, my shyness grew
Each moment more and more:
So I said never a word
And neither looked nor stirred;
I think she must have heard
My heart go pit-a-pat:
Thus I lay, my Lady sat,
More than a mortal hour
(I counted one and two
By the house-clock while I lay):
I seemed to have no power
To think of a thing to say,
Or do what I ought to do,
Or rouse myself to a choice.

At last she said: "Margaret,
Won't you even look at me?"
A something in her voice
Forced my tears to fall at last,
Forced sobs from me thick and fast;
Something not of the past,
Yet stirring memory;
A something new, and yet
Not new, too sweet to last,
Which I never can forget.

I turned and stared at her:
Her cheek showed hollow-pale;
Her hair like mine was fair,
A wonderful fall of hair
That screened her like a veil;
But her height was statelier,
Her eyes had depth more deep:
I think they must have had
Always a something sad,
Unless they were asleep.

While I stared, my Lady took
My hand in her spare hand,
Jewelled and soft and grand,
And looked with a long long look
Of hunger in my face;
As if she tried to trace
Features she ought to know,
And half hoped, half feared, to find.
Whatever was in her mind
She heaved a sigh at last,
And began to talk to me.
"Your nurse was my dear nurse,
And her nursling's dear," said she:
"No one told me a word
Of her getting worse and worse,
Till her poor life was past"
(Here my Lady's tears dropped fast):
"I might have been with her,
I might have promised and heard,
But she had no comforter.
She might have told me much
Which now I shall never know,
Never, never shall know."
She sat by me sobbing so,
And seemed so woe-begone,
That I laid one hand upon
Hers with a timid touch,
Scarce thinking what I did,
Not knowing what to say:
That moment her face was hid
In the pillow close by mine,
Her arm was flung over me,
She hugged me, sobbing so
As if her heart would break,
And kissed me where I lay.

After this she often came
To bring me fruit or wine,
Or sometimes hothouse flowers.
And at nights I lay awake
Often and often thinking
What to do for her sake.
Wet or dry it was the same:
She would come in at all hours,
Set me eating and drinking,
And say I must grow strong;
At last the day seemed long
And home seemed scarcely home
If she did not come.

Well, I grew strong again:
In time of primroses
I went to pluck them in the lane;
In time of nestling birds
I heard them chirping round the house;
And all the herds
Were out at grass when I grew strong,
And days were waxen long,
And there was work for bees
Among the May-bush boughs,
And I had shot up tall,
And life felt after all
Pleasant, and not so long
When I grew strong.

I was going to the Hall
To be my Lady's maid:
"Her little friend," she said to me,
"Almost her child,"
She said and smiled,
Sighing painfully;
Blushing, with a second flush,
As if she blushed to blush.

Friend, servant, child: just this
My standing at the Hall;
The other servants call me "Miss,"
My Lady calls me "Margaret,"
With her clear voice musical.
She never chides when I forget
This or that; she never chides.
Except when people come to stay
(And that's not often) at the Hall,
I sit with her all day
And ride out when she rides.
She sings to me and makes me sing;
Sometimes I read to her,
Sometimes we merely sit and talk.
She noticed once my ring
And made me tell its history:
That evening in our garden walk
She said she should infer
The ring had been my father's first,
Then my mother's, given for me
To the nurse who nursed
My mother in her misery,
That so quite certainly
Some one might know me, who--
Then she was silent, and I too.

I hate when people come:
The women speak and stare
And mean to be so civil.
This one will stroke my hair,
That one will pat my cheek
And praise my Lady's kindness,
Expecting me to speak;
I like the proud ones best
Who sit as struck with blindness,
As if I wasn't there.
But if any gentleman
Is staying at the Hall
(Though few come prying here),
My Lady seems to fear
Some downright dreadful evil,
And makes me keep my room
As closely as she can:
So I hate when people come,
It is so troublesome.
In spite of all her care,
Sometimes to keep alive
I sometimes do contrive
To get out in the grounds
For a whiff of wholesome air,
Under the rose you know:
It's charming to break bounds,
Stolen waters are sweet,
And what's the good of feet
If for days they mustn't go?
Give me a longer tether,
Or I may break from it.

Now I have eyes and ears
And just some little wit:
"Almost my lady's child";
I recollect she smiled,
Sighed and blushed together;
Then her story of the ring
Sounds not improbable,
She told it me so well
It seemed the actual thing:--
O keep your counsel close,
But I guess under the rose,
In long past summer weather
When the world was blossoming,
And the rose upon its thorn:
I guess not who he was
Flawed honor like a glass
And made my life forlorn;
But my Mother, Mother, Mother,
O, I know her from all other.

My Lady, you might trust
Your daughter with your fame.
Trust me, I would not shame
Our honorable name,
For I have noble blood
Though I was bred in dust
And brought up in the mud.
I will not press my claim,
Just leave me where you will:
But you might trust your daughter,
For blood is thicker than water
And you're my mother still.

So my Lady holds her own
With condescending grace,
And fills her lofty place
With an untroubled face
As a queen may fill a throne.
While I could hint a tale
(But then I am her child)
Would make her quail;
Would set her in the dust,
Lorn with no comforter,
Her glorious hair defiled
And ashes on her cheek:
The decent world would ******
Its finger out at her,
Not much displeased I think
To make a nine days' stir;
The decent world would sink
Its voice to speak of her.

Now this is what I mean
To do, no more, no less:
Never to speak, or show
Bare sign of what I know.
Let the blot pass unseen;
Yea, let her never guess
I hold the tangled clew
She huddles out of view.
Friend, servant, almost child,
So be it and nothing more
On this side of the grave.
Mother, in Paradise,
You'll see with clearer eyes;
Perhaps in this world even
When you are like to die
And face to face with Heaven
You'll drop for once the lie:
But you must drop the mask, not I.

My Lady promises
Two hundred pounds with me
Whenever I may wed
A man she can approve:
And since besides her bounty
I'm fairest in the county
(For so I've heard it said,
Though I don't vouch for this),
Her promised pounds may move
Some honest man to see
My virtues and my beauties;
Perhaps the rising grazier,
Or temperance publican,
May claim my wifely duties.
Meanwhile I wait their leisure
And grace-bestowing pleasure,
I wait the happy man;
But if I hold my head
And pitch my expectations
Just higher than their level,
They must fall back on patience:
I may not mean to wed,
Yet I'll be civil.

Now sometimes in a dream
My heart goes out of me
To build and scheme,
Till I sob after things that seem
So pleasant in a dream:
A home such as I see
My blessed neighbors live in
With father and with mother,
All proud of one another,
Named by one common name,
From baby in the bud
To full-blown workman father;
It's little short of Heaven.
I'd give my gentle blood
To wash my special shame
And drown my private grudge;
I'd toil and moil much rather
The dingiest cottage drudge
Whose mother need not blush,
Than live here like a lady
And see my Mother flush
And hear her voice unsteady
Sometimes, yet never dare
Ask to share her care.

Of course the servants sneer
Behind my back at me;
Of course the village girls,
Who envy me my curls
And gowns and idleness,
Take comfort in a jeer;
Of course the ladies guess
Just so much of my history
As points the emphatic stress
With which they laud my Lady;
The gentlemen who catch
A casual glimpse of me
And turn again to see,
Their valets on the watch
To speak a word with me,
All know and sting me wild;
Till I am almost ready
To wish that I were dead,
No faces more to see,
No more words to be said,
My Mother safe at last
Disburdened of her child,
And the past past.

"All equal before God,"--
Our Rector has it so,
And sundry sleepers nod:
It may be so; I know
All are not equal here,
And when the sleepers wake
They make a difference.
"All equal in the grave,"--
That shows an obvious sense:
Yet something which I crave
Not death itself brings near;
How should death half atone
For all my past; or make
The name I bear my own?

I love my dear old Nurse
Who loved me without gains;
I love my mistress even,
Friend, Mother, what you will:
But I could almost curse
My Father for his pains;
And sometimes at my prayer,
Kneeling in sight of Heaven,
I almost curse him still:
Why did he set his snare
To catch at unaware
My Mother's foolish youth;
Load me with shame that's hers,
And her with something worse,
A lifelong lie for truth?

I think my mind is fixed
On one point and made up:
To accept my lot unmixed;
Never to drug the cup
But drink it by myself.
I'll not be wooed for pelf;
I'll not blot out my shame
With any man's good name;
But nameless as I stand,
My hand is my own hand,
And nameless as I came
I go to the dark land.

"All equal in the grave,"--
I bide my time till then:
"All equal before God,"--
To-day I feel His rod,
To-morrow He may save:
            Amen.
Matthew M Lydon Feb 2015
she stood outside the apartment
finger halfway up her nose
scratching with her free hand
a **** loosely encased
in patchy, ***** blue jeans
ratty sneakers with holes where
her toes and dignity poked through

usually a whiner, a brayer
a donkey among gently purring cats
calling down thunder and racket
like a motorcycle tearing circles through a lamp shop

today, of all days, she swayed

silently
in loose waltz time
to soft piano of a long-dead Frenchman
curling down from speakers
mounted in windows
across the street

her misshapen hips and flexing calf muscles
lifting her up in a rude en pointe
somehow made elegant
by a quiet ballad, a soothing moment
on a hot August morning
in Main Street
of the hinterlands.

2/12/2015
the marriage of people I know, and music I only think I know.
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.
Mark Lecuona Oct 2015
walking without my skin
but the bones are still there
cooling themselves but a bit much today
children so engrossed in not knowing our problems
old women, together on a bench, obsessing
the wind passing through me, cleaning the sidewalk
I thought of being like a Frenchman
or at least maybe the charm, or so women say
I can’t speak the language; but so what?
I wondered about understanding what’s good
not swept up in things, but knowing myself
there’s a style about living
we each have our own
we don’t even know it, but everybody else does
they watch, as we walk, noticing our eyes
what they notice
if they are hard
or soft
can we or should we remain as we are
or do we just accessorize
taking on someone else’s ideas for ourselves
transforming us because we are looking
for something
downstairs at the front of the book store
or upstairs alone in a chair, sinking into the past
stretching and sighing
where is my wine glass?
oh, only single serving bottles
plastic
ok, it doesn’t mean I’m not a Frenchman
not the plastic
not the age of the wine
not the fact that I’m not one
but is my charm apparent to anyone
this Westie I noticed knows
he knows that I like Westies
he knows
he saw my soft eyes
how can you know me so well little Westie?
it’s because he looked and I looked back
I was able to smile as long as I wanted
instead of glancing
pretending I’d hardly noticed
even though I had
for a long time
I stared at my coffee
the wine was just talk
I was only wishing
it’s breakfast and I’m already thinking about wine
but your dress
and your eyes
yes, they are soft
but maybe you’re just sleepy
so I’ll blow out the imaginary candle
next to the imaginary wine
burn my lips on my coffee cup, freshly poured
and go
maybe I’ll see someone crazy enough to make me laugh
that’s why I live in this town
to hear someone singing
as we all stare
wondering about him
and why we are dreamers
who imagine moments instead of living them
Mateuš Conrad Apr 2020
.and very much so:
the royal albert hall... is not where you'd go
to watch ballet...
      unless you were going to watch...
an enlarged centipede pretend to stampede
on a treadmill...


high-brow my ***...
         because iron maiden's phantom
of the opera... did... does... predate...
andrew webber's stab...
                 hard rock 'ammer...
       as in... a paul di'anno bitchboy
                 scant-gimpwhore fan... etc.
the castrato operatics... later...
n'ah...               but that's oh so much
an origins story...
                    and hardly the evolution...

- that the phantom of the opera stands on
a skeleton of three songs...
revised...                morphing...

perhaps not, not that they are songs...
i'd have to sharpen my scalpel for
attempting the smithy deeds on words...

a skeleton of three themes...
       thus noted:

               "angel of music"
            "phantom of the opera"
    and... last but not least:
                     "masquerade"...

what a day... or what wasn't expected...
no one ever told me that:
a musical per se... differs so much from
a musical: for the stage...

by musical...
                 i'd be shaking to conjure up...
the screen musicals of a west side story...
etc. -

            and one can easily so tire of
this trap...

  and what of the internal jokes?
jokes at the expense of the opera...
              - poor fool, he makes me laugh
       - hannibal...
quite the jokes...
   having to draw the blood from
the mundane talk elevated to an operatic
context of song...

that a musical is... somehow...
when opera can be reduced to talk...
and can be thus reduced to:
the joker in a hand of poker...
   a whimsical little card...

the 25th anniversery of the phantom
at the royal opera house...
one can somehow forgive the electronic
attaches of the overture...
whether the electric guitar of the drum
machine...

   like one can forgive:
                 nirvana's unplugged...
at the end though...
   even andrew webber looks perplexed /
nervous... how did we get away with this?
i don't know:
the only style of genre that...
actually requires a stage and props...
and ample volume of space!
a theatre: since otherwise...
opera: pure technique...
                and prop minimalism...

and...

because can a musical: not require a stage?
does it indeed feed too many images
that need to be attired with quacks...
with feathers... with leather boots and chandeliers?!

now i'll toast! i'll toast to a new reason
to go down the alleys of ah bit tipsy:
itsy bitsy sniffing a bottle neck...
bloated from a champagne cork pop!

truly... if only the stage...
   that allowance to perform a performance
a need to perfect: always never:
the editor in charge...
   all those out-takes left to what life is
left behind the curtain...

     the musical of the movies of h'america...
whatever they might be...
to name but a few would be best...
           and if i didn't first see the phatom
on a television screen...
but in its natural environment:
with the volume of required air...
     i wouldn't have been able to choke
my tears...

and i have seen the theatre
and i have seen the opera
and the ballet...
                            i sometimes...
"sometimes": wearisome...
try to forget the maggot pit of phelgm,
sweat and ***** of a rock concert...
        of all the mediums...
         this jumbled up swedish table platter...
what a cocktail of a rollercoaster!

i could forever take off my garments
of jealousy: of which there's that pitiable
affair of a beard-envy...
                well...
                           well well...

how pristine: they even had a music-box!
in that crude relief of finding
"revisions" and alt. interpretations
of... perhaps it's only a matter of
two themes and that overture?

             and if it's song and dance...
       it's not a candy-smiles and tap-dancing buffet...
it's opera and ballet...
because... it's opera:
                 ha! empty these cupboards!
no one needs to attend an opera
like a foreign language movie:
with subtitles running on a FTSE100
reel above the stage...

                      the musical: is the reinvention
of the opera... a musical is an opera...
with mild added animation of theatre...
and there's a pinch of ballet!

          this will most certainly not translate
into me liking cats... or les misérables...
       this will do...
                   sing-along / sing-through?
and everyone is, suddenly... equipped with
a deciphering ear to translate the over-infuated
vowels of an operatic breath?!

- and very much so:
the royal albert hall... is not where you'd go
to watch ballet...
      unless you were going to watch...
an enlarged centipede pretend to stampede
on a treadmill...

- but if someone would tell you...
a musical... west side story? yes?
     i'm pretty sure it would be all about:
singin' in the rain... fair enough...
             but all for that popcorn entertainment...
and the tap-dancing...
and chewing-gum advert smiles...
and all that technicolour dabbling...
and all those heavily bothersome editing
processes... like... the plumbers
most associated with veins and arteries?
sorry: the romanians are picking the fruit
and veg for the next: x-factor star...
the next youtube vlogger breakthrough chart
topper...

blunt and ******* obvious...
      and how has english changed since Dickens?
i made a note of...
because i will not make notes
of what's already passed...
a direct etymological association with a loan,
word...
  not from dutch, german or french...

       SA-LU-BRI-OUS
            (healthy...)

                   PER-EM-PTO-RILY...
         (not being permitted a denial)

that 19th century victorian english that...
just had to loan words directly from
latin... this much of reading Dickens remains
in me... after having just experienced
a blitzkrieg of a musical: proper...

there are still the same old nooks 'n' crannies
for me to find shadows and moths
in...

    because: i am most certainly the one
about to cite: they took away my circuses!
and m'ah bread!
there's no football! well... no football?
goodness me! what are, what are...
the alternatives?!

         opera you can... disregard...
theatre if... movies are your...
ahem... sartre's curiosity with the keyhole...
voyeurism: to exist is to be seen...
but only through a keyhole...
                     which movies aren't, of course!
the editor comes in...
even in the golden age of cinema...
the panoramic view... resembled a stage...
and in the old movies you could
time... the editor taking charge...
and how long it would take for
the actors to forget their lines...

            not that that matters... given...
there's no stage... but the red carpet
of postures and toothpaste adverts...
and paparazzi *** epilepsy from the strobe
glitter ball of the leeches congregating!
not even vultures make such a spectacle!
i saw the same...
then the concrete was layered with enough
frost at night...
the crevices would become impregnated
with diamonds of ice...
every twist of the head would
agitate these sparkles toward imitation
of a flash!

there's a "musical": in the advent of the h'american
sense... and there's: a musical...

- and if you happen to hear a subtle joke
by evelyn waugh in the meantime:
at the better for you...
              what is an encyclopedic "ogling"
within the confines of scrutiny:
that man may forever be attired...
and the genitals just dangling like
champagne flutes without any,
any sort of, scrutiny of...
not having to play the Oedipus!

               here's a fork... here's a donkey...
here's a spoon... here's the Schleswig-Holstein
and its siege of Westerplatte!
here!
   the Schleswig-Holstein tenor of
                           the opera: Westerplatte...
oh joy: a "my" in a "history"...
and none of it an affair that might...
disturb the peaceful lives
of those lived: under the splendour
of a charles II and a handel firework's music
to have to somehow: "put out"!

clearly: i'll be dying from the ******
of all the collective forces of the universe
and gambling and... oopsies...
i am here... and it's not that sort of grey...
pistons assured!
- had i the face of beauty...
beside starring as a tadpole of potential...
a voice with a stage to make outlet with...

- what could ever become of this...
jigsaw puzzling overdue do...
                         the narrative in the classical sense:
hardly what, and what not:
this vector and the in-between
from some mythical (a) toward a journalism,
and weekend opinion pieces...
and all that insomnia riddled "journalism"
of the current year of crux denoted with
a (b)...

               all true: from darwin and the "big bang"...
and of course... time shrinking...
in between... beside carbon dating...
and let us not hear of things speak
for themselves: but ourselves!
untrue! hercules!
untrue! prometheus!
untrue untrue untrue!
but darwin and the ape: nod! gentlemen!
we have proof!
myth or no myth: but a journalistic integrity!
that's enough proof! for today and tomorrow!
and... what's not the fiction that's already
memory?

and what is... this imagination that's...
not a single street witnessed of Paris
in the circa of the year that was... 2004...
or 2006 or 2007...
                      
for the art... and this detail of science that
once upon a time shocked...
now... only comes... burdensome...
a ballet on ice... a shaking of hands with
a shadow... something beside this:
base revision of culture and civilization:
this bogus lopsided quest for:
re-inventing... nothing more... than a zoo!

so little must have happened in the case
of english history...
this hannibal and the mountains...
but what curtain: the great wall of china:
built among the mountains...
ingenious: doubling-up?
  xerxes whipping the waves of the aegean...
the great wall of *****-chewing-wall'ah...
i dare become the new albino...
i dare... and i the next japanese porcelain
frailty...
               many thanks: for the <caugh caugh>...
hooray!

              oh my mother:
the cindarella of nations of europe...
         i seriously can't do much worse than
that cocktail and carboot sale of tchaikovsky's
1812 overture...
   it's an overture!
              
really? the phantom of the opera is because...
of the overture?
last time i heard... prokofiev's lieutenant kijé
(kij - stick... kije... sticks)...
romance... was all a rave! "rave"...
              a nibbling at a crescendo...
    but hardly: then again: a nomad chorus...
a reminiscence... a memory lost: yet foretold...

and if... the anonymous provider...
of the full extent of the carmina burana...
      what if?
        i play... this cliche... this... my most
democratic oath: for the bettering of the voice
that could allow the congregation of
the many! my democratic oath: my quasi:
civic duty... me joining the club of the most
sober bottom's-up! pick'ld-week!

                 such are the affairs... hardly a worthiness
of a frenchman of pander...
or of being so blessed by an island...
when being neighbour of europe...
and easily bound to be found because:
france never too interest in the robot antics
of the scandinavians or what
was ever to be assured by iceland!

thus came the crude: skeleton waiting
to be refined... a peter schteele interlude of:
fancying a giant to a tumble...
i will not satisfy myself with a biography
outside of the realm of immediacy...
how do people write a biography without
the peacock of whim and of what's readily
available? a biography with a past...
automated: futurism... n'est ce pas?

         - i escape for the transcendental relief in
beauty... my own lack...
therefore better neglected: rather than denied...
it's my own that Belzeebub should
****** with maggots and acne synonyms onto
my face...

          i escape for beauty... not... sorry...
pardon my fwench: a ******* conversation
of the paupering sociopathic sort of
a job trotter sordid kin'!
                  if only crocodiles could cry...
they'd be warm-blooded...
and i would be year after year
an oscar nominee for a toast
of best actor at the oscars!

          pity... pity and the subsequent
dumbdrum!
                no! i do not want to guillotine this
affair with the autobiographic as long
as i am drinking and not any champagne
in sight... or... schnapps...
              
i best be off... this is enough frivolity
of the heart for a day's worth!
ogdiddynash Jan 2015
X-rays of the soul,
Madame Chan proclaims,
translucent we stand,
visible out and inside
before our creator,
but only to that
limitable being

if only there were a machine such,
on earth, as in heaven

perhaps seventeen Frenchman,
one hundred and forty five,
mostly Pakistani children,
or thirty five
no longer alive,
just barely mentioned,
already forgotten,
Yemeni young
police cadets,
two NYPD,
might still be adjudged
innocent by those

who only see themselves in mirrors,
blindly believing
they are created
in the image of
God
and knowledgeable in the
execution of
his will

if human Justice is thus blinded,
perhaps God is too?

we need much betters cameras...
more accurate selfies...
MC Hammered Dec 2014
Dancing
underneath city lights,
jazz bands
reverberating, breathing in
voodoo shop
musk.

Soul
pulsates beneath
cobblestone,
wide eyes
peering up at
beaded balconies on
Frenchman Street.

Freedom is
coffee and baguettes from
Cafe Du Monde at
midnight,
surrounded by strangers.

Find me under strings of
flickering bulbs,
trading trails with
travelers.

Candlelit doorways illuminate the drifters, the curious, the backpackers,the Kerouacs,
the way to the gypsies past
Bourbon.

But not home.
Heather Butler Mar 2012
Well, what now, hey?
     I threw the dog overboard yesterday.
     The day before, the day?
Where will you go, hey?

I heard the orchestra-man play
The same way,
     Sanctum, requiem, asylum
All Latin in his French dog-eared play.

     Hear the monkey, playing accordion play
To the whirling whirly-whirly-ghig
     Tre dramatique, no? Today
I understand you're just as "tramatig."

I want to hear your Frenchmen play
Play ***** pipes play play
      In his dog-eared French *****-man
Play

But I cannot, cannot say
     Tears of joy, in hydrant spray
The Hyades triumphant rainbow stay
     Cough your little fears away;

Hear the Star Spangled Francis Key play
Frenchmen play, play,
Little piggies counted play
Black white keys with little piggle-plumps play

Atone-al, A-tonal---atonal tonal sounds as if to say
"Getting married here to stay"
       All alone and all today
      Settle down if for a day
And who will hear the trumpet play
When *****-man Frenchman say
"Where? Home of the free" and stay

Keep your hands away
Never want to        let you say
               "Hear me, hear ye, all you weary, weary dreamers
         But never left your confidence like Russell-rustle leaf-blown willow-white

You fill them up with seventy two pay
      Make a kite, to(k)night, allRight
      Thank god for the fleas in the right
Hairless creatures for to sway

I threw the dog overboard yesterday
The day before, the day
And if you'd wanted it to stay
You should've say, you should've say

But never let my hand betray
The vein, the line, the artery
Of arterial shells bombastically
Loquacious to a fault, this day

They say "You want another day"
They say "You never wanted say"
They say "You wasted every day"
They say "They say, they say, they say"

                   But e'er forget, ne'er forget
                   I'll despise you abandon heaven for earth to get
       And leave your money, your millions behind
       For mansions with my Lord to find

But in the ceiling never was a god to pray
Aaron Wallis Sep 2014
Burly bleak plumes roll out aloft corn
Where the dragon fell post spin and ditch
A wretched hulk of ruin splintered and worn
Amongst endless blanch green fields which

Arc with a gust and apart where he treads,
Dragging his silk cape afar from flame
Clueless and concussed to a near house he heads
With a tattered scarf that constricts yet ***** about his mane

Black fists of cloud had boomed around him as they soared
His beast spat metal fire whilst the pale sky turned dull
The zipping ballet of warfare smiled throughout as motors roared
Gnashing its teeth and making forgotten martyrs of them all

Shuddering not from demise rather conflict as a whole
He is as content with death as he is to survive
Just not burn the world and condemn his soul
A horror; men of rule seem keen to keep alive

An agrarian self-dines rancorous and crocked
Half sat, improperly perched from where he was shot
Monsters had come for him once before this day
They took his spouse and his daughter and then took them away

He can hear but does not hark to the battle aloft
It is now like the rain and the trees in a gust
But to the boom and the shake he stands with a cough
And as he cites the invader he sees he must do what he must

The grower limps out with a Chassepot in his arms
As the airman’s hands reach up and he falls to his knees
With beads on his brow the man pleads with met palms
The crofter sees naught but a Prussian blue monster disease

The pilot knows his death, ‘Ich bin nicht sicher, wo ich will gehen?”
The old Frenchman just sniggers as he thinks never again
With the rifle’s slug now spent and the horror sent back to his hell
The farmer mumbles to himself, ‘je dois me chercher une pelle,”
Wars happen. It is *******
ghost queen Oct 2020
Night was falling, a full bright silver moon was rising, and Seraphine’s hunger had become unbearable. She needed to feed, had to have young fresh female blood, to stay alive and young.

Science had caught up with the reason vampires needed to feed on the youngest, preferably baby’s blood. In 1866 a Frenchman named Paul Bert had conjoined rat’s circulatory systems in a process called parabiosis, and thus the Prize of Experimental Physiology from the French Academy of Science.

In 2012, Cambridge University’s Julia Ruckh found old mice cojoined to young mice physically and mentally rejuvenated, becoming younger, smarter, and more energetic. Subsequent research discovered proteins in the plasma caused the rejuvenation. News outlets had proclaimed, “fountain of youth discovered in ordinary plasma.”

Seraphine needed the youngest, which has the highest concentration of rejuvenation proteins and hormones;  the purest, which is virus-free, and female, which has the highest levels of estrogen and progesterone.

Ideally, a baby girl’s blood would be best, but in today’s modern society, killed babies drew attention. The next best and the pragmatic thing was a 15-year-old runaway girl. L’ Association Assistance et Recherche de Personnes Disparues (ARPD), estimates 1000s of Parisienne girls, ages 10 to 18, runaway each year due to ****** and or physical abuse, ending up on the street, and having survival *** in 48 hours or less for food and or protection. And few if anybody cared. They disappeared, never to be found, presumed dead from a ****** overdose, or stabbed in a fight for food, money, or drugs.

Since runaways had high levels of disease due to survival ***, ****, and ****** addiction, Seraphine focused her attention on young troubled Arab girls living in the Habitation à Loyer Modéré (HLM) or projects of the 93rd, the department number of Seine-Saint-Denis, the poorest, predominantly Maghreb Islamic Arab banlieues of Paris.

Seraphine would undo her ponytail, letting her raven black hair cascade down around her shoulders, so she could fly around and into the projects at night landing on rooftops, listening for arguments, yelling, or shouting of eahira (*****), waqha (****), or haram (forbidden). When she heard those words, she knew a father was forcing old-world customs and religion on his born and raised in France daughter. The daughter, going to secular French public school, knew neither Arabic nor Islam, rebelled, wanting to live a secular, feminist rather than a submissive religious life.

Seraphine had found this month’s mark. She focused her superhuman hearing and sight on a tenth-floor open balcony window of the building across the street.

She could see an older man dressed in the traditional white dishdasha tunic, and taqiyah skull cap worn to evening prayers, yelling and throwing his hands in the air. Further in the flat, Seraphine could see a girl, crying. The man yelled waqha, waqha, then slapped her, and she fell to the floor. An old woman pulled the man back, as the girl got up and ran out the door.

Seraphine knew how this would play out and where the girl was headed. Four blocks away was the Lycée Général et Technologique, which housed a 24-hour crisis center for teens facing physical and or ****** abuse, pregnancy, homosexuality, ****** addiction, or homelessness.

As foreseen, the girl burst out the front doors of the HLM, running, crying down the street. Seraphine leaped from the 13-floor building into the air, silently following the girl like a bird of prey. The girl walked down Rue Bonnevide to Rue Guy Moquet, taking a shortcut through a wooded park.

Seraphine flew down to the ground, landing without a sound, and followed the girl from a distance. She could smell her youth, see her round hips and long shiny hair. When the girl had walked deep into the dark and silent park, Seraphine sprang forward like a puma, tackling the girl to the ground, and slitting her throat before she could scream.

Seraphine savored the ****, drinking the squirting blood from the carotid artery, relishing the warm fresh blood. The girl, in shock, blinked rapidly, trying to process what had just happened to her. She tried to speak but gurgled only blood, tears of fear started streaming down her cheeks. She knew she was dying, was afraid of dying, and wished her father was here to protect her, and make it all go away.

The blood slowed to a trickle. The girl had bled out and her body died. Seraphine continued to drink, ******* harder to get the remaining blood. The girl’s body convulsed then stilled as her brained slowly and finally died.

Seraphine had fed and would be satiated till another full moon.  She got up and licked her lips of residual blood. Her clothes were drenched in sweat and blood. She looked at the girl’s dead body, admiring her clear complexion, and big brown doe eyes, but felt no remorse for the ****.

She picked up the girl’s body in her arms, jumped into the night sky, and flew 65 kilometers northeast of Paris to La Foret De Compiegne in la department d’Oise, a secluded and rural part of northern France. Dead center in the forest lies Saint-Jean-aux-Bois, a small, and forgotten farming village of septuagenarian and octogenarian.

Seraphine flew to a farm a kilometer outside of the village. As she neared the farm, she could smell the putrid stench of pig ****. She started her descent, dropping the girl’s body, which hit the ground with a thud, in the barnyard, as she gently touched down.

The farm was dark, the only light was that of the full moon. She heard a rustling coming from the farmhouse. She saw an old man walking her way, holding a dim flamed oil lamp. He did not look at her, only at the ground, afraid of what would happen if he looked her in the eyes.

Seraphine grabbed the girl’s body by the hair and dragged it to the main pigpen, and threw the body over the fence and into the pit of sleeping pigs. The body hit a pig, startling it out of its sleep, squealing, waking up the other pigs, and realizing they had been fed fresh meat. The pigs sheared the flesh off the bones, then chewed and ground the bones. Within a couple of hours, there would be no trace of the young girl’s body. She was just another disappeared runaway.

Seraphine turned her attention back to the farmer, pulled out a brick of Euros from her coat, and threw it at his feet. He didn’t dare pick it up. He was too afraid of her. He knew what she was. And she knew, he knew what she was.

He’d seen the countless girl’s bodies come through like chicken carcasses at a processing plant over the decades. He knew he would die of old age soon, and only hoped God would forgive him for helping a monster.

Seraphine turned around, jumping into the sky, and disappeared. He was trembling and relieved that she was gone. He won’t see her for another full moon. He painfully bent over and picked up the brick of Euros. His hands were shaking.

******

Seraphine got out of the shower and wrapped her hair in a towel. She looked in the mirror and admired herself, the flawless white skin, the blood red lips, the pear shaped figure, but most of all her firm perky *******. She was brushing her teeth, when the doorbell rang. She rinsed out her mouth and wrapped a towel around her, walked to the door and opened it. It was Damien. She mischievously and alluringly smiled. He grinned back, knowing why she’d called. “I was so glad you were still up when I called,” she said poutingly.

She took his hand and led him to her bedroom. It was softly lit, a low yellowish light, not unlike that of a candle’s. The walls were decorated in red damask wallpaper with gold crown, base, and chair moulding. It was very elegant, very French. The bed was a large four posted red ruffled canopy, covered with a red duvet and pillows.

She got to the foot of the bed, turned around, unwrapped herself, sat on the bed, and shuffled herself to the headboard. She looked at him and spread her legs, showing, offering herself to him. Damien took off his clothes and crawled to her, over her, and leaned down to kiss her. She rose up to meet his kiss, wrapping her arm around his neck, then dragging him down in her.

She kissed him hard, ******* his tongue into her mouth, biting his lower lip. She stopped. He looked at her, a questioning look on his face. Then she pushed him down towards her *****. She had a trimmed and sculpted bush, just enough not to hide her full lips.

He started kissing around her bush, her tummy, and inner thighs. He could feel her squirming, as he circled around, edging closer to her *******. He kissed her lips, sliding his tongue up and down, then penetrating her.

She was wet, and tasted fresh, like sweet spring water. How amazing he thought to himself. I’ve never tasted a woman like this before. He went deeper with his tongue, pulling back the lips with his hands. She pushed his head hard into her. He licked her splayed ******, as she moaned in pleasure and approval. He moved his tongue up till he got to her ****, and lightly rubbed it then stopped, kissing her tummy. She relaxed and sighed.

He kissed his way down to her ****, kissing it softly then circling it with his tongue. She arched her back as he vigorously rubbed her **** with the tipe of his tongue. She moaned, then yelled stop, stop, in breathy gasps, then fell back into the pills. She took his head in her hands, and pulled him up to her mouth, and gave him deep, passionate baiser amoureux.

She took his hard **** in her hand and guided him towards her *****. She slid his **** up and down her *****, lubing up the head of the **** with her wetness. Then she let go, and he penetrated her slowly, as she gasped then moaned. He felt her wetness and heat as he slid deeper into her.

He started to pump rhythmically back and forth, slowlying picking up speed, as she moaned and groaned as he bottomed out his **** into her. He was going to *** and started to moan, when she yelled, “choke me, choke me.”

Taken back, he slowed. She looked up at him quizzically. “Choke me,” she said sternly. “You're a big boy. Choke me,” she repeated with a bit of irritation in her voice. He placed his hands around her neck and lightly pressed and started pumping. He got back into the rhythm and was back on track, getting close to *******. “Harder,” she said, “hard like you mean it.” It turned him on, and he clamped down harder as he pumped harder, animalistically.

He knew she was getting close to orgasming as she moaned and writhed under him. “Oui, oui, oui,” she screamed, and in a blink of an eye, she’d flip him on his back. Her hands on his chest, holding him down, as she rode him hard. She screamed, “ah, ah, ah,” then collapsed on his chest. His ****, still hard, inside her. She slowly rolled over, taking him with her, till he was on top, then rocked her hips, wanting him to continue, to finish.

He started to moan. She hooked her wrist around his neck and pulled him to her mouth, kissing him hard and deep as he came. He convulsed collapsing  on top of her. His **** still inside her, as she wrapped her arms around and rocked him back and forth, kissing the top of his head as if comforting a child.

He rolled over, crashing into the bed with exhausting and fatigue. He looked over at her. She was staring up at the ceiling. He saw the reddish purple strangulation marks he’d left on her neck, and slipped into a deep sleep.
Mateuš Conrad Jul 2016
yes, theology reduced to the anti-speculative reasoning
to choose he v. she, as if what pronoun mattered
to be hardly exact - national effigies exist
for ex-patriots - immigrants is a
***** word used by assimilating cultures,
the small intestines and the
the tape worms - she ******* Europe -
he labouring Europe - winged Hussars in Ukrainian mud -
while Versailles was built - Poles, the French of the East -
Moscow was trivialised twice - once by Mongol,
once by Pole - Nietzsche maddened called for
the Slavic-Frenchmen - i can already see the proximity
of French with Polonaise - the duchy of Warsaw -
Napoleon - Justepatron - just partition -
or thus the two bombardments equal -
thus two kept a holy alliance - that the Pole
be Frenchman when a croissant was questioned.
martin Feb 2014
So I said to this German chappie
If there were ten green bottles hanging on the wall
and one green bottle should accidentally fall
how many green bottles would there be
hanging on the wall,
you do speak English?
Nein he said

So I turned to this Frenchman I said
There's a strange smell around here
Don't you think?
He said  oui
I said I think you're right old son
JRBarclay Jun 2010
Your liquid is
leaking
all over my table
yet
you stand tall
beckoning me
4:13 with no mercy
please save
me
drink me
drink me
light another
cigar
...ette
Miette? Miette?
Me yet?
How does this
make sense to
a Frenchman?
How come some
people get fat
but then stop
at a certain point?
Is it
possible to not
lie?
:Tell the truth
all the time
We're all liars
bigots
*******
creators of filth
Will my hair
stop falling out?
Will my hands
stop shaking?
Will my feet
stop pounding?
Will my thoughts
quit pouring out?
Will this
beer
stop flowing down
my throat?
Will the Cure
stop making me cry?
Will Tool ever
break up?
What do people do
when I'm sleeping?
Who do I like more
Black Sabbath or
Led Zeppelin?
Dead Kennedys or
The Misfits?
Mozart or
Beethoven?
Philip Seymour Hoffman or
Daniel Day Lewis?
Natalie Portman or
Scarlett Johannson?
Goth chicks or
Nerdy chicks?
or both
or all of the above?
Do my eyes
perceive reality?
Do my fingers
feel gravity?
Does my tongue
taste sarcasm?
Do my ears
dare to fathom?
Can I trust my friends?
Should I trust my lover?
Mother
should I trust
the government?
Who do I hate more
Nicholas Cage or
Ben Affleck?
Nickelback or
Linkin Park?
George W. Bush or
Adolf ******?
Money or
Women?
or both
or all of the above?
© J.R.Barclay 2010 (except, of course, the obvious Pink Floyd reference)
Mateuš Conrad Oct 2016
horror movie tactic: or the abrupt / concentrated
                                                                              crescendo -
                              the shrill -
the chalk on the blackboard -
                                  all there, horror prime is
not the images,
                       but the music,
                                                  horror is defined by
music - the the lack of -
                           as are epics, with humanity being
inspired rather than ****** -
                and i dare say, i made my first collage worthy of
the aged Matisse: exhibit (a) a newspaper,
(b) a packet of cigarettes,
                       (c) a bottle of whiskey
and finally (d) heidegger's pondering(s) ii - vi;
i told you i was mad enough to buy a copy instead of:
when books are concerned, it's hard to imitate a
taste for designer ware, for a:
        my great grandfather invented / founded so and so...
how easily you can become elitist with books,
a bargain at £30 when usually $60...
                                        and, honestly?
i do feel less snobbish and more powerful,
                 i wield a variation of Egyptology's term:
precious artefact, something from the Third *****,
an intellectual output that doesn't bother Schindler
and the cinematography of the kamiński
red, amongst all the obvious bloodshed -
here's me, some years from the devastation,
feeling insecure about the need to call them Jews
(when they were primarily Poles) to anti,
  to anti justify when the two labels are considered
with variation on the pristine assumed nature of
Israel's policy -
                      sounds different when you consider them
Poles rather than Jews -
                           and here i ventured into the complexity
of thesaurus rex stomping ground the dictionary
keeps reverent - i'm not an Catholic escapist artist,
you won't find any argument to suit my awareness there -
          Jesus can have my writ of concerned antisemitism -
i already said that the tight-rope event by a Frenchman
was and will forever be more spectacular than
the crucifixion -
                                             he was a prophet born
without a conscious involvement in the three magi
and the star of Bethlehem -
                                       i don't believe he was born to be
recipient of a pristine banking on the matter:
         that all depends on how we behaved later,
evidently the Romans respected Jewish c.v.
none were handed down to Roman authorities to
build the coliseum - they were left pristine in their
Pharisee guises, and then the supposed "god" (level
it with the existentialists, the ditto means ~, approx.
or ambiguity, passed down, like a neared concern with
mythology) usurped the religious movements
the Roman respected and never employed the rites
of passage prescribed by Ramses and Nebuchadnezzar;
          or as i continually say:
you rather hear the word ****, or your face being
punched by my fist?
                                       why not, why not talk
***** and keep the *** acts pristine in accordance with
the rule of life? you think that not talking *****
will keep your ****** ******* haloed?
                   for the case of life: i rather talk *******
and **** with effectiveness than
                 put my tongue into a ****** and talk
pretty pretty, and **** like an imbecile...
                                      because i need to become a fuhrer
when she's doing her bit, and i'm doing her bit...
                i equate censoring peasant cordiality with
the things that destroys us: famines, earthquakes etc.,
   with the rise of ****** perversity -
to not talk oath words is as much as talking ******* pretty
and engaging with paedophilia -
                    or something quiet similar to it.
          **** me, talk *****, you don't even have to eat
shellfish: the grand scavengers of the depths -
                      better talk ***** than throw punches
or engage in unspeakable blasphemies;
so why are they trying to make you talk pretty
when you're bound to stuff that **** in your mouth?
you think that will resolve the matter,
thinking *** is ***** thereby enforcing a pristine way
to say hello; really?
              because that's where it's heading -
and it won't do much good when you say:
i can't say akin with the lark what the hell i want,
because another force is rummaging in the same area
saying: i can do what the hell i want, with or without
****** annoying lark singing me onomatopoeia(s)!
              sure, a mind that feels caged will flutter into
ambivalent freedom with the tongue,
       as will a tongue that feels caged flutter into
ambivalent freedom of the tongue:
enter?           a Rothschild -
         have you noticed how things have changed since
Descartes equated the dualism of thought and doubt
as the medium of being?
         apart from Heidegger, the finite increment posit
of what's the centimetres of a person's lifetime?
i think
                1 centimetre
                                        i doubt
                                                       1 centimetre
           precipitates into
                                                i am
                                                                 also, 1 centimetre,
existentialism took the i doubt from the equation
and replaced it with: i deny -
                                                and so called it bad faith...
denial is a subtler version of lying, or perhaps: a more
eloquent expression of it:
       god, i acknowledge the fact that the thesaurus is
an enemy of logic - i.e. close proximity synonyms and
                                      extensively divergent synonyms:
the first tool of rhetoric exposed,
i.e. say red ten times... sure!
      crimson, burgundy, wine, rust,
                      ruby, dahlia, geranium, maroon,
              scarlet, titian
                                               (nouns are primarily synonyms,
their existential purpose is to be synonyms,
   to compensate the existential flaw in Darwinism in
terms of the high tier of variant evolutionary consideration
        and investing in / creating a manageable vocabulary,
kindred of agricultural expertise / -ease, not as suggested
       aesthetic; tee off, a variant wording: games aside,
    but truly a word game, or golf; mankind has staged
the greatest war with its communicative system:
politics v. crosswords: two games - and none are enjoyable,
better leave the games to the symbols 0 - 9);
oh right, d'uh, back to the Rothschild "problem",
                you confront someone like that,
you won't hear a word of doubt, you'll hear the words
of denial... the point is: stunted emotional withdrawal -
just put the whole dynamic into a school playground,
                     people like that can't doubt their actions,
they can only deny them, which is why existentialism
exposed an very emotional variation of cogito ergo sum,
       the sentio ergo sum, or what one calls the Cartesian
extension: c.c.t.v. - like any viral infection: mass paranoia
stemming from a dichotomy rather than a duality
imbued by thinking and acting according to a balance.
the worded confrontation is a summary of a delayed reflex
of the staged confrontation, hence the need for the status of
"the shadow people", to deny and then exert force is
to deny and then to later manipulate certain factors into
an equation: bomb a place, **** anonymous "a", etc.,
             the fact is: it's algebra incorporated into language,
the general concern being about: the nonsense of
a Mr. Smith class system incorporated into all the brickwork
layers of the pyramid...
       sure, a Rothschild will feel vulnerable when question,
and he'll deny rather than doubt, and he'll think his
***** is 1 centimetre tall when ***** and is protruding from
his forehead... but that same person will react with
the "doubt" part of the equation:
                           he'll invest in an arm's deal that will
slaughter ten thousand Colombians over a kilogram
of *******... and he'll then doubt whether those ten thousand
Colombians had social security numbers or passports
or whatever it is they actually had...
                     courtesy?      sure: doubt they ever did anything,
keeps you thinking...
                        deny them the idiotic lie of proxy?
oh sure: they're into higher powers too! don't you know
that evil also works miracles?
                          there are proxy miracles,
are there are immediate miracles of: well, why not be
a saint for the day?
                                 my advice is:
doubt propels thinking, it's an instigator of thinking
  which some call: non-being...
                                but i consider thinking to be a variation
of being:
                                 as in: an aversion to watch a football match
and join a herd...
                       negation? the existential alter to coupling
thinking that's to translate into being?
      &
ConnectHook Sep 2015
ººº

Beware lest anyone cheat you through philosophy and empty deceit,
according to the tradition of men, according to the basic principles of the world,
and not according to Christ.


Colossians 2:4-8 (NKJV)

His Nietzschean trip moved from Comic toward Tragic:
Deleuze’s delusions flew out the fenêtre
Airborne and ****** on philosphy’s magic
(the nihilist suicide’s raison d’être…)
Propelled from the window, transcending the Ontic,
his organless body in textual flight,
a schiz-flow beyond on a voyage turned frantic.
His thought – a nomadic adornment for speed,
multiplicitly viewing a thousand plateaux
was a force for unhinging the doorways of light
and a plea for postmodern decoding indeed.
His frame soon encountered pure striated space
in the form of the pavement caressing his face.

He joins other smokers of Gallic tabac,
other esotericians of cognitive frenzy
(those mullahs of madness, those sultans of Whack…)
Sorely missed by his victims, disciples and friends
he is mourned, misinterpreted, copied, dismissed
– but for semioticians he heads up the list.

Another brave Frenchman, some guy named Debord
a bespectacled Marxist (who missed all the marks)
made the mediums’ message a radical bore
dialectically fading the lights into darks.
Indirectly disrupting pop-culture with Punk
and other anarchic phenomena-junk,
he too chose to leave with a nihilist bang –
while we whimper and suffer down here with the gang.
The old situationist’s last situation:
an agit-prop funeral short on elation…

So to French de-constructor-philosopher-ravers
and all who rejoice while society wavers
I offer these lines, like a quick coup-de-grace
and be warned – they’re now viewing the Good Lord en face.
A schiz-flow elegy for Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995)
& Guy Debord (1931 – 1994)

https://connecthook.wordpress.com/2012/11/27/deleuzional/

ººº
Don Bouchard Mar 2013
Who is this old man sitting in the tattered old chair,
Yelling French at Mad Dog Vachon,
Bragging about the Crusher's capacity for beer,
Chortling at the desolation of the British Bull Dogs?

Smoking his cigars to their very ends in his old pipe,
Spitting plug tobacco juice
Mostly in the can beside us as my Grandma gags....
The French they speak to each other
Should include requests for pardon....

This raving lunatic is my Grandpa Charles,
And I am five and six and seven,
Sitting on his lap,
Believing every word the Gospel truth:
Seeing Vachon as the savior of French Canada,
The Bulldogs for the evil nation they proclaim,
Kegs of beer as quantities strong men crush.

This old Frenchman whose horse days are done,
Who barely knows to sit still
Though he is a passenger now,
Beside my father...
Knows magical tricks to stun and spell me:
Pushing his teeth out with his tongue,
Leaking smoke from his ears,
Tamping burning coals with his thumb...
An old man who refuses to be old,
Who sits and raves at wrestlers on TV.

— The End —