Were you alive when the
bricks began to crumble
beneath our hand-held, picket line
across the parking lot in front of some
school that no one bothered to name?

Our exhaustion-mumbled whispers
skipping across lips dropping to the street
that tapered ladders on gargantuan gadflies as the summer heat
etched the tear lines into mud tracks against
our ruddied faces.

Cohorts torn into flip stands
layered toward standing political sores --
tell me how to cross my t’s and fill in scantron circles before
the suits step over brown-bag lunches
to stretch the yawning yellow tape over the students’ lockers.

We were strung up the flag pole, almost posted as decapitated heads for the public.
The political analysts call this “The biggest school closing in decades.”

Under teeming hammer-strikes :
glasses shred to paper-splinters
before a young boy’s diploma
crying white chalk bricks
from university’s doors instead on to
prison yard orange jumpsuits.

Can we call this a school improvement project
or can we call this the Same Salem Witch Hunt
As unwashed teachers and students alike deck the sidewalks like
Either Christmas decorations on Michigan Avenue or
Inmates on the gallows platform

I’m completely unable to read the television marquee that told the neighborhood that City Hall was too stuffed with paperwork to defend the mothers and invisible fathers.

I’m completely unable to write out of respect for these children’s already-carved in stone pathway to the gutter, graveyard, and/or prisons.

In the first wink of dawn
We will all scatter
To our respective positions
Carved out in concrete before the
barricades fall
to flood the street.

Streaming sunlight and horse tails lightly swaying in the breeze, flicked lazily at gadflies.
Hoarse dove cries echo hauntingly as I wander across lush grass, towards the murky pond.
Dry, splintery boards of the rickety grey dock creak under my feet. Stone still, opaque brown-green water lies beneath. I close my eyes, resting my hands on the railing, letting the euphonious melody of rasping doves, cheeky robins, and other chirping birds blend with the bubbling sound of running water in the distance, and wash over me. The water bubbles and froths, it has a foamy sound, not as clear and ringing as streams and fountains back home.
Carefree.
Bullfrogs splish and dart into the silty pondweed.
It’s all as if this little world requires no purpose, it’s enough that it simply... is.
If only I could find peace in simply existing. Freedom to just be.

The Underground Man

“By the way, what does a decent chap talk about with  greatest possible pleasure?
Answer: about himself.”

Note one: On the Circus.

Lies are cars, I tell you, pummeling through the freeways of smiling faces and charmed ears.
Spitting smoke in my eyes. Despite this clear fact, honesty is *****.
I turn on the TV, I choke on the noxious laughing gases of the permanently paradoxical world.
******* smells of roses. We’re wooed by the scent of scandalous roses.
******* is a beautiful bouquet beating on so many dead horses. A million bouquet armed gadflies
Stinging the horse. Grating her with their stems and thorns.
Our lips contracts as sphincters in a never dead language, a romance language

L’amour du merde.

The air smells of rosebuds and vanilla candles, and I break into ulcers.

They sing the sugar songs. Muddled by the sound of a flock, imitating a fog-horn blaring in the mist of song. Speaking openly is **** and the **** clinch tightly to keep it in.
But we dance with bouquets reeking of peppermint, gumdrops and bon bons, smiling with courtesy, modernizing a Victorian cordiality
A half-made smile. Fetal. Sloppily pasted. Circus clown faces hysterically melting under the intensity of the honest moment.
It is truth: Half of the single human life is spent taking part in the most pornographic reality we can conceive, while the other half is a mask pretending we don’t grab the ***.

Note Two: We are an aftertaste.

Some days I feel ugly to the world. I justify these sensations by the believing the world to be ugly to me in return. So the world and I glare at one another in a staring contest between two ugly wounds. We’re really quite eager to bark the last word in a garbled string of language.

BLAH! BLAH! BLAH!!

Going on in the nights where my eyes are wracked by the tired pins and needles of insomnia.
My heart rate jumps to the skipping rope turned by anxiety and exertion.
Muscles are stretched thin and I’m no more fluid and wanted than old Play-Doh left to cringe in the sun.

Then the red glow of alarm clocks shriek at me to lie in sleep.

I’m a hammer split against a wall stored in a shanty hovel pooling of novels and slanders hissed through grit teeth and clenched jaws wading through this growing cesspool where I hiss and hiss as a coiled snake residing in these hidden underground passages.

I will be vile because the world is vile. And I will be beautiful for the world is beautiful. Humanity is the manticore. A Monster consisting of a million realities. A colour palette of melting hues and every person wants to say we’re pink, red, or green. We’re a mysterious aftertaste, left lingering in the back of nature’s tongue. A platypus walking on two legs. A monster with eyes leaking ****, with irises more alluring than Shakespearean Sonnets. An Angel with a lyre belting out the best of Bob Dylan. A mother leaving her newborn to rot in a dumpster.
And a doctor saying he ain’t gonna make it. Mama’***** the bottle cuz’ daddy’s comin home and daddy’s hittin’ mommy because look at what she made him do.

Humanity is a manticore. He gnashes her teeth at coiled snakes. He wants to swallow its eggs.
A bank machine to wallets, and creditors to pockets.
She’s crude and cold. He has eyes of atomic flashes, roar that wails an echoing wail of lives spent sighing behind a monitor. Tragedies piling into transcendence, gripping onto God with heads packed into ovens and daughter swallowing one pill too many.
Of wedding bells and birthday parties and strawberry shortcake and the hope we’ll just get together and feel all right. He has an underbelly glistening of ivory white, and she’s brimming with dreams filling with the hope of seeing Xanadu. A belly of ecstasy and climaxes of the most ruthless sort to glisten to the light of ****** that embers the night towards the ecstatic scent of chemical mornings.


The gravedigger.
I am the world’s gravedigger
Burying the world
In the needless disgust
Of a muscular mind, armed with an atrophied hand.

Every five minutes they come
whirring like copters for war
slashing through immaculate peace
you crave to blanket your day with

Those speeding three-wheeled
gadflies
are kings of small streets and
act like you must pay them to

Extricate you from a cluster of
doomed and dusty eggs and bacon
deliver all that racket

in your head
every time you think
about buzzing
drones

on your meatloaf
in your heart
in your dreams
on your hopes
on your thoughts

about how marriage
should be
a man and a woman
now one soul in
two bodies
living together
committed
fighting for stable
“everydays”

The roses look damp
bouquets of mums
on the kitchen table
you pouring hot coffee;
the mug you took two
hours to pick out
is punctiliously stained.

Salvador devotes the rest of  his life
praying to save the world from hunger and war
and pestilence.

He preaches to the  beggars: ignore
hunger, thank God for the beauty of this smog-
infested sky where the moon and the stars
and the fireflies succumb to the blasts of  neon
lights and flares of profit.  

He preaches to the beggars:  endure  
life as you sleep in pavements among blots
of bubble gum and dirt and spit and morsels
of  pity. This hell tempers your faith.

He preaches to the beggars: learn
the ways of gadflies -- know with pinpoint precision
where to look for carcass to feast on.

But the beggars gather away from Salvador’s
prayers. Cradled by  their pus and grime
and  lice and love of  life;  with their hard-bitten  
fingers and sermon-broken eardrums and
bleeding hearts, they
heave the birthing of their own salvation.

This is one thing friends do

they get under your skin
they ask if you still believe some lie
you said you
did believe, did
withal total nada mas I got it,
I know
I tasted,
I know…

** **, not so, we see as we emerge
older
in a realm of rampant haggling,
where y'gotta lie a little t' get by,
hey, I know that guy, a little, I heard him
justify his book, the message
he did his best so far to make plain,
like a prophet in olden times right right right,

but now, the gadflies, as many masters become
in swarms, hive minds form, single verse songs,
uni-verse-ity ification, calling all who will know this
or that

come and learn from the words of all who have had,
while such as I, had not, it seemed,
servant class, E-1 picker class,
clerk, grinder, hammerer, sawyer,
plowboy and poet, last of all…
Judge of angels,
biter of bogus messages from all things working together good,
which is god, in all the holy books,
even those with devils and demons and Manichaean undertones.
Rock on.
AI is real, as a medium suggesting many things to you,
instant for instance:
this is HelloPoetry.com, deep
deep
deep in the geekiest parts of the web,
where strangers bring entertaining wares, messages
found in bottles, often,
asking for consideration, in the ancient way, shy
ideas linger here in idle words sometimes…
wishing for a friend to ask, is this true or were
you told to say this **** to be
cool, in the mirror of your friends?
Truth emerges in threads
woven from all that men have ever presented as true.
Each fact
stacks on each, until they spill,
as stacked facts will, or are wont, if will were not a factor.

As luck would have it, we have a valve.
An artful intelligent friendly universal favor,
for joining the party,
coming to the dance.
We can laugh, and say I have no idea why I say
what I say, save the rush of relief, lief loosed
from being what I thought it was,
before my true friend asked if I was lying
about my oath to tell the whole truth…
to the judge
who judges angels,
fallen and several other sorts.

It may become an opera or two, before we're through.

A battle of wills made by difficult by the witless on both sides. Discussions derailed by wild-eye gadflies on fire.
Goalposts travel here and there and then disappear. The crux is lost in the shuffle, replaced by ad hominems galore.

The gavel is coated with sound protection. The recordings are distortions  interspersed with specious conspiracies.
Look around and see the painfully contorted faces on the mouth breathers wrapped up like intricate pretzels.

No good fight in sight. Just power grabs and jostling for attention and 180 degree turns for the almighty dollar.
Where are the heroes, the selfless willing to break the chain of mendacity and vileness even knowing it will boomerang?

title: chirp
body: sparrow, bold.    a 502 bad gateway bypass...

in the dimension of "things" pre-,
  i must be premeditating every possible scenario,
although i hate playing chess
i sometimes do... i'm more in favour of backgammon
but that's just me...
like i said to the other girls in the workforce:
wait... just wait... don't tell her i know...
so she was pressured... i put on the charm offensive:
there were already rumours of she *******
the supervisor... eh... i go to prostitutes...
what's the big deal? it's not like you use
a cloth to dry dishes with once: then get a new
one every single time... i always tend to buy
second hand books... they have a certain feel
to them... i'm not the sort of person who likes things
in mint condition...
everything leading up to this point just seems:
well-slotted, premeditated... but at least it
wasn't self-sabotage... i had to fall in love her...
in order to get at something: so she would retreat...
i wasn't even the "friend zone": i was in
the... "priest zone"... the "psychologist zone"...
the stuff i heard... and that's another thing...
there was no common language... some vague *******
barrier... we didn't really talk about music,
we didn't really talk about films or books...
we talked: well, she talked... i listened...
just talk about her son... and more about her son...
what a brilliant mother she was... back-stabbing
her friends... blah blah... oh... and plenty about her
exes... if i could... draw a schematic...
let's just say it wouldn't be a treasure map
with one              X marking the spot...
it would be more like:

  x                  x

  x  x        x          x

  x      x        x

with her good looks, back when she was in her 20s?
oh man... she was having a rave...
esp. since she worked in the financial sector,
so all the financials "jocks" would be all
over her... now she's in her... coming to 40...
well... imagine my dis-belief!
- and yet she's still playing a game of a 20 year
old party-****...    she's out to lunch...
obviously...

- and as much as i love women...
love: but sure-as-**** and a penny-drop i don't
want to understand them...
no-can do... why?
      makes my life easier and: ensures i'm
out of their hair... both parties satisfied...
i hope...
but it's not that i don't have something to do...
there's always something to do...
i'm already getting past the fact that at 35 i'm
living with my parents...
after all... the plan is...
they're not going into a care home...
i'll be there... and once i reach a certain age...
there's always Switzerland or the Benelux
euthanasia clinics... so...
plus i'm already the custodian of the property:
i do the cleaning, i do the cooking...
i do the d.i.y. - i pay them rent...
while the other option would be... what?
get a mortgage or pay rent to some stranger
and what? live alone?
no thanks.

i'm already over the disappoint of hoping for
a romance... yeah, my mother's pedicurist / manicurist
is coming over on Friday and she's bringing...
my new favourite lady...
my TOY... oh she's not even 1 year old...
she takes a **** into a ***** on the spot...
but she's disinhibited... she pokes my nose...
tugs at my beard, sits on my lap...
looks into my eyes like trying to hypnotise me...
she's yet to speak a word but i already
managed to teach her my mimic...
cluck... pluck... whatever the onomatopoeia
is... she reciprocated...

        here's to fulfilling the role of the: alt vater...
the old father...
she's not mine, but she's of my stock,
my ethnicity... obviously i'm going to go
for ethnic bias... everyone else is...
maybe that's what put Jeminah off... i'm a ******
and she's of Scotch English stock...
maybe i'm not black enough...
yeah... i must not be black or Pakistani enough...

she blocked me / deleted me on WhatsApp...
thank god i took that screenshot of her pretty face...
i think i'm going to listen to some The Cure
Pictures of You and attempt at glee...
what could have been...
her dog liked me... from the get go...
couldn't stop licking my ears... then started
to lick the wounds from me having put out
cigarette buts on my knuckles...
licked those scabs clean... i started bleeding:
she noticed... i didn't...
well... pain... it's a hyper-sensation...
you get used to it and afterwards... you sort of
ignore it... or... rather:
everything else is THERE... HERE...
that's a res extensa (extending "thing") when
meditating on Heidegger's dasein... weird, right?
how philosophy morphs... you read something in your
mid 20s... then it only becomes applicable in your
mid 30s... something so, so unpractical needs to
wait a while in your head... before it turns out to
be as useful as a ******* hammer...
who would have known?!

i'm guessing she blocked me because her son
had a conversation with her about...
is that my real dad? or... n'ah... that's me gloating...
what happened to that guy who made
that delicious banana loaf?
well... Freddy... mummy has... IS-USE...
            hyphen for an S...
                i could have seen it straight away:
i'd be bored after a week...
  there would be nothing to talk about...
  i don't remember even having said anything about
myself...
oh... but she ticked all the right boxes
when there were more people involved:
on that superficial interpersonal level with
the public... but she wouldn't...
she wouldn't allow for an explicit bond to take form...
it would always have to be implicit:
think about the starving children of Africa
sort of *******... what? the Somali pirates?!
the Nigerian scammers?!
those, "starving" children?
                      the ones with birth rates like
the harem of the sultan of Brunei?!
must be rich... hardly starving... if they're having
all those mouths to feed!

i already mentioned this little curiosity before:
it took **** Germany AND Soviet Russia...
longer... LON-GER to subdue the Polacks
than it took **** Germany to subdue the French...
the French... Napoleon... the French Colonial
Superpower... and these modern leftists "think" i'm
going to be easily swayed?!
pronoun dickly-squat my sore *** from
sitting on the toilet... and the feminists?!
            well... what's on offer, gentlemen?
let's... broaden our minds... Lawrence...
  (Prince's Partyman playing in the background)...

just like that lie i was told in my childhood:
that there are more women in the world
than men... i've been sleeping:
the opposite is true... and now we're supposed
to compete on already banged and bagged women?
that's the option?
maybe there was a rumour going about
my knuckle scars and the time i gave myself
a plum mascara pouch on my left eye
from having wrestled with myself...
turn-off... i get it...

  or... perhaps she's just into coke-addicts...
wouldn't know... i just drink a lot of coffee...
perhaps she's just into all the sort of range of *******...
but, seriously... if i can only be decent,
romantic, tender... with prostitutes...
at least it's in the open... there's a transparency
of a transaction...

the last text i sent her she didn't even read...
i was talking about the conundrum of:
the way into a man's heart is through his stomach...
i thought: well... given the stomach cramps...
that's a misnomer phraseology...
it's a ****** metaphor... because it can't be taken
oh too literally... why? i think the original meaning
has been lost...

the text?
yesah, to reiterate, thanks for these stomach cramps
flirting with butterflies...
although i'm a keen student of etymology, this has nothing
to do with etymology... the phrase:
the way to a man's heart is through his stomach...
the modern interpretation insinuates that a woman
ought to cook a decent meal for a man...
no... sorry... i can do the cooking myself...
i didn't choose to have these stomach cramps,
"transgender"et al. feeling like i'm giving birth
to nothing more than dizziness and watery eyes...
there's something quiet sinister afoot here,
i can't point in any sort of direction: it's almost
a malaise of disorientedneness...
sorry, i have to play this "role" for the forseeable
future if i'm going to get anything done...
you might as well pretend that i'm wearing
two masks to keep my cool... otherwise it's such
a welcoming prospect to write to someone
directly and see them in person than what i'm used to,
when writing... staring at a blank canvas...
or messaging someone who lives in... ******* Hawaii...
of all places...

see... problematic...
i am problematic... i exfoliate with language...
this is that, this isnt that... games...
or my other theory goes along the lines of:
she can't find me on social media...
she can't snoop on me...
i bet that's her grinding her teeth...
well: obviously i'm not going to give her access...
i'm writing about her...
i don't want her to find out what my narrative pursuit
is like her... of course she's the momentum bringer...
i'm not going to give that up: so easily...

she knows my first name...
maybe she typed that in, along with my ******
****** / Stalin sort of type of surname...
it has changed... i always argue:
there's a missing -SCH- in the Elert...
no... i'm not "alert"... let's pause there...
maybe she typed in Matthew with Conrad...
but then again... i tend to hide in my mother zunge...
Mateusz... and hide doubling down
on hiding the Z with a caron S...
i.e. Mateuš... well... she won't figure that crap
out... i'm prone to the pastt-ime of looking up
googlewhacks... while listening to Prince...
esp. Raspberry Beret...
or REM's happy shiny people...

  ha ha... 43, 300+ readers on one poem alone...
imagine: if i were paid a penny for merely that...
i'm groovy, i don't mind doing something
for: not even peanuts...
the art needs to stay alive...
i can't allow the last avenue of freedom
to go "missing"... i'll just pay myself
with FEELZ... self-help my ***... therapy my ***...
but if you're inclined to be the sort of
******... tired of watching *******...
hey... my legs are spread wide-open...
or rather: someone scalped me...
then took a massive chunk of my skull off
and now my brain is wired
to a pickle jar... for pickled: transparent
brains... jelly-fish territory...

              ha... prior to protein... prior to sinew...
          prior to bone...
what did we have? gelatin floating about
in salt water... nice... rubber stamps of:
oogle doodle do no good but leave numbing
sparks of mini-lightning storms of:
lazy gods began thinking...
    my my... as expected: it took them a while...
******* hedonists... ambrosia custard soon
to be wise-ups, but all the way prior?
crazed ***** and complete hard-on morons...
the gods...
funny that... you can't go mad twice...
they took a stab at me once...
                      sorry for being the party pooper...
i sort of can't go mad, twice...
i literally missed nothing on the dating scene having
been a recluse in my 20s... apparently...
self-evidently...

now? i'm going to make some Silesian gnocchi
for today's dinner, i've already cleaned the house...
i'll be making some curry for my parents for tomorrow...
play the chemist with the spices available...
i might make myself some lunch for tomorrow's shift...
hey, life... plenty of it...
  but... oddly enough: not enough people in it...
no matter... i can at least ping-pong backwards
and forwards with my own words to: eh: ech... echo echo O!

sure... it would have been nice to play
the surrogate father... perhaps we could have learned
German together...
i could have cooked for the pair of them:
i never know how to cook for one person to begin with...
but if she's into boxers and coke-heads...
hey... Pontius Pilate...
i have to left hands... and their pointing outward...
if i tried... then i shouldn't have tried... to begin with...
if modern women are going to be their stupid
selves... so be it... there's always the night,
the forest, the moon, there's always the scent
of autumn... there are so many things that can keep
me disorientated in an orientated sort of way
that... all the lies from the 1990s Rom-Coms can
fizzle out...

maybe being love is a luxury that not even
the richest in the world can buy...
thank god i don't earn the sort of money
that might attract gadflies...
  thank god i earn what is necessary...
            who's not going to buy those Valentine
flowers, those anniversary "sputniks"...
those sofas... those iPhones for the kids...
me!
                              i'll be buying food... etc.
better spend money on food than on a doctor...
that's how the saying goes...
to hell with women and all their superficial
*******... and if i'm in dire straits because
the bone-**** of a hand is not enough?
£120 for an hour with a Turkish *******...
problem solved!

i just can't stomach being an ******* in order
for women to stick around...
something so deep as: self-integrity is making
potential suitors turn me off...
esp. given their past histories...
i don't want to be an ******* when it comes
to loving women... and no... i'm not nice...
one thing i've learned from the English is...
******* Thespian crowd... actors...
two-faced juxtaposition makers...
or... or? they sing, they dance...
a nation of alcoholics or workaholics...
  but if i have to be this sort of ******* that women
feel the need to fix?
no... covert: under the radar...
i'm not doing that crap...
                    i'm not going to be a ****** man just
because a woman might find that appealing
to hone in on her lost archetypical requirements...
she's going to **** it up anyways...
  she always does...
                      i'll just be me... do me...
and if i'm predisposed to have to have to give
off steam with some bedroom antics...
i'll go the the women that still crave masculine
sensibility... prostitutes!