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Warren Erasmus Sep 2012
It started out so nice
This year
This life
My eyes wide with promise
My smile chasing its silver lining
Iris dilating like a magnified black button
Vacant, stupid
But promising

It started out so nice
When my parents tied the knot
Unmatched
Bracing for the windstorm to come
And the pumpkin oval moon
With their seventies corduroys
And their vinyl records
Scratching away at Elvis
In oval loops
Rocking and rolling on the living room carpet
Dying to be in love, madly
But unmatched

It started out so nice
When my sister was born
Cuddly thing
Running around
With her belly button
Wedged between her fingers
And snot running down her face
***** little thing
But cuddly

It started out so nice
On my bike one morning
Sailing on silver morning calm
Slippery
Gears seamless up and down
Leaning with life into hairbend corners
Straightening them out
Parental
And from nowhere a yellow taxi
Oozed from an exit
Greeting me with a thud
And then air
Borne to fly, it seems
Asphalt rushing at my face
Painful
But slippery

It started out so nice
When your lust grabbed my attention
Sickly, but lovingly
By the scruff of the neck
And your eyes threw me to the floor of my shyness
And your lips pried open my stubborn heart
With no regard for your own shame
How you gave me the lesson I needed
Before you tore away to someone else
Taking my throat with you
It was sick
But loving

It started out so nice...

Just before I stumbled into the Sugarman
The voice of the silvery soothing one, the same
The one with the indigenous eyes behind the shades
The one of perpetual expression of peace washing both highboned cheeks
With Big Ben behind him offering the world, the same!
Now hiding his golden smile in a shack of broken leaves and winters ice
Stooping his bent back against the galeforce reserved for the forgotten
Labouring to keep his gentle form afloat
Amidst the calm of his nothingness
Propped up by the skinniness of trembling knees
Sunk into the oversized roominess of his boots
Which plod the same snowbound path every day
In a soundless march to fetch his daily survival
And questions fell about me
Like spilt gruel splashing
And I asked why
And I asked
Why?!

Why you, Sugarman?
Are you really happy in your humility?
Do you still feel the butterflies
On a velvet afternoon?
It sure looks like it
You look just fine in your sea-purple Detroit harmony
I'm not there to share yours
But I'm ok with my dawn
And my sister is ok
My parents are ok
My girl is ok
Im not there to share your dawn
But I'm ok
Mateuš Conrad Aug 2016
as with any plaster work, or draping muscles and bones and
organs in skin - i knew i reached a zenith of some sort:
forever introspective, that chance momentum
that never reaches a museum of retrospective
finalised banalities -
and with that's happening in America,
i get a chance glimpse into that part of the world
so bogus, so *****-like, so haphazardly
put together - the chance to see the rats (artists)
jump ship and head to Tangiers, Paris, London
(for the pillars of the movement to come,
London especially, but might i suggest Edinburgh?
the capital of the offshoot that's to come
from Scandinavian novels?) -
i wouldn't suggest heading to Prague -
or Budapest - never to tourist hot-spots, obscurity is
what you need - Edinburgh out of season,
then the theatrical circus isn't there -
***** poetics: poncy monologues and Annabel
art-house flea markets... but that's the beauty,
flea markets in France, charity shops in England...
but i did exhaust this one musical avenue,
i dropped the ᚱᚢᚾᛖᛋ - it got boring after a while:
all that charged up mythological feeling -
the way we always wanted: myths to feel with,
to eat, rather than the sterile scientific facts...
i've learned enough to later ditch them,
even a Professor of Chemistry will have a postcard
of Edward Hopper's painting by his desk,
that window to view the world that doesn't
necessarily encompass sun moon and constellations...
how anyone would be foolish to scrub off
some inspiration from such things bemuses me,
the lowest of the low of poetic expressions is
sung to things that manage too much: the moon
and the sea tides, the sun and the seasons and
phototropism - it's a double edged sword...
only from one art to another do we get to see
our labourers of attention, else the same old deficit:
god... who in his glee took offence at anyone
having more awe-inspiring sense to please such
things... no alone can you master contemplating
both the beauty and the utilisation behind such
objects as a single man... however well...
it's impossible... you're sharing the bronze platform
with those that simply wrote of the shallow
beauty, and those that found these objects
were not simply aesthetic, but meaningful in
the machinery of things... it was never up to
us to find that electric genius of combining the aesthetics
with the machinery as one...
for in that sense god is a form as fraction
of 9/1, 8/1, 7/1, 6/1, 5/1, 4/1...
the fraction of wholeness... a complete set to start with...
man has already proved the limit as a fraction
with the base 3... 9/3, and that didn't really end well...
at best man is composed of a fraction base of 2...
by sharing the world through marriage to a woman,
or through a learned devotion, a crumb of what a woman
is, a philia (love) of his interests, a soloist voyage...
some just say: you will either take to being faithful
to philology and yourself as its devotee,
or you'll take up a wife... oddly enough chemists are
defilers of marriage having any purpose other than
to distract... but as i said: you can rarely write
decent things when trying to admire celestial spheres...
more ambition comes from the distraction of the zodiac
"prophets" and astrologers... a poem about the moon
is just a poem that is levelled with a poem
about a dustbin... but hey... Top Cat lives in the dustbin,
Neil Armstrong bopped along the lessened gravity
surface... but which is easier to acquire for a smile?
Benny... cue the violin theatrics of lamenting to a comic
end.
well... we have to juggle each other's impressions,
taking at hacking the raw meat will not give any of us
medium-rare barbecue steaks marinated...
taking the moon as something else is: nice...
and you know how nice things end up as... as tacky
suburban *******... if you're going to tackle the
thing with all the rawness... i'd first spend looking
looking at that thing of your attention in a graveyard...
just to get the feel to the idea: well... my fellow daisies
sniffed from the roots up would probably have
said something sulky similar.
but it's like that, you get to exhaust certain musical avenues...
i'm currently at a period where i have enough
stash of jazz records to rekindle my interest in it...
on today's menu? the real McCoy (McCoy Tyner,
Joe Henderson, Ron Carter and Elvin Flynn -
Flynn makes his mark, even though not the star
of the album, Art Blakey has a match) -
then onto the tragedy of Sonny Clark with his
cool struttin' alongside Art Farmer, Jackie McLean,
Paul Chambers and Philly Joe Jones...
i must admit that after watching the film whiplash
my ear-buds staged a coup to move from a certain
type of music into this... and even though
i already said that the climate in America at the moment
is very a second attempt at a Beat movement...
it's very much different... i guess jazz makes all the sense
in a pure urban environment...
jazz and urbanity, the hipster parties where wine flows
like poetry and people get to do their wild marijuana
******... but Bukowski changed everything
by bringing a taste of the classical into the scene...
it feels just like that these days...
there's no jazz on the radio...
going back to watches and radios, mono-utility things
that are the glamours of the inoffensive cluttering of a room...
no digital screen... the radio position at the back
of my head, behind me, the little fly-eye Rubik cube
ahead of me...
that's the odd thing with coming with jazz these days...
it's like Bukowski in the shadows of the beat movement
back when it was the beaten track...
so i said that jazz and urbanity are perfect partners...
well... take jazz from an urban environment and put it
in a outer-suburban environment, in a place
about 30 minute walk from farming fields with bulls
and horses... foxes the thieves rummaging in people's
trash... and... as classical music took to
teaching us the language of celestial bodies,
Holst... in this kind of environment jazz does the same...
jazz becomes equal to classical music with celestial
bodies... i'm just wondering if there are enough
instruments to arrange the solar system...
Mercury the Trumpet...
         Venus the Double Bass
Earth the Piano
                       Mars the Drums
Jupiter the Tenor Sax                                   (comparatively,
                Saturn the Soprano Sax                using a Holst
                                                           ­        schematic, the reverse,
                                             yet citing Jupiter, not as a planet,
                                           well, the bellowing voice of paternal fury)
Uranus the Clarinet
                                           (takes sheer magic to play that thing)
so that just leaves us with an Neptune as either
   Alto Sax or Trombone...
but that's how jazz morphed since it last came across
poetry... someone stole it from its urban environment
of busy streets and ugly manners and quick quick snappy
and the millionth time i could compare it to a spontaneous
encounter with someone in a bar... jazz lost its cool there...
people said the same thing about jazz
as Kaiser Joseph II did of Mozart... "too many notes"...
translate this urbanity into an outer-suburban environment
and put it against that kind of backdrop?
well... personally, there are just enough notes in each piece...
you looked outside the window? you could hear
a **** from a mile away and no tree would even sway
in nodding approval even with a galeforce wind slapping
them... jazz lost its synchronisation with the urban environment
it emerged from... but in so doing, it managed to mature
like good wine on the outskirts of large cities,
where it literally became the only thing that could ably
make a Kandinsky moment from semi-detached houses.
NEWSFLASH... what is this concern about art being
subjective? i don't see where these arguments go...
i thought art was about revealing the intimate,
not revealing the objective shallows of a method...
of limited scope like any philosophical systematisation...
if Christopher Columbus ever did things
objectively he might have discovered Lisbon or the Canary Islands...
art can't be objective... trying to argue that art is
"only a subjective" expression... well, if it was to be
a "greater" expression objectively, an artist would
walk into an art gallery, take all the paintings from
the canvases, and turn to the public and say:
now let's see your subjectivity, otherwise go ponce
off the art critics to take something they said to your
date about how: the light contorts the features of expressions
blah blah blah blah blah... the point of art being
superior as a subjective vehicle is so that i can feel someone
else's feelings... as opposed to thinking someone else's thoughts...
art is the sensual, not the premeditated dogmatic funeral -
which all philosophers attend: they're objective to the
point that they're afraid of having a personal attachment
to their outputs - they will hardly ever want to invite
a criticism of their objectivity, because they're such emotional
paupers - they fear criticism of their subjectivity to such
a point, that you can simply look at their pronoun usage
strategy, they really do use these words like kings -
but when Mozart is criticised by the Kaiser... he thought
nothing of it... he actually thought, nothing of it,
perhaps his vanity was wounded, but his virtue wasn't...
which is why he remains with us...
for the fatal wound incurred is not that of virtue,
but that of vanity... and true virtue is unafraid of criticism,
there's this cognitive blockage that enriches the
heart and leaves the mind blank... the sort of blank
that accommodates the Pyramid of Vanity:
bishops, priests, doctors, kings, queens, portrait artists,
Versailles... such things are so ****** void of anything
but scare-mongers, sycophants, leeches and finally tourists...
for whatever you take from the realm of Hades,
there's a stamp-duty on each precious element from that
realm... each thing is stamped: worthless...
you couldn't extract penicillin from Hades...
changing gold into a ring is worthless if such symbolism
of a union of monogamy end with the ring being
nothing more than a thing disputed over the divorce settlement.
robin Jul 2014
i havent washed my hair in a week. ive been wearing these braids for the last four days but today a girl said my hair looked like the sea, thick water green with life, my heels fall too heavily when i walk and i know i seem angry but i promise im just tired, i'm drinking pond **** and pretending it's sweet  im falling off the roof again

ATLAS HOLD ME UP ATLAS HOLD ME UP I KNOW IM NOT THE WORLD TO YOU IM JUST A GIRL THAT MADE YOU CRY BUT GOD IM SO ******* SCARED IM AFRAID OF DROWNING BUT I HOLD MY HEAD UNDER SALTY WAVES ANYWAY

this is like a brick to the gut this is like a skipping record screaming the same words with the same intonation but prefaced by a thousand of itself it somehow takes on new meaning a new sort of color, a repetition rash, a spot you cant stop scratching

BUT REALLY WHAT MATTERS MOST ISNT THE LAST WORDS YOU SAY BUT THE LAST WORDS YOU HEAR BECAUSE THE WORLD IS STILL MOVING THE WORLD IS ERASING ITSELF BUT YOU ARE ENDING I AM ENDING AND I DONT WANT YOUR VOICE AS THE LAST ******* NOTCH ON MY BEDPOST

and you said you could still feel me, you said you could taste me like pennies in your mouth but it meant nothing and we were petty we were hollow we went as far as grazing lips and faking smiles i know you werent what i wanted did you know i wasnt what you wanted?did you know im not what you need?did you wait for me to touch you and wither when i turned away?im sorry im so callous. im sorry im so detached.

THIS IS A HAMMER TO THE KNEES THIS IS YOU WAKING AT TWO AM CHOKING ON MY HAIR THIS IS YOU FLINCHING WHEN YOU SEE ME SMILE THIS IS BLISTERED LIPS AND CALLOUSED KISSES AND BITING MY TONGUE FOR THE FIFTH TIME TODAY MY EYES HAVE BEEN BLOODSHOT SINCE BEFORE WE MET IM SORRY I DIDNT LET YOU AFFECT ME BUT WHEN I CRY IT IS NOT FOR YOU I AM OVERWHELMED BY MYSELF AND YOUR APOLOGIES ARE ONLY KINDLING IN A BONFIRE A WITCH BURNING MY GRANDMOTHER TOLD ME ID GO TO HELL AND I GUESS ITS COMING TRUE

im just a ******* storm chaser, running after anything that could be a hurricane and leaving when its just another ******* sigh i stand in the shadows of broken people and get bored when they hold me instead of ripping me apart, what the **** is wrong with me?ive been listening to your voicemail for the past ******* hour, you want to know why i havent called you back, it took five months to realize you were no hurricane, it took five months for my interest to fade and its my fault, i gave you time to get attached then tore you away like a bandage soaked through and useless im sorry, i thought you were stronger than this at least strong enough to bruise but instead you hold my hand and cry.i cant take this.i don't want your love i want you to destroy me i want you at least to try and im sorry i let you think i was whole enough to balance you but im just a different kind of broken

I WANT INTERLOCKED FINGERS AND SUPPRESSED LAUGHTER IN A CHURCH BUT I GUESS THATS ASKING TO MUCH THATS SELFISH ITS MIDNIGHT AND IM SCRIBBLING UGLY FACES IN A NOTEPAD, IM THINKING ABOUT YOU, I WANT SOMETHING DIFFERENT I DONT WANT TO BE THE ONE ALWAYS LEADING THE ONE ALWAYS HAPPY I WANT TO BE SWEPT ALONG IN SOMEONE ELSES GALEFORCE FOR ONCE AND I WANT SOMEONE TO WANT ME NOT SOME IDEAL THEYVE GLUED ONTO MY SKIN IM NOT DEEP IM NOT SEDUCTIVE IM NOT CLEVER IM JUST IMMATURE AND INSECURE WITH STANDARDS HIGHER THAN I DESERVE

i dreamt of you last week. you cut off my hair while i stared at the floor, wove tapestries to hang on your walls, left me comatose in the kitchen. hasn't it been a while since we spoke? how've you been?

ITS ALWAYS GONNA HOLD A SPECIAL MEANING FOR ME THE WAY YOU LET ME PHOTOGRAPH YOUR BRUISES AND I HID MY CIGARETTES WITH THE NECKLACES MY GRANDMOTHER GAVE ME I HAVENT TOUCHED THEM IN WEEKS BUT ****, IM WRITING ABOUT YOU AGAIN AND I NEED SOMETHING IN MY MOUTH THAT ISNT YOUR NAME

i wanted us to live forever in a whirlwind spinoff universe, falling too fast and laughing too hard to think, your fingernails scratching me enough to bleed, but you called me annabel lee and i wonder why the ******* wanted me to die, but i know i cant blame you because poetry is hard to understand, you can only have one or the other i understand poetry but not people emotion only makes sense in theory, wild chaos and discord, and ive been in love with eris since i was a child, but with your hand in mine i cannot reach  through your ears to pull out your thoughts in verses and try to understand you, and im sorry that i hide my verses from you instead of telling you *i feel trapped
ahh. ... i wrote this hella long ago but i kept forgetting to post it
She wasn't storybook pretty
She wasn't even the plain kind of pretty
No mary sue or timid thing
She was weepy phonecalls at 3am
And smashing plates in kitchen sinks
She was thunder and lightning
Bright and burning
And you couldn't catch her if you tried
She was destruction and it was not
Beautiful, but it was enchanting
The type of girl who stole breaths
Simply for the enjoyment of watching
Us mere things gasping for air
She was a galeforce wind in winter
You couldn't look away,
And she couldn't stay
Even if she wanted to.
Jill Tait Sep 2020
I am bothered and blustered as I try to go.. from the powerful wildness of the winds that blow.. why I went out walking in this well I will never know..but it’s whisting and wailing worries me so...

I wouldn’t care but when I left my garden gate..I felt a mild breeze and now it must be a galeforce eight.. ‘Heaven’s above’ it’s got me in a right old state..as I am running and rushing in a figure of eight..

Eeh this is one step forwards and two steps back.. in amidst my frustration and this tornado’s attack..It will be a wonder if I don’t land on my back..as it pushes me with such an aggressive punch and pack..

“Windy woos can you please die
down”..I espy the sea in my midst it is an awful brown..God help the fisherman as I stare and I frown..Oh my goodness me I hope they do not drown..

— The End —