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zebra Oct 2017
Here is a primer on the history of poetry

Features of Modernism

To varying extents, writing of the Modernist period exhibits these features:

1. experimentation

belief that previous writing was stereotyped and inadequate
ceaseless technical innovation, sometimes for its own sake
originality: deviation from the norm, or from usual reader expectations
ruthless rejection of the past, even iconoclasm

2. anti-realism

sacralisation of art, which must represent itself, not something beyond preference for allusion (often private) rather than description
world seen through the artist's inner feelings and mental states
themes and vantage points chosen to question the conventional view
use of myth and unconscious forces rather than motivations of conventional plot

3. individualism

promotion of the artist's viewpoint, at the expense of the communal
cultivation of an individual consciousness, which alone is the final arbiter
estrangement from religion, nature, science, economy or social mechanisms
maintenance of a wary intellectual independence
artists and not society should judge the arts: extreme self-consciousness
search for the primary image, devoid of comment: stream of consciousness
exclusiveness, an aristocracy of the avant-garde

4. intellectualism

writing more cerebral than emotional
work is tentative, analytical and fragmentary, more posing questions more than answering them
cool observation: viewpoints and characters detached and depersonalized
open-ended work, not finished, nor aiming at formal perfection
involuted: the subject is often act of writing itself and not the ostensible referent

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Expressionism

Expressionism was a phase of twentieth-century writing that rejected naturalism and romanticism to express important inner truths. The style was generally declamatory or even apocalyptic, endeavoring to awaken the fears and aspirations that belong to all men, and which European civilization had rendered effete or inauthentic. The movement drew on Rimbaud and Nietzsche, and was best represented by German poetry of the 1910-20 period. Benn, Becher, Heym, Lasker-Schüler, Stadler, Stramm, Schnack and Werfel are its characteristic proponents, {1} though Trakl is the best known to English readers. {2} {3}

Like most movements, there was little of a manifesto, or consensus of beliefs and programmes. Many German poets were distrustful of contemporary society — particularly its commercial and capitalist attitudes — though others again saw technology as the escape from a perceived "crisis in the old order". Expressionism was very heterogeneous, touching base with Imagism, Vorticism, Futurism, Dadaism and early Surrealism, many of which crop up in English, French, Russian and Italian poetry of the period. Political attitudes tended to the revolutionary, and technique was overtly experimental. Nonetheless, for all the images of death and destruction, sometimes mixed with messianic utopianism, there was also a tone of resignation, a sadness of "the evening lands" as Spengler called them.

Expressionism also applies to painting, and here the characteristics are more illuminating. The label refers to painting that uses visual gestures to transmit emotions and emotionally charged messages. In the expressive work of Michelangelo and El Greco, for example, the content remains of first importance, but content is overshadowed by technique in such later artists as van Gogh, Ensor and Munch. By the mid twentieth-century even this attenuated content had been replaced by abstract painterly qualities — by the sheer scale and dimensions of the work, by colour and shape, by the verve of the brushwork and other effects.

Expressionism often coincided with rapid social change. Germany, after suffering the horrors of the First World War, and ineffectual governments afterwards, fragmented into violently opposed political movements, each with their antagonistic coteries and milieu. The painting of these groups was very variable, but often showed a mixture of aggression and naivety. Understandably unpopular with the establishment  — denounced as degenerate by the Nazis — the style also met with mixed reactions from the picture-buying public. It seemed to question what the middle classes stood for: convention, decency, professional expertise. A great sobbing child had been let loose in the artist's studio, and the results seemed elementally challenging. Perhaps German painting was returning to its Nordic roots, to small communities, apocalyptic visions, monotone starkness and anguished introspection.

What could poetry achieve in its turn? Could it use some equivalent to visual gestures, i.e. concentrate on aspects of the craft of poetry, and to the exclusion of content? Poetry can never be wholly abstract, a pure poetry bereft of content. But clearly there would be a rejection of naturalism. To represent anything faithfully requires considerable skill, and such skill was what the Expressionists were determined to avoid. That would call on traditions that were not Nordic, and that were not sufficiently opposed to bourgeois values for the writer's individuality to escape subversion. Raw power had to tap something deeper and more universal.

Hence the turn inward to private torments. Poets became the judges of poetry, since only they knew the value of originating emotions. Intensity was essential.  Artists had to believe passionately in their responses, and find ways of purifying and deepening those responses — through working practices, lifestyles, and philosophies. Freud was becoming popular, and his investigations into dreams, hallucinations and paranoia offered a rich field of exploration. Artists would have to glory in their isolation, moreover, and turn their anger and frustration at being overlooked into a belief in their own genius. Finally, there would be a need to pull down and start afresh, even though that contributed to a gradual breakdown in the social fabric and the apocalypse of the Second World War.

Expressionism is still with us. Commerce has invaded bohemia, and created an elaborate body of theory to justify, support and overtake what might otherwise appear infantile and irrational. And if traditional art cannot be pure emotional expression, then a new art would have to be forged. Such poetry would not be an intoxication of life (Nietzsche's phrase) and still less its sanctification.  Great strains on the creative process were inevitable, moreover, as they were in Georg Trakl's case, who committed suicide shortly after writing the haunting and beautiful piece given below

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SYMBOLIST POETS
symbolism in poetry

Symbolism in literature was a complex movement that deliberately extended the evocative power of words to express the feelings, sensations and states of mind that lie beyond everyday awareness. The open-ended symbols created by Charles Baudelaire (1821-67) brought the invisible into being through the visible, and linked the invisible through other sensory perceptions, notably smell and sound. Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-98), the high priest of the French movement, theorized that symbols were of two types. One was created by the projection of inner feelings onto the world outside. The other existed as nascent words that slowly permeated the consciousness and expressed a state of mind initially unknown to their originator.

None of this came about without cultivation, and indeed dedication. Poets focused on the inner life. They explored strange cults and countries. They wrote in allusive, enigmatic, musical and ambiguous styles. Rimbaud deranged his senses and declared "Je est un autre". Von Hofmannstahl created his own language. Valéry retired from the world as a private secretary, before returning to a mastery of traditional French verse. Rilke renounced wife and human society to be attentive to the message when it came.

Not all were great theoreticians or technicians, but the two interests tended to go together, in Mallarmé most of all. He painstakingly developed his art of suggestion, what he called his "fictions". Rare words were introduced, syntactical intricacies, private associations and baffling images. Metonymy replaced metaphor as symbol, and was in turn replaced by single words which opened in imagination to multiple levels of signification. Time was suspended, and the usual supports of plot and narrative removed. Even the implied poet faded away, and there were then only objects, enigmatically introduced but somehow made right and necessary by verse skill. Music indeed was the condition to which poetry aspired, and Verlaine, Jimenez and Valéry were among many who concentrated efforts to that end.

So appeared a dichotomy between the inner and outer lives. In actuality, poets led humdrum existences, but what they described was rich and often illicit: the festering beauties of courtesans and dance-hall entertainers; far away countries and their native peoples; a world-weariness that came with drugs, isolation, alcohol and bought ***. Much was mixed up in this movement — decadence, aestheticism, romanticism, and the occult — but its isms had a rational purpose, which is still pertinent. In what way are these poets different from our own sixties generation? Or from the young today: clubbing, experimenting with relationships and drugs, backpacking to distant parts? And was the mixing of sensory perceptions so very novel or irrational? Synaesthesia was used by the Greek poets, and indeed has a properly documented basis in brain physiology.

What of the intellectual bases, which are not commonly presented as matters that should engage the contemporary mind, still less the writing poet? Symbolism was built on nebulous and somewhat dubious notions: it inspired beautiful and historically important work: it is now dead: that might be the blunt summary. But Symbolist poetry was not empty of content, indeed expressed matters of great interest to continental philosophers, then and now. The contents of consciousness were the concern of Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), and he developed a terminology later employed by Heidegger (1889-1976), the Existentialists and hermeneutics. Current theories on metaphor and brain functioning extend these concepts, and offer a rapprochement between impersonal science and irrational literary theory.

So why has the Symbolism legacy dwindled into its current narrow concepts? Denied influence in the everyday world, poets turned inward, to private thoughts, associations and the unconscious. Like good Marxist intellectuals they policed the area they arrogated to themselves, and sought to correct and purify the language that would evoke its powers. Syntax was rearranged by Mallarmé. Rhythm, rhyme and stanza patterning were loosened or rejected. Words were purged of past associations (Modernism), of non-visual associations (Imagism), of histories of usage (Futurism), of social restraint (Dadaism) and of practical purpose (Surrealism). By a sort of belated Romanticism, poetry was returned to the exploration of the inner lands of the irrational. Even Postmodernism, with its bric-a-brac of received media images and current vulgarisms, ensures that gaps are left for the emerging unconscious to engage our interest

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IMAGIST POETRY
imagist poetry

Even by twentieth-century standards, Imagism was soon over. In 1912 Ezra Pound published the Complete Poetical Works of its founder, T.E. Hulme (five short poems) and by 1917 the movement, then overseen by Amy Lowell, had run its course. {1} {2} {3} {4} {5} The output in all amounted to a few score poems, and none of these captured the public's heart. Why the importance?

First there are the personalities involved — notably Ezra Pound, James Joyce, William Carlos Williams {6} {7} {8} {9} — who became famous later. If ever the (continuing) importance to poets of networking, of being involved in movements from their inception, is attested, it is in these early days of post-Victorian revolt.

Then there are the manifestos of the movement, which became the cornerstones of Modernism, responsible for a much taught in universities until recently, and for the difficulties poets still find themselves in. The Imagists stressed clarity, exactness and concreteness of detail. Their aims, briefly set out, were that:

1. Content should be presented directly, through specific images where possible.
2. Every word should be functional, with nothing included that was not essential to the effect intended.
3. Rhythm should be composed by the musical phrase rather than the metronome.

Also understood — if not spelled out, or perhaps fully recognized at the time — was the hope that poems could intensify a sense of objective reality through the immediacy of images.

Imagism itself gave rise to fairly negligible lines like:

You crash over the trees,
You crack the live branch…  (Storm by H.D.)

Nonetheless, the reliance on images provided poets with these types of freedom:

1. Poems could dispense with classical rhetoric, emotion being generated much more directly through what Eliot called an objective correlate: "The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an 'objective correlative'; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked." {10}

2. By being shorn of context or supporting argument, images could appear with fresh interest and power.

3. Thoughts could be treated as images, i.e. as non-discursive elements that added emotional colouring without issues of truth or relevance intruding too mu
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PROSE BASED POETRY
prose based poetry

When free verse lacks rhythmic patterning, appearing as a lineated prose stripped of unnecessary ornament and rhetoric, it becomes the staple of much contemporary work. The focus is on what the words are being used to say, and their authenticity. The language is not heightened, and the poem differs from prose only by being more self-aware, innovative and/or cogent in its exposition.

Nonetheless, what looks normal at first becomes challenging on closer reading — thwarting expectations, and turning back on itself to make us think more deeply about the seemingly innocuous words used. And from there we are compelled to look at the world with sharper eyes, unprotected by commonplace phrases or easy assumptions. Often an awkward and fighting poetry, therefore, not indulging in ceremony or outmoded traditions.
What is Prose?

If we say that contemporary free verse is often built from what was once regarded as mere prose, then we shall have to distinguish prose from poetry, which is not so easy now. Prose was once the lesser vehicle, the medium of everyday thought and conversation, what we used to express facts, opinions, humour, arguments, feelings and the like. And while the better writers developed individual styles, and styles varied according to their purpose and social occasion, prose of some sort could be written by anyone. Beauty was not a requirement, and prose articles could be rephrased without great loss in meaning or effectiveness.

Poetry, though, had grander aims. William Lyon Phelps on Thomas Hardy's work: {1}

"The greatest poetry always transports us, and although I read and reread the Wessex poet with never-lagging attention — I find even the drawings in "Wessex Poems" so fascinating that I wish he had illustrated all his books — I am always conscious of the time and the place. I never get the unmistakable spinal chill. He has too thorough a command of his thoughts; they never possess him, and they never soar away with him. Prose may be controlled, but poetry is a possession. Mr. Hardy is too keenly aware of what he is about. In spite of the fact that he has written verse all his life, he seldom writes unwrinkled song. He is, in the last analysis, a master of prose who has learned the technique of verse, and who now chooses to express his thoughts and his observations in rime and rhythm."

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OPEN FORMS IN POETRY
open forms in poetry

Poets who write in open forms usually insist on the form growing out of the writing process, i.e. the poems follow what the words and phrase suggest during the composition
984

’Tis Anguish grander than Delight
’Tis Resurrection Pain—
The meeting Bands of smitten Face
We questioned to, again.

’Tis Transport wild as thrills the Graves
When Cerements let go
And Creatures clad in Miracle
Go up by Two and Two.
I hate the dripping dark hollow behind the little wood;
Its tips a cursed maroon with a blood-red heath.
I think I praised and lamented it too soon;
Before seeing its scent; I saw already its stray mystical death.

My crown is torn, outraged by florid winds and scorn;
Like a tangled old roots of the windblown thorn;
I shall feel scanty by my own poetry,
And throw it about, duly, like a static little joke.

I shall let my heart grow dull and illiterate;
I shall not taste joy, no more, in any clear--flowery fate.
I shall seek everything bitter, and not sweet;
Even not pure as the honey of a bee; for it shall be plain.

I shall curve and bend any straightforward light;
I shall harass it, and blind it--as if my ghost’s dead soul is very not here.
Ah, where is but Maud, Maud, Maud, and Maud;
Perhaps she is astray in my memory still, and not by my side.

I feel relieved so soon as glanced at her beside me;
She owns still that full lips like a perniciously tasty moon;
She is adorable like the flower of heaven itself;
She strikes me again when away, and tosses me about when near.

Ah, Maud, Maud, Maud;
Tame me again with thy rain of laugh;
Saint me once more like a fresh young bird;
Come to me now, and return my unheeded love.

Ah, Maud, Maud, Maud;
And kissing her forehead takes me back to that day;
A day of myths, a day of agile swans and storms;
An ornate time of hatred; a whirl of bitter fate; a dust of sorrow.

Ah, Maud, Maud, Maud;
And again I was alive in this tale, with a burning heart;
On one eve of tears, a mischief, and a wan poetry;
I caught about shadows in which there was no soul of Maud.

I could only see the stones, lying ghastly about the fireplace;
Ah, Maud, are you but still haunting those whimsical moors?
Their strange murmurs but I cannot hear;
But still they consume me, ah, I am scared;
I wish they would be gone soon, I wish you were but here.

These storms were amusing but peculiar;
They are bizarre, but intelligent and stellar;
And calling thy name out but breathes into me strength;
Ah, but should I be here, and bear away thy image alone?

Ah, and thou wert in but nymphic and lilac dream;
And my heart was still not massaged by the tender storm;
For it meant thee, and hungered but for thee only;
And in the midst of love had it longed, and yearned for thee.

Ah, where is but Maud, Maud, Maud, and Maud;
Her with her childish eyes and rounded head of bronze,
With her rapturous steps and wild glittering aroma,
With her atrocious jokes, and a wintry secret touch?

But still she was not anywhere about;
She dissolved like one romantic bough of soda;
And within a rough joke, she would be but gone;
And now the storm returned, but I was wholly on my own.  

Ah, and now the striking storm is mounting the earth;
Should I write alone and chill myself by the green hearth?
For I hath nothing to console and lengthen my parched logs;
I shall wait outside and drift about yon wintry bog.

Ah, where is but Maud, Maud, Maud;
Maud with her heart-shaped face and bare voice aloud;
A voice that soaked my senses and craving throat;
Maud but teased me and left me to that joke.

Where is but Maud, Maud, Maud and Maud;
Maud, the goth princess within my ancient poetry;
Who but remained symmetrical and biblical in her vain torments;
Who but stayed sturdy and silent; amidst her anger, and vain fellows’ arguments.

Listen to me. I am but full of hatred.
I am neither a gentleman nor a well-bred;
I, who is just a son of an infamous parson;
A malleable son; with a bleak aura of a putrid spring.

I, one who crafted ingenious jokes;
But interminable as they always are;
I made Maud sit still as I held my woodwork;
While she perched herself on yon bench, gazing at dispersed starry stars.

Maud the shadow in my pale mirror;
At times she ceased at morns, but retreated at night;
On her brother’s sight she fled in horror;
But on mine her smile turned me bright.

Maud was idle, sparkling, vibrant, and tedious;
Her heart was free and not marred by stupor.
She was the sun on my very bright days;
She made me startled; she always left me curious.

Maud the green of the farm, the red of the moon;
Without her everything would spring not and remain odious;
Everything would be bleak and stayed tedious;
Ah, but still I could not own her, though I was her saviour.

I was a farmer and perhaps still am;
Perhaps that’s why her mother ditched me with shame.
Maud said she had not places like home;
Her house was the mere shallow--and gratuitous throne.

Maud came often down and agitated;
Her mood shadowy, she cried and cried too aggravated;
I caressed her back, and placed my palms on her white knees;
She told me stories whenever no-one else would see.

She wanted not to mount the throne;
She giggled often, at our country escapade;
She loved my cottage, she sweetened my thin grass;
Even those apple trees had then her eyes, which sprayed tough, lonely seas of green.

Maud took to hymn and dear children’s little songs;
She was popular always among the talkative throngs.
She would love to dance and wiggle and turn around;
While village pupils gathered to sing a noble sound.

Ah, but when the mirthless prince arrived;
With white horses and swords of a knight;
Maud was swallowed every morning, all through day and night;
Maud was no more seen by my side.

I thought I was not alive, for dreams were unreal;
If they had been, then they I’d have want’d to ****;
But seeing Maud not gave me fretful chills;
I often woke up tensely, within a midnight’s shrills.

Ah, where is but Maud, Maud, Maud, and Maud;
Maud my bumblebee and my delicate little honey.
I kept waiting for her behind the rustic brook;
I fetched my net and fished by my old nook.

Ah, and where is Maud, Maud, Maud, and Maud;
My eyes were still and my chest could no more speak.
I wearily fancied she had been kidnapped faraway;
She would be jailed in a sore realm, and would no more be back here.

Ah, for had she been lost, then I had lost my ultimate pearl;
For there would no more be magic, there would be no more of her;
No-one would so restore my original spring;
Perhaps there would be no spring at all, and I would suffer in summer.

And I would lose anyway--my lyrical, elusive demon;
For Maud had always been elusive herself.
She wore that evil smile and thin laugh;
As I told her tales of fairies that she loved.

As I am fond of magical poetry and dramas;
Maud too used to read them with genuine personas.
She was my epic fanatical little devil;
She liked tropical cold and a faithful Mephistopheles.

I should be Faust, as she once said;
For had I fair hair, yet a bald head;
She said like Faust, I was cleverly amusing;
But to me, like Mephistopheles--she was unusually entertaining.

She danced before me a beautiful ballet;
She was young and keen to levitate as a ballerina;
She crafted me limericks and such fair lines of sonnets;
She made earth my heaven, and my melodies a twin cantata.

Ah, and where is Maud, Maud, Maud, and Maud;
I need my butterfly amongst this wheezy curdling cold.
I need my lover to soothe my chained hysteria;
I need to get out of here, and feed my love with her charms.

Ah, but where is Maud, Maud, Maud, is not she here?
I was then screaming in my solitude, could she but not hear?
I could speak not, no more--sore and wounded by this snowstorm;
I crept sick and weak like a dumb old worm.

She was not even heard of upstairs;
While I was dying here as a roaring beetle.
I hath almost lost all my creative flair;
I felt tormented and neglected and nearly feeble.

Ah, but a story like this is not such a fable;
So at that time I did shun sadness and seek a warm ending;
But indeed, to escape fate the poor were perhaps not able;
And the farmer’s son shall never be a king.

And ‘twas the nobles’ right to be idyllic;
To be deemed far then fairly righteous.
My charms were trivial, and so was then my wit;
My prayers were too parted and despaired; no matter how rigorous.

I kept my work along the countryside;
I toiled all night and behind fierce daylight.
I hoped Maud would see me back one day;
But what I found was to my dismay!

Ah, Maud, for she was now engaged;
To that pathetic creature the cursed morn brought about;
And parties arranged, voices too raised;
The union was now what people had in thought.

Onto my shoulders my head kept sinking;
I killed myself nearly, for my irksome defeat in this rivalry;
A rivalry that failed to transgress vital destiny;
A rivalry I could not even bear to think.

But again, this love had always been everything;
And thus Maud’s union would equal my death;
One night I crept out of my bed;
I had in hand a keychain and a net.

The soldier was infused by sound sleep;
And into Maud’s grand chamber I crept;
Everything was pink and quite neatly kept;
But woke I her not--as I heard her breast breath slowly.

She was tremendous still--in beauty;
Maud in her splendour; so young and free.
Ah, she was free but not free, I fathomed;
I looked at her over and over again.

I looked at her violet bed and comfort net;
Ah, my Maud too ****** and temptingly red.
She was too abundant in her young and chaste soul;
Ah, I could not imagine how she would soon be one else’s.

Long did I stand; ‘till morning streamed back again;
Still I remained unmoved; I stared at my darling in vain.
I jumped startled as the door opened;
And showed me the horror of the Queen!

‘Come, ye’ fool’, she voicelessly instructed;
Her face emotionless as these words emanated;
‘And embrace thy very fate’, to the handcuffs me she directed;
‘For daring look into my dame’s immaculately flawless chamber’.

She pointed thereof--a black gun at my chest;
It would soon burst out and tear my vest;
And even fly me straight to death;
So drifted I, without further haste nor breath.

Those poor soldiers imprisoned me there;
A cellar room at the top of filthy stairs;
I stayed awake only for grief and tears;
And most of the time I laid about sleepless and stared.

I grew skinless as my bones squinted;
And laughed at me with their sordid might;
Flies were about me, bending onto my rotten pies;
And slices of meat left out by sniggering guards.

I hit my head on witnessing Maud’s cold marriage;
‘Twas on a Saturday on the castle’s rain-wetted field.
I heaved myself onto the windowsill and saw;
How the couples were blessed and sent thereby back.

I could not see Maud’s face and fleshy cheeks;
But didst I feel her discarded tears;
Marred and defiled her lovely fits;
Though just those innate, and not out there.

I struck the lifeless paint with my bare palms;
Now the walls were tainted; they smelled like my blood.
Time passed and desire for Maud was never killed;
I’th missed her every day, since then, and perhaps always will.

But my love for Maud was never probable;
I was decent, honest, but indeed not preferable;
I was not even preferable by fate, as thou might see;
Fate who is neither truthful; nor frankly urges us to lie.

I often laid hopeless by the moonbeam;
Until night came and eyesight grew more and more vulnerable.
I waited ‘till it was dark and left to day no more gleam;
Then took my journal of Maud’s jests and read her affable poems.

I turned around--and would disgrace my bed still;
I was plain starved but had no desire to be properly fed;
Of a dream of death I grew instantly pertinacious;
And of my future tomb I grew fonder--and yet rapidly curious.

Ah, but my sweet Maud, Maud, Maud, and Maud;
And deliriously she somehow became pregnant;
But remorse said she kept the souls of two;
And fatefully could not make them both perfect!

I indeed plain prayed for Maud’s survival;
I cared not whose sons they might be;
Ah, but the twins were still sinning babies--as I comprehended,
For they were formed not from cells of mine!

Ah, Maud, Maud, Maud,
And during those last days she was cautiously ill;
And a drive of cholera had again grown widespread;
But she was not maddened; by it she was not marred.

She was sickened by temper still;
And the prince found dead, she grew more terrifyingly ill;
She had a pure heart, so she flourished not over the beast’s death;
Nonetheless, he remained the father of yon sickly offspring.

Ah, Maud, Maud, Maud,
I was duly growing perfectly anxious;
She was to give birth--ah, to those little ignoramuses;
And within a little chord in one or days of two--she would do so.

But without a father to care for her notorious sons;
And even I was locked away, and could not do so;
I was terrified, I was horribly undignified;
To learn this stern reality we were so sullenly faced with!

Ah, not now! I could not too believe my ears!
Maud and her children were dead--they’d been stillborn;
Before they left Maud alone to receive her fate;
Her locksmith would not come; he had another due in a nameless town.

By the time he arrived my darling had gone;
Perhaps she was now shimmering in heaven;
Enchanting her children with her enormous spells;
Narrating stories no plain human could ever tell.

Even in heaven my love would perhaps be famous;
Her tenderness would make other angels jealous;
And angered by envy, they would gather and complain to God;
How an earthly soul could be more vivacious than their heavenly were.

Ah, but where is Maud, Maud, Maud;
Maud and her chain of songs that were never to be broken;
Maud and her familiarity with gardens and blue lilies;
Maud and her immaculate pets of birds that still sweetly sing.

Ah, but where is my darling, my darling, my darling;
My eternal ocean, my hustling flowerbed, my immortal;
My poem, my enchanting lyric, my wedding ring;
My novelty, my merited charm, my eternal.

And now she was longing for her grave, as I’d been told;
For I’d been told by the dimmed torches and fuss and mirthless air outside;
By the endless wandering and the prince’s wails and wordless screams.
Ah, my Maud had now migrated from her life--but attained her freedom!

And he was thus unworthy of being in her heaven;
Her heaven where there would be me, her true love;
And thus he would be glad to greet his fires of hell;
He would marry an evil angel there--and make himself again full.

But I’d be with Maud, Maud, Maud and Maud;
I’d be again with my gem, indefatigable little darling;
Whose voice was unsure, whose poems were never known;
But ‘twas enough that they’d been known to me, her secret--ye’ dearest lover.

So took I, that spinning penchant and a circle of strings;
The edges I matched to the chains on my ceilings.
I braced myself for my very own fiery death;
But again, I’d be with Maud and death would no more, aye, be sad.

Thus the above poem was done by my spirit;
But with the same token and awe of genuineness and wit;
I feel tired--I shall close my eyes, and thus enjoy my heaven now;
For my wife and starlings are all waiting for me to-morrow.

It is now nighttime in heaven;
And there is indeed, no place on earth lovelier;
I gaze into my wife with a loving madness;
Her cheeks sweeter still, than any proudest swiftness.

I shall take my vow of marriage tomorrow;
My proud wife sitting in yon angelic chair by my side.
I shall cradle, then, those white little nuptial fairies;
They are Maud’s children’s, but lithe and gracious and bow to me in chaste mercies.

Ah, Maud, Maud, Maud, she is but all mine now;
I am still surprised now, as sitting by this heaven riverside.
One even grander than the one I’d had beside the lake;
Which I often farmed when I had needs to bake.

Ah, Maud, Maud, Maud, she is a ghost but as ever lively;
We are both dead but she boldly remaineth lovely;
I know she is worthier than serene jewels or mundane affairs;
And still she is worthier all the same, than any other terrific palace--or heir.

Ah, Maud, Maud, Maud, and this war is but all over now;
Thus let us dream dead of the exciting tomorrow.
We shall see life and our children grow;
We shall witness delight--and miracles none ever knows.
Mateuš Conrad Nov 2016
i.

for the past few weeks i've been doing an experiment,
thankfully philosophy allows such things,
of course, they're deviations from what i'm used to
in chemistry, they're less, what's the word?
spectacular - but they are nonetheless experiments,
and that's the beauty of being grounded in some sort
of science (trinity of biology, chemistry and physics
and that's the limit, beyond this there are only
pseudo-sciences)... medicine? that's the tsarina of
learning: like any tsarina: gets down and *****,
and yes: mathematics is the genteel queen.
philosophy on the other hand seems like a vagabond
in learning, never really pieced together,
never really sentenced to a single direction:
and for that matter, thought can become less narration
that stretches into the sort of philosophy that Sartre
embodied with his novel, and more into thought becoming
experimental...
you might be wondering what the experiment consisted
of... well, over the weeks i've been sadistic unto myself,
it's to do with trying to figure out the modern curse
that's the 3D's: debt, depression, dementia.
                i can't fall asleep without a bottle of whiskey
cigarettes, sleeping pills and music playing in the background:
which would make me a terrible partner, anyway.
   beyond that though, for weeks i repeated a pattern,
i fell asleep to the *hellraiser ii: hellbound
soundtrack
by christopher young...
       day-in-day out: as if to pressurise the idea that
the faculty of dreaming could be censored in the same way
that thinking is censored in liberal speech
eroding people's vocabulary, **** included.
     what i mean by that: every day i woke up with 15 minutes
of despair, then the zenith came after i lay in bed
for 4 hours and felt too many leeches ******* at me...
   those 15 minutes of despair were always there,
but then i usually got up and went about my daily business...
i admit that whiskey could be to blame,
anyone could argue the alcohol-is-bad argument,
but arguing as R. D. Laing might have that it's
also a sedative if you don't include social adhesion to loosen
the tension of going out and dancing:
then i don't see the point of saying it's all bad.
         sleeping pills (i found) are not 100% active without
what the prescription states that you should do:
i exceed limits, but then i write during the night -
            create a balance and i'm sure any insomnia
might be made minimal... anyway:
so i've been doing this roundabout experiment,
listening to the above album while falling asleep,
but then yesterday i decided to fall asleep listening to
godspeed you! black emperor's album F♯ A♯ ∞,
and guess what the experiment proved:
  i felt little or no anguish for 15 minutes,
obviously the usual groggy of a pseudo-hangover,
  but that doesn't mean staying in bed for 4 hours
because you feel **** about life 'n' all...
                   as already stated there's what we call
a cartesian dichotomy, that somehow altered mental
states cannot be translated into a physicality -
depression in this sort of language becomes lethargy -
people never seemed to connect the dots that
state the monism of everything having a pairing either
side of Humpty-Dumpty sitting on the ergo fence
asking about a flying omelette... ergo is a variation
of what precipitates... depression = lethargy...
the purest kind of what i know (i have enough psychiatric
literature to redeem myself from what would
be deemed quack-medicine with their quack doctors) -
some say that taking the vitamin B12 supplement
could help you: or that weak digestion is to blame, too.
i would be quack doctor if i was in a position of power,
and since i am not really earning anything from my
"poems", what sort of power can i abuse? trust -
but then again these are thought experiments,
           i first experiment on myself, then note down
the observations i have accounted for.
               so what will my unconscious eat today while
i switch off my consciousness? i was thinking of
the cure's disintegration album,
         perhaps that's why i did weeks of falling asleep
to a horror movie soundtrack, to later move into
neo-prog "rock" and then into 80s goth melancholia...
    i'd say that pop ****** melancholics off...
and such a nicer word for depression...
                   it's not even close to compression and has
nothing to do with aviation or the Netherlands...
     melan, melan: ah! melanism - a certain darkness,
    choly -         condition of darkness...
       and that star of Bethlehem appeared at night...
man of sorrows, well that's just blatant;
           but for all the romanticisation about darkness
and the mysterious moon and all the insomnia,
i still prefer the anti-cartesian explanation of actually
creating the proper answer to what has become
a dichotomy between the physical sciences and
the pseudo sciences, given that ergo is a precipitation
then for the two opposite to become inseparable
depression must be equal to lethargy: which is a variation
of the grander genus (family): metabolism.
               is this the point where i re-quote that famous:
doctor! heal yourself!
                                      well, if there's anything to go by
i have in my mind, given my life a prolonging in a way,
what was it... amitriptyline?
                                         the new ******* for
the respectably prone to citizenship's serenity of leaving
other people to their own demises -
  i mean, look at all the teetotalers: hyperactive bunnies
with too much energy that translated into things like
the infamous pyramids and the doubly infamous chimneys.

ii. the danish girl

i would have never thought that the transgender movement
had such a puritanism about it,
such platonism - nearing martyrdom;
who could have thought?! i only managed to see the film
today... i'm a sentimental ******* and i was choking
on not crying at the end of the film
here was a true representation of an artist,
         there's he (einar wegenar): a successful local
artist, within the confines of Copenhagen,
modestly famous: primarily because of having
perfected a technique and sourced it in a childhood
memory that keeps haunting him,
    thus he keeps repeating it, although with slight
alternation to refresh it, but no photograph to work
from, hence my previous statement:
  memory is the best cinema or arts' gallery (this
is not a universal statement, memory doesn't always
heal, or fascinate or have the ability to revitalises itself
or become the most potent "hallucinogenic" experience);
and then she's there (gerda wegener), also
painting, but more in line with paying the rent
rather than appeal, rich people needing portraits to
hang on the walls of the future of their lineage
        in years to come so someone might boast:
that was my ancestor, who founded the first bank
of Copenhagen sort of stories -
and all she wants to do is be an artist like Einar;
and she keeps coming back from galleries with her
works and they never give the critics any appeal
at being original - they have a suggestive generic
quality to them: precisely because they've been painted
for money. art is cruel in that way,
  when critics reduce producing art like they might reduce
being a cashier in a supermarket on the basis of:
job done... then comes the offense from the artist.
the beauty of this film is the platonism that soon explodes,
the near innocence... i really don't know how
the transgender movement borrowed from this:
all those Baphomet ******* with too many parts,
silicon chests and ***** and what not?
       this is one of the finest forms of defamation -
these days the transgender movement is so sexually
potent it doesn't really deserve what can only appear
as a self-imposed crucifixion...
              this story predates the unearthing of the nag
hammadi scripts, it's intuitively bound to what was
unearthed in 1945...
      einar sees the desperation of gerda, he knows
that he'll simply remain a local artist,
    bound to a square mile of earth, local, provincial
even... what he decides on is best expressed
by Marilyn Manson's lyrics: now i'm not an artist
i'm a ******* work of art
.
        how can not this resonate further into the film
if not by this motto:
it is a consecration of a memory, to invert it and
un-seize the moment long ago experienced and now
fuelling art, or the repetition of a safe technique established.
one man's frustration and a woman in a cage:
the potential seen - then a sudden bursting of madness,
the evident anti-cross -
                                  to say he had reached his limits
and she was kept frustrated and under-appreciated is
blatant enough, this self-sacrifice for a woman to
find her subject, was all too evident when she utters
the words that: the student overcomes the teacher,
and that's the whole story,
                       he has to walk into the canvas,
     in whatever way imaginable, and what a better way
than on a whim to escape the dreariness of parties
   by dressing up as a woman, after gerda's model
is late so she can continue a painting and einar
has to step in and wear a few female garments...
       to later realise the Dionysian consequence:
                                  only to the utmost excess, from here.
this could hardly be a propaganda movie for
the transgender movement... the "propaganda"
aspect ends when you hear children imitating this
artistic "prank" in today's society...
      it wasn't a prank in the slightest: but a profound
expression of love between two artists...
          outside of art the whole transgender movement
is still only ***** and silicon **** of Thailand's lady-boys:
that's not reality?        
although i actually did choke with nearing to cry
in the closing scene...
    unlike the Christ story... there was no resurrection.
so hans and gerda travel to the place where
einar depicted the landscape in his revisions,
       and both of them are standing there
        and it's ****** pulverising with so much depth
upon being so little when reduced to a canvas
but because you see the painting first, do you later
see the landscape with more emotion...
     and i thought to myself: gerda will recreate
the landscape in her own eyes, she'll what he saw
and what he gave up for her to paint him in his
transformative (transfigurative) state of becoming
lili elbe...
                     that's why i was about to cry -
     that she could put lili aside, and return to /
resurrect the memory of einar the locally famous
artist... that she would apply the same technique in
painting lili / einar but turn her attention to
landscapes... as if to imply that both of them became
reunited before all the madness of life came chasing them
into extremes.
          to my dissatisfaction? after the film ended
and before the credits started rolling... postscriptum facts
after these true events... she continued to paint
lili / einar as she did, which prompted her to fame
on the Parisian estrade; after seeing that, written down?
tears? what tears... i'm actually thankful that i choked
on them and didn't do an outburst necessarily...
thank **** i wasn't watching the film alone!
     i know that i might have invoked a sense of:
rough around the edges with this description, but i'm hoping
it's abstract enough to make the film more potent:
filling the blanks with images;
still, this was used for a transgender movement?
                                                did he make it plainly obvious
that this was a transcendental transgender iconoclasm?
         it's the platonic element in it that steers this whole
story, away from what 21st century movements regard
as prototype for their ******.
Mateuš Conrad Nov 2015
sample precursor: there are three binding directions of a chemical group (e.g. CH3) to the benzene ring - the ortho-, the meta- and the para-... but i'll ask a different question: what is copernican north what is copernican east a copernican west or a copernican west without a "flat-earth" / how else to read / navigate a 2D map going from point (a) via vector (c) to point (b) along the short-cut of the hypotenuse - which, isn't a short-cut, but the logical conclusion of walking neither the middle path nor the right path, but the logical path? we're no astronauts... we didn't see the proof... we can only entertain the "idea" of a 3D object we live on, but we're still strapped to a "flat earth" in order to navigate... endless stories of how GPS tech. fooled people off the edge of a cliff... "flat earth" is no reverse psychology ploy... i'm no ******* astronaut... i never stood left right or center on the moon to have the foggiest sense of admiration for that awe-balancing moment that leaves so many deluded in it being otherwise: first come first served, last come: what's there's to serve that last man if not merely the drudge-report of a commute? besides... trans- and cis-, why are people borrowing from chemistry and attaching gender to what is exlusive to chemical compounds? look at them... pop chemistry... cis-trans isomerism... fine, let these people have that... my new n.e.w.s. (north, east, west, south): orthography, something clearly missing in the anglophone world (no diacritical markers, i and j do not count)... ergo? orthography = east... paranormal = west... since the west is obsessed with either aliens or hush-hush military projects... now... both north and south are meta- coordinates... on the basis, on the basis of what? two words really work well to establish a foundation: from ars poetica? metaphor (borrowed from a change of mind - meta- and -phren - mind, a change of mind, all mental illnesses are changes of the mind, alternatives to alleviate the stranglehold of the commune of the greater picture known as society)... but... there's also metaphysics... which is in the interest of philosophy... how else not to explain the obvious, how else to treat both the reader / audience as the well informed genius(es) but mistreat them as would be grander genius(es) if the socratic endeavour of "pretense ignorance" was not to be established? it's a hard juggle... east is already well established in orthography, west in paranomal... literally: metaphor - a change of mind, literally metaphysics - a change of groundwork physicality of things... a rock remains a rock in either "heaven" or in "hell"... metaphysically there seems to be a direct translation... this is why i'm terrible at crosswords, this whole puzzle structure of either working from a direct definition to the word itself, some random geographical posists, some historical posits, some outdated out-of-vogue words related to specified period idiosyncracy, a tinge of the therausus... my current crossword is an interchange: meta-phor, meta-physics, meta-phot, meta-physics and on and on it goes: even with the isolated prefix of meta-, if i return to the words: as they are... would: denoting a change of thinking (state of mind) or... denoting a change of physics, i'm met with metaphysics, i.e.: a branch of philosophy that deals with the first principles... sounds like a priori physics, yet all i can fathom if i wrestle this word to its casual use: isn't it a posteriori physics?! the what comes after physics? i should think that most people understand metaphysics on an a posteriori basis rather than an a priori basis... hence the question: what happens when we die? last time i checked: death happens last... birth happens first... any question-worthiness (according to heidegger) should begin at: the beginning rather than begin at the end, in the same way that all questions should be sought in a medium of predating the dates of events, rather than with a spirit of hindsight, hindsight belongs to the "what if" of history in that dynamism of expressed time... on the canvas of an infinitely expanding space: we seem to be riddled by a very cul de sac concept / expression of time: our quill - given that ****** didn't learn from napoleon when it came to russia... perhaps finding out what copernicus found out: "we" figured: get me off this ******* celestial carousel where i can't even feel the dizzy immediate of a ferris wheel! again: i'm terrible at crosswords, sudoku? no problem... but words: if not gushing out of me, waiting like a lizard predator for a linear narrative spew? count me out... i don't play with words, i use words... i'm a wordsmith, hence the ethnic origin denote: słowianin: slav - i don't know where these west-saxon punks derived their etymology from: słowo = word... *****-liquor juice teens thought it was: oh fo' sho' smart... still: metaphor, metaphysics... metaphor... metaphysics... disgruntled with the immediate compound readied for pop use... meta-physics... the vector is the prefix... why do philosophers push metaphysics so much, but in turn rely on the crutch of metaphor? to change their mind, if metaphysics is an abstract theory with no basis in reality, then the schizoid / metaphorical mind is an abstract in an abstracted theory of the mind - which has "no" knowledge of reality, or rather: "reality" excludes such a mind from ever absorbing an expression in it... a schizophrenic can't explain the reality of a person who can solve crossword puzzles... just as someone who solves crossword puzzles with a fear of alzheimer's: who treats the fatty tissue that's the brain as a muscle... given that the cells of alzheimer's disease are killer proteins... proteins as the antithesis of white blood-cells that feed of fat tissue... after all: what else could the brain be if not fat and water? slow burner... first the sugars, then the more complex carbohydrates, then the fat: last? the proteins... the process of starvation... you want up? you want down? again: metaphysics / metaphor... ta meta ta phusika... the things after the physics... so what's with the inverted: prior things? hence people associated a life after death... hence how philosophers have to escape into the poetic realm to quickly change their minds on the definition... a change of mind is much easier than a change of what physicality entails... most spew metaphors but keep on course... after all: given the genesis of the metaphor, a metaphor is just a tool, a humble stop-off pause... born from humble poetics: it's only a literary tool, it's not some grand pillar of morality associated metaphysics, which nonetheless dictates: first principles come last and last principles come first... here's my crossword puzzle: metaphor, metaphysics, meta-alpha, meta-beta, metaphor and the meta-alpha, metaphysics and the meta-beta... etc. etc., i will not solve this crossword puzzle, even though it doesn't look like a crossword puzzle... it's a narrative crossword puzzle, i'm just looking for the sort of fixed point people associate with prime words: red, left, blue, right, up, fox, dog... words of readied vocabulary, readied vocabulary dissociated from puzzled vocabulary... i want to established a fixed permanence of the dissociated close proximity grounded in the meta- prefix of the words meta-phor and, meta-physics... i'm starting to find this impossible, given how the words have dissociated themselves from the grounding in the meta- prefix... phor alias phren (mind) and the whole gush of isolated metaphysics of beginnings: meta a priori vs. meta a posteriori - and of course: meta a- apriori... hell if i can't solve crossword puzzles: since i already have a crossword puzzle in my head... what am i to do? try writing pop?! a dog does what his master orders, a jester tells a joke his king would find amusing... i'll just treat this enclave of an audience as a bunch of people subscribed to ulterior forms of voyeurism (dissociated from pain / pleasure gratification, esp. that of a ****** nature).

.you know like in latin you had the interchangeable tongue twisters æ and œ? well... english resurrected one more... au... oh stralia... auntie; ******* hell i've been speaking this since aged ate and i still can't get my tongue into that phonetic plughole... or what's that onomatopoeia for: it really hurts? awe... nah... aw... aw... well no cute kitten about to say aww.

well it began with the usual... i wish i didn’t...
sitting in the autumnal garden
drinking coffee and eating a nicotine croissant,
watching the fog recede into nothing
while the earth showed its naked cleavage
after what seems like centuries of arcane dryness
befitting a story of an egyptian idol...
then the panic set in...
what to cook?! what to cook?!
my mother is away visiting her parents in poland,
who celebrate the feast of all saints with the usual
tackle formidable in poland:
forget the paris fashion week, forget the london fashion week...
forget the next gucci advert...
all the action happens in poland’s annual all saints’ fashion week...
through the cemetery (ahem) cat walks
(more like death on rollerblades donning a tutu
and looking fatter than size 0 models)...
because that’s when the fur coats are worn,
the make-up is heavier and everyone comes
to discuss the materialistic jealousy of a small town...
it is a small town after all...
death knocks with all the nine cat’s lives just to prove
the point...
anyway, so i’m the head chef, and in panic
i search for a recipe... i’ve only got pork on the ready
in the recognisable frozen state...
but i also have shrimps... tiger prawns...
so i look through the usual suspects... thai green curry...
ah ****! no coconut milk!
what’s it going to be? prawn korma curry
(better mild than hot i say, with all this maple syrup
and honey colours about... talk about decay),
active ingredients? chilli powder (1/2 tsp), cinnamon
(1/2 tsp), turmeric (1/2 tsp) and ground almonds (2 tbsp),
there ready... looking suntanned my gorgeous twirls of seabed manure...
enough to spare my father making himself sandwiches (i always
disguised my “dyslexia” by associations... sandy witches...
the t broke the barriers and the floods entered)...
with toasted nannies / au pairs... relatives of some sort...
then onto writing my father’s invoices:
project plaistow hospital and some housing development near
the city airport... beckton we call it... backwards and forwards
stink crowned with drinkers regurgitating on the pave...
now that is a *******... recycling centre or horse manure?
then to tesco... for the nightcap...
oddly enough tesco has become a friend of mine once more,
i divorced the turkish shop, they added 10 pence to the polish beers,
now i’m on the sedative medication of this bottle bavaria beer
and whiskey... 1 quid for the former... 10 quid for the latter -
i’ve sold my soul! never mind...
then to the beacon that’s home... it’s night... it’s spooky...
it’s essex: that non-touristy place in england people with passports
never dare to visit, shambles.
well one thing came out true... none of the above though:
you ever consider the theory of the aeroplane syndrome in writers?
you know, like with rock stars you get the full package,
you get the aeroplane and the retrieved delay of the engine mushroom,
but with poetry (which is competing with music,
philosophers just wait in that queue for the cheese, wink, whine and wrinkle)
you only get the sound... that delayed mushroom...
you see the poet but never hear him...
it’s a typical delusion i’d call parallel or even adjacent to narcissism,
you walk down the street and the closest you come
to someone recognising you is a stranger uttering out: ‘hey richard!’
‘name’s matt mate.’
‘oh... sorry.’
it’s this aeroplane syndrome theory... it’s perfectly acceptable...
you have the image but don’t have the delayed sound...
you have the delayed sound... but you only get a photograph...
you have the english national health service mental health unit crisis...
and then you have people shunning intellectualism
trying to cure people by burning / not reading philosophical books;
the day ends with drinking and reading
an article about keith richard’s antics in the sunday times’ supplement
and the thought: well i gave her a stabbing chance
at feminism... she thought the active ingredient in anti-contraception
pills was placebo... she phoned and gave birth to me...
i said abort... you’re no post-teen mum at university, you won’t be...
******* was great but i’m not that much of a match from a cosmopolitan magazine quiz
(as duly taken on my way from st. pestersburg to moscow to see
metallica play), plus there are no roofing jobs in scotland...
the scots have mountains already... there’s no point building
scratched sky skylines with mountain ranges nearby...
so even though i went to a catholic school...
i did my first redemptive act by reading about gnostic heretics...
and not getting confirmed being the second...
i would have not taken first communion... but playing the xylophone
at the nativity play was too much fun...
plus it is the only salvador dali bit of the story...
after that you have st. sebastian...
plus you see where this is going... the greeks translated
the tetragrammaton into the gospels
of st. matthew, luke, mark and john...
and the romans were duped into the legality of
things... first name, second name, confirmation name...
surname.
Nigel Morgan Nov 2012
After the painting by Leonard John Fuller

I had promised I would arrive in good time for afternoon tea with Edith and the Aunt. Angela was nervous.
     ‘Edith scares me,’ she said. ‘I feel a foolish girl. I have so little to say that she could possibly be interested in.’
      She had sat up in bed that morning as I dressed. She had frowned, pushed her hair back behind her ears, then curled herself up like a child against my empty pillow. I sat on the bed and then stroked the hand she had reached out to touch me. She was still warm from sleep.
     ‘They are coming to see you,’ she whispered, ‘and to make sure I’m not fooling about with your mother’s house.’
‘I’ve told you, you may do what you like . . .’
‘But I’m not ready . . . and I don’t know how.’
‘Regard it as an adventure my dear, just like everything else.’
‘Well that had been such an adventure,’ she thought. ‘When you drive off each morning I can hardly bare it. It’s good you can’t see how silly I am, and what I do when you are not here.’
        I could imagine, or thought I could imagine. I’d never known such abandon; such a giving that seemed to consume her utterly. She would open herself to this passion of hers and pass out into the deepest sleep, only to wake suddenly and begin again.

Angela felt she had done her best. They’d been here since three, poked about the house and garden for an hour, and then Millicent had brought tea to the veranda. Jack had promised, promised he would look in before surgery, but by 4.30 she had abandoned hope in that safety net, and now launched out yet again onto the tightrope of conversation.
         Edith and the Aunt asked for the fourth time when Dr Phillips would be home. How strange. she thought, to refer to their near relative so, but, she supposed, doctor felt grander and more important than plain Jack. It carried weight, significance, *gravitas
.
       Angela hid her hands, turning her bitten to the quick nails into her lilac frock, hunching her shoulders, feeling a patch of nervous sweat under her thighs.
       ‘He’s probably still at the Cottage Hospital,’ she said gaily, ‘Reassuring his patients before the holiday weekend.’
      She and Jack had planned to drive to St Ives tomorrow, stay at the Mermaid, swim at ‘their’ bay, and sleep in the sun until their bodies dried and they could swim again.
       ‘How strange this situation,’ she considered. ‘Edith and the Aunt in the role of visitors to a house they knew infinitely better than she ever could.’
       The task ahead seemed formidable: being Jack’s wife, bearing Jack’s children, replacing Jack’s mother.
      Edith was thinking,’ What would mother have made of this girl?’ She’s so insipid, so ‘nothing at all’, there wasn’t even a book beside her bed, and her underwear, what little she seemed to wear, all over the place.'
      Edith just had to survey the marital bedroom, the room she had been born in, where she had lost her virginity during Daddy’s 60th party – Alan had been efficient and later pretended it hadn’t happened – she was sixteen and had hardly realised that was ***. Years later she had sat for hours with her mother in this room as, slipping in and out of her morphia-induced sleep, her mother had surveyed her life in short, sometimes surprising statements.
      Meanwhile the Aunt, Daddy’s unmarried younger sister had opened drawers, checked the paintings, looked at Angela’s slight wardrobe, fingered Jack’s ties.
      Edith remembered her as a twenty-something, painfully shy, too shy to swim with her young niece and nephew, always looking towards the house on the cliffs where they lived.
     They were those London artists with their unassorted and various children, negligent clothes and raised voices. The Aunt would wait until they all went into St Ives, for what ever they did in St Ives – drink probably, and creep up to the house and peer into the downstairs windows. It was all so strange what they made, nothing like the art she had seen in Florence with Daddy. It didn’t seem to represent anything. It seemed to be about nothing.
       Downstairs Angela knew. The visit to the bathroom was just too long and unnecessary. She didn’t care, but she did care, as she had cared at her wedding when the Aunt had said how sad it was that she had so little family, so few friends.
       Yet meeting Jack had changed everything. He wanted her to be as she was, she thought. And so she continued to be. All she felt she was this ripe body waiting to be impregnated with her husband’s child. Maybe then she would become someone, fit the Phillips mould, be the good wife, and then be able to deal with Edith and the Aunt.
        That cherub in the alcove, how grotesque! As Edith droned on about the research on her latest historical romance, Angela wondered at its provenance. ‘Daddy ‘ loved that sort of thing, Jack had told her. The house was full of her late father-in-law’s pictures, a compendium of Cornish scenes purchased from the St Ives people. She would burn the lot if she could, and fill the house with those startling canvases she occasionally glimpsed through studio doors in town. She knew one name, Terry Frost. She imagined for a moment covering up the cherub with one of his giant ecstatic spirals of form and colour.
       The chairs and the occasional tables she would disappear to the loft, she would make the veranda a space for walking too and fro. There would be an orange tree at one end and a lemon tree at the other; then a vast bowl on a white plinth in which she could place her garden treasures, rose petals, autumn leaves, feathers and stones. There might be a small sculpture, perhaps something by that gaunt woman with the loud voice, and those three children. Angela had been told she was significant, with a studio at the top of Church Lane.
       Edith had run out of experiences regarding her monthly visits to the reading room of the British Museum. She was doing the ’ two thousand a day, darling’, and The Dowager of Glenriven would be ‘out’ for the Christmas lists. The Aunt had remained silent, motionless, as though conserving her energies for the walk through the cool house to the car.
       ‘Oh Darlings,’ Jack shouted from the hall, ‘I’m just so late.’ Then entering the veranda, ‘Will you forgive me? Edith? Aunt Josie? (kiss, kiss) Such an afternoon . . .’
       Surveying the cluttered veranda Angela now knew she would take this house apart. She had nothing to lose except her sanity. Everything would go, particularly the cherub. She would never repeat such an afternoon.
      She stood up, smoothed her frock, put her arms around Jack and kissed him as passionately as she knew how.
This is the first of my PostCard Pieces - very short stories and prose poems based on postcards I've collected or been given from galleries and museums. I have a box of them, pick one out at random - and see what happens!
Mateuš Conrad Apr 2017
.how does philosophy and psychology differ? well. psychology was spawned from having to focus on the "need" of a "learning" for writing: speak comes easy, writing, not so much. psychology is so easily spoken, philosophy isn't, philosophy is like a child talking to an adult when psychology / sophistry comes into play /
    refrain... how do i rephrase this statement?
      ah! philosophy is like a child talking to a child...
psychology is like an adult talking to a child...
psychology is a supertition of knowledge...
philosophy? a fear of knowledge.
  knowledge does not make happy people,
or gullible talkative types, either.

... the birth of psychology contra philosophy... the when sophia over-powered the philosophers with too many observation cues... maxims and aphorisms... la rochefoucauld & nietzsche... it began with a dialogue, it maintained itself in a solipsistic monologue... it ended up as advertisement slogans: maxims and aphorisms.... cute observations: seen, "seen" but never tested... i've seen the ugly side of psychology... it's psychiatry... the big pharma carousel and slurred sedative spreschen... try getting a slurred sedative spreschen out of me... i'll sock you... i'm this: )( close to the itch of throwing a punch, i almost forgot what implies: peace... me dancing on old college's (edinburgh) roof while listening to: the shins, new slang... that was peace...
  that was me: rooftop, night, moon,
and the lingo of limbs floating freely off my torso
and at the same attached to it...

       i once cared about a "double" chin...
i grew a beard,
stopped worrying about: when will i learn
the violin... fiddled with my beard
for a while and figured: not now,
not ever...
                much much more gracious
than fiddling with ***** hair...
after all: a beard is very much akin
to ***** hair...

          jordan peterson and the old testament...
right...
       if ever a cain...
  siberia looks like the ideal prison...
after all god said, or "said": let him walk off his sins...
hard to walk off your sins when caged...
siberia? perfect training ground...
all that ******* being sold, cain? a vegetarian...
abel? sacrificed animal flesh...
paradox... so... god... expected us...
to remain hunter gatherers?!
  cain was thinking ahead!
he sacrificed fruits and veg. and...
cain was like: we better start thinking about
morphing into an agricultural society!
god praised abel, the neanderthal hunter gatherer...
cain was like: but look! look! wheat! bread!
we can feed more people!
god said: hunter gatherer! abel! win win!
cain paid homage to god
via fruit & veg...
abel... via kosher blood sacrifices...
now... either i'm just plain stupid...
or god is a really bad fiction....
written up by circumcised men
who never learned to *******:
since: the obvious impediment restriction...

cain was a veggie... abel sacrificed animals...
mea culpa somnum... send this whole
died on the cross
          ergo saved ergo ergo
my fault ******* to sleep... i'm tired of this mantra
like an eskimo is bored of ice...
i'm bored of listening to semitic proverbs...
   i'm bored of their rubrics...
their: "fate-warnings",
their superstitions... a semite will forever remain
a semite for me: kippah-***-tonsure...
or a camel-jockey brigade... lucky them they settled
on a once grand mountain range
of Sahara that was the bed for oil...

oh look! wow! i can think for myself!
wonderful...
               which is what i always thought
would become reality...
i'd watch a video...
not comment,
                 and write a rebuttal...
                  which would fall on deaf ears...
or that sacred minority report...
i'll face it if you face it:
the monotheistic god of the semites...
is as ridiculous
as the poloytheism of the pagans...
      the monotheistic god of the semites
is just too... pristine...
     give too many omni- prefixes
to a being and he becomes, boring...
like superman...
                  and to still preserve intellectual
integrity within the ontological omni-
zoo?
                              hey! feel free!
       i much prefer to believe in a "god"
of a limited circumstance...
                  as the will of creation? sure: omni- etc.,
but as a spectator in the back of the minds
of the "created"? cameo presence...
hence not omni- etc.,
                  after all: free will is free will...
and it requires no divine intervention
in order for it to be proved...
  however bad it happens to be upon
embodiment...
    god was never a source of intervention...
the jews begged prayed lampooned for
that sort of god...
did it fare them well? i don't think so...
god was always a cameo for me...
   something i could rely on...
in terms of finding my grand jurisprudence
libra... when the human sense of justice
would disintegrate...
and i'd be met with the west saxon mantra
of: innocent until proven guilty...
or a jimmy saville...
  i was wronged,
no one will believe me,
fair enough...
                     at least i've found some source
of compensation,
for the time being,
before i believe: not to be reunited
with the dead loved ones...
but before i believe to stand
in the grand court of judgement...
with king Solomon as the prosecutor
.


do what the english language does, it uses
hyphens to create compounds...  just do this:
            object-object...
   would i **** it?                depends on the follow-ups
that constrict the two-way "system"
of re-appropriation
            with the german language...
it really is the new: north south east west
"copernican" discussion...
    the **** am i supposed to do
(as a male) with an object
     that's not object=object... because it isn't...
      or object≠object: well? because it
clearly isn't...
                      ****, bro?
                       can i get a hotdog instead?
yeah yeah, extra onions on top...
                            but write it out in
that natural **** schizoi fashion
    as post-german compounds... hyphenated,
but instead include the following variations...
      and put them up for a narcissus inspection
and ask: are they chiral?
               stress-free is a compound word...
           but it's easier with an object-object
compound... 'cos' then you can **** around with
object-object... object=object...
             object≠object...
                                object~object...­
                       object≈object...
                           and   object≡object...
it's close proximity, i gather, so it's hard to
orientate yourself as you might with 1 + 1 = 2...
                      but it's in english, and english is
prone to try and forget the norman conquest
and rekindle itself as: with a germanic origin,
and all that custard that modern german
looks like: i'd be sooner wearing sun-glasses than
actual optic magnifiers if i was found
reading german krupahunddoughchew...
                               or the likes of this fake example.
true transgender? it happens in the ≡ category...
the binary...
       it means: even though you're male
   and can't fulfil the female role of a reproductive
****** capacity... i'd still *******...
    joke's on me...
                 but otherwise? apart from the starting point
in the english language...
      the hyphen and compounding words
as is the "vogue" standard...
               so working from object-object...
and then including the stated variations
                       of a dualistic **** by dichotomy...
         ah man... i'm just talking about
how english is trying to resurrect its saxon
ancestors... what with creating these hyphenated
words... you're going to shove some
      other mathematical symbol in between
the two stated words and think of
                                  some grander schematics...
the death of the university coincided with
the death of the asylum...
                               evidently 2 + 2 does equal 4...
         but it's still a case of working
from object-object...
                            object/subject-subject/object?
north, east, west, south...
                      what the ****?!
                        we have modern neanderthals
roaming this place, and they're faking
  the status **** sapiens... that the hell can
evolve from that?
                    clear and bite-sized truth acknowledgement:
we're **** schizoi... split brained...
                     we've reached a stage where
we're not modelled by a multiplication impetus,
but an obelus impetus (÷)...
                       western society figured...
as **** similis: we have a billion chinese and
a billion blue indians of the raj...
                                why should we be bothered?
                isn't that the case of what's happening?
unearthing the nag hammadi library
                               and the whole transgender movement?
oi! where's the vatican! get those cardinals off their *****!
                                 white, red, purple, black.
pope, cardinal, bishop... priest...
           sure sure... brown....                          monks.
but we're losing a fight against neanderthal islam...
                   come your hungry, your oppressed...
your first cousin ******* retards.
                                         i know i'm taunting,
i'm taunting with a reason: neanderthal islam....
                 so much for history and gloating about it
citing the ottomans; thing is... i have lost the ability
to fear death... i'm actually teasing it, more and more,
day after day, after yet another day...
                          it's a bit like the reverse process of
castration... i'm feeling up pigs' genitals, saying:
      oh look! this porky can sign in #A!
                               quick! to the castrato oink corp!
yep... etymology... the alternative to reading
history.
To me eternity lies in thy eyes,
and thy rejection my demise.
If so but accept and heal me likewise;
whilst shun and stab my sore heart, otherwise.
Thou hath always been to me a surprise;
Though a doubtful, but sparkling surprise,
So any dejection of thine shall be odd,
And a thousand times bitterer than a cold rapid retort;
For thou art pure; and sometimes too pure and fine
As how thy immortal soul stayest still, and growest not old
And in toughness and roughness is to remain,
So long as thy dried flesh shall age, and afford;
And with such songs so prolific as prayers
By friendly laudations like bewitching storms
Thou shall forever stay, and newer grow fader
And in such coldness thou shall offer me warmth;
Beside yon raging fire, and about thy manly arms,
Thou shalt but lull and cradle me like a baby-
until sleep comes and whispers dreams onto me,
Thou shalt be far more tender and smart-
Unlike that ungrateful preceding heart,
Which claimed to be civil, but uncivil,
United but then left my unsuspecting heart apart;
So unlike thee, who is but a smart little devil
Thou who earnestly tempted my soul, and lured my blood
Thou returned my blushes, and caught away my heart
Ah, and now-whenever I thinkest of thee,
All pain and gloom shall revert to oneness,
But how still I know not, as whose days remain but a mystery
For everything in which is at times barren and colourless;
But when alive, they are just as simple
as those brief dreams of thine and mine,
With a love but too sufficient, majestic and ample
Delicately shall they turn troubled and unseen,
But caring and healing and blinding and shaking,
taking turns like oceanic birds which go about
swimming and singing and strumming and swinging,
like a painting of prettily sure clarity-but unseen,
or perhaps a pair of loving, yet unforgettable winds.

To thee whom I once loved, and now still do,
To thee towards whom my hardened heart-again, turns soft,
To thee whom my delirium is all kept safe and true,
To thee for whom I canst feel never reproach-and only love,
And to thee-ah, to thee, thee only-by whom
the grandeur of the blue sky shalt melt;
Ah, thee! And betwixt thy gaze,
All fictitious sunsets shalt perhaps become wet-
Just like those azure spirits in thy fair eyes,
Sometimes too indignant but unquestioning,
and too pure-as to whom even the Devil hath no lies;
To thee only, to whom this enduring love is ever assigned,
And forever, even its temptation be mine, and only mine,
Like unforgivable sins, which are sadly left unatoned
In its eternity standing still like a statue;
beside its wrathed, and bloodied howling stone
And to thee merely, to whom this impaired heart shall ever return,
As it now does, with cries and blows that makest my heart churn
And canst wait not 'till the morn, for on morns only,
thou shalt creepest down the stairs, and stareth onto me,
Often with eyes full of questions;
Questions that thou art too bashful to reflect,
So that turn themselves later on, into emotions,
Which withereth and dieth days after, of doom and neglect.
Ah, but still I loveth thee!
For this regret makest me but loveth thee more and more,
and urge my soul greater, to loveth thee better-than ever before.
For 'tis thee who yet stills my cry, and silences my wrath;
The one who kills my death, and reawakens my breath.
Thou on whom my love shall be delightfully poured,
A love as amiable as the one I hold for dearest Lord,
A love for thee, for only thee in whom I'th found comfort,
A comfort that is holier than any heaven, or even His very own divine abode;
Thou art holier than the untouched swaying grass outside,
Which is green, with greenness so handy and indulgent to every sight,
Thou who art madder than madness itself,
But upon Friday eves, makest my joy even merrier,
And far livelier-than any flailing droplet of rain
Showering this earth's clustered soil out there,
Which does neither soften nor flit away my pain
But makest it even worse, as if God Himself shan't solicit, nor care
Like any other hostile love, which thou might kindly find, every where.

To thee whom I once loved, and now still do,
To thee towards whom my hardened heart-again, turns soft,
To thee whom my delirium is all kept safe and true,
To thee for whom I canst feel never reproach-and only love,
And to thee-ah, to thee, thee only-by whom
the grandeur of the blue sky shalt melt;
In my mind thou art the lost eternity itself,
And by its proud self, thou art still even grander,
For thou makest silence not any more silence,
but joy, in return, even a greater joy.
Ah, thee, thou who the painter of my day,
and the writer of my blooming night.
Thou who art the poet of my past,
and the words of my courteous present.
Thou shall ******* flirty orange blossoms,
And cherish its virtue, which strives and lives
As a most sumptuous, and palpable gift-
Until the knocking of this year's gentle autumn.
Ah! Virtue, virtue, o virtue-whose soul always be
a charm, and indeed a very generous charm-
to my harmonious, though melancholy, *****.
Ah, thee; o lost darling-my lost darling of all awesome day and night,
My lost darling before starlight, and upon the pallid moonlight,
My lost darling above the reach of my sight, and height;
Thou art still a song-to my now tuneless leaves,
and a melody to their bottomless graves,
Thou shalt be a cure to their ill harmony;
Thou art their long-betrayed melody.
And even, thou art the spring
my dying flowers needst to taste,
fpr being with thee produces no haste;
and or whom nothing is neither early, nor late;
And whenst there be no fate, thou shalt be
yon ever consuming fate itself-
And by our inane eyes, thou shalt makest it
but adorable and all the way strong,
For thou, as thou now do, nurture it better
than all the other graciousness among;
Thou art the promise it hath hitherto liked; but just
shyly-and justly refuted, for the bareness of pride,
and often inglorious resistance-all along.

To thee whom I once loved, and now still do,
To thee towards whom my hardened heart-again, turns soft,
To thee whom my delirium is all kept safe and true,
To thee for whom I canst feel never reproach-and only love,
And to thee-ah, to thee, thee only-by whom
the grandeur of the blue sky shalt melt;
Ah, thee! Even in undurable haste, thou art still like a butterfly,
fast and rapid flowing about the earth and into the sky;
Thou who art grateful not for this earth's soil;
Thou who saith 'tis only the sky that canst make thou feel.
Thou who cannot sit, thou cannot lay,
but on whose lanes thou always art secure,
as though from now thou shalt live too long
And belong to this rigorous earth
to whom our mortal souls do not belong.
And as to its vigour, death cannot be delayed,
and words of deadness shalt fast always, be said.
Ah, yet but again, I cannot simply be wrong;
for thou art immortal, immortal, and immortal;
To death thou art but too insipid and loyal;
that willing it not be, to take thy soul into its mourning,
and awkward prayers so scornful and worrying.
Thou who needst not be afraid of death;
for breath shalt never leave thee, and thou shan't breath.
Unsaid poems of thine are thus never to remaineth unspoken,
and far more and more thoughts shalt be perfectly carved, and uttered;
Unlike mine; whose several mortal thoughts shalt be silenced, and unknown
And after years passed my name shalt be forgotten, and my poems altered.
But thou! By any earth, and any of its due shape-thou shalt never be defaced,
and whose thoughts shalt never, even only once-be rephrased,
for thou art immortal, and for decades undying shalt be so;
And to life thou remaineth shalt remain chaste, and undetached;
as the divine wholeness whenst 'tis all slumped and wretched,
and white in unsoiled finery, whenst all goes to dirt and waste;
For grossness shalt escape thee, and stains couldst still, not thee fetch.
To every purity thou shalt thus be the best young match;
Ah, just like my mind shalt ever want thee to be;
but thou art missing from my sight-ah, as thou art not here!
Our paths are far whenst they are but near,
and which fact fillest me still, with dawning dread and fear
Unfortunately, as in this poem, my words not every heart shalt hear;
And to my writings doth I ever patiently retreat, the one,
and one only; whom to my conscience so dear.

To thee whom I once loved, and now still do,
To thee towards whom my hardened heart-again, turns soft,
To thee whom my delirium is all kept safe and true,
To thee for whom I canst feel never reproach-and only love,
And just to thee-ah, to thee, thee only-by whom
the grandeur of the blue sky shalt melt;
How fate but still made us here and meet,
That clue shall never makest me blind, and forget!
Now blighted I am, by dire ungladness and regret,
for having abhorred, and slighting thee too much!
For should I still cherish thee before my mortal death,
and be bitter and testy not; much less grim or harsh.
For fate is what fate is, as how love is just it looks;
and God's doings cannot be wrong; and true and faithful
as words I found crafted, and deciphered in old books.
Ah, and God's blessings are to arriveth in time,
and to taste whose due I indeed needst to be patient.
Be patient t'wards the love on which I climb,
ah, as for me-and whenst the right time cometh-
thou shalt be my sole wealth; so dear and sufficient!
And so for thee, no matter how thou hath my heart now torn,
Still I canst, and shalt reward thee not-with scorn;
for thou art my fate, my path, and my salved destiny;
For of which I am assured, definite, and convinced-
with all my degrees of humble pride, and vivid certainty-
Ah, darling, and thou art my humbleness, but also too many a time-my vanity;
For whom I shan't go and venture but anywhere-
As long as thou stayest and last-verily and for yon whole eternity, by me.
aj heatherly Nov 2012
Only in my dreams,
where the butterflies are aflutter,
Can I find the warm, smooth surface,
to something so much grander than I could ever imagine.

Your hills,
your valleys,
your rivers,
your lightning,
the beauty unsurpassed.

The glow of the lights,
down the street corridor,
flakes falling, sticking,
straight to your hair.

Wrapped in my warmth,
I hold on tight,
To what I know,
the only truth in this world.

Every moment,
two beats,
fresh again,
and together in time.
I want this moment to last forever.
This moment, I not yet know.
Will I ever know you...
Could I ever find you, see you, feel you, my truth.

*I don't know who you are.

But I love you. More than you yet know...<3
©Anthony Heatherly, 2012
Mateuš Conrad Oct 2018
.i cannot do justice to Hölderlin's invocation of Hyperion, but i also have no intention to, but i'll begin with, what isn't regarded as a pristine, classical constellation:

it begins with a punt volant,
on first observation,
   ・
      which descends in brightness
         ano teleia -
romanic interruption of the added
comma beneath it,
like a tail dragging the head along...

    the constellation?

        a dismembered man,
a crooked pentagram,
and a trinity of sorts...

                              .          .        
    ­                               .    
                                           .
        .

                       .

                                       .

this, the dislodged man,
with a trinity of stars floating
outside of him...

the trinity is faint...
when you first spot the ano teleia
star with its brightness...
yet that is a mishandled
pentagram...

which brings me to the argument,
some people send their DNA
to companies that
discover their genetic makeup,
i also read a newspaper article
that stated:
why bother?
you genetic make-up
also consists of what
you gravitate to,
culturally...

    so... i'm reading an article
on Hyperion...
and then i follow several links...
all i know is that the Vikings
were the founders of
Kiev...
                
   and to get to Kiev from Norway...
you have to go past the land
i was born in...

   then working from an article
on Emperor Julian, the Apostate...
then onto an article on Mardonius...
then on the article on the Goths...

Goths?
  Swedish "vikings"...
  who had established settlements
in the region of Poland were
i was born,
by 250BC...
                  
   so... why would i cling to
Nordic folk songs,
or their revisionism,
if i... suddenly hear a song,
and react with goosebumps on
my cheeks from hearing it?

or what about the remnants
of Scythia?
           boiling in my veins?

that newspaper article was right,
i don't need to send off my DNA
sample to companies,
i can read my DNA from the culture
i'm migrating toward!

     Hyperion,
i have abandoned the Athenian gods
of Olympus,
i've looked elsewhere,
to the mountain that became
the pit of Tartarus...
look back at Uranus, and sampled
the wintry perfumes of Gaia...

          swam in the ***** of Pontus...
and i have...
seen how both the gods,
and the titans...
   are the source of etymological
classification,
unlike what the judeo-christian tranditions
teach...
Adam didn't name the birds
and the animals from an a priori
posit / advantage point
of some obscure inheritance...

        first come the grander things...
man conjures up the existence / non-existence
of either gods, or titans...
to spin the wheel and gain etymological
momentum!
            
of what became the ****** of the affair
between Helios and Gaia...
    however true...
   or untrue...
      there is still an etymological foundation
for the existence of said
names...
   the names / not beings...
that spawn more names to be attributed
to such miniscule things
as flies, centipedes and pebbles...

from the word Uranus, comes the word
Helios,

from Selene comes the word
which coincides
the words Pontus, Oceanus, Poseidon,
and subsequently the
moon's influence of the tides...
the... παλίρροιες (palirroies,
siblings of the furies, the rivers,
and all other nymphs)...

      but however ridiculous applying
these nouns is...
they are rigid evolution
of words, formerly grunted,
or expressed in a barbaric way...
these are the words first defined...

Gaia probably became perfected
when there occurred a syllable
arithmetic... well... "arithmetic" is a lose
term of addition...
    the syllable g'ah! g'ah!
combined with i'ah!
                            
stealthy *******, this Jewish god,
he knew it all along...
hide in the letters,
hide in phonetics,
hide long until...
there's a second Belshezzar moment
in history...
when he's seen a second time...

i see him!
the surd H and the laughter
instigator H of the tetragrammaton...
you sigh when you write AH...
you express a vague awed-surprise
when you write OH...
    H represents the breath...
and the soul...

i see him!
i write too much to not be able
to dis-guide you from doing likewise...
the breath enter with an AH
and an OH...
   ah as in wonder with a surprise,
oh, as in counter: so i was wrong?

ooh... like something is teasing
you...
    uh? as in an element of disgust...
but?
HA?
       the point...
the point being?
laughter...
                    how else can you
express laughter,
if not balancing on the Jewish
definite article,
i.e. HA, i.e. HA-shem (the-name?),
how?!

but the Greeks were of some use...
their names of Titans and
Greeks?
   etymological boot-camps...
what we began with,
and, ultimately,
what we return to,
not for bowing, prayer,
belief...
but?
            *momentum
...
    
we already that Zeus is actually
Thor,
   who's father, Odin,
is Uranus...
                    so, technically...
Zeus is Thor...
                     Prometheus is Loki...
etc. etc. etc.,
      point being...
these similarities, these correlations?
they're not, they're not,
plagiarisms...
                        they would be plagiarisms,
if they had similar etymological
beginnings...
they're not plagiarisms,
because even now,
not everyone on this earth is a bilingual
entity that could
support a globalist agenda!
      if bilingualism was rife,
then the liberals could have their
globalist "unity"...
              but since bilingualism is the lesser
half of the polymath...
    no...
              isolated communities
have isolated ideas...
they look as if they were plagiarisms
now... but then?
   the only globalist artifact left these days,
the Socratic argument for
universal, convergent purposes -
and particular, divergent practicalities...
these religions were not
plagiarisms...
   do you really think that
plagiarism is a pulverizing motivational
tool for the perpetuation
of a people's existence?
   i don't think so...
                      plagiarism doesn't drive
people...
it's just a strange coincidence that
there are similarities that could be conceived
as plagiarisms...
but then again...
****... me and this Mongol share
a very similar physiognomy...
  and... oh ****... we're standing up-right...
have five limbs...
   and we use fire to cook food...
yeah... the religious plagiarism issue is
really suspicious...
we weren't, ever, to make a similar conclusion...
since we all, supposedly led a mass
exodus from Africa...
     like **** we did...
     perhaps...
               but the story doesn't begin
with an origins...
   more... what happened in what
became localized eventualities of segregation...
hey... i might have, 100 year... ha ha!
yeah right... to write my own narrative...
i don't like the antithesis of
doubt: of the perfected plethora of
the antithesis of both faith & denial...
     i like my rainbow plethora of doubt
to "counter" faith & denial...
   given that i also don't like
the pseudo-schizophrenic dichotomy of
faith, contra denial.
- makes for a more exciting
content of the heart... what? doubt;
doubting Thomas
  with a heart like a sinking stone,
and fire in his eyes,
                    a, second Belshezzar.
Where Shelter Aug 2018
my second fight today with god

the first involves gods correctable errors of judgement

the second,
am asked to deliver a eulogy for someone
I never met and no is not in the range of acceptable answers

alone and misperceived as forsaken, despite calls and poems
glorious and galore, I was slow to realize, now fast,
was I meant to be
her here,
where shelter,
the first, will always now be
too late

you break off pieces for the needy, forlorn,
the ones you might of loved, it’s costly for
both the giver and the forgiven, but I am the unforgiven in giver,
a redeemer failure, the question mark and the short dotted flat line,
uniquely marked human,
the Cain marker forehead now forever a
carved minus sign, meaning I am lessened, lesser and
insufficient was

read out loud, an old soft tender, inspired by hers,
a missive sweetness tinged with affection, writ by a human savior who did not
do a good enough job, nonetheless,
everyone slaps my back later saying beautiful bespoke,
and when you going home, stay a few days, she’d appreciate

a thank you smile but can’t, though the dead will follow you,
that goes unsaid, but you will know
grander grief yet, as guilt continue-us,
and the tune playing non-stop stop isn’t yours,
but you spoke it  to her once as a justification explanation,

it was true but a nile river-red-colored plague
that added to her dissatisfaction, come disastrous for one  
who didn’t ever get to leave egypt

guess i’m admitting its my fault
not gods;
so I let the  ******* off the hook on this one,
but I’ll get even I swear, it/he, nah,
SOB
just laughs,
but this will be one of life’s allusions
I will recall and wonder when will that tune cease,
but get no answer from nobody


that tune?

<>

Go 'way from my window
Leave at your own chosen speed
I'm not the one you want, babe
I'm not the one you need
You say you're lookin' for someone
Who's never weak but always strong
To protect you an' defend you
Whether you are right or wrong
Someone to open each and every door
But it ain't me, babe
No, no, no, it ain't me babe
It ain't me you're lookin' for, babe

Go lightly from the ledge, babe
Go lightly on the ground
I'm not the one you want, babe
I will only let you down
You say you're lookin' for someone
Who will promise never to part
Someone to close his eyes for you
Someone to close his heart
Someone who will die for you an' more
But it ain't me, babe
No, no, no, it ain't me babe
It ain't me you're lookin' for, babe

Go melt back in the night
Everything inside is made of stone
There's nothing in here moving
An' anyway I'm not alone
You say you're looking for someone
Who'll pick you up each time you fall
To gather flowers constantly
An' to come each time you call
A lover for your life an' nothing more
But it ain't me, babe
No, no, no, it ain't me, babe
It ain't me you're lookin' for, babe


by Bob Dylan
farewell babe

12:48 pm a blustery Saturday
Hal Loyd Denton Jul 2013
Dedicated in part to Iva and Terry and their ever lasting love

First to describe what it is made from and then what it ultimately is and what it means
I will just be able to give description in part it is too great for any one person to do justice to it I choose
To use what some may call and object used in ceremony by unlearned superstitious people but you will
See this has none of that going on but I ‘am hunting big game in that regard maybe you are setting in a
Chair in your house apartment yes but also you are on a planet suspended in space a space that an
un manned space ship Voyager is on a trip of exploration one day it will pass from our galaxy the Milky
Way and go into many galaxies but it will never come to an end because its journey is carrying it into
Infinity one of the stars is a hundred times bigger than earth they are more numerous than the sand on
The sea shore but it is said that God knows them each and every one by name David said we are
Fearfully and wonderfully made my point is we are spirit and flesh the flesh perishes daily but the spirit
Is Renewed daily this all goes into the qualities and perfected ingredients that make up the amulet I’ am
Writing about here is a couple of human examples this is what can happen when you see the real truth
About the body and spirit Dr Albert Schweitzer was from High German society his credentials include
Theologian, Musician, Philosopher, Physician, and medical missionary and his home was in a safari tent
In the African jungle one of his many visitors was the actor Hugh O’Brian after this meeting Hugh went
Back home and sold his big pretentious car bought a used one and modeled his life after Schweitzer this
Great man came to realize what he really was not the outer that passes away but he was immortal and
Understood solidly what that meant our trouble with the Arabs is their identity problem they fret at
Deadly levels about the glories of the past and what as a nation they contributed in mathematics
Language now they reproach themselves and then the disgraceful aspect they are ruled by the west
Again they should take pride in their heritage and within the frame work of the given reality they could
Be great benefactors through the oil riches that were put in their hands and by changing their moral
Compass to the spirit they could amaze the modern world and the other human content in this amulet it
Can’t be discussed without bringing Lincoln into it from the humblest beginnings he became a towering
Giant his words blaze with grandeur significance and other worldly wisdom when it happened I don’t
Know while swinging an axe or while reading by candle light he fused his small life into the great current
That is flowing eternal his accomplishments superceded that of his backwoodsman’s life by eons I finish
With that part of the amulets fascinating qualities now if I follow what I discussed with my wife which
Was so painful several times I was interrupted by tears and was not able to be audible one of the things
Was widowhood I speak in particular about Iva recently certain influences have passed into my life it
Plays out here dreams joys love is unquestionably the most powerful force we can ever know I
Tried to lay the ground work that the flesh is limited but by the spirit we can now and in the future will
Override the sad state of affairs of living in this body that imprisons us restricts us because
We are now in this physical life there was a great quotation of course out of date now because of
Refrigeration but it said God gave us memories so we could have roses in December this I do know that
Spiritual connection does exist between us and our lost loved ones but that the flesh is so dense
And insensitive the connection is poorly or nonexistent my words speak of the beauty of the spirit
Nothing is impossible to it so we have to reconnect the broken by imagination my unaltered thought it
Will always be this truth what was will always be its Ida birthday this week the room only glows slightly
The music is soft and from eternal shadows Terry steps forth this magical moment is provided by purist
Love they join in tender embrace the flood of years together and apart breaks over them it’s like he only
Left moments ago Terry has lost little things that use to bug her but now there are new ones look at
Him not one thing has changed except all that is better but he got that way by divine aid on the other
Hand she has grown into this beautiful woman of grace and softness that glows with character it’s his
Time to be envious but she knows she got that way by doing it one day at a time love tumbles down a
Richer measure than the music can ever do new promise is born deep within each heart that was
Beating Stronger the longing ever so briefly was short circuited in powerful arms he seemed to carry her
On air as they swayed to other worldly rhythms there isn’t a clock where love is concerned because love
Is timeless it is placed on a steadfast but oh so flimsy when it comes to physical endurance if we were
Only able to see love as God sees it is it not the shimmering living picture that is from the bottom of the
Floor to the ceiling within is the telling vibrancy a currency more valuable than all others nothing else
Can take two very different lives and create one that streams bliss and longing a selflessness that stirs
And moves hearts to heights of appreciation a otherwise place of only rumor and place of tall tales but
Here between two people cherished thoughts are visible touching and powerful built by stones hewn
From quarries that reach back before time and have a future that is without end building materials of
Feeling emotion faith and honor all else would only be fables nothing could be that sure and have
Such endurance pillars of fire that burns and its end is in purification the arching unfamiliar to one
Looking from the outside but for the two in the center when the countenance of another can melt you
With a look and when eyes are locked together has the power to make the whole world fall away
Nothing else exists or should exist love has a bridge unseen the other side holds spectacle splendor
Fulfillment laughter romance announced in royal castles on the highest hills not even the richest can
Purchase what Terry and Iva have it is secure guarded and promised by He who is all love widowhood is
A robber but his plunder is of truth but the riches outweigh this temporal division and though
Sorrow as keen as it is makes loss into wellsprings where denial exists then courses unknown open and
You love the departed even more than before ever greater waves reach that other shore you have
Heaven then you feel this rapturous deep wave’s made noble by the caldron that has tears that over
Time Become far more valuable than diamonds and swells of emotional dreaming of a future day all that
We long for in life are constant gift to the departed these truths are mighty in force between Terry and
Iva for her birthday visit and the sweetness of parting with the statement see you ihasta manana in
English it means see tomorrow the tomorrow that now are seen through tears but then joy and rapture
Hugs will be without this divide the surging racing of the most clear and beautiful river will be surging in
Our hearts your hardship is harder than mine because I dwell in pure love and you must contend with
Human l life that isn’t clear and free thoughts are muted where here they burst and grow as you are
Taking in a great harvest where on earth you must be content with a small garden here your forehead is
Always shining for two reasons such wondrous thoughts occur continuously and His glory shines from
The throne brighter than the noon day sun when you walk in the sunshine and it touches you know that
Part of it is me touching you it can’t be as powerful as when its starts because earth regrettably has
A diffuse system so see it as when I use to kiss you tenderly if I didn’t say it I was saying thank you
For being mine and that you will be mine forever now that is half true be well my beloved my eyes are
Ever on you as the French say not goodbye but Au revoir it means till we see each other again and I do
Know all the languages and French is the language of love in my mind you appear in all the loveliest
Places in Arabian nights on the shore of the St. Guadalupe River that has the most shinning waters like
Your smile that is like day light dawning or in the lovely foots hills of the Sierra Nevada the Brazos River
Country because with you in them they are the picture of my beloved rest with the peaceful knowledge
It won’t be long now I have it on good account now the streets of gold then the gold in the streets will
Blend with our golden hearts which we refined in life and death by the High blaze we truly gave up all
That tarnished the gold now only the purist golden love is all that remained I love you

I had to stop writing last night around two I got to sleepy I had to delete a half a page it was just like
Writing a report it was lifeless when I came back to write I prayed that Christ would cleanse me with his
Blood so what I write would be truly pure it worked because I was broken by tears hard to see the keys
That way but I wouldn’t write any other way now the amulet grows dark because it is a living reality stop
Here if you are easily wounded I wrote already about my home Fremont California in night thoughts I
Described the shooting death of a teenager on a bike in broad day light a distance up the street we lived
On just because he was Mexican and just a week later a Mexican mother missed her ride at midnight to
Go an work at a nursing home her teenage daughter went worth her because she was afraid I know the
Place this happened very dark a man I say a man he had human features let say he got out of his car
Picked up a fallen tree limb and beat them both to death as they screamed into the cell phone to their
Helpless relatives yes the amulet shows a dark ominous Black like an ink well was knocked over and the
Ink rushed over the face your reaction is disbelief stunned a disconnection occurs that same thing
Happened before but on a grander scale in the garden when our first parents fell the same thing
Happened a darkness covered the globe leaving natural light unaffected but men and women’s minds
Were darkened they could do everything as before but they could only practice unrighteous acts as seen
When Cain slew righteous Abel there was a way to connect and do right but like to day most just strayed
farther and farther from true right living only the coming of the pure one that would be slain and by this
Sacrifice only could you have your mind freed and you by the spirit can walk free and please the most
Holy one He was beaten to the point you could only tell He was human because He stood upright and
Had limbs it was brutal but that was the cost to purge the vile disease we all suffer from that bleeding
Broken lamb was taken from that cross and His resurrection cast a new light over the whole earth the
Amulet glowed take cotton white clouds white snow and your getting how white and pure the amulet
Became this is in the heart of every soul that is redeemed it is the Holy Spirit it is shining and will shine
Into that perfect day don’t continue without it you rob your own soul of everything that is clean and
Decent and it will fill that ache in the heart that desires something all those that chase the next drug
High or the next conquest of another human how pathetic and it grinds those that practice it into a
Powder of Shame and guilt and a destination that only will end in flames why would anyone be that
Careless with Their own soul when there is a Heavenly Amulet waiting for you
This is to anyone out there that's listening
From anyone who ever let you down and went missing
Lovers, parents, best friends, and siblings
Sometimes life conspires to make liars of good men

This is to anyone out there that's listening
From everyone that ever let you down and went missing
Lovers, parents, best friends, and siblings
Sometimes life conspires to make liars of good men

I'm sorry I wasn't who you thought I was
**** it-- I'm sorry I wasn't who I thought I was
I said no matter what, I'd always be there, but that wasn't honest
Because I'm not
And 'cause that ain't how life goes
Broken promise

Growing up, I always thought I was one of the good guys
I thought it was black and white like that
That I could nurture my good side
But I've caused hurt and I've stripped pride
Both on the surface and inside
I wasn't cursed with a dark side, I was just normal
Average, regular, nothing special, I'm telling you
Just being human makes you both God and the Devil's clear replica
I've had my emotions crushed and maybe crushed a few along the way
And at the time, I meant every single word I would say
Every word of love, and every word of hate
Every time I would adore, and every time I'd berate
But time passes, and sometimes those emotions fade
Making liars of both the threats and the promises made

But is a lie really a lie if you mean it at the time?
How can a lie be a lie if you mean it at the time?
A lie can't be a lie if you mean it at the time
How can a lie be a lie if you mean it?

This is to anyone out there that's listening
This is to
This is to anyone out there that's still breathing

I bought a heartbreak hotel
On my own, with no investors
Closed it down and opened the "*******, get over it" bed and breakfast
In loving memory of having loving memories
Of combustible emotions, and having real enemies

Typically poetically dramatic endings
Were once a trademark of mine
Patents pending
And the mighty height of emotions on parting ways
Was always grander than the connections of the early days

When we were fighting, there used to be thunder and lightning
Ferociously frightening, a clash of the titans
Emotions heightened, every single muscle tightened
An addiction to the thrill of the fight, the excitement

Love at first sight always seemed unconsidered
I'd rather love at first fight, and then onto double figures
An unconditional love? Well, that just means nothing
In love with the mere idea of loving something

Always just hunting for that near-life experience
In fear of missing something vital from your own existence
All your emotions subconsciously thought out and scripted
Less about how you're feeling
More about how you ******* depict it

But all that stops when one day you just decide to stop playing along
That point in time when the most amazing things in the world can just as easily seem
Pedestrian

You've lost both that loving and that loathing feeling
Turns out, hell does have a bottom
And heaven, a ceiling
Both love and hate become opaque in time's wake
A face that once summons rage now summons nothing
Whether it's emotions tethered, nerve endings severed
Or just the outlook you acquire when you're a little more weathered
Remaining conscious of this all, and in a way, feeling above it
Still feels like bad riddance to good *******

But is a lie really a lie if you mean it at the time?
How can a lie be a lie if you mean it?
By scroobius Pip
What do you want from me?
I ask my memories,
Wondering why they’ve come out to play,
Tap dancing across the wood floors of me mind,
Creating a cacophony that echoes off my skull.
What do you want from me?
I hear them when they respond, “We’re trying to make you safe.”
I know they’re attempting to prevent tumbling off the same rocks,
Trying to ensure I don’t crack bones on the same hard places.
They are telling me to avoid having pieces of me stolen again.
I couldn’t protect myself at thirteen or sixteen,
So I stumbled down the same dark alleys until I was 18
And paid a grander price in an even darker cave at 19.
I’m 22 now, and I’m still picking up the pieces out of the mouths of men,
Men who cut me down until I was a conglomerate of bite size, fuckable pieces.
I was taught not to scream when my pieces were being consumed.
Who needs to be a whole human anyway?
If tip money went into my pocket,
If he told me he loved me afterwards,
If I was alive to see the morning light,
Who was I to complain?  
And when I stopped wanting to see the sun rise,
They gazed upon my pieces
And berated me for the wreckage.
What do you want from me?
Is a question I only know how to ask myself.
I have never dared ask those who stole from me
Whether they came to me in good faith,
Never had the wisdom to lock up what was valuable.
I have never demanded of anyone what their intentions were,
So I ask again: What do you want from me?
What am I expected to provide?
Am I allowed to be a whole human here?
Or will you require I be bite size again?
I am desperate to be safe in the same flesh that once enticed those who hunted me.
What do you want from me?
I’ll tell you what I want.
I want to go home whole,
Knowing my skin is all mine.
RAJ NANDY Jul 2015
Dear Friends, I have simplified the true story of
the Grand Canyon of Arizona by leaving out the
plethora of scientific details, & the various theories
of scholars about its formation! Presenting here the
more popular version for your kind appreciation!
Therefore, I have used only a part of my Notes on
the subject. Kindly don’t forget to read Part Two
later, for the total story. No need to comment in
a hurry! Thanks, -Raj.

STORY OF THE GRAND CANYON IN
VERSE : PART ONE- BY RAJ NANDY

              BACKGROUND
Our unique planet earth on which we reside,
Remains restless and dynamic, which in its
bowels it hides!
Titanic forces have been at work since our planets
formation; (App. 4.5 billion years ago)
Tectonic plates collided shaping continents,
along with quakes and volcanic eruptions!
Mighty glaciers had formed and receded, while
forces of nature did shape,
When mighty Himalayas and the Rockies rose
up, as we see them on date!
Several species evolved and of multifarious kind,
Leaving a trail of geological mysteries behind!
Geologists have tried to figure out what caused
the rugged Rockies to rise,
From miles below the surface of the earth,
stretching across 3000 miles;
Across New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming and
Montana, all the way up into North Canada;
To become the longest mountain chain of
North America!
The Geologists speculate that the heavier
Pacific Oceanic Plate, had moved northwest
under the North American Plate;
And as a result of this geological seduction
and embrace,
A split had opened up in the American West!
Such mountain building activity or ‘Orogeny’,
Had occurred in several phases during Earth’s
evolving history!
But mostly it occurred during the ‘Age of the
Dinosaurs’ in the Mesozoic Age,
Around 100 to 200 million years hence!
Now cutting across million years of Geological
History,
I come to the Colorado Plateau to commence
my Grand Canyon Story!

THE COLORADO PLATEAU
The awesome forces which raised the Rocky
Mountain Chains, also raised the Colorado
Plateau at a later time once again!
But during the Plateau’s gradual rise there was
surprisingly no devastation,
As the well preserved sedimentary layers rose
up with the Plateau without deformation!
Like an elevator traveling upwards this Plateau
gradually rose,
Along with its several embedded rock layers,
with which it was composed!
The Plateau is scattered over an area of some
1300,000 square mile as we know;
Going clockwise it covers Arizona, Utah, Colorado,
and the State of New Mexico!
Within this rugged area are located the Grand
Canyon, Grand Staircase, Bryce and Zion Canyon,
Arches, National Bridges, Monument Valley,
Glen Canyon, and Lake Powell.
It was Major John Wesley Powell a Geologist,
a brave solder and an explorer,
Who during the 19th century had mapped the
entire Grand Canyon area;
By sailing down the treacherous rapid infested
and uncharted Colorado River!
During the American Civil War Powell’s right
hand was amputated,
God bless his soul for the work he had initiated!
(
The area from Bryce Canyon down to the Grand Canyon
is referred to as the ‘Grand Staircase’ due to the existing
land features!)

THE SOUTHERN RIM OF THE PLATEAU
Standing near the edge of more easily accessible
Southern Rim, one gets captivated by the sculptured
beauty and brilliant colors of sedimentary rock layers;
Which also captivated the imagination of tourists,
geologists, painters and explorers!
Geologists have opined, that till 80 million years, this
area was inundated by the Sea several times;
By dating the limestone and marine fossils on the
top Kaibab Limestone Layer they now find!
The lowest rock basement of this Plateau the
Vishnu Schist, dated as a third of our Earth’s
total age, still exists! (Dated as 1.5 billion years.)
Yet the dominant color of the layers of the
Canyon is of a reddish kind,
Due to iron deposits in the layers that we find!
Standing on the edge of the Southern Rim one
is struck by the grand panoramic view and its
macro immensity !
Gazing into a 1500 meter deep gorge carved into
nearby horizontal sedimentary rocks, - a stark
reality,
Where Man becomes aware of his own micro
fragility!
These layers were deposited 500 million years ago,
Prior to the elevation of the Colorado Plateau!
Viewing this testament to Nature’s magnificence,
Man loses himself for a while, to become transfixed
in space and time!
Though there are other deeper canyons in this
world we know, but none are more impressive
or grander;
So Major Powell named it the ‘Grand Canyon’,
which had also made him to wonder!

GRAND CANYON AND THE COLORADO RIVER
The Grand Canyon stretches from Lake Powell near
Utah-Arizona boarder right up to Lake Mead,
Is around 277 miles long with a max width of 18 miles,
and a max depth of around 6000 feet!
The Canyon proper is located in the northwestern
portion of Arizona, in the midst of the Grand Canyon
National Park,
Where the Colorado River bisects this Park into
Northern and Southern halves!
The Northern Rim is a 1000 feet higher and is ideal
for rafters, trekkers, and cliff climbers.
The better connected South Rim has around 5 million
visitors annually!
But the affluent few with lesser time, visit the glass-
bottom horseshoe shaped ‘Skywalk’ in the western
section, in Hualapai Indian Reservation territory!

             CONCLUDING PART ONE :
The question that intrigue Geologists and the visitors
alike, is how the Colorado River did shape,
The mighty Canyon through this great depth?
Before giving you the answer in Part Two
I must pause here to quote,
Lines from the poem “Grand Canyon” which
Lisa A Williams once wrote; -
“I look to the depths far, far below,
To crevices and caverns formed long ago.
To twisting trails, ledges steep,
Winding rivers with pools so deep! ..........
Cascades of color with each sunrise,
Golden walls with lavender hues,
Shades of pink and smoky blues.
Rainbows of stone, dance in fading light,
Lengthening shadows, with approaching
night . …………….
A brush in hand the painter can see,
The miracle of nature and all it can be.
Trying to capture the beauty of age,
Seems impossible with human gauge!
So much to take in, the eyes try to behold,
An ancient image of creation so bold.
Formed by ice and melting snow,
An artist’s canvas sketched long ago!”
-  by Lisa A Williams.

Dear readers, later in the second part of this
story,
I shall conclude by telling you how the
Colorado River in all its pristine glory,
Carved out this vast Canyon through million
years of our Earth’s History!
Part two will be posted later after a break
surely,
Thanks for reading patiently, from Raj Nandy
of New Delhi.
*ALL COPYRIGHTS ARE WITH THE AUTHOR ONLY
Mateuš Conrad Mar 2016
i still think the oceans are insulators of tectonic plate movements, constant and endless vibrations represented by waves, these vibrations, when translated on dry land, movements of crumbling buildings, rigidity as testimony to the insulating fluidity of water; it's like those nuclear power plants, you use water to cool things down, or as in the case of oceans and tectonic plates, insulate volatility... well, radioactivity in the opposite scenario of nuclear power plants... oh look, a rhyming couplet - now that's how you understand things, if not reveal them, find complimentary rhymes on a grander scale than the casual technique in poetry, so over-used and overrated.*

i guess so, monsters bedded, big and small,
an old granny without a family member
to accompany her, harrowed by
charity groups who ask for money
more for the bureaucracy of its workers than
aiding actual victims - someone has to
look pretty, writing solemn letters and
filing in the spreadsheets -
by the way, how's that advent of the grand
timings working, find the hyphen,
the comma, the colon and semi-colon on the clock?
well, there ain't a full stop on there, i'm sure,
hard to decide on encoding time of a 100m
sprint, or a formula 1 thousandth of a second.
so this angel of euthanasia comes along,
a cruel case they say, while years later
a man suffering motor neurone disease
pleads for a change of law, according to switzerland,
he wants it bad, real real bad, he's no longer
even stoic about death, the disease didn't
rob him of expressing tears, and he's pleading
for it, a death sequence, he too knows
a drop in an ocean has no ripple effect,
humanity is the ocean, waves and waves of it,
always dynamic, never still like a lake or mirror,
either the ocean, or the river;
so this angel of euthanasia is there, kills
about 100 grannies, and guess what,
he hangs himself in prison, so that his widow
can receive his pension salary of £100,000,
odd, isn't it? i mean, why would a supposed
"serial killer" wait in prison, hang himself
just after he was eligible for a general practitioner's
pension, just so his wife could have it?
all those old grannies probably lived
on the state pension of one hundred
and twenty quid, not one hundred thousand, i'm sure.
well the guy suffering from motor neuron disease,
oh crap, i wish i could remember that philosopher's
name, parmenides? zeno? can't remember,
yeah, forced himself to suffocate,
without water and without a pillow; yep,
just sat there and held his breath.
Andrew Rueter Jul 2017
My transcendent transition
Brought by my ****** ambition
Became my personal religion
When I gained a monk's chastity
All my pleas just came back to me
My prayers remain unanswered
Like someone dying of cancer
An inept bow-legged dancer
My skills are useless
My bites are toothless
My eyes are youthless
When my face has been strained
By the energy that was drained
On this ceaseless journey
To sate my ceaseless yearning

They don't look like the pictures they show
They only choose the photos that glow
They're so afraid of being alone
Willing to lie
To lure unsuspecting prey
And trap them in a spider web personality
But webs are useless against grander creatures
And become an annoyance
When all the wildlife
Can only see silk
And get itchy in the effected areas
In our minds we build barriers
In our hearts we grow wearier
Searching for someone to hold us tight at night
Someone that looks right in the light
Someone that helps fight all our plights
Someone to give that tranquil transition
Into that peaceful loving condition
JM McCann Mar 2015
The carpet all around me
my little island lonely to no one.
Little flourishes in the carpet  twisting back on each other
and back again,
rolling endlessly this way then having a change of heart
and bending back the other way.
Flowing freely on its canvas.
The stunning flowers, looking surprised as
I focus on it.


I sit, a lethargic tiger, my picture of myself.
The television perched ready
for the next greatest thing.
My head, static on my shoulder,
a boulder resting on itself.
The gentle hum of air conditioner.
With great effort
I gaze slowly out the window,
up past the air conditioner,  
past the base of the metal frame
where the tree idly stands.  
My eyes lift past them, to the heavens
The clouds content where they are, slowly pulled along.
A greater force heaving, making gentle progress.

The edges of my chair start to form.
My arm resting on the soft fuzzy border,
my stomach hazy in deep territory,
my toes out beyond the border.
In a disjointed synchrony I make my way to
the fridge. The blank door swung open
rotting milk, and a once great fish.

The milk fading, a gentle
fade, not hurrying, but the milk, not taking its time.
A  tad yellowish but still white.

The milk a long fierce journey,
perhaps having bounced around the world,
for it to be as is now.
Perhaps
through turbulent oceans, did it see the endlessly taunting
of the ocean? What did I miss?! Did it see the gentle waves
thrash mercilessly? Did it see the infinities of life?
Did it see the octopi dying for the young ones?
Did it see storm clouds change course for their safe passage?
Did it see nature play its hand?
Even if it saw nothing at all,
I envy the milk with the hint of yellow!
Doorways without doors the milks unknown voyage.
It of course could have easily just came from
a farm down the road in a truck with a billion
other containers of milk, on a well traveled path,
the only question, why?

I sigh knowing, the best I’ll get is “an answer” trying
to sell me some more milk. Though the best questions
should never be properly answered.

No answers in the fridge, and I’m still hungry.

The smell of the fish overpowers me.
The smell of the ocean, of the seas of
what we did to them!
Of how the same fish, epitomizing
turned noses, once part of something grander than us.
We have seen the tops of the world,
flew down rivers and
cut through the skies,
held enough power to send a man
to the moon and back in the palm of our hands,
yet never been to the places that the fish has been.
We have clear lines and boundaries, yet
No walls separate what we haven’t seen.
No limits.

A  school flows by,
barrel rolls and flips, each individual
showing off amiable bubbles.
A collective direction, no agreements
just space, the sandy floor free of motion.
The floor free quiet, a gentle bed.
Taking their time, a place
to be but never of the essence.
A lump in the distance,
a dip behind them. Slowly becoming
something more, something grander.
A mast starts to form a gift from above
no gentle giveaway.
A hellish panic.
The alarms bell ringing panicked
sailors, a vault flows by. Nobody looks twice. The
earth slowly swallowing the meal, as
if to enjoy each taste and make it last.
The fish intrigued.
Ignorant of the history. Wooden ruins, choral
the dead ship alive!

A shadow crosses the sun.
A sleek shark shows its hand.
The school flees the table.
The shark chases demanding to be payed.
Flying towards the old gift they dive into
the maze.
Only coral in the doorway to the left.
He keeps pursuing.
The group scatters.
Pretenses over
some failing.
Sharp teeth cut indifferently.
New respect for the fragility of water.
Not just joy when they swim now, but a heartbroken celebration
flying along the streams with a learnt respect.
Celebrating each other.

My shadow, catches me off guard, flees up
the wall and up past the celling.
I watch it go and
stumble and look down to see what caused me
to see only my feet and the floor. Oak wood strips
make the floor solid. Endless minuscule canyons
carved below me. Wavy sand dunes and craters sit atop the canyons.  
Rivers flowing separating sides.
Rocks calaborating, blocking paths,
creating treasures.  
everywhere.

Surely somewhere down there a couple holding hands,
a dingo eyeing its next meal watching intently,
solely focused on the ****.  
Perhaps a number of tourists, impressed with the landscape,
snapping pictures of the stone valley.
All wondering at the rocks, meticulously placed.
Tourists cooling off in the rivers.
  Maybe just maybe though
a pair of strangers bump into each other on a
narrow trail, and instead of passing by,
both of them will leave all the better for it.
To defy nature and prove to the landscape, that
people can exist in your world and respect
your customs but play by different rules.
That we have made progress! Not just in phones
but in the barren glory of canyons.
Maybe then the stranger will bump into
the tourists and offer out a hand.

Then the couple will make love,
the tourists will take more photos,
the dingo will eye more food,
the drumbeat will likely stay the same
but maybe just maybe though
the stranger will start something
and help out another stranger,
New music to all who will listen.
Lost completely but with no need to be found.
Any feed back is always welcome! Hope this does something.
Zane H Aug 2012
Ambition,
the Drive,
to do better.
Strive,
towards grander dreams.
Dream,
of greater goals.
Overcome,
harder obstacles.
Arrive,
at higher heights.
Reach,
for a new destination.

8/2/12
Nicholas N Jan 2018
(Hypnos- God of Sleep
Eros- God of Love
Nyx- Goddess of Night)

ME:
I closed my eyes
And met 3 strangers
Whose names I knew but,
Could not express.
They stood with grace and prowess,
Each one grander than the next.
They petitioned me to ask them,
Anything at all,
So I asked them about dreams,
Given to us by gods.

HYPNOS:
A weak internal monologue,
Lapsing into night.
They sleep and breathe
So slowly,
They sleep; and breathe so deep.

EROS:
Their dreams I clouded,
Tinged, with crimson haze.
They long for one another,
They long;
To find each other.

NYX:
The dream ends now!
As my darkness overwhelms.
They no longer need to think,
They drink;
As to forget.

ME:
Pretence keeps up my dreaming,
Innerspeaker of my thoughts,
Past tense reveals it all:
Groundskeeper
To my soul.

An arrow from your quivers
Surely would do the job,
Of a thousand
Quarts of liqour
Or novocaine, or god.

NYX:
When you see light
You will see clearly,
The truth of misery.
Though I know nothing of such light,
The darkness lives in me.

EROS:
Soon your day will come,
To feel as all the rest.
The burning fire of passion,
Bellowing wild,
A fire without smoke.

HYPNOS:
And now as you awake,
Arise! Dear sir, go forth,
Knowing of what you learned,
In this episode,
This dream.
Mateuš Conrad Oct 2017
i tried to assimilate, oh wait, i did, and i speak better native sprechen than the actual natives, and for that? you get the boot, because some camel jockey egyptian mongrel mixed with iranian blood gets the better of you... i guess the "natives" were fans of the eastern european *******, but not the eastern european males, **** it, i'm coming for the ride; can just see the ****** shouting: ooh ooh! their male counterparts are a'coming! and next thing you know, i'll be asking you to play the ******* banjo, with a toothpick!*

and it was always going to be torrential rain,
suspended in a prelude crescendo
of soulfly's song prophecy...
oh all the hoes come from eastern europe,
just like all didlo moulds come from africa,
gotta perfect that "pleasing of the white
******* honey cougar in plastic too, yo, bro..."
black people don't speak the current
lexicon, they are hyper-evolutionary
with their slang impromptus,
gets annoying after a while,
when you stop keeping track of their
ghettosprechen...
      ******* could have said custard,
meant margarine, but i'd still think of
jungle...
                     ghetto *****, get-a-go!
next time you mention all women of
eastern europe as ******, i'll mention
you in my charcoal wish-yo-were-edible
roasts... **** me... i'd prefer eating a leg
of lamb than a ******; shank.
oh, the word offends you,
but doesn't offend you in a rap limerick?
i.e. ***** ***** bab bab *****?
black people invent too much slang,
too much degenerate use of language,
      i try to keep it straight and universal,
off the orangutans go, talking orange is
the new black...
           i still find it hard to fathom
darwinism, who would be mad to begin
in africa, and end up in the arctic circle,
and no china?! common origins *******...
  tried looking for an eskimo in china,
all i found was, a ******* icecube!
      post-existentialism does exists,
it exists in the form of anglo-existentialism,
i.e. a darwinistic blackmailing...
    21st century existentialism is blackmail,
plain dumb & simple...
   and yes, i have a girlfriend, i call her...
sophia...
       and nietzsche was right:
the ugliest of the ugliest? atheists,
intellectually speaking.
       and why would you ever consider
the pristine sophia / ****** mary if not considering
aspasia, phryne, rahab, theodora,
   to counter philosophy,
   why not craft a:
    philospasy, a philophryny,
       a philorahabu, a philothedorum?
guess what, of the most famous prostitutes,
the contestants are philorahabu,
                     and philothedorum,
and all are famous prostitutes;
then the pristine sophia, my "girlfriend";
philosophy has a deity, that although
deemed pristine, has been touched by
many hands, and many strangleholds of ego,
time to turn this princess into a *****;
and the ones that visited a *******,
will look at those that haven't with curious
eyes.
let's not forget the siamese twin prostitutes
safa & marwa, and the matriarch
and true founder of islam ha-gar -
      the concubine of abraham,
  that ******* mother of islam.... hagar...
you really think men invented the islamic
attire for women?
              who's at the chanel catwalk,
straight men, or gays and women?
       you blame anyone, you blame: hagar...
running between the mounts safa & marwa...
islam, that totalitarian reinvention of
"repentant" / "revised" mode of prostitution...
and as i once overheard an englishman speak,
the niqab? satan's postbox.
- the craft began with treating the world as
solely inanimate, to make it as inanimate as
possible, and interact in it,
   as the sole animate agent, obviously with
the obvious hurdles of animate expressions,
nonetheless, these expressions being
outside the vicinity of integrated animate
actors, working around in inanimate surroundings,
conclusively,
  the "supposed" animate expression regain
their inanimate stratum by a repeatedly
predictable observation of
a prior re similis ad infinitum
  (prior to, again, similar toward infinity).
the point was always to make the world
as inanimate as possible,
    collecting books is a starter,
  collecting cooking utensils another,
the point being, to surround yourself with as
much inanimate reality, as to prove yourself
the animate, the "actor"...
             or more expressively: the puppeteer...
it still bothers me, grinding two prefixes...
the penta-      vs.        the tetra-...
   why? well, we are embodied with five sense,
but there are only four elements...

    vision
audition
gustation                       yes, but there's only
  olfaction
     somatosensation

                    air, fire, earth, water...
      this is almost gagging a schematic,
  we can see fire, earth and water,
  we can hear fire, air, water and earth,
      we can taste...
      we can smell fire, air, water, earth,
we can touch fire, water, earth...

this, by the way is crude...
   and is limited by not adding particular
observations...
   but the ratio 5:4 is in place, akin to
the mad hatter's 10/6 = 0.666...
         and that missing one is: ad infinitum,
might as well call it the lazy eight with 4:5...
since the elements came prior to the senses.

i'm guessing the "fifth element" to compliment
the five senses is a far greater posit than
a sixth sense, in that, this "fifth element"
is a plagiarism of kierkegaard,
  i.e. the "changelessness of god",
namely the eternally immovable object,
an object of constantly perpetuated friction,
so stationary that it moves all things,
which also precipitates into an eternally
recurrent subject matter,
immovable, ergo, inexhaustible.

- and i will die believing that anglo-existentialism
is an argument from the perspective
of blackmail, esp. since it's overtly-repetitive
and unoriginal,
  and if the english found continental
existentialism boring, a continental european
like myself, will find some hidden interest
in this "boring" artefact of time,
   but nothing can redeem repetition,
not even a boring artefact of writing,
   since when reading a boring "effort" of
writing, you can actually wake up,
and yawn...
  but when the same "effort" is repetitive,
you never get a chance to yawn,
you're still asleep, "apparently" enthralled.

- and to give a conclusion...
if an irishman thinks you write akin to
the psychiatric slang of "word salad",
ask him if he has read any james joyce,
if the answer is no, and he replies that he prefers
video game narratives, and has ambitions of
writing a book citing the cliche moonlight sonata
of beethoven... it's one of those times
you can't even laugh, internally, or externally.

- eventuality vs. actuality -
whereby actuality is a reactionary stance
that drags past events into present and future
events...
   whereby eventuality is a liberal stance
that drags past events into a wall,
   the present into a status quo,
  and the future into a snooze button phase
of a clockwork orange.

- no, i don't like this darwinistic blackmail of
continental existentialism,
  this monochromatic monolith...

- better start calling philosophy by its proper name,
philorahabu / philothedorum
(were not underlined on the pixel canvas,
thereby bypassing the oxford dictionary panel
for nuo-verbum acceptance) -
      keep that ****** of yours sophia
in a cage, because your thinking,
like your body, will become contaminated;
but one thing is for sure,
that concubine hagar running between
safa & marwa looking for water...
    can't imagine any other grander matriarch...
a reformed *** slave, who gave birth
to the niqab...
            i really can't imagine jannah
that way... i think it looks like:
1 man + 72 prostitutes,
              and 1 woman + 3 holes stuffed.
Cara Anna May 2013
Everyone has that place they go to when the world is too much with them. Or at least, near everyone. Mine is dark, like the sea, and it’s full of stars. It’s not quiet. It’s endless and orchestral, swirling with symphonies that I haven’t quite heard yet, symphonies that are always just a galaxy out of reach.

And sometimes it’s full of fields. I’m from the city, but they feel like home. They circle me and the sky is blindingly blue and I count my breaths: One, Two, Three, and so on. Until softly the wind blows and there I can imagine a different sort of song -- it doesn’t elude me; it consumes me. It’s there in the breeze, in the drifting bits of dust and pollen and tiny particles of sunshine. It’s great and beautiful and the first song that anyone ever heard.

And every so often. Only every so often. That song changes. It’s still within reach, but it’s a different tune. The song is light with floating, glowing ash; it’s heavy with a million voices and laughs and other songs; it drips with summer drinks and rushes through my soul. I am not alone in some black, celestial ocean or alone in golden labyrinths; home is no imagined place, nor are others just comforting phantoms. I am with them. It is more breathtaking than the stars, and more blinding than the sky.

It was like this that my summer began. In musical swells of escapism, visions of melodramatic beauty, grander than my true surroundings. It was built up like Fitzgerald crafted the West Egg, and it nearly ended much the same way; a journey homewards marked with disillusionment.

First came the traveling. I had hoped to find something I’d lost, and started out my search in the throbbing streets of Barcelona, saturated with sunlight during the days and at night with the sounds from sports bars as the football games ended, or young lovers’ laughter along the clear, black Mediterranean coast. Even the most hushed, winding alleys were full of something; perhaps this was just some magical element I conjured to make every moment new and original.

In Spain I found sea food and chilled beer and a bright rose to color my cheeks. I found churches crafted with dizzying dedication, art that made my heart stop, that somehow filled the world with its own sort of symphony.

Then came Paris. There was wine, red and deep and romantic, wine that Hemingway might have brooded over, or that Audrey Hepburn could have brought to her lips on some glamorous getaway from her Roman home. I found walls too, covered with Degas, with Monet and Manet alike, with Da Vinci and the rest. I discovered what it feels like to survey the Luxembourg Gardens on a July day, from a high shady point where despite denim shorts and a boulangerie sandwich, you’re aware that you’ve been graced with something that holds a euphoric regality.

And finally came a trip to Maine. On the shores of Bar Harbor I saw the endless pines and clear blue waters that spelled out the promised land for the first explorers. Atop Cadillac Mountain, as I burrowed into my father’s jacket and hid my face from the wind, I found the stars, as endless as I’d dreamt. They danced for me as for Van Gogh and I could have died up there. I found cool mornings to be filled with walks to rocky shores, and tea and berries and books. There was a different quality here than had been in my European travels. It was introspective and quiet aside from the chirps of crickets and birds and the laps of waves on dark cliffs. I loved it.

Each place held its own collection. Sand and shells and Spanish fans; metro tickets and corks and long linen dresses lightened on the bottom from the waters of the Seine; sea glass pulled from the harbor and dream catchers and endless dog-eared pages. Physical, tangible, ephemeral things for me to grasp onto. I added them to my character, grafted them to my bones, made them my own.

But what use is imagined significance; I hadn’t grown or changed or even learned what it was I had been looking for. I was several weeks older, I had seen a few more corners of the world, granted meaning to trinkets and decided they added to my worth.

It was August then. Shorter days for fluttering leaves and the understanding that nothing separated me from the person I had been aside from the hours between us. Direction in life can’t be dreamt up, it’s earned. It’s what you’re allowed to have after you’ve fallen down and picked yourself back up. I fell, but chose to imagine a new self in faraway places where my troubles couldn’t find me amidst the breezy, sunny crowds.

The cobblestone Parisian streets, the docks of Barcelona, the coves of Maine; they were only where I fled to when my own world was too much with me. When I couldn’t find any use in continuing as myself, I invented a girl laughing on the edge of l’Arc de Triomphe, wading quietly into the inky mystery of the warm sea, or hiding in pine forests with a copy of Wuthering Heights and a serious demeanor. She was the same girl that lost herself into empty fields and dark oceans of stars.

Only one thing stopped the self-absorption that had claimed me that summer. It was nothing fateful; nothing original. I didn’t traverse the world to see this, and the experience was not mine alone. It didn’t hold any old hollywood glamour, nor was it the topic of any of Hemingway’s books. Or maybe it was. It was true, after all. It was the truest thing I did the entire summer; it wasn’t adorned with portraits or cathedrals or soaring landscapes because it didn’t need to be. Hemingway, I think, might have liked that. What I’m going on about now is that Every-So-Often moment. It doesn’t stand lonely in my memory, like so many of the others might. It’s brimming not with strangers and false romantic visions, but with the company of those souls you’re allowed to feel like you’ve known for your entire life, for more than your entire life. The sounds of empty seas and shapeless symphonies have no part; instead, there’s the strumming of guitars with songs so familiar they place an ache right in the core of you. You ache because that moment, full of bonfire and friends and song, is becoming you in a way that nothing else could have (for all of your efforts). It’s a beautiful ache, the one you get when you’ve come home after a long time spent lost and away.
JR Morse Sep 2013
this swifter's grift -
lifting loosely
fitted accoutrement

lourden fruit
carelessly held
silkened, gimlet lit
shamelessly rivened
to a paler shade
of need.

solitude's
enchanting seed
may confer
a grander banquet’s call
but, this tug of
grandiloquent oblige
and politesse . . .

master and slave consort
black and scarlet
swift of tongue and fingertip
unbound so neatly
and leather blind



tell me muse of the anger flesh on fire
is there really dignity in defeat
that eludes the victor

tell me muse of the truth in nature
ill-graced tail-lamp broken
is destiny all ways ordained in contradiction

tell me muse do hearts all times submit
to the beacon call
shyness long forgotten
narrative so harshly written

as ne'er before
with an insistence
ageless yearnings bellow  
as but glazened shadow


if reason sleeps
there will be no learning
no refuge
only to each
for their crimes
a four-chambered riddle



All Rights Reserved
James R. Morse, NYC  2013.
"The higher we fly, the smaller we appear to those who cannot."
Vamika Sinha Jun 2015
Dear Vamika,
of a long and a
short
time away. Of the
future, when
your ******* are fuller
and you can finally speak
French fluently.

I hope you are a woman.

I know you
have not changed the world.
I didn’t write you that way.
I’m still
not writing you that way.
For my cheap gel pen
has none of that spark
of Fitzgerald’s and Nabokov’s,
who could bewitch the imagination with
such timeless giants
as ****** and Daisy.

So remember:
you’ll be brilliant
but absent
from any history books.
But still.
You are enough, exquisitely enough,
for the literature
I inhabit.

Hence, I fill pages with your inky
outlines, shade in the spaces
slowly
with hopes and wishes and poetry and dreams.
For you, of you.
I note
all that you are
composed of, so that
even the marginalia
laughs out your lipstick,
your clothes drawers,
your reading habits.

I am writing you as a woman.

I am writing you
as Music. Here is your laughter,
a little smokier now,
unspooling like a work of
Debussy’s. Here are your
fingers, lighter now, like meringues
or dandelions, as they dance
on your silver flute,
better, better, better than ever,
in shiny theatres far
grander than you imagined.
And here are your tiny
scrawled music notes, that with a few touched
keys, echo as tumbling stars
in the ears of thousands
and then plenty.

I hope you are a woman.
So play, compose, laugh and sing; be
Music ‘til your dying day.

I am writing you
as Ambition. It is calmer
than the fire that currently
singes my hands. Yet it’s still as
constant
as the flame you
light, every night before bed,
in front of the Goddess Durga
you pray to.
Your heart still
salivates for hard-boiled
surprises, for lucky pennies
found on pavements, for the
metallic sweetness of, yes,
success.

I hope you are a woman.
So strive, and strive again,
‘til you’re nothing but ash.

I am writing you, too,
as Success.
Surprise!
Those words unhooked
from the crevices of your mind,
are now bound in
paperbacks.
You are a poet, sleeker than
the 17-year-old fledgling
in her dim bedroom.
You are a journalist,
pouring morning stories
like hot tea, and sighing
with honey glee at
your name in
print.
You are a writer;
you fill even more pages, and
you now have a
gleaming, expensive
pen.

I hope you are a woman.
So write, ‘til you have lost
all breath.

I am writing you
as Compassion. How could I not
let you share words (your  personal magic) with
countless sparking children?
And not fill your hands with
gifts of maths, English,
science and art that you can
give and give and
give to them?
An education is as precious and
priceless as Picasso, you say.
A human right, all the same.
A human right.

I hope you are a woman.
So be kind. That’s it.
Always.
I have not forgotten  
to write you as
Justice.
Go out and support,
wave flags and placards,
sign petitions, join many
campaigns, scream out ‘til
your throat can’t bear such
honesty, such
indignation.
Keep fighting.
Never stop. The world is unfixable,
imperfect and
unhappy.
Help it.

I hope you fight for other women.
I hope you fight for other humans.

I am also writing you
as Resilience. So you’re able
to face yourself in that
mirror, even though
your stomach has a stubborn bulge, still,
and you haven’t yet learned
to smile at your nose.
Still.
And I’m reminding you that you do,
yes, you do,
have the strength to cry alone, then
get over it,
to have panic attacks, then
get over it,
to pick yourself up from
life’s many disintegrations and
start again.
You can. You’ve already done it.
I hope you always will.

I know that you are a woman.
So never give up, as
cliché as it sounds. Go ahead and
die trying.

Now, as the cadenza
of this rather sentimental piece,
which I’ve spun as
sweet
as stolen sugar
and the romantic comedies at which
you secretly weep,
I am writing you as
Tenderness.
See, I decided that Love and
Romance are but
bombs. And you and I both
believe in non-violence.
Therefore, you are
a hugger now, with lips
which kiss your husband,
scold your children
and sing
lullabies to the whole silly lot of them.
Your heart is always
swimming
with a good bit of warm wine,  so don’t
question its fullness.
Take care of yourself.

This.
This, above, is all I hope for you
to stay and have and be
until the symphony’s final note, your
final breath.

You are a woman.
Flawed, intelligent, beautiful, cracked, strong, kind, stubborn, soft, honest.
Real.

You are a woman.
So stay like this,
but be just a little more wiser, a little more grown
each passing year.

A woman.
Vamika, that’s all I ever want you to be.
What do you hope to achieve in your lifetime? (Entry for Commonwealth Essay Competition)
WhyamIaSpoon Jan 2012
My auspicious and audacious assault augments the annoyance of aged accomplices.

My bodacious broadside of boffolas berates and buffaloes bros beneficently.

A classy crusade Clownishly chiseling and criticizing childishness.

A devilish ******* of dillydallying dullards; devoutly denying dimwits the dulcet dream of defiance.

Excessive, exuberant edification, ebulliently eliminating education-evictees.

A fair-weather frolic in flippancy with furious fools floundering in flawed foppishness.

Gregariously grating glum guys gleefully, growing grander garnishes of gripping gallantry gaily.

Heckling hooligans highlights my heavenly humor.

Irreverently irking irritable, iniquitous idiots in inestimably infuriating and incredible instances.

A jolly, jocular **** joking with jerks.

A kreiger kicking kleptomaniacs in the karyotype. (Cut me some slack, this is 'k', after all.)

A ludicrous, laughing lambaste of lollygagging lunatics, loftily loosing luscious lunacy on lucky losers.

A magnificent masterpiece of malfeasance, a monstrous, malevolent mission of massive misfortune for the minor minors missing no malicious missive.

A noxious, narcissistic niggling of nitwits, niftily nixing the noisome naivete of niggardly nobs.

An offhand, off-color outburst of outlandish observations to outclass the obnoxious overtures of obsequious offal.

A pragmatic prediction of possible platitudes or platypi, a placid parley of pyrotechnic pleasantries provoking Pyrrhic protections by prurient prats.

A quixotic quibble quarreling with a queer quarry.

Ribald ribbing, ruining the robust reality of the repreachful, repugnant, and rapacious with risque ridiculousness.

A silly, slighting slander of sluglike slavishness, succinctly sinking sloppy simpletons sourly.

Tracing the titillating talent of towing tyranny to towering terrors to tactless, togless, terrapins of the times.
Mateuš Conrad Jan 2020
.i do expect you to become lost in this labyrinth - at least that's what i'd rather say - sleep-deprivation is for "some" reason to escape the mediocre of having catched the "8 hour wink"... or whatever the Minotaur wouldn't call it... because i wouldn't call it a "problem" of "gender-neutral pronouns" either... i would call it a "problem" of noun-acquisition-status of letters; notably in greek and hebrew.

friends of "the" family have been looking
for on fb,
****... the caron S (š) will not do!
i need to use two alphabets that...
did not nurture yiddish into existence!
cyrillic didn't accept hebrew...
it'll have to do...
it wouldn't be enough to simply write
my name in cyrillic...
and no... in hebrew no less!
since the vowels are hidden...
and inserting the proper hebrew vowel...
it still wouldn't matter that...
my surname is missing... the galician germanic
e(ch)lert or the e(sch)lert...
no... but how is one to insert
the right kind of vowel: all in hebrew niqab
harem of diacritical markers subscript...
when... you don't have...
enough letters as nouns as scientific
constants as the greeks... do...
i guess only η (eta) stands out as a sore thumb /
black sheep... but i am bound to be wrong,
in the meantime:
well it's hardly a letter-with-a-noun
inclined akin to alpha (α) -
otherwise all is well...
we use the prefix prime (the grammaton per se)...
and discard the suffix when constructing words...
ergo? a-lpha...
and so an so forth...
till be arrive at...
blasting your ears nearing deafness because:
beethoven's mrs. H is:
music so you have to shout over it!
loud! what?! loud music!
loud music what?! loud music
to shun the "pain"...
oh... see you in one of those classes
when you can write sign-language for the dead
when you've been allowed to write braille!
see you sputnik ****!
yeah, see you deaf in one year divine John!
but you get the promise that's:
not your everyday latin castrato sing-along...
those greeks sure have all the best
science... stabilizers... not a lot of songs
to sing along to... because their letters
are also noun-status: also have noun-status...
otherwise the ol' prefix use...
and the suffix recycling centre...
a word like: matter...
well...
   ματτερ - no... i will not use the greek word...
i'll state... mmm... hm!
mu implies m- and cutting off the -u...
alpha implies a- and cutting off the -lpha
tau implies t- and cutting off the -au...
epsilon implies e- and cutting off the -psilon
rho implies r- and cutting off the -**...
and so... we have the word matter...
and the recycled materials for...
some other words...

hebrews? hebrews do have... noun-status letters...
(א) aleph - what's vogue?
inserting the iota into the omicron that's
the marriage: φ (phi)...
or whether it's the turning of the iota in
the omicron to provide the opening of the door
θ (theta) to see: that light at the end of the tunnel
delta (Δ)... again... it's only aleph we're "investigating"...

the other letter in hebrew with a noun-status?
(ג) g'imel...
another is (ד) d'alet...
(ז) z'ayin...
(ל) l'amed...
(ס) s'amekh... most certainly (ע) a'yin...
(צ) t'sadi...

interlude: what is the distance
between (א) a'leph and (ע) a'yin?
a kametz...

now we can "debate" - noun-status letters...
the greeks are in the same sort of pickle
as the hebrews...
there can be a debate whether...
the greeks have more than:
alpha, beta, gamma, delta, epsilon, iota,
lambda, omicron, sigma, upsilon, omega
as noun-status letters...

why? because it becomes silly...
(ק) qof and (κ) kappa...
(ר) resh and rho (ρ)...
(שׁ) and... well... to be honest...
that's heading into cyrillic territory...
and the caron S (ш)...
given (ס) samekh and sigma (σ)...

this always happens to me when i come
across a hebrew...
even if he's old and riddled with dementia...
i see him with his polish bride
and i see a "romanian gypsy"...
the feeling is... strange...
this hebrew is like an old cousin of mine...
but it's always a touch of magic...

i am not good at solving crosswords...
(כ) 'xaf' and chi (χ) -
perhaps i have exagerrated the letter-as-noun
status on some of this greek and hebrew...
tightly-knit bed-fellows...
as the boasting resounds in the labyrinth
of the rise and fall of the roman empire...
and the barbarian attempts to have
settled the lands near the seven hills...
and revived the eagle...
spec-ta-cu-lar failures!

the germans should console themselves
with having a crow on their marching banners...
and polacks should...
satisfy themselves with the unicorn myth
of an all-white bald eagle... albino eagle...
and so the harry potter: minus ***** 'arry
can have their unicorns, swans,
honey-badgers, welsh dragon,
st. andrew's gryffindors... etc. -

name, a name... i need to... change it...
obviously...
no hebrew vowels will be used...
since... their use... is devoid of what's already
concrete usage of diacritical markers
in established letters...
if cyrillic and hebrew is to be used...
and not greek and hebrew:
because... well thank you for the new testament
riddle... let's move... away...
to "greater" / other... things....

i can't use a kametz alpha
a tzere epsilon
a chirek iota
a cholem omicron
or a shurek upsilon (omega)...
so all the vowels will have to by cyrillic...

my... latin, name?
mateusz konrad... let's drop the surname...
let's call it a game of:
ibn... or ben... matthew son of konrad...
and since i don't have a... confirmation name...
what name? i would have chosen: Isidore...
after the saint of seville...
or... Ignatius (of Loyola) -
the only fun part of going to a catholic school
was... learning about the counter-reformation
and writing an essay about it...
and their library was decently stacked...
so... plus plus...

this is but a simple exercise...
first the name in cyrillic...
there will not be a full name in hebrew...
which i'll probably lace with greek...
and it will still make all the more perfect
sense... should it be transliterated back
into anglo-ßaß...
yeah: why i don't have a girlfriend...
with these sort of interests?
i guess an hour with a *******
once a year is enough for me...
and for womankind in the hospice of omni...

just following the laziness
of the russian visa authorities are the embassy...
they didn't translate mateusz into matvei
or konrad into: Дракон...
мат-вей...

these are the sort of idiotic tier-1 level
кaцaпс... working in the russian embassy in Loon'don...

because i was never going to be the матвей
who'd **** an илoнa like the 300 deadly mongrel
saracren mameluks or the spartans... no...
i counter the 7 headed beast on her
with every ****** in that one night
i was making my final goodbyes...
but keeping the mikhail bulgakov novel...
through a repose in Warsaw and...
i finished what, "apparently" i wasn't supposed
to finish...

and she is one of those troubled girls...
every ****** partner that meant anything to her...
she will have a tattoo of that lover
on her body... i know my place on her body...
it's on the right shoulder-blade...
the tattoo is of a dragon...
i know because i've met girls like her...
elsewhere...

even as i was being driven home after taking
my mother for her rheumatoid arthritis check-up,
blood test, x-ray... and the pakistani cab-driver
was talking about all the precautions he needs
these days: video ahead of the bonet for insurance
policy... a camera looking in...
and audio recording on his smartwatch...
because what he said... didn't surprise me...
i once picked up a spanish girl - Tamara in a club...
and she decided to take me home
for a one night stand...
as we were approaching the house she was
sharing with three homosexuals
she decided to jump out of the cab...
and make a runner... i calmed the cabbie:
i'll pay for it...
we tried to later **** the hetreosexual way
with her calling me angel because
of my "erectile dysfunction" under the bed sheets
in that putrid smoke of cocoon ***...
like the birth of a rancid moth embryo and
choking from the heat of dust and alcohol
and... what i am alluding to is that some girls
do jump out of cabs to avoid paying the fair...
i knew what the pakistani cabbie was saying...
she owed him 40 quid...
he filed the whole thing to the police...
she accused him of ****** assault...
the story would have fit...
she run from the cab when he tried to sexually
assault her... but... he did have
that audio recording from his smartwatch...
in the end the girl was fined 700 quid...
which is nothing... compared to...
what's that called in h'america? a false accusation?
slander?
i know that girls jump out of cabs...
to avoid paying the fare...
i drove with one... who did just that...
i guess she was so used to this act that she
forgot i was sitting next to her...

- all the *****... but then all the chem-soup
post-psychiatric *******?
the ***** i can stand...
the pills are just tasmanian devilish when
it comes to catching the perfect
battery insomnia recharge...
and always meeting and respecting
the elder of the group darwinistic:
prat pact... a hebrew...
there always needs to be a yew
a *** in the equation...
no... not some english society
uncle tom worth of a high society rabbi...
i mean a jew that will support
west ham... because...
it's an irrational team...
it can fathom beating chelsea (A)...
but then... "forget" to win against...
for god's sake! Norwich (H)!

i know! i know! joseph conrad took his place!
here's my part anagram!
Mатвей Дракон...

the near non-existent diacritical presence
in the english language...
well... no "surprise surprise" if...
you're starting with
и (i) or rather (ı)...
and what's being the flock of salmon
up the river, being caught?
the j but not (ȷ)... imagine my... "surprise"
that the russians arrived at...
и and ı - in tow... ȷ and the й...
the breve...
parabolla or... my eyes only see
the microscopic details when someone
will simply slurr?

- borrowing from yesterday and...
in the early night of winter standing
in the garden with four potatoes
and something else...
looking up at the sky...
i am used to seeing unusual "things"
in the sky -
i'm not unusual when it comes
to having seen a u.f.o. - fluorescent
and squid like in colour -
but i'm also the sort of person that
would carry a few beers for such
spontaneous encounters -
rather running around like a raving
lunatic armed with a camera
filming the whole thing...
i have no proof: i hope my words are enough...
and if they're not?
well... if it can be seen with a naked eye -
i don't need to blink via a technological
feed and argue about: quality of the picture...

but even i wasn't ready for...
what i saw today...
those are roaming stars? aren't they?
and i really did forget to count how
many moved in the same direction
askew - one by one with equal distance
between them - before the distance between
extended - there must have been more than
10 - i'd say there were around 20!

is this always how things are -
when one contemplates the tetragrammaton?

part anagram? well because the russian
do have a version of the hebrew matisyahu...
but they do not have the german conrad
in their language...
probably as to why the germans do not
really have... a yuri or nikita in their language...
nikita after all sounds more feminine than
masculine - anyone could with hindsight
speak of mr. rocketman's lover of
the same same... as not some russian beau
example of the fairer ***...
but a comrade khrushchev...

- and why wouldn't i call those russians
that work in the russian embassy in Loon'don
кaцaпы? for one... they just type letter for letter:
a mateusz / a matthew is a мaтэусз...
for all "legal" purposes...
they already have the сз = ш...
bureucratic purposes...
and no wonder some are like:
how do you say that?
too many consonants some add...
and i really did think that all of us were
allowed to be fully literate...
that's not the case... blowing my own horn...

having a wet ***** over: because i like my given
names... perhaps that's why i didn't want
the confirmation option of being allowed
to change any of my given names: legally...
to one of my own chosing...
when i was 15 / 14 i didn't even known
or think about a name like Isidore...

when the german name became coupled
with a hebrew loan...
otherwise the russian with the first
being an anagram... drakon -
Mатвей Дракон - it's just a name -
it's my name - what's in a name is what's
precisely not in anonymous names
.666 handles and avatars on the internet...
i can own my face - and i can own my name...
because - i kind of like it...

again: on in russian can the west slavic
C be distinguished from the K... Ц -
and back into the cyst of the western lands...
Ç or what came with sigma's tail...
it's so... boring... to have less the different
sounding letters - given no diacritical markers -
and only the "exotica" of spelling -
all the metaphysics in the world combined
and concentrated in greenwich...
but no real orthography...
i could begin the day by bemoaning this poverty
of the english language...
oddly enough as both the outsider coming in...
the immigrant who became a citizen...
and as the insider coming out and coming in
again on that expatriate spectrum of
working from the thesaurus: IMMIGRANT...
for all the beauty of Macbeth...
i can have to ruse myself to bemoan
conventional english... the formal english...
the antithesis poetica...

but i do somewhat "know" why it's called
a tetragrammaton...
i wouldn't classify any of the letters that make it up
as noun-worthy letters...
the kametz (a) and the tzere (e) are nouns...
and letters... but you don't see them when
the hebrew doesn't exfoliate and is left
crude with "missing vowels" for the gentiles
to read...
saying that... calling ה (he) a noun is pushing it...
as is calling ו (vav) a noun...
or י (yod) - although...
the yod could be allowed a noun-status
as... an apostrophe... or a version of the caron -
but the remaining letters of the tetragrammaton...
are "syllables" in that they are consonants...
and when the tetragrammaton comes face
to face with noun-status letters of its own
universe: g (ג) gimel, d (ד) dalet, z (ז) zayin -
l (ל) lamed, s (ס) samekh, ц (צ) tsadi -
resh? shin? the gates are open to allow the question
in... but when...
there's also siamese Adams aleph (א) and Ayin (ע)
being and nothingness respectively...

what could Islam possibly offer me...
intellectually?
when i once asked a muslim what...

alif, lam, meem                                      meant...
he replied... only god knows...
so i thought... only god?
i must have been talking to one of those muslims
who have arabic overlords...
before they can catch a whiff of the almighty
blah'llah...
ا, لَـ, مَـ
again... greek only touches upon...
the initial - the medial and the final
version of sigma...
isolated you would see the capital sigma...
Σ - which could also be treated as the initial
letter - given that the σ looks more like a medial
form - although it's also initial -
whereby ς is the final form -
almost like the english: 's... apostrophe s -
which could be claimed to be an article of possession...
or the plural article when the apostrophe
disappears - or when the ς altogether disappears
when: the possession is plural:
a teachers' strike... e.g.

no not with a fatha - we have our own diacritical
markers... thank you...
but good question...
so... why is the meem written in an isolated
form in the word - yawm (day)...
but not in a final form?
but i do not write in a squiggly line in this digital
arena... perhaps my language looks simply
written... oh yes, the aesthetic of the arabic script
is always stressed...
but even the hebrews think like the greeks
and the latins... in a way...
nothing has to flow in one river-wry format...
there's no isolated letter... of a letter -
as there's no initial no median and no final
form of it... but there is a "question"
of the hiding of vowels...
for gentiles and muhammadians alike...

- perhaps some will call it the trans-community...
there was once a dead poets' society...
evidently with the rise of de-transitioning...
there's now a nag hammadi library society...
circa 1945 when this library was left unchecked
in the hands of: the children
with too many toys and too many sandpits...
probably that one neu-mecca of san francissco...
at least the dead sea scrolls:
that were unearthed at about the same time...
treated the hebrew far better than
the nag hammadi library treated its children...
and why the former power, the vatican,
didn't step in... to control these text...
as they flew out on a *****-nilly without
herr zensor... herr inquisitor...
i will never know...
the scouts of medicine left... black holes
of having advanced in the field of anaesthetics...
too many toys for the the children
with too many sandpits...

- because i would rather the fascination
with a language... than its immediate...
polyglot acquisition and use...
if i put my head to it... perhaps i could
speak the 7 languages my great-grandfather spoke
before jumping into the Niagara Falls
leaving a postcard sent...
but when i peer into the details...
i quiet like these two trenches of mine...
this english this canvas and my eye toward
the east and the south and semites...
just because english is a language without
diacritical markers...
a language filled with metaphysical dialectics:
but missing any mention of orthography...

a hebrew might hide a vowel...
and write only consonants on street signs
for a gentile to read...
but then the gentiles' languages morphed...
and a vowel became distinct...
there is A that begins the word: ah-men...
but there's also an A that is invoked with a tail
to point and identify a tree, an oak:
dąb...
so much for kametz being hidden...
if there's no 2nd tier "complexity" of kametz...
but there is one for the visible...
A - vowel - a vowel with a tail...
but without a name -
as all letters are - whether vowel or consonant...
in the litany and choir of the castratos
of ancient Rome...

pause with me...
what music are you listening to?
i'm listening to... years of denial - burning sun
(veyl channel) - 1,319 views...
i like to... find the better alleys of my entertainment...
as i can't hate kevin spacey...
not because of kevin spacey...
but because of lester burnham...
or more to the point...
why thomas newman reminds me of a...
reincarnation of Satie...
not a Chopin or a Liszt virtuoso of the piano...
not a when a hammer strikes
a line of 88 nails...
but when a butterfly chances the here and there,
on a shy-loot of a beauty of scarce sounds...
just the same of nostalgia for this era of
movies borrows me from out any new
suspence... as that sort of nostalgia creeping
into people born in the 1960s who truly
admire h'american movies from the 1950s...
even i am to blame when i feed
a nostalgia - more to the point for the technicolour
acryllic glow akin to...
richard quine's 1958 bell book and candle...
but of course scandinavian existential cinema
of a Bergman would be in black and white...
black and white photographs...
but if we're talking movies?
Undogmatic & Kernfeld - thought experiments...
Amanti d'oltretomba (1965)...

i will have to refine the greek to hebrew to greek
similarities...
an Ezra Pound can hide behind counting
matchsticks and reading into chinese ideograms...
when lo and behold! some japanese *******
comes up with a minimalism of the on'yomi...
or perhaps japanese is a language
that fuses elements of braille?
no point question the matter since
the mongols famously didn't come over to Japan
to add to the already Mandarin caste of
the kun'yomi...

but no... these greek letters are nouns...
even though π is equivalent to understanding
the wheel a posteriori: as a circle -
prior to there was only a wheel but no
knowledge of the dynamic of the radius,
or the diameter...
but it's still a prefix weak hardly a noun...
alpha and beta are nouns because they
denote something - prefix category shared -
but... the alpha and the beta male...
even gamma rays...
what's that? π-networks of coming back
to point (0, 0) in terms of:
no more than three powers of seperation between
you and some random from hugh yawn'khh?
my bad...
but η, μ, ν, ξ, π, ρ (ρ requires delta epsilon
and sigma to imply island of Rhodes)...
τ - but this is not China and tau is not Tao...
to tow is... to tow...
φ, χ, ψ... these could be names...
but ψ is like a crucifix for psychologists...
so these are... but at the same time:
are not names...
working from Latin, "borrowed"...
A (or aye)... B (queen bee)... C (i çee)...
D (dye or dry or d.i.y.)... E (eh? vowel catcher
arm no. 1 of the tetragrammaton)...
surd if the other arm... most notably in gujarati...
or not...
but this leftoever ancient Latin:
                                sing along! sing along!
a, be, cee, dee, e, ef, gee, h "hatch" / hay,
i, jay, kay, em, en, o, ***, que queue cue,
Ar, Tee, U, Vee, ekhs (x), why (y), zee or general Zod /
Zed... etc.
do i remember the "correct", french pedagogic
sequences of: letters of the alphabet?
i thought the whole "game" was about
the lexicon? and the lexicon within the lexicon
of the correct spelling?
are there 26 letters in the english alphabet?
there are! mein gott!
do i have to monkey-play-me-harmonica -
monkey-play-me-the-acordeon and tap to play
the drums... really? now?!
there were never going to be any alphabetical
sequence of events...
if i can remember that there are 26 letters:
the order of the pedagogues doesn't matter...
the lexicon matters... one's own vo(gue)-ca-bu-Larry...
short of Lawrence...
and shouldn't i give up my Lawrence Vogue...
i will certainly to remember to give
the "correct" order of what begins
with abc- and ends with -xyz...
this is the inbetween...
please see fit to spot a sparrow or a typo...

becuase if the british are to be proud of their past...
proud in the sense that it is...
fermenting and all this decline of the west "thing"...
of the people that has to "somehow" welcome
a revival... кaцaпы (plural of кaцaп)
is a racial slurr - designated for russians...
by those who had a pseudo-isarel interlude...
of what was known as the polish-lithuanian
commonwealth - of the last european pagans -
who didn't become the prussians
and made the bavarian spirit rigid
and militaristic...

i find this part of history... rather... infantile...
i have been taught a version of history
through the lense of infantalism...
perhaps science-fiction was the serious medium
of literature after all -
all of the past - if it is to be called a past -
is prescribed by zeitgeist -
my contemporaries' suggestion to be an infatile dream!
it must be a version of infantilism!
at least: that's my response in relation to:
the past having any aspect of being worth
celebrated...
me struck dumb being coerced by a...
genetic archieology of a past...
what some of the current people invest in...
mirror mirror: on no wall beside
mirror mirror: my face...
speculum speculum: well! there's always history
as etymology!
i don't like the word faciem...
where does visage come from?
oh... right...

quest to perfect the algorithms to escape
the everyday speculum was prime suspicion:
to speculate...
i guess any search engines requires:
etymological root...

mirror mirror: my void eating face...
my pulpit of vanity -
my valley of aeons...
my detail of the smirk the demonic glee...
of your most greyish glee...
of no concern for celebrated beauty...
or at best: no beauty to be exemplified
and stealing memory having invested
in the memory of cinema...
mirare mirare: comesse vacare visage meum...

now that's rather different...
isn't it? a history lesson with...
a stress for a post-scriptum in-and-out
"epilogues" (misnomer) and a return
from the trivia interlude back into the narrative...
only with an understudy of etymology...

who do i look like? some ******* ***
who would use such a ***** word as epistemology?
"epilogue" is a misnomer in the context when...
there was never a justifiable metaphor...
a misnomer is a metaphor:
for the **** by the ocean of the shore
in the vicinity to claim town status - Dover -
albino cliffs: more or less...
epistemology is a word most frequently used
by people... who read to people...
encyclopedic entries... cyclopes reading...
all that matters is the cwowd: which is the Velsh
variation of: that already numb-R lost trill
of tarantula bit anglo-ßaß...
which didn't require zeppelins or h'american
spaghetti accent westerns of draw and drule
and drawl...

such a minor racial slur when it comes
to the russians... soviets or red barons...
you must have never visited Moscow or St. Petersburg...
**** the right sort of ******-up russian girl...
and... if you're lucky!
she's take you to... the russian versailles!
Peterhof -
the racial slur stills remains...
a thank you matka rosiya...
satellite son over 'ere: the bellowing from Berlin
is like a sudden plague of hyenas attempting...
no... the foxes are imitating the hyenas...
which is which or rather: which is why?
a mutual agreement: reciprocated...
a great a great much decent ****...
for both of us...
the memory still feeds me...
oh no, it doesn't haunt me:
it feeds me... i could only find replicas
in brothels... i would never dare usurp
this catherine this tsarina of my memory...
i would never dare invest my personality in someone
else... she can be married her... 3rd time...
and this might be her 10th repentence...
of an 11th lover...
on this sinking ship: Potemkin i go as one -
reincarnation or no...
i still don't believe: this hindu myth of:
only a fixed number of people were every to be
born... and the rest are the harsh realities
of the base focuses of animals...
as we somehow drag these n.p.c. mysterions with
us... whether strangers or fathers or mothers...
are you not attached to your grandson:
dearest "catherine"?

such is the tyrany of the hindu polygamy
trans-temporal polytheism...
a diadem with a mouth for an eye...
and an eye for a mouth: or what better way
to salvage this grief of being only being 20 and 21
when having met and having to vow to
allow ourselves our each his and her seperate
lives...
at least some people call it:
the house of lords... and the house of commons...
on a much grander scale...
oh i'm pretty sure tsar (ras)Putin is much amused...

as i am now speaking with a borrowed tongue:
someone lent me a tongue -
i desired to speak with it -
imagine this complete lack of horror with regards
to being lent -
when reicarnation comes to the fore...
i agree: with "him": a most disagreeable
metaphor for... whatever it is the hindus truly believe
to be: the most humane form of
being allowed a human: self-consciousness
and a relationship to all those teenage
*****-dear-diary entries of... precursors
to the menapause and... the blue blood gremlins
of the big pharma pills-down...
the big pharma *******...

unless asked... always in uniform before your "majesty"...
as with any decent *******...
god forbid one of them thinks i'm jesus christ...
come back...
but never with these... grey-area maidens...
this "tool" will not be aroused
on the simple signature end contract promise
of: he made it to the finish line of a one-night stand!
where's the finish line of a one-night stand?
the next day? the *******, the *******...
her ******? at least the new generation
have the... cipher password for sexting...
or whatever has become of a good old fashioned
**** your brains out?
via you **** a plum sore tattoo into my pelvis
with your coccyx like a well balanced
african body of ivory beauty?!
you know the type... it looks like butter
in moonlight... like... what's the point of a niqab
in africa?! it's already... a warewolf has come
among the wolves...
and how i miss you, i esp. miss you when
i sit on my windowsill and listen to foxes
mating...
how those ******* squeal yank and bite nothing
but bone having omitted both the flesh
and the fur!
i miss you the most when i sit at night -
and listen to foxes mating;
after all... this is essex... this is england...
foxes at around 1am are my cognac...
beside ms. amber: and you know you'll also
be ******* her when i've had my fill...
but oooh... look at me: oooh...
gravy...
but i've watched! crows don't attempt fucky-fucky
tow-dollar sucky-sucky bangkokh style
during the die... all that is black that's worth
the crow is done in the night...
perverted pigeons during the day!
****-*******-me-into-a-voyeurism of their
greedy insect esque antics of coo coo...
then jump onto the rucksack of a female...
and all those beta-male pigeons... and that: huh?!
moment of bewilderement when he "thinks"
he has cooed like an alpha...
only the memory of you...
and all the prostitutes after you...
which always made imagining ******* you again
all that more simple; there was no кaкaшкa
with them to begin with.
Timothy Roesch Mar 2014
Oh the cringing  demon of eternal youth,
******* away promise and hard won truth.
I see far more than ***, lingering, in her eyes
I see, instead, the milk teeth of youthful lies,
of forever and today, hopes and screams
replacing tomorrows, frayed at the seams.

Oh, mere ***, be gone, you sordid troll!
Crawl yourself back in your hole.
If ‘tis *** you brought to this trapped piece of light
then speak to your own soul and leave me a bite
of the apple she does not offer
and the delights you think her youth will proffer.

I have no time to dance to your twisted tune
of youth over too fast and maturity too soon!
What stinks more of your *******;
her stretched, prolonged, aging youth or back bared, partial  ******?

I giggle as I consider her Eve-like dreams
of bitten apples and grander things.
And God said, let there be light.
Is that truly all He said when he banished the night?

Maybe she is wet from being born.
From demon Youth’s desperate grasp she is torn
and into the world, for a moment, she is cashed;
back bared and ready to be lashed
by the ‘cruel’ reality we keep from youth…
…like bronzed, baby booties and baby’s lost tooth.

Maybe, coquettishly, she glances ahead,
away from the bonds of youth’s birthing bed;
not, as you apparently dream, toward some sordid affair
you see in bared skin and strands of dampened hair!

There is beauty in her eyes, it is true,
the beauty of youth’s first, full faced view
of tomorrow and tomorrows again…
Exactly how long do you think, she should remain a youth, then?
Oh the Apple that lingers past ripe upon a tree,
Snakeless, Eve-less, unchosen, unbitten for an eternity.
Shall we trap, virginal, in iron cages of our blind, stupid lust
the false innocence of youth only tears and death can rust?

Foolish, foolish Adam and blind, impregnable Eve; is *** all you can ever see?
I can peer past your layers and layers and layers of false, bitter modesty.
If you see ******* then know this, before you atone:
You bring that demon wherever you go and it is yours and yours alone.
Created while viewing the famous Miley Cyrus photograph of a young Miley in only a towel.
Lysander Gray Sep 2015
She wore mountains round her neck

           (“No, lower.”)

Peaked with scented minarets

           (Softer and sweeter than strawberries,
           grander than a psalm.)

In the gulch between words
I offered you a prayer
and you wounded me with a poem.

I watched you  move
like a summer night
to disrobe the cover
of your collected works
           -a landscape of fire and blood
            that beats a wardrum
            deep in my hungry river.

Your petals pressed against my lips
           to drown , to drown
                      gladly.

She wore mountains round her neck,
and I wore her ankles with a smile.
Memory
Present
Memory
The south-wind brings
Life, sunshine, and desire,
And on every mount and meadow
Breathes aromatic fire,
But over the dead he has no power,
The lost, the lost he cannot restore,
And, looking over the hills, I mourn
The darling who shall not return.

I see my empty house,
I see my trees repair their boughs,
And he, —the wondrous child,
Whose silver warble wild
Outvalued every pulsing sound
Within the air's cerulean round,
The hyacinthine boy, for whom
Morn well might break, and April bloom,
The gracious boy, who did adorn
The world whereinto he was born,
And by his countenance repay
The favor of the loving Day,
Has disappeared from the Day's eye;
Far and wide she cannot find him,
My hopes pursue, they cannot bind him.
Returned this day the south-wind searches
And finds young pines and budding birches,
But finds not the budding man;
Nature who lost him, cannot remake him;
Fate let him fall, Fate can't retake him;
Nature, Fate, men, him seek in vain.

And whither now, my truant wise and sweet,
Oh, whither tend thy feet?
I had the right, few days ago,
Thy steps to watch, thy place to know;
How have I forfeited the right?
Hast thou forgot me in a new delight?
I hearken for thy household cheer,
O eloquent child!
Whose voice, an equal messenger,
Conveyed thy meaning mild.
What though the pains and joys
Whereof it spoke were toys
Fitting his age and ken;—
Yet fairest dames and bearded men,
Who heard the sweet request
So gentle, wise, and grave,
Bended with joy to his behest,
And let the world's affairs go by,
Awhile to share his cordial game,
Or mend his wicker wagon frame,
Still plotting how their hungry ear
That winsome voice again might hear,
For his lips could well pronounce
Words that were persuasions.

Gentlest guardians marked serene
His early hope, his liberal mien,
Took counsel from his guiding eyes
To make this wisdom earthly wise.
Ah! vainly do these eyes recall
The school-march, each day's festival,
When every morn my ***** glowed
To watch the convoy on the road;—
The babe in willow wagon closed,
With rolling eyes and face composed,
With children forward and behind,
Like Cupids studiously inclined,
And he, the Chieftain, paced beside,
The centre of the troop allied,
With sunny face of sweet repose,
To guard the babe from fancied foes,
The little Captain innocent
Took the eye with him as he went,
Each village senior paused to scan
And speak the lovely caravan.

From the window I look out
To mark thy beautiful parade
Stately marching in cap and coat
To some tune by fairies played;
A music heard by thee alone
To works as noble led thee on.
Now love and pride, alas, in vain,
Up and down their glances strain.
The painted sled stands where it stood,
The kennel by the corded wood,
The gathered sticks to stanch the wall
Of the snow-tower, when snow should fall,
The ominous hole he dug in the sand,
And childhood's castles built or planned.
His daily haunts I well discern,
The poultry yard, the shed, the barn,
And every inch of garden ground
Paced by the blessed feet around,
From the road-side to the brook;
Whereinto he loved to look.
Step the meek birds where erst they ranged,
The wintry garden lies unchanged,
The brook into the stream runs on,
But the deep-eyed Boy is gone.

On that shaded day,
Dark with more clouds than tempests are,
When thou didst yield thy innocent breath
In bird-like heavings unto death,
Night came, and Nature had not thee,—
I said, we are mates in misery.
The morrow dawned with needless glow,
Each snow-bird chirped, each fowl must crow,
Each tramper started,— but the feet
Of the most beautiful and sweet
Of human youth had left the hill
And garden,—they were bound and still,
There's not a sparrow or a wren,
There's not a blade of autumn grain,
Which the four seasons do not tend,
And tides of life and increase lend,
And every chick of every bird,
And **** and rock-moss is preferred.
O ostriches' forgetfulness!
O loss of larger in the less!
Was there no star that could be sent,
No watcher in the firmament,
No angel from the countless host,
That loiters round the crystal coast,
Could stoop to heal that only child,
Nature's sweet marvel undefiled,
And keep the blossom of the earth,
Which all her harvests were not worth?
Not mine, I never called thee mine,
But nature's heir,— if I repine,
And, seeing rashly torn and moved,
Not what I made, but what I loved.
Grow early old with grief that then
Must to the wastes of nature go,—
'Tis because a general hope
Was quenched, and all must doubt and *****
For flattering planets seemed to say,
This child should ills of ages stay,—
By wondrous tongue and guided pen
Bring the flown muses back to men. —
Perchance, not he, but nature ailed,
The world, and not the infant failed,
It was not ripe yet, to sustain
A genius of so fine a strain,
Who gazed upon the sun and moon
As if he came unto his own,
And pregnant with his grander thought,
Brought the old order into doubt.
Awhile his beauty their beauty tried,
They could not feed him, and he died,
And wandered backward as in scorn
To wait an Æon to be born.
Ill day which made this beauty waste;
Plight broken, this high face defaced!
Some went and came about the dead,
And some in books of solace read,
Some to their friends the tidings say,
Some went to write, some went to pray,
One tarried here, there hurried one,
But their heart abode with none.
Covetous death bereaved us all
To aggrandize one funeral.
The eager Fate which carried thee
Took the largest part of me.
For this losing is true dying,
This is lordly man's down-lying,
This is slow but sure reclining,
Star by star his world resigning.

O child of Paradise!
Boy who made dear his father's home
In whose deep eyes
Men read the welfare of the times to come;
I am too much bereft;
The world dishonored thou hast left;
O truths and natures costly lie;
O trusted, broken prophecy!
O richest fortune sourly crossed;
Born for the future, to the future lost!

The deep Heart answered, Weepest thou?
Worthier cause for passion wild,
If I had not taken the child.
And deemest thou as those who pore
With aged eyes short way before?
Think'st Beauty vanished from the coast
Of matter, and thy darling lost?
Taught he not thee, — the man of eld,
Whose eyes within his eyes beheld
Heaven's numerous hierarchy span
The mystic gulf from God to man?
To be alone wilt thou begin,
When worlds of lovers hem thee in?
To-morrow, when the masks shall fall
That dizen nature's carnival,
The pure shall see, by their own will,
Which overflowing love shall fill,—
'Tis not within the force of Fate
The fate-conjoined to separate.
But thou, my votary, weepest thou?
I gave thee sight, where is it now?
I taught thy heart beyond the reach
Of ritual, Bible, or of speech;
Wrote in thy mind's transparent table
As far as the incommunicable;
Taught thee each private sign to raise
Lit by the supersolar blaze.
Past utterance and past belief,
And past the blasphemy of grief,
The mysteries of nature's heart,—
And though no muse can these impart,
Throb thine with nature's throbbing breast,
And all is clear from east to west.

I came to thee as to a friend,
Dearest, to thee I did not send
Tutors, but a joyful eye,
Innocence that matched the sky,
Lovely locks a form of wonder,
Laughter rich as woodland thunder;
That thou might'st entertain apart
The richest flowering of all art;
And, as the great all-loving Day
Through smallest chambers takes its way,
That thou might'st break thy daily bread
With Prophet, Saviour, and head;
That thou might'st cherish for thine own
The riches of sweet Mary's Son,
Boy-Rabbi, Israel's Paragon:
And thoughtest thou such guest
Would in thy hall take up his rest?
Would rushing life forget its laws,
Fate's glowing revolution pause?
High omens ask diviner guess,
Not to be conned to tediousness.
And know, my higher gifts unbind
The zone that girds the incarnate mind,
When the scanty shores are full
With Thought's perilous whirling pool,
When frail Nature can no more,—
Then the spirit strikes the hour,
My servant Death with solving rite
Pours finite into infinite.
Wilt thou freeze love's tidal flow,
Whose streams through nature circling go?
Nail the star struggling to its track
On the half-climbed Zodiack?
Light is light which radiates,
Blood is blood which circulates,
Life is life which generates,
And many-seeming life is one,—
Wilt thou transfix and make it none,
Its onward stream too starkly pent
In figure, bone, and lineament?

Wilt thou uncalled interrogate
Talker! the unreplying fate?
Nor see the Genius of the whole
Ascendant in the private soul,
Beckon it when to go and come,
Self-announced its hour of doom.
Fair the soul's recess and shrine,
Magic-built, to last a season,
Masterpiece of love benign!
Fairer than expansive reason
Whose omen 'tis, and sign.
Wilt thou not ope this heart to know
What rainbows teach and sunsets show,
Verdict which accumulates
From lengthened scroll of human fates,
Voice of earth to earth returned,
Prayers of heart that inly burned;
Saying, what is excellent,
As God lives, is permanent
Hearts are dust, hearts' loves remain,
Heart's love will meet thee again.
Revere the Maker; fetch thine eye
Up to His style, and manners of the sky.
Not of adamant and gold
Built He heaven stark and cold,
No, but a nest of bending reeds,
Flowering grass and scented weeds,
Or like a traveller's fleeting tent,
Or bow above the tempest pent,
Built of tears and sacred flames,
And virtue reaching to its aims;
Built of furtherance and pursuing,
Not of spent deeds, but of doing.
Silent rushes the swift Lord
Through ruined systems still restored,
Broad-sowing, bleak and void to bless,
Plants with worlds the wilderness,
Waters with tears of ancient sorrow
Apples of Eden ripe to-morrow;
House and tenant go to ground,
Lost in God, in Godhead found.
Graff1980 Oct 2018
It’s all a lie. I work the words, speaking spastically in humorous verbs, and **** jokes. Strangers smile, and tender sweet laughter, which I love. So, I keep pushing the boundaries, working weird thoughts. They laugh more, which is what I work for.

Later when they are not looking, I look at them. I try to keep it less creepy than the other stalker type men, but I am studying them; Learning the limits of my understanding, sussing out the rhythms in which they speak and think. I try to devour their truths but hope they don’t see me struggling to see them.

I observe the hallway world. There is a man a foot shorter than me with a very wide waist, slightly longer white hair that gently curls at each end with small bald spot in the back, and the face of a cherub. Hands in his pocket he barely looks up but gives me a slight grin when I acknowledge him. Then his eyes return to the ground three steps ahead. He speaks softly and walks slowly. I know he is hiding something deep, but I do not try to see too far behind the surface, to the grander mind because people don’t appreciate that kind of trespassing. I wonder if his shyness is a product of years of rejection, abuse, or merely a reflection of a truly introverted disposition.

I am in a hurry, dropping off books at an out of town library, and picking up some poetry to devour later. She must be new, because she moves slowly. Then attempts to engage me in social pleasantries. I am trying not to pay any attention, and she is not super desperate, but she wants to speak and be heard. So, I really look at her.
Lengthy strands of brown thinning hair fall down her long skinny face, slightly obscuring a small growth under the left side of her cheek. Thin rim glasses look at me, as she talks about what she likes to read. Then shifts the discussion to the walking dead. She is passionate and despite my previous urge to escape, I am now sincerely engaged.
The gym is loud with ****** music and clinking equipment. She is stunning; Long wavy hair released after a hard workout. She is tanned, and thin but muscular, with a soft and generous voice. I ask her about her boys, and old man. She always appreciates that. We keep the chit chat short, so we can workout and get on with the day.

I stare back at a familiar but silent face, there is a building rage ready erupt, something deep and dark that is waiting to self-destruct. I do not like this person much. Dark hazel eyes pressure me, to seek something deep, short dark brown hair recedes but at a barely perceptibly rate. Teeth seem to be shrinking extremely slowly, except for the lost and already rotting ones. His body is losing fat. He is improving, but **** that. He should work harder.
I have little patience and compassion for this dumb doppelganger, but I still observe seeking something deeper, the darker unheard truths. I stare at him and snarl.

      “I like them much more then you.”
Joseph Perales Sep 2010
******* by my repose
confined in these here clothes
why I’m here who honestly knows
perhaps to keep you on your toes

most likely to keep me on mine
involuntary impulses through my spine
to jolt my idle body back into line
a puppet posed to play fine

I will sever these said stings
so I may move on to grander things
move where love rarely stings
and the sky and moon often sings
Hal Loyd Denton Nov 2011
Calendar
This was the story that was told to me as I set in my cabin on the ocean just listening to the sea breeze take
Its pleasure making noise out of anything that was loose it was like a game the wind loved to play some
Time it could take the day or a whole night since fall was fast approaching I had made sure plenty of fire
Wood was available but I thought old wind why should you have all the fun why not give you a playful
Friend so some wood was selected with more green and had a potential to be aromatic so I sat there in
My grand chair by the bay window the wife tired had already gone to bed though it was quiet early the
Fire place was quiet lively the dance it played in the shadowed corners beyond my reading lamp and the
The popping snapping as the fire released the secrets it had gathered as it stood testy Gail force winds
And those pacific monsoon rains they had given the trees quiet volumes’ that it had recorded now it happily shared I couldn’t resist with it lying so close on the stand by the chair Granddads last visit had left his pipe and
Cherry tobacco behind the times we had watching the pipe smoke swirl up then it just does a slow hang in
The room and silently drifts as his sonorous voice would fill the air with stories to please any appetite I
Thought we should go to town and see him he was ninety five now a friend had launched a small
Campaign to get as many as possible to send him birthday cards she had done so for her mother and
Decided to extend it to another oldie but goody as she was fond of saying so I took up that old familiar
Tobacco pouch loaded the pipe well packed it like I watched him do so many times struck the match held
It over the tobacco did a couple of draws and she was well on the way fired and smoldering as that
Sweet cherry blend filled the room now here is where the tricky part comes in did the knock come to the
Door or did all of these gentle rhythms combined become too much and I slipped upon the sleep train
And continued even to grander locals well we don’t have time to resolve conundrums right now if real
Or dreamed a lady from down the beach was at the door she was new to the area after pleasantries she
got down to the reason for her visit while putting her house in order cleaning storing she came on this
Calendar it was very old she even hoped possibly an earlier owner had been a sailor and it possibly held
Some grand tales well it seems it had a few of its own the name was the first indication the title was
Memories always make me strong well she had been at a good while so a break was in order well what
Do you do with a calendar? She decided to look up those who had passed on to see and remember their
Special Day she decided to start with Terrance the husband she lost to cancer it might have taken the
Physical man but his spirit indomitable now he was just the true greatness that once was robed and held
Contained in physical restraints now unleashed at times she could know his presence but as she sat and
Placed the calendar in her lap and the date of his birth the most delightful vivid images let go a barrage
Of memories they truly came alive in the room was that him standing there who turned on the Cat he
Always reminded her of her dad Clarence and grandfather Jack his power his tenderness flooded her
Heart he pulled her from the chair this slow dancing wasn’t how they used to do it if they danced at all
But now to be held so close would she swoon no matter he would hold her as before everything in the
Room caught their reflection it was like ball room oh the romance poured in like flood laughter mixed
With tears the aloneness was thrown against the wall the years apart dissolved giddy was an under
Statement this continued for a timeless period and then he leaned forward and said love I must go but
Keep track on the calendar because on our anniversary I will be back we will dance and laugh the night
Away she returned to her chair and before sadness could replace the happiness she started to see
Names of friends and their loved ones special days as she passed her finger over the dates gold letters
Would form telling who’s birthday or anniversary she was filled with joy she knew they could experience
What she had to share she felt overwhelmed she knew I did a little writing from what her neighbor had
Told her possibly I could tell her how to proceed that is still being worked out but you could look at your
calendar for now there is more to this realm than you know be adventurous who knows who your dance
partner could be if your ever out on the west coast tell me your stories maybe I will put it in a book or excerpt it on facebook by for now God bless you richly.
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---------------------------------------------------------------­-----------------
Joseph Perales Sep 2010
my tongue tastes like cheap girls
and my mother’s disapproval
if I had any indication of a mind
it would be primed for removal

what a mess I’ve made of myself
and an even grander one of she
she really should have known better
I can’t even bring myself to love me

I’m vicious, and malicious
with venom in my kisses
I’m lonely and I’m listless
always your favorite sickness
seduction like it was seditious
amiable, and worse yet ambitious

sights and sickness set on you
I’m the monster inside your bed
like something similar to a siren
my songs stained inside your head

if love is truly a great battle field
no holds barred war will be waged
I will destroy and devour all in sight
no one will be saved, I am a lion caged

I’m vicious, and malicious
with venom in my kisses
I’m lonely and I’m listless
always your favorite sickness
seduction like it was seditious
amiable, and worse yet ambitious
R Guildenstern Nov 2012
crimson and magic
to splash without panic
in waves of compliance
for drugs made from science
and sorceress who summon the simple solutions
illusions! illusions!
of grander worth loosing
confusing the process will aid not for coptic
nor catholic
or elsewhere semantics
act frantic in panic
to sob without reason
treason! say treason!
the exit of reason
to wander in wander a fate beyond yonder
set ponder a path set by mind on the map
of solutions and systems
domestic conditions
yet wild apparitions
appear as conditioned - concerns
to a mindset as stern and subtracted
by fractions of actions repulsed by distraction
disgruntled reactions
supposing contractions
created the action
conceived from distractions
The reasons
let change be for seasons
while i stay the rock in the pond
either frozen  not gone
as the watcher
still watching
content upon watching
exhaling the notion
that motions for movement
atonement! atonement!
with further consolement
atlas like the breeze of the gavel
let both parties ravel and tug
whether free or debugged
only mind over matter
unscrambles the lather
too see that is free
is like blind sight at sea
with the waves of conforming
to drown is informing
if not then be peace !
for all parties deceased
by a water so deep you could drown in your sleep
Cunning Linguist Nov 2013
I don't know why I find death so enthralling;
Or the calling of culled nullified angels more charming than alarming
Salutations to an array of all things macabre and flooding the streets with tidal waves of shock

The blood in your veins
was already cold as ice anyway
before draining away in the embalming process
Your entrails always showed
the manner in which you vested with finesse;
Enthroned in a tomb of frozen snow

Hell burns frigid and unremissive
Your every thought - piercing incisions
While I puzzle together these pieces of the grander picture
The polarity of her stigmatic enigma
Demeanor meandering to and fro
Gandering to pander every whim
Throwing glances left and right
At each of my fellow gentlemen

Rays of light cast from the windows
Outlining my silhouette in the shadows
Low moans bellow in a tour de force
As I peer through your soul
You have but a split second
So spit or swallow,
and choke back your tears
As I bring your worst fears to life

Hell hath no fury like mine reckoning
My discourse beckoning;                              
Imperiously        
imperiling
         and deafening

Channel these demons -
Screams echoing in melodic discord
Face stoic, in lieu of remorse
Wallowing in the shallows and wailing for recourse
The *****'s lament holds no candle;

From the summit,
without substance -
She plummets
in shambles
At free fall speed
she meets the grounds embrace;
but it breaks away

Calm before the storm
Then once more your life flashes
As you reach for the light
hiding in the tunnel's flip-side
Only to realize its not of the Heavens
But a raging Inferno

Neural impulses spiderweb across time
Each one precisely in line; memories -
Absence of your vindication aligned hand in hand
with every secret you buried in the sands

O'er the new rage
Of the golden age noir
Compulsively laying without delay
Fashioned like it's going out of style
"Now **** me something vile -
M a s t e r  r a c o n t e u r"
Make my trials worthwhile
Purveyor of *******
Undeterrable provocateur;

Inclined to bide my time while finding the finer aspects of slaughtering swine
Her squeals, reminiscent
lulling me to unconsciousness
Forever more I remain in denial
Whittling ever closer to nihility
While begging assuaging intoxication to ease my conscience

In the blink of an eye;
Destiny manifest is slathered in spattered inklings of splattered blood red
On a platter shall I present her head
A trophy for my sempiternal Lord of the dead
Why admire the intrinsic birth and death of nature as something beautiful and palpable
When all that exists is worth perishing
I've given up on humanity
A once vibrant pool of endless possibilities
Is reflected in a dismal void steeped with pitch
Mateuš Conrad Feb 2016
.the crows' persistent croak undermines all attempts at man's adventure into universal fame, or one that might distinguish man's composition, from earth, as intended for adam, to air, as intended for odin, to water as intended for poseidon, to fire as intended for the tetragrammaton.

it fails, most of the time,
poetry is scarce,
too much fondness of the abstract,
hence residues of
distracted verse, whimsical,
overburdened pronoun usage -
such likes - complex punctuation
to replace diacritical marks in
france or germany or norway,
poetry doesn't have the impetus,
just doesn't have the impetus to
package fudge, package fudge paragraphs
of fiction, poetry isn't anything
unless it's anti-fiction,
there's no point idealising
how you would fit into a glass stiletto
when it doesn't allow a fitting: cindarella was first
two jealous sisters got their heel
and big toe cut off, you want to encode
that as .pdf or .jpeg?
technophobes ***-standing:
is that enough for a start-up religious cult?!
i'm just wishy washy wondering,
all bets on it taking off - congregation of
en masse suicide seems a fanciful expression,
mind you, i have no excuse.
where there's a middle there ain't no finger,
no message evaluation and furthered to
an execution, the middle has an eroteme:
not exactly erotically thematic, just
a hunch off huh...
so... poetry... it's scarce, tumble **** practice
of a lost joke...
poetry exhibits itself sometimes in tight-tangle prose
of a knausgård - fancy wording a mile apart
would make traffic accidents aplenty,
and it happens... ramble ramble ramble (worded),
then some poetic ecstasy like an unguided tour
of a gallery making you kneel in anti-catholic
gesticulation of a painting by francis bacon...
shouldn't happen, but it did...
so while prose writers are like things infused
with packaged designation of the right
digestion and right diet content of carbohydrates,
poets are like: what sustenance from air?
we ramble sometimes, **** naked i presume,
but we do, and when we do, we draft novels
for other people, we're not into nation building
or writing novels... we're the anorexia of prose...
and that's grand... because it means
that our readers have to be self-involved,
not ready to grasp the rooting of prose diction...
more fused to the open airs
of writings' scarcity...
we need strong readers not numbers...
we need people who are self-involved,
who would spit and kick a copper statue of
the poet represented in a public square with
people of the spoken tongue the real tourists
wondering: who's that?

that aside...
          i went to sleep thinking about chess...
into bed at around 1am
woke up at around 9am...
past two nights? interludes of
perhaps 2 / 3 hours...
    cutting on the alcohol is one thing...
keeping a tally?
proof: co-op sells 1liter labelled bottles
of scotch,
but as it turns out, according to my braille tally?
it's: ⠷⠷ (500ml) + ⠷⠷ (500ml) + ⠷ (250ml)...
they label it as a liter...
but it's actually 1.25liters...
three days later: you get the full picture:
-esque akin to 'and on the third day he rose
again, according to the scriptures...'

good luck to the men and their vanity
projects...
   i will never become as famous as
the man who "invented" stumbled upon
fermentation to produce beer / wine...
distillation to produce whiskey / *****...
dom perignon and albert hofmann
are known now... give it a few centuries later...
****! gone!
       but to overshadow the universal
stability of a woodland pigeon cooing,
a crow croaking, a fox laughing?
   my words are here: yet these examples
retain the future unchanged...
by void, crook, vogue or folly...

so i went to sleep thinking about chess...
there's the king: the point
of the game...
              to topple the king...
get ol' charlie firsty on the chopper...
distract charlie zee 'eck'und
with pseudo-harems and handel...
and fireworks on the thames...
little learning tool offshoot of louis XIV...
the king is just an elevated pawn...
it seems the king only controls the pawns
given his own movement rules...
the queen though?
   she's the bishop and the rook combined,
as she's also the king and pawn, combined...
the knight is the only odd piece
on the whole board...
   why? didn't queens feast their eyes
upon knights of old, at tournaments...
chivalry: the dropped oopsie handerchief moment
when the king wasn't looking?
the knight piece is the only outsider piece
on the board... hence it's ontological
grasshopper routine of jumping
outside the line of pawns and then
jumping back into line...
the king is a king in name only:
it would appear...
  while the most powerful piece on the board
is the queen: since if the king merely
control the pawns:
   at a battlefield a king command pawns
(soldiers)...
  in the background...
the queen will command...
   the bishops, the knights,
   the rooks (houses, castles) -
she's not on the battlefield with with pawns...
and soon knights become judges
and lawyers - merge with the bishops...
i never like playing chess -
but i liked thinking about chess...
  from the perspective of: the queen is
the most powerful piece on the board...

you could even rewrite chess by expanding
the board... so it would look like so:

1. denotes pawn         9. denotes king

2. denotes bishop        6. denotes queen
3. denotes knight        4. denotes rook.


1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1
         9 3               (battlefield formation)
      2 4 4 2             (behind the scenes formation)
        3 6    

but the board would have to be expanded from
64 to say... 100 squares... per board...
it's still chess... but with a twist...
it's what real life would look like...
one knight would be faithful to the king
and stand behind his army on the battlefield...
the other knight would be *******
the queen in secret surrounded
by castles and the clergy / the judicial system...
well: so many people have become so good
at the game of chess...
   kasparov vs. deep blue...
         so smart: and yet no imagination.

besides... i had more important things to do
today than remember what i fell asleep with...

1. making the perfect sausage rolls...
the most pristine invention of the english
and how the french fumed when their puff
pastry was "degraded"...
never use meat from sausages...
always minced pork...
and instead of adding carrots...
celery... and who would have thought
that fennel seeds are the secret ingredient...

2. watching india get their *******'
whipped and their ***** put into
a meat grinder by the new zealand side
at the cricket world cup...
**** me the last 5 overs!

3. lamenting the state of cinema...
the pursuit of "being" via distraction
with the end goal of fulfilling "happiness"...
so much for "being" and so much for "happiness"...
take two prime examples...
it only took 8 years to spare all the details
that seperate them...
1958's the inn of the sixth happiness
starring ingrid bergman...
those movies! mmm hmm!
i would gladly take away all the current
heavy editing and metallurgy scaled
CGI for a classical western panoramic view...
no dialogue... just an expansive camera
distance where the characters are dwarfed
by the grander scheme of things:
even if it's just a valley or a field...
cinema dropped the paranoramic
   interlude, resorting for the clausto-****
of heavy editing with multiple cameras
switching backwards and forwards
like watching a game of tennis...
    actually: both genres degraded themselves
dropping the panoramic view at times...
less in sport, more in cinema...
but this is 1958... the 1950s! the glory days of cinema...
fast-forward to 1966... and the film:
ALFIE...
       what's the difference between a lothario
and a ****? a self-employed ******...
or some other weird combition of 'not-a-joke'...
wait a minute... why are the women
so ******* dumb come the mid-1960s in cinema...
while back in 1958: they were so admirable?!
ingrid bergman learned mandarin,
she was ambitious, she was stubborn...
she was bossy...
  come the 1960s we're talking about
    beings without either soul or will
simply orientated at being dumpster *** toys...
i don't even know where the men
did that to them...
           the women in 1950s cinema
gained respected... they were commanding...
or at least decisive in giving
the least expected virtue: generosity
and on top - a sense of fairness -
                             a merit pyramid...
1960s cinema women, "women" are nothing
more than sloppy teenagers...
these women are not women...
1960s cinema doesn't depict women...
it's starting to depict one direction:
  pissy-pants teen girls...
               ******* at the sight of harvey styles
sighing and ****...
        plus... back in the day:
cinema used to be... engaging...
ben-hur? how long? 5 hours?
  gone with the wind? how long? 7 hours?!
cinema like opera: 15 minute interludes,
toilet breaks before the next part went on...
now? a quckie 1.5 hours long CGI ***** fest
of minimal dialogue and the heavy editing
juxtapositions of "angles"...
       people don't watch modern cinema
because it's engaging...
they watch it... because it's... distracting...
pretty bright lights! ooh! aah!
i love the fact that i'm being snarky
           and sarcastic... what else can you be?!
   i don't even think is missed that much
when it comes to the sub-culture of drugs...
psychadellic or otherwise...
i ****** well missed on a decent amount
of cinema...
   and when that happens...
       look at me...
                            what's that phrase...
a bitter old man... aged 33...
bitter doesn't even cut it...
              it's not even a bitterness...
it's an elevated sense of nostalgia...
   for me nostalgia is something i was present
at when it started going to ****...
late 1990s... cartoon network, early internet...
etc.,
              1990s date night movie quality
requiring adults to employ babysitters...
i was there...
1950s cinema? yeah: i wish i was nostalgic
about that... but i wasn't there...
hence the technical observations...
and how, objectively: movies were...
oh god so much better.
Such ignorance,
such temptation,
Such Ambition,
such delusions of grander,
such hedonism,
such debauchery,
such betrayal,
Such jealousy,
Such bigotry,
Such caprice,
Such entropy,
Such stupidity?
such is human Nature.
THE noon was as a crystal bowl
The red wine mantled through;
Around it like a Viking's beard
The red-gold hazes blew,
As tho' he quaffed the ruddy draught
While swift his galley flew.

This mighty Viking was the Night;
He sailed about the earth,
And called the merry harvest-time
To sing him songs of mirth;
And all on earth or in the sea
To melody gave birth.

The valleys of the earth were full
To rocky lip and brim
With golden grain that shone and sang
When woods were still and dim,
A little song from sheaf to sheaf-
Sweet Plenty's cradle-hymn.

O gallant were the high tree-tops,
And gay the strain they sang!
And cheerfully the moon-lit hills
Their echo-music rang!
And what so proud and what so loud
As was the ocean's clang!

But O the little humming song
That sang among the sheaves!
'Twas grander than the airy march
That rattled thro' the leaves,
And prouder, louder, than the deep,
Bold clanging of the waves:

'The lives of men, the lives of men
With every sheaf are bound!
We are the blessing which annuls
The curse upon the ground!
And he who reaps the Golden Grain
The Golden Love hath found.'
Graff1980 Nov 2014
It is a terrible thing this flesh that wears us
Being makes us
Slaves to atomic thought
Particles possessing some consciousness
Dreams stream from the undermind
To undermine
All we thought we were

From the sub-atomic to the atomic
On into the protein patterns of our thoughts
Neurotransmitters flood and fulminate
Filling our minds with strange things
Receptor receiving impressions
Leave strangers believing instincts

Animals evolved to understand but ignore
The gifts we have acquired from millions years and more
A talent for analyzing then adjusting ourselves
And after the fact constructing a model
That makes continuity out of all of the chaos

Now most take it for granted
Become carbon copies cut in granite
They give in to the impulses
And waste said potential on fulfilling the illusion

The desire to be grander is subsumed
By their fear of non-existence
Which is what they become
Not after death
But as cogs in the machine
In a factory of robotic human beings

— The End —