A Poem for Three Voices

Setting:  A Maternity Ward and round about

FIRST VOICE:
I am slow as the world.  I am very patient,
Turning through my time, the suns and stars
Regarding me with attention.
The moon's concern is more personal:
She passes and repasses, luminous as a nurse.
Is she sorry for what will happen?  I do not think so.
She is simply astonished at fertility.

When I walk out, I am a great event.
I do not have to think, or even rehearse.
What happens in me will happen without attention.
The pheasant stands on the hill;
He is arranging his brown feathers.
I cannot help smiling at what it is I know.
Leaves and petals attend me.  I am ready.

SECOND VOICE:
When I first saw it, the small red seep, I did not believe it.
I watched the men walk about me in the office.  They were so flat!
There was something about them like cardboard, and now I had caught it,
That flat, flat, flatness from which ideas, destructions,
Bulldozers, guillotines, white chambers of shrieks proceed,
Endlessly proceed--and the cold angels, the abstractions.
I sat at my desk in my stockings, my high heels,

And the man I work for laughed:  'Have you seen something awful?
You are so white, suddenly.'  And I said nothing.
I saw death in the bare trees, a deprivation.
I could not believe it.  Is it so difficult
For the spirit to conceive a face, a mouth?
The letters proceed from these black keys, and these black keys proceed
From my alphabetical fingers, ordering parts,

Parts, bits, cogs, the shining multiples.
I am dying as I sit.  I lose a dimension.
Trains roar in my ears, departures, departures!
The silver track of time empties into the distance,
The white sky empties of its promise, like a cup.
These are my feet, these mechanical echoes.
Tap, tap, tap, steel pegs.  I am found wanting.

This is a disease I carry home, this is a death.
Again, this is a death.  Is it the air,
The particles of destruction I **** up?  Am I a pulse
That wanes and wanes, facing the cold angel?
Is this my lover then?  This death, this death?
As a child I loved a lichen-bitten name.
Is this the one sin then, this old dead love of death?

THIRD VOICE:
I remember the minute when I knew for sure.
The willows were chilling,
The face in the pool was beautiful, but not mine--
It had a consequential look, like everything else,
And all I could see was dangers:  doves and words,
Stars and showers of gold--conceptions, conceptions!
I remember a white, cold wing

And the great swan, with its terrible look,
Coming at me, like a castle, from the top of the river.
There is a snake in swans.
He glided by; his eye had a black meaning.
I saw the world in it--small, mean and black,
Every little word hooked to every little word, and act to act.
A hot blue day had budded into something.

I wasn't ready.  The white clouds rearing
Aside were dragging me in four directions.
I wasn't ready.
I had no reverence.
I thought I could deny the consequence--
But it was too late for that.  It was too late, and the face
Went on shaping itself with love, as if I was ready.

SECOND VOICE:
It is a world of snow now.  I am not at home.
How white these sheets are.  The faces have no features.
They are bald and impossible, like the faces of my children,
Those little sick ones that elude my arms.
Other children do not touch me:  they are terrible.
They have too many colors, too much life.  They are not quiet,
Quiet, like the little emptinesses I carry.

I have had my chances.  I have tried and tried.
I have stitched life into me like a rare *****,
And walked carefully, precariously, like something rare.
I have tried not to think too hard.  I have tried to be natural.
I have tried to be blind in love, like other women,
Blind in my bed, with my dear blind sweet one,
Not looking, through the thick dark, for the face of another.

I did not look.  But still the face was there,
The face of the unborn one that loved its perfections,
The face of the dead one that could only be perfect
In its easy peace, could only keep holy so.
And then there were other faces.  The faces of nations,
Governments, parliaments, societies,
The faceless faces of important men.

It is these men I mind:
They are so jealous of anything that is not flat!  They are jealous gods
That would have the whole world flat because they are.
I see the Father conversing with the Son.
Such flatness cannot but be holy.
'Let us make a heaven,' they say.
'Let us flatten and launder the grossness from these souls.'

FIRST VOICE:
I am calm.  I am calm.  It is the calm before something awful:
The yellow minute before the wind walks, when the leaves
Turn up their hands, their pallors.  It is so quiet here.
The sheets, the faces, are white and stopped, like clocks.
Voices stand back and flatten.  Their visible hieroglyphs
Flatten to parchment screens to keep the wind off.
They paint such secrets in Arabic, Chinese!

I am dumb and brown.  I am a seed about to break.
The brownness is my dead self, and it is sullen:
It does not wish to be more, or different.
Dusk hoods me in blue now, like a Mary.
O color of distance and forgetfulness!--
When will it be, the second when Time breaks
And eternity engulfs it, and I drown utterly?

I talk to myself, myself only, set apart--
Swabbed and lurid with disinfectants, sacrificial.
Waiting lies heavy on my lids.  It lies like sleep,
Like a big sea.  Far off, far off, I feel the first wave tug
Its cargo of agony toward me, inescapable, tidal.
And I, a shell, echoing on this white beach
Face the voices that overwhelm, the terrible element.

THIRD VOICE:
I am a mountain now, among mountainy women.
The doctors move among us as if our bigness
Frightened the mind.  They smile like fools.
They are to blame for what I am, and they know it.
They hug their flatness like a kind of health.
And what if they found themselves surprised, as I did?
They would go mad with it.

And what if two lives leaked between my thighs?
I have seen the white clean chamber with its instruments.
It is a place of shrieks.  It is not happy.
'This is where you will come when you are ready.'
The night lights are flat red moons.  They are dull with blood.
I am not ready for anything to happen.
I should have murdered this, that murders me.

FIRST VOICE:
There is no miracle more cruel than this.
I am dragged by the horses, the iron hooves.
I last.  I last it out.  I accomplish a work.
Dark tunnel, through which hurtle the visitations,
The visitations, the manifestations, the startled faces.
I am the center of an atrocity.
What pains, what sorrows must I be mothering?

Can such innocence **** and ****?  It milks my life.
The trees wither in the street.  The rain is corrosive.
I taste it on my tongue, and the workable horrors,
The horrors that stand and idle, the slighted godmothers
With their hearts that tick and tick, with their satchels of instruments.
I shall be a wall and a roof, protecting.
I shall be a sky and a hill of good:  O let me be!

A power is growing on me, an old tenacity.
I am breaking apart like the world.  There is this blackness,
This ram of blackness.  I fold my hands on a mountain.
The air is thick.  It is thick with this working.
I am used.  I am drummed into use.
My eyes are squeezed by this blackness.
I see nothing.

SECOND VOICE:
I am accused.  I dream of massacres.
I am a garden of black and red agonies.  I drink them,
Hating myself, hating and fearing.  And now the world conceives
Its end and runs toward it, arms held out in love.
It is a love of death that sickens everything.
A dead sun stains the newsprint.  It is red.
I lose life after life.  The dark earth drinks them.

She is the vampire of us all.  So she supports us,
Fattens us, is kind.  Her mouth is red.
I know her.  I know her intimately--
Old winter-face, old barren one, old time bomb.
Men have used her meanly.  She will eat them.
Eat them, eat them, eat them in the end.
The sun is down.  I die.  I make a death.

FIRST VOICE:
Who is he, this blue, furious boy,
Shiny and strange, as if he had hurtled from a star?
He is looking so angrily!
He flew into the room, a shriek at his heel.
The blue color pales.  He is human after all.
A red lotus opens in its bowl of blood;
They are stitching me up with silk, as if I were a material.

What did my fingers do before they held him?
What did my heart do, with its love?
I have never seen a thing so clear.
His lids are like the lilac-flower
And soft as a moth, his breath.
I shall not let go.
There is no guile or warp in him.  May he keep so.

SECOND VOICE:
There is the moon in the high window.  It is over.
How winter fills my soul!  And that chalk light
Laying its scales on the windows, the windows of empty offices,
Empty schoolrooms, empty churches.  O so much emptiness!
There is this cessation.  This terrible cessation of everything.
These bodies mounded around me now, these polar sleepers--
What blue, moony ray ices their dreams?

I feel it enter me, cold, alien, like an instrument.
And that mad, hard face at the end of it, that O-mouth
Open in its gape of perpetual grieving.
It is she that drags the blood-black sea around
Month after month, with its voices of failure.
I am helpless as the sea at the end of her string.
I am restless.  Restless and useless.  I, too, create corpses.

I shall move north.  I shall move into a long blackness.
I see myself as a shadow, neither man nor woman,
Neither a woman, happy to be like a man, nor a man
Blunt and flat enough to feel no lack.  I feel a lack.
I hold my fingers up, ten white pickets.
See, the darkness is leaking from the cracks.
I cannot contain it.  I cannot contain my life.

I shall be a heroine of the peripheral.
I shall not be accused by isolate buttons,
Holes in the heels of socks, the white mute faces
Of unanswered letters, coffined in a letter case.
I shall not be accused, I shall not be accused.
The clock shall not find me wanting, nor these stars
That rivet in place abyss after abyss.

THIRD VOICE:
I see her in my sleep, my red, terrible girl.
She is crying through the glass that separates us.
She is crying, and she is furious.
Her cries are hooks that catch and grate like cats.
It is by these hooks she climbs to my notice.
She is crying at the dark, or at the stars
That at such a distance from us shine and whirl.

I think her little head is carved in wood,
A red, hard wood, eyes shut and mouth wide open.
And from the open mouth issue sharp cries
Scratching at my sleep like arrows,
Scratching at my sleep, and entering my side.
My daughter has no teeth.  Her mouth is wide.
It utters such dark sounds it cannot be good.

FIRST VOICE:
What is it that flings these innocent souls at us?
Look, they are so exhausted, they are all flat out
In their canvas-sided cots, names tied to their wrists,
The little silver trophies they've come so far for.
There are some with thick black hair, there are some bald.
Their skin tints are pink or sallow, brown or red;
They are beginning to remember their differences.

I think they are made of water; they have no expression.
Their features are sleeping, like light on quiet water.
They are the real monks and nuns in their identical garments.
I see them showering like stars on to the world--
On India, Africa, America, these miraculous ones,
These pure, small images.  They smell of milk.
Their footsoles are untouched.  They are walkers of air.

Can nothingness be so prodigal?
Here is my son.
His wide eye is that general, flat blue.
He is turning to me like a little, blind, bright plant.
One cry.  It is the hook I hang on.
And I am a river of milk.
I am a warm hill.

SECOND VOICE:
I am not ugly.  I am even beautiful.
The mirror gives back a woman without deformity.
The nurses give back my clothes, and an identity.
It is usual, they say, for such a thing to happen.
It is usual in my life, and the lives of others.
I am one in five, something like that.  I am not hopeless.
I am beautiful as a statistic.  Here is my lipstick.

I draw on the old mouth.
The red mouth I put by with my identity
A day ago, two days, three days ago.  It was a Friday.
I do not even need a holiday; I can go to work today.
I can love my husband, who will understand.
Who will love me through the blur of my deformity
As if I had lost an eye, a leg, a tongue.

And so I stand, a little sightless.  So I walk
Away on wheels, instead of legs, they serve as well.
And learn to speak with fingers, not a tongue.
The body is resourceful.
The body of a starfish can grow back its arms
And newts are prodigal in legs.  And may I be
As prodigal in what lacks me.

THIRD VOICE:
She is a small island, asleep and peaceful,
And I am a white ship hooting:  Goodbye, goodbye.
The day is blazing.  It is very mournful.
The flowers in this room are red and tropical.
They have lived behind glass all their lives, they have been cared for
        tenderly.
Now they face a winter of white sheets, white faces.
There is very little to go into my suitcase.

There are the clothes of a fat woman I do not know.
There is my comb and brush.  There is an emptiness.
I am so vulnerable suddenly.
I am a wound walking out of hospital.
I am a wound that they are letting go.
I leave my health behind.  I leave someone
Who would adhere to me:  I undo her fingers like bandages:  I go.

SECOND VOICE:
I am myself again.  There are no loose ends.
I am bled white as wax, I have no attachments.
I am flat and virginal, which means nothing has happened,
Nothing that cannot be erased, ripped up and scrapped, begun again.
There little black twigs do not think to bud,
Nor do these dry, dry gutters dream of rain.
This woman who meets me in windows--she is neat.

So neat she is transparent, like a spirit.
how shyly she superimposes her neat self
On the inferno of African oranges, the heel-hung pigs.
She is deferring to reality.
It is I.  It is I--
Tasting the bitterness between my teeth.
The incalculable malice of the everyday.

FIRST VOICE:
How long can I be a wall, keeping the wind off?
How long can I be
Gentling the sun with the shade of my hand,
Intercepting the blue bolts of a cold moon?
The voices of loneliness, the voices of sorrow
Lap at my back ineluctably.
How shall it soften them, this little lullaby?

How long can I be a wall around my green property?
How long can my hands
Be a bandage to his hurt, and my words
Bright birds in the sky, consoling, consoling?
It is a terrible thing
To be so open:  it is as if my heart
Put on a face and walked into the world.

THIRD VOICE:
Today the colleges are drunk with spring.
My black gown is a little funeral:
It shows I am serious.
The books I carry wedge into my side.
I had an old wound once, but it is healing.
I had a dream of an island, red with cries.
It was a dream, and did not mean a thing.

FIRST VOICE:
Dawn flowers in the great elm outside the house.
The swifts are back.  They are shrieking like paper rockets.
I hear the sound of the hours
Widen and die in the hedgerows.  I hear the moo of cows.
The colors replenish themselves, and the wet
Thatch smokes in the sun.
The narcissi open white faces in the orchard.

I am reassured.  I am reassured.
These are the clear bright colors of the nursery,
The talking ducks, the happy lambs.
I am simple again.  I believe in miracles.
I do not believe in those terrible children
Who injure my sleep with their white eyes, their fingerless hands.
They are not mine.  They do not belong to me.

I shall meditate upon normality.
I shall meditate upon my little son.
He does not walk. &n

.
From their private jets,
The primal privileged
Spot a spark earthwards,
The glint of the rolling
Out of guillotines.

Guillotines so tall, waiting,
Just for them and they know
It was coming, as they know
They have it coming.

The rabble they so despise,
Yet pander for as they pull
Wool and leave all in cold,
The wretched who someday
Read injustice in the leaves,
The Princes of sham, cloven,
Always bearing woven bags,
Carpet dreams of desperate,
Down trodden, never fearing
To be trampled, till the blade
Is shining in the searing light
Of new day.

For retribution is a fable
The reptilian upper classes
Are cold to see as it strikes,
Their forked tongues,
Eventual as slimy winter
Strangles themselves
In a hollow cave,
Unmarked.

Even the dirt is soiled
With their fame, their
Scaled names, even
Sun will not shine
On the bloodied blots
They have wrought.

Such murderous stiffs,
Who enslaved all warmth
And empathizers in a rug
Fit for a tomb.  And all their
Art as false as they!

The earthy shall rise
And salt their mortal
Wounds, songs will not be sung
For the indifferent masters
Who now pour into streets
Made for severed muck.

The only beauty they left:
Opulent, soppy-red coiffured heads
As they roll on the potholed,
Sooty pavements.

Eyelids descend like a guillotine,
decapitating the visual stimuli
my mind engrosses upon in daylight.

Then there is a numbness as the
cascading representations of my
day are all rendered darkened silence.

*"My day is colour, my dreams are black and white,

oh right... i thought i was on a ****** nod for a minute,
what, a, blank...

she thought i looked like Jim Morrison when met,
i worked out, played squash,
a really healthy example of zoology -
is that, the logic of caged animals?
a bit like the logic of soulless animals
with a god, soulless animals without one,
and the other two 90° variations of the square?
they're inspereble (blah) / momentary
dyslexia, naturally with English - inseparable,
pairing, ah! but isn't much of modern
psychology a bit like zoology? i mean the cages,
the untested theories, stemming from
roots of Jungian and Freudian *******?
Edward Hopper sketched himself with the joke
on visual inferences from these two
molesters of fair game - Michael Myers
just walked in and smashed their heads in...
win win scenario... but psychology is very
much like zoology - keeping a caged animal,
reverse baby onomatopoeia from what the adults
equate mama with... ego... that's their childishness,
babies say *mama adults say ego,
as if no dead Latin bureaucrat is listening
with a chisel in hand to double-fold missing
the concept of handwriting - it wasn't alive
back when it was all on papyrus, or stone,
it had a brief existence in aristocratic circles
when we wrote with quills and connected pretty well,
we soared with geese! we soared with swans!
we perched on trees like jerky crows!
god, it was beautiful, but then digital came in,
newspaper print, we felt claustrophobic connecting
letters, like jigsaw puzzles put together
some things didn't connect - unless it was a case
of a familial affair, ******, less game of hide & seek
and more a game of lookalike...
we even had perfumed paper back then...
right now you read a newspaper for too long
and you're ready to stamp your fingerprint in a police
station... and i thought money was *****,
newspapers are second-best... ***** currency of
the omni-literate populace - starving journalists
who parasitically feed of of celeb culture,
provided with excess stimulation by paparazzi
nudes... but zoology and psychology are alike,
cages in both cases, restrictions: either no god
or no soul, either some body or nobody -
trained cognitive monkey... does a fanciful trick
sometimes: yep, gets up onto a table in a nightclub
and does a cancan interpretation of the goose step
(stechschritt - all those in favour of the ministry
of simply silly get drowned in the Thames)
as if jogging on a treadmill, in one place -
the mantis in a game of chess - the mantis in a game of chess -
a game kings believed having the earliest known
satellite image from way way above - the best
way of looking at the abstraction of insects.
still, zoology is very much psychology, or vice versa,
cages and prior theories with their guillotines of
Aztec like sacrifice - i told you! those pyramids were
built for capital punishment, excess on architectural side
of what a scaffold could look like, fear inducers,
deterrents, but at least not Egyptian tombs!
and how many bars in this cage of yours can you can
with psychology: the logic of having soul, in practice
the logic of not having a soul, i.e. treatment of thinking -
the behavioural study of a man sitting in silence -
after an hour he folds a leg over the other and continues
sitting in silence - psst... it's called listening therapy...
or talk... 3 hours pass some rain falls... neither patient
or the psychiatrists is any wiser... but the latter gets paid,
the former just looks like a **** clown without makeup.
so she hooked up and wanted to start a band...
she had keyboards in mind... that was already a bad idea...
she thought i was some sort of version of Jim Morrison...
well, if i was, or if i am... i'm doing this thing solo.

some say it's called dart-eyes, a kaleidoscopic venture
that might leave you myopic, oddly enough i know
that people say a lot of far fetched things,
   and the excuses are usually metaphors,
there's the literal cardinal,
the literal spanish inquisition,
  and metaphors of demons in the bible -
          i still want to experience a fully
theocratic world: where man's words come
forth from man, and god's words come from
the mouth of god... again: poetry without
a god is like biology without chlorophyll,
   no one even suggested a kneeling process and
ardent prayer to be invoked,
     all it took was a spare thought away from
the daily commute and the daily invigoration
from some sort of ethic, oddly enough it always
ends up being an ethic of work...
   i guess that's why in the west everyone is
nearing an addiction thoroughly apparent that's
named workaholism... once the relationships
fail, the only saving string of hope is work,
an absurd work ethic, because wouldn't you
take a syringe filled with ink and do shifts in an
office beyond the norm, thus entering the world
of night shifts and anything else antisocial?
   people can't really be friends, we're fired up
toward formal relationships and what's guiding us
to these relationships is hierarchy...
              oddly enough the Aztec or Mayan
pyramids don't have that sort of feel to them,
they don't prescribe interpretations of hierarchy,
quite the opposite,
     ask someone who doesn't have a conquistador
heritage to explain that they are:
  the gallows... guillotines... the tyrant is not
buried within, these aren't caves to entombing a
tyrant with all his riches...
      there are no chambers in these structures...
they were intended as architectural symbols of
common law... those presumptions European
*******... human sacrifice? a myth...
these were sights of capital punishment,
you stepped out of line: you'd get your heart
carved out and your body would drop from
the execution altar down the steps for
           the scavenger mob to tear you apart
even further: had you transgressed communal
consent... justice has to become overpowering
but that does not mean we carve a mount
Rushmore akin to the statues of the valley of
the kings of enthroned pharaohs...
  much of ancient Egypt lingers in what we
call "modernity"... esp. in America...
             and the world is currently establishing
itself into cold war ii (i said that once,
can't remember when)... and until this is firmly
established, that it's clearly accepted that we're
dealing in a cold / intellectual war, then
we'll pass all that intelligence and engage in a hot war /
and emotional war, as characteristic overflowing
of populism, which at present times: has
all the coordinates, but no proper vector to
allow a congregational march toward impeding
dangers... but better a second cold war than
a third world war... so much of ancient Egypt
in America... the washington memorial for one...
what's the other name for it? ah... obelisk;
or what the pagans built to counter the fear of
impotence: well... we've established a bountiful
supply of humans... can we do a floral pattern
now? oddly enough we embraced tomb-pyramid
builders from the north-eastern side of
Africa's brain-dead region, and trusted
conquistadors wiping out a people that used
pyramids to stress the importance of law:
i can't see no reason to think that those pyramids
were intended for human sacrifice...
capital punishment? well, d'uh... because wasn't
Golgotha so unspectacular as to be less
than what it was? had they crucified him in private,
in some back-alleyway crucified to a door,
would history open its doors to the advent of
Christianity? don't think so.
what i'd really love to see is people with
necklaces of silver, and the thing dangling on them
would be a different torture mechanism...
an iron maiden... it's like prescribing pain is
necessary... it's a dogmatic ruling on a once upon
a time (even the briefest) chance of happiness...
but even then certain philosophers say:
why be happy, when you can be interesting?
how interesting do you have to be so many times over
to not even wish for a stillness of neither want
nor drive to go beyond what you already have?
i don't know if this is an adequate comparison,
but in terms of interesting...
   a movie (side effects, 2013) utilises only two songs
in its official title:
   the focal point of a ******
       is staged to a "sleepwalking" woman preparing
a dinner for three (only two people are in the apartment),
the song? thievery corporation's the forgotten people...
i knew the band prior, and i've seen the film
before... but i never bothered to watch the credits...
i remember the odd couple who'd sit in cinemas and
engage in watching the end-credits, always the one
odd bunch: as if saying thank you to all the people
involve... a quick stroll through a graveyard is probably
comparably akin....
   and the other song? Bach's
   orchestral suite no. 2 in B minor, bwv 1067 -
     but i can't remember whether it's actually featured
in the film, simply because there's no focal moment
in the film where it can be heard as prominently as
the first song... and then there's thomas newman in
between (no surprise);
but a film like that is a meditation...
             if only two songs are used, chances are
the dialogue will have many strengths, because there
will be a multiplicity of consistent reinterpretation,
a bit like talking into a Tate Modern and seeing
Rodin's the kiss statue (inspired by Dante's divine
comedy), sketching it from the northern perspective,
the southern, western and eastern perspectives...
    i've seen few films that accredit a very minimalistic
soundtrack... on that note, how songs could literally
be translated into film titles: side effects - the forgotten people,
  dead poets' society - carpe diem, american beauty -
any other name, are there others? there probably are.

but that's nothing compared to last night's antics...
   some people climb the Everest... clap clap clap...
some people design super-suction vacuum cleaners...
clap clap clap...
                    from time to time i solve sudoku drunk
(no clapping)... but there's a narrative involved,
the narrative goes when you try to map out solving
one of these 81 "rubic" squares... applause for
speed with these babies like applause for premature
*******... aren't they compatible?
   we all have limitations, mine came yesterday,
when i allocated superscript numbers to the journey,
quiet literally an optical tangle, i should have used
       things like ª ' “ ‘ ¨ † above the plotted line...
but it only takes one mistake to ground you
   and then you have to go back and make minute corrections,
as the notes themselves suggest (crazy eyed darting):

exhibit a.

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0    9    0    0    0 ­   0    2    0    1
7    0    0    8    0    0    0    6    0
0  ­  0    6    0    7    0    5    0    0
4    0    8    7    0    0­    1    0    0
0    1    0    0    0    5    0    0    0
0    0 ­   9    0    1    0    3    0    0

   exhibit b. html that doesn't allow subscript
            or superscript notation, hence the brackets
   denoting movement (pending)

9 (24)    0          3 (23)    0    8 (5)    2    7    1 (2)    0
1 (12)    8 (8)    7 (9)      0    4          0    0    2          0
2            0         5            1    0          7    0    3 (13)   8
8 (7)       9        4 (18)     0 5 (33) 0    2    7 (1)      1
7            5 (16) 1 (14)     8   2 (20)   0    0    6           3 (21)
3 (19)    2 (17)  6            0   7           1 (15)  5           8 (6)    0
4            3 (27)  8           7   0            0         1            5 (28)    2 (26)
6 (30)    1          2 (22)   4 (31)    3 (32)    5    8 (3)    0    7 (11)
5 (29)    7 (10)    9    2 (25)    1    8 (4)    3    0    0

      it is no surprise that the notation played a key part
in having failed to map out the route taken,
       when you're using numbers in a puzzle
  it's almost an inevitable path to failure,
since you're making superscript "bookmarks" at
high concentration, and without any distinction to
what the puzzle demands, hence you go "cross-eyed"
  in solving the puzzle, and superscripting your progress
using the same symbols that are required to solve it,
but given that the puzzle involves 81 slots
  with 9 x 9 identical components (only so rearranged
  to be not contradict the rule of the puzzle
i.e. 9 symbols in each square of the nine in total,
   with a 9 x 9 variation on all linear arrangements not
involving two similar symbols, i.e.
   1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9, rather than 1 2 2 3 4 5 6 7 8) -
what became a hope to correct the mistake, but given
the intricacies of the progress, all the more harder to
recount steps and subsequently move forward with
   the spotted error...
hence a refresh, and the need for schematic,
given that there are 81 slots in total, with
     27 already in place, and given that there are 26
units of alphabet... how handy to actually persist in
using these characters, but adding diacritical variations
to make up 54 necessary, without invoking
      a 10 or a sz...

exhibit c.

0    0    0    0    0    2    7    1ą    0
0    0    0    0 ­   4    0    0    2    0
2    0    5    1    0    7    0    0    8
0    9    0    0    0 ­   0    2    7α    1
7    0    0    8    0    0    0    6    0
0 ­   0    6    0    7    0    5    0    0
4    0    8    7    0    ­0    1    0    0
0    1    0    0    0    5    0    0    0
0    0­    9    0    1    0    3    0    0

exhibit d.

nb. α = 1, ą (ogonek) = 2, á (acute) = 3, à (grave) = 4,
â (circumflex) = 5, ä (umlaut) = 6, cedilla missing,
   ã (tilde) = 7, b = 8, c = 9, ć = 10, č (caron) = 11,
ĉ (circumflex) = 12, ā (macron) = 13, ç (cedilla) = 14,
d = 15, e = 16, é = 17, è = 18, ê = 19, ě = 20, ë = 21,
f = 22, g = 23, ǧ = 24, ḡ = 25, ĝ = 26
         (now i figure, could have used Greek... d'uh!
ahh, i'll use it for the finishing touches),
        h = 27, i = 28, ı = 29, í = 30, î = 31, ï = 32, μ = 33
j = 34, δ = 35, k = 36, λ = 37, ł = 38, τ = 39, n = 40,
ń = 41, ñ = 42, o = 43, ō = 44, ø = 45, p = 46,
q = 47, r = 48, s = 49, γ = 50, φ = 51, χ = 52, ψ = 53, ω = 54.

before i begin the puzzle... there's a reason why a caron
g (ǧ) might exist, and why a grave z might not...
   and why there's a piquant difference between
an acute z (ź) and ż - depending on the aesthetician,
who decides to move away from the national linguistico-aesthetic
dogma... for example the name George,
orthodoxy states you must learn the aesthetic version
of Grze'gosz... but you would also be able to write
the alternative: Ǧegoš - given that rz is equivalent to ż,
    and given that there is no grave accenting of z,
but there is the acute (ź), perhaps you could consider
the dot a convergence point that could assimilate
sound, immediately over the caron g... of course none
of these remarks are intended for application: because
they would never reach a consideration in a learning
curriculum of any nation, a whimsical idea derived from
the remnants of the esperanto experiment...
  from what i can see, ǧ would equal grz, and
the reason that rz exists at all, and it equivalent to ż
is because a grave version of z is missing, and that
the acute z (ź) exists, and there is no point of balance
that otherwise is the foundation of the caron...
  i wouldn't have thought focusing on such "trivial"
signs above letters provided so much pecking-orders.

exhibit e. focal points in greek notation

9ǧ    4ñ    3g    6o    8â    2    7    1ą    5τ
1ĉ   ­ 8b    7c    5p    4    3q    6ń    2    9ł
2     6γ     5      1      9r    7    4n    3ā    8
8ã    9    4è    3s      5ψ   6ω    2    7α    1
7    5e    1ç    8      2ě    4ø    9ō    6    3ë
3ê    2é    6    9λ    7    1d      5    8ä    4k
4    3h     8    7     6χ    9φ    1    5i    2ĝ
6í    1    2f    4î     3ï      5     8á   9μ    7č
5ı    7ć    9    2ḡ    1     8à     3     4j     6δ

thus completed: there's a reason why the majority
of the narrative is done utilising diacritical marks,
i could have used many more distinct symbols,
but the point is: there are very few focal points
that can be ascribed distinct markings,
most of the puzzle is done on the basis of "crazy eyes",
i.e. darting eyes - focal points do emerge after
much darting about the squares, notably when
a linear sequence is completed, or whenever one of
the 9 squares is completed, or when all nine squares
contain nine 7s or 8s...
      or that's one way to go about not having any whiskey,
the rain pouring outside, and the night stretching
into a near eternity -
            
exhibit f. narrative of correction, actual excerpt

it began at h, i.e. labyrinth corner no. 27,
******* trainspotting! this is going to be like reading
the time for the next train to arrive at Waterloo!
  5(28), 5(33)?, 5(28),
  6(30), 4(31), 3(22), 5(33), 33? 9(38), 4(34),
  6(35), 4(36)...
6(41) < 4(40) < 5(39) < 9(38) < 9(37)....
       4(42) < 6(43) < 9(44) < 4(45) < 5(46) < 3(47) < 9(48) < 3(49) <...>
   6(58) > 9(51) < 6(52)...
        longest period spent on 3(13) / ā -
   and the notation that gave way to this spiral?
5(33), which actually ended up being 5(53) / ψ.

Hands like guillotines
sever ties
flee fleeting moments
of traumatic scenes
and gay parades
on ink-stained clouds
blushing like mushrooms
tinted by the sun.

I dream of living to see the next revolution,
And of the men who will not live through that revolution,
Of the air humming electric static heat in anticipation of the inevitable riot,
Of the holy barricades standing in defiance of Heaven,
Of the enlightened kicking down the doors with guns and masks, asking;
"ARE YOU GONNA BE A PART OF THE PROBLEM OR ARE YOU GONNA BE A PART OF THE SOLUTION?"
Of gallows for the dogs of war,
Of guillotines for the capitalist pigs,
Of a firing squad for every reactionary content to oppose the wheel of history even as it crushes their bones down to nothing,
Of the end which justifies  the blood staining the cities red as the hammer and sickle cells that divide and multiply fevered in the streets,
Of the ghosts of iron men long dead still insisting that we take not one step back,
Because men get arrested, animals get put down
And God,
God made them as stubble to our swords, boys
And with blades clenched between their teeth so climb the dregs of the Earth to the surface to taste the apples they shook from the trees,
In 24 hour news cycles the slogans repeat to infinity:
"NOT RESISTING ARREST"
"NOT COMMITTING A CRIME"
"I WAS NOT A THREAT, WHY DID YOU TRY TO **** ME"
You can only force people to paint the smallest target possible on their own backs for so long before you end up in the crosshairs
I have seen the faces of  my saints painted on the walls of eternity -
Of Trotsky,  million headed proletariat staring daggers through the hearts of the tsars,
Of Cromwell, crusader for the ungovernable force of will,
Of Robespierre, headsman of divine terror riding on the wings of the Angel of Death,
I have seen the end and the means played out in countless dramas across millennia,
And the only question that remains unanswered is this:
Are you gonna be a part of the problem or are you gonna be a part of the solution?

I'm
Done
I simply
Refuse
To be
Pretty.

Cute, maybe
Adorable, sure
I could stand a shot at
Beauty.

But I will
Not
I repeat
Not
Conform to
Pretty.

It's surely
Nice to be
Pretty
But I'd rather
Take my
Sincerity
Or hilarity.

And I won't
Sacrifice my
Dignity for
Regularity.

Pretty faces are
For sale at a
Dime a dozen on
Our magazines
But I'm looking for
More than eyeliner
And lipstick
Guillotines.

I moved past
Pretty
Lost my shot at
Perfection
When I found a
Crack
In my gritty reflection.

Not to say I'm giving up
On my beauty intention
But woman cannot survive
On wardrobe interventions.

A pallid page: laid out for guillotines
Of chickenscratch all frantic in a trek
Across that indifferent monstrosity.
The lines ascend, but tend to end a wreck.
This certain fate stalks they who brave the Blank:
To crumple and to crease, to never cease
‘Till but the wiliest, weathered words remain,
Stalwart, scarred; final heralds of the peace.
What end is sought in this warmongering?
That question’s murk curses humanity.
Minds have been known to yield to stronger things…
the dinner bell, perhaps insanity.
Yet brave these squabbling syllables we must
Else face the terror of collecting dust.

Giles Corey

What is there, really,
Left to say
When you cannot trust
The honest pay?

Do you, really
Hear the sounds,
Of the clocktowers
coming down?

I do not, really,
Know the time.
We're just acquainted..
No friend of mine.

No friends at all
Are mine, per say.
Just folks to call,
From day to day.

From day to day,
And dusk to dusk.
There's nothing left
But empty husks.

I'd gouge my eyes
With forks and knives,
If that would bring me
To Saint Ives.

Gouge my eyes
At sight of her
Hopes I despise:
empty aquifer.

That saturate the souls
Of bedazzled bums
And homeless ******
Sent to pick the crumbs.

Great fallen father
Oh, dying mother
What way is water?
Who hid the shelter?

Your sons and daughters
Are frightened now.
They cannot win
They don't know how.

We all have fears
Of how we'll fare
When you say,
"We need more engineers.

To build the cities
And the gutters
And the gluttons
And the guillotines
And the gilded glaves that gorey Giles brings.

To pile the stones
On our frail young frames
As we're forced to cry
To **** our names,
"More weight."

Face first
into the pasty mud
too weak to crank myself up
too ashamed to continue hugging earth
but we all hug our mothers when we're hurting.

Finally risen from the pit
Face up, proud, and defying
I gave him my stony gaze
Face caked with loam

He sneers
I could swear there are
canines in all gum roots
as he speaks
tongue dancing to farce
I hope he guillotines the messenger

He utters
you look pretty when you wear
the ****

He thwacks me deadly
I tip and tumble
right down
down

It is the betters years now
I've soared up, up
up
and now people wear mud
for me
not on faces
not that I'd care
I'm paying them, after all
after all, I'm not buying their souls
after all, they want to be here
they're happy
and after all I've been through
It's high time someone takes the mud
for me... and then
I see her

Red hair rippling in radiant sun
casting glints of desire I catch with
hungry eyes
Her skin pale as pearl
Her face speckled like rich mineral
Her features delicate and strong
Her eyes, sharp and bright and silhouetted, like
windows to a garden,
yes,
green eyes.

I've tasted never
I've spoken never
of such quibbles as love,
but her beauty is the embrace
I've never known

It's all a shimmering flow
a cascade of fluid memory
the quenching of things
not known to be thirsted
My eyes open to a path
I've just found the will
to traverse in peace.

Yet, like Jack and Jill,
we go tumbling down
down
the hill
and...

It's a wedding anniversary
not ours
because silence
and delirium imbibed
is preferred on such occasions

I smile
She glances
and sighs deep
unearthing cavernous
voids
of misery
caked on memories
of bittersweet mysteries
called love

It is only in the mirror that,
with those windowed eyes,
she gazes with scorn, pity
a truth meant for me

Shame crushes my heart
heartbeat pulsing like
a crumpled soda can
rattling on empty road

With languid brushstrokes
she applies the mascara

You look pretty when you wear
the ****
I said

The pin drops
and with it
the canvas...

One man's trash is another's face
We can find solace in the
shattered remnants
of our dreams,
or we can challenge
the very precepts that
assured our rightful happiness

concrete flinging monkey that i am:
albeit albino -
tinged with himalayan salt hues...
   well this little detail of my working
limbs: concrete -
3 parts of sand 1 part  magic dust:
some water -
here's a dead-earth dough -
it's not a pizza it's not a pizza dipped
in caramel to be subsequently
deep-fried: it's not a scottish ingenuity
project for a heart-attack:
after all... a mars bar battered is missing...
oh my little edinburgh...
one of those nights and mornings:
having finished watching the matrix
trilogy and expanding on:
joys of 5am: being awake prior to
the cockerels shooting out their salutes
to the ***** of white noise and fat
on leaves glistening in: an abyss of a yawn -
the crags and st. arthur's seat:
big ******* volcano sleeping
in the middle of the town...
          such crispness of urban life...
the streets so devoid of noons and...
  buying that carton of cornflakes
      and some milk and enjoying a double
variation of crispness...
well concrete flinging monkey as i
were today: doodling my slow
in the garden... digging a trench for g.i. joe
soldiers in my take on world war I...
so the weeds (morning glory esp.) would
take to teasing its presence from my
neighbour's backyard...
  obviously there was a spider: a glutton
of a eye-fest... whether it was just finishing
its delight or...
           the moth: i guess it was a moth
had a missing head...
  so grand slurp champion was *******
all the details...
   i nudged it once, i nudged it twice...
that bulb of: bottomless pit torso that
probably arrives at secreting a web...
i nudged it once more...
nothing...
no nervous scuttling or having to parachute
onto a sponge of its exoskeleton...
i arrived at the posit: my little world
and my inquisitive lense of the microscope...
apparently a spider will not mind
being nudged by "the hand of god"
should it be eating a moth...
    hardly a lazy sod:
                  what's there to admire the a priori
argument:
   it's not like a spider learns
to become the architect of a web -
it's not like dogs learn to swim...
                     throw a dog in the deep end
and watch the gruff ruffian tread!
duck beast...
                    no... apparently you can try
and try to agitate a spider in the middle
of his meal... even after...
after the meal? the spider had to eat
up some cotton...
    like a bear might prior to undertaking
hibernation... to clog up the ****...
the spider started nibbling on some
of the web...
    and i guess they do that...
go hunting with a web:
                  at the opportune moment...
a day's worth at best to pass the time...
once the meal is over
they figured out to clog up the nutrients
with some of the web...
   can spiders take a ****...
but unlike agitating a hungry spider...
which will scuttle the moment it
is brushed with a tip of any sort...
this well fed specimen took things... lightly...
i could have... done...
the extension of "scrutiny":
buried the ubiquitous bulldozer of fangs
that concentrated on the guillotined
head of a moth in a dollop
of my concrete...
                       i just find it impossible
to **** moths... hell... some night
i'd a proud caricature of man in what
become a nursery -
            come sunrise i don't know whether
i am the graveyard
my mouth the last "search" for these...
        "refugees" from the torment of the night...
conversational overtones in this:
"poetry": it's not something to
make memory architecture of rhyme...
rhyme alone is not enough...
lyricism - i am not gorging on wishing
for a Keats replica...
that it might rhyme and be better
ingrained: a burning coal of fluid ink...
or that horrible alternative of: the haiku...
mash up: i write for the sake of not being
able to afford the paint the canvas
the brushes or the superstitious agony
of what's already preemptive in such
an undertaking...
                     but it's better tested:
      from this day's depth and its
eyes made most pertinent -
      (this shouldn't be hard...
all i have to look for is a -ent suffix
to match)
           toward some forever incessant...
my own limbo toying with body:
to later succumb to an anybody...
                lazily rhymed -
    lazily staged: for all the gold
of the leprechauns... k k k k koch:
                                  chasm and a miasma...
by god's sexless and the devil's
**** and furry *****...
   i want to rhymes...
i wants to rhymez...
               rhymez likes ping-pongs...
in another tongue:
the plural of echo: is not ecce for a cappuccino:
etch 'ere...
         crescendo bother: blues...
i forget there's painting involved...
no crisp solidified sounds:
   a tongue lapsing up a lisp and a labrador
cow-traffic of moo: st'...
                        from colour to a sound...
an alphabet ring-a-ding-ding...
in another tongue the plural of echo:
              ech...
                     not... m'eh... or eh... for an E...
which is first sung and later cited: eeee (longating)
e-ha!-o...
              not e.e.k.o.
                             prune juice fermenting
from drinking: god this brain this sponge...
spiders and spiders...
        spiders and spiders...
first inconvenience is also a staggering
remedy: failure on my part...
hangover from a love that lasted...
well... from april through to september...
           obviously impossible as i couldn't
just see the need to "pet" tarantulas...
           me and my fickle arachnophobia...
it's sometimes there: it's sometimes not there...
and "there"...
hell... if a louis zukofsky can play
the tender part of aristocratic verbiage:
here i come towing a guilty expansion
project: under the proposed guidelines
of: democracy... had i a tongue with
a sidewinding penny to boot...
that i might lisp or spit point blank
an empty fill: and... there would be an
academic career waiting for someone
as i might: provide... postmortem...
                 it's not an agony of
the overlooked...
it's just an agony of agony...
   for some per se pressure to peruse one's
own lack of detail...
to have to complicate the demands
of an audience as a...
  "back-up plan": B-project...
                         in seeking redemption:
or gravity -
   all i know is that i'm not a narrative
architect - i'm too poor to paint...
or rather: i have a photographic memory
and i'd rather make food that cezanne
wouldn't want to paint:
or debase by eating...
          could you paint still life
these days: no... not very: not really...
but i am not a journalist... either...
primarily so...
             i am a democrat on the level that
i would be happy to live
outside of plato's republic:
it's not like plato ever convinced that
figurehead of Syracuse...
                  so... spoilt eggs...
chicken strutting flamingos...
     red's an oopsie come blue and purple
is born...
that's not true...
green and yellow will yield blue...
fair enough...
               but as sure as death: i am...
big credit to punctuation as a revision
of: not anti-rhyme: but certainly not pro- it...
    because i'm constipated on this
type of exertion...
i want as much of the holy fire of lyricism
to burn a mark on the cinema of
memory...
   but... alas: here's my 2nd best take
on this not being tabloid journalism...
               - so how come everyone started
to write: cute?
i mean: if not a cute rhyme then...
some variation of the exasperated haiku?
  - sputnik...
           in sight a digression rubric...
it's the same idea:
   - sputnik
   - moon shards
    - elevations of comparisons
   to match up to a meteor crater with
a slice of apple crumble...
    - sound is most certainly not colour...
- could i call nouns primes:
  or numbers? odd... even...
             red elepahant 1 G
              blue sky 0 K
              horrible hat 9 pro
circus envy... esp. clown envy...
                        this couldn't possibly be...
tabloid journalism...
or "poetry"... it's how far democracy
allows itself the pursuit of: ideals
with a hint of veto... for the pardon
of the status quo hierarchy...
                 concrete flinging monkey...
- robert duncan: nee san francisco -
i write by eyes alone -
i neuter the sounds employed
to challenge like neither *** -
best unscripted and that...
       metaphor of metaphysics
                collage of misnomers -
at best...
                     having to sit with
a slab of lard on your head at noon -
       this least grammar this last exasperation...
a furniture of a "poem"...
an earthworm's guide / guise of the tongue...
wriggling away at the benign...
        postcards and a slick licking of
postage stamps...
                 i forget to pause: i pause...
i paint with this bothersome blood of ink...
the crisis at the revisited crux...
stale europe dying h'america...
                i have yet to read anything
i have written aloud...
   i have yet to read anything i have written
aloud...
i have yet to read anything
i have written aloud:
resonance...
                    revelation 13:5...
          the beast was given a mouth to utter
proud words and blasphemies and
               to exercise its authority
  (for forty-two months)...
time a forgotten space...
or at best: a concentrated suffice of it...
a most bearable 10am in september...
i'd like to think i can't be
exasperated... or i might just:
jest at overt-punctuation...
          - written as pure eyes and
a beethoven towing deaf-        -ness...
    too much of: jack of all trades...
- we once had a "pardon" of handwriting,
in that we once employed a quill
and a detail of ink -
but not now but not now
of this clicking machinery like
chickens' pecking grains or letters...
         spiders and spiders and all those
freelance romantics...
a democracy of language that can
escape a caging formality to the endearing
dear sir, kind regards essay / letter...
language in a tuxedo...
language of escapism...
that one might treat a watermelon
as driftwood... or the crucifix as such...
  - that this can be a language that cannot
be a mechanised slaughter -
  for a throw-away: a 20th century admiration
for some variation of the "up-to-date"...
i am having to diminish
the base of an argued for: carpenter...
by bone... by bone... by each...
carrying of the vowels without:
the pentagram soliloquy -
           that could only be a variation
of rhetoric without an eagering of an audience...
this ingrained son of sam
this glittering blood feud of nights...
a line of an exasperation...
and each and every akin to this "maxim"...
because this is not tabloid journalism...
and it's not because it's
a democratic avenue of would-be squalor...
my niche partitioning
between those literate and those:
hardening a candyfloss of tortures:
       born air: settled in a tomb of fire...
born water: settled in the double sediment
that's once a breathing air comb
into frets of grain...
and earthworm wriggling...
now cement... malicious albino ape jester:
my little evil at the passable concern for
salt and the himalayas...
in that i work on the worth of:
teasing clone i - not in english not in english:
but in english...
  in this... tongue that's a best
butchered body of... a scrutiny that's
almost a... verifying anatomy... best:
   brick by ******* stacked...
a harbour of anathema and dangling
posits of: walking-9-to-5 abortions...
            high cue: but otherwise there's always
a managing of a queue...
that's bottom brass and godhad grey...
with a tease of a concept of hair...
balding snow on tomorrow's mountain...
- that i never hear what i write...
that i see it...
            i see "it" borrowed from somewhere
that has to be revised and revisited and
so-forth backed up renewed into
a ******* Guggenheim... renewing:
          new yorker slang and formalities of
rent... and... shackled up with...
dirtying the shells of oysters with...
prior the lemon and the glug of
the slugging: a word for lessening tourism of
Penzance... or anywhere in south wales:
cornwall...
         i tried loving the russians...
i tried loving the russians...
but then i had a mirage of a girlfriend
that had to tame tarantulas and i was
an arachnophobic tease -
                 - that in poetry the narrator is "somehow"
not the protagonist...
disembodiment via a section by
section - this limit of a candle...
this the kidney... this the heart...
but a "polyphony" of chicken hearts
towed into a broth...
          that poetry doesn't allow
a narrator... that i want to pick out a mask...
and i want tabloid journalism to spew
out of me...
this little detail this grammatical
arithmetic - sound of A...
and the syllable tease of a consonant -
impromptu question:
              asked in between: "in between":
what is a consonant K...
then again: in borrowed rome:
KAY is not the greek kappa...
what is the nurture of over-naming
and what are synonyms?
                      layers upon layers and
this is not a purity of jargon-jesting...
spiders and spiders...
                    - such that i believe in the anonymity
of readers and how i don't expect
a comment section:
   that bukowski made poetry pop
for: a gary snyder admirer...
  
  or - how one hundred arrows were sharpened
on flesh: and were dimmed...
because to crown this crude
metal creed against a stone....
and had to make coagulation of
frothing bloom -
extracting pauses to make a living
with taking wheel:
              burning rubber and burning
kites...
             burning threads and shoelaces...
dissolving sugar into
caramel...             an oyster that became
a tongue.... and a tongue...
its uttermost silence that could be
wrapped up back into a clean
residue of: biting / nibbling
for a piano... because never at a...

           such is the concept of rhyme...
that one can beg for guillotines
to... supposedly... "end".

from latin: a letter i can see...
a word i can: lip-read!
               not this... vanguard
of sanskrit and the glagolitic.

translate the letter to a status of a number...
whole: holes...
from nothing the sieving project.

“ash”

a swelling fills my chest
it sounds like heavy waves crashing
against jagged cliffs

     stars stars stars

silver spears descend
   i am pierced


        here

through my clavicle

the rain-swept streets waft with reminisces
  like stale perfume on a black wrinkled shirt

            my head half
submersed in water


                tickling my ear

        I can hear my nose breathing
                  heart pounding
                      throat gulping

body floating

                         dismembered
                  

                       in this liquid abyss


               like a spirit lost
                        in the neon-green ether
         of absinthe

                            lips
              press against my shivering skin

                 a warm palm plunges

                            clasps my numb hand

   a light delves

                            into the obsidian chasm

                   pallid faces

      innumerable

materialize

               from a cavernous distance      

fiery orbs combust

              crackling

                                like dry wood

                               in a snowy forest

smoke billows
                                     towards the fathomless night
                            
                             rising

                       rising

                rising

                   chest

swells
                      
waves

     crash
    

lungs

            bells
                          

eyes


ash...

II

“Shadow-Play”

The shadows in the corners of the room
whisper my name
they are the same shadows
by alley ways,
            behind tombstones
       beneath beds
inside my head

over the plains

the highest and whitest of clouds
cast darkest hues

the brightest of suns

i think of you

                         the whispers get louder
                         the curtains flutter
                         the air turns colder

somewhere a murmur

                         shhh

be still   be still  my dear

the rope hanging in the attic
                        the vague visions through the static
                                    the tremors of the addict

shhh
  be still
      my dear

                          love casts its pallor
                                blood on pale collar
                                  i hear you call her


                   by candle lights
                        as rain drops
                               and winds howl
                                       and wood creaks


      
               icy razors lay on warm tubs
                            guillotines fly through the air                
                    birds fall from thick heights
               like notes of despair


don't shake your head
it will all end
soon
in the corner of the room
There
where the shadows call out your name
like the wind sweeps the rain


               pull out a smoke
                    drag over a chair
                          sit by the window
                            and stare


there is the world    there is the world
   you are not a part of
                there is the world
            full of cruel love
        there the children laugh and play
like you never have
or ever could

   It’s understood

                  the rain floods into gutters
                       the once crisp leaves drift
                          they sog and they shudder
                          from spring-autumn skies
                                 down down sewage drains
                                     all truths mask in lies
                                          all love in pain      

shhh  shhh

the shadows the shadows

   they whisper my name

III

“eternally…”

I see your spectral silhouette
   hovering on the sea's horizon
      at midnight

  as the surf struggles and collapses
     before my feet

    it's so **** cold
     my gut convulses
      my hands shake
        my being shivers

              your hair whips
                 the dark air
               like thunder

                           the wind lashes
                         my numbed skin with coarse sand


            and it's so dark

                    the moon oscillates wide rings
                            of pallid skeletal light

                               and you flutter there exactly
  where the sun set
       six hours ago

                                 when its afterglow
                    disintegrated
                             pixel x pixel
    

                               your shadowy figure
                                   now beckons

                                      join me
                                    this night
                                and every night

                                    hereafter

                                      love
                          
                              I close my eyes....

                                    ...

dancing and sweating

  we lay in my room

             under burgundy covers

                      reeking of cheap beer
                               and dirt

your ******* still slightly moist
    flung on my chair

  my sticky shirt still emanates smoke
     like an industrial factory

you arms wrap a

~

Sluggish, my eyes barely focus,
headlights seem faint
through this cracked windshield
in heavy traffic, bending lanes
with detour signs collecting travelers
like gas station snow globes,
displayed in between blurred white lines

Monstrous *** holes shake me awake
from the thoughts crawling
deep within a weary mind,
a casualty of a night to forget
which will not soon be forgotten
as digital numbers, glaring red
catch my eye and I see…5:38

Darkness engulfs the cab of this truck,
dash lights cringe and flash hypnotically,
out of round tires draw skid marks
on a lonely winding pavement
As my feet fall through the floor boards,
scraping on glass shard encrusted asphalt
bleeding beyond the speed limit

White knuckles grip the wheel
while doors become giant guillotines,
slashing at faux leather seats, exposing rancid foam leaking
battery acid on the engine’s severed heads
Everything begins to spin, losing control,
a bright flash and I shift to see…5:39
and the sun comes out presenting a beautiful day

I've lost time counting headlights and lamplights and streetlights and stars. I've literally lost time. Each day I wake up, and watch the evening drift by in a sunset, I fall asleep and watch the moonlight sail away on a sunrise.


It was an empty promise, these lights all around. It was an empty promise, that buzzed with the current a few thousand volts. Lights...pale and broken bulbs bleeding gasses and lies. But I guess in the dishonesty of some idea so pure, I found the dream that Teslas lightning tipped fingers yearned for,


A quest of solid gold that conducted an orchestra of thunder. And so lights couldn't be a lie anymore,


They could only be a dream, a dream never fully realized so long as the frozen dead fingers of liars past held their grip. Edisons overgrown yellow tinged finger nails, piercing through the veil of misty electric sparks,


Yet here i am


The light bulb is over MY head now! And my brainstorm is an F4 hurricane, my bolts like guillotines for your greedy fingers!


Because this is the generation of new light, of new thunder and new mayhem.
Of illumination!


A new generation carrying torches, casting out our light bulbs and our lamp posts. Forcing fire into Mason jars and using flames like they were new again.


No no no
…
Not Mason jars. Pull those ******* light bulbs from the headlights and lamplights and streetlights, fill those ******* with gunpowder and unstable explosive mixtures and make stars, *******!


Make flames that burn brighter than Edison's unholy lies, that tear down the dome and bring the skies falling!


Watch everything we've built, watch corruption and lies and racism and false superiority come hissing out of the cracks, trying to save themselves from the building pressure,


Trying to claw their red boney fingers from the fire but they can't. Because they are the fire,


And we will all watch as they burn like they always wanted to. Their voices shining past all of the glory their burning visage may grant, their bodies becoming one with the chaos that is our country.


And then we will have nothing left but ashes. No more eagles. Only the right and left wings of a Phoenix,


Risen from our ash and tears, flying into the sky to become the sun...To shine like nothing ever seen by our eyes so used to a false light.


Because it's time we became the sun. It's time we chose a real light to follow, not a halogen tube spewing gas over sickly bodies. No more light bulbs to only last a few weeks. Were tired of artificial light...Tired of breathing oxygen made in a lab…


Maybe it's because we've lost so much time under buzzing broken bulbs, under boot heels and tyrannical ideation. We've lost so much time staring into TV lights and camera flashes that we've only been able to wait for someone real to step into frame...


We've lost so much time counting headlights and lamplights and streetlights and stars. Counting the minutes till a new hero appears...I'm ready to be the light.

i remember
(a pluchritudinal memory)
when almost so effortlessly
our lives lied to us most indefinitely
in the hours that return with
lashes and chains—

as in clothes heavy soldered
to washlines, the waft in the air is as familiar as the rain cooling
the blades of grass you speak of,
something the dark only conjures
waiting at the brink of my unclosed retina.
i know all of these well-placed memories
like furniture you have arranged
under the hollow hands of the home.
yet barely even so, a fond memory of—
the daedalus outside or the cut
gladiolus, plucked out of the moseying hour's vicious wingtip.

we do not always die like this.
when all our dying whispers are thrusted
underneath mouths of stone,
when all of our wishes hold a flame
paler than a vague rekindling of the dead.

sometimes promised something an ellipsis would half-ponder and postpone
in word's mid-birth.

the raging moon had waned.
all the windows shunned — hermetic,
air outside potent, leaving all books
half-read yet fully opened.
the children hide behind thin shades
of roses,
i can hear the steely grit of the flesh
pared from the bone as my mother
guillotines with kitchenware

we do not always die instantaneously.
most of our ways to go leave
demarcations on soul — something so easily displaced, doubled array of its arrival into half-wakefulness.

something only a last prayer thumbed
down to the last bead
and we cannot cry anymore.

night's flumine seeks to rebuild the wound undone delicately
leaving my breath and betraying my body.

we somehow always die like this.

.

Sluggish, my eyes barely focus,
headlights seem faint
through this cracked windshield
in heavy traffic, bending lanes
with detour signs collecting travelers
like gas station snow globes,
displayed in between blurred white lines

Monstrous *** holes shake me awake
from the thoughts crawling
deep within a weary mind,
a casualty of a night to forget
which will not soon be forgotten
as digital numbers, glaring red
catch my eye and I see . . . 5:38 am

Darkness instantly engulfs the cab of this truck,
dash lights cringe and flash hypnotically,
out of round tires draw skid marks
on a lonely winding pavement
As my feet fall through the floor boards,
scraping on glass shard encrusted asphalt
bleeding beyond the speed limit

White knuckles grip the wheel
while doors become giant guillotines,
slashing at faux leather seats,
exposing rancid foam leaking
battery acid on the engine’s severed heads
Everything begins to spin, losing control,
as I finally screech to a halt at a stubborn traffic light

When I glance to my right and I see her,
singing along with her radio,
more beautiful than any song I’ve ever heard
She notices me staring and smiles,
then rolls down her window and blows me a kiss,
I roll down mine as she points to a little coffee shop
and says, “Care to join me?”  I nod in agreement

I once again catch a glimpse of the clock . . . 5:39 am,
but suddenly time no longer matters

Open smiles were fading away

As the seeds grew into trees

Innocent babies falling on the mother

Foreign guillotines flying free



The river of blood flowing by her

Mother’s sons are rising too

Fiery eyes blinded by the sister

You were a part of it too



Open your eyes and look up at the sky

Oh Mother we won’t let you cry

Your salty tears gushing down the rivers

Will bring your boys back home to life

Pretty birds will sing out for you Mama

We’ll build a heaven around you

MA!


All the toys were stolen by the father

And the children suffer in loneliness

One ******* gone brings around another

Our pockets overflowing with emptiness


Sad little sister fears the brother

She can’t hug mama all alone

Left to kiss the feet of the mother

She has lost her way back home


Its time to wipe your tears ma

Its time to forget your fears ma

Its time for me to come home ma

Its time you were not alone ma

Its time to….

Atlantis shall rise again.

She will spear through the currents,
until the helms of her cityscapes
cleave the tides
that have entombed her.

In the beginning,
it hurts
as she guillotines
the barnacles
and bottom feeders
congealed upon her brow.

In the beginning,
she bleeds--

she bleeds--

but

she heals.

Shrugs the brine
from her rooftops
and hails over
the men and women
who sunk her Queendom
all those millennia ago.

As the moonlight
crescendos through
the stained glass,
timeworn prophecies
written in the jagged contours
of greek lettering
reveal themselves upon the pillars:

Atlantis shall rise again.

Ophelia's throne reclaimed
only by the one
who has treaded
The Great Deluge
and survived it

only by the one
who is fluent in
the language of drowning
but has not bowed
to the hurricanes

by the one
with hair like raven feathers
and dark eyes spun to gold
when they look into the sunset

by the one
who is named
after a gemstone,
the most precious
of them all--

Atlantis shall rise again

and

I shall rise with Her.

buried alive; (in) sane; or harakiri?

a trifecta of horror
cuts through the lush foliage while i
writhe in a nest of
eldritch entrails

anxiety
rises up like an ophidian
coils shedding every quarter of a noon
ready to strike -
i lose movement
and falter through the streets
the meeting rooms,
and the endless conversations that end in stalemates;

my anxiety
an ouroboros of volcanic self-effacement
spills into posh mental facilities (lies)
and shoddy hospitals that turn the sick into the living dead

humiliation
burns bright red (magenta)
and brands my delicate skin with age-old glyphs
they mark the end of a civilization

the birth of a metropolis
with twin suns and dark monoliths
where the mob guillotines the visionaries
and the artist dies a dog's death.

Here is the vond vedette,
Here are the congeries scopulous at the alluvion combe - a serow discovers a yawn
Within its palm. Electrical storms redd over this mountain's peaks its verbs, spate it's cwms. Lichen flux ecesis, caught in the current towards veridity.
A verderer hazed by chessile guillotines, naves hain- dwindling grike of corrasion

Indomite lithoids behooving one's obstacle of self, set by sanguine puerile innocent knosps. While the eyes howk that merriment of skin-cleft sensations into the reweaved aureoles, those many colored plumes of split flowers, which open into brightly singing dactyls of these grieving bield and obscene vocations. To the gulch of one thousand bells, and only the passive nestling interstices to anoint them

The silence was sinister, as if, sound had lost its vocal chords,
the days arrived and sunsets painted the sky in crimson
and gold leaf ensembles of artists dreams.

While they sat around a table, document drivers ran around
pushing agendas, translating armageddon scenarios
if the other side raised a finger or pulled a trigger.
So the sulky diplomats sat like doormats where
the national feet were wiped upon and trust was invested
in their stupidity. Harvard education, pin-striped suits
with loud aggressive neckties announced their status
to TV crews and intrepid journalists, hanging on every word
like guillotines, to ravage the leading newspaper stories.
Headlines were deadlines. Diplomats drummed
up side angles for photographic faces  to appear firm
and responsible to the taxman's money.

Here they gathered
with their policy whisperers awaiting for a signal
to open their loaded dialogues of positions and
policy shifts. Yet no one said a word.

The silence, for once, kept all the mouths shut
( one wished permanently!)
no one said a word for 3 long hours,
but they sipped chilled water, took notes of nothing
glared at each others sides and took notes
again of what was not said.

At the stoke of two, when the clock belted
a twang and the echo bounced through
many empty heads, the diplomats rose
to call it another day of negotiations.

The cold war had just had its 9th meeting.

Author Notes
The Revolution says little, but the war take sides. Diplomats are busy 'discussing' how to end the war, and find a solution. Their policy positions are so entrenched, that little happens. The silence is as loud as could be. Meanwhile, the guns boomed and little childrens playgrounds were pock-marked with cluster bombs. Lines of refugees, walked up the mountains seeking shelter in neighbouring towns. The cold war complemented the heat war that was raging on the battlefields of doom. Please stay indoors.
© Marshall Gass. All rights reserved.

Many of the world's greatest Leaders throughout our tumultuous history have;
Many of  the insightful Revolutionaries in stink hole and glory hole countries have;
Many of the oppressed, disenfranchised and cheated also have.
Look to Lenin, Mandela, Gandi, Nehru, Havel, Bhutto, Ceausescu, Charles I, Papadopoulos, Lady Jane Grey, Louis XVI, Marcos, Milosevic, a pile of Mohameds, Mussolini, Nicholas II, Pinochet, Saddam, Marie Antoinette, Pope Clement V, Selassie, Baghdadi, Duvalier, and, let's not forget the author of Mien Kampf, Adolph the Tenderizer.
And what do they all have in common?
Some, before they became boldly notorious, and others, after they became criminally notorious.
Some, looked out their window and saw platforms being erected.
Others witnessed gallows, guillotines. posts and walls.
They all got some time in:
PRISON. GAOL. JAIL. COOLER. LOCKUP.  DUNGEON. KEEP. PEN. BASTILLE. CLINK. STATESVILLE. SLAMMER. STOCKADE. THE BIG HOUSE.
You get the idea.
His time will come.

is it still considered... watching ****...
if she also *******...
or... you're watching that...
take on japanese sexuality in anime...
with a gloryhole and a rubber ****
and she's addressing it:
shogun... and... there's custard...
of the ******* scene?
or she's teasing you pregnant...
and you're like:
         no more eggs!
***** like watermelon juggernauts!

i was never a fan of soap opera...
whether coronation st.
or something turkish / mexican my
grandmother would better enjoy...

drama: internet: clebrity drama...
idubbbz etc.
          i am click-baited by the change
in the algorithms...
"once upon a time" the website
worked as... a thesaurus jukebox...
none of these videos would come up
as suggested...
so i scroll through them:
3 minutes in and my attention span
has become ridiculed by:
the spezial juice...

     there's not other alternative...
not being a *******...
       something sobering...
       not even nostalgia and a life prior:
mix-tapes recorded for an
highschool sweetheart...
reef: give me your love...

         i should have become a monk...
templar chant: antiphona:
                  crucem sanctam subiit...
something out of necessity...
in terms of *******?
it's hardly me playing for the cuckoldry
pass...
    she's alone... i'm alone...
she has more toys...
i have a grip of the hand...
that can hold a basketball with
one hand...
which dwarfs my: "esteem"...
      and it's like a sensation akin to...
the mouth of a squid suckling out
an extra trim of the *******...
very forensic ugly *******...

no floral patterns of a pregnant girl
needing to be comforted by
less a "stance" and more a tongue:
wriggling to tease...
or whatever it might be called...

is it ****? she's with a toy shooting
custard cream...
and... i have a hand that acts like a squid mouth...
boniest **** i have yet to see...
****'s a dwarf to boot...
but at least... no concern for WD40
and **** fetishes...
to compete with homosexual zeniths of
pleasure: gained...
thus pleasure: given...

is it ****... when she's at it...
and i'm "at it"...
   and there's no... theatre?
  what is it... then?
                 crucem sanctam subiit
qui infernum confregit
         accinctus est potentia
   surrexit die tertia...
                    alleluia...
dear good: moral superiority?
     dial me up...
these choral works are...
   the medicine when even Handel doesn't
quiet cut the matter: solid...

sooner the dogs and insects come unto
my body: the sooner i will be able
to wash their base instincts myself with...
and afterward...
the clerical matter of:
the... "spiritual refrain"...
a completely blank slate of mind...

       first comes the fire...
and if you're lucky: suppose there's water
to come to quench your thirst: after...
because the looks of it...
teeth do not fare well...
when chewing sand...

             point being... it's hardly a...
video-friendly affair on my part...
but a woman *******...
**** me... spring already?!
the flowers are budding?
the asexuality in her is... jumping to extremes?
as a joke... or hardly...
hands... too bad all those asian girls
already started to look like
****-robots...
      kyoto-eyes...

                       fake... fake...
   good of me to have ****** a beached
whale... "******"...
snuggled and eyelids teased with lips...
and of course... the mechanists' trance
for piston envy... blah blah...
           but a carrying point of
comparison... when the bleach starts
melting the plastic...
and she is... and i am...
being ****** off and each other
by telephatic forces equivalent to...
ghosts...
   and is it *******... just then?

i had to explore these crude...
one-armed bandits... since... typing...
on a keyboard... i sometimes
see myself in the mirror...
but... on a piece of paper:
i have to remind myself that:
i am... and will forever be...
right-handed...
        
                       the teenage trick was...
to sit on the hand you don't use to write...
and then... ******* with it once
enough numbing was imbued...
ghost did it... was the motto...
i don't know...
      ever become fooled to eat something...
before an operation where
a general anaesthetic was used?
and you wake up...
regurgitating window-licker esque
blah gurgle blah blah further?

from the athenian strip-club
to a brothel in the east end...
and sieving through...
eh...          minor evidence...
settling down on gloryhole ******* flicks
for a while...
any adventure of her ******* herself
and "easing" me to...
that squid-mouth of a hand...
of my own...
        but everything on the throne of thrones...
then a quick baptism in a shower:
promises are promises...
no armchair... not scented candles...
doing the no. 1, 2 & 3...
on the throne of thrones... does...
the trick...

- and once the bourbon is opened:
the perfume of... every... single... brothel...
i meet a man on a rampage...

and he says: beside reading gregory corso...
ah... forget reading him...
just hear him speak... that's the sexiest
**** voice suckling at the ****
of the escape from "alcatraz" / prose paragraph...
you will... ever... hear...

scouts honour... although i was no more
a scout than the slingshot
my philatelist grandpa made me...
shooting iron *****-heads... giggling...
in the confines and comfort
of a... kitchen window...

   my grandfather: the philateist...
i'll have to admit...
i make a much better drunk than he ever was...
my father is a cockerel boxer
and my uncle a gloomy zombie...
when i drink, though?
i am still that... hard-on-sunrise
diving into a ***** of some old
stripped in Athens... from... hell...
Macedonia?
and those "other" eyes looking at me...
the message always reads:
take your ******* toys...
and *******... from this sandbox of we
milking the lechers...
colt...

so i'd be at it... with a reply akin to...
i was never in athens...
the card debit dried up...
escorted by a bouncer...
****** myself at the atm machine...
walked back to the hostel
like some GI Joe...
      
   oh sure... ***... the great adventure...
is it ****...
watching her play with her barbie
and me play with my ken?
pristine, though...
          is it **** when i'm not giving
a narrative piece...
no classical italian 1970s...
         scenes...
        is it ****?
       or is it... butchers' spree!

i just don't have the toy...
the guillotines *****... soz... let's extend that
into: "oops"?!
i guess if i was gay... conservative...
an... Tangier was the hotbed of
frilocking...
under the Islamic regime of the... ******* sons...
and the lesbian duaghters...
and the unloved... under polygamy...
and: isn't muhammad...
the one who tried... to claim both...
the psalms of David...
and the solominic prowess at a hard-on?
i guess he must have failed in one
of these two adventures...

so much for Muhammad's surrogates
of Zion... the mothers of the believers...
or those struck by the reality of waking up...
in some suburb of Birmingham...

is it ****?
he does who what with when she
does it with a guillotined ken-play-dough?
here's the porsche...
and here's... the limping deaf
and blind horse...
i'd sooner have the horse...
after a while it become apparent...
i... can't... chew...
or... digest... metal...

but a horse i can... ***** into a furthering
of life... as i "leisure" myself into
a chicken... even the marrow in the bones
will not matter...

is it ****?
she's shooting blanks i'm shooting out
a genocide...
there's this tissue... there's this tear...
there's a hard-on and there's the spring
of genitals on her part...

and it's the modern version of...
what **** was like in the 1970s and the 1980s...
before... she had to go up-stream
and against the salmons of solomon...
migrating with her hybrid...
puppeteering strings...
i clenched my hand that didn't become a fist...
but the mouth of a stripteasing zebra...
and the motto: k.o.
of an uvula that would somehow
become the pricess and frog of... cough-medicine
slurp... and later a kiss...
and things, "things"... just had to become
so ugly...
so wholly unrecognisable...
when standing upon waverly bridge...
looking out across... the firth of forth...
and that... tapeworm eerie white...
one of those nights... scaling the old college scaffold...
with a belarusian ***...

this tinge... this ribbon of an accent
and a signature...
this forever-new...
        
upkept thus far...
    a horror movie soundtrack...
to a lullaby replica...
by god i snore harded than...
an asthmatic cerberus...
   what's ****?
        i care to mind the details...
hands being the most ****** aspect of...
my synonym...
all procelain and easily broken...
hands i could have do...
with making bone arithmetic a "thing"...

i ****-size a comparison...
by the looks of it...
the Cindarella: heel... cut off...
is a bit like me missing...
a knuckle...
             just at the pinky...
where my signet ring should abide
by for the eternal purpose
of the engluish bachelor...
and queen... and prince charming...
and a wales...
that invokes the boundary of...
not only cornwall...
but also devon... somerset...
dorchester...
     agor ysbeiliai:
                    o hanesyddol maliaf
o pethau...
       none of it... actually...
some other prince charming...
drag queen hour reading...
orwell having a ******* with...
  a: wilde...

             high-brow expectations....
to riddle out 1 + 1 = 2...
                        that somehow nothing
has to remain... plough-towing...
pig-trough-tied... hoof and bite...
and goodmorning vietnam... d.j. accurate...
or the pleasures from cartilege...
and all the scooping up
pedantry: in details...
over such minor facts of a former:
base relief to imitate: imitating life...

i am quiet adamant...
away from the realities of a London
or a Warsaw...
one can most certainly...
conjure up a quest of time...
as that sort of quest whereby...
time's-amiss...
in that the clocks have apparently
clogged up and... therefore...
"somehow" stooped to... quiet simply...
having... stopped!

Wake! Kokura to a novel world of peace
Under the canopy of dark divine clouds
A million deaths and a zillion days of sufferings
Ah! Flown to a distant land
While the holy hands patting your shoulders
Away Nagasaki crying,
… a loud ghostly cry..

When the fat boy shed fireballs from above
Flitting shadows unable to find a cwtch
Death solidified, melted to florid streams
On a boundless billowy sea of hellfire.
Murky minds killing unknown souls
Burnt alive was innocent, wicked and wise
On their knees, a nation bend
Away victory cried,
… a loud cheerful cry…

Ah! Know me first before you please
to squander guns, grenades or guillotines
At least the cognizant me die in peace,
And a better predilection for your choicest blessings.
Silent guns are a hackneyed dream
Begging only for a better aim
Away hope loath to stop,
.. a loud wishful cry…

Lamb, what will it take,
Before you see guillotines,
Wait, outside of mass.