I’m lost in Rome,
all the roads have brought me here.
I’m searching for home,
Holding a picture of it near.
I step into the metronome,
I enter with an identity in my pockets.
I speak to the garden gnome,
He’s asking if I’d like to buy a silver locket.
At a legato tempo,
10. The metronome keeps ticking.                                                         ­       
My lips only stay chapped,
Simply because I won’t stop licking them.
“I’m looking for the Lucky Fix.
The Shaved Jaguar told me this is the place.”
The Gnome haggles me up in my face,
“Oh please, I know all the old tricks!
I now control your brain stem.
You have a long way to go! You’ve been trapped!”
At an Allegro tempo;
20. The Metronome keeps tocking.
On the stage,
The Kangaroos are still kick-boxing.
Breaking free of their cage,
The only price is to make you dance.
“I seek to barter for some potions",
They want to know, "So Why have I been cursed?”
The Hooting Owl, offers them a grand notion.
“Keeping thinking that and you might just burst.”
30.The metronome stops on the off-beat, .
“Where is the Lucky Fix?”
I began to grow impatient!
“Don’t you first need your feet?
Your priorities need to be layered bricks.
Your addiction to gratification will lead you to defeat!
You can find the matches in the Fire Station.
I know some of the tricks. That’s a good place to start.”
The Goblins are looking for the heart.
40. With a Presto Tempo
You must reset the Metronome.
TJW 2013
.

symphony arrangement for poetry - personae distinctions of hidden violins and woodwinds, somewhere along the way brass - leaving Cabaret Voltaire (Zurich), moving to the Beat Hotel (9 Rue Gît-le-Cœur, Paris), ending up on the Cowgate (Edinburgh).

when you read newspapers you realise that dinosaurs roam
the land, the fortress of printing press, unlike the printing press
(which was taken seriously from the word go!)
the internet has been largely squandered; you read these
things in newspapers, the evolutionary reaction - ensuring that
among these dinosaurs are also opinion pieces, dinosaurs write accounts of what's happening, batrachotoxin amphibians write
opinions: i.e. what isn't happening: opinions go forward unchecked
and undisputed, added that there are many potions in the cauldron
it's hard to pick one out and dig deeper until both parties are in no position to hold such and such opinion, given the missing
muscle of implementing change or the skeleton to keep
the status quo - but this is a slight deviation from what i
was intending to convey - the old guard of printing is worried
sick that it might be usurped in the long run - it prints damaging
reports about the existence of the internet, looking at it as not
a niche environment, which it technically is - but cats, ****, cats,
****, apparently we all log on to meow and moan -
as a tool of entertainment it's the least thrilling source of
the desired "entertainment", the unscripted nature of this niche environment is what's actually good about it, in that a single
person can become both writer, editor and publisher -
but indeed, the internet has been squandered,
although it improved from what used to be a wholly anonymous
environment peppered with dangers of random encounters -
the infamous chat rooms changed even more to infamous
phone-books: you heard it, stories of cyber bullying - the internet
has been squandered, by all means, trying to save it is a bit like
trying to save the world, or as one Tao principle suggested to me
early on forged in me: the best way you can aid the world
is to forget the world, and let the world forget you.
a film director would say, well, i'm stuck in the house,
i'm thinking of shooting a biopic of Lawrence of Arabia...
i see a desert, a man riding a camel through it...
but you have to then start muling over the facts: you'll have to get funding, get the casting right,  but no one likes shooting in
the desert, you have to get  the catering sorted, you start shooting,
but the camera track ruins the desert, so you have to move
to another part of the desert that's pristine with wind parallel
ridges in the sand, then the studio calls you and says you're
spending too much money, then peter o'toole stumbles
out from the trailer hungover almost everyday; sure, you need inspiration and ideas, but that's only 1% or the whole,
99% is working with people - as a director you're not actually
playing god, you're helping other people, De Niro preferred
mumbling something prior to a scene, but Seymour Hoffman
went into a scene like a crocodile quickly snapping
to the shout of cut! and the clapperboard.
i suppose poetry could be like that too,
99% being the audience and the necessary oration,
that would work - unless of course you'd do the same with
painting - but whereas with painting you're invited to critical
thinking, see an artist next to his painting elaborating on
the themes and use of colours? i don't want to assert common sense
wisdom from one profession and apply the same wisdom
                                      to another with a trans-occupational
relativism: that red           is relative to               crimson -
              but we'll have to do away with lighting,
              darkening and what not, so yes,
red is relative to crimson insofar as we forget lighting
and Edward Hopper. anyone can appreciate the
lazy approach, but i took to some mammoths without the help
of audio books, a reasoning man, not a mob gob emotive conjurer worth a tonne of heckles and haggles - but i guess the dream
through this gamble would be the monetary reward...
you know... after so many years writing for peanuts i have lost
all appetite for spending money beyond what i consider
to be a workable cure for insomnia - i don't have to buy music
any more since i can stream it, i have more privacy without
a mobile phone, all i have is this little brick wall that's stationary
in this virtual jungle on which i scribble - with the radius from
this point being anything ranging from 1 to 6 sensible miles,
beyond 6 and we're talking blisters on feet; can you imagine what
our predecessors could endure in terms of walking? they had hoofs
instead of feet, while we have skin as smooth as a baby's buttock
cheeks on the soles of our feet. the strangeness of modernity:
1. a man drives a car with with a bicycle on the roof, just so he can    
    peddle down a scenic route...
2. the volume of skimmed milk bottle is the same as full fat milk,
    but if you bought full fat milk and added water to it the volume
    would triple (via semi, so yes, triple)...
3. healthy diets - 350% increase in vegan population
   in Britain over the past 10 years - the protein problem
   (once it was the fat problem, low fat yoghurt came about,
    turned everything into a sugar problem), i.e. women aged
    between 19 & 24 requiring to hit the 58 gram daily
    recommendation of protein would have to eat:

everyday foods
chicken breast (251g = 276Kcal)
eggs x4 (460g = 658Kcal)
salmon fillet (291g = 533Kcal)                                 v.

clean-eating foods
quinoa (1,318g = 1,582Kcal)
chia seeds (371g = 1,818Kcal)
                              goji berries (405g = 1,504Kcal)
                              kimchi (3,222g = 863Kcal)
                              tofu (707g = 70Kcal)
                              ******* (384g = 632Kcal)
                              coconut yoghurt (3,422g = 6,844Kcal)
almond milk (14,500ml = 3,625Kcal)
avocado (2,900g = 4,843Kcal)

  as healthy as stuffing turkeys for Thanksgiving, can you imagine
  drinking fourteen, fourteen litres of almond milk?! i don't even
  have to imagine drinking 700ml of whiskey to get the point
  and reach the threshold of the effectiveness of sleeping pills...
  no alcohol, no sleeping pills, better sit it out than take so near  
  ineffective buggers; although as a warning: you might end up
  sleeping for *12 hours - variations on the BMI and previous habits
  of drinking - socially? not so much, medically? primarily -
  not in favour of the anti-alcohol lobby being part of the "safety"  
  guidelines given to the public...
4. charities' costs eat up 78% of donations,
    another 21st century anomaly, effectively dismissed
    by the church's alms giving history depicted in Sistine opulence,
    so no wonder whether in cardinal robes or suited and booted for
    the near-invisible secular religiosity, such poverty of symbolism
    compared with the predecessors, at least back then you'd
    know who to send to the guillotine - and this is how Louis XIV
    treated his courtesans, he made a certain type of clothing
    mandatory, a Versailles school uniform as it were,
    most the the courtesans went bankrupt having to buy the
    clothes, some pieces would be equivalent of a sports car,
    they went bankrupt to remain in the club,
    so they borrowed monkey from Louis, and so Louis kept
    them in his pocket: poor rich people, or necessary
    leeches (as once used in medicine, Louis' absolutism
    being the sole malady, abuse of power necessitates
    paranoia); or to quote Lisolette about the royal *******
    'mouse droppings in pepper.' Philippe (Duc d'Orléans)
    was the transvestite who charged into battle
    and conquered the Dutch, much to his brother's
    shame at having only made conquests in the bed - well
money here, money there, shoving a piano into a concert hall accompanied by an orchestra, something Chopin would never
do not wishing to leave the comforts of salons - although
Metallica dared to.
                                                             ­           welcome to
the age of silica and chameleons (cha cha cha champ a camcorder anyone? well, imagine what scrutiny Narcissus would pay a photograph, imagine giving a photograph to Narcissus and
wonder would he change his behaviour), get fooled by
the adverts once, second time you'll eventually see needing to feed
a charity's bureaucracy rather than an African, hence the migrant
                                                                                                    crisis...
sometimes there are no surprises as to where certain things
originate, Marxism and England, zenith of the empire,
or as historians claim, the decadence of the Romans was their fascination with food prior to the end: ready-meals and
microwaves among cooking shows, currently the daily program
of channels, esp. that of 4 is culinary and horse racing,
all the interesting programs are broadcast when everyone
is about to fall asleep... Saville bankrupted the B.B.C.
posthumously: a game show, "jackpot" of one grand.
- advertisement didn't expect live T.V., the mute button,
the pause button and the fast forward button...
but in a 100 years time if not more they'll look back at us as
having finally exhausted Groundhog Day (starring Bill Murray) -
sure, the technological breakthroughs were great, magical,
but the content? 20th century most probably,
the ideal time of fluid and at ease plagiarism - obviously
exceptions were made, but this walking nightmare
of the exhausted second half of the 20th century caught up
in the 21st century - dialogue replaced by visuals,
clash of the titans (1981) v. clash of the titans (2010) -
the only good bit of the latter is the inclusion of Hades -
it's beautiful, i'm nostalgic to a history i was born in and
belonged to, i'm not a nostalgic Nietzsche or Hölderlin
bumming about singing praises of the Ancient Greeks -
you see, it's close-at-heart nostalgia because i belonged to it,
the infant of it - a peculiar circumstance to be in; or coming
to terms with the first signs of decay: cartoon network's
cow & chicken with i r baboon - have you seen the horrors
of modern cartoons compared with computer graphics?
readies them to  pick up gaming soon after,
given gaming graphics. in summary - some say sitting behind
a computer screen is a sign of a lack of self-assurance,
or confidence, self- anything you want to suffix with, well,
that could be true, but you have a photograph included,
and the days of the typewriter are over - but i could also say
the same about certain brands or shops, are they too lacking
self-confidence to stop their existence on  the high street?
the royal mail delivers junk, you might get 100 junk envelopes
and a christmas  card... o.k. make that 1000 to 10,000 envelopes
of junk and one letter directly addressing you that hasn't been
written using an analogue like

dear mr. / mrs. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

we would like to inform you that your insurance
claim has expired.            etc.

the infancy of this century is what's deceptive, the greatest
deception i can think of - the great health scares and subsequent
over-usage of antibiotics breeding super-bugs in hospitals
anything and everything under the sun - including
that damnable idea that the planet Mars employs people whom
it's attracting into its orbit - earthly geologists must be bewildered
that the only subject of learning from all of man's
capacity to send into space is geology: and on the return flight
home we realised that we'd only be bringing back some arenite
(sandstone); that quote about about painting being 50 years
ahead of writing, the same is true with science fiction and
actual science.

I told you the ticking madness was enough to turn it into a panic race, so detached from all that we are made of, we become nothing we are made from. Now ingesting genetically assembled seeds - that don’t deserve the name seed at all. For seed is life, she belongs to mother earth, not a synthetic corporate beast.

A patented man made pill that sprouts an idea of life, a deception, that when ingested in it’s varied shelved forms and assimilated, draws us further and further away from nature, and our nature, and man, now part robotic manifestation through assimilation alone.

And they come with their chains and capitalist whips to break the backs of the earth reapers and sowers who fed yesterday, who fed their fathers, chaining them into a prison unbreakable, suffocating beneath a system controlled by paper. But surely man, his free thought, seed and crop, is more valuable than paper slavery?

And our brother labours in pain, all but to produce a good, or a bad that the unsuspecting haggles for, all because their growing inner robot has a dogmatic pining to be more than nature itself. He seeks supernatural, he seeks fame and status, and to be a god, but that “god” has no concept of the cosmos he was set forth to know, to praise and to be praised by, so instead he worships artificial idols.  

And the fight continues. And the madness ticks on, debilitating the organic ones; seed robbery after seed robbery, crop seize and acquisition after policy, after policy, after tariff after bill and there is no bailout. It’s all woven into a web of intricacies, leaving no room for natural, no room for humble.

Then they say the meek shall inherit the earth, and I wonder when, and by question alone I am reminded of the ticking madness. I am reminded that natural, never questions time.

two feet shuffle
onto the matted down, stained-brown, maroon-ish
welcome mat while

a head shakes off the dusting of snow
its shaggy hair has collected.

breath billows out of a mouth
like smoke from a burning cigar as

a body, with glasses fogged, fingers frosted,
bundled up in scarfs, and mittens, and layers galore
inches into the grocery store

where a bagboy slouches in a
half-dazed stupor, eyes glued to the clock,

a self-righteous old lady with her
back bent, voice shrill,
haggles the price of soup

and a baggy-eyed mom snaps hushed
chastisements to a *****-faced boy,
with ratty hair falling onto his blushed face.

in this store, customers move slow,
with nowhere to be and nowhere to go

and the holiday jingle heard playing
above them, betrays their heavy hearts
and sunken spirits.

outside, it is cold,
but inside this store,
it is no different.

The charity shop smells of yesterday's arguments
and the mannequins legs' are slimmer than mine.
She poses ethereal in the window,
wears a skirt I outgrew 2 years ago,
he would be on her if she could part her peachy lips.
I look beyond, hidden, watch
while he haggles over the price of his own shirts.
I laugh, I skip and potter home,
my thighs chafe,
I don’t care.

I.

On the surface easily gliding,
  are my hands. I keep on the table
  an ajar carton of cigarettes. Then slowly
  becoming in my pocket, taking form of a hand,
  a crumpled cinema ticket when straightened,
  ironed by plainsight, walks with lines, the end credits roll lasciviously like an estranged lover
   whose face I can almost touch.
  When let go of closure, air thins and I move
  secretly with fluency. This is how objects
  escape my grip.

II.

  In front of the eatery, a transit.
  I had a dream once in a depthless sleep,
  a figure in stilts studded with guilt.
  The face next to me, disquieting the music
   of currencies, naked in sound as the truth shaved
   like a beast. The nearby tarmac resounds with
   another throng of absence. As a substitute
   for beings shackled to duty,
   the oncoming woman assumes theirs,
   borrows their faces of dreariness and ***** a thousand times like white sheets harassed by
   the wind through opened windows.

III.

    Define space as a venue for collision.
    Say when a red-haired woman straddling
    a duffel bag and myself confused as a peripatetic.
    She ascribes her presence to my footing
    and from where she left off, I take form
    of her expired movement.
                     Found strangeness is that space
    is what happens when remembered. But hold no
    bearing and rear contrivance,
     trying to be bold by definition -- space solicits
     the in-betweenness and then transmutes
     an occurence,
             say the volatile shape of a hand when
    clutching and releasing, the fugitive manner of
    feet when avoiding puddles, the unsolicited
    reticence of a troubling question.

IV.

            A man carries a take away and is now
     amongst the populace, waiting under a shed,
     housing a familiar language. Home.
    
      But first, trivialized. Haggles with the cab driver,
    trying to transact a being angled towards home.
    They agree to a fault, money's perfume clinches  the fingers and is given to a calloused hand.
             Air once stale, is now succulent with the
      resonating memory of a child's excited laughter,
      and is now presumably waiting behind a gated
      home. Like the palm of the hand, the number
         of times the vehicle trundles within
     the nearby avenue is the force it enkindles
        with rest. He is home,
     unloosens his clothing. Like a fine specimen
          freed from a vitrine.

I take these sleeping pills, awake hanging from the ceiling by my feet like picture stills, this redrum, this darkroom, my bedroom, it's my free will, mentally ill, mentally I'll devour you cowards and oafishly fish for guts in this cesspool with your backbone, backwards thinking, I'm reversed through life, unnatural, confused and abused, subdued and unglued, if they can't drown an ocean alone, why the **** do I always have this feeling sinking?

I'm a tantrum, a **** hand slammed on a dam like it was a wave's drum, a GI Joe ***, hypocrite lite, a hoplite, tip of the genetic spear like bubblegum, wages of conscience break unevenly, I'm sin, the son, five family's and one sum, a giant fee, fi, fo fum, killing myself to stay alive is the only way I know how, life backwards, that's redrum

Shining, not kings, never royalty, they don't know the meaning of loyalty, sell their own mother, countersue and bet their babies for a king's ransom, love is a price tag that haggles down the value if the right accessory is handsome, ******* them, hand-me-downs, wearing another prince's crowns, being laughed at and lauded for dressing up like fancy clowns, these get-arounds, bury them, up to the neck in dirt mounds, up to here with the vocal chord strumming their tonally familiar sounds, they're ghosts and can watch in silence, because I put them after my life, at the bottom of a boot you wouldn't scrape dog **** off of, housed like a jackknife

I hallucinated the full body apparition of someone that I always hated
a blurry figure before my eyes, I could feel him just over my shoulder
I'd been awake going on four nights, hearing noises, seeing strange sights
shadows that weren't cast from lights, the isolation of being in this place called home
and I was paranoid, probably high, dosed on sleeping pills, and wandering alone
I carried a loaded handgun into the hallway, cleared every room, checked the locks,
because I heard people through the walls, muffled like they were just out there
my own dog looking at me like I'm the one who needs to go outside,
I was scared half out of my mind, the other half already preoccupied
with crazy thoughts, I thought I saw myself, like a smear appearing through a rainy windshield, or a foggy mirror
and I couldn't feel anything real, a small jolt of alertness, forced to register as self-preservation, translation- fear
I was so numb, that it took days for the skin to break
and when it finally settled in, my muscles and my bones began to ache
I know how I felt about that hallucination, once I was rested, grounded, and awake  
how I always feel, why it's always too late
it crept up on me that week I had to completely isolate,
and it was inside of five days, my mind playing tricks on myself, the one person I truly hate.