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Mateuš Conrad Jan 2017
it's twenty past four,
i have spent the past hour watching
the Vierschanzentournee -
like someone in England might
have stayed up, watching
the n.f.l. or a boxing match...
i bought johnny walker black
at the airport and i sat there
watching history.
                        can there be a modernised
version of ecce ****?
             apart from dietery requirements
and angst against Wagner
and all that pompous rattle
invoked in the original by Herr N.?
i guess there can be...
    there i was, on my hiatus,
going to bed almost every single night
trying to sleep-palm a chess set
or a keyboard, but both seemed out
of reach...
                   this, again, a forceful
resignation toward the past day,
              it will never be perfect,
the first approach will always be
rusty, it has been three weeks
since i last entered this spiderweb,
of snappy convo and even snappier
overload of democratic practises;
and before me: endless sleepless
nights, and countless miniature
fürhers... and thus this fact:
  which i thought was worth avoiding...
but then i did buy a used laptop for
550zł, (given the exchange rate,
that's roughly £100... the downside?
everything is in paul-leash (no,
that's not an americanism of drawl
and draw and slobber and Houdini's
last trick) - hence i might actually
sport a cravat, moccasins and a
velvet dinner jacket...
                                   and when
Rodin employed his minions to
    chisel away at chapters from Dante,
Dumas (have you ever seen his
omni coprus?) like some pseudo-Pope
employed heavy-drinking monks
to write out his stories for salon bored
ladies until their hands were
playing shadow-arthritis games
         that children would applaud:
rabbit! rabbit! poor monks, exhausted
from having scribbled and
chicken scratched chicken blood into
papyrus wanted nothing more than
to grow their nails so they couldn't
hold a quill... no matter! Dumas would
say... we'll sharpen your nails,
vol. 25 of the comte bourbon &
the flamingo dance, and Rambo XVI
were both written by the unfortunate
monks...
              once again: there's
autobiography... and there's an autobiography...
  to write an autobiography
so that no biography is worth writing...
perhaps if i used paragraphs:
i could be considered: "serious".
      then there's that thought:
thought as origin of biographics -
           nothing to be preserved in
it having happened, returning from
Stansted in a taxi:
  only a thought:
   philosophy cannot claim anything
to be counter-intuitive in its foundation,
to me that conjures up an analogue:
the guillotine is the counter-intuitive
foundation of the french revolution...
Ivan the terrible threw dogs off the Kremlin
wall, and gauged out the eyes of the St. Basil's
architect... and since then
children in Poland loved to play:
throw a bunch of marbles into a little hole...
evidently ancient Egypt resounded
in capricious cappuccino Milan...
or: Míllánò! nurse! nurse! the syllable-scalpel!
herr doctor, is that defined by diacritical
marks? yes sister.
                  **** in boots to suit you toppling
too...  and may i add:
             how ever did i digress from
the mundane reality of: second-hand laptop,
Windows in Polish... every single word
in english: red tape, underlined...
if i have dyslexia, it'll show like a crow's
feather on a dove -
and when it does, you can start calling
me Chief Apache Pixie Jack...
or how you have black and white as
polar, the rainbow... and then
nights in grey satin by the bothersome blues.
this will be defined by lacklustre
and hopping along... then, vaguely:
a romance?
                        it was supposed to
be a hiatus... hiatus...
         3 weeks of what became defined by
anything but such hopes...
   some people span a literary career of
20 years... take 3 years to write a book...
         it takes me 3 years to keep
a single thought...
          can you really repress biographic
accounts these days?
                                 well... if written
par with the times, i guess it's as much
fun as questioning whether
     the following two are very much akin:
1 + 2 + 3 = 5 - 10 + 20 x 2 = 30
is the same sort of arithmetic as when
you do the "math"of writing out
a word like onomatopoeia...
the hanging vowels of babylon...
          if anything, then this -
             as it also could be: on the scrapheap
of memory, a dazzling iron-clad
      heftiness of pulverising vector -
a Gucci demanding a pulpit and an
avocado on toast... champagne and
squid... or as the Michelin criteria were
revealed: rubber tire and squid di Calabria...
tell the two apart... you'll get a republic
passport... who would have thought
that rubber tires were the benchmark,
the ph 7 of foody palettes across the
azure blob, with some ashen and fern
bits in between.
   but this is me, testing new equipment...
having spent 3 weeks on two kinds
of detox... alcoholic... oh the whiskey...
and the ski jumping gavrons...
   plush? sparrels in a rolling dozen
of figurative barrels - and more sensibly?
kestrels, petted by stiff, castrated
   hippos of the sky, akin to astronomy
naming blobs: pi-7773-quatro-offshoot-of
Juno...
                 or a boo boo 747...
about as gracious as a **** launched
off a trebuchet at the dome of the rock...
gimmicky the sliding down...
hot wedge like swallowing a sword...
                3 weeks on this vegetarian
diet... detox alcohol detox 21st century
phonebook...
    rusty first imprints from the waiting game...
but my my...
               wasn't it fun...
                  Jan Kazimierz Waza
(the finicky cardinal)
                                       as presented by
Horatio... no no: John Ignatius Kraszewski...
   (Copernicus was apparently Prussia)...
which means Ignacy was Bella Belyy Kraшevsky...
      which makes me wonder:
why is the violin the pauper's? instrument
or the instrument of hoped-for empathy?
any one would tell you:
as also the accordion player on a tree...
well... roof here, roof there:
try doing ballerina's tip toe on a gothic
spiral tip of a cathedral...
and yes, the gargoyles... sing-along:
silent night...
                       holy night...
again: this was supposed to be a hiatus...
dogmatic statements... and....
    apodictic statements...
                      in truth, most people are
size 0 with their diet of words....
      where that turkey of a tongue to
fatten 'im up? well... ask the shepherds
of Damashek when Saladin will come
to rattle the blacksmith to wield a sword.
a thousand maidens faint...
   (if this was a cabaret voltaire play,
it would happen...
    and the two will never win:
one has a crop of hair on the scalp,
but spider-legs of a beard on the chin...
the other has precious silverware on
the scalp... and 21st Amazonian nomads
peeping out from between his
beard)... well...
not bad for a break from hiatus...
the whiskey is good,
                    the breadth has already been
tested...
   oh yes, the dreaded notes...
   this was supposed to be a:
a 3 week break, bam! a whole session
of writing it out in one go,
beginning with: the first question
i was asked as the Western Warsaw coach station:
do Kijova? i.e. to Kiev?
       oh sure, plenty of Ukranian merchants
down the western side of Warsaw...
   a Ukranian family of only women
sitting eating 3 while chickens among other
things: polskie chlopachki nie placzy...
and if you're lucky! you might even spot
a Mongolian!
                    it was never going to be an easy
transition...
i left Poland when it was -18°C...
                   sunny... bitter...
   walking on snow was like either
hearing a meow purr every time the foot impressed
itself on the snow, or i was wearing latex...
                 and to come into this abysmall
+7°C "winter" that England is?
   gothica... rain in winter... only in England...
and yes, if i were born here
i would be making awckward jokes about
the rain... but i wasn't.... i inherited it
from some unforseen discourse about
     Saint Gorbachev and how bloodless it all
became... prized piglets of Kazakh:
   dollar baby koo chi go go west and buys
usés a Lambro-jini... plight of the Sinking Belgian:
and all he did was sail to Congo on a waffle...
   pity the man! pity the man!
    i have no romance with England...
the grey skies and the constant rain
are like toenails to my heart... they're just there...
but you just see me walk in that pine
forest... in my natural element...
                              -18°C...
why did only German poets philosophise?
   and why did only Shakespeare make
poetry indistinguishable from philosophy and
why did the French turn to pastries
                                rather than the dry
and cough infused pages of bookworm time-donning
yella spaniel sepia waggle waggle
                  Sorbone          
   & Pavlov... pretty girls and pretty boys in
the Erasmus programme... to Rome!
to Antwerp! to Brioche! ... to a brioche...
                      Bruges!
                                               Kiev aflame...
Cracow a mind-game...
            Prague merely an INXS postcard from
the early 1990s...
                    Berlin a wall...
   Munich a litre of gods' **** and company of a dog:
of a dog's intuitive measure of man's
competence with regards to a desire for gods...
                   Lvov... thankfully Lvov
will never be the Istambul of Byzantines' nostalgia...
   so too Vilno...
                                                well...
that's for starters.
Rebekah Jan 2019
An awkward stance, a lopsided walk
leaning to the left-hand side,
most likely a result of supporting a tall and lanky silhouette.
The heftiness of your clumsy steps become louder and louder as you come closer,
and as your head tilts, and your shoulders relax,
I see the reflection of my smitten face in your glasses.

Your hair, ***** blond,
and often resembling a birds nest,
has been ruffled just the way I like it.

Your tired wee eyes,
a bi-product of your constant desire (?) to read,
is my favourite sight to see.

Your baggy jumper
hangs off your skinny frame,
and carries the smell of you.
A hint of  Calvin Klein, some musk,
and just the smallest bit of damp (a small chuckle)
but I'd have it no other way.

That smell, jumper, hair, and lopsided walk,
they're safety.
Especially those eyes,
those huge, soft eyes.
They're home for me now.

So make a cup of tea,
and pull up a chair,
because if home be where I lay my hat,
I have laid mine quite certainly.

— The End —