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Liam C Calhoun Jul 2015
I extolled them as they went about their
Menial tasks in suits of silk;
Sunday bests amidst the concrete, the earth,
The broken shards of
Bamboo splintered skin, hiding interiors
                          And further, the broken mirrors of
                          The broken memories of the
                          Broken histories upon the
                          Broken backs become names wrought ancient.
Though further from fractured, a family calls,
Beholden to the absolute intent, but one wish –
Eternity amongst the bountiful brethren left behind
Atop tea-brimmed Mountains and a
One malevolent, revered benevolent,
Mao.

One more saga prerequisite this newer dynasty red –
                          Witness the
                          Wives huddled plowshares,
                          The daughter scribbled arithmetic
                          And sons assumed thrones to legacy.

I scrutinize soiled  – smoke amid pear peelings,
The dirtied – unscathed and archaic,
So very fatigued – just one more nail,
For his eternity, with scratch and
Sliver of blood, a sanctity upon chin
                          Beyond cradled hammer,
                          Hand hugging thumb,
                          Thumb beyond nail, iron or the
                          Heart impaled homesick;
But I and hand asserting tie, freshly pressed,
Almost gleaming with an embezzled prestige –
Born unto Arcadia, a puzzle near complete
Continued to run, with only second’s pause to admire,
So very far from the fields of, “father,” or first blink,
While Sunday’s best weep, work and wither.

This man with joint autographed, “end,” and
                          Soon to be mound, history wrought dust,
                          A chipped Henan ceramic
                          And hours in attempt to breach;
                          Behold the back of Chen.

*The title of this piece was inspired by observing constructions workers wearing suits we'd typically wear for an interview. That being said, my venture in China is near an end - years in the making. What's next? Ecuador? Japan? Morocco? Montana? Either way, I could never thank China enough for all that'd become naked before I and my pilgrimage christened, "world."
Mateuš Conrad Jan 2020
anyone who has been in this position
will tell you:
              when you start reading philosophy
books, well...
   there's not much a psychologist
or a psychiatrist can really help you with...
after all: psychology is pop philosophy,
it's an off-shoot of philosophy,
       and that's not some pompous
affirmation of the subject matter,
            it just is, what it is,
                 blatantly it's rather problematic,
if the h'american education system
introduces philosophy in high school...
you should really discover philosophy
aged 21, at least 21...
        hell, alcohol and *** can come before,
as they naturally will...
but i have a sharp aversion with regards
to teaching teenagers any philosophy...
again: what an over-used term:
   "philosophy" - esp. in the climate
of self-help gurus...
                  philosophy is not a subject
that fixes ****... it complicates life...
   and when life is already complicated:
the only aid is to at least
fortify your mind...
                     rarely a life uncomplicated
with an uncomplicated mind...
but such life exists...
  nonetheless...
                  these days philosophy lies
in the shallow grave of psychology...
                 psychology just seems to be
a pursuit, a cascade of schematism,
    oh yes... schematism...
           schematism is the new scholasticism,
on note, that medieval system becomes
more and more appealing...
   without jumping to any conclusions...
hard to pick up random facts,
unshakeable facts for a befitting narrative...
i mean, the usual suspects are there:
the big bang, darwinism, world war II...
but there is no "real" narrative
      for so many of us...
                        unless from mouth to mouth...
but from a mouth you've never heard
speak?
          a distant voice that has no power
to resonate?
                 in my hands i hold two books...
history of germany 1918 - 2000...
           modern history is so dry...
                      people in this book are so
unimportant upon a retrospective reading,
even ****** is akin to a dwarf...
    since the "concern" is germany...
             history books, a great genre,
when dealing with individuals,
    esp. medieval individuals...
       for what is history?
                         an incremental seduction
by minor events toward a memorable
crux, a single: outstanding culmination
zenith / sigma...
                           the summa summarum
of here and now.
   will it be considered "****" to have
a fetish for the german tongue,
after all, west saxon, english,
   is the offspring of altmanndeutsche
(would i have a fetish for russian?
   i don't think so, i'm too entwined in english)
alles in allem auf hier und jetzt...
    again: heidegger's dasein seems to be
forward looking: rather than inward looking...

so, in my other hand?
     jim bradbury's biography of...
    philip augustus: king of france 1180 - 1223...
a mighty book... but more a mighty person
invoked...

what is to justify man's desire for happiness,
for the content life?
                        the more i ever felt the relief
of a contentment with life:
         the more it passed me by,
                     i was more or less asleep than
awake.

         eh! the current canvas of history via
the mainstream application bores me,
jumping between the two genesēs of
the big bang (yeah, in a vacuum, good luck
playing a violin up there,
with someone reciprocrating what
eventually looks like a mime) and darwinism...
it's congesting: custard for a brain -
      vanillesoße zum ein(e) gehirn -
out of the blue, a question -
    is it the same in german as in english,
regarding the indefinite article?
        i.e. a tree
                        an amber stone
         ein gehrin
                 or eine gehrin,
         the grapheme question...
  are two vowels allowed to mingle again?
   i.e.               æmblem
                       well... doesn't that become
a directive? an indirect article composed
of itself and a noun becomes definitive,
a definite article? as far as i'm aware...
there are no consonant graphemes...
sure... you can have SZ (SH) reduced to
a caron S (hiding the Z like a hebrew
might hide a vowel) i.e. Š...
                                       just a thought...

funny that... after my first psychotic
trip (mild drug, marijuana, so hardly
a point breaker) - i once studied chemistry,
i was semi-good at mathematics...
but then... my language skills / interests
exploded...
                     it became and has remained
a fixation...

  mind you, if you're still in high school
and are taking up majors,
and are thinking about furthering your
language skills?
               flat chance of you achieving
your satisfaction taking pure english lessons...
i took history...
     and history? well, you're still taking
an english major, but a major in a science,
at least all the history books have
a gratifying narrative...
              but in terms of history per se?
etymology...
                 how words arrived,
and how words morphed...
         guilty! i like to confine myself
to the sort of history i find to be bound
to a comprehesive retreat...
           big **** darwinism and all its
regressive ontological tactic of explanation
is one thing, the big bang is another thing
also...
               but at least i can return
to the history span that begins,
   and ends... with phonetic encoding...
the birth of thought,
when you could begin to shut up
without an empty bath's worth of the head,
but all the plastic ducks and foam
in your head, and itchy finger tips...
greedy buggers who could only be
satisfied with an alphabet,
and puzzles of words, and later sentences...

just give me a bottle of whiskey,
a decent album (akin to wooden shjips V)
and i'll sing like the kind of sparrow
you only hear at night...

and all this current ******* of "m'ah opinion",
my opinion this, my opinion that,
that "grand" constructions,
             surely it would be easier for
the phallus to find a ******
     than a tongue to find the dialectical
insertion point of the whole "my" opinion...
well, not really, every time i think of the act,
i always found the insert point
to be below my original intent,
what with women having
   to seemingly parallel coccyx bones
either side of their pelvis...
            the frontal deceptive coccyx
bone just above the v'ah-g-g...
            eh... amateur... even with prostitutes...
but this whole: it's my opinion!
it's my opinion! well, you'd be hopeful
to entertain a dialectic also,
apparently that's not the case:
give, "my" opinion insinuates:
     it cannot be debated, it cannot be changed,
no other person can entertain it,
what a primitive defence mechanism...
even poisonous frogs have
a better defence mechanism...
            again: i don't really own anything
in this world,
   i'm only guarding it, but i don't own it:
the everyday story of every single
antique...

  again, back into a "critique" of history
as a literary genre,
               i own a few first editions,
     the biography of philip augustus is one
of them: 1998 edition, first,
which is beside the point...
            i'm sure that life in medieval europe
was harsh...
but at least you had peacock characters,
rather than this, moden, bland c.c.t.v.
reality t.v. personalities...
              oh of course modern life
has all the perks... standing in line...
               but there's no way of replacing
an adventurous ambition with
complacency and comfort...
plus, they had such great names!
        peaches geldof (rest in peace)...
peaches?!
               compared to bertran de bron?
joscius?           conrad of montferrat?
  saladin & the ayyubid empire?
       hell, the smaller the tribe,
  the better the name...
             the angevins, the capetians,
the merovingians!
         now?        eh: zee fwench.
boo'ring...
   even a bull wouldn't charge at
the colour red even if you wanted him
to.

again: these days you can rely on
people who know the facts...
   and factoid checking is all we ever do
these days, being always "right"...
facts overshadow the story we're about
to tell...
            a bull charges at head:
because he / it sees a honing pointer
of: there's something "missing"...
              daltonism "vs." protanopia...
i once had a high school fwend who
laughed... at this catholic high school...
purple blazers were yellow to him...
who needs l.s.d. then?

       once again... a medieval history book?
as a genre?
                so many stories...
but there is no a priori factual check
impetus...
     the facts are a posteriori...
  what is a priori? the story...
                          and why wouldn't
philip augustus be overlooked?
given the fwench rhe-vou-lú-çion?!
****! T gone missing! T gone missing!
the H is a surd, but it shoved itself
past the cue, elbows high!      
          
  the battle of bouvines (bou-veens,
or: bou-v'ah)
                     depends...
                how selective we "must" become
to make choices from such
an impossible spectrum of events...
after all... muslims readily cite and remember
the crusades, even to this day...
hush hush the sacking of baghdad by
the mongol horde...
for the library was burned and
the skulls were stacked!
hush hush about the first defeat
of the mongols by the mamluk slaves
in egypt... who weren't mohammedians
to an extent of being slaves...

you almost stand there,
bewildered... what about the jihad
into mongolia...
well at least go and help your brothers
out in Xinjiang and Henan!
why isn't the botherhood attempting
to jidad their way:
jihad with the chinese communist party?

hush hush... let's adore the palm trees
lining avenue des Champs-Élysées...
let's sit back... procreate for a while...
eat the good food...
let's sit back and procreate...
the 2010s was a good year for fear and
tarantulla bite-numbing escapades...
let's just sit and procreate...
let's become lazy... chant with the Tehran
zindiqs ****'ites! deaf to h'america
and we've conquered London and...
just sit back... because... we've earned it...
we have satisfied ourselves with
the blood of the ***** (kuffar)...
allah the almighty will bless us in
our respite concerning those Persian
zindiqs! the people of the desert with but
one book have conquered!

true indeed: where a jihad would be
even deemed "justifiable"...
in cha-cha-china... where muslims are
being persecuted... London! London!
we need more in London...
well this whole: muslim brotherhood
and the whole muhammad ali thing...
malcolm x... only worked...
but this is the chinese doing it to their own...
no need to intervene and bring
the good people back into the ummah...
    
  hush hush, hush hush, hush hush...
cherry picking history, are we?
    well...            let's cherry pick together!
look at this garden of time:
plenty of picks, plenty of beginnings!
at this point: a certain amount of history
can become fiction,
and not in a bad way...
it can become the basis for "studying"
archetypes...
             funny how time treats those
who experience it...
    it mutates them...
                   and to no purpose
of appealing to the general public,
  so much can and has happened in my life:
and yet...
         nothing is worth the curator's knowledge
of commentary,
  the status of laureate:
   i'd sooner be found, bound to the pleasure
of shooting dead ducks floating in
the water with a slig-shot...
       than, whatever, the aspiration for
the post, deserves;
  g.c.s.e. allowed poetics can deal with that...

again:
   why is poetry so overtly scrutinißed?
no one makes so many notes regarding prose...
but then poetry is being analyßed?
out come the scalpels, the weights,
the whole forensic scrutiny!
        10 words are expanded into
a 10,000 word essay...
      gay science my ***...
                   it's the most over-scrutinißed
form of language,
no wonder people are intimidated
by it... who would want to write in a medium
that has so much scrutiny hovering
above it: and no, it's not a ******* halo
or a laurel wreath!

           there's only so much meaning
that can be derived from a sentence,
before the pun, dries out,
  before the metaphor, dries out,
before all these bogus over-stressed
ars poetica identifiers via "technique" become
exhausted, and what you're left with,
is the ancient art of narrative...
  
  yeah, sure sure, i too wish my narrative
"skills" were better...
             i'm streuengehirn...
              if i really wanted to write
a ******* mathematical rubric of:
1 x 1 = 1
1 x 2 = 2
1 x 3 = 3...            i'd be currently writing
a YA vampire romance trilogy...
do i look like someone who's going to write
a YA vampire romance trilogy?!

           eh... back when you could respect
a homosexual akin to william burroughs...
back to a tomorrow's worth of respecting
a homosexual akin to douglas murray...
   or that gay sitcom starring
           ian mckellen & derek jacobi...

                       two old **** talking:
        eloquence and ettiquete...
                     now, that was fun...
i too wish some perv shoved his ****
through my ***, picked up my hands...
and transformed by idle tongue
to present a, stage performance worthy
of an encore...
                             alas...
   given the current climate...
          i'm stuck with the sort of gays
the old gays would probably be ashamed of...
so much for the adventure and
          the... courage... of feeding a pleasure
of "something" going in, rather than coming out...

irritable bowel syndrome from time to time,
i honestly enjoy taking a **** too much,
so much so that i find the male
****** to be overrated.

post- scriptum musing:

favourite past-time?
catching a mosquito by the *****
while wearing boxing gloves.  
  
don't know how drunk doesn't
translate into shy...
or how the former translates
into an antidote for the latter
(&
   also
     bound to italics) somehow...

a fool's idle wondering
equating itself with
all the world
   and the men invested in it:
ambitions, adventures,

            so... who's going to follow
suite in gratifying this "grand"
errand?
             surrounded by unshakeable
cliffs of "knowledge" of facts...
what story is to be told,
without a fear of plagiarißm?
since there is a fear:
it implies... the story is not worth
passing on,
not unless the newly-born arrive
and are born from a foreign
body, not alligned
   to the organic allignement
of continuity...
  pass what may pass...
               once again: arriving
at the jargon babylon deposit of
the fuel for a will to live,
                             as shared universally.

— The End —