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D'Arcy Sahn Oct 2014
We are hydrocarbons
We all burn
We are all laughed at
And we all get our turn

We produce our own enemies
We almost smother ourselves in sadness
We all release CO2
When we die from this poem's badness

We all want to be superior
We all want to be the equalizer
We want to be leerier
Without being the sympathizer

We smite and are smited
We hurt and we heal
We spite and are spited
And have a tenuous relationship with what's real

We are hydrocarbons
We are equal despite what we aspire
And if you don't agree
I'll light you on fire
Constructive criticism appreciated.
Wade Redfearn Sep 2018
The first settlers to the area called the Lumber River Drowning Creek. The river got its name for its dark, swift-moving waters. In 1809, the North Carolina state legislature changed the name of Drowning Creek to the Lumber River. The headwaters are still referred to as Drowning Creek.

Three p.m. on a Sunday.
Anxiously hungry, I stay dry, out of the pool’s cold water,
taking the light, dripping into my pages.
A city with a white face blank as a bust
peers over my shoulder.
Wildflowers on the roads. Planes circle from west,
come down steeply and out of sight.
A pinkness rises in my breast and arms:
wet as the drowned, my eyes sting with sweat.
Over the useless chimneys a bank of cloud piles up.
There is something terrible in the sky, but it keeps breaking.
Another is dead. Fentanyl. Sister of a friend, rarely seen.
A hand reaches everywhere to pass over eyes and mouths.
A glowing wound opens in heaven.
A mirror out of doors draws a gyre of oak seeds no one watches,
in the clear pool now sunless and black.

Bitter water freezes the muscles and I am far from shore.
I paddle in the shallows, near the wooden jail.
The water reflects a taut rope,
feet hanging in the breeze singing mercy
at the site of the last public hanging in the state.
A part-white fugitive with an extorted confession,
loved by the poor, dumb enough to get himself captured,
lonely on this side of authority: a world he has never lived in
foisting itself on the world he has -
only now, to steal his drunken life, then gone again.

1871 - Henderson Oxendine, one of the notorious gang of outlaws who for some time have infested Robeson County, N. C., committing ****** and robbery, and otherwise setting defiance to the laws, was hung at Lumberton, on Friday last in the presence of a large assemblage. His execution took place a very few days after his conviction, and his death occurred almost without a struggle.

Today, the town square collapses as if scorched
by the whiskey he drank that morning to still himself,
folds itself up like Amazing Grace is finished.
A plinth is laid
in the shadow of his feet, sticky with pine,
here where the water sickens with roots.
Where the canoe overturned. Where the broken oar floated and fell.
Where the snake lives, and teethes on bark,
waiting for another uncle.

Where the tobacco waves near drying barns rusted like horseshoes
and cotton studs the ground like the cropped hair of the buried.
Where schoolchildren take the afternoon
to trim the kudzu growing between the bodies of slaves.
Where appetite is met with flood and fat
and a clinic for the heart.
Where barges took chips of tar to port,
for money that no one ever saw.

Tar sticks the heel but isn’t courage.
Tar seals the hulls -
binds the planks -
builds the road.
Tar, fiery on the tongue, heavy as bad blood in the family -
dead to glue the dead together to secure the living.
Tar on the roofs, pouring heat.
Tar is a dark brown or black viscous liquid of hydrocarbons and free carbon,
obtained from a wide variety of organic materials
through destructive distillation.
Tar in the lungs will one day go as hard as a five-cent candy.

Liberty Food Mart
Cheapest Prices on Cigarettes
Parliament $22.50/carton
Marlboro $27.50/carton

The white-bibbed slaughterhouse Hmong hunch down the steps
of an old school bus with no air conditioner,
rush into the cool of the supermarket.
They pick clean the vegetables, flee with woven bags bulging.
What were they promised?
Air conditioning.
And what did they receive?
Chickenshit on the wind; a dead river they can't understand
with a name it gained from killing.

Truth:
A man was flung onto a fencepost and died in a front yard down the street.
A girl with a grudge in her eyes slipped a razorblade from her teeth and ended recess.
I once saw an Indian murdered for stealing a twelve-foot ladder.
The red line indicating heart disease grows higher and higher.
The red line indicating cardiovascular mortality grows higher and higher.
The red line indicating motor vehicle deaths grows higher and higher.
I burn with the desire to leave.

The stories make us full baskets of dark. No death troubles me.
Not the girl's blood, inert, tickled by opiates,
not the masked arson of the law;
not the smell of drywall as it rots,
or the door of the safe falling from its hinges,
or the chassis of cars, airborne over the rise by the planetarium,
three classmates plunging wide-eyed in the river’s icy arc –
absent from prom, still struggling to free themselves from their seatbelts -
the gunsmoke at the home invasion,
the tenement bisected by flood,
the cattle lowing, gelded
by agriculture students on a field trip.

The air contains skin and mud.
The galvanized barns, long empty, cough up
their dust of rotten feed, dry tobacco.
Men kneel in the tilled rows,
to pick up nails off the ground
still splashed with the blood of their makers.

You Never Sausage a Place
(You’re Always a ****** at Pedro’s!)
South of the Border – Fireworks, Motel & Rides
Exit 9: 10mi.

Drunkards in Dickies will tell you the roads are straight enough
that the drive home will not bend away from them.
Look in the woods to see by lamplight
two girls filling each other's mouths with smoke.
Hear a friendly command:
boys loosening a tire, stuck in the gut of a dog.
Turn on the radio between towns of two thousand
and hear the tiny voice of an AM preacher,
sharing the airwaves of country dark
with some chords plucked from a guitar.
Taste this water thick with tannin
and tell me that trees do not feel pain.
I would be a mausoleum for these thousands
if I only had the room.

I sealed myself against the flood.
Bodies knock against my eaves:
a clutch of cats drowned in a crawlspace,
an old woman bereft with a vase of pennies,
her dead son in her living room costumed as the black Jesus,
the ***** oil of a Chinese restaurant
dancing on top of black water.
A flow gauge spins its tin wheel
endlessly above the bloated dead,
and I will pretend not to be sick at dinner.

Misery now, a struggle ahead for Robeson County after flooding from Hurricane Matthew
LUMBERTON
After years of things leaving Robeson County – manufacturing plants, jobs, payrolls, people – something finally came in, and what was it but more misery?

I said a prayer to the city:
make me a figure in a figure,
solvent, owed and owing.
Take my jute sacks of wristbones,
my sheaves and sheaves of fealty,
the smell of the forest from my feet.
Weigh me only by my purse.
A slim woman with a college degree,
a rented room without the black wings
of palmetto roaches fleeing the damp:
I saw the calm white towers and subscribed.
No ingrate, I saved a space for the lost.
They filled it once, twice, and kept on,
eating greasy flesh straight from the bone,
craning their heads to ask a prayer for them instead.

Downtown later in the easy dark,
three college boys in foam cowboy hats shout in poor Spanish.
They press into the night and the night presses into them.
They will go home when they have to.
Under the bridge lit in violet,
a folding chair is draped in a ***** blanket.
A grubby pair of tennis shoes lay beneath, no feet inside.
Iced tea seeps from a chewed cup.
I pass a bar lit like Christmas.
A mute and pretty face full of indoor light
makes a promise I see through a window.
I pay obscene rents to find out if it is true,
in this nation tied together with gallows-rope,
thumbing its codex of virtues.
Considering this just recently got rejected and I'm free to publish it, and also considering that the town this poem describes is subject once again to a deluge whose damage promises to be worse than before, it seemed like a suitable time to post it. If you've enjoyed it, please think about making a small donation to the North Carolina Disaster Relief Fund at the URL below:
https://governor.nc.gov/donate-florence-recovery
Mateuš Conrad Dec 2016
if you can find c. g. jung writing an answer to the biblical Hiob, i can be found writing this... or as the Lad Bible states: be your superficial you... so when she's not her superficial self... you can just play the awkward monotone speaking caveman that you weren't before she played you that superficial card of hers to tone down your interests.

you know why i'm fascinated with schizophrenics?
primarily because they are concerned with
an inorganic medical condition,
there are, absolutely, no reasons to suggests they
are organically prone to premature degeneracy,
they are what the Alzheimer old man calls an angel,
and what the "angel" experiences from time to time...
to cite a non-typical schizoid experience -
a splinter in the mind?
when i wrote my previous poem, i was listening
to the song *the parting glass
throughout,
on and on and on... the rhythm took over...
and when the "poem" was finished i retracted myself
into my room and first played auld lang syne
(with lyrics and English translation)
...
                           and then... the pure instrumental
of knee-deep-bagpie... bagpipes, sure, horrid,
screeching drowning-lungs of magpie
cackling cut short into a carbonated highland water...
     oh don't worry, what this comes down to
is personal experience, such negations of ease
are not like the black plague, or a.i.d.s.,
they don't come into contact with purely-riddle
human incompetence... it takes more than that...
certain conditions are not viral...
you can't interpreted them as political malevolence
akin to a political movement... primarily because
the numbers don't add up...
                    the complexity of thought is
the complexity of regarding the mind as an abstract
of the brain, given the brain has no accuracies
concerning abstraction when stated against being automated
to a pair of kidneys... i too wish for a La La Land sometimes...
but that's not the reason people allow ***** donations...
     but you know, it really gripped me,
i wrote that poem, listening to the parting glass,
and felt nothing, nothing... because i was so
formulated to write what i wrote...
  i wrote the last bit, walked into my room,
and played the second version of auld lang syne...
the royal scots dragoon guards pure instrumental...
   and you get to weep these cold tears
after an insomniac cold shivers getting warmer with whiskey...
              and whimper and bite your bottom lips...
because you're hardly a woman fainting
and the drama isn't in you...
               and it's actual tears...
people laugh and cry saharan tears, meaning: it never
rains over it...   i see Sahara as the ancient version
of the Himalayan mountain range, suddenly reduced
because god is fickle and well, aren't we all?
           if any of us are alive to read or speak such
encodings... there will be a desert made from
the Himalayas that will be called the Himalaya -
but that's really being optimistic.
       there used to be mountains, mountains in
north Africa, Gandalf! but they crumbled in deserts!
where once a mountain range, subsequently a desert...
where now a desert, once a mountain range.
can i please get a taxi to leave this current
history and Darwinistic revisionism of it as telling
us ape Adam had more psychology about him than
Charles XIV? i want to hear the geological version
of Darwinism! but am i hearing any of it? n'ah ah.
       so yes, upon hearing the scotch dragoon guards
pipe a full whiskey sodden breath into the
         bagpi - i heard the word counter to my scrambled
narrative... king... king?!
                   which is what's bewildering about
a medical term deemed premature dementia...
   it's an organic impossibility...
but given society is an inorganic organism
and all our socio-political mechanisms aren't exactly
organic, there might be some sense in this piquant
dabble in an auditory hallucinogenic experience -
which, evidently, people find frightening,
since they occupy defining their thinking with
hearing so much, and when seeing a homeless man
think so little...
                     logic? a particular arrangement of words
that does not provide kind rubrics for the testimony of
the many...
                    i can hallucinate this auditory "addition"
and competently go on my daily business,
or my nightly business finishing a bottle of scottish amber...
some people cannot...
                 what i see it western society predicating
their poor knowledge of Alzheimer's as if searching
for some genius to explain what happens to the abstract
functions of what the brain represents
                 in terms of how the brain and abstraction
can't be cleanly separated, i.e. to treat the degeneracy
of the brain as succumbed to, but not succumbing to
the elaborated foundations of the "brain"
within the trans-physical functions of the "brain"
within a framework of memory, vocabulary, memory.
people first attribute the brain with too much
           concern for abstraction when in fast the driving
force for abstraction is the now-vogue zeitgeist
"psyche does not exist" -
                            and when the brain degenerates like
a heart or a kidney can... people start to freak
out propping out a Frankenstein revival that brain
cannot in-act upon...
                                 they told us the brain is fat...
          then they tell us only 0%, or fat-free yoghurts are
good... isn't the case for the epidemic of dementia
due to the fact that we're censoring fat?
what feeds the brain? fat! what are we censoring from
our diets? fat! fat free ******* yoghurt!
                             where does the modern epidemic
stem from? censoring fat! you anorexic ******* morons!
  you know why i put extra fat in the way i cook
meals, you know what orthodox cooks tend to
like a sizzle of a lump of lard? brain food...
     and yes, some call it eating a lot of nuts...
well then... fry me a ribs-eye steak on a handful of
cashew nuts you crazy *******!
            this is what drives me crazy concerning
auditory hallucinogenic experiences...
there are no drugs that you could ever sell that people
would buy to experience an auditory hallucination...
primarily because people made thought
   an auditory experience...
                  that's the norm, i'm not talking Walt Disney
here... and people enjoy music because it feeds the heart
in a way averse to images that feed the libido
or dreaming...
    the point being, my "hallucinatory" experience lasted
for less than a second... some ***** on l.s.d. trips
for half a day because he finds modern movies boring
and finally gets to appreciate cubist contortion
mechanisations... i can do more damage with a second's
worth of "auditory" hallucination than that little
hippy can do away with 12 hours, and only end up
writing a haiku thinking he can suddenly conjure up
spirits of Shinto like some Gilgamesh *** Bruce Springsteen;
then he shaves his hair and travels to Mongolia
to learn the index against the lips motorboating
harmonica... and i end up saying: thank you;
cos it wouldn't be twangy without that kind of a tranquiliser
to stabilise excitement beyond encoding sounds.
          i can tell you how ******-up my internal
narrative has become, so i'm defeatist,
here's how it looks like when i get agitated...
               writing on a white flag...
      oh look: wavy! wavy! i'm waving it...
going boats full of nuts and bananas!
             you ever hear the story of a psychiatrist
jumping on a table and barking when a conscription
  cadet tried to fake being mad?
      she did what i just wrote and asked H. Clinton
to reiterate on the campaign trail.
                    inauguration 2017:
   i solemnly swear, that H. Clinton barked like a ruffian
poodle on the campaign trail.
  beside the point though, schizophrenia is an inorganic
manifestation of an actual organic degeneracy -
it's a negation-of-ease for dangerous people...
     people who probably have a music taste outside
the top 40 best selling albums (let alone singles)...
                   and they're quick to pick up on this grey area
concerning premature depression...
                it's trendy these days... people who are melancholic
are people who are like Homer, wrote the Odyssey
went blind from making too much heroism from
      the cannibalism at the gates of Troy and couldn't
handle telling a single lie after having written such an epic...
   or as Virgil convened: Paris didn't escape,
Aeneid did... no one knows what happened to Paris,
       probably choked on a raisin or something:
it's ancient history, if you're not going to talk about it
in a callous manner, then be prepared for careless mannerisms:
pout, **** *** cheek, shelfie!
               what i am seeing is this quote:
a butterfly on the Galapagos Islands... a Tornado in
Colorado... the poetics of quantum physics,
or misplaced potentials of counter-quantifiable
simultaneous counter-interpretations...
    the butterfly effect? under the umbrella corporate
otherwise known, from ancient times: a metaphor.
hey, we started reading into hydrocarbons,
there's no way to talk easy for us...
                           for all my love for one inspiration,
i lost my love for him when he said that not tying your
shoelaces (i.e. spelling) was because he thought it was
indoctrination... you know who i mean: Mr. Chow Chewski...
   spelling? that's like tying your shoelaces!
         question is... who would ingest a hallucinogenic
drug that didn't utilise the multi-coloured world to
an excessive amount to be prescribed, say, an U.V.
phosphorescent spectrum of seeing... when, given all
that... sound occupies this realm of b & w?
               who could create an auditory hallucinogenic?
can you imagine it?
                             most people with a weakened cognitive
membrane would go nuts... as the case has been proven
many a times...
        but given the fact that no such hallucinogenic exists,
or that "auditory" / cognitive hallucinations are
disregarded even though Descartes stressed this
   notion of a substance / thought, and an extension /
       sensual disparities with regards to cohesive uniformity,
i.e. regarding over-stressing a particular sense
      and never reaching a former cohesion...
           can only mean a circumstance later described
by Kant within the framework of the noumenon -
    i.e. perhaps you've seen too much, but heard too little...
perhaps you've tasted too much, but had barely a sniff of
                  more...
        the original thought when exposed to a cohesion
of uniformed senses, experiencing a discohesion of
             a presupposed sensual "uniformity",
returns back into a form of thought, i.e. an extension...
                only because the thing in question is a
presupposition, not a supposition that can be countered
with a proposition, i.e. since we all made mistakes
presupposing, we have become prone to propositions to
suppose otherwise... in terse terms: invent politics.
so what i termed "auditory" and "hallucination"
and conflated them in a prefix of cognitive-, in consolidation
i meant to say that: once all presuppositions (thoughts)
disappear by the miraculous ape that man either is
or wishes himself to still be... and we deem to say:
   reality...                 we only have suppositions (extensions)
               that appear...
                         by the miraculous ape that man never
was and wishes himself to nonetheless be:
  in that consolidatory ref. to the last trinity of Cartesian
thought: substance - in the former the formation
of will... in the latter the complete lack of it -
                              to the simpler scenarios,
we already have knowledge of prisons and asylums...
            because internalising such possible scenarios
never leaves the many to be grafting such possibilities
with enough calm as to persevere for the sole purpose
of understanding, as what point can a noumenon-unit
enter the argument if not from a reflex
                       as this continued narration explains...
none of this was reflected upon...
reflection in such circumstances usually means weaving
a machete at your neighbour...
                                  the noumenon-unit
the ping-pong factor in all of this is a reflex action...
         not a reflective action...
               i am no king no more than i am a pauper...
   now imagine if i tripped for 12 hours on l.s.d.,
having extracted so much, from an "auditory" "hallucination",
that, in the realm of the mind, is neither a minute,
nor a second, nor a nanosecond...
               it's unitary equivalent is simply that of: a word.
Mateuš Conrad Mar 2019
.how did the political "debate" ever become surmount to include musicians? from what i've seen? of the KEXP radio session...  Ashish Vyas had the most fun from the session... i always admired the bass players more than those ****-offs running out of rhythm guitar sessions... bass, a tier above the drums... masturbator-grand-master-soloist... i guess this is one of those nights where i drink more than i write... elephant's ******* choking me to come... oh well... not even a Decalogue will save me... the political art is no art to begin with, curtains... all i'm seeing if curtains... and households filled with retired personel... and curtains... curtains but not blinds... it's abhorrent to have to listen to music with hushed bass guitar... notably metallica... apart from devil's dance and... where's the bass guitar? the rhythm guitar section overpowers the music... fine fine, have your solo *******, but don't silence the bass guitar with the rhythm guitar, i need to hear the drums translated via the bass guitar into the rhythm guitar... solo guitar and vocals all you want... it's like... the lessons to be learned from jazz, when all the fire prime instruments are allowed to solo... went, "missing"... i need the bass, man... frantic bass & drum genre type of music will not do lollipops for me... what was the alternative? dub-step? well... vex'd & distance... burial... who were the others? i don't remember... don't make me cite skrillex: white privelege man! yeah... at least with rabbit teeth missing, doing that well known party trick! i don't like bands that have a knack at an over-emphasis of the rhythm guitar, who neglect the bass guitar... it's so counter the jazz-inheritance... tool: grand bass, red hot chilli peppers, silverchair... i need that smoothing out layer of sound that manifests itself in a bass... a layer of sound just below the rhythm guitar and a tier above the base (not bass) of the african drum borrow... bāß... base (not bass)... yes, it's not supposed to look pretty: a phonetic antithesis... as most "things" in english...

             mind you... did i mention how heidegger
has a foot in the door?
       oh... i didn't? did i?
     the reflexive and the reflective quadratic...
the reflex of conscience "vs."
the reflectiveness of consciousness...
       heidegger:
                  language - only if speech has acquired
the highest univocity of the word does it become
strong for the hidden play of its essential
   multivocity (as withdrawn from all "logic"),
of which poets and thinkers alone are capable,
in their own respective modes and their own
directions of sovereignty.

  of the few lyrics i've entertained these passing
"days"?
             the black keys: lonely boy -
              i got a love that keeps me waiting...
borrowing from Kafka i guess:
      in that case, i’ll miss the thing by waiting for it.
   no?
   guess there's no "oops" where these words
come from...
              
    with the "passive" circumstance of the faculty
of memory...
                two tiers of memory:
the reflexive memory type,
the scholastic rubric type...
  1 x 4 = 4, a + b + a +c + u + s = instrument =
counting... etc.,
            that's the reflexive memory type...
a scholastic rubric...
      dyktando...
but memory also occupies
the reflective parameters...
          which involve personality...
a sort of memory dissociated from schooling,
and more, associated with:
disinhibiting any chances of succumbing
to dementia's grinding machine
of the mortal circus...

  the reflexive memory storage bank is
the buffer...
the "placebo": nay... the safety mechanism...
but... too much education,
too much pointless education,
and the erosion of the reflective memory
storage bank: this is not a buffer,
this is not a something equipped with
a "safety mechanism"...
        given that a self is perpetuated
within the confines of
a constant conflict with the "self"...
   a and italics / the and "ambiguity commas"...

well, there's always a place to start...
i find of like philosophy as being
a rigour associated with a satisfactory
form of vocab.,
       namely?
i can use the associated words bound
to a sentence with confidance...
unlike a ****** fiction writer,
sometimes dabbling into loan words
from a thesaurus, to, invoke:
an intelligence superiority...
  don't worry...
  when people lend themselves
to use a thesaurus, having exhausted
their adjective knowledge... it shows...

come on... a background in chemistry nouns?
3,5-methylhexane... you think?
that's the remains of a saxon past in english...
in chemistry...
germans spell like dr. faustus to begin with,
they, compound...
        the remains of a germanic past in
the current state of english shrapnel still
lives... in chemistry...
        hydrocarbons...
                  usually met with a hypen:
hydro-carbons...
       siebentausendzweihundertvierundfünfzig
(7,254)...
well, very german: what a waste of not employing
punctuation marks (', -) when it came
to the caterpillar 189, 819:
methionylthreonylthreonylglutaminylarginyl...isoleucine,

Me­thionylthreonylthreonylglutaminylarginyltyrosylglutamylserylleucy­lphenylalanylalanylglutaminylleucyllysylglutamylarginyllysylgluta­mylglycylalanylphenylalanylvalylprolylphenylalanylvalylthreonylle­ucylglycylaspartylprolylglycylisoleucylglutamylglutaminylserylleu­cyllysylisoleucylaspartylthreonylleucylisoleucylglutamylalanylgly­cylalanylaspartylalanylleucylglutamylleucylglycylisoleucylprolylp­henylalanylserylaspartylprolylleucylalanylaspartylglycylprolylthr­eonylisoleucylglutaminylasparaginylalanylthreonylleucyl arginylalanylphenylalanylalanylalanylglycylvalylthreonylprolylala­nylglutaminylcysteinylphenylalanylglutamylmethionylleucylalanylle­ucylisoleucylarginylglutaminyllysylhistidylprolylthreonylisoleucy­lprolylisoleucylglycylleucylleucylmethionyltyrosylalanylasparagin­ylleucylvalylphenylalanylasparaginyllysylglycylisoleucylaspartylg­lutamylphenylalanyltyrosylalanylglutaminylcysteinylglutamyllysylv­alylglycylvalylaspartylserylvalylleucylvalylalanylaspartylvalylpr­olylvalylglutaminylglutamylserylalanylprolylphenylalanylarg inylglutaminylalanylalanylleucylarginylhistidylasparaginylvalylal­anylprolylisoleucylphenylalanylisoleuc…

or just read the end of james joyce's ulysses
or jean-paul sarte's iron in the soul...
you do have to insert shrapenl punctuation
into this word...

but these are the last remains of the english language
being associated with a germanic origin:
compounding words...
             esp. in chemistry...
                

as any drunk would state,
to suffice...

    what was it that the luftwaffe
prescribed for the night raids
on London?

   and what did isis fighters
be prescribed?

    amphetamines?
n'oh!
   (minus the extended omega:
oooooo enough time
for a katy perry song,
an afternoon shower,
a slap in the face,
and then a few punches,
hey, jerking off became
boring)...

   so the british,
and a few polacks doing their
r.a.f. bit beat the germans
because?
   oh... **** no...
they were ingesting
an impediment factor,
durg, ****,
drunk, numb-skulled...

    we're talking counter
measure to the "enchanced"
mensch...
    high on amphetamines...
insomniac, but still going...
i guess the loci of
the amphetamine adventure
had to relocate to the anti-ego
focus of the phallus
in the variation of viagara...

****...
i care more for my giggles
and a friar tuck physiognomy...
seriously...
   it's more important than mere
gymnastics of
a freudian "metaphor"...
  ha ha...
   i guess conversation is
also allowed...
   try keeping that up...
given that most men are
******* into a solipsism...

     date nights... m'ah ah ha ha ha...
i figured that i don't
need french intellectuals to
redefine absurdity,
or german philosophers
to "redefine" existentialism,
i just needed to leech
off an nativistic english
"public"...

                      what the ruling
class spews:
   i reinterpret...
                  simple, 1 + 1 = 2...
crux, numbers,
   bounce back...
echo...
     compliment to the language...
as i stood in the shower thinking...
well isn't modern gaming
slightly "ingenious"...
money piggy...

or... reversed...
    provided the unlimited time
of experience...
no constraints,
just a game within a game,
like sims 3: making a sim
play a video game...
wormhole paradox
      and a brain shattering moment,
a jolt,

         these modern "free" games?
well... at least if you
do not invest in them,
are... games mostly associated with
time...
time is the game...

   whoever gets ****** into
the money laundering schemes
of these games,
forgot to read the cheat walkthroughs
akin to final fantasy VII,
because of homework,
and... Saturday mornings.

   **** air guitar:
here's to air drumming to posit
a point...

          the allies drunk their pint
of whiskey, slightly debilitated,
without the circumstance of feeding
a feeling of superiority,
the germans over-inflated
their superiority complex with
amphetamines...

         ergo?
    i'm either proper drunk, or just plain dumb,
or... it's related to listen, repeat,
listen, repeat: katy perry
  (sucker for POP!)....

      never mind...

games used to be fun,
games used to lead to a completion,
tenchu, that was fun,
final fantasy VII...
but this current,
money-sucker of an experience?
well... sure...
now games have reached
an anti checkmate conundrum
which it is...
because, the games are "free"...

           apparently time,
is perceived as a non-commodity...
tell that to someone stuck
in traffic...
      time: the "elder" flimsy
              construct of relativism...

try not giggling
while exchanging whislting to
either the british grenadier march song,
and the french la marseillaise...

   it's like eating pork liver with onions
fry funny...
    or at least a stew of chicken
hearts... tight tender little *******...

but modern gaming is just that...
ingenious counter measure
to the old school variation
of gaming,
    games... without fiction,
games, without script...
    continued perpetuation
of engagement "syndrome"...

     thank god,
i'm pretty sure that if i went beyond
owning a PS1,
i wouldn't have spotted this,
and have a narrative subsequently,
for the worth any sort
of compromise...

ergo? i drink...
   eh... i need to dumb down...
it wouldn't be fair otherwise...
it's not so easy,
to acquire a culture,
a psychology,
a mentality,
   and then...
     to ****... (grimmace, burp,
         snigger) it all away...

**** me, the flute always
gets me...
          i mean...
every time i hear that flute...
my feet at rambling,
itching to tap along...

   well of course it wasn't
the ******* jazzy clarinet,
was it?!
  tell that to the broad
who perfect a *******...
see if she comes back
as smart,
as smart to comply with
the intricacies
of playing, the ******* clarinet.

p.s.
aud lang syne: the only song,
of all time...
shakespeare seems
pale by comparison,
"side-note"...

          broad vs. brode,
******* giggles in the afternoon.
Courier Pigeon Mar 2012
My days are filled
With Quadratic functions
And Hydrocarbons.
I've had little time for
Billy Collins.
Or sleep, for that matter.

I'm thankful for the little
Moments like this.
When the professor can't find
His power-point.
Or a lunch hour where
I eat something besides text books.

I need time to reflect.
Find myself under all this stress
Take a breath and
Play a quick game of
"Where's Waldo"
With my soul.

Scribble some words
Or a picture.
Or maybe,
Just stare out the window
Contemplating the willow tree
And how her limbs struggle to
Kiss the ground.
Robert Ronnow Feb 2016
Negligible morsel of biomass
my fat belly, formerly abs
insignificant yet it occupies me
hourly while bored or hungry.

Fat is what? a picture
of despair, giving up caring
or man out of balance, other
side of the world's starving

mass, case of the soul's malnutrition
industrial agriculture, television
supermarkets, vacations, hydrocarbons
and the grid. Electricity, urban

traffic jams, photons at final
rest. Sugars synthesized, abundant
plastics to carry them home in.
Into your house and into your mirror.

Memorizing the periodic table
and learning the calculus makes one
no thinner. Walking the mountain
in heat and cold and rain, alone

or in fire crews should inhibit.
And a healthy fear of death. A laugh
a day at *** and pain and fate
which renews the biomass I hate.
www.ronnowpoetry.com
Smile
Cry            Leaf
      Dance
Sniff                      ­          Hair
                             Eat
            Tasty                                Climb
      ­                            Sleep
Choose                         ­                           Fluff
                          Fumes
­Nitrogen
                                                        ­    Hydrocarbons
                                             Fire
Burn
                     Death
Fall                                  Scream
              ­    Cat
                                                         ­             Kyet
Storm
                  Turmoil
               ­                     Pencil Javelin
****                                                     ­   Save
                                      Love               ­             Hate
             Dog
                                                    Squirrel
Sob
                   Laugh
See if you can write a poem out of these words. In this order. Add #slothwords so people can find them.
Marshal Gebbie Jul 2011
Age old forests compressed
To thick primeval ooze
Interred between layers
Of sediments fused
By time and tonnage
To hard papa rock
Concealing CRUDE OILS’
Subterranean shock.

Shocking in value
Escalating with time,
Shocking in politics
Which equates to a crime,
Implications shocking
When you stop to see
That resource limitations
Have diminished quickly.

Consider the clout
When a fast world of cars
Without hydrocarbons
Would seize up like stars,
Stars, in the sense
Of their immovable grace,
For a fuel less planet
Would IMMOBILIZE this place.

Abrupt immobility
To bring chaos and mess
And the utter lost beauty
Of a girl in a dress,
And the time and space
To smell a good rose
Instead brittle chaos
Malevolently  posed.
Bleak desolation
Of the world we hold dear
And a massive regression
To impoverished fear.

Marshalg
Looking thru the hour glass
4 July 2011
**Only way to deliver this poem is SLAM and with vehemence!!
Bryce Dec 2018
Funny how it is.

A bright light, morphing through the clouds

The soft touch of droplets, melting into shingles

The only time you're really able to look.

Wandering along the roads and banding together, they are everywhere at once!

a political movement--libertines, belligerent against the rule of continuous airs

The princely stream that does not love them

Raised into fists, falling to bombard a defenseless floor, the poor baby of collateral

In it there is hope for the cloud

the ground does not mind being wetted again

Halfway around the world the deserts are still empty and warm, where the sands of oceans taste wind

On islands the land is a pinprick between a cloudy sea, it is green and bleeding and drinks in the light

All the baby birds of earth look up into the raining sky, asking for?

And given no answers with godly warmth.


I dream to show you this world of mine-- the one all too unreal and divine

You are a moment of rain, rapidly becoming Ingrained within the concrete
Lost in the forever of this place

I am greedy and wanting to leave my mark, I invent hydrocarbons to build smarter oxygen drops

they one day become us

They always become us

I am an early storm, violent and unkempt-- I seek immediate retribution,
I ravage the lands

With no further to go, I will dissipate

Precipitate

And give the light space to show.
Bryce Jan 2019
When we stopped at the mission
The cracked Adobe was a message from god
Saying,

Centuries are just cracks in the stone, my world runs on diamonds and hydrocarbons
On charming interactions
On moments of synchronicity
On rubbing out heat to be dissatisfied into the void
To give feed for the new ones
In the feral zodiacs.

She frowned at this answer, said she wanted something less ethereal,
Something tight to clutch
Like the Parthenon's Corinthian columns
Or the great gables of a Neverending tabernacle
She was a greedy and godly girl

I was stupified, staring intently at the cracks
Asking what strange beings were created in between
Tracing the canyon routes with my hands, pressing the palm against the grooves
They were warm with lost sunshine, they had dust and life and creatures of God that sought not the gaze of us, but the eternal love of the dark

I have neglected many times this fact of life, pretending to be a stone in a world of pulsating flesh
Wanting to be abused eternally in exchange for experience

To be Boulder--
With granite cheeks and dusted neck
With cobalt eyes and chiseled chest
Tectonic movement, sparring feet
And left forever towards the seas.
Mateuš Conrad Oct 2017
i find that the natives, speak such an unremarkable
language of their own, that the language itself -
without persona or
        a "non grata",
once in a while: demands
a foreigner to speak it -
since the natives have become
so complacent using it -
turning a fork into a saw
sort of speak...
                a screwdriver
into a hammer...
              there are these glorious
times in the history of man,
where the natives speak
their native tongue:
so unimaginably dull -
lullaby-prone by some fiction
of their present surroundings -
the english speak the sort
of english that pakistanis acquire -
they're the insipid diatribe
           exhaustion of
the most beautifully proficient
  allocation of sound: akin
to the sparrow...
              at least the german be
stern schoolmaster akin to the crow -
but the english?
         you start losing respect
for the natives, when you speak
        better native, than the natives.
the last remains of an anglo-saxon
past remain in chemistry -
otherwise it's the optical-ease /
way out regarding the to be said:
hyphenated words -
   hydrocarbons - in english would be
hydro-carbons -
     you learn your syllable count
with chemical names:
       calciumoxychloride...
  but then there are the patriots -
        native-men-tongue
             (heimatmenschenzunge);
by the time i'm dead, i'll know the teuton
inside-out, and make sure to put him
back together: outside in.
- and yes, to reiterate,
the only "thing" about the english
being remotely saxon, is how
anti-german english has become,
optical spaghetti of the elongated
german word -
       which in english = minus the hyphen...
the english decided on less:
the german custard word scrabble -
and more on norman shrapnel -
i.e. hydro-philic          -          or hydrophilic -
   stage 1 (oxford)               stage 2 (cambridge);
and then the populace can write
a meme, a "phone number" to nowhere.
There sleeps in the seeping ounce
of the tree burned to carbon
that made charcoal
a chance for me to take any
and all scraps of paper
I can find in my room
and put them to good use

There sleeps in the back of my mind
fragments of light
and sensations of summer
crystallizing into thought

"I want to hike four trails, around an island." I
say
but the speedy winding and the great illusion of time ticks me down
"I can only hike three"

The fourth I'll sit at its base, with my scrappy notebooks and sketch.
the burned vine will create trees    
      what immaculate a thought
to "good use"
the trunk that we took to shred and make this sheet,
to "good use", too
it'll be the paper under the black soot
when I draw

here sleeps my mind in the dark coal
ever luminous below the incomplete combustion of
hydrocarbons and the explosive nature
of untamed
emotions

"But I want to hike four trails.
Maybe, I'll have to come back"
Wade Redfearn May 2018
A Saturday afternoon in Austin, in mid-March.
A dinner scheduled, a girl with colored hair
says she has enjoyed our conversation, and will see me soon.
A stack of books piled up to my knee,
and three hours to sit in the sun, if it lasts.

There is something terrible in the sky, but it keeps breaking.
Over the chimneys a bank of cloud piles up; one flies overhead and I'm forced to reread a page gone grey.
A pinkness is rising in my arms, breast, ears,
and my sweat drips onto split pages.
I am wet like the drowned and my eyes sting.
A message from my sister informs me of another overdose.
A hand reaches everywhere to pass over eyes and mouths.
A glowing wound opens in heaven.

A mirror out of doors draws a gyre of oak seeds no one watches,
in the clear pool now black as a cypress swamp.

Bitter water freezes the muscles and I am far from shore.
The water reflects a taut rope.
The water reflects a jail in the shallowest bend
that will one day be remade to stanch the water of poison.
Feet hang in the breeze singing mercy
at the site of the last public hanging in the state.
Today, the very area dilapidates as if scorched
by the whiskey he drank that morning to still himself.
A bandit, maybe, but loved by the poor, and now
lonely, at this end of authority: a world he has never lived in
foisting itself on the world he has -
only now, to steal his drunken life, then gone again.

Years later, a plinth is laid
in the shadow of his piney feet,
here where the water sickens with roots.
Where the canoe overturned. Where the oar was broken.
Where the snake lives, and teethes on bark,
waiting for another uncle. Where schoolchildren take the afternoon
to trim the kudzu growing between the bodies of slaves.
Where appetite is met with flood and fat
and a clinic for the heart,
the best in the region.

Where the tobacco waves near drying barns rusted like horseshoes.
Where the boats took tar down to port, and money back
that no one ever saw.

  Tar binds the heel but isn't courage.
  Tar seals the hull -
  sticks the planks -
  made the roads.
  Tar is a dark brown or black viscous liquid of hydrocarbons and free carbon, obtained from a wide variety of organic materials through destructive distillation.
  Tar in the lungs will one day go as hard as a five-cent candy.

Liberty Food Mart
Cheapest Prices on Cigarettes
Marlboro $22.50/carton

The white-bibbed slaughterhouse Hmong hunch down the steps
of an old school bus with no air conditioner. They pick clean the
vegetables, flee with woven bags bulging.
What were they promised?
Air conditioning.
And what did they receive?
Chickenshit on the wind; a dead river they can't understand
with a name it gained from killing.

Truth:
A man was flung onto a fencepost and died in a front yard down the street.
A woman was set upon by an owl and cracked her head on the driveway.
I once saw an Indian murdered for stealing a twelve-foot ladder.
The red line indicating heart disease grows higher and higher.
The red line indicating cardiovascular mortality grows higher and higher.
The red line indicating motor vehicle deaths grows higher and higher.
*I burn with the desire to leave.

The stories make us full baskets of dark. No death troubles me.
Not the bored blood excited by opiates;
not the nighttime arson of the law;
not the smell of drywall rotting or the door of the robbed safe falling off its hinges;
not the chassis of teenaged cars gone high over the bump,
over the bend, plunging wide-eyed in the river's icy arc.

If you would like to understand,
look in the woods to see by lamplight
two girls filling each other's mouths with smoke.
Hear the shout of boys loosening a tire,
stuck in the gut of a dog.  
Turn on the radio between towns of two thousand
and hear the tiny voice of an AM preacher, sharing the airwaves of country dark with some chords plucked from a guitar.
Drink this water, bitter as it is: and if they tell you that trees cannot feel pain, you will have learned not believe them.
I would be a mausoleum for these thousands
if I only had the room.

Here in the city, a mute and pretty face makes a promise I see through a window. I pay obscene rents to find out if it is true, in this nation tied together with gallows-rope, with its codex of virtues.
First draft.
Mateuš Conrad Oct 2018
yes, i love german, esp. for coining phrases,
alas, i'm not so much into memes -
but... when it comes to words?

look, the lost aspect of the german language
that still functions in English?
i can tell you where to find it...

shh... psst... don't tell anyone...
chemistry!
             where else can you find the germanic
fudge packaging of a word?
esp. with the syllable count,
but...         no ******* hyphen!

all the chemical names,
the hydrocarbons, the shampoo packaging
names...
    they all stem from the anglo-saxon rooting...
and since...
i'm an anglo-slav...

the NPC affair... ha ha...
                    ha ha... i mean...
as the Jews would say: isn't that the, the point
making an emphasis of
the forced stut-stut-stutter?

welcome!
to the second tier of the metaphysics of
eugenics!
       certain genes are not allowed,
certain thoughts and their subsequent
egos need to be sterilized...

so i thought...
   oh forget George Orwell for the minute,
stop reading these people's bible...
you don't actually have a plan
reading that work,
it's already implemented,
you will not find an antithesis
to the agenda in that book,
you have to look elsewhere...
   spotting the same recurrence...
it's no longer fun...
                    it's like train-spotting...
yes, and again something will come up,
and it will be predictable,
i hate predictability...

group think, double think,
wrong think, right think are obsolete
by now...

two new terms:
     and it has to be in german...
mind you...
          i'm not particularly versed in
this compound...
  does a noun, or an adverb,
or a pronoun work best with a verb?
the three options:

   (noun) neindenken
   (adverb) nichtdenken
  (pronoun) keindenken

maybe we can work on the interchange...
mind you, group "think"...
last time i checked... hives do not think,
thinking is not an exclusive "sentiment",
and in terms of inclusiveness:
you can't have thinking,
that's not how inclusiveness works...

hence?
                bienenstocksprechen:
hive-talk....
                    yes, you can find remnants
of the Anglo-Saxons in the English
language, the down-trodden Germanic
tongue, enveloped in shrapnel kind
of spelling when... alternatively to memes,
kernwörter are formed...

the Anglo-Saxon imprint is still in use...
it's incubated in the language of
chemistry...
                       just read the label of
ingredients of a shampoo bottle...
    the last of the Saxons rest within.

— The End —