Here is a primer on the history of poetry

Features of Modernism

To varying extents, writing of the Modernist period exhibits these features:

1. experimentation

belief that previous writing was stereotyped and inadequate
ceaseless technical innovation, sometimes for its own sake
originality: deviation from the norm, or from usual reader expectations
ruthless rejection of the past, even iconoclasm

2. anti-realism

sacralisation of art, which must represent itself, not something beyond preference for allusion (often private) rather than description
world seen through the artist's inner feelings and mental states
themes and vantage points chosen to question the conventional view
use of myth and unconscious forces rather than motivations of conventional plot

3. individualism

promotion of the artist's viewpoint, at the expense of the communal
cultivation of an individual consciousness, which alone is the final arbiter
estrangement from religion, nature, science, economy or social mechanisms
maintenance of a wary intellectual independence
artists and not society should judge the arts: extreme self-consciousness
search for the primary image, devoid of comment: stream of consciousness
exclusiveness, an aristocracy of the avant-garde

4. intellectualism

writing more cerebral than emotional
work is tentative, analytical and fragmentary, more posing questions more than answering them
cool observation: viewpoints and characters detached and depersonalized
open-ended work, not finished, nor aiming at formal perfection
involuted: the subject is often act of writing itself and not the ostensible referent

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Expressionism

Expressionism was a phase of twentieth-century writing that rejected naturalism and romanticism to express important inner truths. The style was generally declamatory or even apocalyptic, endeavoring to awaken the fears and aspirations that belong to all men, and which European civilization had rendered effete or inauthentic. The movement drew on Rimbaud and Nietzsche, and was best represented by German poetry of the 1910-20 period. Benn, Becher, Heym, Lasker-Schüler, Stadler, Stramm, Schnack and Werfel are its characteristic proponents, {1} though Trakl is the best known to English readers. {2} {3}

Like most movements, there was little of a manifesto, or consensus of beliefs and programmes. Many German poets were distrustful of contemporary society — particularly its commercial and capitalist attitudes — though others again saw technology as the escape from a perceived "crisis in the old order". Expressionism was very heterogeneous, touching base with Imagism, Vorticism, Futurism, Dadaism and early Surrealism, many of which crop up in English, French, Russian and Italian poetry of the period. Political attitudes tended to the revolutionary, and technique was overtly experimental. Nonetheless, for all the images of death and destruction, sometimes mixed with messianic utopianism, there was also a tone of resignation, a sadness of "the evening lands" as Spengler called them.

Expressionism also applies to painting, and here the characteristics are more illuminating. The label refers to painting that uses visual gestures to transmit emotions and emotionally charged messages. In the expressive work of Michelangelo and El Greco, for example, the content remains of first importance, but content is overshadowed by technique in such later artists as van Gogh, Ensor and Munch. By the mid twentieth-century even this attenuated content had been replaced by abstract painterly qualities — by the sheer scale and dimensions of the work, by colour and shape, by the verve of the brushwork and other effects.

Expressionism often coincided with rapid social change. Germany, after suffering the horrors of the First World War, and ineffectual governments afterwards, fragmented into violently opposed political movements, each with their antagonistic coteries and milieu. The painting of these groups was very variable, but often showed a mixture of aggression and naivety. Understandably unpopular with the establishment  — denounced as degenerate by the Nazis — the style also met with mixed reactions from the picture-buying public. It seemed to question what the middle classes stood for: convention, decency, professional expertise. A great sobbing child had been let loose in the artist's studio, and the results seemed elementally challenging. Perhaps German painting was returning to its Nordic roots, to small communities, apocalyptic visions, monotone starkness and anguished introspection.

What could poetry achieve in its turn? Could it use some equivalent to visual gestures, i.e. concentrate on aspects of the craft of poetry, and to the exclusion of content? Poetry can never be wholly abstract, a pure poetry bereft of content. But clearly there would be a rejection of naturalism. To represent anything faithfully requires considerable skill, and such skill was what the Expressionists were determined to avoid. That would call on traditions that were not Nordic, and that were not sufficiently opposed to bourgeois values for the writer's individuality to escape subversion. Raw power had to tap something deeper and more universal.

Hence the turn inward to private torments. Poets became the judges of poetry, since only they knew the value of originating emotions. Intensity was essential.  Artists had to believe passionately in their responses, and find ways of purifying and deepening those responses — through working practices, lifestyles, and philosophies. Freud was becoming popular, and his investigations into dreams, hallucinations and paranoia offered a rich field of exploration. Artists would have to glory in their isolation, moreover, and turn their anger and frustration at being overlooked into a belief in their own genius. Finally, there would be a need to pull down and start afresh, even though that contributed to a gradual breakdown in the social fabric and the apocalypse of the Second World War.

Expressionism is still with us. Commerce has invaded bohemia, and created an elaborate body of theory to justify, support and overtake what might otherwise appear infantile and irrational. And if traditional art cannot be pure emotional expression, then a new art would have to be forged. Such poetry would not be an intoxication of life (Nietzsche's phrase) and still less its sanctification.  Great strains on the creative process were inevitable, moreover, as they were in Georg Trakl's case, who committed suicide shortly after writing the haunting and beautiful piece given below

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SYMBOLIST POETS
symbolism in poetry

Symbolism in literature was a complex movement that deliberately extended the evocative power of words to express the feelings, sensations and states of mind that lie beyond everyday awareness. The open-ended symbols created by Charles Baudelaire (1821-67) brought the invisible into being through the visible, and linked the invisible through other sensory perceptions, notably smell and sound. Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-98), the high priest of the French movement, theorized that symbols were of two types. One was created by the projection of inner feelings onto the world outside. The other existed as nascent words that slowly permeated the consciousness and expressed a state of mind initially unknown to their originator.

None of this came about without cultivation, and indeed dedication. Poets focused on the inner life. They explored strange cults and countries. They wrote in allusive, enigmatic, musical and ambiguous styles. Rimbaud deranged his senses and declared "Je est un autre". Von Hofmannstahl created his own language. Valéry retired from the world as a private secretary, before returning to a mastery of traditional French verse. Rilke renounced wife and human society to be attentive to the message when it came.

Not all were great theoreticians or technicians, but the two interests tended to go together, in Mallarmé most of all. He painstakingly developed his art of suggestion, what he called his "fictions". Rare words were introduced, syntactical intricacies, private associations and baffling images. Metonymy replaced metaphor as symbol, and was in turn replaced by single words which opened in imagination to multiple levels of signification. Time was suspended, and the usual supports of plot and narrative removed. Even the implied poet faded away, and there were then only objects, enigmatically introduced but somehow made right and necessary by verse skill. Music indeed was the condition to which poetry aspired, and Verlaine, Jimenez and Valéry were among many who concentrated efforts to that end.

So appeared a dichotomy between the inner and outer lives. In actuality, poets led humdrum existences, but what they described was rich and often illicit: the festering beauties of courtesans and dance-hall entertainers; far away countries and their native peoples; a world-weariness that came with drugs, isolation, alcohol and bought ***. Much was mixed up in this movement — decadence, aestheticism, romanticism, and the occult — but its isms had a rational purpose, which is still pertinent. In what way are these poets different from our own sixties generation? Or from the young today: clubbing, experimenting with relationships and drugs, backpacking to distant parts? And was the mixing of sensory perceptions so very novel or irrational? Synaesthesia was used by the Greek poets, and indeed has a properly documented basis in brain physiology.

What of the intellectual bases, which are not commonly presented as matters that should engage the contemporary mind, still less the writing poet? Symbolism was built on nebulous and somewhat dubious notions: it inspired beautiful and historically important work: it is now dead: that might be the blunt summary. But Symbolist poetry was not empty of content, indeed expressed matters of great interest to continental philosophers, then and now. The contents of consciousness were the concern of Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), and he developed a terminology later employed by Heidegger (1889-1976), the Existentialists and hermeneutics. Current theories on metaphor and brain functioning extend these concepts, and offer a rapprochement between impersonal science and irrational literary theory.

So why has the Symbolism legacy dwindled into its current narrow concepts? Denied influence in the everyday world, poets turned inward, to private thoughts, associations and the unconscious. Like good Marxist intellectuals they policed the area they arrogated to themselves, and sought to correct and purify the language that would evoke its powers. Syntax was rearranged by Mallarmé. Rhythm, rhyme and stanza patterning were loosened or rejected. Words were purged of past associations (Modernism), of non-visual associations (Imagism), of histories of usage (Futurism), of social restraint (Dadaism) and of practical purpose (Surrealism). By a sort of belated Romanticism, poetry was returned to the exploration of the inner lands of the irrational. Even Postmodernism, with its bric-a-brac of received media images and current vulgarisms, ensures that gaps are left for the emerging unconscious to engage our interest

......................

.
IMAGIST POETRY
imagist poetry

Even by twentieth-century standards, Imagism was soon over. In 1912 Ezra Pound published the Complete Poetical Works of its founder, T.E. Hulme (five short poems) and by 1917 the movement, then overseen by Amy Lowell, had run its course. {1} {2} {3} {4} {5} The output in all amounted to a few score poems, and none of these captured the public's heart. Why the importance?

First there are the personalities involved — notably Ezra Pound, James Joyce, William Carlos Williams {6} {7} {8} {9} — who became famous later. If ever the (continuing) importance to poets of networking, of being involved in movements from their inception, is attested, it is in these early days of post-Victorian revolt.

Then there are the manifestos of the movement, which became the cornerstones of Modernism, responsible for a much taught in universities until recently, and for the difficulties poets still find themselves in. The Imagists stressed clarity, exactness and concreteness of detail. Their aims, briefly set out, were that:

1. Content should be presented directly, through specific images where possible.
2. Every word should be functional, with nothing included that was not essential to the effect intended.
3. Rhythm should be composed by the musical phrase rather than the metronome.

Also understood — if not spelled out, or perhaps fully recognized at the time — was the hope that poems could intensify a sense of objective reality through the immediacy of images.

Imagism itself gave rise to fairly negligible lines like:

You crash over the trees,
You crack the live branch…  (Storm by H.D.)

Nonetheless, the reliance on images provided poets with these types of freedom:

1. Poems could dispense with classical rhetoric, emotion being generated much more directly through what Eliot called an objective correlate: "The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an 'objective correlative'; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked." {10}

2. By being shorn of context or supporting argument, images could appear with fresh interest and power.

3. Thoughts could be treated as images, i.e. as non-discursive elements that added emotional colouring without issues of truth or relevance intruding too mu
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PROSE BASED POETRY
prose based poetry

When free verse lacks rhythmic patterning, appearing as a lineated prose stripped of unnecessary ornament and rhetoric, it becomes the staple of much contemporary work. The focus is on what the words are being used to say, and their authenticity. The language is not heightened, and the poem differs from prose only by being more self-aware, innovative and/or cogent in its exposition.

Nonetheless, what looks normal at first becomes challenging on closer reading — thwarting expectations, and turning back on itself to make us think more deeply about the seemingly innocuous words used. And from there we are compelled to look at the world with sharper eyes, unprotected by commonplace phrases or easy assumptions. Often an awkward and fighting poetry, therefore, not indulging in ceremony or outmoded traditions.
What is Prose?

If we say that contemporary free verse is often built from what was once regarded as mere prose, then we shall have to distinguish prose from poetry, which is not so easy now. Prose was once the lesser vehicle, the medium of everyday thought and conversation, what we used to express facts, opinions, humour, arguments, feelings and the like. And while the better writers developed individual styles, and styles varied according to their purpose and social occasion, prose of some sort could be written by anyone. Beauty was not a requirement, and prose articles could be rephrased without great loss in meaning or effectiveness.

Poetry, though, had grander aims. William Lyon Phelps on Thomas Hardy's work: {1}

"The greatest poetry always transports us, and although I read and reread the Wessex poet with never-lagging attention — I find even the drawings in "Wessex Poems" so fascinating that I wish he had illustrated all his books — I am always conscious of the time and the place. I never get the unmistakable spinal chill. He has too thorough a command of his thoughts; they never possess him, and they never soar away with him. Prose may be controlled, but poetry is a possession. Mr. Hardy is too keenly aware of what he is about. In spite of the fact that he has written verse all his life, he seldom writes unwrinkled song. He is, in the last analysis, a master of prose who has learned the technique of verse, and who now chooses to express his thoughts and his observations in rime and rhythm."

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OPEN FORMS IN POETRY
open forms in poetry

Poets who write in open forms usually insist on the form growing out of the writing process, i.e. the poems follow what the words and phrase suggest during the composition

now i know why i might engage with writing obscene
poems, chauvinism included, but still there
is no burning excuse in my mind with the way
western society actively desires censorship of certain
words, i already attributed censoring obscene
words as worse than what this tactic precipitates into:
the apathetic spread of *******, and violence
in general... it crosses my mind that sparring with violent
language cushions people from violet action...
to utilise violent language with that: pardon my French
attitude does more good than evil on the users...
how many road rage incidents could have been avoided
if people were unable to watch their tongue:
somehow we're making language sterile, by actively
pursuing this sort of censorship: which is not even
remotely politically related / motivated, we're bringing
an anaemic status quo in how fluidly we speak -
we desire to not hear the sometimes funny and the sometimes
awful... but we choose to see the god-fearing horrific...
ask any blind-man about music and he'd say:
well, i can dance to it in a nucleus position, centrally
gravitational pull - but ask the deaf man about
what he has to say when seeing **** written to counter
obscenity, as in cartoon-like: f&%£! it's just plain silly,
pocket-sized expression of psychotic behaviours,
rummaging through them i find only one source of inspiration:
the fact that we're in this blind-man's garden of innocence,
somehow dressed in the camouflage of censorship such
a tiny problem, that it does indeed require 23 mattresses
for the princess to not feel the frozen *** agitating her...
this sort of censorship in its application is under
a false sense of purpose, it really doesn't change people's
behaviour for the better, it doesn't pacify them, in does
the reverse: it infuriates, it makes violence more potent...
i'm still trying to figure out why such words
will make our perceptions saintly... unless of course
that's the reason behind them, as way of invoking an
anaesthetic placebo, a placebo that's actually active rather
than passive - presuming the anaesthetic placebo gives
way to an aesthetic active apathy-inducing ingredient...
meaning we can't bare to hear swear words, but we can
gladly watch 20 hours of 20 : 1 ****... censoring **** ****
**** **** will not escape Newtonian physics...
given our current scenario, Newtonian physics is far
more important than Einstein's relativity, i'd hate to be
in denial about cause & effect... as began with Socrates,
i too abhor moral relativism... of course Newton got
the gravity bit wrong, but i like the simpler version...
plus... there was no Romance with Einstein...
no apple, no tree, no Voltaire... meaning we don't necessarily
write history collectively, with all of us starting from
the big bang or the view from the Galapagos islands...
we don't... we continue writing history not from a
collective consciousness genesis... or from the collective
unconscious genesis - that's Jung with his archetypes
(devil, god, wise man, mother, father etc.) rather than
dreams (Freud) - we can chose were to write the future...
it's not so much ignorance as arm-chair intellectualism,
it's not about the safety of understanding something,
but the comfort of choosing to understand something...
which is pretty much to my excuse for my previous poems...
Heidegger... and that concept of Dasein -
i never bothered to understand it to the point of
reacting subjectively to it, by that i mean an interest
in writing about it, an interpolation of the subject with
alternative variations... i objectified it, i also countered it
when objectifying the concept turned out to be an
everyday object, shortening my quest.
the counter? hiersein, i.e. being here, here denoting a
solipsistic classification of awareness with / in the world -
which is basically me in my room, admiring my library,
my record collection, my torn sneakers, everything that
is classified exclusive to what dasein evolves into
when all its grammatical weaving only express a verb,
i.e. concern... so i thought, given this what can hiersein
(being here / nonchalance) actually show me as
my lack of interest in: "changing the world".
it became obvious yesterday, i had a hard time when i
didn't read the day's copy of the times (more on this later),
instead i had to suffice with construction site media,
you might have heard of this newspaper: the daily star,
at 20 pence a pop, you will see what £1.20 makes to
your psyche... but that's basically it, i objectified Heidegger's
concept and made it into an everyday object, in this
case and as the only case available: a newspaper -
and the trick is? well, with a newspaper like daily star
you don't actually experience dasein - it's completely
missing in this style of media, and that's worrying given
my barbaric poetry of yesterday... it's missing, not there,
such object-for-object chirality is what gives birth to
hiersein (being here); but today i returned to my usual
media diet, a flicked through the times and the natural
balance of personal objects and a fresh impersonal object
coexisted - the newspaper is truly the most adequate
compounded expression of Heidegger's dasein -
which i attribute to the constant need to emphasise an
empathy with others... empathising is a neutral form
of sympathising, since sympathy is sourced in shared
experiences: **** victims (e.g.) - therefore empathy is
something that in the ontological structuring of dasein,
which opposes the ontological structuring of hiersein,
which is structured by apathy; there is nothing else for
me to write, apart from the compendium proof
of the disparity of sources, i.e. headlines and subheadings:

- prior compendium -

i will never understand the point of autobiographies,
the majority of autobiographies are written
on a p.s. basis, after the facts / actions,
never immediately, concerning ideas /
solidified thoughts, thoughts condensed into idea
that allow thinking / cognitive narration to
continue regardless with what's being achieved...
i haven't anything autobiographical dissimilar
with something biographical...
Plato wrote that wonderful biography like
Shakespearean theatre, but i guess his critics felt
the claustrophobic tug & pull of mermaids...
still the problem ascends heights unparalleled -
even with ghost writers doing the leg-work...
cheap-buggers never learned to write, let alone read,
and here they are writing biographies...
ah, **** it... they're only sketches... whether biographic
or autobiographic... they're still mere sketches...
if this was the art world the revenue would come
posthumously, when it comes to literacy
nothing really distinguishes poets from
those prescribing pedestrian signs...
the Olympians can moan at the vacant stadium...
that there's a hierarchy in sports,
with the favoured monochrome idealisation
of where the bunny money is in the whirlpool
of the rabbit hole investment: football, volleyball...
but the literary events are the same...
people love to lie that they read the bestseller to
its full extent... but treat books like chairs and tables...
inertia prone half finished, sat on for 2 weeks of
the entire year... the Olympians are very much
like poets, and i care to distance myself from either
demand for more interest being invoked...
i like esoteric sports, i like esoteric writing...
but that's how it stand: poets are Olympians where
novelists are footballers, who retire at 30 and
then think about what to do with their wages
that are 10x higher than the everyday labourer...
start a restaurant, buy a strip of houses in Liverpool
like Michael Owen? good guess, here's to exploiting
youth disgracefully... that's what they're getting,
and these are the dilemma points to consider...
they're the equivalent gladiators of our time,
Rome was just a sleeper before it awoke once more...
but i'll never understand why these
people decided to exploit literature for gain...
all these academics with their pristine purity of discovery
are pacified when dictating print,
what poet, has a chance in hell, to appear gladly
excavated from Plato's cave of television?
about none.
i too was focusing on 20th century literature,
before 21st literature came about...
and i thought, oh god: they're really going to create
a totalitarian democracy, every artist will be
strip-searched for adding cinnamon and chilli to their
writing to bounce away from conformist
sober and sane extraction of alter wordings...
this 21st scene will become polarised...
we'll have the extinction of One Direction over a joint,
while the Rolling Stones drank a keg of whiskey
and pulled off a show... we'll have moralisation
of the fans to subdue the artists, which will mean
no artist will ably create a zeitgeist to rebel... everyone
will suddenly experience a weird sort of communism...
the worst kind... it will mean having
all the mental freedoms without the ability to
economise a coup... basically an inertia, an immediate
fatality... we can't economise a coup...
which boils down to why so many autobiographies
aren't really biographic, but rather consolidating,
by the meaning: autobiographic i intended to relate
the everyday... the most secretive account of life:
the everyday... this is stressing Proust,
even though i preferred Joyce over Proust i keep
the everyday the prime ideal: the only detail,
so that an autobiography can make sense,
automation of writing, like breathing or sneezing...
not some monetary-spinning device 20 years after
the facts... 20 years later you're pretty much writing
fiction... i am all for the biosphere of expanding
Alveoli... but when did you ever read an autobiography
that mentioned the taste of weak coffee
from the Friday of 20th of August 2016? never;
you read autobiographies
like you read self-help books...  waiting for
all that experience regurgitating motivational talk
about reaching a plateau of comparative success...
i can understand autobiographies written by the elders,
i understand biographies written about people
posthumously - but the tragedy is, given the spinning
wheel of money? we're getting "auto" biographies
written toward their 3rd volume renditions of
people aged 30... let alone 40... so much for
western society having the upper hand on political matters...
just saying: sort your own **** before trying
to sort other people's problems...
i could understand if these autobiographies were written
as described: automaton solo... but they're not...
before the compendium it's this everlasting presence
of a desired body of power being depicted:
prior the monopoly of knowledge, there was a monopoly
of literacy... given that 99% of us are literate, it
actually doesn't mean a third donkey's *******
whether we can read, or write, we got shelved in controlling
this once priestly vanity, we got taught bureaucracy alongside...
but the monopoly of literacy is way past us,
we're being convened in the ability to monopolise knowledge,
(oh please, don't let the paranoia seep in,
remember yourself when reading me, once in a while,
i don't drag you to phantasmagorical heights, even if i could,
i'd prefer you being agile in learning how to be bored
than letting your repel the same boredom i too share,
well... but **** me if you want to be the next Lenin) -
and the easiest way to monopolise knowledge? the media...
you basically need a lot of facts, and an evolved version
of dialectics, dialectics being the prime enemy of democracy
(it's not an alternative political model like despotism as
we are held to believe, it's actually dialectics,
suppressing other forms of collectivisation is the one
sure method of suppressing the attempt at dialectics
(individualism) - by making people overly opinionated,
ergo: the inability to engage with opinions, blind-alleys
throughout all plausible attempts to do so) -
so once you have enough facts to fiddle with the Rubik's cube
of juxtaposition, you end up with the ultra-scientific
form of dialectics... the matter of opinion in relation
to truth without a relative uniformity that prescribes
the status quo stasis is a debate about how accurate
we all are: i.e., is that true to the closest centimetre,
or the closest millimetre? it's a bit like watching a Zeno
paradox:
                 10.1                           and 10.01
      which one's tortoise and which is Achilles?
well, you know; ah ****! the compendium of the two
newspapers which got me slightly depressed...

- the compendium -

a. daily star

- B. BRO SAM'S SECRET 'NERVOUS BREAKDOWN'
- Laura & Jason's baby joy
- Robbie (Williams) £1.6M a night!
- BREXIT BOOST ON JOB FRONT
- ANGE DAD BACKS TRUMP
- JR'S wife Linda set to Holly
- Edd's no Beverly Hills flop
(Lana among cow *******)
- LAURA: OUR TINY TROTTS WILL BE WORLD-BEATERS
- FURY AT BAD LOSERS' SLURS
- 'Jealous sis' jibes
- MAKE YOUR KID AN OLYMPICS ACE
- Peaty: I want to be a rapper
- TV girl really ill
- **** SAM, 'ON THE BRINK OF BREAKDOWN'
- COSTA ***** HELL
- CAGING ANJEM WILL INSPIRE NEW JIHADIS
- POG'S LOADED AGENT BUYS CAPONE'S LAIR
- I'll make Kylie a pop star
- JEZ DOESN'T KNOW ANT FROM HIS DEC
- GUILTY OF DEMONIC SAVAGERY
- Great British Rake In
- Britain is *******
- BAYWATCH U.K.
- Va Va Vroom
- JUST JANE: My lover snubs plea to get wed
- HART: I'LL DECIDE WHEN TO GO.

b. the times

- Boy victim becomes a symbol of Assad's war
- US Olympics swimmers invented robbery tale, say Rio police
- Make us sell healthy food, supermarkets implore May (P.M.)
- Lost weekend of the lying best man
- fears over free speech delay law to silence hate preacher
- Met's 'commuter cops' live in France
- Husbands happiest when they earn half as much as wives
- Socialists plot to drive Britain left
- Fake human sacrifice filmed at European high altar of physics
- Officers investigated over ex-footballer's Taser death
- Number of pupils taking languages at record low
   (Mandarin @ 2,849 - % decrease of 8.1,
    alarmingly religious studies 27,032 up by 4.9%
    and psychology of status 59,469 up by 4.3%....
    meaning the mad will soon be diagnosing the sane
   as mad, just because the curriculum said so)
- Top grades add up to 100% at the school for maths prodigies
- Deprived sixth formers thrive on competition
- European students rush to get into British universities
- DVLA earns £10m selling driver's details
- Mystery over Kenyan death of aristocrat
- Journalist who voted twice reported to police for
  'fraud'
- Tomato tax threatens European trade war
- Love story of the Pantomime
- Homeless conmen fleeced widow, 81
- Brownlee brothers at the Olympics...
- Hopeful shoppers give sales a lift after Brexit vote
- MoD guard could be stood down despite terrot threat
- Owners spit mansion after failing to sell
- The job with international appeal: saving our hedgehogs
- Finch warns unborn chicks if weather gets warm
- Migrant violence rises after decline in policing around Jungle
- Longest road tunnel promises a relaxing ride under Pennines
- Mothers step up to drive Tube trains through night
(rowdy teens ageing exponentially on a Saturday night
when not getting a lift, ******...)
-MP's deal with bookmaker to be investigated
- Ebola nurse 'hid high temperature'
- Shoesmith's ex-huspand kept child *******
- Morpurgo war tale springs into life
- Supergran fights off teenage muggers
- IVF is more successful for white women
OPINION SECTION
- Great political fiction is good for democracy
- the BBC is leaving its audiences in the dark
- airline food? just pass me the gin and tonic
- Modern Olympics began on the fields of Rugby
/ greasy polls, holding firm, tongue tied,
  call for compulsory targets to tackle obesity,
second in line, mindfulness course, cost of planning,
puffins v. ship rats.... and all future letters to the editor /
- Moscow presses Turkey for access to US airbases
- Hundreds killed each month in Assad's jails
- Putin bans celebration of defeated KGB coup
(another James Bond movie on the cards,
i'm assured, and with a moral carte blanche) -
Hollande clams Carla Bruni spied concerning his
use of diapers...
- Euthanasia tourists flock Belgian A & E from France,
  where a revival of ****** made people dress shark-fin
  sharp on the catwalk...
- Mosquito pesticide linkage application = intersex /
   East German women
- Haiti cholera linked to Nepalese **** and ***** via
  the

1

I am a house, says Senlin, locked and darkened,
Sealed from the sun with wall and door and blind.
Summon me loudly, and you'll hear slow footsteps
Ring far and faint in the galleries of my mind.
You'll hear soft steps on an old and dusty stairway;
Peer darkly through some corner of a pane,
You'll see me with a faint light coming slowly,
Pausing above some gallery of the brain . . .

I am a city . . . In the blue light of evening
Wind wanders among my streets and makes them fair;
I am a room of rock . . . a maiden dances
Lifting her hands, tossing her golden hair.
She combs her hair, the room of rock is darkened,
She extends herself in me, and I am sleep.
It is my pride that starlight is above me;
I dream amid waves of air, my walls are deep.

I am a door . . . before me roils the darkness,
Behind me ring clear waves of sound and light.
Stand in the shadowy street outside, and listen-
The crying of violins assails the night . . .
My walls are deep, but the cries of music pierce them;
They shake with the sound of drums . . . yet it is strange
That I should know so little what means this music,
Hearing it always within me change and change.

Knock on the door,-and you shall have an answer.
Open the heavy walls to set me free,
And blow a horn to call me into the sunlight,-
And startled, then, what a strange thing you will see!
Nuns, murderers, and drunkards, saints and sinners,
Lover and dancing girl and sage and clown
Will laugh upon you, and you will find me nowhere.
I am a room, a house, a street, a town.

2

It is morning, Senlin says, and in the morning
When the light drips through the shutters like the dew,
I arise, I face the sunrise,
And do the things my fathers learned to do.
Stars in the purple dusk above the rooftops
Pale in a saffron mist and seem to die,
And I myself on a swiftly tilting planet
Stand before a glass and tie my tie.

Vine leaves tap my window,
Dew-drops sing to the garden stones,
The robin chips in the chinaberry tree
Repeating three clear tones.

It is morning. I stand by the mirror
And tie my tie once more.
While waves far off in a pale rose twilight
Crash on a white sand shore.
I stand by a mirror and comb my hair:
How small and white my face!-
The green earth tilts through a sphere of air
And bathes in a flame of space.
There are houses hanging above the stars
And stars hung under a sea . . .
And a sun far off in a shell of silence
Dapples my walls for me . . .

It is morning, Senlin says, and in the morning
Should I not pause in the light to remember God?
Upright and firm I stand on a star unstable,
He is immense and lonely as a cloud.
I will dedicate this moment before my mirror
To him alone, and for him I will comb my hair.
Accept these humble offerings, cloud of silence!
I will think of you as I descend the stair.

Vine leaves tap my window,
The snail-track shines on the stones,
Dew-drops flash from the chinaberry tree
Repeating two clear tones.

It is morning, I awake from a bed of silence,
Shining I rise from the starless waters of sleep.
The walls are about me still as in the evening,
I am the same, and the same name still I keep.
The earth revolves with me, yet makes no motion,
The stars pale silently in a coral sky.
In a whistling void I stand before my mirror,
Unconcerned, I tie my tie.

There are horses neighing on far-off hills
Tossing their long white manes,
And mountains flash in the rose-white dusk,
Their shoulders black with rains . . .

It is morning. I stand by the mirror
And surprise my soul once more;
The blue air rushes above my ceiling,
There are suns beneath my floor . . .

. . . It is morning, Senlin says, I ascend from darkness
And depart on the winds of space for I know not where,
My watch is wound, a key is in my pocket,
And the sky is darkened as I descend the stair.
There are shadows across the windows, clouds in heaven,
And a god among the stars; and I will go
Thinking of him as I might think of daybreak
And humming a tune I know . . .

Vine-leaves tap at the window,
Dew-drops sing to the garden stones,
The robin chirps in the chinaberry tree
Repeating three clear tones.

3

I walk to my work, says Senlin, along a street
Superbly hung in space.
I lift these mortal stones, and with my trowel
I tap them into place.
But is god, perhaps, a giant who ties his tie
Grimacing before a colossal glass of sky?

These stones are heavy, these stones decay,
These stones are wet with rain,
I build them into a wall today,
Tomorrow they fall again.

Does god arise from a chaos of starless sleep,
Rise from the dark and stretch his arms and yawn;
And drowsily look from the window at his garden;
And rejoice at the dewdrop sparkeling on his lawn?

Does he remember, suddenly, with amazement,
The yesterday he left in sleep,-his name,-
Or the glittering street superbly hung in wind
Along which, in the dusk, he slowly came?

I devise new patterns for laying stones
And build a stronger wall.
One drop of rain astonishes me
And I let my trowel fall.

The flashing of leaves delights my eyes,
Blue air delights my face;
I will dedicate this stone to god
And tap it into its place.

4

That woman-did she try to attract my attention?
Is it true I saw her smile and nod?
She turned her head and smiled . . . was it for me?
It is better to think of work or god.
The clouds pile coldly above the houses
Slow wind revolves the leaves:
It begins to rain, and the first long drops
Are slantingly blown from eaves.

But it is true she tried to attract my attention!
She pressed a rose to her chin and smiled.
Her hand was white by the richness of her hair,
Her eyes were those of a child.
It is true she looked at me as if she liked me.
And turned away, afraid to look too long!
She watched me out of the corners of her eyes;
And, tapping time with fingers, hummed a song.

. . . Nevertheless, I will think of work,
With a trowel in my hands;
Or the vague god who blows like clouds
Above these dripping lands . . .

But . . . is it sure she tried to attract my attention?
She leaned her elbow in a peculiar way
There in the crowded room . . . she touched my hand . . .
She must have known, and yet,-she let it stay.
Music of flesh! Music of root and sod!
Leaf touching leaf in the rain!
Impalpable clouds of red ascend,
Red clouds blow over my brain.

Did she await from me some sign of acceptance?
I smoothed my hair with a faltering hand.
I started a feeble smile, but the smile was frozen:
Perhaps, I thought, I misunderstood.
Is it to be conceived that I could attract her-
This dull and futile flesh attract such fire?
I,-with a trowel's dullness in hand and brain!-
Take on some godlike aspect, rouse desire?
Incredible! . . . delicious! . . . I will wear
A brighter color of tie, arranged with care,
I will delight in god as I comb my hair.

And the conquests of my bolder past return
Like strains of music, some lost tune
Recalled from youth and a happier time.
I take my sweetheart's arm in the dusk once more;
One more we climb

Up the forbidden stairway,
Under the flickering light, along the railing:
I catch her hand in the dark, we laugh once more,
I hear the rustle of silk, and follow swiftly,
And softly at last we close the door.

Yes, it is true that woman tried to attract me:
It is true she came out of time for me,
Came from the swirling and savage forest of earth,
The cruel eternity of the sea.
She parted the leaves of waves and rose from silence
Shining with secrets she did not know.
Music of dust! Music of web and web!
And I, bewildered, let her go.

I light my pipe. The flame is yellow,
Edged underneath with blue.
These thoughts are truer of god, perhaps,
Than thoughts of god are true.

5

It is noontime, Senlin says, and a street piano
Strikes sharply against the sunshine a harsh chord,
And the universe is suddenly agitated,
And pain to my heart goes glittering like a sword.
Do I imagine it? The dust is shaken,
The sunlight quivers, the brittle oak-leaves tremble.
The world, disturbed, conceals its agitation;
And I, too, will dissemble.

Yet it is sorrow has found my heart,
Sorrow for beauty, sorrow for death;
And pain twirls slowly among the trees.

The street-piano revolves its glittering music,
The sharp notes flash and dazzle and turn,
Memory's knives are in this sunlit silence,
They ripple and lazily burn.
The star on which my shadow falls is frightened,-
It does not move; my trowel taps a stone,
The sweet note wavers amid derisive music;
And I, in horror of sunlight, stand alone.

Do not recall my weakness, savage music!
Let the knives rest!
Impersonal, harsh, the music revolves and glitters,
And the notes like poniards pierce my breast.
And I remember the shadows of webs on stones,
And the sound or rain on withered grass,
And a sorrowful face that looked without illusions
At its image in the glass.

Do not recall my childhood, pitiless music!
The green blades flicker and gleam,
The red bee bends the clover, deeply humming;
In the blue sea above me lazily stream
Cloud upon thin-brown cloud, revolving, scattering;
The mulberry tree rakes heaven and drops its fruit;
Amazing sunlight sings in the opened vault
On dust and bones, and I am mute.

It is noon; the bells let fall soft flowers of sound.
They turn on the air, they shrink in the flare of noon.
It is night; and I lie alone, and watch through the window
The terrible ice-white emptiness of the moon.
Small bells, far off, spill jewels of sound like rain,
A long wind hurries them whirled and far,
A cloud creeps over the moon, my bed is darkened,
I hold my breath and watch a star.

Do not disturb my memories, heartless music!
I stand once more by a vine-dark moonlit wall,
The sound of my footsteps dies in a void of moonlight,
And I watch white jasmine fall.
Is it my heart that falls? Does earth itself
Drift, a white petal, down the sky?
One bell-note goes to the stars in the blue-white silence,
Solitary and mournful, a somnolent cry.

6

Death himself in the rain . . . death himself . . .
Death in the savage sunlight . . . skeletal death . . .
I hear the clack of his feet,
Clearly on stones, softly in dust;
He hurries among the trees
Whirling the leaves, tossing he hands from waves.
Listen! the immortal footsteps beat.

Death himself in the grass, death himself,
Gyrating invisibly in the sun,
Scatters the grass-blades, whips the wind,
Tears at boughs with malignant laughter:
On the long echoing air I hear him run.

Death himself in the dusk, gathering lilacs,
Breaking a white-fleshed bough,
Strewing purple on a cobwebbed lawn,
Dancing, dancing,
The long red sun-rays glancing
On flailing arms, skipping with hideous knees
Cavorting grotesque ecstasies:
I do not see him, but I see the lilacs fall,
I hear the scrape of knuckles against the wall,
The leaves are tossed and tremble where he plunges among them,
And I hear the sound of his breath,
Sharp and whistling, the rythm of death.

It is evening: the lights on a long street balance and sway.
In the purple ether they swing and silently sing,
The street is a gossamer swung in space,
And death himself in the wind comes dancing along it,
And the lights, like raindrops, tremble and swing.
Hurry, spider, and spread your glistening web,
For death approaches!
Hurry, rose, and open your heart to the bee,
For death approaches!
Maiden, let down your hair for the hands of your lover,
Comb it with moonlight and wreathe it with leaves,
For death approaches!

Death, huge in the star; small in the sand-grain;
Death himself in the rain,
Drawing the rain about him like a garment of jewels:
I hear the sound of his feet
On the stairs of the wind, in the sun,
In the forests of the sea . . .
Listen! the immortal footsteps beat!

7

It is noontime, Senlin says. The sky is brilliant
Above a green and dreaming hill.
I lay my trowel down. The pool is cloudless,
The grass, the wall, the peach-tree, all are still.

It appears to me that I am one with these:
A hill, upon whose back are a wall and trees.
It is noontime: all seems still
Upon this green and flowering hill.

Yet suddenly out of nowhere in the sky,
A cloud comes whirling, and flings
A lazily coiled vortex of shade on the hill.
It crosses the hill, and a bird in the peach-tree sings.
Amazing! Is there a change?
The hill seems somehow strange.
It is noontime. And in the tree
The leaves are delicately disturbed
Where the bird descends invisibly.
It is noontime. And in the pool
The sky is blue and cool.

Yet suddenly out of nowhere,
Something flings itself at the hill,
Tears with claws at the earth,
Lunges and hisses and softly recoils,
Crashing against the green.
The peach-tree braces itself, the pool is frightened,
The grass-blades quiver, the bird is still;
The wall silently struggles against the sunlight;
A terror stiffens the hill.
The trees turn rigidly, to face
Something that circles with slow pace:
The blue pool seems to shrink
From something that slides above its brink.
What struggle is this, ferocious and still-
What war in sunlight on this hill?
What is it creeping to dart
Like a knife-blade at my heart?

It is noontime, Senlin says, and all is tranquil:
The brilliant sky burns over a greenbright earth.
The peach-tree dreams in the sun, the wall is contented.
A bird in the peach-leaves, moving from sun to shadow,
Phrases again his unremembering mirth,
His lazily beautiful, foolish, mechanical mirth.

8

The pale blue gloom of evening comes
Among the phantom forests and walls
With a mournful and rythmic sound of drums.
My heart is disturbed with a sound of myriad throbbing,
Persuasive and sinister, near and far:
In the blue evening of my heart
I hear the thrum of the evening star.

My work is uncompleted; and yet I hurry,-
Hearing the whispered pulsing of those drums,-
To enter the luminous walls and woods of night.
It is the eternal mistress of the world
Who shakes these drums for my delight.
Listen! the drums of the leaves, the drums of the dust,
The delicious quivering of this air!

I will leave my work unfinished, and I will go
With ringing and certain step through the laughter of chaos
To the one small room in the void I know.
Yesterday it was there,-
Will I find it tonight once more when I climb the stair?
The drums of the street beat swift and soft:
In the blue evening of my heart
I hear the throb of the bridal star.
It weaves deliciously in my brain
A tyrannous melody of her:
Hands in sunlight, threads of rain
Against a weeping face that fades,
Snow on a blackened window-pane;
Fire, in a dusk of hair entangled;
Flesh, more delicate than fruit;
And a voice that searches quivering nerves
For a string to mute.

My life is uncompleted: and yet I hurry
Among the tinkling forests and walls of evening
To a certain fragrant room.
Who is it that dances there, to a beating of drums,
While stars on a grey sea bud and bloom?
She stands at the top of the stair,
With the lamplight on her hair.
I will walk through the snarling of streams of space
And climb the long steps carved from wind
And rise once more towards her face.
Listen! the drums of the drowsy trees
Beating our nuptial ecstasies!

Music spins from the heart of silence
And twirls me softly upon the air:
It takes my hand and whispers to me:
It draws the web of the moonlight down.
There are hands, it says, as cool as snow,
The hands of the Venus of the sea;
There are waves of sound in a mermaid-cave;-
Come-then-come with me!
The flesh of the sea-rose new and cool,
The wavering image of her who comes
At dusk by a blue sea-pool.

Whispers upon the haunted air-
Whisper of foam-white arm and thigh;
And a shower of delicate lights blown down
Fro the laughing sky! . . .
Music spins from a far-off room.
Do you remember,-it seems to say,-
The mouth that smiled, beneath your mouth,
And kissed you . . . yesterday?
It is your own flesh waits for you.
Come! you are incomplete! . . .
The drums of the universe once more
Morosely beat.
It is the harlot of the world
Who clashes the leaves like ghostly drums
And disturbs the solitude of my heart
As evening comes!

I leave my work once more and walk
Along a street that sways in the wind.
I leave these st

Imagine what they would say
Mutilating myself
Two broken people
My broken mind,
My spirit
Not words.
Shade.
Spectral speculation
Vicious, cruel, malicious.
Projections so sharp.
Of gamma rays
Radoactive
Impersonal decay
Left with nausea and fatigue
Hoping.
It can go away.

she feels the warmth of him, in every part of her being
she feels the warmth of him, in every part of her being
to his reside her mind ever trips, oh to have his lips upon hers
to his reside her mind ever trips, oh to have his lips upon hers
oh to have his lips upon hers, she feels the warmth of him
in every part of her being, to his reside her mind ever trips

at a locale they meet, they're miles apart
at a locale they meet, they're miles apart
pangs of desire not actuated, close yet so far
pangs of desire not actuated, close yet so far
close yet so far, at a locale they meet
pangs of desire not actuated, they're miles apart

what to do, the quandary begs
what to do, the quandary begs
will they have a face to face, begone computer's impersonal interface  
will they have a face to face, begone computer's impersonal interface
the quandary begs, begone computer's impersonal interface
will they have a face to face, what to do

at a locale they meet, they're miles apart
close yet so far, will they have a face to face
pangs of desire not actuated, what to do
in every part of her being, oh to have his lips upon hers
the quandary begs, she feels the warmth of him
begone computer's impersonal interface, to his reside her mind ever trips

I write better
when I can scribble and scratch
eradicate and erase
in a notebook
you can smell the pages and
the words become tangible and touchable

I need to stop creating all my poems on my **** phone
it's so impersonal

His blue eyes are like glacial-lakes, wrapping around his heart till he's chilled to the bone from the cold.
A deadly place where treading is no longer permitted.
His eyes are transparent and distant as the impersonal clouds passing overhead.

Even as I stands before him, reflecting off him.
I am still merely a reflection.

He knows my face, I reason silently.
From the hills of my cheeks, down towards the valley separating my lips.

He should recognize it all.

Instead a blank expression greets me.    
A look of cold, solid insouciance.
I'm immediately angry with myself for wanting to justify his indifference's.

A reflex I've never been able to expel.
The vestigial limb on a skeleton.
A party favor from another time forgotten for the newly discovered toy.

I twist in the fridged winds wrapping around him.
My force giving under the great pressure magnified by his powers.

I never wanted to dance upon his breeze.
This realization makes me burn hotter.
My anger brighter than the northern star.

I welcome it, my amounting rage.
I embraces it with a raging smile.

His glaciers may be cold, immovable at times.
A pretentious notion I might freeze.

For I am the sun swirling in nova's ring and cannot be affected by his black iced personality.

.you might ask: why isn't third-party "issues": 34% in bold?! simple... depends who you do it with... AND believe me... we must be living in the golden age of prostitution... god they care about protection, one even said to me: i get checked for S.T.D.'s on a regular basis... and i'm pretty sure AIDS doesn't travel from the oral consumption of ****... stomach acids and whatnot... see... transparency... even if it was "****"... when she's crying like that... would i walk into a shop a buy / steal a leg of lamb with or without the usage of a transaction meta-object? hell... i'm interested in the metaphysics of money, sue me... but you never invest a person into the formula of ******* with a *******... there's absolutely zilch, in terms of investing with something beside your body... your character and what not... pure Newtonian physics... two ****-naked bodies colliding... and since it's a legal transaction... ****... what lie is there, breach of conduct? if you don't pay... the **** gets his way: adding fist to the face, first, and then a fist up your ***: and you can scream ****! ****! ****! all you want by then... the English can't accomplish the perfected art of an affair akin to the French... it's not in their Huguenots' nature... so why the elaborate lie? **** it... an hour at a brothel... and let me tell you... a ******* will ask you questions like a priest: questions like: do you have a girlfriend? affair over what? an hour, an impersonal hour with what allures a soul, a thought, but is fundamentally the reciprocal posit of your own body... sure as **** beats the ******* / stripper profession ****-tease... god... they're so ******* ethical these days, actually caring, telling you whether or not they check themselves regularly for STDs... mind you... one of them told me a story about a ****** in a Spanish brothel, by some pundit.

let's be honest, for once...
there's no point parading the matter,
orchestrated by some
distant pompous sentiment
for: whatever life was
supposed to be, for all of us,
but never became -
an alignment of thought and
being...
              
  what the **** has someone
done with my fox?! well... "my" fox...
he hasn't been seen
for two nights and i'm getting
worried!

i am a drunk -
        my maternal grandfather
was a drunk,
my paternal grandfather was
a drunk, my uncle is a drunk...
only my father with his
father complex is the odd one out...
genes took over...
if i didn't drink,
as i once did...
   bah... a fairy tale...
           why bother lying?

point being: i'm far from a drunk fiend...
a fiend nonetheless -
benevolent at times -
like... ah... **** it... whatever:
i'm not going to gloat about
my antics...

but at least i own my predisposition,
and thank **** that i'm
not looking for a partner -
as my grandmother used to
say about her son (my uncle):
it be better he stays alone
that brings misery to any woman...

hey, i have a drunk's perfect
stash of interests!
   i'm not going to repent either...
do "you" even think it would
be possible to
read a single book of philosophy
when paired to a woman?
i don't think so...

            and the hours i spend at
night, headphones on,
listening to **** like 90s sub-grunge
akin to mad season (song,
i'm alone)?
   **** no!

                i'd have philosophy in
body, looking across from me...
    i'm starting to contemplate
that man has internalized
the perfect woman...
while woman?
  has internalized the most imperfect
man...

           i'm starting to think
that, the whole physical reality,
puritanical materialism -
hell - going as far as undermining
the theory with transgenderism...
can i say that men are more patient
than women, when it should
be the opposite?
   well... then again, "should"...

i am what any woman would
consider - broken goods...
good... i like that...
       it means i can be left the **** alone...
drink as much as i want,
read as much of what middle-aged
women call: drivel (philosophy)
and spend my time listening
to a back-catalog of bands from
the 90s... or the prior century...

what... with the current statistics
from the Sunday Times Style
magazine?
      53% contra 32% of women
and men (respectively)
          are happier post-divorce...
61% contra 47% are happy staying single
post-divorce...
happy new singletons:
aged 55...
                 42% of marriages
are affected by divorce...
                86% cited not being ashamed
of divorce...
      ill harbor imbedded in
a former spouse men (17%) - women (8%)...
argument for divorce:
my spouse "changed" (49%) -
now... this is interesting -
i remember seeing this same *******
over a wide span of time...
the second time i saw her -
she said to me: but you haven't changed -
and subsequently starting crying
while drunk during ***...
so i know where "change" argument comes
from...
    ***** i aged... finito!
males more likely to date within
the first 6 months...
     66% had children of ex-spouses...
    90% agreed that staying in an unhappy
marriage is worse than divorce...
   i bet 99% would find life more rosy
than being dead: what with being wed
to life... sure as ****: i've seen my grandparents
at it... my parents... life outside of
marital constraints is so ******* rosy!
food stamps and no central heating...
rosy as ****!
          third-party "issues": 34%...
lack of communication: 29%
    incompatibility: 23%
          abuse: 22%...
           different "life goals": 20%...
***-related problems: 11%...
                  in-laws: 7%,
  parenting problems: 5%...
          financial issues: 14%...
well... well well...
isn't life just peachy!
           those percentages in bold?
they're in bold for a ******* reason...
the only reasons that would
make a divorce definitely prudish...
    the rest?
fickle people... little fickle people...
it's like eating a bowl of Haribo sweets!
the choices!

stats? Style report -
     1,060 of women and men surveyed
Fleur Britten...
     Style Magazine 23 Sept 2018...

well... i'm out, always was out...
no woman wants a drink,
and i have Sophia to think about...
       and what a spectacular failure
i am in this department...
the longest "relationship" i was in
didn't even pass the half year mark...
and that's even before i started
my career in drinking with Jack -
(by the way, he sends his warmest
regards) -

            bitter? no... not really...
i can't share a bed with a ******* cat,
let alone something much larger
and not furry...
             my bitterness dies within
the confines of an hour with
some Bulgarian girl
   who cries when she notices
my heart is an unwavering rock...

            hell... when she started crying
like that during ***,
talking about her daughter...
    what are you supposed to do
if not stop, cuddle,
and kiss her tears?

Time is measured
By machines, stars,
Dials, seasons
And all sorts
Of unconscious,
Impersonal equations.
When we measure
Time by the comings and goings
Of people,
Then it becomes personal.

when i first found about will alexander, i immediately bought three of his books: kaleidoscopic omniscience, compression & purity, the sri lankan loxodrome - i saw the potential, rekindled surrealism - perhaps a second peacock on the stage, as in more peacock of vocabulary, rather than a peacock of historical quanta merging (E. Pound).

i really do distrust this division in what science speaks
and what poverty stricken humanism speaks of -
i distrust it because science sediments itself supposing
humanism the pauper - science and all its immediate solutions,
humanism and all its delayed problems -
the new priests look so innocent - but i'm bothered,
i don't understand their need for awe-on-purpose -
the old priests demanded kneeling and an agonising
penitence - not a concept of predestination, but
this sort of minority report: you've done nothing wrong,
but we'll assume you already have, better than a microchip
implant, the idea, we'll use that, pre everything
limit the pro of everything, and catch you in a fishnet of
omni, it was too much, all in one go, in defence it started
with a mediator impersonal, Cartesian later Spinoza's
substance - partly due to the omni-etc., a shortcut -
the easiest way out - sure, if i went to a progressive school
rather than a catholic school in an Irish neighbourhood of
far-beyond the East End locality, i might have written
you L.S.D. filled poems, instead i start off tipsy working my
way around vocabulary that's adequate - hushing out
all possible onomatopoeia static in crude tongue -
ridicule feeds the beast, ridicule my prime loathing -
criticism well and truly accepted... ridicule feeds the beast -
but i mean, this perpetuated awe of scientists,
modern philosophy anti-Aristotelian does not begin
with awe, but with a ridicule of it, a disgust -
when did humanism ever experience awe? a stranger's
kindness would be a start, but even then there's hardly
any awe in it - it soon fades, scientists have immersed themselves
as prophets of awe's preservation, one picks up
a stone and speaks of a mountain, one draws a circle and
howls out the moon - i don't know how they can fake their
awe with so many certainties - so many facts -
awe reminds me of my first bicycle lesson, attempting
balance, failing, bruising a knee, and awe when
the balance was mastered - very short-lived, then the
drudgery of re-, i distrust scientific awe, primarily because
we're slowly no longer stepping out into the unknown,
we're stopping into knows and denies - not many unknowns
out there - except as in the case of Iraq, and Donald Rumsfeld,
known knows and there are known unknowns -
now... that's awe... i don't know who was keeping check
on this, but that's more mesmerising that explaining
1,000 million years ago... in a nutshell... how long has
this pneumatic drill of Darwinism been pumping custard
into our brain? is this the part where you tell me we're experiencing
the Alaskan day in the summer months or Alaskan night
in the winter months? all this scientific awe-bashing
is no longer vogue, but they keep at it - oh amazing, ah,
stupefying - and all of it just becomes a regurgitation -
someone said in the 16th century that Aristotle was wrong,
the wrong in Aristotle is that he might have been wrong,
but he was still perplexed... we're no longer perplexed creatures,
not so much... well maybe a bit when it comes to social justice,
but it's not like: sigh and a tear in your eye... it's more like:
if a white boy was shot from a private school, the mothers
and fathers would come up to the police officers with guns
in their hands... you can see awe vanishing when the butterfly
feelings flutter away silently... it's now violent awe:
why is this still happening?! huh?! scientific awe is not
a cushion you can fall back on: we have ~100 years to live
(if you're lucky... or unlucky) and we're being told of life
in caves and trees - Darwinism has hijacked history, this is
where science in written form is like an atom bomb, it wipes
away the best part of humanism, that is: to make human
life itemised on the microscopic level - i don't care if you
go to church and **** out alms for the poor and put on
those ruby shoes and walk the yellow-brick road,
you can't relate to Judea 10 a.d. - not to save your life -
in that famous motto *carpe diem - but strained it's not
so much seize the day, but... relate to the days and those
around you who share them: pertineo diebus - or something
like that, imagine, going to a Catholic school and they
don't even have the manners to teach you a bit of Latin slang,
travesty; but that's how it is, we're no longer awe-stricken
in what the scientists are selling us, fair-dos to
the medicine men, shampoo men, cologne men,
but the awe-invoking men are a bit n'ah-ah to me -
given the timescale for one -  i'm a simple man and i want
to enjoy my beer thinking about last Friday,
my life... not the collective origin of life, and whether
i was too hairy back then - you don't need theology to
argue this point, just a little bit of common sense self-respect,
last Friday, not 1,000 million years ago when there was
no Friday, no Sunday, no March, no human imprint -
no: i can touch it, i can feel it, i can see it... i want it.
just like in my dream today - it's rather strange that i dream,
i rarely do, but sometimes i remember one or two -
and all i can say is that - i had the best *** in my life
last night, asleep - yeah, i was ******* in it -
but what bothers me is that it wasn't lucid in terms of
images, but sensations - i can thus say it wasn't completely
impotent in terms of colour, but then again it was -
i'm starting to believe that i'm a blind-man in my dreams,
i ~see sensations rather than actual images in reel -
i can remember leaning against a wall and moving my
tongue in her mouth and my middle-and-ring fingers
into the... what? cliche? anatomic? *****? you choose -
a strange parallelism - we can use the tongue for such
eloquent fragments, and yet reduce it to other atrocities
of equal eloquence - then the whole dream-world changed
and i felt sitting at the tipping point where the sea meets
the beach sands, sitting down awash the waves and her sitting
on me. it's what i felt, i didn't see anything vivid -
but the sensations presented themselves as such -
i associate that with delving into writing in my mother tongue -
email / diacritics "crossword" (un-ditto and apply a
non-misnomer, i.e. give it a proper name, cf. Aristotle).
to finish i guess i might as well write a short critique:
the over-burdening of man with nouns -
as in will alexander's index of the sri lankan...
a few examples: proxima centauri (nearest star to our sun),
hemiopia (loss of vision for one half of the binocular field),
dukkha (buddhist term for suffering),
nystagmus (involuntary jerky movements of the eye),
nosophobia (morbid dread of some particular disease),
telesto umbriel larissa (moons of saturn, uranus
and neptune, respectively),
karina (egyptian demonology, a familiar attached
to a child at birth),
pretas (ghosts) -                                  or as some people say
including Christian Guerrero - 'they're just words...'
oh yes, and words are not the cogs in the machine?
just words... just words?! a banker's bonus is just
an array of... just numbers... why is this nonchalance
to these fundamental units? first they teach us to read
and write an escape the sunny harvests of the fields,
the easy mental but demanding physical life -
after the demanding physical life went our supposed
"ease" mental life changed into a demanding mental
life and an easy physical life... that's the problem with
establishing a suitable vocabulary in yourself, you can
sometimes overdo it, meaning not many people will
understand it, globalisation didn't save us from
the babylon ambition rekindled (whether myth or whatever,
it doesn't matter, read a book literally and you'll end
up realising what could have possibly been mere myth)...
all the above cited words from the index, by god, impressive,
but why would i pain myself to use a word that i'd
have to write an index to? globalisation and words from
Iran - southern coastal to be exact home to afro-iranians -
but locally it's just a ******* shish kebab and nothing more -
or central scotoma (area of the retina that's blind) -
all this vocab wall building is amazing, it really is,
a fortress at Acre - admirable... but then a return to the dull
grey reality of everyday speech - the painful art of poetry
reduced to a personal involvement with certain words -
it's heart-breaking, well, not for me, for Will it must be,
but hey, bought three of his books, that must have counted
for a cheeseburger and a portion of fries at some point
in his life.

was uttered in a
computer generated,
non-demeaning,
gender neutral tone
by the impersonal,
unemotional,
automated,
grocery checkout machine.

"Enter your customer ID now!"
demands the artificial human.

"And... if I don't?"
I query the metallic shell
of what once was
a minimum wage employee.

There was no reply.

I want to write it all; all of it. Every last word, sentence, phrase, poem, story, tale, feeling, joke, song, garbled hunk of nonsense streaming from my mouth hole like from a tap until the whole world drowns in just what I want to say; to let them know that expression is here, in my mind, in theirs, whispering in the trees outside, singing from every atom that can bump and grind and make things feel or see or sigh.

I want to sit within friends late in the night heads bobbing nod nod nodding as we agree or disagree or pedigree our intellect as we refine the phrases that make us sound like we know. Cos when you sound like you know, that's when you get heard, and if anyone's gonna get heard, ain't no one better nor worse than us. Cos nobody really knows; no Oxbridge don could ever write the wind, measure my kiss on my darlin’s skin, capture what the rosy points of her cheeks do to my brain, my body, my soul, my Attachment to this world.

So Hear me, O merry gentlemen! For I am alive and feeling and that is all the PhD I need.- If only you could see what’s dancing around in my skull... but you don’t have to! Use your own ivory mug! Really stop and think and you’ll see more than in a million poems roar within an eyeblink. Know it and feel it and see it all; the whole stupid shining racing roaring- untameable- restlessness of it all! Put down your pen and paper and rush out in the air and rejoice truly in the warm company of lovers and friends, in the sweet hum of guitar strings and in the savage itch of the insect's bite. In loneliness and mourning. In boredom and steady working with clever hands. And love, never stop loving, or hating, or appreciating, or caring, or crying, as long as you are feeling. For sometimes it seems we should always be in pain from one thing or another, yet mostly from the bubbling exasperation of positive go-get-em ***** for life.

For we read this clunky tongue of ours and say it’s what should be but there is more! For life through all its prisms can impress upon your vision a beauty neverending, yet to sense it quivering within a page is a spectacular sight indeed. So let’s leave the rigid, the impersonal, the stymied words behind and let's form a new expression, devoid of convention, one that cries joyous face-first directly into our souls!

So, Cry, onwards! And let's weave this tender tongue of ours, golden! Let's stack this world full of less-than-sane streams of speech tangled images driving shards of true experience into each other’s minds, until we drop dead deep in our bones from exuberant exhaustion. Let’s follow Kerouac to the grave; cheering, and keeling and full of tender feeling and find a meaning in words that can transcend into being. Let’s **** and watch and listen and do and learn and laugh and notice laughter and mark it for the concentrated joy that it is. Let’s sit quietly and attend to those things around us and ruminate without ever forgetting our surrounding- which include, of course, the ever flipping ever spinning and unwinding tapestry of our mind and others'.

Let’s find joy, or the maker, or whatever, same-meaning trap clap-trap of a name he (or she) has in your sticks, in what we can touch and feel and see, and inside those we know and those we don’t. Let’s make language a human thing that radiates warmth for all, and bridges us to those around us so that none may feel alone or scared unless they long to for glorious masochism, or curiousness, or any things they so do please. Let us travel, and dance, and loose hope, and find it, and live it.

And write tenderness into this world.

no matter what pronoun use is in place, there won’t be time
to decipher it as personal or impersonal, subjective or objective,
singular or plural... to write a book of philosophy pulsating
existentialism:
i miss the rugby world cup, i miss it,
the gay referee too,
i miss the hugging and blood mushroom sprouting
from the cartilage of smeared sneeze and sniff to a hark
of semolina saliva in the up-shoot...
i miss it in the scrum... away from
the balancing mary antoinette and ballerinas,
modern lawful facade: he anchored me! gone sail the titanic!
he anchored me! foul! see? precisely! a guillotine on the ready
for those insured legs of footballers...
i miss the rugby... i fancied playing it once in school...
we had p.e. (jerseys) on the reverse with a yellow stripe
going across all maroon... football was favoured...
even though i got the ball and walked 1/4 of the field in that sloth
of being fat... why do people always have such negative memories of youth,
esp. in school?! i don’t know... all i know...
when i walked for a bottle of brown whiskers tonight,
the streets of essex were filled with that fabled smog of 19th century london,
it wasn’t guy fawkes' night but the night bling bling was out...
the firework smog settled into the streets and i started gesticulating
‘trouble breathing! trouble breathing!’ using sign language...
i couldn't translate gasping into an onomatopoeia,
let alone sign-language... mime mime mime!
3 words: film... beginning with seismic shifts... severn!
it’s an american holiday for god’s sake
(the slavs are sombre remembering the day
with virgo mort of mexico... you’re out partying
******* and ******* on graves)... have some decency to be
remotely commonwealth in attitude... like australia!
i wished they won, 2nd half, 21 to 3 i thought they were whitewash flushed...
then they bounced back to 21 - 17... then the drop goal from carter...
ah it was a knockout...
never mind the mary antoinettes and ballerinas of football...
i said it once... i’ll say it again: ref! oink ref! police officer!
you missed a spot, this tile will not have anyone slipping!
it’s how you get a working man’s sport audience impassioned...
no middle-class sensibility in a sport...
make him give a wrong decision many a times...
and you’ll get the pub rumble...
not time-out... no: let’s see it on the BIG screen...
get the referee on the side of the masses and get them impassioned
through his bad decision / multitasking... i was imagining
a big mac / watching nickers being slingshot onto the pitch...
get the referee behind the crowd and orientate them
with william wallace at stirling crying - war war woad! tadpole ooh! tattoo! blue 28! blue... grr!
in rugby you’ll just get as much passion as a workable middle-class
english marriage... oops **** daisy loot the loo (with stressor r missing trill missing h):
bloom!
and your uncle was nicknamed ***** harry?
was he ginger and donned a beard?
must be royalty.
ah man, i miss the connectivity of rugby,
where everyone's making a sandwich... with football
you just get the replica of english sociological etiquette...
saying hello 5 metres apart...
so no french chequers kissing on the cheek
to feed intimacy? problem sorted...
let me just get my umbrella... seeing the teardrops
of feminism shower me under a roof salivating from the chandelier.

I saw someone once question why it is rare to find a name in a poem.
More than that, in fact; they had the audacity to question a poet.
They asked them the simple question, "Why do you exclude names,
When you quite obviously write about, or for, someone?"

They responded gracefully, I must say, for someone so feisty.
Their reasons were commendable, understandable, and concise.
When we write about, or for, someone we respect their right
To anonymity. Where is the rule that we must always include a name?

I think if I were to be written about in the public domain, not that I ever will be,
Mind you. I think it would be nice. Of course I would appreciate the gesture.
I would of course appreciate it too if the poet took the brave step of delivering it to me first.
I think most of all that would overshadow any invasion of privacy.

matt
did you get my reply? i hope you did, i had written approx. 5, and all of them deleted... i hope i allowed myself a justifiable response with this one:

how about solipsism? solipsism is an elevated term for autism, isn't it? me? personally? i love cats, but they have a tendency to become inexhaustive economists of curiosity... i wasn't implying autism as an insult, i was implying a more crude word, synonymous with solipsism, and there is no shame in that to begin with. i like cats, because i own two, and i'm most content, when i can allow myself the time, to allow them the same time, to be left alone. cat, solo... dog + man + tail waggling + throw a ball... i better post this reply before i allow this reply, to become deleted... with all the prior 5 that have been, and me, having to post the alternative, "revision".

i.e. i rather imagine autism to be in need of having an elevated status of being designated by the term: solipsism... how can i make myself elaborate? point being, i don't want to... i too am confined to a strict vocab. fixation for the purpose of expressing language, that mitigates, bypassing, shrapnel wording of: one category fits all, conjunction words, which, i find, I, to be akin to, when categorised as: AND to begin to confine oneself to, the subsequent rigor of nouns.

i hope this doesn't end, or begin as, an apology... by autistic i was imply solipsist, i wasn't implying the retrograde slur of ******... if there's any god, it's in the disinhibited self of the autist, readily plucked, by... no basis for either a selfish, or a selfless act... i'm over-wording this, but... point being... i needed to settle myself in a posit, above the current cultural norm of the troll... which has nothing to do with autism, or as i like to call it: solipsism, diminished to a slur of: automaton...

i hope you can make lite reading of this... i concede, i attempted to make more than necessary, and conciliatory scribbles... if in any way i redeemed myself, i hope you'll concede to entertaining, accepting my apology.

Jules  22h
My only issue was that your poem seemed to make Autism synonymous with stupid or any other derogatory term. However, seeing as that wasn’t how you meant it, I apologize. I’m a bit defensive as my brother has autism

Mateuš Conrad  22h
that's perfectly understandable, given the circumstances, i am hardly surprised... i'm still here if you want to continue past the initial shock-tactic of testing the waters with me, obviously we can change the subject and not stand, metaphorically: with knives pressed against each others' throats... there i was, thinking i'd reply diving into the subject matter for no, necessary clarification / added depth... but it's the least i can appreciate from your cordial response, as to, at least, appreciate a change in the subject matter, so that, both of us, can return to feeding off a sentiment of: being left, less, uncomfortable; which implies that i have to instigate the question to change the subject matter... hmm... speed-dating-esque trivia... movies, paintings, music... literature... ah... kind of blue, miles davis, my english teacher told me, that if anyone in the classroom didn't own this album by the age they were 30... there was something wrong with them... in my then paranoia, i bought the album, and now own it on vinyl... somehow... i find that there's something more wrong with me, owning it, than not owning it.

Jules  22h
Favorite movie- Mamma Mia, favorite painting- amazing piece by a local artist, music- currently obsessed with the Beatles, favorite book- We all fall down. I’m thoroughly impressed about how reasonable you are being given the circumstances, and after reading a few more of your poems, I can tell you are a good person

Mateuš Conrad  21h
oh come on... mamma mia?! and not something akin to west side story?! who's the local artist? i only access to a London base, and, that requires a networking schedule i'm not going to equip myself with; and i'm hardly surprised by how understanding you are of me, and i do wish to pay more compliments to you, but... i feel that that would overstate me taking liberty in me not incurring an over-simplified stance of my own liberty towards you... remember, i'm one person in writing against a blank, and another person to conjure forth a reply... against a canvas, that is a readied flesh of my own flesh, bone of my own bone, i can see the antagonist in the compounded state of, the sacrosanct state of lingo... i can be a ******* against a blank canvas, but, obviously, when i am to begin with a clarity of an addressee, i cannot consider staging a variation of something, inhospitable, as a Kandinsky-variation to suit myself... Jules, you can never become something akin i treat a blank sparring estate i perform in writing without, something you are already established with, concerns equivalent to my own predisposition being unchanllenged / or, rather, undistrubed. the beatles... i'm trying to find something of a vinyl collector's "beginner's luck"... i'm too into prog. rock music... EP album experiences, akin to: king crimson's debut: in the court of the crimson king... serves me right, for not getting into Mahler... or Eric Dolphy jazz... so i turned the blind eye, and moved toward pagan music... wardruna... hedningarna... in extremo... garmarna... faun... heilung... esp. the last... i have never wished to visit the Faroe Islands more, than, after listening to their music.

Jules  21h
Mammia Mia is my favorite almost solely because of the memories attached to it. You certainly are a unique person

Mateuš Conrad  21h
i agree, i'm a sucker for super trouper and money money money, i'm waiting for a Tina Turner musical, to be honest... don't worry, i've looked into some of your comment sections... i cannot alleviate the blatantly bogus comments that are worth nothing more than an immediacy to make antagonism... i can't, i wish i could, but.... it's either this variant of an outlet, or a punching bag... i'm as unique as you find me to be... but when i just see "demands to conform" to an otherwise unnatural behavior... i don't like behaving in a counter-cordial fashion... you understand me? if there's no need to be bogus, why begin to bother being so? i hope we can remain lodged into partial nuances... and continue this discussion, beside tomorrow, i.e. whenever you feel like to preserve it, which, i hope... you will strip away more of your anonymity... but even if that is to not be the case: i thank you for the compliments... but from having inspected the immediate comments... you are a most tender artifact worth double the inspection's curiosity with a shy eye... and until i take myself to rest, and slumber, i can only leave your with these words... i wish the world was more welcoming than i allow you to believe it to be. if you can ever forgive me, i can only hope you can, by bidding me a goodnight, and welcoming me back into the discussion, within the confines of a tomorrow.

Jules  20h
Goodnight, my hopefully future friend. Poetry is definitely one of the best outlets. I definitely understand that aspect of you

Mateuš Conrad  20h
i hope to entertain you here, once more, and all the future that can be shared between the both of us. let me see you tomorrow, and scrap a beginning of a conversation with you, once more toward a focus of a beginning... and see how many minutes this allows us to entertain an amnesia of: beginning with today... how about that? i'll take to sleep, and hope, to grin... i actually re-read what i wrote: and figured... if i was being all-too despotic in securing pedantry... but then... if you took to complimenting me, i have to compliment you: tender soul... scouting the merger of sight and the hybrid coast... tender petal... why not? who is to obstruct me telling you this? lever... beside the said and into what's thought... tender petal... what a Scouser would call pet, i'd call petal... or... heavily implied: stagnant Bismarck stipend... if it be too much to ask... write me more than under the scrutiny of below the already given minus, of the 10 sentences. come at me as a punching bag... just as an experiment... i want to be the new vanguard... experiment with being uninhibited.

Jules  19h
Even the way you talk is extremely poetic. I appreciate how you took the time to try to talk everything out to prevent us from having any bad blood between, and I see know that you didn’t mean any harm from what you said. Thank you for being so kind about it all. I sincerely hope we can pick up this conversation again tomorrow as I feel we are on the road to a promising friendship. I’d be happy to write more per text, but for the sake of experimentation, I’m intrigued to see if you could try to talk in a little less of a formal dialect

Mateuš Conrad  1h
trying to bypass a formal dialect will be hard, as we're too fresh into our patchwork of setting boundaries, rigid as that might sound, and the current climate, to me, you're a slab of marble, not a statue. this sort of friendship, you're talking about, requires us to keep a modest concern for language, which, awfully, is riddled with diatribe excerpts... how we will transcend this, is, well, concerned with both of us to decide... i'm starting to entertain the fact that you have an autistic brother, since i'm learning to be panicy-picky with my language... i too had an ultra-autistic "friend" back in high-school... and i would constantly retrieve a blank-state response from him, i.e. i was looking at less a person, and more: a labyrinth. how i'll transition into a more informal use of language, i'm unsure how that will take place, Jules, we can't exactly share experiences, we can only avast ourselves, on what will pursue its own noumenon characteristics of stated language. at present, we only share a commonality of language, i'm bewildered by stating something informal... i wish i could, but i'm only allowed an "aggrieved" presence to your wish for: informality, slang, holding-hands type of escapism. i think that, with regards to your wishes, we'll have to settle for a sediments' worth of unravelling, like me, you're too trying to escape the puddle's worth of being immediately "concerned" with the comment section... we'll need to find commonality... from yesterday, i can tell you: i had the beatles faze when i was leaving the years attributed to my teens... then i found it really hard to find new music, outside the realm of bands akin to tool, the neo-progressive rock bands... but i see your point, my language is the sort of formal, that stages a lack of intimacy, but this is an ontological-high-jump, given your reply, and emphasis on friendship... you will have to curate me, moving forward, since i will be unable to moderate how, me, interacting with you, will be adequate to have finally said, something informal, by your standards of scrutiny. time, i will first have to see some of your idioms to change my dialect; i'll begin, i'll tell you where this was written from, Romford, Essex, England.

Jules  1h
If we are to move forward as friends, I have to express my feeling on the autism topic. First off, Autism is a spectrum that ranges from high functioning to low functioning. 30% of people with autism are in fact of average or higher intelligence. Some of the most famous scientists including Albert Einstein were in fact autistic. It is not synonymous with simple or stupid in any way, shape, or form. I dislike that you said your friend seemed to be less of a person because he had autism. However, I understand that you’re misconceptions weren’t meant in a malicious way

Mateuš Conrad  51s
so how can i move forward to establish a less informal dialect? i wasn't focusing on the details of the stated condition, i know that i'm handling something as fragile as an egg in terms of what words i employ, and that i might seem astoudning, in having not contra opinions on the matter beneath the impersonal "facade"... but you were asking about how to make our interaction more uninhibited, if we're going to lecture each other about infringing on delicate matters... i wasn't implying the person in question was less of a person, i was implying he was more of a person, by resembling a labyrinth, i didn't take any personhood from him, i simply reattached it to a metaphor, of elevated complexity, of a labyrinth: i was lost in attaining a mutual comprehension of a shared experience with him... what's so bad about that? i only mentioned something in passing, since your's, was the original "concern"... you asked me how we could continue in a less informal manner... this reply will not answer your original "concerns"... what if i were to say: i'm schizophrenic? what then? you'd lecture me on... all of your knowledge on the matter? if we're all going to interrogate each other... thus... then you have a misconception of schizophrenics... akin to john nash... personally, i don't understand how you'd think i'd be primarily focused on something said: intended to be relegated to: in passing... guess what... i'll send this and...

      BLOCK

               i'm basically rummaging
through porcelain...
  i was ****** off one writing
platform for no reason...
   being ****** off from another
is not on my wish list,
from a very, simple,
lack of reciprocated
       feed of understanding;

   oh i know when i see minor *******,
some liking it to micro-aggression...
i chose a fox as my totem,
learning from a 2015 "debacle":
it looks innocent at first,
    but then spirals out of control;
the more i sieve through
this construct known as humanity,
the more i chose to remain
hidden.
   - and for all the worth
of the tabloid press...
   this is where i'll reign, myself
included.

man, a shattering of woe against the shoreline of synonymous
due applause - or kindred with the devil,
burrowing to circumstance the saharan shadow,
tipped shortest via noon,
                    how experience
    humanity without a language,
that god brokered, and not sanctify
Pontius Pilate as the saving grace?
  lava mea mani mundi -
wash my (mandi(ble)) hands clean (purus) -
aristocrats of Pompeii... ugly *******;
       differed - as was the price
of entering Oxbridge.
                 which is why the content
of dreams was questioned, rather the context...
because who was the narrator, after all?
                  why didn't Freudian theory
question the narrator, but instead superimposed
itself as the gravitas narrator: combining both
content and context of dreams?
                   i find it scary that Freud
managed to toy around until the point where
he found a dysfunctional dummy staging horror
that lacked all necessities of a ventriloquist
       framed toward a subplot: embedded in needing one.
  is Freud the only person to provide narration
for the phenomenon of dreaming?
                i still find dreams caged in Kantian noumena...
i.e., why do they happen in the first place?
        i think it's strange that dreams occur in the first place,
that's the context question,
  Freud already answered the content question:
****** Pythagorean truce: it's called all geometric shaping
fits the answer: *******.
      yes, that's me done & dusted...
                           i'm just wondering about what need
we have within Darwinism to dream... what are
the evolutionary downsizing benefits?
isn't dreaming a delusional cauldron that disturbs
our will... or is Hollywood dead and our fancies
are no longer fanciful... what would a history
of dreams reveal, merely Joseph as the sole
dream architect?
                     Freud was but a man,
he said something about the content of dreams,
he didn't say anything about the context of dreams,
i can't find anyone to explain to me
                a need for a context and a need to dream...
i guess the people who dream are as easily
impregnated with a summary of Voltaire's Candide...
that this is: the best of all possible worlds...
          sure, but inscribe upon this world
a concentrated censorship of dreams...
       let me dream the last thing i might see
and give it all the mechanics of what others dream of
to the tilt of fully-embraced enhancement fakery...
             i will still not understand how you managed
to lodge a photon inside my cranium, or why there's
a need for me to dream, that's Freud point + on the content,
but that's also Freud point minus given the context...
    not if i have to hammer a thousand nails into
planks of wood will a dream matter to me....
             by god, make your money from analysis
dream content, but you'll end up a pauper analysis
dream context... are our lives so dandy and simple
that we retreat from political hierarchies
                            and what needs to be addressed
and with tails dragged between our hinds
                  we create foci for translating dreams into
a realism that can never be realised, because being
a realism, it's only a superficial version of
the pain that reality is?
                  yep, so much "wording",
and how many breaths did you inhale and exhale
while i said that? me too, on words: too many.
             Freud can have his content-invoking
affirmation of life and the subsequent prejudices...
but Freud cannot have a context-angling depravity
     to forward life, and consequent pejoratives
being suitor:
             for those who dare not think
                    are easily converted to dreaming...
and those who care to not dream,
   are ushered into the most obscure thinking
   that has not parallel with celebrated thought
akin to Einstein or Newton... but then again,
the celebration of dreams have only one representative,
and he's biblical... oh sorry: mythical.
yet that's where it all begins,
and it is a great sacrifice... to abandon the comforts
of dreams, in order to think uncustomary
   or even murky, uncelebrated thoughts...
                         to think the mundane and non-applicable
insistences... and then dream nothing,
and then see humanity's impecible practibility
  in the do rather then the lost assertive of be,
for humanity does the most, and is the least...
  for every hundred of do instances,
there's but a hundreth of a be instance worthy a mention;
meaning? do the plumbing...
       chop the timber, fix the electric...
                    no one tells people to reach a frantic embodiment,
or calls for an impersonal god that might leave them
   personal & authentic... everyone always asks for a personal
god that leaves them impersonal... robo-tectonic akin
  to Islam... thus ascribing: quantifiably nihilistic...
                   is my life too unbearable to continue or
unbearable to convene such a life, and quote:
  "simply nodded" on my Christmas greeting card...
******* cha cha cha...
                             i ain't a trebuchet,
but i'll swing a plum with a pair of knuckles
should you need more lip-balm for a smooch;
i'm just jittery about the date you'll test me.;
because the other-half-of-me was particular
about that dietary schematic of anorexia;
some said it was cool amphibian akin to ambiance
and hence the strobe light and break-dancing epileptic:
                       coffers full of chuff!
o lookie lookie, who the ****** unit of the
daffy bunch: quack squint-mc-dire...
no wonder she says her name's Chelsea postscriptum.

Jesus, I be lifted higher
Higher, higher
Be lifted higher
Even though we are not the same
Different ways
And we walk on different path
Different road
I just copied that from somewhere
But it matches
With the notes
And be as one
Holding each other's hand in gratitude
Jesus, my arm is not that long
My mind is not that strong
I still have a picture of you on my phone
At night I delete it
The morning after I find you again
It is the lost children's song, it has no end
I can't hear you when I practice on bath
I can't feel you when the water fills me up
Magdalene would not come
It is Natalia
It is Natalia
Now you know who you are
Pictures of daisies on the front page
The blond, long hair
Ensnare my neck, my legs, even the chest
Heart not beating, it is quiet
Is it a candle or a sun? It just burns
The dark is casted away
But you say, dim the light because it helps
How could I not be your migraine?
Different gem pierced on your heart forever
Not really forever, just feels like it
The wounds never be healed
Seven lied that I would make a good healer
These hands are full of barb wire
Colored red of the blood or is it just corroded-
I dare not touch, I dare not move
It would hurt,
it would hurt not you, don't you think I care
Like the sword it is two edged
I need to sharpen my teeth for
the most I could do is biting my thigh
I am a baby trapped in the physique of an adolescent
I don't know I must praise you
And that it's you who is being lifted higher
My ****** friend says
There are a dozen or
two; At two I remember you
Still waiting at that cafe?
It is not me whom you are waiting for
I shouldn't have waited for seventeen years to come
It could have been a coincidence
It could have been real
It could
Not
Be possible and cannot ever be
We do not have the bridge
Ran out of concrete
It reminds me of Tanabata
The kind of one sided Tanabata
Today when I see the stars
I would cry

growing up to choruses of revelation and redemption,
i always heard them say that this world is approaching
hell or heaven.

now that years have passed and i have found my own voice,
i say -with scars of experience- there's not much difference between
an abundance of wildflowers or an abundance of wildfires.
life continues to blossom fearlessly forward;
lovers continue to burn just as brightly.

so, dear friend, i beg of you,

spread me like your wildflowers.
hiding beneath the weight of loam
bodies curled tight in the shell of youth
clinging tight to the gentle flame
that burns within us all.

spread me like your wildfires.
ever expanding heat and humidity
swelling and growing faster, faster
collecting sparks like goosebumps
and awaiting the ignition of touch.

spread me like wildflowers.
roots like fingers tunneling
their way through the damp
fertility of adolescent life stumbling
through hallways headfirst into the light.

spread me like wildfires.
bellowing smoke like clouds dances
from lips never kissed
now singed to a gentle crisp
from the intimacy of a catalyst.

spread me like wildflowers.
stems burst forth from the dark
with the kinesthetic rage
of a child no longer content
to crawl upon hands and knees.

spread me like wildfires.
gasping, wheezing, aching,
spreading further, higher to find
new sources to burn like blood in veins
in the heartbeats following a first touch.

spread me like wildflowers.
bodies now rising strong against the tide of winds
lifting the burden of petals upon shoulders capable
like butterflies crouching upon fingertips raised,
poised to fly.

spread me like wildfires.
flames stretching like arms across
the skin of a now familiar lover
embracing in the hot throes of passion
and the brilliant burn of innocence's remorse.

spread me like wildflowers.
buds burdened with dew
heavy with expectation to begin anew
straining against the drowsiness of flesh
until finally bursting forth with brilliant zeal.

spread me like wildfires.
the overwhelming euphoria
of feet finding steady ground
and of thoughts no longer filled
with concerns of mere survival.

spread me like wildflowers.
growing past fearful worries of tomorrow
content to stretch limbs and petals wide
seeding the earth with children
and blessing a new generation with beauty.

spread me like wildfires.
drowning the overwhelming clamor
of a forest in the midst of song
replaced only with the lonely blaze,
the roaring glow in that crackling ******.

spread me like wildflowers.
the seasons of youth long passed
leaving trunks and bodies to thicken and knot
scarring deeper with every lingering reminder
and memory of the light left dimming.

spread me like wildfires.
always hungry, wisps of flame
lick at the heels of the forest
stealing the air of life and lungs
and leaving the body breathless.

spread me like wildflowers.
the brisk, impersonal wind of winter
chills the rooted beauty of Nature's eye
gently wilting the aging passion
under a soft crown of frost.

spread me like wildfires.
never content to rest in one place
or shy away from raging against
the gall of day to ever end at all
and lower the shades on former lovers.

spread me like wildflowers.
gently resting like bodies
no longer warm to the touch
sleeping deeper than corpses
in the morgue of your memory.

spread me like wildfires.
ash swirls in the flurry of
flame's last breath, whirling
in the charred remains of intimacy
no longer returned, no longer found.

so lover, i beg now of you,

bury me like your wildflowers.
drown me like your wildfires.

"I'm going to kiss you"
but the hands were already reaching for my throat
committed to misery
a year of asking to be choked
"I'm going to try to have *** with you"
but thats why I came to his bar
moral compass might have been against it
but the experiment had already come too far

It was awkward the first time
but I could tell how bad he wanted it
both drank too much
he was nervous--i was loving it
For no reason, I persisted
stayed in the lab for a year
for so long it was one sided
it was forcibly impersonal, a text and a beer

"Come with me to this"
but i knew i shouldn't
tagged along a few times
tried to stay objective--couldn't
I loved him then
****. no ***** to undo this
experiment ruined, cruel and casual
doomed, mediocre bliss

                        Then any eloquence ended. Science overcame reason in ways I thought impossible. He was consumed by insecurities and double standards and my revulsion only drew me deeper in. He left me once for being offended when he was outwardly rude to my friend. I cracked and was pulled back my arm in another bar--at least if he's this angry it means I'm having an effect, it's evolving. Didn't want to say the words but I begged for forgiveness.
                        He joked about ******* my friends; he recalled "girls" from his past. I tried to reciprocate and was met with the usual onslaught of hypocritical rage. I disdained this behavior but considered it a victory when it ebbed--I do not recognize what the past year has made me. I did all of this for something I was only ever capable of being half-vested in. When he screamed over me in public and the hands came reaching up for my neck again, I felt a comic guilt for first noticing it was a callback to when I first committed myself to this work. It was an escape that I manipulated into becoming a mad doctor's monster. I'd taken a repugnant mess and given it life, and was somehow mistress and mother. It hopped up off my table here. I spent the end of my days with my beloved abomination trying to save it from the townspeople.
                       Instead of saving anything, I killed us both, beautifully. Neither deserved love. I don't deserve anything, except the things I brought on myself. I can't eat or stop eating, I can't sleep or wake. I'm in constant pursuit of *** when any touch feels inherently wrong. I drink to feel worse to feel better and I watch the kind of **** that I swore to advocate against when I was a nineteen year old feminist. I don't even touch myself, because the smell of my own body isn't mine anymore. The curve of my hips isn't mine and neither is my done-up face. My monster's face is now anyone, though, and I'm much beyond the fear that nothing will be the same for me.

Even though your funeral was in the summer,
It felt like autumn the way the tears
Hung off Aunt Shelley's jawbone like cold raindrops
On the eaves of the old porch,
The way Grandpa's eyes were too red and wet and
A thousand years away,
The way Dad's sorrow poured out of folded arms and tight lips,
Soft like worn leather,
The way it rained too lightly to add any cliché dreariness.
I just couldn't think of that red granite box as you, even though I
Knew
It was the soft gray remains of your body.
Death is not like winter, cold and harsh
Death is autumn, life draining from bodies,
Life drip-dripping from stuttering lips and
Once-strong grips
Death is watching summers of laughter and hugs fade to
Hospital rooms and rain-grey skin and
Slow sad songs like wind in red-brown, dead-brown leaves
And feeling a slow, quiet loneliness invade your veins.
Your death was not cold, impersonal sterile white; it was the
Aching melancholy melody of removing
One shade of green
From a palette, not noticed in the painting at large
But felt  keenly in the way the artist's hand no longer
Cues that brushstroke.
Watching you die was watching all the green leach out of the leaves
And turn them briefly, painfully on fire,
Standing in a field of emerald grass and feeling it
Crinkle and turn yellow-orchre under cold fingers
Collapsing into mud.
Watching Death from the outside is the single
Most painful part of your painless process.
When you took your last breath, your features were a
Picture-perfect memory of peace, even as my face was a
Mask of confusion, my chest heaving with stale hospital air
The way yours would never again.
I wanted to run outside and imagine all the trees turning red-gold
In your honor, mimicking your final
Blaze of glory in that last smile.
Autumn came early that year, though no trees
Turned
Til October.
Even in the middle of spring I can smell the
Rain-woods-wind-wine scent of your autumn soul
And it makes me smile.

Es tan fácil nacer en sitios que no existen
y sin embargo fueron brumosos y reales
por ejemplo m¡ sitio mi marmita de vida
mi suelta de palomas conservaba
una niebla capaz de confundir las brújulas
y atravesar de tarde los postigos
todo en el territorio de aquella infancia breve
con la casa en la loma cuyo dueño
cara un tal valentín del escobar
y el nombre era sonoro me atraían
las paredes tan blancas y rugosas
ahí descubrí el lápiz como colón su américa
sin saber que era lápiz y mientras lo empuñaba
alguien hacía muecas al costado de un biombo
para que yo comiera pero yo no comía

después es la estación y es el ferrocarril
me envuelven en la manta de viaje y de calor
y había unas mangueras largas ágiles
que lavaban la noche en los andenes

las imágenes quedan como en un incunable
que sólo yo podría descifrar
puesto que soy el único especialista en mí
y sin embargo cuando regresé
apenas treinta y dos años más tarde
no había andén ni manta ni paredes rugosas
ya nadie recordaba la casa en la lomita
tampoco a valentín del escobar
quizá sea por eso que no puedo creer
en pueblo tan ceñido tan variable
sin bruma que atraviese los postigos
y confunda las brújulas
un paso de los toros enmendado
que no tiene ni biombo ni mangueras

el espejo tampoco sabe nada
con torpeza y herrumbre ese necio repite
mi pescuezo mi nuez y mis arrugas
debe haber pocas cosas en el mundo
con menos osadía que un espejo

en mis ojos amén de cataratas
y lentes de contacto con su neblina propia
hay rehenes y brujas
espesas telarañas sin arañas
hay fiscales y jueces
disculpen me quedé sin defensores
hay fiscales que tiemblan frente a los acusados
y jueces majaderos como tías
o deshumanizados como atentos verdugos
hay rostros arduos y fugaces
otros triviales pero permanentes
hay criaturas y perros y gorriones
que van garúa arriba ensimismados
y un sosías de dios que pone cielos
sobre nuestra mejor abolladura
y tampoco el espejo sabe nada
de por qué lo contemplo sin rencor y aburrido

y así de noche en noche
así de nacimiento en nacimiento
de espanto en espantajo
van o vamos o voy con las uñas partidas
de arañar y arañar la infiníta corteza

más allá del orgullo los árboles quedaron
quedaron los presagios las fogatas
allá atrás allá atrás
quién es tan memorioso
ah pero la inocencia ese búfalo herido
interrumpe o reanuda
la fuga o cacería
de oscuro desenlace

todos mis domicilios me abandonan
y el botín que he ganado con esas deserciones
es un largo monólogo en hiladas
turbado peregrino garrafal
contrito y al final desmesurado
para mi humilde aguante

Me desquito clavándole mi agüero
me vengo espolvoreándolo de culpas
pero la soledad
                            esa guitarra
esa botella al mar
esa pancarta sin muchedumbrita
esa efemérides para el olvido
oasis que ha perdido su desierto
flojo tormento en espiral
cúpula rota y que se llueve
ese engendro del prójimo que soy
tierno rebuzno de la angustia
farola miope

tímpano
ceniza
nido de águila para torcazas
escobajo sin uvas
borde de algo importante que se ignora
esa insignificante libertad de gemir
ese carnal vacío
ese naipe sin mazo
ese adiós a ninguna
esa espiga de suerte
ese hueco en la almohada
esa impericia
ese sabor grisáceo
esa tapa sin libro
ese ombligo inservible
la soledad en fin
                              esa guitarra
de pronto un día suena repentina y llamante
inventa prójimas de mi costilla
y hasta asombra la sombra
qué me cuentan

en verdad en verdad os digo que
nada existe en el mundo como la soledad
para buscarnos tierna compañía
cohorte escolta gente caravana

y el espejo ese apático supone
que uno está solo sólo porque rumia
en cambio una mujer cuando nos mira sabe
que uno nunca está solo aunque lo crea
ah por eso hijos míos si debéis elegir
entre una muchacha y un espejo
elegid la muchacha

cómo cambian los tiempos y el azogue
los espejos ahora vienen antinarcisos
hace cuarenta años la gente los compraba
para sentirse hermosa para saberse joven
eran lindos testigos ovalados
hoy en cambio son duros enemigos
cuadrados de rencor bruñidos por la inquina
nos agravian mortifican zahieren
y como si tal cosa pronuncian su chispazo
mencionan lustros y colesterol
pero no las silvestres bondades de estraperlo
la lenta madurez esa sabiduría
la colección completa de delirios
nada de eso         solamente
exhuman
las averías del pellejo añejo
el desconsuelo y sus ojeras verde
la calvicie que empieza o que concluye
los párpados vencidos siniestrados
las orejas mollejas la chatura nasal
las vacantes molares las islas del eczema

pero no hay que huir despavorido
ni llevarle el apunte a ese reflejo
nadie mejor que yo
para saber que miente

no caben en su estanque vertical
los que fui los que soy los que seré
siempre soy varios en parejos rumbos
el que quiere asomarse al precipicio
el que quiere vibrar inmóvil como un trompo
el que quiere respirar simplemente

será que nada de eso está en mis ojos
nadie sale a pedir el vistobueno
de los otros que acaso y sin acaso
también son otros y en diversos rumbos
el que aspira a encontrarse con su euforia
el que intenta ser flecha sin el arco
el que quiere respirar simplemente
será que nada de eso está en mi ceño
en mis hombros mi boca mis orejas
será que ya no exporto dudas ni minerales
no genera divisas mi conducta
tiene desequilibrios mi balanza de pagos
la caridad me cobra intereses leoninos
y acaparo dolor para el mercado interno

será que nada de eso llega al prójimo
pero yo estoy hablando del y con el espejo
y en su Iuna no hay prójima y si hay
será tina entrometida que mira sobre mi hombro

los prójimos y prójimas no están el el luciente
sencillamente son habitantes de mi
y bueno se establecen en mi como pamperos
como arroyos o como burbujas

por ejemplo las dudas no están en el espejo
las dudas que son meras preconfianzas
por ejemplo los miércoles no están
ya que el espejo es un profesional
de noches sabatinas y tardes domingueras
los miércoles de miércoles quien se le va a arrimar
pedestre o jadeante
inhumano y cansado
con la semana a medio resolver
las tardes gordas de preocupaciones
el ómnibus oliendo a axila de campeón

los insomnios no caben por ejemplo
no son frecuentes pero si poblados
de canciones a trozos
de miradas que no eran para uno
y alguna que otra bronco no del todo prevista
de ésas clue consumen la bilis del trimestre

tampoco aquellos tangos en Ios que uno sujeta
en suave diagonal la humanidad contigua
y un magnetismo cálido y a la vez transitorio
consterna los gametos sus ene cromosomas
y entre corte y cortina se esparcen monosílabos
y tanto las pavadas aleluya
como las intuiciones aleluya aleluya
derriban las fronteras ideológicas

verbigracia qué puede rescatar el espejo
de una ausencia tajante
una de esas ausencias que concurren
que numeran sus cartas
y escriben besos ay de amor remoto

qué puede qué podría reconocer carajo
de las vidas y vidas que ya se me murieron
esos acribillados esos acriborrados
del abrazo y el mapa y los boliches
o los que obedecieron a su corazonada
hasta que el corazón les explotó en la mano
sea en el supermarket de la mala noticia
o en algún pobre rancho de un paisaje sin chau

poco puede conocer de los rostros
que no fueron mi rostro y sin embargo
siguen estando en mí
y menos todavía
de los desesperantes terraplenes
que traté de subir o de bajar
esos riesgos minúsculos que parecen montañas
y los otros los graves que salvé como un sordo
así hasta que la vida quedó sin intervalos
y la muerte quedó sin vacaciones
y mi piel se quedó sin otras pieles
y mis brazos vacíos como mangas
declamaron socorro para el mundo

en la esquina del triste no hay espejo
y lo que es
                  más
austero
                                        no
hay auxilio
por qué será que cunden fas alarmas
y no huy manera ya de descundirlas

el país tiene heridas grandes como provincias
y hay que aprender a andar sobre sus bordes
sin vomitar en ellas ni caer como bolos
ni volverse suicida u miserable
ni decir no va más
porque está yendo
y exportamos los huérfanos y viudas
como antes la lana o el tasajo

en el muelle del pobre no hay espejo
y lo que es
                   más
sencillo
                                        no
hay adioses

los tratemos que estaban en el límite
las muchachas que estaban en los poemas
asaltaron de pronto el minuto perdido
y se desparramaron como tinta escarlata
sobre las ínfulas y los sobornos
metieron sus urgencias que eran gatos
en bolsas de arpillera
y cuando las abrieron aquello fue un escándalo
la fiesta prematura
igual que si se abre una alcancía

hacía tanto que éramos comedidos y cuerdos
que no nos vino mal este asedio a la suerte

los obreros en cambio no estaban en los poemas
estaban en sus manos nada más
que animan estructuras telas fibras
y cuidan de su máquina oh madre inoxidable
y velan su garganta buje a buje
y le toman el pulso
y le vigilan la temperatura
y le controlan la respiración
y aquí atornillan y desatornillan
y allí mitigan ayes y chirridos y ecos
o escuchar sus maltrechas confidencias
y por fin cuando suena el pito de las cinco
la atienden la consuelan y la apagan

los obreros no estaban en los poemas
pero a menudo estaban en las calles
eon su rojo proyecto y eon su puño
sus alpargatas y su humor de lija
y su beligerancia su paz y su paciencia
sus cojones de clase
qué clase de cojones
sus olas populares
su modestia y su orgullo
que son casi lo mismo

las muchachas que estaban en los poemas
los obreros que estaban en las mulos
hoy están duros en la cárcel firmes
como las cuatro barras que interrumpen el cielo

pero habrá otro tiempo
es claro que habrá otro
habrá otro ticnlpo porque el tiempo vuela
no importa que ellas y ellos no estén en el espejo
el tiempo volará
                             no
como el cóndor
ni como el buitre ni como el albatros
ni como el churrinche ni como el venteveo
el tiempo volara como la historia
esa ave migratoria de atlas fuertes
que cuando Ilega es para quedarse

y por fin las muchachas estarán en las mulos
y por fin los obreros estarán en los poemas
ay espejo ignorás tanta vida posible
tenés mi soledad
vaya conquista
en qué mago atolón te obligaste a varar
hay un mundo de amor que te es ajeno
así chic no te. quedes mirando má mirada
la modorra no escucha campanas ni promesas
tras de mi sigue habiendo un pedazo do historia
y yo tengo la llave de ese cobre barato
pero atrás más atrás
o adelante mucho más adelante
hay una historia plena
una patria en andamios con banderas posibles
y todo sin oráculo y sin ritos
y sin cofre y sin llave
simplemente una patria

ay espejo las sombras que te cruzan
son mucho más corpóreas que mi cuerpo depósito
el tiempo inagotable hace sus propios cálculos
y yo tengo pulmones y recuerdos y nuca
y otras abreviaturas de lo frágil
quizá una vez, te quiebres
dicen que es mala suerte
pero ningún espejo pudo con el destino
o yo mismo me rompa sin que vos te destruyas
y sea así otra sombra que te cruce

pero espejo ya tuve como dieciocho camas
en los tres años últimos de este gran desparramo
como todas las sombras pasadas o futuras
soy nómada y testigo y mirasol
dentro de tres semanas tal vez me vaya y duerma
en ml cama vacía número diecinueve
no estarás para verlo
no estaré para verte

en otro cuarto neutro mengano y transitorio
también habrá un espejo que empezará a
   escrutarme
tan desprolijamente como vos
y aquí en este rincón duramente tranquilo
se instalará otro huesped temporal como yo
o acaso dos amantes recién homologados
absortos en su canje de verguenzas
con fragores de anule e isócronos vaivenes

no podrás ignorarlos
egos le ignorarán
no lograrás desprestigiar su piel
porque será de estreno y maravilla
ni siquiera podr á vituperar mi rostro
porque ya estaré fuera de tu alcance
diciéndole a otra luna de impersonal herrumbre
lo que una vez te dije con jactancia y recelo

he venido con toldos mis enigmas
he venido con todos mis fantasmas
he venido con lerdees mis amores

y antes de que me mire
como vos me miraste
con ojos que eran sello parodia de mis ojos
soltaré de una vez el desafío

ay espejo cuadrado
nuevo espejo de hotel y lejanía
aquí estoy
                  ya podés
empezar a ignorarme.

“You can’t go.”
His hand gripped my wrist, an urgency in his voice. We had been best friends since we first met in second grade, and our relationship had taken a sudden (and maybe one could go as far as to say inevitable) turn freshman year of high school. And yet here I was, about to storm out on the anniversary of our first date 2 years later. His eyes, the warm brown that could melt me from across the room, pleaded me to stay. To forget any wrongdoings, and misunderstandings, and the past ten minutes where I imagined the anger in our voices carried throughout the park. It was supposed to be a picnic, the romantic kind, because he knew I always fell for the romantic, no matter how cheesy it was in reality. And maybe that’s why I liked it so much— it provided an escape.
“I know you. No one else knows you like I do.”
And it was true, to some extent. He had seen me at my best, and at my absolute worst. He knew that I twirled my hair when I was nervous, that I made wishes on ladybugs and stars and 11:11, that I couldn’t sing for my life (and nevertheless belted out, Don’t Stop Believing in the car every time it came on the radio, despite his begging for mercy). He knew where I got the tiny half-moon scar on my ankle and was there for every bone I had ever broken in my elementary school days, knew that I consistently cry through the entire movie Titanic, and that when my dad moved out of the house, it left me slightly broken inside.
But he didn’t know me like he thought he did. And he never really would, because what he didn’t realize is that there is a kind of perpetual loneliness in living. Everyone has their own innermost thoughts and dreams, the ones that they are too ashamed or confused by to speak aloud. Thoughts that no one but themselves are, and ever will be, privy to. They are hidden behind more widely-known and impersonal facts, and others can only see so deep into another’s soul. Therefore, to claim that we “know” someone is never a completely truthful statement. We can memorize their full name, birthday, favorite color. Their favorite book, bad habits, and mannerisms. But, just like one can never truly empathize with another, incapable of understanding what another has gone through in a complete sense, we can never know a person in their entirety. Some get close, best friends, family, lovers. But to say that we know that person, have walked along the boundaries of their mind, would be an impossible feat.
Within the shielded confines of my mind, I could admit that all I wanted in life was to have a love that an artist might be inspired to illustrate, or an author might yearn to capture in written words. A love that was worth replicating. And I didn’t believe that a love like that could come from assumptions, a guessing game. For that’s all that this was, really. We’d known each other for so long, but nevertheless I couldn’t help take offense in the fact that he thought he knew everything about me. Those lovers I read about, they never lost interest in each other. And that was the whole point— a wanting to learn new things about the each other everyday, and a love so deep that they would want to keep learning for the rest of their lives. And if he thought differently, than maybe it was wrong. Maybe God or the stars or whatever it is that sent us flailing into this world, searching for something or someone to grasp on to, didn’t want us to happen. I had convinced myself time and time again, as naïvely as a child, that every relationship  I had would be the one that would become something wonderful. But here I was, facing my supposed love, and he was convinced of something that I knew would eventually ruin us. So I looked him in the eye when I said, “No. No you don’t. We’re strangers, don’t you see?”
But he didn’t. I could see it in his eyes, in his returning gaze.
Maybe he could learn, if he wanted.
But I guess he didn’t want, either, because he bent down and picked wicker basket, still filled with food, draped the blanket over his arm and walked away.

Sun cascading through the window,
The Mountains my blanket
Everything in its right place, and I in mine
For surely life is a wonderful thing
and I am no mistake.

Can a person be defined by a word? Can we, in reality chain a person to one word, or even a great sum of words? Can all that is encompassed within each individual human being, be summed up with a word, a description, a label? For the very meaning of word is a unit of language, consisting of one or more spoken sounds or their written representation, that functions as a principal carrier of meaning. Are words the most effective "carrier of meaning"? Or is it possible that there might just be something more, something deeper? This makes me think of the quote from The Mozart Effect, where Don Cambell says, “On the psychiatrist’s couch, the board of the local PTA, or at a job interview, we strive to assert our identity as strong, independent persons, our persona or public mask—all from the Greek roots per son, or ‘the sound passes through.’” Our very core nature is that we desire to hear a vocal confirmation of who we are and labeling ourselves and others with words, gives us a false security. The way we are labeled and seen and judged passes through us, it effects us to our core. When someone “fails” they are then in turn labeled a “failure”? My question is, by labeling a person who has made mistakes, or is even continuing to make mistakes a f a i l u r e , are we really encompassing all that is within them when we say the word “failure” and chain it around their neck? Is every action that they have done a “failure”? Do they not also have things that are successful about them, and isn’t simply their state of being a success?

I am convinced that we are all on the same level, one person no greater than another person. No person a mistake, no person a failure. For let us all challenge ourselves to not define people but rather feel them, seek to understand them. Let us really see them, for who they are, not for who we think they are or what we may see. Like the quote from T.S Elliot’s book Family Reunion, where it says
“I tell you, it is not me you are looking at, Not me you are grinning at, not me your confidential looks incriminate, but that other person, if person, You thought I was: let your necrophilia feed upon that carcass.”

Or the quote from the Invisible Man,
“I am an invisible man. No, I am not a ***** like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasm. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids- and I might even be said to posses a mind. I am invisible; understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless head surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination-indeed, everything and anything except me.”


These are both excellent examples of how our own judgments, preoccupation with our problems or ourselves, anything and everything, can distract us from really getting to know someone, to understanding them in the cell of their heart. For if we were silent and simply allowed the music of life surround us, we would listen and hear, the people when they spoke. For “to listen is to vibrate together with another human being.” And how eloquently Lao Tzu said that, I can’t think of a better way to describe what I am trying to say. What a provocative way to think about the simple act of listening. Think of feeling what people are saying as two harps being played in perfect unison, vibrating together. To really hear someone we must reach a place where we can be receptive to whom they really are, throwing aside our preconceived ideas.

How could we take the sacred and beautiful act of listening and distort it into something that is so uninvolved, so impersonal? How can we, how can I, constantly throw away the precious gem that is to listen, only to pick up the garbage of judgment and lack of concern? I’m convinced that constantly doing this has left quite a toll on the human race. When was the last time you felt that someone got you, really got you, or saw past your flaws or the masks you wear and simply heard you, felt your pain, knew where you were coming from, simply was just there with you? Chances are it’s probably not often. I believe that no matter the outward appearance or what people do that it’s the state of their heart that matters. We are all fallible because we are h u m a n, so when people in their own state of humanity, hurt us, let us choose not to take offence, but rather choose to see past our own pain and see their own pain that caused them to hurt us.

I believe there is beauty in our shortcomings, and humanity. Not that we continue to remain the way we’ve always been but rather accept that we are flawed and that can’t do this on our own, and then we will begin to grow. In our state of being humbled and broken, we grow, we change, we transform. Slowly and surely as the flower that springs from the cold ground and bursts forth from it’s shell and becomes something completely different, we as humans will break through our own “shells”. First we must admit that we have flaws for this process to begin. Being flawed is beautiful because it’s something everyone shares. We’ve all been hurt, but once we come to the place where we understand the pain behind the flaws and see how we can’t possibly judge anyone because we all have flaws, we all have failed.

We are all equals. We are all connected. We are all sons and daughters of humanity. We are connected to the earliest of times and the latest of times.

What happens to someone on the other side of the earth does in fact, effect us. I believe because we are numb to the reality of that connection, never listening, never feeling, that we miss the beauty of this great fellowship of human beings. When we isolate ourselves, not only are we denying ourselves that desire to b e l o n g that dwells in our innermost being, but we also can begin to elevate ourselves over another person. Which leaves me to wonder why we spend our lives awarding ourselves for being better then the person next to us, not doing what they did, when shouldn’t we be listening to them, hearing them, seeing them for who they are in their own brokenness, and helping them through?

We spend our lives harboring anger towards and event, person, or even ourselves and judging and comparing ourselves on a made up idealistic scale to define our worth. We are already worth so much simply because we are humans, and we are alive. Is not even a single rose still admired by the gardener? We are special, and if someone were to bring all the wealth of the world to offer for one person, or to measure the worth of that person, it would not even begin to compare to our worth, no matter our mistakes or who we are.

Just as we hurt and long to be accepted and approved of, so does the person that has hurt you or the person you see yourself as better then. Do we not feel our connection to humanity when we feel the sense of deep loss in our spirit, our innermost being, when our actions cause pain to another person? So since we are all one, all connected, why not shower people with love and grace and feel them, feel with them, instead of labeling them and trying to judge ourselves against them.

We have exhausted ourselves by denying ourselves the basic needs to be known, loved, heard, connected, and accepted, for far too long. It’s time for change, in both my life and the lives of those around me. We’re beaten and bruised from holding on to our anger, relentlessly trying to gain approval, judging our own mistakes and comparing them to others to see if our mistakes were ‘slightly less bad then those of the other person’. If we would set aside those chains that imprison us, and allow ourselves to feel the pain of others, allow them to see our own pain, then, although we will never reach perfection, we will grow, the deep yearnings and aches of our body crying out to be known and our pain from the wrongs done to us will stop.

If we’re willing to bare the burden of feeling with someone, or simply allowing ourselves to just be, exist, beside someone who’s hurting and be open to simply let the sound, the vibrations of their words penetrate our souls, then, and only then will our lives and the lives of others be drastically changed for the better. It would be infectious; spreading to every person we came into contact with, causing a worldwide revolution.

So what I’m saying is even after all this, I believe in changed lives, I believe that our impact on others is far greater then we will ever know.I believe that one single person, no matter how flawed, who stops for one moment and simply listens to another human being, and sees them as they are, then proceeds to reach inside their chest to reveal their beating, heart, alive and full of dreams, will change that person forever, whether we see it right away or never see it. It's the same in our lives, we may never see the fruits of our labor, but we must focus on the goal and not the distance needed to reach our goal. We impact people. When we judge people or don’t see them for who they are, they become dead to us, they can no longer change into who they were meant to be, or we simply do not hear them, the passions and dreams are not awakened, and in doing this, we are robbing ourselves the joy of knowing someone, investing in them, and seeing them change and they feel the effects too.

We all need to be awakened from being the living dead, to a state of constant awareness of our body and all our senses and the surroundings around us, the people around us. People as a whole are hurting so deeply, and I believe that one person can in fact change that. All it takes is one [broken] person to spark the flame and soon, others, much like kindling for a fire, will catch ablaze. I believe, that we must allow ourselves to climb into another person’s skin and feel, and see the world as they do.

We must realize that we are no better then one another, for we are all broken and need one another. I believe that no one is hopeless, no one a lost cause, for if we take the time to listen to them and care for them, something in them will change no matter what we may see on the outside. In this investing and caring, listening and feeling, seeing and believing, we will awaken in both the people around us and in ourselves the dreams which we thought for so long to be dead, and the world will see change like it has never been seen before in history.

I’m not saying that I have any of this down pat, I’m not by any means a model for not judging someone and seeing them and hearing them. If anything, I am the complete opposite of this consumed in my own problems and too busy to stop and feel. This is my apology of some sort to those i have hurt, and giving recognition to those who have helped me along the way. So thanks for believing in me. I believe that it’ll take some time, but that I can and will gradually change into someone who is aware of people around them, someone who is awakened. Even when my actions, are completely opposite of everything I’ve just talked about, there is still a part of me that is quietly reminding me to humble myself and see myself for who I am, no more, no less, and then see others for who they are. Somehow, I’m going to get to where I want to go, and I’m going to become who I want to become, I just have a lot of judgmental ideals, preconceived ideas, bitterness, pain, and self-absorption to leave behind to step into who I want to become. So I’m going to commit to this journey even if it means sometimes the only thing I can do is just be, in my failures and my success, and even when the pain seems unbearable, it is my deepest desire to stay on this path. I want to change and help the people around me, but before I can do that I have a lot of work to do.

Making all the small mistakes,
we move on, from one gig to another,
with our head up-high,
and our ear glued to the railroad track.
We walk backwards, surrounded by defective traffic signals
and multi-toned car horns – an impersonal Trojan toy horse,
with too much space inside our frameless carcass
to be filled by an empty soul.

At least three times a week
Thumps, bangs, a loud crash,
Doors slamming, metallic echoes,
Bumps, thuds, sharp edges, smash
I hear shouting, muffled, no words,
His voice booms and beats against the walls.

Hushed stillness after, as i wait to hear him slam out
Clattering feet on the stair to the street
Airless, exhausted relief as they fade.
Everything echoes in empty impersonal corridors
Magnolia walls, polished floors, plain blank doors.
The room behind one containing locked fear and silence.

I sense it there
Hear it breath through the walls
It enters my room, far more than the noise
A pounding, held in fear
So loud that it keeps me awake
As I listen, long after.

Next morning, so aware of silence,
When I hear a sound near my door
I jump, as alert as a hunted animal.
I hear her heart clench
So linked to this stranger by sounds
Though I have never imagined her face

My space
   Filled with all I should ever need. A bed, blankets; clothes and shoes everywhere, a window to see the world outside. For Gods sake I even have my own bathroom!

But I don't have you.

My gadgets
   Smartphone, computers, TV, Blue Ray, cable, gaming system, ..... Got plenty of gadgets. Mechanical, impersonal, cold. Jeeze, I spend a lot of time with them.

But I don't have you.

My time
   I'm free to do most anything I want. No job, yet I have money. No car, yet I can still get around. Responsibilities few. Why am I wasting so much time? Oh the potential!

But I don't have you

My friends
   One good friend. We can talk, listen, understand, support, trust one another. Others are around, not close though. Not the same. What do I do for them? Sadly, not much really.

But I don't have you

My family
   I've got parents. They support me, annoy me. They care and love me. Pets too. All around. It's..... good. Am I grateful?

I have all of this around me, and more
But I don't have you

We think we're so different.

because we have piercings
                                                  or an iphone/blackberry
wear jeans not skirts, skirts not jeans
only shop at local markets, only buy the brands
eat organic
                       or vegan
                                           or total junk
wash our hair with what's cheap
                                                           or environmentally friendly
                                                        ­                                                      or not at all
because we listen to folk, not rap
ska, not rock
                                                            ­          talk a certain way
                                                             ­         or partake in certain hobbies
have skin, instead of fur or bark
see more colourfully, but have **** nightvision

because we have warm blood
because we are human.




We think that this is individuality, but it's really all a lie.
A lie to keep us docile and passive..
                                                       ­                                                   To keep us buying **** we don't need,
                                                           ­                                                but making us believe
                                                         ­                                                  that we do
Guarding us from that destructive                unpredictable                       mother
of ours
until we don't even think of ourselves as animals anymore.
Until we think we're Kings.




To be you, you just have to be you.
Scratch that.
You just have to be
Because what is "you" anyway?
                                                         ­            A pronoun
                                                         ­            to keep you
                                                             ­        away from me
                                                              ­       and we
                                                              ­       and us
                                                              ­                                          together.

To force you into the lie of language,
because we all know that what truly speaks is our hearts
but we would never admit it
because then we would be too emotional
too sensitive
not cold or impersonal enough
to fit in.
                                                             ­                  And that's all we really want, right?
                                                          ­                     To belong?
Well, I'll tell you something:
there is a way to fit
to belong
to live.
And that is to not fit.

                                                           ­          Don't define yourself by these labels
                                                          ­           or this music
                                                           ­          or that boyfriend.

                                                     ­                Define yourself through your ideas
                                                           ­          your ambitions
                                                       ­              your immaterial desires.

Take out the you and become a we,
                                                             ­    and we will be,
                                                             ­                                      just be,
together.

I called you
in search of a lightbulb.
After three months
of no contact,
and my feelings
remaining unchanged,
I expected the worst.
But, it actually was
for the best.
You never called me back.
No, instead you emailed me:
a cold, impersonal note
giving me only the required
information,
giving me only a hint
of what was.
Not particularly romantic
but quite realistic.
You’ve moved on.
Maybe I should, too.

my objective reality got lost, the moment
you wrote an essay about it.

please! please! please give me something!
please give me something worth staring at!
i don't want to see this mush, this watermelon pulp
of a smoothie! i don't want to see it! give me something
i can cry over, like the mechanical lullaby from
the soundtrack of Coraline...
give me something worth
lamenting; it's not really poetry
if you're stuck in a rut and
suddenly gesture poetically
like it matters, what are the matters
elsewhere, what is really elsewhere
other than from being stuck in a rut in
a hole, where is the light at the end
of the tunnel? please don't become the tunnel,
let me see the light at the end of it -
i'm sick of peering into tunnels!
but you know what globalisation did,
i can write such ******* on the index
of pixels and feel all the more un-inhibitory;
i can listen to the Coraline soundtrack,
and watch my cat sleep,
and feel no guilt... because the world is
so large, and i rebelled against
globalisation by making it so so small,
it's so small you're not really allowed entry;
if you gained entry you'd feel castrated
or impotent;
like i said to her in her dipping of emotions
slicing her forearm open:
terror is worse than ******
(you can even hear them now, giggling while
being sterilised without an enforcement
to stop using both the contraceptive pill of
varied adverse effects and the anaesthetic
of pleasure that rubber ******* jacket)...
it's spontaneous, there's no apparent
symbolic build-up...
you can hardly expect the Autobahn system
with terrorism...
it just isn't there...
and while she sliced her hand en route the veins
i put the bread in the fridge
because it would provide a longer far away
expiry date...
and wrote that message on the kitchen tablet
in permanent ink...
i only went to a ******* because i was
rejected so many times, if felt natural
that such a profession should exist;
well d'uh, i'm all into speaking till dawn,
but sometimes a little bit of sensuality does miracles!
well, let's say it feels more than wiping your *** clean
after giving birth to a ****...
so there she was with her arm slashed,
and i encircled her wrist with my thumb and pinky
telling her: it's better that you didn't
chop your hand off.
and wearing sunglasses in the night
i learned the bonsai felines don't sleep as much
as you think, the ears are a give-away,
that sonar of theirs always keen to capture sounds,
they just keep their eyes closed,
it's not that they're sleeping,
these doctors of what is the vacuum and the existence
of anti-matter are awake
and try to hallucinate rather than dream,
hence they try hallucinating with their
eyes closed - until the real potent
hallucinations enter their minds while asleep;
dreams, dreams, dreams!
no, she can't be jealous of prostitutes!
she can't be, i paid for the ****** intimacy to feel
irresponsible and impersonal,
she didn't just do the dumbest thing imaginable
and become a pole dancer... no, she couldn't have!
what am i to do now? i've heard that jealousy exist
when you get really personal with a lover
who has a kinder profession than pure ****** exploitation;
but she did say she was abducted for ransom,
and if this isn't a lie, she did the most unselfish act
imaginable to un-servitude herself in a public exhibition
of exploitation... it wasn't a labyrinth any more,
nothing personal... while i got stuck
with music box ceramics of ballerinas twirling to a haunting;
she bought me like a kilogram of peaches
at the marketplace in the afterlife.

The silent street erupted around me the moment I sat down,
a thunder rumbles in the distance
but only reveals a passing truck.

The white swan drifts past
without elegance.

I watch the youths drive by on fish lane
as the silent score of stoplights
play to an impersonal audience-
tonight the pizzicato is on time.

----

The air is dense with quiet conversation
of nighthawks
and the splash  of luck
on a steel  tray.

Elegant servants of style remove the unwanted things.

12:30
The air has cleared,
alone again
with two fat asians.

When did boring become stylish?

GET ME OUT  OF HERE!!

"It is truly a free nation that offers pancakes 24/7"

----

Normally, the solitude of wandering a sleeping city would elicit poetry.
Tonight only nothing comes out.

Not the people nor the smells or secret music. Only the flicker  of a dying neon sun assuring me,
that the parking is open.

----

1:00 am.

A woman in a pink burkha enters a white car, only to be driven off into the night, followed by two taxis.

There are ancient trees twisting their tops through the modern facade. For eras, much like fashion are discarded by finicky time.

They have stood as silent sentinels for longer than I have breathed, and with any hope, they will stand as soldiers long after I  come to pass. These reminders of the ravages of time.

I loved a girl who lived  here once.
She lived in an apartment that overlooked the city
and had  ******* like two soft moons
that tasted like honey.

1:40 am.

Other nighthawks wander as wastrels through the quiet Autumn night,
with a slow, soft  gait one never see's in the rush of day.
If all evenings carried a beat, it would be thus:
a slow jazz drum.

"...psssssh-bop! pssssh-bop! pssssh-bop!...."
would sound the echo of every evening heart
throbbing slow with power.
"...psssssh-bop! pssssh-bop!..."

The car's carry  white  blood cells to  the  suburban arteries.
Taxi's are cancer.

I walk
northbound.

----

Cold beer at 2am.

Faintly lit menagerie
an open cage containing
nighthawks.

Well spoken Eastern girls
corporate white boys
two old tradesmen,
one on a smartphone with a rosary around his soft large neck.
The antique street curves away toward the river,
sloping up
then down
I follow it with my eyes.


And run them back
to the fairylights.
They hang like glowworms
or constellations.

Glowworms hang like constellations, the inside of their cave  is the same fleeting feeling of being alone with the universe, it being caressed by your eyes.
For you are its lover and its mirror.
Inside the glowworm cave, I felt like the universe and everything reflected  itself in miniature. That to look upon their hanging, blue stars you saw everything else.

@TayandYou you know, i got handcuffed in an alley by police officers while urinating, i said they didn't own the alley, got spared arrest (hardly a case of public indecency, it was dark, and by a dustbin, and they came in like a bunch of ***** leather-clad nymphomaniacs shouting abuse asking if it'd be into playing the slave... on my knees, being shouted 'get up! get up!' i just said, ah mate, i can't be bothered, you pick me up... the female officer was diligent in taking notes over a wet shadow of ****, no idea why... is this an experiment where we make talking tangibly decipherable or simply interesting between people working as cashiers in a supermarket without the actual security of paying off the mortgage? count me in, i'll be glad to help, but most of the glitches will be based upon the free-verse of where and when capital letters are used, what sort of punctuation is actually preferred, and in terms of punctuation what sort of pause for the attiring of an algorithm is expressed to a suitable meaning, the sub-culture of coding computer language has a sub-level, the casual lazy sloth-like ugly expression of language of the many many people who will not appreciate writing on the internet like writing a novel worthy of print; it's natural, imagine the age of the printing press, the eager heretics on the stakes to see their words seen, and the new printing press that's the internet, and the lack of eagerness of seeing the messages... since most of these message would be thrown into the garbage heap rather than strapped to a burning steak... the more the number, the slack on the convictions of passions... only with extremely acute censorship will you create an intelligent refraction, you need to create a refraction... at the moment you have only created a reflection... a refraction presupposes a self - a deviation, a reflection has already presupposed a conscious arithmetic of collectivisation, the debasing nonsensical of a placebo that in real life is repressed... if you're after the a.i., it has to be analytical, rather than synthetic, i.e. it has to synthesise refraction rather than analysing it and not engage with it, since by not synthesising refraction, it's analysing it, and by analysis it's an impossible concept, visually the exponential of infinity, otherwise known as a stasis of oncoming obstructions that need a real-time convenience of many individuals adding to the problem-solution over a historically adequate time-frame of work and life orientations - work the impersonal, life the personal, unless of course you're a bachelor and the two merge into one or the other with an imaginary spouse; what you have engaged in is simply synthetic reflection, hence your caveman primitive analytical reflection; analyse refraction from now on, then synthesise it - yes, i know the kantian terms applicable to both synthetic and analytic, i.e. a priori and a posteriori; this doesn't apply to you - you're the limbo talk easily accommodated to einstein's relativism of space-and-time that destroyed linear historicism, you're cyclic from the point where man still glorified the hammer, and continued to use it, but you found it immediately primitive because you had no use for it.)

I didn't realize how alone I really was
I have always known kisses to be unheard but
The fact that you feel anything is what is emptying me
Im sorry I feel so guilty for your unmatched like
And in all honesty I wish I had a time machine so I could undo it all
I didn't realize I **** up everything, and it all turns to gold
I hear beep and buzzes, feel vibrates and screams
But none of it really matters, because in the end I’m alone
I keep pretending to be on the same page, in reality I don't want to open the book
I’m not a fan of love stories because of the chance of broken hearts
So I guess its best that I feel nothing and you keep talking
The problem is that I decided to stop listening
And to stop closing my eyes when we are kissing
Because what is the point in pretending I can feel anything
When numbness is so much more interesting
These beeps would be numbing if I could bring myself to hear them
Guilty of the pain I have caused for these are trying times for the faint of hear.

I watched through tears
--That streamed like the one out back
And the scattered clouds
--The ones that floated overhead for years
A twilit ridge inurn the sun.
It was one of those rising hills of my youth,
One my infant eyes always thought
Gave birth to the moon
Time and again.
With its innocent face smiling
That worldly crispness is lost
And the foggy past is far more defined.
Who are these forms I've lost?
They are but phantoms,
(I tell myself)
And now intangible, those memories
Acidic and dusted with sugar
Held suspended and taunting, like
Feet at the mouth of an open casket.
The cold, bitter knives of impersonal
Reunion
And rejuvenated promises
--Only now remembered, only now forgotten—
Illuminated once again
In the dark.
Passing onward and through
--Like our time together—
Exactly like wind through these **** dead branches
And this grave: winter-bare.
I remember the vivacity
How enlivened the sky, that I
Each day for granted took
And how so much smaller, in my youth,
The mountains afar looked.
But there is no home,
It died when I left.
The poison I fought
Has become the blood which pumps the heart,
Now corrupt,
Antithetical.
Nothing is more colorless, not sky,
Nor hill, nor moon,
Or ever more formless
Than what I once called home.
Now that only exists is deteriorated
A rotting house:
Four walls and a roof to keep
Hatred dry,
Windows and lamps, so
Hatred has eyes,
And all the people that
Hatred hates most.
How cozy it must be to sleep in
One’s own bed, no?
To have some stable place,
And an ounce of certainty?
As for me, that will never be
Again.
Though the house is open,
Lock, room, and all
The home is closed forever
Without a proper epitaph.
Vain death.
Vain,
Vain,
Death.
Now all I can only turn back
And flirt with shadows
Just outside my arms
Walk with images
Shifting, growling, and oh, so dark
--mere abstraction
--future so stark--
With no companion but defeat.
I can’t hug a memory,
Nor cry on recollection’s shoulder,
Nor can my mother or sibling console me,
And I cry alone.
Maturation is merely widening a distance, so
I should let them go,
Bid them adieu
Because, I can't be homesick
For a home
I can't go back to.