i never intended to write poetry within a framework for the purpose oration, or too keen for it to be memorised; in the latter instance i know what puts people off poetry: the schooled induced need for memorisation, as if each poem were a national anthem; that's at a basic level, on the more advanced level people are put off poetry because the analysis of poetry, the transaction of but a few words into entire pages of essayist epics, the need to identify poetic tools, and admire does poets who are conscious of applying them puts people off, hence they easily grasp and turn to journalism of the daily news, to be easily duped and perhaps informed; it's harder to be duped by poetry, the tarantula venom in poetry works both ways: so too the poet amazed by an incomprehensibility due to the spontaneity and, something akin to lithium reacting in water: froth boom splash sizzle pop!*

i.

a ****** reader of philosophy books
will realise the hardship of the endeavour,
such books are more for thinking
after than talking a book reading club
to talk about them, in any casual conversation,
a whole philosophy book becomes
a single sentence that's memorable,
and the dropping of the philosopher's name,
nothing more, only because so few people
tackle the subject matter to try and speak
about it after, unless they're in academia
and instead of casually talking about it,
extract what's necessary and popular and
simply teach it - so unless you're paid to read
the material, it's a rather cold world out there
for talk of philosophy over a pint of beer
or a cup of coffee; and why did i start reading
these books? world got complicated, couldn't
escape reality with fiction, had to add to it,
plus it was a welcome change from reading
chemistry.

ii.

this is what i find strange in relation to poetry
and fiction narratives - with poetry you simply
can't get a sense of achievement as you do with
fiction - there simply isn't a sense of achievement
after having read a book of poetry, not in the same
way as there's a sense of achievement after having
read something beastly like joyce's ulysses:
it's the way it's packaged - it's denseness, it's need
for ramble ramble dabble dabble: the more depth
a narrator's consciousness has, apparently the more
critically encapsulating thumbs up too - compare
that to poetry and you see poetry as a form of
pure narration, not contaminated by plot or characters;
plus as franz kafka said: they didn't do two things
i asked of them: a. they didn't burn my work like i
asked, and b. they didn't do as i asked about font size,
it's tiny! any intelligent reader will realise that they
could lose their eyesight reading my works! i said
BIGGER FONT! and compare that to bukowski being
considered a "prolific" writer where his chapters are
knee high and his font is MASSIVE
so poetry is gentler on the eye - it s p  r  e   a    d     s,
cuts short, doesn't bother packaging to be a best-seller,
but it also doesn't do what i mentioned previously,
there's no sense of achievement after completing a poem,
because most poems are actually completed by readers
rather than discarded at some point...
and that's where dis-satisfaction creeps in with reading
prose: you just have to finish them - because i find
with fictive prose that there's no satisfaction i can immediately
find in poetry, the bird spreads his wings and isn't
a curled up hedgehog, or snail, or tortoise -
you need to finish these books to get what's intended
a feeling of achievement, the only satisfaction from
prose is when the last word is read, the book is shut,
is put back onto the shelf, and you look at it and admire
yourself with the thought: gosh jolly good, i've read that.

he's not my favourite writer as such,
in terms of his poetry, no finer antagonist
for his two virtues: honesty and poignant
vulgarity, and as a "drinking buddy,"
i treat him as an antagonist, you'll see why
when i write the following:

he came to america aged 2,
so obviously, knowing how immigration
works, and how adult migrants
are politely told to integrate, which
includes forgetting the mother tongue,
i came to england aged 8.
aged 4 my father emigrated to england
because the once budding steelworks
in my humble town of birth shut down,
over 10,000 out of work,
then other trades buckled under
the weight of enemy propaganda:
levis, coca cola, john paul ii, you name it.
a vague memory of my father was
impressed into me, the 1994 world cup
is my best guess on t.v.
my mother left when i was 6,
she left me a present, a dobermann pinscher
i named axel (after axl rose from guns 'n' roses),
mad *******, bit everyone
and almost took my eye out after i whipped
him for attacking my grandparent's dog,
an alsatian. so technically the earliest
cognitive developments were done
with my grandparents as my surrogates:
grandfather was high-up in society,
was a manager of one of the steelwork
conveyor belt warehouses that produced
train springs and produced the steel columns
for the 1998 world cup in france (stade de france),
but he drank, came with the job,
broke my grandmothers hand,
when i was five i marched him drunk
from his mother's birthday party through
the entire city - but i guess things happen
in your childhood that you can't alter:
his father left for america (spoke 7 languages,
so obviously not a serf), and when he wanted
to make contact his brothers lied about my
grandfather being a rascal of sorts: thief,
hooligan, so so they could get their grubby
hands on the family estate, which, rumour
was it, was rather large; and maybe seeing
the red army invade (boys who slept in barns
in hay with goats), and the ss-man in black
uniform giving him sweets (herr, bite bonbon,
although he says it like the man's name was,
yep, herr bitebonbon - child's word association,
mr. who-gives-sweets), then seeing the ss-men
in rags fleeing from the hammer and sickle dragon;
not to mention his stepfather beating him,
being a miner in the newly integrated lands of
silesia, and many more details i guess.
so anyway, they were my surrogates for some time,
i came to england aged 8 without any knowledge
of the language, learnt it pretty quick, self-taught
mostly, brain still a sponge.
father laid the foundations of dockland's light railway
at the time, but then had a chance to become a roofer.
poland was not in the european union at the time
i had to depart when i started high school,
figure out the reasons sherlock:
spent an autistic year in poland, split by not having
learned the language to a satisfactory point
and forced back to relearn a tongue i was slowly forgetting.
after a year came back to england, plan was to go
to argentina and then america the first time - alas...
but i came with a resolve to never part with my roots,
TO NEVER, EVER, FORGET MY MOTHER TONGUE.
took to studying under grandfather's motto:
matematyka, fizyka i sport / ucz sie, ucz sie, ucz sie.
so i did, went to university to study the sciences,
i could have gone to the russell group bristol or
warwick, but for the budding in me romance to have
started writing ****** poetry, i chose edinburgh.
stayed 3 years, failed french in first year after a brief
losing-my-virginity relationship with a french exchange
student of psychology, failed chemistry 2nd year,
retook exam, no summer fun, 3rd year failed chemistry,
summer in st. petersburg, retook exam and got the ******
degree: immigrants pride and pinnacle i guess.
some horrific **** after, got reduced to working in lidl
for a day, got the job, came in drunk, shoved a bunch
of pickle jars on the shop floor, cut my hand open and
left (politicians are now saying - graduate jobs for graduates,
well, evidently not). but in my 3rd year i met my love,
philosophy - took to it like fish to water, i can't lie,
this is where my antagonist comes handy - he's
being pompous and rightly so at being critical of the
poetry scene, of people studying literature to only
create more literature - i get that, but that's hardly an
attack on learning, or the sheer love of it;
and based on reading an academic work on him,
i gather he has sympathisers behind the enemy lines -
but i too don't like poetry to convey naiveness and
innocence to the world, a dreamworld where everything
comes true because of the way you think of it
a priori, since i guess when the world proves otherwise,
there is no original output of idealism, no cute puppies,
but lynched dancing bears and overworked horses
and the fear soaked eyes of cows in slaughter houses,
this *a posteriori situation leaves most former poets
crushed... crrrrrushed... they either stop writing,
continue writing lies to children, or wise-up,
become as cruel as the world, although a hermit's
cruelty - 'world, on my terms, and with whom and when
you will know that i am still here.'
but it's like that - one invents, the other gets all the credit
and the most famous one of the three doesn't know
the first one when talked about by critics and admirers,
e.g.? tristan tzara, cabaret voltaire, dada anti-war movement
of 1914, invention? cut-up. w. burroughs "perfected"
the method, and thirdly bowie used it too -
critic on television while dirges and epitaphs came:
burroughs' burroughs' burroughs'.
this world has become horrid - all those wars on paper,
all the et tu brute et tu brute et tu brutus?!
all that fame - but ask any banker about infinitesimal
calculus and he will be like... huh what?! what for?!
investments in wars, rocket projections, that kind of thing.
and about that - the horrid nature of the argument:
what came first, leibniz or newton? chicken and egg debate.
both at the same time i guess.
and it's this pervasive first in line, i want to be first in line
incomprehensibility in me -
which means there are only a few famous people
everyone's agreed on, and they're anonymous -
the man who discovered the fermentation process,
and the shaman with ***** who sifted through amazonian
poisons to find a hallucinogenic,
to name but a few of the truly famous ancients.
in conclusion - had bukowski been taught german,
or had been old enough to remember some german,
his writing might have looked something like this;
i too with acne, chernobyl birthmark,
heart condition, and a forcefully induced
****** scheme sophistication brain haemorrhage,
resulting in wrong diagnosis of schizophrenia,
fuelling my subsequent splashing money on
psychiatry books and beating about 5 psychiatrists
at their own game: given my stature of 6ft2
and 253pounds... they were worried i might do
something grotesque - hard to get a discharge,
but got one after 7 years of wrong treatment;
that's like prison, worse, you are living in a society
that tries to pacify you, seeing all the pleasures
of society with people enjoying them, dangling like
a treat, and you're told you're "sick."
i'd rather have spent 7 years with those deservedly
locked up: at least a feeling of solidarity for god's sake:
so as you can imagine, my investment in an internet
presence or the internet's appreciation of it
is about as important to me as yesteryear's snowfall.

Ego headspace, mindset phaneron life perception sight
the assumptions you operate under to simply get by
or focus on a series of tasks that seem to take
the majority of our lives. building always a beat
of building something without looking or even knowing or
being thoughtful about the thing you are building towards
out of fear of it's massive complexity and incomprehensibility
all of the unknown about it.

Death impudence pointlessness despair terror humility absolute antithesis contradistinction
nihilism gives transparency to the structure
Ephemeral and the mad passion to
work against those things

make the march wobbly to show it's deluded nature

show clear forceful severing ending sounds during counterpoint

Every book has a last page, every song a last verse to sing.
Every sentence its full stop, every beginning its ending.
Every existence will one day cease to be,
In the inevitability of death, there is unity.

'Death is simply a beginning,' confidently some state.
'In death, there is nothingness,' others iterate.
But the lock of death in the living world has no key.
In the ignorance of death, there is unity.

In the hearts of some resides unwavering misery.
Others march on, donning costumes of pseudo-normalcy.
The actuality of their loss, still others refuse to see.
In the incoherence of death, there is unity.

Cinema, literature, poetry have ostensibly tried to explain,
With the knowledge directors, littérateurs, poets feign.
No living soul can grasp its intense incongruity,
In the incomprehensibility of  death, there is unity

Gazing through the looking glass, and attempting to reminisce, he lets go, relieves, and perceives.Colossi of raindrops subtly fall through sky’s shadows , violently battling the grey in great amounts, failing to come anywhere near the threshold of one’s most sensitive ear. Nature’s children appear to tremble as dark forebodings of a dreary future pervade the air. The danger and annoyances of such rarities is always given priority and significance. He misunderstands it; he believes in its false infinity.

Unable to stabilize, unable to achieve a desired normality. From every pitter, he regrets; from every patter he forgets. Forcefully drudging through the thick swamp of his mind, struggling to understand what and why, diminishing his hopes of any change, any desire. Suddenly, several elements collide against his one-way mirror in his cell and revitalize his consciousness. Looking through the droplet, his face pressed against, his mentality momentarily produces quick successions of thoughts and random impulses of recovering memory.  

Every snowflake understands its place as sui generis; every raindrop understands its place as trite. The beauty of a snowflake with death, the dullness of rain with life. It’s uniformity and strict nature are necessary to sustain life, but somehow it places a bittersweet piece of an unusual feeling inside him. Its unexplainable transparency, disguising itself as invisible, but not untouchable, stimulates a sense of deep nostalgic hopelessness within him. As he discovers the profound pulchritude, and simultaneous incomprehensibility, of the paradoxical elements of natural and artificial state cooperating to achieve more of the same, he realizes more in this moment. The monotonous, repetitive beat of rain seems to harmonize in an odd manner with some contrasting presence.

A new rhythm to this sound, a new color to this sight. A particular emotion of gradually diminishing despair comes about as he observes little rain boots composing a sort of  rhythmic song with the catchy beat of the rain’s clashing, the continuous flow of the tree’s trembling, the back-up percussion of the thunder’s loud suddenness, the sight of lightning's exciting flash, and the cheerful singing from their voices.Upon this feat, he accepts the shadow’s tears; no longer must he endure the pain of the past’s ******* of the future, now he begins to savor the varied colors of newfound harmony.

good-luck with marriage!

   well, i won't be the one,
   a conformist,
   can't be bothered,
   well no, i can't be bothered,
   m.t.v. turned into
   16 year old pregnancies,
   **** **** a closer inspection
   of queen,
   that won't happen...
   there's no utopia here,
   but what comes from being unloved -

'good-luck with marriage!'

    i asked i got a reply with arsenic...
    well, if a diet is a diet,
    we might as well be hopeful...
    jealous lovers and the incomprehensibility
    of certain people not ever having
    engaged in a life that might provide them...
    tonne of **** with a touché!
    as a vet a rubber gloved hand up to the elbow
    to check a bull's prostate via his **** hole...
    i'd quote feminism, but i might as well
    quote Ezra's lunatic judgement correct
    against Churchill in defence of Mussolini...
    western democracy's narcissism hit me too...
    the constant need to export and never import...
    the constant need for traitors to upkeep
    a contestant populace rather than a populace
    of worthy voters... it was always there...
    so many sacrifices attached to a political
    movement were never worth it,
    the least sacrificial politics always produced
    the most successful endeavours with china
    and india... just those economic gluttons
    and continual iconoclasm with dyslexia as proof...
    how hope of heaven was never encoded in
    images of sounds and kept therein -
    i stead dyslexia, laziness of the communicative
    angle, to keep heaven forlorn with stressed
    images as a laziness to forget the aesthetic of spelling
    a wording... oh well...

good luck with marriage!

“Television brought the brutality of war into the comfort of the living room.   Vietnam was lost in the living rooms of America—not on the battlefields of Vietnam.”                              Marshall McLuhan

You understand where I'm coming from,
Reader Rabbit, you twisted ****? Maybe not;
While you and your boy/girlfriend, later your wife/husband,
Were ******* backpacks around Europe,
I was of a less fortunate, less frivolous cohort,
Like the poor, who always miss the fun stuff.
So I stayed home and waited, dreading time,
Treading water in Queens,
Doing the graveyard shift at the Wonder Bread Bakery in Jamaica,
(No, not that Jamaica, mun.)
Building bodies 12 ways, and sweating out the inevitable,
Praying to my lesser god not to hear from my local draft board.
And who was I to disturb the universe?
“It ain’t me, it ain't me, I ain't no senator's son;
It ain't me, it ain't me, I ain't no fortunate one, lawd naw.”
(Send  "Fortunate Son" Ringtone to your Cell)  
I was just another cynical working-class hero,
Unlike you, numb nuts, and the rest of your silver surfer friends.
I knew I’d wind up without my teddy bear,
Convinced I’d end up sans security blanket,
With no ****-vacant musical chair,
To plop my sorry non-exempt, 1A **** cheeks
Down into when the music stopped,
When the music’s over, turn out the light--Jim Morrison,
Lizard King--turn out the light.
My horse, my horse . . . no wait . . . **** the horse . . .
My kingdom, my kingdom for a 2-S college deferment!
What kingdom?  
What was it Jesus said?
Not of this earth, anyway.
Colonial Indochina: rich man's war, poor man's fight;
It was such an efficient way to rid trash from poor neighborhoods.

Needless to say, I’ve been having a little trouble adjusting ever since,
Since I got back from that Kafkaesque Disneyland Jungle Cruise,
My personal Cold War thriller,
My Tecumseh Sherman “War is All Hell” war,
My war: 45 years ago next week.
These things take time:
So says the recorded message on the VA’s PTSD Hotline.
45 years ago I packed up my duffle,
Packed for what I thought was going to be my last time in uniform,
Grabbed my Army discharge papers, and
Limp-dicked out the side door of,
The Veterans Hospital in St. Albans, County of Queens.
I’d like to say I never looked back. But I’d be lying.

(cue PSA: VA Reaches Out to Veterans:
The Department of Veterans Affairs will begin,
Contacting nearly 570,000 recent combat veterans May 1,
To ensure they know about VA's medical services and other benefits.)

Today and every day is 11-11, Veterans Day—
What gets me now is that all my time since The Nam,
Is on average two lifetimes,
For all those sent home, bagged and tagged.
Is it survivor’s guilt? I doubt it.

You may not understand this, but I miss that freaky jungle.
I felt safe there.
How quickly I learned to expect the unexpected,
And that meant to expect the worse,
Finding my comfort zone the more uncomfortable, the worse it got.
I miss the wet weight of the air,
The cloying heat and humidity.
Humidity: a plain and simple meteorological miracle,
When you have plenty of time to really think about it,
Which I did: 365 days and a wake-up.
You know that whole gorgeous hydrologic cycle thing?
I miss the rain, the sound of falling rain.
I miss the other sounds, every buzz and click,
All the arcane and dismal things that go screech in the night.
And that relentless insect hum,
The jungle vibrating and intense,
The colors vibrating too, especially that electric green,
A green so vivid, every leaf and vine,
"The world's richest repository of terrestrial biodiversity,” I read in some nature magazine,
Lying naked in bed while my therapist ****** me off the other day.
All those freaky creatures great and small,
Every miraculous living thing that’s really alive and thriving.
And this is why--I think,
Getting obnoxiously philosophical for the moment,
This explains why it got to be so easy to waste what was alive and thriving over there, including and especially our selves.

Death never seemed that permanent, that final over there.
And besides, you couldn’t **** anything for that long,
The critters all looking their wet and slimy same.  
Two minutes in The **** and you were
Killing every ******* gnat and bug,
Every leech and snake, anything &
Anyone that just looked at you sideways.

And the flora? Did I mention the flora?
Soupy Sales: (Smack! Bam!)  “I told you not to mention that.”
The flora:  the plants grew back and they grew back quick.
You chop a path on recon and the next day it’s not there anymore,
So you chop the whole way back to the L-Z.  
Chop, chop, Hop Sing!
You were one smart ****, Hop Sing,
Safe and sound in Lake Tahoe, Nevada-side,
Cooking up Ponderosa pork bellies for,
The Cartwright Clan: Ben, Adam, Hoss & Little Joe.
Meanwhile, I’m not earning any frequent flyer miles,
Aboard a chartered TWA, coffee-tea-or-me,
Royal **** airplane to Saigon,
A place called ** Chi Minh City today.
I remember looking around at the faces on that airplane,
As we landed at Tan Son Nhut,
Those forlorn godforsaken faces,
Black and Chicano and poor white trash boys.
Scared shitless, of course,
But we really were jolly green giants over there,
American conquistadors, Cortez and the Boys,
Seeking gold and glory and, of course,
*******, (www.urbandictionary.com):
That sweet wet hole we all crave,
Can't go for too long without,
Center of our life's desire,
What gives women the upper hand in almost every situation,
Except when you pay in South Vietnamese piastres,
Your basic exchange rate $3.00 *******.

Yes, we were American conquistadors,
But traveling light this trip,
Our black-robed Jesuit fathers having missed the flight.
That’s right, for us no Ad majorem Dei gloriam this time,
Our mission so simple and so clear:
SEARCH & DESTROY.
But mostly, Destroy.

And pretty soon you worked your way up the evolutionary ladder,
From bugs, to fish, to frogs and snakes,
Small varmints and reptiles, birds and rodents;
And by the time you taxonomy out to the runway,
You’re pretty much whacking anything that moves,
Anything you feel like, pretty much any time,
All the time, sometimes just to pass the time,
Just to break up the ******* monotony of it all.
So making the anti-personnel leap got sort of easy:
They all looked the same, didn’t they?
They all wore the same pajamas,
And it was never conducive to grunt longevity,
To nitpick the civilians from the soldiers,
Never a good idea to waste time distinguishing friend from foe.

Good Morning, Vietnam:
We really were nerve-gassed-Adrian Cronauers over there,
G-2 Army oxymoronic intelligence stiffs,
Having a little difficulty finding the enemy,
Having one hell of a time finding a Vietnamese man named "Charlie."
They're all named Nguyen, or Tran, or Thanh or Trong or Bao or Phuc . . .
Oh, ****, I get it now.
I grok the how and why,
Of all the names we’ve used for centuries to dehumanize the enemy:
***** and Nips, Chinks and Slopes,
Huns and Krauts, Redskins and Ivans,
Redcoats and Rebs, Zulus and Mau Maus, *****, Ragheads and Sand ******* . . .
To dehumanize is to be dehumanized.
Nominal dehumanization; linguistic trickery.
It made it easy . . .
Well, easier . . .
To **** you.

What was it Pope Innocent III’s legate advised?
“**** Them All.  Let God sort ‘em out.”

Is it smell of burning flesh that makes me so digress?

Yes, I miss that freaky jungle, my friend.
I miss knowing what to expect and what was to be expected.
And most of all I miss that absolute confidence,
My self-liberating soporific certainty,
That I did not give a **** whether I lived or died,
And no one else did either.
I miss the peaceful place to go,
Coping with fear by letting go,
By writing off my life,
My future "in-country,"
My 12-month tour of duty,
My 365 T.S. Eliot Ash Wednesdays,
Learning to care and not to care,
Cultivating indifference as to,
Whether or not I ever made it Wee, Wee, Wee,
All the way home again.
The answers were right there,
Always there, all the time,
In nursery rhymes, and counting songs,
In psalms and arias, and every blues and rock lyric,
Right there, so right ******* there,
In Kris Kristofferson/Janice Joplin parlance of the times:
“Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.”

And life for me since then--
ONE BIG, FAT-TITTED INCOMPREHENSIBILITY!

What was that Walter Sobjak in The Big Lebowski said?

“This is not 'Nam.
This is bowling.
There are rules.”

On

my

deathbed,

I hope that I am visited by
what I think are angels

or demons
(it doesn’t really matter which)

and,

as I wheeze out my last breath,
they reveal to me

that I was actually an alien
from another world

trapped
in the misshapen body of a human

for the entirety
of my existence—

all 28,000-or-so

days of it.

Because
then,

my role in
this whole charade

would finally make sense:

all of the mind-numbing

awkwardness

and suffering

and bullying

and incomprehensibility

of the world

laid out before me—

a picnic for a malnourished soul
to finally feast upon,

a glistening Colorado River to drink from

and,

at long last,
to rest beside.

if a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

and a decent poem this could have been, but then two
distractions came -
       one of less concern than the other:

a. a program on u.f.o. sightings,
         not so much the subject matter,
but the journalistic ridicule of what was later
    translated into a "sensible" branch
of phenomenology - the branch filled with
awe and fear - unlike the branch that deals
with: 'oh, there's but a simple explanation
behind it all',
               the hardship of seemingly
good intentions in making others believe
something tends to end with a crucifixion in
one way or another - the lesser crucifixion?
evidently stigmatism -
                      perhaps a more unfathomable
experience - no hand in the cookie jar
but nonetheless the hand being caned -
later, much much later the talk of
ostracising ostriches - ducking for cover
   when a less mainstream scientists comes
along and takes out equipment to
understand certain phenomena -
          perhaps without the layman's blinking
incomprehensibility - but at least
         not journalistic poking fun off -
     or how the ostriches always talk about
the faculty of imagination overpowering
the senses - casually phrased: you must have
been imagining things... well... **** me!
why did they invent hallucinogenic drugs
given that imagination can suddenly invoke
a hallucination so potent?

b. first it started with your face,
                 then it started with a mirror
and a face in it in some nightclub bathroom -
some look terrible in mirrors
       the movement disguises the many
apparently or non-apparent imperfections -
that trick of morality that beauty (is but
a short lived tyranny) needs to almost
nervously twitch for the participant in
a brief spell of Narcissism,
  so they take the photo, call it a selfie and
say: if i look good in a selfie, the image
in the mirror doesn't matter...
                           they actually look better in
the mirror than in the selfie -
   but then i decided i had enough of the culture,
only a day before, started to look more and
more at my shadow - maybe the
shape of the nearly skin head made me curious,
so i said to myself: tomorrow night,
   when you're sober, go out and make an
album of photographs.
              hence the distraction b... putting the album
together... from colour, to b & w aesthetic,
   fiddling with enough exposure and contrast
to get the shapes out (not a brilliant camera) -
but apart from my anti-selfie i
took two photographs of modern relics -
    they having dismantled them...
                 *phoneboxes!
  i remember walking home with a few beers
when it started raining... good thing that
      one of them had the top glass window
smashed and it wasn't there...
              a great bar it turns out...
yep, a beer or two in a phonebox and
the nostalgia of having pockets filled with coins -
   and that ramous number oh eight-hundred
    R E V E R S E        0800 7 3 8 3 7 7 3
(just like the American say it) - on the other line
a person would hear the automated message:
someone is calling you from... would you like
to pay for the call?
             relics, truly... or minibars when it rains
or cubicles to **** in... why not? anyone using it
for anything else?
                  and so it was today,
after watching the vice presidential discussion
i picked the quietest moment in the night
3:30 a.m., the quietest moment in the night -
30 minutes out, started counting the number of
steps it would take for a concrete shadow
under a streetlamp would fizzle out and become
less and less visible, until another streetlamp
gave back a full-bodied concrete form,
the less blurry and fizzling out after ~34 steps...
it takes about 34 steps for the shadow to fizzle
out when looking at it when created by
a passed streetlamp, as said, another streetlamp
replenishes the lost density of the shadow.

which brings me onto... overpriced books.
        now, stopping drinking could help me buy socks,
or a new pair of shoes...
  but...
                              i haven't picked up a book
recently that would grab my attention...
                 and the last time i wrote poetry while
also reading a book, not since the time of Ezra's Cantos,
and that's donkey's years away, it would seem.
     but by chance i came across one...
the most expensive book i ever bought was in
Edinburgh, £28.50 and in brackets
             [cheapest online £60.30 inc. shipment]...
but the book i'm going to reference seemingly
fell from the sky... Ponderings II - VI:
Black Notebooks 1931 - 1938 by Heidegger -
which stands at £30.10 from a second-party
retailer on Amazon... otherwise it's £50.00!
i am mad enough to buy this book, hence the strict
regime of alternative drinking nights...
           but that's beside the point...
i don't care to compliment the translation,
       this is the first insight into Heidegger stripped
bare from what i consider to be the hardest books
to read - the devilishness of youth -
2 ****** years and a few good books and much
poetry in between enabled i finished that
   monstrosity that is being and time -
but these ponderings? a complete and utter
revelation! well... it's no good looking at it
if you haven't read the magnum opus -
        i can say enough in that he does treat
aphorisms with a slight disdain, or rather as stepping
stones to create an alternative narrative,
    aphorism that have a different impact in a sense
that they are not isolated to just one isolated incident,
     i guess it's phenomenological in a sense
that phenomenons weave a narrative whether in
a cause and effect scenario, alternatively
        either cause, or effect; i thought i write this
poem before writing something less lucid when
relaxing with the whiskey during the end of the shift...
   and all because what's revealed from this
is how to answer the above question -
      if a tree falls in a forest and no one is around
to hear it, does it make a sound?
    if you look up all the Anglophone answers to
the question, you end up reaching the escape
route into buddhism, pop culture jokes
          and a general impracticality of it all
being related to perception and that horrid word
reality.
                i don't like this approach at all -
the easiest escape route is to approach buddhism -
that's the standard practice in English societies,
to escape into buddhism and chime jar jar jam and
joe who was later known of om -
     the book in question (ponderings ii - vi)
shows the skeleton of what is otherwise an Alcatraz
of prose in that systematic height of composition,
and that's how the concept of dasein enters
like a behemoth - in these ponderings dasein
is stripped to the bare essential of: being & there -
that's how i saw that ****** question answered -
it's not really a question of perception
    but a question of concern - and i have started
to really adore how the Germans always manage
to provide a higher tier of logic than the English,
the de facto argument of logic is:
   if i use words, i am logical -
   which doesn't not mean i categorising further
and suggesting i'm also rational,
          because that's beside the point -
illogical expression is something incomprehensible
for a logical person: sign language -
        but that's not to say something illogical
is irrational -
                    what i am suggesting is
that by using words i am logical -
            i can also be irrational, but nonetheless logical,
in the same way as i can be rational
    using the same starting point -
                                but in saying that i can be irrational
cannot mean that i'm illogical -
       because i am still using the basic blueprint: words.
this is the avenue where this £30.10 priced book
on Amazon leaves you wandering -
              but not on its own...
   as already stated...                   and i never
thought i'd be able to say it: reading philosophy
in English has suddenly become comprehensible
and rather enjoyable to me...
         by the looks of it... this will be the only
book on philosophy in English in my library
(the history of western philosophy doesn't count),
given that all the rest of them are in Polish...
      well... with the exception of Nietzsche,
he's pompous enough to be read in English,
         reflections from Scotland,
        on the faded and ever more fading former
Empire.

The alien’s ears listen intently
Every syllable landing deftly
Caught between listening and hearing
He struggles to comprehend their meaning
It's like getting lost in a thick forest
It's dark and lonely, in a crowded house
Familiar words like brief glimpses of daylight on a cloudy day
Meaning hidden behind feverish incomprehensibility
Meaning in every word for the speakers
Every meaning for the speakers in those words
The tool for comprehension and its greatest barrier

just keep nagging about poetry stealing
if not simply invigorating
people's index curriculum vocabulorum
(day-to-day pint of milk
what's the weather like speech) -
keep nagging - it won't make a difference -
i have a grievance all of my own -
one word - slang - or the effective
tool for unprecedented use of misnomers -
slang is, after all, a practice of using
misnomers with social acceptability -
some claim that poetry is incomprehensible -
too difficult - too cult-like -
too whatever it is that people think poetry is -
i'm in it for the long-haul -
i'm looking at the fame of Homer and of
Horace and i see no fame in the modern
definition - the certainty of Nietzsche:
perhaps my true readers haven't been born yet.
i'm that certain of what i write,
capitalism and the short-term effect -
the cure and the same song as stated
on the album ******* -
just keep nagging about what poetry is
and what it isn't - i just spotted an pink elephant
of the easiest of comparisons to nag about too...
urban slang - slang in general - but instead
of a single people being incomprehensible
(like the tweeting format? no? we have an antidote
for that) - i never bothered or knew how
to learn slang, the "cool talk" of being recognised
as a part of a pack of hyenas about to "change the world";
if you explain slang to me i'll explain poetry to you,
some does mature outside the realm
of adolescence - Rimbaud certainly did - and with
him as example i guess we should only write
in our teen years then forget about it,
never age with it - never do a Sistine Chapel pinnacle
with it - poetry is the secondary fashion statement
of the young, the primary fashion statement is
slang - i don't know why i kept it up as i did -
and i don't care much for being too technical
either, Tartar stake for me - i guess the trick
of the novelist is that he knows he can take breaks
in between writing a novel, he can always
come back to it knowing the reader will probably
take days and different yoga positions finishing
his outpouring: as already suggested, poetry as
something that constantly requires a revision of
meaning (esp. in the age of twitter) -
fair enough for the haiku crew - but consider
my deliberate care for a counter haiku: the ensō (zen)-
maximised with the Tao teaching of forgetting
the world and letting the world forget about you -
lethal combination................................
              so this slang debate... can you tell me why
it's so akin to the incomprehensibility of poetry
and why it fizzles out after adolescence of the teen years?

You look at me,
that is all it takes, and temptation tumbles towards me

Electrochemical codes stretch themselves thin
taught and winding
cooing and fluttering in axonal cornices
Echoes rush through neuronal chambers,
charged and pulsating.

My mind in harmony and fully drawn to you
synchronized by the network.
The messages reach my cortex, aesthetic appraisal follows
I know not the meticulous, miraculous mechanics of such a wonderful process but
You beauty is magnified now.
Touch receptors tell my whole body to tingle
Sensory splendor is so scary.

The cascades have commissioned the deeper circuitry:
Those ancient blueprints of visceral demands
from which wicked temptations of man are born,
the veteran fossil of primordial impulse, a buried luxury, a relic:
My reward system
permeated by your kiss.

I am dangerously, fearfully humble to the power of pleasure
It is awake in the under-structure of neurobiologically institutionalized euphoria,
ablaze in the basic backbone of bliss
It is stirring in it’s ancient wires.

I can say I am somewhat privy to the elusive nature of experience.
being a human being alone grants me this
being a scientist of the brain only dilates my sense of love’s incomprehensibility.
And so I sink into your touch, your presence unresisting.

Long, bent around clasping
Black and lace
a life stretched out before
Twin history two people in one
Divinity and rebirth
In my faults
Both shared with others
Mouths and *****
A roiling river of filth
Both have pure memories tarnished
To incomprehensibility
By mistakes.
If i could pour my heart into making
A time machine
To correct this.

Existing is that state
that links
the present temporality
to the infinity of time

man dangles
between two polarities
he strives and struggles
to understand and too often

he is frustrated and disillusioned
for the larger part of his life
seems shrouded in incomprehensibility --
the monotony, vexation, ennui--even inanity

and there seems no escape
from the meaningless round
of just existing-while time mocks and derides
without a single whit of sympathy.

and of how many howling a times
have i watched the closed lid
patches of bonsai tiger tattoo
in stitches and in wrinkles
the rekindled routes of rivers
and veins... that might take to
the route of heart and molten iron
as sourced...
thus my fright,
that aged begotten by only pride,
and cat in pillow safeguarded
by the stuffing of lullabied sheep
of forked duck feathers
into a volume of bypassed flight,
that huffed and puffed a wheezing of sleep,
sepia too arable, kept the pedigree
of unexplored surrender kept for some concern
for signature; and thereby i too served the tongue,
as a plated palette of  forehead
that once scorned acne worthy of constellation
but later make stars an inconvenience
should obstructions be limbed and active
to raise hand and simply orientate with a wave:
so to the incomprehensibility of what defined
poetics rather than simply selling a car,
of what defined poetry and came to be merchant's assertion:
the economy of language never provided its beauty:
and the second economy never lifted a stone
to say it was mountaineering for a zenith of the ever resting
as challenged to be above: for each child nonetheless
in rubric a confirmed multiplier
but hardly a welcome addition that posthumous fame desires.

Key words:

   life
   the world
   people
   self and others
  truth and falsehood
   doubts
   incomprehensibility
   meaning or lack of
   the motives of others
   what's a friend or enemy?
   self-reliance
    courage
   authority
   freedom
   choice
   love and hate
   home
   career
  money
  power
  influence
  budget
  tax
   trust
  deceit
  success
  set-back and failure
  constancy and consistency
  thinking
  feeling
  decision-making
  planning
  e­xpecting
waiting
dreaming

  health
satisfaction
  happiness and sorrow
  death

post scriptum----reader--please do your own list

Onward and upward,
Forward and forward,
Inward and outward.

So the light of reason is cast.

Only to fall upon,  scatter,
And lose  itself in this masterful, incoherent cognitive refuse.

In paths averted, everted, subverted and outraged,
Decipherable only by hallucinatory and encrypted minds,
So it travels.

Thus the pedestrian is assaulted.

Behold how his peppered mind reels!  
How his thirst for the absurd is sated.

And how he too, seeks refuge in incomprehensibility.

incomprehensibility
      words alone - poems for free
                     you - twilight blue - me..

                                     can you, sea?