The Ache is leaving. Three years languished by dead end jobs, drugs and friends. Last week above a bagel store, the sun morphs mute amidst travelling clouds, indifferent fluctuations of light on an otherwise featureless day.

You arrive a tight knot of anxieties over a moment in time that could only have arrived after its departure. The Ache welcomes you into their sparse interior. You trace last month’s 21st across the black mould complex; navigate piles of stacked boxes, unsure if anything is inside of them.

“I always make the best friends in departure,” the Ache says, flipping a plushy up and down by the waist.

“Maybe you can only love that which is already lost,” you reply, with an insight a friend will give you a week later.

The acid tastes bitter under your tongue. Small marks your body bursting, a glowing radiance of interconnections you’d always had but only now begun to feel. The Ache follows suit and you sit on the couch together to watch .hack//Legend of the Twilight. The come up entangles you in the spectacle; the screaming boy protagonist, the chipped tooth gag, the moe sister in need of saving from the liminal space of dead code. You take part in it; you revel in it. Bodies morph on the surface of the screen in hyperflat obscenity, their parts interchangeable to the affect of the drama. Faces invert, break and disfigure, before reformation into the self-same identity form.

A month earlier, you’d hosted a house show at your flat. Too anxious to perform you’d dropped a tab as you’ve done now. An overbearing sensation of too-much-ness — of sickening reality — washed through the nexus of your being. You writhed on the ground screaming into a microphone as a cacophony of sounds roiled through you. Everyone cheered.

The floor rose later that night. A damp, disgusting intensity that triggered contractions in your throat and chest. Pulled to the ground, you fought off your bandmate’s advances, too shocked to express your revulsion and horror, to react accordingly, to reconstitute a border of consensual sociality. You broke free and slurred “I’m no one’s! I’m no one’s!” before running out of the room. Hours later, you tried to comfort them. Weeks later, you realised how ******* ******* that had been. Months later, you learnt their friend had committed suicide days before the show.

Back in the lounge, a prince rides onto the screen on a pig. You turn to the Ache and say “This is ******* awful.”

The Ache responds “I know right?”

Outside the world burns blue with lustre. The Ache trails you and falls onto their stomach. “Oh my god,” the Ache blurts, “this is why I love acid. Everything just feels right.” They gaze wistfully at the grasses and flowers before them; catch a whiff of asphalt and nectar, intermingled. “Like, gender isn’t even a thing, you know? Just properties condensed into a legible sign to be disciplined by heteronormative governmentality.”

“Properties! Properties!” You chant, stomping around the Ache with your arms stretched out. You wave them in the air like windmills. You bare your teeth. “Properties! Properties!”

“You know what I mean, right?” The Ache asks, pointedly. “You know what I mean?”

You continue chanting “Properties!” for another minute or two, before spotting a slug on a blade of grass beneath your feet. You fall to your knees and gasp “It’s a slug!”

You and the Ache stare at the tiny referent for an indefinite period of time, absorbed in its glistening moistures. Eventually, the Ache says “I think it’s actually a snail.”

You used to read postmodern novels on acid. You loved their exploration of hyperreality; their dissection of culture as a system of meaning that arises out of our collective, desperate attempts to overcome the indifference of facticity. Read symptomatically, culture does not reveal unseen depths in the world, but rather, constitutes shallow networks of sprawling complexity — truth effects — illusions of mastery over an, otherwise, undifferentiated and senseless becoming.

Then one day, the world overwhelmed you. Down the hall, your flatmates sounded an eternal return. As they spoke in joyous abandon you traced the lines from their mouths — found their origin in idiot artefacts of Hollywood Babylon. The joy of abstraction you once relished in your books took on an all too direct horror. You recoiled. You bound your lips in hysteria, for fear of becoming another repeating machine of an all too present culture industry. Better dumb than banal — better to say nothing at all, than everything that already was and would ever be. You cried and cried until everyone left — until you were alone with your silence and your tears and your nonexistent originality.

Dusk falls in violet streaks. You reach your room on the second floor of the building, open the bedside window and stick your legs out into a cool breeze. The Ache joins you. Danny Burton, the local MP, arrives in his van, his smiling bald face plastered on its side like an uncanny double enclosing its original.

“Hey look, it’s Danny Burton, the local MP.” Danny Burton turns his head. He glares at your dangling feet for a few seconds before entering his house. “You know, this is the first time in three years he’s looked at me and it’s at the peak of my degeneracy.” You turn to the Ache. “One of my favourite past times is watching him wander around the house at night, ******* and unsure of himself. He always goes to check on his BBQ.” You bounce on the bed in mania.

“See this is what people do, right?” the Ache says, mirroring your excitement. “Like, look at that lady walking her dog.” The Ache motions, with a cruel glint in their eyes, to the passerby on the fast dimming street. “What do you think she gets out of that? Doing that every night?” Without waiting for you to respond, the Ache answers, in a low, sarcastic tone “I guess she gets enjoyment. Doing her thing. Like everyone else.” The lady and the dog disappear beyond the curve of the road. Another pair soon arrives, taking the same path as the one before.

A few months back, you’d met an old friend at an exhibition on intersectional feminism. After the perfunctory art, wine and grapes, she drove you home, back to your run down flat in an otherwise bourgeois neighbourhood. She sat silent as the sun set before the dashboard, then asked how anyone could live like this; how anyone could stand driving out of their perfect suburban home, at the same time every morning, to work the same shift every day, for the rest of their stupid life. The dull ache of routine; the slow, boring death. You said nothing. You said nothing because you agreed with her.

“Life began as self-replicating information molecules,” you reply, obliquely. “Catalysis on superheated clay pockets. Repetition out of an attempt to bind the excess of radiant light.”

It is dark now; a formless hollow, pitted with harsh yellow lamps of varying, distant sizes. The Ache flips onto their stomach and scoffs “What’s that? We’re all in this pointless repetition together?”

You respond, cautiously “I just don’t think that being smart is any better than being stupid; that our disavowed repetitions are any worthier than anyone else’s.”

The Ache returns your gaze with an intensity you’ve never seen before. “Did I say being smart was any better? Did I say that? Being smart is part of the issue. There is no trajectory that doesn’t become a habitual refrain. When you can do anything, everything becomes rote, effortless and pointless.

“But don’t act as if there’s no difference between us and these ******* idiots,” the Ache spits, motioning into the blackness beyond your frame. “I knew this one guy, this complete and utter ****. We went to a café, and he wouldn’t stop talking about the waitress, about how hot she was, how he wanted to **** her, while she was in earshot, because, I don’t know, he thought that would get him laid.

“Then we went for a drive and he failed a ******* u-turn. He just drove back and forth, over and again. A dead, automatic weight. A car came from the other lane, towards us, and waited for him to finish, but he stopped in the middle of the street and started yelling, saying **** like, ‘what does this ******* want?’ He got out of his car, out of his idiot u-turn, and tried to start a fight with the other driver — you know, the one who’d waited silently for him to finish.”

You don’t attempt a rebuttal; you don’t want to negate the Ache’s experience. Instead, you ask “Why were you hanging out with this guy in the first place?”

The Ache responds “Because I was alone, and I was lonely, and I had no one else.”

It is 2AM. Moths dance chaotic across the invisible precipice of your bedside window, between the inner and outer spaces of linguistic designation. There is a layering of history here — of affects and functions that have blurred beyond recognition — discoloured, muted, absented.

In the hollow of your bed, the Ache laughs. You don’t dare close the distance. Sometimes you find the edges of their impact and trace your own death. All your worries manifest without content. All form and waver and empty expanse where you drink deeply without a head. Because you have lost so much time already. And nothing keeps.

Months later, after the Ache has left, you will go to the beach. You will see the roiling waves beneath crash into the rocky shore of the esplanade, a violence that merges formlessly into a still, motionless horizon, for they are two and the same. You will be unable to put into words how it feels to know that such a line of calm exists out of the pull and push of endless change, that it has existed long before your birth and will exist long after your death.

The last lingering traces of acid flee your skin. Doused in tomorrow’s stupor, you close your eyes. You catch no sleep.

“Who’s the lucky guy?” someone asks
“Their name’s Bea,” I reply
“I support that,” they hesitate
“You are so brave.” they add

I never saw their lips as a political statement
Nor did I think holding hands in the front seat
while a friend is puking by the side of the road
Was some kind of revolution

How romantic is it
That our story will be etched
Not in some Neruda poetry book
But a professor’s first textbook
Or a college student’s 2 am essay

When I said I was in love
You thought it meant I was hungry
Not for touch or for pleasure
But for justice and freedom
I didn’t know that
When I run my fingers down her neck
It would be tied to a long Twitter thread

I never saw my love as a battleground
A metaphysical exploration of sexuality
What’s Marxist about the way their eyes
disappear when they smile?
What’s so intersectional about
Our entanglement at the back seat
Or our hands holding in front

I never thought I would be so brave
At my most fragile state
So political
In my most dumbstruck ways
So woke
When I’m asleep in her embrace

feminism fails
when it disregards
those of color

for we know that every dollar
a woman makes
a man makes more

we seem to disregard the bit
where a women of color
make even less
than their white counterparts

feminism needs to stop
excluding
disregarding
those impacted most
it's a hazard to progress

pull up a chair
scoot down the bench
it's time we serve up
intersectional feminism
for the table can hold more
there's plenty of progress to go around

The core of  within and without
Where sums of all rule the trades
Pressing each of the passing wind
To sounds of a prolific harmony

My heart rises at the melody switch
Where after a flutter, the matter fix
reaching to restore the fueled crux
To forms of an ecstatic tuned melody

The core of within and without
Where all the unknowns are unsung
Panting on motorized highways
To mouths of folded tale and tragedy

My heart still praises in your anchor
Where safety sails to the depths
Reaching the cliffs on the coral bay
To trenches as a calm whisper to an ally

Do you remember
the dream you had
some seventeen years ago
about saving the world with prose?
Intersectional towers of oppression
crumbling down
while you move through
crowded dance floors at night.
Maybe it felt lost
misplaced under stacks of bills
holding place in textbooks
or gave birth to something new
when you held the soft pink skin
of your daughter against your own
again and again.
Do you remember the dream
you had about your father
asking if you were ready
knowing the answer was no
or his standing silent
smiling everything will be alright at you
what would he say now?

Bigot spigot on:
Bloviator gladiator
Spewing racist rhetoric:

"Multiracial intersectional
Non-Ableist unpacked transphobalist
Micro-recessive-macro-regressive
Cis-gendered 4th-wave femininizer
**** nonsense!"

—Every Archie Bunker

i was recently told that i'm no poet,
that my words don't evoke art or understanding,
that i haven't grown much, so i took that and chewed it
until it fed my insides and turned my eyes outward on
a world that i haven't dug into at all with words left
jumbling around in a brain used for other means,
i've been forcing my hands and heart to mold this world into a better place,
but without my words what capture will i leave behind, what legacy?

i marched with womxn last month, alone and surrounded by 140,000
others who gabbed and growled about a man with tiny
hands who employs those who want to take control of our reproductive rights,
and wants to throw some of us out of the country, and **** us in the streets,
but the white ladies behind me were more concerned with their clever signs
than the native's plight for their land and the black lady's murdered babies and the burkas being ripped off of women trying to buy skirts in a walmart

i guess i have a hard time finding my america in all of this mess -
i'm a white woman, but i didn't vote for trump
does that make me different? does that make me woke?
i want to join arms and resist with everyone who's ever felt
like they're less than because of something they were born being,
but i'm still not quite sure how to shine solidarity without seeking recognition

i think we all desire ego to be stroked, but how can i want for that
when some people just wish to live? i look long and hard at myself everyday
after too many hours reading about the chaos and sadness so readily
accessed at keyboards stroked by too quick fingertips, the tears they
come and the heart lays heavy, but what do i do? i rally other white folks
to march, i try to change their hearts, i explain what being an ally looks like,
i work in the communities that need it most, i love the children who feel alone,
but i wonder how much of this is for me and how much of it is true love

i'm learning, growing, changing always, but fear holds me in a place between
truly giving and giving just to fill my own cup, the world has changed and the
little girl who stood up to bullies still sits inside of my heart, but the bullies are
corporations, and the president, and coworkers, and family members, and
friends at a super bowl party, so i've got to find a way to be strong with my
solidarity no matter who, what, where, why, when, because this matters and i don't
want to be that person standing up only to put it on instagram, no i want to
affect real change, to be a part of history, to truly love all of my fellow human kind

i want to give from a place of caring without condition, a place that sees color, sees faith, sees gender identity, sees ****** orientation, sees *** work, sees disabled folk,
and doesn't pretend that their story is one that i understand and echo because
i have ovaries and know what it feels like to be frightened, no, i can't put my ******
on a pedestal and use it as a badge of courage anymore, it's time to open my heart
and ears and truly be humbled in the honorary process of letting myself learn

just because i've felt real fear, doesn't mean i know anyone else's fear, and the only
way that i will come to be a true empath, a true ally, a true warrior is if i learn to quiet
the voice within my head and listen when others speak from their darkest depths,
i must build my strength, my bonds, my heart, my mind so i can lift those up, serve as a megaphone for the voices quieted by men in uniform and suits, pound the pavement as a truly intersectional, solidarity-filled sister of every man, woman, child, they/them, that has ever felt alone, that has ever wanted for more, that has ever been denied
the privilege that i benefit from just by living, as a white woman in this world

Aside from my love of women who own their sexuality and being the spawn of the solar phallus dragon and ***** **** of fire, you know mom and dad, let's face it a lot of people are pent up about ***, so anything illuminating on the subject and its various forms, perspectives, sensual aspects and subculture is nothing but a good thing unless of course you are a die-hard *****.

Broadly speaking marrieds and long-term couples grow bored with each other, and singles very often go without *** or even being touched for extended periods of time. In both cases it ***** and not in a good way. Many singles remain fixated on the idea of finding that special person to alleviate their sense of loneliness and many if not most marrieds remain starved for a bit of novelty and are understandably afraid to transgress for fear of the jealousy and pain of betrayal with the loneliness and insecurity it often brings. Of course, there are some who work hard to disown their sexuality all together as a solution.  I see this as a kind ****** & emotional suicide, a moral masochism if religiously motivated and crime against the self.  There is in fact very few of us who manage to find a way to have it all and have it that way most or all of the time. In other words, the entirety of our society has a baked in structure that creates a sense of pervasive despair about ****** desire, not to mention the immense suffering that comes with loving and not being loved back.

Speaking of moral masochism, I find it ironic that the clergy who are sworn to celibacy and outwardly kowtow to the most rigid repressive codes of behavior have been and remain appalling in their rampant *******.

Perhaps whats left is to be driven into a labyrinth of hermetically sealed shadows that incubate a kind of sensual theater of transgression and taboo where simply everything goes.
Well, this writer has lived in those shadows like many others and consequently decided to explore those dark corners both in relationships, and those interior grottos of self through mental construct phantasmagorias and the language of poetry to spotlight this web of pathogens built into the very scaffolding of our psyches and culture.
As a poet I dont want to mimic the ruling culture. I want poetry to be like good ***, as in novel or intimate or perverse or underground like a creepy girl with a little blood on her pigtails in a fluttering dress with great legs just asking for it.
Poetry in its frail orbit is often only seen through the lens of genteel romance, social justice, of documentary, of collective resistance, or perhaps the propaganda of some other public iconography, a kind of literary imperialism in its lock step with the prevailing dogma trend lines while *** remains oddly off the radar? How could that be with so many barking and yelping genitalia, talk about repression.
Is the poetic form collapsing like a drooping mouth from too much pretentious baroque gentility in mildewed assure skies and verdant fields? Has Pandora been dethroned, and stripped of her gloomy yet torrid box of troves?
No folks shes under our bed's, in our brains and DNA disturbing us while we try to avoid her primal groans, groans mind you that manifest in the shadows and then erupt into arguments, tears and the rip apart lives.   

The reason I write about *** is I'm in search of a sacred space where language serves the psyche without artifice, and that makes plain the difference between the conservative public conversation and true innerness of the intersectional shadow lands of self towards a better way to live.

i want to shave my legs, i want to be a girl again
i want to be like you, i want to be feminine
i want to be pretty, i want to wear pink
i want to pluck my eyebrows, i want to wear a dress

i want to paint my nails, i want to wear lipstick
i want to have the softest skin, i want to wear the pinkest blush

i want to write queer poetry, i want to write love songs
i want to be gay, i want to be a lesbian
i want to write about your *****
i want to write about my lack of a *****

i want to wear cute glasses — i have cute glasses
i want my hair to fall down to my lower back
i want to tuck it behind my ears
i want to put it in pigtails, i want to wear it in a scrunchie

i want to be a feminist
i want to be an intersectional feminist
i want to be an angry feminist

i don’t want to suffer under patriarchy
i don’t want to be told to be quiet a man is talking
i don’t want to be told to smile
i don’t want to be stared at with beady eyes
i don’t want to be *****
i don’t want to feel unsafe

i want to feel free, i want to be me
i want to be published
i want to win poetry prizes
i want to show trans girls that we can do anything

Black

Black is the colour a bad day comes to mind or the day people go mad buying online.

Black is the night we’re evil and danger lurks negative connotations that evoke the inert.

Black when beautiful is a pleasure to see illuminates, power, history culture of humanity.

Black is positive regardless of norms neutral defined intersectional and kind.

Black in essence is unique and refined a culture of mankind like alabaster solid and surreal.

I’ve been reading a lot of poetry for quite a few years and maybe this is just me, as in some quirky bias I suffer, or misapprehension about poetry, but much of what I read doesn’t feel much like poetry at all. Now, one can rightfully argue that poetry can be anything, and that’s okay because if we take a look at poetry’s history what we see is a continuum of thesis and antithesis, flagging us who read the stuff that anything goes. So where does that leave us? I might argue that since there are so many distinct kinds of poems that a definition alludes us all together and when we hear the noun p o e t r y, we can only assign the familiar poetic shape as its definitive territory, meaning a few words in a line that are stacked up on each other, which we generally think of as verse with multiplied stacks fulfilling our expectation of poem. I’m thinking if we want to go with that poetry digresses to a linguistic charmless flat land characteristic of prose, relative to at least some of the poetic writing that is highly lyrical, sonically potent, novel, intonated, linguistically muscular, and dynamically connective to the reader. Poetry can take creative liberties that prose customarily does not or cannot take. Poetry may have different linguistic needs like different kinds of English. For example, articles may be absent towards a more concentrated synthesis for phrasing, a lyrical lilt, stream of consciousness boarding on the abstract et al.
Being a poet is born of a feeling that a face may be a liquid surface. That time is malleable, and that there is always something going on in-between the lines gleaned from inexplicable moments of inner disjuncture or a hesitating breath.
Poetry may facilitate that mind may emerge from the concrete objective into the mirrors of the marvelous or uncanny like a burped half avocado and fish head at 2 am in the morning transmuting into a torrent of dormice and angels in delirious avenues of falling stars and looking glasses.
Poetry may address intersectional dimensionality populated by visions and voices of primordial undercurrents, that stories may not lend themselves to. Poetry may be metalinguistic and a fragment of the inner life both collective and individuated. Poetry may work from the inside out without referencing the temporal, locational, and name it and claim it nouns and pronouns typical of prose. So, here’s the poetry problem. Why is it that 99% of the poetry I read here and places like it remain basically written just like prose, linguistically and sonically vacuous, largely bereft of similes, metaphors and all the other strategic devices that can make poetry progressive, inventive and deeply resonate, except of course that they are stacked and columned giving the appearance of poems?
~~~~~
EXAMPLES OF POEMS THAT CAN BE CALLED POETRY
Ballad in A
BY CATHY PARK HONG
A Kansan plays cards, calls Marshall
a crawdad, that barb lands that rascal a slap;
that Kansan ******* scats,
camps back at caballada ranch.
Hangs kack, ax, and camp hat.
Kansan’s nag mad and rants can’t bask,
can’t bacchanal and garland a lass,
can’t at last brag can crack Law’s *****,
Kansan’s cantata rang at that ramada ranch,
Mañana, Kansan snarls, I’ll have an armada
and thwart Law’s brawn,
slam Law a **** mass war path.
Marshall’s a marksman, maps Kansan’s track,
calm as a shaman, sharp as a hawk,
Says: That dastard Kansan’s had
and gnaws lamb fatback.
At dawn, Marshall stalks that ranch,
packs a gat and blasts Kansan’s ***
and Kansan gasps, blasts back.
A flag ***** at half-mast.~~~~~
Ocean of Earth

BY GUILLAUME APOLLINAIRE
TRANSLATED BY RON PADGETT
To G. de Chirico
I have built a house in the middle of the Ocean
Its windows are the rivers flowing from my eyes
Octopi are crawling all over where the walls are
Hear their triple hearts beat and their beaks peck against the windowpanes
House of dampness
House of burning
Season’s fastness
Season singing
The airplanes are laying eggs
Watch out for the dropping of the anchor
Watch out for the shooting black ichor
It would be good if you were to come from the sky
The sky’s honeysuckle is climbing
The earthly octopi are throbbing
And so very many of us have become our own gravediggers
Pale octopi of the chalky waves O octopi with pale beaks
Around the house is this ocean that you know well
And is never still
Translated from the French
Source: Poetry (October 2015)~~~~~

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
BY OCEAN VUONG
i
Tell me it was for the hunger
& nothing less. For hunger is to give
the body what it knows
it cannot keep. That this amber light
whittled down by another war
is all that pins my hand
to your chest.
i
You, drowning
between my arms —
stay.
You, pushing your body
into the river
only to be left
with yourself —
stay.
i
I’ll tell you how we’re wrong enough to be forgiven. How one night, after
backhanding
mother, then taking a chainsaw to the kitchen table, my father went to kneel
in the bathroom until we heard his muffled cries through the walls.
And so I learned that a man, in ******, was the closest thing
to surrender.
i
Say surrender. Say alabaster. Switchblade.
Honeysuckle. Goldenrod. Say autumn.
Say autumn despite the green
in your eyes. Beauty despite
daylight. Say you’d **** for it. Unbreakable dawn
mounting in your throat.
My thrashing beneath you
like a sparrow stunned
with falling.
i
Dusk: a blade of honey between our shadows, draining.
i
I wanted to disappear — so I opened the door to a stranger’s car. He was divorced. He was still alive. He was sobbing into his hands (hands that tasted like rust). The pink breast cancer ribbon on his keychain swayed in the ignition. Don’t we touch each other just to prove we are still here? I was still here once. The moon, distant & flickering, trapped itself in beads of sweat on my neck. I let the fog spill through the cracked window & cover my fangs. When I left, the Buick kept sitting there, a dumb bull in pasture, its eyes searing my shadow onto the side of suburban houses. At home, I threw myself on the bed like a torch & watched the flames gnaw through my mother’s house until the sky appeared, bloodshot & massive. How I wanted to be that sky — to hold every flying & falling at once.
i
Say amen. Say amend.
Say yes. Say yes
anyway.
i
In the shower, sweating under cold water, I scrubbed & scrubbed.
i
In the life before this one, you could tell
two people were in love
because when they drove the pickup
over the bridge, their wings
would grow back just in time.
Some days I am still inside the pickup.
Some days I keep waiting.
i
It’s not too late. Our heads haloed
with gnats & summer too early
to leave any marks.
Your hand under my shirt as static
intensifies on the radio.
Your other hand pointing
your daddy’s revolver
to the sky. Stars falling one
by one in the cross hairs.
This means I won’t be
afraid if we’re already
here. Already more
than skin can hold. That a body
beside a body
must make a field
full of ticking. That your name
is only the sound of clocks
being set back another hour
& morning
finds our clothes
on your mother’s front porch, shed
like week-old lilies.
Source: Poetry (December 2014)
~~~~~
SOMETIMES WE’VE GOT TO READ IT TO KNOW WHAT IT IS.

You are an amazing writer
And one hell of a character
I love the way you think
In your armour, are there no chinks
Precisely do you know how to attract readers
In your world, there ain't no order!
Thou art the mistress of chaos
To your writings, if people are averse
Then it is their loss
Because you are an absolute diamond
And for you, never does learning end!!

You are an amazing writer
And a stellar storyteller
You always call a ***** a *****
By rules, you do not abide
When you are angry
We all are angry
Because we cannot stand injustice
And you yourself are Lady Justice!!

You are an amazing writer
Sure, you do have your share of haters
But that only serves to underscore the sheer impact you produce
Truly, art thou a natural force!!
Smashing the Brahminical patriarchy looks not impossible
Only because your spirit is unbreakable!!

You are an amazing writer
And an even better reciter
Your poetry is simply revolutionary
And though your critics are often reactionary
You simply let your keyboard do the talking
Thus reducing them to effectively nothing!!

You are an amazing writer
And we are your debtors
Because, you are one of those fearless critics
Whom the government always tries to silence
But you brave storm after storm
In order to try and ensure justice for the downtrodden
You are the oasis that represents hope
In a desert full of despair

You are an amazing writer
Who doesn't give two hoots about her detractors
You are the true face of intersectional feminism
In a land full of Savarna feminism
Which is as fake as Israeli democracy
Thanks to you, gender equality is not a mere fantasy!!
Most important of all, though
Is your anti-caste activism
In the never-ending battle against casteism
You are one of the fiercest warriors
May you eventually succeed in breaking all the barriers
Which stand between you and annihilation of caste!!
Jai Bhim!! Vaazhga Periyar!!

squirt (title): pompoms scream (body) - to bypass the 502 Error Gateway...

second shift at Craven Cottage, the Fulham stadium...
well **** me...
i was in luck! Tony, this ex-military supervisor
asked me straight up: you want to do pitch-side?
do i?! the first shift i did was walking around
the park outside the venue, meeting & greeting incoming
fans... but to be allocated a more responsible role?!
you cannot believe how refreshing work has become:
you cannot believe how refreshing tiredness from
work has also become...
i don't know how it happened, but...
ARBEIT MACHT FREI is... ringing high and loud...
perhaps that slogan over a concentration camp
was always a bad joke...
i can't imagine that the Germans thought all the Hebrews
were lazy, not diligent workers...
even my grandfather remembers Hebrews in Poland
selling matchsticks and getting rich,
after all, what was that pre-war saying the Hebrews
had when putting down Polacks?
ah... wasze ulice, nasze kamienice...
your streets, our tenements...
maybe the Germans thought that a lot of Hebrews were
studying in the Yeshiva? nothing practical for society,
or that all Hebrews were somehow rabbis...
whatever it was... well a slogan above the entrance
to a concentration camp: where in a concentration
camp you'd perform a parody of work,
e.g. move one sack of rocks from one end of the camp
to another, to later move it back...
it's not like concentration camps were... munition factories...
a German bad joke...
but if, like me, you spent your 20s and early 30s
working in patches... the odd week on a construction site
doing some roofing, the odd month...
but mostly concentrating on writing...
and now this, steward at a football match...
some rigour re-imbued, some strategy,
some responsibility... i can't press the matter further...
sure, i'm not a football player, i'm not a film actor,
i'm not even the head safety officer in the ground...
i only put on some identifying clothes...
an accreditation badge and a uniform...
what did i get? people asking me questions as to where
to go, if they were sat in the correct seat...
for a man to feel useless, to be without authority:
that's horrible, writing poo'ems would never give me
that...
a compliment from a supervisor when i pointed
out that a woman was drinking wine in view
of a football pitch: which is illegal...
'nicely spotted'... after he approached her and asked
her to finish her wine from view of the pitch...
at the end of the match three boys came up to me
and asked me whether they could
pinch a piece of the pitch...
i let them... how their faces illuminated the place:
it was so dear to them: i couldn't just not let them
(mind you, they only pinched a piece of the astro-turf
lining the actual grass pitch, they didn't hear
that they were pinching fake grass...
let me leave them happy, after all...
i was providing a service)...

prior to leaving for Putney Bridge from Newbury Park
(first getting two buses there,
oh, i'd say a good decent 2 hour trip,
i've started to fall in love with commuting)...
one quick hot dog, with a Turkish toppish
of squeezed onions, parsley,
white wine vinegar, salt, sugar, gochugaru chilli flakes
& some sumac - well... squeezing the onions
releases their juices, making them less bitter:
actually sweet...
i only came back to Romford on the 86 bus
having arrived by train from Stratford
to Goodmayes - it's still zone 4...
all buses are zones one to four... Romford being
in zone six (if using a train or the tube)...
a two piece chicken meal with fries & a coca cola
zero... gulped down at approx. 12:20...
then... the most glorious cigarette to add smokiness
to the digestion...

starting work, proper, in your mid-30s...
while your 20s were spent unravelling a psychotic breakdown,
borderline schizophrenia:
that wouldn't fly, my supposed "schizophrenia"
dissolved when the element of bilingualism came in...
why should i only "hear voices" in English...
when i didn't hear them in ******?
the illness made no sense...
it didn't tap into my bilingualism...
why?! i read up a lot on this topic,
from Julian Jaynes, Jung, Richard Bentall,
R. D. Laing... no mention of schizophrenia coming up
against bilingualism...
misdiagnosis?!
i was never going to be merely a ******* victim...

now i see the bigger picture, music always helps...
the overseer - glass + unbreakable soundtrack,
James Howard's theme...
sure, the bonus of being pitch-side was also being
able to watch the match...
making new friends... well... colleagues...
i talked with Danny about our interests...
his was crypto-currency mine was music & cycling...
he used to cycle: until he hit a tree...
blah blah... time flies when you're talking...

oh such a little role of heroism on my part...
just minding people...
all this life truly requires is these little roles of heroism,
of responsibility...

i was at university, dated... i worked as a sub-contracting
roofer on construction sites...
i'm sorry to say this...
no relationship with a woman comes close...
to the amount of satisfaction received from
having a role that's more than a mere job you get paid for...
being responsible for the safety of others is...
probably somewhere in the hierarchy of where
the status of teacher is placed...
yet not with the current affairs of pedagogy:
of indoctrinating younglings into ideology:
whatever it's called these days...
intersectional *******, anti-racism, critical race theory...
teach them ******* English: the language,
teach them geography, chemistry, history,
don't turn them into spineless zombies
where they resort to a "rebellion" of succumbing
to football fanaticism...

me & Danny concluded: he "supports" Arsenal,
i "support" West Ham... but, "support": not really...
i just love the sport itself... i wouldn't be found a mile away
from the nearest crowd of avid club chanters...

my god, how refreshing to be in a position of authority,
even if it involves being at the bottom
of the hierarchy, being merely a pawn...
i can pull it off though... a welcoming yet intimidating look...
6ft2, 98kg... two jackets clad...
arms folded in front of me, arms folded at my back...
calm, collected... smiling... observant...
perhaps relationships with women were great...
they filled that void i was fed by literature prior
to my engagement with the opposite ***...
did i leave these relationships disillusioned?
of course!

   would i ever return to them? my heart is a stone...
mein herz ist ein kleinstein...
it has stopped bothering me, it bothers me less & less...
i'm not built for love, for romance,
that's why i don't want to write about it,
or even think about it...
i imagine that should a scenario present itself...
i'd be loved: but i wouldn't be able to love...
i'd merely... insinuate... i'd be on the receiving end
whilst doing the utmost minimal to
reciprocate... i'd be a cold-hearted *******...
oh... the mushy-colt aged 21 is long gone...
thank god...
could i love again? intimacy i can get with
a ******* in a brothel and not think twice
that a girl outside the profession of prostitution might
not give me an *******: again: is there something
wrong with me? why can a ******* give me
an ******* while some random girl picked up
in a bar, can't?!

i prefer talking to strangers than i ever preffered
talking to established friends...
it's not high-school anymore... there's no more
high-school banter... come to think of it...
the formality and the clear lines one cannot trespass
when conversing with strangers / colleagues...
come to think of it:
i'd tend to tell strangers more than the people
i was friends with... taboos enter the dynamics of friendships...
you can't tell of your innermost woes to friends,
after all... with friends you're supposed
to have a good time! no?

**** that... with strangers, with my shadow...
i burned down the bridges of my friendships a long time ago...
now i walk in the realm of Hades...
and i'm all the happier for it...
there were four major attachments in my life...
i lost one in the past year: my grandfather...
under circumstances that are, to be frank... rather horrid...
and... now that over a year has passed...
i feel... no... not relieved... i feel: RE-LEASED...
from some sort of heartbreak *******...

it's coming up to a quarter to 3am...
i have a shift this Sunday at the Wembley Stadiun
for the women's FA final,
my supervisor told me as i left Craven Cottage
that there was a good chance i'd get a chance to work
indoors... **** yes...
plenty of children to burn my eyes out:
not mine, not mine, thank god for that...
i don't need to be a father to them...
what a release from some bogus obligation that
in life you have to procreate...
hell... others can do that for me... i can just stand watch
and observe how...
this be the verse, Philip Larkin...
little chance of failure, or disappointment...
the Pontius Pilate approach...

it's a quarter to 3am and i just finished my shift,
my feet are somewhat sore, somewhat chilly,
who would have thought
that standing in one place, or two places
could be so exhausting: i'd rather walk a length of
a marathon than stand on duty...
the air outside looks like... a glass of water
with someone having splashed a dollop of milk into it...
it's so... murky, so... ambivalent...
so literally foggy...

no, not me... i was once the great romantic...
after being injected with the three musceteers,
with Stendhal's the scarlet & black...
i'm the one now saying:
work is better than an intimate relationship with
a woman... moi?! pour putain de l'intention
(is that, for ****'s sake?)
i'm trying to word with with spite...
i'my trying, i'm trying... no... no good...
on the way back some girls eyeing me up...
i try to think of the guys not being eyed up...
invisible creatures...
i hope i'm not much to look at either...
but can a woman do more for me than work?
i don't think so...
i'm such a fan of this hierarchic dynamic,
a work ethic, professionalism...
i don't think i could give myself up, on a whim...
my life can leave traces of fulfillment i generate myself:
this writing... well... it's obviously not Tolstoy...
just a product of these times...
i'll settle for that...
i'll also settle for being merely any overseer in a football
stadium than a rock-star, or actor:
never mind being a heart-surgeon...

but me, the once great romantic...
reduced to a function that mere guarantees him
a pawn status... the microcosm of overseeing
a football match: it is merely a microcosm...
in the grand scheme of things:
a newly found focus... returning with gladness to:
i am small... i'm a unit...
i am insignificant... writing creatively can rob you
of this perspective... infuse you with a sickly
megalomania...
it's best to return, to reality, to people...
away from the high-brow insecurities of an ivory
tower... it's so... refreshing...
after all, no Hamlet here, no Auld Lang Syne...

no... and all the better for it...
maybe it was a bad joke that the Germans posted on
the entrance of concentration camps:
it was... if concentration camps became
munition factories... but sieving sand:
in order to sieve more sand... to perform
Sisyphus tasks... while also exterminating the potential
workers? why not think of it as essentially failing:
when the essentiality of existence was lost?

but... translated, outside of the context
of a concentration camp? arbeit macht freit?
work set's you free... i can forget about my shortcomings...
my shortcomings are replaced with responsibilities...
i can forget about elaborating this tongue to my idiosyncrasy
and focus on formal communication...
i can live parallel lives...
i can have two lives...

as i have a prowess to wield of two tongues...
i can also... wield two lives....
and i don't even need to have a wife, to have children...
i can pass off being some loner since,
i hold a relationship with myself that grounds me
differently to others: others who are exposed
to their solitude, those who do not write,
who do not add form to their being,
who refuse to experience themselves with depth...
who switch off after their swift rather than switch on...

oh, these people are apparent... chamaleon me...
i turn into a right extrovert when a situation imposes itself
on me... yet writing is not a clear aspect of extroversion...
writing is an introvert's project...
yet how these two (aspects) are consolidated has
become... rather: a revelation to me...
i never put it into practice, mind you...
now that i have...

should all the final connections of significance die
and i'll be left alone...
just give me a "lesser" creature to bother me...
perhaps a dog... but more likely a cat...
i like the cats' take on placebo solipsism...

père corbeau...

   me, disavowing the chance of romance with a woman
over a desire to fulfill the role of steward,
sure, while i do my idiot writing on the side...
"idiot": it's never going to reach Fifty Shades of Grey
traction... then again:
i don't think i'll ever write something that exhausts me,
disappoints me... i'll just write what's made available...
what i want... come whoever may wish to come...
and a nice filter to boot... this will never be spoken
in either audio or a video format...
why bother unwanted attention,
made all the more accessible via audio or video?

what's it called? camaraderie? a select number of people
don't want something being spoilt,
by the intrusion of a greater number of people?
a loss of familiarity?
it's life... a phase of transition...
we're only taking a few people with us...
within the framework of memory, of a shared experience...
it's very much unlike a football match...
a football match consists of 11 players...
either side of the opposing teams...
the staff involved with the teams...
the stewards at the venue... blah blah blah...
very much unlike writing...

walk the moon - shut up & dance with me....
that sort of colt is not coming back....
even all those regretfully looking girls coming out of
clubs in Romford, stumbling, obviously not being
able to handle their drink...
oh, that guy is not coming back...
once upon a time taking a ******* a date to
the Tate Modern for an Edward Hopper exhibition,
then to the cinema to see a movie, Troy,
then some sushi... sending her off on the train
with my then friend messaging me
she said she felt butterflies in her stomach...
said "friend" later, years later, sending her a phallus-"selfie"...
ah.. RE-AH-LI-TY everyone's worse nightmare...
any psychotic's bread-and-butter...
so engrossed in it it would be impossible
to simply vacate it, leave it...
come the marriage with death... only then...

servus! neugefundenmann!
oh... hallo mich!

By the way, did you know that the good ole USA according to Salon Magazine is not even on the list of most sexually satisfied countries. Even communist China has us beat, never mind Switzerland, Italy, Japan, Spain, the Netherlands, Brazil, Greece, Mexico, India, Australia, Germany, and Nigeria to name a few. 
  
  The legacy of the Christian imprimatur has devastated the ****** ecosystem of the American Psyche.  The language used by the middle minded "good people" to describe sexuality is often an ugly cocktail composed of derisive language, like disgusting, slimy, unclean, offensive, obscene, squalid, and nasty to name some. I was once married to a woman who weaponized *** using the word disgusting, meaning my desire for her was disgusting, and I'm disgusting. It was devastating. How could that end well? These words remain a mantra of harm in many relationships shaping a marriage towards abject failure. Isn't Venus already fickle enough without calling that regal gift-giver of love and ****** pleasure an omnibus of epithets?
  
  Can you tell the other person your deepest darkest secrets and feel safe? Can they tell you theirs, or is trust an issue?  
Do we wheedle each other with deception to save face and struggle in a gimping relationship assigning it to crutches, a wheelchair, or an early death propagated by an unholy trinity of ignorance, frustration and co-belligerence on the subject of erotasisim as we clutch hopelessly to hope, wondering how things get so loused up?
Most relationships end over finance and ****** unhappiness.

  While cyber **** is accused of bringing out the worst in us  a short trip through contemporary anthropology demonstrates *** remains ***** irrespective of cyber ***, besides have you seen my stained collector magazine collection at the Museum of *** in NYC?
  
Check it out.
1 Weird ****** Practices from all around the world
1.1 Egypt- Public *******
1.2 Mangaia- Old women sleep with much younger men
1.3 Ancient Greece- Young boy lover to an elder male
1.4 Nepal- Brothers share a wife
1.5 New Guinea- Sambian tribe drinks *****
1.6 Indonesia- *** with strangers on Pon festival
1.8 Cambodia- *** will multiple partners before finding the one
1.9 West Africa- Wife stealing festival
1.10 Marquesas Island, French Polynesia- Children watch their parents having ***
1.11 Inis Beag-Make love with underpants on
1.12 Chattisgarh, India- No emotional attachment ***
1.13 Columbia- Make a man trip to have ***
1.14 Haiti- ****** dance
1.15 New England- No-no to penetrative ***
1.16 Rural Austria- Armpit flavored apples
2 15 Unsolved and Perplexing Mysteries of India
2 17 Japanese ***** Festival
  
  As for language  I prefer mango drip shake kissy witchy **** myself, as opposed to disgusting, but profanity can be bicameral too. On one hand of course it can be cruel on the other it can be an aphrodisiac. Ooow your so gona get it you little *****
Context in its intersectional shades of emotional content is everything.
Do we appreciate the impulses of the chaotic dusky subconscious that may fascinate when it comes to those ****** ideations that may cross our minds in the most private of moments Why not use them to enrich your life, or do we run from them and our primal truth? 
 
  While most all praise only tenderness who says *** is just about love, gentility, and the tender promulgated by middle-minded. Is this **** worm pathology rooted in anti-****** Victorian confabulations of the synoptic religions like tattoo ink into the psychic skin forming a deep seated stain of medieval horrors evocative of a Boschesque inferno with bubbling skin, pitch forks and melting collagen? No, no dont hurt me 
  
  In a life filled with stress and endless concerns about survival ****** expression is a sacred oasis for many of us, not another place to be told what we should do, or feel, or think, or be subliminally infested by the Piscean age pathogens as we currently remain still in the grips of the old Roman empire.
  
  Through an in depth exploration of erotasisim through ****, personal experience and literature we might know our own shadows better, share them happily with others, and bring that dark harvest to light so it doesn't trip us up in an exchange of lies to others but most importantly to our selves. At least when you hookup on a social media ***/date oriented site people tend to tell you the most intimate things about themselves up front.  

It may be important to note the difference between mere sexuality and erotasisim. Sexuality is a beautiful impulse but eroticism raises *** to the status of art. Besides *** itself I think of the athletic sensuality of belly dancing as an example.

"if its *****
*****
naughty
or just plane wrong
i want it"

  To acknowledge the shadow, or better yet enjoy it, doesn't at all mean we are devoid of decency, kindness and love. May I suggest that those virtues are so much more potent when they are part of an integrated whole of our being including the dark side. Real musicians, artists, writers and for that matter people who have the spine to be authentic don't just play the vanilla notes and neither do exciting lovers.
God save the kink!

It is not lost on me that the meaning of much that I write is not well understood. Some say if you have to explain a poem its failed.
Id flip that around and say what of the readers responsibility to be culturally assimilated, familiar with surrealism and the writings of visionaries who constructed and promulgated altered realities some of which great movements of literature and culture are built upon, such as Artaud who inspires the subject of my darkly exotic intersectional writings.
Let it suffice to say then at the very least these poems are streams of conciousness that may give hints through a gleaning of suggestive images.