Like a psychotic docent in the wilderness,
I will not speak in perfect Ciceronian cadences.
I draw my voice from a much deeper cistern,
Preferring the jittery synaptic archive,
So sublimely unfiltered, random and profane.
And though I am sequestered now,
Confined within the walls of a gated, golf-coursed,
Over-55 lunatic asylum (for Active Seniors I am told),
I remain oddly puerile,
Remarkably refreshed and unfettered.  
My institutionalization self-imposed,
Purposed for my own serenity, and also the safety of others.
Yet I abide, surprisingly emancipated and frisky.
I may not have found the peace I seek,
But the quiet has mercifully come at last.

The nexus of inner and outer space is context for my story.
I was born either in Brooklyn, New York or Shungopavi, Arizona,
More of intervention divine than census data.
Shungopavi: a designated place for tribal statistical purposes.
Shungopavi: an ovine abbatoir and shaman’s cloister.
The Hopi: my mother’s people, a state of mind and grace,
Deftly landlocked, so cunningly circumscribed,
By both interior and outer Navajo boundaries.
The Navajo: a coyote trickster people; a nation of sheep thieves,
Hornswoggled and landlocked themselves,
Subsumed within three of the so-called Four Corners:
A 3/4ths compromise and covenant,
Pickled in firewater, swaddled in fine print,
A veritable swindle concocted back when the USA
Had Manifest Destiny & mayhem on its mind.

The United States: once a pubescent synthesis of blood and thunder,
A bold caboodle of trooper spit and polish, unwashed brawlers, Scouts and      
Pathfinders, mountain men, numb-nut ne'er-do-wells,
Buffalo Bills & big-balled individualists, infected, insane with greed.
According to the Gospel of His Holiness Saint Zinn,
A People’s’ History of the United States: essentially state-sponsored terrorism,
A LAND RUSH grabocracy, orchestrated, blessed and anointed,
By a succession of Potomac sharks, Great White Fascist Fathers,
Far-Away-on-the Bay, the Bay we call The Chesapeake.
All demented national patriarchs craving lebensraum for God and country.
The USA: a 50-state Leviathan today, a nation jury-rigged,
Out of railroad ties, steel rails and baling wire,
Forged by a litany of lies, rapaciousness and ******,
And jaw-torn chunks of terra firma,
Bites both large and small out of our well-****** Native American ***.

Or culo, as in va’a fare in culo (literally "go do it in the ***")
Which Italian Americans pronounce as fongool.
The language center of my brain,
My sub-cortical Broca’s region,
So fraught with such semantic misfires,
And autonomic linguistic seizures,
Compel acknowledgement of a father’s contribution,
To both the gene pool and the genocide.
Columbus Day:  a conspicuously absent holiday out here in Indian Country.
No festivals or Fifth Avenue parades.
No excuse for ethnic hoopla. No guinea feast. No cannoli. No tarantella.
No excuse to not get drunk and not **** your sister-in-law.
Emphatically a day for prayer and contemplation,
A day of infamy like Pearl Harbor and 9/11,
October 12, 1492: not a discovery; an invasion.

Growing up in Brooklyn, things were always different for me,
Different in some sort of redskin/****/****--
Choose Your Favorite Ethnic Slur-sort of way.
The American Way: dehumanization for fun and profit.
Melting *** anonymity and denial of complicity with evil.
But this is no time to bring up America’s sordid past,
Or, a personal pet peeve: Indian Sovereignty.
For Uncle Sam and his minions, an ever-widening, conveniently flexible concept,
Not a commandment or law,
Not really a treaty or a compact,
Or even a business deal.  Let’s get real:
It was not even much in the way of a guideline.
Just some kind of an advisory, a bulletin or newsletter,
Could it merely have been a free-floating suggestion?
Yes, that’s it exactly: a suggestion.

Over and under halcyon American skies,
Over and around those majestic purple mountain peaks,
Those trapped in poetic amber waves of wheat and oats,
Corn and barley, wheat shredded and puffed,
Corn flaked and milled, Wheat Chex and Wheaties, oats that are little Os;
Kix and Trix, Fiber One, and Kashi-Go-Lean, Lucky Charms and matso *****,
Kreplach and kishka,
Polenta and risotto.
Our cantaloupe and squash patch,
Our fruited prairie plain, our delicate ecological Eden,
In balance and harmony with nature, as Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce instructs:
“These white devils are not going to,
Stop ****** and killing, cheating and eating us,
Until they have the whole ******* enchilada.
I’m talking about ‘from sea to shining sea.’”

“I fight no more forever,” Babaloo.
So I must steer this clunky keelboat of discovery,
Back to the main channel of my sad and starry demented river.
My warpath is personal but not historical.
It is my brain’s own convoluted cognitive process I cannot saavy.
Whatever biochemical or—as I suspect more each day—
Whatever bio-mechanical protocols govern my identity,
My weltanschauung: my world-view, as sprechen by proto-Nazis;
Putz philosophers of the 17th, 18th & 19th century.
The German intelligentsia: what a cavalcade of maniacal *******!
Why is this Jew unsurprised these Zarathustra-fueled Übermenschen . . .
Be it the Kaiser--Caesar in Deutsch--Bismarck, ******, or,
Even that Euro-*****,  Angela Merkel . . . Why am I not surprised these Huns,
Get global grab-*** on the sauerbraten cabeza every few generations?
To be, or not to be the ***** bullgoose loony: GOTT.

Biomechanical protocols govern my identity and are implanted while I sleep.
My brain--my weak and weary CPU--is replenished, my discs defragmented.
A suite of magnetic and optical white rooms, cleansed free of contaminants,
Gun mounts & lifeboat stations manned and ready,
Standing at attention and saluting British snap-style,
Snap-to and heel click, ramrod straight and cheerful: “Ready for duty, Sir.”
My mind is ravenous, lusting for something, anything to process.
Any memory or image, lyric or construct,
Be they short-term dailies or deeply imprinted.
Fixations archived one and all in deep storage time and space.
Memories, some subconscious, most vaporous;
Others--the scary ones—eidetic: frighteningly detailed and extraordinarily vivid.
Precise cognitive transcripts; recollected so richly rife and fresh.
Visual, auditory, tactile, gustatory, and olfactory reloads:
Queued up and increasingly re-experienced.

The bio-data of six decades: it’s all there.
People, countless, places and things cataloged.
Every event, joy and trauma enveloped from within or,
Accessed externally from biomechanical storage devices.
The random access memory of a lifetime,
Read and recollected from cerebral repositories and vaults,
All the while the entire greedy process overseen,
Over-driven by that all-subservient British bat-man,
Rummaging through the data in batches small and large,
Internal and external drives working in seamless syncopation,
Self-referential, at times paradoxical or infinitely looped.
“Cogito ergo sum."
Descartes stripped it down to the basics but there’s more to the story:
Thinking about thinking.
A curse and minefield for the cerebral:  metacognition.

No, it is not the fact that thought exists,
Or even the thoughts themselves.
But the information technology of thought that baffles me,
As adaptive and profound as any evolution posited by Darwin,
Beyond the wetware in my skull, an entirely new operating system.
My mental and cultural landscape are becoming one.
Machines are connecting the two.
It’s what I am and what I am becoming.
Once more for emphasis:
It is the information technology of who I am.
It is the operating system of my mental and cultural landscape.
It is the machinery connecting the two.
This is the central point of this narrative:
Metacognition--your superego’s yenta Cassandra,
Screaming, screaming in your psychic ear, your good ear:

“LISTEN:  The machines are taking over, taking you over.
Your identity and train of thought are repeatedly hijacked,
Switched off the main line onto spurs and tangents,
Only marginally connected or not at all.
(Incoming TEXT from my editor: “Lighten Up, Giuseppi!”)
Reminding me again that most in my audience,
Rarely get past the comic page. All righty then: think Calvin & Hobbes.
John Calvin, a precocious and adventurous six-year old boy,
Subject to flights of 16th Century French theological fancy.
Thomas Hobbes, a sardonic anthropomorphic tiger from 17th Century England,
Mumbling about life being “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”
Taken together--their antics and shenanigans--their relationship to each other,
Remind us of our dual nature; explore for us broad issues like public education;
The economy, environmentalism & the Global ****** Thermometer;
Not to mention the numerous flaws of opinion polls.



And again my editor TEXTS me, reminds me again: “LIGHTEN UP!”
Consoling me:  “Even Shakespeare had to play to the groundlings.”
The groundlings, AKA: The Rabble.
Yes. Even the ******* Bard, even Willie the Shake,
Had to contend with a decidedly lowbrow copse of carrion.
Oh yes, the groundlings, a carrion herd, a flying flock of carrion seagulls,
Carrion crow, carrion-feeders one and all,
And let’s throw Sheryl Crow into the mix while we’re at it:
“Hit it! This ain't no disco. And it ain't no country club either, this is L.A.”  

                  Send "All I Wanna Do" Ringtone to your Cell              

Once more, I digress.
The Rabble:  an amorphous, gelatinous Jabba the Hutt of commonality.
The Rabble: drunk, debauched & lawless.
Too *****-delicious to stop Bill & Hilary from thinking about tomorrow;
Too Paul McCartney My Love Does it Good to think twice.

The Roman Saturnalia: a weeklong **** fest.
The Saturnalia: originally a pagan kink-fest in honor of the deity Saturn.
Dovetailing nicely with the advent of the Christian era,
With a project started by Il Capo di Tutti Capi,
One of the early popes, co-opting the Roman calendar between 17 and 25 December,
Putting the finishing touches on the Jesus myth.
For Brooklyn Hopi-***-Jew baby boomers like me,
Saturnalia manifested itself as Disco Fever,
Unpleasant years of electrolysis, scrunched ***** in tight polyester
For Roman plebeians, for the great unwashed citizenry of Rome,
Saturnalia was just a great big Italian wedding:
A true family blowout and once-in-a-lifetime ego-trip for Dad,
The father of the bride, Vito Corleone, Don for A Day:
“Some think the world is made for fun and frolic,
And so do I! Funicula, Funiculi!”

America: love it or leave it; my country right or wrong.
Sure, we were citizens of Rome,
But any Joe Josephus spending the night under a Tiber bridge,
Or sleeping off a three day drunk some afternoon,
Up in the Coliseum bleachers, the cheap seats, out beyond the monuments,
The original three monuments in the old stadium,
Standing out in fair territory out in center field,
Those three stone slabs honoring Gehrig, Huggins, and Babe.
Yes, in the house that Ruth built--Home of the Bronx Bombers--***?
Any Joe Josephus knows:  Roman citizenship doesn’t do too much for you,
Except get you paxed, taxed & drafted into the Legion.
For us the Roman lifestyle was HIND-*** humble.
We plebeians drew our grandeur by association with Empire.
Very few Romans and certainly only those of the patrician class lived high,
High on the hog, enjoying a worldly extravaganza, like—whom do we both know?

Okay, let’s say Laurence Olivier as Crassus in Spartacus.
Come on, you saw Spartacus fifteen ******* times.
Remember Crassus?
Crassus: that ***** twisted **** trying to get his freak on with,
Tony Curtis in a sunken marble tub?
We plebes led lives of quiet *****-scratching desperation,
A bunch of would-be legionnaires, diseased half the time,
Paid in salt tablets or baccala, salted codfish soaked yellow in olive oil.
Stiffs we used to call them on New Year’s Eve in Brooklyn.
Let’s face it: we were hyenas eating someone else’s ****,
Stage-door jackals, Juvenal-come-late-lies, a mob of moronic mook boneheads
Bought off with bread & circuses and Reality TV.
Each night, dished up a wide variety of lowbrow Elizabethan-era entertainments.  
We contemplate an evening on the town, downtown—
(cue Petula Clark/Send "Downtown" Ringtone to your Cell)

On any given London night, to wit:  mummers, jugglers, bear & bull baiters.
How about dog & **** fighters, quoits & skittles, alehouses & brothels?
In short, somewhere, anywhere else,
Anywhere other than down along the Thames,
At Bankside in Southwark, down in the Globe Theater mosh pit,
Slugging it out with the groundlings whose only interest,
In the performance is the choreography of swordplay and stale ****** puns.
Meanwhile, Hugh Fennyman--probably a fellow Jew,
An English Renaissance Bugsy Siegel or Mickey Cohen—
Meanwhile Fennyman, the local mob boss is getting his ya-yas,
Roasting the feet of my text-messaging editor, Philip Henslowe.
Poor and pathetic Henslowe, works on commission, always scrounging,
But a true patron of my craft, a gentleman of infinite jest and patience,
Spiritual subsistence, and every now and then a good meal at some,
Sawdust joint with oyster shells, and a Prufrockian silk purse of T.S. Eliot gold.

Poor, pathetic Henslowe, trussed up by Fennyman,
His editorial feet in what looks like a Japanese hibachi.
Henslowe’s feet to the fire--feet to the fire—get it?
A catchy phrase whose derivation conjures up,
A grotesque yet vivid image of torture,
An exquisite insight into how such phrases ingress the idiom,
Not to mention a scene once witnessed at a secret Romanian CIA prison,
I’d been ordered to Bucharest not long after 9/11,
Handling the rendition and torture of Habib Ghazzawy,

An entirely innocent falafel maker from Steinway Street, Astoria, Queens.
Shock the Monkey: it’s what we do. GOTO:
Peter Gabriel - Shock the Monkey/
(HQ music video) - YouTube//
www.youtube.com/
Poor, pathetic, ******-on Henslowe.


Fennyman :  (his avarice is whet by something Philly screams out about a new script)  "A play takes time. Find actors; Rehearsals. Let's say open in three weeks. That's--what--five hundred groundlings at tuppence each, in addition four hundred groundlings tuppence each, in addition four hundred backsides at three pence--a penny extra for a cushion, call it two hundred cushions, say two performances for safety how much is that Mr. Frees?"
Jacobean Tweet, John (1580-1684) Webster:  “I saw him kissing her bubbies.”

It’s Geoffrey Rush, channeling Henslowe again,
My editor, a singed smoking madman now,
Feet in an ice bucket, instructing me once more:
“Lighten things up, you know . . .
Comedy, love and a bit with a dog.”
I digress again and return to Hopi Land, back to my shaman-monastic abattoir,
That Zen Center in downtown Shungopavi.
At the Tribal Enrolment Office I make my case for a Certificate of Indian Blood,
Called a CIB by the Natives and the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs.
The BIA:  representing gold & uranium miners, cattle and sheep ranchers,
Sodbusters & homesteaders; railroaders and dam builders since 1824.
Just in time for Andrew Jackson, another false friend of Native America,
Just before Old Hickory, one of many Democratic Party hypocrites and scoundrels,
Gives the FONGOOL, up the CULO go ahead.
Hey Andy, I’ve got your Jacksonian democracy: Hanging!
The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) mission is to:   "… enhance the quality of life, to promote economic opportunity, and to carry out the responsibility to protect and improve the trust assets of American Indians, Indian tribes, and Alaska Natives. What’s that in the fine print?  Uncle Sammy holds “the trust assets of American Indians.”

Here’s a ******* tip, Geronimo: if he trusted you,
It would ALL belong to you.
To you and The People.
But it’s all fork-tongued white *******.
If true, Indian sovereignty would cease to be a sick one-liner,
Cease to be a blunt force punch line, more of,
King Leopold’s 19th Century stand-up comedy schtick,
Leo Presents: The **** of the Congo.
La Belgique mission civilisatrice—
That’s what French speakers called Uncle Leo’s imperial public policy,
Bringing the gift of civilization to central Africa.
Like Manifest Destiny in America, it had a nice colonial ring to it.
“Our manifest destiny [is] to overspread the continent,
Allotted by Providence for the free development,
Of our yearly multiplying millions.”  John L. O'Sullivan, 1845

Our civilizing mission or manifest destiny:
Either/or, a catchy turn of phrase;
Not unlike another ironic euphemism and semantic subterfuge:
The Pacification of the West; Pacification?
Hardly: decidedly not too peaceful for Cochise & Tonto.
Meanwhile, Madonna is cash rich but disrespected Evita poor,
To wit: A ****** on the Rocks (throwing in a byte or 2 of Da Vinci Code).
Meanwhile, Miss Ciccone denied her golden totem *****.
They snubbed that little guinea ****, didn’t they?
Snubbed her, robbed her rotten.
Evita, her magnum opus, right up there with . . .
Her SNL Wayne’s World skit:
“Get a load of the unit on that guy.”
Or, that infamous MTV Music Video Awards stunt,
That classic ***** Lip-Lock with Britney Spears.

How could I not see that Oscar snubola as prime evidence?
It was just another stunning case of American anti-Italian racial animus.
Anyone familiar with Noam Chomsky would see it,
Must view it in the same context as the Sacco & Vanzetti case,
Or, that arbitrary lynching of 9 Italian-Americans in New Orleans in 1891,
To cite just two instances of anti-Italian judicial reach & mob violence,
Much like what happened to my cousin Dominic,
Gang-***** by the Harlem Globetrotters, in their locker room during halftime,
While he working for Abe Saperstein back in 1952.
Dom was doing advance for Abe, supporting creation of The Washington Generals:
A permanent stable of hoop dream patsies and foils,
Named for the ever freewheeling, glad-handing, backslapping,
Supreme Commander Allied Expeditionary Force (SCAEF), himself,
Namely General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the man they liked,
And called IKE: quite possibly a crypto Jew from Abilene.

Of course, Harry Truman was my first Great White Fascist Father,
Back in 1946, when I first opened my eyes, hung up there,
High above, looking down from the adobe wall.
Surveying the entire circular kiva,
I had the best seat in the house.
Don’t let it be said my Spider Grandmother or Hopi Corn Mother,
Did not want me looking around at things,
Discovering what made me special.
Didn’t divine intervention play a significant part of my creation?
Knowing Mamma Mia and Nonna were Deities,
Gave me an edge later on the streets of Brooklyn.
The Cradleboard: was there ever a more divinely inspired gift to human curiosity? The Cradleboard: a perfect vantage point, an infant’s early grasp,
Of life harmonious, suspended between Mother Earth and Father Sky.
Simply put: the Hopi should be running our ******* public schools.

But it was IKE with whom I first associated,
Associated with the concept 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
I liked IKE. Who didn’t?
What was not to like?
He won the ******* war, didn’t he?
And he wasn’t one of those crazy **** John Birchers,
Way out there, on the far right lunatic Republican fringe,
Was he? (It seems odd and nearly impossible to believe in 2013,
That there was once a time in our Boomer lives,
When the extreme right wing of the Republican Party
Was viewed by the FBI as an actual threat to American democracy.)
Understand: it was at a time when The FBI,
Had little ideological baggage,
But a great appetite for secrets,
The insuppressible Jay Edgar doing his thang.

IKE: of whom we grew so, oh-so Fifties fond.
Good old reliable, Nathan Shaking IKE:
He’d been fixed, hadn’t he? Had had the psychic snip.
Snipped as a West Point cadet & parade ground martinet.
Which made IKE a good man to have in a pinch,
Especially when crucial policy direction was way above his pay grade.
Cousin Dom was Saperstein’s bagman, bribing out the opposition,
Which came mainly from religious and patriotic organizations,
Viewing the bogus white sports franchise as obscene.
The Washington Generals, Saperstein’s new team would have but one opponent,
And one sole mission: to serve as the **** of endless jokes and sight gags for—
Negroes.  To play the chronic fools of--
Negroes.  To be chronically humiliated and insulted by—
Negroes.  To run up and down the boards all night, being outran by—
Negroes.  Not to mention having to wear baggy silk shorts.



Meadowlark Lemon:  “Yeah, Charlie, we ***** that grease-ball Dominic; we shagged his guinea mouth and culo rotten.”  

(interviewed in his Scottsdale, AZ winter residence in 2003 by former ESPN commentator Charlie Steiner, Malverne High School, Class of ’67.)
                                                        
  ­                                                                 ­                 
IKE, briefed on the issue by higher-ups, quickly got behind the idea.
The Harlem Globetrotters were to exist, and continue to exist,
Are sustained financially by Illuminati sponsors,
For one reason and one reason only:
To serve elite interests that the ***** be kept down and subservient,
That the minstrel show be perpetuated,
A policy surviving the elaborate window dressing of the civil rights movement, Affirmative action, and our first Uncle Tom president.
Case in point:  Charles Barkley, Dennis Rodman & Metta World Peace Artest.
Cha-cha-cha changing again:  I am Robert Allen Zimmermann,
A whiny, skinny Jew, ****** and rolling in from Minnesota,
Arrested, obviously a vagrant, caught strolling around his tony Jersey enclave,
Having moved on up the list, the A-list, a special invitation-only,
Yom Kippur Passover Seder:  Next Year in Jerusalem, Babaloo!

I take ownership of all my autonomic and conditioned reflexes;
Each personal neural arc and pathway,
All shenanigans & shellackings,
Or blunt force cognitive traumas.
It’s all percolating nicely now, thank you,
In kitchen counter earthen crockery:
Random access memory: a slow-cook crockpot,
Bubbling through my psychic sieve.
My memories seem only remotely familiar,
Distant and vague, at times unreal:
An alien hybrid databank accessed accidently on purpose;
Flaky science sustains and monitors my nervous system.
And leads us to an overwhelming question:
Is it true that John Dillinger’s ******* is in the Smithsonian Museum?
Enquiring minds want to know, Kemosabe!

“Any last words, *******?” TWEETS Adam Smith.
Postmortem cyber-graffiti, an epitaph carved in space;
Last words, so singular and simple,
Across the universal great divide,
Frisbee-d, like a Pleistocene Kubrick bone,
Tossed randomly into space,
Morphing into a gyroscopic space station.
Mr. Smith, a calypso capitalist, and me,
Me, the Poet Laureate of the United States and Adam;
Who, I didn’t know from Adam.
But we tripped the light fantastic,
We boogied the Protestant Work Ethic,
To the tune of that old Scotch-Presbyterian favorite,
Variations of a 5-point Calvinist theme: Total Depravity; Election; Particular Redemption; Irresistible Grace; & Perseverance of the Saints.

Mr. Smith, the author of An Inquiry into the Nature
& Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776),
One of the best-known, intellectual rationales for:
Free trade, capitalism, and libertarianism,
The latter term a euphemism for Social Darwinism.
Prior to 1764, Calvinists in France were called Huguenots,
A persecuted religious majority . . . is that possible?
A persecuted majority of Edict of Nantes repute.
Adam Smith, likely of French Huguenot Jewish ancestry himself,
Reminds me that it is my principal plus interest giving me my daily gluten.
And don’t think the irony escapes me now,
A realization that it has taken me nearly all my life to see again,
What I once saw so vividly as a child, way back when.
Before I put away childish things, including the following sentiment:
“All I need is the air that I breathe.”

  Send "The Air That I Breathe" Ringtone to your Cell  

The Hippies were right, of course.
The Hollies had it all figured out.
With the answer, as usual, right there in the lyrics.
But you were lucky if you were listening.
There was a time before I embraced,
The other “legendary” economists:
The inexorable Marx,
The savage society of Veblen,
The heresies we know so well of Keynes.
I was a child.
And when I was a child, I spake as a child—
Grazie mille, King James—
I understood as a child; I thought as a child.
But when I became a man I jumped on the bus with the band,
Hopped on the irresistible bandwagon of Adam Smith.

Smith:  “Any last words, *******?”
Okay, you were right: man is rationally self-interested.
Grazie tanto, Scotch Enlightenment,
An intellectual movement driven by,
An alliance of Calvinists and Illuminati,
Freemasons and Johnny Walker Black.
Talk about an irresistible bandwagon:
Smith, the gloomy Malthus, and David Ricardo,
Another Jew boy born in London, England,
Third of 17 children of a Sephardic family of Portuguese origin,
Who had recently relocated from the Dutch Republic.
******* Jews!
Like everything shrewd, sane and practical in this world,
WE also invented the concept:  FOLLOW THE MONEY.

The lyrics: if you were really listening, you’d get it:
Respiration keeps one sufficiently busy,
Just breathing free can be a full-time job,
Especially when--borrowing a phrase from British cricketers—,
One contemplates the sorry state of the wicket.
Now that I am gainfully superannuated,
Pensioned off the employment radar screen.
Oft I go there into the wild ebon yonder,
Wandering the brain cloud at will.
My journey indulges curiosity, creativity and deceit.
I free range the sticky wicket,
I have no particular place to go.
Snagging some random fact or factoid,
A stop & go rural postal route,
Jumping on and off the brain cloud.

Just sampling really,
But every now and then, gorging myself,
At some information super smorgasbord,
At a Good Samaritan Rest Stop,
I ponder my own frazzled neurology,
When I was a child—
Before I learned the grim economic facts of life and Judaism,
Before I learned Hebrew,
Before my laissez-faire Bar Mitzvah lessons,
Under the rabbinical tutelage of Rebbe Kahane--
I knew what every clever child knows about life:
The surfing itself is the destination.
Accessing RAM--random access memory—
On a strictly need to know basis.
RAM:  a pretty good name for consciousness these days.

If I were an Asimov or Sir Arthur (Sri Lankabhimanya) Clarke,
I’d get freaky now, riffing on Terminators, Time Travel and Cyborgs.
But this is truth not science fiction.
Nevertheless, someone had better,
Come up with another name for cyborg.
Some other name for a critter,
Composed of both biological and artificial parts?
Parts-is-parts--be they electronic, mechanical or robotic.
But after a lifetime of science fiction media,
After a steady media diet, rife with dystopian technology nightmares,
Is anyone likely to admit to being a cyborg?
Since I always give credit where credit is due,
I acknowledge that cyborg was a term coined in 1960,
By Manfred Clynes & Nathan S. Kline and,
Used to identify a self-regulating human-machine system in outer space.

Five years later D. S. Halacy's: Cyborg: Evolution of the Superman,
Featured an introduction, which spoke of:  “… a new frontier, that was not,
Merely space, but more profoundly, the relationship between inner space,
And outer space; a bridge, i.e., between mind and matter.”
So, by definition, a cyborg defined is an organism with,
Technology-enhanced abilities: an antenna array,
Replacing what was once sentient and human.
My glands, once in control of metabolism and emotions,
Have been replaced by several servomechanisms.
I am biomechanical and gluttonous.
Soaking up and breathing out the atmosphere,
My Baby Boom experience of six decades,
Homogenized and homespun, feedback looped,
Endlessly networked through predigested mass media,
Culture as demographically targeted content.

This must have something to do with my own metamorphosis.
I think of Gregor Samsa, a Kafkaesque character if there ever was one.
And though we share common traits,
My evolutionary progress surpasses and transcends his.
Samsa--Phylum and Class--was, after all, an insect.
Nonetheless, I remain a changeling.
Have I not seen many stages of growth?
Each a painful metamorphic cycle,
From exquisite first egg,
Through caterpillar’s appetite & squirm.
To phlegmatic bliss and pupa quietude,
I unfold my wings in a rush of Van Gogh palette,
Color, texture, movement and grace, lift off, flapping in flight.
My eyes have witnessed wondrous transformations,
My experience, nouveau riche and distinctly self-referential;
For the most part unspecific & longitudinally pedestrian.

Yes, something has happened to me along the way.
I am no longer certain of my identity as a human being.
Time and technology has altered my basic wiring diagram.
I suspect the sophisticated gadgets and tools,
I’ve been using to shape & make sense of my environment,
Have reared up and turned around on me.
My tools have reshaped my brain & central nervous system.
Remaking me as something simultaneously more and less human.
The electronic toys and tools I once so lovingly embraced,
Have turned unpredictable and rabid,
Their bite penetrating my skin and septic now, a cluster of implanted sensors,
Content: currency made increasingly more valuable as time passes,
Served up by and serving the interests of a pervasively predatory 1%.
And the rest of us: the so-called 99%?
No longer human; simply put by both Howards--Beale & Zinn--

Humanoid.

This waiting room is painted of pain,
featuring faces with mouths down-turned,
impatience taking up these empty seats,
of family members already lost,
we feel like the least loved
in the mighty grasps of almighty fate's
crushing hands,
we feel like the last patients
to be visited during the night shifts,
by nurses and doctors,
the times of day when the most dust
is swept back to the humble soil
by an unseen, yet not-so-invisible bashing broom.
the old fan - barely hanging -
is closing in full circle,
a whole life lived.
dull curtains, some unhooked and five minutes to falling,
alongside the walls' stripes
designed with a print of doctors' usual words,
"I'm so sorry for your loss."  

If life truly begins at forty,
then hers ended at the starting line.
this would be a misplaced and mixed metaphor
if it weren't for olympics silently running in the background on the tv
reminds me of my mute cries, surprised eyes bulging, gaping mouths with no sound.

It ought to be a preventative measure; just a routine operation
a possibly cancerous lump.
I am flipping aimlessly through these magazine pages,
each catching a tear-drop for the dog-ears
(whoever reads them next will turn the pages over better).
Some puzzled maze pieces fall out of a box,
my baby cousin tries to gather the cardboard paper of a family tree picture,
but the least important twigs are lost, and the last friendly branch found missing.
The many portraits that make up the landscape go away from time to time.
It was just a little, smallish lump.
these news are hard to swallow.
my eyes are peeling onions.
my throat is winter-hands dry.
mum says she saw her the most alive
a few odd minutes before time clocked aunt out.
Grandma's sister blames herself for suggesting, advising, and in retrospect putting "pressure".
neutral colours ***** the Scrubs' floors,
hypothermia lurking in the corridors,
but the coke from the vending machine is medicine lukewarm.

It was a game of musical chairs,
But when the seven trumpets sounded,
the stools remained still, they stood facing eastward in hexagonal formation.
An angel ascended, the remnants were six shadows now.
With a plot twist, it's less players each round.
Who dies first wins, I've tossed too much soil on dust, my hands are *****.
We wash our hands clean with this paraffin.
Open-casket, the last sight took my breath away - the whitened clay still one,
but with the breath of life taken away, by the One, who giveth and taketh.

It's also winter our hearts,
dips of grief, dabs of black clothing, grim-reaper the thief, we still loath him.
another weekend
another sad-a-day
another funeral.
And his life was a summary,
too brief a breath, as the contraction is.
No sympathy to bother saying
"I am".
Public or private hospitals, dark clouds gather above all.

Twenty-twelve was a scar,
for four years now we are still scooping our scabs, from the bottomless pits,
that fell from ever-fresh wounds picked at a tad too prematurely,
so very early.
Some of the things we will take to our graves
will take us to our graves, as we exhume our pre-mourning selves.
And hurt still drops in drips,
red-bottomed-sticky feet from the blood-washed tiles,
the pain and the paint in permanent.
Some matters you can only think about
when you are half-awake and half-asleep, because these nightmares
are too real to be dreams.

uThixo Ovayo unoNobantu, nabantu bakhe bonke ngamaxesha onke.

~ by New-Black-SoUl #NBS

there's a funny twist to this tale,
              with feminism tackling *******
and *** without consent,
both noble feats to tackle...
the male version? becoming
impregnated without consent -
jeez that sounds weird -
               well the £110 an hour prostitutes
say they check themselves for
***-related diseases regularly:
and i believe them. they also require
you to wear a rubber second *******,
but it's just odd that you can a man,
and have no say in the matter
of your ****** partner being impregnated,
given that your ******* is about
an inch long, and when pulled back
your ******* head turns purple
because of the constraints, so a ******
isn't really that much of a discomfort...
but still she insists... *** in me, *** in...
white lies and anti-contraceptive pills...
so how about strawberry...
i don't mind, my ***** gagging with the *******
pulled back, but hey, ******* with *******
is so much more pleasurable than without
it... i know, i have the capacity.
and indeed i do like Freud, his theory
of the compound Madonna-***** "complex"
is true... question is, is it expressed by
a woman, or by man? i'm guessing a woman
since Freud covered men as Wilhelm Oedipus Rex...
and i went straight down the hyphenated middle...
Madonna O Madonna why are you
in need to talk about ***?
                  and the *****... get's them every time,
no talk, i know why i paid for consent,
she knows i paid for consent, even if she's not
aroused she uses skin-cream to oil up
so penetrating her won't hurt... while i'm not
a universal stunner... but i still don't
understand why a girl would think there's
no opposite of **** / *** without consent...
i.e. forcing a fatherhood on you on the sly...
that's the opposite of ****... she thinks you're
so perfect because she's in her teens and she just
experienced the diversity of the world
and boom, you're trustworthy about her promise
to be on anti-contraceptive pills (she isn't),
you can use a ****** because your *******
is too tight... and then you get a really bad Kafkaesque
theme for the rest of your life.

As dawn unfolds today beyond my fractured windowpane,
a breeze beguiles the ashen drapes. Like snakes they slip aside,
revealing wanton worlds that race and run aground, insane,
immersed in scenes obscene that savants strive to mask and hide.

Outside, the twisted streets retreat. Last night they seemed so cruel.
While lamps illumed lithe demons dancing neath the gallows tree,
their lurking shadows shuddered as they breached the vestibule.
Within the gloom strange things abound, I sense and sometimes see.

Perdu in darkened doorways (those which soothe the ones who weep)
men hide their shame in crevices in search of cloaked relief.
The ladies of the evening leave, it’s soon their time to sleep!
The alleyways are silent now but taste of untold grief.

Distraught nomadic drifters (dregs who stray from street to street)
abandon bedtime benches, squat on curbs they call a home,
appeal to passing strangers for a coin or bite to eat.
Rebuffed, they gaze with icy eyes that chill the morning gloam.

Observe with me once more, beyond my fractured windowpane,
the broken boy with crooked smile, the one who's seen the beast.
With tears, he kneels and clasps the cross to exorcise the stain.
The abbey door along the lane enshrouds a pious priest.

At nearby mall, Mike needs a cig, and stealth'ly steals a pack.
The Man, observing, thinks ‘Hey Boy, this caper calls for blood’,
takes aim, then shoots the fated stripling six times in the back.
Come, mourn for Mike and brother Justice, facedown in the mud.

The shanty town has hunkered down engaged in mortal sports
while shattered bodies' broken bones at last repose supine,
and mama (now bereft of child) in anguished pain contorts,
her eyes drip drops of bitter wrath which wither on a vine.

Fatigued and bored, some kids harass the crowded alley now.
To pass the time, Joe smokes a joint and Lizzy snorts a line.
The NRA (which deals with doom) can sometimes help somehow,
though Eric died with Dylan in ‘The Curse of Columbine’.

Marauders scam the marketplace (with billions guaranteed)  
while babes with bloated bellies beg with barren sunken eyes,
and (cut to naught) the down-and-out (like trodden beet roots) bleed.
Life's carousel confronts us all, though few can ring the prize.

Yes, Mr Madoff, private bankster (cruising down the road,
with other Ponzi pushers, waving magic mushroom wands),
adores addiction to the bailout (coffers overflowed),
and jests with all the junkies, while they’re bilking us with bonds.

A timeworn washerwoman totters, stumbling from a tram -
she shuffles to her hovel on a dismal distant hill,
despondent, shuts the shutters, prays then downs her final dram -
a raven quickly picks at crumbs forsaken on her sill.

Jihadist and Crusader warders faithfully guard the gates,
behead impious infidels, else burn them at the stake
(yes, God adores the faithful side, the heathen sides He hates),
with saintly satisfaction reaped begetting pagan ache.

All day the watchers skulk around our fractured windowpanes
inspecting all our secret thoughts, our realms of privacy,
controlling every point of view opinion entertains,
forbidding thoughts one mustn't think, with which they don’t agree.

Our rulers (kings and other things) have often made demands
of populations breathing air on near or distant shores
and when they didn’t yield and kneel, we conquered all their lands
with sticks and stones, then bullets, bombs and battleships in wars.

Come, cast just once a furtive glance… there's something in the far…
from towns to dunes in deserts dry, the welkin belches death
by dint of soulless drones that stalk beneath a straying star
erasing life in random ways with freedom’s dying breath.

But closer lies an island, where the keepers grill their wards.
Impartial trials? A travesty, indeed quite Kafkaesque.
The guiltless gush confessions, born and bred on waterboards.
No sense, no charges nor defense. A verdict? Yes, grotesque!

Now dusk is drawing near outside my fractured windowpane
while mankind wanes like burnt-out suns in fading lurid light;
and scarlet clots of grim deceit and ebon beads of bane
flow, deified, within a corpse, the fruit of human blight.

you will never hear
a thumping drum of
a Kafkaesque mea culpa
of the first fist clenched
drumming against the chest...
thum' thum' thump,
boom boom, boom boom,
given that my index finger
on my right hand was dislodged
in order that i might not clench it
into a fist,
given the strong hand it once was,
given that,
i'd still gladly if not
ably punch you dead - indeed should
it take another dislocation i would see it:
a face ably punched dead, nonetheless...
question is, would i take more pleasure
anally defacing it rather than punching it?

Kafka was in town,
in disguise he went around
was terribly pleased!

Re-touched by the muse of old work
Light reflects on a life I thought forgotten
The rhythm is straighter
The words clearer
Thoughts not nearly as heavy

We are getting older

Make believe
Reality
And see that
Life is no longer fiction

Clouds wet the land
As the swirling sea on the streets
Tides swelling inland
The cities drowned in their own
Routine & monotony

Slaves to themselves
Their demons
Their vices
Vicious circle

To absurd are we to fight this
Fallible vibrations of human resemblance
Neither dead or alive
In low or high conscious states of being

Where is our message,
Dear Generation?

Concrete caked red hot
In the Los Angeles Sun
Moon setting star light whose
Martyrs are one
And a million

One day
We'll all settle
For whatever
Is in front of us

Some
Already have

Their meals set
The napkins folded
The china out
The silverware
All polished and shined

And oh!
That fireplace is
Burning

Now, the mind recoils in
Kafkaesque' style
More paranoid than old Poe
But not nearly as saturated
In His own imaginations blood
As He'

There was so little, yet, so
Much time back then;

Plenty of room for
The mind to play, to rot, to embrace
The absurdity of existence,
All at the same time

We are quite distracted now,
Aren't we?

So many things to keep our
Naturally busy brains busy;
Hiding so many questions
Hiding so many answers
Hiding so many truths to these
Multitude of questions and answers

What I pain I feel when I think of
How much is missed and the reason for it

Ice hot against the fingertips
A child crying for their mother
Though they know not why
The gavel falling on an innocent man
Girls *****, impregnated, forgotten
An eclipse of humanities evil
Broadcasted as reality television
An apocalypse on pay-per-view
(Is that even around anymore?)
A lie in the form of the truth embraced
Accidents accused for spiritual bigotry
Bareness of the human soul ridiculed
Care taker's thrown from hospital windows
The acceptance of our own horrors
As we smile, nod, a glint of righteousness upon the eye

At times
I hope
This time will
Be forgotten in history

Contributions of
Technology

Almost
Forcing us
To be connected

Making life

A Little More Bearable Every Day

An age who
Finds themselves
As they build
Atop themselves

Nameless,
Their fingernails chip & bleed

Aiming now toward space
A holy place

Or maybe
Just a house
With a barbeque and

A view

Dark bat, would I were curious as thou art-
Like a tea-tray twinkling at night,
And lying with eternal wings apart
Til morning when you end your flight,
And spend the day at your raven-like desk
Chanting incantations old and obscure
With lyrics obscene and Kafkaesque
Quoting first Foucault, then Sassure -
No-yet still puzzling, still remarkable
A black beacon amid shades of grey -
Elusive, and in pursuit quite snark-able.
To you I am drawn as a ****** to ****
I’ll be your muse and you’ll be my death.

Shadows of a future dancing in the light.

When I look into the darkness of another early night.

How many hours have now met me and passed?

How many days until I finally reach my last?

In a room full of dust I am forgotten waste.

A repulsive disease plaguing my loved ones with distaste.

Little legs can’t take me as far as they might.

I remain in darkness so as not to cause a fright.

Samsa the traveling salesman; a haunting, unfamiliar name.

Samsa the traveling salesman; soon gone before his fame.

Deconstructing a Kafkaesque
amphitheatre of the absurd,
Easy wallows she in their hypocrisy,
Son of a gun grabbed on
to the gold that fed his infant
self, doesn't dare let go, won't ever,
Dev breaks the bottle he hits,
scrounges, discards the last scrap,
the rat scurries in, devours, heads
back into the smoked corridor,
the auction goes on, so does he
showering petals and pity upon the
middle road more travelled, bumpy,
potholes full of acid and bile,
the stupidity of the tyrannical majority
and an underwater civilisation consumed
by mind-numbing, mildly shocking TV,
undercurrents of power drowned under.
Uppercase Him, uppercase He,
they hoist a red flag, set it afire,
stomp out the flames, wave a black
rag till the ashes turn to naught,
the Dionysian petit bourgeoisie proceed,
spew, *****, spew, repeat.
The voyeuristic rat has front row seats
gaze fixed, piercing centrestage
auction-house by day, amphitheatre by night,
the bids shall resume when
the morning bells toll, till then,
Dev's hungry for more,
the rat enjoys the show.

theatralic melodys
from the remedy
of first kiss tragedies
self ironic chronics of the super-sonic self-awareness immortality tonic
blasting out jokes
that choke from an overload
of a self-sadistic adolescent glow

there are troubles in teenagetown
out of their mind
cause they are homeward-bound

assimilate a thrill and be a thriller
as you drop a one-liner and become the moment killer
cheerleader utopia and planned backseat scenaries
communicate via inside jokes in binary
prom night is a kafkaesque dilemma
coquettish flirting miniskirts
plus a dangerous liqour goodnight hammer

there are troubles in teenagetown
cause troubles do make a sound

self-reflection churns out an image of a clicking cicada of an aggressively ****** young girl, who due to the pressing weight of a blue silk chord around her throat possesses

a shiny dark, green exoskeleton (refracting light and resistant to moisture)
(SO ******* KAFKAESQUE) (!!!)

who sings as she rubs furry legs together and has decided to spill pain whenever possible onto screens and sheets, throwing up wherever she lands, without true cause in a careless disarray, breeding narcissism (let's throw a party)

biting into shattered satin, like a moth feeding off of human wetness and stains while punctuating words with mispronunciation and self-absorbtion
because she is deathly afraid of being boring and a daily routine, how predictable

(the crowd looks on miserably, fanning their faces with paper plates, sweating profusely)

this poem is predictable;
sorry.

I never have tried to **** myself, it would be silly to think that not killing yourself or killing yourself would have an actual influential impact on most of the world, except in rare cases.

Death is looming, I am grinning, I have not yet seen it so I guess I will live forever and subside off the hearts of men (no, not really, I'm kidding).

The padlock on the continuous barnstorm of a transcendent time whose bunkum is transmuted consciousness aligning with parallax to a congruent worldview is not axiomatic but certainly a veridical property of reality. The universe is as much concept as percept and both properties of consciousness that lead to adaptive behavior are tethered to the eccentricity of the observer rather than the oblong nature of the observed where errors in prima facie judgments delineate the saplings of humanity to beaze under the proctored sunlight of an eternal sunshine that withers seldom to the whims of capricious arbitrage of those whose hubris exceeds the limits of the intellectual frontier because they are gilded with bricolage mentalities that scaffold the skeletonized worldview rather than apprehending the concretism and synthetic arraignment of interrogable reality in a manner that acknowledges the factitious intersection of pioneering understanding and the corporeal existence of realities both transcendent in spatiotemporal mapping and reversible propinquity to the sensible acquisition of tangible knowledge. I contest the worldview of many philosophers as a callow retread of basic logic whose ambition is underserved by a desire for prolix pellucidity rather than cogent succinct promethean formulations that dare to muster the herculean task of demystification even if the entropy of formulation is always flawed by the jaundice of the observers rather than the disdain of the observable consensus. We swing by a filipendulous thread that dangles speculation and reifies the blinkered piebald world of spotty concatenations among neurons recognizing that incomplete associations become the staples of philosophies that are precarious in some logical foundation but sturdy enough to weather the vagaries of the bluster of mendicants who verge on comprehension but pale in comparison to the monolithic edifice of so-called truth when the defalcation of figureheads supplants the clerisy as the new proctor of knowledgeable assertion. I contend that foofaraw is a primeval instinct of community ecology that expedites the balkanization of otherwise unitive properties of society and ravages them with bickering based on clashing predilections that are bellicose and combative rather than irenic and balmy. The acerbic fates of many leads to a rudimentary pessimism or a chary optimism that chides against the fortified exegesis of divinity that can be both proclaimed and stultified for its latticework properties of buttressing society in a permutation that is nimble in some respects but too turgid and rigid in others. The goal of humanity is to become a pliable instrument of a pliable universe that does not rely on buzzword dogmatism or the masquerade of hollow punditry but that relies on self-reliant principles for ascertaining veracity and impugning mendaciloquence with vigilant alacrity rather than casual sportsmanship that reaches finality only upon the handshakes of a battle waged that concedes the impotence of gladiatorial spectatorship as just a gambit of the half-witted cockney witticisms and shibboleths of sportive diversion rather than consequential and decisive reckonings with the subaudition that undergirds all events of any consequence with either a clinched victory or a callow defeatism of a futilitarian worldview that stoops to reconciliation only to propitiate antagonism and buffer against the truculent brunt of weaponized coercion to checkered flags that arbitrate the outcome of a binary polarity of humanized affairs. The majesty of creation is that reversible boundaries can be permeated in a bi-directional manner through the artifice of concerted thought rather than the orchestration of a linear traipse through the deserts of an inclement fate won immediately when projected upon the tangent of any given velocity at any point of acceleration away from the targeted impetus that grants only a partial vantage, a cantle of reality that is fragmented and piecemeal rather than circular and emergent. The most dire battle that humanity faces is the attrition of circumstance by the purposive declarations of imperious authority that seeks to muzzle the ingenuity of many for the deliciation of the few creating an accidia among the clerical institute of thinkers that imposes hogra that few people can grapple with that they are marooned into a cloister that reaps fewer rewards for an ascendant intellect than a virulent libido can clutch with predatory gallops against the also-rans that fight for carnality rather than the ethereal principles lingering within the grasp of many if it became a cynosure of worthy heralded acclaim. We witness the mass fecklessness of giftedness as a shackle of those whose plaudits come intrinsically fortified but sustain none of the abuses that the pedestrians would like to obtrude upon enlightenment to curtail and abridge the art of invention like the coagulation of blood to rob the vitality of throbbing pulse of importunate self-discovery of its macroscopic vista and its telescopic foresight about the future hodgepodge of a recursive fractalized reality besieged by the enemy of linear logical formulations implemented by ivory tower psychologists to muzzle the empowerment of abstruse language in order to make savory the nostrum of the apothecaries of delegated truth bereaved of recourse beyond certain leaps they cannot fathom well enough to flicker with even a faint transient wisdom that is designed to be amenable only to the supernal nature of ideation rather than the caprice of bedazzled humanitarianism. We need to forswear the -isms that flicker with doctrinaire dogmatism and flirt with forceful harangues that exhort a codified message and launch veridical properties of recondite etherealism into an immovable orbit whose inertia can broadcast a singular message of recoil against puritanism in science or skepticism in faith. The bedrock of this message is the deployment of useful extravagance without inordinate delay, the drivel of malcontent transmogrified into the prattle of estimable giants that have stature among the leviathan enough to recriminate against the autarky of self-smug simpletons that infest the world with barbarous indecencies and crude prepossessions that abortively crumple when met with the acerbic teleological gravity of ulterior consequence rather than blossom under the siroccos of manufactured wind designed for windfalls that always create a crestfallen aftermath from the anticlimax of understanding leading to the desiccation of consequence and the engorgement of precedence. These frangible realities become buoyant because the physics of the public dialectic insulates the creaky rickety vestiges of canonical knowledge as a sworn precedent inviolable and immune as a building block of all scholasticism, a retread of parchment recycled over and over again to entrench the past as the titanic vehicle that dictates the future of thought even though the porous inconsistencies of the vagrants of crude formulation make such a vessel less seaworthy than scientism and dogmatism of the monolith would have you believe to be true. The querulous quips of the uninformed predominate with such clutter that the armamentarium against useful idiocy is stagnated into a resigned accord with infernal subjugation of the public volition to insubordinate against a system of parochial enslavement rather than a catholic enlightenment whose universalism of principle ensures a steadfast society guided by scruples rather than undermined by the prickly thorns of abrasive contrition and the magnetism of empathic concern that sabotages the clarity of intelligence and provides a welter in the place of a well-arrayed code of peculiar but defiant distinctiveness that acts as the splinter that cracked the intangible but refractory borders of human inclination and demonstrated the sheer force of golden consistency rather than fickle withering resolve. I exhort and implore the world to heed the best minds that realize the syncretism is answerable to contradiction rather than scuttled from beneath by the impudence of its assertions against the common propriety when it stakes controversy as a gamble to aver the veracity of worldviews that violate orthpraxy with gusto as a brazen gallantry to rescue a foundering planet that seeks disequilibrium in harmony rather than an equilibrated sensibility that is proud to discriminate properly and honestly to clinch fact rather than kowtow to factitious slumber of somniferous kumbaya that is too deferent to maxims that are unduly polite only because charisma supersedes genius in its efficacy to mobilize people to fulfill their roles. With the miscegenation of justice that occurs because of expedience we find holes in many legalistic precedents because they anoint pettifoggery over sensible jurisdiction and face a leaky and ramshackle fate to foment paternalism and divide the clerisy among certain key considerations in order to save face rather than to impose a clarity of orderly supervision that seeks to dissipate the embroiled spiderwebs of dodgy prevarication and quacksalver logic to once and for all ascertain the truth that lurks beyond the primal jaundice of Kafkaesque confusion.

Something stinking this way comes
not just the nausea of cobblestone
on Sundays and all public holidays
'neath the stairwell of insidious intent
hooked onto the static line for ages
the suicidal fish sinks deeper in the
pool of bile but cannot drown, so he
toes the line of the drama queen via
the lament-laden path trodden by
god's servant, past the corner where
foreignicating correspondents collide,
turn right or left – doesn’t matter
which way he chooses, it’s wrong.

The misfortune of being missed by
a Fortuner, he proceeds to jump off
Tilak Bridge and is hit by Range Rovers
endeavouring to hit and run after
the mundane Meru that lost its wind
shielding itself from the tyranny of
daddy's little boys with flaccid toys and
***** mouths and itchy trigger fingers,
misadventure interrupted they pause to
douse the flames of the dying but
urea isn't carbon dioxide; it's piscicide.

Something Kafkaesque calls him but it's
masked with the aroma of ******* served
in the nick of time from 22 through 71,
past Lahore Chowk down Baker St.
Pedestrian rat on the wrong side of
a one-way expressway to your skull
about turn into pitch black cul-de-sac,
scurries in through the out grille gushing
acerbic symphonies from the basement,
storm-water drain up against the tide,
never learnt to swim yet he tries.

After a while, she'll be home and dry.

The low ceiling makes him slouch
in and out through endless maze,
daily grind never takes a break
no room to turn around walk out,
yet again he forgets not to stretch
yet another fresh bump on his skull
now there are four score maybe more
benign, perhaps, who knows?
rats can't scan, only cats can.

The ache's spread to the limbs
the head and the hypertensive heart
then anterior now posterior
the costive claustrophe bleeds again,
it's a duct with a view downstairs,
he's a ****** not entirely by choice,
tom cat jerry kitten eating in and out
the pie is beyond grasp, at the exit
lies a mousetrap sans the bait,
nothing else for him to do but
work his fingers to the bone.

just when the provincials spoke the common tongue and ensured the urbanites were demasked, and all courtesy went out the window, and there were no actors left to fake an air of superiority and a stiffening of the upper lip... when the urbanites became baptised in a river of dung, mud and fear - and couldn't play our a theatrical adaptation of pseudo Oscar Wilde's: Airs and Superstitions... the champagne bottle-neck was chopped off in the countryside, not in the prosthetic urban environment... and god that bothered them... they could no longer fake being ultra-pro-xeno when in fact wholly anti - even having ethnically cleansed the Caribbeans to speak their own racist tongue didn't help much.

eye on the prize, there she sat, in the shop-window,
a beauty, a mandolin -
with my student loan un-amused i bought her
working three nights a week for a month
in a nightclub carrying empty glasses from
the dance floor and toilets -
got her in the end, my dear Antoinette mandolin;
all i ever wanted was to play the end
of Rod Steward's Maggie May to a girl
from a revised scene of Romeo & Juliet -
played it, her amused but she can no longer be seen,
unless crisscrossing South America in some weird
Paulo Coelho novel alt. - thinking a pharaoh would
be hiding cremated in a top hat along
with Alice's first impressions of wonderland -
years later i bought a Martins' & Son guitar
on debit, my ex-girlfriend's father ****** it up,
and gave my mandolin up for free -
the nightclub where i earned her? ***** near
the Edinbrugh train station - being almost cornered and *****
and serving my fellow compatriots of study made me
leave - not before i earned the mandolin -
the shop? *Scayles Music - they have no
jealousy on me these days, and i'd frankly give
writing up for my former health, i don't care
what readership i get - i'll keep at it - they can
submit their little Kafkaesque interrogations making
me into a fool - sure, they can, but we all serve
the higher lord above the knee-bending baron of god -
death claims us all - for the life i've had
i find it strangely appreciative to have a chance to
write it, and all the more thankful to live a cameo life,
because i hardly think it's proper to write
a book after having climbed Mt. Everest... it's just bad
etiquette (lack of tact) - the lesser life demands literate affairs -
the grander lifer demands portraits on horseback
and in the finest attire -
but what i accomplished thoroughly was buying
a mandolin, playing Rod Stewart's Maggie May outro,
and that's that... for the love of Scotland,
among the inbreeding locals of English suburbia -
proven by a low haemoglobin count of passion-fuelled
pigmentation, passions reduced to xenophobia rather
than xenophilia.

“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.”

and why do you think
they shot the serial killer
in the back of the head?
you know, having experienced
a brain haemorrhage aged
21 i'd know... there's nothing
kafkaesque about it...
the slow bleeding out via a hole
in the cranium, you really
are a decapitated cockroach by
this point (living two weeks more
dying from starvation), but in
the serial killer's case also a little
bit fidgety...
oddly enough impairment of the brain
doesn't mean your heart stops
ticking... poor kurt cobain
with that shotgun wound of his...
i mean a stab to the heart is wildly anticipated,
but why would you shoot your brains
out, given that the ***** per se
is not an automaton pump, or a decipherer
of toxins (the liver)?
the brain is a puppeteer of bones.
it's the flow of the haemoglobin
that's kind, kind enough for you to be
conscious and decide your last thoughts
on the matter, auto-suggestive atheism
is what i call it... shoot the thing that's
functioning automatically - your
brain is a paradoxical dual carriage way,
it allows both science and mysticism
to reach the ultimate, reasonable parallel;
basically... don't mess with
the sponge soaking up the porridge;
asked politely, seneca slit his wrists
in a hot bath.

with the most askance inspection
of the most
atomißed of man...

because what does... "fame" look
like in a small town?
i go the shop, the cashier "knows"
me... or at least i have
in possession...
a recognißable face
that can have immediate
impact,
   for whatever the worth
of recognition is worth,
                                   these days...

the nooks & crannies
of cliché tactics...
                  two girls lost in the night,
a stumbling wanderer
picking one of them up
after heaving himself
over
a public park fence...
exposed *****...
14...
         a black cat being cuddled
15 minutes later...
psychotic behavior...
finding the other girl
lying dead-pan face flat
at a bus-stop...
              a phonecall
to one of the girl's father
driving a black cab...
the guys getting home safely,
an IM from one of
the girl's mother: thank you...
the end...

was it necessary of me
write this?
                 don't know...
anything is worth bashing
a blank stare of a page,
intimidating me
to give me prompt...

i can cleave a slice off the meaty
dictum when it comes
to a small town dynamic
compared to biggie big-town
bad boy city...

fame...
          funny...
            i like claustrophobic
"fame"... imbued to a small town
interaction...
   oh sure... there is anonymity
involved...
  but the stage? recurrent...
the audience? non-existent.
the actors?
           blatantly bland
and repeateded beyond
the concerns of: the obvious...
  a granny doing shopping...
goes to the local store...
shops, talks to the cashiers...
returns to her home...
pretends to sleep,
switching on the television,
like...
  counting t.v. personnas...
shadow or shadows...
never mind the fact that she's
wide-awake...
         and there's "fame"...
the **** does fame juice-up-to-forget
about dynamic worth of:
the furthered conversation?
   small town...
yeah... you're famous...
when the supermarket cashiers
"know" your face...
or at least "being" recognißed...
   to have to starve for being
recognißed within the confines
of an anonymous crowd...
              like: being eaten alive
by zombies wishing for hyenas...
sordid crap...
  nothing Dickensian about it...
routine...
                            crisp cut off from
a missing paragraph...
that never was, that never will
be...
                    
modern, fame,
and that hybrid of the c.c.t.v.
mentality...
precursor, status worth,
the pre-aligned
sending of a postcard...
or a letter...
                 like...
'i almost tried to forget minding
my own double' (shadow)...
not that i would ever...
such the nature
of the big big, world...
and such the fate
of the little little, moi...

        big POP and
the little rock...
          one thing to **** against
the wind, one thing alotegether
to **** into a hurricane...
                 glaring
scoops of disgruntled shattering
to attempt to mend...

         fame...
                        famine in the mouths
of others...
   enoughs pigeons reading
to settle on a scoop of dead-beat
and we, have ourselves,
a democratic event!

           just when... god was never
an imaginary "friend",
or some leftover trait
of infantile leftovers...
         before that?
that parasite, is dislodged from
my mind,
excluded from giving me
some, if any, ontological focus...
i want St. Peter's to be toppled
to rubble...
      until then?
  then... who the **** is infantile
and who has me thinking
of a caged canary, to genesis with?!

big city: seeking fame...
little city: fame as the artefact
of familiarity...
some would call: metaphor:
claustrophobia...

            fame is not something
you will find,
beside... the clarity of
what big city provisions
you with...
an anonymous crowd...
no... little town?
fame?
        more like infamy...
oh for sure...
no kafkaesque novel
accomplice to support you...
either.

      nightmare:
anything, anywhere...
as long as it is bland...
    akin to... a supposedly
forgot, addition of,
necessary seasoning,
toying with the basics...
just... as simple as...
salt, pepper, bay leaf...
a whole all spice bud...

should i be seeking fame...
shoot me...
         any if all of...
only the past two years
has the journalist become
the status symbol of
a politician...
       equally not worth
being allowed a democratic
outlet
to begin with...

the day when
the word journalist = politician...
some people might
even suspect me of
amnesia...
  i wish it was amnesia...

             priest? long gone...
but of course
there's the propping
of the theatre...
           to ensure no truth
is left to be investigated...
as long as the murals
      the click-bait...
the mosaic sticks?
  
         as long as
a social contract...
a cordiality is solidified?
                   well!
what is there to complain about?
apart from a few
charlatans?!
   little town
come big city dynamic...
   2 centuries apart,
living, qua: in the same one...
paradox...
          
ever fold and unfold
an umbrella
quickly enough
to imitate the sound
of a crow
fluttering
its wings?
   you know: brrrr...
attempting to shake
off excess water from
the flight tools?
      
i couldn't handle being
boxed into a stereotype...
as i am...
still flirting with
         baron: anonymous;
once born
to be settled into
a grave...
             having to watch
some people agitate
the dead
        with their mea culpas
of... by the grave
a hubris...

           a recant...
the lighted candle...
the memory preserved...

or?
     hell... with the ******
on the conveyor belt...
NEXT!

       in these times...
even ghosts forgot to haunt...
all the schizophrenics are
like: no...
         beyond this world
beings talking to me?
so much... self-assurance...
everyone is taken
to silently gloat
about their telepathic
abilities?

      as old as the Cartesian
trinity... what? telepathy...
res extensa...
     extended thing...
   that's called telepathy...

me?
    i'm still trying to find the sort
of language that would
preserve me,
in continuing to burrow
something, resembling...
part-cipher
   and part-decipher (non-verb)...
all in all...
gesticulating between
overt metaphor,
and conscious of & when
a misnomer was
applied to bypass into
a waterfall, -esque,
                 fluidity of expression.

- this **** is not billboard
material...
what does it matter...
should it matter...
or will it ever matter...
          the grand choir composition:
NEIN...
                  its prime identity
of purpose...
    to never make it as text
worthy of a script
accompanied by canned laughter.

Every once in a while, especially on holidays, I find myself wandering through my memory museum - rattling doors and fishing through those virtual hallways. That’s where I found ‘Father Lucas,’ last night, back from when I was eight or so, at (private catholic) school.

Each week, before we received that week's ‘catechism lesson,’ (religious education) from the nuns, we’d get to hear what Father Lucas had to say about the Kafkaesque mysteries of the universe. He looked very old, wise and wrinkled, like a skinny Santa Claus.

Outside of those brief lessons he was always shrouded in a cloud of cigarette smoke. Even at our age, we knew cigarettes were bad for you - but what did ‘Father Lucas’ have to fear from death? On him, the surrounding smoke seemed right and fitting, as if he were the human personification of the burning bush.

My father had just died (we were in a car crash). Before that, the biggest drama in my young life was putting one foot in front of the other, and suddenly, I had a lot - lot, lot of questions that I absolutely, positively and under no circumstances what-so-ever wanted to discuss with anyone.

Imagine, if you will, the gravitas that Rod Serling brought to the introduction of each Twilight Zone episode, and you have Father Lucas’ introducing the lesson. I felt an anticipation of answers independent of my individual situation.

Father Lucas provided context and meaning to the unknown, he dabbled in surrealism, spun out paradox and it seemed that he stood on the very edge of that dark room at the end of the maze. He was transmitting at my frequency, and I could have listened forever. Bless the man.

Ultimately, of course, there were no ‘answers’ - but that’s ok - no answers are an answer.

Now that you've decided to start this year like every other day of it.
You've realized treating every year like a dead line's
a good way of procrastinating your own existence.
A deadlines the point in time at which something becomes meaningless.
Catching yourself on fire,
you realized this is a decent hobby for those with skin.

Imagine you'd said, if they made houses out of skin,
I though of you.

Not one for metaphors
I'm relying on you to literally be a deadline.

This bed gave birth to you.
You're a nightmare,
This bed's the side of my face I'm fine with not coming out of for weeks.

7 days later is a week
not that anyone's counting
but I've won.

If you'd like, we'll do literally nothing forever
and just how long till I get to become that void I'm staring at?
Soon, you'll say,
or maybe you won't, either way I'm ready to believe you.

Right now you're happy about lying about being happier alone.
Soon you'll be alone, happy about lying about being happier.

Asking what you'd do with three wishes you said
"her" twice, pointing at only one person, said
"die" once, explaining how to fit the worlds ******* supply into a single room.

After reading three books by Kafka
you realized knowing what Kafkaesque means is overrated.

You once smiled at the sun like it was proud of your teeth.
Now your mouths mostly full of rain,
and you really are proud of your teeth.

My hearts beating like its blowing at a small ember in your hands.

I'm the kind who answers "What time is it?"
by turning into a clock
You're the kind to answer " It's all a construct"
before peeling yourself in public like a cold grape.

Soon we'll both perfect being bowls
full of what couldn't be scraped off us.
For now that blank book I wrote " Notes On Futility"
should be enough to sustain you.
I only hope its looking at the blank pages
that turns you blind
not the way you lick your fingers to turn them.

A falasy, I'm ready for anything.
A fact, niether are you.
A song, drag a small corpse, across your lawn
there'll be neighbors, cutting grass
and a sprinkler'll hit you, and your, cold handful.
An ice cream truck plays, and it's, warm out.
Somewhere some child cries, that hes, missed out.
His parents promise, to take him, to the store.

A Concept, me in the dirt
the warmth of the sun radiates through the loose earth
I smell only beautiful things.
A rock scratches just where I want it to
and nothing really moves.
There is no longer a need for music.

Follow the colored lines
down the corridors
one by one
they diverge
abrupt right angles
a sharp turn
into acute psychiatry
a long gentle curve
into imagery
we've seen before
we've been here before
this time is different
and the same
old places
and brand new
parallel worlds
perpendicular paths
follow the lines
of this
Kafkaesque
supercollider
hurtling us down the halls
through the partitions
particles collide
and time stands still
which path do we follow
to bring us back
to the beginning
a whole universe
of possibilities

Mundane concerns stifle
the soul that hungers for the infinite
Practicality subverts the mind
as it questions and wrestles with
this existential enigma...

Bound by the curse of productivity
and the insatiable drive for accumulation
Libidinal, perverse thoughts
drive the working man

to this, to that...

he is a puppet pulled by invisible strings:
the corporate, bureaucratic masters
calling the shots
laughing control freaks...
the world is theirs for the taking
and the worker-slave raises his hands
a sense of triumph
as the crumbs fall down

We live in a Kafkaesque era
merrily languishing
in this willful dementia.

today i kneaded dough
for gnocchi,
tomorrow i will knead
dough for pizza...

                     yesterday
(and a year's worth)
i visited
   a *******...
she was 10 times more helpful
than an English psychiatrist...

over 10 years ago
i visited a ******
neurologist...
hardly a Mt. Everest
summit escapade...
who told me...
otherwise...

- 'am i mentally ill?'
             i asked, the ******
    neurologist?
- 'if anyone says you're
mentall ill,
then they, themselves,
are mentally ill.'
            replied the ******
neurologist.

but that doesn't leave me
off-the-hook...
a non-suspect...

  - would i succumb to
making a serial demand
for the killing
of prostitutes?
i prize the worth of
a ******* to be that,
above,
   a ******* psychiatrist!
which, bewilders me...
jack the ripper types...
morphed into
our, current living...
    
   only yesterday i made
a promise:
   i will forget sleeping
late...
in order to make
the sauce, and knead
the dough...

      i will not,
for one moment,
concern myself
with the zenith of
the day: of providing
the pristine slab
of ****... for my omniscient
"father" to behold...
    
just piano...
trickling like rain...
lazily,
off the fingertips of
thomas newman...
     never akin
to the mock-solitude
of a violin
what is spoken,
as well: audible,
as as well in mute:

thumb, rubbing itself
against the middle & index
fingers...
to suggest:
money is needed...

and i "almost" always
am readied to cry
for an expression
of beauty...
akin to
    a vaughan williams...

i am forever suspect...
in a Kafkaesque twist
on the standings...
             i am...
   precursor... "suspect"...
i close my eyes
and sift through seconds,
minutes, than
can become an hour...
in quasi-akimbo...
perched on a windowsill...
"kneading"
my *** against the folded
leg i am sitting on...

                   sly caught
"on the nod"...
   given that...
i know what an alcoholic looks
like, how he behaves...
cheap-***...
            as i am...
but i'm yet to fathom
someone who drank to
ascribe the practice of:
seeking the cheapest
sedatives...

       like... i've never met...
someone...
   who would like to
venture into explaining
veterinarian practices...
seems all the big-G-bling-singhs
have the teeth covered...
mafia of the
scuttling sigh...
- mostly...
if you are not going to
eat it... why pet it
mentality...
          
as much of an awaited
conviction from
a potted fern as...
all the troubles in
the middle-east...
well... part people...
you solve your ****...
and we'll be...
  "nowhere"...
looking way past the chance
for
        a... revision of sunrise...

surely...
bit boy tactic...
you people can solve
your people's problems
out...

what happens when
white people experience
problems?
sure... they run... they hide...

and what happens
when brown people
experience problems?
they run after the white people.      

   unless ****** got dough...
me... stand all self-explanatory...
what part of URBAN
did you not understand
in a NON-ETHNIC application
of the slur?

        ROBO-AUTO-MAY-TOW...
ROBO-AUTO-MAY-TOW
SAY-PLEASE.­..
YES... oh qui qui monsieur
             RAP-AH-GO-GO...
      i died and neither
the life, or the death...
were all that satisfying...
  you really need people
who cherish life
to fill up your Auschwitz...

no point killing off
nihilists...
who... are more willing to
die...
than you are willing
                                   to live "it",
beyond what "it" is...
       "it"
           funny word...
to have lived a what,
to have lived,
to have lived a willing-
       to have lived, also,
the attache -ness...
       diatribe...
      
       you would be right
in suspecting...
at what point will this man
give this up,
and tow and burrow into
solving a crossword
puzzle?

       i guess "it" ist leben...
thank god so few
of us end up
                  as biographies;

that old fool's gold
of saying: deeds outstrip
words...
   so... why succumb
         to words in the end?

whatever remains of heraclitus' works,
does not matter, as much as what the zenith of his
writing proposes, namely the λoγoς -
                 and since that word has been ingested
by the thesaurus hydra rex -
                         well... there are many avenues of
expressing that word, to whatever end is necessary
to finally reach a cul de sac;
              the concept is obviously much older,
but as a single word, it shortens the famous suggestion
prior to the unit's emergence: in the beginning
there was word, and the word was (with) god...
    and yes... then god shut up, and forgot language
and turned to pure emotion... and he became jealous,
like a woman might tend to be...
      well... he "forgot" it... he just gave it away,
like pennies to a ****** busker in a tube station.
             so that genesis quote had a kafkaesque moment
with the greeks, when it simply became λoγoς.
    the thing is... what interests me, is, say, the following
comparison:    you see a low flying aeroplane...
                    the aeroplane is the λoγoς... but then there's
the sound being dragged behind,
       and you almost displace where the plane is and where
the sound is, that the aeroplane is emitting.
   the concept of λoγoς? it was derived from philosophy...
i can't believe it has taken so long to figure out a compliment
to the λoγoς concept... and there is one...
                                                                    φoνoς,
with its etymological shortening derived from phoneticism,
phonology (the first is a pseudo-origin,
                                   the latter an original-origin).
     an excess of comparison? if there need be for myth:
which of the two concepts would be thanatos and which hypnos?
well...  hypnos = φoνoς
               a lullaby is not written word, it's a sound...
        λoγoς ≠ hypnos -    since i'd further that by saying:
insomnia is a descent into hades... or that reading before you
fall to sleep allows you to actually fall asleep, is like saying
     that, ergo:          λoγoς = thanatos:
  simply because it's not alive.
        then again, λoγoς = thanatos, for reasons i can't really
explain... mein kampf?
                           yet what i wanted to be succinct has spiralled
out of my control, although something i wanted to say is retained
with what i'll conclude with:
if the concept of λoγoς was derived from philosophy...
then the natural compliment to it, would have to derive from poetry,
and the concept of φoνoς has been derived from poetry...
   yet the two never really meet in some siamese absurdity...
the reason for that is that φoνoς is "protected"
          by the onomatopoeia...
                   o
λoγoς      ν
                    o
                    μ
                    α
                    τ
                     o  
                    π
                    o
                    η
                    ι        φoνoς
                    α
what this really represents is that, the λoγoς is limited with
regards to what the φoνoς doesn't bother to encode,
for exmple, imitating the chirping of birds by whistling,
and certainly the φoνoς would not descend to the ridiculous
level that the λoγoς might, when expressing a dog barking,
i.e. woof! in a way φoνoς tricks the λoγoς  by employing
the concept of onomatopoeia, to make it look, absolutely ridiculous,
that it might actually descend to such a debased level;
perhaps it's just poetry per se, and perhaps that's just poetry
being folled by the logos, but the fact that logos can descend to
such muddy waters, tells me that: it can be a form of unreasoning
that does not make λoγoς, the citadel it was thought to be.
     in other words, not everything can be expressed,
                                    either side of the onomatopoeia.
still, if poetry could have ever provided a compliment to philosophy,
it really has taken, a god awful time to do so.

Of progressing science
Of massive equations
Of theory and numbers
Of facts and hypotheses
Unexplained are those things that really matter!

From the realms of a world
That works purely on sense
With so called knowledge immense
But only in your head!
God is a work of fiction, you say
Call those mortals dumb for a day
For they don't believe in science
Yet you prove atom, to my dismay
While it exists, but not seen
Questions to these answers is what I seek
Seem as strong as I wish, I am still weak

Heaps of papers lie at your desk
Where are the answers when I feel Kafkaesque
What use is it, when two plus two can't be five
While she is dead, and I am alive


Pleasures so corporeal
Have left my abode
Facts no longer real
All that is left is the source code
Of what a yes is and a no

Of regressing mentality
Of submissive disorders
Of beliefs and faiths
Of lies and false assumptions
Unexplained are those things that really matter!

why is everyone, suddenly sully, namely patient x, readied for psychological testing, when his only mental "disorder", is the society he lives in? why has everyone become suspect? is stalin in office? no... so, why the ****, do i feel like i'm under some premonition shadow of a bogus minority report? now, shouldn't i feel obliged by a paranoiac shiver, to merely ask a question? no? fall into rank you say... now i'm going to die less in awe, and more in a nervous anticipation of a kafkaesque trial... some words really deserve a thesaurus... when awe became worry, when worry became paranoia, when paranoia became huh(?), and then huh(?) assured us all that it was: not worth the ******* bother.

i don't like psychology for one reason,
and one reason alone:
there's too much common sense in it...
every time i hear some psychologist speak
i think of some sort of common
sense adventist...
      then again, i also think of these
          people as obtuse insomniacs:
for all the common sense they speak,
  they also seem to be the ones
most likely to have been the ones
   recently woken;
i can't help but find psychologists as
"historians" freshly out of hibernation,
with a sickness known as morality,
a "soul" and a god:
    tell that soul bit to asthmatics,
those hyper-ventilating
    multiple-reincarnations locked
up in a two 4 one deal of existential debates,
            ******* gratis...
there's just too much "common sense"
in psychology,
    this darwinistic puritanism that's
annoying as high-**** of a 9th tier worth's
of dante's paradiso:
you still get to see the face of god
(beatrice portinari) -
     but then you miss the murk sloth
sleuth of *virgil in the inferno...
                     and why wonder,
why the people have already decided:
hell is more interesting,
   god is a bore,
                and a woman is at most desired:
when she cannot be attained -
and a man most desirable:
          when he cannot be tamed.

the dream began long before the sleep overcame
me...
   lazy architect of the clouds:
what was it going to be this time:
per usual: castle, swan... a death mask -
ruminations of the future?

                     a violin quarter op. 17
no. 4... or as i imagined it before
sleep dragged me below the waves
into the deepest caves before it plucked
out my eyes and have me tears
or shed in watercolours...

   something so tender as this poem ought
to break into a thousand pieces...
or however many letters there are to match...

standing on Waterloo Bridge... playing that ******
violin... however crudely...
a pocket of fame so tiny that would
spread until... some other violinist heard
of the antics taking stage...
   a dream... that didn't catch me by surprise...
not lingering like a dream: proper...
which might take up at least the whole
morning of a tomorrow upon waking
and bewilder and amaze...
  
            such that i promised myself:
not a sip of that fine Mount Gay Eclipse
***... never: i hope never again will you drink
"thinking" you might write something:
at worst! tender sips only after something
blessedly sober was started during
the business of a day...

               an alternative to the Italian risotto
or a Spanish paella?
none other! the Biryani!
  oh the spices at my disposal...
a black cardamom pod
4 green cardamom pods
a piece of acacia bark (sorry...
  out of cinnamon!)
   3/4 tsp of fennel seeds...
caraway seeds, cumin seeds...
coriander seeds. black peppercorns...
a star anise...
6 cloves
      a bay leaf...

something from Norwegian poetry?
olaf bull?

og jeg, en levende mand, paa jorden hjemme
and i, a living man, with earth my dwelling...
som jeg, en død mand, paa jorden hjemme (begrenset)...

but i'm not going to learn Norwegian
on these isles...
it would make some sense
to learn Danish for a historical
whim or German...

then again... my bet it on either
Romanian or Turkish...
a today... at the Turkish barbers'
i only instructed him:

keep the length (of beard):
   but tidy the rest up...
tut(mak) uzunluk nın-nin sakal:
ancak temiz...

well i sat down in the waiting line while
the other turkish barber was finishing
off a customer... working with the electric
razor around the stubble...
strange sounds...
i've heard of iron stubble...
the sound of shaving never sounded
so... glass on a chalkboard...
a piano shattering...
something felt odd: like someone
was playing me a Turkish film
with Armenian dubbing...

so he shaved and shaved and i looked
on... does an electric razor mowing
stubble make that sort of, "sound"?!
it was only when my usual barber:
the one i modelled for once
when i came in like a homeless man
and 20kg overweight...
he took photos of before & after:
pointed me toward seat no. 2
did i finally come to grips with the sounds...

ha!
a cage with two budgies - budge-rigours...
budgerigars was placed in the corner...
two jittery little fellows...
i sat back closed my eyes and relaxed...
better than a *******:
ah... with ******* you need to staple your
eyes open to your eyebrows...
but getting your beard trimmed?
nothing to it... like kissing metal...
oddly enough either i was relaxed
or my barber was relaxed...
not a ******* pipsqueak from the two
birds...
a vibrating sense of contentment
a bit like...
when was the only time you saw
a bulldog content?
in the company of another bulldog...

now that's what i call a barber shop...
when he finished i was asked by
the other barber whether i wanted
to a cup of coffee...
my barber offered me a hot towel...
i refused both...
i'm pretty sure this was a way
to make new friends...
or rather: have some backup should
a funeral take place tomorrow...

maybe i have been living in England
for so long that... i might look English:
like the Turkish ******* remarked...
but i feel... neither here... nor there...
if i were to go back to my native birthplace:
i'd be alien too: not engrossed in
the politics in the culture in the everyday:
starting from: "born yesterday":
engrossed in the culture & politics of England...
but hardly "born & bred" as one
former fwend of mine: child of Egyptian /
Iranian immigrants remarked...
i can switch off from all the saturation
and read some Knausgaard in ******...

right now... i've just spent a mad hour cycling
and i'm going to sip some proper whiskey-esque
*** without the stealth assassin / an agitator
of a diluter of spirits... caffeine murderer of
a carbonated caramel ****...
i'll drink it straight over some ice...

an hour well spent...
  for all that's currently music: lyrical constipation:
i need to relearn how to breath:
to even think...
revisiting that dream i never had
that began with Haydn's op. 17 no. 4...
just the violins... no need for drum-tactic rhythm...
we're all "im-der-hier"... in the here...
"im-der-jetzt"... in the now...
but never really: must be lagging...
daydreaming or otherwise wishing it was
otherwise...

would taking the offer of a coffee and a hot
towel made so much of a difference...
or would i just have set there like
a ******* pile-on-steam-of-****?!
i love the smell of manure in the morning...
i love the smell of manure in the foggy morning...
i love the smell of manure when i'm
planting a new tree and it grows to be over
8ft tall after planting the original bonsai plum
some 7 years prior...

even in classical music:
there's the music that's there: played to death
& a second death that's boredom
that's only used to diffuse fame...
Haydn's op. 20 no. 4: that's how
a mousetrap ought to work...

niche listening: there will always be
someone reading something by Stephen King...
otherwise... spend a year on the oeuvre
of some composer...
at least the composers never fail:
produce "too much": then listen to it
being filtered down... sharpened to:
a bugging nugget of praise...

all that's pop is not necessary...
unless: utilised for pedagogic tactics...
breathe the air! there are no percussion instruments!
barricade the doors to your mind
with the wind of violins!

seems only fair that since i've had
my beard trimmed by a Turkish specialist...
speck? ***** & span... no...
speZ... if i am to write someone of my own
i'm drowning in the works of others
and there's 7am to mind...
there's defrosting two fridge-freezers too...
the sensibility of waking up
moderately sober...
all that's day and all that's a masquerade!

trivial things: poetry: porcelain...
but they shouldn't be so easily: quashed...
now that everyone can readily
read: write... somehow... long before
poetics was pushed aside...
of all people... if the Vikings are to be
somehow... envied... emulated...
ingenious thieves that they were...
at least they kept words somehow
sacred...
while they exhausted each limb from limb...
a body wed to the earth
a mind wed to the air...
and all congregating in sun, fire & water...
perhaps some mead some
frost... fog and shadow...

how i envy the almost first men
and their chemical eureka upon eureka of
the first intoxication with beer!
not this intellectual: morose flight of body
anchored down by the more heavier extraction
of run: run: ***-***-**-here-we-go!

let it not be another knock-out night for me
on this tired plank of wood i dare to call
ship: but i'm dried up on what's
language: trapped in conventionalities
of passer-by conversations that are hardly
that...

of course this couldn't be a lament:
i would regret a good conversation
since the *** is almost as good or if not better
than any whiskey...
a good conversation would get me off
my rockers all the more...
but then the fear of sobering up
in the middle of it...
for the proper K.O. i'll wait for the chemicals
to take charge... while i'll play both
mouse & fox & sneak downstairs for
a glass of milk...

architects of dreams: best to appease a
boredom of London by stripping it down to:
far away... Athens... here in quasi-Sparta
on the outskirts... the ******* emblems of
itching at the sky...
the ****** emblems of stadiums for
which football was made to be: ahem... "footed"?

bypass the standards of any language...
the nouns...
then work around the verbs...
and the adjectives that work as substitutes of verbs...
eh... prepositional, pronoun and conjunction
shrapnel...

presto scherzando: of Haydn's op. 20 no. 4:
a sort of violin does a pilgrims farewell
to the folk dance: hey hey hey trance
which reminds me of...
some modern song...
   very, very: modern...
                
it complete silence: or rather... memory
by now has become a drunken orchestra!
on the tip of my tongue...
ah! yes! corvus corax! herr wirt!
hey hey hey... there are accents of it...
littering Haydn's
presto scherzando: of op. 20 no. 4!

- and to think... i could have had a wife!
- and to think... i could have had a son!
- and to think... i could have had a daughter!

an uncle was a disappointment...
half of my grand-parentage i don't know...
beyond estranged...
cousins etc. long gone: still alive...
my maternal grandmother recently
estranged herself
from her grandson and her daughter
choosing a conspiracy of three
attitude with some cousin and her son...
while my grandfather...
there's pain: exhilarating...
quickly done away with you:
with a butcher's pardon on the guillotine...
then there's: pain: numbing...
relapsing... erosive...

well... i hardly imagine having enough time
to... somehow conjure up a connection
between corvus corax's herr wirt
& haydn's presto scherzando: of op. 20 no. 4...
beside the fire of the television:
how lacerating the warmth
how tongue numbing how...
if only this insomnia was
somehow translated into a transparency...
like my melancholy is a perpetual
hard-on...

all that's intelligent while only ending up
being mere posturing...
all that's plain daft while only ending up
being mere arrogance...
the insensible Kafkaesque tribalism
of the urban peoples...
the masculine aspect forgotten?
new: automated new: muscle loss?
the new wheat? juxtapositions around
cat's persistent inquiry whether the window
is somehow open...
or whether the bed is not yet slept in?

throw in a glass of milk come 1am
and... beside all that's to come with the chemical
circus... from now...
docile wolf still itching: bite a harvest...
sliding doors... the quintessential British
film from the 1990s...
it has to be...
that's me... dreaming of Swiss cheese...
cut with a guillotine... not a knife...
better still...
                     how familiar a curry has
become...
but you try and find the proper rice
to make a biryani not look like some phlegm
suckling stuck together grains of rice...
of a risotto or a paella...

Lawrence Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

                  Kafka, You, and the Self-Service Checkout Kiosk

                            With thanks to Rowan Pelling


                  Those who have never suffered through Kafka
                  Should not employ the adjective “Kafkaesque” -
                  The landgraf would not approve


When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning
from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed
in his bed into a monstrous self-service checkout kiosk.

Someone must have traduced Joseph K.,
for without doing anything wrong
he was arrested in the checkout line
one fine morning

It was late in the evening when
the supermarket supervisor arrived.


Kafka, The Metamorphosis. Trans. Stanley Corngold. New York: Norton. 1972

Kafka, The Trial. Trans. Willa and Edwin Muir. New York: The Modern Library. 1956

Kafka, The Castle. Trans. Willa and Edwin Muir. New York: Schocken. 1982

The hell of self-service checkouts is becoming Kafkaesque (yahoo.com)