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By
Alexander K Opicho

(Eldoret, Kenya; aopicho@yahoo.com)


Spiritual scholars of Christian Science have a concept that there is
power in the name. They at most identify the name Jesus and the name
of God, Jehovah to be the most powerful names in the spiritual realm.
But in the world of literature and intellectual movement, art,
science, politics and creativity, the name Alexander is mysteriously
powerful. Averagely, bearers of the name Alexander achieve some unique
level of literary or intellectual glory, discover something novel or
make some breakaway political victories.

Among the ancient and present-day Russians, most bearers of the name
Alexander were imbued with some uniqueness of intellect, leadership or
literary mighty. Beginning with the recent times of Russia, the first
mysterious Alexander is the 1700 political reformist and effective
leader, Tsar Alexander and his beautiful wife, tsarina Alexandrina.
The couple transformed Russian society from pathetic peasantry to a
middle class society. It is Tsar Alexander’s leadership that lain a
foundation for Russian socialist revolution. Different scholars of
Russian history remember the reign of Tsar Alexander with a strong

bliss. This is what made the Lenin family to name their son Alexander
an elder brother to Vladimir Ilyanovsk Ilyich Lenin. This was done as
parental projection through careful   choice of a mentor for their
young son. Alexander Lenin was named after this formidable ruler; Tsar
Alexander. Alexander Lenin was a might scholar. An Intellectual and
political reformist. He was a source of inspiration to his young
brother Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, who became the Russian president after
his brother Alexander, had died through political assassination.
However, researches into distinctive prowess of these two brothers
reveal that Alexander Lenin was more gifted intellectually than
Vladimir Lenin.

Alexander Pushkin, another Russian personality with intellectual,
cultural, theatrical and   literary consenguences. He was a
contemporary of Alexander pope. He is the main intellectual influence
behind Nikolai Vasileyvich Gogol and very many other Russian writers.
He is to Russians what Shakespeare is to English speakers or victor
Hugo is to French speakers, Friedriech schiller and Frantz Kafka is to
Germany readers or Miguel de Cervantes to the Spaniards. Among English
readers, Shakespeare’s drama of king Lear is a beacon of English
political theatre, while Hugo’s Les miscerables is an apex of French
social and political literature, but Pushkin’s Boris Godunov, a
theatrical political satire, technically towers above the peers. For
your point of information my dear reader; there has been a
commonaplace false convention among English literature scholars that,
William Shakespeare in conjunction with Robert Greene wrote and
published highest number of books, more than anyone else. The factual
truth is otherwise. No, they only published 90 works, but Pushkin
published 700 works.
Equally glorious is Alexander Vasileyvich sholenstsyn,the, the, the
author of I will be on phone by five, Cancer Ward, Gulag Archipelago’
and the First Cycle. He is a contemporary of Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor
Dostoyevsky, Alfred Nobel and Maxim Gorky. Literary and artistic
excellence of Alexander Sholenstsyn,the, the anti-communist Russian
novelist was and is still displayed through his mirroring of a corrupt
Russian communist politics, made him a debate case among the then
committee members for Nobel prize and American literature prize, but
when the Kremlin learned of this they, detained Alexander sholenenstyn
at Siberia for 18 years this is where he wrote his Gulag Archipelago.
Which he wrote as sequel five years later to the previous novel the
Cancer Ward whose main theme is despair among cancer patients in the
Russian hospitals. This was simply a satirical way of expressing agony
of despair among the then political prisoners at Siberia concentration
camps .In its reaction to this communist front to capitalist
literature through the glasnost machinery, the Washington government
ordered chalice Chaplin an American pro-communist writer to be out of
America within 45 minutes.
Alexander’s; Payne, Pato, Petrovsky, and Pires are intellectual
torchbearers of the world and Russian literary civilization. Not to
forget, Alexander Popov, a poet and Russian master brewer, whose
liquor brand ‘Popov’ is the worldwide king of bar shelves?
In 1945 the Russians had very brutish two types of guns, designed to
shoot at long range with very little chances of missing the target.
These guns are; AK 47 and the Molotov gun. They were designed to
defeat the German **** and later on to be used in international
guerrilla movement. The first gun AK 47 was designed by Alexander
klashilinikov and the second by Alexander Molotov. These are the two
Alexander’s that made milestones in history of world military
technology.
The name Alexander was one of the titles or the epithet used to be
given to the Greek goddess Hera and as such is taken to mean the one
who comes to save warriors. In Homer’s epical work; the Iliad, the
most dominant character Paris who often saved the other warriors was
also known also as Alexander. This name’s linkage to popularity was
spread throughout the Greek world by the military maneuvers and
conquests of King Alexander III. Alexander III is commonly known as
Alexander the Great .  Evidently; the biblical book of Daniel had a
prophecy. It was about fall of empires down to advent of Jesus as a
final ruler. The prophecy venerated Roman Empire above all else. As
well the, prophecy magnified military brilliance, intellect and
leadership skills of the Greek, Alexander the great, the conqueror of
Roman Empire. Alexander the great was highly inspired by the secret
talks he often held with his mother. All bible readers and historians
have reasons to believe that Alexander of Greece was powerful,
intellectually might, strong in judgment and a political mystery and
enigma that remain classic to date.
In his book Glimpses of History, jewarlal Nehru discusses the Guru
Nanak as an Indian religious sect, Business Empire, clan, caste, and
an intellectual movement of admirable standard that shares a parrell
only with the Aga Khans. Their   founder is known, as Skander Nanak
.The name skander is an Indian version for Alexander. Thus, Alexander
Nanak is the founder of Guru Nanak business empire and sub Indian
spiritual community. Alexander Nanak was an intellectual, recited
Ramayana and Mahabharata off head; he was both a secular and religious
scholar as well as a corporate strategist.
The American market and industrial civilsations has very many
wonderful Alexander’s in its history. The earliest known Alexander in
American is Hamilton, the poet, writer, politician and political
reformist. Hamilton strongly worked for establishment of American
constitution. Contemporaries of Hamilton are; Alexander graham bell
and Alexander flemming.bell is the American scientist who discovered a
modern electrical bell, while Fleming, A Nobel Prize Laureate
discovered that fungus on stale bread can make penicillin to be used
in curing malaria. Other American Alexander’s are; wan, Ludwig,
Macqueen, Calder and ovechikin.
Italian front to mysterious greatness in the name Alexander
spectacularly emanates from science of electricity which has a
measuring unit for electrical volume known as voltage. The name of
this unit is a word coined from the Italian name Volta. He was an
Italian scientist by the name Alesandro Volta. Alesandro is an Italian
version for Alexander. Therefore it is Alexander Volta an Italian
scientist who discovered volume of electrical energy as it moves along
the cable. Thus in Italian culture the name Alexander is also a
mystery.
Readers of European genre and classics agree that it is still
enjoyfull to read the Three Musketeers and the Poor Christ of
Montecristo for three or even more times. They are inspiring, with a
depth of intellectual character, and classic in lessons to all
generations. These two classics were written by Alexander Dumas, a
French literary genious.he lived the same time as Hugo and
Dostoyevsk.when Hugo was writing the Hunch-back of Notredame Dumas was
writing the Three Musketeers. These two books were the source of
inspiration for Dostoyevsky to write Brothers Karamazov. Another
notable European- *** -American Alexander is  Alexander pope, whose
adage ‘short knowledge is dangerous,’ has remained a classic and ever
quoted across a time span of two centuries. Alexander pope penned this
line in the mid of 1800 in his poem better drink from the pyrene
spring.

In the last century colleges, Universities and high schools in Kenya
and throughout Africa, taught Alexander la Guma and Alexander Haley as
set- book writers for political science, literature and drama courses.
Alexander la Guma is a South African, ant–apartheid crusader and a
writer of strange literary ability. His commonly read books are A walk
in the Night, Time of the Butcher Bird and In the Fog of the Season’s
End. While Alexander Haley is an African in the American Diaspora. An
intellectual heavy- weight, a politician, civil a rights activist and
a writer of no precedent, whose book The Roots is a literary
blockbuster to white American artists. Both la Guma and Haley are
African Alexander’s only that white bigotry in their respective
countries of America and South Africa made them to be called Alex’s.
The Kenyan only firm for actuaries is Alexander Forbes consultants.
Alexander Forbes was an English-American mathematician. The lesson
about Forbes is that mystery within the name Alexander makes it to be
the brand of corporate actuarial practice in Africa and the entire
world.
Something hypothetical and funny about this name Alexander is that its
dictionary definition is; homemade brandy in Russia, just the way the
east African names; Wamalwa, Wanjoi and Kimaiyo are used among the
Bukusu, Agikuyu and Kalenjin communities of Kenya respectively. More
hypothetical is the lesson that the short form of Alexander is Alex;
it is not as spiritually consequential in any manner as its full
version Alexander. The name Alex is just plain without any powers and
spiritual connotation on the personality and character of the bearer.
The name Alexander works intellectual miracles when used in full even
in its variants and diminutives as pronounced in other languages that
are neither English nor Greece. Presumably the - ander section of the
name (Alex)ander is the one with life consequences on the history of
the bearer. Also, it is not clear whether they are persons called
Alexander who are born bright and gifted or it is the name Alexander
that conjures power of intellect and creativity on them.
In comparative historical scenarios this name Alexander has been the
name of many rulers, including kings of Macedon, kings of Scotland,
emperors of Russia and popes, the list is infinite. Indeed, it is bare
that when you poke into facts from antiques of politics, religion and
human diversity, there is rich evidence that there is substantial
positive spirituality between human success and social nomenclature in
the name of Alexander. Some cases in archaic point are available in a
listological exposition of early rulers on Wikipedia. Some names on
Wikipedia in relation to the phenomenon of Alexanderity are: General
Alexander; more often known as Paris of Troy as recounted by Homer in
his Iliad. Then ensues a plethora; Alexander of Corinth who was the
10th king of Corinth , Alexander I of Macedon, Alexander II of
Macedon, Alexander III of Macedonia alias  Alexander the Great. There
is still in the list in relation to Macedonia, Alexander IV  and
Alexander V. More facts of the antiques have   Alexander of Pherae who
was the despotic ruler of Pherae between 369 and 358 before the Common
Era. The land of Epirus had Alexander I the king of Epirus about 342
before the Common Era and Alexander II  the king of Epirus 272 before
the Common Era. A series of other Alexander’s in the antiques is
composed of ; Alexander the  viceroy of Antigonus Gonatas and also the
ruler of a **** state based on Corinth in 250 before the common era,
then Alexander Balas, ruler of the Seleucid kingdom of Syria between
150 and 146 before the common era . Next in the list is  Alexander
Zabinas the ruler of part of the Seleucid kingdom of Syria based in
Antioch between 128 and 123  before the common era ,  then Alexander
Jannaeus king of Judea, 103 to 76  before the common era  and last but
not least  Alexander of Judaea  son of Aristobulus  II the  king of
Judaea .  The list of Alexander’s in relation to the antiquated  Roman
empire are; Alexander Severus, Julius Alexander who lived during the
second  century as the Emesene nobleman, Then next is Domitius
Alexander the Roman usurper who declared himself emperor in 308. Next
comes Alexander the emperor of Byzantine. Political antiques of
Scotland have Alexander I , Alexander II and Alexander III of Scotland
. The list cannot be exhausted but it is only a testimony that there
are a lot of Alexander’s in the antiques of the world.
Religious leadership also enjoys vastness of Alexander’s. This is so
among the Christians and non Christians, Catholics and Protestants and
even among the charismatic and non-charismatic. These historical
experiences start with Alexander kipsang Muge the Kenyan Anglican
Bishop who died in a mysterious accident during the Kenyan political
dark days of Moi. But when it comes to  The antiques  catholic
pontifical history, there is still a plethora of them as evinced on
Wikipedia ; Pope Alexander I , Alexander of Apamea also the  bishop of
Apamea, Pope Alexander II ,Pope Alexander III, Pope Alexander IV, Pope
Alexander V, Pope Alexander VI, Pope Alexander VII, Pope Alexander
VIII, Alexander of Constantinople the bishop of Constantinople , St.
Alexander of Alexandria also the  Coptic Pope and Patriarch of
Alexandria between  then Pope Alexander II of Alexandria the  Coptic
Pope  and lastly Alexander of Lincoln the bishop of Lincoln and
finally  Alexander of Jerusalem.
However, the fact of logic is inherent in the premise that there is
power in the name .An interesting experience I have had is that; when
Eugene Nelson Mandela ochieng was kidnapped in Nairobi sometimes ago,
a friend told me that there is power in the name. The name Mandela on
a Nairobi born Luo boy attracts strong fortune and history making
eventualities towards the boy, though fate of the world interferes,
the boy Eugene Mandela ochieng is bound to be great, not because he
was kidnapped but because he has an assuring name Nelson Mandela. With
extension both in Africa and without ,May God the almighty add all
young Alexander’s to the traditional list of other great and
formidable  Alexander’s that came before. Amen.

References;
Jewarlal Nehru; Glimpses of History


Alexander K Opicho is a social researcher with Sanctuary Researchers
ltd in Eldoret, Kenya he is also a lecturer in Research Methods in
governance and Leadership.
Lawrence Hall May 2017
The Fifth Karamazov

When young we identify with Alyosha
His optimism and his innocence
His fragile, flowering Orthodox1 faith
A happy, almost-holy fool for Christ

When older, the sensual Dimitri,
With irresponsible lusts and desires
Grasping for the rewards of the moment
Now, ever now, wanting everything now

Then older still, as intellectual Ivan
Sneeringly aloft, above all faith and flesh
A constructor of systems and ideas
From the back pages of French magazines

Though never do we identify with
Nest-fouling, leering, lurking Smerdyakov
Our secret fear, unspoken fear, death-fear:
That he might be who we untruly are

But hear, O hear, the holy bells of Optina2
Those Russian messengers3 singing to us
Inviting us to meet Alyosha again
At Father Zosima’s poor4 hermitage


1Russian Orthodox
2The name of the real monastery upon which Dostoyevsky modeled his fictional one
3The Brothers Karamazov was first published as a serial in The Russian Messenger
4Poor only by earthly standards
Mateuš Conrad Jun 2016
funny story, yeah, it's a funny one with you and the door-stoppers, i read the Brothers Karamazov; d'uh...

and you want t hear the quote? the salt on the wounds?
to angels - vision of god's throne,
to insects - sensual lust. i love the hyphen just hanging there
for unnecessary ambiguity when it comes to punctuation,
hanging in the air, a ******'s hanky with *gone with the wind

soundtrack, oh look here, sexed the
pomp crew that said ******* to their mothers
are angling with a free-spirit of fancies,
they kept me poor for a reason that
suggests i have to pay up a second time,
i didn't get their B.D.S.M.,
i'm praying for an early death
or a death by Islamic terrorism -
did you get it the first time round? n'ah 'ah,
second time? n'ah 'ah... third time?
least likely... what with Polish vermin to mind
i'd be scared to be a sheep, the Poles might
nibble on the shanks, i wouldn't be too sure
should they pacify with message of love
and gathering together...
once vermin, vermin forever, a bit like
those asthmatic british bulldogs ******* up
phlegm to breathe -
but back to the Dostoevsky quote,
*** is overrated - insects can have this domain,
wait for the cool-down,
the clown, and other jeopardy takers to juggle
the rest - it doesn't take celibacy per se to
ensure a strategy - just a rightfully placed
misogyny - and there was one waiting -
take your little Himmler off the crucifix
and see where you stand in the chicken prior
the egg argument - what a foul-mouthed *******
your saviour is... i hardly think he ever used
a toothbrush to mind the words later
of deity fatherhood - i'm not anti-Semitic,
but he's the only reason why i have every right to be;
along with every other Jew in the equation of
concerns - i don't like him, he was crucified,
i have no predestination lingo to boot,
i may have been baptised but i consciously chose to not
be confirmed, i don't have to like him, i'm not
expected to, the rule of the jungle is:
whatever comes your way - his poker hand is that
he was sold by Judas - he claims the foundations of
monetary exchanges, i was born into this ****-pile of
aggression toward thinking any thinking can be claimed
to be a madness... that old cat & mouse game in
England... if no one profits from madness then no
one is mad... who's earning my due renegade ego and who's
starving? i wasn't born to necessarily like him,
capital punishment was served, the Romans didn't
ask the Jews to build the Coliseum, or the Hanging
Barbers' Beards of Gladiators in Garden Form either...
hence the religious exploration, who he agitated...
the only time the Jews were left intact without
a curse of pointless architecture akin to Babylon's
hanging gardens or Egypt's pyramids and this
**** comes along and says that Sunday should be a
rightful trading day, and so we have it, Sunday and
the supermarkets are open till 4p.m., i don't like him
because he was one of the instigators of modern insomnia;
can we please take a break? nope, n'ah, not happening,
so there we have it, not one philosophical day
of retrospection, of introversion, or reflection,
constantly in the REFLEX mode we head toward
having a civilisation based on the non-existence of sleep,
24h New York, London, waiting for the ultimate pick-me-up
of dementia precipitating after we broke the rules
of the existence of sleep being abolished;
oh sure, he drove the traders from the temple and gave
us a house of prayer - ****** should have been
****** on Sabbath rather than agitating Zealots in
the wheat fields - fishermen like St. Peter were
literate back in those days? no chance! even a tax-collector
like Matthew knew more arithmetic than grammar;
the new testament begins with a bad joke by a few
Greeks concerning the tetra-grammaton -
is it Mark's gospel and Luke's that are similar?
Lawrence Hall Jan 2018
The Fifth Karamazov

When young we identify with Alyosha
His optimism and his innocence
His fragile, flowering Orthodox 1 faith
A happy, almost-holy fool for Christ

When older, the sensual Dimitri,
With irresponsible lusts and desires
Grasping for the rewards of the moment
Now, ever now, wanting everything now

Then older still, as intellectual Ivan
Sneeringly aloft, above all faith and flesh
A constructor of systems and ideas
From the back pages of French magazines

Though never do we identify with
Nest-fouling, leering, lurking Smerdyakov
Our secret fear, unspoken fear, death-fear:
That he might be who we untruly are

But hear, O hear, the holy bells of Optina 2
Those Russian messengers 3 singing to us
Inviting us to meet Alyosha again
At Father Zosima’s poor 4 hermitage


1 Russian Orthodox
2 The name of the real monastery upon which Dostoyevsky modeled his fictional one
3 The Brothers Karamazov was first published as a serial in The Russian Messenger
4 Poor only by secular standards
Lawrence Hall Mar 2018
Young Karamazov – once upon a time
Strolled dreaming through the happy hopes of youth
And surely wondered about spring and love
Wrote clumsy verse, perhaps, for a pretty girl

Then fell unfortunately into fashion:
The acquisition of proud vanities
Through the disposition of dreams and souls
Until he was only an old man who

Sat brooding through the bitter schemes of age
Old Karamazov – lost upon a time
Lawrence Hall Jan 2023
Lawrence Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com
Poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
Logosophiamag.c­om
Hellopoetry.com
Fellowshipandfairydust.com

                  ­    Corporal Karamazov Flies Home from the War

                                           “Which war?”

                            “Your war – there’s always a war.”

Every young reader sees Alyosha in himself
A sensitive mystic, misunderstood by most
Questing for an answer to a question unasked
Politely shown the door by Father Zosima

As Old Karamazov? Impossible
53 is an age of antiquity
As Dimitri, Ivan, and Smerdyakov?
They are unable to sort out themselves

Lost in thought in a contract airline seat:

A 22-year-old just two days off the line
A patriarchal colonialist ideologue
Mateuš Conrad Jan 2017
i could conceive the western concept of the rehab,
but then for 3 weeks i was in poland
i didn't touch the bottle for that period of time...
i don't see how an addict with a bunch
of addicts can be cured by anything other than
stigma... i'm actually happy addicted to
addiction: i entered my reading-mode...
   that said, most people can't digest a Kraszewski
book... **** me, we read Bradbury in snippets
just to tow in an essay for A-level english...
       philip augustus, or the chess player concerning
the Angevin family... great stuff...
   i didn't choose the book, my grandfather did,
he owned half the Kraszewski collection and read
nothing of it, he had to find a ******* "bored"
enough to read one of the books,
   and as i once said: i've seen the movie adaptations
of the Sienkiewicz trilogy...
         the cossack uprising, the swedish deluge...
and i said to myself: i can't and i won't...
thanks you jerzy hoffman, and yes: thank you
peter jackson...
              the infinite supply of elven arrows
and Legolas shooting orcs at point-blank range did
it for me...
                thankfully i can write something
as obscure as this, and know, for certain, that
there's a back-alley of the human populace out there
that might be searching for something like this...
   but that's what i found entertaining,
i actually had the opposite of wanting to compliment
the film adaptation of sienkiewicz, with an actual
sienkiewicz book... mind you: Kraszewski covers
the same period... and it's all the same time frame...
   should i write a proof that i read the **** thing?
maybe... but the main idea is that:
a metropolis cannot provide the right environment
for a book... or completing a book...
books are read in the countryside, in small towns,
in palaces... in hunting lodges...
          and i dare say: reading a book, getting into
full swing of the narrative is best done in daylight hours...
and i'll come back to the daylight hours,
  as a drinker and writer i chose the night...
  you know how long it took me to restore my
biological clock, and regain the nocturnal realm after
spending 3 weeks with a clear schizophrenia
of sleeping in the night and wriggling about during
the day? 2 weeks! i restored the biological pendulum,
but i have to admit: i feel ****...
    but i guess it's a worthy sacrifice...
i'm planning to go back to my country of origin
during late spring to read some more books...
i couldn't have read don quixote, the brothers karamazov,
bertrand russell's history of western philosophy
    yada yada yada... or kierkegaard's either / or,
or finished off kant's critique without my place of birth...
  and isn't it like a badge of honour?
                some will tell you to speak out an eastern
mantra... om... and the shattering of chandelier...
the western mantra is also a type of hypnosis,
you have to find a rhythm with a book...
  the mantra is the narrative of a book, and the silence
that incubates you has shark-teeth should anyone approach...
   but urban living makes this spot harder to find
than a begger or the ******... you can read books
in large cities... before you head home you're
bombarded with the psychology of exploiting your
literacy, in adverts, in orientating signs...
        with them being so authoritarian, it's hard
to find time for a liberal attitude to books...
            esp. what books are, best described by people
who'd probably like to throw them like molotov
cocktails in protest marches: thick as bricks those
gargantuan apostles of the void are...
       and so we are: sitting in times of hyperinflation
of literature... if that isn't the case, let me know by
Tuesday next week, i'll brood the assumption myself
until then...
      that's 2 weeks it took me to return to my writing mode...
to get back to the nocturnal realm
where everything is doubly black & white...
                 the point is: i want to write at a time when
the surrounding world sleeps...
     last time i remember, i didn't get a message in my dreams,
i'd love to see letters in my dreams, fortunately
i can't... i haven't seen these artefacts in dreams,
      but it's hard to blame memory as not strained enough
to do so... the unconscious and memory don't really
interact that well... it's a paradox that they even do
and that dreams have some sort of existence involved in
the architecture of our psyche...
                        last night i dreamt of lego batman because:
d'uh his endearing sarcasm... and godzilla!
   boo ya!         and this large city being eaten up
by a tornado, and other things phantasmogorical....
well pandemonium here, pandemonium there...
    don't get any ideas about the nature of dreams and
oedial repression... please! unaffordable housing prices
these days can only mean i'd really earn a mortgage
if my ***-drive went to the dogs, of the profession.
    so 3 weeks of a sober life and enough time to read
books... and my return into a writing life, a nocturnal
life, and drinking...
   mind you, in between there was that masters final
with ronnie o'sullivan (at least romford is famous for
something) vs. joe perry... in the last frame, when they
had 30 odd points each, and they were plucking at the
last remaining red ball for the snooker?
       snooker is a metaphor for the savannah...
you either watch snooker, or a david attenborough naturalist
show... there's the herd of buffalo (the red *****)...
           and the cue ball the hunting predator...
well... it's all a bit abstract, there are just ***** on a green
table... but still... at least in snooker you can bug
the "pawn" (red) ***** without having to *** them,
in chess you destroy completely... the pawns go...
there's no time to keep them for a no-man's land pause...
and i just turned 30... which goes to show:
                  if the game of football was perfect,
i mean perfect like tennis is with hawk-eye and
    6 judges vertical, 4 judges horizontal...
                  then football wouldn't be so passionate,
so religious... the reason it is so religious is because
judging it is so ****** imperfect...
     there's a reason why football can't be perfected in a way
as rugby can, where the referee can pause the game
and ask for a replay... the unfairness principle!
it has to be unfair in order for people to feel even more
impassioned by it! that's why in that film
when Alec Baldwin says something along the lines:
god comes first (while his hand holds out
the index and *******), and football comes second
(the index finger disappears)...
      football can never be a sport that has perfect
refereering... which makes me surprised as to why
it can grace the Olympic games...
                   football (in english, not that theme park
of jumping torpedoes) - yes the football known as:
ballet with hairy legs...
                   it has to remain unfair and subsequently
quasi-religious because it generates the most money,
but apart from that, it has gained a quasi-religious
status because it reflects a sort of life we acknowledge:
the referee made a bad decision, god did this... blah blah...
  and we get passion, religious passion that's
best represented by football hooligans...
                        but whereas other sports perfect their
techniques of refereeing a game, football hasn't done
the least possible, because it requires the whole debate
of: life's unfair!
    if it wasn't for unfair refeering, the game would not
be alive, as it is alive, to stage a confrontation
with: apache west ham, and sioux millwall...
       it's the best way to ensure tribalism...
         make the refereeing unfair, don't improve it...
blame it on the man in the sky, or the ponce in new zealander...  
mind you....
   the last football match i went to was at Stamford Bridge,
Chelsea lost to Newcastle United...
             i just just there like a stoic twant...
           i couldn't imitate the screams and the chants...
   i was just mesmerised at how it's so different from
watching a football match without the television acting
like a microscope... i am sure i was looking elsewhere
when someone scored a goal...
                 i probably went to the toilet when i
missed another goal...
                        and i'll reiterate...
   it can't be a gentlemanly sport, the rules can't be fair,
that's why they call it the sport of the rabble,
they have to contain the illusion of being unfair...
       because it's a "rabble" sport...
the referee has to make bad decisions,
otherwise there would be a "what if" dimension...
ask any Pole about the 1974 semi-finals with Germany
and ask them about the weather that day...
  then ask about the Polish wingers... and how fast they
were... and how the pitch was so slosh, and ice-puppy
fudge that the slow germans won it...
                     because the Poles always say:
we could have beaten the Nedetherlands in the final...
        again: football, if it is to be stated as the secular
alternative to religion, has to have an inherent unfairness in it...
all the other sports will perfect their judgement,
football will not move an inch... just like a religion -
perhaps that's also because we live in times of
cold-consumerism,
       a quick comparison is:
   the reactions of antonio conte vs.
                       ivan lendl -
   the former looks like a raving lunatic when something
good, or bad happens...
   the second? is he watching tennis, or playing poker?
Lawrence Hall Feb 2018
Come, little book, companion of lost youth
Well met at Tien Sha in the long ago
A comrade through the days of gasping heat
A comrade through the nights of flare-lit death

And then

A comrade through life’s lingering after-years
That often seemed only a falling away
From that not time which was lost in not time
The fallenness of man and men and time

O little book that steadies the universe
Where are you now – not lost out of not time?



Too much exposition:

At a Pacific Stars & Stripes book stall in Viet-Nam I bought a Modern Library edition of The Brothers Karamazov which I stowed away with my gear and on which I read a little; I was much more into Tolkien. In the event, more than a year later (I was in-country 18 months) I opened that book aboard a Pan American 707, but was so grateful to be alive and so physically sick that I never read more than a page or so.  I didn’t finish the book until years later, but have re-read it several times since.  

Somehow I have lost it, and although my wonderful daughter gave me a replacement (in larger print), I so miss that companion of the long-ago.
Thanks thespis for another muse anew,
Filliping my soul with the spirit of a song,
To chant for the young world in these pepperish letters,
before my callous  eyes on the skull of  historical future
on my pykitonic   torso of I another African pykin,
as I finish my coffin for the cadaver of poetry
that the law of poetry is a distorting neurosis,
neurotic abnormality its baseboard of time
giving classical  balance for wondrous poetry.

Compensatory motivation a charm of its seed,
Taking dear eyes from the skull of Demodocos
Leaving songfull mouth his legacy for humanity,
Warped physique not short of history,
Teaching the world to drink in full pyrene spring
As hunchbacked dwarfism of Alexander Pope
was not in any sense  dwarfism  of his poetry,
nor club foot of Byron in ******* to Maugham
Byronic heroism to Europe of yester times,
That sired Proust, the Jewish neurotic
And Keats the most dwarfish and Wolfe the tallest
Of man and woman to the cultural matrix
Of Europe, the mother of art, poetry and synaethesia,

From which was born Pushkin that took poetry
Out of his nymphomaniac heart, to the solace of czars,
And Shakespeare the dear thief, luckily converted
Childhood kleptomania into royal theatre of King Lear,
The parallel of four brothers from the house of Karamazov,
Their father; impecunious penny penchant muzhik
In the name of Fydor epileptic Dostoyevsky.

A lull of the time to escape from world of rent and tax,
Gripped nerves of the duo to a new realm of art
wherein sensuous glory from ***** and Indian hemp
propelled the souls of  Coleridge and De Quincey
to grandiose highness of poetry in the dreams of *****,
bordering on the  teutonic greatness of  ritualistic breed,
poetry that transcended from rotten apples  in the writing desk
of Fredriech von schiller the begotten son of Germany,
writing under the arms of Balzac dressed in monkey clobus,
that along with Milton in the lost paradise, gave him swaddles
only when the poetic vein of Milton flowed happily from nothing,
but from the ritualized autumnal equinox to the spiritual vernal,
as Coleridge was in full recondite  of marquetry,mosaic and miracles,
the miraculous white male sheep, the white ram of Wole Soyinka,
that he gave as a gift to Achebe at the last anniversary, evil decoy
that become a car which deathly crushed Chinua Achebe
down to demise in the catacombs for the law of poetry
as abnormal human  neurosis an equation of perfect art.
Alexander K Opicho
Eldoret, Kenya; aopicho@yahoo.com

when i start by name
perhaps in a flap of fault
exculpate my soul
for maximum rectitude
is the true  fill of my heart
glory to the sons of Russia
Kudos to you all and your foremen;
Nikolai Gogol the master in the dead souls
Alexander Pushkin the effeminate poet
Vladimir Lenin who knew what was doable
Alexander sholenestysn the Siberian jail bird
who was on the poetic phone by five
Feodor Dostoyevsky the epileptic Karamazov
Maxim Gorky and Antony Chenkoy leave them alone
Ayn Rand the woman who shrug the atlas for we the living
Vladimir Nabokov the school master who asked for ***
from her student the adourous ******
Boris Pasternak the Muzhik like Leo Tolstoy
who wanted land beyond the horizon
for doctor Zhivago the **** peasant
or Vladimir Makayavosky who slapped the public
in the face of their capitalistic taste,
Glorified be you all you sons of Russia
your Muse is beautiful and erotically crazy
glory for your humour and your finer threads
with which you have woven for me my poems of dystopia
glory be to you all in the stark oblivion
of Leon Trotsky and his penman Leonid Brezhnev
To my weary friends,
Your trials without end,
I wish to send you solace.

Society fails many.
Many die, some by suicide,
And the remnants are muck:
Corrupted and materialistic,
Base and hedonistic.
Yet within the dark bile,
Within its lukewarm core,
Diamonds can form:
Luminescent and pure.
Their bright minds fight for more:
A better world,
"The only thing worth fighting for,"
But they never see it through.
They cannot, I tell you.
The brightest simply shine.
They pray and hope and fight and die,
In their writings, in their art,
You see this coursing vein
Within it all --
In the pages of Karamazov,
In Van Gogh's shining stars.
It is this self-aware entity,
Pondering its own incredulity,
That screams to the sky
On so many sleepless nights:
"Greatness is doomed!
Society is static!
Dreams are but dreams!
Humanity automatic!"

Oh, and how these diamonds form!
Under such pressures and trials.
A life of constant disappointment
Where you only wish to better the world,
Yet the world pays you no mind,
And if you are noticed
It does with you what it wants:
You are slandered and trashed,
They ban your books,
They burn your paintings,
Then teach children about you,
Centuries from your death,
Some skewed version of your vision --
Something they've invented.
And there you were,
Wishing that hunger,
Wishing that war,
Wishing that strife and prejudice,
Were no more.
Oh, and you learned how hopeless this was.
Your infernous, naïve passion folded
Into a glowing ember.
For you have learned,
You wise, weary diamond,
That the ruler of man
Is his own nature:
For every advancement
Someone learns how to exploit it,
And all our theories,
All our lifelong efforts,
Inherited from diamonds before,
Will amount to nothing;
You will die only to pass the torch.

So,
How does a truly aware mind
Find solace with its life?
How can you sleep at night
With so much agony in the world?
How can you come to terms
With your own endless futility?
Oh, the timelessness of these questions.
Do not be dismayed, my friend:
I know how it feels to suffer,
To writhe on restless nights,
For decades,
And quietly cry
To the midnight sky.
We diamonds, we must struggle --
That is what makes us.
And imagine:
If there was no pain and hardship,
Our breed wouldn't exist!
We're byproducts, you know.
The world we wish for has no place for us,
So should we wish for it at all?
Should we end the lineage of diamonds,
For a world free of pain?
What sort of people would live there?
Docile, bright, kind,
Yet there must be something lost.
Yes, indeed there is
Within the darkness and suffering,
The abyss that we face,
We gain something --
Something infinitely valuable,
And only we know of it.

It is here that we learn
That even a completely different society
Would be relatively the same.
So tell me, diamonds timeless,
Why should I live?
To fall in love?
To travel the world?
To learn all I can?
I'll tell you,
You must live
So that you can learn
How to enjoy life
In the face of its ceaseless woes.
You must step over it,
And experience something beautiful:
Hold your lover's hand;
Walk barefoot in the snow;
Lie down in the sunshine --
You will find simple pleasures.
You will want to find more.
And all those years of worry,
Spent hurrying about
Trying to fight for something more,
Will fade into obscurity
As you, with your brilliant mind
Live for yourself some lovely life,
And if they come to take you away --
If you are burned at the stake:
Feel your searing skin,
Then swallow the flame,
For the secret is yours.
Laugh at it all
Laugh away
Mateuš Conrad Oct 2017
it must be one one of my favourite quotes,
given the thickness of the novel,
thick as a hefty loaf of bread...

      to angels - the vision of god's throne;
    to insects - sensual lust
.

and some for others: the liking toward music
playing is much more than
toward a woman moaning, subsequently snoring...

in a tight-fit straitjacket,
a women loses all the time when compared
to music:

       musica omni vincit consortium
                          sine opus femina enim


music wins all consort without a need for a woman

a                                                             "...
stressors galore...
                   when roger became the rabbit,
and the rest was the warner & co.
                  humming party imitating
atillas' yawn...
                               and the lost genghis
trip into movie...
              
    mort apparens in rufus; rufus vividae;
agricola in cataracta
;

death apparent in red, the vivid red;
closure in a waterfall.

                porcus latine auxilium.
Mateuš Conrad Oct 2015
i guess you can only become
a poet after having read
the brothers karamazov,
bolesław prus’ lalka, don quixote,
the critique of pure reason
kierkegaards’s either / or,
russell’s the history of western philosophy...
i can’t think of any other way...
otherwise you’ll be in the itchy fingers
pile of ‘she said, with expressionless mutation
how good it was to burn the bridges of madison county
and start a cannibalistic ***** colony.’
(wait a minute darwin, why aren’t any eskimos blonde?
it’s north enough for them to be bleached scandinavian.)
Mateuš Conrad May 2022
the day's almost finished and i'm sitting with a glass
of a whiskey and pepsi: sharpshooter...
   what's a sharpshooter? three parts whiskey
one part pepsi... that's called a sharpshooter...
by that i mean: the alcohol will not creep up on me
esp. like they serve it in bars... three parts pepsi
one part whiskey... no: better the whiskey be apparent...

and i'm rereading my first encounter with
Charles Bukowski: i remember the first time i came
across him... i was having a psychotic meltdown
back in 2007... running up and down Glasgow in
the sun... i don't know what was more mad:
me or the weather in Glasgow... usually western
Scotland is bound to perpetual rain...
                 but it was sunny that day...
                   well... i don't know how many trips
i made between London, Edinburgh and Glasgow...
running aimlessly: most probably from my shadow,
whether it was that day or the other
i booked a hotel room... i ran out of it after about
5 minutes in panic mode... leaving everything
behind, except for my wallet which i had in my trousers,
but my passport? i don't know why i had
it on me... i only got it back from the Glasgow police
station after a year or so...
                      long story: bad memories...

but i remember that first encounter with Bukowski...
what matters most is how well you walk
through the fire
: in the bookshop i stood there in awe....
because the first poem i read was,
oddly enough insanity

    sometimes there's a crazy one in the street.
    he lifts his feet carefully as he walks.
    he ponders the mystery of his own ****...

    ...sometimes there's a crazy one walking in the street.
       he slips past with a black crowd on this shoulder

obviously i had to buy that book...
back then i was buying books like mad...
i bought that book and the Brothers Karamazov...
oddly enough: i have read it...
to be frank i'm starting to suspect that i'm
pretty well read - but that doesn't surprise me:
after all, reading saved my sanity...
as much as insanity was "fun" i wanted to return
to structures...

            it's not much fun compulsively thinking
about the "secret" meaning of car registration
plates... i'm serious: in my head it was THAT bad
at one point... my entire world view disintegrated
into... a large **** on a pile of spaghetti Bolognese
looks better...

          obviously i'm... sure... i'd recommend going
mad... lucky for me: i wasn't taking to any mental hospital...
maybe that's why i was so introverted for
most of my 20s... hell... i lost all my youth to psychosis...
not all my youth: the youth where you could have
all the ****** fun... but from what i heard:
most men haven't had that sort of luxury...
   what with the advent of social media and dating apps...

but that's the great thing about marijuana (skunk,
it's different in England, the marijuana is illegal
and it's usually spiced with some ****** chemicals)
                                                       psychosis...

at first: oh my god, the greatest drug... i stopped drinking...
i waited for the weekend to smoke...
   i'd sit and write Beatnik ******* poetry...
listen to music... when the stuff was good...
a minute turned into ten minutes...
   ten minutes turned into thirty minutes...
thirty minutes turned into two hours...
literally: time stopped... that's how i came up with
the antonym of Descartes' res cogitans...
   i smoked and i lost my ego...
                it was nowhere to be found...
ergo? res vanus... an empty thing...
              i think it takes a lot of thinking to finally
conquer thought per se...
              to able to merely sense without that cloudy
overlay of thought / narrative has its bonuses...
right now? i have a clog in my head...
before i could tell you something akin to:
i can hear myself think...
    "hear": i was so engrossed in something resembling
solipsism... thought came before the senses...
that's why i missed so many opportunities
with women...

            also: i remember this remark i made...
i remember saying: i can't hear silence...
         guess what's in my head?
                that exact remark... it's almost as if i have
lost my prior "sense" of a soul...
i think i'm soulless... i think my soul has already
left my body... which makes it easier
to coordinate the body... i have this great silence
in my head...

   a moment also came when my vision sharpened...
i started seeing more clearly...

another thing about going mad early on...
oh i did see psychiatrists... i was put on antipsychotic
medication... i used to weigh in 78kg at one point...
6ft2 and 78kg? i was a lean colt...
i put on... over the years... let's say i weighed in
at 120kg at one point...
                   i might have drank back then...
i'm still drinking... but: to think that this sort of medication
doesn't have a metabolic effect would be delusional...

but like i must have already mentioned:
that's the good thing about going mad early on in life,
or rather with madness itself:
you can't go mad twice...
         what's that famous saying?
those whom the gods want to destroy: first drive them
mad...

   about 6 psychiatrists tried to figure me out...
one ******* tried to implant in me the idea of regression:
he insinuated that i was abused as a child...
false memory implants... sadistic little Indian ******...
why do i bring ethnicity into the equation?
oh... reminded of a novel by Will Self...
no: not the quantitative theory of insanity...
   that other one... Dr. Mukti...

                            they couldn't figure me out
yet they still prescribed this ****** medication...
           the medication was making it worse...
                             alcohol? makes it better...
       well... because by the 5th and 6th nutty-professor
i was already well verse in Nietzsche,
Kierkegaard, Heidegger and by the 6th Kant!
why would i need to talk **** over?
   none of them could help me with:
    oh you know, herr doktor... i encountered
a choir in a church that descended, invisible...
then... while in a panic... running around in the church
a great wind descended and dispersed the choir...
well... **** me... if marijuana can give you that
sort of auditory hallucinations:
     i'll wait until i'm dementia prone...
    then i'll go to Amsterdam and jack-up my brain
with some mushrooms... maybe i'll see "things" better...

come to think of it... back in the day it was what
it was... i was in so much distress but internalized it so well
that: i was 12 shadows behind a flimsy veneer...
but i pulled through: right now i think i have:
esp. since my reclusion sort of gave me a spring-like-elasticity...
i jumped back into extroversion with a snap
of the fingers... i was never an extrovert-extrovert:
those annoying *****...
i've learned to be more measured...

  but i pulled through: and not thanks to anyone
except for me... and... necromancy...
which is not some magic... just reading the works
of the people already dead...
    
another saying: music soothes even the savage beast...
tell that to one of my Maine *****...
go on... play her some punk... she's doing a runner...
she is a savage beast... domesticated...
but still savage...
     only recently she scratched the face of a baby...
the baby was: the baby of my mother's manicurist /
pedicurist...
    why did she scratch the baby's face?
     my mother's manicurist / pedicurist brought her
friend along... who in turn brought her son along...
annoying little ****: i was fermenting upstairs in bed
with a massive hang-over... just heard the annoying little
****...
                  
      ADHD+... literally...
            he kept annoying my cat... kept touching her too
"offensively"... she hissed... she started spitting evil eyes...
but he kept on annoying her...
   my mother apparently told him to stop...
the boy's mother stopped being a mother at that point...
he ****** off somewhere to draw, i don't know...
******* circles in the air... when the baby approached...
bam! scratches on the face...
    mind you: no problems prior... babies and animals
mingle quiet well... they did... i was there some other
times... but... all it takes is one silly little **** of a boy
to **** of a cat for the cat to rebel... like a predator...
on something that's weaker: weakest...
     it's a ******* cat... a bonsai tiger...
        
           that's why i never understood man's fascination
with predators, animal predators...
seems like their life just might be interesting...
translate that to predators within men...
            eh... blue oyster cult... something sort of eerie
itch by itch by the end it just becomes disgusting...
no argument: when it comes to the behaviour of cats...
the cat was in the right...
      the cat was in the right... the baby was simply collateral
damage: isn't that the common phrase in modern
warfare? collateral damage?

while Tony Blaire et al. are the ADHD+ **** of a boy
walking away scot free...
            
well... i gave the mother mother's manicurist so many
CDs to copy after i introduced her to Wooden Shjips...
she obviously has a new manicurist...
her friend was supposedly into Viking looking blokes...
but... i've recently saw a brutally honest
video by a woman, she admits to:
having nothing to offer a man... except for ***...
she's a single mum... all the women in my vicinity
are single mothers...

       and she's right... i work... i cook... i clean...
i can iron a shirt... blah blah... if i'm going to be second
best after she panders to her Rugrats...
what am i left with?
   it so much simpler with prostitutes...
although... the one i'm currently seeing sort of crossed
the mark... i think she's fallen for me...
she keeps sending me Selfies while i keep sending her
pictures of trees... flowers... cats... sunrises
and sunsets...

if i were to be stuck with someone like a Denise Royle...
oh **** that... ****: THAT...
     because i would be just that...
a push-over a comb-over...
        recently i watched a movie starring Lara Flynn Boyle...
a film from back in 2002...
   recent pictures? either Jack Nicholson
is the Spartan 300... i don't know...
                    i'm going to grace: if i get to old age...
probably less stressed out...
         like this one ****** i saw today...
the petulant husband... chocolates for the children,
wine for the honey-dubby-dubby-gum-bear...
he might: just get a sniff of the wine...
otherwise! WHIP!
              back on overtime come tomorrow's
Bank Holiday! ha-chi! whimp 'em boy!

existentialism never got along with Darwinism...
for what? my genes?! what about my "soul"?!
i rather find that than pass on some biological fuss
of a glue... someone else will pass something else
on... it's not like the human species will go extinct
because i haven't capitulated to reproductive
"needs"... being a grandfather with grandchildren
or... an old man and death's darling: euthanasia...
always the latter...
god bless the Benelux alliance: reasonable people...
benevolent people... sensible creatures...

****... i knew this was going to happen once i got stuck
into defrosting... "defrosting":
i was trying to get some ice for a whiskey pepsi
sharpshooter refill... a block of ice... no ice cubes...
take out the ice cube container hack at the block
of ice with a knife... fiddly procedure...
take some ice... put the excess ice on the shelf...
hello cleaned ice-cube container...

            i have lost the plot... i digressed too much...
i take it from my English teacher...
a Thomas Bunce... Glaswegian... loved his jazz and his
poetry... he always digressed...
he never taught us... not grammar: only on a must...
once... maybe twice... what did he used to call Shakespeare?
Shaky? Shaken Pear?
   he always digressed... he just told stories...
he wasn't a teacher... you might as well have
lit a ******* fire in the classroom and we'd all huddle
and listen to him ramble...

i've lost it... the day is almost over and i'm sitting
here drinking a whiskey and listening to...
my new found "hobby"... i.e. gothic post punk alternative
darkwave music... rubric!

i've always tried to escape the dichotomy of
the Cure vs. Depeche Mode...

the soft moon... oh... that band is a banger...
2013 release: from the album the soft moon...
songs like: circles,
                     parallels, we are we,
                                            sewer sickness...

there's still so much good music "floating" about...
it's just... so much harder to find...
it wasn't... back in 2016 when the internet still had
some sanity about it...

rubric! where's my rubric?!

the downward path - more than i should
give my remains to broadway - dumpster baby
c z a r i n a - wonderland
morosinthe - nihilism
love of consolation - memory
man + machine & emke - room to cry
ill humans - dramatica
dechakhal - always die
              ciern - the emperor rx
     grey gallows - chains
                       locust revival - no funeral
               two one six - heat
                   the isolators - concentrate on us
                house of breath - make sense of it all
q-7 three times - t-3
                       into her final sleep - heressence...

**** me, now that i come to think of it...
every single shift i worked at Fulham's Craven Cottage
whenever i was placed in Bishop's Park
with a women... i wasn't working...
i was on a first date...
we talked about each other...
Jeminah was the best... even though she kept
talking about her failed relationships...
but we walked into the cemetery and inspect the dates
on graves... my god... she looked so ****
back before she stabbed herself in the back
with rumours about me...

while... in my full view... started swiping left?
right? which one is rejection?
in front of me, indicating: you have no chance
mate... i have these many options... loser...
any of the others make their own wine?
bake? make dogs affectionate enough to lick
your wounds till you bleed and not feel
the pain?
               just saying: ******* pie in the sky!
mash potatoes floating in the lake...

what was i going to write?
   ****... i almost forgot... the day is almost over...
18 minute past midnight... time for closure...
i'm sitting with a whiskey + pepsi sharpshooter...
listening to some underground music...
thinking about trimming my ***** hair
because i need to see Khedra... girl's feeling anxious...

oh... right... i woke up nice an early... 8am...
looked at my phone... ****... no ingress pass for West Ham
vs. Arsenal... what's up?
so i text the manager... where's my ingress pass?
i'm pretty sure that i've booked myself in for this event...

text back... you haven't booked in, mate...

oh crap... crap and no crap: to be honest...
if i haven't booked in... i can't be late...
but i swear i booked in for this match...
the original date was the 28th of May...
that date was moved because West Ham progressed
in the Europa League... so Tuesday was them vs.
Frankfurt... i thought that if i booked in for
the original date of the match-up for the derby
i'd be automatically booked in for today...

while i worked Oxford on the 28th...
   it's not like i "forgot": i just wasn't messaged...
about today... ****** ******* diary keeping...
on my behalf? hardly... i woke up ready to shine...
geared up to do the shift...
arbeit macht frei is my new number one motto...
Wembley shifts... ooh... a blessing...
sometimes going above 12 hours... or thereabouts...

can't you squeeze me in?
   just in case someone blows-out?
  
no... sorry mate... can't print your accreditation
on a whim...
  
   but i already texted him saying: i know what NO
means... fair enough...

****... a whole day to myself... what the hell am i going
to do?!
    i ask dearest... what's for dinner?!
roast beef... ugh... not that crap...
no no... i love roast beef... when it's done proper...
done medium rare in the middle...
but...

    i've mentioned this before...
this recipe... it's a Turkish recipe...
i never thought that beef could be so well coupled
with rosemary... eye-opening...
you'd think on lamb goes with rosemary...
no... beef works just as well... if not better...
i guess the use of rosemary is a way to get
rid of lamb stink... why oh why lamb is sacred
to the Nomads while... pork... the most...
scentless meat in town is given so much
critique: didn't "god" create pork?!
why would god despise anything he created?!
it's counter intuitive...
and i once thought that the Welsh were
sheep *******... no... the Arabs and Muslims
in general have that award covered...
ugly... stinking meat...
  sheep... IT... STINKS!

                        at least pork doesn't... LAMB: STINKS!
maybe that's why their cuisine requires so many
spices... they need to drown the stench of lamb...
pork on the other hand? pristine chops...

tried rosemary: made it worse...
but i like rosemary... as much as i like thyme...
thyme and chicken...
but you wouldn't expect beef to be coupled
with beef...

           this recipe though... oh you know...
some Turkish cook... REFIKA...
hammered beef:

400 gr beef fillet steak
4 cloves of garlic, peeled
2 sprigs of rosemary
2 tablespoons white wine vinegar
4 tablespoons olive oil
200 gr kolot - mild cheddar is better
2 dried hot chilli peppers
1 tsp of Korean chilly flakes
1 teaspoon black peppercorns (whole)
1 teaspoon sea salt

i woke up and... gaining knowledge that i wasn't
going to do the West Ham shift...
there's much better things to do with a cut of beef
than merely butcher it a second time via
a roast... ugh... roast vegetables and roast
potatoes... such an European "thing"...

wait a tick... i haven't done my 60km+
       bicycles sessions in a while...
                        want to see the Houses of Parliament
on the 1st of May?!
****... why not... via the usual route... past Forest Gate...
past Stratford... down Regents Street...
past Trafalgar Sq.? back past the... it was hide tide...
the Thames is not a river! it's an overstretched lake!
what river has a tide-in and a tide-out?!
it's not a river... unless: all rivers are like this on
an island! the Thames doesn't have a flow!
it... bubbles... it's an irritated piece of water!
it's not a river!

on purpose... i shoved down those black intestines
with barley and bacon and onions for breakfast...
with some rye bread...
ironed some bed sheets, t-shirts and a shirt...
and my work trousers...

it's best to count within the confines of 0s...
after all... a person's wealth is not measured impirically...
British Empire bound...
can you translate 6 billion in... what would be
the weight of geld... back then?

i'm done with post punk alternative music....
i'm coming back to the altar of Germanic Crusader
songs... Palästinalied...
i hear the music... i turn to proud airs..
mein gott: ich auch haben ein gesichichte!

jetzt?! alles ist bergwerk!

i am yet to eat a more łakomą feast!
a more greedy feast!
  
LAMB STINKS... perfect match up between
the Muslims and the Velsh...
perfecto! plush! mush! plush! mhuah!
finger-licking good!

why? why my disapproval?!
some elder ****- spitting on "my" pavement...
i don't like that...
disrespect the road others have to walk on...
sure... perhaprs in Pakistan you have
******* donkeys to grind a road to apply
to your obedience... by the stammer
of a donkey's hoofs...
over here... du brauchen asphalt...
    you goat loving spitting camel jockey
of a ****-...
                                     what?!

tomorrow's tired... let's have it... right now!
you ******* nonces....
you ******* fading chocolate copper-necks...
pseudo-predators...

i woke up with this great feeling of cycling for 60+ kms...
i did...
i stopped like a Dervish taking a brake...
at a shop that sold...
Turkish bread... packaged from...
the AL-BAHIJ bakery... somewhere...
near Wembley...
       it's not Naan ******* curry type of Jaapati
type of ****...
wholesome...
      
   i tell you... 60km+ backwards and forwards...
a meal like this will make you greedy...
beef + rosemary...
there's actually a difference between
freshly ground black pepper and readily
available ground pepper...
crushed rosemary... another "case" to implode...

unser liebe fraue...
    von kalten bronnen...
    bescher uns armen landsknecht...
   eine warme sonnen!

die trommeln! die trommeln!
               lälarm! lälarm! lälarm!

           alles güt, ja? wenn ein ist deutsche...
nein?!
   dann ist: partei-zeit!
        gütfühlen!
       ficken du: Hessen-Schwäbisch:
   schweinefleischislamischliebhaber-seltsam...
like.... wie... du was?"

oh man... that Turkish hammered beef...
with the red onion Sumac salad...
with the Sumac... with the red chilly flakes...
with the rosemary... the garlic...
the sea salt... the fresh real, whole... peppercorns...
U-BOATS man! Zeppelins!
               olive oil... lemon juice... pomegranate molasses!

hmm... i stopped over between Forrest Gate and Ilford
at this Turkish supermarket...
it wasn't the usual take on Lavash bread...
but it wasn't a ***(p)at(t)i either...
    the bakery? Al-Bahij... NW10... Miverva Rd...
  
i'm greedy for this dish... i'm always greedy for this dish...
do 60+km on a bicycle: you too would be...
you too would relax listening to Germanic
war songs...
            because... there's nothing better to listen
to when you're that much pumped up...
         nichtsenglischgesprochen!
nichtsenglischgesprochen!
         zu vergessenheit wir märz mit herz!
mit spatzen zum die nur schar!
                               unser: hohl von diese gräber!
Lawrence Hall Mar 2018
Though some maintain that parallels don’t meet
And three-point-something is the sum of pi
And whether X is found; no one knows why
(Was it lost, perhaps wandering in the street?)

Curious matters all Euclidian
Even for the bold mathematician
Are as obdurate as obsidian
Each an illogical proposition  

To the rationalist impossible, and yet -
Parallel lines are at the Altar met
Lawrence Hall Aug 2018
Manichaeism is Quite Wrong, You Know


“…without God and immortal life? All things are lawful then….”

                       -Ivan, The Brothers Karamazov

If there are no boundaries, there is no freedom
With nothing to push against, one’s strength must fail
If God is not, then one can make no plaints
And must take on a burden that can’t exist

If man is never told no, there is no Yes
For him to answer then against the no
And if there is no Yes, there is nothing at all
There is no dichotomy, only the Yes

If there are no boundaries, there is no Yes
And man must cease in silent nothingness
Your ‘umble scrivener’s site is:
Reactionarydrivel.blogspot.com.
It’s not at all reactionary, tho’ it might be drivel.
Mateuš Conrad Nov 2016
among the people that i hold accountable to suggest
someone has lost touch with reality:
    well, apologies for not engaging in your
  cinnamon-laced *** life - i sought other spices:
as in chilli for the tongue, and salt for my eyes,
and pepper for my nose - because that's what's
being debated: when philosophers come back
from their adventure i'll let you know what reality
actually is - then the cathedrals will crumble,
   then the neo-Babylonian extracts from modern
architectural preferences will become less neo-Babylonian
English and more: Glaswegian dialects
surrounded by Croat diacritical markings -
    as if drawing hunting antelopes in caves
   giving us "more" clues about the one inhospitable earth:
or are we truly surrendering to Darwinism
rather than carpe diem? i'm i'll ******* chirpy
given a dinosaur bone, and the timescale -
             and given that we turned Cartesian duality into
a dichotomy, everyday seems challenging:
a blimmin' boxing match 'n' all...
                                    i can't remember how many times
i've been k.o'ed (knocked out) in my waking moments
(conscious or, rather mourning? don't know).
      i still find it staggering they (no paranoia collective:
simply scientists) came up with the fact that the sun
(or any star) is a reaction of helium and hydrogen:
do people really explode into chipmunk joviality when
   doing a b.b.q. of their bodies on a beach?
             (asking questions becomes a ****** syringe
after a while) - and yes, use the term joviality before it
becomes archaic, you never know when it might
unearth a wormhole of Hades and **** the fact out
and flush it into oblivion.
              and some don bowler hats and use folded
umbrellas as walking sticks, perhaps the monocle,
but definitely the bow-tie: and make rhetoric of language:
airs, courtesy (court-t'eh-c vs. curt-see): herr chirurg!
how do you insert the scalpel into the rhythmic expression
of dribbling that kauczuk? (rubber ball).
      (cow- -chook).
           i mean in Cockney: how do you juggle that word
properly while balancing an oyster on your tongue?
and yes, i'm starting to believe Polish (as a language)
borrows too much from German - of the few slavic languages
i also say Kaiser bun -          she's called a variant of
antoinette, i.e., a kajzerka, or Wilhelm (dressed as a little
girl, all hurly burly) akin to philippe duke of orléans;
someone say lace stockings?
      i could write out this ******* in chauvinistic bravado
aesthetic: or i could smoke a cigar...
     and sooner we realised that crows never prayed
but croaked -
        that pigs grunted and never prayed -
that pigeons cooed, and never prayed,
       that monkeys did the mambo knock-knock joke -
that woodpeckers were the original carpenters and
                invoked the existence of the machinegun
and the rattler.
so there are people (sophists) who wear
bowler-hats, smocking, monocles and disdain:
rather ardently -
                 and then there are those that spontaneously
explode, from out of nowhere,
and dress themselves in rags and never rags to riches
sort of attitude - because appearances are deceptive
and too can be gambled with and neglected and seeing
a decay of a royal house: is much fancier than seeing
autumn...     because aren't the Windsors
                                         vacating Buckingham?
as in: from rot -                 apple and pear sweetness.
(at this point the poem should end) -
       not always the case of: less is more...
speaking on behalf the man who read the karamazov
brothers
and stuck a leaflet on the back
of the book that read: the hash marihuana & hemp
museum - oudezijds achterburgwal 130 amsterdam
                    (next to the 'sensi seed bank' grow shop
   www.hashmuseum.com).
i mean you have read something equivalent of a brick
these days, at least one brick within that distractive
paradise of poetry - either the already mentioned book,
or war and peace, or in search of lost time,
or bolwesław prus' the doll - and they said
that life's short... not with these books being read it is...
life becomes a snail-paced traffic jam -
            it's what mystics aim at, across all religions:
the carpe diem momentum.
            it's not even boring, it's just a tedium-ladden
misanthropy: that suggestion is mainly aimed at seeing
an afternoon sitcom about 0-hour contract jobs...
       which is applauded by the terminally ill who
might say: thank **** it's not me.
            so we're all agreed - what the collapse of
communism left behind was a chance of a pension,
        given that all the western countries sold their remnant
versions of tribalism to stealth upper-tier formulations
         of "we're in this together" as otherwise know: companies...
we're not accompanied -
                   cold and wet and ***** -
                            which is odd why we'd think it
necessary to cause upheaval in iRaq...
                           given that the origins of communism were
in England, tested in Mongolia and then ingrained elsewhere...
ah, but of course, the profit margin: it's hard to
automate people surrounded by machines
        it's like olympians competing with para-olympians
where's talk of golf and the handicap?
              not here...
                       but i'm wondering, how can i redeem myself
after having stretched the poem for too long?
     point being: i can't change the status quo, and don't
intend to - and is that hypocritical or simply being
honest? well: if i managed to fit the concept of the big bang
into my little head: i'd choose the bullet every single time -
   we've established a majority, we've become as deluded
in our hopes for individuality: as was once deemed worthy
of the idea of god; we simply have established a constant
supply & demand parameters;
or what Heidegger calls: the perpetuated "ineffectual"
(well, not really him, my wording) -
                  basically a state of panic and
how different does concern compare with anxiety?
   a woman would tell a man that crimson is very different
from burgundy, as man would use the crude sigma:
red, red. n'es pas?

*i wish i could write something within the framework
of universal appeal; something simple
   and easily digested: like baby pulp, or simple
pulp of any fruit, mashed up and regurgitated
as if a seagull feeding its chicks... alas! not to be.
Mateuš Conrad Sep 2016
today was the second time i became a spontaneous ****** - only the second time that a couple ****** in suburbia, without window-blinds and not beneath the sheets - she was on top... just walking past with a beer, headphones on; and indeed my development bypassed teenage hormone harmonisation: to need the opposite - an advanced curiosity aged 8 - prior to actual ***** production - King Onan - which meant that my hormonal chaos atypical of teenagers never set it... i never appreciated a sense of hormonal binding to strive for relationships of this kind of bonding - it's not a complexity that i'd below out from the mountains, more from the gutters... once upon a time i could have taken interest in women in the hormonal crescendo - some tried to state they too were adept at premature findings of the genitals and the bone ***** of the hand imitating **** ***: well, better the **** in your hand, than your, ahem, in the blessed muscular ease of the prostate - or some dare believe.

a crude beginning - but necessary -
however many theories they throw at me,
i feel in limbo of dissatisfaction -
only today i learned that i wasn't born
an entertainer: i should have written
two or three major poems and stood up
and bellowed out a cry of mercy and
rebellion - i don't believe Mozart hummed
any of his pieces after writing something:
if he was a violinist he probably would
have written two pieces, and rambled about
Austria with those two pieces:
writing very little after. i figured: what have
i got to lose, if i end up a dwarf miner,
and keep mining? the mix of seeing stand-up
comedy, and then seeing the opera Werther:
the last scene, where Werther is dying...
i don't know how the opera singer did it -
he shot himself and lay on the stage: singing...
that must have been hard, singing opera while
lying down...
                         but something dawned to me
in the morning today, i woke up and opened up
a book in the price range of £25 - £35...
only a preview, but that's sometimes enough
(the most i ever spent on a book? in Barnados
Edinburgh, £30) - Hölderlin's hymns "germania"
   and "the rhine", by m. heidegger -
and lying on my back, i started reciting Germania,
    
nicht sie, die seeligen, die erschienen sind,
     die götterbilder in dem alten lande,
     sie darf ich ja nicht rufen mehr, wenn aber
     ihr heimatlichen wasser! jezt mit euch
     des herzens liebe klagt, was will es anders
     das heiligtrauernde?
                      the oddity of writing poetry but not
necessarily thinking about voicing it -
    on top of mountains, atop large crowds -
    like a serpent in Eden, i guess, being the more
    appropriate consideration -
     *not those, the blessed ones who once appeared,
      divine images in the land of old,
      those, indeed, i may call no longer, yet if
     you waters of the homeland! now with you
     the heart's love has plaint, was else does it want,
     the holy mourning ones?

perhaps poetry as an aversion toward modern philosophy,
unchallenged systematisation, imagine dropping
a Platonic dialogue into these gargantuan volumes -
half of them would turn into cf. of encyclopedic entries,
or how dialectics turned out to be: dialectic solipsism -
a natural aversion toward prose -
         the rigidity of narrator's curiosity or disposal
of understudies of the narrator: characters with pithy
one liners - or sometimes truly rebelling against
the puppeteering: akin to Ivan and the Inquisitor
in the Brothers Karamazov - perhaps poetry is all
but a rebellion against all literary movements -
but the point being: for the first time i lay in bed
and recited poetry, smoking cigarettes and drinking
has really changed my voice, for the first time
i noticed the orating voice i have, conversations aside,
a warm-up in German, i don't know, i have a fetish
for German and Jewish mysticism -
i'm taking English back into Saxony - no au pairs
and airs and colonial ******* on the natives,
back to the roots - if ever on stage, i don't know,
i might decide that the gamble paid off,
that i decided to create more material than write two
poems and shout them at the world to listen
and pay attention... i'd lie down... yep... i'd lie down
on the stage: to place rhythm and open up my stomach,
as i did in bed today... start warming up in German,
and then launch into English - and sometimes swaying
in Latin, Polish and the odd Greek -
             if they can have stand-up comedy,
             i'm sure they can have lay-down poetry -
cigarette rasp and the water-hole echo drum:
                 paraphrase with a way to antidote modern
society and the constant: purpose-built negation of
autobiographical facts of other people - Sartre's bad faith
association - i don't understand why people have
this inherent need to deny someone their autobiography -
oh right, not glamorous enough, not enough cocktail
parties, not enough Marlin Monroes -
it's not a good enough autobiography without any
thespians, apparently -
                                            and after years at it,
                           you turn into turtle skinned observer -
god forbid shouting this to the world...
          perhaps an innovation is needed - well, i might
find out when i go to Cheltenham - there's a free
even: pub crawling and talking literature,
    and there i'll be, with a freshly printed copy of my
verse... someone gives me a mic, i go onto the stage,
lie down, and recite a poem... who knows?
          after 9 years at it, 11,740 and so many deleted,
i might grow a pair of ***** about that time and, for
the first time, hear whether what i write is any good.
Lawrence Hall Sep 2016
A Novitiate in the World

     “…you will go forth from these walls,
     but will live like a monk in the world.”

     -Father Zossima to Alyosha in The Brothers Karamazov
      
Every vocation is a novitiate
And every labor a monastic prayer:
Matins and Lauds are sung over coffee,
Then Terce for the plough, the lathe, and the wheel

Sext is gratitude for the midday meal
And None is the hour for downing tools
Soft Vespers is the song of happy homes
‘Til Compline sends all good folk to their beds -

Final vows are taken at death; for now,
Every vocation is a novitiate
Mateuš Conrad Feb 2017
one thing most evident about england,
well...
not that many birch trees (my favourite),
or pines...
    birch treets as said to be the scounts,
they lay the ground for a forest,
    the best i can experience
around here are foxes, no wolves...
and even the foxes as shattered...
  a bit like the badgers...
   mind you, we can have as many objective
truths, and sorta feel proud...
    but i feel numb...
   numbers don't add up in the category
of feeling...
      i should really be standing
at some road juncation:
with excess applause...
          i don't think that's necessary...
    i can only state
a neo-gothic excavation began by
type o negative...
                     and the early death of
the lead singer....
   then there's that excess of attire...
lead, and Pb...
                 as some seach: also contained
within: a leash...
               me in a Turkish shop,
talking to the owner:
Papaturk... how i saved him money
when the local council
               inquired why he provided the caravan
umbrella...
    and hid the public bench...
   5 months i haven't seen him...
     we start speaking and it really is 5 months...
i talk about a month spent in Poland
and -18 temperatures...
  he just keeps referecing 5 months...
i'm only buying 4 cans of beer,
who gives a **** about a biography?
   i don't know if i half pretend or actually am
the one some might call: busy...
           my eyes are elsewhere...
i keep looking for them like i might
turn to finding either heart or Brian...
                one's a stone,
and the other a fat-sponge soaked in porridge...
    yep... type o negative... just
when the jerry spinger show was taking off...
took goth to a new dimension,
i remained clad in the most believable grey
attire... the boring type...
        and it's only that having experienced
a very rare traffic of soul-like expderiences...
did i become to realise
that such experiences are, well,
rather pointless...
   or at least undermining everything
surrounding them...
   god is a great concept, to motivate
the hazy fairies of the suggested approach...
             and when it actually happens,
say: hear angels singing while to rob
the altar of its white cloth and lie under the
altar... checking for sure whether you
are hearing what you're hearing...
             it thus becomes an existential
game, i.e. whether you "hear" or hear,
whether you "heard it" or heard it...
     and whatever experience you may have had,
it's a bit pointless to state that you're
of a cultish calibre...
               it just becomes a bit pointlesss...
you just see selling potatoes
   and Korans as more important...
     then it becomes a case of:
  well: why beging with anything at all?
why not call all the saints mental imbeciles?
   why not begin there?
i say that because, given the teaching,
as in: forgiving your enemies,
has not compass in western society,
western society, if isolated,
would be equivalent to a man / woman talking
to themselves in the streets of Beijing...
          i say i could have had an experience,
but the way i have been itemised, scrutinised,
i'd gladly believe in a crowd of people
nibbling at a mystery...
   actually experiencing a mystery gives you nothing!
i'm all for democracy, all for chaos...
            nothing happened, i didn't exist...
it's easier that way...
    that's why i feel no affinity with western
culture... it's just a load of ******* to me...
            i could have said:
i heard angels singing,
   but given the so called "sanity" membrane
of humanity, to create an omni-entity,
to later discard it...
     evidently there's no precise vector linking
(a) to (b)...
                   in england they call this
case a "mental" illness...
  i really wish my brain had the capacity
to create placebo experiences so pontent
that i'd sorta stop following in my father's
footsteps and becoming a roofer...
then again, he was sentenced to labour
in an industrial complex of steelworks,
look how that frail and senile pope
looked like clinging to his throne,
slobbering with his last speeches, "saintly"
john paul ii...
               i was very fond of pope emeritus,
all the grannies in poland said:
take, that, thing, from the throne...
    no easier way to overcome the saints
than have a pope-saint...
   who really wants the spotlight...
but should be killed by strobe-light and something
translating epilepsy into a stroke...
   as one bound to an exodus
i have no allegiance to the current folklore of
my original people...
    i don't know why i kept the tongue:
apparently such things are hard to erase,
   being first generation, i guess only with
an english wife i'd be able to shut up...
hence my english having a "subconscious"
undercurrent of polish...
             and i live in an anglican country...
    oh there are, there are differences
between a catholic nation and a protestant
nation...
   as there are differences between northen
catholic and southern protestant...
        no wonder i was given a "medical"
    noun  schizoid...
       encompass all of that, in a single generation?
you'd go cuckoo!
                 but then again i'm playing
tennis with a brick wall...
         i don't expect pity, i don't expect empathy,
in just expect nothing, no body...
              we're all bound to wear the shoes
we tire with against the pavement...
  but ridicule is the one thing that ****** me off...
   i'd prefer a comforting joke...
   ridicule is something devoid of what is required
for a passion, even a passion scrutinised and staged
by a stand-up comedian in sarcasm...
   ridule is a bit like science,
already lost to the schism of its counterpart of
falsification...
                    so many truths! so many truths!
          i guess that's what philosophy is about,
apart from being a mediator of science with / vs.
humanism, it's the membrane segregating the two...
      you can clearly cheat with science,
you can ascribe fake statistics with science,
  tell them 1 in 5 women were *****
as part of the **** culture phenomenon,
  when someone else states: more like 1 in 165...
but you can't exactly find a person who
lied about reading Tolstoy's war and peace....
only because a person who has read that
   piece of work: isn't exactly keen to talk about it;
from experience:
   i've read don quixote... and i'm not that keen
on giving a proof of having read it...
that's my own c.c.t.v., not yours.
   you can find that a lot, one a person
reads the equivalent of 5 Islamic columns / elements...
   say.... rather than completing the Hajj...
reading the Brothers Karamazov...
        you really don't get that much
conversation...
  reading a book as the established order
of the 19th century, read in the 21st century...
you start to look at your contempories
a bit suspiciously... like they really are devoid
of acknowledging a worthwhile experience with you...
i started to look at most people, my contemporaries,
at bit like walking into a bathroom showroom...
    i guess i thought about brushing my teeth
and talking to them so they could pick up a scent
of wild strawberries oozing from my mouth...
   i read the **** books, i don't need to compete
for being able to talk about them...
given the books... it's very hard to talk about them...
      you don't really get to talk about
these columns...
          well, unless it's the Koran,
then you really get to talk... you get to shout, even,
and shoot a throng of pigeons while you're at it...
  apologies, no apologies... yada...
or as one puts it (talking queeny beeny) -
   to the great artistic mafia of Poles...
              somehow connected...
   the whole: blood thicker than water...
            oh i'm about to dump this
  mongrel soul and treat it as:
            a Mickiewicz might:
of the tongue, of the body, toward the soul
   cleansing...
               i probably will not like the end
results... but that's better than what i have now...
        i don't like to have a mongrel soul
trapped inside a mono-ethnic body...
              i tried the whole utopian masquerade of
living the dream, i.e. "living the dream",
it didn't exactly work out as western politicians
liked to have hoped it might...
             and that's the really sad part,
i really wished it could have worked...
   now, whenever i think about *******
  someone of my ethnic compendium
whether by body represented, or by soul encouraged...
i just think it's ******...
                 it's like the culture i express
has encouraged that i move to
south africa and **** someone so far removed
from my experiences...
          it really does feel like ******...
        what a sick sick world to be gravity prone to too..
but hey! we have the numbers...
     try to be cosmopolitan for a bit,
whether that's in London, or Edinburgh...
      it soon emerges that the Greek city-states of
modern capitals are surrounded by
****** prone cannibals...
   and more importantly: philistines.
                     sure, for a second you can almost
be persuaded by atheistic arguments...
as those took hold the imagination of people
in the early 21st century...
     i just look at man and see god laughing...
and since the case is: the ugliness of a godless man...
      well...
                    the crucifix is hardly
the N on the compass...
  but since the crucifix aimed at the N of the compass...
the northen barbarians said a joke
that made the crucifix something worth
imitating in the Philipines for a worth of spectacle...
and elsewhere, skog av krux -
oh, it's a very short joke...
         blod ørn... ****** eagle...
   given that so many imitate being crucified...
  can only signify it being a complete and utter joke...
one hour in a järn-jungfru
would make up 2000 years worth of history;
or a scene from a Sioux scalping stone...
    we're ingenious like that...
and yes: blod ørn - blod o(h)-ern...
          i prefer the german blut adler...
   so many moustaches, and other periphenelia
of attire, such as a bow-tie...
  to translate the bewilderment
that a latin inherited grapheme can't
be the smallest unit of sound, given the vowel...
  or how the grapheme became translated
for the worth of diacritical marks...
  æ and œ created
    the basis for diacritical marks being applied...
as with the already stated example...
ørn is derived from œrn...
             tongue-tie twisting like a serpent around
its suffocated prey...
          spine bound to crunch, and defeatist chess...
    we can never say why it was applied
to the signifier: umlaut (ü) - best explanation
is a hidden arithmetic... and the compensation
of omicron-macron...
                       but that's just a guess...
    science is anything but holy...
given the fact that it's so easily manipulated...
                 and falsified, and cheated...
     the samde torturous instruments that defended
religion, are but replaced in the name of science...
          as a life bound to be a freedom,
with labour inside the mind that is relentless,
   and in dire need of change...
where  democracy, or autocracy, as nothing more than
slaves of the arch-cardinal, known as status quo.
Lawrence Hall Feb 2018
“Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.”

                 -Father Zossima in *The Brothers Karamazov


I am Napoleon now.  I want to be
Napoleon, and it is so.  I can be
Anything I want to be – isn’t that
The cleverness you’ve always taught to me?

My truth is the truth, and it must be yours
My self-determination - it obscures
Your bogus science and reality
Fiat and fashion my truth thus secures

I am a poached egg 1 now. That’s what I want –
It’s illegal to argue that - so don’t!

1 The allusion to an argument in C. S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity is well known.
Mateuš Conrad Jul 2016
the rain is collecting onomatopoeia (rare
to find a word with plurality in it
misspelled in the geometric hyper-linear
onomatopoeias) -
ever think of the womaniser bred
from feminism? i know you haven't,
and i know you won't before playing
the Shelley game of test-tubes -
your ideals i'll never die for -
i'd be in the trenches during the first world war,
but your world, i don't want to be part of.
she read Huxley, he played football -
he was an outdoor kind of guy,
she was a moth rather than a butterfly,
a new breed of womanisers has spawned -
turns out my kind are the idiots -
well... hello darling, welcome to the real world.
the rain is pouring out there, god playing
piano, looking for both onomatopoeia and metaphor...
it's drain drain drip... it's hospitalised drain
drain drip and the words that encourage
the wholly vacant - the rain -
imagine the evolutionary tactic approached with
assimilation, the invisible immigrants i call them -
they're there, they always want
the dumb innocent Alexei Karamazov to marry,
but when it comes to the events via Ivan as
hidden wedlock, they want the knights of Charlemagne
to *****-slap them silly for the crown of menopause -
i.e. what if i wasn't a woman and never wished
to be one?! freeze the *****, invoke onto me
a belittled version of ****** - you know you are neo
accomplices, and now defence from feminism will
spare you such association;
just remember why the Nazis loved science,
feminists love it too! more in the extreme -
all that's missing is the eradication of Eastern Europeans -
a fear of Russia - most feminists are in love
with the potentials of science like Nazis -
i kept my phallus in a pickle jar to prove her point
that she wanted to reign over the role of the Paraclete
as the comforter of futures to come -
god she loves the fascists - the womanisers in
feminism and the idiots that marry her -
leave her! let her utilise the full potential of a Frankenstein!
Mateuš Conrad Oct 2015
it’s saturday night and it’s that time of the week
when all the days disappear into diapers of new births squatting
with umbilical chord necklaces,
i open horace’s book, maxim something then close it:
‘too pedantic,’ i think then say it:
pictoribus atque poetis quidlibet audendi semper fuit aequa potestas,
which means i’m living in england when prog-rock was heaven sent -
where did the englishman disappear to, the 1960’s?!
then comes glasgow with bukowski (i found
him there with ivan karamazov) and i like the fact
that i’m drinking whiskey at 3am
with the neighbour’s kids watching from across the patches of green
while i: drum with my fingers against the collar bone,
weep over singing in german, wear sunglasses to dim the night further.
you know, many lucifers came with the crucifixion of words:
******, stalin, mao... jesus (the jews really took the golden calf
seriously now, although it’s pinned up and
it’s very diabolical to say the least - well d'uh...
        torture for iconoclastic reaping of the knees to bend) -
but few satans - who came with the motto: the silent waters
nibble at the shoreline.
my grandmother said that one, all credit to her,
so about me and the lamentation of singing in german,
a little bit of enlightened thinking: brehta - which in silesian polish
means... he’s laughing... very close to schprehta - he’s talking in a foreign language -
good for commerce.
then i forget the strain and feverishness of lying in bed listening
to the clock tick tick tick...
i stand up and undress myself from the monkey suit worried
about tigers and mammoths and fleas...
i stand up, plug in to the ploughing of sounds, smoke a cigarette,
have a drink... and play with the kids across two garden’s worth of length
pretending to be the madman.
Lawrence Hall Feb 2018
“I consecrate you to a great novitiate in the world.”

-Father Zosima to Alyosha in The Brothers Karamazov

The monastery gate opens easily
If it really needs opening at all
The road outside also leads somewhere else
But then it just as often leads back again

The distance measured by a crucifix
Where a weary traveler can pray awhile
Or maybe Harry Bailey’s 1 hamburger joint
A cup of coffee and a cigarette

Offered by a pilgrim in the neon night -
The monastery gate opens easily



1 *The Canterbury Tales
Mateuš Conrad Mar 2016
i know, i should have attempted to collect black sabbath's oeuvre, instead  i missed out on master of reality's song solitude, loved that song, learned to play it apart from the solo, and a girl remarked 'i did't know you could play country music', country?! ah, you mean country as in: sleepy hollow haunted woods and wide open fields and remote routes into isolation? ah, well then yes. shame really, but i'm not going to feel ashamed having collected iron maiden and slayer oeuvres (up to a sensible point), but **** me, that song! and thank god i smashed my guitar on the stones, bye bye, you haunted guitar.*

you know, after reading a lot of books,
esp. in your ****** prime and want of party party,
you digest things a lot easier,
mind you, i used to visit my grandparents
in the summer religiously, a perfect environment
to have read major books:
kierkegaard's either / or, bertrand russell's
history of western philosophy,
dostoyevsky's the karamazov brothers,
bolesław prus' the doll,
don quixote, tatarkiewicz's on joy...
i mean mammoth-sized books (by the way,
mammoth is a word derived from estonian,
and they didn't become extinct as far back
as you might think)... but the perfect environment
to read them... and after you've done that,
and enjoyed a few other books in between
you just turn to writing, and reading book
reviews... like today, i sneezed four times
to protect me against the guilt of laughing
reading a book review, rather than the book itself:
death drive - there are no accidents,
a book about celebrities crashing their cars,
fatal car accidents; enlisted examples refer to:
jayne mansfield, albert camus, james dean,
eddie cochran, mike hailwood, mike hawthorn,
marc bolan, tara browne, isadora duncan.
i guess you just forget reading books,
having testified to yourself an adequate cultural
canon being possessed: well, i mean,
imagine going back to the town of your birth
you left aged 8 and spending time with your
grandparents for a month - you have to
make shroud economics in such scenarios.
Mateuš Conrad Aug 2016
sometimes you drink a bottle of whiskey,
and you're like: there's a poem in me,
there's a poem in me!
but there ain't a poem like there ain't
an oasis in a desert, so
so you take a few snaps, an it feels justifiable
to be taking pictures rather than writing
phonetic encoding, then you worry
about the people reading you with Pythagorean
zeal - baked bean and all -
you read a newspaper and overdose on
Heidegger's dasein - you pick philosophical
problems when your life is easy,
you ignore them when life's complicated enough,
the two never meet, so i don't know
whether fame solves the "problem" of consolidating
universal relief with particular agitation of
cared for interest - being famous is hard to craft,
i'm not aiming for any fame other than posthumous fame...
the dust has to settle - with poetry:
the naked narrative - no clothing for the the narrator
to dress in with his Karamazov brothers....
just nakedness to mind -
against the coastline erections of grammar this
Odyssey is bound to impregnate with news' reels
of a shipwreck number dead...
i hate newspapers, like i hate Asian brothels of
power... i hate western media like i hate
Iranian despots... they're the same to me...
they both wrestle with authoritarian exertion -
they're not that different... one and the same
for me....
so, after drinking a bottle of whiskey you sometimes
think there's a hibernating poem in you...
you want to create art that's simply lazy and people
can have it as canvas and think their part out...
it's such a shame that poetry is not equipped for
technology for the masses, but rather well equipped
to entertain the aristocracy when the radio wasn't
invented... i bemoan poetry,
the lacking orchestra... i'm jealous of other art forms,
not as a person, but as a person concerned with poetry...
we only invest our entire lives for the medium
while others detach themselves from their encrypted medium
with the price of oil-paints to mind... or the price of
pianos... never did poetry entertain the crowd,
always the minded singleton of our mutual concerns...
as said, the existential tactic is anti-Darwinism -
it's hardly ever Swedish... teach evolution with the Vikings...
don't be prone to erase pretty much all of history
to make a standing ovation... for celestial t.n.t. -
but it doesn't matter... i just like to experience
pristine Alpine mineral water cascade of peace -
i'll hardly get it... i never thought i would...
from a wholly physical experience i became a wholly
mental experience... you can knock twice for
Santa Clause's response with what i'm saying...
i'd like to return to my fully engaged body...
but there were a few that said i should preach
the Christian message of forgiving enemies without
enacting the duty of expressed lawfulness -
because, i mean, what's the point of forgiving your
enemies after you enacted the full compensation
of law, and prison, and reprimand?
Cain walked free! shallow aesthetics,
pointless diatribe of forgiveness for the photo opportunity...
many of the death row inmates would rather
hear the guillotine drop like a lapping tongue
than hear the phrase: rot in hell -
preserving human rights has its limits -
people simply became thieves in the case of capital
punishment, they robbed criminals of their right
to experience the adrenaline rush...
all acts of suicide don't have this luxury -
mere cognition does not produce the biological
effects that actions beyond thinking do,
suicide is worse than capital punishment,
there's no adrenaline involved, no spontaneity.
i think capital punishment is a clearly set-out
Christmas present... keeping someone locked up
on death row is like battling premature *******...
it's not human... it's zoological...
i vouch to say most would rather have it done
away with in the manner of seconds passing
rather than the billions of years it took for stars
to form, or as in their case... a conscience.
look how many people are trying to revive
the **** euthanasia regime... esp. with motor-neuron
disease... they're begging for it...
not even a cubic metre of a promise of heaven
will equal the ably limb'ed their time on
this earth, known in Dante's theology as purgatory.
Mateuš Conrad Jan 2023
Kaiser Clown

borrowed shoe:
stolen foot.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

auf die frei zungen ich kennt -
   (of the three tongues i know) -
ich kennt zwei
    und kennen eine:
    (i know two and know of one):

auf die frei: ich lieben dieser
                        äußerst
(of the three: i love this utmost)...
                      
    in my youth i spent a good deal of time
watching Disney's Robin "fox" Hood
cartoon in German, somehow it rubbed off
on me...

      i was never born with anything even remotely
resembling the love of the English language...
can there be a love akin to the Anglophile
that excludes the love of the language?
i love everything English except for the language...

each day i'm slowly planning my escape
into womb of the mother of the isles that
was first spoken in Saxony...
         tired Bavarians? tired Pomeranians?
but the Saxons were a landlocked people
who gave them the courage and adventurous
spirits to claim the seas with more than
oars and steer the winds with
sails?

      English didn't come to me as some
poor Romanian kid listening to current pop music
or back then, early 1990s... movies from Hollywood...
i didn't want to speak gimmicks...
i was ****** into the deep-end of speaking this
tongue by starting off a mute...
even with the influences of cartoon network
none left a too great impression on my ears
as the German version of the Disney cartoon
of Robin Hood...

   even after watching the English version many years
later... i can still hear the German dubbing
and i can't escape it...

auf die frei zungen ich spre(s)chen es
mit ein konkurs auf substantive...
(of the three tongues i speak it
with a bankruptcy of nouns)...

        at least i have made progress with predispositions
and conjunctions:
i am better coordinated...
but how... how can one be an Anglophile
without a love of the language?
i can adore the way the English care for
the countryside... how traffic is managed...
how taxes are collected how foreign cultures
can slowly integrate and everyone can feel
somehow, seemingly at home:
even if the natives do not for a while...
but without a love for the language
i cannot be a true Anglophile...

                the beauty of Shakespeare disintegrates
when a simple German neo-folk is played to me...

   in der zwölften stund (sage vom untersberg)

- in der zwölften stunde -
at the twelfth hour
- wenn die raben fliegen um den berg -
when the ravens fly around the mountain
- tun sie lautstark kunde -
they loudly proclaim
- von des kaiser macht und tagewerk -
the emperor's power and legacy
- solang der kaiser schlafet -
as long as the emperor sleeps
- tief drunt' im dunklen bergensschloß -
deep down there in the dark mountain *****
- solang fliegen auch die raben -
the ravens will fly
- hoch über seinem marmelschloss -
high above this castle of marble...

   no words in English, and their meaning make much
for... however simple they might be in German:
the simple fact that... they're spoken in German!
das: sie sind gesprochen im Alt...
    
it is only natural that i sought out the origins of
the English tongue in German,
as much as i am not interested in the etymology
of designated word:
i could never be this youth exposed to too much
English culture wishing to sing pop songs
or utter single line pin-pointers from
films: ehrilch mein schatz,
   ich tun nicht ein pflege
   (frankly my dear,
    i don't give a **** / care)
    or... ich wille wieder (i will be back)...

so the indentations of learning English in a later
developmental stage of language acquisiton
didn't rub off on me: as it does on people
with accents of their mother tongue
who never lose it... and merely culturally appropriate
English as a spoken tongue of culture
and not a "cultured" tongue...
native tongue: a shape-shifting accent
of an educated "class"...
    even today! West Ham was playing Everton,
Toffees... ******* Scousers... Liverpool dwelling folk...
two younglings asked me to speak to one
of the managers who took their banner away
expressing disgruntlement with
how the football club was being managed...
huh?! am i still in England...
i have an easier time understanding Scots
than i have understanding anyone from
Manchester or Liverpool!
i can't understand them!
maybe that's why the Scots are like the Irish:
they come from a proud literary history...
oh... i spoke to an Irishman today at
the football game... woke up at 3am to come
to the game... i understood him perfectly...
i can understand a Scot and an Irishman...
i wouldn't be able to tell you an Irishman
from a North Irishman...
but i could tell you decipherable English
of the Scot and the Irishman from
an undecipherable, local, "polyglot"
mishandling of the English language with
such local accents and idioms as that of
Liverpool or Manchester...
can't understand the *******: even if i tried...

obviously i can't relate to a love of Russian...
as they might say in Poland:
better 6 years of **** rule: by fire...
than the subsequent how many decades it was
under the rule of the Soviet rule: by ice...
a slow burn of war is more demoralising
than a quick stretch of spandex and all hell
and all fury and all hearts united
than this scuttling of rats and shadow-bullets
shot from shadow-pistols!

of course i would naturally side with the Germanic
side of my upbringing:
i have no itch for rekindling any Russian brainwashing!
and i know that the Germanic side of "things"
has become a breeding ground for feral creature-oids
that resemble as best cuckoldry and at worst
the shadiest parts of the ***-scenes in Amsterdam...
but... bone-headed Russians and their
pride... that Russian pride... it's one of those intoxication
liquid i want to drink any of!

hmm...
   perhaps because i know English as a utility,
there's nothing romantic in it for me:
i buy bread with it, i ask: i used to ask for directions
in it, i ask someone in that conventional
formal way how they are and hope for the less *******
that most Americans reply with: how all is dandy
and it's all Texan blue above and not
the grey of the island skyline...

i did think for a moment: i should haven taken a step
further and attached myself to Swedish...
or Norwegian...
but then that's what a German would do...
as an Anglo-Slav it was only natural for me to succumb
to the allure of German...
the natural dynamo...
i fall on German and the German falls on Swedish...
or Danish...
**** knows who the Scandinavians fall on for
inspiration... the Finns?!
after all: the Finns are somewhat Scandinavian:
more Inuit people than...
        
one is a tongue one learned: or, was rather thrown
into learning...
but it's unlike a learning from it being passed on...
no one passed English down to me...
i'm a first generation immigrant...
i learned the tongue in the same time
as my parents learned it...
unlike all those 2nd generation immigrants
who were born in this land
and learned this tongue outside the dynamic
of their parents learning the language:
the only difference being...
i kept the mother tongue, the native, intact...
by refusing my parents' claim that:
if i only spoke English at home,
the English i acquired from being schooled
in the English educational system...
if i forwent me speaking my native tongue
to them: their English would somehow improve...
that they would, somehow, miraculously not have
a foreign accent!
as a child i picked up three majors things...
Catholicism wouldn't take me... i might have been
baptised without my consent...
but i had all the necessary obligations to
give or not give my consent when it came to confirmation:
i haven't been confirmed... i head too many
Gnostic Heresy texts as a teenager...
their idea that somehow i would mistreat my native tongue
in order for them to gain something for it...
like most Pakistani 2nd generation children...
perhaps, maybe... a few slip through the netting...
who still pride themselves on knowing Urdu...
most? with their loss of the mother tongue pick up
their own idiosyncratic accents within the confines
of English: they are literally children robbed
of bilingualism by their parents...

i mastered it and by mastering it found it with
shortcomings that only the tongue i was born
with could expose...

today this alpha looking male sat next to me on the train
and spread his legs... smiling... listening to music...
**** me mate... how much spreading do you need to do?
what i found:
poetry, best read when commuting...
i'm building up a complimentary package for a friend
of mine... she sent me macadamia nut shells
and dried pineapple and honey and...
a feather... i said to her: i will not send you anything
before i compliment a feather you sent me with a feather
of my own... i went cycling two days prior
and: imagine my luck! some magpie... ELSTER...
was either shedding her feathers or was in a fight...
i picked up about half a dozen ELSTERGEFIEDER...
magpie feathers...
on the train... you're better off reading a book
of poems than a newspaper...
the optics are much more clarifying...
none of the claustrophobia and oczopląs
               of a tightly-knitted (printed) column or opinion
paragraph... spread out text...
  poetry books as an alternative to reading newspapers
in transit... that's how i imagine "it"...
once upon a time newspapers were tightly knitted
beyond the scope of the printed paragraph:
it would require the solitudes of Sundays
to sit in calm and quiet and read them...
these days: that tabloid press with headers
and exploding wordings for the newly acquired
people of literacy: the addition of pictures...

nothing new, therefore nothing old...
mein herzenskummer ist was giBt
                   der Sonnenaufgang seine
      rinnsal auf schüchtern farben...
und! unt!
        der Sonnenuntergang seine
    busen-auf-verkörperung:
                auf: das nie vergeht!

                   how easily the displaced spiders...
turn to new architecture of the spider web
should their former and no sooner
than sooner: distraught with the havoc
of a man's quill of fingers having to differentiate
walking into a spider-web confusing it
with: are my eye-lashes camel's now?!

some shifts at work are terrible,
esp. when working with two females...
everything is wrong...
even telling after-work jokes is wrong...
talk of fish fingers... loads of ketchup...
that's wrong too...
top it all of this one is joking about the other
and the other is lesbian
and she has a new girlfriend
and fish-fingers: well... i am a man and i never
equated the smell of ****** with fish...
i know that tadpoles and ****...
but never fish... fish fingers... *******...
ketchup? i joked: that time of the month?
no laughter... no laughter...
if women are joking about their horrid ****
i better not be asked to, ******* joke!

better working with mute men on zombie mode...
i'm already a year behind having my social medial
stalked... sure... they can stalk me when they
figure out my middle name and some Slovak
diacritical markers... not until then...
just because i look silly when ice-skating
and everyone has seen the video doesn't
mean i'll give up my internet presence so easily: so...
i have a project aligning myself to German
so close to my heart i can find it forgiving...
to desire in the heart-of-hearts
to: **** this tongue enough to speak it when drinking!
because i find that Wilhelm was sort of right...
about how Germany was no empire
expect something on the continent
that gobbled up a part of
the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth...
because the Germans were an established people
and there was no sailing spirit in them...
after all: one might be inclined to think they
wanted to upkeep the romantic, familial orientation
of Christianity...
but the powers, the colonial powers at be...
whether the French the English or the Spanish...
who does, Christianity belong to, these days?
one might have asked the same question
before Christianity spread to the Nord Lands...
prior to its prior occupation with the Syrians
and North Africans and the Greeks...
Romans as a side joke?
who are the current mass of Christianity if not
the former colonies of the English
the Spanish and the French?
i know of Christians in South America from
the cross being dumped by the Spaniards with
vain hope... vain hope of the French in Africa...
and the English in Africa... and North America...

at least the Germans didn't... spread this...
Christianity might be allocated to about 12 individuals
within the confines of a single generation...
beyond that? money-grabbing money-laundering:
a religion with only the sole focus on LOGOS
while reading up on Zhuangzi you have several
other, dutiful terms to meditate on...
i might have been smitten by Hindu thinking before
being doubly smitten by Taoist dialogues...
one still remains a categorical imperative...
outside the realm of dialogue:
the best way you can help the world is
to help the world forget you and you in turn forget
the world...
obviously i'm doing X and counter-X...
i'm writing... by extension of writing i "want"...
or is that: "i" want to be remembered...
but thinking is no telekinesis nor is speaking
any telepathy...
             i speak... like today... i get this oddity of looks...
first she asks me: oh what should i reply
to my friend... just been to a Hen-do...
strippers? oh sure... there were strippers...
first time married? no... second... so what's the ******* point
of a hen-do? cluck x2 laid eggs x4?!
  
so her friend sends me a photograph of her newly bought
dress... laces... or whatever the ******* call
a would-be reimagined-curtain...
i tell her: she could pull it off... if she was a size 0...
the lace could really add dimension and curves to
a thin body...
to hide the skeleton...
but you know what would work for her?
a meringue dress...
you know the type? a one piece...
cut just above the ***** line...
simple: smoothed over... no patterns...
all the way from the cleavage to the feet...
so then she shows me her wedding dress...
it cost her £130 while her friend paid over £2000...
exactly what i was describing...
she just sent an AWW and tried to deflate the question,
or simply avoid it...
yeah... she looks like a flayed torso...
because... SHE's fat...

           eat all you want and as much (perhaps)
but at least burn it off...
if there's no work in the fields:
then there's no work in the fields...
but there's enough rubber burning on the bicycle
to escape the monotone drudgery of
urban living... as i found today,
upon Hook Lane cycling up to Chigwell Row...
there's no need to eat excessively...
no comfort in all that fat without
a leather chair or enough warm clothing...

treating people as these existential morons:
conceptualizing the non-existence of free-will is one thing,
another: to debrief them: life is without agency...
a choice-less Darwinism where
jelly-fish are somehow automated: sprouts:
well... no other life could or would ever be!
people without free-will is one thing:
the shackles of the dynamic of choice...
one choice sets you free, subsequent choice shackles
and inescapable binary of freedom-no-freedom...
science governing the flip of a coin...
but... people, robbed of any sort of agency?!
of self-authority over themselves:
so, so easily mangled and mishandled leaving
their fate unto... no fate: double sure...
unto others?!
i watched a few horror movies in my lifetime...
none seem as horrifying as this +mundaneness
of the horrible leftover: forgotten...

i must have a Germanic attitude toward these matters...
i was born into the living spirit of the ****** tongue,
the membrane in situ staging the conflict
of Rome vs. Greece...
or Germany vs. Russia...
i see no end to it...
i was born from the Germans trying to burn out
the Jews from "my" lands
while the Russians trying to subdue the flames
all the while...
i was still borne from a history that required
a solitary antagonist...
less so an protagonist of solitude...
either way: i was going to slither my way through...
like water like serpents...
wie wasser wie schlangen...

mein herz bricht aus hungrig flammen
als ich stürzen blind Samson's
already toppled temple
            
i know i that i will not write the sort of beauty
that's poetry that's everything that's
Zbigniew Herbert's
Godly Claudius
the Game of Mr. Cogito
Mr. Cogito observes his face in the Mirror
the Seventh Angel
   (my favourite of the angels listed?
Dedrael - the apologist and cabalist)
   to name but a few of the poems...

it brings such relief that i can't bring such
beauty into this world: perhaps if my mind was
not muddled by the utility of English
and my romance with German -
perhaps but only perhaps:
i don't even know why i started to write poetry:
maybe it was my lowest ebb
psychotic running on steam and pretend
legs between Edinburgh, Glasgow,
London, Dover, Athens, Belgrade,
Katowice...
                    walking into a bookshop buying
a copy of Rumi's verses...
buying Dostoyevsky's the Brothers Karamazov
and, just by chance... Bukowski...
what was so supposedly special and hiding
within the poetry of this man?
absolutely nothing: i was mad enough
to try it then and to keep at it:
not really knowing why...
  
compared to Zbigniew Herbert i write trash:
perhaps i read too much fiction,
even autobiographical prose: prose in general:
i don't know how to shut up the ten mouths
on the tips of my fingers but
i know how i can seem menacing
on a shift at work... hood pulled over my head
leather gloves squeezing each knuckle
asked by the atypical extroverted woman
whether something is wrong...
pulling my hood up, smiling, yet still being
compared to the grim reaper...
jokes aside: someone is counting the time...

a welcome break from Knausgaard...
this little safe-haven of poetry read in transit...
finally! something that's not mine
and not in English!

that's the terrible difference between men and women...
going to the Fulham shift i was sitting
behind three women... i'm guessing two were
newly arrived brides of war from Ukraine
who also picked up a Thai-surprise bride...
birds sound chirpier and more pleasant to talk
to... sitting behind them reading my little poetry
book... with a magpie's feather for a bookmark...
the women talked... about?
photographs... filters... instagram models...
plastic surgeries of people wanting to look
like their photographs...
impossible dreams! dreams of women...
and some womanized-men...
on my way back... same book same bookmark
and a young man sat down next to me...
put on some decent music i could
make out through the headphones...
angled his horizon to look over my shoulder
as to why i was reading a book with so much
open space and so little words...
not any fiction, not some constipated prose
of imaginary conversations...
and i could feel his leg pressing against mine...

perhaps i am not gay but i can't imagine
being friends with a woman...
i truly can't... there's either *** for me: with women...
or there is friendship with men...
with each man i meet i can achieve this
transcendent: otherwise unpackaged will
of subduing and seduction that only a woman
can provide me... but a conversation with a woman
is painful: at least for the majority of times:
there might be a special place for a woman
who might not necessarily:
but is probably older than me and shares
the same sentiments as me...
probably lives far away and thinks that hand-writing
is like exposing herself all naked...
will go out of her way to send me a feather of a bird
from over 3000miles away...

while i will send her a necklace with a single amber
stone on it... or i will send her a crab's pincer with a hole
drilled in it and ask her to buy some leather-string
to have herself a second necklace...

at work Stephanie the supervisor had to make it adamant
for me alone to know that i would be her Alpha...
whatever the hell that meant...
Alpha... well yeah... because i do try to ensure that
everyone is treated fairly...
the Asians boys of Bangladesh and Pakistan caved it...
this work or this cold of England
finally bit them...
     it's an unrewarding work if you don't have
an escape plan, like i do...
i'm always flying to other pursuits outside of this
work... customer service... being polite to people
that might not be polite to you or simply ignore you...
but even my standards i thought they were
taking it too far...
but i made a pact with them...
they took out a bottle of Jack Daniels and poured
out shots... if there's going to be a snitch among
us... it will be the man who does drink...
so when asked if i'd like a shot i replied: why not!
the weather calls for it... whiskey to warm up!
mixer? oh no no... straight!
plus... you can't mix Jack Daniels with Fanta, can you?
a few new colts were bullied into peer pressure
of silence, asked if they wanted a drink: said no...
me? i had a drink... i'm not snitching...
well i did when Stephanie was coming round
when i just said: nothing about the drinking...
but if there are 7 of us standing in one place...
but i'm the only one giving any customer service
by giving directions and good-evenings while
they're just standing talking to each other,
having a good time? apparently some people still
can't internalise being drunk for their own
self-amusement, drinking is somehow: getting together...
clearly these boys haven't been alone
and drank a litre of whiskey each and every single
night for months on end...

what really bugged me is when they took out a spliff
and smoked it between the four of them...
even as the customers were coming to see
Tottenham beat Fulham 1 - nil...
oh for ****'s sake... it's one thing having a cheeky sip of
whiskey on a cold day to warm up...
but to also smoke marijuana on a shift?
in full view and easily scented air of winter
before customers?
these guys don't want this ****** job...
thank god none of them are either bus drivers
or train drivers or plumbers for that matter!
maybe doctors who forgot to take out a pair of
scissors from a patient's body when
the patient is getting stitched up?

the worst i ever did was drink the night before
and sobered up on my way to work...
ah... not to mention that one time this
girl tried to scout her paranoia from prior relationships
with abusive alcoholic boyfriends onto me:
a man she just met... pampered with an array
of chemicals whether that be a cologne or this alcohol
containing face spray...
who i later tried to sooth by bringing her my homemade
weisserwein... cloudy... like any weisserbier...
chirpsin'... 3 way conversation conspiracies...
until the lie stood on dwarf's legs rather than stilts...
and to think: no i wasn't thinking seriously about
getting into a relationship with her...
she tried to get me fired for "apparently" drinking
on the job! a person she just me...
neurotic ******* *****... it's good that i showed her
what she would never, ever... get...

the difference between men and women...
the shift finished... prior to finishing we already knew
that there was some major ****-up on the tube...
the signals went down...
no Circle line, no Hammersmith & city services...
no services on the District line
from East Ham to Earls Court...
ergo? you'd think there might be a northbound
service to Edgware Rd. from Putney Bridge...
nope... Earls Court is a 4 x 4 junction...
sure... there was the southbound service
from Putney Bridge to Wimbledon...
and whatever service that's a station after
Earls court toward Richmond and Ealing Broadway...
as i'm guessing from Upminster to East Ham
and from one station after Earls Court
to Edgware Rd....
this girl was supposed to come with me
to Stepney Bridge from either Romford or Chadwell
Heath for the shift...
i was 15 minutes late because i felt like getting some
tea and an almond croissant...
she was? an hour late...
by the end of the shift when the transport invonvenience
was building up we went for our debrief
and she was all irritated in the eyes
when she wanted to get an Uber to Hammersmith
or whether it was she thought about going
without telling me: where that would cost her £50+
quid...
                  so when i told her...
i'm not going down the Putney High Street rail connection
because: (a) look at the ******* congestion
of the crowd and (b) i don't need to go to *******
Waterloo because that's ******* south of the river...

mmm hmm mmm... what, should we do?
i told you... i'm either walking or getting the bus 220
to Hammersmith...
debriefing over: she stayed behind for banter
and all the things that hinder an extrovert,
esp. a female extrovert... un-decisive, fatalist,
everything just ******* happens by some whisper
from astrology...
    Aquarius said to Libra that the waters were
about to spill... i ****** off from the stadium
like a hart... shook hands with the managers
thank you goodnight... as i was walking out
toward Hammersmith some young stewards were
shuffling really quickly it all looked very much like
they might be scratching vinyl...
i asked... you heading to Hammersmith?
yes yes... see! that's i like to see!
male to male camaraderie...
we have this unconscious motif of: from *****
you came to ***** you shall return...
it's a bit senseless to go to war these days...
less senseless when you're trying to get from
point A to point B...
there was about 40 of us running for the bus...
amongst us? 1 woman...
***** AHOY!
   obviously i left this girl behind...
her other option was asking one of the managers
to giver her a lift... ******* free-loader...
by the time the manager would have clocked out
all the other parties i would have wasted an hour...
just to get a lift... and then what?
stranded with her? even though we weren't going
to the same point B?
   i left with the *****-mentality... happy too:
because i could read my poetry book in the prized
possession of solitude... and no solitude...
because given the hour... something freakish was
bound to happen on the train or tube...
and it did... some proper English boys talking about
not wanting to take a nightcap in Romford heading
all the way to Shenfield joked when this guy started running
down the train carriage...
and those SKANKS so drunk who were blocking
the doors: subsequently delaying us
subsequently not catching their train blah blah...

well... just as today happened: talking so freely to men,
boys, young men, first point of "concern" / conversation?
establishing "taboos" or habits...
you smoke? you drink? first time you got drunk...
when did you start smoking marijuana first?
and then a natural progression into...
so... what music do you like... just... so naturally?
with women? even with Francesca,
this butcher boy of a lesbian...
it's a cul de sac sort of conversation...
she only talks about herself,
even today i received a text from her...
i broke up with Natalie... broke up i.e. she met her
on Tinder... she stayed round her house
for three nights... Natalie made her lunch for
work one time... cooked dinner another time...
4 days and nights they dated... already broke up...
there you go... Tinder-dating-shoplifting hearts...
window-shopping romances...

free market capitalism? sure... but not when
capitalism overstretches its influence
and we're worse off than the despairing existentialist:
PHILOSOPHERS of the 19th... the precurosor
fabric... i'd say the 20th century existentialist
philosophers had it easier...
but anyone in the 21st century, thinking, even remotely:
would be hard pressed not to express something
of substance bugging all of us:
no great war, no great upheaval,
proxy wars, the Thespian dictatorship over all
the other arts (with the exception of pop music, perhaps)
and the journalistic juggernaut of the quickened
availability of almost anything and nothing...
the free market of capitalism having invested
in creating this... Frankenstein in pieces...
this IKEA ******* LEGO model of a Frankenstein:
but at least Frankenstein bothered to construct
the entire monster rather than creating this
shattered Pandora's box... left in pieces and in
some realisation of a Copernican West...
in a Copernican East... Copernican "west"?
there's a "west" without a setting sun?!
up in outer space?
                         capitalism all fine and dandy:
but not outside the realm of a couple worrying about
how many kettle and toasters sets they will
have to buy during the year or even the wardrobe
needs revisions, or whether it might be worthwile
to change the wallpaper in the living room,
or what movie to watch on a date night at the cinema...
all of that is gone when the free market made
us profile ourselves... with some of us being pushed
so far as to fake cubist like pictures of ourselves
and subsequently implement plastic surgery to
double-fake ourselves...

the shrapnel-shelving-of-self...
it's like people are a library with no alphabetical order:
free market on psychology, morphed beyond
any concern for dreams: if there were any
as the luxury of the Freudian rich...
this... what happened to historiology in the modern
sense as stressed by Heidegger?
a study of history of the people by the people
or at least by individuals... morphed into this grotesque
pop psychology: archeological mapping back
to the primordial Pharisee of Ape and Aping...
farce: Darwin's Curtain of History...
   will we ever remember the beauties and horrors
of centuries from the 16th to the 19th?
no... everything of said years is nil: null...
because the ape's origins quickly morphed into
the man hunched over a microwave adamant in his
belief that... the carbon footprint of producing
a kilogram of chicken meat somehow, somehow would
"save the planet" than producing a kilogram
of tomatoes... given that a kilogram of tomatoes would
only yield a fraction of the necessary calories
than a kilogram of meat... and still the growing
of one kilogram of chicken would cost the planet
less than growing a kilogram of tomatoes...
who needs tomatoes in winter?!
eat, your, ******* root vegetables! carrots boyo! carrots!
but chickens don't need solar energy, nor suntans,
nor greenhouses... chickens cluck just as much
in winter as in summer... and eggs are a year round
product... plus you only need a barn in winter
to keep chicken!
tomatoes rot... chickens? they grow old and die...
until they grow old they still produce eggs...
and when they die? you eat them...
you can't exactly call a chicken rotten if it isn't already
days X already dead, can you?
it might not be as fresh... but...
ugh... no wonder

Zbigniew Herbert: from mythology (of Rome) -

   in the end only the superstitious
neurasthenics carried in their pocket a little figurine
made from salt, resembling the god of irony;
since then there wasn't a greater god.

then the barbarians came, they too greatly prized
the idol of irony.
           they pounded it with their heels and sprinkled
it into their dishes.

no clay-monster of the Levant can intimidate
me now!
not armed with these words:
let us witness the great divorce of man from woman!
let us watch!
pray... let us be brothers and friends and
secretly wishing we were lovers:
in the thinning air... let us talk about the strange
glow above the Thames hanging over Kew Gardens
as if: as i said to him:
as if the sunset still claiming an eye
in the night...
      what woman? what woman could i share
this romantic conversation with?
my interaction with women is so blatant so cold
so forced to claim the male in me and the woman
in her that it's only ******...
oh sure... i was going to the brothel...
but i was coming home already late...
i had two pairs of socks on, drawers, trousers...
a tank-top a shirt gloves and a thick coat...
by the time i would get out of all those layers
and have a quick shower...
half an hour i would have paid for would have become
nothing more than 15 minutes...
not enough time to get a hard-on
of being in the mood...
i already had more than ***...
a conversation... and no woman has yet to actually
provide me with one...
perhaps we are not in the trenches...
but men have always managed without women...
for as long as time knows...

a shift prior... at West Ham... ******* guy with a bald
head and a face as endearing as a plump baby
we great with a handshake that turns into
a thumb against thumb contest and a hug
tells me that i should come and find him at Cavern Cottage
and he'll sort me out with some free food...
hey presto i go and find him
i get a free steak and ale pie...
i know it's a one off...
    we already get discounts for burgers from the burger
van... but it's nice to give a reminder when
being invited...

     we do our rounds in the park...
among the Pakistanis and the Bangladeshi who at first
thought i was British when asked:
oh no... i'm not British... an Anglo-Slav at best...
from that lineage of Anglo-Saxons...
the Saxons who came among post-Rome rule
Britain and mingled or not mingled
with the local Celtic and Welsh and Britton populace...
i'm the second wave that didn't make it
because the British Empire collapsed
and the eastern Europeans were not too dearly minded
in the history of the British Empire...
but they know that i'm from Poland
so when asked: where are you from? there...
and "there"... but i've been living here since i was
7 so there's no "born and bred" argumentation
with me and those in your ethnic stratum
concerning any anti-Pakistani villification
of those in the "upper-castes"... blah blah...
they know... while the three of us walked around
this 40 year old Yugoslav woman
who escaped the Yugoslavian collapse of
circa 1992... starts talking as i switch her around
so she can have a walk with us to warm up her legs
from standing stiff still...
where are you from? oh... here...
i'm not going to tell her what i told the boys...
not after she deflects my attraction to her
by paying more attention to the Pakistani boy
of 20... i'm closer to her age...
but... then she does this sick thing of asking
me to hold her empty cups of tea that
have an unused teabag in it and some dried milk...
oh... right? i'm going to be your waiting boy?

******* testing women... this woman is past her prime...
i know it she thinks she can "test" my patience
by me being her ******* pet-shop-boy?!
fine! fine...
the more and more i talk to women
the more i find them diametrically opposed
to any sort of psychologically asexual universalism of:
ecce ****...
                 women have: and will have to...
sexualize everything from Aristotle to Zeno...
there was once a maybe female version of Aristotle if
only the: give me the drill... i need a bigger hole to see through:
these eyes aren't large enough...
if only there wasn't an oppressive patriarchy...
the oppressive "patriarchy" of autistic geniuses?!
oh... that one... the sort of men cowering
from female sexuality?
  wow! how oppressive!
                    magnificently oppressive!
we all should be so magnificently oppressed by the man
who discovered the wheel by meditating
the O(micron) - what came first?
the wheel or the omega, or was it the sun?
if Prometheus brought down fire... by teaching man
that scratching flint against flint could illuminate
the cave and give man a second womb of poison-fire...
before the forests turned to ash...
before Pompeii's negative of a whiplash of history...

i tried loving women... i loved them for:
the many months i would rather not use
the fingers of both my hands for...
    absolutely un-relate-able creatures...
what *** beside that of female would whisper in
man's heart to leave their minds without
reason to stage the Trojan War
                        or bring architecture to kneel:
like Xerxes: but the madness of Xerxes was rather
beautiful wanting to lash the Aegean into submission
rather than that little Pharaoh ***** who might
have said: best to chisel down a rock face
and glue together sand with egg-whites and spit
into bricks and polish up a craggy mountain:
lest we forget: from a lineage of a people
that once said: let us "reinterpret" the mountains!
pyramids...
                at least the South American tribes invented
the pyramid as an altar... not a tomb...
but we're no smarter than they were dumber:
the myopic-vision strategy of the vantage point
of: what came prior... with hindsight...
but hindsight only works in reverse...
the unmistakeably irreversible past
within the confines of the motto: the terrible
has already happened!
  
                       and some variation of the historically
terrible isn't already happening,
on some microscopic level?
                           not if / not yet?!
                                             hardly...

poetry is air and not the prose of water...
i am stranded between wanting to breathe air
and at the same time more in need to drink water:
no wonder i cannot rest with merely breathing air...
if only i were to breathe air and leave my efforts
with so much nuance as to allow others to breathe
the same air... alas i am like that saying of Heraclitus...
i'll pour you a glass of water
i have prior to drank... leave it for you to drink a day
later: it will not be the same water that i have drank...
i wish i could write like these words might be air...
but it's... aqua post scriptum et plus aqua
post scriptum ad fluenta...

                    verschließen dein augen:
    sehen wieder... immer wieder:
                               bis: es gibt
                             nicht freude:
noch aufschub träumen...
                              kalt silber-rasierer
                                 schneiden auf
mondklären... nacht als auch wirklichkeitstoff.
Lawrence Hall Nov 2020
Something About Life

                                      “Live.  Just live.”

                               -Yuri in Doctor Zhivago

The plane lifted, and the cheering was wild
And then pretty quickly the pilot said
“We are now clear of Vietnamese
Territorial waters.”  There was joy,
Even wilder cheering for most, and quiet
Joy for a few.  For me, Karamazov
To hand, peace, and infinite gratitude.
“I’m alive,” I said to myself and to God,
“Alive.  I will live, after all.”  To read, to write,
Simply to live.  Not for revolution,
Whose smoke poisons the air, not for the war,
Not to withdraw into that crippling self-pity
Which is the most evil lotus of all,
But to live.  To read, to write.
                                            But death comes,
Then up the Vam Co Tay, or now in bed,
Or bleeding in a frozen February ditch;
Death comes, scorning our frail, feeble, failing flesh,
But silent then at the edge of the grave,
For all graves will be empty, not in the end,
But in the very beginning of all.
A poem is itself
Mateuš Conrad Dec 2015
a poet passes the baton / olympic flame to a poet in his posthumous work, not the work he was alive to be able to recite, it all happened with a book published in 1999, when its author died in 1994; the book was bought in glasgow, along with dostoyevky's the brothers karamazov (yes, i read it, ivan is my favourite), and rumi's collection of sufi verse.*

i dreamnt this night that i was at
my first poetry reading,
and due to the nerves i suddenly
turned dyslexic - which is odd,
because when i was leaving high
school aged 18, i did a reading
with parkinson's hands in front
of the teachers and the whole
of my year group and managed
to pull off the pronunciation.
Lawrence Hall May 2017
Memorial Day III: Something about Life

“Live.  Just live.”

-Yuri in Doctor Zhivago

The plane lifted, and the cheering was wild
And then pretty quickly the pilot said
“We are now clear of Vietnamese
Territorial waters.”  There was joy,
Even wilder cheering for most, and quiet
Joy for a few.  For one, Karamazov
To hand, peace, and infinite gratitude.
“I’m alive,” he said to himself and to God,
“Alive.  I will live, after all.”  To read, to write,
Simply to live.  Not for revolution,
Whose smoke poisons the air, not for the war,
Not to withdraw into that crippling self-pity
Which is the most evil lotus of all,
But to live.  To read, to write.
                                            But death does come,
Then on the Vam Co Tay, or now in bed,
Or bleeding in a frozen February ditch;
Death comes, scorning our frail, feeble, failing flesh,
But silent then at the edge of the grave,
For all graves will be empty, not in the end,
But in the very beginning of all.
Joseph John Jun 2014
I built myself up then I fell right off,
And I did with the characteristic passion of a Karamazov.

I don’t know where I get these ideas, but they fill up the room.
They must be born of a mutilated peasant womb.

They stampede and conquer my days.  At night they melt down my walls.
I don’t dare to leave, because I know they’re apt to ambush the halls.

They  may come quiet, but they build to thunder.
They spike their wagon wheels and throw me right under.

There I lay trapped and beaten.  A born winner, dead and defeated.
I never stood a chance against the poisonous egg and *****.

The things I want to want I never do desire.
I burn to be the light, but only ever play with fire

This time I flew  too close.  A moth-brain in my head,
I simply took a nap, and that killed my father dead.

Am I guilty if I wanted him to die?
Am I guilty if I sleep well tonight?
Am I guilty for an averted eye?
Am I guilty though I never told a lie?

Am I guilty if I didn’t pull the trigger?
What God could ever die for this sinner?
June 2014, song lyrics
Lawrence Hall Aug 2022
Lawrence Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com  
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

                                     ­    If I Win the Lottery

Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.

      -Fr. Zosima in Book II, Chapter 2 of The Brothers Karamazov

If I win the lottery, which is unlikely
Because I never buy a ticket, you know
I’m going to have cases of the Modern Library edition
Of The Brothers Karamazov shipped to me.

For the rest of my life I will give copies
To everyone I meet: men in red plastic caps
Mensheviks, Bolsheviks, vegetarians
A lonely soul waiting at the bus stop

Dostoyevsky for everyone
If I win the lottery
Ken Pepiton Sep 1
I agreed to read, thinking
September signals change.
And I imagined seeing it change.

September now, hints of winter,
and of fire season if those latter rains tarry.

Last year they got here during Burning Man,
we saw the wannabes all flee the mud, on TV,
we saw the children of our youth,
roll in it with laughing abandon,
real life,
this year, the rain is just as likely,
so we pay attention to the whole idea,
seasons, on the cosmic scale, now after

the fullness of times is on us, nine billion
others in the etherical medium tying us up,
using us as staves binding broken bones,

fundamental bottom thought, structured
stories said to have inspired our dormers,
and our seven gables,
and our back doors,
and our cellars,
each we must wonder at once, ¿?
are we involved in production, or consumption,
supply side or inside out hungry ghostly chances,

bemusing the beguiled with smile lacking cause,
acausal confrontation with frowning judgmental

adverse reactions to sublime subtlety suggesting,

take and eat, in truth, imagine yourself seeing,
first time, the true beauty of the elephant
reaching past low hung fruits to take
a taste from the high branches.

Shining thing from Eber's legendary written
rules, all translating into knowing how we live
and have our being in times you must imagine

looking back, magi, always were apparent
in the mix of biographies preserved to lead us

let us, all with the will to learn, learn if
we think
we may imagine, using mere words, and tech
so new that you may not reckon how far we are

from yesterday.

when I agreed to read,

because I never read
The Brothers Karamazov,
so  I agreed to read, and
I read it, upto the bitten finger,
if you know the story, and a little more,
another chapter or two, awaiting the death
of the elderly sage of Ruskie Orthodoxy,
whose name is fictional, of course,
but he knew he could walk into the woods,
and live free using known grown means
to quell the thirst from mushrooms,
with buckthorn berry wine,
imaginable
in the Cuyamaca boulders and pines.

Here, with me, a display of color harmony,
the ribbonwoods bloom a creamy burst,
and as suddenly, begin to rust, autumnal colors.
Not New England bright, more subtil by far,
desert shades, surrounded in evergreens,
manzanitas and hemlocks and pines and black oaks.

Time, at the level of cosmic clocks, as a thought
passes faster as we expand into our ever after
thought, as we compress to spring after winter,

feeling years as days, morning childhood,
noon survival, evening to cool starry night
of knowing which lies were used to turn me,
on, or around about
which truth alerted me to nonconformity,
be the new thing, the new old form mankind,
be the representative of we, the people in time,

who played the fools who glorify war, for a season,
while we are lacking learning, having never known,
why we never put our minds to final form, grown
courses taken eroding finished soils to feed seas,
paths past nonsense, past purpose proposed
to be supposed by all who follow, thinking

should we agree, geistlich at this distance,
using English with poetic twists allowed by license,
vide licet, showing all with eyes allowed to notice,
viz.
I am native to this planet, I am part of what is changed,
I am a peasant child from the times of industrial efforting,

establishing the profit motive any tree imagines,
blooming, superfluous fruit for any with appetite,
what is right in life is not pain, but persistant will

to wait on next, imagining ever
experienced on earth,
as it must be where prayers are all answered, yes,
most certainly, on earth as in ever, fires included,

functional consumption and transition into next
now,
as you think I imagined magi, and found I did, imagine
that.
When one reader activates the pen, one writer imagines making my day.
Lawrence Hall Mar 2018
“…you will go forth from these walls,
but will live like a monk in the world.”

-Father Zossima to Alyosha in The Brothers Karamazov
      
Every vocation is a novitiate
And every labor a monastic prayer:
Matins and Lauds are sung over coffee,
Then Terce for the plough, the lathe, and the wheel

Sext is gratitude for the midday meal
And None is the hour for downing tools
Soft Vespers is the song of happy homes
‘Til Compline sends all good folk to their  beds -

Final vows are taken at death; for now,
Every vocation is a novitiate
Lawrence Hall Nov 2017
Something About Life


Strelnikov: “What will you do in Varykino?”
Yuri: “Live.  Just live.”

-Doctor Zhivago

The plane lifted, and the cheering was wild
And at that happy moment the pilot said
“We are now clear of Vietnamese
Territorial waters.”  There was joy,
Even wilder cheering for most, and quiet
Joy for a few.  For one, Karamazov
To hand, peace, and infinite gratitude.
“I’m alive,” he said to himself and to God,
“Alive.  I will live, after all.”  To read, to write,
Simply to live.  Not for revolution,
Whose smoke poisons the air, not for the war,
Not to withdraw into that crippling self-pity
Which is the most evil lotus of all,
But to live.  To read, to write.
                                            But death comes,
Then up the Vam Co Tay, or now in bed,
Or bleeding in a frozen February ditch;
Death comes, scorning our frail, feeble, failing
      flesh,
But silent then at the edge of the grave,
For all graves will be empty, not in the end,
But in the very beginning of all.
Lawrence Hall Feb 2018
The Brothers Karamazov, Book II

There was little news from Russia today
At Optina the midday liturgy
Was over around eleven or so
The faithful crossing themselves as they left

Mostly poor folk, walking to their homes for lunch
And then back to work.  They hardly noticed
A party of their betters strolling about
Reading tombstones, giggling about the quaint monks

Waiting to see a reed swaying in the wind
There was little news from Russia today

— The End —