From an ornate podium
the orator spoke words--
..extraordinarily elaborate ones..
as if,
as if

But those who know..
we who have  laid low,
down in to the trenches
as grunts, both  outside
and inside  

    of the wire..

Those who have  quietly
done their legwork..
who have accepted their
difficult fate  as that   borne  of
and in to,  a training..  an equipping;
lay low,
lay low

.   .   .   .  

The throngs
at the foot of the podium--
mesmerized by their own  need
to be mesmerized,  never even
   noticed the children
who  in their innocence,  peered
out from under the crowd's legs

to better see the 'magnificent' podium..

The oldest of which, ran back to trenches
trying to describe what they saw.
Two of the quiet, unassuming-ones
made their way back to the podium,  
and in blocking out the orator's voice,
(which  to the  knowing,
was  as that of a clanging bell..)

Now observed up close, the inner-workings
of the elaborate podium
and sat in  wonder of its expenditures--
wrapped around such  slipshod,   weak
and hastily assembled framework..

And in having become interested in the
structure's groundedness to what one
would hope would be  a solid-built
foundation, placed onto solid, earthen ground
They instead gasped as they saw its
legs floating upon nothing..

"What the **** is holding this thing up..?"

War-trained and battle-hardened,
they remembered their superiors speaking
in hushed tones that even ******, with all
of his blowhard oratorical *******,   at least

had a semblance of the podium's fastenings..

Albeit, partially assembled by our own country's
stupidity within certain provisions brought forth
in the Treaty of Versailles,

   but this
   but this;

This oratorical misleading of the broken-ones
this empty illusion of a presentation,  borne
not  from a suffering  leading to true regeneration
but instead, a distractive short-cut into the Realms;
   This counterfeit substance..
as if borne in power,    as if..  as if.

    .. But the realms.. they know

It is only those down here on earth,  spirit
cloaked within the deceptive misgivings
of the flesh-- so aching to establish itself
apart  from the necessary legwork needed
to humbly become a part of Stream's flow:
(borne,  solely from the inner Wellspring--  deep
within the bowels of Love's True Ache)..


It is here.. on earth..  that you will find
the reward you seek..  oh wondrous orator,
oh magnificent 'smither' of fine words..

   Your podium, a whitewashed soapbox
   floating upon nothing..


--And therefore meaning   nothing
within the Substance-Based parameters  
    of the Realms.

only today i felt this strange fear from boredom, i don't expect housewives to feel it, although i'm certain they do, brain-draining watching some Jurassic adaptation where man's imagination really did a runner - not into the fantastical but into the absurd - like in science fiction, did a runner, completely off the mark given chemists making shampoos and toothpastes and fertilisers... ethically-free science fiction - but this housebound fear from boredom, greater than a fear of death it seized me and rattled me, i had to go out to buy a few beers; just like it happens to really rich people, they make their homes into micro-units of what's out there, in society, a swimming pool when there's a communal one elsewhere, a massive library of unread books, when there are plenty of those elsewhere, home cinema, snooker table... it's the entire spectrum of social pastimes condensed into a single household... anyway, i got hot and bothered, i'm starting to think it was not a fear of boredom, but what to do with the piri-piri chicken i was marinating: tomato puree, 1tbsp balsamic vinegar, half a large lemon squeezed, 1sp sugar, 1tsp paprika, 1/2 tsp cajun pepper, 14g of parsley, mint, oil, 2 chillies, 2 tsp of garlic puree, salt to taste - whisked in a food processor; ~1kg of chicken - because i thought whether i should shove the chicken marinate in an oven bag and cook it for a while, or whether to take the chicken out from the marinate and place it on a baking tray... ****!

poems and book reviews these days, nothing more,
get someone else to do the legwork -
a thoroughly modern malaise -
social anthropology - titled *tribe -
the pros and cons of modern life and our
search for tribal mythology -
the 8x more chance of depression and
other mental deviations in wealthier
societies than poorer ones -
once it was called adventure, now
it's called tourism - after a while you sort
of get bored of the naked ego
and the clothing range your thought
provides you - unless you keep thinking
out the same thing, over and over again,
dressed like Armani, all black, nothing else -
odd, isn't it? they're playing the cat game,
cat wakes up, same ****, different cover,
well, the same cover - same fur - can't
change - the paradox or parody of
the fashion industry, i.e. that the designers
wear the same thing over and over again
and insist people require a spring collection,
the latest autumn trend.... parody.
so back to this piri-piri chicken      n'ah, not really,
i was thinking about what we already did,
this anti-tribalism, to have given ourselves
the opportunity to experience the least
amount of pain, the anaesthetic, sleep inducing
on the butcher's table more or less -
but we also created another anaesthetic,
this anaesthetic is not so subtle - it concerns beauty -
ever see it? ever walk into Tate Modern and
think about Raphael or Michelangelo?
you could tell me i'm overly nostalgic -
but what i see in plain sight is an anaesthetic in place,
against beauty, esp. in architecture -
who'd think of building a new Coliseum or
a St. Paul's - the Tate Modern (as you might
or might not know) is inside a power station,
big massive chimney - would have worked
better in the Battersea (Pink Floyd's Animals
album sleeve), but then St. Paul's is right opposite
and what a staggering dichotomy it is -
i'm sure that's what you call an anaesthetic in art,
the sort of art you have to get or not get
because, frankly, admiring a tin-can of tomato soup
even by Warhol's standards isn't exactly appetising -
i know, conveyor belt necessity and all, once
artists painted on commission for some duke or
duchess, or king to be adorning lavish palaces,
but as according to Walter Benjamin - the work
of art in the age of mechanical reproduction -
some could once claim the original to be worth
a stupendous amount of dosh, but with the above
mentioned essay, the original is worth diddly-squat,
because there is no actual original these days,
because artists don't necessarily have to invest
in raw materials - and the copying process is 100%
perfect, what with photocopying and all...
but **** me over once more, how am i going
to cook this piri-piri chicken?
the few beers took the problem off my hands,
i ended up marinating the chicken in a bag
but then shoved it into a baking tray
an covered with aluminium foil, forty odd
minutes and the chicken was tender - ~5 minutes
without the aluminium foil covering while
the oven was switched off and the temperature
was descending - the carbs? couscous -
alt. North African semolina - and extra cucumber
in tzatziki - a few hours later and i'm a little
buddha not thinking an ounce or a continent's worth
of suggestion... one of those rare albums
salmonella dub's  inside the dub plates,
i'm a real provincial with this album,
tumble **** here, tumble **** there,
never settling for a ****-garden -
i told you i'm just borrowing the language, in fact,
given my alcoholic and status as vermin among
the bulldog rigid British (Londoners can have
their little gay pride parade, whatever, they
better give me up for surgery to a veterinarian than
a human doctor, after all, i'm all ******* gerbil from
now on in, it doesn't take enough pacifists to turn
my attitude into a Neo-**** and bulldozer the Union
Jack into a shallow grave, i don't expect the Caribbeans
and the Pakistanis to usher words of: it's how it is,
a rite of passage, **** your cumin and your ****,
battle of Britain, who among the R.A.F. flew and spat fire?
us) i'm more Apache in a bigger zoo than the one in
Reagents Park, i'm in a conservation zoone -
i'm Aboriginal - shaman of the fire water -
i'll be as ******* ridiculous as i want - go chant
you little kirtan get together mantras going,
i'm sure you'll *****-fight-those-pigeons dead without
a single coo being ushered in - and your little yoga stints
asking questions about the flexibility of the skeleton
not pulverised by scientific eyes for a schematic and
a schooling rubric to domino up the cranium with mandible,
ulna and radius etc. -
but at least i know what sort of country i live in,
and what country is wandering into political apology that's
too late, in ratio 27:1, soon to be Turkey + the Yugoslavian
gape, Albanian and Macedonia by 2020 -
>30:1 - great Welsh ratio that is, oh ****, wait, Scotland too?
i never thought about it coming - there's my 2 cents
on the topic, and that England is becoming more American
by the day? that's good? really?! i thought the
aim of England was to inspire America rather than
vice versa... what a ****-storm these few days ended
up being; ol' McDonald didn't have a farm, but
had the slogan - *i'm lovin' it!

morning my grandfather wheels with one hand his chair and with the other dips a net into the many tops of a pool.  he taps the rim of the net on the walk to better appraise the wet calf legwork of a grasshopper.  he lets the net touch bottom then releases it wholly to its listening.  he will avoid feeling like the net and instead allow his hands their errancy to the tugged down caps of invisible boys.  a healthier man, a more nervous man, would smoke.

he rolls his sleeves and can better see dropped pipes, freed hammocks.  an ant in the low, upturned hill of his elbow makes for his palm and is quickly there and lost.  not today, but others, he has heard children skin their knees at which point houses appear for them to enter.  

from the chair he lifts his forgotten buttocks and they hold for only a moment their dream of sitting.  he circles then the  cement sides of the pool and then it’s dark.  so dark that when he is visited by two bright shoes he believes they are alone and so ties them underwater.

parse and praise the phrase,
checkerboard fraction,
appréhendé immédiatement,
a poem title!
put aside to marinate,
stamped "will not expire,"
doing the research legwork,
**** it is a real thing!

toujours,
where the best words and titles come from,
if one listens well
romantic notions swell the chest,
all the love affairs over so many decades,
all checkerboard games
with Kings a-crowning and Queens a-moaning,
poet, no way, never planned ahead,
always lost by a fractious split,
more than a fractional loss,
losing
most triumphantly!

each lover took and left a fraction behind,
a numerator, a denominator, never a whole number,
for then there would be no poetry need

you want,
have need for
une idée fixe
whom I should be, but i could be a
multiple choice answer
a three scoop ice cream treat,
or perhaps, a mix of forty favorered flavors
a new one,
chaque coup,
why not?

our first disagreement
both of us wish to nominate the other to be the nominator

the denominator is a definition of what is the whole
because i am gracious,
foolish and less than whole
already
I concede cause I am in already in retreat,
conceding comes supernaturally nowadays,
so move me forward on the checkerboard
and triple jump me, and any way
I am pas de nom
we close today with an American
yay...

i realised soon enough, that with each new poem, i am abstracting myself, Kant would claim some transcendental (dentistry's epitome of detachment from the repetitiveness of the task ahead, surely a canvas worthy of perfecting the actions) method, a circumstance of an elevation ahead, a necessarily involved eventuality of an obstacle to obstruct Belgium, i.e. a plateau, a flatland... transcending doesn't necessarily invoke abstracting, by transcending you can imagine something akin to god - by abstracting you can only conspire to throw a curtain over your self - well, to put it in close proximity: transcending you invoke the necessity of god / abstracting you invoke the non-necessity of the self - by transcending you have increments, even if Newtonian (infinitesimal, calculus, Leibniz) and other measurements of change, but when it comes to abstracting you don't have a clear path toward a methodology, hence the poetic expression being adequate, a spontaneity; with each new poem i am abstracting, digging in a coal mine of nothing, revolutionising the big bang, indeed poetry's weakness is to suggest that on the Cartesian pivot, too much rests on the side of 'i am', in that poets claim high revenue by exploiting this side of the equation - to boot very little is given leverage on the 'i think' side of the juggling act... poets claim too much and think too little, but at least their claims have a standard, a standard that's invoked is having possession of a heart (the whirlpool) that gives each and every one of us a lost tractacus (tract, route, a dragging, the lost history, atomic history, atomist representation of history that's etymology - the origin of words - pre-history, onomatopoeias, the end; well... if you're going to belittle me with a ******* monkey, i might as well sing Ol' McDonald had a farm, e ah e ah oh) - oh right, you want a linear representation with clear use of conjunctions: the alternative of historical investigation, debating whether the treaty of Versailles constipated Weimar Germany to the extent of having world war two precipitate is investigated with hindsight / too late hunches - etymology is a type of history, the history of words, origins in spontaneity or onomatopoeia / mimic? good question... i don't know, and i will certainly not s  p  e  l  l it out for you, on your own... chop chop.

i really am abstracting myself, i'm not even bothered
by Kant's methodology of transcendental concerns,
for me abstraction is a poly-geometric invocation,
too many vectors, x, y, z's, pentagons, hexagons, whatever,
transcending to me is simply a parabola reduced to
a dy/dx - a straight line - forget Kant, he'd nodding off
after reading Hume (who ran stark naked in Edinburgh,
not necessarily true) -
what i came across, stylistically speaking:
i have the second volume of the Critique near me,
and *why i'm not a painter by Frank O'Hara...
the pronoun usage... philosophers are performing this
juggling act with pronouns, like would be kings...
poets have stripped themselves to the nakedness of
the first person pronoun, philosophers in turn have
put this pronoun (i) in inverted commas (if you're
into existentialism and ****), but philosophers are
mimicking kings, for example when a mother of
a labourer constructing the palace of Versailles died
unfortunately by a falling brick Louis XIV didn't become
self-conscious, because he pounced back at the woman
with the words: 'is she addressing us?', it's
like this weird schizophrenic analogue, kings and
philosophers juggle pronouns, in that they usually write
within a realm of plurality, as many people, read any
philosophy book from the Enlightenment and you'll
enter a simulation of schizophrenia - they really do juggle
the pronouns, it's like they're instilled with fighting
the Socratic daemon who constantly poured honey liquor
into the grandpa's ear on a bench in Athens -
i mean, i could throw in an extract from the Critique
to prove my point, but i'll be lazy and let you do
all the legwork, of going into a library and finding
the book in question, and the example as stated...
if you're lucky enough to have a library that actually
possesses such heretical works against the status quo.

The routine started, and
the world around me stopped.

Intricate arm and legwork
carefully layered to create a
smooth rhythm. She moved
in time with the music,
she was the music;
her body a vital instrument
for this Dream Girls song.

She was a vision--
captivating,
liberating,
invigorating--

my head spun
with every pirouette;
heart leapt
with her graceful jumps.

A great love radiated
from her entire being.
I saw it in her eyes as she danced.

I felt it in my heart as she danced.

Big white shoes swing wide
While small dog struggles to keep
Up with mincing steps

It used to be a non-stick pan.
But then came usage. Wear and tear,
The scratches from a fork that you use to test the temperature of your spaghetti stack up.
Eventually you have the whites of eggs,
The sauce from beans and the crackling from pork crackling hugging the thing.
**** you don’t need, **** that no one wants,
**** that can’t be organized into anything but drain food without some major legwork.
Now imagine an occupation in which this non-stick-frying-pan-reorganisation-legwork was all that was needed to get a cheque.
And artists wonder why they can’t turn a cent.

Nauseating persiflage pontification
by aeolists with hollow minds,
it's a zugzwang situation,
so stuck among the prolix.

Panglossians in one ear
pessimists in the other,
a hiraeth longing for hygge,
yet stuck in the social mire.

Nonneutonian fluid vacuum,
imminent immersion of initiatives,
halting inundation of discerning,
heading toward a humming flat line.

Suddenly I adimpleate, with joy,
an archetypal suggestion floats in the air,
I excuse myself from the aretalogers,
and hunt the primordial source.

With legwork and inquest,
here and there on the scene,
I am defeated, misfortune,
alas, absorbed back into the quagmire.

let's do it, i said
i'm a bona fides reprobate
let's call up the dead
arouse Mother Fate

we dressed ourselves purple
like butterflies and birds
sat in a circle
said all the words

in mix of drama and derring-do
we painted a pentagon in electric blue
lit red candles and turned down the light
and waited and waited the whole --- night

then just before dawn
as i stifled a yawn
as if in a blur
i saw something stir

at first I thought
'twas imagination
but then i was sure
it was a visitation

the hairs stood up on the back of my neck
my heart beat faster as i thought 'what the ----'
my arms 'n legs froze as if inert,
though all o' my senses were really alert

inky, metallic, with glinting eyes
hooded, unworldly, as if taken by surprise
air of sinister, darker affairs,
unaware of all our fixated stares

it came on slowly, unsure at first,
then started forward, as if coerced
as if beckoned by unseen power,
by spirits o' nefarious witching hour

black and hardened were its wings
fixed on its back like two locked springs
a mouth vacant with open pincer
with an odd click like meat-mincer

bamboozled by the circle of candles
the black anthropoid walked around in angles
traced the floor as if driven berserk
the peremptory beetle with fastidious legwork

a factoid known by a pitiful few
beetles are attracted to colour light blue
and when aided by a scented taper
are apt to go on a pre-dawn caper