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The hanky he was sobbing into was crusty,
*****, unwashed, unclean; yet strangely comforting to a little boy,
as he cried he made his way to a culvert behind the school,
some place the other kids couldn’t see him crying,
it was more comfortable being near rocks
-next to that watershed for some reason?

He looked down at his antagonist,
the scaly-green feet,
they made him cry harder,
he lamented…

“Why have I been tormented so?”

“Who gave me these feet? Who made me this way, lizardly, scaly, an animal no?”

“What class am I, what species? Are those toenails, claws or a disease?”

“The way I’m treated makes me sad. Where is my mommy, where is my dad?

“Did I come from an egg? Didn’t we all? Why do they pick on me, make me feel so small?”

“My feet are reptilian even I can see that!”

“Am I part lizard? Are there horns on my back?”

“I can’t hide in sneakers ‘cause the claws tear them apart.”

“Not great at math, language or art.”

“They always pickin’ on me, today it’s in the schoolyard.”

“That is why I sit here on the rocks crying with my ugly feet and sullen heart,”

“Cannot run fast so no baseball, basketball or soccer…”

“The other kids tried to stuff me in my own locker…”

“One mean little girl even threw a dead mouse at me!”

“But I’m only part lizard as far as I can see?”

“My English teacher says that my words are like a bird song”

“If I talk like a birdie along with monster’s feet, no wonder I don’t belong!”

“Even still, to be so mean to me, I know that it is wrong…”

“ONE DAY I WILL SHOW THEM ALL, THESE FEET THEY HAVE A PURPOSE!”

“MY WORDS OF SONG AND FEET OF MAGIC COMBINE A COSMIC CIRCUS!”

“I am no freak of nature, no forest Pan or Satyr…”

“It is not the way I look, my clothes or feet that matter…”

“It is what is in my heart and mind, the things I do that truly count…”

“For those things that make us different, for they are tantamount…”

“Seven heads, seven stages, seven fables, seven sages”

“Seven stars and seven wonders and seven heavens that we’re under…”

“And all those things they say are great and marvelous about us…”

“Will one day be written in the book by Great Old Uncle Taautus!”
Children's rhyme. Scylla represents the rocks near shores who rend ships to pieces that venture to close to them.
Pocket watch, I tick well.
The streets are lizardly crevices
Sheer-sided, with holes where to hide.
It is best to meet in a cul-de-sac,

A palace of velvet
With windows of mirrors.
There one is safe,
There are no family photographs,

No rings through the nose, no cries.
Bright fish hooks, the smiles of women
Gulp at my bulk
And I, in my snazzy blacks,

Mill a litter of ******* like jellyfish.
To nourish
The cellos of moans I eat eggs --
Eggs and fish, the essentials,

The aphrodisiac squid.
My mouth sags,
The mouth of Christ
When my engine reaches the end of it.

The tattle of my
Gold joints, my way of turning
******* to ripples of silver
Rolls out a carpet, a hush.

And there is no end, no end of it.
I shall never grow old. New oysters
Shriek in the sea and I
Glitter like Fontainebleu

Gratified,
All the fall of water an eye
Over whose pool I tenderly
Lean and see me.
David Ehrgott Dec 2014
Had nice thoughts of Florida
'till a 'gator ate a man
So morbida
Mateuš Conrad Nov 2016
if god is dead,
then poetry is nought: but suicide.

could it be the evermore question, a year from now
the same autumn will rinse the lands of once budding colour,
and stretch, as the eye can see, the witry skeletons,
where once the birds nested their young in bulbs of harvested
twigs  bundled up? for what if the wintry tree, if not
the last remnants of the airs of spring,
a lizardly womb of flight...
   so the paupers of Rome argue
about the benefits of monogamy,
as they might about monotheism...
and they say monogamy is not "natural",
but what is? why take the burden of
a widower swan, why extract monogamy from
swans and later find the harem of monkeys?
and then simply say: it be unnatural... why?
we were never gracious enough to mirror
swans, hence the brothers Grimm and the
ugly duckling mistook...
        oh wagers of the translated Graeae
of Scotland, where it Hamlet on the couch,
or where it Macbeth?
what matters is how populist media makes
a franchise of a form of athletics that cannot bed
a guised look of despondency -
      puritan saxon conference on sexuality
that gone beyond the ******* use:
***** therefore thinking,
            flaccid therefore not thinking...
you can utilise language to a point where mathematical
certainty is given, as is the missing blemish of
woad... no wonder the Saxon maidens
    retain their virginity at home,
but treat themselves for a nibble of the Magdalene
on the isle of Malaga... puritanism disintegrates
2 weeks in...
                   and still they bemoan,
if they have been growing more and more depressed
since the second world war...
                why allow them to create this viral infection
that's like a virus ingested by unsuspecting
       victims... are they not the ones
prescribing premature depression since they
heaved no foetus in their womb?
          and having done so, are clear of the command:
remove that alien **** from me!
   aren't they?
       if god is dead... all those who write poetry
have committed suicide...
           i once made a lament statement:
given that god is dead, then so is poetry,
i don't which is more lamentable...
but i'm sure to spot a few more eager-beavers of
kneeling and prayer than i'm to see poets...
and can i return to the heights having sunk so low?
      evidently i didn't sulk on my way down,
could poetry ever be tamed with no populist
acrimony? no *auld lang syne
?
      i doubt it...              i very much doubt
a care for anything else sing-along astute than that,
for all i can compete with, is, some sort
of individual... a shadowy statuette...
         it's what's called the reverse of having a heart
for the cardiologist, a brain for the neurosurgeon,
a pathology for the psychiatrists,
  an ambition for the philosopher (mistook them
as humanists you have, for those that are simply
relegated from the realms of language by linguists) -
  for the oncologist that's hardly an ontologist....
swans epitome monogamy with the widower...
apes are Islam with the harem...
          and they say gods do not exist...
but if one sees no god, how is one to replica
a god's existence, if man borrows from the purest
sense of plagiarism that hides no legal documents
enforcing a slack on plagiarism, namely that of anima /
animal? man cannot grasp a concept of god
by sacrificing himself on the altar of imitable animal...
swans have their monogamy... man too presumptuous
also chose swans as the guiding beacon...
softened core, a mongrel of mammal and lizard
that the birds became... furry but borne from
a cracking of the eggshell... man too presumptuous...
he looked elsewhere to no visionary guide since
Narcissus: for mythology is the guiding hand of
new poetry, should god be indeed dead, and poetry
akin to that statement be merely suicide...
then at least mythology is equivalent of history
for poetry... at least there is a logic involved..
   for assuredly should god be dead,
and chlorophyll as pointless as the logic of bio:
be that of life outside one's own graphic or within
one's graphic... should life be nothing more
than the tactless usurping of history that is merely
a blank hole between the omni toward a speciem,
then why have we bothered recording history?
of all scientific theories, of all that rampantly
degrade all human dignity, why create a despotism
within science, that constantly repeats itself
to be overvalued, for reasons that suggests:
en masse applicability due to its pictorial invigoration
for a cruising simplicity? i gather this be a reason
for the emergence of technophobes, or men equipped
to war armed with nothing but sticks!
it's one thing to popularise an idea, later morphed
into a theory, then morphed into an ideology
(an idea that recurs persistently and has no
theoretical basis to not succumb to its theoretical
premise of becoming dodo - the theory of evolution
doesn't take into context the notion that it too can
become extinct... surpassed by something more
invigorating)... later morphed into a shiva
construct that destroys itself...
          we've seen 20th century's pinnacle of this
idea... we've seen eugenics emerge from a pristine
monkish background that said: how best
to economise the case of: the accurate *****-count...
is Darwinism the zenith of invigorating man?
              i find it's too arrogant to even imagine
a square tilting into a rhombus...
       suggesting a rectangle...
       but the days of roaming the Savannah are long gone
and past us... the dependency on oil and gas
and central heating has created a prison-like Akeley...
from what we've inherited, toward what we can
expect, or with suspicion: demand.
            and to think having begun erasing history,
and to think, having erased history of what's noteworthy,
we turned the slapped cheek into a cubist abstraction:
it seems pointless naming pubs after Charlemagne
(shar-le-maine) let alone singing about them...
let's all celebrate running ****-naked on a Kenyan
plateau... and rather than dealing with the past
on a poetic scale... rather: on a literalist scaling of things...
it's almost like biblical literalism kinetics....
     in either case: everyday poetry dies...
or as the case is minded to refresh the argument:
    with the death of god, poetry committed suicide...
i don't know which is the more tragic evidence
of what language has become...
                     this doesn't even invoke an analysis
of the marketplace use of language that politics is...
god forbid it should ever come to that...
  aren't we supposed to feel something otherworldly
at some point in our lives?
                     it's not that i can't rationalise my existence
into this world alone... and feel all the contentment
i need by mere concern for thought trickling into my
being within it...
            it's just that i can't rationalise my existence within
this world alone, based upon a hierarchical
          symptom... much akin to Guy "Lucifer" Fawkes
tried to state by blowing the houses of parliament...
which doesn't suggest a need for a celestial conjuring
of dictator... man has already encouraged that
with English 24/7 c.c.t.v.,
                                                   and as might be suggested...
the point you reach when catching yourself trying
to persuade or enforce a point...
         that lacks all emotive sensitivity hoping for
a romantic excavation invoking the zeitgeist of the times...
neo-romantics are on the rise...
                            we do live in a time of neo-romanticism,
as a few might have suggested: globalisation's
and the audaciousness of militant Islam's offspring:
lying dormant, like a speech by Pope Urban II:
     it just lay there, under a fog of submerged Calvinism
and secular sensibility... waiting patiently
        till the nibbling stopped and it had a chance
to counter... it truly was a case of Damocles' seconds...
tick-tock, tick-tock... and thus the guillotine dropped;
you could feel the carcass stench in the air
         or what cultural-marxisim would make of
an economy that attacked its own economic model...
  it would be deemed dead economically,
but culturally? resurgent...
         you could sniff it out in the air, that rotting
carcass menu: providing a wake of vultures,
                                  or a comedy house of hyenas.
Katie Nov 2020
I had a dream.
There was a dachshund
sitting in front of me,
not just a dachshund
but also my family.
Looking, laughing, celebrating
me.
That's never happened before,
you see.

I had a dream.
There was a man,
no, two. Maybe three,
they kept lizardly eyeing me.
I knew they wanted to hurt
me,
but not hurt

me
That has happened before,
you see.

I had a...

Dream?
There was a dachshund
sitting in front of me,
yet eagerly running away
from my family.
Running towards the men,
not two, but three,
running to show me,
these men,
they came for me,
yet the dachshund stays.
That protection has never happened before,
you see.

I had a dream.
The pale-scaled men,
racing for the dachshund at my speed.
Trembling hands,
my family still celebrates,
but the main event's running away,
I leap,
jump
fall
to save the dachshund
as the gun crawls
out of their hand,
bullet seeping away from the barrel.
I wish this had happened,
you see.
As the men disappeared,
dachshund in tow,
the silver hit me.

I felt it all rush through my
fingers,
from that preppy piano recital,
to my non-existent prom suit.
dogs now silenced
to pens finally capped.
Muted I-do's
to the stage lights finally dimmed.
and I could call this ocean
that swept through my
fingers,
nothing but relief.

Yet waking up,
I can find no better words for it
than a dream.
sounds random until the words actually mean something
Mateuš Conrad May 2018
what the hell is to be "won"
or "lost" to earn the
status of either "winner"
or "loser"?
    came the concern:
i never gambled...
          ans the next best thing
concerning the
existential vector?
   one vote, one veto:
the democracy of death...
and the intermediate shoving
and tugging, pulling?
    such a concern for a mere
but once...
   what a harangue...
    like an impetus for keep
the snowman rolling:
   can i simply opt out,
disconcerned for
an objective?
               never found a
lizardly lazy...
              women
as pleasurible as
fattening doughnuts?
         dunno...
               keter through
to a yesod,
and... oom... glum...
no malkhut...
  left reads the right,
up and down
        and then somehow
is read backwards...
  what the **** is won
in the mortal frame?
panicky would
be ****** stemming
from Dubai...
              rich, rich, rich...
baked Alaskan he-he....
            i won and you lost
and then came
the riddle of the mortal confines...
and?
    some sort of tomorrow...
i can almost feel
for those lazied bodies
imitating mammal grief...
   because the Pontius
Pilate gesture has
become the impetus
to counter out-reaching
crux and the bitter
         sloth-slouch-scoop....
it can hardly become
worth an inquiry,
to mind oneself,
within the zoological
mindset of:
    a "grieving"
              collective...
having lost
                   a replica...
compared
to Marx...
Adam Smith is so
shyly cited as
the father of capitalism...
    sing-along
david bowie
    moments to attempt
"grief"...
           might i suggest
a loss of keeping up
with familiar terms...
      given that capitalism
doesn't have
a personal name to mind...
there is no Smithism...
              i'm just worried
that the "intellectual"
discussion is too one
sided,
     given that capitalism
has none,
   and can only feed
on the imperfected argument...
becauae who is
to be blamed of
the supposed capitalist
intellectuals?
   not once has Adam Smith
been cited...
                best talk
about the unread books...
who are the infantile examples,
who are the capitalist
intellectuals?
             just one will do,
to counter: marxism...
            some -ism...
       some necessary -ism...
             no one has bothered
to give one example in
the past year...
             the intellect of capitalism
needs to be known though...
     out of curiosity,
i'd like to know the anti-marx...
just one citation...
               adam smith?
vaguely cited...
   because i can't hide with
an orwell argument,
giving the missing point
of a huxley...
                    what is
the intellect of capitalism?
        god the dumb in me...
               i simply don't know!
then again
socialism as counter
   the post world war II
     western european
marshall plan...
        in the east...

               what can authentically
make remarks of
a citizenship of Syria
along the lines
of making ordeal from
a butcher's status...
        
    i have not heard one,
not one,
   citation of capitalist
intellectualism...
  
             with a Marx
there is no Smith...
    not too -ism relegated...
i'd love to know
the intellect though...
     given that
              for an intellect
to be so: down riddle by syndrome,
it somehow managed
to compete with
american imperialism...
and what is america
without a soviet counter?

   self-undermining,
legacy-media curator
and...
             balancing censor-roles...

       who can become the Marx
to argue the intellectual
side of capitalism?
          Adam Smith?! ha ha!
          i can only wait...
    imagining the next
improvement of utilising
the toothbrush...

             no one can deny
that we never had it so good...
and that we also had:
so little to
     relive a desire for
   continuum to be prolonged
and:
       do i have an existential
impetus to
  make more, of a failed
replica of "me"?
                no... not really;

the "useful idiots"
    can do that for me...
   having exacted
  the Attenborough saturation
quench of "argument"...

    i still don't know what
the counter-Marx
                relief in making
capitalism intelligent,
"intelligent"...
                     less than useful,
is to compensate
the current folly of
arithmetic...
                 if socialism is so
dead beyond: gott ist tot...
  why revive it
            in making capital?

           thank god i'm just an idiot
with a keyboard and a blank
stare...
                
                 too much monkey
footage, too much objectivism as
sanitation, as: ethos,
  as: "sensibility"...
   to even mind humanity being
"quest"-riddle within
the focus of the former gamble
on the next Mozart, being merely
500 years apart...

              and then the demand
burries a Mozart
                   in an **** of rot
and ammonia dust...

                            it can only be subtle
to mind an intellect in
       crafting a critique of capitalism...
such vague...
   paraphrasing...
               north of england...
                  pristine fathers of
huamnity...
                  some russians could say:
that there is no:
   all capitalism is good V.
  all socialism is bad                
                                   line of argument....
      
the counter-socialist
capitalist argument is akin
to premature *******....
                given that capitalism
is older,
  "socialism"...
    circa late 19th century genesis...

   nearing conversion:
and with death the sole abode...
    not, within, the grieving
confines of:
                a shattering scoop
of mentioning
a translation of mind into tongue...

but can anyone please cite
     a counter-intellectual output
to hide Marx and be worth
an -ism?
                  
             the easy-target
brigade is:
but short of the idiotic stance
on seiving out a mark
                      of the first tattoo.
Mateuš Conrad Dec 2016
it has been over a year, to what has become:
    i have made too many points to be caged into one
     fraudulence, or one whimsical suggestion
that might entomb me... too many times has
the wind been undecided concerning what direction
my thought would travel to,
if my i am remained enthralled
within a stasis plateau... i cannot say how many
works could be written from a
string of i, 1, think, 2, therefore, 3,
i, 4, am, 5: five words... perhaps because the fact
is so recurrent, and so diverse
you can almost always encounter it
over and over again,
   in a kaleidoscope -
                  you can say:
how much of my thought precipitates
      toward my being so
to thus be instructed?
   and what if one says the opposite:
like... i think parallels i am...
  thought parallels beings...
and for that: we have the case
of ontology...
                    oh this is old territory,
and only a few could find a hammock
in these arguments...
          because there is no pop glory in
them to be found: for all things that
such postscriptum remarks are these days:
they are not dealt with in this world...
for let us say: man finds it truly
       uncomfortable to be cradling a soul...
materialism bites back with a vengefulness
  to completely destroy such entities:
and call upon history to speed-up
   their reasoning of the profundity of
the argument first given: as history speeded-up
   is but mythology...
  to quickly forget.
                 i rarely like to recreate my
steps back into this fact of the pentagram...
          it sounds too over-ridden with
past examples that have been left alone
or alooft...      they are no longer in line
with the vogue zeitgeist...
or the zeitgeist of the current vogue...
      but it has been over a year
since i made this entry: and yes, i remember it...
did you know that walking in temperatures
   in the range of -1 to -3ºC  is actually more
pleasant than walking in temperatures
in the range of +1 to +3ºC?
          i guess it could be counter-intuitive...
but there's that outer-suburban road
in the night... and that empty street,
   and there's me walking right down the middle
of it, rather than on the pavement...
   and it's so much more pleasant
in temperatures below 0ºC than just slightly
above... more pleasant: because it's
actually warmer... and the reason being?
there's absolutely no moisture in the air...
suddenly the water once bound to water vapour
becomes crystals on the pavement...
   and yes, this be but the second night
when Jack Frost came back...
likened to yesteryear... that strange sight,
of paparazzi crystal flashing on the pavement...
i might have asked for a red carpet too...
but there is was, the paparazzi frost
    tingling on the pavement...
       a red carpet scenario with an audience of 1...
below 0ºC... the warmer air of frost,
where water no longer exacts authority in the air...
   as if laden with a tombstone that
my shadow is... but so much clearer to be content
with such a burden: than an image in a lake,
or a mirror, so much less burden with a shadow
than a reflection...
                    wherever i look i gaze at an atom
bomb explosion, yet without strobe-shadow-etchings
on Hiroshima brick walls... i gesticulate
  my shadow like a puppeteer... and it pleases me
to see the puppet walk and trot, and swiggle
down a bottle of beer, and ooze out cigarette
smoke between street-lamps...
               and... fay! no strings attached!
o whiskey: my amber fay... o amber fay!
      through your tides of moon and mood,
that none of us have seen fathomable in temperaments
above what the prescription suggests:
         not you puritan Amber at room temperature:
for you are not cognac...
   or classic 1950s Hollywood dabbling with soda water...
             on the tip of my tongue: a bonsai iceberg
tickles my tongue, and the glass rattles with many
of them: like castanets!
                        there you are:
   in the deafness of the night my chauffeur and
    snogging suitor: for each bite of frost indoors
i twirl to romance: that no barbiturates could ever
provide... then let me teach the one who ended
his literary career asking to be a disciple of Dionysus,
let eternity be for me: a chance to teach him
how to appreciate you...
                  of course the Green Fairy will be there
as if the Lilith of Eden: lizardly green
or perhaps chameleonic rainbow tinged
so frivolous as to be envious and yet hide it;
for if he truly wanted to be a disciple
     to the fervours of a company with you -
i can spare him a lesson or due, for him to complete
his transvaluation of all values, and perhaps
    the untimely permutations.
                yet only with prior obstacles already
cited, as if lines wriggling toward nowhere of a
student in an hour's worth of detention...
      a mantra must be stated, and then avoided:
the serpent of narrative must sidewind
    away from the clear indication of what can
possibly come prior, and post.
                      still... a year ago i looked at the same
sight as i did today: the flickering of frost
on the pavement under a street-lamp...
     like a red-carpet event at a movie premier,
frost like photographic paparazzi flashing -
but this? o Amber Fay... such a subtler version,
that metaphor of epileptic nervousness
         that comes without warning and sooths
having strained one's eyes on the heavens
too often... to think: such an array of diamonds
on a brutish scrape of pavement:
        o such blissful humbling by the coming of
winter... with a Quasimodo to add to the scene:
    to look down upon this world and feel
a hunch about what route to take...
                is but a frightful realisation that
by looking up... once sees so few a chance to appropriate
      passive magic of this world
              and you and the world entwined for a purpose
to simple see what needs to be seen:
     and expect no fathomable truce between
such sights on a frosty night on the pavement:
   and  the celestial       zodiac patterns
     that speak neither of man or a god: but simply of aeons
  of perfected harmoniousness, to nothing more:
than a ratio.

— The End —