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j carroll Feb 2013
these days i fill my lungs with smoke
to insulate my brain
and consider the londoners
who i haven't seen in far too long.
michael with his spitting essex accent
and juliet who michael says 'sounz welfee'
telling me to put a kettle on and then
complaining when
i leave the tea bag in the mug.
"i like it strong to the last drop" i insist
and they call me a 'daft ****'
and michael says that if all yanks made tea
like i do
then it's no wonder we were willing
to throw it in the harbor.
we all take our tea in different shades.
and they can tell just glancing at the cup
that i've over-poured the milk.
they seem to always consider hue
those londoners
who know their nuances.
                                               afterall
they were raised beneath shades of grey.

perhaps i see more delicately,
too.
Terry Collett Sep 2013
The road up from the farm
the smell of cattle
the sound of them
calling across the fields

and you and Jane
having helped
weigh milk
and feed the cows

took a steady walk
up towards the Downs
the sky blue
the clouds white

the trees
above your heads
crows and rooks
calling downwards

you are doing well
Jane said
for a London boy
anyone would have thought

you've been a country boy
all your life
you smiled
well I just get stuck in

you said
when you haven't got
any cinemas or shops
near by you have to find

some way
to occupy your brain
I've even taken up
bird watching

with a cheap book
I picked up in town
when the bus
took us there last week

she looked happy
her dark eyes
lit up by
the sunlight

her dark hair
well brushed
reflected
the light of sun

she wore that blue dress
with the solitary flower
(the one her gran
had bought)

you liked the way
she walked beside you
the calm manner
as if she'd known you

all her life
I heard you got in a fight
at school on your first day
she said out of the blue

yes
you said
in the greenhouse
with Nigel

he said he didn't like Londoners
and I said too bad
he pushed me
and I socked him

and there it was
but you're friends now?
she asked
o yes after that

we got along ok
you said
what didn't he like
about Londoners?

she asked
he said his parents
said Londoners smelt
and had fleas

and so forth
she frowned  
where did they get
that idea?

they had evacuees
during the War apparently
you said
you reached the hollow tree

by the side
of the track
up the Downs
and entered in

and sat on the ledge
this she called
her secret hideout
few people know it's here

she said
I used to come here
and sit and think
she added

you thought
of the last time
you'd come here
it had rained

and you had run in
out of the downpour
and she had kissed you
and then sat back

surprised by what
she had done
and you both sat there
in silence

until she spoke casually
about the church nearby
and how small it was
and how you both must

go there sometime
there was no rain this time
she sat there
next to you

looking at you uncertain
can I kiss you?
you asked
she looked away

and downwards
then nodded
and lifted her face to you
your lips touched

and you kissed
it was a long kiss
eyes closed
hands touching

bodies near
then you both
broke away
we mustn't tell anyone

she said
we're only 13
and they wouldn't understand
of course not

you said
my lips are sealed
she smelt of apples
her eyes

were searching you
her hand
still touched yours
I'll show you

where the sheep wool
gets stuck
on the barbed wire
at the top

she said
and so you climbed
out the hollow tree
back on the dry

mud track
the rooks above you
the sunlight
on your back.
Mateuš Conrad Apr 2022
title: loop
body:
or holes or days
and oh: or months...
let's pretend years
never existed.

sometimes, it's truly weird... but i'm not English... or British... sure... for convenience's sake, when asked by officials in the NHS... put me down at white British... once was the case of the Anglo-Saxons... well... at best i'm an Anglo-Slav... but i can't allow all these racial "minorities" residing in England to label with me... "reparations"... a "colonial-past"... or... post-colonialism, or whatever the fetish is... i just belong to a people without a colonial past... sorry... that's racist... to be unable to differentiate people ethnically... it simply is... that's how H'america rots... it has no ethnicity distinction... it's either all RACE or ***... can't tell apart the Serb fascists from the Ukrainian fascists?! i can't buy into this whole: i'm white therefore i'm somehow also the inheritor of post-colonialism... i'm on side with the Russians given this argument... sorry... i'm not having it... that's ******* racist: just because i'm white is somehow indicative of me receiving the minority sadism against the British in the realm of post-colonialism... **** no... **** never...you will not put other people's history onto other people: because you're ethnically-blind... just because i'm as white as a Brit doesn't imply we share a shared history... ****-off cupper-neck... come come... milk me the golden **** of Moloch! right now... i'm loving the Russian attitude of... *******... or we'll **** with you...because it simply doesn't make sense for certain ethnicities of the white race to... capitulate to the "racial minorities" of a post-colonial argumentation of: new schematics of how society's to be orientated... nicely... just nicely... i'm seriously thinking about ******* off to Liverpool... the women seem nicer... less paranoid... less-stuck... less... ugh... yucky... itchy... whatever it is with having... over-value delusions of... obviously having bypassed the safety-net of becoming a nun...

the day started well enough... i must have drunk about half
a litre of whiskey: forgetting to take some naproxen
to ease me into sleep.. woke up with cold sweats
at: some time just past 5am...
some nightmare... Holocaust related? i don't remember...
but if you're waking up sweating and shivering
at the same time... lucky for me... i meditated on this towards
work: well... the horrifying has already happened...
i never understood the argument that 6 millions Jews
died in the Holocaust... technically... those were 6 million
Polacks... while France capitulated to **** Germany
in whatever span of time...
  it took longer for Poland to capitulate to both:
**** Germany and Soviet Russia... and we're talking:
a nation that only recently emerged after being non-existent
given the partitions... while France... a colonial power...
anyway... had two coffees... a precursor of a bad idea:
showered... applied 7 different "beautifying" products
to my hair, beard, face... armpits... collar bones and neck
and hands...
   ****** off... as ever... one hour early:
why do i mismatch my timing whenever travelling to
Wembley... if i catch the fast (Southend Victoria train)
i can get from Romford to Liverpool Street in under 20 minutes...
since... the train doesn't stop at: Chadwell Heath,
Goodmayes, Seven Kings, Ilford, Manor Park, Forest Gate...
Maryland... straight onto Stratford...
and then Liverpool Street... and then that's another
20 or so minutes on the Metropolitan Line to Wembley Park...
well... nice weather... spring is in full swing...
another two coffees from McDonald's... sitting on a bench
on the Olympic route...
eating an almond croissant... oh looky-looky...
company... starlings...
                        i was surprised: where did the pigeons *******
to? so i'm going to be sitting on this bench
by myself... drinking a 4th coffee... eating an almond
croissant... smoking a cigarette after the "feast" while
having this troop of 4 or 5 starling beg me to pinch
of my croissant... ****'s sake: the day is starting to look
beautiful... i couldn't resit...
plus... there's that added bonus of looking mythical...
eh? even mystical... since a few coworkers already spotted
you and you're not some old man in a park
throwing breadcrumbs to pigeons...
you're throwing pinches of an almond croissant to starlings...
i always said: better a soul of an old man
in a young body than... the complete ******* opposite
of... whatever leads to dementia: lax...
old men having tantrums of teenagers...
                       just looks silly... and it was sort of like
that today... with the Scousers... Scouse...
   i was expecting such a lively, lovely atmosphere...
i swear... the further north you go... the lovelier people
become... my heart poured out at the Liverpool fans...
the Manchester fans? eh... not so much...
they're sort of like Londoners... stiff-upper lip: tense...
paranoid... i don't know how to describe them:
proper... after today i'm thinking about visiting Liverpool...
******* for the weekend... maybe book a ticket
at Anfield... but just go and see the city... wander...
get lost... find myself...
        i'm tired of continental Europe... then again:
i'm also tired of the south of England...
           4th coffee in... i thought i was going to die...
a thumping in my forehead... i already have high blood pressure
issues... four coffees in... almost zero food:
calorie intake: for someone 6ft2 and 98kg... it's not 2000kcal...
for the first time on a shift
i had to do my jacket up so that my neck would
be covered... the tie was suffocating me...
with ideas of dropping dead from a heart-attack...
thrice prone to *****... the one time i did i enacted
being a cow... i swallowed it back down... crummy...
eh... flakey... sort of like when you...
bring back milk that's half digested: when it splits...
into cheese and lactose juice... acid...
on my way back home: a most glorious full moon...
cider... sweaty shirt...
and this... fiddly ******* the Metrpolitan line...
mixed-race... sort of reminded of Harley Dean...
fiddling with her blonde-tinged curly hair...
i always found curly hair... um... hmm...
too infatuating... she does her make-up...
her lips with a crayon and then some quasi-lipstick...
cute nose, cute forehead...
and she just keeps looking at me...
with the most doe-esque intimidation of:
          why don't you react to me?! why?! why?!
she's so ******* blatant: she can't hide it...
i'm sitting there with my shirt undone...
   oh right... hairy chest of a pirate... thick bulging neck...
babe... i'm tired... i've been up since 5am...
started the shift at 9m... just finished come 6:30pm...
of course i'm *****... ever time i become tired
i need to relax: since i've been keeping this hardened
**** in my ****-pocket since this morning...
i'll get back home... sit on the thrones
and do the no. 1, 2 and 3... which is **** while sitting
down... relaxing my ****... taking a ****
and subsequently jerking off...
but she was so blatant... d'uh... pretending to look
into the glass behind me for her reflection...
checking her phone without taking a selfie...
how her hair would look better arranged if she
has a pair of sunglasses perched on top of her head...
truly... a pretty little number...
but i was already coming down from a high of:
Scouser women... are all the English girls so pretty
up north? like i said: i think i need to take a weekend
trip to Liverpool... or Newcastle...
i was taking aback when a married woman
approach me... started talking... gripped my hand and
then proceeded to kiss my cheek...
infatuated by the beard...
  that's nice... that's why life is worth living...
random strangers... coming up to you: infatuated
by your presence... having no reservations:
no inhibitions... needing to kiss you... touch you...
always with the northern types...
and i'd agree... southerners: the fairies...
Londoners... so ******* Victorian: reserved...
it's like playing poker 24/7...
   most of the time i find myself of keeping a trustworthy
line of conversation... i just become mute:
bored... i don't like the nitty-gritty of small talk...
what the **** do we have in common?!
absolutely nothing... beside... what?
trying to keep each other comfortable?
no... i'll use my silence to strain the fact that:
we're not friend in school playground... we're not...
but it's different with northeners...
i witnessed two grown men... cry... because they
were refused entry for being sick... puking...
grown men crying... because they couldn't be part
of the Liverpool choir of: you're never stand alone...
mind you... coworkers getting ****...
deservedly: too eager... too eager... push and shove...
can't we just talk? once you get that *******'s worth
of an SIA license you start losing the plot...
machismo... ugh... talking about people who can't
tell the difference from judo from throwing
watermelons...
oh but these northern girls... a married woman
just walk up to you... tipsy... tipsy as:
custard is most definitely pale, high noon sun
yellow... grabs your hand and kisses your cheek...
times like this: i feel... gratefully alive...
it's so very little but at the same time: so much...
i can forget the 5am wake up call...
of the nightmare that stirred me...
i couldn't possibly cry over football...
something beautiful, like Prokofiev? sure...
lucky for me we managed to seize about 10 cans of beer
from someone... who managed to bring those cans
of beer home? moi...
beer... relaxing to some Type O Negative...
i'm pretty sure there was this other woman
on the train: fixated on playing with her...
she kept stroking it... stroking it...
some other day...
like a cat with an itchy scalp... what the **** do they call them?
archetypical clues?
i heard that once... if a woman in your vicinity is
fiddling with her hair... she's into you...
i seriously want to forget these stereotypes...
i prefer the more direct approach...
she comes up to you: a complete stranger
and kisses your on your furry cheek...
it might have been sunny... it might have been warm
today... but the tenderness of those lips...
i need to book a weekend break to Liverpool...
seriously... i need to visit Liverpool...
those woman are insatiable! i need to ******* to Liverpool!
i already can't stand the claustrophobically
constipated London girls...
   it does my head in!
            what happened to: perchance: some... foon?!
on a *****-nilly... what the **** is this?
the ******* Black Dahlia... no... wait...
the Black Narcissus nunnery? the ******* hills are full
of music?! or is that... filled, with?!
this is a trajectory toward a death-cult...
o.k. whatever... i'm getting slowly more drunk
and relaxed and... not in the mood of...

whatever... i just can't face up to having to faces...
it's enough that i already juggle two tongues...
but i can't face up to having two faces;
i see people taking themselves overtly seriously
and i'm thinking about... puking:
and then swallowing the puke that doesn't leave
my mouth... like a cow's digestive schematic.
Mateuš Conrad Jul 2016
i only noticed it today - from the wide opening spaces,
the scarce forests and horses grazing -
where everyone around here looks very much feral -
and even behaves feral - it's sometimes eye-opening
seeing the big city - the rat channels - the avoidance
of staring each other in the eyes -
the number of mobile phones in almost constant use -
a grant antopia that London and other cities have
become - behemoths in their own right -
but what's most eye-opening is the perfect skin
of the populace - i can almost claim a Joseph Merrick
appearance - relativity has nothing to do with it -
the 21st century and the Victorian era are completely
two different swarms of fish - Londoners' perfect skin,
with mine like fields of Ypres during world war two -
or quiet simply: mine the moon-face - littered with
tiny bullet incisions - even if i wanted, on this
basis i wouldn't land an executive job - an office job -
these people look for pampered - so docile even -
busy docile, but so docile - and once in a while you
see a glimmer of what it's all about - a public show
of affection - a couple lost in a moment between one
underground train and the next on the tube platform -
it's mesmerising seeing such moments, such is
their rarity - for you know judging by the overall
consensus - that so too is rare an old couple - as also
a family outing - the consensus speaks a different urbanity -
not such Edenic delights in the firestorm of concrete
and sweat and fast-food outlets, overpriced beer and overpriced
coffee - priced according to the postcode and the view.

but enough of that... the ballet! the first time i went
to a ballet it was to see *swan lake
-
i was put off - a sour taste on my tongue, i thought
i'd give all future ballets a pass -
then Bolshoi came along out of the blue -
i had someone else's ticket, so i went for free -
i could be all hot-air ponce puffing that it's Bolshoi -
and as if by miracle... i fell in love -
the main reason? when i went to see the swan lake
it was like watching an enlarged centipede
stomping on the stage - it was staged in the Royal
Albert Hall... they also play tennis in the Royal Albert...
the ground is too hard... when the swan lake
ballerinas pranced en pointe the centipede was out...
it even managed to overpower the orchestra -
the great en pointe centipede of royal albert hall -
the difference! the difference! when ballet becomes
silent - effortless - as it was today at the royal opera
house with a softer stage - given the play, i was
expecting the ballet dancers to imitate a bull's hoof
hitting the ground before charging - that came,
since we had matadors on stage - Don Quixote was
there too (obviously), but more in a comic role
as sheer presence - if the character danced, the whole
adaptation would have been a complete failure -
ballet and romance - who would Don Quixote dance
with, a ******* windmill? he's cameo compared
to the dancers - and all the more effective, since the
opening scene is wholly dedicated to him,
when he decides to go on his quest - Sancho runs into
his house with stolen meat, three women are after him,
so Sancho decides to hide under Don Quixoté's table  
(yes, they pronounced it with an acute e, otherwise
tongue-waggling business-as-usual); but to be honest
act i through to half of act ii doesn't feel like ballet at
all - not like swan lake felt like by comparison,
there are accents of ballet - accents as in that soloists
performing with what would otherwise be a bubonic
plague of other ballerinas missing - not to mention
that some of the soloist feats are done with the legs
being kept a secret / i.e. hidden - we get flamenco
dancers, not ballerinas - i came here to see Bolshoi
flamenco? well that's the good part - then all the
Spanish allure vanishes - phoom! puff! it's gone -
Don Quixote is taken ill and collapses in a forest -
loses consciousness and wakes into a dream -
boom! 30 odd ballerinas on stage dressed in tutus
of light azure - out of nowhere in the middle of act ii
and all the way through to the end of act iii we have
pure ballet - all the techniques, from
a (pirouette) à la second - a brisé - a fouetté -
a male grand jeté - everything you can imagine basically.
thank god Don Quixote doesn't dance but is the cameo
vehicle moving things along - fighting with windmills
or dancing ballet with windmills? i'm not too sure now,
it's more fun i suppose having actually read the book -
in the ballet the windmills' debacle comes much later
than in the book - it's like this two part story -
just before Don Quixote collapses in the forest and
the ballet begins - we have three giants swirling on stage.
on a less gratifying note though - so many Russians
in the house - i guess paying to see Bolshoi in Moscow
must be expensive, cheaper to fly to London and
see it here - but then again... why am i surprised or remotely
bothered? i could have been as level headed in my
analysis as Kierkegaard at the theatre - but i can't -
the music is too intoxicating, the body language too
architecturally sound and impenetrable -
all i can say with an honest heart:
DON'T GO TO SEE BALLET AT THE ROYAL ALBERT HALL
(you'll be watching a centipede dance),
SEE IT AT THE ROYAL OPERA HOUSE -
can't get a better summary than that.
Terry Collett Jan 2014
You walked with Jane
as you passed by
the water tower
she talked

of the various breeds
of cattle
there were some
for meat

others for milk
some for both
she pointed out
some cows

in a field nearby
and told you
their breed
have you ever seen

a calf born?
she said
no
you said

not seen anything
like that
let's go to the farm
I think they have a cow

that is due to drop
she said
so you turned up
the drive

that led to the farm
where you worked
some evenings
after school

or at weekends
she walked and talked
you listened
looking at her

dark hair tied back
with a green ribbon
her dark eyes shone
with sunlight

you looked away
at that moment
watching the farm dog
pass by

with its one good eye
(it had bitten you once
and you were wary of it)
a cowman

was at the side
of a shed
clearing out
has the new calf

been born yet?
she asked
he looked at her
then at you

no not yet
he said
but should be soon
want to watch then?

he said
gazing at you
kind of grinning
yes

Jane said
Benedict here
hasn't seen a birth
oh of course

these Londoners
haven't nought
he said
hang about a moment

and we'll go across
he said
you looked at Jane
she was silent

looking around the farm
have you seen
a calf being born?
you asked

many times
she said
ever since
I could stand

I’ve been near
cattle and sheep
I know most breeds
of both

she added softly
after a few minutes
the cowman walked
you both over to the cowshed

over the yard
and opened up
the half door
there she is

he said
waiting to drop
you and Jane
peered over

the half door
at a cow by the wall
looking at you
disinterestedly

her tail flapping
away flies
shouldn't be long now
the cowman said

never seen
a calf born then?
he said to you
no not yet

you said
don't suppose
you Londoners
see much of cows

he said smiling
no not at all in London
you said
he looked at Jane

then at the cow
which was standing still
making noises
then moving

then standing still again
I was about 5
when my old dad
took me to see

a calf born
the cowman said
all that blood and stuff
near made me

want to puke
first time
you looked at Jane
her hands

on the door top
her eyes focused
on the cow
she had on blue jeans

and boots
and a yellowy top
with small bulges
of *******

there she goes
the cowman said
and you gazed
at the cow

and a head appeared
as if by magic
out of the rear
of the cow

and it hung there
momentarily
then it slid out
and dropped

to the straw filled floor
covered in blood
and stuff
and the cow

licked the calf
and you watched
fascinated
at the new life

laying there
moving
the cow licking
the legs moving

the head turning
that's how it is
the cowman said
easy one that

and you moved closer
to Jane
smelling her scent
her warmth near you

her arm next to yours
what will you call it?
Jane asked
don't know yet

the cowman said
might call it Benedict
if it's a bull calf
and Jane

if it's a heifer
he smiled at you both
and opened up
the lower door

and went in
then closed it up again
there you are
she said

now you've seen
a calf born
you nodded
and you walked back

out of the yard
and up the drive
let's go back to my house
she said

Mum'll give us
tea and cake
and we can tell her
about the calf  

ok
you said
walking beside her
sensing her nearness

her hand close to yours
you wanting to hold it
but not doing so
walking there

beneath the sun's
warmth and glow.
A BOY AND GIRL IN THE COUNTRYSIDE IN 1961.
Mateuš Conrad Jun 2016
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!
"Young Man found Murdered in East End. Police believe that in the early hours of Tuesday morning a young man who hasn’t been named  was tragically killed. His body was found the following morning by his cleaning lady. There has been much speculation linking this latest death to the series of murders that has happened in the capital over the past two weeks."

The headline news at the moment, yes another ******. This time another man killed, the ever changing result at the moment is now two men and three young women. It seems the killer prefers severing the femoral artery of his victim, thus securing a fast and ****** end to their poor pathetic lives.

I read intently, the pure supposition by law enforcement officials that seems to me to be almost comical in nature. They bandy words like Serial Killer and Maniac across the pages of every news paper.
I smile, as I fold it in half, placing it neatly on the table next to my breakfast things, for I know that tonight another ****** will occur. First things first though, I have to go and earn my keep.

I work as an investment banker in the cities renown square mile. Yes I am one of those so called pariahs who is happy to receive the extortionate bonuses that the majority of Londoners and the rest of the country, I might add, are all so busy complaining about. I must concede to the fact that I totally deserve every penny I get but I suppose I would say that, wouldn’t I?

Pariah, yes that’s me pretty much to a tee.

Pariah: definition, outcast: somebody who is despised and avoided. Yes that sums me up perfectly even if I do say so myself. Of course most of my friends and colleagues would not be of that opinion at this moment in time but I do believe that they will come to this decision soon enough. As I have already stated, I have a crust to earn so I had better start to make a move, the rent won’t pay its self you know. I won’t bore you with the daily working life of an investment banker, the majority of you idiots wouldn’t understand me even if I did, so I will fast forward ten hours and once more speak to you from more comfortable surroundings, this time in the guise of a well frequented public ale house in the East end of London.

As my night progresses I see her across the now bustling and noisy lounge area and yes, she is something to behold. God has been very kind to this young lady. Her name is Petunia and a more than willing victim one will never meet. She is perfectly formed and voluptuous in every way you can imagine. Just what I am looking for on this lovely summers evening. Over the course of the evening the charm flourishes and Petunia and I laugh, chat and drink our way through it, getting even closer as the night closes in. This is working lovely, that flash of thigh as she rubs her leg along my own. The glint in her eyes tells me that this young woman has succumbed, hook line and sinker to my charms.

Not one of those to big myself up but this is of no surprise to me, as I do believe I have everything almost every woman would ever want. The looks, personality and money, with this in mind, she never stood a chance really. We leave the pub arm in arm, she looks a little unsteady due to the drink.

Come into my parlour said the spider to the fly and she is so prone to take that first step. Our destination, her flat just a stones throw away. My mind racing, excitement so enthused within my cool and calm exterior.

If you have been following the events of the last few weeks you will know that the past five Murders were all committed with a short sharp blade entering into the groin area. I am so aware of that silken metal that the steel presents to my leg. I feel it intently even through the leather sheath that is bound so securely below my trouser leg. I am so aroused at this moment in time.

Inside Petunia’s flat we waste no time getting close as I push my quarry back onto the divan. After the initial fumbling we are almost there. As we taste each others tongues my left hand reaches down to select my weapon from its casing. I feel its coldness in my hand, raising it to the desired position. All I have to do now is slide it forward and penetrate.

My hands are sweating. As we feed on each other with our mouths I feel my hand shaking. I try to shut off the emotions now running through my mind but I cannot do it. I pull my mouth away from her succulent lips and realize that this is just not going to happen. It felt like such a good idea until now, I was so motivated before this but I just haven’t got it in me to **** this beautiful woman.

A sharp pain brings me to my senses as the blade slides into my groin. The pumping coldness that is now soaking through the material of my Armani trousers. I am shaking so much, in Hemorrhagic shock, as my life’s blood pumps from my femoral artery. She pushes me onto my back, as I fight to keep breathing, Petunia looks down at me smiling.

“Thank you for a lovely night -- Number Six.”
2013
Mateuš Conrad Feb 2017
after acquiring the english language,
and synthesising it for twenty years...
ugh... breakfast that is but a cup of water
and immediately feeling bloated...
or just imagining that you can live
on food and alcohol... like a diesel engine....
comes to just as much
     trying to catch butterflies akin to
nabokov, or thoughts...
      and are either, so trully necessary?
well... unless you take to calling it
the only relative opposite of picking up
a gun and shooting someone for no reason
other than a per se reason, which
subsequently has to be reasoned with -
akin to this...
  or, dare i say, picking up a philosophy book
and seeing how there is clearly
a child in there, esp. in english -
how each philosophy book seems to be
avoiding the pronoun i -
such is the nature of these books,
    a lot of hide & seek happening -
with the basic formula of: being yourself,
to avoid, your self.
then again as this french girlfriend told
me when she was staying in edinburgh
for a year to complete her erasmus program
from the university of grenòble
and she was doing this psychology experiment
and she needed native speakers...
  and i was given the stick for trying to
fake her science by suggesting that i'd do it...
yeah...
           well i really did hook up with her when
an american was about to court her,
and that's the only time i played the huinter-gatherer
role, or was motivated to do so,
when we went bar crawling and i pulled her
from the crowd and we stayed behind while
the group moved to another pub...
that was the only time i felt a need to do the "chase",
later this thing called the categorical imperative
came along, and i subsequently lost the impetus
to compete...
being a gladiator could have been greater,
what with the hardships of life...
but you can watch these gladiators fall...
quiet easily, buying groceries in a supermarket,
or opening a fridge door...
it's this return to the mundane, the household
environment can really beat a man,
if his life is lived to sample the ancient
field of danger...
   so when i did get the schtick of her empiricism
i decided: well... i'm no native....
and aren't we all so puritan about science
when some of it can't be falsified,
which it can:
        never too fond of accents myself...
native or alien...
               some people have a fetish for
feet or a french accent...
                        but that ***** essex slur...
or however you'd like to put it,
  it's not even cockney, but you get to hear
something quasi-cockney around these parts
more often, given that a lot of londoners
are moving away to these parts...
cockney meets essex county...
or meats it... yep: beats it silly with squalor
and at the same time: sophistication of living
in cement graveyards of an international city...
then again, you walk into a forest at night
during the summer, wearing only a t-shirt...
and it's freezing!
   you can actually hear Gaia breathing...
and then out of the woods and onto the cement...
that rush of feeling a complete change
of temperature... well... that's something.
          oh it wasn't me, i didn't dump that
french bird, she dumped me,
       as an experienced woman in her early
twenties would, to a ****** (who lost it with her),
18 year old.
    memories and all, what a grand cinema,
sipping absinthe on the streets of athens,
the athenian strip-club...
                sitting on a stool looking at a stripper
while holding two women in my arms
and kissing that sweet, sweet tender *****...
what happened after?
   drank all my money away,
                was escorted by a bouncer to a cash
machine... ****** myself
           and scuttled away back to the hostel....
and then took the bus from athens to katowice...
macedonia? beautiful, very hilly...
       serbia though... a plataeu of snow...
and i admit, belgrade from the distance
looked stunnig... esp. because of the snow.
oh right, i was supposed to insert a          )
having begun it with a     (      of an original prompt...
english really does have this natural
basis to invoke a self-conscious pronoun base of i,
it's like there's this need for a double-certainty
of the speaker stating that: it really is that person
speaking... or even thinking...
     polish        as a language? it rarely uses
the pronoun ja, i.e. i,
                          it's just certain -
english has to overtly use the pronoun -
      and it would be certainly pointless to ditto it
out... like some careless selfish womanisers
by the name of sartre...
                   that's the one thing i don't understand
about sartre, how it could ever be, something
about "ego"... more like Igor and doctor frankenstein...
i find that expression, yes, that alone
   " e g o " to be akin to pontius pilate washing his hands:
for whather transgression: i can't be to blame...
and then comes that ****** mantra
of mea culpa... and it just goes on and on...
to be frank, the whole point of mea culpa
is to transcend any invocation of self-pity...
      it's probably the foremost notion of transcendentalism,
well given that self-pity exists in people,
and some people would rather take blame;
indeed, it is my fault that i once had a heart
to feel intimate with someone, or even entertain
the idea of a fwend...
                            if anyone asks, i'll just be
a hermit, in my little cave.
London is an onion.
Not one of those big, brown juicy globes
you can buy in packs of three, from Tesco,
No, an earthy, shrivelled relic from an old geezer's allotment,
With trailing fronds and a few infestations.
If you were to take a bite, your eyes would smart and your body rebel with a cough, a shudder and a wheeze,
But moments later, a smile would be playing round your lips,
Such a sensory adventure, though not exactly pleasant, can still be savoured,
And you'll remember the taste forever.

Londoners are weevils, hiding in the layers.
Outer, inner, some of us worm our way between them all.
Me, I tend to head for the heart of the thing,
Soho, Southwark, the inner sanctums.
I sometimes venture nearer the surface, the outer edges,
But too close to the unknown, and unfamiliar air,
And I start to pine for the centre.
You can work between the layers,
But the many skins are tougher than you'd think,
Better to burrow down, find a place to sustain
The appetite of a hungry little grub.
Loitering with a vacant eye
Along the Grecian gallery,
And brooding on my heavy ill,
I met a statue standing still.
Still in marble stone stood he,
And stedfastly he looked at me.
"Well met," I thought the look would say,
"We both were fashioned far away;
We neither knew, when we were young,
These Londoners we live among."

    Still he stood and eyed me hard,
An earnest and a grave regard:
"What, lad, drooping with your lot?
I too would be where I am not.
I too survey that endless line
Of men whose thoughts are not as mine.
Years, ere you stood up from rest,
On my neck the collar prest;
Years, when you lay down your ill,
I shall stand and bear it still.
Courage, lad, 'tis not for long:
Stand, quit you like stone, be strong."
So I thought his look would say;
And light on me my trouble lay,
And I stept out in flesh and bone
Manful like the man of stone.
Mateuš Conrad Oct 2016
it has been exactly since ~3p.m.
                                                            yesterday...
                                       through to
3p.m. today: that's 24 hours +
                                      4 o'clock, 5 o'clock rock,
          6 o'clock,
                                          7, 8, 9
                     10, 11 and the upcoming twelve
         24 + 9 + excess passing the 36th hour...
oh this is just target practice -
                  what used to be
   serotonin has become adrenaline:
   spawning cobweb shadows with
   a mere arm-hair aligned with an itch:
i say to my cohabitants -
        i'm too poor to rent an apartment
with my contemporaries,
         and i can't be bothered to look cool
for 10 years... before the money starts
coming in... a day before a tongue spoke:
and see you in 20 years...
         and see you in 30 years...
the people born prior to 1975
       and after 1969 came out to earn
£57,000 a year... while those born
after 1979 and before 1985 had a wealth
*** of £27,000...
                            who are the landlords?
quick digression, i love how the idea
of exiting the bloc (it used to be designated
to the eastern bloc, now anything east of Calais
if a bloc... the European bloc -
        my my... ain't it love-ly?
   they wanted an Australian points system,
so first came the Australian plastic currency,
boy, i was happy, cashing in my first Churchill
miniature that i could dip in baked beans
and use as a spoon) spread beyond the old
stereotype... and the points system?
you know who's smoking the hookah of
panic here?            
                            the freelancers of nationality...
   they haven't fitted in...
don't worry... they'll keep you,
but after seeing you they just thought:
once the cheeky chappy, now a chavvy chappy...
  we love the E2 dialect, it's hardly Coccers
or bonkers... but after my day
(i'll relate to it in a moment)
       i heard to prop'ah Cockneys giving it
all the guv' and n'ah and
        what's Kilimanjaro in Cockney slang?
all the Cockneys are living in Essex,
   Romford, Chelms and the Essex lads
from Ireland are a bit shy, never talk to
the old people who used to live on
the Isle of Dogs or the Wharf -
              East London moved, and i'm in
the thick o' it... you ***...
                       i'm here,
open ******* spaces and hedgehog counts
to mind... never the next Susie from
Whitechapel doing the runner from Jackie,
             and funny that,
the day began during the night,
sober, i tested the idea: if you gonna go
nocturnal, stay sober...
                  fast... drink coffee in the morning,
and what some proper bollocking
        on the box...
                               i say: revivals never
sounded more like bells, the 1970s
had Patois... the old parle with dread-lock Sam...
             i squeeze in a bit of Norse
and hey presto... Ahmed's your uncle...
                     'cos we all like a bit of
way-hey banter, the: back in the day
   when the 1966 squad was best known
for West 'am...
                               am i sensing the idea that
i'm licking off the prop'ah beef burger 'ere?
                    what the **** rhymes
with Kilimanjaro?
                                wait! got this one:
apples & pears - stairs...
                          you gyro?
                        no! wait... the two Cockneys
weren't from south London,
this ain't Peck'am talk... this is proper grub...
         jar squared: verb, meaning?
     i know my neighbour, heard him
lecturing his wife over the wall about
the diminishing concept of family in the "west",
           to me that's
the Cockneys meant by guv'nah:
                           aw right der geezer,
   stop that fidgety: don't be late tomorrow,
let a man eat his plums and wear his trousers...
       i swear: the only good cinema these days
is English cinema...
                                 i said! the only good cinema
these days is English cinema...
               if i didn't watch
       we **** the old way during the night,
after spending my day as i did (i'll get onto it,
hold your submarines)
                               i would have pricked my ears
on the two Cockneys next door
   at 4p.m.                  finishing some job...
but given the "guv'nah's" attitude: 'aving
a laugh at coming early tomorrow, if at all.
     my day?
                 i wished i could say i woke up
early...
                            the entire spectrum
of sunrise...
                            epileptic shock from the sun
after smoking a cigarette at 5a.m. when
all the constellations where out...
                          not enough sleep,
as the Russians say: no good to live but to
not have seen snow.
                               it shivers with enough
hours under your belt...
                                      i'd love those
Soviet torture chambers of sleep malnutrition...
gents? when the ***** and the cards and cigarettes?
    i'm currently the most loathed
  person in America... which technically makes me
more than simply unemployed...
        anyway...
cut my hair... two millimetres off the helmet...
off the cranium... not crew cut, not skin on side
and some ***-fluff on top...
in the night, when the moon is bright,
   my two millimetres of hair look like skin...
oi! Skinners! the shame would have really been
to have protruding ears...
                                    come to think of it,
i love the contorts of my shadow more than
the body my shadow disdains...
                  i decided to visit my old school
after that...
                     ...............................
do you know the feeling of getting onto a bus
when you having been on any other form
of transportation (other than your legs)
for a few months?             surreal...
                   and even that's a bad way to describe it...
this is where words simply fizzle out...
                            they just did the white rabbit
trick and you're felt with nothing else to
do but squeeze into the top-hat and hope
that some other magician will pull you out
rather than another: white rabbit.
                          so the 499 from my house
up to Romford (sunny! glorious day!
   shirt, sleeves rolled up,
           denim trousers, navy suede shoes,
azure shirt, headphones, bus ticket,
wallet, packet of smokes, and the ride -
smile all you want - when you smash a sports
car you don't have the view of a dozen
horrified passengers there with you
to practice your ultimate Buddha gimmick -
Ching-Chong Eyed and smiling)
                oh yeah, the insurance... huh?
   off at Romford central, and onto the 86
courier from Bangladesh to Ilford...
                    what did i miss in the list above?
ah... three copies of poetic optometry...
written by? moi, n'est pas? oh come on,
let's not get the ruler out: mangetout and manage trois...
                           (only fuel is horses)
           the 86 is a double decker, the 499 isn't...
sun in my eyes behind the glass the enhanced star
gleamed: what privilege -
               by day the star
                                           by night the star in
   a mirror that's the moon -
                                         selfish helium
giggling into a hydrogen Hindenburg fury!
                 or that's what the scientists say...
how they worked it out, i'll never know...
                            but apparently the sun
is a H-He           something or other...
            H because of atom bombs,
   and He because we giggle like idiots when we see
it: never the thirsty horse in cowboy movies.
   got off at Seven Kings...
in between school girls eyeing everyone and everything...
just my luck... schoolchildren...
                               everywhere on the bus...
just there...
                                    and also just nowhere...
         so i got off at Seven Kings and went into my
old catholic school...
                                  waited at the reception for a good
5 minutes (good to know they're still teaching
people manners with regards to the uttermost
productive necessity of bureaucrats)
               -              i asked about my old English
teacher: does Dr... er... does Mr. Thomas,
        er, does Mr. Bunce (Thomas) still work here?
   yes, he does.
             you see, i'm a former pupil of this school
and i wondered if i could have a meeting with him.
oh, that's impossible, he's currently teaching.
                     Kafka... note this in your afterlife...
         well... in that case, could i leave him a message?
oh sure, just write your name and your contact details
and he'll get in touch with you.
   well... i need a bit more than a scrap of paper,
can i have a notepad?
                 sure.
                                    so i took  the pen
and the notepad and sat in this grand refurbished hall
of the school that used to remind me
of chemistry labs stinking of old wood and sulphur,
of the old ways... of being beaten and Pink Floyd
escapism and all the hippy crap...
                               what a grand place this has become...
it's no longer known as C. P. Catholic School...
but the plus version: C. P. Academy...
  but you still walk into the plus surroundings and there
are still pamphlets written by Father Ted
about *our Lord and Saviour christ Jesus...
          or Hey! Zeus! in Spanish... same ****...
different cover...
                               but i was well dressed in my
Indian summer wear that's Indian summer:
English September and October...
              i'd move the calendar up a bit...
get the kids off anti-depressants...
                           anyway, i had my three copies
of the "first edition", try tell that with the internet
breathing down your neck... it doesn't, matter...
             but i did write him a lovely note:
unchaining me from the straitjacket of grammar!
                  i wrote from what year i graduated
2002 (g.c.s.e.) or 2004 (a-level),
                        and blah blah and one more blah
later                    walked back to the reception
  and asked for a rubber-band...
                   then i bundled the whole thing together
and asked if she could give it to him...
                    of course, she replied.
                            p.s. if you don't mind,
Mr. Thomas, you can always shove one of those
copies into the school library...
                         p.p.s., someone stashed
the book about the Gnostics by some German in
there once... maybe i'm thinking along the same lines.
      the journey back?
i walked.
                                 i walked from Seven Kings
to Romford...
                               taking a stroll
with one hand in my pocket (left)
because holding a cigarette in the other is never
exactly great when it's not doing something...
that's what the pockets are for...
not exactly suited for your wallet... but your hand...
when you're strolling in the green-belt fields
segregating the outer-most London (wannabe
Londoners / Eastenders) and the Essex inheritors
of Cockney... Kilimanjaro?
                                  Kilimanjaro?
                 ­                          me, i don't Essex
either...           most of the bankers chose this
district for the scenery, i.e. standing in a field
that isn't a hill or any sort of elevation
and beyond, yonder, the glass shards of their
former institutions...
                                        4.7 miles... not bad...
  a stroll... and that's without any food and solely
on coffee and a sleepless night...
           a butterfly fluttering along the way (only one)
and a fresh ripe auburn conker lying beneath
an oak tree (also, only one)...
            but what hit me was walking back...
it was truly like reading the book of revelation...
13:7... all the way from Seven Kings through to
the Romford: the street vendors, the bookies,
the Muhammedian car dealers...
                  the bewildered ones walking into
mosques, Sikh temples...
                                       one man cleaning the patio
entrance to a church from weeds...
                           cheap Kentucky chicken from America
         (if you think, that they don't synthesise
the meat in cat food and call it tuna or beef
but rather use actual meat... you're grossly mistaken,
    it was on the news...
                                         they are already
capable to synthesise meat...
                                     they do it in the perfume industry,
they're doing it in the food industry -
    a childhood memory of asking why they were
smearing lipstick on the frogs they caught...
they replied: they burn easier...
                  and they did... paint a frog lipstick
pink and boy... that's a French marshmallow, right there)...
           but if you ever walk that stretch of road...
               revelation 13:7...
          i'd like to see the Evangelists wriggle out
of that one...                       oh sure...
i treat religious television like some meathead
might watch football... it's game on after 5 minutes...
but anyway... that was my day...
           all 36 or so hours of it... how was yours?
                                                          ­                        g'day!
Mateuš Conrad Oct 2016
i was about to start writing this up when i thought:
another whiskey Quincy? **** storm,
spilled the remains of the one i barely touched
before having to pour myself a:
puritan Scot in Cheltenham.

now, i heard people say any town in Essex
is a ****-hole...
                            fair enough...
but there are darker recesses of England you
must get to know before making that
assumption...
                  sure, London, proper London,
zones 1 - 4, E17 (post code, outer reaches,
Walthamstow, used to have a dog racing
track - played there once,
like a typical Paris catwalk, those hounds)
can skive off Greater London
                    like New York can laugh off
New Jersey, it's pretty much like that...
the only thing is: Londoners don't know what
exists outside this area: the buffer zone.
this is the buffer zone...
                 you experience England outside of
this very sensitive area of integration,
take for example a 3 hour coach trip to
a little town of Cheltenham in Gloustershire
not far from Oxford (a hub of learning)
and Bristol (Massive Attack, and that
bridge by Brunel - funny, engineers are above
architects, in that engineers build things
that *work
, architects are like science-fiction
novelists rather than scientists -
do you know how many problems workers
experience, because an engineer
"forgot to mention" something essential in the plans?
at least an engineer gives you a read table,
all architects work for Ikea -
          ah, here's pieces a - z,
put it together yourself) - anyway...
              spilled my Quincy whiskey, now i'm a puritan
of scotch - unlike that damning quote from
1950s Hollywood: whiskey with a drop of water...
   ok ok... a little **** of ice floating about...
when will the nagging stop? no one says jack
about putting water into authentic absinthe...
      why? cos it goes cloudy green when you do!
(too much digression, news paragraph).

   i was leaving London on Friday,
murky the way i like it... Albert Bridge never seemed
so out of cinematographic urgency -
               but the west end with its grand buildings
appealed to me to start imagining
                    Oscar Wylde ghosts leaving these places
for promenades in top cats and tiaras for the ladies...
                     west London... the best way to see it
is in transit... preferably rather urgently...
                    and in a coach with other people not paying
attention...
                       the Thames receded into the estuary (
as it does), those housed in boats experienced a wake-up
call with a 10° ***** into the mud -
                                past the Chelsea pensioners' abode,
past many monuments to be exact...
   and then onto the open M4... past Windsor Castle
and the streak of aeroplanes about an aerial mile
apart landing at Heathrow -
                                  3 hours later, there i was,
in Cheltenham - chitty chitty bang bang,
apparently dubbed the hub of all English literary
endeavours - well, if you're going to host
a literature festival, wouldn't you claim to host
it with at least one patriotic son of the word?
did i see any statue of a famous poet or writer in
that little rugby stockpile of excess triceps?
nope.
           well, at first i thought it was cute...
                                a little Portobello, albeit
without the St. Petersburg paintwork on the houses,
houses as grey as the skies...
                                           got lost looking for
the b & b hotel i was supposed to be staying at for
the night, went into a gas station, asked,
i was apparently only adjacent lost -
                           old school, map printer and no
g.p.s. on foot -
                                  i once read a map and navigated
a car from an obscure Essex city,
to an even more obscure city in eastern Poland,
past the dreaded Penta Germania consisting of:
Düsseldorf, Duisburg, Essen, Wuppertal and
obviously Dortmund -
                                           i call it the whirlpool
of navigation...
                            anyway, so i found the abode,
what a nice little place it was, shied away from
all the traffic - a lovely garden,
a room fit for a journeying writer,
          actually, everything a writer could hope for
to lock himself away and write,
            tunic scenic - everything to ease the literary
constipation - the surroundings, the whole decor,
i even took a picture thinking: shame if no
Balzac were to not emerge from these rooms...
                           i sure didn't,
i dropped all the things, took a shower,
went into town to do the g.p.s. topographic of
the city so i wouldn't need a map in the future -
bought a bottle of whyte & mackay with a huh?!
apparently this brand isn't popular...
               went back to the room and found myself
drinking in front of the dreaded sight...
well... it was a room fit for a writer...
               but it had a double bed in it...
and a mirror at the desk...
                                    i downed one puritan glass
and looked in the mirror: i don't need your company.
looked away and found to my amazement the
truth of modern writing: the industrialisation
of writing... it emerged in the 20th century when everyone
did it by himself, with a typewriter -
        the industrialisation of writing on an individual
scale can be quiet debilitating when trying to
rekindle the quill... i didn't write anything, i doodled,
and those were bad doodles, it wasn't writing,
it was doodling... i drank a quarter of the bottle
and went out...
        went into the first bar, ordered a Guinness and
and sat down by a table with a
(later disclosed) Gloustershire University student,
a Canadian, jacking-off a script for some
B-short-movie in a public place: to catch the oozing
exfoliation of inspiration from crowded places -
if ever that worked, it might have ever worked
in a graveyard...
                             we were joined by his friend,
some peasant, we got chatting, boy, it was such a thrill
to exchange names... the Canadian's name
i did remember: Darcy...
                          he had that look about him that made
it worthwhile to remember his name,
ah, when names fit the image...
                         chubby, pig-blondish, hairy...
i'm guessing a native of Quebec...
                               but i could be wrong.
so a few hey hey, yeah yeahs later i asked if they
knew something about this gig on the festival slot
that was starting tomorrow, 5 p.m. and for free...
sure sure... got to eye the guide... so i asked:
so, maybe we could meet up at this place at this time
and go from there....
                                  Titanic looked more graceful
sinking than the reply...
                                                 i had to really check myself,
this isn't London psyche chess, this is:
we are small people from a small town,
we think a charming stranger is a serial-killer...
                    the Yorkshire ripper case scenario,
not last... first.
                              i might have been ******* a lemon
by then and pretending to be drunk squirming
a Buddha look - i pretended the polite noting down
the details: suddenly i didn't think like attending
this ****** venture that would start at 5 p.m., end
at 12 a.m. and according to my travel diary:
having to wait 2 hours to catch the 2 a.m. home.
so i went to the first instalment of the "literature"
festival... lemn sissay and salena godden -
and i have to admit, it was a corker - a true
a champagne cork popped and hit the crystal
chandelier and i laughed... and that's how i lost my
virginity to "spoken word",
                                         i wasn't listening to poets,
but i was thoroughly entertained, i swear that
at the end of her performance Salena pointed into
the dark (great tactic, how can they be nervous
if they can't see anyone? they stand on a pulpit of pure
light and see black ahead, where the nerves?)
and said: esp. to my friend over there...
                i might have involuntarily back-laughed /
snorted like a pig trying to catch enough lung volume
for a ha ha...
                          got chatting to this lovely middle-aged
couple: told them: i'm being ***** with gags.
                prior, i was watching the queue build up
into the room, with a god-awful grin on my face...
i couldn't take it off...
                         perhaps because i was looking at
the demographic and thinking: where are my peers?!
i spotted about three people in a close age proximity -
the rest were farts and soon-to-be-farts...
                             now Sissay freaked me out...
in a good way... i met the two after the show,
i brought two copies of my own printed work to give to
them... i had to ask their publicist if i was allowed
to touch the Aegean marbles... luckily i did,
but then i asked the stupid question to Sissay:
so who were you trying to imitate when your eyes
were bulging out nearly gauged out like a Pink Floyd
song video of: teacher! let these children go!
               i should have associated something African
freakish in mask, a strengthening - the sort
of look that New Zealander rugby players put on
to frighten people off when dancing the haka -
he really did talk like that...
                                       the little devil voice didn't help
either... but i only asked that "stupid" question
while mumbling something about how hard it was
getting published and how anyone aged nearing 40
forgot the free press of the internet emerging and
how he asked for a q & a after the performance...
and... hand on my heart:
                                   got asked one question...
          and answered... only one question...
                                        a complete and utter ******* meltdown...
   not: oh yeah, so who's your major influence...
                      a Samuel Beckett moment from not i.
later i standing outside and smoking, a grand English
dame of the west approached me,
chitty chatty kiss the hand later i got to say the most
famous line known to the current Englishman:
unfortunately... from Essex.
             honest. anyone asks you in Essex the question
they always ask: so where you're originally from?
                         anywhere else in England
they just ask you: whe
I am
in Eden
a mother's
brother but
this chunnel
is surf
London would
scarf to
the sands
therein dawn
as their
bridge was
to cross
the air
with Tim
where in
Times Square
A town in London allied Thames
Mateuš Conrad Sep 2018
always back in
a monochromatic society,
twice a year...
   a nausea -
    of only interacting with whites
akin to myself...
most people will not understand
the nausea...
   and there is a nausea -
within these anti-major
cosmopolitan hotspots...
but the nausea passes...
   but in terms of a personal
psychology?
  i lose something...
   a game a learned integrating
into english society...
the... chameleon game...
   i never have that
in Poland, i'm back to square
one, generic,
like the rest of them...
       i prefer the English
multi cultural society for
personal, "selfish" reasons...
namely?
i can play the chameleon game...
i can speak two tongues
and four accents,
   reserving a fifth for
some Muslim who thinks
i have the ****** features
of a German...
       back home i'm just
a Pole among Poles...
      nothing that couldn't
be conceived as lack-luster...
back in England?
ah nay.. not exotica for
the women...
             i prefer the chameleon
game...
as it turns out...
not all immigrants huddle...
at least not all Polacks huddle
together in... communities...
communities of workforce?
sure... Poles coexist together
only in work environments...
socially?
    like a ******* dog & cat...
i don't know any Poles in terms
of community,
  or social interaction...
      no chance in hell...
never will...
   which shows...
when i travel back to Poland
to visit my grandparents...
**** me the nausea of being
an ant in an anthill...
      i once landed in Krakow
and fooled around
by pretending to not speak
the native tongue...
only interacting in English...
i felt sick...
            how?
   i eased out an ear of
compassion and spoke to her
when she approached me
talking about how her son
hanged himself and she needed
money...
   and there was this
immigrant Anglo with
a Polish girlfriend,
and some Miroslav with a
broken French accent who
emigrated to France and
forgot to speak the native tongue...
and the girl of the "expat"
was like: huh?!
    England is unique in that respect...
well...
not England...
   London... and London
is not England...
    England is not London
and Londoners were never merely
Cockneys...
last time i heard?
Jackie the Ripe-Piper
was probably a Jewish Pollack...
    i was born in a small torn
just shy of Masovia -
every, single, time,
the monochromatic nausea
of only seeing white people...
i guess... it must be the same
for a Nigerian who grew up
in England and gets to visit his
grandparents back, "home"...
women are different,
i'm talking about males...

           then again... ****...
a Nigerian can't exactly perfect
the chameleon game...
i've been Hungarian,
Swedish, but mostly German...
never a Pollack...

            back "home" you miss
the ethnicity roulette...
    i can understand the ultra-nationalism
of small towns of nations...
but i can also understand
the ultra-cosmopolitanism of
capital cities of post-nationalistic
states...

come to think of it...
    i'm only comfortable in East London...
west London is off-limits for
comfort, again,
equivalent to the monochromatic
nausea bound to urban Poland -
the tourists sticking out
like birch trees in a ******* pine
forest...

      it's all contradictory -
rural - small urban strongholds...
where people recognize you
via recognizing your grandparents
and your grandparents fill
the locals in...
   no problem...
   traveling through Warsaw?
a ******* gutting sensation
like some variant of William
Wallace being executed...
   Mongols, Ukrainians, Roma...
    the odd Lithuanian...

it's the nausea of the effect of
a revived commonwealth once seemingly
lost...
    unlike the British commonwealth
slowly disintegrating into
farce and: keeping up appearance...
pomp & circumstance
having replaced pride & prejudice...

i can walk down a shady East End
street and talk...
            and feel nothing but
a welcoming thrill of contempt...
   strap me to a crowded place in the center
of Warsaw...
and i'm disorientated,
like a fox in daylight...
                   wildly afraid...
all the time on my guard...

  and i'm! "supposedly" the native...
   merely having inherited
the language is no guard...
      i might speak "their" language...
but when it comes
to the several underlying
languages of human interaction?
****... i can walk down
some shady alley
of Whitechapel -
                           i've learned it from...
i guess...
that one time me and my three
friends were robbed
in South Park, Seven Kings...
two girls as bait...
and then 10 of them approached...
started kicking my crying
friend to the ground...
some **** about me asking
for my walkman back off of him
while he was getting kicked...

whatever it was...
   there are actually more languages
than the mere communicative
of a Fwench class of buying
groceries...
   there is the language that
extends into the surroundings...
   the sort of language
that allows you to visit a Goodmayes
brothel
and leave it
telling the girl:
   can i not shower,
so i can keep your skin's
perfume for a while longer?

  there is no chameleon game
when i visit Poland,
i don't visit Poland,
  i visit the dutiful grandson who
still has grandparents...
and that?
is the most boring game of chameleon...
i stop drinking, enforce
a self-styled rehab...
   read a book, watch Polish t.v.
befitting pensioners...
   sunrise... sunset...
   and give my grandmother
a holiday from cooking for
a dementia sufferer...

  but back in London...
              a parade of over 280+
languages... making the mold
in the shadows of off-limits Mayfair
and other, politico, ******-pots
of riches,
exhausted by the Sheiks
   and Mandarin Emperors
                 of the Lapis-Lazuli.
Big Virge Jul 2015
So What Does This CLASS Thing...
... Mean To YOU... ???

Someone Who Went...
To A... " Public School "... ?
Or A Gent In A BOWLER...
Whose Demeanour Is Cool... ?

Well....
If This DEFINES Class To You... ?
Watch... Laurel and Hardy...
They Wore Them TOO... !!!

But All They Did Was...
... Act The FOOL... !!!!!

ME... Well I Went To...
Your Average State School...
Surrounded By Kids...
With A Few Who Were Fools... !!!

And Some Came UNSTUCK...
... WITHOUT Any Glue... !!!

Cos' They Left School...
WITHOUT Paying Their Dues... !!!

Like... LEARNING In Lessons...
Instead of GIRL STRESSING... !!!

Well I'm The TEST PRESSING...
That Proves That Some Lessons
Can Leave People STRESSING... !!!!!
And Yes... Second Guessing... ???

What Class Am I From... ?!?

I'm... NOT From A Class... !!!
Except A... " Classroom "...

But THAT ISN'T TRUE... !!!!!!!
My Mum And Dad KNEW...
What Couples Should Do...
In The... "Privacy of "...
A... " Double Bedroom "... !!!

IC1... IC3... ?
How About... IC2... ?

Do These STUPID Groupings...
DEFINE... What Is YOU.... ?!?!?!?

Well... If They DO...
Good Luck To You... !?!

But Police Like The Government...
DEFINE Who They CHOOSE...
Just So Their PUPPETS...
Can... DISH OUT ABUSE... !!!!!

Being BLACK Is A Class...
ALL of It's... " OWN "... !!!!!

Cos' Most OTHER Folk...
... DON'T Enter The Zone...
Where Blacks Are Deemed...
To Live UNCONTROLLED.... !!!

I've LOST CONTROL...
A... Couple of Times... !!!

But Now I Stick To Writing Rhymes...
To Show My Class By Using MY MIND... !!!

Class... DISTINCTIONS...
Go With NARROW Minds... !!!

While Words I Write...
DEFINE The Times...
WITHOUT Class Signs... !!!

I'm Just Another VICTIM...
of... Western Systems...
That KEEP US... A P A R T...
By The Use of.... " Isms "....

... " CAPITALISM "...
Is A CLASSLESS... Ism... !!!

Cos'... If You BELIEVE...
You're Just CASH DRIVEN... !!!

While... " RACISM "...
Is A... Class Filled Ism...
Where Blacks Are Deemed...
To Be... FIT For PRISON... !?!?!

But That's NOT ME...
Cos' I Haven't Been In Em'... !!!!!

I Grew Up........
In London... " West Ealing "...

But This DOESN'T Mean...
That I'm Liking DARJEELING … !!!

This Class Thing Needs CLEANING... !!!
Cos'... Living This Life...
Does NOT Have A Ceiling... !!!

This AIN'T Monty Python... !!!
Life Has... DEEPER Meaning...........
Than Visions of... " CLASS "...

Houses For LOUSES... !!!
And I'm NOT Talking Scousers'... !!!
They're ALL Right With Me...
It's People From London...
With... NO CLASS BELIEVE... !!!

I Can Tell By Their Looks...
When They're Looking At ME... !!!

These People Are FULL of HYPOCRISY... !!!
This IS How CLASSY TRUE Londoners Be... !!!

Who Then Have The CHEEK... !!!
To DEFINE... Who I Be... !!?!!

My Father And Friends...
Used To Run In BARE FEET...

My Mum Used To TEACH...
And Both of Them Came From...
That... Bajan' Country...

With Sugar Cane Fields...
And White Sandy Beach...

My Father Is NOW...
An... OSTEOPATH... !!!

So Let's LOOK At That...

He's Treated STAR Athletes...
And White Folk That's FACT... !!!!!

Does THIS Give Me A PASS... ?!?
To Be... " Middle Class "...
Even Though I Am BLACK... ?!?

This STUPID Class Question...
Is Simply A... FARCE... !!!

Divisions Are... VAST...
Like A Galleon Mast... !!!
But BREAKING These Boundaries...
Is A Task... BEYOND Class... !!!!!!

And This Is UNCERTAIN... ?
Who... REALLY Has... ?!?

.......... " CLASS ".........
British folks and their ... " Groupings " ... !!!
John F McCullagh Feb 2013
She wasn't precisely a criminal,
nor innocent of sin.
An Asymmetrical warrior
and a Republican to the end.
To Londoners, she was a terrorist
To the Irish, a voice from the past.
She wound up, old and embittered,
Determined that Peace should not last.
She 's survived by her sons and her sister
and some tapes that Sinn Fein brands lies.
She was known as the "Old Bailey bomber"
in the time of the Troubles gone by
Her coffin was draped in the colors.
Her comrades in arms standing by.
The living now are greybeards
and the rising moon is  not nigh.
This is an edited version of the original poem to correct some factual errors and to better represent the woman who is the subject of the poem
Mateuš Conrad Aug 2016
well, thank you England, but bye bye,
but hey! the blonde ferret  will be your guide,
anally sniffing Kentucky. say bye to Hong Kong -
say bye in Bengali to India বিদায় (bid-aya). oh sure,
feel pride, but there's the Zeppelins missing,
Focke-Wulf Fw 191 too... Londoners Yorkshire proud
as turnips.... horse and carriage people... blame the Poles!
invite the Syrians... the Hair-rash gingers
from Dublin never mattered... feels good not feeling racist once
you greet the Syrians unable to work the coal-mine, doesn't it?
a bit like donating to Oxfam?
go **** forward mind i guess where the triceps will
come from... remember that my
great paternal-grandfather was a **** with a
Wehrmacht dagger - adding to your closure on debility,
and the Irish jingle - or as someone said:
the show must go on... i just laugh at your little
racism nibbles - never heard a viola in an Irish jingle -
heard the Titanic, for sure, the perfect pub buddy
had a self-conscious moment - there's always the KKK
and the graveyard - unless you're not being
democratic, which i am aware of;
dogs and as suits the master - coagulating glue
for the thick thick contrast between φ and θ, esp.
in ascribing the title genius to a child, via spelling,
when φ and θ are side-by-side, e.g.:
as women said: i knew better than your concern
for digestion, so i grew a foetal-turnip while
you harboured a thought;
i guess the continuum mattered greatly to the thought
excavated, but i held life dearest,
and the foetal-turnip mattered most...
well, as Moses wrote: i'm anything but man,
so loving you (woman), will always be like
digging up turnips along with fishing for shrimps,
a bogus affair needing fishermen and half the sea
of awaited selectivity for the metaphor
there being other fish to catch; whatever;
****** come cheaper than dating, and dying for the third
or fourth time, i can't wait being aged 40;
by this point... it really doesn't matter if there'll be
a gathering to celebrate my name in Trafalgar Sq.;
by now there are other priorities, like turning on
the radio and not stealing MP3s; i only compound
the self with consciousness given history -
history makes me self-conscious, a shame of not having
invented the refrigerator or the kettle, or having
a thought concerning gravity to no use for someone
climbing the god-body of Tibet that's Mt. Everest.
IAyfarah Jun 2017
The Souls of Grenfell Tower

1 Grieve not, dear families, of the souls  of Grenfell Tower, for their souls did not depart in vain.

2 Grieve not, dear families, of the souls of Grenfell Tower, for their souls have been chosen from amongst other souls

3 Grieve not, dear families, of the souls of Grenfell Tower, for their souls have been returned in the best of months, Ramadan

4 Grieve not, dear families, of the souls of Grenfell Tower, for God descended to listen to their final utters of prayer

5 Grieve not, dear families, of the souls of Grenfell Tower, for their blissful souls reiterated the peacefulness of 2 billion others

6 Grieve not, dear families, of the souls of Grenfell Tower, for they proved, pried upon practicing pupils, prevent further terror and tragedy

7 Grieve not, dear families, of the souls of Grenfell Tower, for in June, they indeed sealed the end of May

8 Grieve not, dear families, of the souls of Grenfell Tower, for their souls showed the tweeting real duck, Londoners Khan all break fast together

9 Grieve not, dear families, of the souls of Grenfell Tower, for they led Britain's conversation and distanced Hatie and her fallen solutions

10 Grieve not, dear families of the souls of Grenfell Tower, for their souls invited pleasant lilies, with beautiful oras, and the most famous of hellos - Salaam

11 Grieve not, dear families, of the souls of Grenfell Tower, for they ignited the indigestion of cladding, in lowly aristocrats and their tory toys

12 Grieve not, dear families, of the souls of Grenfell Tower, for Martyrdom was their end to a new beginning

13 Grieve not, dear families, of the souls of Grenfell Tower, for God has granted them Gardens of Eden.
Mateuš Conrad Apr 2022
after a long shift at Fulham (Craven Cottage): well... obviously
it was going to be a longer shift than usual...
we were readying ourselves for a pitch-invasion...
since... if Fulham won... they would become secured
promotion to the Premier League...
i asked to be moved inside: third time...
   all the prior shifts in Bishop's Park were: one big
joke / yawn... nothing to do...
                                    absolutely nothing... nada -
            ei mitään
at least inside the stadium i could do something useful...
first on the turnstiles... then on the seg-line...
then... moved to the front... facing the crowd...
obviously i was picked to move around a bit because
i can sometimes look intimidating if i want...
not that i really want to... but Fulham has a different
atmosphere to West Ham...
mind you... whatever the stereotypes... western Londoners
are slobs... they have no fashion sense...
honest to god... eastern Londoners have so much
more dress sense! esp. the men...
   i won't mention the women either side of the fence...
but... east London men: well... the ones that come
to football matches are... proper ******* lads...
    prim...
                       back to the turnstiles: paired up with
this Muslim kid... for a while he thought i was Muslim
too... like those Muslim propagandists on Edgware Road
trying to make me into a proselyte thought
i was German... backwards and forwards...
so what time do you break fast...
   you still break the fast in the classical way with water
and dates? he looked bemused since
in the turnstiles opposite us... the "ummah" breaks
fast with an entire ******* meal... my guess... Somalis...
he even asked me for a favour:
can i pray in this turnstile shack... you know where
east is?
           i don't mind but... we're opening in like 5 minutes:
and i'm pretty sure your prayer is not as quick
and pointless as our father... which only good children
get up to before going to bed... in Catholic circles...
at least: until they become... well apostates...
so he asked: you're fasting to? it was the beard...
the full beard and moustache... ergo i must be a Muslim...
and not an urban hipster... well: no long hair done up
in a Shiva "jatadhara" - but not dreaded / matted...
oh no... i fast for a non-religious reason...
   i like fasting: it makes you more concentrated...
you learn that by fasting you can train yourself to hunger
something that transcends a hunger for food...
me... when i fast... i hunger for the eyes of women
to look at me... literally: hungry like a wolf...
          i hunger for human interaction: but Fulham is
not a friendly crowd... high-brow... depends...
            - and i truly don't know how Charles Bukowski
wrote about the drudgery of work...
           i must have spent too much time in my ivory tower
in my twenties... raving mad...
to now find myself... happily working... after all:
only a day prior i was doing some hardening...
right now... i count... 9 trees that i planted in my garden...
so far: the first... a plum tree... towers over me...
and each year she doesn't disappoint with her yield...
the others are just infants, but hopefully...
two years down the line... some apricots...
cherries.... morello cherries... apples... pears...
   i might not have walked in Eden... but... eh... so so...
plus the rosemary the thyme and the wild garlic that...
in the summer months... come night time after having
watered it... it smells like... marijuana...
    plus that massive eucalyptus tree at the end of it:
shame... no pandas...
               but i understand like... i don't want to say it...
but... it's sort of like.... ahem: ARBEIT MACHT FREI...
long shift today... pitch-invasion...
   some roughing up at first... then enough people took
up audacity and it was like: just let them past...
yesterday dismantling a vegetable patch...
   shifting about a tonne of soil... shovel: shove shove...
into bags and dumped into another part of the garden...
then... digging three holes for three gorgeous trees...
there... i did my green bit...
    - but not since the health of the youtube algorithm
have i been so frustrated at my once favourite
pastime of foraging for new music like a John Peel...
i once had the best-set up for finding new music i might like...
once you could appreciate youtube...
when... ahem... it was a "manosphere": or rather...
a site primarily used by men...
               before all the cat videos... before all the make-up
tutorials... it was a glorious time to find music!
now? now we're talking about looking at ***** colony
of patches of... i just don't have the words...
but... sometimes... i still get lucky...
   i got lucky today...
        there's nothing like coming back all the way from
Putney Bridge to Romford... hands shaking...
strong pain in the chest: no... it's not a heart attack...
hands shaking... if i were diabetic?
                   i haven't eaten anything all day...
   i managed to hold about 20cl of **** through all the trip...
oh god... the chicken shop is still open...
hot box... 6 spicy chicken wings... chips... five (s)quid...
eat half while waiting for the bus... hands still shaking...
eat the other half on the bus... get off the bus...
go into an alley... ****... go to a patch of grass
and wipe my hands to finish off what the tissue couldn't
accomplish... take out a cigarette and... ah...
surgeon's hands...                 blood sugar levels alright
one more... and in my memory... that one girl
in yoga pants that kept playing with her hair...
pulling her pants up... exposing her massive:
and i mean... hmm... peaches can't be as plum...
giving me the stare... she kept me going until
the shift finished...
             so i got home... and when i come home
tired: i'm *****... so... took the "holy trinity" to the throne
of thrones... took a ****: you're going to automatically
**** while your **** relaxes... and then...
the usual story... at least i'm not making an Only-Fans
account and filming myself for others...
it's there one minute... and then once the deed is
done: creative juices can start flowing...
sit down with a whiskey... or two... or three...
and try to figure out what to do with the sick algorithm...
foraging for more music...
and there is a massive underground movement of folk...
i've known about Hedningarna for some time...
best songs? tappmarschen... vargtimmen... raven...
Suomi... which... is a strange sort of what's classically
associated with Scandinavia... since the Finns are...
well... particular... Inuit... mythological in a sense
of being almost Eskimo...
        was i going to get lucky tonight?
sure as **** i was... the current algorithm is a bit like
a slot machine... you have to be patient with it...
subscribe to at least two good channels...
i can recommend: HARAKIRI DIAT
   and IN DEPTH MUSIC... those two channels have changed
the way i had to improve the use of the site
for my benefit...
we're still staying in Finland...
           but we're moving away from folk music:
going back in time to the 1980s...
with what was happening post-punk in England...
two music genres i abhor... punk... and rap...
i can't stomach them... stiff little fingers.... fair enough...
i'd sooner find myself on the "wrong end" of a stick
for liking Phil Collins like... that Bateman guy...
or U2... but... no... i can't stomach punk or rap...
it's not right for my digestion...
      but? post-punk? gothic rock? deathrock?
   sign me up... it's almost like the extension of The Cure
and Depeche Mode and Joy Division i've always been hungering
for...
   found it today...
the following rubric is the artist and a song(s)
with a translation of the song titles...

musta paraati - romanssi (romance), myrsky nousee (storm rises)
belaboris - kuolleet peilit (dead mirrors)
this one is going to be funny...
silmät - haudattu (burried)...
          but if you take the word apart?
   hau - woof... dattu - date... we start barking
on the 20th of April?!
syyskuu - susi (wolf)
        kuudes tunti - kuuntele ääniä (listen to the sounds)
kuolleet kukat - kasoittain tuhkaa (loads of ash)
hiljaa - kuume (fever)
               päät - rikoksen rytmi (crime rhythm)
liikkuvat lapset - sinut haluan (thee i want)...
                  well... i'm not a Finn...
                                 sinut halua (without the n)...
but... the basic jyst is already there: i want you...
whether that's sinut halua or sinut haluan...

i was lucky today... looking for new music...
i'm not so lucky... too many cat videos...
too many make-up tutorial videos fudging the original
thesaurus algorithm where:
music was just more accessible... but no surprises...
look at what happened to the high-street...
once upon a time men could go to a vinyl shop...
forage... find something interesting...
now? what's left?! shoe shops... clothes shops...
restaurants...
they burnt the secular church of man:
to the ground...
                i'm lucky... in Romford we still have
the last "face" of what's the HMV franchise...
it's not HMV though... there's also this one crazy
record shop in Upminster...
but... that's about it...
        you burned my ******* church to the ground...
replacing it with... **** i don't need...
that's just not cool...
            i mean come on: men are visual creatures?!
ah ha ha... yeah... when it comes to looking at women...
if there were no women involved...
to hell with painters... they're freaks...
paint over something i can blink at?! and give it up to my
memory bank?
visual creatures... men...
hmm... sure... Beethoven was such a ******* visual
creature that his love for music...
well... if it didn't drive him mad...
the gods were good to him: they just drove him deaf!
men are only visual creatures when
women are concerned... we're as ******* abstract
as you can get...
         you burned my church to the ground!
why couldn't a sacred space of men coming together
and sharing tastes and distastes still exist?
no one is going to have a conversation over buying
a ******* pair of shoes... well... who would?
but over a record album... talk talk... talk talk:
tears for fears... of **** this ****... i'm out... bailing...
even my mother mentioned this quack of a fact
joke: women just binge-watch t.v....
         i don't know how i managed to keep up
with the series Billions... probably for Chuck Rhodes...
women just ******* talk t.v. t.v. t.v.:
ask them about music? ask them... except for the popular
current crap? i count a woman interesting
if she has even the remote interest in music...
but... most women don't...
for them... listening to music: looking at inanimate
objects and imagining them vibrating is: alien...
what you could do... is... this little experiment...
tell a man to listen to some music... while looking at a rock...
hell.. a ******* mountain... but a rock is just grand...
but play him some music...
now... do the opposite... tell a woman to watch some
animate object... but... mute her hearing ability...
so... put the volume down low on something on t.v.:
and let the woman watch...
in turn... put some earphones on a man
and tell him: you're Sisyphus... watch the rock...
because: i never truly grapled with the myth...
even if a Camus tried to explain it to me...
mein gott... on my way back home...
******* spaghetti-eaters... H'americans...
apart from the accent... their bravado was just
overflowing... loud: girls more boisterous than
the boys... flesh everywhere... i could spot at least
two ******* about to show more than
the darkened flesh around the *******... the *******...
loud: drinking on public transport:
even though it's illegal: acting as if they own
the ******* place... women this **** have never
come across as... anything but appealing...
let's be honest: if i want to visit a *******:
i'll visit one... put my money on the table:
blah blah Dandy Warhol's an hour later...
but all this libido insomnia that men go through:
this overt-teasing... i'm like a horse with
eye-blinders... trot: the: ****: along...
        plus the accent is... bothersome...
       i pray that i never have to visit America...
i pray that i might, somehow get to see the glimpses
of the Kamchatka Peninsula...
            two girls quit work when i said that i dated
a Russian girl (from Novosybirsk) and that:
in the "current climate": it would be a bad idea to
date a Russian girl... that's before the Ukraine fiasco...
oh well... rumours... tremors... but still all handshakes
at the company's Reichstag...
bearded: heavy looking men... it's such a pretty
joke that all of us look tough but...
if we had to come across someone with a black belt
in judo: we'd be... ha ha... slippery pancakes!
but... but... they burned my church down...
long gone are the days best associated
with Nick Hornby's High Fidelity...
    that novel: made me...
           it's one of the few books where the film adapatation
made me want to read the book...
Stendhal's the Scarlet and the Black
was another... the Three Muskateers...

well... isn't it such a lovely comment anyone
could leave?

but the best itches, are the ones you can't scratch, no? what's that thought you haven't shared with me? - and, may i ask, are you willing to share it now? just as i''m waiting: are you bloodied and willing to... allow the leeches to drain the restraints from you? speak your mind... i feel no need to inhibit my thinking: that's how i respect the concept of free speech, if it follows the Cartesian model... res cogitans becomes res extensa: i sometimes like to revel in revealing what i think... therefore translating it as "speech": even... when entrusted with lettering... it's not speech... is it? freedom of speech is an extension of thought: no? painters can't talk for a worth of chalk or... rather: charcoal on canvas: i.e.: ****... epileptic blinking machines... eh... it's just a little distinction between how Y and I diverge... yet at the same time merge... dye... difference... i'm not even sure how to overcome this fiddly bit of the Anglo-Zunge... but there's no lisp involved...  but you're getting my grift... motive... whatever you want to call it... yeah... phi and theta... which... in English is basically: F = PH = TH... i already found this keyhole using the iota and omicron: key in: twist... hey presto... i.e. I + O = Φ / Θ = Ω i.e. the door opens... this was not borrowed from the Exploits & Opinions of Dr. Faustroll: Pataphysician by Alfred Jarry... please... don't restrain yourself... you think i could?

i only copied it for the equations... well... just this one:
I + O = Φ / Θ = Ω.
Mateuš Conrad May 2017
i used to think i had a ******* problem,
                                                        as in: being addicted to it.
                       i used to ******* while taking a ****
on the toilet while watching either photographs
   (that's class, first rate, old school) or the odd video;
but then, something strange happened,
   maybe it's relatable to the promiscuity hierarchy of birds...
crows? never seen them at it,
                                       robins? never seen them at it.
woodland pigeons (with their distinct dog collar of white
around their necks)? never seen them at it.
ducks? never seem them at it.
      swans or canadian geese? never seen them at it.
it's those rats with wings! that's what londoners call
urban pigeons! ******* are ***** as a chance of gangrene!
and cuckoos! those ******* are ***** as ****!
                      so you see, there is a decency in the kingdom
of birds...           sparrows... well only in spring,
and you can see them do it, if they decide to build a nest
really close to your window... but i can excuse them...
because they're (and i have seen them do it) ****
but then there's the whole nest-building process.
    i'm cool with that... but those urban pigeons and cuckoos
are blimmin' disgusting.
      anyway... the most fascinating thing happened to me,
i turned all cenobite (a.ka. monk) after doing an exercise
that might blow your mind... it was a bit like:
  how on earth are you going to stop ******* yourself?
hmm?
                    it's not that easy to be frank...
   well...           watch a video of a pregnant woman putting on
a show on any the **** websites... no, not videos
            where she's being ******... soloists...
                you ******* to that sort of performance for about...
i'd say 10 times... and afterward... it's home and dry...
                   your ***** start to shrink, becuase they're becoming
condensed with *****... and that's that.
       oh yeah, when you abstain they shrink, becoming
    more and more chestnut hard... the more you *******
       the bigger they are... and emptier...
        hold on, 'old on... testicales are storage spaces...
                                                       ­     so what produces them?
and that's philosophy in a nutshell... asking really naive questions
for which there are already answers for, probably,
                 but awe, is not in certainty, it's in uncertainty.
once again, if this can be considered a "cure" with regards
     to *******...
       a pregnant woman soloist... like she might squeeze her
******* and milk flows out... or she might rub her foetus-enclaved
   abdomen...      (a) it's not a turn-off
               but          (b) it's a turn-off from ******* per se.
thank god this has happened... i was looking for it for
ages! i'm no urban pigeon or a cuckoo! over-sexualised and what?
                lamenting if you're not getting any?
           but that is exactly the exit strategy in an over-sexualised
culture... a pregnant woman doing a solo performance.
thank you, oh very much thank you,
                     i'm leaving with elvis, evlis has just left the building,
i'm bowing out, it was nice for the past 22 or so years,
     i'm starting to wonder: have i ever had a slush puppie?
Whilst London burned
they did try so hard
with hands tied behind their backs
they did try

This political upheaval
lies between the lines
kids doing criminal acts
beyond the years of crime

This nasty situation
with thugs on our streets
this is what England is now
full of yobs and sheep

This Rat in black
has had far too much
if I had law in this land
I'd eat them up for lunch

Looters and thieves
visions beyond belief
I want them called to justice
before I loose it and grit my teeth

I will fight for my country, tooth and nail
No enemy from within, will take us now
I would face death before loosing London
and all good Londoners will show you how

By Christos Andreas Kourtis aka NeonSolaris


© 2011 NeonSolaris (All rights reserved)
The gas mask swings from round his neck
as he holds tight his mothers hand
the screaming sirens call all the be prepared
it's down to the shelters all over this land

The wardens with their tin hats
usher hurriedly these London born
down deep to the underground
down to the humid stale and warm

All is ghostly for silence holds dominion
then from above they hear the distant drone
this is the unearthly sound of bombers
coming to destroy Londoners homes

In flurries of six the bombs fall
you hear them get closer
the ground seams to quake
as children start to shake

So this is war in it's lowest form
threatening the existence of the London born
some close their eyes and pray
with hopes to live another day


By Christos Andreas Kourtis aka NeonSolaris



By NeonSolaris
© 2010 NeonSolaris (All rights reserved)
There’s a constant anxiety on those tables
A perilous way to deflect the world and all its problems
A kind of insidious joy in collecting
All these miniatures, minuscule and exquisitely crafted figures
Bothered by life in their stillness
Like little swans and princesses
Lingering in a silence which is sacred.
These tiny clever ones
Shuffled on slightly scratched wood,
Wear their days like a cloak of doom
And push each other
Like Londoners out of the tube.
Fearless, little monsters
Repressing their hunger,
treading over the borders of life, they enter
forests from which no escape is granted
Where awakens a desire for mutiny,
From the abnormal perfection
Smothered under ceramic faces.

A bedside table full of whatnots
Doesn’t shield you from bad dreams
The little shepherd lies smashed on the floor
And no one’s going to cry for him.
A poem about the confusion and franticness of life. People always running somewhere yet scatched in moments of panic and fear, like they were whatnots on a table. Suggestions for improvements welcome:)
Mateuš Conrad Jan 2023
there might have been perhaps two other New Year's Eve
to match this years,
of these only one was actually magically youthful,
between 2004 coming to 2005 or perhaps it
was 2005 coming to the year 2006...
i was still studying at Edinburgh (Promis, Alicia),
that's when Promis lost her virginity
to me after Hogmanay, becoming irresistible...
seeing Fiona slobber me...
at the same time "drink me, eat me"...
**** drink to puncture her virginity while
Alicia was left cold, Lebanese reading that book:
The Hours... leftover in the communal room...

i didn't have any fun with these girls that time round...
what i had fun with was... my flatmate...

with Tristan from Bristol,
running around the streets breaking car side-mirrors
reenacting scenes fro Fight Club...
Bruce decided to become this middle-aged
man aged 18...
he bought a "bucket" of golf clubs...
one night we took them out...
we took out some golf clubs...
a few golf *****... and a few glasses...
we stood in the middle of the street...
pretending to... AIM... at... ha ha.. AIM...
we missed all the golf *****...
but! we managed to hit all the glasses!
it was... spectacular...
we were golfing in the proper Scottish sense
of the origin of golf...
       we had golf-clubs... we had golf-*****...
but we weren't hitting golf-***** with golf-clubs...
we were using golf-clubs... to... aim at imaginary
pint-glasses... sitting on top of...
shot-glasses... or... perhaps the reverse...

then that one terrible one circa 2003 or 2002...
going back to Poland, back then trying to romance
Katie (Kasie) - being invited to a house party...
being surrounded by teenagers hornier than me...
small-town mentality of getting hitched-early
and i was having trouble to breathe and find out
anything about whether i was already
the foreigner that still spoke his native tongue,
smoke, ****** music,
   the past part of the house party was helping with
the preparations with the host i only met that
evening...

this other New Year's Eve i was sitting alone
in my grandparent's house... alone in the kitchen...
both of my grandparents decided to go to bed early...
i watched the fireworks alone and felt
a solid stone of melancholy: a reflective sadness that
is not some reflex-depress or deflect-impress...

before today i promised myself change my habits,
how i would change everything,
quit smoking or at least cut down: i would most certainly
not smoke in the morning and on an empty stomach,
i would cut down on the heavy bourbon or whiskey
*****... why?
  heavy ***** has ****** up my digestive system a little...
irritable bowel movements and...
sometimes the inability to take a **** in one go...
rather... having in splintered...
   in sections... well... easily prone to sometimes vomiting
or rather: needing to ***** to feel at easy...
that was three days ago...

      i just wanted to stop feeling the also hightened
blood pressure...
             these "headaches" that weren't headaches but sort
of pulsations... as if my brain was dehydrated,
spinning, almost feeling death-tickling...
squeezing of the throat...
i told myself that i would stop drinking the heavy
duty liquids even if that meant i would have more sleepless
nights... well... new year's resolutions begin
two days before a new year's eve...
but the old ways have to come around for just one
last time on new year's eve and then:
with the intended plans...

    prior to the 30th... on the 29th i said to myself:
promise me this you-i, you will follow-through...
so i drank four ciders, took some generic painkillers
to ease me sleep and hey presto...
perhaps not a healthy 8 hour lapse into the Land
of Nod - but at least i woke up relaxed at 10am...
i had 5 hours spare until the shift would start
at the London Stadium...
                       i ate enough food smoked a cigarette
starting puking... right... you're not taking an cigarettes
to the shift... on my way there these
high-pressure "headaches" kicked in...
again i thought i was constipated but i had already
taken a shift before leaving...
no... these were not high-pressure "headaches"
anymore... excitement was kicking...
    i was again promoted to a supervisor: **** it...
here's me taking care of the east-wing with 15 stewards
under me...
i was excited... why? West Ham fans have the worst
reputation of all the clubs in the Premier League...
27 arrests in the season 2021/22...
i was excited... i was expecting something to happen...
i had 4 stewards on their ****** shifts...

in the middle of the match where West Ham was losing
to Brentford 2 - nil, Martin on gate 141 started gesticulating
with his hands in the middle of the second half...
i walk over... he tells me something is going on...
i look up... oh ****... about 12 guys, some of these guys
were fathers who brought their little boys along...
haggling with punches and grabbing and ferocious
tongues, children crying... a woman in the audience
starts glaring at me with hysteria and screaming
at me: do something! do something!
        calmly i turn on the radio and communicate
to Head Control: Control, this is Papa 2.3 -
i need a response team to be at gate 141 immediately!
the woman is still screaming,
the situation is escalating.... the children are even more
distraught, the blokes are more ferocious
(and the funny thing is, it's West Ham fans
fighting West Ham fans and not Brentford fans...
because the team is close to relegation
and i guess one fan knows better than another
fan about how to turn the situation can be
overturned) -
                           so as the pitch-side manager
Joe once said about contacting Head Control:
'i try getting through to them, they ignore me...'
well... i go at the radio again...
    'Control! this is Papa 2.3 - i need a response team
at gate 141 of the Billy Bonds stand! turn your cameras
onto what's happening! the situation is escalating!'
hey presto... persistence paid off...
    in about 20 seconds about 10 bouncers (SIA licensed)
rush in and break up the crowd... take some guys out,
comfort the children... i'm just happy the hysterical
woman is not looking at me eyes of scorn as if i'm
some impotent radio-holder...

the shift finishes at around 10:30pm...
   i still manage to catch the tube to Gants Hill and the 66 bus
to Romford, the petrol station near the police station
is still open so i buy three ciders...
    get home just after 12am, drink two ciders smoke two
cigarettes, take some painkillers and try to sleep...
oh ****... oh right... no chance of that happening...
i'm already sweating from alcohol withdraw...
cider can't replace bourbon or whiskey...
                   but excitement turns into post-panic control:
the situation was contained...
but that's not why i couldn't fall asleep...
i tried to... maybe i did for about 30 minutes in between
listening to Heilung's album Futha...
   i must have snoozed off for about 20 to 30 minutes
maybe less... turning side to side...
                                       but i knew that there wouldn't
be any point given i finished drinking the cider at
around 1:10am and i had to get up at 6am...
               to eat some porridge, shower, get dressed...
which i did... weird... ever see a fly casually flying
in a kitchen during December? heat makes flies crazy
during flight... in the "cold" of December (13 degrees Celsius
is cold for December... i experienced about
a week of promising,, authentic cold and snow
a week or two ago) - now this stinking damp and mediocre
cold... ate the porridge standing up contemplating
the lazy flight of the fly... so big... so juicy...
thank god it was one of those black ones and not
those green-belly that **** out dormant larva so quickly
the larva that turn to maggots so quickly...
black flies don't have that capacity...
because black flies... well... you associate black flies
with pestering cows... ergo? they feed off ****...
the blue-belly flies feed off dead meat... cat food...

6am wake up, wash, get dressed, and *******
to Putney Bridge for a 9am shift starts at Cavern Cottage:
Fulham vs. Southampton... New Year's Eve...
i have done a shift on Boxing Day last year...
double pay... but doing a Boxing Day shift is not the same
as... doing a New Year's Eve shift...
      it's like that W. H. Auden quote about
New Year's Eve:

the only way to spend New Year's Eve is
either quietly with friends or in a brothel.
otherwise when the evening ends and people pair off,
someone is bound to be left in tears.

ha! i have a third option!
    
so on my way to Putney Bridge, since the Elizabeth
Line is on strike until the 2nd of January...
****... this complicates my travel in London a little...
i can't take the simple option of taking the 103
bus to Romford Station and head to Paddington
and then a short walk from one Paddington (train)
station to the Paddington (tube) station and
like... 6 stations from Paddington to Putney Bridge
(Stamford Bridge, if you're interested?
that's at Fulham Common, or Broadway,
one of the two) - i could have complicated matters
by taking a longer walk from Hammersmith...
but i like walking through Bishop's Park...
as i was once reminded by one co-worker...
that's where Gregory Peck meets the priests
who gets killed in the film Omen...
it's a beautiful park: it's right next to the Thames...
so the route changes... i have to get the 103
bus to the A12 and then get on the 66 bus to
Newbury Park... then the central line to
Holborn, then the Piccadilly Line to Earl's
Court and then the District Line to Putney Bridge...
i truly tried all the alternatives...
e.g. central line to Oxford Circus -
Victoria line to Victoria and the district line
to Putney B.
     or... central line to Notting Hill Gate and
district line to ditto B....
     but i found that... there's too much walking
involved...
          the shortest route is the one i found out...
sure... it's a bit long changing at Holborn...
but changing at Earl's Court is the shortest...
plus Earl's Court is the interchange
between Edgware Rd, Richmond, Wimbledon,
Upminster and Ealing Broadway...
and the station is almost open air... so sickly sweet
underwear drying in the underground
during the Blitz sort of sensation association
with waiting...

                          ah... well... i managed to get in
to the sign in area for the shift early, i was probably the first,
said hello to the owner of the company,
who's name i always forget... an imposing figure...
former-military... but i still forget his name...
Scott... Scott... hello hello... i didn't shake his hand
this time round because i'm not left-handed
and i noticed he was holding a cigarette in his right...
signed in...
   ooh... the grand comedy of being early...
some perks come with that...
between Putney Green and Putney Bridge i realised
that my halting my drinking and elevation
of insomnia left me without any of those
high-blood pressure headaches... no excitement...
not this time round...
               i was cool as a cucumber...
i didn't feel any constipation... but then after signing
in... ooh... that porridge really helped...
as did that ****** chicken, sweetcorn mayo and
salad sandwich and Monster watermelon drink
did too... sign in at 9am... shift starts at 10am...
irritable bowel-movements...
    the staff toilets sub-standards... i tell someone:
if anyone asks... i'm going to the public toilets
in Bishop's Park... but there are toilets for staff?
you see the cubicles mate? cubicles without doors...
i'm not here to ****... i'm here to take a dump!

fidgety i'm walking back to Bishop's Park...
i enter the toilets... i enter the toilets... then the cubicle...
i peer in... wow! no animals were (yet) here!
the toilet seat is clean! it's left down!
there's toilet paper! there's a coat hanger!
wow! wow! am i just about to "******" as if seeing my
favourite ****-star from when i was 15?!
i take my coat off and all the elements of accreditation,
high-viz. and stadium passport...
undo my shirt a little at the collar and sleeves...
undo my zipper and clip pull down my trousers
down sit down and: PHOO! i **** out both
a gold nugget of firm shirt and a subsequent
waterfall of the looser stuff... my god...
i know that i'm supposed to find some sort of relief
in *******... this... this is better than *******...
ejaculations happen in private...
this is inverted *******: taking a **** in a public
toilet is more of a relief than ******* in private...
after all... it's pretty much the same, isn't?
i might not be looking someone in the eyes...
my member might not be in someone else's body...
but... Bishop's Park was organising their annual
run around the park for jogging enthusiasts...
i was already done when this one jogger ran
into a cubicle next to the one i was sitting in
finishing off my "taking a ****" counting time
solving a Mahjong... when i start to hear him puking...
i just took the most glorious Hiroshima ****
and here's next to me separated by a flimsy screen
that can't sort of discriminate the existence of sounds...

we waited for the shift to start for so long...
Stephanie pulled out... i saw her at West Ham and she asked me
whether i'd be with her in the Bishop's Park...
she turned in sick... so... i was back with Toni...
on the Hammersmith end of the stadium...
well... Thames-side and Hammersmith end...
i just implored her for a favour... i'm tired Toni...
can you put me on the outermost position...
last time i curated this position the weather was beautiful...
i spotted the bridge after Putney Bridge and
i thought: oh... the Kew Bridge...
what a glorious sight... but no...
the bridge that comes after Putney Bridge is
the Hammersmith Bridge... but that's when the weather
was good...
i just didn't want to work with Mark...
    citation needed: 'with my 12 years of experience
as a steward...'                      the ****-joke of the profession...
it was barely a year since i worked this job
and i was already supervising and yet he...
yeah...                               i can understand flies...
more than these busy-bodies of deluded semi-half A.I.
projects of hurt humans...
Francis Bacon paintings are grotesquely beautiful...
but this? this is reality-par-excellence...
interacting with it is: this incomplete human sort
of a joke... that can become a sly group-think of
being comfortable with a specified discomfort...

so i asked her... stand me there... next to ol' Father Thames
and let me admire that bridge i'm not sure about...
so she did...
     what i wasn't actually expecting was the weather...
i took the ******* position...
but as i soon learned... the best position...
the wind came with the rain and the rain came with
the wind...
                      there was this dog-walker with 4 dogs
with one being a terrier ADHD prone spaniel...
running rampage as if having seeing the godhead
of Anubis...
                      
          i was directing Southampton fans to the Putney
stand to avoid the Hammersmith stand...
just talking... hello, how are you, good afternoon...
smile... more smile... choke on a ******* biscuit
and a peppermint...
                   old men telling you: you're not getting paid
enough... lovely weather, oh... not as lovely as if...
it might be staged in the dark...

more about Mark with Lyndon and Toni...
pestering three women Chill (that middle-aged Turkish
woman... oh names... apples: Melanie... Nile? pears?
verbs?!) talk gets lost... on details...
joking about jumping the tide-out Thames...
i was just looking at how crows scared the seagulls...
one swan swimming alone...
metal-pickers in the mud...
                         i'm not myopic or the antagonism
of myopia... L.S. Lowry's stick-paintings...
                                 sure as **** metal-pickers...
in the mud i noticed what i first thought was a treasure
chest... turns out it was an old computer disk...
what was that even called if it wasn't a monitor?

oh and the weather truly broke me...
the rain came at an angle...
i smarted myself up by asking for a second... water resilient
jacket to put... i wasn't going to put on a flimsy potato-starch
pancho...
but that didn't stop my trousers getting soaked...
then once the rain stopped and the wind resumed:
getting dry... then once the rain came back getting soaked again...
but my socks were already soaked beyond getting dry...
walking the pavement in wet socks in leather shoes
is like... skinning an alive pig...

soaked feet.... although my upper body was kept warm...
talking with Toni about the proper attire for
winter... waterproof overalls... from Sports Direct...
and combat shoes: Magnums, used by police officers
and the army and all manner of security forces...
she asked for a cigarette, i gave her one,
she wasn't expecting a Camel... we walked...
looking each other in the eyes and subsequently
at each other's shoes...
in that instance she told me about her life...
she was living with her father and her stepmother...
how he biological mother kicked her out...
i just forgot which of her "mothers" was
the bipolar one... oh, right... her stepmother...
so i inquired about her stepmother's bipolar disorder...
so is that like manic depression?
no? split personality disorder? what's that like?
are all her personalities integrated or are they,
each to their own, loose canons?!

but there were these other two girls... Naomi...
who looked like a more pristine version of Will Smith's
wife... Jada Smith... i was... looking at Jada Smith...
with more hair... a nose piercing and a piercing
like a freckle where my moustache would cover it:
to the side... two kids... living in Richmond...
totally irresistible... this is how i always wanted
to spend my New Year's Eve... stoically...
at first in a gradation of pain...
pain from feat turning into the flayed beast
revealing nothing but bone, prone to accepting
the elements...

           this other girl... nice... cannibal looking teeth...
bound to braces... plump in the face... wearing a beany hat...
also mingling with Mark, the negate,
she touching him teasingly... once ***** was mentioned
i gave her some advice... oh... but you do know that
the only way to drink ***** is to drink it frozen, right?
so it resemble a sickly sick syrup... no ice, no mixer...
at best a chaser... she peered at me as if i belonged to
an ethnicity of a people that knew how to drink the ****
stuff... quizzical eyes... i forgot to tell her about
spending some time with the Russians:
being myself of a Slavic origin: ABSOLUT VANILLA...

i already knew it was the sort of New Year's Eve i was waiting
for when the shift was coming to a closure...
i was back in position admiring the Thames...
admiring the fading dark Green of Hammersmith Bridge
when the supporters were walking out...
one recognised me saying: so, you're been here,
all along? pretty much...
more passed and i just started spewing the casual:
have a good night, safe journey home,
and then the seemingly comical:
happy new year!

                 happy new year echo!
happy new year! happy new year!
            this precautionary tale of when Gandalf inquired of
poor Frodo: will it be?!
what? a happy new year?!
am i wishing a happy new year to you in advance
hoping, or perhaps wishing, or perhaps knowing:
that it might be... a happy new year?!
the phrase itself is about as meaningful or... meaningless
as licking a post-stamp and sticking it to
a postcard... wishing or not wishing: a "you"
to be "here"... no?!

                                   how about... happy new year
could be replaced with: MAYBE NEXT YEAR...
i.e. when i and you, are still alive...
we'll see each other again... i think that just might be
the summit of what happiness entices mortal creatures
such as ourselves to, from time to time: actually: believe!

the shift ended, i was soaked from feet down...
the trip back from Putney Bridge back to Romford was
sort of... giving CPR to octopi and walking on borrowed
legs... and less than sleepy eyes...
i got off at Gants Hill... ordered a spicy chicken burger
and three hot wings... gulped them down...
went into a Tesco Express... bought myself
a 70cl bottle of Jim Beam, a bottle of Pepsi...
3 cider bottles...
                     got home... said hello to my parents...
sorry... i'm ******* off... climbed into bed...
pretended to sleep, or rather, relaxed with naked feet
under the bed-sheets from them not being soaked...
"woke up" after about 2 fours... hours...
greeted them... sorry... i'm not into St. Sylvester's
celebration...
but i sat down with them...
as i have done for the past two or three years...

Jools Holland's Hootenanny has become sort of:
10pm ITV news in the household come this time of year...
what wouldn't i do without it...
Cat Burn's song Go... i never heard of it until then...
i ate some traditional tripe broth...
to warm the stomach up...
i hanged the bottle of Jim Beam and the bottles of cider
on the garden fence before coming home...
i was going to pick them up later...
to drink... well... at least half...
but it was so worthwhile to be so physically exhausted...
wow! these notes i wrote about that month
last year where i spent almost spent £1000 of prostitutes
and in the meantime lost two of my greatest
lovers... of 30 minutes' worth...
i.e. Khadra and Mona... who... the Madame of the brothel
told me would never return...

we watched the ******* spectacle of the fireworks...
wow! great! crowd!
i just retorted... if i were the people between
Westminster Bridge and the Embankment Bridge...
seeing the fireworks... i'd save up on t.v. memory...
i'd record the collective spectacle...
but got before the massive wheel
and stand there and stare... oh... but look...
who what or when Londoners? Chinese tourism...
the inescapable flu: chick or flex pork chop infections
but no rats and flies are the wholesome friends?!
standing there... with technology spread-out *******
third-eye non-experience...
the technology saw it first...
                                ugly humans non-humans
robots seem lovelier...
                    
                     that's how i learned about Cat Burn's song Go
thinking: didn't Ed Sheeran write this?!
doesn't matter...
once this supposedly spectacular night ended
when i heated up my feet and regained some flesh
in them...
                  i started drinking with my usual standard
of toxicity... looking through old notes...
ooh! an unfinished joint! wow! i had a premonition!
i will not want to go to a brothel i will not want
to go to a depressing house-party...
i will want to go inward...
into myself and starve anything already established...
i think i must have met about 3 girlfriends
tonight... possible...

now i'll finish a bottle of 70cl of bourbon by myself
while writing and smoke that joint...
finally! a new diet of music!

and the odl rekindling of an alliance....
perhaps placing conkers might put off spiders
from aligning a household with a disapproval for housing
spiders... but flies... that's a different matter;
i'm going to smoke this joint
and dream my hazardous of this years first and last
breaths.

where is that ******* fly...
i hope it's still alive while i'm alive... if i swallow it in
the night... i'll pretend to be a Pontus Pilate...

no other New Year's Eve has been so benevolent to me...
i was fudge packed between commuters not trying to
entertain the fireworks on the Thames...
me? go home...
       tired old young man....
                         why are there suspicions of me:
by simply being punctual as having any sort of association
with any nation's army?!
i like sunsets... i like sunrises... i adore the aloofness
of the aloneness that's: otherwise missing
in the claustrophobia of interaction with the other...
WOJSKO...
                        
            this has certainly been the best New Year's Eve
to meet all others...
before me stand's King Lear and Lot's Wife...
i wonder... who is... the Pillar of Sugar?!
Sugar = Salt + Water... no?!
so who is... the pillar of Sugar?!

   ah... ha: hermeneutics contra etymology!
          there's only one history for me...
   that being etymology: the origin of words from words:
to use words is not to use anything beyond words themselves...
which excludes my original assumptions that
letters or geometric shapes akin to letters or vice versa
could ever be utilised...
verba ex verba - non verba ex figura, numerus vel littera:
verba ex et enim verba!
meaning for meaning...
not meaning borrowed from either the associated
or dissociation...
or dissociation and a(n) association...

   well... it just so happens that i have... something of a...
half-wit... canvas of artificial-intelligence
to work with... it's basic intelligence...
                           just what i need.
Mateuš Conrad Oct 2017
i've been carrying this napkin with a scribble on it
since yesterday -
  obviously in the heimatspreschen -
chcem stanąć przed sędzią, który może
osądzić sędziów
- i.e.
    i want to stand before the judge, who can
pass judgement on all judges -
and a lesson for a few:
   e. e. cummings does not even tickle
orthography...
   noMatter howOrWhy you write so so,
and the not so... that's not orthography...
you don't get teach people orthography
with a language that has no diacritical
aesthetic... orthography goes hand in hand with
the application of diacritical marks,
and, since english has none: i consider
the interpretation of e. e. cummings'
works as: on the sly orthographic: absolute
diatribe.
        you want to know what orthography
looks like?
exhibit (a)
  chcem stanąć przed sędzią, który może
osądzić sędziów
- correct - orthodox -
exhibit (b)
hcem stanąć przed sędzią, ktury morze
osądzić sędziuw

esp. on the może (maybe)
  and morze (sea)...
                    that's orthography!
take your ****** little e. e. cummings
                                   ******* and... *******!

so much for an intro...
today i found myself in possession of a 6 zone
travel card...
   little essex boy went sightseeing into
london, his adventure would end at
alexandra palace, wood green,
  the piccadilly line, zone 3,
  so off little essex boy went,
got on the train from lil' market town into
liverpool st., started walking on the platform
thinking: thank **** no owls and quarters
and hidden passageways into & through
brick walls...
      as any wordsmith will tell you:
once you enter the urban environment proper,
you start to realise, well, a permanent
insignificance of your effort dawns on you,
how you're overshadowed by all the clogs
in the machinery of the civilised world...
   awe? far from it... i was barraged,
pulverised by the ant in an ant-topia -
or should i say: a utopia is a place where
there's a seemingly infinite demand for work,
not necessarily a seemingly infinite
supply for work, but certainly a demand for
work...
             the most ******* job has to exist
to accommodate the people -
  it doesn't have to, but is has to exist in
order to be a bit like housing space.
so i passed them, the train operators,
the ticket inspectors, the men on the tracks
improvising improvements from ilford to
stratford (manor park, forest gate, maryland
etc.) -
  it really didn't matter whether one worked
and two snoozed on the job -
  the idea perpetuated itself:
  if not actually doing anything:
**** it, act, look busy, or look perplexed
by some "unfathomable" obstacle,
most notably thought.
            oh you better believe me that i have
great respect for even the most menial
professions -
    or as i like to call them: flip flop hopping just
shy of heaven -
the daydreamers' jobs -
   ******'s on that till telling train tickets,
ever so often waking up by an imaginary
coconut falling on his head when
a new customer arrives and wakes the
**** up.
                      london... ah, what a place...
someone once said you're never a meter away
from a rat on these streets...
   no ****, and half a meter from a rat with wings
and probably an eager tourist feeding these
"penguins"...
                    but i took the trip because
i thought i'd feel inspired, change of environment,
like: i honestly can't remember the last
time i sat on a bus, or a train, or the tube...
       me in a sitting position,
inside a belly of some mechanical diesel
caterpillar...
                       just for the occasion i thought i'd
dress up, put on a pair of socks and a pair of jeans...
well, i thought: these londoners can't suspect me
coming from the home counties...
gotta look the part, in some remote way...
fat face attire all, from the waist up;
                      but the people in their number
and disorientation hit be like a saharan gust
of wind, remnants of a hurricane -
                 everywhere i turned at liverpool st.
there was either a zombie apocalypse,
or some crack-******* ***** late for a train...
          i got some fine red wine prior to
the expedition...
               and so i headed to alexandra palace...
why? well... it looked mighty fine 11 years ago
from the rooftop of the scottish widows h.q.
near st. pauls...
         sitting pretty on top of a hill...
  so i got there, ensuring i let the arsenal fans
get the first two trains from st. pancreas to
pass me by, extending my wait for about 10 minutes...
    who was arsenal playing today?
tottenham? the punters on the train said:
2 - nil.
           don't know the score.
             so i got to wood green...
no one actually said there was a hill to climb!
  **** it, i climbed it, and when i got to the top...
to be honest, alexandra palace looks more
spectacular from a distance akin to st. paul's
on the 19th floor...
        it actually looks bigger from that sort of
distance...
          but i reached the top, and still had my wine,
and i even brought with myself a glass...
so i opened the bottle and began to forget
the initial: the **** am i doing next to
alexandra palace?!
            shouldn't i be sitting comfortably finishing
the second season of versailles at home?!
ah... never mind... so i drank the wine and
became shocked at the horizon before me...
as a connoisseur of drinking partners -
yes, you might have suspected all along,
i was drinking the wine alone... aha! but i wasn't:
i was drinking a bottle of wine, with, the view;
on the up side, the view from alexandra palace
is so much better than the view from
primrose hill - sure, maybe st. paul's isn't
visible, and you get to see much more of
the ferris wheel by the thames -
      but when it comes to a drinking buddy -
the view from alexandra palace is so much
better than the view from primrose hill.
           - and as ever, a highlight from the voyage,
helping god disguised as an old lady in
a hindi shawl with her shopping -
   in one of those wheely bags... down
the escalator, onto the tube, then off the tube...
  why did i imply god disguised as an old lady,
she said she's 70, i compliment her that she
looks 60... and believe me... that bag of hers
weighed about 30 / 40 kg...
                       and then back to romford,
for a quick pint of guinness on romford high st.,
aah... home... home with the "****"...
with the sort of people that make sense -
                  born and bred and sooner or later
to be dead...
                     at least this apparent
"*******" is not as much a farce as the entirety of
london put together...
            i can feel at home here,
mind you, a pint of guinness costs 3.15 over here,
which isn't exactly extortion down by
liverpool st. at 5 quid a pop.
           london used to make sense once,
even for me, but these days -
     it's just a ouroboros -
                  it's in its own stratosphere of "busy",
******* jobs, ******* rent,
        and as much as any noah's arc translated
into a city state as you can think of,
with only rats on board...
           but when you stand on either primrose
hill, or next to alexandra palace,
with a bottle of wine and your drinking
buddy that's the view -
            you can only start citing bilbo baggins:
i feel thin, sort of stretched, like butter
  scraped over too much bread;
   because that's what london is: superficial -
which is why i immediately known what
i'm going to get when i step onto
the romford high street...
        sooner or later it's all going to turn
into superficiality central, the mimic cities
of l.a. (and thank ****, that i can only imagine
this to be the case of said imitation).
Ilene Bauer Jul 2018
In London, the crowds got to swoon
At a 20-foot orange balloon
Of a baby, quite plump,
Looking very like Trump
As he often appears – a buffoon.

His huge mouth is agape with a scream,
Surely spouting a foul-sounding theme
And his little hand grasps
What inspires some gasps –
That’s his phone, with its Twitter-type stream.

So the “welcome” the planners conceived
And that Londoners thereby achieved
Was a slap in the face
Bringing Donald disgrace
And the chance to see how he’s perceived.
Big Virge Aug 2019
It Seems That ... FEAR ... ?
Is groWING ... Here ... !!!

Because Some People ...
Have Shed ... TEARS ... !!!

TEARS Because ...
A Loved One's ........ GONE .........................................

This ... OF COURSE ...
Is CLEARLY ... WRONG ... !!!!
Cos' Fear Right Now ...
Does NOT ..... Belong ......
On ... London's Streets ...

WHY ... Wage WAR ... ?
When We NEED ... Peace ... !?!

PEACE and LOVE ...
and ... UNITY ...

DON'T ... " Presume " ...
That I'm ... GUILTY ... !!!!!

You DON'T KNOW ...
What Type ... I BE ...

I Just Write ...
TRUE Poetry ...

POETRY ...
That's REAL To ... Me ... !!!

These Are Words To ...
WAKE The ... "Herds" ... !!!

What You See ...
Are Visions ... BlUrrRrRRREeedd ... !!!!!

Visions BLURRED By ... " Fallacies " ... !!!
Visions BLURRED By ... " Tragedies " ... !!!

Do You See ... ?
The Things ... I SEE ... ?

Judgements Made ...
By ... " Met' Police " ...

RAIDING Homes ....
Like ... "Forty Thieves" ...

What I SEE ...
Is ... Met' Police ...
Pointing GUNS ..... Needlessly ...
At Young Men ... Who Look Like Me ... !!!

Asians TOO ...
Are Now ... DISPLEASED ...
By ... ABUSE ...
They SEE On Streets ... !!!!

Meantime ........
ALL We're Hearing Is .....

"We NEED HELP,
from, Young Muslims !"

WHY ... !?!

If They Know ...
... EVERYTHING ... ?!?

Those INVOLVED ...
In ... Bus BOMBINGS ... !!!

That's Why NOW ...
Police ... WILL STING ... !!!

Now Isn't THIS ...
A ... " Funny Thing " ... ?!?

IF They ... " KNOW " ...
About ... THIS STUFF ... ?

Why KEEP Making ...
Such A ... FUSS ... ?!?!?

Putting FEAR ...
In Those Who ... " Trust " ...
Riding On ... A London Bus ...

NOW It's FEAR ...
That They Hold DEAR ... !!!

It's A ... STRAIN ...
On ... MANY Brains ... !!!!!!!!!!!

Riding On ...
London's ... Tube Trains ... !!!
It's THE SAME ... Time and AGAIN ...

Asians NOW ...
Can Get ... TWO SEATS ... !!!!

cos of This ...
A ... TRUE Story ...

A Friend of Mine ...
A Young ... " Asian " ...

Was On A Train ...
With .... " Caucasians " ...

When They SAW ...
The Bag He Had ...

They STEERED .............................................. CLEAR ........

Now ...
AIN'T That ... " Sad " ...

This is WHY ...
It Made Him ... MAD ... !!!!!

He's Born and BRED ...
In ... THIS HERE Land ...

and He Is A ...
... CLEVER Man ... !!!

English Wife ...
and ... Two Children ...

He Is NOT ...
A ... " TERROR Man " ... !!!!!

But He's Suffered ... RACISM ...
From .... Guess Who .... ?

YES ... Englishman ... !!!
Who .... BELIEVE ....
What's On ... NEWSSTANDS ... ?!?

This Stuff NEEDS to .................................................................­................. Disappear ............. !!!!!!

News Stories ...
CREATING ... Fear ...

WHO In ... England ...
REALLY ... Gains ...
From BLOWING UP ...
A London Train ... ?!!!?

OF COURSE ...
It's MUSLIMS ...
Who Will Gain ... ?!?

From These ... " Acts " ...
Take A Sec' and ..... Think On THAT .....................................................

Do You Get ...
What I'm Saying ... ???

No ...
Well Let Me ... TRY AGAIN ... !!!

OF COURSE It's ... Muslims ...
Who Will ... GAIN ...
From These ... " Acts " ... !?!
Take A Sec' and ... THINK ON That ........................................................

It's Muslims NOW ...
That Face ... REAL PAIN ... !!!
From Londoners ...
Who FEEL ... THIS Way ... !!!

HATRED ... IS ...
A HORRID Thing ... !!!!!!

What You See ...
Ain't ... EVERYTHING ... !!!

Check Through ...
The Past .......................................

They've LIED BEFORE ... !!!
From ... " Watergate " ...
To Clintons' ... ***** ... !!!

This Is TRUTH ...
It AIN'T ... " Folklore " ... !!!

Hatred ... YES ...
I Do .... ABHOR ... !!!!!

Check The STATS ...
and DON'T ............................. ignore .........
Why ... WE'RE HERE ...

We AREN'T Here ...
To Shed ... " False Tears " ...

Use Your Eyes Man ...
Steer .................................................................­... WELL CLEAR ..................

of ... This Thing ...
That We Call ........

...... " FEAR " ......
Fear is a manipulative tool, and, as terrible as these tragedies and bombings have become, there needs to be some thought, rather than blind faith in what the governments feed us as being the truth. London in 2K5, became a hot bed of sirens, arrests & FEAR, that made me write this .....
Cian Kennedy Jun 2019
Cherry blossom pinks encircle a park,
Cordoned off by stretched police ribbon
Surrounding its inner heart.
Inside lies a man. Cherry blossom pinks run from his body.

Springtime has brought record temperatures
And Londoners sit out, filling the beer garden
that overflows into the adjacent park.
The sun’s heat can be blinding.

Later they wrap the tape back up.
Another stabbing.
Open and shut.

The sun sets and the beer garden empties.
Tomorrow, the park will fill again.
The cherry blossom’s pink as temporary as our memories.
Mateuš Conrad Jun 2018
you know what sweet sensation of
whiskey hitting the nervous system,
just after you've been awake for more
than 30 hours...
     and every gulp you start feeling up
a touch of cushion,
   like it might be your mother singing
a lullaby to you as a child?
****'s all... fuzzy...
                    fictoid...
  which is the alternative of a factoid:
an item of unreliable information
that is reported and repeated
so often that it becomes accepted as fact...
well borrowed from real life,
that's focused upon it (life,
or the narrative) being usurped from
being staged...
i still don't know how drunks manage
their quasi-epileptic
        space-oddities by climbing
7 stories of a building,
  to simply know on the balcony window
from the wife: refusing them
entry via the conventional route,
of utilising a front door...
               true story that,
****** managed to do the spider-man
up nearly... wait... circa two metres
per storey...
             sigma, circa: 20 metres
up in the air!
                 that's not exactly 100 metres
of comparison while holding
your breath in a jamaican sprint...
          blind wind playing the flute
of a pine forest...
                but there are certain sensations
you just can't suspect of
being the product of a Saturday night
revelry in Essex, England...
                some drunks do the Dante's
inferno expedition into:
       everything and anything -
   but only when embarked upon, solo.
my excesses of insomnia are
countered by my "excesses" of drinking,
       what could possibly be wrong
about a teddy bear among romanian
****** dreaming, awake,
  of a pillow?
                it's not even a comfortable
numbness,
      it's a mollusk encapsulated by
the safety of an oyster's shell mentality...
         i mean, there's only so much
much of the FIFA world cup you can stomach
before seeing a proper game...
   and when you do manage to receive
the spectacle of a 3 - 3 Spain vs. Portugal?
**** me... that's like receiving
the ******* eucharist!
                        RAMOS!
                       ­          ******* child of
            a one ******* ball-sack of Franco...
   and those Spanish eyes:
you know the ones...                    (    (
romance with a real tear-jerker...
             but what more entertaining
than the football is,
   the behind-the-scenes preservation
of the political narrative by minors,
minor-intellectuals, and:
                  behemoths of swaying the gamble
of history...
Iberian eyes?
        i'm starting to call them
                          siamese Shiva diamonds...
muguruza has them...
                           very idiosynratic...
in vino veritas?
    i find twice the amount of truth
in a dose of sleeplessness and whiskey...
       which usually ends with
a knock-out and: the great void eating
            all concern or, "need" to dream...
hell with a brain like a sponge that
requires quasi-x-ray
               to suit-up to the everyday
in the mythos timing ref. to boiling an egg
in real time...
         RAMOS!
          you already know of the extra
long football socks, and the rolled up sleeves,
   Puyol would be a proud
second-far-removed-claim-of-fatherhood...
not that's the case...
      beside the point...
                but there's no distraction from
my perspective,
              an appreciation of, sure,
               but you can't exactly forget
the premature ******* quasi-thrill
of listening to the bundestag match of:
left-to-right, right-to-left,
             and something in between
being plagued by a w. b. yeats quote about
all centres,
            apart from the gravity hard-on
of god, which, for reason for the four seasons:
always seems to hold,
   tight like a ******* mousetrap,
tiger pounce...
        very humane, in terms of a rodent
passing bypassing being a plaything
of some bonsai feline...
                ha ha! in vino, veritas?
every tried a dosage of sleeplessness,
   and something more, strict?
   a Dublin ****, or a Glaswegian
                                           apple juice?    
****, the mingling with sleeplessness...
you'll speak more truth than
the C.I.A. would mind giving
                two shoves to a shovel over...  
nudges? sure...
      nugget crisp and...
                  oh but i like the current
digression...
     the facade...
                      the momentary month of
blissfully forgeting the talk of politics,
and imagining the head
of Commodus being kicked about by
                          22 legionaires...
no greater cathedral to make man's
concern stupendous,
        than in a prayer-house of amnesia...
and, there isn't a reason as we'll somehow
forget for half an anno after the month?
circa, of course...
                                                     well?
by the sober judge i make my plea drunk...
and should the judge drink?
          first i nail him to a cross,
   and then: allow him to pass judgement...
who the hell doesn't pass
crucial judgement concerning sexuality,
on the throne of thrones,
without first doing the no. 1,
  and then doing the no. 2,
                   and then not doing the no. 3?
i should be all "hot-and-bothered",
   should i?
                          a case to say:
                                 don't date, on a diet;
because not on the cruel slab of
the altar of mammon are two naked
bodies suddenly: phantom?
         does eating, **** the butterflies?
what sort of contract for an hour,
require a prenup of eating,
      for a time constraint that's more than
            the actual: non-verbum flex,
                          which constitutes an hour?
RAMOS!
                    always the central defender
role...
              because... well...
              given the hard-on for the tournament...
you can somehow listen in on
political-football kicking-off simultaneously...
while the Tsar is found stark
naked, dressed in gloat, gluttony and glee,
the little people can take to tongue and chess...
little people, like the Warsaw pundits,
the staggering delayed pleasure Londoners...
and Berliners-***-Bavarians...
               and whoever the hell is left...          

ah, the quiet life: and it's little wonders...
   but a Tsar that appears so well attired in his
self-with-nation
                             goat-fat smile,
    like a Davvy Cameron prior:
      plump doughnut and plush well oiled
cheecks with missing bones...
                     plump little doughnut...
can't help but admire
   the arabian formal checkers pajamas...
sorry...
           i forgot it's high-fashion over
there too...
             houndstooth print
                                   coffee-table-cloths...

come to think of it, this western-union
euro and the post-nationalistic experiment?
**** the tongue, before claiming
a dead soul, to control the living thought...
i only allow english for reasons
that i can speak it, above a certain
framework of its native contraints,
   but if another Belgian is going to think
i'm going to let him perform a sujud
on me like i were some half-wit from Congo?!

the swiss still make milka...
                   so...
                                see you in Ypres?
and yes, truth is a form of audacity...
                               Benelux: Banalflux;
cite Forrest Gump to boot, if y'all wanna.
Mateuš Conrad Jan 2022
while men are looking for adrenaline "injections"...
women? women?! you can't be serious,
they're looking for anxiety?
if men are looking for adrenaline,
while women are looking for anxiety... no wonder...
that's me, speeding on a bicycle, dodging traffic...
while she's out there looking for
a pseudo-******, some gagging-demigod
blah blah...             that's why i prefer the transparency
of prostitution... i pay them...
why would i want to get "****" for free on
dating apps? i can still open doors for women,
be kind to them, but... ahem... "hook up"?
i'd rather be hang-over, drawn & quartered...
i'd say: if you want the cosmopolitan take on ***...
why date? why not: bypass everything
that's absolutely *******-wanking
time... time... genuine prostitution...
   she's a... nymphomaniac...
     you have to meet a nymphomaniac outside the realm
of the ******* canvas...
and sure... Lady Gaga can sing about her
"poker face"... what, a woman's poker face suddenly
appears when she's... 70?
women have a "poker face" for ****...
only yesterday women, girls... as young as 14 were looking
at me with some interest...
*******! i don't have money!
i vowed to write for fricko! i'm a steward
at a football match... i'm a foot-soldier in the hierarchy
of how this event is being organised...
walking up the gangway... two couple...
darting eyes of a woman, afraid eyes of a man...
i did the rounds about 4 times... every 10 minutes...
i mingled with the Yorkshire beefcakes,
knuckled to knuckle with them... kept the stairs available...
my supposed supervisor, where was she?!
nice nails though, acrylic? definitely red...
definitely too long to hold a rolling pin or a whisk...
by now i'm thinking:
cut the arms off, cut the legs off... blind them...
keep the torso for *******...
oh... right... that's from a horror movie...
bone tomahawk? yeah, that movie...
            at least if you pay them upfront...
there's no need to deal with a hook-up culture...
ha ha... ha... ahem... "culture"...
if you pay a woman upfront...
               who's lying to who? who's lying to begin with?!
but at least she's being paid...
if i can do roofing, tarring ******* brick on frick
on cement blocks... i can do... the steward's load
of ******* of crowd control at sport events...
i forget about football...
i lost the plot regarding whether i ought to be
entertained... arbeit macht frei, *******!
i'd rather do the most menial task than...
do what some of these people do and subsequently
have to watch a football match...
at least now i can pry on women...
watch them... i like watching...
i'm obviously also watching out for a potential
heart-attack / stroke incident...
but i like this game... women have poker faces
worth of ****... they can't hide certain things...
i look at children, smile, but in me a stern-appropriation
of: yeah... i wish i could be your father, too...
i know he's drunk and chanting *******...
while i'm here... moderating the fact that...
it's only a game... it's not a war...
how these poor children don't want to be
indoctrinated into the football mantras...
  they want to escape being somehow: entertained...
a good practice, i found... when dealing with
crowd control...
look at some text... then translate it into Braille...
or Morse...
for example:
                       i see
                       ⠊ ⠎⠑⠑

it sort of helps when beginning to even out
the physiognomy of people...
they might look like football hooligans,
then again, living in the south east of England,
in Essex... i think the Northern folk are
rather... endearing... childish even...
oh forget about the Western woke Bristol-esque *****!
even i think the western Londoners are
*****... the Leeds supporters even chanted:
who hates Chelsea?! who!? who?!
something to that standard...

no... women have the supposed lady gaga
"poker-face" worth ****... sure... when they're 70...
and "perspectives" run: rife!
you can sense tension, esp. if it's ******...
****** tension is more apparent than...
the tension associated to violence between men...
men measure themselves up in accordance
to potentiality... ****** tension is a *******
circus of clowns by comparison...
i might be 6ft2 and weigh 220pounds in winter
but... that doesn't mean i'll get easily laid
in... hook-up? culture?!

point being... i can get an immediate hard-on
when i'm with a *******...
i tried to do the act... casually... once... or twice...
******* limp... LIMP!

oh no no... ******* with the Christian motto of:
MEA CULPA... you ******* with that right off!
i know my faults... but i'm not going to give into
you pushing me into a solipsistic bubble!
you too! et tu! didn't Caesar exclaim those
words  concerning Brutus?! et tu?!

       on the brighter side of, "things"...
can you imagine world war I trenches with transgender
soldiers?!
i'm thinking about it... if some men can look prettier
than some women...
there truly is some "vague" brotherhood that
outlasts the need to procreate...
i'd give the more wholesome women the benefit
of the doubt if... from past ages... they arrived at their
postures by having to knead dough...
but... since... that's automated...
******* these women is about as appealing
at punching myself in the face...
****! punching myself in the face is more appealing!
as i sometimes do.

****... all the pretty ones succumb to prostitution...
of sorts...
i think the mentality is: beauty is to be shared...
i have no other counter argument...
beauty is to be shared... esp. female beauty...
because a woman is the world: a woman is the womb...
i stopped caring when i started paying
for *** and not paying for dates...
it's called a transparency of transaction...
i won't waste your time: if you don't waste my time...

vectors and ratios, simple, no?
Universe Poems Nov 2020
Abracadabra,
used to heal
Londoners saw,
the appeal
Doorways covered,
with the seal
Hebrew words,
holy spirit feel
create as i speak,
no misfortune,
will seek,
Abraxas stones,
protect, and keep

© 2020  Carol Natasha Diviney

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