He's singing a song with his eyes
And everyone can hear it

People sit with their heads down
Facing the red light
Ignoring the loudest sound a human can hear
Silence

Trying to ignore the loudest vision we see
The man on the median
Without a home

And he's singing a song with his eyes
And everyone can hear it

The red light has paused us
Forcing us to stop
Some of us try to continue our motion
Through our phones or radio
But something has stopped

Some of us are angry
Feeling that he’s taking advantage of the pause
Filling the pause
And the silence
With a picture
Framed by our window
That we didn’t ask for
But he exists whether we see him or not

The column of traffic
Before the left turn
Is filled with empathy, resentment, and judgment
all at once
The feelings running into each other
Like waves of water
Sloshing between the cars

“Being homeless is a choice”
“He didn’t ask to be homeless”

And he's singing a song with his eyes
And everyone can hear it

He used to have a home
He lived in wealth

And sitting in one of the cars before the red light
Is a man that used to be without a home

But the man on the median is happier somehow
Not all men on medians are happy
But somehow
He is
How strange

He disturbs us because he is one of us
A fellow human
Living in a way we aren’t


~ JL

Salam hangat untuk pembaca yang terhormat,

Apa kamu tahu apa yang lebih cerdas dari berada di tengah-tengah dan jadi pengamat sebelum benar-benar memihak? Atau, apa menurutmu tindakan itu bukanlah tindakan yang akan dilakukan oleh orang-orang intelektual yang sesungguhnya? Apakah menurutmu itu adalah tindakan orang-orang bodoh yang tidak peduli atau orang-orang pemikir yang berhati-hati?
Kakekku menyisipkan kata ‘median’ pada nama awalku dan ia jadikan kata itu sebagai nama kecilku, juga nama panggilanku. Di antara nama lengkapku yang berbunyi, Mediana Prawirahardja, kata yang diartikan sebagai nilai tengah itu ia tetapkan sebagai nama panggilan untukku. Harapannya adalah agar aku akan memiliki sifat yang sama dengan kata itu. Berada di tengah. Netral. Damai. Berada di tengah  dan menilai, atau berada di tengah dan memiliki nilai.
Nama adalah doa dan lama-kelamaan, aku mulai lelah menjadi pengamat yang hanya bisa menyaksikan dan mencari-cari kebenaran yang belum terungkap di antara hiruk-pikuk masyarakat yang hilir-mudik penuh hingar-bingar ini, di balik dunia yang berantakan ini.

Like the bike you bought after saving lawn-mowing money for a year, welfare reform was the prized trophy of the conservative governing philosophy. We believed that we'd found the vehicle of social mobility for poor Americans, once and for all. No one should live on taxpayer money without doing some work on their own, right? Everyone agrees, right?

Wrong. President Obama ran over our bicycle, issuing illegal waivers to welfare's work requirements and taking the wheels off the program. The fact is, we never won the welfare battle after all. Out of the 80 different federal welfare programs, the '96 welfare reform really only fixed one. A third of the U.S. population received benefits from one or more of these 80 programs in 2011. According to the Department of Agriculture, one program alone – food stamps – gave benefits to a record-breaking 47.7 million in the last month of 2012, benefits those millions didn't have to work to receive.

Rep. Paul Ryan recently said it's time to use the 1996 reform as a model to fix the rest of welfare. He's right, for at least five compelling reasons.

1. America's welfare programs are redundant and inefficient. As The Heritage Foundation's welfare expert Rachel Sheffield noted, there are at least 12 separate programs providing food aid, 12 funding social services, and 12 assisting education. Average benefits from all welfare programs are about $9,000 per recipient. If you converted those programs to cash, it would be more than five times the amount needed to raise every household above the poverty line. We should streamline redundant programs to save money while getting the same or better value.

2. Means-tested welfare programs are fiscally unsustainable. These cost nearly $1 trillion annually. By the end of the decade, welfare spending will rise from five percent to six percent of GDP. This means every taxpaying family would have to make, and then give up, over $100,000 in the next ten years – just to cover the cost of welfare spending.

Imagine this: If government spending were a pie, welfare would be a bigger slice than defense, education, or even social security. This isn't apple pie a la mode. It's poison-the-economy pie with a side of swamp-our-children-in-debt ice cream.

3. The welfare state encourages dependence instead of lifting people out of poverty. Poverty has actually increased with federal spending on anti-poverty programs. Adjusted for inflation, we've spent nearly $20 trillion total on “the war on poverty.” That's more than the combined price tag of all America's wars. Ever. From the American Revolution through Afghanistan, we've spent less than $7 trillion. These days, we spend 13 times what we spent on welfare in the 1960s. Guess what? In 1966, the share of the population living below the poverty threshold was 14.7%; by 2011, that share rose to 15.0%.

This spending gives people significant incentives to stay on welfare. According to the Senate Budget Committee, if you break down welfare spending per household in poverty, recipients are making $30/hour. That's higher than the $25/hour median income – certainly more than what I make per hour.

4. Welfare dependence creates behavioral poverty. Perhaps President Franklin D. Roosevelt said it best: “Continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fibre. To dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit.” To become comfortable relying on the work of others instead of your own work will change your character, and the character of the nation. Americans want to give everyone a helping hand, but hand-holding year after year, generation after generation, patronizes, corrodes, entraps. In the words of welfare policy experts Robert Rector and Jennifer Marshall writing in National Affairs:

Material poverty has been replaced by a far deeper “behavioral poverty” — a vicious cycle of ***** childbearing, social dysfunction, and welfare dependency in poor communities. Even as the welfare state has improved the material comfort of low-income Americans by transferring enormous financial resources to them, it has exacerbated these behavioral problems. The result has been the disintegration of the work ethic, family structure, and social fabric of large segments of the American population, which has in turn created a new dependency class.

Is this the America we want? It is not compassionate to leave a whole class of people in perpetual dependence. Behavioral poverty cuts off millions of citizens from a chance at American opportunity, destroying the virtues necessary to sustain oneself. My generation has seen the effects of behavioral poverty – in D.C., Detroit, or my hometown, Cleveland. Whole neighborhoods rot. To many, this cycle of dependence indicts the principles of American society as inherently unfair.

5. Work requirements promote individual responsibility and reduce poverty. Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) work requirements slashed welfare caseloads by nearly 60 percent. Poverty among all single mothers fell 30 percent. About 3 million fewer children lived in poverty in 2003 than in 1995.

Strange insecurity
overflowing backwashing traitors
skilled by entities
willing to viciously ******
massively diminish minds
whom without say-accept
what's to be overturned

even the queen doesn't wear as many pompous garments
throughout the year, as she does  upon coronation,
or the annual opening of the parliament -
high almighty she sits, in the chamber
of the house of lords, before the
"commoners" / middle-class pimps
lords of the manor of Cambridgeshire
are later summoned by black rod -
all the knock knock jokes stem from there:
black rod - knock knock.
the commons' - who's there?
black rod - black rod!
the commons' - black rod who?
black rod - black rod you wouldn't even care,
                    the pigs' trough is waiting.
but even the queen doesn't wear
all the garments she's entitled to upon
this occasions - i mean the full garment...
so is the commoner's approach to
vocabulary... on a printed page of a book
a poem looks: so much more menacing!
it's as if i actually have stamped
each poem, and they're not r.t.s. (return
to sender) example of bypassing
and destroying the the royal mail
with a magician's snap of the fingers...
but as honesty goes, the internet made
one magic trick, snap of the fingers,
and a thousand centipedes of postmen
disappeared in a second... gone... flushed
down the social-cohesive toilet...
it's called: improvement... the Chinese
are like: bring them over, we have
a billion and we need the leg work,
done and dusted, the last meaningful
letter i ever received was... i don't remember:
safe to say: never.
i am actually comparing something,
opened a beer, sat on a windowsill,
and thought to myself: after i digest
Stephen King's media outlet with his
many ghost writers, i'll smoke a cigarette
and read that ghastly thing that has my
name and picture printed on it...
it's ****** hard to read your own thoughts
back: given elephant narcissus in the room
and the bay leaf sensation in your mouth
rereading the ******* -
oh, by the way, in my culinary arsenal,
on today's menu: pork tikka masala -
i know, a heresy, tikka masala paste extra,
but to infuriate the palette:
not ground cumin and coriander, seeds,
a bay leaf... cloves (not necessary),
and cardamon pods -
                                freshly chopped tomatoes,
creme freche instead of double cream and
yogurt - garam masala, Kashmiri chilly powder,
paprika, turmeric... anti-dementia exercise:
what the **** did i put in?
50% youth unemployment in Greece,
45% and 40% in Spain and Italy respectively,
well, if you're going to have an existential
crisis, i.e. you're not in denial about old age
and how the Dutch and the Swiss and the Belgians
are the great humanitarians of our time...
might as well have one now.
funny enough, most people will not be saving up
for a pension... they'll be saving up for
euthanasia... honest to god, the lemmings are coming!
the lemmings are coming! in human terms:
that's not a myth.
****... what a digression... even the queen doesn't
wear the many garments presiding over her
role as being understood upon the annual
opening of parliament: in layman's terms,
i mean that to be synonymous with vocabulary...
a.i. says one as an abstract version
of all the other pronouns...
   the royal says we: because there's always
an entourage of lackeys and servants -
all the commoners get stashed in i, the over-exemplified i:
egoism, you, he, she, and the paranoid collective
of the royal's we, i.e. they...
it came to me rereading the Frederick II
Hohenstaufen Linguistic Experiment -
i realised, because of certain words having
a near ~synonymous status:
mainly because they're so closely bound,
and like triplets, you can't have three different
wombs to get the bunch out
(oh, i have fried twins on toast,
once or twice, twin yokes in one egg,
i wonder: would they ever... er...
become Siamese? division gone awry,
or God teaching angels mathematics,
someone's bound to slip up... oh come on...
give room for some ****** simplicity!) -
what i want to reiterate is: even the queen doesn't
wear all the required authoritarian garments
throughout the year: look at her taste in
frocks... a puppet without a puppeteer -
now that's authority, wink-wink-oi-oi
nudge of the elbow, 'ello 'ello 'ello 'ello;
the same goes for me, you and every other
Jack and Jill... three words...
all statistical... mode... median... mean...
now, i haven't the foggiest how to differentiate
you a meaning for each... thus
looking at the poem i mentioned:
ontological modes - i.e. certain words can't
provide ontological modes -
attacking the verbiage, you honestly haven't
read continental thought, roll a spliff,
****** off... anyway...
it's like the queen's story... let's say her
garments are necessary analogy: she doesn't
wear all the pompous cloth and pearl
every day, unless it's everyday in a painting...
that's the same with vocabulary...
plus mode, median and mean are congested into
an alphabetical coercion -
let's say zoological and anthropoid -
so far apart you can almost keep them freshly
imprinted to a satisfying differential immediacy -
i.e. you can give me a meaning of the two words...
but mean (1) is soon followed by median (2)
                later comes the meaning of mode (3 -
in alphabetical order... even though
the alphabet has only a quantum chronology -
  compact a, first, then b - stranger that it
wasn't supposed to be necessarily e) -
which is why we seem to unhinge from specific
vocabularies - in education we are strained
at times to learn specific vocabularies,
but later discard them, we're actually repelled by
categorised vocabularies: niche vocabularies -
from the moment of hinging unto certain
words, we immediate unhinge from them...
leave school, learn to earn money...
as with the queen: we don't wear all the garments
of the vocabularies we were exposed to...
the difference being: she gets reminded...
the majority of us never get reminders
about using certain words: even in pub trivia
general knowledge quizzing, or that's the last
resort... for the most part, that's
what the dictionary is for:
                            it's prime utility has an
   a posteriori ontology -
                whereas the thesaurus (rex) has an
a priori ontology: which is why writers look up
words on the synonymous scale to create an exotic
jungle, which would otherwise look like the meadows
of Hyde Park... plus the dictionary states a word's
etymology - which doubles the proof that
a dictionary has an a posteriori ontology / nature
    of being used -
                                 in abstract, yes, ontology:
                 nature of being per se - box of chocolates
and Forrest Gump's wisdom on: you never know
what the kaleidoscope will show off and what you'll
get: mint?! yuck!
                             but as i already stated:
even the queen doesn't wear all the garments
required for the annual opening of parliament
every day... as with us and our lesser jewels:
words - not all words are there to be kept on
close surveillance through the year -
                     it's worthwhile remembering that
each of our faculties has a weakness...
and not all words are permanently loyal to us,
primarily through environmental fluctuations
governing their use, outside of a chemists?
would you necessarily hear nouns used in a chemist
outside a chemist? probably not...
so that's how i do mental crosswords -
well, i have absolutely no clues -
you have a bank balance an average Chinese
might have of 3000 ideograms -
    find me the tetraideogrammaton!
    earth wind & fire... & water...
                       but that's how i known i'm doing
crosswords in my head... a long forgotten word...
revisited... and instead of creating clues and guess
work: i have a narrative, anew -
a word once used in an examination paper,
later discarded, now revisited for my pleasure -
but we never have a complete account balance
of our vocabulary, that's always fluctuating like
stock-market share prices -
                we're like the queen without her
authoritarian garments most of the time -
                              we have (on purpose) set up
various bank accounts for specialised topics /
obscure knowledge - i really don't know if this
was a good idea - crosswords and obscure knowledge
trivia - again, like at school, this is a way
to misplace the greatest outlet of memory:
the optic foundation - the photographic something or other...
which, by way of consent has the power to
show us the dark room being opened -
      the Black Dot Eraser - happens all the time:
the Black Dot Eraser is like a concentrated form of
something, prone to insane gravity of pulling everything
into a nano-metre dot... a blind censor -
                      who says: i haven't seen anything prior,
and even with your words attempting to illuminate
the sense that hasn't graciously been bestowed upon me:
i will not see anything after.
                       unappealing the quest for
a unifying sense datum... of the five variations,
      given the five senses, how can we every reach
a simple i i i i i                 rather than a variable
                                      i i I I i?
      it's a basic schematic - a variation of?
some words (datum in exclusiveness) have variations
   in being ascribed sense - given there are give senses,
not every word (datum as exclusive of 4, but inclusive
   of at least 1) can be ascribed a placebo uniformity:
   i i i i i -                           since the nature of a datum is
   to show us fluctuation:
                                      e.g. i i I I i...
   given that different people, react to a word differently
in each sensual medium: the fluctuation of
   being given a piece of information inscribed in a word
when ingested by hearing, seeing, speaking, etc.
well... that's that: 200 camels came by the oasis
and drank 200 litres of water each (that is their
actual capacity after crossing a desert) -
                                                            and that's that:
testimony to the superiority of the oryx.

There is a Middle Road between all Worlds
I know this to be Truth
I have always seen it, glimpsed like a shadow in the corner of my Eye
Everywhere I have ever Looked
Everywhere I have ever Been
Everywhere
I have always felt myself to be
Known my Self to be
Standing to one side or the other of this Lost and Delicate Way
Skipping between the Extremes, always
Too High
or Too Low
too Hard or
too Soft
too Strong or too Weak
Too Much
or Never Enough
a Life Exhausted, leaping Across the Divide
from Mountaintop to Mountaintop
Seeking in vain the peaceful Valley on the Horizon
Always in The Distance
always Almost
never Now
Until
Until
until

until I collapse
until I cannot Go Any Further
until I finally Let Go
and Let My Self Fall
and Slide down the Mountain
because there is Nothing Left for me to do
but Lie Down
and Be Still
and Rest
Eyes Wide to the Sky
along the Middle Road

The second that the inanimate vehicle
was no longer mine to control
and I fish tailed out
like I often fantasize about doing among the sea
wheels, bumper, lights
battled
median, gravity, and hope
As the same air that I ****** in
flew my mobile above the median
I caught a glimpse of that beautiful mountain
of where I accepted I would roll and be at the bottom of
no longer a mermaid swimming in air
all I could hold was my hope in salvation
"Please let there be a heaven, and please let me in."

As a little girl I was told I was "saved"
and I remember so specifically dunking my body under water
and no longer did heaven allude me
I made the choice with  myfather
hoping that as he was submerged in that "holy water"
that he would no longer be addicted to the "devil's drink"
I made the choice to be renewed
Clean.
Reborn into new skin and better more brilliant choices

As the snow reflected off of the mountain innocently
I prayed that the holy water, my prayers, my altruism, my heart would allow all of it to be true, for me
Bouncing back off of the median
another thought snapped into my cortex
"I hope Alex will be okay. I hope this doesn't ruin his life."
I spun exactly 4 times, crossing exactly four lanes

On the other side of the freeway
I felt the vibration of the vehicles flying past me
shaking my damaged car
I was in fact "saved."

What would I regret?
Who would I have wronged that would celebrate my passing?
Would there be anyone?
Who did I right?
Who would have regrets in the time they made for me, or the conflicts that always arise in relation with others?
Who did I change? What have I done with this life?

At least I would be dying at a time that I started turning my life around
and at least I would be dying at a time that I sat with a woman alone in the hospital trying to make the decision to keep her baby or put him up for adoption.
At least I got to hold him, and hold her heart in that space. At least I did that.
At least I loved Alex the way I always should have in the last two weeks. At least I gave him that.
At least I finished that painting for one of my closest, dearest friends.
At least I spent a weekend with my family, truly listening, truly being present.
At least I got to connect with my brother in a way I never have before.
At least I was a good friend to the people important to me.
At least I went to Europe and traveled.
At least I stopped drinking so much, and started giving more.

I didn't get to finish that really good book
and I didn't get to bring life into this world
and I didn't get to enjoy my relationship deeper
or my incredible friendships longer
I didn't get to go back to Paris
or learn French
or do that water color workshop inFebruary
and I didn't get to swim in the ocean one last time
I didn't get to master healthy boundaries
or get work published
or recite slam poetry
or say "I'm sorry" to all those men I wronged.
I didn't get to heal and repair from how far my ego took me
I didn't get to meditate or do hot yoga one last time

Humbling.
I hated the whole experience, because it was so **** humbling
I'm not invincible
I am mortal
And I cannot be the fearless strong woman
I try to be
every second of the day.
I will die,
but it won't be my corpse on that day
at the bottom of the mountain
in those mustard cords
and messy locks
listening to Heart "Crazy On You."
two minutes after a conversation with Bri
about silly childish plans and
how she was doing better,
even after I had gone
how much she wanted to hug me
and loved me.

Not that day.
but someday
death will undo me.

.i do expect you to become lost in this labyrinth - at least that's what i'd rather say - sleep-deprivation is for "some" reason to escape the mediocre of having catched the "8 hour wink"... or whatever the Minotaur wouldn't call it... because i wouldn't call it a "problem" of "gender-neutral pronouns" either... i would call it a "problem" of noun-acquisition-status of letters; notably in greek and hebrew.

friends of "the" family have been looking
for on fb,
****... the caron S (š) will not do!
i need to use two alphabets that...
did not nurture yiddish into existence!
cyrillic didn't accept hebrew...
it'll have to do...
it wouldn't be enough to simply write
my name in cyrillic...
and no... in hebrew no less!
since the vowels are hidden...
and inserting the proper hebrew vowel...
it still wouldn't matter that...
my surname is missing... the galician germanic
e(ch)lert or the e(sch)lert...
no... but how is one to insert
the right kind of vowel: all in hebrew niqab
harem of diacritical markers subscript...
when... you don't have...
enough letters as nouns as scientific
constants as the greeks... do...
i guess only η (eta) stands out as a sore thumb /
black sheep... but i am bound to be wrong,
in the meantime:
well it's hardly a letter-with-a-noun
inclined akin to alpha (α) -
otherwise all is well...
we use the prefix prime (the grammaton per se)...
and discard the suffix when constructing words...
ergo? a-lpha...
and so an so forth...
till be arrive at...
blasting your ears nearing deafness because:
beethoven's mrs. H is:
music so you have to shout over it!
loud! what?! loud music!
loud music what?! loud music
to shun the "pain"...
oh... see you in one of those classes
when you can write sign-language for the dead
when you've been allowed to write braille!
see you sputnik ****!
yeah, see you deaf in one year divine John!
but you get the promise that's:
not your everyday latin castrato sing-along...
those greeks sure have all the best
science... stabilizers... not a lot of songs
to sing along to... because their letters
are also noun-status: also have noun-status...
otherwise the ol' prefix use...
and the suffix recycling centre...
a word like: matter...
well...
   ματτερ - no... i will not use the greek word...
i'll state... mmm... hm!
mu implies m- and cutting off the -u...
alpha implies a- and cutting off the -lpha
tau implies t- and cutting off the -au...
epsilon implies e- and cutting off the -psilon
rho implies r- and cutting off the -**...
and so... we have the word matter...
and the recycled materials for...
some other words...

hebrews? hebrews do have... noun-status letters...
(א) aleph - what's vogue?
inserting the iota into the omicron that's
the marriage: φ (phi)...
or whether it's the turning of the iota in
the omicron to provide the opening of the door
θ (theta) to see: that light at the end of the tunnel
delta (Δ)... again... it's only aleph we're "investigating"...

the other letter in hebrew with a noun-status?
(ג) g'imel...
another is (ד) d'alet...
(ז) z'ayin...
(ל) l'amed...
(ס) s'amekh... most certainly (ע) a'yin...
(צ) t'sadi...

interlude: what is the distance
between (א) a'leph and (ע) a'yin?
a kametz...

now we can "debate" - noun-status letters...
the greeks are in the same sort of pickle
as the hebrews...
there can be a debate whether...
the greeks have more than:
alpha, beta, gamma, delta, epsilon, iota,
lambda, omicron, sigma, upsilon, omega
as noun-status letters...

why? because it becomes silly...
(ק) qof and (κ) kappa...
(ר) resh and rho (ρ)...
(שׁ) and... well... to be honest...
that's heading into cyrillic territory...
and the caron S (ш)...
given (ס) samekh and sigma (σ)...

this always happens to me when i come
across a hebrew...
even if he's old and riddled with dementia...
i see him with his polish bride
and i see a "romanian gypsy"...
the feeling is... strange...
this hebrew is like an old cousin of mine...
but it's always a touch of magic...

i am not good at solving crosswords...
(כ) 'xaf' and chi (χ) -
perhaps i have exagerrated the letter-as-noun
status on some of this greek and hebrew...
tightly-knit bed-fellows...
as the boasting resounds in the labyrinth
of the rise and fall of the roman empire...
and the barbarian attempts to have
settled the lands near the seven hills...
and revived the eagle...
spec-ta-cu-lar failures!

the germans should console themselves
with having a crow on their marching banners...
and polacks should...
satisfy themselves with the unicorn myth
of an all-white bald eagle... albino eagle...
and so the harry potter: minus ***** 'arry
can have their unicorns, swans,
honey-badgers, welsh dragon,
st. andrew's gryffindors... etc. -

name, a name... i need to... change it...
obviously...
no hebrew vowels will be used...
since... their use... is devoid of what's already
concrete usage of diacritical markers
in established letters...
if cyrillic and hebrew is to be used...
and not greek and hebrew:
because... well thank you for the new testament
riddle... let's move... away...
to "greater" / other... things....

i can't use a kametz alpha
a tzere epsilon
a chirek iota
a cholem omicron
or a shurek upsilon (omega)...
so all the vowels will have to by cyrillic...

my... latin, name?
mateusz konrad... let's drop the surname...
let's call it a game of:
ibn... or ben... matthew son of konrad...
and since i don't have a... confirmation name...
what name? i would have chosen: Isidore...
after the saint of seville...
or... Ignatius (of Loyola) -
the only fun part of going to a catholic school
was... learning about the counter-reformation
and writing an essay about it...
and their library was decently stacked...
so... plus plus...

this is but a simple exercise...
first the name in cyrillic...
there will not be a full name in hebrew...
which i'll probably lace with greek...
and it will still make all the more perfect
sense... should it be transliterated back
into anglo-ßaß...
yeah: why i don't have a girlfriend...
with these sort of interests?
i guess an hour with a *******
once a year is enough for me...
and for womankind in the hospice of omni...

just following the laziness
of the russian visa authorities are the embassy...
they didn't translate mateusz into matvei
or konrad into: Дракон...
мат-вей...

these are the sort of idiotic tier-1 level
кaцaпс... working in the russian embassy in Loon'don...

because i was never going to be the матвей
who'd **** an илoнa like the 300 deadly mongrel
saracren mameluks or the spartans... no...
i counter the 7 headed beast on her
with every ****** in that one night
i was making my final goodbyes...
but keeping the mikhail bulgakov novel...
through a repose in Warsaw and...
i finished what, "apparently" i wasn't supposed
to finish...

and she is one of those troubled girls...
every ****** partner that meant anything to her...
she will have a tattoo of that lover
on her body... i know my place on her body...
it's on the right shoulder-blade...
the tattoo is of a dragon...
i know because i've met girls like her...
elsewhere...

even as i was being driven home after taking
my mother for her rheumatoid arthritis check-up,
blood test, x-ray... and the pakistani cab-driver
was talking about all the precautions he needs
these days: video ahead of the bonet for insurance
policy... a camera looking in...
and audio recording on his smartwatch...
because what he said... didn't surprise me...
i once picked up a spanish girl - Tamara in a club...
and she decided to take me home
for a one night stand...
as we were approaching the house she was
sharing with three homosexuals
she decided to jump out of the cab...
and make a runner... i calmed the cabbie:
i'll pay for it...
we tried to later **** the hetreosexual way
with her calling me angel because
of my "erectile dysfunction" under the bed sheets
in that putrid smoke of cocoon ***...
like the birth of a rancid moth embryo and
choking from the heat of dust and alcohol
and... what i am alluding to is that some girls
do jump out of cabs to avoid paying the fair...
i knew what the pakistani cabbie was saying...
she owed him 40 quid...
he filed the whole thing to the police...
she accused him of ****** assault...
the story would have fit...
she run from the cab when he tried to sexually
assault her... but... he did have
that audio recording from his smartwatch...
in the end the girl was fined 700 quid...
which is nothing... compared to...
what's that called in h'america? a false accusation?
slander?
i know that girls jump out of cabs...
to avoid paying the fare...
i drove with one... who did just that...
i guess she was so used to this act that she
forgot i was sitting next to her...

- all the *****... but then all the chem-soup
post-psychiatric *******?
the ***** i can stand...
the pills are just tasmanian devilish when
it comes to catching the perfect
battery insomnia recharge...
and always meeting and respecting
the elder of the group darwinistic:
prat pact... a hebrew...
there always needs to be a yew
a *** in the equation...
no... not some english society
uncle tom worth of a high society rabbi...
i mean a jew that will support
west ham... because...
it's an irrational team...
it can fathom beating chelsea (A)...
but then... "forget" to win against...
for god's sake! Norwich (H)!

i know! i know! joseph conrad took his place!
here's my part anagram!
Mатвей Дракон...

the near non-existent diacritical presence
in the english language...
well... no "surprise surprise" if...
you're starting with
и (i) or rather (ı)...
and what's being the flock of salmon
up the river, being caught?
the j but not (ȷ)... imagine my... "surprise"
that the russians arrived at...
и and ı - in tow... ȷ and the й...
the breve...
parabolla or... my eyes only see
the microscopic details when someone
will simply slurr?

- borrowing from yesterday and...
in the early night of winter standing
in the garden with four potatoes
and something else...
looking up at the sky...
i am used to seeing unusual "things"
in the sky -
i'm not unusual when it comes
to having seen a u.f.o. - fluorescent
and squid like in colour -
but i'm also the sort of person that
would carry a few beers for such
spontaneous encounters -
rather running around like a raving
lunatic armed with a camera
filming the whole thing...
i have no proof: i hope my words are enough...
and if they're not?
well... if it can be seen with a naked eye -
i don't need to blink via a technological
feed and argue about: quality of the picture...

but even i wasn't ready for...
what i saw today...
those are roaming stars? aren't they?
and i really did forget to count how
many moved in the same direction
askew - one by one with equal distance
between them - before the distance between
extended - there must have been more than
10 - i'd say there were around 20!

is this always how things are -
when one contemplates the tetragrammaton?

part anagram? well because the russian
do have a version of the hebrew matisyahu...
but they do not have the german conrad
in their language...
probably as to why the germans do not
really have... a yuri or nikita in their language...
nikita after all sounds more feminine than
masculine - anyone could with hindsight
speak of mr. rocketman's lover of
the same same... as not some russian beau
example of the fairer ***...
but a comrade khrushchev...

- and why wouldn't i call those russians
that work in the russian embassy in Loon'don
кaцaпы? for one... they just type letter for letter:
a mateusz / a matthew is a мaтэусз...
for all "legal" purposes...
they already have the сз = ш...
bureucratic purposes...
and no wonder some are like:
how do you say that?
too many consonants some add...
and i really did think that all of us were
allowed to be fully literate...
that's not the case... blowing my own horn...

having a wet ***** over: because i like my given
names... perhaps that's why i didn't want
the confirmation option of being allowed
to change any of my given names: legally...
to one of my own chosing...
when i was 15 / 14 i didn't even known
or think about a name like Isidore...

when the german name became coupled
with a hebrew loan...
otherwise the russian with the first
being an anagram... drakon -
Mатвей Дракон - it's just a name -
it's my name - what's in a name is what's
precisely not in anonymous names
.666 handles and avatars on the internet...
i can own my face - and i can own my name...
because - i kind of like it...

again: on in russian can the west slavic
C be distinguished from the K... Ц -
and back into the cyst of the western lands...
Ç or what came with sigma's tail...
it's so... boring... to have less the different
sounding letters - given no diacritical markers -
and only the "exotica" of spelling -
all the metaphysics in the world combined
and concentrated in greenwich...
but no real orthography...
i could begin the day by bemoaning this poverty
of the english language...
oddly enough as both the outsider coming in...
the immigrant who became a citizen...
and as the insider coming out and coming in
again on that expatriate spectrum of
working from the thesaurus: IMMIGRANT...
for all the beauty of Macbeth...
i can have to ruse myself to bemoan
conventional english... the formal english...
the antithesis poetica...

but i do somewhat "know" why it's called
a tetragrammaton...
i wouldn't classify any of the letters that make it up
as noun-worthy letters...
the kametz (a) and the tzere (e) are nouns...
and letters... but you don't see them when
the hebrew doesn't exfoliate and is left
crude with "missing vowels" for the gentiles
to read...
saying that... calling ה (he) a noun is pushing it...
as is calling ו (vav) a noun...
or י (yod) - although...
the yod could be allowed a noun-status
as... an apostrophe... or a version of the caron -
but the remaining letters of the tetragrammaton...
are "syllables" in that they are consonants...
and when the tetragrammaton comes face
to face with noun-status letters of its own
universe: g (ג) gimel, d (ד) dalet, z (ז) zayin -
l (ל) lamed, s (ס) samekh, ц (צ) tsadi -
resh? shin? the gates are open to allow the question
in... but when...
there's also siamese Adams aleph (א) and Ayin (ע)
being and nothingness respectively...

what could Islam possibly offer me...
intellectually?
when i once asked a muslim what...

alif, lam, meem                                      meant...
he replied... only god knows...
so i thought... only god?
i must have been talking to one of those muslims
who have arabic overlords...
before they can catch a whiff of the almighty
blah'llah...
ا, لَـ, مَـ
again... greek only touches upon...
the initial - the medial and the final
version of sigma...
isolated you would see the capital sigma...
Σ - which could also be treated as the initial
letter - given that the σ looks more like a medial
form - although it's also initial -
whereby ς is the final form -
almost like the english: 's... apostrophe s -
which could be claimed to be an article of possession...
or the plural article when the apostrophe
disappears - or when the ς altogether disappears
when: the possession is plural:
a teachers' strike... e.g.

no not with a fatha - we have our own diacritical
markers... thank you...
but good question...
so... why is the meem written in an isolated
form in the word - yawm (day)...
but not in a final form?
but i do not write in a squiggly line in this digital
arena... perhaps my language looks simply
written... oh yes, the aesthetic of the arabic script
is always stressed...
but even the hebrews think like the greeks
and the latins... in a way...
nothing has to flow in one river-wry format...
there's no isolated letter... of a letter -
as there's no initial no median and no final
form of it... but there is a "question"
of the hiding of vowels...
for gentiles and muhammadians alike...

- perhaps some will call it the trans-community...
there was once a dead poets' society...
evidently with the rise of de-transitioning...
there's now a nag hammadi library society...
circa 1945 when this library was left unchecked
in the hands of: the children
with too many toys and too many sandpits...
probably that one neu-mecca of san francissco...
at least the dead sea scrolls:
that were unearthed at about the same time...
treated the hebrew far better than
the nag hammadi library treated its children...
and why the former power, the vatican,
didn't step in... to control these text...
as they flew out on a *****-nilly without
herr zensor... herr inquisitor...
i will never know...
the scouts of medicine left... black holes
of having advanced in the field of anaesthetics...
too many toys for the the children
with too many sandpits...

- because i would rather the fascination
with a language... than its immediate...
polyglot acquisition and use...
if i put my head to it... perhaps i could
speak the 7 languages my great-grandfather spoke
before jumping into the Niagara Falls
leaving a postcard sent...
but when i peer into the details...
i quiet like these two trenches of mine...
this english this canvas and my eye toward
the east and the south and semites...
just because english is a language without
diacritical markers...
a language filled with metaphysical dialectics:
but missing any mention of orthography...

a hebrew might hide a vowel...
and write only consonants on street signs
for a gentile to read...
but then the gentiles' languages morphed...
and a vowel became distinct...
there is A that begins the word: ah-men...
but there's also an A that is invoked with a tail
to point and identify a tree, an oak:
dąb...
so much for kametz being hidden...
if there's no 2nd tier "complexity" of kametz...
but there is one for the visible...
A - vowel - a vowel with a tail...
but without a name -
as all letters are - whether vowel or consonant...
in the litany and choir of the castratos
of ancient Rome...

pause with me...
what music are you listening to?
i'm listening to... years of denial - burning sun
(veyl channel) - 1,319 views...
i like to... find the better alleys of my entertainment...
as i can't hate kevin spacey...
not because of kevin spacey...
but because of lester burnham...
or more to the point...
why thomas newman reminds me of a...
reincarnation of Satie...
not a Chopin or a Liszt virtuoso of the piano...
not a when a hammer strikes
a line of 88 nails...
but when a butterfly chances the here and there,
on a shy-loot of a beauty of scarce sounds...
just the same of nostalgia for this era of
movies borrows me from out any new
suspence... as that sort of nostalgia creeping
into people born in the 1960s who truly
admire h'american movies from the 1950s...
even i am to blame when i feed
a nostalgia - more to the point for the technicolour
acryllic glow akin to...
richard quine's 1958 bell book and candle...
but of course scandinavian existential cinema
of a Bergman would be in black and white...
black and white photographs...
but if we're talking movies?
Undogmatic & Kernfeld - thought experiments...
Amanti d'oltretomba (1965)...

i will have to refine the greek to hebrew to greek
similarities...
an Ezra Pound can hide behind counting
matchsticks and reading into chinese ideograms...
when lo and behold! some japanese *******
comes up with a minimalism of the on'yomi...
or perhaps japanese is a language
that fuses elements of braille?
no point question the matter since
the mongols famously didn't come over to Japan
to add to the already Mandarin caste of
the kun'yomi...

but no... these greek letters are nouns...
even though π is equivalent to understanding
the wheel a posteriori: as a circle -
prior to there was only a wheel but no
knowledge of the dynamic of the radius,
or the diameter...
but it's still a prefix weak hardly a noun...
alpha and beta are nouns because they
denote something - prefix category shared -
but... the alpha and the beta male...
even gamma rays...
what's that? π-networks of coming back
to point (0, 0) in terms of:
no more than three powers of seperation between
you and some random from hugh yawn'khh?
my bad...
but η, μ, ν, ξ, π, ρ (ρ requires delta epsilon
and sigma to imply island of Rhodes)...
τ - but this is not China and tau is not Tao...
to tow is... to tow...
φ, χ, ψ... these could be names...
but ψ is like a crucifix for psychologists...
so these are... but at the same time:
are not names...
working from Latin, "borrowed"...
A (or aye)... B (queen bee)... C (i çee)...
D (dye or dry or d.i.y.)... E (eh? vowel catcher
arm no. 1 of the tetragrammaton)...
surd if the other arm... most notably in gujarati...
or not...
but this leftoever ancient Latin:
                                sing along! sing along!
a, be, cee, dee, e, ef, gee, h "hatch" / hay,
i, jay, kay, em, en, o, ***, que queue cue,
Ar, Tee, U, Vee, ekhs (x), why (y), zee or general Zod /
Zed... etc.
do i remember the "correct", french pedagogic
sequences of: letters of the alphabet?
i thought the whole "game" was about
the lexicon? and the lexicon within the lexicon
of the correct spelling?
are there 26 letters in the english alphabet?
there are! mein gott!
do i have to monkey-play-me-harmonica -
monkey-play-me-the-acordeon and tap to play
the drums... really? now?!
there were never going to be any alphabetical
sequence of events...
if i can remember that there are 26 letters:
the order of the pedagogues doesn't matter...
the lexicon matters... one's own vo(gue)-ca-bu-Larry...
short of Lawrence...
and shouldn't i give up my Lawrence Vogue...
i will certainly to remember to give
the "correct" order of what begins
with abc- and ends with -xyz...
this is the inbetween...
please see fit to spot a sparrow or a typo...

becuase if the british are to be proud of their past...
proud in the sense that it is...
fermenting and all this decline of the west "thing"...
of the people that has to "somehow" welcome
a revival... кaцaпы (plural of кaцaп)
is a racial slurr - designated for russians...
by those who had a pseudo-isarel interlude...
of what was known as the polish-lithuanian
commonwealth - of the last european pagans -
who didn't become the prussians
and made the bavarian spirit rigid
and militaristic...

i find this part of history... rather... infantile...
i have been taught a version of history
through the lense of infantalism...
perhaps science-fiction was the serious medium
of literature after all -
all of the past - if it is to be called a past -
is prescribed by zeitgeist -
my contemporaries' suggestion to be an infatile dream!
it must be a version of infantilism!
at least: that's my response in relation to:
the past having any aspect of being worth
celebrated...
me struck dumb being coerced by a...
genetic archieology of a past...
what some of the current people invest in...
mirror mirror: on no wall beside
mirror mirror: my face...
speculum speculum: well! there's always history
as etymology!
i don't like the word faciem...
where does visage come from?
oh... right...

quest to perfect the algorithms to escape
the everyday speculum was prime suspicion:
to speculate...
i guess any search engines requires:
etymological root...

mirror mirror: my void eating face...
my pulpit of vanity -
my valley of aeons...
my detail of the smirk the demonic glee...
of your most greyish glee...
of no concern for celebrated beauty...
or at best: no beauty to be exemplified
and stealing memory having invested
in the memory of cinema...
mirare mirare: comesse vacare visage meum...

now that's rather different...
isn't it? a history lesson with...
a stress for a post-scriptum in-and-out
"epilogues" (misnomer) and a return
from the trivia interlude back into the narrative...
only with an understudy of etymology...

who do i look like? some ******* ***
who would use such a ***** word as epistemology?
"epilogue" is a misnomer in the context when...
there was never a justifiable metaphor...
a misnomer is a metaphor:
for the **** by the ocean of the shore
in the vicinity to claim town status - Dover -
albino cliffs: more or less...
epistemology is a word most frequently used
by people... who read to people...
encyclopedic entries... cyclopes reading...
all that matters is the cwowd: which is the Velsh
variation of: that already numb-R lost trill
of tarantula bit anglo-ßaß...
which didn't require zeppelins or h'american
spaghetti accent westerns of draw and drule
and drawl...

such a minor racial slur when it comes
to the russians... soviets or red barons...
you must have never visited Moscow or St. Petersburg...
**** the right sort of ******-up russian girl...
and... if you're lucky!
she's take you to... the russian versailles!
Peterhof -
the racial slur stills remains...
a thank you matka rosiya...
satellite son over 'ere: the bellowing from Berlin
is like a sudden plague of hyenas attempting...
no... the foxes are imitating the hyenas...
which is which or rather: which is why?
a mutual agreement: reciprocated...
a great a great much decent ****...
for both of us...
the memory still feeds me...
oh no, it doesn't haunt me:
it feeds me... i could only find replicas
in brothels... i would never dare usurp
this catherine this tsarina of my memory...
i would never dare invest my personality in someone
else... she can be married her... 3rd time...
and this might be her 10th repentence...
of an 11th lover...
on this sinking ship: Potemkin i go as one -
reincarnation or no...
i still don't believe: this hindu myth of:
only a fixed number of people were every to be
born... and the rest are the harsh realities
of the base focuses of animals...
as we somehow drag these n.p.c. mysterions with
us... whether strangers or fathers or mothers...
are you not attached to your grandson:
dearest "catherine"?

such is the tyrany of the hindu polygamy
trans-temporal polytheism...
a diadem with a mouth for an eye...
and an eye for a mouth: or what better way
to salvage this grief of being only being 20 and 21
when having met and having to vow to
allow ourselves our each his and her seperate
lives...
at least some people call it:
the house of lords... and the house of commons...
on a much grander scale...
oh i'm pretty sure tsar (ras)Putin is much amused...

as i am now speaking with a borrowed tongue:
someone lent me a tongue -
i desired to speak with it -
imagine this complete lack of horror with regards
to being lent -
when reicarnation comes to the fore...
i agree: with "him": a most disagreeable
metaphor for... whatever it is the hindus truly believe
to be: the most humane form of
being allowed a human: self-consciousness
and a relationship to all those teenage
*****-dear-diary entries of... precursors
to the menapause and... the blue blood gremlins
of the big pharma pills-down...
the big pharma *******...

unless asked... always in uniform before your "majesty"...
as with any decent *******...
god forbid one of them thinks i'm jesus christ...
come back...
but never with these... grey-area maidens...
this "tool" will not be aroused
on the simple signature end contract promise
of: he made it to the finish line of a one-night stand!
where's the finish line of a one-night stand?
the next day? the *******, the *******...
her ******? at least the new generation
have the... cipher password for sexting...
or whatever has become of a good old fashioned
**** your brains out?
via you **** a plum sore tattoo into my pelvis
with your coccyx like a well balanced
african body of ivory beauty?!
you know the type... it looks like butter
in moonlight... like... what's the point of a niqab
in africa?! it's already... a warewolf has come
among the wolves...
and how i miss you, i esp. miss you when
i sit on my windowsill and listen to foxes
mating...
how those ******* squeal yank and bite nothing
but bone having omitted both the flesh
and the fur!
i miss you the most when i sit at night -
and listen to foxes mating;
after all... this is essex... this is england...
foxes at around 1am are my cognac...
beside ms. amber: and you know you'll also
be ******* her when i've had my fill...
but oooh... look at me: oooh...
gravy...
but i've watched! crows don't attempt fucky-fucky
tow-dollar sucky-sucky bangkokh style
during the die... all that is black that's worth
the crow is done in the night...
perverted pigeons during the day!
****-*******-me-into-a-voyeurism of their
greedy insect esque antics of coo coo...
then jump onto the rucksack of a female...
and all those beta-male pigeons... and that: huh?!
moment of bewilderement when he "thinks"
he has cooed like an alpha...
only the memory of you...
and all the prostitutes after you...
which always made imagining ******* you again
all that more simple; there was no кaкaшкa
with them to begin with.

There is a man
Sitting in the grassy buffer
Between the gas station
And the road
Watching the busy intersection
I wonder what he sees
As car after car rushes through
I wonder what he's looking for
As we all pass him by
He looks kind of odd
Sitting there alone
I think he's the one who's
Got it all figured out

Did you know that if you leave your car in your driveway,
With the keys in the ignition,
And someone sits down in the front seat like they own it, and drives away,
You are the one who is liable for theft?
They can drive that sucker to the coast.
They can burn the upholstery with their cigarettes. They can bring their friends into the back seat, and fill the compartments with their refuse, and ****, and they can leave it ruined in front of your house, or crushed into the median on the highway, or left in disconnected pieces under an overpass.
It will be called, “unauthorized use of a vehicle.”
It will be called a “misdemeanor.”
But you left the car running.
Weren't you kind of asking for it to happen?

They said,
This,
(Gesturing to the skirt which fell to two inches
above my kneecap),
Is like that.

If I walk outside of my house in jeans and a t-shirt, or a long dress with thin straps,
Or with my chin tilted out,
Or with long eyelashes,
Or with full lips,
Or with my hips swaying when I walk,

It's like I left the car running.

It's like I invited them to force their bodies into the front seat.
In their minds, or with their hands, or with their lips to anyone who would listen to them.

Little girls in leotards become like unlocked car doors;
Where men can burn their cigarettes into their skin,
Or stick their fingers in
In plain view of their parents,
And told to let it happen,
Quietly.
It isn't theft,
It's “a medical examination.”

What did they expect?
It isn't a theft.
She was just as guilty of negligence.
It isn't really a felony.
It's not THAT BAD. (Stop being so dramatic.)
It's the unauthorized use of your body, for a time, or one night,
or every time you close your eyes for the rest of your life,

Sure-

But you left the car running.

You want to read little pristine pretty posies
not get involved betwixt & ignore the thorns of life
whatcha gonna do when your scratch becomes infected
hiding in the bushes of denial will get you hives
of the contradicting type, bucking like a bronco
amidst the flowery storm clouds of refusal
riding through wild fields of four leaf clovers
on unicorns wings of phantasmal puff'd perfectly pink skies
pseudo fairy tales conjured up in the mind
never to cross the median line of reality's mock deception
swallow the chimerical pill of inauthentic utopia
just be sure your mythical allegory never plays havoc
in your secret garden of rainbow streaming sublimity,
the fall is greater from the zenith of repudiation

Fever-flushed children and
Broken bodies
Litter hospital halls like so much
Human refuse
….Wondering why
their need for care is treated so tepidly by a
Society which worships
Profits
Power and
Prestige
….Waiting while
they wallow in anguish as
Privacy
Paperwork and
Payment are
Debated by bureaucrats in cubicles
….Wanting to be refreshed and
restored to some measure of usefulness
….But
Free to Pursue Life on their terms in exchange for  
Silence
Acceptance and
Despair

Huddling for warmth and in
Fear of discovery
they assemble in rag-tag formation
having scaled formidable fences
Seeking freedom from
Poverty and oppression
Searching for work of any sort
….No matter how
Humiliating or
Hard
….No matter the
Cost or
Conditions
Disparaged and despised they labor
in hope that their children will have a chance for success
instead of suffering a similar fate
…..But
Free to Pursue Liberty
in a land where their presence is
Ignored if not Denied

Unkempt in camouflage
One-legged and
Vacant-eyed
he rolls his rickety wheelchair along grassy median with muted effort
displaying cardboard sign
childishly scripted
in one weather-worn and gnarled hand
while clutching a decapitated jug in the other
Forgotten
Forlorn, and
Discarded veteran
Victimized far more by country than foe
….But
Free to Pursue Happiness while
Begging on street corners as
Upright citizens dispense
Unwelcome opinions or
Pocket change with equal
Self-righteousness


Life
Liberty and the
Pursuit of happiness….
Ideals that slowly incinerate on the
Altar of Capitalism
….Songs forever lost in the
Cacophony now
Played on the
Instrument of Politics

I am the empty space between the highways,
Abandoned strip of indirection,
Subsisting on passers-by's throw-away
food and emotions / Civic midsection /
I am a buffer / I lead nowhere and
no roads leads to me / I am the empty
nest of a bird long flown to the wetlands /
I am everyone's, cared for by the city,
I am where the bodies are buried
sometimes / I am where teenagers get high,
The lake of grass from which Charon ferries
you and your people to the other side,
I am where tall grasses sway at midnight,
Snowplowsand. Cars pass. Hourglass headlights.

I walk to the gym
Because I don't have enough money
To drive there

Walkin' to the gym
Exercising before I get there
The walk is the warm up

I may stop and sit on the grass median
Underneath a tree to meditate on the way back

Red and white yin-yang,
Angels and Demons pass by,
Highway median.

It had been the longest summer of longing in my not so long life I had imagined how you would feel from our ever so innocent beginnings, I was in his car the late august air brushing stray hairs from behind my ear softly on to my cheeks the air like slow warm breaths with undertones of the promised september chill. In the space of forty five minutes I had counted fifteen red cars in the wing mirror. everything in this long wednesday seemed as futile as the war poems in the anthology with the sunset on the cover similarly filtered and dissected to try and extrapolate some kind of meaningless meaning to meaningly satisfy the means which I know full well I do not mean.

To fit well
into this scheme,
my slice of hell --
my wasted dream.

Never fit
the social stencil --
messy colors,
lines in pencil.

Could not see
that I was strange,
nor feel free
within their cage.

On the fringes,
binary fear
oft impinges
upon the queer.

No context,
bridge, or adapter:
gender/***,
and person after.

Categories
supersede
humanity
in word and deed.

Life between
the lines, beyond
median, mean,
and mode is odd.

On the fringes,
binary fear
oft impinges
upon the queer.

Lets take time to think
and drink.
Take a break
from the proverbial rake.
Enjoy the seeds
grown into trees.
For the sweetness of the fruit
stems from the root.

Let me ask the question that I've wondered for what seems like centuries.
Let me know.
What exactly is the ******* point?
What drives you to turn emotional "love"
Into physical "love"?
I have been constantly dissatisfied.
Endlessly unamused.
Forever jaded.
To the point that I can't imagine the notion of this ******* being even minutely beautiful.
Or even worthy of being the median of which love is concocted.
**** it.
I don't want to understand.

If all a top physicist knows
About the Truth be true,
Then, for all the so-and-so's,
Futility and grime,
Our common world contains,
We have a better time
Than the Greater Nebulae do,
Or the atoms in our brains.

Marriage is rarely bliss
But, surely it would be worse
As particles to pelt
At thousands of miles per sec
About a universe
Wherein a lover's kiss
Would either not be felt
Or break the loved one's neck.

Though the face at which I stare
While shaving it be cruel
For, year after year, it repels
An ageing suitor, it has,
Thank God, sufficient mass
To be altogether there,
Not an indeterminate gruel
Which is partly somewhere else.

Our eyes prefer to suppose
That a habitable place
Has a geocentric view,
That architects enclose
A quiet Euclidian space:
Exploded myths - but who
Could feel at home astraddle
An ever expanding saddle?

This passion of our kind
For the process of finding out
Is a fact one can hardly doubt,
But I would rejoice in it more
If I knew more clearly what
We wanted the knowledge for,
Felt certain still that the mind
Is free to know or not.

It has chosen once, it seems,
And whether our concern
For magnitude's extremes
Really become a creature
Who comes in a median size,
Or politicizing Nature
Be altogether wise,
Is something we shall learn.

Phantom Fierce Pierce

For Sally

Do have the courage of fear?
What!
You heard me.
Admit that we are all inhabited,
Admit that we are all inhibited.

Fear, the eleventh plague visited upon the Egyptians,
Nothing more paralyzingly complete.
Walking down an average day, an average street,
A median day, a medium day that a
Black disease from whence unknown,
And you are a froze shadowed chalk figure
Drawn upon the concrete, unable to move.

What would you pay, anything,
What would you give, everything,
Cleanse it all
Cut out the incisions
That with precision
Haunt your every
Waking and sleeping moment.
The deeds that did not get done,
The deeds that cannot get undone,
Both your undoing.

A plague on both, a plague on me,
My plague, unique to me,
Free me from this whatever the cost.

But it can't be arranged.
No devil to sell back the things
Of which you are ashamed,
No stain stick extant to guarantee success.

When the hollow is so great
You feel non-existent.

But you do not see what I see...
Courage, raw and plain, admits
These phantoms are not phantoms at all.

Those figures try to break you.
There is a beach, a path, where you know,
Safety.

Not easy to get there. The bus schedule unpublished.
But the bus line exists.
And you have the courage to wait, patiently
Until it arrives.

There is value here, if you read between the dashes
And the dots.

I see you for who you are.
You are the phantom fiercer piercer.

Shown us the way.

She Shoots Me Towards 

the Reaches of the Atmosphere.

(narcotic)

She Bravely Descends Earthward 

from the Divine Empyreal. 

(superhero)

Not Unlike a Hypodermic Needle 

Piercing My Median Cubital Vein,

(narcotic)

She Flashes into My Heart 

in Scarcely Eight Seconds.

(superhero)

Besides Inducing Euphoria,

She Effectuates Toxicity;

(narcotic)

In Fewer than Ten Minutes, 

She Targets My Defenses.

(superhero)

She not only Provokes Peak High,

(narcotic)

She Destroys a Lifetime of Yearning.

(superhero)

She is My ******. (narcotic)

She is My Heroine. (superhero)

~ The Sharpie Poet

Just once,
I'd like to be normal,
Average.

Or the median,
Mode,
Or range.
I'm not picky.

Too smart for my own good,
But actually stupid.

Too clumsy to play a sport,
Yet I play anyway.

Either the pliable,
Gullible,
Easy to mess with nerd.

Or the weak link,
On the basketball team.

Is fitting in,
Just once,
Too much to ask for?

Is one real friend,
That big of a request?

Is knowing what to say,
Really that hard?

Is being pretty,
Too big a wish to grant?

Why can't I be normal,
For once in my life?

beauty doesn't cease to be
when it ceases to be seen
ignorance can't educate itself
without accepting its fallacy
happiness can't be quantified
without sadness in quantity
a life can't last a lifetime
without deaths finality

I am a person of almost and kind of.
I am a shadow of what I was
Hidden in the darkness of a past
Cast down by the light of the future.
This present of in-betweens
The liminal space in which I exist.
The here and there on the journey ahead.
I am the line between the points
The mystery before the solution
I am the median, the average, the midway
I am incomplete.
Pieces of a whole
unable to form the big picture.
This limbo of emotions
The neutral of positive and negative
Inactive, inert, insufficient.
This heart filled with grey
Longing to see through rose colored lenses
Paint my world with emotion.
Trade the silence for music.
To fit in the missing pieces.
But almost doesn’t offer solutions
And kind of doesn’t capture the horizon.

the i.q. (intelligence quotient) is hardly representative,
you can bishop-streak as a tourist to Giza and get
the same result... quotient etymologically speaking
is simply a quote, statistically represented -
meaning it only gathered answers from
the μ - median, mean, and meridian, also
a fond mention of mode: we all wish to sleep as peacefully
as the dead, necromancy with the pepper & salt shakers
for the fancy... stirrup hunch to giddy up,
and that makes two of us qualm bitter with
                                                    the grey matter
unexposed in chess tournaments.
i.q. (intelligence quotient) v. i.i. (intelligence inclusiveness):
that too.. statistics means a lot of autism
and many tiger mommies... preferably with surname Chang....
bright kid / always the dummies -
make that five years after the the show,
show them bullied... n'ah, you wont.
meaning the only thing included is
a pyramid and competitiveness, rather than shared
genius - which is hard to come by -
yes, the inclusiveness bit of the Rubik's cube solved
like Pavlov's tongue and the palette of a dog
given Sumerian cuisine to slobber over
when ingesting a tablespoon of cinnamon as the
other educated guess: the educated joke, universities
are famous for them being practised.
thus μ and the statistician's consonant... constant...
three tiers of synonymous bishops making up one
cardinal - intelligence is well enough quotient's worth
and the pyramid for a competitive streak of further events...
but such intelligence performed as example among
children doesn't qualify others to share the oncoming demise...
we need intelligence of an inclusive nature,
not a statistical correspondence with economists dodging
hard questions with quick investment answers...
we need people to tell the difference between
inclusiveness on the plural scaling of being a part of,
rather than an exclusiveness on the plural scaling of not being
a part of (alter: an exclusiveness on the solipsistic slave-scaling
of simply da sein - i.e. being there) -
i get the pronoun ambiguity, whenever there's no i involved
and it's purely a thing, everyone in the factory asks for the
Schindler's List - whether or not people are organic or
prosthetic(s) extending into a network of parasite or host
economy projects, and people ask those questions;
meaning? people are more likely to dismiss the idea of
a soul (an indestructible part of themselves, whether
contemporary or far fetched in terms of: ahead - Kant lives on
from the 18th century, plastic surgery will make others like you
take up the augmentation many decades later... there is always
something indestructible about you... it's called recycling
in the transference of physics, or metaphysics, the soul is like
an atom... it's indestructible... but your ego isn't... your ego
has no correlative support of the soul - your soul is an
indestructible unit, prone to gravity e.g., but your ego is prone
to the more pervasive moral force, which gravity isn't
a part of in term of monotheist glue... namely conscience...
the indestructible part of your isn't a self-conscious Jungian
jargon bit watered with control that you're aware of...
the soul, the unit of indestructibility is the unconscious bit...
which is why we continue to have actors, poets, plumbers,
bus drivers... you can't destroy the soul in the collective
unconscious sense of things... the indestructible element of
your being continues regardless of your wish to sell
out and profit or take an overly conscious case of
being aware of conning the selfish gene stipend on Wall Street...
it still bites back at your **** for showing off your yacht
rather than your Mongolian yurt.
the soul is real... not in an individualised sense of things...
the individual is completely destroyed... constantly revised
via recycling... a lot of Hinduism makes his plainer but
more mythical and less hoarse in its reality of death -
the soul is a continuum, the indestructible capacity of
preservation, preservation rather than evolution -
anti-Darwinism? the preservationists... apply poetic rhyming
to ideas and the truth is ******* boring - poetry can decipher
GRAND PLATINUM ORNATE GALAS OF STATE AFFAIRS
by looking at the suffixes... and rhyming them together
getting the toad's ******* of October Fest's burps...
it is time to learn how to write poetry outside of poetry...
it's time to write testaments, it's time to write biblical accounts
of our lives... there's not time for pretty verse...
it's at this precise moment when poetry has become too
technical in theory and mundane in practice...
use this zenith moment to read language across all genres...
and never applying it for a poetic expression...
look! the paupers are numerous! but these paupers are
octopus handy in picking your ten pockets!
to have reached the plateau of Darwinism as having to preserve...
to have reached the penultimate affair of the prone
destructibility of identity, personality, character (Thesaurus Rex's
RA! or the complete synonymous archive of ego) - meaning
that the soul was a plumber you never were given
the Saturday of the appointment, and your chronology being
that of a Ford Automobile salesman in some showroom in Peckham.

This tomb hideth the dust of Aeschylus, an Athenian, Euphorion's son, who died in wheat-bearing Gela; his glorious valor the precinct of Marathon may proclaim, and the long-haired Medes, who knew it well."

On the Plain at Marathon
We stood in Darius’ way.
An outnumbered band of Athenians
who the Medians sought to slay.
They had first crushed the Ionians
Then put Eretria to the Torch.
Wherever Darius conquered
the bleeding earth was scorched.

Our Hoplites held the high Ground
and penned the Persians in.
For several days a stalemate reigned.
Neither side could win.
But when the Persians spit their force
and sailed on a friendly tide.
Our hand was forced
there was but one course
if Athens was not to die.
Our Phalanx moved against each wing
of the Median horde.
Though numerous, they were lightly armed
against our spears and swords.
We burned their ships and slew their men
Their Panic turned the tide.
Aeschylus seemed to be everywhere
urging on our side.
A  Legend holds Pheidippides
To Athens then made haste
to proclaim: “Rejoice , We conquer!”
at the end of his last race.

You'll always be twenty-three.
Always.
And that kills me.
You were older than me.
Now...

******* the futility of it all.
******* ******* it all!
I wish that I could punch a hole
in the world with my words and
find you.
I wish you knew.

I just wanted to tell you..
I just thought you needed to know,
at least once before everything is
broken headlights and crushed
tomorrows.
Blood and pavement and a median.
Crushed glass and a world
standing hollow without you.
I wish you knew.

I think I loved you once.
Think.
Coward.
I need to find you some days.
**** this tired world and it's
arbitrary thefts.

Your name should have a million hits a day.
You should have been...
My god how brilliant you were.
Like a jewel and like a genius.
You should have been forever.

I guess, in a way, you are.

You were a part of my life,
and a much bigger part than I ever would
have had you believe.
Did you know that? Had you figured it out?
Perhaps not.

A year since. Fifty-two weeks.
More in fact.
It was May.
Day after my brother's birthday.

******* it.

You were older than me.
October to my November.
One month that you lorded over me.
One month.

You'll always be twenty-three.
Always.
Forever.
Now...

i'm sitting on the windowsill like a crow
perched on the rooftop,
eating watermelon and downing
a mixer of whiskey and coca cola

while i ponder the *style sections of
last weekend's style magazine
a magpie in me draws open the curtain
open of the silence, and i make the
neighbour's dog bark with laughter -
the section in question that prompts
me is a piece about silent speed dating
(i only ever did that obscene
event once at university,
we left with L tattoos on our foreheads),
**** just didn't work, too much
systematisation with the cards -
i'd prefer a chess tournament to be honest;
in the speed dating scenario you
get zombies and Oreo biscuits,
cracking fun - mingling fruit with alcohol,
it's really a Saturday night in my head,
picturesque: i.e. picture it - photosensitive
epileptics on the dance floor shaking all
the possible muscle including the buttocks -
times up...
england is really abhorring toward poets,
only Shakespeare made it count -
as a playwright -
or as they say in Yorkshire - Germany
and the 1930 - 40s, not Beethoven prior,
the youth wouldn't read a book,
but would continue to shoot the Nazis in
computer games comfortably into the 21st century -
in england if it's not Shakespeare it's filth,
degenerate art, that's the reasoning -
from the saturday review not, one, review,
of, a, book, of poetry, not one -
if this is a healthy literate stance then
call me Mona Theresa and put a strap-on
***** on me -
it's easier to find bargains in the Amazon online
store than a good poem - worth of mouth
had an ammonia soaked handkerchief stuffed
in its mouth, and hey presto! cow manure
never met the chance of nostrils engaging...
in england what's prized above
poetry is journalism, hence by respect for
those who disengage from from coupling poetry
to music by making music laughable
with poetry's rhyming -
twang twang - #a, repeat... twang twang a doodle
do f, through to c, or something worth
a silent cipher on the page -
indeed journalism above poetry, ars umbras:
the art of shadows, the art of obscurity,
the perfect stance of diplomacy,
take the bureaucratic route -
'short of an umbrella?!' the cabbie questioned,
'short of ice cubes on ye'r 'ed?!' the innovator retorted?
and with that the audience became bemused
when the magician pulled out a cabbage head
from the top hat rather than a rabbit -
indeed poetry, had i been Voltaire writing
about england has almost disappeared from
english - mind my ignorant pessimism -
but mind that journalism took over,
and instead of poetic musicology what's required
is poetic journalism - i can't have stone age emblems
of care to coerce me into geological rudiments -
if indeed i am but one man
among the collective i am obviously wrong,
but should that matter, i should seize to care
whether i actually read a Stephen King novel,
since i haven't, as they say, appreciated the living art,
and chose instead literary necrophilia,
then i am sourced as a voice in the graveyard -
or as one homeless man said: a gem -
all it took was politeness and a free cigarette -
indeed this literary necrophilia -
it's quite becoming - and to then realise -
well, with each day a new mode of conduct
in the median of populace of the highest average -
harsh to consider in conclusion any if all
pronoun usage to be akin to conjunction and
preposition use as a care for a vain approach
in the use of language and self-buffoonery -
simply how the language works,
with that stated and the phonetic approximations
found on too many occasions to be realised -
e.g. can you please pút pooh bear into
       his enve-low-p', and seal
       it shút with ha-née / ha-knee rather than red wax?