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Lia Frenae Jan 2017
Chocolate is great
It's really neat
But, to be the color, it's bittersweet
This is the experience of a lifetime that Hersheys must undergo
To read, to be told, to hear
That it's almost good enough
Almost pretty enough, almost smart enough
Too reserved and mannered to be this and that
Tears down almost all confidence that Hershey has
It takes away it's natural state
Like a Hershey left in the heat
It takes a while for that Hershey to find beauty again within itself, to find a true acceptance to who it really is, and the discover it's identity
To understand that it won't always make ends meet
But that Hershey will overcome this phase
That made it's life a living maze
The Hershey will wake up
Look in the mirror and see they are somebody
with a cocked up head
will forget what everyone said
and the microaggression that became so macro will soon be irrelevant
That Hershey will see it's real identity to see a girl named Aliah
Anjana Rao Mar 2016
To be brown is to
know racism in every shade -
internal,
or
external,
microaggression
or
aggression.

To be brown is
an inquisition,
every time you step foot outside –
“What are you?”
“What does your name mean?”
“Have you tried that restaurant?”
“Have you been back?
“What religion are you?”
“Say something in your language!”


To be brown is
the shame
of either
too much
or not enough,
that you try to
press down, ignore,
forget about -
don’t be so sensitive.

To be brown is
an investment,
the way you are always supposed to
rise and rise and rise,
have the opportunities of the west
and the values of the east,
marry a nice brown heterosexual,
go to graduate school,
have a good career,
earn more money than your parents did,
be safe and settled,
provide for your parents,
your parents,
who only pressure you
and push you
because they want you to be

happy.

To be brown is
diaspora,
the way your tongue
trips over the words of native languages
you never grew up speaking
because English was always taught
first
to generations before you,
the way you weren’t born with
any real community,
and even now
most of your friends
are white,
the way
you have to move in the world
hearing your name
mispronounced in every way imaginable,
the way you
scan the room
for any brown face
because you know
a brown person will
understand,
the way you realize
how often you are the only
brown body
in any space,
queer or straight,
the way you really are a
minority.

To be brown is
reclamation,
the way you learn to
find beauty in the brown and the hair
and the body type,
the way you learn to
let yourself feel Anger
at appropriation,
the way you learn to fight
for identity –
correct the mispronunciations
learn the language,
listen to the music,
cook the food,
wear the clothes,
go back to the country
learn the history,
do what you need to do
in your
imperfect
perfect
way,
****
what anyone says.

To be brown
is to be
enough.
Mateuš Conrad Jan 2017
i find nothing intelligent about philosophy,
if in were to prescribe a self-help book
i'd prescribe any philosophy book,
it would become mantra to: dumb-down.
fascinated as i am, dancing
pretending to drum, when there's
a sudden jolt and i sing hail! in the
vandal epice, i am fully intact as a
skeleton of an albatross - and stand in a shape
of ᛉ... zigfreid... jawolh...
    having spent 3 weeks in Poland,
in some obscure city gave me utter peace...
but hey, why not come back to England
and get a moral sun-tan of absolute
*******... why not dress up
  in post-colonial nuances, why not experience
post-colonialism?
         3 weeks without the internet
and i really, really did feel relief...
           i thought television is bad...
well, it is bad, if you have internet access...
but with the internet, comes the Belzeebub,
a swarm of words, of opinions that only lead
to a cul de sac of your own basis:
for not talking on a street corner, with a sign
dangling on your neck like a cowbell
reading: the end is near!
          i get it, it's a fetish, it's man claiming
the end will come when he'll obliterate gravity,
i''m cool with that, shindig and all the ponce
of an urban vocab...
   talk to me like a farmer though... please,
please, please do... i want to talk to a farmer...
i can't deal with this cool urban kids
and their microaggression and, whatever it is
they have stashed in their socks...
     because you really can't read a philosophy
book and care to be intelligent...
         i've read a few, and each time i return to
the most despotic creature i could ever wish
to be... the one that's perplexed that he
say something tangible, something worth
riddling... but nothing outside of
the arithmetic... of gluing i am dodo
therefore i'm extinct
...
     try to imagine living in a country without
a colonial past... i can, i just did, spent
3 weeks in Poland, and after having acquired
English, like the good, assimmilated foreigner
i am: i want to unlearn it...
   i'm dying to unlearn it... i ****** wish i didn't
speak it...
              it's too global for me...
    i speak it, but i don't want to speak it,
but then i invested over 20 years of my life in speaking
it, and thinking in it...
       i'd also like to see little england,
the england with its camper vans and it's yorkshire
terrier... but i am currently holding
an anchor on the periphery of London,
and boy, the drag is something, i am actually
enjoying this paralysis...
but you can't expect to read a philosophy and
get the idea that suddenly there's a theory
of relativity sleeping within you...
    read a philosophy book, learn to become an idiot...
    intelligence can't even stomach awe...
it always has to say something witty,
be something opportune, have a dinner party...
fake it...
           the idiot just looks at the world
and says: huh? it really is a chance to play the Frankenstein
monster... so many people, and they have so
much care to trade, sell apples, argue...
so much care to attain the ****** appeal,
to trim their hair...
   so much energy to trade, sell life insurance,
to argue...
               where do they get it from, that mana?
it can really be so welcoming,
to experience life in a non-colonial society,
    to be bored, to do nothing and simply be human...
now that's a first...
              to do nothing and simply be, human...
   me thinks that animals have it easy,
i wish i could have the digestive system of a koala
bear...
                to be a creature with a mono-facet
adaptability dynamic... well, a bi-facet adaptation
scenario... me, coordinates (0, 0), the thing
i want, coordinates (1, 1)... move!
     not me, i'm human, i have to go to the *******
cinema, i have to attend a funeral,
i have to do a, b, c, and all the way down through to z...
    evolution is cruel...
               this constant physical bombardment
with sensual teasing, and then being ****** anally by
some cognitive fudge phalllus...
    it's really become obsolete to even think,
there's no: think for the pleasure of mere thought...
now i'm waiting for a shepherd to
huddle me into a crowd in need of writing a book...
i really don't know how the natives
  deal with this, but if i were to suddenly speak my
native tongue i'd be better off, english is really
being stretched, so many bad, i mean really bad
accents... they only speak the english they speak
because english is a barren wasteland without any
diacritical marks... it's covert language,
puny secretive bollocking at the start,
and nothing else at the end...
    but it really is a headache knowing english
these days... it's doing my head in...
          i speak english and i'm already imaging
myself head-banging, or knocking down
the al-buraq - if you know Polish then you'll
just say: the beetroot.
                       and whatever the media tells you,
everyone in the trenches of society
actually adores Putin...
             it could be sad, but at least it's not so
flimsy and artsy after all...
   a society with clear indication that internet
megalomania is not permitted...
                  yes, i really am writing you a postcard
with a: wish you would go there...
     even with its Christian conservatism...
      it's actually bearable...
becuase, having 3 weeks there, and as i get older
(even though i'm only 30)...
  i find England: exhausting... literally
like dragging elephant testicles wherever i walk...
it's exhausting... England is exhausting...
   talking English is exhausting...
     this beacon of hope and freedom has become
a **** nugget, set alight on a toothpick...
     i've lived in England for so many years,
and have yet to taste the local delicacy... of an English
******... while a story emerges in Rotherham
about a ******* cartel... it begins to really break
your heart... there's you, ***-starved and
having the tendency to over-exaggerate a handshake
and there's the world...
     you can't really drink enough alcohol these days
to knock yourself out...
and i've been drinking, on and on, on and on... and on...
and it never stops being so depressing!
     there, my tongue is lose... it's a streaker on a
football pitch... running wild... giving it all
for the worth of simply: frenzy...
             but there's something very ancient about this
dynamic... the fact that these are the lands
once occupied by the romans...
sure, in Poland you use the Latin alphabet, but
the spaghetti maneli crew never threw their
pizza that far up north...
                          go to any country that doesn't
boast of a Roman heritage...
that's for starters...
                         if the place boasts about being
conquered by the romans...
                  you end up watching a funeral that
just won't go away... not how the latin alphabet
was best symbiotic with numbers due to the holes
and you can't code on a computer screen
with anything, but latin... try writing an app.
using arabic or hebrew...
it truly is a language based on: matchsticks made
in heaven...
                 just the areas where the romans didn't
settle... the "uncivilised" regions...
    it's enough that the Slavs probably had the equivalent
of runes... and a polytheism of some sort...
but all i see is: perfected exploitation of the latin
alphabet, and well, might as well forget the rest.
    now that's major digression...
      it's as if i'm trying to have a conversation,
  but then the claustrophobic tendency of narration
take off and i''m thrown into a Tartar army...
       entranced into singing allah'u akbar... instead
of reciting Rumi...
                    it is what it is,
and since England is a major player in world
affairs, there's nothing little about it, even
if you live in Dover...
                 yet there is a nation-state serenity somewhere,
where everything is truly small,
  truly content with very little, where it's not
gagging to advertise itself, to sell itself...
    perhaps Auschwitz is a blessing as a "tourist"
destination after all...
           come to think of it... people will be children
around the pyramids...
they'll climb a pyramid... make funny photographs
of the pyramids what afar, as if they were holding
it... can't see any funny photographs coming
from Auschwitz... people gearing up to
smoke a shisha in a gas chamber...
                       or climbing into one of the crematorium
ovens to replicate a Tokyo hotel "room",
maybe Auschwitz is the blessed deterent of globalisation?
it's a great question...
           while the Czechs import hen and stag parties
to their capital with cheep beer...
  no one from the west seems to feel the same
drunken bliss in Krakow... what with Auschwitz
so close...
               they'd rather drink with the Russian
separatists in Kiev!
                  and indeed, what the German rage left,
i wear it like a black diamond...
              a crow's croak...
so, does that mean i have to appeal to some
imaginative conquered-party appeal?
   that i let it all happen, while i pressed the snooze
button on my clock?
     i don't know... Poland is a bit odd, and coming
from there, it almost seems that i should be writing
about Moldavia.
              and blessed are those: firmly rooted in one
place, with neither care nor obligation
   to travel far...
                          lest they bring nothing but
scurvy, in hope of bringing the beacon of civilisation
  and only that, no olympic flame: but a plague.
England is a land of displaced people,
  and can't be anything other than:
i got ants in my pants and i'm going to sing the blues!
Gregory K Nelson Mar 2019
Thirty-nine and single
and its been this way four years.
A few flings on the side,
a little skin to skin win,
jumbled kind words in passing,
bubbled emoji smiles,
a morsel from your crumbling heart,
a giant bite of your sin.

I've never been the cheater.
Had my fun when things were undefined,
kept my exes as friendships,
but never crossed the invisible fence line.
Never broke that kind of promise,
never ate the fruit from that Tree of Knowledge

Never been the cheated as far as I know,
I wasn't born to play that cuckold role.
I am just the grateful accomplice,
a secret man-shaped hole in your life,
you speak of only with that man.
We bump and rub our egos,
while you make more sensible plans.

I am a gift that knows nothing or generosity,
humility that swings with fists for fences,
salvation with a price tag,
water for the hungry,
sunshine on a frigid Universe,
the morality of a well meaning fool.

"I can get by on little or nothing."
And I quit my job without reason.
I've got no paper in my pocket,
and not much working for me,
on the street.

I'm not a vegetarian,
I like the smell,
the flesh and soul,
of sizzling meat.

I am "woke" in a way that is not yours,
Woke to the true and endless fight against injustice.
Woke to pragmatic workable solution,
But I expect people to laugh off
or confront a microaggression.
Your complaints mean little to me.
I was born with an incurable disease.
And "if I was half the man I used to be,
I'd take a flamethrower" to your safe spaces,
to your shout downs,
when they threaten free speech.

My hands and arms are strong,
but my legs are weak.
My life is weak.
My car is scraped, dented,
and full of paint and ash.
I quit my last job without a reason.
The next one will be worse.
I owe more than I earn,
preach more than I learn.

My jacket is torn.
My sweater is fifty years old.
My feet are rough beach rocks.
My jeans sag below an alcoholic's gut.
My teeth are yellow nicotine.
My knees crack.
My *** bleeds.
My hands shake.
My **** quakes.

My back aches,
threatening violent mutiny.
My beard is just beginning
its unstoppable transition to gray.
My sweatshirt reeks of ****.
Nights sweats flood my sheets every night,
whether we are together or alone.

My eyes are above it all,
window to my soul,
so much more apt and able,
to produce tears.
In that one way,
I have grown.

This Soul is the unforgiving ice
of a small pond
in a giant winter meadow.
The yellow grass is dead,
but keeps its head above the snow.
The evergreens sway solemn in brutal wind.
The pond is safe to skate on,
If you don't fall too hard.

As we move towards the work of Love
the internet makes a shrewd habit,
of taunting our loneliness.
It supports an army of strippers,
sending stock requests to be "friends,"
with the hope a man might feel loved,
just enough to surrender Visa digits.
Lost girls courting lost boys,
twelve dozen at a time.

My heart wails for affection,
As all hearts must do.
But the wail is just another song now,
passed by painted fingernails
on the local radio dial,
sung only to myself,
like an organist practicing hymns,
in an empty church at midnight.
Jonah Trejos Jun 2022
my brain is a marvelous thing
it curses me
loves me
hates me
admires me
but is my brain a truthful thing
or is it lying
is my brain in control
or am i just free falling
a spiral downward toward the depths
an abyss filled with my deepest regret
did they mean what they said
in their mini microaggression
or is just my brain being a tool of mental incarceration
locked inside
it curses me
loves me
hates me
admires me
but is my brain lying
or is it a truthful thing
my brain is in control
when i feel my feet lift off the ground
your simple words
a slight touch
bring me joy
such that i could simply float away
like a balloon lost from a child's hand
a careful grasp let go
a cherished thing abandoned
once again
my brain is a marvelous thing
but it's lying
i'm not in control i'm spiraling
so i put on my mask
of it's all alright
and smile
and wave
because that is what my marvelous brain says to do
This is a poem I wrote when I was feeling lost. A day where it seemed as if the whole world was crashing in on me. There are probably errors, places where I should have capitalized an "i" and even more places that I could rewrite. This is a first attempt at capturing something deeply emotional for me, I hope you can find the same emotion in it that I did.
I S A A C Jun 2020
You understand the cycle of generational trauma, birthed from hurt to cause drama
You understand communication styles that dip their pedicured toes into ***** waters
You understand the impact of microaggression and discontentment

But you don't know what love is
The examples you had only you taught you how to be toxic
Birthed patterns within me that restrict me
Anxiety reaching new heights as we reach the peak

Sleeping with you closer to me in cause a sudden dream prompts you to leave
If you love something set it free but what if you don't return to me
Emptiness I would feel because I never knew what love was
Until it was too real and I let my fears dismantle what would've been soulmate love.
Think'
Mateuš Conrad Apr 2018
pirates, with a Huckleberry
******* row boat...
doing the Achilles vs. the tortoise
logic macabre with
Somalis...
           if ever a microaggression...
meaning, curbed bodies and alliances
with ****** in the morge...
     well... sign me up Libido Jim...
tis an un fo 'ah bone fide...
ah... fy fy n'oh fide... n'oh fight...
      bonding fade... or post Latin post Brit
dicritical enclosure, loss...
   Gaulish excess spelling
and not wonder:
the last remnant literacy monopoly...
dyslexia... eyes see one thing...
tongue speaks another...
      trash the bib.,
remnant 0f bible,  diacritical marks...
bone fide...
     tetragrammaton fiddle with
the diacritical violin...
        no, no Anaïs Nin ands a father figure...
id est more fetish figure and less
father rigour...
                          bond fíd(e)...
like all french... shy on the suffix ***
loss of diacritical canon...
                                    as literate as the pastoral...
and God forbid I ever make the sort of dough
worthy of the sistine chapel or
the da vincy code...
   I shadow,  and the undercurrents...

John "kukła" Paul II...
   or? John Paul "the wickerman"...
at least they allowed Ratzinger
the dignity of papa emeritus...
   poles like bangladshis are
expendable... but worth the:
princess ought to have that unicorn...
my my... came slurping honey,
the sugar baby...
and the delayed claustrophobia
of the inescapable ratio
of women, outnumbering men...
and even Solomon,
employed eunuchs to tend
to his harem, stemming from
the myth of ****** stamina.
Mateuš Conrad Feb 2020
before listening to all these podcasts...
where was i, having not listend to
some BBC4 radio?

have i had to become... this necessarily:
unscripted...
no mention of mily balakirev...
the moon starts to fade -
yet somehow retain its strict form...
as anything within the confines
of a vacuum...

where is the rust or anything akin
when you try to push opposing poles
of magnets... and later suppose:
oh, just the planets...
hindering a Holst composition...
barricaded by paper
anddoodles of a blunt pencil...

today i thought -
about time: i reread the only book
i would ever reread...
richard brautigan's troust fishing in
h'america...
the coalmine... and watermelon sugar...

whether or not invited:
life always happens beside me...
and: that's not a clerical error...

best choice of sedatives... come friday
night... i'm a... footnote presence...
to watch a movie in a cinema...
you'd probably require a bag of pop-corn...
poets and bureucrats...
the advent of cinema is...
me learning to use portions of:
the reconquista of braille in the realm
of stenography...

Tiro: how to encode sounds quicker
than by the current standard of
letters... stenography and...
what would never become a rigid rubric
of orthography...
or diacritical preference in
the "borrowed" tongue...

a mongol invasion sets you back... 200 years...
an ottoman invasion sets you back... 100 years...
russian influence sets you back...
300 years...
and your people's petty frivolity...
damaging for the ranks of romanians
and lithuanians... 400 years!

to be an island folk...
imagine... not being landlocked...
further exploring work...
while summoning avenues of:
the better part of friday...
and that culture... my... how it thrived...
like today...
i heard of a tobias in germany being
charged shooting strangers...
in 2 locations... then going back...
and executing himself and his mother...
some stabbing incident in a mosque
in regent's park...

me shopping for vegatables...
a niqab ninja... sorry... you can overstate
an "east european" accent if you want
with these words...
i have rubber ears...
"we" are to protect the people...
who are likely to cause us harm...
because no khaki is available...
or mustard brown...
how, can i, own, a memory...
of the 20th century... and the wars
in tow...

i can tilt a glass of cider and call it:
gods' ****! that i can do...
but i can't... somehow make myself
available... to this... frankenstein monster
of: well... wouldn't it be...
just oh so ******* nice... if we came to the feet
of the shadow of a tower of babel!

poland was always a problem among
the english:
we didn't ask you to start a war...
so why blame the ******* plumbers!

then again... what sort of "cuck"...
is invaded by both **** germany
and soviet russia? the sort of cuck that
learned to ha! "escape" with this mediocre
english... the stereotype follows...
all the polacks are plumbers...
just like all the englishmen are gays...
savvy?

because no cinnamon man would
allow the raj to wilt!
and we are... keeping the best of our
affronts!
because there's the north,
the west, the south... but the east
is a sentence of stressors..
that the east reminds everyone else:
"in europe" of the madmen...
as douglas murray said it best...
"microaggression" or no aggression...

i'm tired of the english gentleman...
as i'm tired of the ape...
the english ape...
perhaps i'm more inclined to think
in louis XIV terms of: heliocentric
sun casts no shadow...

move, elsewhere? oh i'm pretty sure
i have invested my time and effort
in a grievance that i want resolved...
but that i will not see it resolved...
all the better! i will not see no societal
betterment, either!
i like pickles... do you like pickles?
first i will go deaf before i will go blind...

i'm tired of being a past...
as i'm tired of never becoming a future...
and in the currency of presence:
the now... forever the fluctuation
gamble... with nothing of a waterfall
certainty...
i am... a cotton binding bundle...
among the scraps and irritation scoops
of rock...
baseline: a hark of a crow
when one expects an opera sung by...
******* mermaids!

in essex and i'm shopping next to...
a... perhaps i have not liberated myself from...
perhaps i'm still 8 years old and i'm leaving
snowman footprints on the concrete...
from the monolithic culture of...
the grand babel... that's being exercised in:
beta stages...

perhaps because everything is signatured:
made in china...
it really doesn't make a difference...
breed us... the sustainable mongrel!
i quiet expect myself to
hiding away in Kenya on a beach...
thinking about Ghanian timber being imported...

that this language is english...
i'm sorry... an englishman isn't using it...
doesn't that tow behind: usurping the natural
buoyancy of a boat?
called a duck... at least a duck doesn't sink...
then again:
perhaps i'm not supposed to peer into
these "surnames" of views...
what if integration was all wrong...
eh... madmen from the east...
as long as we get, but one,
egyptian artifact of a pharaoh!

please don't include me in this arithmetic...
no... don't...
oh yes... those... very sensible gays
we hear a lot about... "elsewhere"....
it's always a metaphorical ditto and elsewhere
and: foraging for sensible with the irish...
mother russian sent me...

why is it that...
bilingual is, but no longer is...
the newly frozen focus frame
of schizoid?
              don't mind me...
          after some time enough of the people's
sanity begs itself: the consort... approval...
and rating...
am i mollusk bound to a shell...
maybe whatever, probably not...
but... if i were to don the niqab...
i'd be all the more welcome! for the cocktail!
so why did...
england... pretend to care about Poland...
and state: war! against Germany...
why did you ******* even bothersome yourselves
to "care"?
wouldn't you like us to...
be... currently... spreschen deutsche?!
ich kennt ich würde!
i wouldn't mind... the ****** tongue disappearing...
i'd still be... using the remains of Latin...
given this phonetic encoding, is not...
phonecian... or... cuneiform...

i've come back to say... you really didn't require...
to save us...
perhaps having german as an envelope language...
we would have become
the second scandinavia... the south italy
of the baltic states... perhaps the baltic sea
was to become the new... mediterranean...
the new rome... outlier whittle bright scon...
and all those people and nations involved
in bringing the baltic sea ambitions into fruition...

oh believe me...
but i've invested over 20 years of my life
on these isles...
to have to return to: forevever not welcome...
with the history of less...
to stage war to defend a people...
that otherwise become: gutter-scouts...
while the niqab-ninja walks like a scared cow...
oh sure... if you're culturally confused...
don't run up to me asking for resolutions...
why would even defend poland when **** germany
and soviet russia invaded...
daydreaming your little: lawrence of arabia:
universal man... the god-riddled man valentines'!
have 'im!

i'm tired of the stereotypes...
the middle-men that we are...
not being the higher tier russian oligarch types..
you "not racist" peddlestool proximity...
but it's o.k. if it does have to include
the Polacks and the Irish...
*******... no go zone.

— The End —