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abby al juaithen Feb 2012
my mundane life
is all too trivial
I am a child
I still live
in my parents house
the one my father built
with his words,
the one my mother
blew spirit into
with her macaronis
the one I sat
in my room
studying in
useless packs
of forgotten information
trying
to cry.
into new notebooks
and ukulele
filling bathtubs
opening windows
letting air
form an air
of beauty
in my ugly
homely
country
unloved country
every being here
utters poorly articulated words
of loath
to you
how do you stand
so strong
whilst staggering within
adversity?
would my life
be more
or less
mundane
if I were nabokov
living in russia
transcending and transmitting
beauty?
coated with cold
and cruelty
thats cruel for cruelty
and aesthetics sake,
rather than
heat
and rage
and silenced
misery.
Matloob Bokhari Oct 2014
THESE EYES,THESE BEAUTIFUL EYES

When you looked at me
The fire of your eyes created
Deep waves in the sea of my soul
I am drowning deeper and deeper
In the wide ocean of infinite love
These eyes,these beautiful eyes
Made me see deep in the ocean
And imbibe wisdom from the sky
These eyes,these beautiful eyes
Painted kindness on my mind;
And  inscribed love on my heart
These eyes,these beautiful eyes
More beautiful than the starry night
More sweet than the moonbeam kiss
More kind than  fragrance of perfumed garden
These eyes,these beautiful eyes
    Marilyn Ann Francis Beautiful....EXCELLENT...MAF
Angela Davis
Natasha Nabokov Thank you, poets, you make my day Natasha Nabokov It's such a memorable poem, Matloob. Thank you
Wow, Matloob, you should post your work in FM Online Magazine, I know that the editor would publish it!
Michele Vizzotti-White Writing about eyes is such a great idea and u do it so beautifuly, u go on from the appearance to the way they make one feel in few but rich words, my fav line is the painted kindness in my mind eyes tell so much yet i have not read many poems about them
Saalik Siddiqui Fantastic indeed.
Demelia Denton Another beautiful poem Matloob
Melanie Bingham Chapman very, very nicely written !
Natasha Nabokov Oh, you are so magnificently productive
Larry Barmash What would you do if I sang out a tune

Perry Alexander Nectar of love.
the down keeps me up
needing to crash but thoughts beckon
i know i must pay tomorrow
full moon tonight
what’s your excuse?
if you’re a woman don’t misconstrue
i’m not a  misogynist
true misogyny neccitates great admiration
full moon tonight
what’s your excuse?
i don’t care tonight
gonna stay awake till collapse
i dreamed Apple traded
$99.00 monday morning and i bought it
i’m not your type
not your type not your type
i read Flaubert, Zola, Nabokov
i know it’s hard to see
i imagine angels
what do you like in your cup of tea?
while taking care of neighbor’s cat Oskar
decided to replace porch standard white with green light bulb
i hope they like it
they’re burners
they’ll be gone for two weeks
KM Jones Jul 2010
She had given up trying to write stories; her inability to even tell one had frightened away even her most far-fetched of hopes. Her own story consisted of monotony. He was her plot; he was her heart; he made her happy, and then that was the end. Outside of that shallow framework, she contented herself with solitude and sleep deprivation. She spent her life counting seconds, minutes, hours of wasted time.  She had been born a dreamer with two left feet and too much caution to pursue her own dreams. She used to dare to believe herself to be a poet; filled notebook after filled notebook is tucked away in her drawer to prove it. She envied the prose of others, the poetry of life, every piece she could never be creative enough to write. She filled her shelves with half-read classics, pretentiousness at its finest. She admired Hemingway, Nabokov, Vonnegut, but read nothing or no one religiously. Ironically, her deepest fear was not that she was incapable of making a difference but that she would forever be too afraid to try. She was ambitious but without reason and she without reason once she had fallen in love. (However, she would have never changed  the existence of that love for all the world.) He was her every waking and slumbering thought, her beginning and her end, her every muse and very writer's block. She had written in times of adversity; she had written in times of desperation; nevertheless, she found herself incapable of writing in times encompassed by the selflessness of love.

She perceived art to be a reflection of one's own self or perceptions of the world around them. However, he was her entire world, altogether far too familiar to invent and yet far too mysterious to define. He was the dim outline of a dream she couldn't recall, the scent of nostalgia she couldn't place, the familiar face she could have only known in another life. He was the everything of which she could say nothing. A speechless poet is of no value to their audience; she was a poet without even an audience to please. Her father had once called her a brick-layer. She could not move from one sentence to the next without first cementing each and every word unrelentingly into its place. She was not a river, as the best of writers were. She was not a writer, as the most unabashed of dreamers are. She was a failed poet, a feigned intellectual, the uncensored rush of air from a depleting balloon- pure energy- without direction and  inevitably lacking endurance. Perhaps these realities were what kept her from writing her story. Perhaps it was her pursuit of appearing to be an artist that prevented her from actually becoming one. She looked to answer questions of inspiration amidst happiness, after all, shouldn't inspiration spill over in such times, overwhelmingly, uncontrollably, and without end? Additionally, where did inspiration come from anyway, within or without one's own mind? But, surprisingly, the one question she wanted most to ask herself was, if every second not spent moving forward was one more she counted as wasted, why she did not waste one more moment hopelessly trying again?
July 22, 2010 - From third person diary entries
Mateuš Conrad Mar 2016
i only started collecting a library, because, would you believe it, my local library was a pauper in rags and tatters; apologies for omitting necessary diacritic marks, the whiskey was ******* on icecubes to a shrivel.*

ernest hemingway, e.m. forster, mary shelley,
aesop, r. l. stevenson, jean-paul sartre,
jack kerouac, sylvia plath, evelyn waugh,
chekhov, cortazar, freud, virginia woolf,
philip k. ****, dostoyevsky, aleksandr solzhenitsyn,
oscar wilde, malcolm x, kafka, nabokov,
bukowski, sacher-masoch, thomas a kempis,
yevgeny zamyatin, alexandre dumas,
will self, j. r. r. tolkien, richard b. bentall,
james joyce, william burroughs, truman capote,
herman hesse, thomas mann, j. d. salinger,
nikos kazantzakis, george orwell,
philip roth, joseph roth, bulgakov, huxley,
marquis de sade, john milton, samuel beckett,
huysmans, michel de montaigne, walter benjamin,
sienkiewicz, rilke, lipton, harold norse,
alfred jarry, miguel de cervantes, von krafft-ebing,
kierkegaard, julian jaynes, bynum porter & shephred,
r. d. laing, c. g. jung, spinoza, hegel, kant, artistotle,
plato, josephus, korner, la rochefoucauld, stendhal,
nietzsche, bertrand russell, irwin edman,
faucault, anwicenna, descartes, voltaire, rousseau,
popper,  heidegger, tatarkiewicz, kolakowski,
seneca, cycero, milan kundera, g. j. warnock,
stefan zweig, the pre-socratics, julian tuwim,
ezra pound, gregory corso, ted hughes,
guiseppe gioacchino belli, dante, peshwari women,
e. e. cummings, ginsberg, will alexander, max jacob,
schwob, william blake, comte de lautreamont,
jack spicer, zbigniew herbert, frank o'hara,
richard brautigan, miroslav holub, al purdy,
tzara, ted berrigan, fady joudah, nikolai leskov,
anna kavan, jean genet, albert camus, gunter grass,
susan hill, katherine dunn, gil scott-heron,
kleist, irvine welsh, clarice lispector, hunter thompson,
machado de assisi, reymont, tolstoy, jim bradbury,
norman davies, shakespeare, balzac, dickens,
jasienica, mary fulbrook, stuart t. miller,
walter la feber, jan wimmer, terry jones & alan ereira,
kenneth clark, edward robinson, heinrich harrer,
gombrowicz, a. krawczuk, andrzej stasiuk, ivan bunin,
joseph heller, goethe, mcmurry, atkins & de paula,
bernard shaw, horace, ovid, virgil, aeschyles,
rumi, omar khayyam, humbert wolfe, e. h. bickersteth,
asnyk, witkacy, mickiewicz, slowacki, lesmian,
lechon, lep szarzynski, victor alexandrov, gogol,
william styron, krasznahorkai, robert graves,
defoe, tim burton, antoine de saint-exupery,
christiane f., salman rushdie, hazlitt, marcus aurelius,
nick hornby, emily bronte, walt whitman,
aryeh kaplan, rolf g. renner, j. p. hodin, tim hilton... etc.
Mateuš Conrad Sep 2015
in that, beyond good and evil, there's on femininity and masculinity; we already know of st. thomas' account about how the masculine needs to made into feminine and vice verse... no wonder such teachings in the undercurrent of our life, that we went beyond this and started doing likewise in the framework of good and evil; but there's hardly a dualism within the four 90º, while the tetragrammaton opens the gates to geometric phoneticism, which does not work in the hebrew depiction of the tetragrammaton, only in latin, because in latin one will not see a vision but reveal, having heard but not seen, and when inserting a thought into an experience: a satanism that said: i'll be satan and change this choir into moving stars and send a telegram to the aliens! should i see man loose all dignity in warring with himself that ended in napoleonic trust for man and man on the battlefield - because what she offered most men can get, and what i was offered only one among the billions, and in history about three, get.

so while some attempts at a sensual proof were not
granted, only one was, through moses,
and obviously through elijah - as sensual proofs
go, the proof of moses had to be fused with
a cognitive remainder, since, given the fact
that the torah was written by the supreme outsider,
the book depicting elijah was written by a true insider,
yet the cognitive realm which these two operated in
is a pure mystery, given the fact that sensually,
the staged rifts were short lived, yet too long lived
cognitively, having to argue, cite and disagree with
moses, who dragged the most sensual distortion
into the cognitive realm.

so as cognitive proof-arguments go, they are simply that,
more cognitive proofs lead to more argumentation,
but little sensuality, such that the paid need for
theological argumentation that leads to no sensual
precipitation enters the realm of holocausts,
whereby idle and vain cognitive proofs have no sensual
******, only more "thinking;" paid thinking.
and when the sensual proof for the non-existence of god
appears, like the holocaust, all those accumulative
"proofs" from the cognitive realm... end up like midgets...
and everyone's awe taken aback, because so much
cognition was left undisturbed, that the senses are prompted
for a disaster! why would i want cognitive argumentation
if i cannot seek and find a sensual guarantee?
where's the sensual ******, if cognitive argumentation
climaxed to the fine tuned 1 + 1 logic is a sensual anticlimax?!

the odd thing is walking the neighbourhood with beer and hand
waiting for the indian heatwave, but as i sooner realised,
this type of drinking is no good - the shelter of the garden
is where i find laughter - on the street making miles
i find anger - and as i noticed a day prior:
beer in hand, cigarette burning the lung forests,
watching a clear night sky, seeing a boeing boast
engine ***** high up to sound like i drone - that
universe forgets i can claim a nighttime hemisphere of sounds
with that boeing, even though the daytime skyblue is blinded
by a dilated pupil,i can feed that massive vacuum
of emptiness and keyhole glitter a mishap and a chance
to study less celestial geometry to endeavour out of this
haven.

prompts a maxim this verse does:
no one around me in my shape or walk -
tall enough to reach the sky, but
dumb like a thirteen day old butterfly, still flirting with the flutter.
***** you were born as the caterpillar old man,
now you're a fever of beauty in colour,
and only for two weeks, or even less if nabokov is about.

well, crescendo!
when simon magus stood with st. peter at nero's throne
the stage was like the two women with solomon about to cut a baby in half.
it was scened within the following framework of details:
st. peter started to sing bon jovi's 'lay your hands on me,'
with alternative lyrics - let me lay my hands on you
with the power of the holy spirit.
nero replied: lay your own hand on yourself, get away from
me you ***** *******, that holy spirit of yours, the one
you said is a personality but really isn't is just another form of:
celestial chaining; magus simon, what about you?
so simon magus came up and said:
i'll whiff you a smokey vision of caligula learning
of philosophy as read by his talking horse *incitatus
.

i wish for praise here on originality, but i heard of this one,
the talking horse of caligula by the one and only zbyszek herbert,
and in quick translation the poem reads -

*says caligula:

from all the citizens of rome
i loved only one
incitasus - a horse

when he entered the senate
the unblemished toga of his fur
glistened immaculately among hemmed with purple cowardly
                                                        ­                           murderers.

incitatus was full of virtuous bounties
he never spoke over me or spoke in general
a stoic nature
i think that at night in the stables he read philosophers

i loved him to such an extent that one day i decided to
                                                              ­                   crucify him
but his noble anatomy countered such a feat

he bosomed the position of consul with dignified apathy
he held power to the helm with a cupful of water
spilling none in a drunk waiter's swagger,
meaning he used none of it with the entitlement

it was impossible to make him bow to long lasting bonds of love
with mt second wife caesonia
alas no lineage of future caesars arose - centaurs

that's why rome crumbled

i decided to nominate him a god
but on the ninth day before the calendar days of february
cherea cornelius sabinus and other fools obstructed these godly intentions

with calm he received the message of my death

thrown out from the palace and sentenced to exile

he accepted the burden with dignity

he died heirless
butchered by a thick-skinned butcher from the township of anzio

of the posthumous fates of his meat
taticus is silent with regards to.
Vamika Sinha Jun 2015
Dear Vamika,
of a long and a
short
time away. Of the
future, when
your ******* are fuller
and you can finally speak
French fluently.

I hope you are a woman.

I know you
have not changed the world.
I didn’t write you that way.
I’m still
not writing you that way.
For my cheap gel pen
has none of that spark
of Fitzgerald’s and Nabokov’s,
who could bewitch the imagination with
such timeless giants
as ****** and Daisy.

So remember:
you’ll be brilliant
but absent
from any history books.
But still.
You are enough, exquisitely enough,
for the literature
I inhabit.

Hence, I fill pages with your inky
outlines, shade in the spaces
slowly
with hopes and wishes and poetry and dreams.
For you, of you.
I note
all that you are
composed of, so that
even the marginalia
laughs out your lipstick,
your clothes drawers,
your reading habits.

I am writing you as a woman.

I am writing you
as Music. Here is your laughter,
a little smokier now,
unspooling like a work of
Debussy’s. Here are your
fingers, lighter now, like meringues
or dandelions, as they dance
on your silver flute,
better, better, better than ever,
in shiny theatres far
grander than you imagined.
And here are your tiny
scrawled music notes, that with a few touched
keys, echo as tumbling stars
in the ears of thousands
and then plenty.

I hope you are a woman.
So play, compose, laugh and sing; be
Music ‘til your dying day.

I am writing you
as Ambition. It is calmer
than the fire that currently
singes my hands. Yet it’s still as
constant
as the flame you
light, every night before bed,
in front of the Goddess Durga
you pray to.
Your heart still
salivates for hard-boiled
surprises, for lucky pennies
found on pavements, for the
metallic sweetness of, yes,
success.

I hope you are a woman.
So strive, and strive again,
‘til you’re nothing but ash.

I am writing you, too,
as Success.
Surprise!
Those words unhooked
from the crevices of your mind,
are now bound in
paperbacks.
You are a poet, sleeker than
the 17-year-old fledgling
in her dim bedroom.
You are a journalist,
pouring morning stories
like hot tea, and sighing
with honey glee at
your name in
print.
You are a writer;
you fill even more pages, and
you now have a
gleaming, expensive
pen.

I hope you are a woman.
So write, ‘til you have lost
all breath.

I am writing you
as Compassion. How could I not
let you share words (your  personal magic) with
countless sparking children?
And not fill your hands with
gifts of maths, English,
science and art that you can
give and give and
give to them?
An education is as precious and
priceless as Picasso, you say.
A human right, all the same.
A human right.

I hope you are a woman.
So be kind. That’s it.
Always.
I have not forgotten  
to write you as
Justice.
Go out and support,
wave flags and placards,
sign petitions, join many
campaigns, scream out ‘til
your throat can’t bear such
honesty, such
indignation.
Keep fighting.
Never stop. The world is unfixable,
imperfect and
unhappy.
Help it.

I hope you fight for other women.
I hope you fight for other humans.

I am also writing you
as Resilience. So you’re able
to face yourself in that
mirror, even though
your stomach has a stubborn bulge, still,
and you haven’t yet learned
to smile at your nose.
Still.
And I’m reminding you that you do,
yes, you do,
have the strength to cry alone, then
get over it,
to have panic attacks, then
get over it,
to pick yourself up from
life’s many disintegrations and
start again.
You can. You’ve already done it.
I hope you always will.

I know that you are a woman.
So never give up, as
cliché as it sounds. Go ahead and
die trying.

Now, as the cadenza
of this rather sentimental piece,
which I’ve spun as
sweet
as stolen sugar
and the romantic comedies at which
you secretly weep,
I am writing you as
Tenderness.
See, I decided that Love and
Romance are but
bombs. And you and I both
believe in non-violence.
Therefore, you are
a hugger now, with lips
which kiss your husband,
scold your children
and sing
lullabies to the whole silly lot of them.
Your heart is always
swimming
with a good bit of warm wine,  so don’t
question its fullness.
Take care of yourself.

This.
This, above, is all I hope for you
to stay and have and be
until the symphony’s final note, your
final breath.

You are a woman.
Flawed, intelligent, beautiful, cracked, strong, kind, stubborn, soft, honest.
Real.

You are a woman.
So stay like this,
but be just a little more wiser, a little more grown
each passing year.

A woman.
Vamika, that’s all I ever want you to be.
What do you hope to achieve in your lifetime? (Entry for Commonwealth Essay Competition)
I am Munich

I am Paris

I am Edinburgh

I am New York City

But I am not New Jersey

I am not Bonn

I am not Alberta

I am where the city lights are

My life is a piece of art

I am where the symphonies lie

I am wherever Nabokov and Dali want me to be

I am on paints and pictures

I am temptation of rapture

Oh, Mister Nabokov, why this fate for me?   (I beg to you)

Oh, Miss Grey, why this fate for me?          ( I envy you)

Oh, Miss Banks, why this fate for me?        (I hate you)

Tortured ****
Mateuš Conrad Jun 2016
early on i left an imprint for me to remember,
kinda like 2 x 2, equating to 4,
not as simple with words:
i like this dialectic between Dionysian and
Apollonian attempts to express aye arr parley!
shake the pine trees to get the toothpicks
like you might get a mojito, onward! toward
El Dorado! transgressing 24 hour hours
and you get the flavour:
first beer in in from dieting, oh ****, it's bitter,
second beer, mm, sweeter... then the headline
of whiskey and coke... Kazakhstan nice... yok sh'eh mash?!

three movements working their way,
those conquered and exposed to direct roman rule,
presiding over the "charm" with roads, western europe,
now they're so pride to reach that far back,
mention Boudica, one, more, *******, time!
i'll give you Britain that made Louis XIV
the peasant king at Versailles, and Charles II
wise with a Guy Fawkes firecracker... mm, guess
it happened here! in the yeast of a baker's
reincarnation via Malachi's heresy:
Elijah coming soon? Elijah not coming any time
you blunt sword of monotheism excluding
the chance of many, democratic influences!
either the fish or the aquarium...
the aquarium... a billion of them plus Islam will
be anarchic China, people never wish for better,
they only wish to better themselves,
including the social strata stampede that's necessitated
in the process... scientific positivism of Enlightenment
died, the absolute necessity (god) / the absolutely
necessary thing became trapped in the Bermuda
or the Copernican triangle, no good for crossing
oceans, just ably whirling east to no east outside
the atmosphere, try me with two thing:
Copernican vectors with a stable point constantly moving,
rather than sunny, constantly expressed economically
as usurper against usurer and the university grant
of simony, although worthy of an actor to spread
charitable work and paedophilia in Asia dubbed
Portuguese Missionary - well i'm sure the apologetics will
come, my neighbour hugging her dog watching television,
closest kin of the genesis story having secondary reminders
determining whether the lie was white or instructive,
a joke or seriousness - indeed entombed in treating these
words as a holiness worth for all the present religious attire.
absolutely necessary Kant said,
he also said: you said omni- etc., indeed you're on a
roundabout of intellectual yawns, there's nothing new here!
i need god as a concept of vectors and cursors, mediating
more than the caging of man's affirmation of himself
with Freud... the sounds and equally shared optics
need to accommodate a oneness, god is a predicate
of essential function: a. the triple affirmative:
i, thought, existence... something to concern myself with,
b. the duo affirmative:
denial, thought, existence... the arithmetic goes further,
i am writing quickly hence i will not brood over,
except a comparison in cinema, the film *hostel
(2005)
and pretty much all of Hollywood's 1970's grit output...
take for example Al Pacino in the panic in needle park,
you know what i see? modern american interpretation
of what eastern europe represents, the farts
leave flamboyant Amsterdam hopeful for Slavic ******,
they come to Slovakia, and it hits them,
the passive lack of jealousy and need to impress
building a chrysler building, the oddity like landing on mars...
but it's already been done with, New York in the 1970s,
the same slavic grit, even the way the cinematography looks
like the colours were shaded with a peppering of sand...
new york in the 1970s is like Eastern Europe in
the horror set in 2005 in Slovakia... globalisation's paranoia,
there are still people out there who we can't ascribe
metaphors to being exclusive: no iron lady lifted the
iron curtain, the iron lady had an iron skirt, and she
couldn't lift that up either... Churchill puffer a cigar
and a million bees emerged heralded by Edward the Confessor.
that's the relation though, Hollywood's 1970's urban grit
and what the tourists encountered in Slovakia in 2005,
a sleepy kingdom, 2nd Mongolia, second to none,
which i beg to differ with, given the Scots were tight
stretching 2 pence copper coin to invent copper wire
and the Swiss (also in hilly surroundings) have us
elaborate paedophilia via Nabokov catching butterflies...
hardly two mountain ranges and hardly two plateaus.
it's called exotica these days... yep... the dissection of
the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth and the emergence
of both Lach, Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Latvian, Estonian
and White Russian is what the Czech say made them
speak both cesky and saksonski... tseba! holy roman
prague ****, disintegrated into the Austrian intervention...
very much as if: thank you for defending Vienna from
the Ottomans, Jan Sobieski.
but the Jews got reparations at the end of the ordeal,
and western Europe received the Marshall Plan...
eastern Europe received Marx... too proud they said,
it's not exactly Mama Russia surrogate,
it's Papa Khan also... moon gall! no news from Mongolia
i hear, sooner a tale from an American zoo
where a retired silver-back dragged a baby from
drowning in an inch of water, hero shot,
where were the parents? a four year old can hardly
sit on a kitchen stool let alone climb over zoological
fortifications... ah the blessing given unto man
by Iblis to ape ably a delay he has no chastity over:
if Iblis defended his pride, then man can but
defend his chastity - Iblis was given a longer time-frame,
man was given a shorter time-frame, Iblis'
choice expands furthest into myth, man's choice
implodes further into repetition - for Iblis' mistake
was but one, when knowing of man's aplenty;
it is said that when a man is to become a father,
he relives his childhood - legality i say would have
obliged me, but pride took no notice of symbols as signatures
of such love, especially given the expenses,
or as in the supermarket today, the cashier invested ?
into the one buying the goods:
- where is she? you're not together any more?
- oh, she's moving to York, it's her work, she has to.
- you're not moving with her?
- well, it's only for 2 years, and then she'll be back,
  training, it will take her 4 months...
na'h ah... bye bye...                       she ain't coming back...
tell you what mate, keep a cat, the most selfish animal,
bestia ex solipsism - no necessary petting by constantly
showering it signs of jealousy and ownership and upkeep,
as if having to punch a gorilla to hold hands.
i love feminism for one thing only:
it made sexism a branch of Darwinism, *** warfare...
in relation to me? two girls chatting away:
- *******! how could he leave you!
- but he did!
- what ***** made him do it!
- philosophy!
don't get me started on those who read very little
and can't allow philosophy a poetic form, and necessarily
have to plagiarise Aristotelian stylistics to be considered
philosophy (albeit only in scholarly musings).
i'm sure it was something about the fruits of our
presupposed wisdom that bore knowledge that individuated
us, to the point of extremes, as hardly scraps for
vultures, to no animal nobleness, parasitic amongst each other,
defining the 16th century or such desires to keep
afresh, minted and pampered for the next cohort of dupes...
some find the memory of dogs towards us keener
than our fellow men should wish to share...
the animal domesticated and not eaten is seemingly our
prefect to walk toward a seize-less craft of un-exhausted thought,
only un-exhausted because of missing interaction,
say there, is that Hegel's mirror (master) and narcissus (slave)?
the emergence of these belittled nations is clear in
western europe, the bombing of Libya,
the usurpers of Syria, the once conquered having a taste
for empire and colonial rule think they cherish
the biblical conundrum when the resurrection was inclined toward
the lands Sven and Mietek - toward the lands
of conquerors and the ones converted -
four movements thus (sketched):
a. sonata: βορας ηλιος - μακεδων να ινδια
b. adagio: βιργιλιος ως καντηνoν -
                  μεσoγειος: μαυρος (ex),
κoκκινος (ex), ειρηνικoς (ex),
ατλαντικoς (ex), βoρειος (ex), βαλτικη (ex),
south a poet, north a philosopher,
from only one sea came two oceans and many other seas
to sustain the thirst for seawater among men!    
c. scherzo: Casimir the 3rd welcoming the Jews.
d. sonata: an die mitternachtfreude - more like a calm
before taking up the arms.
Miss Daytona Oct 2020
I wrote on your back words of a bygone era,
Back when we were a a collusion in the making
Not souls, not cells, not matter
Yet by then, Nabokov had already met Véra

And to her, he wrote about a strange joy
Ane what he knew right when he met her:
He only ever existed within her eyes,
He was only ever seen through their letters

I’m not sure you hear the same notes,
And I want to be a lover, not a beggar
I want hear the songs of your thoughts
On a loop, growing louder, forever
Third Mate Third Aug 2014
A lot of people think they can write or paint or draw or sing or make movies or what-have-you, but having an artistic temperament doth not make one an artist.


Even the great writers of our time have tried and failed and failed some more. Vladimir Nabokov received a harsh rejection letter from Knopf upon submitting ******, which would later go on to sell fifty million copies. Sylvia Plath’s first rejection letter for The Bell Jar read, “There certainly isn’t enough genuine talent for us to take notice.” Gertrude Stein received a cruel rejection letter that mocked her style. Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way earned him a sprawling rejection letter regarding the reasons he should simply give up writing all together. Tim Burton’s first illustrated book, The Giant Zlig, got the thumbs down from Walt Disney Productions, and even Jack Kerouac’s perennial On the Road received a particularly blunt rejection letter that simply read, “I don’t dig this one at all.”

So even if you’re an utterly fantastic writer who will be remembered for decades forthcoming, you’ll still most likely receive a large dollop of criticism, rejection, and perhaps even mockery before you get there. Having been through it all these great writers offer some writing tips without pulling punches. After all, if a publishing house is going to tear into your manuscript you might as well be prepared.

1. The first draft of everything is ****. -Ernest Hemingway
2. Never use jargon words like reconceptualize, demassification, attitudinally, judgmentally. They are hallmarks of a pretentious ***. -David Ogilvy
3. If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy. – Dorothy Parker
4. Notice how many of the Olympic athletes effusively thanked their mothers for their success? “She drove me to my practice at four in the morning,” etc. Writing is not figure skating or skiing. Your mother will not make you a writer. My advice to any young person who wants to write is: leave home. -Paul Theroux
5. I would advise anyone who aspires to a writing career that before developing his talent he would be wise to develop a thick hide. — Harper Lee
6. You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club. ― Jack London
7. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. — George Orwell
8. There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are. ― W. Somerset Maugham
9. If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time — or the tools — to write. Simple as that. – Stephen King
10. Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong. – Neil Gaiman
11. Imagine that you are dying. If you had a terminal disease would you finish this book? Why not? The thing that annoys this 10-weeks-to-live self is the thing that is wrong with the book. So change it. Stop arguing with yourself. Change it. See? Easy. And no one had to die. – Anne Enright
12. If writing seems hard, it’s because it is hard. It’s one of the hardest things people do. – William Zinsser
13. Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college. – Kurt Vonnegut
14. Prose is architecture, not interior decoration. – Ernest Hemingway
15. Write drunk, edit sober. – Ernest Hemingway
16. Get through a draft as quickly as possible. Hard to know the shape of the thing until you have a draft. Literally, when I wrote the last page of my first draft of Lincoln’s Melancholy I thought, Oh, ****, now I get the shape of this. But I had wasted years, literally years, writing and re-writing the first third to first half. The old writer’s rule applies: Have the courage to write badly. – Joshua Wolf Shenk
17. Substitute ‘****’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very;’ your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be. – Mark Twain
18. Start telling the stories that only you can tell, because there’ll always be better writers than you and there’ll always be smarter writers than you. There will always be people who are much better at doing this or doing that — but you are the only you. ― Neil Gaiman
19. Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative. – Oscar Wilde
20. You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you. ― Ray Bradbury
21. Don’t take anyone’s writing advice too seriously. – Lev Grossman
image – christine zenino
Taken from the Internet
Everything is such fun in the beginning,
when it’s new and undiscovered.
i’ll try almost anything.

What is meant by almost?
All these stupid sick **** roles we play,
all this pretending, why?

i want to believe there’s something
behind the curtain
besides a windowless stone wall

Something inexplicable
his/her majesty of everything/
living/dead/never existed.

William Blake said, “Either be a poet or a painter.
Being both muddies audiences, and discredits one or the other.”
Actually, Blake didn’t say that. i am lost.

is it possible to love after what has happened?
the rage, hurt, disappointment of betrayal.
my ex still stalks

as recently as two mornings ago,
all her exaggerations, over-reactions, fury.
Why so desperate to return to crime scene?

An admission of her own guilt?
Excessive compulsive wound licking (psychogenic alopecia)?
Another excuse for getting drunk?

When we waited for the elevator going down
You said, “Let’s just get this over with.”
i understood completely.

i, who worships my own death.
i, who ****** on my own grave.
i, who gets bored faster than speed of light.

i, who suspects killing around every corner.
i, who sleeps restless.
i, who worries.

i, who loves women.
i, who does not understand women.
i, who is a woman.

i, who bangs the dude in L.A. to advance my career.
i, who is a nobody.
i, a man with no place to stand.

i, who belongs to a family of
blustering flirts, flatterers,
kidders, thieves.

We sit at the table,
monkey-wrenching hand over fist lives.
Forget about the eyes.

Watch the fingers.
Don’t listen to the speeches.
Words are intentional distractions.

Where’s your wallet?
Gypsies? No, we’re not gypsies,
more upper-crusty, yes, very well-connected secrets.

Do the names Dante, or Cervantes, or Nabokov mean anything to you?
No, none of them are our kin,
but we know people who know people,

infidelities in very high places.
All i’m saying is,
once you reach a certain level,

we’re all family.
i will make success happen,
with or without you.
Mateuš Conrad Feb 2017
after acquiring the english language,
and synthesising it for twenty years...
ugh... breakfast that is but a cup of water
and immediately feeling bloated...
or just imagining that you can live
on food and alcohol... like a diesel engine....
comes to just as much
     trying to catch butterflies akin to
nabokov, or thoughts...
      and are either, so trully necessary?
well... unless you take to calling it
the only relative opposite of picking up
a gun and shooting someone for no reason
other than a per se reason, which
subsequently has to be reasoned with -
akin to this...
  or, dare i say, picking up a philosophy book
and seeing how there is clearly
a child in there, esp. in english -
how each philosophy book seems to be
avoiding the pronoun i -
such is the nature of these books,
    a lot of hide & seek happening -
with the basic formula of: being yourself,
to avoid, your self.
then again as this french girlfriend told
me when she was staying in edinburgh
for a year to complete her erasmus program
from the university of grenòble
and she was doing this psychology experiment
and she needed native speakers...
  and i was given the stick for trying to
fake her science by suggesting that i'd do it...
yeah...
           well i really did hook up with her when
an american was about to court her,
and that's the only time i played the huinter-gatherer
role, or was motivated to do so,
when we went bar crawling and i pulled her
from the crowd and we stayed behind while
the group moved to another pub...
that was the only time i felt a need to do the "chase",
later this thing called the categorical imperative
came along, and i subsequently lost the impetus
to compete...
being a gladiator could have been greater,
what with the hardships of life...
but you can watch these gladiators fall...
quiet easily, buying groceries in a supermarket,
or opening a fridge door...
it's this return to the mundane, the household
environment can really beat a man,
if his life is lived to sample the ancient
field of danger...
   so when i did get the schtick of her empiricism
i decided: well... i'm no native....
and aren't we all so puritan about science
when some of it can't be falsified,
which it can:
        never too fond of accents myself...
native or alien...
               some people have a fetish for
feet or a french accent...
                        but that ***** essex slur...
or however you'd like to put it,
  it's not even cockney, but you get to hear
something quasi-cockney around these parts
more often, given that a lot of londoners
are moving away to these parts...
cockney meets essex county...
or meats it... yep: beats it silly with squalor
and at the same time: sophistication of living
in cement graveyards of an international city...
then again, you walk into a forest at night
during the summer, wearing only a t-shirt...
and it's freezing!
   you can actually hear Gaia breathing...
and then out of the woods and onto the cement...
that rush of feeling a complete change
of temperature... well... that's something.
          oh it wasn't me, i didn't dump that
french bird, she dumped me,
       as an experienced woman in her early
twenties would, to a ****** (who lost it with her),
18 year old.
    memories and all, what a grand cinema,
sipping absinthe on the streets of athens,
the athenian strip-club...
                sitting on a stool looking at a stripper
while holding two women in my arms
and kissing that sweet, sweet tender *****...
what happened after?
   drank all my money away,
                was escorted by a bouncer to a cash
machine... ****** myself
           and scuttled away back to the hostel....
and then took the bus from athens to katowice...
macedonia? beautiful, very hilly...
       serbia though... a plataeu of snow...
and i admit, belgrade from the distance
looked stunnig... esp. because of the snow.
oh right, i was supposed to insert a          )
having begun it with a     (      of an original prompt...
english really does have this natural
basis to invoke a self-conscious pronoun base of i,
it's like there's this need for a double-certainty
of the speaker stating that: it really is that person
speaking... or even thinking...
     polish        as a language? it rarely uses
the pronoun ja, i.e. i,
                          it's just certain -
english has to overtly use the pronoun -
      and it would be certainly pointless to ditto it
out... like some careless selfish womanisers
by the name of sartre...
                   that's the one thing i don't understand
about sartre, how it could ever be, something
about "ego"... more like Igor and doctor frankenstein...
i find that expression, yes, that alone
   " e g o " to be akin to pontius pilate washing his hands:
for whather transgression: i can't be to blame...
and then comes that ****** mantra
of mea culpa... and it just goes on and on...
to be frank, the whole point of mea culpa
is to transcend any invocation of self-pity...
      it's probably the foremost notion of transcendentalism,
well given that self-pity exists in people,
and some people would rather take blame;
indeed, it is my fault that i once had a heart
to feel intimate with someone, or even entertain
the idea of a fwend...
                            if anyone asks, i'll just be
a hermit, in my little cave.
tight silk ******* with the lilac bra to match,
cream coloured knee high socks.
a collection of classic rock on vinyl and a compliments jar covered in news articles.

too many celebrity perfumes, but a versace collection that makes her think of the beach;
peach smelling deoderant.

chapter books on the floor accompanied by hair ribbons of baby blue and cotton candy pink,
****** by Vladimir Nabokov laying near the juvinile pale legs of beautiful sixteen,
as she paints each toe nail red, pink, white.

almost naked body, remember her tight, fresh lace set
hair perfectly auburn, lips perfectly light coral
mouth slightly open
Led Zepplin playing.
hairspray and rose powder,
unlit vanilla candles and twilight scented creams
she smells faintly of Modern by Banana Repulic and her daddy's cigarettes.

silently waving, a flag of patriotism
the beautiful, elegant sixteen.

-part 1

conceptcollection
Alexander K Opicho
Eldoret, Kenya; aopicho@yahoo.com

when i start by name
perhaps in a flap of fault
exculpate my soul
for maximum rectitude
is the true  fill of my heart
glory to the sons of Russia
Kudos to you all and your foremen;
Nikolai Gogol the master in the dead souls
Alexander Pushkin the effeminate poet
Vladimir Lenin who knew what was doable
Alexander sholenestysn the Siberian jail bird
who was on the poetic phone by five
Feodor Dostoyevsky the epileptic Karamazov
Maxim Gorky and Antony Chenkoy leave them alone
Ayn Rand the woman who shrug the atlas for we the living
Vladimir Nabokov the school master who asked for ***
from her student the adourous ******
Boris Pasternak the Muzhik like Leo Tolstoy
who wanted land beyond the horizon
for doctor Zhivago the **** peasant
or Vladimir Makayavosky who slapped the public
in the face of their capitalistic taste,
Glorified be you all you sons of Russia
your Muse is beautiful and erotically crazy
glory for your humour and your finer threads
with which you have woven for me my poems of dystopia
glory be to you all in the stark oblivion
of Leon Trotsky and his penman Leonid Brezhnev
Annabel Jul 2011
They're brown.
Earth-colored, if you will.
With a slight tinge of green, if you hang around long enough.
But there's more.
There's history, of a tragic sort.
I doubt you'll stay around long enough,
To watch everything unravel.

6 letters.
I'm not some Nabokov beauty.
Well, technically, by age, yes.
I don't go for the older sort.
It was a term of endearment,
But now, it's pure rage.

5'3".
I have a tiny frame. Smaller than most.
I'm not intimidating.
You can pick me up, and throw me down.
(Though I'd prefer you wouldn't.)

32.
Battle wounds. They tell my story.
All over.
Wrists, forearms.
Thighs, hips, ankles.
It's too easy.

13 years.
13 years filled with pain and insanity.
Filled to the brim with memories.
Terrifying memories of watching *****-induced tirades.
They were so oblivious to my cold breath.
Mateuš Conrad Nov 2015
you just asked your enemy to hijack
the war in sexism
and extrovert it into religious acknowledgements
of purpose not bound by ethnicity,
how you solved the prize of waking the far right in me...
i’m staggering to compare or comprehend...
the LEHI...
we lost original islam in nag hammadi...
with the scrolls....
we forgot christianity... we tried to forge an awareness
that muhammad tried to prevent with islam
of honour lost in the sacrifice of femininity to masculine endeavour...
whatever that means...
my memories of paris?
my memories of paris are filled with canadians, talking about nabokov...
drinking wine, eating cheese on baguettes, and listening to two guys
playing bob sinclar’s love generation...
while the parisian girls congregated for a would-be-**** giving the monk
in tense... paraphrase...
cruelty to animals: precursor to world war iii... the war of sexism...
that is mingled with cold war ii...
soon enough the ******* will be our children
and we will not wish to father them...
with us only weakened by stating truth and her weakened by
stating lies...
under what legal obligation are two strangers
supposed to gratify an ugly woman’s pride
with man to cherish a child / children with the tribe / state law surfacing?
where’s the obligation of strangers to gratify
a *******?
we’ve become service societies... all the manly jobs are gone...
exported to china...
power brokers are women... and they’re not ready for house-husbands...
10,000 or how many years of evolution meant
that men became transgender... started sprouting ******* and ****
and fed the younglings with scientific placebo lactose:
win-win... we’re all all defending crumbs and dust architecture
of idealism and realism against the invading horde of revised islam
non-concurrent... some said the word mongolian... some said:
that’s the land where communism flourished and the pope took a ****...
now the west is going bankrupt trying to trotsky the rest as competitive...
no, wait... there’s the islamic model of no acquiring debt...
interest free dynamics... keep shylock in the poetic cage...
so if communism forcefully failed... imagine what anti-interest
islamism will do to the west... it will... simply.. destroy it;
you made communism an enemy and had a pivot-head to assault...
now you have islamic economics... and all you can think of, is, oink:
selling the formula 1 empire... great tactic shorty... great tactic;
i’d rather be a plumber in poland than a poet in england...
i’m no swiss... but my words are better than rolex when hanging to
a dangle of true; god i hate this place...
i’ll destroy it in whatever capacity i am capable of;
well the capacity of being drunk... the best assurance i am
akin to with not buying a kebab and doing the ***** tango.
Carlo C Gomez Dec 2022
~
"The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness." — Vladimir Nabokov

Clockworks and Ferris wheels
mix time and laughter into their spin
and then comes twilight
and a vacant lot
of endless cycles:
hide and seek in a night-time labyrinth
and then the night walks begin
this fear of emptiness
—time is not a straight line

a warning to the curious:
don't ever trust the stars
to guide you
in the black hit of space
the warmth of our flare's lifespan
is a true testament to the skill and sorcery
found in every limb, larynx
and lovelorn heart
of this dimming voidance
Mateuš Conrad Oct 2016
and yes, very much a niche concern, my laptop broke down
   and i'm forced into the box room, albeit not ramped
out with Nabokov's Switzerland lodging:
at a hotel in the Alps catching butterflies and Lolitas -
i've finally matured in my likings -
but let me tell you, it has been painful
adjusting to the upright sitting:
lost the slouch and the quickie
crow-on-a-windowsill with a whiskey
sharpshooter and then a tornado cascade
into the lesser concept of a blank page and that famous
nothing of philosophers... i love the lesser critique
of Heidegger, my grandfather bought me
a 25 volume worths of interest,
and Heidegger stood out foremost,
primarily because of a peculiar surname,
i later learned that he was the German
that would eventually make Wordsworth
pointless in picking up the lyre,
with so many books i had to realise that
i needed a partner akin to walking through
Dante's epic,
              i could have chosen Ovid, but esp.
Horace, but i didn't choose Virgil or Homer,
a blood German peasant... but also
a pheasant, which means auburn peacock...
oh sure, you get familial ties with people
of the world, people who made either their
forenames or surnames akin to the nouns
as familiar as stars chairs and smoked ham rumps...
perfectly akin to everyday familiarity of use...
i wasn't worn in Warsaw or Krakow -
if i were, i probably wouldn't have left the natives,
but living on the outskirts of that great capital
doesn't necessarily impress:
in all honest edict contraction: i feel debased
travelling into London (central), ***** and ******
out my mind...
       i guess this means two more years rereading
Heidegger's being and time
                               after purchasing his ponderings ii - vi
from the years 1931 - 1938;
yes, my family was directly affected by **** Germany,
not in concentration camps, on the frontline,
so why would i be sopping over a **** familiar
in the realm of philosophy?
       a. public intellectuals don't exist in England,
    English doesn't like philosophy,
         proof
                  ?    b. Shakespeare - peer in on shaking
a pear and
                      the dancing of a retired circus bear dancing.
     c. that's Pythagoras, we leave him in the Pascal gambit.
i just think it's a shame that i have this massive
democracy in my room, and i'll end up with something
akin to a Quran -
                              again, why Heidegger?
i don't know, it could have been that Czech Kundera -
     or Kafka, it could have been Seneca,
              but all these writers are city dwellers,
Heidegger was a quasi-villager pseudo-city-dweller,
i find foxes and deer and dead badgers in my little
promenade escapades, also Satanist black masses
with the framework of in excelsior satanis! -
and lightning that strikes but no thunder is heard...
less for the sons of thunder: the 12 hot-air balloons,
it's very much Germanic in Japan with
feng shui or otherwise known in the peninsula as qi
     kee.
                      then there's the **** of the haiku
by the west and me answering: let's make ensō -
smoothed out narratives, ecstatic variation from
     thinking and away from moral decisiveness
in that activity of perpetuated choice-making -
                how clearly thinking extends into narration
rather than the Cartesian
                 precipitation of thought into being -
nope: from thinking into narration
          juiced-up enclosure of "zoological" tightening
with ensō: beefy haikus.
          but what i really find problematic?
the interpretation of Heidegger's concept of dasein
as coupled with ecstasis.... our ex-stasis...
                  with da meaning there
               you can pretend to be "happy" about protests
across the world, and wars and other turbulent
activity...
                   what i am proposing is what Nietzsche
prompted with sum ergo cogito,
         in that the real ecstasis is concerned with being
allocated to a here, and therefore a hesein -
the interpretation posits the ecstasis there
when Heidegger originally posits concern there,
     or as he encodes: "concern"
                       meaning the dittoing puts him in a safety
of the here, it's the ecstasis of not being there,
but here in the present as the ecstasis, and there
     of some abstract venture as being beyond his command
of attributed dynamism of being involved,
for he's not involved. give me an hour and i'll be
in the countryside: we have that weighty countryside mentality,
farmers talking ******* when stacking hay
and laughing with the grammar Nazis when
    people go to the gym but teach their brains
the flab that the brains actually are: primarily spongy fat -
     apart from typos, it's the case
                                           (it is the case that)
   i don't (do not)
                               much concern myself from English
slang of piano (Joanna)
           and the outright **** (Pakistani),
               cos there was no sine                  when people
overacted toward the tan of me swallowing vowels and
replacing them with shortcuts to prop'ah Cockney,
oi oi, ******, bruv! brush up! this bus to school is
mingy with the throng!
                          who ordered the sardines?
        Stendhal is still the love of my life... i can write
enough complexities with Heidegger, but my love
resides with Stendhal... who would have thought
that a film adaptation would make me eager to read the book
(the scarlet & the noir)? Peter Jackson knew, as did J. R. R.
but it comes from the musings,
          once i do the Kantian critique a one over
the missing yawn and what's actually the most underestimated
arithmetics of wording rather than number circus
         or replicas of taxman rubrics:
after enough chemistry, favouring the organic and
later becoming endowed with a palette for Indian cuisine
well: philosophy books are the worded versions
of mathematics in terms of jumping the burning wheels
of 1 + 11 = 12        and          i contemplate
                                            but what's the = and the 12?
it's so ****** open, i could have invited a hundred thieves
to porose a car-boot sale at my house.
but all this, which might seem like self-love,
    it's not about that...the French intellectualise
and have them public because they talk beautifully -
                  the English?
they sing...
                               the Germans are morose and silent...
        the Spanish are simply the onomatopoeias of *******
and the Italians are seen and heard licking their fingers
after enough basil is added to tomatoes...
   i'm still banging on about the apathetic interpretation
of dasein, rather than the ecstatic version popularised
by the scholars...
                                 the version that reads:
if a tree falls in a forest and there's no one to hear it fall,
does it make a sound? that's my interpretation of
dasein / being there / being "there"....
                          a.                          b.
                       concretely            in abstract,
we already know that the abstract of being is nonbeing
or that things are abstracts of nothings with identifiers
of being used, without actually being touched:
i can say that i see a chair without actually having
to sit on it.
                    i was thinking simpler though -
olly murs' heart skips a beat and someone of the major
tracks by one direction...
             when i reference myself to these tracks
i'm being ecstatic, in the dimension of hesein,
                  like da, shortened purposively from the
authentic hier / here in german....
              why am i ecstatic in the here?
   because i don't have to be concerned in the realm of da /
there, where my opinion "might" matter...
                   but really doesn't...
                             which is why i don't understand
this interpretation of dasein meaning ecstasis -
                           or ex status quo....
                                               as already suggested -
our moral obligation toward language is to provoke
a Minotaur to become an architect of our venture in
using language, away from the market place...
into forests, into depths that have no justification
for being imagined, or as such diagnosed as ever being
there and established to planning permission and norms
of established caricatures and cleanly undertaken
shallowing and hollowing out from them being furthered.
i should be sad having trodden such a path
for myself, but i feel a kinship with this German,
come on, what consolidated the Kantian
dichotomy of a priori and a posteriori as in
   or must not philosophy a fortiori poeticize beings?
should not be conversed with from a wholly
anti-intellectual dynamism suggesting a personal
historic aversion of what's otherwise ethnically ******
without suspicion in terms of cultural tact?
again: nothing - which is higher and deeper than nonbeing(s)
(i ensure the ambiguity of the plural, if only
due to the fact that nothing is
    kindred of a definite article - the -
                          and ensures a translation as nonbeing,
while nothing in a quality as in nothingness
            kindred of an indefinite article - a -
         and ensures a translation as nonbeings, the plural,
ambiguity and throng -
   perfect offshoot that's already known as a-
           and -the         with a missing -ism).
yes, language ought to resemble something less
instructional, certainly less capital / monetary,
and more of a preservation of ambiguity and subsequently
myth... or what otherwise concern themselves with
in the hustle and bustle of a public life: integrity,
                                ulterior of the personal sphere of interests:
the person per se;
       and the apéritif (a'per-teeth)?
                 for lack of diacritical insurance, the English
are constantly in need of a tongue-map for waggling it
prop'ah:
                    the Chelsea y'ah
or the Cockney wa'er                - t t t.
                mind you, that's related to the trilling of the R
(originally intended as a trill) and subsequently lost
in the Germanic ethnic cauldron: hark the French and
cipher the English curling the tongue making the R curled
rather than trill - my idiosyncratic fascination aged 8.
  i thought i ought to end this with a thought about
what's a universal maxim in psychiatry
  in England in terms of a standard prognosis:
patient A has lost touch with reality...
      that's the prognosis, the diagnosis: dialectics of Gnostic
teachings? anyway, that's the standard,
that a person has lost touch with reality... what a great swindle!
     y
Wednesday Mar 2014
Kiss me with my lips that look like blood pooling
and eyes that look like an exit sign

Sitting on the back porch licking a popsicle
the color of your essence slowly with eyelids closed
and careful movements

I am a snake charmer
a deadly woman
and I am 12

you want me whispering stardust into your ears
and you’re trying to make yourself see it as wrong

But I am all want
I am need
something about me is saying please

I am silk sheets
a sunny day breeze
and I am 12

the edges of my blonde hair comes to the
third vertebrae in my spine
and you want your hands curled in it

you want me like
I am water to the flame that rests in your tongue

you’ve never read ****** before
but you swear I'm the one
Vladimir Nabokov had in mind
Vladimir Lionter May 2020
You, like Nabokov, are also a polyglot!
An intellectual with French roots, and how nice
That “Pozner’ programme’s again truly lot,
And which year you’ve been on the screen with us.
You’re as an ideal for ladies:
You’re Alain Delon’s Russian pattern.
Your youth’s fuse can’t be extinguished nowadays.
And the audience welcomes in you a hero then!
If only Nabokov were living!
Then you would play chess together with him,
And in welcome and again coming spring,
You would collect  butterflies just for him!
But the epoch’s consciences are passing away
In silence—who’s the next, we don’t know, will leave,
It looks as if we were in war every day,
Unfortunately, we’re losing someone coming to grief.
How many outstanding people have died,
How few outstanding people have remained,
So prosper to the envious out of spite,
Live long—bringing us happiness being great.
{04.03.2020}

Владимиру Владимировичу Познеру

Вы – как Набоков: тоже полиглот!
Интеллигент с французскими корнями.
Как хорошо, что Вы (который год!)
В Программе «Познер» на экране - с нами!
Для многих женщин Вы как идеал:
Ален Делон российского покроя!
Неугасим в Вас юности запал,
И зритель в Вас приветствует Героя!
Эх, если бы Набоков был живой!
Вы с ним тогда бы в шахматы сыграли!
И вместе – наступающей весной –
Ему бы новых бабочек собрали!
Но совести Эпохи в тишине
Уходят. И кто следующий – не знаем…
Мы каждый день как будто на войне:
Кого-то, к сожалению, теряем:
Так много выдающихся ушло,
Так мало выдающихся осталось.
Так здравствуйте завистникам на зло!
Живите долго – в этом наша радость!
{04.03.2020}

Translator - I. Toporov
Matloob Bokhari Oct 2014
MY Place IS Placeless
Matloob Bokhari


You are moonlight
You are fragrance in the breeze
I am bewildered to see you
I am speechless
In the frenzy of my love
I am drifting in the sea of your love
Now and then ,joy and  depression
Dark thoughts and light of love
I am senseless
You and I are inseparable
I want to kiss you  with tenderness
I am helpless
I live for you, my  love is timeless
My heart ,where you are living,
Has become a room of prayer
All  I belong to you!
I am a nameless poet
My place is placeless!

Persian Khushi Sweet and touching


Deanna Caroline Bosworth How precious!...Quite the romantic

    Connie Hofacker Hemmerich Senter Wow, I feel the commitment of your heart...a room of prayer, so very toucing, Matloob. Thank you, for sharing.
Fran Ayers So lovely!!.I missed your poetry!!
Natasha Nabokov Thank you, . Kiss kiss
    Barbara Shoetaker You write so passionately.
Demelia Denton A writer of many explicit romantic words Matloob Bokhari ~ Beautifully written
Lindy Michaels Really lovely...
Mateuš Conrad Jan 2016
paris...
no american in sight, or how i just see utopia...
songs on the steps of  sacré-cœur, kissing
an american girl, then cheese and wine
next to the Eiffel tower, laughing, joking, trailing
and tailing off with talk of nabokov,
the nightclub scene with ping-pong ecstasy dances,
youth, youth, youth,
of youth that congregated once in those places,
parisian girls congregating for a game french hushes
with the chinese whispers  and anglo comic charades
learned from the conquering normans...
paris back then, what wouldn't i have given for it,
but i learned of starving north,
where lecture upon lecture repeated david hume,
and i said:
                   it's the 21st century after all!
                   make edinburgh the new paris!
oh paris, but paris stay intact,
with the eiffel tower in my palm,
where all love met no love
but love met love all the more fictive,
written with a million reincarnations
that once told a tale of warring fractions known
as factions,
and it was told so: paris of my past where
i walked the streets with the compass height
ordaining coordinates that the tower was
to thus learn:
in times of panicky sentencing est mort,
people congregate in hawkish gaze
at monuments of their bone and marrow
turned into cement and irons of scaffold,
and there they congregate to ogle a new hope
when encouraged by a new fascination
of those that are less amazed by the phonetic
simplicity of animals than those who keep them.
oh paris, how i too wished things would have
remained a truer you begging truancy
from international press coverage,
how that one summer i became embedded
in taking to sleep on rock that felt like
woollen napkins filled with duck quills.
and in the memoriam altar two boys played
this song: as entombed by the title.
Michael R Burch Mar 2021
MODERN SONNETS

I prefer the original definition of the sonnet as a “little song” of indeterminate form and length. These modern sonnets vary from more-or-less traditional to free verse and experimental sonnets.



Auschwitz Rose
by Michael R. Burch

There is a Rose at Auschwitz, in the briar,
a rose like Sharon’s, lovely as her name.
The world forgot her,
                                   and is not the same.
I revere her and enlist this sacred fire
to keep her memory’s exalted flame
unmolested by the thistles and the nettles.

On Auschwitz now the reddening sunset settles ...
They sleep alike—diminutive and tall,
the innocent, the “surgeons.”
                                               Sleeping, all.

Red oxides of her blood, bright crimson petals,
if accidents of coloration, gall
my heart no less.
                            Amid thick weeds and muck
there lies a rose man’s crackling lightning struck:
the only Rose I ever longed to pluck.
Soon I’ll bed there and bid the world “Good Luck.”

Originally published by The Neovictorian/Cochlea, then by Voices Israel, Other Voices International, Verse Weekly, Black Medina, The Eclectic Muse (Canada), Promosaik (Germany), FreeXpression (Australia), Poetry Super Highway, Inspirational Stories, Trinacria, Pennsylvania Review, Litera (UK), Yahoo Buzz, and de Volkskrant Blog (a Dutch newspaper)



Such Tenderness
by Michael R. Burch

for the mothers of Gaza

There was, in your touch, such tenderness—as
only the dove on her mildest day has,
when she shelters downed fledglings beneath a warm wing
and coos to them softly, unable to sing.

What songs long forgotten occur to you now—
a babe at each breast? What terrible vow
ripped from your throat like the thunder that day
can never hold severing lightnings at bay?

Time taught you tenderness—time, oh, and love.
But love in the end is seldom enough ...
and time?—insufficient to life’s brief task.
I can only admire, unable to ask—

what is the source, whence comes the desire
of a woman to love as no God may require?

Published by Borderless Journal and SindhuNews (India)



Lozenge
by Michael R. Burch

When I was closest to love, it did not seem
real at all, but a thing of such tenuous sweetness
it might dissolve in my mouth
like a lozenge of sugar.

When I held you in my arms, I did not feel
our lack of completeness,
knowing how easy it was
for us to cling to each other.

And there were nights when the clouds
sped across the moon’s face,
exposing such rarified brightness
we did not witness

so much as embrace
love’s human appearance.



A Surfeit of Light
by Michael R. Burch

There was always a surfeit of light in your presence.
You stood distinctly apart, not of the humdrum world—
a chariot of gold in a procession of plywood.

We were all pioneers of the modern expedient race,
raising the ante: Home Depot to Lowe’s.
Yours was an antique grace—Thrace’s or Mesopotamia’s.

We were never quite sure of your silver allure,
of your trillium-and-platinum diadem,
of your utter lack of flatware-like utility.

You told us that night—your wound would not scar.
The black moment passed, then you were no more.
The darker the sky, how much brighter the Star!

The day of your funeral, I ripped out the crown mold.
You were this fool’s gold.



The Composition of Shadows
by Michael R. Burch

“I made it out of a mouthful of air.”—W. B. Yeats

We breathe and so we write; the night
hums softly its accompaniment.
Pale phosphors burn; the page we turn
leads onward, and we smile, content.

And what we mean we write to learn:
the vowels of love, the consonants’
strange golden weight, each plosive’s shape—
curved like the heart. Here, resonant, ...

sounds’ shadows mass beneath bright glass
like singing voles curled in a maze
of blank white space. We touch a face—
long-frozen words trapped in a glaze

that insulates our hearts. Nowhere
can love be found. Just shrieking air.

Published by The Lyric and Contemporary Rhyme



Maker, Fakir, Curer
by Michael R. Burch

A poem should be a wild, unearthly cry
against the thought of lying in the dark,
doomed―never having seen bright sparks leap high,
without a word for flame, none for the mark
an ember might emblaze on lesioned skin.

A poet is no crafty artisan―
the maker of some crock. He dreams of flame
he never touched, but―fakir’s courtesan―
must dance obedience, once called by name.
Thin wand, divine!, this world is too the same―

all watery ooze and flesh. Let fire cure
and quickly harden here what can endure.

Originally published by The Lyric

The ancient English scops were considered to be makers: for instance, in William Dunbar’s “Lament for the Makiris.” But in some modern literary circles poets are considered to be fakers, with lies being as good as the truth where art is concerned. Hence, this poem puns on “fakirs” and dancing snakes.



Ebb Tide
by Michael R. Burch

Massive, gray, these leaden waves
bear their unchanging burden―
the sameness of each day to day

while the wind seems to struggle to say
something half-submerged planks at the mouth of the bay
might nuzzle limp seaweed to understand.

Now collapsing dull waves drain away
from the unenticing land;
shrieking gulls shadow fish through salt spray―

whitish streaks on a fogged silver mirror.
Sizzling lightning impresses its brand.
Unseen fingers scribble something in the wet sand.

Originally published by Southwest Review



Marsh Song
by Michael R. Burch

Here there is only the great sad song of the reeds
and the silent herons, wraithlike in the mist,
and a few drab sunken stones, unblessed
by the sunlight these late sixteen thousand years,
and the beaded dews that drench strange ferns, like tears
collected against an overwhelming sadness.

Here the marsh exposes its dejectedness,
its gutted rotting belly, and its roots
rise out of the earth’s distended heaviness,
to claw hard at existence, till the scars
remind us that we all have wounds, and I ...
I have learned again that living is despair
as the herons cleave the placid, dreamless air.

Originally published by The Lyric



The City Is a Garment
by Michael R. Burch

A rhinestone skein, a jeweled brocade of light,―
the city is a garment stretched so thin
her festive colors bleed into the night,
and everywhere bright seams, unraveling,

cascade their brilliant contents out like coins
on motorways and esplanades; bead cars
come tumbling down long highways; at her groin
a railtrack like a zipper flashes sparks;

her hills are haired with brush like cashmere wool
and from their cleavage winking lights enlarge
and travel, slender fingers ... softly pull
themselves into the semblance of a barge.

When night becomes too chill, she softly dons
great overcoats of warmest-colored dawn.

Originally published by The Lyric



Loose Knit
by Michael R. Burch

She blesses the needle,
fetches fine red stitches,
criss-crossing, embroidering dreams
in the delicate fabric.

And if her hand jerks and twitches in puppet-like fits,
she tells herself
reality is not as threadbare as it seems ...

that a little more darning may gather loose seams.

She weaves an unraveling tapestry
of fatigue and remorse and pain ...
only the nervously pecking needle
****** her to motion, again and again.

Published by The Chariton Review (as “The Knitter”)



in-flight convergence
by michael r. burch

serene, almost angelic,
the lights of the city                  extend
over lumbering behemoths shrilly screeching displeasure;
they say
that nothing is certain,
that nothing man dreams or ordains
long endures his command

here the streetlights that flicker
and those blazing steadfast seem one
from a                distance;
           descend?
they abruptly
part                    ways,

so that nothing is one
which at times does not suddenly blend
into garish insignificance
in the familiar alleyways,
in the white neon flash
and the billboards of Convenience

and man seems the afterthought of his own Brilliance
as we thunder down the enlightened runways.

Originally published by The Aurorean and nominated for the Pushcart Prize



Chloe
by Michael R. Burch

There were skies onyx at night ... moons by day ...
lakes pale as her eyes ... breathless winds
******* tall elms ... she would say
that we’d loved, but some book said we’d sinned.

Soon impatiens too fiery to stay
sagged; the crocus bells drooped, golden-limned;
things of brightness, rinsed out, ran to gray ...
all the light of that world softly dimmed.

Where our feet were inclined, we would stray;
there were paths where dead weeds stood untrimmed,
distant mountains that loomed in our way,
thunder booming down valleys dark-hymned.

What I found, I found lost in her face
by yielding all my virtue to her grace.

Originally published by Romantics Quarterly as “A Dying Fall”



Come Down
by Michael R. Burch

for Harold Bloom and the Ivory Towerists

Come down, O, come down
from your high mountain tower.
How coldly the wind blows,
how late this chill hour ...

and I cannot wait
for a meteor shower
to show you the time
must be now, or not ever.

Come down, O, come down
from the high mountain heather
blown far to the lees
as fierce northern gales sever.

Come down, or your hearts will grow cold as the weather
when winter devours and spring returns never.

I dedicated this poem to Harold Bloom after reading his introduction to the Best American Poetry anthology he edited. Bloom seemed intent on claiming poetry as the province of the uber-reader (i.e., himself), but I remember reading poems by Blake, Burns, Byron, cummings, Dickinson, Frost, Housman, Keats, Eliot, Pound, Shakespeare, Shelley, Whitman, Wordsworth, Yeats, et al, and grokking them as a boy, without any “advanced” instruction from anyone.



Erin
by Michael R. Burch

All that’s left of Ireland is her hair—
bright carrot—and her milkmaid-pallid skin,
her brilliant air of cavalier despair,
her train of children—some conceived in sin,
the others to avoid it. For nowhere
is evidence of thought. Devout, pale, thin,
gay, nonchalant, all radiance. So fair!

How can men look upon her and not spin
like wobbly buoys churned by her skirt’s brisk air?
They buy. They ***** to pat her nyloned shin,
to share her elevated, pale Despair ...
to find at last two spirits ease no one’s.

All that’s left of Ireland is the Care,
her impish grin, green eyes like leprechauns’.



To Flower
by Michael R. Burch

When Pentheus [“grief’] went into the mountains in the garb of the baccae, his mother [Agave] and the other maenads, possessed by Dionysus, tore him apart (Euripides, Bacchae; Apollodorus 3.5.2; Ovid, Metamorphoses 3.511-733; Hyginus, Fabulae 184). The agave dies as soon as it blooms; the moonflower, or night-blooming cereus, is a desert plant of similar fate.

We are not long for this earth, I know—
you and I, all our petals incurled,
till a night of pale brilliance, moonflower aglow.
Is there love anywhere in this strange world?

The agave knows best when it’s time to die
and rages to life with such rapturous leaves
her name means Illustrious. Each hour more high,
she claws toward heaven, for, if she believes

in love at all, she has left it behind
to flower, to flower. When darkness falls
she wilts down to meet it, where something crawls:
beheaded, bewildered. And since love is blind,

she never adored it, nor watches it go.
Can we be as she is, moonflower aglow?



Loose Knit
by Michael R. Burch

She blesses the needle,
fetches fine red stitches,
criss-crossing, embroidering dreams
in the delicate fabric.

And if her hand jerks and twitches in puppet-like fits,
she tells herself
reality is not as threadbare as it seems ...

that a little more darning may gather loose seams.

She weaves an unraveling tapestry
of fatigue and remorse and pain ...
only the nervously pecking needle
****** her to motion, again and again.

Published by The Chariton Review (as “The Knitter”)



Discrimination
by Michael R. Burch

The meter I had sought to find, perplexed,
was ripped from books of "verse" that read like prose.
I found it in sheet music, in long rows
of hologramic CDs, in sad wrecks
of long-forgotten volumes undisturbed
half-centuries by archivists, unscanned.
I read their fading numbers, frowned, perturbed―
why should such tattered artistry be banned?

I heard the sleigh bells’ jingles, vampish ads,
the supermodels’ babble, Seuss’s books
extolled in major movies, blurbs for abs ...
A few poor thinnish journals crammed in nooks
are all I’ve found this late to sell to those
who’d classify free verse "expensive prose."

Originally published by The Chariton Review



The Harvest of Roses
by Michael R. Burch

I have not come for the harvest of roses―
the poets' mad visions,
their railing at rhyme ...
for I have discerned what their writing discloses:
weak words wanting meaning,
beat torsioning time.

Nor have I come for the reaping of gossamer―
images weak,
too forced not to fail;
gathered by poets who worship their luster,
they shimmer, impendent,
resplendently pale.

Originally published by The Raintown Review



Love Has a Southern Flavor
by Michael R. Burch

Love has a Southern flavor: honeydew,
ripe cantaloupe, the honeysuckle’s spout
we tilt to basking faces to breathe out
the ordinary, and inhale perfume ...

Love’s Dixieland-rambunctious: tangled vines,
wild clematis, the gold-brocaded leaves
that will not keep their order in the trees,
unmentionables that peek from dancing lines ...

Love cannot be contained, like Southern nights:
the constellations’ dying mysteries,
the fireflies that hum to light, each tree’s
resplendent autumn cape, a genteel sight ...

Love also is as wild, as sprawling-sweet,
as decadent as the wet leaves at our feet.

Originally published by The Lyric



Redolence
by Michael R. Burch

Now darkness ponds upon the violet hills;
cicadas sing; the tall elms gently sway;
and night bends near, a deepening shade of gray;
the bass concerto of a bullfrog fills
what silence there once was; globed searchlights play.

Green hanging ferns adorn dark window sills,
all drooping fronds, awaiting morning’s flares;
mosquitoes whine; the lissome moth again
flits like a veiled oud-dancer, and endures
the fumblings of night’s enervate gray rain.

And now the pact of night is made complete;
the air is fresh and cool, washed of the grime
of the city’s ashen breath; and, for a time,
the fragrance of her clings, obscure and sweet.

Published by The Eclectic Muse



Mare Clausum
by Michael R. Burch

These are the narrows of my soul—
dark waters pierced by eerie, haunting screams.
And these uncharted islands bleakly home
wild nightmares and deep, strange, forbidding dreams.

Please don’t think to find pearls’ pale, unearthly glow
within its shoals, nor corals in its reefs.
For, though you seek to salvage Love, I know
that vessel lists, and night brings no relief.

Pause here, and look, and know that all is lost;
then turn, and go; let salt consume, and rust.
This sea is not for sailors, but the ******
who lingered long past morning, till they learned

why it is named:
Mare Clausum.



Leaf Fall
by Michael R. Burch

Whatever winds encountered soon resolved
to swirling fragments, till chaotic heaps
of leaves lay pulsing by the backyard wall.
In lieu of rakes, our fingers sorted each
dry leaf into its place and built a high,
soft bastion against earth's gravitron―
a patchwork quilt, a trampoline, a bright
impediment to fling ourselves upon.

And nothing in our laughter as we fell
into those leaves was like the autumn's cry
of also falling. Nothing meant to die
could be so bright as we, so colorful―
clad in our plaids, oblivious to pain
we'd feel today, should we leaf-fall again.

Originally published by The Neovictorian/Cochlea



In Praise of Meter
by Michael R. Burch

The earth is full of rhythms so precise
the octave of the crystal can produce
a trillion oscillations, yet not lose
a second's beat. The ear needs no device
to hear the unsprung rhythms of the couch
drown out the mouth's; the lips can be debauched
by kisses, should the heart put back its watch
and find the pulse of love, and sing, devout.

If moons and tides in interlocking dance
obey their numbers, what's been left to chance?
Should poets be more lax―their circumstance
as humble as it is?―or readers wince
to see their ragged numbers thin, to hear
the moans of drones drown out the Chanticleer?

Originally published by The Eclectic Muse



Free Fall
by Michael R. Burch

These cloudless nights, the sky becomes a wheel
where suns revolve around an axle star ...
Look there, and choose. Decide which moon is yours.
Sink Lethe-ward, held only by a heel.
Advantage. Disadvantage. Who can tell?
To see is not to know, but you can feel
the tug sometimes―the gravity, the shell
as lustrous as damp pearl. You sink, you reel
toward some draining revelation. Air―
too thin to grasp, to breath. Such pressure. Gasp.
The stars invert, electric, everywhere.
And so we fall, down-tumbling through night’s fissure ...
two beings pale, intent to fall forever
around each other―fumbling at love’s tether ...
now separate, now distant, now together.

Originally published by Sonnet Scroll



In this Ordinary Swoon
by Michael R. Burch

In this ordinary swoon
as I pass from life to death,
I feel no heat from the cold, pale moon;
I feel no sympathy for breath.

Who I am and why I came,
I do not know; nor does it matter.
The end of every man’s the same
and every god’s as mad as a hatter.

I do not fear the letting go;
I only fear the clinging on
to hope when there’s no hope, although
I lift my face to the blazing sun

and feel the greater intensity
of the wilder inferno within me.



Huntress
by Michael R. Burch

after Baudelaire

Lynx-eyed, cat-like and cruel, you creep
across a crevice dropping deep
into a dark and doomed domain.
Your claws are sheathed. You smile, insane.
Rain falls upon your path, and pain
pours down. Your paws are pierced. You pause
and heed the oft-lamented laws
which bid you not begin again
till night returns. You wail like wind,
the sighing of a soul for sin,
and give up hunting for a heart.
Till sunset falls again, depart,
though hate and hunger urge you―"On!"
Heed, hearts, your hope―the break of dawn.

Originally published by Sonnetto Poesia



Water and Gold
by Michael R. Burch

You came to me as rain breaks on the desert
when every flower springs to life at once,
but joy's a wan illusion to the expert:
the Bedouin has learned how not to want.

You came to me as riches to a miser
when all is gold, or so his heart believes,
until he dies much thinner and much wiser,
his gleaming bones hauled off by chortling thieves.

You gave your heart too soon, too dear, too vastly;
I could not take it in; it was too much.
I pledged to meet your price, but promised rashly.
I died of thirst, of your bright Midas touch.

I dreamed you gave me water of your lips,
then sealed my tomb with golden hieroglyphs.

Originally published by The Lyric



Fountainhead
by Michael R. Burch

I did not delight in love so much
as in a kiss like linnets' wings,
the flutterings of a pulse so soft
the heart remembers, as it sings:
to bathe there was its transport, brushed
by marble lips, or porcelain,―
one liquid kiss, one cool outburst
from pale rosettes. What did it mean ...

to float awhirl on minute tides
within the compass of your eyes,
to feel your alabaster bust
grow cold within? Ecstatic sighs
seem hisses now; your eyes, serene,
reflect the sun's pale tourmaline.

Originally published by Romantics Quarterly



The Folly of Wisdom
by Michael R. Burch

She is wise in the way that children are wise,
looking at me with such knowing, grave eyes
I must bend down to her to understand.
But she only smiles, and takes my hand.

We are walking somewhere that her feet know to go,
so I smile, and I follow ...

And the years are dark creatures concealed in bright leaves
that flutter above us, and what she believes―
I can almost remember―goes something like this:
the prince is a horned toad, awaiting her kiss.

She wiggles and giggles, and all will be well
if only we find him! The woodpecker’s knell
as he hammers the coffin of some dying tree
that once was a fortress to someone like me
rings wildly above us. Some things that we know
we are meant to forget. Life is a bloodletting, maple-syrup-slow.

Originally published by Romantics Quarterly



Pan
by Michael R. Burch

... Among the shadows of the groaning elms,
amid the darkening oaks, we fled ourselves ...

... Once there were paths that led to coracles
that clung to piers like loosening barnacles ...

... where we cannot return, because we lost
the pebbles and the playthings, and the moss ...

... hangs weeping gently downward, maidens’ hair
who never were enchanted, and the stairs ...

... that led up to the Fortress in the trees
will not support our weight, but on our knees ...

... we still might fit inside those splendid hours
of damsels in distress, of rustic towers ...

... of voices of the wolves’ tormented howls
that died, and live in dreams’ soft, windy vowels ...

Originally published by Sonnet Scroll



Hearthside
by Michael R. Burch

“When you are old and grey and full of sleep...” — W. B. Yeats

For all that we professed of love, we knew
this night would come, that we would bend alone
to tend wan fires’ dimming bars—the moan
of wind cruel as the Trumpet, gelid dew
an eerie presence on encrusted logs
we hoard like jewels, embrittled so ourselves.

The books that line these close, familiar shelves
loom down like dreary chaperones. Wild dogs,
too old for mates, cringe furtive in the park,
as, toothless now, I frame this parchment kiss.

I do not know the words for easy bliss
and so my shriveled fingers clutch this stark,
long-unenamored pen and will it: Move.
I loved you more than words, so let words prove.

Published by Sonnet Writers, Setu (India), Borderless Journal (Singapore) and Vallance Review (Canada)



how many Nights (i)
by michael r. burch

how many Nights we laughed to see the sun
       go
down ...
your hair a frightful, dizzy golden crown ...
your skirt up to your thighs, displaying these
and others of men’s baser fantasies ...
that little pouting flower, slightly parted,
with nothing intervening, nothing thwarted ...



how many Nights (ii)
by michael r. burch

how many Nights we laughed to see the sun
       go
down ...
because the Night was made for reckless fun.
Your golden crown,
Your skin so soft, so smooth, and lightly downed.

how many nights i wept glad tears to hold
You tight against the years.
Your eyes so bold,
Your hair spun gold,
and all the pleasures Your soft flesh foretold.

how many Nights i did not dare to dream
You were so real ...
now all that i have left here is to feel
in dreams surreal
Time is the Nightmare God before whom men kneel.

and how few Nights, i reckoned, in the end,
we were allowed to gather, less to spend.



Come!
by Michael R. Burch

Will you come to visit my grave, I wonder,
in the season of lightning, the season of thunder,
when I have lain so long in the indifferent earth
that I have no girth?

When my womb has conformed to the chastity
your anemic Messiah envisioned for me,
will you finally be pleased that my *** was thus rendered
unpalatable, disengendered?

And when those strange loathsome organs that troubled you so
have been eaten by worms, will the heavens still glow
with the approval of God that I ended a maid—
thanks to a *****?

And will you come to visit my grave, I wonder,
in the season of lightning, the season of thunder?

“Come!” won fifth place in the Writer’s Digest 2012 Rhyming Poetry Contest, out of over 9,500 overall contest entries.



This is a sonnet despite the nonstandard stanza breaks. It was inspired by Dylan Thomas's poem "The force that through the green fuse drives the flower."

There’s a Stirring and Awakening in the World
by Michael R. Burch

There’s a stirring and awakening in the world,
and even so my spirit stirs within,
imagining some Power beckoning—
the Force which through the stamen gently whirrs,
unlocking tumblers deftly, even mine.

The grape grows wild-entangled on the vine,
and here, close by, the honeysuckle shines.
And of such life, at last there comes there comes the Wine.

And so it is with spirits’ fruitful yield—
the growth comes first, Green Vagrance, then the Bloom.

The world somehow must give the spirit room
to blossom, till its light shines—wild, revealed.

And then at last the earth receives its store
of blessings, as glad hearts cry—More! More! More!

Keywords/Tags: poem, poetry, spring, stirring, awakening, spirit, power, force, grape, vine, wine, growth, bloom, blooming, blossom, blossoming



Herbsttag (“Autumn Day”)
by Rainer Maria Rilke
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Lord, it is time. Let the immense summer go.
Lay your long shadows over the sundials
and over the meadows, let the free winds blow.
Command the late fruits to fatten and shine;
O, grant them another Mediterranean hour!
Urge them to completion, and with power
convey final sweetness to the heavy wine.
Who has no house now, never will build one.
Who's alone now, shall continue alone;
he'll wake, read, write long letters to friends,
and pace the tree-lined pathways up and down,
restlessly, as autumn leaves drift and descend.

Published by Measure, Setu (India), The HyperTexts, 3 Penny Paintings and The Society of Classical Poets



Aflutter
by Michael R. Burch

This rainbow is the token of the covenant, which I have established between me and all flesh.—Yahweh

You are gentle now, and in your failing hour
how like the child you were, you seem again,
and smile as sadly as the girl
                                              (age ten?)
who held the sparrow with the mangled wing
close to her heart.
                            It marveled at your power
but would not mend.
                                And so the world renews
old vows it seemed to make: false promises
spring whispers, as if nothing perishes
that does not resurrect to wilder hues
like rainbows’ eerie pacts we apprehend
but cannot fail to keep.
                                     Now in your eyes
I see the end of life that only dies
and does not care for bright, translucent lies.
Are tears so precious? These few, let us spend
together, as before, then lay to rest
these sparrows’ hearts aflutter at each breast.

Published by The Lyric, Poetry Life & Times and The Eclectic Muse (Canada)



For All That I Remembered
by Michael R. Burch

For all that I remembered, I forgot
her name, her face, the reason that we loved ...
and yet I hold her close within my thought:
I feel the burnished weight of auburn hair
that fell across her face, the apricot
clean scent of her shampoo, the way she glowed
so palely in the moonlight, angel-wan.

The memory of her gathers like a flood
and bears me to that night, that only night,
when she and I were one, and if I could ...
I’d reach to her this time and, smiling, brush
the hair out of her eyes, and hold intact
each feature, each impression. Love is such
a threadbare sort of magic, it is gone
before we recognize it. I would crush

my lips to hers to hold their memory,
if not more tightly, less elusively.



Water and Gold
by Michael R. Burch

You came to me as rain breaks on the desert
when every flower springs to life at once.
But joys are wan illusions to the expert:
the Bedouin has learned how not to want.

You came to me as riches to a miser
when all is gold, or so his heart believes,
until he dies much thinner and much wiser,
his gleaming bones hauled off by chortling thieves.

You gave your heart too soon, too dear, too vastly;
I could not take it in; it was too much.
I pledged to meet your price, but promised rashly.
I died of thirst, of your bright Midas touch.

I dreamed you gave me water of your lips,
then sealed my tomb with golden hieroglyphs.



The Forge
by Michael R. Burch

To at last be indestructible, a poem
must first glow, almost flammable, upon
a thing inert, as gray, as dull as stone,

then bend this way and that, and slowly cool
at arm’s-length, something irreducible
drawn out with caution, toughened in a pool

of water so contrary just a hiss
escapes it—water instantly a mist.
It writhes, a thing of senseless shapelessness ...

And then the driven hammer falls and falls.
The horses ***** their ears in nearby stalls.
A soldier on his cot leans back and smiles.

A sound of ancient import, with the ring
of honest labor, sings of fashioning.

Published by The Chariton Review


See
by Michael R. Burch

See how her hair has thinned: it doesn’t seem
like hair at all, but like the airy moult
of emus who outraced the wind and left
soft plumage in their wake. See how her eyes
are gentler now; see how each wrinkle laughs,
and deepens on itself, as though mirth took
some comfort there, then burrowed deeply in,
outlasting winter. See how very thin
her features are—that time has made more spare,
so that each bone shows, elegant and rare.
For life remains undimmed in her grave eyes,
and courage in her still-delighted looks:
each face presented like a picture book’s.
Bemused, she blows us undismayed goodbyes.



Flight 93
by Michael R. Burch

I held the switch in trembling fingers ... asked
why existence felt so small, so meaningless,
like a minnow squirming feebly in my grasp ...

... vibrations of huge engines thrummed my arms
as, glistening with sweat, I nudged the switch
to OFF ... I heard the klaxon’s shrill alarms

like vultures’ shriekings ... earthward, in a stall ...
we floated ... earthward ... wings outstretched, aghast
like Icarus ... as through the void we fell ...

till nothing was so beautiful, so blue ...
so vivid as that moment ... and I held
an image of your face, and dreamed I flew

into your arms ... the earth rushed up ... I knew
such comfort, in that moment, loving you.

Published by The Lyric



If You Come to San Miguel
by Michael R. Burch

If you come to San Miguel
before the orchids fall,
we might stroll through lengthening shadows
those deserted streets
where love first bloomed ...

You might buy the same cheap musk
from that mud-spattered stall
where with furtive eyes the vendor
watched his fragrant wares
perfume your ******* ...

Where lean men mend tattered nets,
disgruntled sea gulls chide;
we might find that cafetucho
where through grimy panes
sunset implodes ...

Where tall cranes spin canvassed loads,
the strange anhingas glide.
Green brine laps splintered moorings,
rusted iron chains grind,
weighed and anchored in the past,

held fast by luminescent tides ...
Should you come to San Miguel?
Let love decide.

Published by Romantics Quarterly



To Please The Poet
by Michael R. Burch

To please the poet, words must dance—
staccato, brisk, a two-step:
so!
Or waltz in elegance to time
of music—mild,
adagio.

To please the poet, words must chance
emotion in catharsis—
flame.
Or splash into salt seas, descend
in sheets of silver-shining
rain.

To please the poet, words must prance
and gallop, gambol, revel,
rail.
Or muse upon a moment—mute,
obscure, unsure, imperfect,
pale.

To please the poet, words must sing,
or croak, wart-tongued, imagining.

Originally published by The Lyric



The Endeavors of Lips
by Michael R. Burch

How sweet the endeavors of lips—to speak
of the heights of those pleasures which left us weak
in love’s strangely lit beds, where the cold springs creak:
for there is no illusion like love ...

Grown childlike, we wish for those storied days,
for those bright sprays of flowers, those primrosed ways
that curled to the towers of Yesterdays
where She braided illusions of love ...

“O, let down your hair!”—we might call and call,
to the dark-slatted window, the moonlit wall ...
but our love is a shadow; we watch it crawl
like a spidery illusion. For love ...

was never as real as that first kiss seemed
when we read by the flashlight and dreamed.

Published by Romantics Quarterly and The Eclectic Muse (Canada)



Once

for Beth

Once when her kisses were fire incarnate
and left in their imprint bright lipstick, and flame,
when her breath rose and fell over smoldering dunes,
leaving me listlessly sighing her name ...

Once when her ******* were as pale, as beguiling,
as wan rivers of sand shedding heat like a mist,
when her words would at times softly, mildly rebuke me
all the while as her lips would more wildly insist ...

Once when the thought of her echoed and whispered
through vast wastelands of need like a Bedouin chant,
I ached for the touch of her lips with such longing
that I vowed all my former vows to recant ...

Once, only once, something bloomed, of a desiccate seed—
this impossible blossom her wild rains of kisses decreed.

Published by The Lyric, Writer’s Journal, Grassroots Poetry, Tucumcari Literary Journal, Unlikely Stories, Poetry Life & Times



These Hallowed Halls
by Michael R. Burch

a young Romantic Poet mourns the passing of an age . . .

A final stereo fades into silence
and now there is seldom a murmur
to trouble the slumber of these ancient halls.
I stand by a window where others have watched
the passage of time—alone, not untouched.
And I am as they were—unsure—for the days
stretch out ahead, a bewildering maze.

Ah, faithless lover—that I had never touched your breast,
nor felt the stirrings of my heart,
which until that moment had peacefully slept.
For now I have known the exhilaration
of a heart having leapt from the pinnacle of Love,
and the result of each such infatuation ...
the long freefall to earth, as the moon glides above.



Oasis
by Michael R. Burch

for Beth

I want tears to form again
in the shriveled glands of these eyes
dried all these long years
by too much heated knowing.

I want tears to course down
these parched cheeks,
to star these cracked lips
like an improbable dew

in the heart of a desert.
I want words to burble up
like happiness, like the thought of love,
like the overwhelming, shimmering thought of you

to a nomad who
has only known drought.



Melting
by Michael R. Burch

for Beth

Entirely, as spring consumes the snow,
the thought of you consumes me: I am found
in rivulets, dissolved to what I know
of former winters’ passions. Underground,
perhaps one slender icicle remains
of what I was before, in some dark cave—
a stalactite, long calcified, now drains
to sodden pools whose milky liquid laves
the colder rock, thus washing something clean
that never saw the light, that never knew
the crust could break above, that light could stream:
so luminous,
                     so bright,
                                                      so beautiful . . .
I lie revealed, and so I stand transformed,
and all because you smiled on me, and warmed.

Published by Borderless Journal



Afterglow
by Michael R. Burch

for Beth

The night is full of stars. Which still exist?
Before time ends, perhaps one day we’ll know.
For now I hold your fingers to my lips
and feel their pulse ... warm, palpable and slow ...

once slow to match this reckless spark in me,
this moon in ceaseless orbit I became,
compelled by wilder gravity to flee
night’s universe of suns, for one pale flame ...

for one pale flame that seemed to signify
the Zodiac of all, the meaning of
love’s wandering flight past Neptune. Now to lie
in dawning recognition is enough ...

enough each night to bask in you, to know
the face of love ... eyes closed ... its afterglow.



All Afterglow
by Michael R. Burch

Something remarkable, perhaps ...
the color of her eyes ... though I forget
the color of her eyes ... perhaps her hair
the way it blew about ... I do not know
just what it was about her that has kept
her thought lodged deep in mine ... unmelted snow
that lasted till July would be less rare,
clasped in some frozen cavern where the wind
sculpts bright grotesqueries, ignoring springs’
and summers’ higher laws ... there thawing slow
and strange by strange degrees, one tick beyond
the freezing point which keeps all things the same
... till what remains is fragile and unlike
the world above, where melted snows and rains
form rivulets that, inundate with sun,
evaporate, and in life’s cyclic stream
remake the world again ... I do not know
that we can be remade—all afterglow.

[Note: “inundate with snow” is not a typo.]



A Vain Word
by Michael R. Burch

Oleanders at dawn preen extravagant whorls
as I read in leaves’ Sanskrit brief moments remaining
till sunset implodes, till the moon strands grey pearls
under moss-stubbled oaks, full of whispers, complaining
to the darkening autumn, how swiftly life goes—
as I fled before love ...
                                     Now, through leaves trodden black,
shivering, I wander as winter’s first throes
of cool listless snow drench my cheeks, back and neck.

I discerned in one season all eternities of grief,
the specter of death sprawled out under the rose,
the last consequence of faith in the flight of one leaf,
the incontinence of age, as life’s bright torrent slows.

O, where are you now?—I was timid, absurd.
I would find comfort again in a vain word.

Published by Chrysanthemum and Tucumcari Literary Review



Break Time
by Michael R. Burch

for those who lost loved ones on 9-11

Intrude upon my grief; sit; take a spot
of milk to cloud the blackness that you feel;
add artificial sweeteners to conceal
the bitter aftertaste of loss. You’ll heal
if I do not. The coffee’s hot. You speak:
of bundt cakes, polls, the price of eggs. You glance
twice at your watch, cough, look at me askance.
The TV drones oeuvres of high romance
in syncopated lip-synch. Should I feel
the underbelly of Love’s warm Ideal,
its fuzzy-wuzzy tummy, and not reel
toward some dark conclusion? Disappear
to pale, dissolving atoms. Were you here?
I brush you off: like saccharine, like a tear.

Published by Sonnet Writers, Freshet and Sontey (Czechoslovakia)



At Cædmon’s Grave
by Michael R. Burch

“Cædmon’s Hymn,” composed at the Monastery of Whitby (a North Yorkshire fishing village), is one of the oldest known poems written in the English language, dating back to around 680 A.D. According to legend, Cædmon, an illiterate Anglo-Saxon cowherd, received the gift of poetic composition from an angel; he subsequently founded a school of Christian poets. Unfortunately, only nine lines of Cædmon’s verse survive, in the writings of the Venerable Bede. Whitby, tiny as it is, reappears later in the history of English literature, having been visited, in diametric contrast, by Lewis Carroll and Bram Stoker’s ghoulish yet evocative Dracula.

At the monastery of Whitby,
on a day when the sun sank through the sea,
and the gulls shrieked wildly, jubilant, free,

while the wind and time blew all around,
I paced those dusk-enamored grounds
and thought I heard the steps resound

of Carroll, Stoker and good Bede
who walked there, too, their spirits freed
—perhaps by God, perhaps by need—

to write, and with each line, remember
the glorious light of Cædmon’s ember,
scorched tongues of flame words still engender.

Here, as darkness falls, at last we meet.
I lay this pale garland of words at his feet.

Published by The Lyric



Altared Spots
by Michael R. Burch

The mother leopard buries her cub,
then cries three nights for his bones to rise
clad in new flesh, to celebrate the sunrise.

Good mother leopard, pensive thought
and fiercest love’s wild insurrection
yield no certainty of a resurrection.

Man’s tried them both, has added tears,
chants, dances, drugs, séances, tombs’
white alabaster prayer-rooms, wombs

where dead men’s frozen genes convene ...
there is no answer—death is death.
So bury your son, and save your breath.

Or emulate earth’s “highest species”—
write a few strange poems and odd treatises.



Crunch
by Michael R. Burch

A cockroach could live nine months on the dried mucous you scrounge from your nose
then fling like seedplants to the slowly greening floor ...

You claim to be the advanced life form, but, mon frere,
sometimes as you ****** encrusted kinks of hair from your Leviathan ***
and muse softly on zits, icebergs snap off the Antarctic.

You’re an evolutionary quandary, in need of a sacral ganglion
to control your enlarged, contradictory hindquarters:
surely the brain should migrate closer to its primary source of information,
in order to ensure the survival of the species.

Cockroaches thrive on eyeboogers and feces;
their exoskeletons expand and gleam like burnished armor in the presence of uranium.
But your cranium
     is not nearly so adaptable.

“Crunch” is a poem about evolution and survival of the fittest which questions where human beings really are the planet earth’s most advanced life forms.



Duet (II)
by Michael R. Burch

If love is just an impulse meant to bring
two tiny hearts together, skittering
like hamsters from their Quonsets late at night
in search of lust’s productive exercise . . .

If love is the mutation of some gene
made radiant—an accident of bliss
played out by two small actors on a screen
of silver mesh, who never even kiss . . .

If love is evolution, nature’s way
of sorting out its DNA in pairs,
of matching, mating, sculpting flesh’s clay . . .
why does my wrinkled hamster climb his stairs

to set his wheel revolving, then descend
and stagger off . . . to make hers fly again?

Published by Bewildering Stories



Album
by Michael R. Burch

I caress them—trapped in brittle cellophane—
and I see how young they were, and how unwise;
and I remember their first flight—an old prop plane,
their blissful arc through alien blue skies ...

And I touch them here through leaves which—tattered, frayed—
are also wings, but wings that never flew:
like Nabokov’s wings—pinned, held. Here, time delayed,
their features never merged, remaining two ...

And Grief, which lurked unseen beyond the lens
or in shadows where It crept on furtive claws
as It scritched Its way into their hearts, depends
on sorrows such as theirs, and works Its jaws ...

and slavers for Its meat—those young, unwise,
who naively dare to dream, yet fail to see
how, lumbering sunward, Hope, ungainly, flies,
clutching to Her ruffled breast what must not be.



Because You Came to Me
by Michael R. Burch

for Beth

Because you came to me with sweet compassion
and kissed my furrowed brow and smoothed my hair,
I do not love you after any fashion,
but wildly, in despair.

Because you came to me in my black torment
and kissed me fiercely, blazing like the sun
upon parched desert dunes, till in dawn’s foment
they melt ... I am undone.

Because I am undone, you have remade me
as suns bring life, as brilliant rains endow
the earth below with leaves, where you now shade me
and bower me, somehow.



Caveat
by Michael R. Burch

If only we were not so eloquent,
we might sing, and only sing, not to impress,
but only to enjoy, to be enjoyed.

We might inundate the earth with thankfulness
for light, although it dies, and make a song
of night descending on the earth like bliss,

with other lights beyond—not to be known—
but only to be welcomed and enjoyed,
before all worlds and stars are overthrown ...

as a lover’s hands embrace a sleeping face
and find it beautiful for emptiness
of all but joy. There is no thought to love

but love itself. How senseless to redress,
in darkness, such becoming nakedness . . .

Originally published by Clementine Unbound



The Princess and the Pauper
by Michael R. Burch

for Norman Kraeft in memory of his beloved wife June

Here was a woman bright, intent on life,
who did not flinch from Death, but caught his eye
and drew him, powerless, into her spell
of wanting her himself, so much the lie
that she was meant for him—obscene illusion!—
made him seem a monarch throned like God on high,
when he was less than nothing; when to die
meant many stultifying, pained embraces.

She shed her gown, undid the tangled laces
that tied her to the earth: then she was his.
Now all her erstwhile beauty he defaces
and yet she grows in hallowed loveliness—
her ghost beyond perfection—for to die
was to ascend. Now he begs, penniless.

Published by Katrina Anthology, The Lyric and Trinacria



Every Man Has a Dream
by Michael R. Burch

lines composed at Elliston Square

Every man has a dream that he cannot quite touch ...
a dream of contentment, of soft, starlit rain,
of a breeze in the evening that, rising again,
reminds him of something that cannot have been,
and he calls this dream love.

And each man has a dream that he fears to let live,
for he knows: to succumb is to throw away all.
So he curses, denies it and locks it within
the cells of his heart and he calls it a sin,
this madness, this love.

But each man in his living falls prey to his dreams,
and he struggles, but so he ensures that he falls,
and he finds in the end that he cannot deny
the joy that he feels or the tears that he cries
in the darkness of night for this light he calls love.



Free Fall (II)
by Michael R. Burch

I have no earthly remembrance of you, as if
we were never of earth, but merely white clouds adrift,
swirling together through Himalayan serene altitudes—
no more man and woman than exhaled breath—unable to fall
back to solid existence, despite the air’s sparseness: all
our being borne up, because of our lightness,
toward the sun’s unendurable brightness . . .

But since I touched you, fire consumes each wing!

We who are unable to fly, stall
contemplating disaster. Despair like an anchor, like an iron ball,
heavier than ballast, sinks on its thick-looped chain
toward the earth, and soon thereafter there will be sufficient pain
to recall existence, to make the coming darkness everlasting.



Fledglings
by Michael R. Burch

With her small eyes, pale blue and unforgiving,
she taught me: December is not for those
unweaned of love, the chirping nestlings
who bicker for worms with dramatic throats

still pinkly exposed, ... who have yet to learn
the first harsh lesson of survival: to devour
their weaker siblings in the high-leafed ferned
fortress and impregnable bower

from which men must fly like improbable dreams
to become poets. They have yet to grasp that,
before they can soar starward like fanciful archaic machines,
they must first assimilate the latest technology, ... or

lose all in the sudden realization of gravity,
following Icarus’s sun-unwinged, singed trajectory.



The Higher Atmospheres
by Michael R. Burch

Whatever we became climbed on the thought
of Love itself; we floated on plumed wings
ten thousand miles above the breasted earth
that had vexed us to such Distance; now all things
seem small and pale, a girdle’s handsbreadth girth ...

I break upon the rocks; I break; I fling
my human form about; I writhe; I writhe.
Invention is not Mastery, nor wings
Salvation. Here the Vulture cruelly chides
and plunges at my eyes, and coos and sings ...

Oh, some will call the sun my doom, but Love
melts callow wax the higher atmospheres
leave brittle. I flew high: not high enough
to melt such frozen resins ... thus, Her jeers.



In the Whispering Night
by Michael R. Burch

for George King

In the whispering night, when the stars bend low
till the hills ignite to a shining flame,
when a shower of meteors streaks the sky
as the lilies sigh in their beds, for shame,
we must steal our souls, as they once were stolen,
and gather our vigor, and all our intent.
We must heave our husks into some raging ocean
and laugh as they shatter, and never repent.
We must dance in the darkness as stars dance before us,
soar, Soar! through the night on a butterfly's breeze:
blown high, upward-yearning, twin spirits returning
to the heights of awareness from which we were seized.

Published by Songs of Innocence, Romantics Quarterly, Poetry Life & Times and The Chained Muse



Elemental
by Michael R. Burch

for and after Dylan Thomas

The poet delves earth’s detritus—hard toil—
for raw-edged nouns, barbed verbs, vowels’ lush bouquet;
each syllable his pen excretes—dense soil,
dark images impacted, rooted clay.

The poet sees the sea but feels its meaning—
the teeming brine, the mirrored oval flame
that leashes and excites its turgid surface ...
then squanders years imagining love’s the same.

Belatedly, he turns to what lies broken—
the scarred and furrowed plot he fiercely sifts,
among death’s sicksweet dungs and composts seeking
one element whose scorching flame uplifts.



Premonition
by Michael R. Burch

Now the evening has come to a close and the party is over ...
we stand in the doorway and watch as they go—
each stranger, each acquaintance, each casual lover.

They walk to their cars and they laugh as they go,
though we know their forced laughter’s the wine ...
then they pause at the road where the dark asphalt flows
endlessly on toward Zion ...

and they kiss one another as though they were friends,
and they promise to meet again “soon” ...
but the rivers of Jordan roll on without end,
and the mockingbird calls to the moon ...

and the katydids climb up the cropped hanging vines,
and the crickets chirp on out of tune ...
and their shadows, defined by the cryptic starlight,
seem spirits torn loose from their tombs.

And we know their brief lives are just eddies in time,
that their hearts are unreadable runes
carved out to stand like strange totems in sand
when their corpses lie ravaged and ruined ...

You take my clenched fist and you give it a kiss
as though it were something you loved,
and the tears fill your eyes, brimming with the soft light
of the stars winking sagely above ...

Then you whisper, "It's time that we went back inside;
if you'd like, we can sit and just talk for a while."
And the hope in your eyes burns too deep, so I lie
and I say, "Yes, I would," to your small, troubled smile.



Leave Taking (II)
by Michael R. Burch

Although the earth renews itself, and spring
is lovelier for all the rot of fall,
I think of yellow leaves that cling and hang
by fingertips to life, let go . . . and all
men see is one bright instance of departure,
the flame that, at least height, warms nothing. I,

have never liked to think the ants that march here
will deem them useless, grimly tramping by,
and so I gather leaves’ dry hopeless brilliance,
to feel their prickly edges, like my own,
to understand their incurled worn resilience—
youth’s tenderness long, callously, outgrown.

I even feel the pleasure of their sting,
the stab of life. I do not think —at all—
to be renewed, as earth is every spring.
I do not hope words cluster where they fall.
I only hope one leaf, wild-spiraling,
illuminates the void, till glad hearts sing.

It's not that every leaf must finally fall ...
it's just that we can never catch them all.



Because She Craved the Very Best
by Michael R. Burch

Because she craved the very best,
he took her East, he took her West;
he took her where there were no wars
and brought her bright bouquets of stars ...

The blush and fragrances of roses,
the hush an evening sky imposes,
moonbeams pale and garlands rare,
and golden combs to match her hair ...

A nightingale to sing all night,
white wings, to let her soul take flight ...
She stabbed him with a poisoned sting
and as he lay there dying,
she screamed, "I wanted everything!"
and started crying.



Wonderland
by Michael R. Burch

We stood, kids of the Lamb, to put to test
the beatific anthems of the blessed,
the sentence of the martyr, and the pen’s
sincere religion. Magnified, the lens
shot back absurd reflections of each face—
a carnival-like mirror. In the space
between the silver backing and the glass,
we caught a glimpse of Joan, a frumpy lass
who never brushed her hair or teeth, and failed
to pass on GO, and frequently was jailed
for awe’s beliefs. Like Alice, she grew wee
to fit the door, then couldn’t lift the key.
We failed the test, and so the jury’s hung.
In Oz, “The Witch is Dead” ranks number one.



Artificial Smile
by Michael R. Burch

I’m waiting for my artificial teeth
to stretch belief, to hollow out the cob
of zealous righteousness, to grasp life’s stub
between clenched molars, and yank out the grief.

Mine must be art-official—zenlike Art—
a disembodied, white-enameled grin
of Cheshire manufacture. Part by part,
the human smile becomes mock porcelain.

Till in the end, the smile alone remains:
titanium-based alloys undestroyed
with graves’ worm-eaten contents, all the pains
of bridgework unrecalled, and what annoyed

us most about the corpses rectified
to quaintest dust. The Smile winks, deified.



www.firesermon.com
by Michael R. Burch

your gods have become e-vegetation;
your saints—pale thumbnail icons; to enlarge
their images, right-click; it isn’t hard
to populate your web-site; not to mention

cool sound effects are nice; Sound Blaster cards
can liven up dull sermons, [zing some fire];
your drives need added Zip; you must discard
your balky paternosters: ***!!! Desire!!!

these are the watchwords, catholic; you must
as Yahoo! did, employ a little lust :)
if you want great e-commerce; hire a bard
to spruce up ancient language, shed the dust

of centuries of sameness;
                                             lameness *****;
your gods grew blurred; go 3D; scale; adjust.



Happily Never After (the Second Curse of the ***** Toad)
by Michael R. Burch

He did not think of love of Her at all
frog-plangent nights, as moons engoldened roads
through crumbling stonewalled provinces, where toads
(nee princes) ruled in chinks and grew so small
at last to be invisible. He smiled
(the fables erred so curiously), and thought
bemusedly of being reconciled
to human flesh, because his heart was not
incapable of love, but, being cursed
a second time, could only love a toad’s . . .
and listened as inflated frogs rehearsed
cheekbulging tales of anguish from green moats . . .
and thought of her soft croak, her skin fine-warted,
his anemic flesh, and how true love was thwarted.

Originally published by Romantics Quarterly



130 Refuted
by Michael R. Burch

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red ...
— Shakespeare, Sonnet 130

Seas that sparkle in the sun
without its light would have no beauty;
but the light within your eyes
is theirs alone; it owes no duty.
And that flame, not half as bright,
is meant for me, and brings delight.

Coral formed beneath the sea,
though scarlet-tendriled, cannot warm me;
while your lips, not half so red,
just touching mine, at once inflame me.
And the searing flames your lips arouse
fathomless oceans fail to douse.

Bright roses’ brief affairs, declared
when winter comes, will wither quickly.
Your cheeks, though paler when compared
with them?—more lasting, never prickly.
And your cheeks, so dear and warm,
far vaster treasures, need no thorns.

Originally published by Romantics Quarterly



Heat Lightening
by Michael R. Burch

Each night beneath the elms, we never knew
which lights beyond dark hills might stall, advance,
then lurch into strange headbeams tilted up
like searchlights seeking contact in the distance . . .

. . . quiescent unions . . . thoughts of bliss, of hope . . .
long-dreamt appearances of wished-on stars . . .
like childhood’s long-occluded, nebulous
slow drift of half-formed visions . . . slip and bra . . .

Wan moonlight traced your features, perilous,
in danger of extinction, should your hair
fall softly on my eyes, or should a kiss
cause them to close, or should my fingers dare

to leave off childhood for some new design
of whiter lace, of flesh incarnadine.



Hymn to an Art-o-matic Laundromat
by Michael R. Burch

after Richard Moore’s “Hymn to an Automatic Washer”

O, terrible-immaculate
ALL-cleansing godly Laundromat,
where cleanliness is next to Art
—a bright Kinkade (bought at K-Mart),
a Persian rug (made in Taiwan),
a Royal Bonn Clock (time zone Guam)—
embrace my *** in cushioned vinyl,
erase all marks: ****, vaginal,
******, inkspot, red wine, dirt.
O, sterilize her skirt, my shirt,
my skidmarked briefs, her padded bra;
suds-away in your white maw
all filth, the day’s accumulation.
Make us pure by INUNDATION.

Published by The Oldie, where it was the winner of a poetry contest



If Love Were Infinite
by Michael R. Burch

If love were infinite, how I would pity
our lives, which through long years’ exactitude
might seem a pleasant blur—one interlude
without prequel or sequel—wanly pretty,
the gentlest flame the heart might bring to bear
to tepid hearts too sure of love to flare.

If love were infinite, why would I linger
caressing your fine hair, lost in the thought
each auburn strand must shrivel with this finger,
and so in thrall to time be gently brought
to final realization: love, amazing,
must leave us ash for all our fiery blazing.

If flesh’s heat once led me straight to you,
love’s arrow’s burning mark must pierce me through.



Imperfect Sonnet
by Michael R. Burch

A word before the light is doused: the night
is something wriggling through an unclean mind,
as rats creep through a tenement. And loss
is written cheaply with the moon’s cracked gloss
like lipstick through the infinite, to show
love’s pale yet sordid imprint on us. Go.

We have not learned love yet, except to cleave.
I saw the moon rise once ... but to believe ...
was of another century ... and now ...
I have the urge to love, but not the strength.

Despair, once stretched out to its utmost length,
lies couched in squalor, watching as the screen
reveals “love’s” damaged images: its dreams ...
and ******* limply, screams and screams.



Renown

for Jeremy

Words fail us when, at last,
we lie unread amid night’s parchment leaves,
life’s chapter past.

Whatever I have gained of life, I lost,
except for this bright emblem
of your smile . . .

and I would grasp
its meaning closer for a longer while . . .
but I am glad

with all my heart to be unheard,
and smile,
bound here, still strangely mortal,

instructed by wise Love not to be sad,
when to be the lesser poet
meant to be “the world’s best dad.”



Late Frost
by Michael R. Burch

The matters of the world like sighs intrude;
out of the darkness, windswept winter light
too frail to solve the puzzle of night’s terror
resolves the distant stars to salts: not white,

but gray, dissolving in the frigid darkness.
I stoke cooled flames and stand, perhaps revealed
as equally as gray, a faded hardness
too malleable with time to be annealed.

Light sprinkles through dull flakes, devoid of color;
which matters not. I did not think to find
a star like Bethlehem’s. I turn my collar
to trudge outside for cordwood. There, outlined

within the doorway’s arch, I see the tree
that holds its boughs aloft, as if to show
they harbor neither love, nor enmity,
but only stars: insignias I know—

false ornaments that flash, overt and bright,
but do not warm and do not really glow,
and yet somehow bring comfort, soft delight:
a rainbow glistens on new-fallen snow.



Over(t) Simplification
by Michael R. Burch

“Keep it simple, stupid.”

A sonnet is not simple, but the rule
is simply this: let poems be beautiful,
or comforting, or horrifying. Move
the reader, and the world will not reprove
the idiosyncrasies of too few lines,
too many syllables, or offbeat beats.

It only matters that she taps her feet
or that he frowns, or smiles, or grimaces,
or sits bemused—a child—as images
of worlds he’d lost come flooding back, and then . . .
they’ll cheer the poet’s insubordinate pen.

A sonnet is not simple, but the rule
is simply this: let poems be beautiful.



The Lingering and the Unconsoled Heart
by Michael R. Burch

There is a silence—
the last unspoken moment
before death,

when the moon,
cratered and broken,
is all madness and light,

when the breath comes low and complaining,
and the heart is a ruin
of emptiness and night.

There is a grief—
the grief of a lover's embrace
while faith still shimmers in a mother’s tears ...

There is no dismaler time, nor place,
while the faint glimmer of life is ours
that the lingering and the unconsoled heart fears

beyond this: seeing its own stricken face
in eyes that drift toward some incomprehensible place.

Keywords/Tags: modern, sonnet, sonnets, free, verse, song, traditional, romantic, romanticism, art, artisan
Weird in his outfits of a late ragamuffin
Reflecting strength of character and soul toughness
Contrasted by dreadlocks on his pykitonic head
Giving him a look of an African amorous ogre,
In the tough stunt for *** with a tectonic girl,
Veneered by mastery of his pen and keyboard
Following after his *** starved ancestor
The muzhik; Vladimir Nabokov the ****** lover,
Swimming in enviable freedom to *******
Afro-English words in his road to the burning church
That barely roasts the peasants for tribal reasons,
A ****** ground for Mochama’s humour
That will hold you glued and captive to the pages
Until the he goat of Abagusii goes through
The second round of its ****** act
Basically forming education for Smitta
The smitten rock of African literature.
Mateuš Conrad Feb 2023
Kaiser's hiccups
/are/
   and \were\
   legendary
and probably
  |will be|

having a little break cleaning the house, after having taken out the garbage, the dustmen always come later than the postman, around 2am, i'm guessing my street is their last point of call... which suits me just fine... the house was almost entirely cleaned, vacuumed, floors wiped with detergent... ugh... **** it... lazy fingers... i opened up my guitar case, the PIECYK (amp) is ******, i still have my first ever acoustic guitar but i'm missing three strings, my electric still has all 6 strings... i'll get some jam out... i haven't practiced in years... i figured: if i can't find a drummer... if i can't find a bass player... try the mandolin outside a girls window once, give up the dream, put a poster of a rock band on my wall... do some art when i'm completely "out of it": drunk... poetry: not a most spectacular art... well: it would be spectacular without all the ******* puritans of form, rhyme and: meter? they call it a meter but not a metre? that's a bit like telling someone you weigh... that's mass in kg multiplied by "X" is... 999.6N... ah... i know... science shoved it's pickled brain into casual talk: the distinction between weight and mass... mass came after weight... weight is still commonly expressed foundation akin to height... but it was a welcome break with my seemingly dead electric guitar... dangled a few jangles and jingles of remembering when i used to play... Silverchair's Shade, Red Hot Chilli Pepper's Under the Bridge... Eric Clapton's Layla... Link Wray's Rumble... Grieg's in the House of the Mountain King...

only today i realised that people are truly lonely...
odd... when i was in my utter depths of despair:
no one came... but who did come? me!
i picked myself up, no one was willing...
but then... coming across a descending /
an ascending choir of song in an empty church
then hearing a great wind disperse the singing:
i did have my technological asset with me...
the hallucination, the, "hallucination" was so potent
that... regardless of putting in my headphones
or not... the singing continued...
it was only when i scuttled and hid beneath
the altar and took the altar cloth off the altar
and covered myself momentarily with it
then starting running around the church like
a headless chicken... i know! i know! i know with
a BURNING I KNOW... if i uttered a word
i would hear the wrong reply!
either a god descending or a devil ascending...
after all... either side has a singing choir...

people are truly lonely...
i'm alone... loneliness is something that
attracts people to me...
i can't stomach loneliness...
for me that's like... the cul de sac of former
extroverts having an orange with no
orange juice to trickle down into a glass:
half full? regardless the optical misnomer of
calling the same glass: same... half empty...
i am more than willing to do this security
job because i get to do some decent work...
like being a chemistry teacher...
it's a great narrative canvas...
i write over what was already talked (over)...
that's how you get to paint by writing...
you're not some Tolstoy's...
no... not some Pavlov's dog trying to wet his appetite
but also sweat... via drooling saliva...
before my shift i had that random conversation
with mother...
she was watching the t.v. adaptation
of Leo Tolstoy's War & Peace and i said to her:
i don't recall having ever read Tolstoy...
he's not like Dostoyevsky, is he?

so we compared: Tolstoy is the writer
of the macro-cosmos... of events that shake nations
and the individuals: "individuals" are sort of:
chess-pieces...
it's the sort of literature of the salon...
Dostoyevsky is a psychologist...
a world war II might be taking place...
but... but... some Heinrich *******is getting dealt
a terrible hand of both luck and fortune...
like i said to my ailing mother:
she half-jokes aligned with giving birth to me
being her crucifixion...
i joke back: maybe if i wasn't born
i would have both my hinds...
i was once called a: hunchback angel by a guy
advocating the advent of the DUB-STEP musical
genre... way before DUB-STEP became bust
and only associated with SKRILLEX
"drop the button buster, beat, blah blah"...

reimagine drunk conversations in a pub...
in a PLOOB... Scouse? i don't know... maybe somehow
someday, maybe...
    ich sehen rot.. ergo: ich aufladung,
i.e. go! i.e. gehen!

people are so lonely, not having read anything of
philosophy...
if i were to learn anything from the sage-father
that my father isn't....
read philosophy when i'm old and clinging ton sanity
with a chance: oops...
*******... death end clue...
what?                        before you're dead...
please leave your nappies alongside the rest
of the remains of you...

i was having a: drinking session with
newly married couple... Irish traveller...
i downed his, my, his, my: whichever pint
long before the closing hours were done...
Frankie... Francesca...
**** me... Matthew Conrad "m.d."

it's called: tunneling!
me what?! a **** was asking me to g back
to her flat to sniff some *******...
smoke some ****....
i'd love to...
        but i need to make my mother
a coffee come 9am...

i never realised people could become so lonely
and when drinking enough become so blatantly obvious
about it...
it took me one night trip to find a fox's corpse
by the side of the street
to subsequently find a skip and some black bin bags
wrap the road-****... walk with it for almost five miles,
stopping off at the house to weigh myself
then me and the carcass...
amassed to about 7kg... a big, healthy *******
of a fox...
when i was picking him up from the pavement
at 5am a man and a woman were eying me up
like: no... not a ******... a shaman...
they should i might be pretending to chop the fox up...
i just didn't want such a beautiful creature,
beautifully dead, serene, lying on the side of the street...
the only burial i gave him was throwing him
into some thorny bushes by a stream...
another time i was playing i-see-you-but-you-don't-see-me
with another fox... sat on a curve and just eyed it...
until a woman passed the fox and me sitting across
the street drinking a beer... WE'RE MEDITATING!
did the fox flinch? nope... the woman walked about a metre
from the fox... ****** didn't flinch...
i was working up to the TOTEM...
it took one afternoon of the door being opened to
my kitchen and me cooking up two curries...
hey presto: BRODY...
that ****** came for leftovers from meals for over a month...
until, he stopped coming...
i'm guessing he was hit by a car...
but... i'm guessing my care for one fox being
somewhat properly buried and another fox coming
to inquire about: what smells so good
is the reason why i have captured such great photographs
of a fox in my garden...

- hmm... date? or after work coworker drinks?
i know that i scribbled in my little notepad
when she went on her Nth visit to the toilet...
my guess is that males have weaker bladder
of the sexes... a SPRINKLE OF SOME MARIJUANA..
i'm waiting for VOLTAGE...
i'm about to hallucinate in ink... burgundy mixing itself
with Bishop Purple...
those first 30 minutes after a sunset...
cycling down the A12 with heavy traffic... reaching the Green
Belt between Romford and Mark's Gate...
breathing through the nose...
Spring is teasing... Spring is teasing with her
oncoming stealth of scents...
the earth is yet again starting to breathe...
first comes the botanical kingdom,
soon after will come the kingdom of the insects...
wait! i have not heard of an angel or a demon
associated with botany! in charge of, say... roses...
too good of a mark for a Saint George with...
or was that St. Stephen...

write like an imitation of ice-skating...
pretend to fall... gain momentum...
think out a thinking of shadow, curb,
night and walking Ninja hey-presto! feline...
think a loudness: think the loudness...
the ***** of a 4 x 4 pedestrian cross
section of Tokyo...
leave your cycling attire on the bed, stinking of you...
watch a female cuddle and curl up to your Lycra
long-shanks for the specific reason: been cycling...
acid on a bicycle... the 1st and the only ever tRIP...

i always wanted to travel to India...
and walk back to England...
i always wanted to do that...
second: if? aha... QUESTION "question" questing onion
quest of an onion... ANSWER:
i swear, i: as it were... as it is... i: as it were:
i of i, i off i, i vs. no-i...
not i vs. not-i: schizoid broo... Brrrrr... BWOOM(B)
***** a-plenty with witches...

fly fly away my little star...
fly fly away my little st'ah... st'ah...
Stachurski! da da da... ditch Z-Detusche:
na minute, na chwile! na jedno
i drugie dingo dingo!

Lord of the Mushroom!
and mushy peas... and... dhal...
Lord... Bel
              פִּטרִיָה               (Be-EL)

i'm shocked that the gnostics didn't...
to be honest? what was missing in Hinduism?!
what was missing in Hinduism?!
AH HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA
AH HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA
AH HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA
AH HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA
AH HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA
AH HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA
AH HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA
AH HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA
AH HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!

oh yeah... that's a Satanic laugh that is...
a laugh that makes the existence of soul viable...
it is a glowing...
when one internalizes laughter with eureka
and mixes it up with stage-fright and a "hate"
for the sound of one's voice...
but then from time to time...
one is caught singing while doing chores and finds
one's voice appealing to be given song
rather than words to speak or write...

but not even in Egyptian mythology...
it was coming! it was ******* coming home!
the botanical godhead...
in the pantheon was missing!
was missing in the pantheon!
the

פ
P / PH / F (greek sidelined, referee: TH)eta
ט
T
ר
R(esh)
י
    YOD: first son of Yiddish: YON... by a boy named
YON...                  a

      e                                               i
                            Λ
                            Y                                  (LY)HH
    
                  o                       y

ה
hello friend: vowel catcher and laughter generator ...
ה not Π... that one connecting letter: ח

hmm: older than capitalism and communism,
but to simply the problem up:
capitalism is the lion
and everything English...
capitalism is the bear
and everything Russian...
vice versa for communism...
the English bred their mythos on the superiority
of a lion and... a unicorn... more a Celtic, Scottish... thing...
the Russians on... a union with the bear...
the bear and the two headed eagle: ergo:
another unicorn...
like the Srbs... serbs... two headed eagle?
the Soviet downfall with the two-headed eagles
of Chernobyl?
       ******: moi... i seriously sometimes forget
my own ethnicity i'm so caught up in English
metropolitan... cosmopolitanism...
      the Global City-Free-States... CITIES AS STATES...
very imaginable...

not City-States... rather... on the global connectivity
project?
what Dinosaur what meteor?
what super-volcano what Yellowstone
what man?
  it's a bit like Pompeii...
give the worlds greatest party and then the volcano
explodes...
better than a meteor: a volcano killed us...
Yella Big Yella...
            the greatest, supposedly no OB-EASE:
into obese...
          ah ah... tongue out... speak! the prolonged A
of neither ah not āh...
                      -
                        2

                                      ****... that's chemistry's notations...
                     2
                  -                                 (huh?!)

the macron over the A... for AAH...
i.e. not an:                                                      ah!

                        á!
                                               A
    
                                   H                        H

           á                                   'ey?!
                                ha ha: key?    hey?!

the burial ground of...
    hmm...
               BEE-EL...
      
PHTRYH: the godhead is that of a mushroom...
people partied to the music of: infected mushroom...
a god is making himself known...
like the false god of H. P. Lovecraft
horror-imago: Nyarlathotep...

precisely! what vowels!
PH or P or F?
   two H's emerged... a good sign that it's PH
for aesthetic reasons...
scribbling this down...
i feel like i'm actually left-handed...
a diametrical opposition to the stasis-enforced
gravity of nothing falling: everything sitting...

ph(aeiou)t(aioue)r(aouei)y(aueio)h(aeiou)

if insects can be allowed the dimension of godly
creatures: thousand blessings on the head!
the lion's head the eagle...
emblem of the Volk of the Volcano:
a Mushroom-Head...
                    
toilet... ah... welcome relief... the water is running...
running...
hmm... from a top... otherwise flowing...
if...
lake: mirror imitation, Lake Narcissus and
his brother Sea Samael: Death...
     like absinthe before adding water like it
was milk...
the water is in tide: with tide: use the FORCE...
tide...
   like water found the force... the force:
with force water found gravity via tide...
earth found gravity with the quake
fire found gravity with the sparkle of the stars...
fire... charcoal peered at night at the already
lighted... as he admired the lightning with fear...
no lightning ever warmed...
comforts of a distant home... fire found gravity
envying the stars... Prometheus who?
and the brothers of Gaia?
Fero...
                fire...
                              AQ... the water brother...
ah... forgot about the younger sister:
AIA...              air...

what a weird ******* date, coworker after shift drinking...
i've never been on a date with a lesbian...
i felt... TESTED... we watched almost the entire match
Chelsea women vs. Tottenham Women Hotbras...
coming close to the end of the shift she asked
if i wanted to go drinking...
sure... why not...

            hmm... it became a date... after she bought the two
rounds i paid for on our previous encounter
when we actually went ice-skating and i became
a local internet sensation for teaching seagulls how to fly:
wearing ice-skates, frozen lake: fly fly!

so we start... the pub is getting busy...
it feels worse than a strip-club...
at least in a strip-club most people are naked
and people get to wear imaginary masks...
in a pub? **** me...
people are dressed up and are made to wear
imaginary clothing! ha ha!
masks?! what masks... a LIE is 10 masks... one lie equals
10 masks... because a lie concerning
the body of soul... is accented with more than
a physical imprint...
LIE MASK AS IF PRETEND SUPPOSE SO
AS IF AS SO CALL IT QUITS
ACTING

it felt like a date... she was getting all nervy...
going to the toilet... checking her phone all the time...
i was patient, smart girl, while i was pretending to
opt out from her OCD... check the phone...
check the fridge-freezer... check your opt out
capacity for a TV license...

how do you go out on a date with a lesbian?
neither you nor her are advocating for woke talking points...
about pronouns or... Furry? listen...
she talks to me about getting FIFA '22...
i finished gaming off at PS1 and reliving the golden days
by re-watching the walkthroughs of
MGS2 (metal gear solid 2)...

because? movies are ****...
i don't want to want these women...
i want... a ******* canoe and a ******* paddle!
and a grizzly bear cub to cuddle and a birch tree to cuddle!

MUFFA!
YEROYI... AHMADI-DEM-BASHAI
YAMSH'EH GIBYT!
VAZOL: OCH TIBI IM PEO-OM-KATA
ES O I TOBOM.

no language suddenly praise with the rigidity of
continuation...
i'll be honest... what do i need a woman for?
to get old, get a haircut... buy food...
not watch the sunrise or the sunset...
instead watch the news on t.v. watch the t.v.
not watch the aquarium?
don't own an aquarium?

own a car but don't own a bicycle?!
in London...
it was 2: so nie to know you: snooze:
represented by letter Z or 2...
if 5 is S and 6 is b...

                     the marriage of letters
to numbers... numbers? meaningless...
absolutely... meaningless...
199 KILOGRAMS
200 CENIMETRES
X contra "x"...

        dead-weight marrying
      1 + 1 + 1 = 3
when marrying
o + n + e = one...
              ah! but 3 and one are different!
former? the forever unit...
latter? the splinter, E3...
forever question...

               turn 3 into omega...
when sharpen it up for a SH... hide the H...
wake up the Z... hide the Z
emerge with a v above an
                           S

call it crown....

     - so Francesca asked me to go drinking again:
again a date doesn't feel like a date...
am i supposed to know about the plethora of female
sexuality?
         **** McDonald one day...
   straight out of Orange is the New Black the next?
just for drinks... i thought we would equal out the tab
on who paid for what previously...
went into the pub at around 20:30 came out around
00:15... we watched the females' football league...
her team, Chelsea beat Tottenham at the Leyton Orient
ground: no plague of parakeets...
honestly: hand on my heart and one on my ear
standing naked before four mirrors:
i did not hear about wild parakeets... parakeets
in general since: only since i worked the Craven Cottage
shifts... Bishop's Park was full of them!
there were no wild parakeets in Essex... not that i know of...
i once listed down all the birds
i could see from my garden...
seagulls, kestrels, two hawks battling in the air,
woodland pigeons, urban pigeons,
crows, magpies, sparrows, swallows,
robins, blackbirds, Canadian geese (migrating),
mallard ducks (also migrating), swans (migrating ditto)...
but sure as **** no parakeets!

in that session i bought only 1 round...
she was hungry so she ordered food...
three plates of food...
fried wings with two sauces...
a bowl of cheesy fries with strips of bacon
and a bowl of popcorn chicken which
i first thought was: battered and deep-friend
mozzarella nuggets...
i had three things... showing off my eating skills...
my grandparents never used to eat
the cartilage and the best meaty bits
off of the chicken legs, drumsticks or wings...
i went a step further...
a bit like eating a whole apple... including the core...
aa magic trick of eating:
you begin with holding something in your hand...
then it disappears completely...
holding an apple, whole, and eating it whole...
subsequently is a bit like playing with a top hat
imagining red eyed albino bunnies, from Albania
(albino >< Albania).. clash of borrowed letters
but two completely different meanings...

etymologically: Albania: land of the Albinos:
Albanios? more like a he, noun...
a mountain, a he...
                 a lake: he and she... neither, always:
if reading English like a native
of the tongue...
                        Albatross from Albanions...
poetry borrowed from a dictionary, rigid function:
hiding the rhyme
exposing the etymological "rhyme".
Alba-
                                      white...
a dyslexic meets a Daltonist in Dover..
the dyslexic arguments are along the lines of:
Dawid Bovie... dead... pish-poor shapes to be be
before huddling out the grave
for a Madame Tussauds pose and a quick nap
and not asking for
a Doppelganger like Sisyphus without a stone
but the equivalent worth of the stone
in pebbles...

    i would be a fair god...
if i'm willing to give birth to an angel of the Botanical realm
since there's the Lord of the Flies... Beelzebub..
and there's the Lord of the Mosquitos: Jesus "sacred heart"
reincarnated by Jungian inspection
a literal: MOTHER... ******...
Chirst...
                      it's not enough to play the pig's blanket
and pretend a crucifix is a ***** and in dire need of being
used by a ******* according
to Marquis de Sade...
Phateroyah...
                     obviously the vowels will change...
with vowels like water and consonants like earth...
punctuation is like air... punctuation and a physical
representation of writing: nothing ethereal,
nothing metaphysical... writing with expression
on our faces... writing as something less and less
a claustrophobic or its implosion: to an effect...
writing less about an extension of thinking...
in the Cartesian dynamic:
res extensa: via writing, alternatively:
if one were to be prone to smoking enough marijuana:
auditory hallucinations... writing is
by definition the same variant of the EXTENDED classification
as a schizophrenic's auditory hallucination...
the former just forces it upon others...
the latter is unwarranted access to a corrupted ego...
a hurt ego...
an ego without the capacity to imagine,
to dream, to digress...

i showed her how to eat chicken proper...
i ate three wings, two chips avoiding the bacon and cheese,
and about three popcorn nuggets...
i forgot myself: once all the cartilage on the bones
was cleaned off... i went in to bite into the bones...
the ends are sort of soft and marshmallow-almost...
not in texture... in my reimagining:

reimagining - hmm... Kant...
         remembering...
a prior... remembering...
   a posteriori: reimagining...

if a crime happens we don't have an a priori remembering
tactic... ingesting the realm of a prior
with memory... remembering...
that's what we do...
what came before 5? S? or !!!!! five exclamation marks?
or? >>>>> five more-than signs?
did 5 come before five?
did words spawn numbers
or did numbers spawn words?
clearly they're not identical...
and they operate two different realms...

we have words for numbers...
as we have numbers that are also letters...
but numbers are not words...
even 3.14159....
                   is not a word, but a letter: Pi i.e. P...
it's not a word... it's at best a letter...
i'm thinking the gods are words and the angels
are letters...
  while the anti-gods are constants
and their "angels" are numbers...

constants?
                         3.14159..... is not a constant... it's a freak of O...
a circle... and a whole mythology of the Wheel...
O... ****** VENUS...
  phallus... the egg... Oh and 0ero         Z: zed extended
via snooze: zzzzz... harps and snoring... terrible music...
constants? in numbers as if creating a word?

6.02214076 × 10²³ mol⁻¹

                     Avogardo's: the equilibrium dynamic if
i remember correctly...
today i learned about...
     Jakob Fugger... back in his day worth around
400 billions "x"... who financed the construction
of St. Peter's in Rome...
i now wish i visited Rome instead of Venice...
          i would have had more fun in Rome...
  
(algebra is the reply, letters imitating
numbers... should the inclusion of MOL be a problem)...

i bit off the chicken legs marrow...
she was in the toilet about fifty ******* times, each time,
ordering more drinks...
we came in at 20:30 and left at around 00:30
at one point she was in the toilet and
i just remembered something...
they have this "thing" in Japan... where you pay a stranger
to pretend to be your friend...
i'm not pretending... but conversation is dry...
i try to ask questions: i ask questions,
i hear replies... but i don't hear reciprocating
questions... Mr. Familiar has or had no problems?
people confide in me and yet
whenever i try to confide in them
i'm told to shut up...
oh... i get it... i do...
before i knew it i was this heaven-sent ideal...
i was the strength and they were the weakness...
i see it now more than even...
she can tell me about her abusive past...
her drunk father who kissed her mother with knuckles
instead of lips... how she's a lesbian but also
a butch ******* **** with hands almost as large as mine
and how her daughter was put into care
because "X"...
but my shizophrenia is a "schizophrenia" is...
i wasted my 20s on anti-psychotic drugs and psychiatrists
that i bundled up and threw into a hornets' nest of
******* *****, threesomes (just the one, but one is
the threshold)... prostitutes: you talk more with your
eyes and your hands and your other endings
and your nose than you care to ******* lasso a string
of coherent words together...

my problem? what problems?! exactly...
there's nothing wrong with me: i have no regrets...
i don't need to speak to someone with an endearing
sake of self definition... i can just scribble notes down
and leave them for some yet to be born
****** of petty things...
i can do just that... no wonder i can't open up...
talk about... "me"? that's still packaged goods...
i'm waiting for the morbid call of a biography
postmortem...

it's strange going on a date with a lesbian...
it's not a date it's me going for after-work drinks
with a colleague...
it's me and her eyeing up the same behind the counter:
tight ***, fake eyelashes she can pull off...
her unwashed pink-fading dyed fair:
feminist... it's me telling her a little about my past:
i had long hair before,
i couldn't pull off a Jesus...
i would only grow a beard if i cut my hair...
short...
she's still trying to find me on social media...
god: i love keeping a girl in suspense whether or not
i have any social media presence...
best try it out with a lesbian first...
we talk about dating apps:
i have a knowledge of their existence...
but hardly a knowledge that might demand
the pressures of: USAGE...

i end up drinking the night away with a revelation...
i was eyeing these two pairs of love birds for some time...

when i was at the Ol' "John's" taking
a whizz... this Greek version of Freak... o.k. o.k.,
ETHAN ROARK type... balding on the top
of the cranium, allows his hair to grow long...
didn't you know...
Garry Glitter was released... he's already
been harangued by the ******* "police"....

what like Batman did a "forever"?
          
   i get paedophiles doing a second jester runner
with meeting up with underage:
sorry... not boring enough?
it's like pretending to be a mandible,
aerobic classed agility with
a prosthetic... that's what ******* a teenage girl
might feel like:
i rather run with deer....
or charm a fox into becoming my totem...
should i be reincarnated what might i come back as?
i'm not banking: i'm saying: fuchs!
fox! LIS!
if i were to freely roam the prance-lands of Essex
as a fox... that's me, done and dusted...

but i wouldn't inhibit a man willing to repent...
after all: if no forgiveness?
the Muslims were right: no crucifixion took place...
did it?
a 78 year old can be given a heave's sake....
life's fruition and that's done...
sorry for the hurt parties... living their:
adamantly purposive lives
with the weight of: Abel not dead...
sorry... the story goes... Cain murders you....
you're still live yet:
you're supposed to be dead...

i'm only making excuses for Gary Glitter...
i wouldn't be for...
Ralph Heimans...
                                 it's music and i can't stop
listening to Rock & Roll parts I & II...

**** me: i ended up the night...
she hated ***** accents.. Liverpool-day-john-ion...
part Eirish: skirmish: scoot!
a Swabian swap... an "oops": Ludwig... or was
that Lufthansa...
this girl, a ***** bridge,,. i'd love to add hired
bride...
                  but instead?

Traveller Irish... i was talking to a bridge...
bride...
you want a drinking race?
ejecting the two pairs...
i snuggled down my pint: his pint...
in 3x glugs... i saw a phantom of an opera...
what?she told me she never used social
media before marrying?
why do i need to Afghanistan to find
datable brides? i squeak and wriggle myself
into the CAMPER VAN culture...
Irish travellers... so? i'll drink with them...
i'd drink with a repentant ******* asking:
was it anything like Nabokov prescribed?!

£30 for 3.5grams of ****...
time excavated? 30+ hours...
£120 + £10 for entry for an hour with a *******...
well... i'd love to prove my masculinity
with having a competing:
hopeless: always alive sort of battery life:
kept up: *******...
but even i think *** is primarily a dosage of
insect desires...
mammals like us sometimes
tend to play games to escape the pressures
of ***...
requested: what? getting my beard trimmed
or getting my underwear "lost" or my ******* "trimmed"?

i get it... ******* are people who are not afforded
a chance to compensate...
relieve themselves through the shared
antics of (shared) grief...
just like Jesus Christ once crucified can't be
resurrected! n'est ce pas?!
what if... the ******* can be left alone...
in his freedom and a freedom-sickly-cage...
what if?!

a bit like saying:
but i can't be anti-racist...
i can be a non-racist...
but i can't be: anti-racist...
                    there are humans either side of
the "argument"...

one mighty argument of goo after another...
inverting the whole dynamic of dates...
seen your face for over a year...
now i heard your voice: your soul...
you heard me laughter...

a naked table, a naked chair...
a dressed table, a dressed chair,
a lightbulb with a cloche...
rigid Slavic KLOSZ...
walls: brick or slab...
naked... wallpaper slapped on...

   how did that "date" end up?
i was speaking to Irish Travellers...
the ****** types... caravan dwellers...
with the girl... snogging before
ordering a pint....
how she was Lady Margaret all pristine
didn't drink or use social media
before getting married...
i was chasing pints...
race: 3x glugs down...
  i out-chased him...

the pub was closing, we wanted the people out...
strange so, talking to this Irish Traveller Lassie,
most settled people with mortgages or
council houses, flats... avoid speaking to Irish Travellers...
but the revelations she uttered...
i might as well been talking to a Muslim girl...
by her account...
she didn't start drinking before she was married...
she didn't use social media,
she said that in the travellers' community having
a social media account is a bit like *******...
hell: i think it's much worse...
fair play to the capitalistic system...
but social media is what it is...
         it has marketed our private-lives...
not written as a complaint...
                        i allowed for that to happen...
willingly...
now i can't simply walk away from the gallery...
i still don't know what to do with it
instead of making if a reference point akin to:
the red and the amber and the green
of traffic lights...
the "system" wasn't going to capitalise on the market
of my dating preferences and ****** encounters...
sure... i don't mind a public "dear diary"...
a place to store links to music videos when i forget
to add them to my browser's bookmarks:
because i've probably added the same song twice...

but Kant has been bothering me...
ever since i wrote:
a priori remembering
    and a posteriori reimagining...
why do i think that it's impossible
to a priori reimagine?
              
i need to go back to the rubric
and try to burn it into my head like the alphabet
was burned into my mind once...
one of the following four
is impossible:
    with the simplest expression for each:

(analytical) a priori                             (analytical) a posteriori
1 + 1 =2                                                   not every man is a ******
wrong!                                                   some men are
that's synthetic a priori!
+, /, £

(synthetic) a priori                               (synthetic) a posteriori
1 + 1 = 2                                                   £: money makes monkey
i synthesised these                                either that shaman
numbers...                                              mushroom on an ant's
analysed what prior?                            buttocks or:
the increasing number                          the botanical "anomaly"
the added, subtracted,                        money is: asexuality it's
multiplied,                                              what if Adam gave Eve
by god sq. rooted?!                              her first un-earned banknote...
1, 2, 3, 4...                                              spend freely! not having
                                                                earned it!
                                                               what if Eden and the apple
                                                                are wholly outdated
                                                                metaphors?

hmm...

the first £10 she got? was that money earned or money freely
given? was she handed down an allowance or
her first earnings? the trickling down idea follows suit:
if her father gave her money for free... for completing "chores"...
if he gave her an allowance: worse still...
without chores...
why wouldn't expect the sane fir passable:
future partners: daddy day-care "hoes"...
                           my daddy this, my daddy that...
HUBBY no. 2... give give...
i drink less... i smoke some marijuana
and i remember that i read some philosophy...
no new grounding since Wittgenstein
gobbled down Spinoza in a ferocious
of homosexual madness of jealousy...
misunderstood by at least 4 parties...

*** and women unplugged...
some of us boys are playing a game of Alchemy...
solid silver, liquid silver...
i guess plastics are gassy silver...
***... can i please assume there might be
two mouths breathing?

I ate your breath before you ate the apple...
i ate your breath while you gauged
my eyes and saw milk in your *******...

in the labyrinth of: i sigh...
i'm to your bidding bound, sire...
i ate your breath long before you might have ate...
that fruit of autumn, fallen, rotten...
fermenting.... this rotten fruit...
no, not plucked from three... ripe and sweet...
rather picked up attired in autumn's clothes:
auburn, over-ripe cinnaamon-brown,
orange and yellow...

you gave me a drunkard's bear or ilk!
male deer! you gave me a drunkard's apple!
i might be stumbling:
but i'm still chiming with the blues!
what Mosad Mandarin faction of
the intelligence community?

   ching-fang-*******-wall'ah-CHANG
wrote a similar (liar) armistice peace-war:
if we can't use this military equipment...
let's, make... ******* movies!
woo yee HA!

Baron astronaut, ergonomic... a house ought
to have two doors: H... a house
ought to have rooms focused upon the dynamic
of Y...
oh **** your woo! woo! glue my ***
of the Tetragrammaton:
i heard it once before:
the Arabs got their pearly and Kentucky bound
Timothy....
while the Hebrews got the paranoia...
windmills in Chelsea, London,
not Kansas... New Lit Bits of Jersey....

i was left aghast... um... i laughed...
i couldn't say the words ****... pairing it up with her voice...

well... according to sources all knowledge a piori
is ANYLYTICAL... but what was i "analysing"
when i was conjuring the letter R or the number Z?
i borrowed the circle from the sun
and the house from the cave?
i must have done so...
i probably conjured the game of rugby from
the sea's tides and yoyo from an egg of a dodo...
and the goal posts from the letter H...
ripples in the water ZigZag and M and W...
cosine as the refined W
and sine as the refined M...

   a parabola confined in a W...
D in do and devil...
God with Dog and: all?! ah!

    i'm not dumb: i just want to extract more from Kant
than people, ever had, toyed with a jihad of had the Hadiths
in a puddle of paper: equaling the refined weight:
of the organic worth of bark? timber: temples of stone
have turned the gods all cold:
about 5 kilograms for a stash of a week's worth of newspapers...

please please don't let me understand myself:
please oh please don't let me understand myself:
when i'm sober and especially when i'm slightly drink...
drunk... drunk... and smoking a bit of ****...
and...

grass is green: after having established that
not everything is grass
and not everything that's grass is green
wheat? grows like grass...
but it's not green...
and it grows taller than grass
and cows and horses don't eat it...

i could watch a thousand movie and listen to a million
songs... i could even manage to love a woman
and her tell me in the cravat adorning mammal skin
caravans... but i'd still go to bed with Kant...


   it's not that difficult but i need to ask myself to burn
this rubric into my mind...
under each the easiest expression: an abstract...
i just can't word it differently:
a priori remembering...
true...
a posteriori reimagining...
also true:
after the fact of seeing a tree...
can i see a tree prior?
ergo? i can't be capable of a priori reimagining...
first i have to see a tree...
but upon seeing the tree i can't reimagine it...
therefore i can only reimagine what comes after seeing it...
how do i practice a priori remembering?
on the most practical level...
i remember 1 + 1 = 2...
history and memory...
sure... but what of history as epistemology?
as a child i'm not really taught that 1 + 1 = 2...
knowledge and 1 + 1 = 11... not "somehow" just by
"coincidence" of the missed meaning of the cipher +,

epistemology and etymology are the only
two branches that should be given access to the study
of history...

reimagining a tree is impossible in that it's a realm
of geometric abstractions that borrow from
geometric orthodoxy and render them useful:
a tree is a home, i can, reimagine a tree...
if i reimagine myself as a bird or a monkey
perched in a tree... reimagining the roof...
via the sky... but that's hardly likely,
mountain and cave dwelling: home...
a prior reimagining is in its own right something...
but reimagining resulted in the dimension
of a posteriori...
i reimagine a tree and make it: a talking tree...
i apply pareidolia...
or like with clouds... those favourites...
why would i reimagine clouds a priori?
i can... but then that would imply reimagining
cauliflowers... or rather: clouds remind me of
cauliflowers: but that's not reimagining either
clouds or cauliflowers: it's remembering what each
looks like and why, subjectively i remember:
that i think they're alike...

hmm... proof: no pudding....
clearest blue...
          or solid green... the Jade from China...
XINY X= CH
we can apply the letter X in our tongue...
that's what marijuana morphs:
the perception of time... 10 minutes already
feel like an hour....
xolera... cholera H! hhhh...
                 xorwat - croat...
                   xemia - chemistry....
chmiel: xmiel:
                              toad breath!
the stuff i sniff up before going to bed!
you ******* DYSLEXIC...

choroba: xoroba...
sickness...

  DYSLEHIC...
                   i'm asking for upgrades...
i hope my upgrades are not too: demanding...
i'm asking... i'm asking...
i'm getting **** all...
well then... best not become a priest
and conjure up what i might need...
i may need this that and the other...
Hebrew...
i'll need the vowel hiding prerogative
to be minded... i'll need Kant..
punctuation marks and numbers....
most certainly letters...
plus akin to comma....

                                 if still alive: i'll lso require death...

chwila: xwila: a fleeting moment...
lapsed timing...
           c H-A
arecz: samo-H-ah...
                  nie na xixota.... śpiew
raptem: tak! ha! ha! aha!

daj znać gdy ty i ja,
tak nagle żyją... i nie... o tak!
i mihght have a Frenchman's heart
to want: Romance after news of
a hereafter..
the moon is blue
the sun is bronze...
the air is milky in the morning...
the water is traffic and there's no
traffic... i'd like death before the explaining mantra:
what's worth a life: squid parody on... ******* skates?!

the love of the gods is doubly insulating...
first they try to demolish you: one ******* fatal claim after another...
the they employ women... they too... *******.. fail...
what are you rounding up against, you?!
sails without winds and no boats to sail with,
the supposed... great artefacts of claiming
the winds!

i once sat alone in a park... hair growing freely....
i had no addition of a face with the addition of hair...
i had no beard, not stubble...
the wind was and my long hair was
and there was, no war, no famine...
there was only dancing and twice reading
into a Charles Dickens...

twice: a rereading a text not available
for journalistic imprints of:
that satisficed mantra of derailing:
expectations of the meddling-ground....

oh well: oh nothing...
oh riddle me some more: nothing...
life is cheap: buy it bought!
sell it sold!
       earn it not living (it); earning it!
ergo: "living"... and (existentialism)...

   a king's frown is a beggar's stomach...
money makes money:
onions grow on trees!

giving birth to the son of Mammon
was... not... hard?
seriously?!
                          thank god i'm twisted in my own
sort of superstitious way...
when there's talk of a birth of an angel...
my ****** demands become joke...
i forget something, and within the confines
of something: almost: everything...

save180:

p'oh tay t'oh
but not
toe-may-toe
that's not
t'oh may t'oh
but...
t'oh m'ah t'oh

         if only it was a p'oh t'ah toe t'oh.
Matloob Bokhari Oct 2014
MY Place IS Placeless
Matloob Bokhari


You are moonlight
You are fragrance in the breeze
I am bewildered to see you
I am speechless
In the frenzy of my love
I am drifting in the sea of your love
Now and then ,joy and  depression
Dark thoughts and light of love
I am senseless
You and I are inseparable
I want to kiss you  with tenderness
I am helpless
I live for you, my  love is timeless
My heart ,where you are living,
Has become a room of prayer
All  I belong to you!
I am a nameless poet
My place is placeless!

Persian Khushi Sweet and touching


Deanna Caroline Bosworth How precious!...Quite the romantic

    Connie Hofacker Hemmerich Senter Wow, I feel the commitment of your heart...a room of prayer, so very toucing, Matloob. Thank you, for sharing.
Fran Ayers So lovely!!.I missed your poetry!!
Natasha Nabokov Thank you, . Kiss kiss
    Barbara Shoetaker You write so passionately.
Demelia Denton A writer of many explicit romantic words Matloob Bokhari ~ Beautifully written
Lindy Michaels Really lovely...
Jennifer Nov 2012
"...our poor romance was for a moment reflected, pondered upon, and dismissed like a dull party, like a rainy picnic to which only the dullest bores had come, like a humdrum exercise, like a bit of dry mud caking her childhood." V Nabokov

How easy it is to confuse love with hatred
Like what they poured on your soul was acid
Slowly but surely the two opposites bounded
Every moment you spent is now clouded
Welcome to the moment you dreaded

Because slowly that hate disappears
Was it numbed by all those beers?
No, I'm just tired of the pasts' sneers
"Remember? He made you happy!
No, I'm just tired of all those tears
Now it's your heart that hurts with my spears

All those pains faded away
Elsewhere, I led them astray
You're dead to me, go decay
I don't love you, I daresay
Surprise! Viciousness is my forte.
Kim Jong Il Oct 2012
I printed out America
I looked it up on youtube
And I lost it.

Where are you, America?
Did you hide under my communistically red bed sheets?
You’re not there

Are you the piece of paper under my ****?
No, that's another Ginsbergian poem full of soul and extra brilliant kindness.
Are you on my wall?
No, Baudelaire and Mayakovsky turn their heads in disagreement.

Are you one of the leafs in my room of poetry leaf fall?
Do you lie sublimely on my shelf along Nabokov and Turgenev?
Or are you the paper I left on the table in a rush?

Do you lie scrambled in my bin?
I know you never would
Or perhaps the wind took you away
And you forgot to wave?

America, I put my queer hands down in desperation.
* The poem is "America" by Allen Ginsberg
is a familiar phrase
we like to flaunt
    especially
when we would like to utter a complaint
    about contemporary grievances
    god and the world & cetera

in doing so
we keep good company
from Socrates to Livius
    to Shakespeare, Goethe, Emerson,
    Whitman, Fitzgerald, Hurston, Vonnegut,
     Morrison, Angelou, Nabokov, etc.

I guess this is because
the times like these
are always those
in which we live
Vivian Oct 2013
Let's run away together
and buy a cramped, one bedroom apartment
in New York or Prague or San Fran or Bristol
wherever you like
(I could never begrudge you anything)
I'd sleep so much better
with you in my arms
(I wouldn't be scared
that you would **** yourself
in the night)
I'd learn to cook
vegitarian
just for you
and
I'd make you tea
when you were sick;
You'd tell me
"You're pretty"
every morning
and mean it
and
You'd read me
Nabokov and Ginsburg and Shakespeare
over breakfast on the weekend.
We'd go to the museum
and discuss
artistic movements
and painting techniques;
We'd go to concerts
and dance (though
neither of us
can)
We'd lie in the grass
under the stars
naming off constellation
basking in each others' proximity.
In short, we would
love each other;
*** each other;
make each other happy.
Let's run away.
let's run away together.
Taibhsear Nov 2012
Man's literature surveys the landscape of
life with such care that
the passionate man is merely a
caricature of innumerable minds.
The self-created man is as such
according to the connections of his own
experience to that of the volumes
adorning the world's shelves.
Mine eyes of passion are the reincarnation
of the angel Edmund Dantès; anguish
the respondent ripple of the Creature born in
Ingolstadt. Burns teaches humility
as Boethius the ambitions of Lady Fortune, both
under the whims of fleshly confinement.
To bear further testament, Nabokov
brands the sublimity of the individual as
the lost, old soul Taibhsear
calls Love out on the street holding the name
not of his greatest desire but that of her's.
Eons hold the grandest wealth that is the build-up
of the "drops in the ocean" that
are the whims of man and his
written word.
Mateuš Conrad Feb 2019
the new gillette ad.,
******,
please,
DON'T SHAVE...
no Lenin stasi,
not alt.
to whatever left
or right in
copernican
terminology is...

"culture war":
basically,
warring with ronin...
or no factions...
or no shogun
to, mind the matter...
stop shaving,
what is the worst
that could happen,
your face looking
like a 1970s
gyrating *****
bits...

SLO' 'N' GRO'.....
a beard:
which doesn't imply:
any more
of the worth of man,
but a man's worth:
nonetheless,
like Gump Forrest Gump
said:
i know what love is,
Jenny...
  and i know
what a ******* ice-cream
berg-that-sunk-the-Titanic
looks like like: Steward.
none of us are
leaving this *******
being, the either
to either suit a cosmos
of choice: ever
the two smart ones
apart...
savvy?

you're are dumb as
chalk contra brick...
and i am cheese
with an adjective's worth
of of chalk...

lookie 'ere:
a humming camel!
**** me...

i said: *******...
can you even imagine...
i tortured that oyster's worth
of an excess of skin...
in terms of genitals...
parody of 242...
and i ate and ate and ate
that ****...
no praise...

       i recovered my mouth
and the mandible jaw
only when i looked
like:
   having just eaten a slab
of tinned mackerel...
   ugly: born the 4th of july
family fwendy antics
sort of picture...
  all: oily...
like...
my body was dipped
in sea,
but all my mouth was
alright with the religious
procedure of:
mouth dipped in oil:
a messiah is born!

oh don't get me wrong:
i much enjoyed
oral *** performed on
women...
one amsterdam *******
informed me:
laughing...

    you know what
oral *** is like,
misnomer
the canvas of
                prostitutes?
kissing...
i spent an hour kissing
one,
only because i forgot
to trim m'ah... boosh...

i'm bored:
so what's not new?
gillette ad.....
****, that's old:
stop shaving...
yes,
every time i pick
up one of those
thai misnomers of ***
in the park,
and i search beneath
the drowning-line...
and there's no ****
assurance...
trans-phobia?
    
  gay: love beard...
the *****-suprise,
what?
with a sports-bra?!
did i just buy a chicken
breast or was that
a pork's chisel
worth?

         i was arachnophobic
for a while...
the spider was still there...
i employed the tactic:
forget it's, "there"...
the ****** was still
sitting proud like
a painting of some artist
in the national tate...

Heidegger...

        irrational fears were
fun...
or at least:
that was the basis of
them being subject to
emphasis...
      not like this...
not like this though...

                    come the bataclan
incident:
   and they slaughtered
and ate the genitals
of the men shot dead...

   i: dodo:
english: dodo project -
pidgin english...

               scuttle though:
baron mis-brain
      alias:
       and whatever
   dumb-do-dumb-better-be
is noorm...
      
cannot the protest
averting the gillette ad.
be nothing more than:
don't shave?

        hell...
i'm all loser, all beavis & butthead
& beck & radiohead
ready...

               what i supposed
to be... a solo lone creep
actor readying for
the apocalypse of
              what has become
the glory-hole
  contra latex
                    fetish riddles
of...
    the remnant man?

yeah...
i'm trans-phobic...
in that:
i could never fathom
anything coming
in, rather than out,
of that 'ole of
prostate massage
sitting's worth...
but being a faked face...

enough for the worth
of a bearded Beatrice
to suffocate my
limp's worth of:
the sort that requires
an insomniac *****...

i'm trans-phobic,
in terms of
being allocated
the pretense of
having to experiences
a thai surprise...
which is basically
a bisexual girl
picked up in a park
off a bench,
donning a sports bra
and a short-hair
cut...

   what's the difference
between a trans-phobia
and a thai-surprise?

and what isn't?
          - i could never find
a crop of short hair on a woman
unappealing;
every ****** has a tom-boy
haircut...
and what isn't nabokov:
will certainly not be
a john williams novel: stoner...

the really people
of the seriousness literature
of novels...
well... being a, "poet"...
i'm the tabloid gnat's
worth of person,
in the economy of selling
toilet paper...
with **** smear's worth
of content to boot...

'appy as i am:
one of belzeebub's
apostles:

        galileo! galileo!

the worth of the most
uneventful life:
encapsulated
in... a riveting... chance:
rather choice...
of words...
  to make...
                it a life...
almost worth living...
or at least allowing
a... posthumous scan
worth of print.
Anais Vionet Apr 2022
I’m not always a fan of poetry - if I actually take time to ponder it
- it can be so irritatingly rhymey, kind of fussy and needlessly intricate.

Compare my love to a summer’s day and I’ll probably yawn and walk away.

Take a nuanced look at the transactions of *** and consent,
and as adults, we may wonder where the romance went.

You know, it only happens once in a while,
that someone with wit and individual style
comes along with something to say
and scribbles it down in a poem or play.

Here’s to the creative visionaries,
to Dickinson's unique and dreamy imagery,
to Shakespear’s highly stylized, run-on sentences
that manage to speak to us over the centuries
or challenge our stifled, bourgeoisie banality
like Nabokov’s use of stunning vocabulary.
Matloob Bokhari Oct 2014
IF I LOVE NOT, I HAVE NOTHING
MATLOOB BOKHARI


If I worship more than arch angel but don’t love
I have nothing
If I give all I have to the poor, but don’t love
I have nothing
If I have faith which moves mountains,but don’t love
I have nothing
If I give gold in  alms as big as Ohad but don’t love
I have nothing
If I die  moving around the arc of covenant, but don’t love
I have nothing
If I die fighting  in the holy war, but don’t love
I have nothing
If I die and buried in the tomb of prophet but don’t love
I have nothing
If I get land larger than Solomon’s Kingdom,but don’t love
I have nothing
If I receive God’s healing power like Christ but don’t love
I have nothing
If I am given un paralleled patience like Ayub but don’t love
I have nothing
If make sacrifice like Ismael and Hussain but don’t love
I have nothing
If I am given the kingdom of the world, but don’t love
I have nothing
No matter what I have done, no matter what will  I do
Without  wings of love, I cannot soar in the kingdom of God
Natasha Nabokov: reading your poems, I am reminded of Tagore who is my first love

Angela Davis :matloob, your work is so amazing!

Laura Luce del:Hello  Matloob Thanks.,  Its an amazing, understandable & great write. I hope you are blessed throughout the rest of yoir life. Never stop writing! ♡LLM


Vincent Boykin: I admire your courage in writing about Love in a serious relationship with the spiritual. It's shows your heart and that you understand Love. Love is usually just some word in the cosmos. Love bonds everything in good. Love. Super Poem! It's how I took it. It made my day. Thank you.
Demelia Denton: An amazing poem Matloob .... Enchanting ...beautifully worded
Michele Vizzotti-White: I like the fast pace of it, but it still is rich in thought/words


Fay Slimm: Ah - - how true are these words Mat. - love is all we need and nothing more. An inspiring read.


Seyed Mohammad Reza Parhizgar : this is why you are called Matloob, but I have something better than love, and that's God.thanks dear friend I loved your poem.

Sara Fielder: I agree, love should be the motivating factor in everything we think, do, and say. The world would be a better place if we all remembered that.

    
Stephen Montgomery : My favorite line is:  all   I can sense the cogs turning in this sincere post which has come to an understanding; Love must be everything because love conflicts with nothing. Hold everything sacred and nothing suffers

— The End —