Submit your work, meet writers and drop the ads. Become a member
Martin Bailes Mar 2017
The Great Negotiator
likes to play golf actually
likes to play a lot of golf
even though he touted
from the podium that he'd
be too busy to play golf
unlike that lazy Obama
who couldn't get enough
golf time it appeared didn't it,

& The Great Negotiator has
visited his golf clubs 13 times
in 100 days but his staff
like to kind of not talk about
it too much really do they,
it actually being kind of a
sensitive topic,

& the Master Deal Maker
would be winning so much
you'd be tired of him winning
& then maybe just perhaps
he might find time for a round
of golf in between the many
deals he'd be pulling off
left, right, & centre & winning,
winning, winning in his first
100 days as the Great Negotiator
who could make a deal & get
things done,

& all that other stuff he endlessly
spouted forth in that vapid earnest
New York deal making whisper of his,

oh yes ... The Great Negotiator.
Good god almighty.
Meena Menon Sep 2021
Flicker Shimmer Glow

The brightest star can shine even with thick black velvet draped over it.  
Quartz, lime and salt crystals formed a glass ball.
The dark womb held me, warm and soft.  
My mom called my cries when I was born the most sorrowful sound she had ever heard.  
She said she’d never heard a baby make a sound like that.    
I’d open my eyes in low light until the world’s light healed rather than hurt.  
The summer before eighth grade, July 1992,
I watched a shooting star burn by at 100,000 miles per hour as I stood on the balcony  
while my family celebrated my birthday inside.  
It made it into the earth’s atmosphere
but it didn’t look like it was coming down;
I know it didn’t hit the ground but it burned something in the time it was here.  
The glass ball of my life cracked inside.  
Light reflected off the salt crystal cracks.  
I saw the beauty of the light within.  
Nacre from my shell kept those cracks from getting worse,
a wild pearl as defense mechanism.  
In 2001, I quit my job after they melted and poured tar all over my life.  
All summer literature class bathtubs filled with rose hip oil cleaned the tar.  
That fall logic and epistemology classes spewed black ink all over my philosophy
written over ten years then.  
Tar turned to asphalt when I met someone from my old job for a drink in November
and it paved a road for my life that went to the hospital I was in that December
where it sealed the roof on my life
when I was almost murdered there
and in February after meeting her for another drink.  
They lit a fire at the top of the glacier and pushed the burning pile of black coal off the edge,
burnt red, looking like flames falling into the valley.  
While that blazed the side of the cliff something lit an incandescent light.  
The electricity from the metal lightbulb ***** went through wires and heated the filament between until it glowed.  
I began putting more work into emotional balance from things I learned at AA meetings.  
In Spring 2003, the damage that the doctors at the hospital in 2001 had done
made it harder for light to reflect from the cracks in the glass ball.
I’d been eating healthy and trying to get regular exercises since 1994
but in Spring 2003 I began swimming for an hour every morning .  
The water washed the pollution from the burning coals off
And then I escaped in July.  
I moved to London to study English Language and Linguistics.  
I would’ve studied English Language and Literature.  
I did well until Spring 2004 when I thought I was being stalked.  
I thought I was manic.  
I thought I was being stalked.  
I went home and didn’t go back for my exams after spring holiday.  
Because I felt traumatized and couldn’t write poetry anymore,
I used black ink to write my notes for my book on trauma and the Russian Revolution.
I started teaching myself German.  
I stayed healthy.  
In 2005, my parents went to visit my mom’s family in Malaysia for two weeks.
I thought I was being stalked.  
I knew I wasn’t manic.  
I thought I was being stalked.  
I told my parents when they came home.  
They thought I was manic.  
I showed them the shoe prints in the snow of different sizes from the woods to the windows.  
They thought I was manic.  
I was outside of my comfort zone.  
I moved to California. I found light.  
I made light,
the light reflected off the salt crystals I used to heal the violence inflicted on me from then on.  
The light turned the traffic lights to not just green from red
but amber and blue.  
The light turned the car signals left and right.  
The light reflected off of salt crystals, light emitting diodes,
electrical energy turned directly to light,
electroluminescence.  
The electrical currents flowed through,
illuminating.  
Alone in the world, I moved to California in July 2005
but in August  I called the person I escaped in 2003,
the sulfur and nitrogen that I hated.  
He didn’t think I was manic but I never said anything.
I never told him why I asked him to move out to California.  
When his coal seemed like only pollution,
I asked him to leave.  
He threatened me.  
I called the authorities.  
They left me there.
He laughed.  
Then the violence came.  
****:  stabbed and punched, my ****** bruised, purple and swollen.  
The light barely reflected from the glass ball wIth cracks through all the acid rain, smoke and haze.
It would take me half an hour to get my body to do what my mind told it to after.  
My dad told me my mom had her cancer removed.
The next day, the coal said if I wanted him to leave he’d leave.  
I booked his ticket.
I drove him to the airport.  
Black clouds gushed the night before for the first time in months,
the sky clear after the rain.  
He was gone and I was free,
melted glass, heated up and poured—
looked like fire,
looked like the Snow Moon in February
with Mercury in the morning sky.  
I worked through ****.  
I worked to overcome trauma.  
Electricity between touch and love caused acid rain, smoke, haze, and mercury
to light the discharge lamps, streetlights and parking lot lights.
Then I changed the direction of the light waves.  
Like lead glass breaks up the light,
lead from the coal, cleaned and replaced by potassium,
glass cut clearly, refracting the light,
electrolytes,
electrical signals lit through my body,
thick black velvet drapes gone.  





















Lava

I think that someone wrote into some palm leaf a manuscript, a gift, a contract.  
After my parents wedding, while they were still in India,
they found out that my dad’s father and my mom’s grandfather worked for kings administering temples and collecting money for their king from the farmers that worked the rice paddies each king owned.  They both left their homes before they left for college.  
My dad, a son of a brahmin’s son,
grew up in his grandmother’s house.  
His mother was not a Brahmin.  
My mother grew up in Malaysia where she saw the children from the rubber plantation
when she walked to school.  
She doesn’t say what caste she is.  
He went to his father’s house, then college.  
He worked, then went to England, then Canada.  
She went to India then Canada.  
They moved to the United States around Christmas 1978
with my brother while she was pregnant with me.  
My father signed a contract with my mother.  
My parents took ashes and formed rock,
the residue left in brass pots in India,
the rocks, so hot, they turned back to lava miles away before turning back to ash again,
then back to rock,
the lava from a super volcano,
the ash purple and red.  


















Circles on a Moss Covered Volcano

The eruption beatifies the magma.  
It becomes obsidian,
only breaks with a fracture,
smooth circles where it breaks.  

My mom was born on the grass
on a lawn
in a moss covered canyon at the top of a volcanic island.  
My grandfather lived in Malaysia before the Japanese occupied.  
When the volcano erupted,
the lava dried at the ocean into black sand.  
The British allied with the Communist Party of Malaysia—
after they organized.  
After the Americans defeated the Japanese at Pearl Harbor,
the British took over Malaysia again.  
They kept different groups apart claiming they were helping them.  
The black sand had smooth pebbles and sharp rocks.  
Ethnic Malay farmers lived in Kampongs, villages.  
Indians lived on plantations.  
The Chinese lived in towns and urban areas.  
Ethnic Malays wanted independence.
In 1946, after strikes, demonstrations, and boycotts
the British agreed to work with them.  
The predominantly Chinese Communist Party of Malaysia went underground,
guerrilla warfare against the British,
claiming their fight was for independence.  
For the British, that emergency required vast powers
of arrest, detention without trial and deportation to defeat terrorism.  
The Emergency became less unpopular as the terrorism became worse.  
The British were the iron that brought oxygen through my mom’s body.  
She loved riding on her father’s motorcycle with him
by the plantations,
through the Kampongs
and to the city, half an hour away.  
The British left Malaysia independent in 1957
with Malaysian nationalists holding most state and federal government offices.  
As the black sand stretches towards the ocean,
it becomes big stones of dried lava, flat and smooth.  

My mom thought her father and her uncle were subservient to the British.  
She thought all things, all people were equal.  
When her father died when she was 16, 1965,
they moved to India,
my mother,
a foreigner in India, though she’s Indian.  
She loved rock and roll and mini skirts
and didn’t speak the local language.  
On the dried black lava,
it can be hard to know the molten lava flickers underneath there.  
Before the Korean War,
though Britain and the United States wanted
an aggressive resolution
condemning North Korea,
they were happy
that India supported a draft resolution
condemning North Korea
for breach of the peace.  
During the Korean War,
India, supported by Third World and other Commonwealth nations,
opposed United States’ proposals.
They were able to change the U.S. resolution
to include the proposals they wanted
and helped end the war.  
China wanted the respect of Third World nations
and saw the United States as imperialist.  
China thought India was a threat to the Third World
by taking aid from the United States and the Soviets.  
Pakistan could help with that and a seat at the United Nations.  
China wanted Taiwan’s seat at the UN.
My mother went to live with her uncle,
a communist negotiator for a corporation,
in India.  
A poet,
he threw parties and invited other artists, musicians and writers.  
I have the same brown hyperpigmentation at my joints that he had.  
During the day, only the steam from the hot lava can be seen.  
In 1965, Pakistani forces went into Jammu and Kashmir with China’s support.  
China threatened India after India sent its troops in.  
Then they threatened again before sending their troops to the Indian border.  
The United States stopped aid to Pakistan and India.
Pakistan agreed to the UN ceasefire agreement.  
Pakistan helped China get a seat at the UN
and tried to keep the west from escalating in Vietnam.  
The smoldering sound of the lava sizzles underneath the dried lava.  
When West Pakistan refused to allow East Pakistan independence,
violence between Bengalis and Biharis developed into upheaval.  
Bengalis moved to India
and India went into East Pakistan.  
Pakistan surrendered in December 1971.  
East Pakistan became independent Bangladesh

The warm light of the melted lava radiates underneath but burns.  
In 1974, India tested the Smiling Buddha,
a nuclear bomb.  
After Indira Gandhi’s conviction for election fraud in 1973,
Marxist Professor Narayan called for total revolution
and students protested all over India.  
With food shortages, inflation and regional disputes
like Sikh separatists training in Pakistan for an independent Punjab,
peasants and laborers joined the protests.  
Railway strikes stopped the economy.  
In 1975, Indira Gandhi, the Iron Lady,
declared an Emergency,
imprisoning political opponents, restricting freedoms and restricting the press,
claiming threats to national security
because the war with Pakistan had just ended.  
The federal government took over Kerala’s communist dominated government and others.  

My mom could’ve been a dandelion, but she’s more like thistle.  
She has the center that dries and flutters in the wind,
beautiful and silky,
spiny and prickly,
but still fluffy, downy,
A daisy.
They say thistle saved Scotland from the Norse.  
Magma from the volcano explodes
and the streams of magma fly into the air.  
In the late 60s,
the civil rights movement rose
against the state in Northern Ireland
for depriving Catholics
of influence and opportunity.
The Northern Irish police,
Protestant and unionist, anti-catholic,
responded violently to the protests and it got worse.  
In 1969, the British placed Arthur Young,
who had worked at the Federation of Malaya
at the time of their Emergency
at the head of the British military in Northern Ireland.
The British military took control over the police,
a counter insurgency rather than a police force,
crowd control, house searches, interrogation, and street patrols,
use of force against suspects and uncooperative citizens.  
Political crimes were tolerated by Protestants but not Catholics.  
The lava burns the rock off the edge of the volcano.  

On January 30, 1972, ****** Sunday,  
British Army policing killed 13 unarmed protesters
fighting for their rights over their neighborhood,
protesting the internment of suspected nationalists.
That led to protests across Ireland.  
When banana leaves are warmed,
oil from the banana leaves flavors the food.  
My dad flew from Canada to India in February 1972.  
On February 4, my dad met my mom.  
On February 11, 1972,
my dad married my mom.  
They went to Canada,
a quartz singing bowl and a wooden mallet wrapped in suede.  
The rock goes down with the lava, breaking through the rocks as it goes down.  
In March 1972, the British government took over
because they considered the Royal Ulster Police and the Ulster Special Constabulary
to be causing most of the violence.  
The lava blocks and reroutes streams,
melts snow and ice,
flooding.  
Days later, there’s still smoke, red.  
My mom could wear the clothes she liked
without being judged
with my dad in Canada.  
She didn’t like asking my dad for money.
My dad, the copper helping my mother use that iron,
wanted her to go to college and finish her bachelors degree.
She got a job.  
In 1976, the police took over again in Northern Ireland
but they were a paramilitary force—
armored SUVs, bullet proof jackets, combat ready
with the largest computerized surveillance system in the UK,
high powered weapons,
trained in counter insurgency.  
Many people were murdered by the police
and few were held accountable.  
Most of the murdered people were not involved in violence or crime.  
People were arrested under special emergency powers
for interrogation and intelligence gathering.  
People tried were tried in non-jury courts.  
My mom learned Malayalam in India
but didn’t speak well until living with my dad.  
She also learned to cook after getting married.  
Her mother sent her recipes; my dad cooked for her—
turmeric, cumin, coriander, cayenne and green chiles.  
Having lived in different countries,
my mom’s food was exposed to many cultures,
Chinese and French.
Ground rock, minerals and glass
covered the ground
from the ash plume.  
She liked working.  

A volcano erupted for 192 years,
an ice age,
disordered ices, deformed under pressure
and ordered ice crystals, brittle in the ice core records.  
My mother liked working.  
Though Khomeini was in exile by the 1970s in Iran,
more people, working and poor,
turned to him and the ****-i-Ulama for help.
My mom didn’t want kids though my dad did.
She agreed and in 1978 my brother was born.
Iran modernized but agriculture and industry changed so quickly.  
In January 1978, students protested—
censorship, surveillance, harassment, illegal detention and torture.  
Young people and the unemployed joined.  
My parents moved to the United States in December 1978.  
The regime used a lot of violence against the protesters,
and in September 1978 declared martial law in Iran.  
Troops were shooting demonstrators.
In January 1979, the Shah and his family fled.  
On February 11, 1979, my parents’ anniversary,
the Iranian army declared neutrality.  
I was born in July 1979.
The chromium in emeralds and rubies colors them.
My brother was born in May and I was born in July.

Obsidian—
iron, copper and chromium—
isn’t a gas
but it isn’t a crystal;
it’s between the two,
the ordered crystal and the disordered gas.  
They made swords out of obsidian.  





Warm Light Shatters

The eruption beatifies the magma.  
It becomes obsidian,
only breaks with a fracture,
smooth circles where it breaks.  

My dad was born on a large flat rock on the edge of the top
of a hill,
Molasses, sweet and dark, the potent flavor dominates,
His father, the son of a Brahmin,
His mother from a lower caste.
His father’s family wouldn’t touch him,
He grew up in his mother’s mother’s house on a farm.  
I have the same brown hyperpigmentation spot on my right hand that he has.

In 1901, D’Arcy bought a 60 year concession for oil exploration In Iran.
The Iranian government extended it for another 32 years in 1933.
At that time oil was Iran’s “main source of income.”
In 1917’s Balfour Declaration, the British government proclaimed that they favored a national home for the Jews in Palestine and their “best endeavors to facilitate the achievement” of that.

The British police were in charge of policing in the mandate of Palestine.  A lot of the policemen they hired were people who had served in the British army before, during the Irish War for Independence.  
The army tried to stop how violent the police were, police used torture and brutality, some that had been used during the Irish War for Independence, like having prisoners tied to armored cars and locomotives and razing the homes of people in prison or people they thought were related to people thought to be rebels.
The police hired Arab police and Jewish police for lower level policing,
Making local people part of the management.
“Let Arab police beat up Arabs and Jewish police beat up Jews.”

The lava blocks and reroutes streams, melts snow and ice, flooding.
In 1922, there were 83,000 Jews, 71,000 Christians, and 589,000 Muslims.
The League If Nations endorsed the British Mandate.
During an emergency, in the 1930s, British regulations allowed collective punishment, punishing villages for incidents.
Local officers in riots often deserted and also shared intelligence with their own people.
The police often stole, destroyed property, tortured and killed people.  
Arab revolts sapped the police power over Palestinians by 1939.

My father’s mother was from a matrilineal family.
My dad remembers tall men lining up on pay day to respectfully wait for her, 5 feet tall.  
She married again after her husband died.
A manager from a tile factory,
He spoke English so he supervised finances and correspondence.
My dad, a sunflower, loved her: she scared all the workers but exuded warmth to the people she loved.

Obsidian shields people from negative energy.
David Cargill founded the Burmah Oil Co. in 1886.
If there were problems with oil exploration in Burma and Indian government licenses, Persian oil would protect the company.  
In July 1906, many European oil companies, BP, Royal Dutch Shell and others, allied to protect against the American oil company, Standard Oil.
D’Arcy needed money because “Persian oil took three times as long to come on stream as anticipated.”
Burmah Oil Co. began the Anglo-Persian Oil Co. as a subsidiary.
Ninety-seven percent of British Petroleum was owned by Burmah Oil Co.
By 1914, the British government owned 51% of the Anglo-Persian Oil Co.  
Anglo-Persian acquired independence from Burmah Oil and Royal Dutch Shell with two million pounds from the British government.

The lava burns the rock off the edge of the volcano.
In 1942, after the Japanese took Burma,
the British destroyed their refineries before leaving.
The United Nations had to find other sources of oil.
In 1943, Japan built the Burma-Thailand Railroad with forced labor from the Malay peninsula who were mostly from the rubber plantations.

The rock goes down with the lava, breaking through the rocks as it goes down.
In 1945. Japan destroyed their refineries before leaving Burma.
Cargill, Watson and Whigham were on the Burmah Oil Co. Board and then the Anglo Iranian Oil Co. Board.  

In 1936 Palestine, boycotts, work stoppages, and violence against British police officials and soldiers compelled the government to appoint an investigatory commission.  
Leaders of Egypt, Trans Jordan, Syria and Iraq helped end the work stoppages.
The British government had the Peel Commission read letters, memoranda, and petitions and speak with British officials, Jews and Arabs.  
The Commission didn’t believe that Arabs and Jews could live together in a single Jewish state.
Because of administrative and financial difficulties the Colonial Secretary stated that to split Palestine into Arab and Jewish states was impracticable.  
The Commission recommended transitioning 250,000 Arabs and 1500 Jews with British control over their oil pipeline, their naval base and Jerusalem.  
The League of Nations approved.
“It will not remove the grievance nor prevent the recurrence,” Lord Peel stated after.
The Arab uprising was much more militant after Peel.  Thousands of Arabs were wounded, ten thousand were detained.  
In Sykes-Picot and the Husain McMahon agreements, the British promised the Arabs an independent state but they did not keep that promise.  
Representatives from the Arab states rejected the Peel recommendations.
United Nations General Assembly Resolution181 partitioned Palestine into Arab and Jewish states with an international regime for the city of Jerusalem backed by the United States and the Soviet Union.  

The Israeli Yishuv had strong military and intelligence organization —-  
the British recognized that their interest was with the Arabs and abstained from the vote.  
In 1948, Israel declared the establishment of its state.  
Ground rock, minerals, and gas covered the ground from the ash plume.
The Palestinian police force was disbanded and the British gave officers the option of serving in Malaya.

Though Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy supported snd tried to get Israel to offer the Arabs concessions, it wasn’t a major priority and didn’t always approve of Israel’s plans.
Arabs that had supported the British to end Turkish rule stopped supporting the West.  
Many Palestinians joined left wing groups and violent third world movements.  
Seventy-eight percent of the territory of former Palestine was under Israel’s control.  

My dad left for college in 1957 and lived in an apartment above the United States Information services office.
Because he graduated at the top of his class, he was given a job with the public works department of the government on the electricity board.  
“Once in, you’ll never leave.”
When he wanted a job where he could do real work, his father was upset.
He broke the chains with bells for vespers.
He got a job in Calcutta at Kusum Products and left the government, though it was prestigious to work there.
In the chemical engineering division, one of the projects he worked on was to design a *** distillery, bells controlled by hammers, hammers controlled by a keyboard.
His boss worked in the United Kingdom for. 20 years before the company he worked at, part of Power Gas Corporation, asked him to open a branch in Calcutta.
He opened the branch and convinced an Industrialist to open a company doing the same work with him.  The branch he opened closed after that.  
My dad applied for labor certification to work abroad and was selected.  
His boss wrote a reference letter for my him to the company he left in the UK.  My dad sent it telling the company when he was leaving for the UK.  
The day he left for London, he got the letter they sent in the mail telling him to take the train to Sheffield the next day and someone from the firm would meet him at the station.  
His dad didn’t know he left, he didn’t tell him.
He broke the chains with chimes for schisms.


Anglo-Persian Oil became Anglo-Iranian Oil in 1935.
The British government used oil and Anglo-Persian oil to fight communism, have a stronger relationship with the United States and make the United Kingdom more powerful.  
The National Secularists, the Tudeh, and the Communists wanted to nationalize Iran’s oil and mobilized the Iranian people.
The British feared nationalization in Iran would incite political parties like the Secular Nationalists all over the world.  
In 1947, the Iranian government passed the Single Article Law that “[increased] investment In welfare benefits, health, housing, education, and implementation of Iranianization through substitution of foreigners” at Anglo-Iranian Oil Co.
“Anglo-Iranian Oil Company made more profit in 1950 than it paid to the Iranian government in royalties over the previous half century.”
The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company tried to negotiate a new concession and claimed they’d hire more Iranian people into jobs held by British and people from other nationalities at the company.
Their hospitals had segregated wards.  
On May 1, 1951, the Iranian government passed a bill that nationalized Anglo- Iranian Oil Co.’s holdings.  
During the day, only the steam from the hot lava can be seen.
In August 1953, the Iranian people elected Mossadegh from the Secular Nationalist Party as prime minister.
The British government with the CIA overthrew Mossadegh using the Iranian military after inducing protests and violent demonstrations.  
Anglo-Iranian Oil changed its name to British Petroleum in 1954.
Iranians believe that America destroyed Iran’s “last chance for democracy” and blamed America for Iran’s autocracy, its human rights abuses, and secret police.

The smoldering sound of the lava sizzles underneath the dried lava.  
In 1946, Executive Yuan wanted control over 4 groups of Islands in the South China Sea to have a stronger presence there:  the Paracels, the Spratlys, Macclesfield Bank, and the Pratas.
The French forces in the South China Sea would have been stronger than the Chinese Navy then.
French Naval forces were in the Gulf of Tonkin, U.S. forces were in the Taiwan Strait, the British were in Hong Kong, and the Portuguese were in Macao.
In the 1950s, British snd U.S. oil companies thought there might be oil in the Spratlys.  
By 1957, French presence in the South China Sea was hardly there.  

When the volcano erupted, the lava dried at the ocean into black sand.
By 1954, the Tudeh Party’s communist movement and  intelligence organization had been destroyed.  
Because of the Shah and his government’s westernization policies and disrespectful treatment of the Ulama, Iranians began identifying with the Ulama and Khomeini rather than their government.  
Those people joined with secular movements to overthrow the Shah.  

In 1966, Ne Win seized power from U Nu in Burma.
“Soldiers ruled Burma as soldiers.”
Ne Win thought that western political
Institutions “encouraged divisions.”
Minority groups found foreign support for their separatist goals.
The Karens and the Mons supported U Nu in Bangkok.  


Rare copper, a heavy metal, no alloys,
a rock in groundwater,
conducts electricity and heat.
In 1965, my Dad’s cousin met him at Heathrow, gave him a coat and £10 and brought him to a bed and breakfast across from Charing Cross Station where he’d get the train to Sheffield the next morning.
He took the train and someone met him at the train station.  
At the interview they asked him to design a grandry girder, the main weight bearing steel girder as a test.
Iron in the inner and outer core of the earth,
He’d designed many of those.  
He was hired and lived at the YMCA for 2 1/2 years.  
He took his mother’s family name, Menon, instead of his father’s, Varma.
In 1967, he left for Canada and interviewed at Bechtel before getting hired at Seagrams.  
Iron enables blood to carry oxygen.
His boss recommended him for Dale Carnegie’s leadership training classes and my dad joined the National Instrument Society and became President.
He designed a still In Jamaica,
Ordered all the parts, nuts and bolts,
Had all the parts shipped to Jamaica and made sure they got there.
His boss supervised the construction, installation and commission in Jamaica.
Quartz, heat and fade resistant, though he was an engineer and did the work of an engineer, my dad only had the title, technician so my dad’s boss thought he wasn’t getting paid enough but couldn’t get his boss to offer more than an extra $100/week or the title of engineer; he told my dad he thought he should leave.
In 1969, he got a job at Celanese, which made rayon.
He quit Celanese to work at McGill University and they allowed him to take classes to earn his MBA while working.  

The United States and Israel’s alliance was strong by 1967.
United Nations Security Council Resolution 242 at the end of the Third Arab Israeli War didn’t mention the Palestinians but mentioned the refugee problem.
After 1967, the Palestinians weren’t often mentioned and when mentioned only as terrorists.  
Palestinians’ faith in the “American sponsored peace process” diminished, they felt the world community ignored and neglected them also.
Groups like MAN that stopped expecting anything from Arab regimes began hijacking airplanes.
By 1972, the Palestine Liberation Organization had enough international support to get by the United States’ veto in the United Nations Security Council and Arab League recognition as representative of the Palestinian people.
The Palestinians knew the United States stated its support, as the British had, but they weren’t able to accomplish anything.  
The force Israel exerted in Johnson’s United States policy delivered no equilibrium for the Palestinians.  

In 1969, all political parties submitted to the BSPP, Burma Socialist Programme Party.
Ne Win nationalized banks and oil and deprived minorities of opportunities.
Ne Win became U Nu Win, civilian leader of Burma in 1972 and stopped the active role that U Nu defined for Burma internationally
He put military people in power even when they didn’t have experience which triggered “maldistribution of goods and chronic shortages.”  
Resources were located in areas where separatist minorities had control.

The British presence in the South China Sea ended in 1968.  
The United States left Vietnam in 1974 and China went into the Western Paracels.
The U.S. didn’t intervene and Vietnam took the Spratlys.
China wanted to claim the continental shelf In the central part of the South China Sea and needed the Spratlys.
The United States mostly disregarded the Ulama In Iran and bewildered the Iranian people by not supporting their revolution.

Obsidian—
iron, copper and chromium—
isn’t a gas
but it isn’t a crystal;
it’s between the two,
the ordered crystal and the disordered gas.  
They made swords out of obsidian.


Edelweiss

I laid out in my backyard in my bikini.  
I love the feeling of my body in the sun.  
I’d be dark from the end of spring until winter.
The snow froze my bare feet through winter ,
my skin pale.
American towns in 1984,
Free, below glaciers the sunlight melted the snow,
a sea of green and the edelweiss on the edge of the  limestone,
frosted but still strong.    
When the spring warmed the grass,
the grass warmed my feet. 
The whole field looked cold and white from the glacier but in the meadow,
the bright yellow centers of those flowers float free in the center of the white petals.
The bright yellow center of those edelweiss scared the people my parents ran to America from India to get away from.  
On a sidewalk in Queens, New York in 1991, the men stared and yelled comments at me in short shorts and a fitted top in the summer.  
I grabbed my dad’s arm.

























The Bread and Coconut Butter of Aparigraha

Twelve year old flowerhead,
Marigold, yarrow and nettle,
I’d be all emotion
If not for all my work
From the time I was a teenager.
I got depressed a lot.
I related to people I read about
In my weather balloon,
Grasping, ignorant, and desperate,
But couldn’t relate to other twelve year olds.
After school I read Dali’s autobiography,
Young ****** Autosodomized by Her Own Chastity.
Fresh, green nettle with fresh and dried yarrow for purity.
Dead souls enticed to the altar by orange marigolds,
passion and creativity,
Coax sleep and rouse dreams.
Satellites measure indirectly with wave lengths of light.
My weather balloon measures the lower and middle levels of the atmosphere directly,
Fifty thousand feet high,
Metal rod thermometer,
Slide humidity sensor,
Canister for air pressure.

I enjoy rye bread and cold coconut butter in my weather balloon,
But I want Dali, and all the artists and writers.
Rye grows at high altitudes
But papyrus grows in soil and shallow water,
Strips of papyrus pith shucked from their stems.
When an anchor’s weighed, a ship sails,
But when grounded we sail.
Marigolds, yarrow and nettle,
Flowerhead,
I use the marigold for sleep,
The yarrow for endurance and intensity,
toiling for love and truth,
And the nettle for healing.
Strong rye bread needs equally strong flavors.
By the beginning of high school,
I read a lot of Beat literature
And found Buddhism.
I loved what I read
But I didn’t like some things.
I liked attachment.  
I got to the ground.
Mushrooms grow in dry soil.
Attachment to beauty is Buddha activity.
Not being attached to things I don’t find beautiful is Buddha activity.  
I fried mushrooms in a single layer in oil, fleshy.
I roasted mushrooms at high temperatures in the oven, crisp.
I simmered mushrooms in stock with kombu.
Rye bread with cold coconut butter and cremini mushrooms,
raw, soft and firm.  
Life continues, life changes,
Attachments, losses, mourning and suffering,
But change lures growth.
I find stream beds and wet soil.
I lay the strips of papyrus next to each other.
I cross papyrus strips over the first,
Then wet the crossed papyrus strips,
Press and cement them into a sheet.
I hammer it and dry it in the sun,
With no thought of achievement or self,
Flowerhead,
Hands filled with my past,
Head filled with the future,
Dali, artists poets,
Wishes and desires aligned with nature,
Abundance,
Cocoa, caraway, and molasses.

If I ever really like someone,
I’ll be wearing the dress he chooses,
Fresh green nettle and yarrow, the seeds take two years to grow strong,
Lasting love.
Marigolds steer dead souls from the altar to the afterlife,
Antiseptic, healing wounds,
Soothing sore throats and headaches.
Imperturbable, stable flowerhead,
I empty my mind.
When desires are aligned with nature, desire flows.
Papyrus makes paper and cloth.
Papyrus makes sails.
Charcoal from the ash of pulverized papyrus heals wounds.
Without attachment to the fruit of action
There is continuation of life,
Rye bread and melted coconut butter,
The coconut tree in the coconut butter,
The seed comes from the ground out of nothing,
Naturalness.
It has form.
As the seed grows the seed expresses the tree,
The seed expresses the coconut,
The seed expresses the coconut butter.
Rye bread, large open hollows, chambers,
Immersed in melted coconut butter,
Desire for expansion and creation,
No grasping, not desperate.
When the mind is compassion, the mind is boundless.
Every moment,
only that,
Every moment,
a scythe to the papyrus in the stream bed of the past.  

































Sound on Powdery Blue

Potter’s clay, nymph, plum unplumbed, 1993.
Dahlia, ice, powder, musk and rose,
my source of life emerged in darkness, blackness.
Seashell fragments in the sand,
The glass ball of my life cracked inside,
Light reflected off the salt crystal cracks,
Nacre kept those cracks from getting worse.
Young ****** Autosodomized By Her Own Chastity,
Nymph, I didn’t want to give my body,
Torn, *****, ballgown,
To people who wouldn’t understand me,
Piquant.

Outside on the salt flats,
Aphrodite, goddess of beauty, pleasure and fertility and
Asexual Artemis, goddess of animals, and the hunt,
Mistress of nymphs,
Punish with ruthless savagery.

In my bedroom, blue caribou moss covered rocks, pine, and yew trees,
The heartwood writhes as hurricane gales, twisters and whirlwinds
Contort their bark,
Roots strong in the soil.
Orris root dried in the sun, bulbs like wood.
Dahlia runs to baritone soundbath radio waves.
Light has frequencies,
Violet between blue and invisible ultraviolet,
Flame, slate and flint.
Every night is cold.

Torii gates, pain secured as sacred.
An assignation, frost hardy dahlia and a plangent resonant echo.
High frequency sound waves convert to electrical signals,
Breathe from someone I want,
Silt.
Beam, radiate, ensorcel.
I break the bark,
Sap flows and dries,
Resin seals over the tear.
I distill pine,
Resin and oil for turpentine, a solvent.
Quiver, bemired,
I lead sound into my darkness,
Orris butter resin, sweet and warm,
Hot jam drops on snow drops,
Orange ash on smoke,
Balm on lava,
The problem with cotton candy.

Electrical signals give off radiation or light waves,
The narrow frequency range where
The crest of a radio wave and the crest of a light wave overlap,
Infrared.
Glaciers flow, sunlight melts the upper layers of the snow when strong,
A wet snow avalanche,
A torrent, healing.
Brown sugar and whiskey,
Undulant, lavender.
Pine pitch, crystalline, sticky, rich and golden,
And dried pine rosin polishes glass smooth
Like the smell of powdery orris after years.
Softness, flush, worthy/not worthy,
Rich rays thunder,
Intensify my pulse,
Frenzied red,
Violet between blue and invisible ultraviolet.
Babylon—flutter, glow.
Unquenchable cathartic orris.  

















Pink Graphite

Camellias, winter shrubs,
Their shallow roots grow beneath the spongy caribou moss,
Robins egg blue.
After writing a play with my gifted students program in 1991,
I stopped spending all my free time writing short stories,
But the caribou moss was still soft.

In the cold Arctic of that town,
The evergreen protected the camellias from the afternoon sun and storms.
They branded hardy camellias with a brass molded embossing iron;
I had paper and graphite for my pencils.

After my ninth grade honors English teacher asked us to write poems in 1994,
It began raining.
We lived on an overhang.
A vertical rise to the top of the rock.
The rainstorm caused a metamorphic change in the snowpack,
A wet snow avalanche drifted slowly down the moss covered rock,
The snow already destabilized by exposure to the sunlight.

The avalanche formed lakes,
rock basins washed away with rainwater and melted snow,
Streams dammed by the rocks.  
My pencils washed away in the avalanche,
My clothes heavy and cold.
I wove one side of each warp fiber through the eye of the needle and one side through each slot,
Salves, ointments, serums and tinctures.
I was mining for graphite.
They were mining me,
The only winch, the sound through the water.

A steep staircase to the red Torii gates,
I broke the chains with bells for vespers
And chimes for schisms,
And wove the weft across at right angles to the warp.  

On a rocky ledge at the end of winter,
The pink moon, bitters and body butter,
They tried to get  me to want absinthe,
Wormwood for bitterness and regret.
Heat and pressure formed carbon for flakes of graphite.
Heat and pressure,
I made bitters,
Brandy, grapefruit, chocolate, mandarin rind, tamarind and sugar.
I grounded my feet in the pink moss,
paper dried in one hand,
and graphite for my pencils in the other.  



































Flakes

I don’t let people that put me down be part of my life.  
Gardens and trees,
My shadow sunk in the grass in my yard
As I ate bread, turmeric and lemon.
Carbon crystallizes into graphite flakes.
I write to see well,
Graphite on paper.  
A shadow on rock tiles with a shield, a diamond and a bell
Had me ***** to humiliate me.
Though I don’t let people that put me down near me,
A lot of people putting me down seemed like they were following me,
A platform to jump from
While she had her temple.  

There was a pink door to the platform.
I ate bread with caramelized crusts and
Drank turmeric lemonade
Before I opened that door,
Jumped and
Descended into blankets and feathers.
I found matches and rosin
For turpentine to clean,
Dried plums and licorice.  

In the temple,
In diamonds, leather, wool and silk,
She had her shield and bells,
Drugs and technology,
Thermovision 210 and Minox,
And an offering box where people believed
That if their coins went in
Their wishes would come true.

Hollyhock and smudging charcoal for work,  
Belled,
I ground grain in the mill for the bread I baked for breakfast.
The bells are now communal bells
With a watchtower and a prison,
Her shield, a blowtorch and flux,
Her ex rays, my makeshift records
Because Stalin didn’t like people dancing,
He liked them divebombing.
Impurities in the carbon prevent diamonds from forming,
Measured,
The most hard, the most expensive,
But graphite’s soft delocalized electrons move.  






































OCEAN BED

The loneliness of going to sleep by myself.  
I want a bed that’s high off the ground,
a mattress, an ocean.
I want a crush and that  person in my bed.  
Only that,
a crush in my bed,
an ocean in my bed.  
Just love.  
But I sleep with my thumbs sealed.  
I sleep with my hands, palms up.  
I sleep with my hands at my heart.  
They sear my compassion with their noise.  
They hold their iron over their fire and try to carve their noise into my love,
scored by the violence of voices, dark and lurid,  
but not burned.  
I want a man in my bed.  
When I wake up in an earthquake
I want to be held through the aftershocks.  
I like men,
the waves come in and go out
but the ocean was part of my every day.  
I don’t mind being fetishized in the ocean.  
I ran by the ocean every morning.  
I surfed in the ocean.  
I should’ve gone into the ocean that afternoon at Trestles,
holding my water jugs, kneeling at the edge.  














Morning

I want to fall asleep in the warm arms of a fireman.  
I want to wake up to the smell of coffee in my kitchen.  

Morning—the molten lava in the outer core of the earth embeds the iron from the inner core into the earth’s magnetic field.  
The magnetic field flips.  
The sun, so strong, where it gets through the trees it burns everything but the pine.  
The winds change direction.  
Storms cast lightening and rain.  
Iron conducts solar flares and the heavy wind.  
In that pine forest, I shudder every time I see a speck of light for fear of neon and fluorescents.  The eucalyptus cleanses congestion.  
And Kerouac’s stream ululates, crystal bowl sound baths.  
I follow the sound to the water.  
The stream ends at a bluff with a thin rocky beach below.  
The green water turns black not far from the shore.  
Before diving into the ocean, I eat globe mallow from the trees, stems and leaves, the viscous flesh, red, soft and nutty.  
I distill the pine from one of the tree’s bark and smudge the charcoal over my skin.  

Death, the palo santo’s lit, cleansing negative energy.  
It’s been so long since I’ve smelled a man, woodsmoke, citrus and tobacco.  
Jasmine, plum, lime and tuberose oil on the base of my neck comforts.  
Parabolic chambers heal, sound waves through water travel four times faster.  
The sound of the open sea recalibrates.  
I dissolve into the midnight blue of the ocean.  

I want to fall asleep in the warm arms of a fireman.  
I want to wake up to the smell of coffee in my kitchen.  
I want hot water with coconut oil when I get up.  
We’d lay out on the lawn, surrounded by high trees that block the wind.  
Embers flying through the air won’t land in my yard, on my grass, or near my trees.  





Blue Paper

Haze scatters blue light on a planet.  
Frought women, livid, made into peonies by Aphrodites that caught their men flirting and blamed the women, flushed red.
and blamed the women, flushed red.
Frought women, livid, chrysanthemums, dimmed until the end of the season, exchanged and retained like property.  
Blue women enter along the sides of her red Torii gates, belayed, branded and belled, a plangent sound.  
By candles, colored lights and dried flowers she’s sitting inside on a concrete floor, punctures and ruin burnished with paper, making burnt lime from lime mortar.  
Glass ***** on the ceiling, she moves the beads of a Palestinian glass bead bracelet she holds in her hands.  
She bends light to make shadows against  thin wooden slats curbed along the wall, and straight across the ceiling.
A metier, she makes tinctures, juniper berries and cotton *****.
Loamy soil in the center of the room,
A hawthorn tree stands alone,
A gateway for fairies.
large stones at the base protecting,
It’s branches a barrier.  
It’s leaves and shoots make bread and cheese.
It’s berries, red skin and yellow flesh, make jam.
Green bamboo stakes for the peonies when they whither from the weight of their petals.
And lime in the soil.  
She adds wood chips to the burnt lime in the kiln,
Unrolled paper, spools, and wire hanging.
Wood prayer beads connect her to the earth,
The tassels on the end of the beads connect her to spirit, to higher truth.
Minerals, marine mud and warm basins of seawater on a flower covered desk.  
She adds slaked lime to the burnt lime and wood chips.  
The lime converts to paper,
Trauma victims speak,
Light through butterfly wings.  
She’s plumeria with curved petals, thick, holding water
This is what I have written of my book.  I’ll be changing where the poems with the historical research go.  There are four more of those and nine of the other poems.
Meena Menon Apr 2021
The eruption beatifies the magma.  
It becomes obsidian,
only breaks with a fracture,
smooth circles where it breaks.  

My mom was born on the grass
on a lawn
in a moss covered canyon at the top of a volcanic island.  
My grandfather lived in Malaysia before the Japanese occupied.  
When the volcano erupted,
the lava dried at the ocean into black sand.  
The British allied with the Communist Party of Malaysia—
after they organized.  
After the Americans defeated the Japanese at Pearl Harbor,
the British took over Malaysia again.  
They kept different groups apart claiming they were helping them.  
The black sand had smooth pebbles and sharp rocks.  
Ethnic Malay farmers lived in Kampongs, villages.  
Indians lived on plantations.  
The Chinese lived in towns and urban areas.  
Ethnic Malays wanted independence.
In 1946, after strikes, demonstrations, and boycotts
the British agreed to work with them.  
The predominantly Chinese Communist Party of Malaysia went underground,
guerrilla warfare against the British,
claiming their fight was for independence.  
For the British, that emergency required vast powers
of arrest, detention without trial and deportation to defeat terrorism.  
The Emergency became less unpopular as the terrorism became worse.  
The British were the iron that brought oxygen through my mom’s body.  
She loved riding on her father’s motorcycle with him
by the plantations,
through the Kampongs
and to the city, half an hour away.  
The British left Malaysia independent in 1957
with Malaysian nationalists holding most state and federal government offices.  
As the black sand stretches towards the ocean,
it becomes big stones of dried lava, flat and smooth.  

My mom thought her father and her uncle were subservient to the British.  
She thought all things, all people were equal.  
When her father died when she was 16, 1965,
they moved to India,
my mother,
a foreigner in India, though she’s Indian.  
She loved rock and roll and mini skirts
and didn’t speak the local language.  
On the dried black lava,
it can be hard to know the molten lava flickers underneath there.  
Before the Korean War,
though Britain and the United States wanted
an aggressive resolution
condemning North Korea,
they were happy
that India supported a draft resolution
condemning North Korea
for breach of the peace.  
During the Korean War,
India, supported by Third World and other Commonwealth nations,
opposed United States’ proposals.
They were able to change the U.S. resolution
to include the proposals they wanted
and helped end the war.  
China wanted the respect of Third World nations
and saw the United States as imperialist.  
China thought India was a threat to the Third World
by taking aid from the United States and the Soviets.  
Pakistan could help with that and a seat at the United Nations.  
China wanted Taiwan’s seat at the UN.
My mother went to live with her uncle,
a communist negotiator for a corporation,
in India.  
A poet,
he threw parties and invited other artists, musicians and writers.  
I have the same brown hyperpigmentation at my joints that he had.  
During the day, only the steam from the hot lava can be seen.  
In 1965, Pakistani forces went into Jammu and Kashmir with China’s support.  
China threatened India after India sent its troops in.  
Then they threatened again before sending their troops to the Indian border.  
The United States stopped aid to Pakistan and India.
Pakistan agreed to the UN ceasefire agreement.  
Pakistan helped China get a seat at the UN
and tried to keep the west from escalating in Vietnam.  
The smoldering sound of the lava sizzles underneath the dried lava.  
When West Pakistan refused to allow East Pakistan independence,
violence between Bengalis and Biharis developed into upheaval.  
Bengalis moved to India
and India went into East Pakistan.  
Pakistan surrendered in December 1971.  
East Pakistan became independent Bangladesh.

The warm light of the melted lava radiates underneath but burns.  
In 1974, India tested the Smiling Buddha,
a nuclear bomb.  
After Indira Gandhi’s conviction for election fraud in 1973,
Marxist Professor Narayan called for total revolution
and students protested all over India.  
With food shortages, inflation and regional disputes
like Sikh separatists training in Pakistan for an independent Punjab,
peasants and laborers joined the protests.  
Railway strikes stopped the economy.  
In 1975, Indira Gandhi, the Iron Lady,
declared an Emergency,
imprisoning political opponents, restricting freedoms and restricting the press,
claiming threats to national security
because the war with Pakistan had just ended.  
The federal government took over Kerala’s communist dominated government and others.  

My mom could’ve been a dandelion, but she’s more like thistle.  
She has the center that dries and flutters in the wind,
beautiful and silky,
spiny and prickly,
but still fluffy, downy,
A daisy.
They say thistle saved Scotland from the Norse.  
Magma from the volcano explodes
and the streams of magma fly into the air.  
In the late 60s,
the civil rights movement rose
against the state in Northern Ireland
for depriving Catholics
of influence and opportunity.
The Northern Irish police,
Protestant and unionist, anti-catholic,
responded violently to the protests and it got worse.  
In 1969, the British placed Arthur Young,
who had worked at the Federation of Malaya
at the time of their Emergency
at the head of the British military in Northern Ireland.
The British military took control over the police,
a counter insurgency rather than a police force,
crowd control, house searches, interrogation, and street patrols,
use of force against suspects and uncooperative citizens.  
Political crimes were tolerated by Protestants but not Catholics.  
The lava burns the rock off the edge of the volcano.  

On January 30, 1972, ****** Sunday,  
British Army policing killed 13 unarmed protesters
fighting for their rights over their neighborhood,
protesting the internment of suspected nationalists.
That led to protests across Ireland.  
When banana leaves are warmed,
oil from the banana leaves flavors the food.  
My dad flew from Canada to India in February 1972.  
On February 4, my dad met my mom.  
On February 11, 1972,
my dad married my mom.  
They went to Canada,
a quartz singing bowl and a wooden mallet wrapped in suede.  
The rock goes down with the lava, breaking through the rocks as it goes down.  
In March 1972, the British government took over
because they considered the Royal Ulster Police and the Ulster Special Constabulary
to be causing most of the violence.  
The lava blocks and reroutes streams,
melts snow and ice,
flooding.  
Days later, there’s still smoke, red.  
My mom could wear the clothes she liked
without being judged
with my dad in Canada.  
She didn’t like asking my dad for money.
My dad, the copper helping my mother use that iron,
wanted her to go to college and finish her bachelors degree.
She got a job.  
In 1976, the police took over again in Northern Ireland
but they were a paramilitary force—
armored SUVs, bullet proof jackets, combat ready
with the largest computerized surveillance system in the UK,
high powered weapons,
trained in counter insurgency.  
Many people were murdered by the police
and few were held accountable.  
Most of the murdered people were not involved in violence or crime.  
People were arrested under special emergency powers
for interrogation and intelligence gathering.  
People tried were tried in non-jury courts.  
My mom learned Malayalam in India
but didn’t speak well until living with my dad.  
She also learned to cook after getting married.  
Her mother sent her recipes; my dad cooked for her—
turmeric, cumin, coriander, cayenne and green chiles.  
Having lived in different countries,
my mom’s food was exposed to many cultures,
Chinese and French.
Ground rock, minerals and glass
covered the ground
from the ash plume.  
She liked working.  

A volcano erupted for 192 years,
an ice age,
disordered ices, deformed under pressure
and ordered ice crystals, brittle in the ice core records.  
My mother liked working.  
Though Khomeini was in exile by the 1970s in Iran,
more people, working and poor,
turned to him and the ****-i-Ulama for help.
My mom didn’t want kids though my dad did.
She agreed and in 1978 my brother was born.
Iran modernized but agriculture and industry changed so quickly.  
In January 1978, students protested—
censorship, surveillance, harassment, illegal detention and torture.  
Young people and the unemployed joined.  
My parents moved to the United States in December 1978.  
The regime used a lot of violence against the protesters,
and in September 1978 declared martial law in Iran.  
Troops were shooting demonstrators.
In January 1979, the Shah and his family fled.  
On February 11, 1979, my parents’ anniversary,
the Iranian army declared neutrality.  
I was born in July 1979.
The chromium in emeralds and rubies colors them.
My brother was born in May and I was born in July.

Obsidian—
iron, copper and chromium—
isn’t a gas
but it isn’t a crystal;
it’s between the two,
the ordered crystal and the disordered gas.  
They made swords out of obsidian.
This is the next part of Lava.
I dont know any cool pickup lines,
I stole them from TV
Hey baby do you have the time?
You just walked away from me

Im not cool or smooth
And I'm not slick
And I need to think of something quick

He didnt write for you, that punk rock love song,
He stole it from the Byrds
He just changed the chords
And never bothered to learn the words

But he's got you hooked
Your pulse
Is racing

You know that hes a traitor
He's a one-track trouble maker
And he's rotten company

But he's got you in his sights
You're going home with him tonight
Another loveless casualty

He keeps you coming back for more but now
Hes into someone new
He changed the locks on both my doors
So I guess that means we're through

But baby dont go,
He isn't home
And I'm waiting

I know that he's a traitor
A true master debater
Such sincere insincerity
Without hesitation
Standing in ovation to
Your perfect symmetry

We'd take it slow
But we both know
He's waiting

You know that hes a traitor
Silver tounged negotiator
And he's plotting mutiny
You dont know him quite like I do
Once he's had his way, he'll leave you
To a taxi company
And he's immune to my handy remedy,

Just come inside, he asks persuadingly
But you, you're thinking of me

Just spend the night
We'll work it out
Tomorrow

You know that hes a traitor
He's a one-track trouble maker
And he's rotten company
But he's got you in his sights
You're going home with him tonight
Another loveless casualty
That little ******* part of me
Another thematically, or at least rhythmically influenced. Check out Ludo "Mutiny Below" for where I was going with this one.
SassyJ Sep 2016
Chaotic systems*
Disabled stems
Controlled streams
Dash in seams

Work ain't progress
It's a misused regress
Full of regrets
The greatest dissolution
No vision, just revisions
The mission of bureaucracy
Hypocrisy and autocratic casts
Top cats bumper weighty bonuses
Outclassed in beer bellies
Slashed in pompous waistcoats
What a waste on the coast?

I am not afraid to tell you, "I ain't a ******* robot"
I am not a machine of production and rotations
I am not afraid to tell you, "Go **** your *****"
Give me time to be creative, innovative and autonomous

Chaotic systems*
Disabled stems
Controlled streams
Dash in seams

Be an example, model the sample
Let the leader lead the leaders
Let the leader be the servant
An active weaver of the basket
To hold with the strongest straws
In rows and crows, clinging to all
A negotiator of the common people
A facilitator in times of conflict
Let the worker be dedicated
Passionate, triumphant and trial-led
But the case is, all are in it for the money

I am not afraid to tell capitalists, "Give workers their rights"
I am not a ******* charity mate! Share the faked matte!
I am not afraid to tell you, "Stick it up on your ***!"
**Give me time to be creative, innovative and autonomous
Work frustrations..... systems that just don't work or promote creativity...... they just stir chaos.
Guido Orifice Oct 2016
After all, poetry is a savage calling.*
-Edel Garcellano

Let poetry be an interstice.

Say, an intervention to the gap of loneliness. Depressive. Let bitter medicines dissolve or, madness will make its ultimate call.  Convulsive patterns of mental spasms. Schizophrenic impulse hitting the nerves.

What is known to be rational flees. Enough to learn from the burning of its wings and Youth.

Say, pulling a magic trick under the hat. You know you are being fooled but why enjoy such spectacle or, better enjoy than masking the truth.

Say, a glimpse through an interstice—from Whitman’s poetry.

An intervention to the rashness of day. An intercept to the chaos of the soul. A reminder that we are not assemblages forever desiring.

A poetry fumbling to the course, enough to welcome the rain of sad realizations.

“The task is heroic. Poetry is a minor matter” (E. Garcellano) – an intervention/interstice, the negotiator to the ultimate task of poetry.

We are savage gods. We feed on the detritus of truth, those are, lies.

Consider this poetry as an epitaph. To the disremembered victims of El Sidro. We dealt the cards of fate. We intervened to live. We pierced our stones to their hearts so cold.

Darwin’s prophesy always reminds us that in every epoch there are some interventions we cannot avoid. After all, we are his favorite animal.

We are gods feeding on loneliness. We are agnostic souls entangled in caves of shadows.

Say, are we forever trapped in the compulsive dimensions of ourselves? In love, for example.

To answer this question is the task of poetry.

Let poetry be an interstice.
Marcus Well Feb 2018
So, what about Number Forty Five?
He’s worn that number on his jersey for a year now,
So what can we surmise?
He demands loyalty, or your days may be numbered until your demise.
He’s as scrappy as they come, and that’s no surprise.
I hear DC politicians tread with fear in their eyes.

Does he project the benevolence of American presidential tradition?
HELL NO, he doesn’t seem interested in any such transition.

Is he a statesman, a great unifier?  Hardly!!
Is he a man of diplomacy whose words are well chosen of course,
Who retains his dignity?
Quite the hot-head most of the time I see,
A bull in a china shop
uncaring of how he’s obnoxious or coarse.

A shrewd negotiator?  I’ll give him that;
He can be rude, crude, rash, brash, and yes shrewd
At the drop of a hat,
Seemingly more concerned with the substance of gain
rather than principle
and how played goes the game.

Not a man of promises forgotten,
Our president makes every effort to follow through on each one.

A humanitarian?  I don’t think so, not his way.
“America first” construed to mean economic prosperity
To trickle down to workers’ payroll and nothing more
Leaves a large lacking of heart – materialism over philosophical perspective,
Defining who we are by how we live and to others how we give.

Mutual respect?  He respects his own ego and that seems to be it –
a character deficit.
How else could he refer to African countries in such ****** insult?
This is certainly no good for US Diplomacy abroad, an undeniable fault!!

He still has his main ****** as a business negotiator;
The rest of the presidency I don’t think he really cares for!!

Everyday disruption seems to be
more in the news than in the days before, and
Trump is usually in the thick of it (as we reluctantly keep score) –
often for something he says or tweets impulsively.
We know he’s eccentric, but is he psychotic – out of his tree?
(Rome had Nero; we have Trump it seems)
“Do we need more” presidents from Queens?
Should we FIRE the one we have?

We’ve seen the lightening flash;
Amid the “fake news”,
we’ve heard the true loud thunder.
After one year,
We have his number,
Number Forty Five!!
samantha page Sep 2016
THEY SAY*
they want to be different, greater
don't they realize to their own words they're a traitor?

THEY SAY
they're a debator, educator, investigator, negotiator
but how?
how can they be so different when they all say the same things?
how can they be so ignorantly hypocritical?

love everyone* they say whist full of hatred
hang out with your friends they say when alone in bed
you never talk to me they say although they've never tried
go outside they say from deep inside
get off your phone they say while on the computer
just be nice they say when they're actually a persecutor

THEY SAY
so much and do so little
want to become more while becoming less
they guess it's a success when they oppress
but it's just a mess

THEY SAY
things they should be saying to themselves to us
but we are all people too, not slaves to command or objects to discuss

THEY SAY
this and that and everything
but I say

N O T H I N G

for it is better to say nothing at all than to participate in the
parade of puppets who profusely preach phony phrases.
I'd rather remain silent than take part in this cacophonous,
hypocritical, ignorant, perfunctory mess that we call
*s o c i e t y.
Seher Seven Mar 2016
The one
Let’s see…

Tall dark and handsome, please…
Brilliant.
Aware of the fraud of success.
Open heartedness.
Honest. Totally honest.
Conscious.
Strong, in arms and chest.
Courageous!
Studious, patient.
Warm and welcoming
In the oddest of
Situations.
Fluid yet stern in stance.
Bold yet quietly impresses.
Lion and Lioness
Capability of holding me
Securely. Tightly, loosely,
Freely.. encouraging free.
Right there beside me.
Right here.

He, I see now the pull.
That tug to He.
Its you.
The divine energy of the
Light of the womb.
Its you, in form.
The magnificent,
Heaven sent adorned with
Structures of Gods.
Its you.

Its your space I await to feel
Pressed against.
The essence you emit.
The presence you elicit.
The delicate tracing of your lips
I will know them as soon as we kiss
And before, I will notice
The form. The shape, the way
Your teeth show through.
It will all come back as soon
As I see you.
You will see me, I promise
That day, you will see me.

What more, she said to get it out…

The one,
Competitive with no one,
Except his self.
Compassionate to healing
Trusting of women.
A tree lover, hugger…..ehhh
… for sure a lover.
And can swing an ax if
Its cold and winter.
Problem solver and
Negotiator.
Maybe an Aquarius…
I want a writer,
A poet, a singer.
I want a hard worker.
I want the one to see
Me.
When he hears me
He knows he’s heard his call.
The voice calls him in
And we swim, diving deep within
Spending hours
Divulging our souls.
Testing for qualms.
Adjusting for changes in the future.

The near future, he will walk right up to me
He will ask me my name
And we will speak as friends.
And we will grow naturally,
As it happens time and time again.
Ours a slow and steady end.
Jude kyrie Mar 2019
There's a place hidden  inside of  us all,
we keep it  to  ourselves so that no one  can see it.
You see It contains all  of the  secrets
that the  heart contains.
Whenever it is seen by another  person
we lose our control,we lose our Hearts.
It has happened to me just. Once.
Only  once.

She was a cop
well not really
a hostage negotiator
the term I think is first responder.
I was sat on the edge of a high rise.
Twenty-six storey high building  
the people below in the far away  street
looked like ants.
But I felt like one.
I wanted to end it all
and dive into  oblivion.

Sure I had a gun
but it was not to use  on someone else
it was for my last resort.
That's when she appeared
about  ten feet behind me.
She had a kind Consolation about  her.
Tell me it's not about  a woman  she said.
How  did she know that.

It's my wife she's leaving  me
taking the kids.
Why she asked.
Because  she has found someone  
she loves  more  than me.

She pulled  a beer out of  her purse.
Want to share my last beer she asked.
OK but you have  to sit on the Ledge With me .
She did
oh my god she was pretty for a cop.
Can I have you put the gun away she said.
It was my last resort but I gave it to her.
She joined me on the ledge

We cracked open her last beer.
She said its OK
my husband left  me he
said I was a workaholic
It's true I am

I looked at her eyes they were beautiful
He must of been crazy I said.
She smiled.
Come down with me
she purred back to ground zero.
Only if you will have a date with Me
She smiled
so if I date you you won't  **** yourself.
I I guess so.
OK we will do it
one date
Promise
Yes I promise.

I followed  her  downstairs
the cops grabbed me.
And I knew
she had played me like a stradivarius.

I got out out of jail six months  later
It was ok
Three hots and a cot.
A nice guy shared my cell.
No one tried to *** **** me.  
When I was outside  the gate
A car pulled  up.
It was my cop.
The one who  shared  her last beer.
I said what the **** do you want.
You just got me six months in the sneezer

She smiled  that beautiful  smile of hers.
Did you  learn anything in there.
Yes I learned not to trust Beautiful lady cops
She said I am here aren't I.
Yes, you are why?
You wanted a date
And I promised you one date right.

Yes you did.
Well take me on one.
We went for dinner
It was great she was so great.
She looked at me
Have you got over your wife leaving.
Yes I have
We shouldn't have  been together  really
It was for the kids.
OK do you want to see me again.
I whispered  yes I do you are lovely.

Two years  later.


Our second  child was born.
She will be as beautiful as her mother I hope.
My kids come to us half the time we got joint custody.
I got work as fireman.

I sit in my chair  some nights
and just look at her
She saved my life.
She shared her last beer with me.
And you know
what they say.
If you save Somebody's life.
They belong to you.
Be careful
When you fix someone
That is broken
They will belong  to you
Bob B Feb 2018
Stormy is back in the news,
Looking for better reviews.
It wouldn't be keen
Not to come clean
On something she couldn't refuse.

People say Trump's a bit harried;
It all happened after he married.
'Twas just a short fling;
No promise, no ring.
But big plans for silence miscarried.

Trump's fine attorney then later,
Serving as negotiator,
Paid Stormy a sum
To make her stay mum
And said, "Good-by, alligator."

As **** star, Stormy might brag
About any man she might snag.
Her story and pix
From twenty-oh-six
Came out this year in a mag.

Attorney and Trump both deny
That anything happened. Then why
Did both of them feel
That Stormy would squeal,
And give her the dough on the sly?

We hear now that Stormy is saying
Their pact to stay silent is fraying.
She blurted out, “Halt!
The lawyer’s at fault.
No longer will I be obeying.”

Stormy is sly, people say.
To some she's a Morgan le Fay.
She said to the press
That she'll take her dress
And test it for Trump's DNA.

It seems as though only Trump's base
Completely ignores his disgrace.
When he is errant
And so **** transparent,
How can he keep a straight face?

Perhaps we will find that no doubt there
Will be more to scribble about. There
IS one suggestion:
Bring up the question
Of how many "Stormys" are out there?

-by Bob B (2-16-18)
Steve m sawyer Aug 2018
I'm an instigator,
A thought generator,
My words fly across the page,
Like I'm an aviator,

I'm sometimes seen as the perpetrator,
As I spread my message,
I feel like the negotiator,
If only I could reach out to other's,
And be a communicator,
A compromiser or a speech maker,
Or even an encourager or a motivator,

But nobody hears my voice,
I'm not an educator,
Sadly I'm invisible,
Unlike a force of nature,
I wish I could do more,
but like you i was born into this world,
I wasn't the creator,
But I'll never give up, I'm going now,
I guess I'll try again later.
Norbert Tasev Dec 2020
Then it was running harder and harder every day: My heart-stabbing **** knife was already every moment of mortal Immortality even bleeding in me! While the Great Time steered him here and there like the never-to-be Negotiator! Tiny, glued-handed gigolos, trendy jambs, trampled the chances of survival in others as well, until in the end they selfishly sinned! My soul, ready to soar, was forced to be shackled by bound shackles; the consolidation of imagined Friendships could have been mine alone, if I had already given up on the happiness I could find!
 
I would need something beyond an unspeakable need to be able to live with content again, and not just be ashamed of my own guilt! By deliberately contemplating the unexpected traps of Being, it is better to avoid and look back, so that even memories cannot haunt you! A call to morning awakening often lacks a sense of duty; In addition to the basic need for filling bites and the testimony of responsible toddler feet, the exploratory mind also selfishly desires more: It wants to reflect and testify and formulate!
 
My fears, which are so wide, squeeze my throbbing heart in the basket of my chest, and if my dear one could know that even the most mundane tasks often rise to the line of trying trials, he would understand
Cedric McClester Jun 2018
By: Cedric McClester

Trump the diplomat
All that was missing
Was his top hat
Trump the negotiator
Negotiated what we
Had before, nothing more
North Korea waited
And he capitulated

They promised to
Denuclearize
But where or when
We’ll have to surmise
Will continue to be
A big surprise
Meanwhile we conceded
What they needed

They needed to be
Legitimized
And we gave them that
You realize
With little from them
In return
Because Donald Trump
Refuses to learn

He considers the summit
A huge success
But in reality
It was so much less
Trump placed North Korea
On an equal plane
But they’re a nuclear threat
Just the same




Cedric McClester, Copyright © 2018.  All rights reserved.
Little Bear Feb 2020
Humpty Dumpty dinosaur
Cabbage intervention
Pomegranate superman
Cat combustion engine

Floribunda mermaid sock
Tulip nuts crab apple
Dingo sausage metaphor
Peanuts wedding chapel

Rabbit bacon octopus
Toadstool hair satsuma
Weasel carrot gristle flag
Timone simba pumba


Purple chicken nugget sauce
Generic baby boomer
Zebra armpit underware
Butterfly harpooner


***** pickle under pants
Worm negotiator
Windy beansprout sausage dog
Cardboard Rotavator

Hairy ice cream body *****
Juicy **** denial
Otter baby gusset lunch
Autopsy free trial
I found out that having a constant internal narrative was a thing. I thought everyone had an internal monologue. Mine is a constant. Some have no inner voice. How does that work? I thought (to myself) the constant narration in my head was normal. Not just thoughts floating in and out but conversation, with myself, about everything lol

Not to say this is what I think but, the steady stream of words is weirdly normal to me :)
TPerdue Aug 2018
I’m in the bathroom
Scrubbing out a small white plastic trash can
Scratched on the outside
Yellowed on the inside
We’ve both been in this house
For 28 years.

Ani DiFranco is singing
F*ck You and your untouchable face
And I’m thinking about how often
I’ve sung along in frustration and kinship
Me and my uncanny skill
Of making things appear
As I think I wish them to be.

I’ve thought so often
That he held himself tauntingly close
But folded arms
Closed eyes
And I, ungrateful wretch
Unmitigated gall, all that.

Conjuring the warmth of his palm
To the tremble in my fingertips
Who was hostage?
Who was negotiator?

Rinsing the last suds from the bottom
I think that sallow dour aged yellow
Is comfort.
Is a sunrise.
Mateuš Conrad Apr 2022
i've finally accepted my opinion on the ultimate song...
esp. after a ****** shift at the London Stadium:
West Ham vs. Lyon...
  there's not other song that keeps me.... groovy...
up-beat... even though we had about five pitch-intrusions...
runners... whatever...
i was mouthed off for not doing my job:
even i was on the opposite side of the pitch
and... no one was paying me to be a supervisor...
mouthed off for other people not doing their job...
clueless sputnik sort of people...
the whole: penguins of Madagascar... just smile and wave...
middle-aged *******: do your job...
then apologies... but me being the negotiator:
sir, i understand you... the passion... no one wants
a pitch-invasion, even if it's by a soloist...
yes, kind sir, thank you for your criticism...
people need to be herded...
i don't have a c.c.t.v. type of third crow of Odin
on my shoulder to check on everyone,
for ****'s sake!
        then this *******... with a walking stick...
ugly inside and out...
i could understand: humble... not this sort of crap...
that's why he's a *******: in my eyes...
because he has ugly insides...
moans into my ear... but i paid £71 to watch this match!
i can't see **** because of the steward standing up!
sir... we're supposed to stand up just before
the end of the match...
but i paid £71 to watch this match!
may i suggest, buying a ticket... so you're sat
a bit higher up?!
  i actually love this job... which isn't really a job...
crowd management...
i'm more used to dealing with inanimate things...
applying them...
what a glorious precursor to dealing with
children in a classroom... the mascots fist-bump me...
as to the colt... i also have my usual crowd...
i blow kisses to them they retort with:
we love you! and what the **** am i?
some ******* high-viz. traffic cone...
    that's all i am...  or am i?
    i forget to get to know myself in these situations...
i just checked on the Muslims in the crowd
breaking fast... you have your candy-bar?
or are you on the strict date breaking of the fast
diet? joked aside with another Muslim lad...
so... is it true? some of the Ummah binge eat
when the sun goes down?
oh, i agree... another one of those sly *******...
a feeling of conversation soon turned into a feeling
of conversion... trouble is...
ha ha... sure... i'd tell him... i'd convert...
but... i'd convert to ****'ite Islam... not Sunni...
that's a worthwhile joke... to keep...
  sure... i'll convert... but... i don't want to convert
to Sunni Islam... i want to convert to ****'ite Islam...
because... PBUH: Muhammad was a man
that didn't keep his word...
                    then again, i figured...
there could possibly be a third splinter in Islam...
that the Turks could take care of...
Arabs and Pakistanis in the middle...
Persians being one outlier...
Turks being the third...
  so composed within the confines of European
cosmopolitanism...
besides the Byzantines... who spent the most time
in the Balkans? not the Ottoman Turks?!
well then! sorted!
            why dates?! how about a handful of
Brazil nuts, or pecan nuts?!
what's with these ******* Arabs and
diabetes... oh sure... drinking it bad...
but SUGAR: GOO' GOOD...
sure... not enough sugar... chop a hand off...
chop a leg off...
it truly was a ****** ****... i arrived at Romford
and said to myself... better walk it off...
drink two ciders on the way home...
eat some... vegetarian spectacular wrap...
smoke... admire the moon...
thick skin, though...
whatever the people were saying...
with my usual crowd i just blew kisses...
shook hands... it was all good...
as the break guy i could have watched the match...
yawn... i found out that... football?
is best watched on t.v.: when at a football match
i rather watch the crowd...
but i've switched off...
it should have been the song akin to:
a-ha's cry wolf,
duran duran's the reflex...
roxette's - watercolours in the rain...
prokofiev's lieutenant kije suite / battle on the ice...
boney m's cover via placebo:
daddy cool... no... that will never cover it...
bohemian like you by the dandy warhols...
no chance...
  girls aloud - the show... nope...
vaughan williams;:
        fantasia on a theme by thomas tallis
nope...
nothing by early madonna: i tried material girl...
no chance...
there's only one song...
cel-ah-brate... believe me...
  i can't be wrong...
    i can be wong... but i can't be wrong...
KOOL & THE GANG: CELEBRATION....
sure... and all those underappreciated black artists
by zee weißvolk!
          ficken-du-zu!
                    fickereiwic­hsenarbeite!
*******-****-jobs...
      problem (aufgabe)? solved (
                                                          gelös­t)!
always with the: ****-it attitude... and always always best...
with s stern elevation of English into German...
no no... trying to pull off English into a Russian
translation... never cuts through the lard...
you can see the Russians... sons and daughters
of oligarchs... truly timid creatures...
but the rich kids of China at Fulham?
          solipsistic... ******* on lemon type of crowd...
****... you're right... they just might be...
smuggling prunes in their *******...
sometimes... you never really know...
        ugh... where's the Ummah's position on
the Uyghurs? no suicide bombing in the part of the world?
pseudo-humans? so, so celebration of Islam
there? ******* double-standards if you don't
think those people as equal to your own:
Arabii cwowd... so much current stuff happening:
yet the trucks of peace: piece by piece of instestines
being dragged through the streets of Nice...
the joyous parties surrounding Cologne...
let's just have a good time! goad:
milk the goats sort of fun time!
yeah-hoo!              party!
                             ­ while we're walking on egg-shells:
minding who gets to break fast! yeah-hoo!
the girls of Rotherham! gang-*****!
getting soaked in petrol! yeah-hoo!
          i'm a party man... i love to party!
i'm a party man! this is a party song! i'm in a part mood!
at one point being so respectable...
one close alternative: for a song...
PENDULUM: TARANTULA...
    that song came on and i was clubbing in Basildon...
i went... mental bruv!
                and when the music is right...
sure... but i'll covert... to the Turkish version of Islam...
don't you know... there's this third branch of
your religion, it's not ****'ite... it's... Turkish...
it began with barbers and prostitutes...
in the Balkans...
                it treats Jesus as: a son of Hell...
the Lord of Mosquitos...
the greatest troll Hell ever produced....
lord of mosquitos...
        לורד  של יתושים
                eh? lurd shl ysushim?!
well, it's a best kept secret... Hebrews have always
been a secretive types...
let them continue: preserving their ******* past...
what... ever...
          Jesus for me was... is...
a Prince of Hell... just as there was a prince of flies:
Beelzebub...
  he... was the Prince of Mosquitos...
blood turns to wine, wine turns to blood...
water turns to blood... blood blood...
and those 2000+ years with the inspiration
for the myths of vampires?! seriously?!
then, i, must, be, *******, clueless! asleep!
      only recently i've learned -
i have a weak-spot: ein schwachpukt:
          betreffend: ingwer-behaart-frauen...
gälisch: wahr-und-richtig...
          this: diese geistbetäubung beihilfe!
oh, i even talked with this Celtic beau!
ginger... i'm sworn to these women!
with a crusade... i call them shy auburns...
this one i talked about being  James Joyce
disciple... i was once a mythological blonde
type of guy... now? sure... blonde...
but more... strawberry blonde...
ooh... those red-heads...
            i hate chocolates...
but i want to drizzle them into the stuff...
i want their ginger to turn into brown!
into oak!
                  kiss me: because i have lost care....
how much i want to love...
per usual... so much is always missing.
Kelly Scanlon Aug 2020
I don't cover my laptop camera
Let them see this fishbowl life
At least someone could be seeing

Are you in there? Are you entertained?
Are you a ghost in the machine?
Maybe you're FBI or NSA?

Help, I've taken myself hostage
I need a negotiator  or a ******
Look just please look **** you look
jeffrey conyers Aug 2018
The best way to know Christ?
Is to read the scriptures for yourself.
Sure the book points out, we have teachers, preachers, evangelist before us.

But there's nothing better than reading it for yourself.
Then you become aware when a false prophet twisting the word.

Hey, this truth when it comes to what we know about Jesus?

Many leaders give you this image of a calm man upon this earth.
But if God got angry with us.
Then odds is he came down hard upon some disciples.

We see leaders afraid to intervene in the hardship situation.
Wanting to be accepted instead of being a negotiator.
From what we know about Jesus?

He faced all challenges without a halt to thinking about it.
He was strong.
He was bold.
Went places many told him to avoid.

A famous president once stated, there's nothing to fear, but fear itself.
And CHRIST wasn't afraid to take a stand.
So why?
Are his people?
When things aren't lining up to righteousness.
Universe Poems Jul 2023
1823 two telescopes,
independent focusing scopes
Affixed together,
they made a bridge
Two years later Paris negotiator
Centre focus,
wheel development,
both simultaneous relevant
Lorgnette quite simple
Mounted,
a handle counted
The precursor
19th century,
they made an entry,
at the Theatre
Definitely Opera event spectator

© 2023 Carol Natasha Diviney
the idea of tattooing my entire back
in the tube map of London
came to mind
only moments ago after dreaming up
a host of bodies
semi-naked with other sort of signatures
no inflicted upon
the left-hemisphere of the brain

as such, also pondering the idea of shifting
the view of the world
away from

                           N

            W                     E


                          s

and as such to not combat the asymmetry
but rather embrace it
two islands of water in my cranium
pushing away at
and exploding grey matter into vacuums

not unlike the carnivorous protein of
Alzheimer
                 Alz Heinz
or at least this is me rummaging in Martin's
head
looking for clues of me
and him in me
or rather nephew now reduced or inflcited
the raise of being simply "friend": kolega -

kolega Alz Heiz
                            kolega Alz Heinz

now i see the world like i see London
to the south of me the great whirl
of Thames - old water old father Thames
with son Charon
                      not admitting me to the Oval
to watch the cricket

punctuated with nervous breaths after a micro-dosage
of the forest
in newspaper talk of a celibate tree
found circa 130 years ago
cloned many times
but not having a mating partner
must **** for a tree... currently standing priestly
in Kew gardens i believe...

the spitfire pilot who dreamed of flying
aged 17
crashes after a stunt gone bad
the Reddit guy with the red lamp
who thought he was actually married to his highschool
sweetheart
who had two kids
and never missed a day of work
living the white picket fence dream O America
instead playing football
hit in the head so bad that the multiverse
manifested itself in his head

some cruel prank best not mention God
and if i do by god
from the age of 21 a bad bad
bad trip that lasted well over ten years
now everyone in the house
is writing

i am writing
my father is writing an invoice
for Knights Asphalt for the work currently
undergone at Victoria
mother is writing a pPełnomocnictwo

                  to ensure care is taken of Martin
that his hard earned money
will be spent on his own care
a cruel joke of early retirement plans
spent 2 years drinking and sitting with
grandmother listening to teenage music
i mean if the brain isn't fried
from inactivity
not even a personal diary or reading a book
where will the mind wander
and how will it recline when looking
at van Gogh's painting of the chair
not a chair but THE cHAIR

                 words so close yet far away
symmetric damage to both
hemispheres as if metaphor
for the growing of horns
and in this happy-state obscene
but certainly drank too much last night
and now have the shakes
oh jeez now the slight paranoia of the receeding
high like i thought it was a good idea
or are my eyes just simply glazed
and am i relaxed is writing appropriate
during the daytime if it's not required
formal

i.e. W. H. Auden wrote that only the Hitlers
of the world write at night
but i wonder whether this is not a tease
now my eyes are not red
but like wax and my mother's interruption
to avert my eyes from the screen

'control control to charlie 10'
'charlie 10 radio check'
'yes yes control, charlie 10 radio check'
'loud and clear charlie 10 over'

the idea being did my mother realise
or not the tear of writing the document
rather than: is her son hurting anyone
by smoking the Amsterdam way
the casual not London way of smoking
i.e. **** is smoked in London
in public and at large events with massive
crowds
me and a colleague of mine
agreed that **** is abused like this
and best enjoyed in private
behind closed doors
with music
some whiskey
and enough music to drive a camel bonkers

i mean: she did walk in and asked me
whether the spoke in my wheel was fixed
i went to the bicycle shop last saturday
indefinitely
one ******* spoke
apparently to be finished by thursday
today is monday
and?
a bicycle shop without spokes
plenty of wheels on display
a bicycle repair shop
is more a shop than a workshop
and that's the biggest problem
no supplies of spokes?
what are these, German car parts?
if you can have a supply of rubbers
then surely there aren't that many
wheel sizes which might make you oversupply
on spokes...

but she walks in with £100 and tells me:
you can have it
if you only go to the bicycle shop
now and buy yourself a new bicycle
how much money did dad
give you for your birthday?
£200...
   well then... off you go...

          (but i really did start writing this poem
trying to heal
and i'm going to finish it
mind you i still have 2 hours before the shop
closes)

obviously i spent £100 on two packets
of Sherbet and that's all the way from America
and i kind of like the idea
of **** coming in packets that resemble
sweets perhaps
this isn't drug abuse on grounds of legality
since bought
     but in terms of how it is used
and what benefits reaped then i imagine, yes:

when i first starting writing and had
the straitjacket of poetry on me
my heart was a mush of nonsense my brain
was a much of nonsense
only now can i see the need for prosaic more
than ever
and no indeed people stopped writing
in the straitjacket of poetry within the confines
of what came to pass in the 19th century
and dissolved by the 20th
and needs a reinvention in the 21st

now a call from Lyndon my company rep
and no i'm in no mood for
conversation that's why i believe my eyes
to be wax and *****
and glazed and not even a glass of whiskey
will make them look sober
this feeling of creativity must pass
as the left hemisphere switches off or rather
concentrates on something immediately
that i know poetry is not written like
one works to grease up and find oneself
a juicy duck
or rather hunt for a juicy duck
with no green overalls
not rifle and no hunting dog
like the ones used at stadiums as sniffers
and the sniffers are gentle dogs
because when the police come with their
German Shepherds then
boy do those dogs talk
less bark more talk
less bark more talk

                and my how restless those dogs
are even the sniffers
are restless dogs
after all these are: dogs at work...

hundebeiarbeiten...

            hundebeiarbeiten...

  ­     we have the Germans coming in next week
and i already have my all clear from
the UEFA that i can work the event
so here comes all the pomp and gravitas of
the Champions' League final
            Real Madrid and Borussia Dortmund

hmm... etymology of names:

       there-mouth and now i'm thinking it's
a good thing that i didn't go since
this is my day off
but i mean i didn't go to the bicycle shop
because however my mother thinks
it the fact that i started writing again
and i haven't been writing for what seems to be
donkeys' year
since meeting Edie
and in the current variation of me
i'm intellectualizing whatever it might be
in the rubric of relationships
and ***
                            and friendship
and i don't know what else but when i'm also
working on my day off rather
than relaxing with the family might tell you
a lot about me maybe i should have done
something like this tomorrow when
they weren't home
because i feel like i'm going to have to explain
myself

this is like a narrative of a child
or at least i am robbing myself of the biblical
saying in how
it is said of men:

         genesis 2:24

  a man shall leave his father and his mother
and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh

how is that not the case
are we in a shared abode could it be said
that i'm anything more than client at this point
someone who will subsequently cook
dinner
and is this not my own free time to enjoy
my own freedom at least my legs
returned to normal after lying in bed
for a little bit longer

and honestly that experience with the Yorkshire
lads yesterday was mind-boggling
and mind-opening and ego-closing
and ego-crashing ego-destruction
how you can just absorb the energy of the crowd
and work it to your favour
and jeez i was never the roaming cleaner
of my place of work
whereby there was no issue with litter
and how often does cordon 7 call in for cleaners
and ******* bags
and i worked that cordon before
and i took my own initiative and sorted out
the bags myself before
but others who worked that area
would waste control room's time by radioing
in this minor issue that could be resolved
with some personal initiative
jeez
       i never thought i could write about work
that was the antithesis of Bukowski's approach
to work that work is the drudgery
because honestly i think how the Nazis didn't
think because honestly
Jews were a fertile breed of workers
so making fun of that
  they were making fun of that
because there is no luxury time for the scholars
and i mean the jews are the scholastic
people of the world and some less serious
of them sure
they are not the eclectic sort i imagine in my
dreams of worms and books
and bookworms unlike those sandworms
of Dune and more the reality of the Metal Worms
of London
and me travelling in them like some Jonah
mind you
i always held the oceans with distrust
but even then diving i did see plenty of life...

Anahola Beach.
Cannons Beach.
Hanalei Bay / Pier - Black *** Beach.
Kahili Beach - Rock Quarry.
Kalihiwai Beach.
Lumahai Beach.
Makua Beach - Tunnels.
Secret Beach - Kauapea Beach.

    (yes, that was ctrl+c/p
   (some variation on style
(returned to listening to music
after interruption
(paranoia receded
(started raining
(if i was a child receiving money
i would have jumped
at the opportunity
to go get bicycle
but i went today
and the used road bike that
looked **** nice
was already gone
so buying a new bicycle
seems grotesque at this moment
(anything new for that matter
buying something new
rather than used)
seems like a horrible waste of money)
the idea that used goods)
were aplenty once)
and people fought for them)
and now no one is fighting over money)
each earning it

but at a time there was a time where
people had exclusive rights to money
and others had no access to money
but instead: WIKT I OPIERUNEK
(bed and board)
and would be the workers of the household
of a people who were workers
of the world
and these people did exist
and they had a history and architecture
and since architecture is the best
idea of what history is
and a people become
then yes the revival of the Coliseum
i have witness
and i am but a voice in the wilderness by now
maybe i should have been
getting married to my childhood sweetheart
but what is thinking
i don't know: she's with five children
and an older hubby
while i'm the rigid disciplinarian of grammar
because i didn't love her fully
because of her literacy skills or was that our
shared youth
or anything - just not a waste of this afternoon
given it's raining
and yes if i were a kid and received £200
and say i had my own savings in a jar
of pennies and pounds
i would have jumped at the opportunity to buy
that bicycle and cycle happy-mad in the rain
but i'm not a child anymore and
i can't imagine going back
to somewhere where the brain was
orientating itself having spent so much time
in the dark outside of the dark
of the womb
but not like some fetal narrative is even
possible or even supplanting an ego
into a fetus is
   like putting a scorpion into a shoe
and a sock on one's nose: the general gist of:
(i think jyst should be as relevant as gist
and it even looks better on paper
let alone the similarity of phonemes)

  i.3. jy-          gi-                       -st

not station of saint
although both are used as is also st for street

oh **** oh **** oh **** oh **** oh **** oh ****
KAMIKAZE YO
KAMIKAZE YO
カミカゼ ヨ!

                         カミカゼ ヨ!

      I⁴                     and E⁴

since  in the following "magic square"

                             ya yu yo

     ヤユヨ

                  there is no Yadam and Yevie
the other story not told of the genesis of letters
and by Jove the resting place of so many
meanings deposited into Latin script...
unimaginable wonders
and overhearing my Nigeria neighbour
talking
jeez the music is on in my headphones
but this boombox of bellowing
conversations over the phone is unerving
and that time i smoked with him
in the night on the roof outside out
bedroom windows
i thought of Martin
   and his youth living in those communist
flats
    with greenery everywhere
nothing dystopian about it because of the foliage
and popped up ugly hen houses
never mind his youth of spent time
talking with his neighbor out of the window
in the warm summer evenings
sharing stories and smoking cigarettes
the one that lived above him
yes, him, forgot his name and sur
but him i saw him and a few others when
i visited last
and to think they are his peers
and they seemingly congregated to a Wake
but it wasn't a Wake but an Awakening
to see cruel or just fate
have her whims
however to put it fate a cruelty will the justice
or what is a gamble or something
or
           or

too many avenues it would seem...
gently massaging of the face
everyone at work is happy that my beard is visible
again
everyone at work is happy that my beard
is visible again
and i'm happy at work because finally my voice
is visible and can be used
without a loudspeaker
and i'm no longer embarrassed that i sometimes
get tongue tied
because maybe it's because i'm a Londoner
no joking
maybe my bilingualism is a phonetic retardation
from time to time
                   (then the music comes off
and there's the hum of conversation
and no t.v. in the background perhaps this too
the unread messages: i count at least 29)

but oh **** oh **** oh ****
what was actually going to see Kamikaze Yo!
(maybe
oh redemption mother calls and reminds
me to go back and buy the bicycle
and now sobered i will for sure

get some wind in my beard
and in my hair
glide with traffic
but
but but but

oh **** o help me "god":

confirmed work
wembley
7th june
13:30 - 23:15
sign in 12:30

confirmed work
wembley
8th june
07:30 - 20:30
sign in 6:30

confirmed work
9th june
london stadium
06:30 - 18:00
sign in 5:30 (or as close
to it as you can)

                   what did i book myself in for?
a 3 day sleeplessness extravaganza?!
   ha ha: Bukowski and work...
            Mathias Eschlert and: arbeit macht frei; haaaaaa.

p.s.  more like

                                   E


                    n                                        ­            S


                         W

my new compass...  i have to see the world
differently
not like presented on weather chanels
because no the north is not up
or the south down
after all what is n.e.w.s. in space
what is the Copernican n.e.w.s.?
                  
                   best to see the world sideways,
for now, at least.

p.p.s. or perhaps this is mother telling
me to show-off my money
if security staff get teased
and abused at events being called
minimum-wagers
minimum-wagies           etc
if we can get pushed and shoved etc

                        well... sooner rather than later
they'll nickname me: the Negotiator
3 ******* years in this job
and still no physical confrontation ....

              O Leeds O Leeds O Sweet Lords
and Lloyd.
We have a Baroness and a diplomat. They were a team in a global organization. And they had an affair. And both were addicted to something. She to ****** and he to saving the world.
She promised him to quit and he promised her to quit.
He promised to quit if she promised to submit to a clinic after he quit his world saving addiction.
She promised to enter the clinic if he promised to leave the world’s stage.
They sat in a hotel room and she says, for the time being you can use you diplomatic status and pouches to get me the brown sugar. He said, the world saver he was, that could be great cover, for the time being.
Diplomaniak, I love you. Baroness, you sweet Brownie, I love you.
So for the time being as it was nothing changed.
The diplo haggled and joked with the dealers. He had learned the trade from his parents who both had been junkies. So he bought the best of the best. The Baroness took it for granted she got the best of the best.
Pouches came and went and the diplo covered it all up with a crazy story. About them containing samples of biochemicals used in warfare. And used by him to expose rogue states. All to prevent exposing his rogue mate.
Dealers asked him, you on the sugar?
No, it’s for my sugar. I’m on a drop of whiskey and a puff of tobacco.
But then time being as it was something changed.
The diplo finally found a suitable successor.  One who wasn’t trying to save the world. The world decided it would do it’s saving it self.
So in came a peace loving and peaceful negotiator. A man who extended existing wars and supported starting new ones.
The Baroness booked herself into the clinic. The diplo visited her every day. This time without the sugar but with a bottle of crème de cacao for her and a drop of whiskey for him. The nurse expressly had forbidden any stimulants in the clinic, so the diplo used a different pouch. He bought a large chocolate box. Together they retreated to a secluded spot in the garden and enjoyed sips of their respective browns.
One day the Baroness said, I’ve got to tell you something.  I’ve fallen in love.
With whom?
With the nurse.
Well, that’s better than being married to the needle, said the diplo.
You don’t care?
I care a lot but only for you.
Her new lover barred him from visiting her.
But the diplo found a way around this. He mimicked the voices of her family members and got her to visit him in their usual hotel rooms. There they sipped their browns in secret.
But the time being as it was one of them died. And when that happened their last words to each other were that they stopped making promises to each other.

— The End —