Poems about Icarus

These are poems about Icarus, flying and flights of fancy...



Southern Icarus
by Michael R. Burch

Windborne, lover of heights,
unspooled from the truck’s wildly lurching embrace,
you climb, skittish kite...

What do you know of the world’s despair,
gliding in vast... solitariness... there,
so that all that remains is to
fall?

Only a little longer the wind invests its sighs;
you
stall,
spread-eagled, as the canvas snaps

and *****
its white rebellious wings,
and all

the houses watch with baffled eyes.



Flight 93
by Michael R. Burch

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

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

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

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

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



I AM!
by Michael R. Burch

I am not one of ten billion―I―
sunblackened Icarus, chary fly,
staring at God with a quizzical eye.

I am not one of ten billion, I.

I am not one life has left unsquashed―
scarred as Ulysses, goddess-debauched,
pale glowworm agleam with a tale of panache.

I am not one life has left unsquashed.

I am not one without spots of disease,
laugh lines and tan lines and thick-callused knees
from begging and praying and girls sighing "Please!"

I am not one without spots of disease.

I am not one of ten billion―I―
scion of Daedalus, blackwinged fly
staring at God with a sedulous eye.

I am not one of ten billion, I
AM!



Finally to Burn
(the Fall and Resurrection of Icarus)
by Michael R. Burch

Athena takes me
sometimes by the hand

and we go levitating
through strange Dreamlands

where Apollo sleeps
in his dark forgetting

and Passion seems
like a wise bloodletting

and all I remember
, upon awaking,

is: to Love sometimes
is like forsaking

one’s Being―to glide

heroically beyond thought,

forsaking the here
for the There and the Not.



O, finally to Burn,
gravity beyond escaping!

To plummet is Bliss
when the blisters breaking

rain down red scabs
on the earth’s mudpuddle...

Feathers and wax
and the watchers huddle...

Flocculent sheep,
O, and innocent lambs!,

I will rock me to sleep
on the waves’ iambs.



To sleep's sweet relief
from Love’s exhausting Dream,

for the Night has Wings
gentler than Moonbeams―

they will flit me to Life
like a huge-eyed Phoenix

fluttering off
to quarry the Sphinx.



Riddlemethis,
riddlemethat,

Rynosseross,
throw out the Welcome Mat.

Quixotic, I seek Love
amid the tarnished

rusted-out steel
when to live is varnish.

To Dream―that’s the thing!

Aye, that Genie I’ll rub,

soak by the candle,
aflame in the tub.



Riddlemethis,
riddlemethat,

Rynosseross,
throw out the Welcome Mat.

Somewhither, somewhither
aglitter and strange,

we must moult off all knowledge
or perish caged.

*

I am reconciled to Life
somewhere beyond thought―

I’ll Live the Elsewhere,
I’ll Dream of the Naught.

Methinks it no journey;
to tarry’s a waste,

so fatten the oxen;
make a nice baste.

I’m coming, Fool Tom,
we have Somewhere to Go,

though we injure noone,
ourselves wildaglow.

This odd poem invokes and merges with the anonymous medieval poem “Tom O’Bedlam’s Song” and W. H. Auden’s modernist poem “Musee des Beaux Arts,” which in turn refers to Pieter Breughel’s painting “The Fall of Icarus.” In the first stanza Icarus levitates with the help of Athena, the goddess or wisdom, through “strange dreamlands” while Apollo, the sun god, lies sleeping. In the second stanza, Apollo predictably wakes up and Icarus plummets to earth, or back to mundane reality, as in Breughel’s painting and Auden’s poem. In the third stanza the grounded Icarus can still fly, but only in flights of imagination through dreams of love. In the fourth and fifth stanzas Icarus joins Tom Rynosseross of the Bedlam poem in embracing madness by deserting “knowledge” and its cages (ivory towers, etc.). In the final stanza Icarus agrees with Tom that it is “no journey” to wherever they’re going together and also agrees with Tom that they will injure no one along the way, no matter how intensely they glow and radiate. The poem can be taken as a metaphor for the death and rebirth of Poetry, and perhaps as a prophecy that Poetry will rise, radiate and reattain its former glory...



Free Fall (II)
by Michael R. Burch

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

But since I touched you, fire consumes each wing!

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



Fledglings
by Michael R. Burch

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

still pinkly exposed, who have not yet learned
the first harsh lesson of survival: to devour
their weaker siblings in the high-leafed ferned
fortress and impregnable bower

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

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



The Higher Atmospheres
by Michael R. Burch

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

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

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



Notes toward an Icarian philosophy of life...
by Michael R. Burch

If the mind’s and the heart’s quests were ever satisfied,
what would remain, as the goals of life?

If there was only light, with no occluding matter,
if there were only sunny mid-afternoons but no mysterious midnights,
what would become of the dreams of men?

What becomes of man’s vision, apart from terrestrial shadows?

And what of man’s character, formed
in the seething crucible of life and death,
hammered out on the anvil of Fate, by Will?

What becomes of man’s aims in the end,
when the hammer’s anthems at last are stilled?

If man should confront his terrible Creator,
capture him, hogtie him, hold his ***** feet to the fire,
roast him on the spit as yet another blasphemous heretic
whose faith is suspect, derelict...
torture a confession from him,
get him to admit, “I did it!...

what then?

Once man has taken revenge
on the Frankenstein who created him
and has justly crucified the One True Monster, the Creator...

what then?

Or, if revenge is not possible,
if the appearance of matter was merely a random accident,
or a group illusion (and thus a conspiracy, perhaps of dunces, us among them),
or if the Creator lies eternally beyond the reach of justice...

what then?

Perhaps there’s nothing left but for man to perfect his character,
to fly as high as his wings will take him toward unreachable suns,
to gamble everything on some unfathomable dream, like Icarus,
then fall to earth, to perish, undone...

or perhaps not, if the mystics are right
about the true nature of darkness and light.

Is there a source of knowledge beyond faith,
a revelation of heaven, of the Triumph of Love?

The Hebrew prophets seemed to think so,
and Paul, although he saw through a glass darkly,
and Julian of Norwich, who heard the voice of God say,
“All shall be well,
and all manner of things shall be well...”

Does hope spring eternal in the human breast,
or does it just blindly *****?



Icarus Bickerous
by Michael R. Burch

for the Religious Right

Like Icarus, waxen wings melting,
white tail-feathers fall, bystanders pelting.

They look up amazed
and seem rather dazed―

was it heaven’s or hell’s furious smelting

that fashioned such vulturish wings?
And why are they singed?―

the higher you “rise,” the more halting?



Earthbound, a Vision of Crazy Horse
by Michael R. Burch

Tashunka Witko, a Lakota Sioux better known as Crazy Horse, had a vision of a red-tailed hawk at Sylvan Lake, South Dakota. In his vision he saw himself riding a spirit horse, flying through a storm, as the hawk flew above him, shrieking. When he awoke, a red-tailed hawk was perched near his horse.

Earthbound,
and yet I now fly
through the clouds that are aimlessly drifting...
so high
that no sound
echoing by
below where the mountains are lifting
the sky
can be heard.

Like a bird,
but not meek,
like a hawk from a distance regarding its prey,
I will shriek,
not a word,
but a screech,
and my terrible clamor will turn them to clay―
the sheep,
the earthbound.

Published by American Indian Pride and Boston Poetry Magazine



Flight
by Michael R. Burch

It is the nature of loveliness to vanish
as butterfly wings, batting against nothingness
seek transcendence...

Originally published by Hibiscus (India)



The Wonder Boys
by Michael R. Burch

(for Leslie Mellichamp, the late editor of The Lyric,
who was a friend and mentor to many poets, and
a fine poet in his own right)

The stars were always there, too-bright cliches:
scintillant truths the jaded world outgrew
as baffled poets winged keyed kites―amazed,
in dream of shocks that suddenly came true...

but came almost as static―background noise,
a song out of the cosmos no one hears,
or cares to hear. The poets, starstruck boys,
lay tuned in to their kite strings, saucer-eared.

They thought to feel the lightning’s brilliant sparks
electrify their nerves, their brains; the smoke
of words poured from their overheated hearts.
The kite string, knotted, made a nifty rope...

You will not find them here; they blew away―
in tumbling flight beyond nights’ stars. They clung
by fingertips to satellites. They strayed
too far to remain mortal. Elfin, young,

their words are with us still. Devout and fey,
they wink at us whenever skies are gray.

Originally published by The Lyric



American Eagle, Grounded
by Michael R. Burch

Her predatory eye,
the single feral iris,
scans.

Her raptor beak,
all jagged sharp-edged ******,
juts.

Her hard talon,
clenched in pinched expectation,
waits.

Her clipped wings,
preened against reality,
tremble.

Published as “Tremble” by The Lyric, Verses Magazine, Romantics Quarterly, Journeys, The Raintown Review, Poetic Ponderings, Poem Kingdom (All-Star Tribute), The Fabric of a Vision, NPAC―Net Poetry and Art Competition, Poet’s Haven, Listening To The Birth Of Crystals(Anthology), Poetry Renewal, Inspirational Stories, Poetry Life & Times, MahMag (Iranian/Farsi), The Eclectic Muse (Canada)



Album
by Michael R. Burch

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

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

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

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



Springtime Prayer
by Michael R. Burch

They’ll have to grow like crazy,
the springtime baby geese,
if they’re to fly to balmier climes
when autumn dismembers the leaves...

And so I toss them loaves of bread,
then whisper an urgent prayer:
“Watch over these, my Angels,
if there’s anyone kind, up there.”

Originally published by The HyperTexts



Learning to Fly
by Michael R. Burch

We are learning to fly
every day...

learning to fly―
away, away...

O, love is not in the ephemeral flight,
but love, Love! is our destination―

graced land of eternal sunrise, radiant beyond night!
Let us bear one another up in our vast migration.



In the Whispering Night
by Michael R. Burch

for George King

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

Published by Songs of Innocence, Romantics Quarterly, The Chained Muse and Poetry Life & Times. This is a poem I wrote for my favorite college English teacher, George King, about poetic kinship, brotherhood and romantic flights of fancy.



For a Palestinian Child, with Butterflies
by Michael R. Burch

Where does the butterfly go
when lightning rails,
when thunder howls,
when hailstones scream,
when winter scowls,
when nights compound dark frosts with snow...
Where does the butterfly go?

Where does the rose hide its bloom
when night descends oblique and chill
beyond the capacity of moonlight to fill?
When the only relief's a banked fire's glow,
where does the butterfly go?

And where shall the spirit flee
when life is harsh, too harsh to face,
and hope is lost without a trace?
Oh, when the light of life runs low,
where does the butterfly go?

Published by Tucumcari Literary Review, Romantics Quarterly, Poetry Life & Times, Victorian Violet Press (where it was nominated for a “Best of the Net”), The Contributor (a Nashville homeless newspaper), Siasat (Pakistan), and set to music as a part of the song cycle “The Children of Gaza” which has been performed in various European venues by the Palestinian soprano Dima Bawab



Sioux Vision Quest
by Crazy Horse, Oglala Lakota Sioux (circa 1840-1877)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

A man must pursue his Vision
as the eagle explores
the sky's deepest blues.

Published by Better Than Starbucks, A Hundred Voices



in-flight convergence
by Michael R. Burch

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

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

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

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

Originally published by The Aurorean and subsequently nominated for the Pushcart Prize



Squall
by Michael R. Burch

There, in that sunny arbor,
in the aureate light
filtering through the waxy leaves
of a stunted banana tree,

I felt the sudden monsoon of your wrath,
the clattery implosions
and copper-bright bursts
of the bottoms of pots and pans.

I saw your swollen goddess’s belly
wobble and heave
in pregnant indignation,
turned tail, and ran.

Published by Chrysanthemum, Poetry Super Highway, Barbitos and Poetry Life & Times



Flight
by Michael R. Burch

Eagle, raven, blackbird, crow...
What you are I do not know.
Where you go I do not care.
I’m unconcerned whose meal you bear.
But as you mount the sunlit sky,
I only wish that I could fly.
I only wish that I could fly.

Robin, hawk or whippoorwill...
Should men care that you hunger still?
I do not wish to see your home.
I do not wonder where you roam.
But as you scale the sky's bright stairs,
I only wish that I were there.
I only wish that I were there.

Sparrow, lark or chickadee...
Your markings I disdain to see.
Where you fly concerns me not.
I scarcely give your flight a thought.
But as you wheel and arc and dive,
I, too, would feel so much alive.
I, too, would feel so much alive.

This is a poem that I believe I wrote as a high school sophomore. But it could have been written a bit later. I seem to remember the original poem being influenced by William Cullen Bryant's "To a Waterfowl."



Flying
by Michael R. Burch

I shall rise
and try the ****** wings of thought
ten thousand times
before I fly...

and then I'll sleep
and waste ten thousand nights
before I dream;
but when at last...

I soar the distant heights of undreamt skies
where never hawks nor eagles dared to go,
as I laugh among the meteors flashing by
somewhere beyond the bluest earth-bound seas...

if I'm not told
I’m just a man,
then I shall know
just what I am.

This is one of my early poems, written around age 16-17. According to my notes, I may have revised the poem later, in 1978, but if so the changes were minor because the poem remains very close to the original.



Stage Craft-y
by Michael R. Burch

There once was a dromedary
who befriended a crafty canary.
Budgie said, "You can’t sing,
but now, here’s the thing―
just think of the tunes you can carry!"



Clyde Lied!
by Michael R. Burch

There once was a mockingbird, Clyde,
who bragged of his prowess, but lied.
To his new wife he sighed,
"When again, gentle bride?"
"Nevermore!" bright-eyed Raven replied.



Less Heroic Couplets: ****** Most Fowl!
by Michael R. Burch

“****** most foul!”
cried the mouse to the owl.

“Friend, I’m no sinner;
you’re merely my dinner!”
the wise owl replied
as the tasty snack died.

Published by Lighten Up Online and in Potcake Chapbook #7

NOTE: In an attempt to demonstrate that not all couplets are heroic, I have created a series of poems called “Less Heroic Couplets.” I believe even poets should abide by truth-in-advertising laws! ― MRB



Lance-Lot
by Michael R. Burch

Preposterous bird!
Inelegant! Absurd!

Until the great & mighty heron
brandishes his fearsome sword.



Kissin’ ’n’ buzzin’
by Michael R. Burch

Kissin’ ’n’ buzzin’ the bees rise
in a dizzy circle of two.
Oh, when I’m with you,
I feel like kissin’ ’n’ buzzin’ too.



Delicacy
by Michael R. Burch

for all good mothers

Your love is as delicate
as a butterfly cleaning its wings,
as soft as the predicate
the hummingbird sings
to itself, gently murmuring―
“Fly! Fly! Fly!”
Your love is the string
soaring kites untie.



Lone Wild Goose
by Du Fu (712-770)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

The abandoned goose refuses food and drink;
he cries querulously for his companions.

Who feels kinship for that strange wraith
as he vanishes eerily into the heavens?

You watch it as it disappears;
its plaintive calls cut through you.

The indignant crows ignore you both:
the bickering, bantering multitudes.

Du Fu (712-770) is also known as Tu Fu. The first poem is addressed to the poet's wife, who had fled war with their children. Ch'ang-an is an ironic pun because it means "Long-peace."



The Red Cockatoo
by Po Chu-I (772-846)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

A marvelous gift from Annam―
a red cockatoo,
bright as peach blossom,
fluent in men's language.

So they did what they always do
to the erudite and eloquent:
they created a thick-barred cage
and shut it up.

Po Chu-I (772-846) is best known today for his ballads and satirical poems. Po Chu-I believed poetry should be accessible to commoners and is noted for his simple diction and natural style. His name has been rendered various ways in English: Po Chu-I, Po Chü-i, Bo Juyi and Bai Juyi.



The Migrant Songbird
Li Qingzhao aka Li Ching-chao (c. 1084-1155)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

The migrant songbird on the nearby yew
brings tears to my eyes with her melodious trills;
this fresh downpour reminds me of similar spills:
another spring gone, and still no word from you...



Lines from Laolao Ting Pavilion
by Li Bai (701-762)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

The spring breeze knows partings are bitter;
The willow twig knows it will never be green again.



The Day after the Rain
Lin Huiyin (1904-1955)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

I love the day after the rain
and the meadow's green expanses!
My heart endlessly rises with wind,
gusts with wind...
away the new-mown grasses and the fallen leaves...
away the clouds like smoke...
vanishing like smoke...



Untitled Translations

Cupid, if you incinerate my soul, touché!
For like you she has wings and can fly away!
―Meleager, loose translation by Michael R. Burch

As autumn deepens,
a butterfly sips
chrysanthemum dew.
―Basho, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Come, butterfly,
it’s late
and we’ve a long way to go!
―Basho, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Up and at ’em! The sky goes bright!
Let’***** the road again,
Companion Butterfly!
―Matsuo Basho, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Ah butterfly,
what dreams do you ply
with your beautiful wings?
―Chiyo-ni, loose translation by Michael R. Burch

Oh, dreamlike winter butterfly:
a puff of white snow
cresting mountains
―Kakio Tomizawa, loose translation by Michael R. Burch

Dry leaf flung awry:
bright butterfly,
goodbye!
―Michael R. Burch, original haiku

Will we remain parted forever?
Here at your grave:
two flowerlike butterflies
―Matsuo Basho, loose translation by Michael R. Burch

a soaring kite flits
into the heart of the sun?
Butterfly & Chrysanthemum
―Michael R. Burch, original haiku

The cheerful-chirping cricket
contends gray autumn's gay,
contemptuous of frost
―Matsuo Basho, loose translation by Michael R. Burch

Whistle on, twilight whippoorwill,
solemn evangelist
of loneliness
―Matsuo Basho, loose translation by Michael R. Burch

The sea darkening,
the voices of the wild ducks:
my mysterious companions!
―Matsuo Basho, loose translation by Michael R. Burch

Lightning
shatters the darkness―
the night heron's shriek
―Matsuo Basho, loose translation by Michael R. Burch

This snowy morning:
cries of the crow I despise
(ah, but so beautiful!)
―Matsuo Basho, loose translation by Michael R. Burch

A crow settles
on a leafless branch:
autumn nightfall.
―Matsuo Basho, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Hush, cawing crows; what rackets you make!
Heaven's indignant messengers,
you remind me of wordsmiths!
―O no Yasumaro (circa 711), loose translation by Michael R. Burch

Higher than a skylark,
resting on the breast of heaven:
this mountain pass.
―Matsuo Basho, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

An exciting struggle
with such a sad ending:
cormorant fishing.
―Matsuo Basho, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Does my soul abide in heaven, or hell?
Only the sea gull
in his high, lonely circuits, may tell.
―Glaucus, translation by Michael R. Burch

The eagle sees farther
from its greater height―
our ancestors’ wisdom
―Michael R. Burch, original haiku

A kite floats
at the same place in the sky
where yesterday it floated...
―Yosa Buson, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch



Critical Mass
by Michael R. Burch

I have listened to the rain all this morning
and it has a certain gravity,
as if it knows its destination,
perhaps even its particular destiny.
I do not believe mine is to be uplifted,
although I, too, may be flung precipitously
and from a great height.

"Gravity" and "particular destiny" are puns, since rain droplets are seeded by minute particles of dust adrift in the atmosphere and they fall due to gravity when they reach "critical mass." The title is also a pun, since the poem is skeptical about heaven-lauding Masses, etc.



Ultimate Sunset
by Michael R. Burch

for my father, Paul Ray Burch, Jr.

he now faces the Ultimate Sunset,
his body like the leaves that fray as they dry,
shedding their vital fluids (who knows why?)
till they’ve become even lighter than the covering sky,
ready to fly...



Free Fall
by Michael R. Burch

for my father, Paul Ray Burch, Jr.

I see the longing for departure gleam
in his still-keen eye,
and I understand his desire
to test this last wind, like those late autumn leaves
with nothing left to cling to...



Leaf Fall
by Michael R. Burch

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

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

Originally published by The Neovictorian/Cochlea



The Folly of Wisdom
by Michael R. Burch

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

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

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

She wiggles and giggles, and all will be well
if only we find him! The woodpecker’s knell
as he hammers the coffin of some dying tree
that once was a fortress to someone like me

rings wildly above us. Some things that we know
we are meant to forget. Life is a bloodletting, maple-syrup-slow.

Originally published by Romantics Quarterly



Kin
by Michael R. Burch

for Richard Moore

1.
Shrill gulls,
how like my thoughts
you, struggling, rise
to distant bliss―
the weightless blue of skies
that are not blue
in any atmosphere,
but closest here...

2.
You seek an air
so clear,
so rarified
the effort leaves you famished;
earthly tides
soon call you back―
one long, descending glide...

3.
Disgruntledly you ***** dirt shores for orts
you pull like mucous ropes
from shells’ bright forts...
You eye the teeming world
with nervous darts―
this way and that...

Contentious, shrewd, you scan―
the sky, in hope,
the earth, distrusting man.



Songstress
by Michael R. Burch

Within its starkwhite ribcage, how the heart
must flutter wildly, O, and always sing
against the pressing darkness: all it knows
until at last it feels the numbing sting
of death. Then life's brief vision swiftly passes,
imposing night on one who clearly saw.
Death held your bright heart tightly, till its maw―
envenomed, fanged―could swallow, whole, your Awe.
And yet it was not death so much as you
who sealed your doom; you could not help but sing
and not be silenced. Here, behold your tomb's
white alabaster cage: pale, wretched thing!
But you'll not be imprisoned here, wise wren!
Your words soar free; rise, sing, fly, live again.

A poet like Nadia Anjuman can be likened to a caged bird, deprived of flight, who somehow finds it within herself to sing of love and beauty. But when the world finally robs her of both flight and song, what is left for her but to leave the world, thus bereaving the world of herself and her song?



Performing Art
by Michael R. Burch

Who teaches the wren
in its drab existence
to explode into song?

What parodies of irony
does the jay espouse
with its sharp-edged tongue?

What instinctual memories
lend stunning brightness
to the strange dreams

of the dull gray slug
―spinning its chrysalis,
gluing rough seams―

abiding in darkness
its transformation,
till, waving damp wings,

it applauds its performance?
I am done with irony.
Life itself sings.



Lean Harvests
by Michael R. Burch

for T.M.

the trees are shedding their leaves again:
another summer is over.
the Christians are praising their Maker again,
but not the disconsolate plover:
i hear him berate
the fate
of his mate;
he claims God is no body’s lover.

Published by The Rotary Dial and Angle



My Forty-Ninth Year
by Michael R. Burch

My forty-ninth year
and the dew remembers
how brightly it glistened
encrusting September,...
one frozen September
when hawks ruled the sky
and death fell on wings
with a shrill, keening cry.

My forty-ninth year,
and still I recall
the weavings and windings
of childhood, of fall...
of fall enigmatic,
resplendent, yet sere,...
though vibrant the herald
of death drawing near.

My forty-ninth year
and now often I've thought on
the course of a lifetime,
the meaning of autumn,
the cycle of autumn
with winter to come,
of aging and death
and rebirth... on and on.

Originally published by Romantics Quarterly as “My Twenty-Ninth Year”



Myth
by Michael R. Burch

Here the recalcitrant wind
sighs with grievance and remorse
over fields of wayward gorse
and thistle-throttled lanes.

And she is the myth of the scythed wheat
hewn and sighing, complete,
waiting, lain in a low sheaf―
full of faith, full of grief.

Here the immaculate dawn
requires belief of the leafed earth
and she is the myth of the mown grain―
golden and humble in all its weary worth.



What Works
by Michael R. Burch

for David Gosselin

What works―
hewn stone;
the blush the iris shows the sun;
the lilac’s pale-remembered bloom.

The frenzied fly: mad-lively, gay,
as seconds tick his time away,
his sentence―one brief day in May,
a period. And then decay.

A frenzied rhyme’s mad tip-toed time,
a ballad’s languid as the sea,
seek, striving―immortality.

When gloss peels off, what works will shine.
When polish fades, what works will gleam.
When intellectual prattle pales,
the dying buzzing in the hive
of tedious incessant bees,
what works will soar and wheel and dive
and milk all honey, leap and thrive,

and teach the pallid poem to seethe.



Desdemona
by Michael R. Burch

Though you possessed the moon and stars,
you are bound to fate and wed to chance.
Your lips deny they crave a kiss;
your feet deny they ache to dance.
Your heart imagines wild romance.

Though you cupped fire in your hands
and molded incandescent forms,
you are barren now, and―spent of flame―
the ashes that remain are borne
toward the sun upon a storm.

You, who demanded more, have less,
your heart within its cells of sighs
held fast by chains of misery,
confined till death for peddling lies―
imprisonment your sense denies.

You, who collected hearts like leaves
and pressed each once within your book,
forgot. None―winsome, bright or rare―
not one was worth a second look.
My heart, as others, you forsook.

But I, though I loved you from afar
through silent dawns, and gathered rue
from gardens where your footsteps left
cold paths among the asters, knew―
each moonless night the nettles grew

and strangled hope, where love dies too.

Published by Penny Dreadful, Carnelian, Romantics Quarterly, Grassroots Poetry and Poetry Life & Times



Transplant
by Michael R. Burch

You float, unearthly angel, clad in flesh
as strange to us who briefly knew your flame
as laughter to disease. And yet you laugh.
Behind your smile, the sun forfeits its claim
to earth, and floats forever now the same―
light captured at its moment of least height.

You laugh here always, welcoming the night,
and, just a photograph, still you can claim
bright rapture: like an angel, not of flesh―
but something more, made less. Your humanness
this moment of release becomes a name
and something else―a radiance, a strange
brief presence near our hearts. How can we stand
and chain you here to this nocturnal land
of burgeoning gray shadows? Fly, begone.
I give you back your soul, forfeit all claim
to radiance, and welcome grief’s dark night
that crushes all the laughter from us. Light
in someone Else’s hand, and sing at ease
some song of brightsome mirth through dawn-lit trees
to welcome morning’s sun. O daughter! these
are eyes too weak for laughter; for love’s sight,
I welcome darkness, overcome with light.



Prodigal
by Michael R. Burch

This poem is dedicated to Kevin Longinotti, who died four days short of graduation from Vanderbilt University, the victim of a tornado that struck Nashville on April 16, 1998.

You have graduated now,
to a higher plane
and your heart’s tenacity
teaches us not to go gently
though death intrudes.

For eighteen days
―jarring interludes
of respite and pain―
with life only faintly clinging,
like a cashmere snow,
testing the capacity
of the blood banks
with the unstaunched flow
of your severed veins,
in the collapsing declivity,
in the sanguine haze
where Death broods,
you struggled defiantly.

A city mourns its adopted son,
flown to the highest ranks
while each heart complains
at the harsh validity
of God’s ways.

On ponderous wings
the white clouds move
with your captured breath,
though just days before
they spawned the maelstrom’s
hellish rift.

Throw off this mortal coil,
this envelope of flesh,
this brief sheath
of inarticulate grief
and transient joy.

Forget the winds
which test belief,
which bear the parchment leaf
down life’s last sun-lit path.

We applaud your spirit, O Prodigal,
O Valiant One,
in its percussive flight into the sun,
winging on the heart’s last madrigal.



Breakings
by Michael R. Burch

I did it out of pity.
I did it out of love.
I did it not to break the heart of a tender, wounded dove.

But gods without compassion
ordained: Frail things must break!
Now what can I do for her shattered psyche’s sake?

I did it not to push.
I did it not to shove.
I did it to assist the flight of indiscriminate Love.

But gods, all mad as hatters,
who legislate in all such matters,
ordained that everything irreplaceable shatters.



An Illusion
by Michael R. Burch

The sky was as hushed as the breath of a bee
and the world was bathed in shades of palest gold
when I awoke.

She came to me with the sound of falling leaves
and the scent of new-mown grass;
I held out my arms to her and she passed

into oblivion...

This is one of my early poems, written around age 16 and published in my high school literary journal, The Lantern.



Lines for My Ascension
by Michael R. Burch

I.

If I should die,
there will come a Doom,
and the sky will darken
to the deepest Gloom.

But if my body
should not be found,
never think of me
in the cold ground.

II.

If I should die,
let no mortal say,
“Here was a man,
with feet of clay,

or a timid sparrow
God’s hand let fall.”
But watch the sky darken
to an eerie pall

and know that my Spirit,
unvanquished, broods,
and cares naught for graves,
prayers, coffins, or roods.

And if my body
should not be found,
never think of me
in the cold ground.

III.

If I should die,
let no man adore
his incompetent Maker:
Zeus, Jehovah, or Thor.

Think of Me as One
who never died―
the unvanquished Immortal
with the unriven side.

And if my body
should not be found,
never think of me
in the cold ground.

IV.

And if I should “die,”
though the clouds grow dark
as fierce lightnings rend
this bleak asteroid, stark...

If you look above,
you will see a bright Sign―
the sun with the moon
in its arms, Divine.

So divine, if you can,
my bright meaning, and know―
my Spirit is mine.
I will go where I go.

And if my body
should not be found,
never think of me
in the cold ground.



The Locker
by Michael R. Burch

All the dull hollow clamor has died
and what was contained,
removed,

reproved
adulation or sentiment,
left with the pungent darkness

as remembered as the sudden light.

Originally published by The Raintown Review



Keywords/Tags: Sports, locker, lockerroom, clamor, adulation, acclaim, applause, sentiment, darkness, light, retirement, athlete, team, trophy, award, acclamation


Keywords/Tags: Icarus, Daedalus, flight, fly, flying, wind, wings, sun, height, heights, fall, falling, ascent, descent, imagination, bird, birds, butterfly, butterflies, hawk, eagle, geese, plane, kite, kites, mrbfly, mrbflight, mrbicarus

As he scanned the far horizon of the mangrove beach
He imagined her silhouette by the sea of Norwich
A home he had left long to be so remotely far
On this alien shore with her face a distant star!

The sea winds kissed his skin in a bid to make amend
For his walks in the blazing sun weariness of dayend
He felt a peace in his ruffled mind craving for a rest
Amid the waves’ serenade dreaming a lulling nest!

What if he made his home on this ****** desolate beach
Walked the sands thought-romancing the woman of Norwich
Swam wild in the saline sea then lie in the mangrove’s shade
With no statistics to worry about only love’s buzz in his head!

Not going back to the asphalt path he would build here a hut
Laze dream lying in the shadows of wild and green coconut
In the starry evenings when the sea would hold her bewitched
He would walk the trails of scent left by the woman of Norwich!

This man went with the mission of building on the sea a port
But the mangrove gave him a reason to make there a love resort
No relic survives now the waves having carried beyond reach
All except the lingering scent of his love for the woman of Norwich!

preliminary explanation

before i really begin the project i have a few scatterings
of thought that made me do this, without real planning,
a different sort of impromptu that poetry's good at,
less Dionysian spur-of-the-moment with an already
completed poem entwined to a perfect ensō,
as quick as the decapitation of Mary Boleyn with the
executioner fooling her which side the swing would
be cast by taking of his hard-soled-shoes -
i mean this in an Apollonian sense - i know, sharp contrasts
at first, but the need to fuse them - i said these are
preliminary explanations, the rest will not be as haphazardly
composed, after all, i see the triangle i'm interested it
but drawing a triangle without Pythagorean explanation
i'm just writing Δ - i'll unravel what my project is
about, just give me this opportunity to blah blah for a
while like someone from an existential novel;
what beckoned me was the dichotomy of styles,
i mean, **** me, you can read poetry while in an awkward
yoga position, you can read it standing up, sitting down,
eating or whatever you want - obviously on the throne
of thrones taking a **** is preferred - the point being
what's called serious literature is so condensed for
economic reasons, font small, never-ending paragraphs,
you need an easy-chair and a bottle of cognac to get
through a chapter sometimes - or at least freshly mowed
grass in a park in summer - it's really uncomfortable because
of that, and the fact that poets hardly wish upon you
to be myopic - just look at the spacing on the page,
constantly refreshing, open-plan condos, eye-to-eye -
but it's not about that... the different styles of writing,
prose and the novel, the historical essay / encyclopedia
or a work of philosophy - what style of writing can
be best evolutionary and undermine each? only poetry.
poetry is a ballerina mandible entity, plastic skeletons,
but that's beside the point, when journalism writes history
so vehemently... the study of history writes it nonchalantly,
it's the truth, journalism is bombastic, sensationalist
every but what courting history involves -
a journalist will write about the death of a 100 people
more vehemently than a historian writing about the Holocaust...
or am i missing something? i never understood this dichotomy
of prose - it's most apparent between journalism and history...
as far as i am concerned, the most pleasurable style of
prose is involved in the history of philosophy, or learning per se,
but i'll now reveal to you the project at hand -
it's a collage... the parameters?

the subject of the collage

it weighs 1614 grams, or 3 lb. and 8 7/8ths oz.,
it's a single volume edition, published by Pimlico,
it's slightly larger than an A5 format,
3/4 inches more in length, and ~1 centimetre in
width more, it has a depth of 1 and 3/4 inches in depth,
a bicep iron-pumping session with it in bed -
i was lying with this behemoth of a book
in bed soothing out a semi-delirium state
listening to Ola Gjeilo's *northern lights
and flicking through the appendix, and i started thinking,
no would read this giant fully, would they?
the reason it's a one volume edition is because
the only place you'd read such an edition would
be in a library, at a desk, and you'd be taking snippets
out from it, quotes, authentic references points
for an essay, esp. if you were a history student,
such books aren't exactly built for leisure, as my arms
could testify... after the appendix i started flicking
through as to what point of interest would spur me
onto this audacious (and perhaps auspicious)
act of renegading against writing a novel (in the moment,
in the moment, i can't imagine myself rereading plot-lines
after a day or two, adding to it - that's a collage too,
but of a different kind - and no, i won't be plagiarising
as such, after all i'll be citing parallel, but utilising
poetry as the driving revision dynamic compared
to the chronologically stale prose of history) - i'll be
extracting key points that are already referenced and not
using the style of the author - the book in question?
Europe: a history by Norman Davies prof. emeritus
at U.C.L. - the point of entry that made me mad enough
to condense this 1335 page book (excluding the index)?

point of incision

Voltaire (or the man suspected of Guy Fawkes-likes spreading
of volatility in others) -
un polonais - c'est un charmeur; deux polonais - une
bagarre; trois polonais, eh bien, c'est la question polonaise
(one pole - a charmer, two poles - a brawl, three poles -
the polish question) - mind you, the subtler and gentler
precursor of the Jewish question, because the Frenchman
mused, and not a German, or a Russian brute...
and i can testify, two Polish immigrants in a pub,
one senior, the other minor, one with 22 years under
his belt of the integration purpose, one with 12 years,
the minor says to the senior about how Poles bring
the village life to cities, brutish drunkards and what not,
it was almost a brawl, prior to the senior was charming
a Lithuanian girl, before the minor's emphasis on
such a choice of conversation turned into idiotic Lithuanian
nostalgia about the disintegration of the Polish-Lithuanian
commonwealth, primarily due to the Polish nobility.

10,000 b.c.

looking that far back i don't know why you even
bother to celebrate the weekend -
i mean, 10,000 years back Denmark was
still attached to Sweden,
England was attached to France,
and there was a weird looking Aquatic landmass
that would become a myth of Atlantis
in the Chronicles of Norwich,
speedy ******* Gonzales with the equivalent
of south america detaching itself from Africa...
mind you, i'm sure the Carpathian ranges are
mountains. they're noted here are hills or uplands,
by categorising them as such i'm surprised
the majority of Carpathian elevations as scolded
bald rocky faced, a hill i imagine to have some
vegetation on it, not mountain goats with rock and roof
for a blacksmith in a population of one hundred...
at this point Darwinism really becomes a disorientating
pinpoint of whatever history takes your fancy,
Europe - mother of Minos, lord of Crete,
progenitrix / ******* and the leather curtains
of Zeus's harem (jealous? no, just the sarcasm
dominates the immortal museum of attachable
****** to suit the perfect elephant **** of depth
the gods sided with, by choice, excusing the Suez
duct tightening of a prostate gland... to ease the pain
upon ******* rather than *******); mentioned by Homer
the Blind tooth-fairy, the Europe and the bull,
Europoeus and the swan, same father of wisdom to mind,
on the shores of Loch Lomond -
attributes a lover to the bull, Moschus of Syracuse,
who said earring Plato cured him of where the ****
should not enter even if it shines a welcome
in the disguise of Dionysius... revisionists bound to Pompeii
named Titian, Rembrandt, Rubens Veronese
and Claude Lorrain revived the bulging bull's *******
and her mm hmm mm, too gracious my kind, hehee...
Phonecians from Tyre and Io - so too the Sibyl of ****** -
and unlike the great river civilisations of the Nile,
the Ganges, soon to be the Danubian civilisations
and gorged-out-eyes-that-once-sore-colour-but-lost-sight-of-
colours-­after-seeing-the-murk-of-the-Thames...
soon the seas overcame civilisations of the rivers,
as Cadmus, brother of the thus stated harlot said:
i bring you orbe pererrato - hieroglyphics of the cage,
but not an owl or a hawk inside it -
so let's perfect speaking to an encoding by first
rummaging into learning how to procure the perfect
forms of counting - i say left, you say I, i say right
you say II, left right left right, what do you say?
VI. bravo! the Hellenic world just crossed the Aegean
and civilisation bore twins within the cult of a lunar-mother,
Islam of Romulus and Remus, a she-wolf
a canine of the night - according to another -
tremulae sinuantur flamine vestes - or so the myth goes -
a cherished phantom of what became the fabled story
of sole Odysseus with his ears open and the remnant
sailor's ears waxed shut - as if the bankers of this world,
revelling in culprit universal fancy than nonetheless
bred the particular oddities - lest we forget,
the once bountiful call of the sirens to the oceanic
is but a fraction of what today's sirens claim to be song,
a fraction of it remains in this world, the onomatopoeia
of the once maddening song, the crude *******
arrangement of vowels bound to the jealous god's
déjà vu of the compounding second H.

from myth to perpetuating a modern sentiment

you can jump from 10,000 b.c. to the Munich Crisis
of 1938 - 9 with a snap of the fingers,
imitating quantum phenomenons like gesticulating
a game of mime with Chinese whispers necessary,
if Europe is a nymph, Naples her azure eyes,
Warsaw her heart, Sebastopol and Azoff,
Petersburg, Mitau, Odessa - these the thorns
in her feet - Paris the head, London the starched collar,
and Rome - the sepulchre.
or... die handbuch der europaischen geschichte
notably from Charlemagne (the Illiterate)
to the Greek colonels (as apart from Constantine to
Thomas More in eight volumes, via Cambridge mid
1930s)... these and some other books of urgency
e.g. Eugene Weber's H. A. L. Fisher's, Sr. Walter Ralegh,
Jacob Bronowski... elsewhere excavated noun-obscurities
like gattopardo and konarmya had their
circas extended like shelved vegetables in modern
supermarket isles, for one reason or another...
prado, sonata sovkino also... some also mention
Thomas Carlyle (i'd make it sound like carried-away isle,
but never mind); so in this intro much theory,
how to sound politically correct, verifiable to suit
a coercion for a status quo... Europe as a modern idea,
replacing Imperum Romanun came Christendom,
ugly Venetian Pirates at Constantinople,
Barbarossa making it in pickled herring juice
in a barrel to Jerusalem... once called the pinkish-***-fluff
of Saxony, now called the pickled cucumber,
drowning in his armour in some river or Brosphorus...
alchemists, Luther and Copernicus were invited on
the same occasion as the bow-tie was invented,
apparently it was a marriage made for the Noir cinema,
beats me - hence the new concept of Europe,
reviving the idea of Imperium Romanun
meant, somehow including Judea in the Euro
championship of footie gladiator ***** whipped
narcissists, rejecting the already banished Carthage
(Libya / Tunisia by Cato's standards) and encouraging
the Huns, the Goths and the even more distant Slavs and
Vikings to accept not so much the crucifix as
the revised spine of the serpent but as the geometry of
human limbs, well, not so much that, but forgetting
Norse myths of the one-eyed and the runic alphabet
and settling for ah be'h c'eh d'ah.
dissident frenche stink abbe, charles castel de st pierre
(1658 - 1743) aand this work projet d'une paix perpetuelle
(1713) versus Питер Великий who just said:
never mind the city, the Winter Palace... i have aborted
fetus pickles in my bedroom, lava lamps i call them.
the last remaining reference to Christianity?
Nietzsche was late, the public was certain,
it was the Treaty of Utrecht, 1713, with public reference
to the republica christiana / commonwealth was last made.
to Edmund Burke: well, i too wish no exile
upon any European on his continent of birth,
but invigorate a Muslim to give birth on it
and you invigorate an exile nonetheless:
Ezra expatriate Pound / sorry, if born in eastern
europe a ***** Romanian immigrant, pristine
expatriate in western Europe, fascist radio has
my tongue and *****, so let's play a game:
Russian roulette for the Chinese cos there's
a billion of them, and no one would really mind
a missing Chow Mein... chu shoo'ah shaolin moo'n'kah!
or a cappuccino whenever you'd like to watch
classic Italian pornographic cinema with dubbing
with nuns involved... Willaim Blake and his
stark naked prophesy, pope pius II (treatise 1458)
even though Transylvania, Tharce and Hungary
shared the same phonetic encoding with diacritical
distinctions like any Frenchman, German,
or Pole at the Siege of Vienna (1683)
to counter the antagonising Ottoman - i swear historians
do this one purpose, juggle dates and head-of-state figures
prior to entering a chronology - they must first try out
a ******* carousel before playing with the toy-train...
broadcasting to a defeated Germany public, T. S. Eliot
(1945) ****** import to into Western Germany
and talk of the failing moral fabric, China laughing
after the ***** intricacies of warfare of trade,
what was once wool we wished to be silk...
instead of silk we received vegetarian wool, namely
hemp, and Amsterdam is to blame... nuke 'em!
that's how it sounds, how a historian approaches
writing a history from the annals, from circa and
circumstance and actual history, foremost the abbreviations,
the fishing hook standards, the parameters,
the limits, and then the mathematics of history,
one thing culminating into another... contra Lenin
N. S. Trubetskoy, P. N. Savitsky, G. Vernadsky
Russian at the perks of the Urals - steppe Tartar shamans
or salon pranced pretty **** boys? where to put
the intoxicant and where to put the mascara... hmm,
god knows, or by 21st calculations, a meteor;
they say the history of nations is a history of women,
then at least the history of individuation
and of men who succumb to its proliferation
is astoundingly misogynistic.
Seton-Watson, among the the tombstones too reminded
of remarkable esteem and accomplishment
with only one gravedigger to claim as father...
as many death ears as on two giraffe skeletons
stood Guizot, men of many letter and few fortunes,
or v. v., incubators of cousin ***** and none the kippah
before the arrogant saintly diminished to
a justly cause of recession, ha ha,
by nature's grace, and with true advent of her progression
as guard-worthy pre- to each pro-
and suggested courteous of the ****** fibre,
oh hey, the advent of masqueraded woofing,
a Venetian high-brow, and jealousy out of a forgotten
spirit of adventure that once was bound
to hunting and foraging... forever lost to write  history of
a king dubbed Louis the XIV...
crucibles and distastes for the state to be pleased,
once removed from Paris, forever to Angevin womb
accustomed once more, at Versailles released -
as cake be sown so too the aristocratic swan necks
for worth of mock and scorn - and the dampening rain
rattle the blood-thirst of the St. Bartholomew's Day
slaughter, to date, the rebirth of Burgundy,
of Anjou, and with the dead king presiding, to be
of no worth in judging himself a king before god or pauper...
saluer Antoine Quentin Fouquier-Tinville!
that i might too in stead rattle a few bones prior to burial
with the jaw that will laugh and chatter least
had it been to my kingly-stead a birth so lowly.
then at least in satisfactory temperament i procure a
judgement of the noble like of a *****
for an hour's worth of pistons and jarring tongues...
as if from a nobleman then indeed as if from a *****,
for who sold Europe and said: Arabia, if not the
Frenchman, the Englishman, the Spaniard?
the former colonial conquests served you not enough?
i imagine the reinstatement of Israel like
the Frankish states under Philippe-August...
precursors to a cathedral dubbed Urban the 2nd's..
there were only Norwegian motives in the Ukraine
and the black sea... Israel to me is like plagiarism
of the Frankish states of the middle-east, with Europe
slightly... oom'pah loom'pah mongolian harmonica.
some said Rudyard Kipling poems,
some said Mr. Kipling's afternoon tea cakes -
whichever made it first on Coronation St.
some also say the Teutonic barbecues -
it was a matter of example to feed them hog
and cannibalise the peasants for ourselves,
a Prussian standard worth an army standard of
rigour - Ave Maria - letztre abendessen nahrung -
mein besitzen, wenn in die Aden, i'd be the last
talking carcass...
gottes ist der orient!
gottes ist der okzident!
nord - und sudliches gelande
ruht im frieden seiner hande.
germany's lebensraum, inferiority and classification,
inferior slavs and jews, genetics and why my
hatred of Darwinism is persistent, you need
an explanatory noting to make it auto-suggestive
for Queen & Country? diseased elements,
Jewish Bolshevism, Polish patriotism,
Soviets, Teutons, the grand alliances of 1918
or 1945? Wilsonian testimony of national self-determi

January Colours

In the winter garden
of the Villa del Parma
by the artist’s studio
green grass turns vert de terre
and the stone walls
a wet mouse’s back
grounding neutral – but calm,
soothing like calamine
in today’s mizzle,
a permanent dimpsey,
fine drenching drizzle,
almost invisible, yet
saturating skylights
with evidence of rain.

February Colours

In the kitchen’s borrowed light,
dear Grace makes bread  
on the mahogany table,
her palma gray dress
bringing the outside in.

Whilst next door, inside
Vanessa’s garden room
the French windows
firmly shut out this
season’s bitter weather.

There, in the stone jar
beside her desk,
branches of heather;
Erica for winter’s retreat,
Calluna for spring’s expectation.

Tea awaits in Duncan’s domain.
Set amongst the books and murals,
Spode’s best bone china  
turning a porcelain pink
as the hearth’s fire burns bright..

Today
in this house
a very Bloomsbury tone,
a truly Charleston Gray.

March Colours

Not quite daffodil
Not yet spring
Lancaster Yellow
Was Nancy’s shade

For the drawing room
Walls of Kelmarsh Hall
And its high plastered ceiling
Of blue ground blue.

Playing cat’s paw
Like the monkey she was
Two drab husbands paid
For the gardens she made,
For haphazard luxuriance.

Society decorator, partner
In paper and paint,
She’d walk the grounds
Of her Palladian gem
Conjuring for the catalogue
Such ingenious labels:

Brassica and Cooking Apple
Green to be seen
In gardens and orchards
Grown to be greens.

April Colours

It would be churlish
to expect, a folly to believe,
that green leaves would  
cover the trees just yet.

But blossom will:
clusters of flowers,
Damson white,
Cherry red,
Middleton pink,

And at the fields’ edge
Primroses dayroom yellow,
a convalescent colour
healing the hedgerows
of winter’s afflictions.

Clouds storm Salisbury Plain,
and as a skimming stone
on water, touch, rise, touch
and fall behind horizon’s rim.
Where it goes - no one knows.

Far (far) from the Madding Crowd
Hardy’s concordant cove at Lulworth
blue by the cold sea, clear in the crystal air,
still taut with spring.

May Colours

A spring day
In Suffield Green,
The sky is cook’s blue,
The clouds pointing white.

In this village near Norwich
Lives Marcel Manouna
Thawbed and babouched
With lemurs and llamas,
Leopards and duck,
And more . . .

This small menagerie
Is Marcel’s only luxury
A curious curiosity
In a Norfolk village
Near to Norwich.

So, on this
Blossoming
Spring day
Marcel’s blue grey
Parrot James
Perched on a gate
Squawks the refrain

Sumer is icumen in
Lhude sing cuccu!
Groweþ sed and bloweþ med
And springþ þe wde nu,
Sing cuccu!

June

Thrownware
earth red
thrown off the ****
the Japanese way.
Inside hand does the work,
keeps it alive.
Outside hand holds the clay
and critically tweaks.
Touch, press, hold, release
Scooting, patting, spin!
Centering: the act
precedes all others
on the potter’s wheel.
Centering: the day
the sun climbs highest
in our hemisphere.
And then affix the glaze
in colours of summer:
Stone blue
Cabbage white
Print-room yellow
Saxon green
Rectory red
And fire!

July Colours

I see you
by the dix blue
asters in the Grey Walk
via the Pear Pond,
a circuit of surprises
past the Witches House,
the Radicchio View,
to the beautifully manicured
Orangery lawns, then the
East and West Rills of
Gertrude’s Great Plat.

And under that pea green hat
you wear, my mistress dear,
though your face may be April
there’s July in your eyes of such grace.

I see you wander at will
down the cinder rose path
‘neath the drawing-room blue sky.

August Colours

Out on the wet sand
Mark and Sarah
take their morning stroll.
He, barefoot in a blazer,
She, linen-light in a wide-brimmed straw,
Together they survey
their (very) elegant home,
Colonial British,
Classic traditional,
a retreat in Olive County, Florida:
white sandy beaches,
playful porpoises,
gentle manatees.

It’s an everfine August day
humid and hot
in the hurricane season.
But later they’ll picnic on
Brinjal Baigan Bharta
in the Chinese Blue sea-view
dining room fashioned
by doyen designer
Leta Austin Foster
who ‘loves to bring the ocean inside.
I adore the colour blue,’ she says,
‘though gray is my favourite.’

September

A perfect day
at the Castle of Mey
beckons.
Watching the rising sun
disperse the morning mists,
the Duchess sits
by the window
in the Breakfast Room.
Green leaves have yet to give way
to autumn colours but the air
is seasonably cool, September fresh.

William is fishing the Warriner’s Pool,
curling casts with a Highlander fly.
She waits; dressed in Power Blue
silk, Citron tights,
a shawl of India Yellow
draped over her shoulders.
But there he is, crossing the home beat,
Lucy, her pale hound at his heels,
a dead salmon in his bag.

October Colours

At Berrington
blue, clear skies,
chill mornings
before the first frosts
and the apples ripe for picking
(place a cupped hand under the fruit
and gently ‘clunch’).

Henry Holland’s hall -
just ‘the perfect place to live’.
From the Picture Gallery
redolent in portraits
and naval scenes,
the view looks beyond
Capability’s parkland
to Brecon’s Beacons.

At the fourteen-acre pool
trees, cane and reed
mirror in the still water
where Common Kingfishers,
blue green with fowler pink feet
vie with Grey Herons,
funereal grey,
to ruffle this autumn scene.

November Colours

In pigeon light
this damp day
settles itself
into lamp-room grey.

The trees intone
farewell farewell:
An autumnal valedictory
to reluctant leaves.

Yet a few remain
bold coloured

Porphry Pink
Fox Red
Fowler
Sudbury Yellow

hanging by a thread
they turn in the stillest air.

Then fall
Then fall

December Colours*

Green smoke* from damp leaves
float from gardens’ bonfires,
rise in the silver Blackened sky.

Close by the tall railings,
fast to lichened walls
we walk cold winter streets

to the warm world of home, where
shadows thrown by the parlour fire
dance on the wainscot, flicker from the hearth.

Hanging from our welcome door
see how incarnadine the berries are
on this hollyed wreath of polished leaves.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When was the last time I wrote something meaningful?
My life has become nothing more than shifting from one
house to another, encompassed by drug taking and a sense
of nothingness. I have become a working class flea, but with enough money
to feign royalty, structure is a distant memory, no longer tangible.
Living in total squalor with no desire to change, a perverse lusting
to continue down this dusty trail of over indulgence and self-deprecating
destruction. I need to get out of this ******* mess, yet at the same time
a sick voice within tells me to stay, so perhaps I will, perhaps I will crash
further into the aphotic world of the people I loath, the people who I despise. But I am not like them. I am different, right? For the moment, my blade has been sharpened enough to slash through the inevitable wrath of unfortunate circumstance, I am still in control, unlike the others - dying in their own self-encompassing shadows of subjugation.

There's a passage in a story by John Buchan where a minor character explains how a good mystery story is created: take at least three random subjects or events and connect them together. Here goes.
 
A toothbrush
Covent Garden
Wildflowers*
 
Interesting to let the mind float free and subjects appear unbidden, thought Marcus. The moon had risen and out at sea its reflections caressed the swelling waves. Calm the night after such a day of being about.
 
Gregory had phoned him, early. Marcus had been lying in bed. Sylvia had just returned from the bathroom and had folded herself into his arms. Their collective feet had conversed amicably as early morning feet do. She was still tingling a little from the passion they had shared, stretching herself languorously like a cat coming into the warm after a cold night out.
 
'Marcus,' said Gregory, 'it's today.' And that was all. The line went dead, but that was all he needed to know.
 
He extricated himself from Sylvia who was intent either on sleep or further love-making. She was incorrigible, but so so desirable.
 
I'll just take a toothbrush he thought as he swiftly shaved. He picked a new pink one still in its packet and put it in his bag with the papers, a map, his camera . . .
 
He thought about Ripley as he steered the car onto the motorway. That character fascinated him and he wondered if its inventor Patricia Highsmith had ever known such a man; a nice good-looking man, but selfish and nasty. Marcus wondered if he was selfish and nasty. He reckoned he was.
 
When he reached Covent Garden, parking illegally in Jermine street, he wasted no time in walking directly to Turino's. There, amongst the tourists and the out of town shoppers was Greg.
 
'I have this little package for you. Don't open it until you reach Southwold. Park in front of the Lion Hotel. Do nothing until she appears, which she will do after her lunch with the doctor. Then follow her. We think she'll go to Ben's. If she does we want the pictures . . . and as explicit as possible. Leave the package.'
 
It's at least two and a half hours to this village on the Suffolk coast. Until Ipswich he scarcely regarded the early summer colours, the plaintive skies, fields stretching to woods, the occasional grandeur of parkland.
 
He stopped for coffee at a services and called Sylvia.
 
'Hi Sylvia it's me.'
'Where are you? I was hoping we'd spend the morning together.'
'Well Greg called . . . I'm on my way to the seaside.'
'Oh . . . no time for Sylvia today?'
'Not today'
'Tonight?'
'if all goes to plan'
' You journalists, you're all the same . .'
 
But he wasn't. He was different. He didn't just write, he could investigate, uncover things, hack into mobile phones, get the compromising images.
 
Yes, she was going to Ben's . North, on the Norwich road. No hesitation. She drove fast. He had to have his wits about him. When she turned off the main road to the mill he carried on, then doubled back and two miles further on parked within sight of the building.
 
Her red car was there the courtyard. He decided on getting in from the garden so left the road for an adjoining field. Waist high in a profusion of grasses and wildflowers Marcus made his way painstakingly towards a collection of outbuildings, the indoor swimming pool, garages, an office.
 
The pictures were good. Both of them, together. The architect and the broker. Lovers, conspirators, thieves. They deserved everything coming to them.
 
He had entered the mill briefly. There were voices upstairs, a little laughter and then silence. He left the package on the kitchen table propped up against a vase.
 
They'd been following her movements for months after he'd taken his suspicions to Fred. Yes, he'd been so lucky. A wine bar conversation, an aggrieved employee, a few leaked documents and it all came together. And now this . . . the ****** stuff the paper loved.
 
He decided not to go back to Sylvia tonight but walk by the sea, let the gentle whoosh of water on the pebbled strand sooth his ruffled conscience. He had done his job. There would be other intrusions. Investigations, revelations. Mr Nice but nasty like The Talented Mr Ripley, he thought.

two bottles of 70cl whiskey later and a few beers, popping sleeping pills for an actual effect worked with (it's ten past five p.m., i'm already mentioning ~ eleven minutes to midnight, so wait)... you get the shovel and broom ushering the ***** drinkers from a town centre in Leicester or Norwich; or you implant a hope to live in Scandinavia; you're basically laughing with a russian at that point: 'eh eh, where's lithuania?' 'ah ****, it's next to yuri reciting poetry on the laika satellite.' 'thought so.' german started from monkeys, sent one into space... slavs started with dogs... like all good people, i would too have kept the cats grounded in atmosphere; well, the oedipal riddle began with a sphinx, so i'm more than ready for the cerberus.*

i'm not going to repent for
my alcoholic metabolism,
i'll wait till you turn into ostriches
ostricizing vegans for anaemia
and bulimia and the london fashion show;
bullseye market that cares for
diaphragms and diabetes; sure the arabs
are alcohol free, but diabetic
looking into the sand dunes like looking
at dunes of sugar.

how far can analysis go,
if philosophy books do not
utilise grammatical words / categories?

i dare say, let's begin with
that mathematics calls coordinates,
a simple (x, y, z) of the algebra
that translates into
  (1 across, 2 up, 3 diagonally) -

in language, that's a bit more
complicated:

   the category of prepositions stretches:
on, in, from, with, counter(-) -
with or without the hyphen affix making
counter a suffix...
                against is still minded
as a preposition...
                               as...
  
oh god, i believe in the trans-movement,
although i believe in the transcendence
of grammatical categorisation of words,
minus the meat & two veg,
and minus the floral pattern analogy
of female genitalia... for ****'s sake.

language, you must admit, has more
coordinate "starting" / incision markers
that mathematics had or ever will, "have".
why?
                 simple... 26 beats 10 digits...
even if there's the c k q...
              Siamese i.e. -
               the grapheme ae...
                      whatever...

  i hate the devilishly debilitating stance
of having perfected language and
treating this perfecting as anti-"scientific"...
   your parents originated from norwich?
if not so: i'd think so.
                    
       i'm about this | | close to losing
my temper and frying a belgian waffle...
calling in Thai with a crisp Eloise salad and
reminding the inclusion of the use of tamarind...
that over-salty peanut butter paste...

i hate being the person to break it to you:
language can be re-celebrated
having tasted the piquant pompousness of
over-exaggerated establishment of science
as a quasi-religion...
                          
language can be as scientific as an -logy
affix -
    as long as it minds the bouncy-castle
of grammar, notably categorisation words
of the orthodox caste choice of woo-woo-wording...
it's best to begin with shrapnel,
notably the already titled observation,
correlation between mathematical coordinates
and worded "coordination"
        via prepositions...

               we already sharpened
the islamic five pillars into two:
  a- (without)
                             the- (with) -
the prefix distinction, unfortunately is only
entertained by the indefinite articulation -
since a definite articulation has a higher name,
most distinguishable...
            
                                  there's a "point"
to "the" point, only given that "the" point
   is gambling on "a" point, without a recurring
point of curbed ambitions of
                   said: "point" being demaned
  in the first place...

in the existentialist vernacular that's also
called: juggling the "ditto" / inverted commas -
two things are apparent:
                        three things are being said.

only when language is "unnecessarily"
complicated does life become the so craving for
answering: life's short, life's simple -
  yes, but that being said -
language is elongated, with death being
the centipede to a butterfly's two weeks' worth
of gilded glide and pomp and
         colour-dyed circumvent of
the numb-packing grey and, everyday.

A seven-hour stretch
Over 300 miles
Of motorway
Across country
It was a tough trip

The temperature dropped
As the bright blue sky
Changed to a gorgeous cascade of pinks
It was breathtaking
And made me think
We do not experience these scenes
In our everyday life
It was for the traveller's eye

so this nun mary from the school
of the sisters of notre dame
(dame or Dane?) had her brain removed
and probed: full of plaques and entanglements,
advanced Alzheimer's the coroner said,
aged 101 the brain,
yet up to her death no symptoms of the disease...
she was one of 678 subjects of the nun study,
American experiment genesis 1986 a.d.,
(journalism is really a true ally of poetry),
the 678 were told to write a character assassination
in range between poetry and diary (in their 20s),
"low idea" density they did produce,
but like Sister Anastasia: an amazing poppy-seed cake.
indeed dementia, the western medical anxiety,
10% of people over 60 and 50% of those over 85,
the grey plague i call it (grey matter, no
vermin scuttling about);
men are particularly less at the risk,
long gone the vogue of smoking tobacco -
could have asked the Apache indians about
peace-pipes long into their 90s... but no.
Aloysius Alzheimer / Oppenheimer
discovered the anti-ego unit and the atom bomb
with the neuron, in the latter case the 'd'uh' gene...
cave in the vowels on discretion
saying 'y Dinosaur kno'w, but i saw
a big mushroom boom' caving in meaning they
have to sound more hollow than you thought before
(the vowels, the vowels)...
like the article states, is it really a dis-ease?
i.e. a negation of ease? only if you found learning
at school to be torture and equipped with
a mentality for menial tasks like sunset on a monday
or summer 1904 so too summer of 2014...
no dementia in the giant Galapagos turtles,
they outlive us and still have a brain-rate
on a scale of: take one step here, plop a **** there...
lettuce, lettuce, lettuce... munching this greenery
will take forever! indeed the backlog of libraries of
knowledge and the result of those pioneer futilities
never tapped, still fucky fucky, toow dollar sucky sucky
on the cranium donning a crown.
the rest of the article concerning 4 inches closer
between the finger that dipped into peanut butter
(a closed mouth, eyes, and one nostril)
and identification of nature's diarrhoea (mm those
crunchy bits of fungi and corn undigested) -
but i'd tell you the experiment is faulty,
the peanut butter served up probably wasn't warmed up,
sense of smell and gaseous imprints, like
chlorine the disinfectant in public swimming pools...
not watching television a big give-away,
leisure time spent watching Plato's cave
at 27% of the sigma elsewhere and 18% by those
not afflicted...
then there's the whole dementia diabetes debate,
vegetables versus fruits... vegetables win...
Alzheimer's (also known as type 3 diabetes)...
imagine a creature coerced into disbelieving the
existence of water, and that alcohol is water
and a hamburger, that's me...
remember that nuns are cloistered yet sociable...

general hardbacks
1. the unmumsy mum (50,195 examples sold)
2. how it works: the mum (119,830 examples sold)
3. how it works: the husband (312,910 examples sold)

general paperbacks
1. the road to little dribbling (68,270 examples sold)
2. SPQR (26,765 examples sold)
3. the shepherd's life (61,000 examples sold)

want the fiction statistics of the publishing industry?
here goes:

fiction hardbacks
1. the last mile (4,190 examples sold)
2. private paris (3,225       "             "  )
3. predator (22,430            "             "  )

fiction paperback
1. career of evil (16,865    "              " )
2. the girl in the spider's web (55,625 examples sold)
3. make me (127,395 examples sold)

so there's that and there's the 148 diaries found in a skip
(a life discarded): apparently only 148 diaries remained
from a total of 1,000, the universal truth after seeing
Iolanthe, running incompletely from 1952 (Cambridge),
a "true thing" at 30 words per minute ranging between
1 and 3 hours of composition daily (handwritten,
imagine writing with a keyboard ***,
hand-crafted in Israel, yes the *** is an Israeli invention),

so there's that, all the intellectuals bits and bobs,
but there's also:
#instawoman: 'mostly non-fiction - so i keep
them in the loo. a paragraph is better than nothing,
even if it takes me five years to finish a book.
agony aunt "mrs. mills'" replies to modern truffles
(sorry, trivialities): my b/f wants to have ***
on trains on the Glaswegian side of scotland
bit tipsy bit turvy (turdy?) and popping to do likewise
on the Cornish coastline, her reply?
****** pervert... fetishism (Freud believed)
derived from a man's unconscious terror of once
having stuck his head out of his mother's ******...
(hey! my bladder man! my ****! that ****
didn't develop till i was outside that annoying
oven / aquarium!) - so she replies and says:
whisper "the seven o'clock London Liverpool St.
to Norwich", and as my own input:
for a premature *******.

that's Sunday sorted then.

by the time malachi wrote of elijah's half, god split too, and then the embodiment happened on two roundabouts worth of twirl: god was a third's worth of christ's trinity talked about, recognising india in a symmetrical summery of applause for anglia's capital norwich - exchanged in overcoming autumn into similar wobbly within grasp - stornoway - to pinpoint an x for some lapsed tongue twirling less hollywood and more of the towing dimensional twins: diaper dipped innocent and sunk into welly fudge wet sludge slurps of onomatopoeias, exchanged to boot pivots for the weatherman handling insignia of coordination with a queen's lazed approach to care for the public's handy utility: shaken the plumber shaken the electrician, but gloved the hand ordinating trickles of tubular artery and sparks of the veiny rarity skidding into pressurised suicides named.*

as i said it once: by the time of malachi elijah was half of what jesus became,
a trinity of thirds; but by a polytheistic nitro of interests reincarnation
was not much for the oneness: with malachi in oath
to claim elijah in half, while jesus stole a prophet's book,
which endowed a testimony, such that much of the greek "god said"
was roman "let me ease into it and regurgitate."
so while malachi wrote of elijah's re-incarnation and spoke heresy on
the pulpit of polytheism for a crowd of monotheists
not allowing a seventh of the same pool draw
of sunken chlorine breathed as a matchstick sparked,
it was malachi so many years prior
anticipating the many gods ridiculed by a singled out earth,
while jesus stole isaiah's book and hiding it near the dead sea,
and having his own testimony
of being integrated into egyptian alimony
sold and paired revealing the sorrowful desert winds that the desert
in toadish engulfed the nearby architecture. so i tell you: jesus stole isaiah's testimony,
was crucified for it, because within the penta- framework moses wrote
like a true outsider - and we prefer narcissists holding a mirror rather
than gripping a nail to a placard of steadied wood of ennobling statues
of geometrics. why then the many narcissist messiahs empowered by posing
into a polaroid fake and the lost oedipus plural theorised?
once malachi came with the heresy elijah was halved with god,
and once jesus came and the people began deciphering babylonian madness
so that the hanging gardens were architecturally sound
and the pyramids were proven higher than the eiffel:
without a sweaty wrinkles' river taken aqua vivo, we thus conversed.
elijah was a third in the form of jesus who begat one as a trinity
to further the heresy of malachi.

there is a limit for everything.

there's a limit on how accurately
you can pronounce 'pecan',
and it's worth a watch--
between wild west ranger
and retired norwich resident.

one must decide which arm
is stronger-- two grocery bags
for the left arm and one for
the right,

but if it were not so,
you may as well carry them
on each drooping finger.

a can rests on a tired desk.
it is filled with nothing,
which is precisely everything.

it weights 478 lbs. to an ant,
a balloon's helium proximity to you.

now try to step in the aluminum cylinder
and carry it from the inside

Mad in my envy.
Mad in the irrational stresses of "love".
Mad at all the happiness I isolate.
Mad with the visions of success.
Mad with my prewar publications.
Mad with your gestures of bliss.
Mad in how we can't get carried away.
Mad at how the money always talks back.
Mad when I am making this a monologue.
Mad when I haven't crossed the minds of
       strangers.
Mad when they declare the eyes of reason to
       be obscene for the children.
Mad at the fame that they call existence.
Mad when I see the lackluster descriptive
       lies within their Bibles.
Mad that you became the society we
       ******.
Mad toward the rebirth of the minister's
       daughter who sang for forgiveness and
       love but lied about both,
Wasting our time on useless Norwich
       sonnets, and naming the theoretical
       infants—
Wouldn't anyone be mad as hell?

II. GENESIS.

Beautiful in your powerful gaze, upgrading
       constantly, tossing me aside, casting
       countless new euphoric darlings into the
       void since my dismissal.

Draining each meaningful vein from the
       poor souls who fall under your magnetic
       pull—who want to brave the human    
       castle (floor lined with pitfalls) and then
       you, *** Incarnate! Most perfect
       amongst us! Blessed be your Godly
       word, you execute them with joy!

Holy in your immaculate beauty, dear Saint!
Now it is your time of reckoning.

Happy Birthday.

Don't forget who made you.

The only natural poem I have consciously been involved in-
The site, not just the reporting-
was when I happened upon a sheep gazing at me
in a field immediately off a motorway in Norwich.

This was not planned, yet it was
disconcertingly poetic.

Life whispers it's potentialities, it's immovable eros
the way billboards make us aware of our melancholia.

"Your hair is flaxen"
No, your hair is just damp. "Flaxen" reminds
us of a language that according our reading of poetry
existed long before our ancestors could read.
It does, however, sound more complimentary,
therefore more sincere,
therefore more comforting
than "damp."

I wear all my pretentious vocabulary and sentimental heart-stirrings
like a cross dangling from my neck
pretty as the plastic emotions I express
Because of my dearth of enthusiasm as opposed to experience
Because of the transparency of my speaking without first attuning
to the spectre of blood which no longer clots my lungs Dominika
but now sullies my hands.

But I wash and wash, and am clean, cleaner than most.
And my cleanliness infuriates you Dominika,
it breaks your back to see me so elevated among the wrecks.
When you speak there is no air that leaves your lungs to pollute the air
there are all only words whose sounds make the other sounds commonplace.
Whereas I am all white, brilliant, brutal air.

I've calculated the effect this has on your sense of self
Dominika, of your progress, of your place in the narrative
and though you hate me for implying so if I explained
You wouldn't understand
Dominika
I made it that way.

Here come
pairs   of   legs
   riddled with cellulite
   accents
     stuff the air
Neuwcassul
   Burmingum
stores     reek
of cheap   tat
   bargain   last-few-quid   items
Irish music
no-one gives a     jig     about
    Mr. Whippy's
for sale every seven/six
   make that     five     cafés
women   packed
   like bubblewrap
     into denim shorts
     middle-aged men
plagued with     tattoos
   Irn Bru tans

back at the chalet
     kids thwack
   plastic     *****
with plastic racquets
   next-door neighbours
   puff on their nineteenth
*** before midday
come   night
karaoke floods towards us
   like a murky tsunami
don't stop believin'
     hold   on   to   that   feelin'

but the   girl
in the museum
   had a ponytail
   another one
dipped in gold
   like a fancy chess piece
and I walk   around
in a   Norwich   shirt
lick sea-breeze
     and know
   this isn't
home

Hundreds of foam backed carpet squares.
Fiber, pattern, loop or pile;
The same materials each one bares.

Design in laying of interest to sight.
Rotated up, down, or flipped around;
Creates diversity in the way it reflects the Light.

We are “soul and body, clad and enclosed in the goodness of God.”
Julian of Norwich

unlike painters, poetic sketches
are rarely written down,
they're spoken,
it's not necessarily a psychiatric
worthy evaluation of a lack of health,
poets levy all the possibilities
of anti-matter (the compromise)
to sketch - you can spot them
incur constant defeat, writing on
a sheath with their inky sword,
on a colour of defeat, warring with
the word, but to no avail,
yet still ram-persistent-ignorance
remaining to be utilised;
learning the english language
from the age of 8,
i meet a Cypriot in a pub in the
irish "quarter" of greater london,
and he tells me i'm posh -
self-taught elocution that
allows me to slur posh when drinking,
i had it coming, learn from scratch,
scratch your way in to the aristocratic
heights, but have a stiff-left **** cheek
and the whole cheek affair will
bubble-foam through;
aspiring Sadduccee said:
'but not because of the babylonians
or the egyptians had we such
a massive influx of religious debate
and religious intellectualism,
as under the romans...
their image-engraving system
serves the polity, they ignore
the engravings, but do so nonetheless
for some odd principle,
there's the point of gesticulation
amiss, only the ****** females
gesticulate with incense and ****** -
none dare cross the threshold of
argument, unless they head to the
undiscovered lands of the north,
by such distance allowed to be crossed,
a crucifixion would seem but a torturous
tickle, compared to the blood eagle execution.'
indeed the northern numbness of the heart,
lest anything else prevail, this alone will...
but the larger the society, the less chance
of tribalism and justice eager to sentence
culprits... more thieves and cowards...
a thief will not steal your arm or leg,
but the by-product of your arm's or leg's labour,
cowards and thieves rampant.
so indeed, the poet sketches, but sketches
with his mouth, onto the canvas of clouded
skies, bird cries and howling foxes,
he sketches like a painter might,
although respectably announcing the numbers;
a Pharisee said:
'we invented this mode of communication,
these letters these numbers for only
one monumental reason, stationed
in the Bastille, envisioned our fate we did,
we crafted this little abstracts into
as many units as there are,
for the sole reason as to complicate
our imagining of things...
strain the mind to read, un-strain it to
imagine a higher reality of a child's impromptu -
for we crafted these symbols of curbed sound
to craft incision upon incision
and create the only anatomy of the mouth:
one H fills the vowels, one H to hollow them out,
and there you have a W like a crimean tatar piñata,
god's fat **** sitting on a naked alphabet
reveals diacritical geometrics ascribed to
the four letters.... the Y?
that's a bit like:

          scythe                     cyst



                       cauldron

it's technically chiral, s, k, c....
but then they interchange like some quantum
physics explanation, the odd affair.'
indeed socrates or jesus couldn't show you that,
they only wrote an ancient form of signature
of being present (X), and with their death a full-stop...
but in times when only a minority where literate
it was rather becoming, rather expected:
to shout into the tier of the literate ones,
a message, so profound, it would take
enforced suicide or torture to get something across...
but now we're all literate... i guess the only way
to shout a message is to shut up...
a glorious time to think, by my standard of interpretation.
so in terms of sketching poetically,
leave the would-be haiku-upon-haiku aside...
europeans can't write a haiku,
they don't write them drunk...
you get a chinese drunk on your dosage of whiskey
by the first round... he'll write you a depth
of philosophy parallel to the oddity of
spring blossoms blooming throughout winter
on the border between a home county (essex)
and east anglia (capital norwich);
glutton glob gob tearing in argument,
which is a heated discussion;
so when you see a "madman" talking,
he's not addressing his self (himself),
you obviously only read in the enclosure of fiction,
so you divide it into a third party associate (the narrator)
and imaginary friends of the narrator (characters,
first person heroes, second person: people
speaking about the heroes)... and by that definition
you haven't touched a single philosophical novel...
yes, those books... written by pedants wondering
how best to syllable a little pause...
how to stress, de-stress, including over provisions
of optics.

1044.  BC
King.  David.  Writes. On the. Run from Saul
". Keep me. Safe. O. Lord in you I  take. My. Refuge."
The. Year. 1338.  
A.  Pestulance. Lies. Untouched.  for. Hundreds. Of. Years. Suddenly. Awakens. .
  China.  The once. Great.  Mongolian.  Empyre   Finds. a. Gateway to the. West,
Only to become. Ravished by. Sickness.  ,.
Cappas. Catapult  corpses. ,
Cappa. S.  Merchants. Flee. On. Death. Boats. Set. For. England ,
Prosperous. England's.  Green fields.  ,  
A. Monks. Prayer  
". Dear. Lord. Keep. This. Sickness. Away from these. Green  fields. "
Yet.  Flanders.  Ships. Sailed. ,
Port. To. Port. The. Merchants.  Sailed .
Fear. Stalked. the. Deckhands. ,
Stay away "  
Stay. Away ". Cry. After. Cry. , untill
The. Ghost ships. Deadly. Cargo.  Of.  Fleas. , and. Rats.  Sailed. Into. The.  evenings. Sun.
Airborne !,!!!  
Boils
Fever,
The. Spewing ,
Dead. In. Six. Days.
They. Danced. The. Macarbra. ,  ..
Mothers.  Abandoned their children. ,
Fields.  Lay. Empty. Of. Harvest ,
Death. Stalked. England's. Green. Fields. Like. a. Table. Cloth set. For. Tea .
  
God. Is.  Love. ,
God. Does. Not. Condem.
Those. He. Loves.  To. Damnation. For their sin.
All. Will. Be. Well.  do not. Fear.
For. All. Will. Be. Well. ""
Julian of. Norwich. Had. Seen a. Great. Vision
Burn.
Her. Manuscript. Must. Go. To. The. Flame"
The. Reformers.  Came. .
With. Pitchfork and. Intent.
Yet. They. Found. Nothing.  
Nothing but. An impenetrable   Fortresses of. Love.
Ashford. In. Middlesex.    Twenty. Sixteen.  
Dudley. Road. Sunday. Morning  ,
God. Forgives our sin.
and. Heals. Our. Deseses. ""

I sit here silently listen to music and think is my thoughts while they float around allowed I see myself as a different person I hear the sounds around me take the lyrics in makes no difference music's just freeform expression of ones and just and demons I go to school and go to college I gained knowledge there is no difference in the way I walk around these holes the emptiness I walk I see the darkness the tide ebbs and flows the ocean goes home seem to float away faces in the crowd I talk but no solace is found allowed I read my soul as if it were a blank page I see nothing nothing but pain disdain and discord I put the record on that block I see nothing shock of pain there's no freedom in this world left is there nobody here that actually cares the hear someone share their words my feelings written down on paper is there no one that can come take you away from here do you weigh your mind body and soul I wear my heart on the sleeve setting in cold or nothing to behold I read this poem aloud and then I walk through a desolate crowd if there is no one watching sitting there and watch ruins of cities wants forgotten I look at prep yet and I look at different cities around the world that look at Ohio Troy I love you get Connecticut and I look at the town I live in Norwich all the Forgotten buildings once burned unseen I mean all these towns are we forgotten all these places around the world the Berlin Wall USSR Soviet Union's all the time nothing to see nothing I am too young to know this but for what our society does to are young lead them astray to lead their pain away for nothing good can stay everything gold is nothing to hold for we are all better left unseen forever

These are antinatalist poems and translations by Michael R. Burch.  The antinatalist translations include poems and prose by Al-Ma'arri, Aristotle, Buddha, Homer, Omar Khayyam, Sappho, Seneca, the bible's King Solomon, and Sophocles.

Antinatalism is the belief that human beings should not procreate. Do we have the "right" to bring other human beings into a world that was always "red in tooth and claw" and is now increasingly deadly due to global warming, nuclear weapons, drone warfare and maniacal leaders like ******, Mussolini, Stalin, Putin, Jong-un, Netanyahu and Trump?

There were antinatalist notes in Homer, around 3,000 years ago ...

HOMER

For the gods have decreed that unfortunate mortals must suffer, while they remain sorrowless. — Homer (circa 800 BC), Iliad 24.525-526, translation by Michael R. Burch

It is best not to be born or, having been born, to pass on as swiftly as possible.—attributed to Homer, translation by Michael R. Burch

One of the first great voices to directly question whether human being should give birth was that of Sophocles, around 2,500 years ago ...

SOPHOCLES, PART I

Oblivion: What a boon, to lie unbound by pain!—Sophocles, translation by Michael R. Burch

Not to have been born is best,
and blessed
beyond the ability of words to express.
—Sophocles (circa 497-406 BC), translation by Michael R. Burch

It’s a hundred times better not be born;
but if we cannot avoid the light,
the path of least harm is swiftly to return
to death’s eternal night.
—Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus, translation by Michael R. Burch

There are more Sophocles quotes later on this page. According to Aristotle, it had become so common in ancient Greece to say "It is best not to be born" that it was considered a cliché!

ARISTOTLE

"You ... may well consider those blessed and happiest who have departed this life before you ... This thought is indeed so old that the one who first uttered it is no longer known; it has been passed down to us from eternity, and hence doubtless it is true. Moreover, you know what is so often said and [now] passes for a trite expression ... It is best not to be born at all; and next to that, it is better to die than to live; and this is confirmed even by divine testimony [i.e, the wisdom of Silenus]: ... The best for them [humans] is not to be born at all, not to partake of nature's excellence; not to be is best, for both sexes. This should be our choice, if choice we have; and the next to this is, when we are born, to die as soon as we can." — Aristotle, Eudemus (354 BCE), surviving fragment quoted in Plutarch, Consolatio ad Apollonium, sec. xxvii

KING SOLOMON THE WISE

The Bible's wisest man, King Solomon, agreed with the ancient Greeks that it was best not to be born:

"So I returned, and considered all the oppressions that are done under the sun: and behold the tears of such as were oppressed, and they had no comforter; and on the side of their oppressors there was power; but they had no comforter. Wherefore I praised the dead which are already dead more than the living which are yet alive. Yea, better is he than both they, which hath not yet been, who hath not seen the evil work that is done under the sun." — King James Bible, Ecclesiastes 4:1-3, attributed to King Solomon

OMAR KHAYYAM

Happy the soul who speeds back to the Source,
but crowned with peace is the one who never came.
—a Sophoclean antinatalist passage from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, translation by Michael R. Burch

AL-MA'ARRI

Another strong, relentlessly questioning voice was that of a blind Arabic seer, the great Arab classical poet Abu 'L' Ala Ahmad ibn 'Abdallah al-Ma'arri, commonly referred to as al Ma'arri...

Bittersight
by Michael R. Burch

for Abu al-Ala Al-Ma'arri

To be plagued with sight
in the Land of the Blind,
—to know birth is death
and that Death is kind—
is to be flogged like Eve
(stripped, sentenced and fined)
because evil is “good”
in some backwards mind.

Antinatalist Shyari Couplets by Abul Ala Al-Ma'arri (973-1057), translation by Michael R. Burch:

Lighten your tread:
The ground beneath your feet is composed of the dead.

Walk slowly here and always take great pains
Not to trample some departed saint's remains.

And happiest here is the hermit with no hand
In making sons, who dies a childless man.

SENECA

Two thousand years ago, the Roman philosopher and statesman Seneca spoke of his right to euthanasia, but also about the bliss of not being born in the first place ...

Just as I select a ship when it's time to travel, or a house when it's time to change residences, even so I will choose when it's time to depart from life.―Seneca (4 BC-65 AD), translation by Michael R. Burch

There is nothing so pointless, so perfidious as human life! ... The ultimate bliss is not to be born; otherwise we should speedily slip back into the original Nothingness. Seneca, On Consolation to Marcia, translation by Michael R. Burch

Religion is regarded by fools as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful. — Seneca, translation by Michael R. Burch

SOPHOCLES, PART II

Antinatalist quotes by Sophocles (circa 497-406 BC):

Never to be born may be the biggest boon of all.—Sophocles, translation by Michael R. Burch

Oblivion: What a boon, to lie unbound by pain!—Sophocles, translation by Michael R. Burch

The happiest life is one empty of thought.—Sophocles, translation by Michael R. Burch

Consider no man happy till he lies dead, free of pain at last.—Sophocles, translation by Michael R. Burch

What is worse than death? When death is desired but denied.—Sophocles, translation by Michael R. Burch

Children anchor their mothers to life.—Sophocles, translation by Michael R. Burch

When a man endures nothing but endless miseries, what is the use of hanging on day after day, always edging closer and closer toward death? Anyone who warms his heart with the false glow of flickering hope is a wretch! The noble man should live with honor and die with honor. That's all that can be said.—Sophocles, translation by Michael R. Burch

ANCIENT GREEK EPITAPHS AND OTHER EPIGRAMS

Pity this boy who was beautiful, but died.
Pity his monument, overlooking this hillside.
Pity the world that bore him, then foolishly survived.
—Michael R. Burch, after an unknown Greek poet

Little I knew—a child of five—
of what it means to be alive
and all life’s little thrills;
but little also—(I was glad not to know)—
of life’s great ills.
—Michael R. Burch, after Lucian

Death is evil; the Gods all agree.
For, had death been good,
the Gods would
be mortal, like me.
—Sappho, translation by Michael R. Burch

Gold does not rust,
yet my son becomes dust?
—Sappho, translation by Michael R. Burch

Here he lies in state tonight: Great is his Monument!
Yet Ares cares not, neither does War relent.
—Michael R. Burch, after Anacreon

Everywhere the sea is the sea, the dead are the dead.
What difference to me—where I rest my head?
The sea knows I’m buried.
—Michael R. Burch, after Antipater of Sidon

Blame not the gale, nor the inhospitable sea-gulf, nor friends’ tardiness,
Mariner! Just man’s foolhardiness.
—Michael R. Burch, after Leonidas of Tarentum

Mariner, do not ask whose tomb this may be,
but go with good fortune: I wish you a kinder sea.
—Michael R. Burch, after Plato

MORE ANTINATALIST QUOTES

Everybody stop breeding, or by method of birth-control stop birth.—Jack Kerouac

Original Sin is the crime of existence itself.—Arthur Schopenhauer

Nanda, I do not praise the creation of a new existence: not even a molecule, not even for a moment.—Gautama Buddha, translation by Michael R. Burch

Since time dawned
only the dead have experienced peace;
life is snow burning in the sun.
—Nandai, translation by Michael R. Burch

Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay
To mould me man? Did I solicit thee
From darkness to promote me?
—John Milton, Paradise Lost

This dream of nothingness we so fear
is salvation clear.
—Michael R. Burch

MODERN ANTINATALIST POEMS

"Dover Beach" by Matthew Arnold
"Infant Sorrow" by William Blake
"Hurt Hawks" by Robinson Jeffers
"This Be The Verse" by Philip Larkin
"Prayer Before Birth" by Louis MacNeice
A large number of poems by Tom Merrill

MY ANTINATALIST POEMS

The first Catholic Pope, according to the Popes themselves, was Saint Peter, whose original name was Simon according to the gospels. So I have written a poem for the first Simple Simon and his simpleton heirs. If there is an "eternal hell" and most human beings are bound there, from day one the Popes should have been warning human beings NOT to procreate, duh!

Multiplication, Tabled
or Procreation Inflation
by Michael R. Burch

for the Religious Right

“Be fruitful and multiply”—
great advice, for a fruitfly!
But for women and men,
simple Simons, say, “WHEN!”



Paradoxical Ode to Antinatalism
by Michael R. Burch

“God is Love.”

A stay on love
would end death’s hateful sway,
someday.

A stay on love
would thus be love,
I say.

Be true to love
and thus end death’s
fell sway!



Habeas Corpus
by Michael R. Burch

from “Songs of the Antinatalist”

I have the results of your DNA analysis.
If you want to have children, this may induce paralysis.
I wish I had good news, but how can I lie?
Any offspring you have are guaranteed to die.
It wouldn’t be fair—I’m sure you’ll agree—
to sentence kids to death, so I’ll waive my fee.



veni, vidi, etc.
by Michael R. Burch

the last will and testament of a preemie

i came, i saw, i figured
it was better to be transfigured,
so rather than cross my Rubicon
i fled to the Great Beyond.
i bequeath my remains, so small,
to Brutus, et al.



***** Nilly
by Michael R. Burch

for the Demiurge, aka Yahweh/Jehovah

Isn’t it silly, ***** Nilly?
You made the stallion,
you made the filly,
and now they sleep
in the dark earth, stilly.
Isn’t it silly, ***** Nilly?

Isn’t it silly, ***** Nilly?
You forced them to run
all their days uphilly.
They ran till they dropped—
life’s a pickle, dilly.
Isn’t it silly, ***** Nilly?

Isn’t it silly, ***** Nilly?
They say I should worship you!
Oh, really!
They say I should pray
so you’ll not act illy.
Isn’t it silly, ***** Nilly?



Epitaph for a Palestinian Child
by Michael R. Burch

I lived as best I could, and then I died.
Be careful where you step: the grave is wide.



Antinatalist Haiku for the Children of Gaza
by Michael R. Burch

You astound me,
your name
unpronounceable on my lips ...

Born into the delicate autumn,
too late to mature,
pale petals ...

Soft as daffodils fall
all the lamentations
of life’s smallest victims,
unheard ...



Styx
by Michael R. Burch

Black waters,
deep and dark and still . . .
all men have passed this way,
or will.



Dust (II)
by Michael R. Burch

We are dust
and to dust we must
return ...
but why, then,
life’s pointless sojourn?



Long Division
by Michael R. Burch

All things become one
Through death’s long division
And perfect precision.



evol-u-shun
by Michael R. Burch

does GOD adore the Tyger
while it’s ripping ur lamb apart?

does GOD applaud the Plague
while it’s eating u à la carte?

does GOD admire ur intelligence
while u pray that IT has a heart?

does GOD endorse the Bible
you blue-lighted at k-mart?



thanksgiving prayer of the parasites
by Michael R. Burch

GODD is great;
GODD is good;
let us thank HIM
for our food.

by HIS hand
we all are fed;
give us now
our daily dead:

ah-men!

(p.s.,
most gracious
& salacious
HEAVENLY LORD,
we thank YOU in advance for
meals galore
of loverly gore:
of precious
delicious
sumptuous
scrumptious
human flesh!)



****** Most Fowl!
by Michael R. Burch

“****** most foul!”
cried the mouse to the owl.

“Friend, I’m no sinner;
you’re merely my dinner;

as you fall upon my sword,
take it up with the LORD.”

the wise owl replied
as the tasty snack died.



faith(less)
by Michael R. Burch

Those who believed
and Those who misled
lie together at last
in the same narrow bed

and if god loved Them more
for Their strange lack of doubt,
he kept it well hidden
till he snuffed Them out.



Enough!
by Michael R. Burch

It’s not that I don’t want to die;
I shall be glad to go.
Enough of diabetes pie,
and eating sickly crow!
Enough of win and place and show.
Enough of endless woe!

Enough of suffering and vice!
I’ve said it once;
I’ll say it twice:
I shall be glad to go.

But why the hell should I be nice
when no one asked for my advice?
So grumpily I’ll go ...
although
(most probably) below.



brrExit
by Michael R. Burch

what would u give
to simply not exist—
for a painless exit?
he asked himself, uncertain.

then from behind
the hospital room curtain
a patient screamed—
"my life!"



The Shrinking Season
by Michael R. Burch

With every wearying year
the weight of the winter grows
and while the schoolgirl outgrows
her clothes,
the widow disappears
in hers.



Defenses
by Michael R. Burch

Beyond the silhouettes of trees
stark, naked and defenseless
there stand long rows of sentinels:
these pert white picket fences.

Now whom they guard and how they guard,
the good Lord only knows;
but savages would have to laugh
observing the tidy rows.



Time Out!
by Michael R. Burch

Time is at war with my body!
am i Time’s most diligent hobby?
there’s never Time out
from my low-t and gout
and my once-brilliant mind has grown stodgy!



Waiting Game
by Michael R. Burch

Nothing much to live for,
yet no good reason to die:
life became
a waiting game...
Rain from a clear blue sky.



Scratch-n-Sniff
by Michael R. Burch

The world’s first antinatalist limerick?

Life comes with a terrible catch:
It’s like starting a fire with a match.
Though the flames may delight
In the dark of the night,
In the end what remains from the scratch?



While not antinatalist poems, per se, these poems question the dubious claims of Bible and the religions it spawned. I wrote the first poem, "Bible Libel," after reading the Bible from cover to cover at age eleven.



Bible Libel
by Michael R. Burch

If God
is good,
half the Bible
is libel.



fog
by Michael R. Burch

ur just a bit of fluff
drifting out over the ocean,
unleashing an atom of rain,
causing a minor commotion,
for which u expect awesome GODS
to pay u SUPREME DEVOTION!
... but ur just a smidgen of mist
unlikely to be missed ...
where did u get the notion?



What Would Santa Claus Say
by Michael R. Burch

What would Santa Claus say,
I wonder,
about Jesus returning
to **** and Plunder?

For he’ll likely return
on Christmas Day
to blow the bad
little boys away!

When He flashes like lightning
across the skies
and many a homosexual
dies,

when the harlots and heretics
are ripped asunder,
what will the Easter Bunny think,
I wonder?



A Child’s Christmas Prayer of Despair for a Hindu Saint
by Michael R. Burch

Santa Claus,
for Christmas, please,
don’t bring me toys, or games, or candy . . .
just . . . Santa, please . . .
I’m on my knees! . . .
please don’t let Jesus torture Gandhi!



gimME that ol’ time religion!
by michael r. burch

fiddle-dee-dum, fiddle-dee-dee,
jesus loves and understands ME!
safe in his grace, I’LL **** them to hell—
the strumpet, the harlot, the wild jezebel,
the alky, the druggie, all queers short and tall!
let them drink ashes and wormwood and gall,
’cause fiddle-dee-DUMB, fiddle-dee-WEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEee . . .
jesus loves and understands
ME!



Saving Graces
for the Religious Right
by Michael R. Burch

Life’s saving graces are love, pleasure, laughter
(wisdom, it seems, is for the Hereafter).



pretty pickle
by Michael R. Burch

u’d blaspheme if u could
because ur God’s no good,
but of course u cant:
ur a lowly ant
(or so u were told by a Hierophant).



u-turn: another way to look at religion
by Michael R. Burch

... u were born(e) orphaned from Ecstasy
into this lower realm: just one of the inching worms
dreaming of Beatification;
u'd love to make a u-turn back to Divinity, but
having misplaced ur chrysalis,
can only chant magical phrases,
like Circe luring ulysses back into the pigsty ...



In His Kingdom of Corpses
by Michael R. Burch

In His kingdom of corpses,
God has been heard to speak
in many enraged discourses,
high, high from some mountain peak
where He’s lectured man on compassion
while the sparrows around Him fell,
and babes, for His meager ration
of rain, died and went to hell,
unbaptized, for that’s His fashion.

In His kingdom of corpses,
God has been heard to vent
in many obscure discourses
on the need for man to repent,
to admit that he’s a sinner;
give up ***, and riches, and fame;
be disciplined at his dinner
though always he dies the same,
whether fatter or thinner.

In his kingdom of corpses,
God has been heard to speak
in many absurd discourses
of man’s Ego, precipitous Peak!,
while demanding praise and worship,
and the bending of every knee.
And though He sounds like the Devil,
all religious men now agree
He loves them indubitably.



Ars Brevis
by Michael R. Burch

Better not to live, than live too long:
this is my theme, my purpose and desire.
The world prefers a brief three-minute song.

My will to live was never all that strong.
Eternal life? Find some poor fool to hire!
Better not to live, than live too long.

Granny ******* or a flosslike thong?
The latter rock, the former feed the fire.
The world prefers a brief three-minute song.

Let briefs be brief: the short can do no wrong,
since David slew Goliath, who stood higher.
Better not to live, than live too long.

A long recital gets a sudden gong.
Quick death’s preferred to drowning in the mire.
The world prefers a brief three-minute song.

A wee bikini or a long sarong?
French Riviera or some dull old Shire?
Better not to live, than live too long:
The world prefers a brief three-minute song.



no foothold
by Michael R. Burch

there is no hope;
therefore i became invulnerable to love.
now even god cannot move me:
nothing to push or shove,
no foothold.

so let me live out my remaining days in clarity,
mine being the only nativity,
my death the final crucifixion
and apocalypse,

as far as the i can see ...



Practice Makes Perfect
by Michael R. Burch

I have a talent for sleep;
it’s one of my favorite things.
Thus when I sleep, I sleep deep ...
at least till the stupid clock rings.

I frown as I squelch its **** beep,
then fling it aside to resume
my practice for when I’ll sleep deep
in a silent and undisturbed tomb.

Originally published by Light Quarterly



Redefinitions

Faith: falling into the same old claptrap.—Michael R. Burch
Religion: the ties that blind.—Michael R. Burch



Listen
by Michael R. Burch

Listen to me now and heed my voice;
I am a madman, alone, screaming in the wilderness,
but listen now.

Listen to me now, and if I say
that black is black, and white is white, and in between lies gray,
I have no choice.

Does a madman choose his words? They come to him,
the moon’s illuminations, intimations of the wind,
and he must speak.

But listen to me now, and if you hear
the tolling of the judgment bell, and if its tone is clear,
then do not tarry,

but listen, or cut off your ears, for I Am weary.

I believe I wrote the first version of this poem around age 17 or 18.



Less Heroic Couplets: Funding Fundamentals
by Michael R. Burch

"I found out that I was a Christian for revenue only and I could not bear the thought of that, it was so ignoble." — Mark Twain

Making sense from nonsense is quite sensible! Suppose
you’re running low on moolah, need some cash to paint your toes ...
Just invent a new religion; claim it saves lost souls from hell;
have the converts write you checks; take major debit cards as well;
take MasterCard and Visa and good-as-gold Amex;
hell, lend and charge them interest, whether payday loan or flex.
Thus out of perfect nonsense, glittery ores of this great mine,
you’ll earn an easy living and your toes will truly shine!

Originally published by Lighten Up Online



Less Heroic Couplets: Attention Span Gap
by Michael R. Burch

Better not to live, than live too long:
The world prefers a brief poem, a short song.



Less Heroic Couplets: Crop Duster
by Michael R. Burch

We are dust and to dust we must return ...
but why, then, life’s pointless sojourn?



Less Heroic Couplets: Clover
by Michael R. Burch

It’ll soon be over
(clover?)



Less Heroic Couplets: Weird Beard
by Michael R. Burch

for and after Richard Thomas Moore

C’mon, admit — love’s truly weird:
why does a ****** need a beard?

Should making love produce foul poxes?
What can we make of such paradoxes?

And having made love, what the hell’s the point
of ending up with a sore, limp joint?

And who invented love, which we all pursue
like rats in a maze after sniffing glue?



Pagans Protest the Intolerance of Christianity
by Michael R. Burch

“We have a common sky.” — Quintus Aurelius Symmachus (c. 345-402)

We had a common sky
before the Christians came.

We thought there might be gods
but did not know their names.

The common stars above us?
They winked, and would not tell.

Yet now our fellow mortals claim
our questions merit hell!

The cause of our damnation?
They claim they’ve seen the LIGHT ...

but still the stars wink down at us,
as wiser beings might.



ur-gent
by Michael R. Burch

if u would be a good father to us all,
revoke the Curse,
extract the Gall;

but if the abuse continues,
look within
into ur Mindless Soulless Emptiness Grim,

& admit ur sin,
heartless jehovah,
slayer of widows and orphans ...

quick, begin!



bible libel (ii)
by Michael R. Burch

ur savior’s a cad
—he’s as bad as his dad—
i note per ur horrible Bible.

demanding belief
or he’ll bring u to grief?
he’s worse than his horn-sprouting rival!

was this man ever good
before being made “god”?
if so, half ur Bible is libel!



un-i-verse-all love
by Michael R. Burch

there is a Gaud, it’s true!
and furthermore, tHeSh(e)It loves u!
unfortunately
the
He
Sh(e)
It
,even more adorably,
loves cancer, aids and leprosy.



Notes toward an Icarian philosophy of life ...
by Michael R. Burch

If the mind’s and the heart’s quests were ever satisfied,
what would remain, as the goals of life?

If there was only light, with no occluding matter,
if there were only sunny mid-afternoons but no mysterious midnights,
what would become of the dreams of men?

What becomes of man’s vision, apart from terrestrial shadows?

And what of man’s character, formed
in the seething crucible of life and death,
hammered out on the anvil of Fate, by Will?

What becomes of man’s aims in the end,
when the hammer’s anthems at last are stilled?

If man should confront his terrible Creator,
capture him, hogtie him, hold his ***** feet to the fire,
roast him on the spit as yet another blasphemous heretic
whose faith is suspect, derelict ...
torture a confession from him,
get him to admit, “I did it! ...

what then?

Once man has taken revenge
on the Frankenstein who created him
and has justly crucified the One True Monster, the Creator ...

what then?

Or, if revenge is not possible,
if the appearance of matter was merely a random accident,
or a group illusion (and thus a conspiracy, perhaps of dunces, us among them),
or if the Creator lies eternally beyond the reach of justice ...

what then?

Perhaps there’s nothing left but for man to perfect his character,
to fly as high as his wings will take him toward unreachable suns,
to gamble everything on some unfathomable dream, like Icarus,
then fall to earth, to perish, undone ...

or perhaps not, if the mystics are right
about the true nature of darkness and light.

Is there a source of knowledge beyond faith,
a revelation of heaven, of the Triumph of Love?

The Hebrew prophets seemed to think so,
and Paul, although he saw through a glass darkly,
and Julian of Norwich, who heard the voice of God say,
“All shall be well,
and all manner of things shall be well ...”

Does hope spring eternal in the human breast,
or does it just blindly *****?



Icarus Bickerous
by Michael R. Burch

for the Religious Right

Like Icarus, waxen wings melting,
white tail-feathers fall, bystanders pelting.

They look up amazed
and seem rather dazed—

was it heaven’s or hell’s furious smelting

that fashioned such vulturish wings?
And why are they singed?—

the higher you “rise,” the more halting?



Crescendo Against Heaven
by Michael R. Burch

As curiously formal as the rose,
the imperious Word grows
until it sheds red-gilded leaves:
then heaven grieves
love’s tiny pool of crimson recrimination
against God, its contention
of the price of salvation.

These industrious trees,
endlessly losing and re-losing their leaves,
finally unleashing themselves from earth, lashing
themselves to bits, washing
themselves free
of all but the final ignominy
of death, become
at last: fast planks of our coffins, dumb.

Together now, rude coffins, crosses,
death-cursed but bright vermilion roses,
bodies, stumps, tears, words: conspire
together with a nearby spire
to raise their Accusation Dire ...
to scream, complain, to point out these
and other Dark Anomalies.

God always silent, ever afar,
distant as Bethlehem’s retrograde star,
we point out now, in resignation:
You asked too much of man’s beleaguered nation,
gave too much strength to his Enemy,
as though to prove Your Self greater than He,
at our expense, and so men die
(whose accusations vex the sky)
yet hope, somehow, that You are good ...
just, O greatest of Poets!, misunderstood.



Heaven Bent
by Michael R. Burch

This life is hell; it can get no worse.
Summon the coroner, the casket, the hearse!
But I’m upwardly mobile. How the hell can I know?
I can only go up; I’m already below!



Beast 666
by Michael R. Burch

“... what rough beast ... slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?”—W. B. Yeats

Brutality is a cross
wooden, blood-stained,
gas hissing, sibilant,
lungs gilled, deveined,
red flecks on a streaked glass pane,
jeers jubilant,
mocking.

Brutality is shocking—
tiny orifices torn
by cruel adult lust,
the fetus unborn
tossed in a dust-
bin. The scarred skull shorn,
nails bloodied, tortured,
an old wound sutured
over, never healed.

Brutality, all its faces revealed,
is legion:
Death March, Trail of Tears, Inquisition . . .
always the same.
The Beast of the godless and of man’s “religion”
slouching toward Jerusalem:
horned, crowned, gibbering, drooling, insane.



Shock and Awe
by Michael R. Burch

With megatons of “wonder,”
we make our godhead clear:
Death. Destruction. Fear.

The world’s heart ripped asunder,
its dying pulse we hear:
Death. Destruction. Fear.

Strange Trinity! We ponder
this God we hold so dear:
Death. Destruction. Fear.

The vulture and the condor
proclaim: The feast is near!—
Death. Destruction. Fear.

Soon He will plow us under;
the Anti-Christ is here:
Death. Destruction. Fear.

We love to hear Him thunder!
With Shock and Awe, appear!—
Death. Destruction. Fear.

For God can never blunder;
we know He holds US dear:
Death. Destruction. Fear.



Lay Down Your Arms
by Michael R. Burch

Lay down your arms; come, sleep in the sand.
The battle is over and night is at hand.
Our voyage has ended; there's nowhere to go . . .
the earth is a cinder still faintly aglow.

Lay down your pamphlets; let's bicker no more.
Instead, let us sleep here on this ravaged shore.
The sea is still boiling; the air is wan, thin . . .
lay down your pamphlets; now no one will “win.”

Lay down your hymnals; abandon all song.
If God was to save us, He waited too long.
A new world emerges, but this world is through . . .
so lay down your hymnals, or write something new.



What Immense Silence
by Michael R. Burch

What immense silence
comforts those who kneel here
beneath these vaulted ceilings
cavernous and vast?

What luminescence stained
by patchwork panels of bright glass
illuminates drained faces
as the crouching gargoyles leer?

What brings them here—
pale, tearful congregations,
knowing all Hope is past,
faithfully, year upon year?

Or could they be right? Perhaps
Love is, implausibly, near
and I alone have not seen It . . .
But, if so, still, I must ask:

why is it God that they fear?

Published in The Bible of Hell



Where We Dwell
by Michael R. Burch

Night within me.
   Never morning.
     Stars uncounted.
       Shadows forming.
       Wind arising
     where we dwell
   reaches Heaven,
reeks of Hell.

Published in The Bible of Hell



Intimations
by Michael R. Burch

Let mercy surround us
with a sweet persistence.

Let love propound to us
that life is infinitely more than existence.

Published by Katrina Anthology



Altared Spots

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

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

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

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

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



Peers
by Michael R. Burch

These thoughts are alien, as through green slime
smeared on some lab tech’s brilliant slide, I *****,
positioning my bright oscilloscope
for better vantage, though I cannot see,
but only peer, as small things disappear—
these quanta strange as men, as passing queer.

And you, Great Scientist, are you the One,
or just an intern, necktie half undone,
white sleeves rolled up, thick documents in hand
(dense manuals you don’t quite understand),
exposing me, perhaps, to too much Light?
Or do I escape your notice, quick and bright?

Perhaps we wield the same dull Instrument
(and yet the Thesis will be Eloquent!).

Published by The Neovictorian/Cochlea



dark matter(s)
by Michael R. Burch

for and after William Blake

the matter is dark, despairful, alarming:
ur Creator is hardly prince charming!

yes, ur “Great I Am”
created blake’s lamb

but He also created the tyger ...
and what about trump and rod steiger?

NOTE: Rod Steiger is best known for his portrayals of weirdos, oddballs, mobsters, bandits, serial killers, and fascists like Mussolini and Napoleon.



Is there any Light left?
by Michael R. Burch

Is there any light left?
Must we die bereft
of love and a reason for being?
Blind and unseeing,
rejecting and fleeing
our humanity, goat-hooved and cleft?

Is there any light left?
Must we die bereft
of love and a reason for living?
Blind, unforgiving,
unworthy of heaven
or this planet red, reeking and reft?

NOTE: While “hoofed” is the more common spelling, I preferred “hooved” for this poem. Perhaps because of the contrast created by “love” and “hooved.”



Modern Dreams
by Michael R. Burch

after David B. Gosselin

I dreamed that God was good, but then I woke
and all his goodness vanished—****!—
like smoke.

I dreamed his Word was good, but then I heard
commandments evil, awful, weird,
absurd.

I dreamed of Heaven where cruel Angels flew
above my head and screamed, the Chosen Few,
“We’re not like you!”

I dreamed of Hell below, where prostitutes
adored by Jesus played on lovely lutes
“True Love Commutes.”

I dreamed of Earth then woke to hear a Gong’s
repellent echoes in Religion’s song
of right gone wrong.



Prayer for a Merciful, Compassionate, etc., God to ****** His Creations Quickly & Painlessly, Rather than Slowly & Painfully
by Michael R. Burch

Lord, **** me fast and please do it quickly!
Please don’t leave me gassed, archaic and sickly!
Why render me mean, rude, wrinkly and prickly?
Lord, why procrastinate?

Lord, we all know you’re an expert killer!
Please, don’t leave me aging like Phyllis Diller!
Why torture me like some poor sap in a thriller?
God, grant me a gentler fate!

Lord, we all know you’re an expert at ******
like Abram—the wild-eyed demonic goat-herder
who’d slit his son’s throat without thought at your order.
Lord, why procrastinate?

Lord, we all know you’re a terrible sinner!
What did dull Japheth eat for his 300th dinner
after a year on the ark, growing thinner and thinner?
God, grant me a gentler fate!

Dear Lord, did the lion and tiger compete
for the last of the lambkin’s sweet, tender meat?
How did Noah preserve his fast-rotting wheat?
God, grant me a gentler fate!

Lord, why not be a merciful Prelate?
Do you really want me to detest, loathe and hate
the Father, the Son and their Ghostly Mate?
Lord, why procrastinate?



Alien
by Michael R. Burch

for J. S. S., a "Christian" poet

On a lonely outpost on Mars
the astronaut practices “speech”
as alien to primates below
as mute stars winking high, out of reach.

And his words fall as bright and as chill
as ice crystals on Kilimanjaro —
far colder than Jesus’s words
over the “fortunate” sparrow.

And I understand how gentle Emily
felt, when all comfort had flown,
gazing into those inhuman eyes,
feeling zero at the bone.

Oh, how can I grok his arctic thought?
For if he is human, I am not.



Autumn Conundrum
by Michael R. Burch

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



Piercing the Shell
by Michael R. Burch

If we strip away all the accouterments of war,
perhaps we’ll discover what the heart is for.



Belated Canonization
by Michael R. Burch

I loved you for the best.
I loved you through the worst.
I loved you fully dressed,
even when the water pipes burst.
But the gods were not impressed
and so they took you first.

I loved you nonetheless,
even when the earth seemed cursed.
I loved you at the prom.
I loved you in the hearse.
I still think of you as blessed.
Please excuse this morbid verse.



Only Flesh
by Michael R. Burch

Moonlight in a pale silver rain caresses her cheek
but what she feels is an emptiness more chilling than fear ...

Nothing is questioned, yet the answer seems clear:
Night, inevitably, only seems to end ...
Flesh is the stuff that does not endure.

The sand slips sinuously through narrowing glass
as Time sums all things past, and to come.
Only flesh does not last.

Eternally, Night pirouettes with the Sun;
each bright grain, slipping past, will return.
Only flesh fades to ash though unable to burn.
Only flesh does not last.

Only flesh, in the end, makes its bed in brown grass.
Only flesh shivers, frailer than the pale wintry light.
Only flesh seeps in oils that will not ignite.
Only flesh rues its past.
Only flesh.



Parting is such sweet sorrow
by Michael R. Burch

The cosmos is flying apart.
Hush, Neil deGrasse Tyson’s irked heart!
Repeat, repeat.
Don’t skip a beat.
Perhaps some new Big Bang will spark?

Neil deGrasse Tyson told Stephen Colbert that what keeps him awake at night is the fear that expansion will cause most of the universe to become invisible to us.



Menu Venue
by Michael R. Burch

At the passing of the shark
the dolphins cried Hark!;

cute cuttlefish sighed Gee
there will be a serener sea
to its utmost periphery!;

the dogfish barked,
so joyously!;

pink porpoises piped Whee!
excitedly,
delightedly.

But ...

Will there be as much glee
when there’s no you and me?



How It Goes, Or Doesn’t
by Michael R. Burch

My face is getting craggier.
My pants are getting saggier.
My ear-hair’s getting shaggier.
My wife is getting naggier.
I’m getting old!

My memory’s plumb awful.
My eyesight is unlawful.
I eschew a tofu waffle.
My wife’s an Eiffel eyeful.
I’m getting old!

My temperature is colder.
My molars need more solder.
Soon I’ll need a boulder-holder.
My wife seized up. Unfold her!
I’m getting old!



Sinking
by Michael R. Burch

for Virginia Woolf

Weigh me down with stones ...
   fill all the pockets of my gown ...
      I’m going down,
         mad as the world
            that can’t recover,
to where even mermaids drown.



The Drawer of Mermaids
by Michael R. Burch

This poem is dedicated to Alina Karimova, who was born with severely deformed legs and five fingers missing. Alina loves to draw mermaids and believes her fingers will eventually grow out.

Although I am only four years old,
they say that I have an old soul.
I must have been born long, long ago,
here, where the eerie mountains glow
at night, in the Urals.

A madman named Geiger has cursed these slopes;
now, shut in at night, the emphatic ticking
fills us with dread.
(Still, my momma hopes
that I will soon walk with my new legs.)

It’s not so much legs as the fingers I miss,
drawing the mermaids under the ledges.
(Observing, Papa will kiss me
in all his distracted joy;
but why does he cry?)

And there is a boy
who whispers my name.
Then I am not lame;
for I leap, and I follow.
(G’amma brings a wiseman who says

our infirmities are ours, not God’s,
that someday a beautiful Child
will return from the stars,
and then my new fingers will grow
if only I trust Him; and so

I am preparing to meet Him, to go,
should He care to receive me.)



The Abyss
by Michael R. Burch

Love, the abyss
where pale Lorelei dwell,
swells with bright music —
the music of hell.

For the sirens there lure
countless men to their doom,
crying, “Give us a child!”
in the luminous gloom.

And who can resist
their cries — wild & untamed —
or the flash of a breast,
its pink ****** inflamed?

So the young men all leap
in their lemming-like urge
to thresh their soft shells
where the dark waters surge.

Now many lie shattered
on the sharp, hidden rocks
where they succor the spawn
of some wily sea-fox.



Lures of the Lorelei
by Michael R. Burch

These are the rocks where the Lorelei combs
her wind-tangled hair as the dark water moans,
and her uncanny hymns echo softly between
worlds fashioned of stone and strange algaed dreams . . .

Here men hear her songs, as they always have done,
as they dream to be one with the pulse of the foam . . .
as they also now long for her sleek, slender arms—
sweet relief from their ships, mules, wives, shanties and farms!

But what does she offer them—is it love?
As she croons her desire, is she moray, minx, dove?
Or merely a mystery: an enigma, like death,
to men bent on drowning, unhappy with breath?



Strange Tides, Stranger Tidings
by Michael R. Burch

for Sharon Rose

She walked into the sea one night
to never be seen again;
the Maelstrom made her hair a fright
as she left the world of men.
Some say she thus gained second sight.
Beware strange tides! Amen.

The first year of her life was hard;
the second was harder still.
Like a cameo carved out of sard
she bent to God’s harsh will.
At last her doctors all agreed:
“Just give her some **** chill pill!”

The years flashed by; she did not age
so much as disappeared.
For who could see
                             human dignity
in a thing so small, wizened and weird?
At last she had no memory
save all she’d ever feared.

Then the sea called to her strangely,
as if the Voice of God:
“I repent, O, I repent
of my Anger and my Rod!
Now I only wish to hold you,
and have you Tulip-Cod!”

She thought her nickname sweet indeed;
she did not stop to think,
for who can doubt the Word of God?
She tottered to the brink
of Doom itself, an ancient crone
doomed like a stone: to sink.

She made a votive offering;
she cast a lonely spell
upon the sea, before she stepped
into the gates of Hell;
the Maelstrom took her greedily;
she bade the world, “Farewell!”

So what became of her, you ask?
I can’t pretend to say:
did Michael and the Devil
contend for her that day?
Did the Voice of God mislead her,
or the wind lead her astray?

But sometimes late at night
when the ocean’s dreary roar
abates somewhat, an eerie light
gleams on that rocky shore,
and a lovely Mermaid, tulip-white,
sings, tremulous and pure ...

sweet ancient songs of ancient wrongs
the “love” of God endures.
                                            Amen



I Panajia I gorgona (“The Mermaid Madonna”)
by Michael R. Burch

To touch—the trembling eagerness of fingers
that sightless, in blind darkness, knew to *****,
to seize the hand outstretched, and thus to hope ...
such was your touch, and softly, now, it lingers:

fond memory! I do not understand
this foreign hand that grasps mine now: crude claws’
rude pincers, which engage, but without cause
except to trap me in such enervate sands.

O softer than your mermaid’s swimming tresses:
your arcane touch, your almost human hand!
You held a shell shaped like an ampersand
close to my ear; the surging sea’s caresses

spoke to my heart ... until Gorgona neared
on crablike feet: repulsive, skittering, weird.



Abide
by Michael R. Burch

after Philip Larkin's "Aubade"

It is hard to understand or accept mortality—
such an alien concept: not to be.
Perhaps unsettling enough to spawn religion,
or to scare mutant fish out of a primordial sea

boiling like goopy green tea in a kettle.
Perhaps a man should exhibit more mettle
than to admit such fear, denying Nirvana exists
simply because we are stuck here in such a fine fettle.

And so we abide . . .
even in life, staring out across that dark brink.
And if the thought of death makes your questioning heart sink,
it is best not to drink
(or, drinking, certainly not to think).

#antinatalist #antinatalism #birth #born #procreation #procreate #life #death #Sophocles #Homer
antinatalist , antinatalism, birth, born, procreation, procreate, life, death, Sophocles, Homer

.Daniel Farke is not the older brother of Roger Federer?!

come on! come on ref.! that was a blatant off-side...
a blatant fowl -

apparently when the famous
grouse comes out -
liter bottle being towed and...
no one wants to drink it...

you brewing chocolate with
that attempt to sneak in a tamed
laphroaig? tamed -
an exaggeration... truly is...

even o' Knausgård loves a bit
of footie...
as did ol' Marley...
and what's not to like?
it's the alternative to compensate
without watching ballet -
and of the latter i too am prone...

22 ballerinas and in between
some: stop being so sensitive
as a fwench footballer...
the whole story... in a nutshell...

the next draw of the f.a. cup is
happening in england...
oh... me? mezmerised?
mesmerized... **** it:
moi... meßmerißed?

i have been playing... wir sind des
geyers schwarzer haufen...
in the background...
imagine my immediate shock...
och! no apostrophe to be associated
with a possessive article...
geyers: oh those pedantic germans
i will round up and tell them:
sie sind so falsch!

who was norwich city playing tonight?
Burnley...
but that doesn't matter...
i sometimes watch movies to remember faces...
i like to remember faces...
esp. in movies...
photographic memory which also
implies that i'd rather read a paper
map than follow g.p.s. directions:
esp. in the vicinity of Antwerp...

and most esp. when the german roullade
of traffic comes up...
the Rhine... three cities... Duisburg,
Essen, Dotrmund... and you're not a local...
and you're navigating armed with only
a paper map...

but that's not the point -
there's a reason why i wrote these last words
first - to have to also write them last...

no one is going to come up and tell me
that, "somehow" the manager of Norwich F.C.:
Daniel Farke...
is not the older brother of Roger Federer -
a genetic choking delay...
Daniel Farke is not the older brother of
Roger Federer??
ref.! oi! come on!
blatantly a few genes skipped or were lagging
when this doppelgänger phenomenon
took off!

but... more like an older brother than
really trying to match a doppelgänger to a victim
like some trivial pursuit with stalkers...

navigating a car past Antwerp and then
through Duisburg, Essen, Dotrmund
is a major *****... but then the joy of sneaking
past Berlin at its toes via
Ludwigsfelde and bang on straight
toward Frankfurt an der Oder...

i still remember the border police and checkpoints
and the long queues on the bridge and
prior to it...

are assigned doppelgängers because
we do not have twins?
yet... we need to have a, twin?
an older brother...
i somtimes thought about my doppelgänger...
like this cosmic oopsie that it already
is...

my "twin" elsewhere...
am i having the "better" life of the two of us?
come to think of it...
there's no "better"...
only that... which of the lives is more
plain in sight: just odd, just weird?!

a raw challenge of words - not some tartar genius -
it's a "question" or not - and it's a roulette -
it's a gamble -
it's: words not roasted -
words not roasted in an oven of academia -
esp. oven roasted via a masters in arts:
english lit. or jane austen studies - majors -

i can't exfoliate just yet -
i have to catch the midnight train into tomorrow...
because - "something" needs to be tended
to - and i'm about to become
a very responsible nouveau adulte...
i have no time to talk about philosophy -
how i found the time to read it
is another matter -
but talking about it...
seems pointless if... not also weilding
a hammer - heidegger's:
can we talk while doing something else,
menial - and escape the banality of breathing
by on the side - supposing thought?

the crux of the hammer and the nail...
and this talk - or no talk - escapism of sorts...
the isolated words to be "thought" about...
"representation content" and...
what... "what": "reality" is made of...
a speaking that has to return back
into the yoke of thinking -
and not something as practical as...
hammering nails in... ad infinitum...

knock knock... who's there?
Descartes who? Descartes i doubt the table
but not the chair i'm sitting in;
ever knock knock on a leather chair?
there's no superstition of "jinx" associated...
or i could just as well be drinking...
my "thinking" is already
on the train about to leave: come midnight...

raw tartar steak of genius -
words not baked via an oven of an academic
degree in the direction of... modern linguo?
my way all the way back from:
esters RCOOR'
aldehydes RCHO...
carboxylic acid(s) R-COOH...
all that but above all this...

the austrians really do know how to
make the best coffee...
something a christoph waltz would say...
the austrians are (a)
the germans are (b) - high, low - whatever
floats your boat of comparison -
and i do only have an address and a name...

Der-Franz (Vienna since 1929)
A-2512 Oeynhausen
Sachers Strese 7...
hazelnut flavour... coffee...

hans landa eating a strudel -
is probably the best strudel in the world...
and on all days...
but this... it's also a hugo boss uniform...
it's crisp cut... and...
say all you will...
when a girl might wish for a cindarella dress...
any boy would wish for a hugo boss
that clean cut and readied
for: being ironed twice daily...

as of yet: i'm yet to expect a darwinistic
furore - fever - of the coming of
the close of the 19th century and
the opening of the gates for the 20th century...
second coming of darwinism leaves
me hardly convinced -
oh but it's true - oh but yes yes -
some of us are working in the knitting
of the kingdom of the Brine -

this so-called culture war:
words make bad bullets and sentences
are hardly rifles to shoot them with...
paragraphs like bombs: would do...
if congested into... non-paragraphs...
end of james joyce's ulysses or...
jean-paul sartre's iron in the soul...

the rare events of a postcard being sent by
a philatelist...
or a lepidopterist coming clean
on the metaphor of: the most forbidden fruit...
of which king john of england
would never find out about:
sooner the magna carta...

i'm tired of and i have always never tired of...
byzantine chants...
what can anyone actually remember
of the remains - apart from the chants...
or the bureucracy?
the youth that riddled them with canons
and a library that contained only one
book...

i can't even bother to stomach the correct
grammar -
unless it's a translation...
english: red herring...
french: hareng rouge
german: regenbogenforelle
you wouldn't expect me to succumb to
Ablenkungsmanöver / heimlich maneuver
of a spin-doctor, truly!
english: rainbow trout,
french: truite arc-en-ciel...
german is already given...
polish: pstrąg tęczowy...

nietzsche was right... we are the slavic
equivalent of the french...
we share most of their grammar 1-2 1-2...
why i didn't learn it proper?
they write one thing -
then say another -
i can only see excesses of letters
in written french... once they start
talking... all those letters come
and disappear under the suffix- umbrellas...

otherwise... i'm tired of having the need
to sharpen words -
words: would be bullets -
are not pencils -
sticks and stones and all things
associated with infering information:

otherwise just as last night - attempting to fall
to sleep: giggling and imagining myself...
having walked into the north sea off
the coast of norwich...
shouting: i'm a whale! i'm the beast from
the sea! i'm a whale my primordial
mammalian ancestor! i will swim to Denmark!

talk about living through a drought of:
where the english seems to be the dream-a-lots
having never felt a leash of metaphysics
around their necks tighten and give themselves
unto catholic mantras of central europe -
or how the italians are still christian in name only...
otherwise the go to:
aestheticians and romantics of the fig...

these words are not...
how did i perfect cooking chicken ******* without
the torso or the limbs -
the torso and at least half of the limbs
went into a most perfect chicken soup...
the remains and some frozen goods
went into a **** chicken marinade...
thyme... thyme... check y'er dubliners'
on the surd of H in that one...
it's θyme... otherwise's it's t'inking: time...
not so, paddy o'brian? patrick?

snail-paced grammar:
2 steps forward... 1 step back...
at least in the confines of this leftover:
catacombs of Latin...
we are all the children of Rome -
the hebrew were wrong about two alphabets...
the greek and the latin...
spot on! spot on when it came to...
persian cuneiform and egyptian hieroglyphs!

back-up... the glagolitic and the rune scripts...
somehow accomodating the overlords
of judea... otherwise: really stretching
the history for a personal experience...
what alphabet is this?!

- concept of beauty in the 1950s:
none other than the bleach mingling with amber
that was marylin monroe - the blood of which:
and the modern "beauty?
ava lauren - otherwise i call it:
the mandible jaw of ***-appeal gymnastics -
leather beauty - some worn, torn and -
the jigsaw puzzle that comes naked and
there hardly a kennedy romance at stake...
because even in her mature years -
it's "something" that would appeal
to Rodin's hands...
it's already... it leaves me at ease to ****
like a shotgun into my one "crooked" leg folded
and hunched like a crow perched on a windowsill
of the new-born Papillon -
marylin the icon? untouchable...
ava lauren the limbo montage and:

even this poo'em is proof:
why lament the crux of a would-be Liszt performance?
"views"... if that's anything to go by:
i have an *** and a ****** -
implies... i have more than a head a spine to prop
it on and a tongue's worth of an oyster
dissected between the 32 shells...

that views should count: a fountain of youth!
of a body i am certain...
of a soul: i know what i have -
only after i have lost it -
shared company - rejoice soul! hell doesn't exist!
as they call say: via their slavic proverbs:
the devil is without a soul...

perhaps i'm asking:
are not some of my words infantile?
d(evil) and go(o)d?
do or do not...
come to think of it... what makes people
invite the ****** eye into their ****** *******?
to boast or gloat?
i hardly think so...
from the times i watched...
and from the times i was the protagonist 1st person...
sometimes the third person attitude
is... well... imagine being in a 69 position
of reciprocating each other ******* & "*******"...
faber & faber...

if you have a ******* **** in your face...
and you're slurping and slurping...
what out of body experience can you expect
to have... to really and you really
want to appreciate the face of a woman
pleasuring herself and somehow you
on the side...

bogus and boring the same old
*******...
in that cocoon of: under the bed-sheets...
like two foetuses *******
amphibian bode -
placenta erections and:
the place where no two mouths meet!
otherwise:
she rodeod to the point
of a complete tail turned coccyx erosion!

*** is ***... no need to bring grammar
into this "debate" with a bilingual "schizoid"...
otherwise: hello Chloe...
is Chloe ready for a circus?

for all the *** in the world...
it's never something appealing for the eyes...
it's numbing for the parts that
imitate ******* snipping...
and otherwise... it's always more fun
casually: in third-person...
very much akin to reading a book...

because this piece of writing will not topple
your below average amateur post
from the free-range harvest of:
and this one tested this *****...
and this one was showing off: how she can
still get frisky when pregnant...
and... this sore loser is hardly going to...
because...
the greater pleasure comes from music...
to me *** is a most:
dyssynchronyous act...

how some people still manage to focus on saying
something is beyond me...
i'm left with onomatopoeias...
half-wit compositions of somewhat consonant
leverages - somewhat vowel expansions
of breath...

never does god even into this brothel...
i show him the "niqab" and all that's visible
is either silence of the hebrew definite article: ha...
why would i somehow
fathom a god in forms? not words?
with a c.c.t.v. focus etc?

- ******* on the roses, eating the roots
and sniffing the ashes -
variations of the modern: fine and lean
cannibal... because none of this invokes
the mandarin: specialz elephant ivory
"herbalism"...
cos if beijing don't sniff it...
we'ez knot snifz it... woz!
n00b wording and "get some"...

ל... find me a F(ucking) in 'ebrew, levite!
kametz = no aleph or ayin...
chirek? "i"?
well... it's и in cyrillic... א in 'ebrew...
but the latter is: an A...
the other gay Adam to Ayin...
and: whenever jeffrey "napoleon dynomite" dahmer
went along...
hiding vowels... and two vowels
treated as consonants...
you'd have to be born in London,
Golders Green to keep up with
the Hasidi...
because wherever they go...
the quarter is followed up with a ghetto...
like a bayz payot caduceus... listening: sparrows
chirping!

would a myth of Eve the prozzie Lilith
even matter at this point?

it only comes down to: integrating
or keeping with the purity of the forbidden fruit
that isn't *******...
but... cousin *******!
i've seen how this old forbidden fruit looks like...
it slobbers... it doesn't speak...
it's wheeled around: it doesn't walk...
the old fruit of eden: ******* your mother,
******* your cousin...
because i know what the next forbidden fruit is...
the circa 16 year old...
but that doesn't invite genetic: non-chernobyll
"status teases"...

inbreed far enough so that no outsider
will ever want to meddle with the ****** politics
of: the first ever niqab ultra...
because the muslims were never:
but really were about... the power dynamic
played out in rumi's *******: sufism...
a tier up from: gentlemen! let's broaden our minds!
Lawrence! ***** in the air! adhan!
compensated by the christian *******
at the altar...
religious gesticulation toward proving
the existence of incubuses: a very feminine affair...
when the broomstick stops "working"...
and there's no sabbath to attend...
and high-tier french socialite society
moves to London...
and the Viennese patisserie was always better
than the Parisian yoke-riddled flat and custard
agitation prone...

i poke my head out of my whittle
hermit cave...
and oops is supposed to happen...

or... drink enough cider and a shot of whiskey
at the same time... and...
it's almost like you're part of
the baltic culture of eating... kashubian herrings...
or generally pickled herrings...

why the **** did Amon Goeth say...
casimir the great - so called -
told the jews they could come to Krakow -
well, even history says:
first they were jews...
later they were polaks...
or: no... they weren't polaks to begin with:
not with that history allows us to entertain...
likewise...
"they're" not h'americans...
israel seems to be...
somewhat of a safebet gamble...

if i heard that one palestinian had roots
in saudi arabia...
like all those "pakistanis" circa 2001 that
had roots in saudi arabia...

the subject - the **** -
the tender geopolitics in between -
the 7 year madness of nebuchadnezzar
that never made it into a ben-hur esque movie
****...
shame i say...

of course this will not reach a far greater audience...
ah... what am i missing?
a ****** - a plump *** - a decapitated madame tussauds
monsier de sade *** toy / would be barbie or
an otherwise ripe cucumber...

my agony: extending the *******
into a cusp of a bone hard hand...
rather natural -
not unless - the proper deal is associated...
me and my ******* and
the girls being circumcised...
well then...
that would almost be like me...
being james cook having just visited
the Easter Islands!

chem. soup brain... or Brian...
no song of no more new to come,
no new song of all that's to come,
no bride of either westminster
or wandsworth or walthamstow...
not within the confines
of the ****- burnings of the dolphin
skins of the yorkie-pies
of the ol' shire... coal-mined veins
from no, to no lesser Silesia...
among the Picts... dear widow
of London that's the current spirit
of lemon-suckling brine?!
oh my dear, what no aloof...
shying from the haggis, from the neeps!
the tatties!
and the myth of the deep frier
marzipan...
the fidget of the fudge explorers
of the Rhine of Yer **** Messieurs!
come to think of it...
i came to england as a fleabag of
eastern europe with a nietzschean moustashe
i borrowed and burrowed from and into
my father dear...
but when in SCOTland...
i arrived as a Dane...
this beyond past comparison arrival
willing to... **** a lass beside her senses
and her geography...
and in that... all was made sane...
because i see no reason to believe
these metropolitan daughters and sons
of fairies...
should they still exalt the ghost
of shakespeare...
and his art a mode of transcendence...
when all his works require!
actors!
the gob and goblet with my tongue
pickled in it like
the body of frederick barbarossa
arriving at Jerusalem...
London: the Salem of my Trials...
will ever and forver old Burns make
a speech: to later sigh...
because the English girls from Leicester
and Norwich arriving in Loon'don
will make it plain and far...
we from the foreign lands:
from the countrtyside will but and but
and but some more!
dear starlings pure... please! recite me some
of your love of Shakespeare:
as long as it rhymes... it's poetics;
ticks... those lesser tapeworms off...
here's a better terminology concerning
a cow-bell... roy orbison will never be allowed
to reign over the status of a black sabbath riff...
but...
he has the rest... nazareth and...
flea of the dog...
royal scots dragoons: this unison of
a non-continental aspect of land...
these isles...
and the english swans these english girls
will have to return,
cite their sonnets and never lend themselves
to "anecdotes" from the plays...
what did i say?
it is worth as much a misnomer
as it is worth a metaphor...
because for all of Shakespeare's worth...
he too would gladly rest,
his final sentiment via Bach's rolling technique...
should it be, when it is already well known...
no one recites a sonnet by a Shakespeare
when old Hogmanay is over...
when St. Sylvester's is celebrated...
and never this, very english... cold-ce
firecracker fore-warning the:
part and parcle of Guy Fawkes' night
of toy-terror...

what words and what words aren't...
and then those words better sung?
of never have,
of never heave...
of never baron over: of never "steve"
(stephen's claim and rite)...

so much for Shakespeare's sonnets...
when come new year's eve
and all that resounds...
is auld lang syne...
and all sing to embrace...
and none sign to what's...
nonetheless later sung...

was man ever to fathom being
so disillusioned to early...
to early as to catch a prosper from
the scent of thyme?
i can't stomach the recitations
of Shakespeare...
they sound to me like a clogged toilet...
i do not require a new recitation...
i require the proper reincarnation
plumber for this gobshite blockage
of what doesn't require to be ******* out:
re- again re- again re- again
and once more until another ted hughes
calls it: an "event at Wimbledon"...

**** it... yes... it was Primrose Hill...
unlucky for me... the Prussians never made it
into the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth...
nor was there a deluge to recount
on the canvas of a Bayeux Tapestry....
but sure as Sherlock ******* Holmes knows
his Watson...
cite and recite all the Shakespeare pedagogy
all you want...
the man would prefer rotten cabbages
to be thrown at the stage than having to endure
the immortality of a Bach...
esp. when... the words of a scotman are
sung come the eve of a new year's day...

by abide the Roud Folk Song Index...
this poo'em will too, not disappear as frequently
as the next to "new" viral video...

if only i wandered as far among
the Welsh... perhaps...
among the Richards of Little Ireland
and all the clever deargfriochta!

what's there to compensate with?
Southend... Colchester... Clapham Junction...
Prince Irvine of Clemence & Chelmsford...
epilogue of Epping -
as glutton Loon'don and...
fair well... bride Bethlem...

a song to not having parted...
a song to not heaved a last farewell...
a song for yesterday...
a song for: everyday!
a song for the domesticated dog...
and never the abides of a lost
leash that also calls itself a dog in horse-ridden
stirrups!
a song to bypass Leicester,
Doncaster, Newcastle, Carisle and...
the lesser domains of Hadrian's scare...
those BIG in domine dominos of history...

my putrid lot to have to remind...
it's not Shakespeare that's sung...
come the advent of anewed...
bubonic Edinburgh...
or how the first skyscrapers were born...
how the first bridges were raised
over no river or any manner
of a body of water...
how i came across my first
scottish "witch" and even if she was
the 2nd or 3rd Fiona...
i didn't fall in love with her...

old clinginess of a mythological Kiev...
somewhere between
Warsaw and Moscow...
yet again... it would have been
better that i return to the squalor of...
forget me to remember:
London 20th century 90s and 80s.

ever since i've quit smoking: beside those two
self-congratulatory puffs at the end of
each day...
                    more and more people are smoking...
in movies...
        they look so... content with
the stampede of the locomotive breath...
                interludes into 5 minute incissions
of absolutely dis-satisfaction...

                    4th of july... some variation
of independence day...
                      i'm planning to visit Loon'don...
for a sport of: zoology...
                i'll take a hubris and hiatus magic
pouch of liqour with me...
expecting: riots...
                  
        peacocks and pistachios...
            porcupines and pomegranates...
molotov cocktails and bagpies...
               i just want to see... oxford circus
yawn... i want to take the scenic route
of a promenade upon stepping off
the tube...
        perform the dull task...
of... window-shopping for mannequin
in restaurants...

    oh god... i'll have to trim my beard...
dissolve some sugar in water
and put it in my hair so: stick-ing anti-wind
gravitas...
             i'll walk this mistanthrope
on a leash of good riddles...
            i'll play the part of someone from
norwich...
    not someone from romford...
              Loon'don the tease from
Mashiter's Hill...
              plain as day: the sky-line in
my hungry eyes...
  almost towing a cow:
                  
         and of course i want to be seen...
how otherwise not so settle the matters
of sensibility...
of this ******-fest of: the obeying conundrum...
4 dada suicides: published by atlas press
in an edition of 1000 copies...
2005...
         what a fraction i do own....

        arthur cravan among the four...
the nephew or... some variant of...
related to... oscar wilde...
                 yes... the physiognomy
are a steal... in terms of what's resembled...

  i trip down: don't tempt me... memory
lane...
   world was I: and the war...
   the dada movement in Zurich....
   cabaret voltaire...
                        Geneva? well...
fast paced betting...
          live and try to not get rich...
something to get by... working for...
a loitering wage...
if you gave me... 2 tonnes of soil...
a tonne of gravel... and said...
3 hours...
                 fair-*******-afro-frenzy
    and enough...
         but "work" as a loitering...
                     what "lockdown"?
the neighbour finally put up a fence
after 15 years of her being implored...
the old roots and stumps had to be dug
up... all the way from
late february...
     a new shed... 13sqm of wimbledon
turf to admire and water...
                       i have to forbid myself
joy... though... in telling my maternal
grandfather: i've quit smoking...
    before he dies: and i pretend to wish
to grow old: i hope this happens...
this... carrier pigeon message is passed...

only today the bewildering... sacrilege...
i was watching: corpus christi...
2019... point being...
it was in my native tongue...
with english subtitles...
         i can't pretend...
   i was more eager to read the subtitles
than to listen to the "mother"
and the "father"...
      sure as hell and that they will die...
this language will die in the vicinity...
then within me...
who am i going to speak it to...
i can imagine... "30 years of and tomorrow"...
and i'll speak it:
zapomniejać mówienie po polsku...

russian interlude i'd call them...
i'll most certainly not me...
a lithuanian ****** miłoš....
              i have to arrive at the prospect...
i am not really arriving at
a country left... or a country arrived at...
"nation": ah ha!
                     siamese twin horror:
bilingual freaks...
             i was always told to shy
away from the concept of a diaspora...
unlike... the jew the italian...
the russian oligarchy...
                      and english...
what... i... made... of... it...

neu-concept...
              i... a pronoun category word...
some obnoxious... reflexive-reflective
quadratic of anti-narcissus...
i: a pronoun... perhaps...
but i as... king george minded...
i: verb!

                          i will take: will i?
i like the idea of the 4th of july...
the tokyo olympics...
that one event in the sport calendar...
when... i don't feel infringed...
with a body capacity to...
perform... a palé - i do have a body...
for greek wrestling...
antithesis judo...
but sure as **** a plethora of body shapes...
ping-pong table assured...
click-bait... without a tennis racket...
and that's why...
squash would have been a good
choice to join the olympic racket...
olympiaco(s) raquettes...

   lofty body builders... ant-worshipping...
not relevant though...
sprint a 100m...
climb 100m...
    clearly toned equilibrium bodies...
bouldering and baseball...
no squash...
     tennis is hardly an olympic
sport...
           it's a money sport...
it's a riviera elton john slim jr.
sort of sport...
football? it's a money sport...
rugby? it's a ******* sort of sport...
football is about as much
an olympic sport as...
a curse of a sneeze...
the only reason why brazil
staged the sporting affair was...
because they lost the world cup...
blah blah...

       squash should be an olympic
sport... why it isn't...
and forest ******* gump
can have his... ping(o)-pong(o)
   berlusconi parties: minus... tony blaire...
is all the reason to note...

hmm... blaire... white... that tehran
trans whizz kid...
   i see... no... no... absolutely...
not similarities... within the confines...
of... "a borrowed shadow" of...
   eva longoria...

i had the same plans for halloween...
the same plans for prague...
prague i can forgive myself...
mother has a hip-replacement...
and i'm all up-and-arms: ******...
like the good boy scout
buffalo billy-oh / geiny boy!

                to suffer from a lack of ****...
is not... to find jokes in language:
when one still has... itchy finger-tips...
"suffer"... and "lack of ****"...
best resolve... no clingy p.s.
             no... cuckoldry...
    the fabled ex-girlfriend of mine...
ex-....
   ****... how old am i? 34...
an ex- from... ah... ha ha... when i was 21...
prostitutes... a thai surprise...
and a black girl done at random
when i hosted my own birthday party...
with an art of an *** so tight...
i received a plum tattoo above...
where her coccyx decided to toy with
the... "art of mechnical reproduction"...

walter... "waterboy"... benjamin?
herowitz? i too had a really ****** surname...
like... ******... like stalin...
catholic ploy... take the best of the three given...
we also reserve an option of a fourth
when you... decide to... become...
confirmed... lucky for some atheists:
who have been... unlucky for me...

of the people that stayed...
    of the people that left...
             unlucky for me...
   those that left: didn't "leave"...
the australians...
            left and "left" and it's not like...
they came back speaking
total ******* cockney...

       it's not that i'm even confused...
"overwhelmed" with emotions...
that reveal themselves...
to have to be... perpetually... displaced...
post-modernist...
quack for doctor...
quasi for marxist astute!

                my ideal ex... rich girl...
one spare apartment in st. petersburg...
riches in novosibirsk...
      educated in england...
   look at me... i ****** a rich ****...
a prop'ah... rich ****...
a russian rich ****...
   not old english sloth dough...
not a reperations **** of worship
that choc-a-bloc-of-sowwy...
  a real... oyster binding with teeth
sort of libido... well! ha! lucky me!
for a ******! she's not a mongrel 2nd
class citizen of the turnip and tulip
and...
   beg R'ah-R'ah-Rhapso-silly-Pullin'-Tin!

you know... i can remember
the love at first sights in my life...
she... Ilona... i experienced in reverse...
two girls were trying to fry some
pancakes...
she hook and sinkered my iPod...
while i refined the idea of pancakes...
she looked like...
something the ugly duckling
would bully at... duck school...
filled her gob... smart...

        yeah yeah...
but i do remember all the times
i experienced love at  first sight...
and their names...
the best horror movie i would ever land
in being a critique for...

1. Milena...
                          2. Kot...
      i can't remember her name...
that's her surnane... she had...
                   two younger sisters... twins...
3. samantha... st. augustine's primary school...
4. janina (canon palmer... an ugly affair...
    i hoped i made reperations to...
joining art class and giving her a rose)
    5. gemma la porte...
  6. emma... a big... ******* sensation...
  7. let's just call her Sancha...
  irish girl... two years older than me...
still in highschool...
8. Isabella... the french psychology student...
and god begot: a loss of virginity...
   9. priya...
     who's the 6 / 7...
             the sister of my first girlfriend...
which would make... a 18 year old...
a pedohpile with a... 15? year old...
                      10. predates 4...
cameron diaz in the mask...
    11. is a cameflouge of Ilona...
my love at first sight in reverse...
if i stayed long enough...
i would have ***** myself to oogle
my eyes out and **** her like
some aria giovanni clone...
                big siberian nose...
her myopia and being plasyfully teasing
"short"...
yes yes... beside that... massive plum
bullseye...
        we must call that:
                wetted ****: seconds...
  
see... i have this cinema in my mind...
of first loves... loves at first sights...
more thirsts rather than thrills...
and... then i want to see Loon'don...
in zoological modus operandi...
i want to see...
    window-shopping for mannequins
of... sylvia plath borderline psychotic
shoelaces of soul...

         i want to shop for...
the agony confined to... raised eyebrows
and the confines of... all things made
easily extreme bound to ****** expression...
having to... self-lacerate...
before the pro-social cordial...
i want to see the future martians...
misantrophes... like-oid mois...

i can honestly be trusted with "love"...
call it the muse....
first sighting...
her moles her first trickled...
lob of the forgotten kiss...
the whirlwind thorough lintany...
her lapse in a guarantee of
ear lobes...
    like my... "shy"...
                  occipital lobe....
investigated by janina...
                                
                           that little light in a tunnel...
a summer in masovia... or mongolia...
or.. whatever is called...
crisp... and doughnut...
idaho... jeffrey: jeff'ohs "napoleon dynamite"...
    dahmer...
                                 mon'ghouls:
the goos of the freely rejected...
cousin Sib is no mal. and frying up
with word-blob Sah...
          -eria              contra...
bloat-zilla...                -ara...
                               death-stow genius no-no...
trans-nanny has an eastender melt-meow-down...
the opera goes: fly-be-fwee:
lucky luke and the fervour
of the force for a complete...
****-lawd comeback town: towwie...
gripping basics...
                       king jefffers...
and jaffa... and khalidha...
     and lay-tea-cia... milkin' dozens...
**** ****...
      ******* whapping 'inge...
                 cwy: rhapsody... remembers
to trill that Sysiphus... and -esque...
              
        ***** and blahs the world over
for...  solidarity of...
compensated vitriol...
       jeff is an ugly u(n)(c)kle...
jeff is a ****** loon:
serenity... theme park expactation
project: alpha 50.9...
     he's an an FM in frequence...
and best listened to:
when "reading was a thing":
typo... of digest...
a **** queen and ***** quag...

             calofornian subtitles...
ever since...
   ever since... a petty Hague and Hue...
european conquest of time...
and something akin to
h'america... and its louisiana purchase:
ratio no. 2!
fly-over **** Iowa...

  it's not like... croatia was...
the Balkans was such a small: and ditto:
afffair of... inbreeding folks...
lord: lowd and...
spandex 1980s Berlin to...
give revenue in all things
that catered in retaining...
a loathing of... pertained to...
CWISP...
                    trill the R who?
the french hark it...
the english... larp...
woebot... for every robot...
they... tarantulla tongue numb
that...

                 whyming...
RHYME-B'OH...
            ******* kings and queens...
it's the "united states":
having to annex the forntiers...
the annex
on conquistador...
velcommen mingling xo xo xo...

the "encrypted" sexuality
of a the concept of female hands...
misguided by the proportions...
best hid in a niqab...
but when exposed: pork meets...
buffalo-slingers...
no... arab / camel jockey hands...
are not beijing...
or ***... porcelein hands...
you could... **** a ******* camel neck...
and i am: the beck unfucked cockrel
you best wish: yawn-yacht...
you never never...
ever... called a forking...

   arab women have these fat
hands that black women...
would require... 12" of envy
a white anorexic would require of them...
to muster...
a blasphemy and... a kenyan litany...
some of that sort...
all i know...
jesus be all big with...
                   post-apocalyptic
protestantism in post-colonial...
"oops" of the 21st century...
          forgive i.e. tow what?

               how about...
i allow my grandfather a death
by demetia...
               and then i wait...
i wait for nothing...
or i wait for: "history"...
no... sooner i wait for...
the brothel... than this bollocking waste
of time of... frank zappa is...
burning up like...
            a heretic...
                    within...
a 1m sq. of a proximity to mecca!

how fortunate: the man with... none...
              how fortunate...
             the grievance of a man with so much...
to have to... find...
poker-dole... facing...
a man with the queen's penny...
i am a man worth of a queen's penny...
does that even become know...
respected...
for all the money grieved into
making up...
the honoruable citizens' tax invested:
"quest"...
i am... its last...
           radical... and...
                                     royalist...
i have to come...
with a parade of worded -ings
and thinning paroles!

                         this birth of a new:
a nation of fat-whips and bores!
              let me become inclined to leisure...
for the lost revelation of
a tenure of fiction!

what was "once" a female...
has "become" the homosexual...
what was "once"... the mother in law...
has now "become": the bridget...
and nuance shellshock...
               fraserburgh... kid-joy... ****...
an ode to: joe... the...
                       ben nevis and bon jovi
of... the... "nuanced"...
and...                 "pioneers":
all best reserved...
   for the alaskan and the louisina purchase...
and...
the lost told tide of...
the spaniards: arms...
goths... north africa...
reconquista...
conquistadors...
sooth talking some mayans
and aztecs into: "in-breeding"...
        miriad... moors...
gives us a tan... us... whitey loop holes...
  tanning with a mongrel
cocktail a mongol...
typo... tan ****-up tao...
tanning with tao...
tow tufu **** what?!
       beijing fwend a fwied deifying
pig loco?
vibes... first locomotive **** promo...
last fist comes first and thirst...
no... samuel beckett's sore...
so... sore n'oh m'aw...
   savvy... you... *******... gooseberry
savoured prim nancy?!

i consider the new year very much like that of the Chinese... in that: why become so craving uplifting from the gloom so early in the months of winter? only now winter is biting, gnashing its teeth and riddling man: only now can man truly sense a revival, or what came to pass and what it to come... thankfuly the myth of the Dragon of Vavel involves a wise little kid, a sheep stuffed with sulphur: and an alcoholic dragon: who drank half the Vistula before having its stomach ruptured; for now comes the zenith of winter - December was such a mild month... who would have man is supposed to have the fuzziest of feelings beset by St. Valentine's? what? now?! when winter is: hardly mattering to make a case for love?!*

frankly - i thought it would have started sooner,
but after a month or so on this
island of trees and nightmares i could not
find my own feet, let alone the tongue
that: instead of being an icarus:
         was somehow shell-shocked in
the trenches at Ypres -
                                  almost a month upon
returning to this land of trees and nightmares
and nothing:
                       budding within me: utter
          despair -
                          a month wandering a labyrinth
fearful of the minotaur: without a minotaur
in sight - and still wandering until i met
my own shadow: fearful of it -
               it started to dawn me:
        were i not alone in the labyrinth to begin
with? so what minotaur was i actually looking
for? so i chanced upon hades and his
   centry cerberus and asked:
   to which he replied: have you forgotten
your own centry: the chimera?
                       it was plain to see that i was
actually readjusting to this land once more:
as i once did, so long ago:
        count to this a circa of twenty-three years...
some i am glad to remember
  others i am convinced have more to
glitches in the development of the frontal
cortex than can actually be ascribed:
          authentic misery...
but it had to happen at some point:
          in the lowest ebbs of hell known
to arab folk as zamharīr i found a mollusk
in a frozen tree: which showed me a pearl...
    and the mollusk said: i am your tongue
take it from me and be revived...
    of any days, but considering i was awake
from yesterday just three hours prior
to this hour upon which i write woken -
i can't remember whether last night
   had any meaning:
  but meaning there was -
               a feeble animal like creature -
scuttling in the night, fasting by day:
          possessing a ferocious appetite for
thai cuisine by night...
          who was that creature:
         who only said but one word upon
encountering earthly folk as a greeting:
ha-yah?
             seems the young swan has shed
its young feathers and allowed new feathers
to grow: sterner and worthy of
a new year: and a new flight.
for what did exactly pass through this day?
the man arose with the dawn
   and said: bid me well, bind me to your
motion and pull me as i can speak of
a goodnight...
         the man decided what best to concern
himself with regards to running a household...
   first he put on the washing...
       then he cleaned the house
   including his stench-filled murk of the previous
year...
          after all: what is a year if not
     a room uncleaned for about a month?
         same as the last year,
       and the year before that, and the year before...
having neglected his hygiene he then
   decided to baptise himself...
           because: after all?
                 what is hygiene if not sometimes
neglected?
               it sometimes means nothing
of a ritiualistic drama of army rigour to
constantly wash, as to say
   of the taoist and the mirror: or was
that al-Ghazzali: but i digress for one speaks
of the mind while the other of heart -
so to whom am i to ascribe the quote
that i can't cite verbatim:
           stop polishing the mirror of your
         mind all the time -
                     you'll frighten all the much
     necessary guests from murking
   it once in a while -
     for they must come, but they must
also leave: or rather: remember -
        you too are obliged to leave -
   sooner or later...
                 i guess i can only ascribe
that to myself...
                        given how the day unfolded...
so after having baptised myself:
    i wasn't any more cleaner nor dirtier
as before:
                     the body was "washed":
but rather the mind revived...
        soon the nearing 15th, 16th, 17th
hour of being awake didn't matter...
               i started my work in gehenna:
but instead of sacrificing children to the fire:
it was 5 chicken thighs:
     first fried for a crisp skin,
    later drenched in apple cider -
   to which onion garlic and mushrooms were
added -
       and then into a casserole dish
   and into the oven of Moloch (with thyme
   and a bay leaf)...
      an hour or so later: making the final touches
to the cider sauce:
      double cream and Norwich mustard
(4:1) - mash & veg on the side...
      and then antics with the four legs of
a chair: two un-even - four chairs in total -
yet two chairs with two un-even legs...
    followed by un-******* the legs
and ******* them back on...
      followed by:
                      well don't worry:
    where's the health and safety of these people
so "principled" when i am told to
***** the bolts back on tight with you
sitting on the ****** chair with my head
beneath it?!
                           but i said to him:
   listen, this is the schematic i'm seeing:
  
    |          /

    |          |

       one pair of legs allign, the other pair don't...
maybe you mixed up
       putting together the two chairs?
what i wasn't told was that they
were put up in a private manner:
           no i didn't ask for how much
you bought them for...
                i'm a taurus, he's an aries...
he wouldn't budge...
    he tried to "convince" me that the legs
somehow didn't match up when placed
side by side:
      so i said to him:
    but come look at my perspective
i'm telling you: this chair looks
   like this:

    |          /

    |          |

   just put the leg of the other chair in
the place where       /   is
      and let's see if they allign?
   you think he budged?
    of course not:
                  i have a witness for who
i had to write a reply to the chair company:
yes i tried what you suggested
  (but it was really a ****** suggestion)
considering that you were implying
one person should sit on the chair
  while the other had his head under
the chair and was tightening bolts back
onto the legs...
       so i had to write a reply:
  listen - (a) i don't like waiting for
replies concerning the exchange of goods...
   (b) your solution was *******
  (c) i can send you photographic
evidence: that you're selling wonky products
and (d) please reply to this
   without trying to figure out a way
to save the postal service by reverting
back to carrier pigeons...
   yours sincerely: a still unsatisfied
                              customer...

i get the stubborn part:
     **** it - i paid for it i want a decent product:
IKEA doesn't fester such problems...
Lego... that's a danish company, right?
   so if Lego can be put together
    IKEA can be put together...
                 Danes, Swedes... what's
the difference? they're not exactly referred
to as western europe.

- oh, the man from last year stopped drinking?
like hell he did...
                    he's wearing a new pair of shoes...
  and he's using a fancy new glass that
looks like a sputnik...
          i could never suffocate people with
the airy fairy...
                 honest to god...
       i'm still wondering what the german
sadists did to sven hannawald while
watching RACIST SPORTS of the winter
Olympics...
                     ah: funny how we have
to compete with the Japanese et al.
           i swear i didn't come from Africa
but out of an Eskimo's *******... igloo igloo...
EXCEPT THE SPORTS ON KILIMANJARO
can't really qualify, for the Mongol said:
building a ******* snowman
   belongs in art-class...
         while throwing a snow-ball
belongs in the jungle-target-practice
               using a heavier object,
                                                i.e. a rock;
and the young ones were taken to
   the KILIMANJARO arena to practice
with lighter objects, but in harsher conditions...
having returned to using heavier
objects, but in more advantegous conditions
when running ****-naked...
         i've heard the anglican version of:
all from africa we came...
            i'm not buying it:
           i'm wondering what the *******
squint is all about, rather than **** myself
over melanin:
     sun cream and the sun for me -
  or what i call vitamin D...
                  devil vitamin!
                    
post-scriptum:
       once upon a time i met a Mongolian
in a coach station in Amsterdam -
  and the look he gave me was a look of:
you are my son... what on earth has happened
to you? and he wasn't much older than me,
but the same pair of eyes tell the same
story: or the eyes that once were and have
become so other...
            
                 can you imagine that all these
words could only be spewed from listening
to Scandinavian folk music?
                                     now you can.

.there were always three songs from the 80s that we, more or less elusive... since i wasn't someone who frequently listened to the radio, i'd hear these songs - on an off perhaps once a year - at a particular time, notably travelling - or there would be some modern revamp to suit the trance-kids... midnight oil's - beds are burning, men at work - down under - well... not so much... the best example would have to be... 1984s... nik kershaw's - the riddle... i mean the lyrics are mind-boggling: near a tree by a river
                  there's a hole in the ground
                  where an old man of Aran
                  goes around and around
                  and his mind is a beacon
                  in the veil of the night
                  for a strange kind of fashion
                  there's a wrong and a right
                  but he'll never, never fight over you...
well the song is primarily about the Irish immigrants that went off to h'America - blessings of Babylon - the arms, the guild of hammers and sickles and all that to boost an honest's man honest's wage for labour... what else? the old man of Aran is a ref. to the 1934  Robert J. Flaherty documentary: Man or Aran... for i see no reason to celebrate this song in a modern fiasco... the tune: if you only like the tune... you might as well tell me... that d.j. Tiesto is going to revamp chris the burgh's - a spaceman came travelling... because that's just gonna happen! although i imagine myself writing the odd scribble about... a young man and his storm petrel - of Tindhólmur...

it really has been this sort of day -
to be rudely interrupted by still clinging friends of
the family dropping by, for the hey! surprise
at 8pm on a Monday evening -
staying up till after 10pm...
distorting the plans of me cutting down on drinking...
you don't just drop uninvited -
not scheduled - perhaps in a war torn part
of the world like Iraq...
and you're the U.S.A. pilot of a drone
that killed the son of some wisened Mesopotamian
who offers you tea with tears
and he doesn't understand your words
and then the grandson runs in and wants
to sell you all the eggs...
because the old man just didn't want the money
like that... but that's a cruel situation...
not in England, not in Germany do you
just appear on someone's door at 8pm
with covert blah-blah to reach a ****** of
the real reason for the "happy dropping by"...
it's a Monday... a happy happenstance can
occur in a cafe - on neutral territory -
not when - it's polite to serve coffee and tea
and cakes... it's a Monday!
there are no excuses!

now i see it... how i will ever stop drinking as
much as i have...
there is simply no satisfaction from a good night's
sleep anymore -
it needs to be corrected -
i had to start thinking that my insomnia is
a prerequisite for my brain to explore foreign
lands of... what will become of this verbiage...
until i come to last conclusions...
hardly alcohol widthrawl symptoms -
but you can just imagine -
a sensation of a ghost of my cat that i suspected
was killed by my "neighbour"
jumping onto the bed and making gentle
indentations in the cotton of the bedsheats...
not quiet alseep - somehow sleeping -
more hallucinations of the Mengu
/おもmen頬yoroi/ - i will not even delve
into something i know nothing about...
read: error... had to look for...
the simpler japanese i know exists...
i don't even know whether the stated kun'yomi
looks any better to the on'yomi メン...
and the wikipedia entry for (yoroi) doesn't
even exist!
but that's how the insomnia brain works it seems...
it needs to be somewhere between borderline
sleep deprivation and no sleep at all...
or at least pseudo-sleep and pseudo-dreams:
hallucinations - not visual or auditory as such...
imagine the sensation of a cat jumping
onto your bed and feeling the gentle indentations
of him walking next to your lying body?
you can't exactly find the right sort of amount
of sleep... sometimes stretches of 8 or so hours
leave you... exhausted the next day -
with a sort of vocabulary that should be waiting
in line for a retirement home and pear pulp
and a mash and roast beef milkshake to slurp up!
too much sleep is no good for the brain...
but then too little is no good for the body...
it's a fine balance... if i find it... well...

to take a beer for a walk at night -
the 2nd day of frost -
to see the stars with more lucidity
of them being exfoliated by the endless prism
of frost on the cold and hardening concrete...
paparazzi camera epilepsykrieg of a red-carpet...
under the most visible constellation
of  Scorpio

                            •
                       •
                  •
    

                         •           )צ(
                           •

                                             •                  
                  •

illuminations of the tsade... and ayin (ע)... mah-zahl
akh-ravh - oh i'm sure the hebrews to treat
the H as surd akin to the sacred raj hindu
of sanskrit... what saved them that would have never
saved the "red" indians?
the "blue" indians had sanskrit and...
a culinary arsenal of spices... which was appealing
to some little people of Norwich and Bristol
who became just became bored of rosemary,
thyme - parsley and dill.

words can at best become merely co-ordinates...
you would have to walk these same streets
at these specific times of the year -
the second frost of winter -
a clear sky -
dogs barking in the background -
foxes if... are rather exotic when they start
performing: mate-calling...
the odd crow insomnia that croaks
in flight at night...
this suckling vacuum of air exploring
a near infinite distance of astmophere
coming into a horizon with the nothingness
of space and the celestial mechanics of
the orbs - the traffic of Eastern Ave.
toward Southend in the background -
no wind... the sound of a kosher goat
taking another glug glug from a bottle
of beer - the gentle scortching of smoked
tobacco in a cigarette being dragged (inhaled)...
perhaps a very distsant sound of a train
chuggling along -
the dogs barking at the cold...
the dogs barking at the cold...
the inability to hear one's own footsteps...
a mania for the night and all the seven if not
more delights of taking a walk alone at night.