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Brandon Halsey Jan 2012
This is one of those serious poems
And yet it has nothing new to say
But the poet needs to keep himself busy
And writing seems to be the easiest way

The poet rises up on his soapbox
Because he works better from an elevated height
He screams about organized religion, politics
And stripping away of our basic human rights

Like a magician with a classic misdirection
The poet wraps his moralizing in purple prose
He hits you over the head with one simple point
That he’s forgotten more than you’ll ever know

Around the time of the nineteenth obscure reference
The reader is in awe of his far-reaching knowledge
Then the poet overuses polysyllabic words
Just to prove he went to a good college

And the poet keeps filling up the notebooks
Even though he should have stopped long ago
But the publisher agreed to pay by the word
So unfortunately, there’s four more stanzas to go

Quickly, the release date approaches
There’s one printing, then two, then three
And the poem becomes a hit in coffee shops
Recited by grad students in between bites of biscotti

His face now graces the cover of every magazine
In an explosion of exuberant media admiration
Dozens of talk show appearances are scheduled
For the newly crowned “voice of our generation”

The publisher decorates the dust jacket with blurbs
Complimenting the book’s “dangerously original rhymes”
But it’s nothing more than passing hyperbole
Gathered from a glowing review in The New York Times

Now thousands grasp the paperback edition
And eagerly await the feature film adaptation
Meanwhile, the poet hunches over his typewriter
And commits more sententious literary *******
Mateuš Conrad Feb 2019
.within these words is the simple question... i'm a misogynist? i'm a misogynist? i'm such curious as to how i could get away with all of this if i, truly were a woman, but as being a man, i am prescribed the sentient double-knocker of: a ******* mea culpa!

so i spent the afternoon making
two curries...
   by now... cultural appropriatio:
whatever the hell that means
having an arsenal of indian
spices that would scare both
the russians and the h'americans
with their nukes...
but like i said:
i concede:
                 the blue indian cuisine,
i.e. from the Bengal
or the Punjab?
superior to my bland salt &
paper...
although...
when it came to the chicken chettinad?
i'm not here competing
for the white-boy-eat-a-lot-of-chillies
olympics...
one standard red chilli,
four kashimiri dry chillies,
and yes... some standard chilly
powder...
       if i want to burn my tongue:
i'll drink near-to-boiling
water... thanks...
don't know... i sometimes make
so much curry in one afternoon
i'm happy to forget doing
the stereotypical male thing of...
watching the 6 nations rugby,
or the skii jumping competition
from Letho (Finland)...
   it's like... i'm transported back
to Edinburgh,
  doing 12 hours of lab. training
once more...
              hell... no lab. work for me:
but i guess... blue indian cuisine
is the closest thing to a chemistry
experiment, notably an organic
chemistry experiment...
mind you:
   have you ever wondered why
you tend to eat a little bit more
of the sauce...
   if you don't dice the chicken,
move away from dicing chicken
*******, and instead fry (which will
come later)
       whole chicken thighs?
or... marinate them prior to...
          curating them via
                   the method of poaching
them in the sauce?
diced chicken: so bland...
         esp. from the breast....
but the meat... cooked whole...
esp. as a thigh (the best bit of
the chicken, and with the bone
intact? oh god!)...
my few favorite curry though?
the one i made later...
    a... sali murgi...
   (yes, the H is always a surd...
   moor-ghee...
    butter of the moors)...
      with those beautiful sali
crispets...
          on top...
   also... who would have thought:
dried, apricots... in a curry?
oh i don't mind this...
   "cultural appropriation"...
me cooking curry is...
so much more than someone
donning dreads...
and... by the looks of it...
          i might even, slyly,
cook better than some natives...
well i already know that
i can speak a more orthodox english
than some of the natives,
i knew that back in high-school...
  started in class 2B...
moved a year later to class 1B...
(class... tier, same thing)...
a year later i was in class 1A...
and it went like so:
    1A, 1B, 2A, 2B,
              1C... 3A, 3B,
                      1D, 2C...
and no... there was no 4A or 4B...
(it skipped every two numbers
and every two letters)...
so... me worried that i might
not cook better than some
Indian's grandmother?
   not in the least...
              a, woman, cooking?
please... give me a break...
             what's that story:
if she overuses salt...
she's thinking about something...
if she underuses salt
she's fostering ill-will...
she over-cooks the pasta
she wants a divorce...
she under-cooks it...
she wants you to start recreationally
running because you have
a "beer-belly-flab"...
yeah... i'll say it...
WOMEN DO NOT BELONG
IN THE KITCHEN...
        mind you...
i was helped by a standard-bearer
to the antithesis of saying so...
mother dear...
   mother ed gein mother dear
(this better freak some people out)...
ah...
but you know what?
frying the potato sali...
last time i used a *** and a standard
cheese grater for the potato...
ingenius...
however many chemistry
experiments i ever did...
no cliche american high-school
"faux pas"...
          but then...
like men are supposedly unable
to tell the difference
between
burgundy and cordovan...
         the **** is a...
               julienne peeler?
yes... mother dear...
or... grandma dear...
                 any other woman in
"my life"...
   no really... but i always like
to keep the ed gein joker card
in play...
   for breathing space...
             all the other women in my
life were...
    for two worthy exceptions...
the nurse in the hospital
where i was born...
                     birth-mark scared...
thought it was better to
shove suckle of a feeding bottle
into my mouth so hard
that i would suffocate,
and almost die from
a premature heart-attack...
ended up with an.. "enlarged" heart...
last girlfriend...
  now... i don't even want to begin
with that story...
in full agatha christey
alias poirot paranoid-mode...
****** her for 7 hours one night
prior to leaving St. Petersburg...
****** her in the batch while she was
on her period and it was
the first time she told me to put
on a ******,
after she first told me to take it off...
so yeah... the curry was great...
we lated sat together
like jesus mary & st. joseph
watching the t.v.
   ah... China's one child-policy...
back in Europe
i'm a dormant serial killer
and my mother is actually my sister...
and my father is a *******
Anglican priest...
or myth, or ghost,
  counter... "god"...
of me turning to the public stage...
BUMPER STICKER
RETRACTION FROM H'AMERICA...
if he died for "our", "sins"...
why is the mantra still:
  the mea culpa of...
"allowing" him to die on the cross?
so we watched a movie...
book club...
staring...
   jane fonda...
  that guy from miami vice...
that woman from ms. congeniality,
that woman from back to the future
vol. 3,
          that woman from
        father of the bride...
                       and DREYFUS!
fifty shade of grey...
   cameo by e. l. james, walking
the dog?
                         yep...
        anyway... watched that...
prior to, dressed up real fine...
was asked where i was going...
to buy some beer...
   walked to the local for some cider...
had to endure a interlude
with a drunk west ham supporter
talking to the colt cashier about
working in outer east london
but being an arsenal supporter...
the movie though...
book clup...
          so it ends on a:
and they lived happily ever after,
didn't it?
            yeah... it did...
but as i was walking about...
the demographic...
   my "neighbour"...
a single mother who still has her
son living with her -
who should look like he's ageing
but... to me he's still
a stunted cabbage-patch
                       of a 13 year old...
a daughter who sometimes
crashes...
      walking home with
a... "catch"...
                           a man...
                 who i would seriously
make ******* antagonisms of...
elsewhere? in the... vicinity?
similar stories...
                      around here
i'm the jesus, the messiah's
mother and my father,
                 the ghost of st. joseph...
last time i wanted to play roulette...
my mother was visiting
     her parents,
both of them slept at my uncle's
house,
i hosted a birthday party...
                and...
  ended up ******* a black girl
in my room on a chocolate couch...
how's that?
      don't even ask me how
i managed to persuade a thai
    bisexual with cheap polish beer
and jazz...
        done brutally / i.e. realistically
in the garden...
with a my own persistent zenith
of surprise...
the thai surprise...
           of reaching into her *****...
really... sport's bra...
and you just picked her up
   from a park bench lamenting
into the phone drinking beer
at the same time, + the short hair?
really? no... moment of "suspence"
           of... the thai surprise?
there were always the odds:
3:1 - she's a woman...
        or 4:2 - she's... he's she's
                               she's he's a man...
oi! shem?! what's up?
which is it?
(3? mouth, the floral pattern,
and the ***...
                1? choice...
  well... if you've already started
courting?
              there isn't one...
4? how many points of entry
between two men? 4...
   but how many choices?
the... teasing *******
literature and wanting to experiment
or...
   the "homophobe"...
which only applies to...
   ****** taqiyya...
                        or the thai surprise...
oh i'm pretty sure i've met
a few homosexuals in my life,
but all of them had
the courtesy to... dismiss homophobia...
what was "homophobia"
and became "trans-phobia"
was forever some borrowed
from Islam... ****** taqiyya)...                
    
                 oh but reality is brutal
on this level...
                         no... not rosey ****
friends, best buddy psychotic
                  lingering ex-girlfriends...

so i drank one cider,
watched match of the day
for all the premiership highlights...
drank two more ciders...
in between taking
a king's salute of one's
most worthy subject:
    a 10cm length of fudge-like
****...
forgot to *******...
and found myself thinking...
'what if the opening
for david bowie's song
from the man who sold the world,
the width of a circle...
could ever become something
-esque shape of things to come
by audioslave...
that subtle rhythm section...
what if all rhythm sections
of songs could have more
a more subtle air about them,
so that the rhythm section
doesn't have to compete with
the vocals...
   harmony...
                very much unlike
the rhythm guitar of Metallica...
what then?

i'll speak my mea culpa...
but i'll also imagine myself
nailing him to the cross...
and then dry *******
the erected crucifix
                         with him on it...
yes...
    and he might have died,
but i somehow managed to live,
in order to understand,
rather than forget the omni-****
banality for...
    the spec-attache-of-the-wrongly-
reattached-to-the-omni-****
as-stand­ard-the...
                            particular man.

inclined to be on a, "jonestown massacre"
style... motiff?
         please...
                  i'd need to dumb
my language down to a level of
understanding that
could no longer be riddled
with idiosyncracies,
          and, subsequently
become: peppered with rhetoric...

who doesn't,
made of flesh,
borrow a segment from
     idolatory,
of these, of all of all
of the possible days...
                oh.... subtle translation
of the german reality
at the peak of the 19th century...
what was the twilight,
or rather... who were the idols
of that frame of history?
wherever i look now...
i cannot see what twilight
there's is to speak of,
other than via my own
post-mortem...
    and by then...
             i only seem to want to convey:
but i am only making
a snippet of what an status
would perform
otherwise:
full swing wholly engrossed
in idolatry do...

        nibbling...
to better explain metaphysics...
id est:
       as simply as possible...
with a...
                 underlying principle
of metaphor...
   and subsequently:
   a literalism that only dabbles
with ridicule of,
what centers around...
self-worth,
    and self-worth-attainment,
best mitigated by
   a self-deprecating comedy...
         that... is provoked
as a modus operandi...
                by an undermining,
tragico-comic...
         of a... noumenon,
self-excluded:
              deprecating comedy per se.

thus:
   the self, returns to the "self",
returns to "the box"...
               which ends up being...
something almost bearable
to have to endure,
esp. when stacking shelves
in a supermarket.
Stella Gamber Aug 2013
Every poet writes of
the moon as if they know her,
drinks coffee like water,
and overuses words that
they have never even said aloud

Because no one truly cares
what the writer felt,
if the interpretation
did not feel relative to the reader himself

       An indent here,
a story about bruised knees,
a summer that should have never ended,
and love that should have
                  before it even began
A copy of a copy,
of a copy, of a copy

and no one seems to notice,
unless while reading,
they felt nothing similar

I could tell you I have flowers
sprouting from my rib-cage,
and a rabbit thumping away in my chest,

but if that means nothing to you
I become just another
******, wannabe internet writer
who failed to make
your heart-strings
resound

- S.G.

— The End —