THE ENIGMA OF TIME IN VERSE: PART TWO
Dear Friends, having introduced ‘The Enigma of Time in Verse’ in Part One, along with few selected poetic quotes, I now mention what some of the important Philosophers thought about Time down the past centuries. But while doing so, I have tried my best to simplify some of those early concepts for better understanding and appreciation of my readers. If you like it, kindly re-post the poem. Thanks,  – Raj Nandy of New Delhi.

          THE ENIGMA OF TIME IN VERSE : PART TWO
   I commence by quoting Sonnet 60 of Shakespeare about Time,
   Hoping to seek some blessings for this Part Two composition of
   mine!
“Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,
  So do our minutes hasten to their end;
  Each changing place with that which goes before,
  In sequent toil all forwards do contend.
  Nativity, once in the main of light,
  Crawls to maturity, wherewith being crown’d,
  Crooked elipses ’gainst his glory fight,
  And Time that gave doth now his gift confound.
  Time doth transfix the flourish set on youth
  And delves the parallels in beauty’s brow,
  Feeds on the rarities of nature’s truth,
  And nothing stands but for his scythe to mow:
  And yet to times in hope my verse shall stand,
Praising thy worth, despite his cruel hand.”

              PHILOSOPHY OF TIME
Animals are said to live in a continuous present,
Since they have no temporal distinction of past, future,
or the present.
But our consciousness of time, becomes the most
distinguishing feature of mankind.
Though we are mostly obsessed with objective time, -
As the rotation of our Earth separates day from night.
With the swing of the pendulum and the ticking of clocks,
Which regulates our movements, while we try to beat the clock!
But the ancient theologians and philosophers of India and
Greece,
Who were among the first to ponder about the true nature
of all things,
Had wondered about the subjective nature of time;
Was time linear or cyclic, was time endless or finite?

GREEK PHILOSOPHERS ON TIME:
I begin with Heraclitus, the Pre-Socratic philosopher of 6th Century BC born in Ephesus.
He claimed that everything around us, is in a constant state of change and flux.
You cannot step into the same river twice Heraclitus had claimed,
Since water keeps flowing down the river all the while and never
remains the same.
This flow and change in Nature is a process which is ceaseless.
The only thing which remains permanent is impermanence!
Here is a quote from poet Shelley reflecting the same idea:
“World on world are rolling ever
  From creation to decay
  Like the bubbles on a river
  Sparkling, bursting, borne away.”

Now Heraclitus was refuted by Parmenides, born in the Greek colony of Elea,
On the western coast of Southern Italy, as his contemporary.
Parmenides said that our senses deceive us, since all changes are mere illusory!
True reality was only eternal and unchanging ‘Being’, which was both indivisible and continuous - filling up all space.
Zeno, a pupil of Parmenides, through his famous ‘Paradox of Achilles and the Tortoise’ had shown, that when the tortoise was given a head start,
Swift footed Achilles could never catch up with the tortoise,
Since the space between the two were infinitely divisible, resulting in the impossibility of movement and change in motion!
Now the Greeks were never comfortable with the Concept of Infinity.
They preferred to view the universe as continuous existing ‘Being’.  
However, unlike Heraclitus’ ‘world of change and flux’,
Both Parmenides and Zeno have presented us, with a static unchanging universe!
Thus from the above examples it becomes easy for us to derive,  
How those Ancient Greeks had viewed Time.
Time has been viewed as a forward moving changing entity;
And also as an illusory, continuous and indivisible Being!
To clarify this further I quote Bertrand Russell from his ‘History of Western Philosophy’;
“Creation out of nothing, which was taught in the Old Testament, was an idea wholly foreign to Greek philosophy. When Plato speaks of creation, he imagines a primitive matter, to which God gives form as an artificer.”

PLATO AND ARISTOTLE ON TIME:
For Plato, time was created by the Creator at the same instance when he had fashioned the heavens.
But Plato was more interested to contemplate on things which lay
beyond the sway of time and remained unchangeable and eternal;
Like absolute Truth, absolute Justice, the absolute form of Good and Beauty;
Which were eternal and unchangeable like the ‘Platonic Forms’, and were beyond the realm of Time as true reality.
Plato’s pupil Aristotle was the first Greek philosophers to contemplate on reality inside time, and provide a proper definition as we get to see.
He said, “Time is the number of movement in respect to before and after” - as a part of reality.
To measure time numerically, we must have a ‘before’ and an ‘after’, and also notice the difference objectively.
Therefore, time here becomes the change which we see and experience.
Time takes on a linear motion moving from the past to the present;
And to the unknown future like a moving arrow travelling straight.
Aristotle had developed a four step process to understand everything inside of Time and within human experience:
(a) Observe the world using our senses,
(b) Apply logical rules to these observations,
(c) To go back and consult past authorities, if your logic agrees with their logic,
(d) Then only you can come to a logical conclusion.

No wonder in our modern times, experiments conducted by the LDC or the Large Hadron Collider, located 100m underground near the French-Swiss border,
By going back in time simulates the ‘Big Bang’ conditions, that moment of our universe’s first creation.
The scientists thereby, study the evolution of our universe with time, which  resulted in the  finding of the Higgs Boson !  (On 4thJuly 2012)

NOTES :  All elementary particles interacting with the Higg's Field & obtain Mass, excepting for photons & gluons which do not interact with this field. Mass-less photons can travel at the
speed of light with a mind boggling 186,000 miles per second! Now this LDC is a Particle Accelerator 27 kms long ring-shaped tunnel, made mostly of superconducting magnets, inside which two high-energy particle beams are made to travel close to the speed of light in opposite directions, and the shower of particles resulting from the collision is closely examined, presuming that these similar shower of particles must have been produced at the time of the ‘Big Bang’ some 13.8 million years ago, at the time of Creation! Sound like fiction? Well, Prof. Peter Higgs got the Noble Prize for Physics, for locating the particle called ‘Higgs Boson’ among those shower of particles, on 10th Dec. 2013.

NOW TO LIGHTEN UP MY READERS MIND, FEW TIME QUOTE I NOW PROVIDE :

“TIME WASTES OUR BODIES AND OUR WITS,
  BUT WE WASTE TIME, SO WE ARE QUITS!” – Anonymus.

‘Time is a great Teacher, but unfortunately it kills its Pupils!’ – HL Berlioz

“Lost , yesterday, somewhere between sunrise and sunset, two
   golden hours,
   Each set with sixty diamond minutes.
   No reward is offered, for they are gone forever!” – Horace Mann


PLOTINUS & ST. AUGUSTINE ON TIME:
Now getting back to our Philosophy of Time, there was Plotinus of the 3rd Century AD,
The founder of the mystical Neo-Platonic School of Philosophy.
He had followed Plato’s basic concept of Time as “the moving image of eternity.”
Mystic Plotinus tried to synthesize both Aristotle and Plato by saying that the entire process of cosmic creation,
Flows out of the ONE  through a series of emanation!
This ONE gave rise to the ‘Divine Mind’ which he called the ‘Realm of Intelligence’ and is an aspect of reality,
When everything is understood in terms of Platonic Forms of Truth, Justice, the Good, and Beauty.
However, the later Christian theologians had interpreted this ONE of Plotinus, -
As the Christian God, the Divine Creator of the Universe.
For God is eternal, in the sense of being timeless, in God there is no before or after, but only a timeless present.

Now this lead St. Augustine, to formulate a very admirable relativistic theory of Time!
St. Augustine, the greatest constructive teacher of the Early Christian Church, had written in Book XI of his ‘Confessions’ during  5th century AD, -
His thoughts about the enigma of Time which had perplexed the Greek philosophers of earlier centuries.
To simplify St. Augustine’s thoughts, I now paraphrase for the sake of clarity.
Time can only be measured while it is passing, yet there is time past, and time future in reality.
To avoid these contradictions he says that past and future can only be thought of as present: ‘past’ must be identified with memory, and ‘future’ with expectation.
Since memory and expectation being both present facts, there is no contradiction.  
“The present of things past is memory, the present of things present is sight; and the present of things future is expectation,” - wrote St. Augustine.

This subjective notion of time led St. Augustine to anticipate Rene Descartes the French philosopher the 17th Century,
Who proclaimed “Cogito, ergo sum” in Latin, meaning “I think, therefore I am”, and is regarded as the Father of Modern Philosophy.

Now cutting a long story short I come to Sir Isaac Newton, well known for his Laws of Motion and Gravity.
Newton speaks of ‘Absolute Time’ which exists independently, flowing at a consistent pace throughout the universe, which can only be understood mathematically.
Newton’s ‘Absolute Time’ had remained as the dominant concept till the  early years of the 20th Century.
When Albert Einstein formulated ‘Theory of Space-time’ along with his Special and General Theory of Relativity.

Now the German philosopher Leibniz during 17th century, had challenged Newton with his anti-realist theory of time.
Leibniz claimed that time was only a convenient intellectual concept, that enables to sequence and compare happening of events.
There must be objects with which time can interact or relate to as ‘Relational Time’ he had felt.
Ernst Mach, like Leibniz towards the end of 19th Century, said that even if it was not obvious what time and space was relative to,
Then they were still relative to the ‘fixed stars’ i.e. the bulk of matter in the universe.

CONCEPT OF TIME AS 'SPECIOUS PRESENT' :
During late 19th century, Robert Kelley introduced the concept of ‘spacious present’, which was the most recent part of the past.
Psychologist and philosopher William James developed this idea further by describing it as ‘’the short duration of which we are immediately and incessantly sensible’’
William James also introduced the term “stream of consciousness” into literature as a method of narration,
That described happenings in the flow of thought in the mind of the characters, - likened to an internal monologue!
This literary technique was later used by James Joyce in his famous novel ‘Ulysses’.

TIME CONCEIVED AS DURATION: HENRI BERGSON (1859 -1941)
Next I come to one of my favourite philosopher the French born Henri Bergson.
The Nobel Laureate and author of ‘Time and Free Will’ and ‘Creative Evolution’.
Will Durant in his ‘Story of Philosophy’ says Bergson was ‘the David destined to slay the Goliath of materialism.’
It was Bergson’s ‘Elan Vital’ that life force and impelling urge, Which makes us grow and transforms this wandering planet into a theatre of unending creation.
For Bergson, time is as fundamental as space; and it is time that holds the essence of life, and perhaps of all reality.
Time is an accumulation, a growth, a duration, where “duration is the continuous progress of the past which gnaws into the future and which swells as it advances.
The past in its entirety is prolonged into the present and abides there actual and acting.
Duration means that the past endures, that nothing is lost.
Though we think with only a small part of our past; but it is with our entire past that we desire, will, and act.”
“Since time is an accumulation, the future can never be the same as the past, -
For a new accumulation arises at every step, and change is far more radical than we suppose…the geometric predictability of all things, Which is the goal of a mechanistic science, is only a delusion and a dream!”  
Bergson goes on in his compelling lyrical style:            
“For a conscious being, to exist is to change, to change is to mature,
to mature is to go on creating one’s self endlessly. Perhaps all reality is time and duration, becoming and change.”
Bergson differed with Darwin's theory of adaptation to environment, and stated;
“Man is no passively adaptive machine, he is a focus of redirected force, a centre of creative evolution.”

Martin Heidegger, the German thinker in his ‘Being and Time’ of 1927, had said:
“We do not exist within time, but in a very real way we are time!”
Time is inseparable from human experience, since we can allow the past to exist in the present through memory;
And even allow a potential future occurrence to exist in the present due to our human ability to care, and be concerned about things.
Therefore we are not stuck in simple sequential or linear time, but can step out of it almost at will!

CONCLUDING  PART  TWO OF ENIGMA OF TIME IN VERSE
In this part I have tried to convey what the Ancient Greek Philosophers had felt about Time in a simplified way.
Also some thoughts of Medieval and Early Modern philosophers and what they had to say.
Where Sir Isaac Newton stands like a colossus with his Concept of Time, Laws of Motion, and Gravity.
Not forgetting Henri Bergson, one of my favourite philosopher, of the mid-19th and the mid-20th Century.
All through my narration I had tried to hold the interest of my readers, and also educated myself as a true knowledge seeker.
In my concluding Part Three I will cover few Modern Philosophers along with the relativistic concept of time.
Certainly not forgetting the space-time theory of our famous Albert Einstein!
Thanks for reading patiently, from Raj Nandy of New Delhi.
  *ALL COPY RIGHTS ARE WITH THE AUTHOR ONLY

KUSTA BEN LUKA is my name, I write
To Abd Al-Rabban; fellow-roysterer once,
Now the good Caliph's learned Treasurer,
And for no ear but his.
Carry this letter
Through the great gallery of the Treasure House
Where banners of the Caliphs hang, night-coloured
But brilliant as the night's embroidery,
And wait war's music; pass the little gallery;
Pass books of learning from Byzantium
Written in gold upon a purple stain,
And pause at last, I was about to say,
At the great book of Sappho's song; but no,
For should you leave my letter there, a boy's
Love-lorn, indifferent hands might come upon it
And let it fall unnoticed to the floor.
pause at the Treatise of parmenides
And hide it there, for Caiphs to world's end
Must keep that perfect, as they keep her song,
So great its fame.
When fitting time has passed
The parchment will disclose to some learned man
A mystery that else had found no chronicler
But the wild Bedouin.  Though I approve
Those wanderers that welcomed in their tents
What great Harun Al-Rashid, occupied
With Persian embassy or Grecian war,
Must needs neglect, I cannot hide the truth
That wandering in a desert, featureless
As air under a wing, can give birds' wit.
In after time they will speak much of me
And speak but fantasy.  Recall the year
When our beloved Caliph put to death
His Vizir Jaffer for an unknown reason:
"If but the shirt upon my body knew it
I'd tear it off and throw it in the fire.'
That speech was all that the town knew, but he
Seemed for a while to have grown young again;
Seemed so on purpose, muttered Jaffer's friends,
That none might know that he was conscience-struck --
But that s a traitor's thought.  Enough for me
That in the early summer of the year
The mightiest of the princes of the world
Came to the least considered of his courtiers;
Sat down upon the fountain's marble edge,
One hand amid the goldfish in the pool;
And thereupon a colloquy took place
That I commend to all the chroniclers
To show how violent great hearts can lose
Their bitterness and find the honeycomb.
"I have brought a slender bride into the house;
You know the saying, ""Change the bride with spring.''
And she and I, being sunk in happiness,
Cannot endure to think you tread these paths,
When evening stirs the jasmine bough, and yet
Are brideless.'
"I am falling into years.'
"But such as you and I do not seem old
Like men who live by habit.  Every day
I ride with falcon to the river's edge
Or carry the ringed mail upon my back,
Or court a woman; neither enemy,
Game-bird, nor woman does the same thing twice;
And so a hunter carries in the eye
A mimic of youth.  Can poet's thought
That springs from body and in body falls
Like this pure jet, now lost amid blue sky,
Now bathing lily leaf and fish's scale,
Be mimicry?'
"What matter if our souls
Are nearer to the surface of the body
Than souls that start no game and turn no rhyme!
The soul's own youth and not the body's youth
Shows through our lineaments.  My candle's bright,
My lantern is too loyal not to show
That it was made in your great father's reign,
And yet the jasmine season warms our blood.'
"Great prince, forgive the freedom of my speech:
You think that love has seasons, and you think
That if the spring bear off what the spring gave
The heart need suffer no defeat; but I
Who have accepted the Byzantine faith,
That seems unnatural to Arabian minds,
Think when I choose a bride I choose for ever;
And if her eye should not grow bright for mine
Or brighten only for some younger eye,
My heart could never turn from daily ruin,
Nor find a remedy.'
"But what if I
Have lit upon a woman who so shares
Your thirst for those old crabbed mysteries,
So strains to look beyond Our life, an eye
That never knew that strain would scarce seem bright,
And yet herself can seem youth's very fountain,
Being all brimmed with life?'
"Were it but true
I would have found the best that life can give,
Companionship in those mysterious things
That make a man's soul or a woman's soul
Itself and not some other soul.'
"That love
Must needs be in this life and in what follows
Unchanging and at peace, and it is right
Every philosopher should praise that love.
But I being none can praise its opposite.
It makes my passion stronger but to think
Like passion stirs the peacock and his mate,
The wild stag and the doe; that mouth to mouth
Is a man's mockery of the changeless soul.'
And thereupon his bounty gave what now
Can shake more blossom from autumnal chill
Than all my bursting springtime knew.  A girl
Perched in some window of her mother's housc
Had watched my daily passage to and fro;
Had heard impossible history of my past;
Imagined some impossible history
Lived at my side; thought time's disfiguring touch
Gave but more reason for a woman's care.
Yet was it love of me, or was it love
Of the stark mystery that has dazed my sight,
perplexed her fantasy and planned her care?
Or did the torchlight of that mystery
Pick out my features in such light and shade
Two contemplating passions chose one theme
Through sheer bewilderment? She had not paced
The garden paths, nor counted up the rooms,
Before she had spread a book upon her knees
And asked about the pictures or the text;
And often those first days I saw her stare
On old dry writing in a learned tongue,
On old dry ******* that could never please
The extravagance of spring; or move a hand
As if that writing or the figured page
Were some dear cheek.
Upon a moonless night
I sat where I could watch her sleeping form,
And wrote by candle-light; but her form moved.
And fearing that my light disturbed her sleep
I rose that I might screen it with a cloth.
I heard her voice, "Turn that I may expound
What's bowed your shoulder and made pale your cheek
And saw her sitting upright on the bed;
Or was it she that spoke or some great Djinn?
I say that a Djinn spoke.  A livelong hour
She seemed the learned man and I the child;
Truths without father came, truths that no book
Of all the uncounted books that I have read,
Nor thought out of her mind or mine begot,
Self-born, high-born, and solitary truths,
Those terrible implacable straight lines
Drawn through the wandering vegetative dream,
Even those truths that when my bones are dust
Must drive the Arabian host.
The voice grew still,
And she lay down upon her bed and slept,
But woke at the first gleam of day, rose up
And swept the house and sang about her work
In childish ignorance of all that passed.
A dozen nights of natural sleep, and then
When the full moon swam to its greatest height
She rose, and with her eyes shut fast in sleep
Walked through the house.  Unnoticed and unfelt
I wrapped her in a hooded cloak, and she,
Half running, dropped at the first ridge of the desert
And there marked out those emblems on the sand
That day by day I study and marvel at,
With her white finger.  I led her home asleep
And once again she rose and swept the house
In childish ignorance of all that passed.
Even to-day, after some seven years
When maybe thrice in every moon her mouth
Murmured the wisdom of the desert Djinns,
She keeps that ignorance, nor has she now
That first unnatural interest in my books.
It seems enough that I am there; and yet,
Old fellow-student, whose most patient ear
Heard all the anxiety of my passionate youth,
It seems I must buy knowledge with my peace.
What if she lose her ignorance and so
Dream that I love her only for the voice,
That every gift and every word of praise
Is but a payment for that midnight voice
That is to age what milk is to a child?
Were she to lose her love, because she had lost
Her confidence in mine, or even lose
Its first simplicity, love, voice and all,
All my fine feathers would be plucked away
And I left shivering.  The voice has drawn
A quality of wisdom from her love's
Particular quality.  The signs and shapes;
All those abstractions that you fancied were
From the great Treatise of parmenides;
All, all those gyres and cubes and midnight things
Are but a new expression of her body
Drunk with the bitter sweetness of her youth.
And now my utmost mystery is out.
A woman's beauty is a storm-tossed banner;
Under it wisdom stands, and I alone --
Of all Arabia's lovers I alone --
Nor dazzled by the embroidery, nor lost
In the confusion of its night-dark folds,
Can hear the armed man speak.

i still think the oceans are insulators of tectonic plate movements, constant and endless vibrations represented by waves, these vibrations, when translated on dry land, movements of crumbling buildings, rigidity as testimony to the insulating fluidity of water; it's like those nuclear power plants, you use water to cool things down, or as in the case of oceans and tectonic plates, insulate volatility... well, radioactivity in the opposite scenario of nuclear power plants... oh look, a rhyming couplet - now that's how you understand things, if not reveal them, find complimentary rhymes on a grander scale than the casual technique in poetry, so over-used and overrated.*

i guess so, monsters bedded, big and small,
an old granny without a family member
to accompany her, harrowed by
charity groups who ask for money
more for the bureaucracy of its workers than
aiding actual victims - someone has to
look pretty, writing solemn letters and
filing in the spreadsheets -
by the way, how's that advent of the grand
timings working, find the hyphen,
the comma, the colon and semi-colon on the clock?
well, there ain't a full stop on there, i'm sure,
hard to decide on encoding time of a 100m
sprint, or a formula 1 thousandth of a second.
so this angel of euthanasia comes along,
a cruel case they say, while years later
a man suffering motor neurone disease
pleads for a change of law, according to switzerland,
he wants it bad, real real bad, he's no longer
even stoic about death, the disease didn't
rob him of expressing tears, and he's pleading
for it, a death sequence, he too knows
a drop in an ocean has no ripple effect,
humanity is the ocean, waves and waves of it,
always dynamic, never still like a lake or mirror,
either the ocean, or the river;
so this angel of euthanasia is there, kills
about 100 grannies, and guess what,
he hangs himself in prison, so that his widow
can receive his pension salary of £100,000,
odd, isn't it? i mean, why would a supposed
"serial killer" wait in prison, hang himself
just after he was eligible for a general practitioner's
pension, just so his wife could have it?
all those old grannies probably lived
on the state pension of one hundred
and twenty quid, not one hundred thousand, i'm sure.
well the guy suffering from motor neuron disease,
oh crap, i wish i could remember that philosopher's
name, parmenides? zeno? can't remember,
yeah, forced himself to suffocate,
without water and without a pillow; yep,
just sat there and held his breath.

To separate the word from it's identity
Is quite the delightful mind game
How things are agreed to be described or named
is just convention for communication; a key,
for organization of knowledge. Nothing more, less, and neither.
While unable to negate this absurdity, ultimately, why bother?

For example, the universe, or reality for that matter, is not "good" or "bad." It just "is" and, thus, not even that (by "that" I am referring to the aforementioned "is" of course, but also the formal definition of "that," however, I also ironically don't mean that either by "that" as I mean nothing, yet I also don't mean "nothing" by "that" as I intend "nothing," "is," and "that" to be both metaphorically and literally interpreted while also neither simultaneously, which is seemingly contradictory). Did you follow that? I apologize, but it's a paradox to try and explain this concept/whatever about words with more words, thus I can only hope to allude to it or otherwise imply it. Lend me your ear again, or your eyes I suppose, but also neither... Sorry! One more time:

A palindrome isn't even a palindrome by it's own literal definition, but it's literal definition is also that of a palindrome. The word "palindrome" exists both as a palindrome and not a palindrome and also neither simultaneously. Schrodinger's cat, but no, too, and also both and Gorgias, Parmenides, Zeno an

America, you don’t need us anymore
so we’re going on vacation.

You’ve got religion to whisper in your ear
and sing you to sleep at night,
and culture of homogeneity to get you up
and going on cold Monday mornings, coffee in hand.
You’ve got plastic prophesies to keep you alive
and sick on medicines from unrhyming
peddlers of purpose.
You’ve got assumptions and science to teach the kids now
so long as the chemists abandon their really significant digits!
You’ve got calculus problems and practical things to scribble
on the back of the wornout canvasses of Monet and the recycled
papyrus of Parmenides—nothing’s changed.

You don’t need metaphorical ice cream.
You don’t need symbolism of green ideas.
You don’t need moonlight anymore.
You don’t need breezes on summer afternoons
unless they’re part of a lemonade ad.
You don’t need stars.
You don’t need hope or purpose or prosperity
that can come from the meaningless lines
of poems.
You don’t need us anymore, so we’re leaving.
That’s it.
We’re done.
Goodbye, America. It’s been
fun.

Time is something that wonders by,

meaning nothing, but for our lives.

The great expanse,

the truth untold

It’s all eqations, so I’m told.

Time is someting I’d like to conquer,

in my body and mind,

I’d like to know what Einstein saw after Newton,

In Time.

I’d like to beat the fates at their game,

reveal Plato’s world of ever lasting.

Time came, it went and it’s coming,

it’s now and then and will be – but not forever, at least here.

it conquers death, and life.

Time after all is not  concerned.

So time,

in mystery and rarefied symbolism,

Are you real or just conjured?

Parmenides had you for nought,

Explain the passing moment from now till then,

The change from what is to what isn’t makes the sense your illusion,

maybe you’re static and we’re just pasing,

percptions’ lie and conscious deception.

But, if you really do have dimension,

let it be revealed,

let me turn your hand to my creation,

and make what I haven’t from past sensation.

it's not really a shortcut to philosophy when writing
it in a shape of a poem, hardly a reason to trust
there's an orthodox choice of subjects -
unresolved problem, or even having to warrant
that horrid academic style of narration - and even if
not academic then simply in the vein of vanity: 'he's
wrong, he's wrong, oh he's definitely wrong...'
after all poetry can be philosophical,
after all heraclitus wrote sparingly and wore a cloak
of enigmas - as joseph and the multicoloured dreamcoat,
so too heraclitus and the multinigmatic (πολυνιγματικoς)
cloak; then there was parmenides of elea &
empedocles of arcagas who just wrote poetry,
albeit much less self-involving
as modernity would like to believe - and i guess
if qualified as didactic poetry, the instructions were certain
disguised as faults of their own understanding,
thus the instructions are of a higher calibre, in that
they are wrong and the reader must service their
wrongs... say... with something like galileo or newton,
because who the hell would like to constantly read
didactic poetry of specific instruction to be fulfilled
while the poet has to only write it in the comfy abode
of the page?

A micro-black hole in super-infinite space,
Anne Frank preaching the Promised Land
To millennials born in exile,
Worshipping Bob Marley in Babylon
Waiting for Christ to take out the trash;
Keep waiting
She knew nothing of the Bible,
Didn’t know she was a Jew---gay, straight or terrorist,
Dialectical materialism clashing with the Holy Trinity
In the neutron stars’ collision of
What we call density in space at the end of super-gravity,
No endings anymore: the singularity is us:
the negative to the photograph---

Black holes shake the spacetime sisterhood
with bigger and bigger gravity waves
Until the universe shatters like a snow globe---
Soviet ******, Russian princess bride
designating the next phase of your honor;
She’s my Soviet sister, mister
Design your press for Putin’s world-wide wedding
Desire is divine when the world is in calamity---
Soviet mothers live in the sewer
Below Sonya’s ***, her pomegranates
On the cottage table she belongs to no man but me,
My bride from the mist---

Parmenides agreeing with Euclid in bliss with a good cigar---
The ice in your eyes may be cool
Because Elton feels it (we all feel it)
Your great-uncle was a **** spy not Ai Wei Wei’s father
Like Mao Zedong, the great poet
Of the Cultural Revolution forbidden
To write made to pull a plow
Don’t lie about it,
Proud he wanted to pound ur ***---

Soviet princess, I wish to know u like a father,
There is snow and there is now---
Riding the bride raw in a Russian tradition,
Tsunami women in boxers
With an eyeful of throat,
Candy-eyes in her waistline,
In her middle earth contours
I who am that poet whom
Is the feline shadow shape sharp as a tail of tall chords
Twisting in the gravity shifts
The wind is shallow now, who looks like that---
Her American-Turkish mother
Who began to fish behind the lines
Her fat *** in boxers a woman:
Pin-uposophy the science of hummingbirds
And the dramatic decline of bees,
The saucer flips and trips through space---
Listening to Wagner, discussing Nietzsche
Glorifying white womanhood
Burning the bunny and ******* flag---
She goes where her cloned colon goes---
Ivy-eyed in Hamburg; New Zealand;
Cryogenic ******* designed for living testicles---
Glorifying wormholes and supernova---
I like that

The neutron star exploding you can feel it
Men have been ****** children since time began
In what appears to be human nature---
Transgender crime boss turned informant
Gunned down on the operating table,
Transcendental Idealist Plato invites Diogenes
Out for a drink in the Golden Age
With Bunny Yeager, the beginning of ugly beauty queens,
Not the first, Russian history going far back in time...
Ask Vartuhi about Pushkin
She will tell you abstractly,
*** trafficking and harassment are one thing,
New York, London, Milan, Tokyo, Paris
Guilty of ****** assault against men and women---
Heartless tgirls getting plastic surgery to become
Teen ****** and slutty wives looking hot
In 1920, the year I took the Polish girl in the ***
And saw her future,
The scientist moonlighting as a shocking stripper
known throughout Europe
What is unknown to the aliens
Is I will move to Bulgaria or Bagdad
And close the windows on
Naked neutron **** flappers
and other strippers of long ago;
The Nazis have never been forgotten
For good reason---
The myths they made were picked up in the street---
This thing just talks and keeps talking
With no time for ******* ****---
A poem is not a song, a poet is not king
Or president or Aung San Suu Kyi
Or Robert Mugabe or Kim Il Sung
Or Kim jong Un or Carl Jung
Or Sigmund Freud or Joseph Stalin---
Playing sports in a warzone,
Not a figurehead or martyr,
This is not mathematics or a game of chance;
Your AI is smarter than you are---
The Golden Age of Anarcho-Nihilism
The vocabulary of ants and giants,
Say u saw the 7 stars and pray---
Absurdo-Futurism blah blah blah
U know kids are on drugs
Ur heroes alcoholic predators,
Nothing goes unchanged, it’s human nature
U can’t arrest someone for being human;
Do not cast moral aspersions
When you cannot defend your own actions---
Ur father was a ****** *****,
Ur mother god only knows---
Mayakovsky and Whitman met on the pier,
Rupaul's liquor bottles floating in shark infested water
Although he doesn’t drink or smoke---
Do you know him? Mao Zedong, Adolf ******,
Donald Trump lacking essential brain chemistry
Producing a brainless sadist
In an American cultural revolution,
An open attack on intellectual history;
In the future there will be no ideas, LGBTQ-etc.
Christian Conservatism left or right---

Which one are u? ****** harassment does not exist
When anyone accused is guilty---

Christian intuition says there is a paradise,
That is, paradise compared to this dump---
Now science is telling us the same thing,
The Infinite Singularity of Eternal Paradise

Growing flowers in a tin-can
In the shadow of the black hole and sky’s end
I have no interest in Magic Realism
And completely reject Surrealism---
I want to write floating prosody,
That is prose that takes place
In heaven and/or hell, not this world;
Anyone who can comprehend Cubism
Can grasp the multiverse---
Futurism, Suprematism,
Abstract Expressionism,
Constructivism, quantum theory---
Things working along the lines
Of the Higgs field,
Wherefore the mind can transcend
Mere three-dimensional
Thinking like Einstein, Freud and/or Dylan---
Something about YHWH---
The abstract One a Neo-Platonic concept
Derived from Plato’s ideal forms; Jung’s archetypes
And Freud’s unconscious (Jung’s subconscious)
What Einstein called relativity most people call reality
That can be manipulated by poetry or music.

Man and *** is like a cop with a gun;
Sooner or later they’re going to use it
***** bullet fires ****** bullet wound bleeds---
The pendulum swings
Between being and non-being and/or becoming
And unbecoming, but the wound pre-exists
The bullet in a tachyonic temporal reversal
Of patriarchy and matriarchy,
The Saudi royal family deposed and replaced
by a string of democratically elected female presidents;
Which will become the first female dictatorship of the new era;
There will be others, mothers and such,
***-camps perpetuating the politically correct species,
So cries the Jewish poet before he is ******
By the wayward women who rule the toilet-state---
The bald-headed ***** with nice ***, nameless Empress,
Spurring the underground Machismo movement;
Men with guns who want to replace all other women
With their oriental counterparts---
“I dreamed of a world
               Of only Asian women and men of every color!”

The baritone Bible banned, all men Christ---
Our women Christian not Jewish or Muslim
Our poets banned lest they speak micro-aggressions;
I am one, outlaw unlike my brothers who bow
At the feet I once scaled like mountains,
She is waiting at the top with a Bible in hand
She can’t read or understand
As it makes no sense to her female brain;
She only knows deception like the old KGB,
obvious by the accent I can’t understand---
Israel gone, Palestine soon follows.
Burqinis on the beach and in the street,
Leggings and funky sneakers,
Her pores open by hot yoga;
So cries the Jewish poet before he’s ****** to death
I heard the prophet wail like Mayakovsky
The red, white and black the colors of no flag---
Most of the ants doing nothing;
Most fascists dull-witted mediocrities,
I saw her waving the red-white-&-black
In the Nollywood invasion of collective castration
Of the male species as if we were wild animals
Women directors taking out insurance but not in Iran---
Which is ruled by an old man;
What will the saudis say
When the supreme leader is a woman at last---
The red guard will end like Quadaffi’s bodyguards
I’ll have a Russian lover, I’ll have an Indian lover,
But I won’t have a Muslim lover
And don’t want one although I thought I did at one time---
Not only priests are rapists,
The average guy is a ****
Every man is a saint
And what does that make u, *****?
A *****. ****, *****, ashamed? of what?
Nothing since u jump out of our clothes
At the smell of money;
Most people deep as mud;
Their words half-forgotten poetry
Maybe it rhymes or not,
Catholic and/or Protestant
As the sun comes up on a cloudy day during mass---
Call no man father or master or brother---
The Jewish poet is ur brother,
No man is ur master
Except Hermes or Prometheus or Pythagoras
No man is ur father dancing
To mother’s organic music,
Her milk flowing from her 1,000 *******
Call no man mother and no woman father
White noise background radiation prayer
Building a great pyramid by randomly piling stones
One atop another that fly---her father,
Her uncle, her brother not related to me---
The blonde girl running on the beach at dawn
Is not a goddess---
The witch-hunt of powerful influential men
Who can’t keep their hands to themselves
Is destroying the vulture before it can be born
As the Enlightenment and Renaissance
Went down in flames like the Roman Empire
And what is left but dreamers led by Jesus
And his angels and saints---

As the pit opens beneath barefoot ballrooms
She falls into Hades never to return
With her foreign accent she’s a ****** as am I---
How can she take the sacrament
With her fingers shoved in her ****?
When Jesus returns I want to be ******;
I’m not going to heaven w/o a cigarette;
My lover the flapper taking away my sin;
This bread this cup my breakfast---
The priest speaks to the black hole
As if it were alive forgetting the supersupernova
And neutron stars that begin spacetime
At the end of all things that shall come again;
Passing away again in timespace---
There are no more pure virgins only gods in their wisdom
***** ******* pure---
***** mothers better than clean mothers---
Money raining from uber-clouds;
Nollywood semi-virgins living with the pain
Of genital mutilation,
Everybody is writing poetry these days
Inspired by children that can barely spell
The words inspired by adults
That don’t know poetry from ****,
Who can’t rhyme without hip-hop
In the background---

The wooden poet meets the burqini beauty queen
On the beach in the rain and wind---
Feet caked with mud, swirling black holes
crashing and exploding like cars in Jerusalem
again and again until LIGO picks up the vibration
And tells the world---
What can gravity waves do that a terrorist can’t?
Gravity waves give women ****;
Have you ever seen an australopithecus female?
They are not pretty unless u love animals as do I,
even a Neanderthal woman won’t **** me;
O - I am the prophet who leapt upon horseback
and rode like fire into battle a man of war.
Women are worn-out cliches
Cries the Soviet poet who lives and breathes
In the underworld made of oak;
Do not envy evil gay men---
A prophet at dawn sleeps with men,
Army and navy and Marines---
And I pour out my spirit like flesh
remembering her earthen blood,
The moon darkened by the Christ child’s name;
A girl sold for wine to drink I will mold like clay---
Your body beaten into a wooden sword
In the Bronze Age.

Be still before the Lord and wait patiently for him,
She just wants to dance and so she shall
The anarcho-nihilist absurdo-futurist cult
Of the Soviet fembot buried in the ghost city,
Don’t go there, the radiation lingers
In the baritone voice of one who returns;
Where the old women will not **** me
Like I’ve seen them do to others---
Young girls won’t **** me like their mothers will---
Anger leading to evil in the ghost city
Jonah went to Nineveh
And told the Ninevites to go **** themselves---
No Jews were insulted, no women *****,
God laughs at the wicked,
Their swords pierce their own hearts---
The wicked shall vanish and beauty shall fade;
In the field of eternity it shall be scattered
Like smoke by the wind---
All good things come from gravity waves
Women grow **** and men grow big *****
They mate and are fruitful,
I built a fembot and named her Sonya and she became a poet
And made me a lot of money; she was that good.