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Martin Narrod Apr 2014
Your colors are so heavy, how dare I, I cannot sleep. Years inundated under, through skin coils, marigold fields. Yellow crocuses, orange California poppies. Moors of cattle ranchers, yokes of oxen. Plasticine uber-confidence, silky white-skinned testubular thrice people harmonies. Blisses of contagion, contagious bliss. Wrists and incisors, tying down in a bedroom, waking up to live harps and choruses. You dance like you're so alive, but I'm so alive I can't dance. Or breathe. Or knead my fists of earthen wears, or sell my soul completely. I drove off a cliff last night, but the four foot fall ended neatly. The plateau authors my chance to sew my bright, beyond- my fortunes. But the hour before I fall asleep, seems to be the greatest torture.
Her love is graffiti
On the blank walls
Within me,
All those colors
All just seem
Like different
Shades of red
To me,
As they pool
At my feet
I admire her soul
Not like I have
X-ray vision,
But I've seen
Her beauty faded
Before me
As a rose
That wilts
As a flower
That withers,
All that is pretty
Isn't just plasticine,
It's real flesh
As every breath
Oxidizes from within,
I know that all that will be left
Is like
What it must be
For the deaf and blind
Only what I feel
From and for her
When I'm near...

APAD13 - 130 © okpoet
Mateuš Conrad Nov 2016
i.

i really want to write this like a poet, but i'll probably
ramble on, i want to create this poetic haiku
or what one might call a punchline
in a joke, i will, obviously,
           i will (obviously) provide
how the alternatives would look like,
but sometimes i think that the poet
is enraged by the idea of the narrator:
or the consolidator of personae -
defeatist poets write from a personae
perspective, as if each poem is
a new and nuanced character -
a nuance of the narrator,
   yes: not novels, a plateau of literature
that poetry is...
           the setting is unknown,
but these people simply congregate
and say something, akin to the burning man
festival, and then return to their
day jobs...
          i don't know why poetry is less and less
resonating with music: maybe because
the old critique of poetry being faced off
with philosophy doesn't make sense
given that there's this rainbow of musical
tastes and the general diversity?
looking at the classical circumstance of
poetry vs. philosophy makes no sense
when the *logos
is removed and the phonos
is inserted in its place...
   bad grammar, bad spelling... why look for
meaning in words in the almighty sphere
of all things holy, when in the trenches
   people are shooting bullets not at targets
but at empty space?
    that's why i love the notion that writing
can become something akin to a will to power:
the power over not of those illiterate -
urbanism has dissolved such a concept...
  we became literate in order to read adverts:
or the iconoclasm of the alphabet:
pretty coca cola nearing arabic for all
those magpies out there...
           the myth goes that the magpie spotted
the shimmer of a silver spoon and stole it
and as the debate of the fates go:
i was to marry a rich woman and leverage
myself into a calm suspense... but it wasn't
to be. such is the case: when writing
can become as difficult as arithmetic of numbers,
and certain blemishes on the fountain head
of humanism that's literature can provide
the right arithmetic complexity...
   given that, what could possibly be the sum
total of this "poem"?
  the irony of the cartesian 1 + 1 = 2...
                in terms of meaning? in a polyverse
   of the what if? universe?
        a cinema better than the Hollywood industry...
that could fit into my concept of man enduring
for eternity, even with the vain hope of challenging
his mortal frailty... have a historiological cinema
of the what ifs... i'd sit in there and be like: wow!
Adolf graduated from the Vienna Art School
and world war two didn't happen?
    the treaty of Versailles wasn't a version of
colonial powers against expansionist politics
concerning a European nation? wow!
they basically didn't join the club of colonial power,
and they were punishing the colonial powers of
the time... or that's how i see it:
i don't see myself needing to ascribe myself
to pronoun pluralism in any shape or form:
it just breeds some overt concept of paranoia;
and obviously this has nothing to do with the title,
because it i shunned the narrator, i'd be a poet,
and if i wrote a cutiepie version of this
i'd feel hungry for not having played the piano
long enough while tipping a glass of whiskey
into my mouth... just is the curse of
enjoying typing: hurrah for our loss of handwriting
and that beautiful circumstance of writing
words with connectivity - by modern standards
undecipherable as if Hebrew or acronyms
and emoticons: puncture after puncture and nothing
concerning waves or serpentines of encoded talk...
beautiful... absolutely beautiful.
  the new form italics? syllable-ism, to stress,
punctuation marks in words: beau-ti-ful!
there, goes a weeping pair, that's Ludovico Arrighi
& Aldus Manutius...
    and what i do understand, and it's pivotal,
take the concept of a narrator out of the prosaic mosaic
and take away the concept of personae out of
poetry, and mould the two together...
you get an implosion worthy of a Hiroshima...
a bit like what the Beatles conceded too after
releasing their revolved album... they stopped
live touring... they had an implosive moment
and said: as any artists in the background,
we are the invisible hands of the plumbers
who connected toilets to the pipes: hey presto!
the Beckton ****-stink on the A406...
poetry can become this...
        it can also become something akin to:
etymology is a version of archeology,
although there's no physical space to engage with it,
   and i know why Heidegger turned the word
being into beyng... it's not a mutilation
of the word, he was practising a version of
archeology (not etymological) in that he was
excavating (as archeologists do) an archaic word
from the modern equivalent... Sherlock Holmes
of the black forest... found an amber tear
                      wedged in a tree...
i never know why they called it the Baltic sea...
i'd change it... i'll start calling it the Amber Sea...
given so much amber can be found on the shorelines
of it...
             and yes, this prompted the additional bits
in the title: considering the idea that it's twice as important
as what i will eventually write with dues for
the lightning bolt's worth of a title...
    language has to be mandible, language has to
be plasticine... it can't be dittohead bound -
strict, regulated, ivory encased in a museum hush...
   esp. if it doesn't need something controversial to
be spoken... exactly at that point...
          what was i originally intending?
            language as form archeology? perhaps...
no! no no no... the pro-life vs. the pro-life debate...
    a destitute woman, perhaps a *******, perhaps
a woman who was *****...
                         as the laws in Poland currently stand:
she has to give birth...
      i never said i agreed with the stranglehold of
my "brethren", i simply said
           bilingualism as a rhinosaur (dino remnants?)
        stampede against multiculturalism...
what is the perspective? i respect the culture that
assimilated me, only through having the capacity
to speak the language of the culture i was born in...
    multiculturalism has no respect for its
host culture, the multicultural argument goes:
if i speak good enough English, i'll still be able
to wear Pakistani pyjamas in public...
it's the hijab wearing English-pristine girl who
knows ****-all arabic: but speaks good English,
so she's assimilated well enough...
       and there's me... when everyone is going
muddles berserk in their groin regions
     flirting with bisexuality... so few flirt with
bilingualism... well: how could all that fucky-sucky
go to waste, eh?   multiculturalism doesn't work
if the person attempting integration doesn't
have a moderation minder,
    if you don't respect your own original society
in the least, as in: ensuring you keep your
mother tongue and do the utmost to speak two
languages... multiculturalism of people who
don't do this are just plain lazy...
   lazy!           is that an excuse if you were born
in a host country? only if your parents were
so worked up thinking that knowing two languages
was a disadvantage... and so the byproduct
of all things that aren't part of the multicultural
franchise... if you have no respect for your mother
tongue / culture when moving to a different
country... you don't have respect for your
country of birth... or in a more succinct way said
by Napoleon: a man who knows two languages
is worth two heads... etc.
       ah, the debauchery of narrating and not
orientating yourself around creating characters...
bliss... and also the main reason poets feel guilty
about writing poetry... the missing characters.
but onto the title and the main point i was going
to make...

ii.

over an egg.

iii.

can't we simply argue the point
between pro-life and pro-choice
over breakfast of scrambled eggs?
or poached eggs... or fried eggs...
or eggs boiled for 5 minutes
so the yoke is all runny?

iv.

and they said there's no purpose to
abortion...
         the most popular food of
choice for breakfast... is an abortion.

v.

i'd say... make sure those pro-life protesters
stop eating eggs...
           they're eating abortions...
but ****... can you imagine anything
                          more yummy than an egg?
don't worry, Darwinistic existentialism
of furthering the human question
   has already been answered by an abundance
of the Mandarin and the Sanskrit population.
chocolate fireguard, teapot,
or fender, icecream sofa, dry sea
or wet towel, glass hammer,

waterproof teabag, newspaper
raincoat and umbrella, lead parachute, ashtray on a motorbike,

handbrake on a canoe,
vote in a dictatorship,
loudhailer to a deaf mute,
grief at a wedding,

****** in a monastery.
inflatable dartboard,
spoon in a knife-fight,
screen door on a submarine,

wooden soap, shortbread tires,  
knitted light bulb,
bread boat, plasticine wire cutters,
paper hole punch, water hat,

custard floorboards,
ceiling tiles made of gravy,
portrait of a bowl of soup,
a stone cigarette,

syrup knickers, hole in my bucket,
plastic oven, wax truss,
liquorice bridge,
false teeth made of soap,

lemonade roof,
jelly boots,
jam cardigan,

paper bicycle pump,
ice-cream saucepans,
soluble drain pipe,
packet of rubber nails,

see-through mirror,
revolving basement restaurant
roll-on hairspray, rubber pencil,

****** with a hole in it,
limp ****, pockets on a lettuce,
**** on a fish, lolly pop van in Hell,

one-legged man in an ****
kicking competition,

meaningless life,
unnecessary death,
forgotten words and deeds,
ignored needs,


this poem.
Enjoy slipping in the occasional serious note,
Mateuš Conrad Aug 2016
i.

my writing is truly one thing, my life another - not
that's a statement clouded in excuses and guilt:
just the claustrophobic macabre -
and so it happens, that every few days i reach
the limit with wrestling the Minotaur -
the time comes when the liver k.o.s the brain
and the brain then starts punching the liver -
it usually stars in the afternoon, e.g. yesterday,
at 3 in the afternoon, a burrowed sense of guilt
comes over, cigarettes are rolled and chain-smoked...
a promise of not painting the front of
the house is the overpowering weight on the heart -
as is an ably bodied father: who, i might
as the source of my writing capacity: the silence -
but the day flows through... the excess nicotine
adds to the shakes, the detox period begins
with a big meal: chinese pork belly in five spice
and other additives, peppers, spring onions
until a thick goo sauce is cooked slowly to thicken...
served with 'it's called egg fly lice, you plick!'
(Uncle Benny, lethal weapon 4) -
the meal is ate as if a ****** ****** - this is
really the point of critically approaching the
concentrated detox - binge of television,
drinking orange squash and smoking -
playing some stupid video game between watching
an even worse movie - before the saga of
x files begins... at 5 a.m. with the most annoying
feline opera by the most annoying ginger cat
begins... the shades are drawn and the hours between
5 a.m. are spent in a quasi somatic state -
the pain in the brain is too strong to allow you
a kipper without the sedative being dragged from
the body: taking sleeping is avoided -
the blinds in the room don't have blackout plastic,
by 6 a.m. a t-shirt is rolled up and put against
the eyes, the eyes adjust to the light until 7 a.m.,
the body gets up and goes downstairs for more
orange squash, but this time breakfast is stomached,
yesterday's leftover rice, fresh eggs scrambled
and mixed with spring onion -
                                                     cigarette, and a daytime
news channel - Victoria Derbyshire -
the main topic of concerns? only 12% of Paraolympic
Rio tickets have been sold, a charity having raised
about £25,000 wants to sponsor Rio's children
to join in the fun... housing shortages in England,
Redbridge council buying social housing in
Canterbury (once a military base) - 7 people living
in one room (the Romanian standard is
14... you have to remember night shifts) -
oh i seen houses like that, i remember one Jew renting
out his house to 20 / 30 Poles before the Union
expanded... paid of his mortgage... no new reality
here for me... the major misdiagnosis of heart attacks
in women on the N.H.S.: a woman ate a curry,
thought it was only a heartburn... boom, two days
later drops in agony... in between the real
results of the detox... sitting...
not ******* out whiskey yellow ***** when there
are barely any toxins in the body... diarrhoea...
up to about 8 times on the toilet - more orange squash,
more cigarettes... then onto the piece the resistance...
the x files... which last up to about the twilight zone
hour of having reached the 24 hour mark of being
awake... one last **** and then shower, and
then doing the laundry (on a sunny day like this,
it would be a shame not to)...
                                                   at noon
tinned mackerel in sunflower oil... brown bread,
all the oil drank... but by the twilight zone hour
a realisation: ****! my headphones are broken!
i've been walking around these streets with those
very depressing sounds of vrroom vrroom...
i know how the old complain about the youth
and their headphones... yes, but you probably
grew with about 10 cars per hour passing your
house back in the day... and too the birds could
be beautiful, and the sound of children's games
and golden laughter... but all the other sounds...
so off to the shop for a very respectable £1.50 pair...
and then the moment when all the sights
on the streets are no longer synchronised with
what i'm hearing, my eyes sharpen and i dance
past the cars and people never bothering to press
the crossing lights on streets: ease the traffic,
ease the traffic... then into the supermarket and
the detox ends... i can go back to sleeping a decent
night... a bottle of Stella... the only thing sexier
on a hot summer's day on the street... good old,
good cold Stella Artois...
then up to another shop for two more beers and
tobacco...
                        after that? magic...
as the title suggests: on a park bench with Ernie -
something more grand than Beckett's waiting
for Godot
... i.e. something resembling a scene from
Patriarch's Ponds, an encounter with
Mikhail Alexandrovich Berlioz (editor of a highbrow
literary magazine, abbreviated MASSOLIT)
and a young poet Ivan Nikolayich Poniryov -
a few clues to the less knowledgeable parties:
Behemoth ***** and chess, a book that makes
sense of the world interrupted by Herr Woland's
wonderful delights (among many), such
as the notable pandemonium at Ivan Savelyevich
Varenukha's Variety Theatre -
yes very much akin to Hector B.'s:
symphonie fantastique: dream of a witches' sabbath.

ii.

sincerest apologies... the sedative hasn't been bought
yet, and a patient father's invoice for work
done on the construction must be written in tangible
English - in ref. to the uttermost sincerity -
Polski nadal w mej duszy dudni,
                            taki ogrom organów i
                                         bębnów twki -
           że strach pomyślec - czy to wir zamkniętej
historii ludu: czy poczatek gorszych prwad o świecie?
   bo co o zamkniętej historii (skrawku) ludu?
      to przeciez moj dziad'ek w Partii uslugi dawal!
      a kraj podziekowal - i co Prawda to Walesa
   na Florydzie z lwa w zlota rybke sie zamienil.
   (comp. diacritic
                                                       ­                                 pending)

iii.

as i knew, i should have finished this poem on
the principle of ensō - all in one piece -
thus i would have staged what happened on the bench
with Ernest -
                        but after walking to the supermarket
minding my own business and the jokes ensued
about how no one notices, how they know my name
as it's their mascot -
                                   after walking into a world
i found chaos; indeed if i wrote the poem on principle
of ensō, i would have included the phantasmagorical
details of something so simple you could almost cry at it...
the simplicity of it, the fluidity of almost 2 hours
spent in conversation... about what? i'm not telling,
and how was it spoken? i'm not telling either -
let's just they laughed at Ernest's bike, because
it was proper oldie...
                                     i mean, i won't mention the odd
details, but the essence? forget it man!
after writing my father's invoice, and how cut money
on the construction site, blame it Romanians but only
have themselves to blame with their model
of profiteering and that ****** fetish they have
Che's socialism of guerrilla warfare...
                            and the comments in the supermarket,
it just stuck with me about Ernie's bike,
nothing in comparison to the Tour de France's racers
doing up to 50kmh...
                                      it just made me happy to make
a clean bed... and prevent 36 hours awake threshold
glitches of abstraction: black strings and random
square objects popping out of nothing with me in a
variation of nervous startles... Ernest's bike?
an antique, a 1950s Raleigh...
- hard leather seat beneath that modern overcoat?
- yes; no one would even take it if i left it
  outside a shop, they'd probably sell it for parts.
- well, unless someone is smart enough to notice
  a vintage, and tries to restore it,
  buy the vintage green paint and cover the rusty bits.
oh **** it, i can't keep my own company to suit
being happy by saying: ooh, doesn't know a joke,
the happiest he felt after walking out with a stone heart
was making a bed... but to be honest?
psst... i haven't made it in over a month... last night i
was getting cold-heat shivers in the idea of it being *****
enough though i shower everyday... ok, every other day
sometimes, my socks have holes in them, and my
shoes are ripped.
but there's more to this... the bicycle is a pun
of a Heidegger maxim: man is born as many men...
but dies as a single man... imagine how many
influences are entombed in us, the education reformers
to begin with, motherhood tips, cot deaths...
but we die as individual men... so when Ernest said
about the bicycle being only worth spare parts,
i said what Heidegger meant: but i'd take the whole thing
as one.
- how many gears?
- three at the back, one at the front; you see this thing?
- the long tube beneath the seat?
- yeah, when charged it would power up the front
   and back lights.
- oh, i'm used to seeing that thingy-madgit that you'd
   press against the front tire and the principle would be
   the same.
- a dynamo.
- yeah, a dynamo, forgot the name of it.
it started so innocently, i just sat on the bench with my
earphones and two beers and started rolling a cigarette.
- may i invade the bench?
                                               (earphones out of the ears)
- sure.
                and we just sat there, i asking if he minded me
smoking.
- i used to, loved it, esp. after dinner, gave it up 15 years ago.
  then conversations about dogs, family,
                                         and children's games,
          i said
- i'm finding it hard to find people of my generation with
even friendly dynamic of the body: eye contact is gone!
- it's all the fidgeting on those ****** tablets and phones,
when we were kids we used to play marbles,
conkers, hopscotch, so many...
- and we used to draw a racing maze, fill bottle caps
with plasticine and flick them through the maze
(i can't remember if we threw dice to see how many
moves we could make).
  by the time we started talking about the dogs we liked,
and compared them to the dog walkers passing us
   we already forgot who died today: it was Gene Wilder...
the world is mourning him, and we sat there
and the best i could come up with was Richard Pryor.
- dumb animal luck...
- you know how i managed to train my dog to run
  around the park, but come back to me? i used a whistle
  to get the dog to come back and i'd give it a treat.
  until it got the hang of it, i sometimes wouldn't give it
  a treat... other times i would, the point being was
  to teach it both obedience when nothing was given
  and double obedience when something was.
- ever heard of Pavlov? he basically did the same thing,
  but your experiment had coordinates, it was three-dimensional,
  Pavlov's was just two-dimensional, instead of a whistle
  he used a bell... just to stimulate two senses
  as coordinated, the sound of a bell created saliva
  in the dog's mouth, poor dog received treats
  but in the end Pavlov put him in a car with closed
  windows in the middle of summer outside
  of Parliament square; obviously the dog died.
- German shepherd though... i had a friend, naturally
  obedient.
- could walk a German shepherd through Manhattan
  without a leash.
- exactly, not even half a metre away, and when the
  master stops, the dog stops.
(i started thinking, what a great way to invert theology,
in this way from dogs to gods.)
well... i guess there was more, but if i write more
about it, when i'll reflect upon this chance meeting of
complete strangers as more insightful than it
already was...
                         he managed to climb back on his bike
with a slight problem after his hip-replacement
operation... at 74 such things break... and he rode off
and i sat there trying to think about what the hell
i was thinking after watching the x files to find
something insightful...
                                        well, i got one thing,
i mentioned it before... i could never have believed
that adults created the most nightmarish version
of hide (negate) & seek (doubt) -
                   i thought it was just as bad as
  truth & dare with religion - with that motto:
          the Koran: this is the truth, and the only truth...
so truth or dare? i dare you to deny it!
                    can i just doubt it? you know, not be
a definite unbeliever, but an indefinite quasi-believer?
well doubt in the stated quasi-believer is wavering,
isn't it? the two of the most beautiful games of
innocence, morphed into these gargantuan abominations.
Clare Wright Jun 2010
High on a hill our grandparent’s home stood,

Its majesty in stone cast a haunted look,

Light glimmered from a paraffin lamp,

Whilst outside it snowed on the geese,

As they ran to their shelter,

And the cows mooed on the fields above,

And the goats cried in the barn.

Mother pumped water from the well,

We ran around collecting eggs,

Granddad showed me how to milk a goat.

In the evenings we gathered in the kitchen,

The fire roared in the range,

Granddad sat in his big chair,

He burned anything just to keep warm,

We thought it very strange.

Mother worked at the big white sink,

Knitted squares hung from a line,

We made tiny plasticine dolls,

They slept in plasticine beds,

We drank Dandelion and Burdock,

Ginger pop and Sarsaparilla,

It came in enormous stone bottles,

Dad got it every week from a man at the door.

Most of the rooms were huge, bleak and bare,

A room we called the playroom,

Was carpeted with goat skins,

There were jars of melted metal,

Who knows why?

We were told it was grandma’s jewelry,

Melted to stop the Germans getting it in the war,

In the long hall there was a dressing up chest,

We loved to look inside.

The bathroom was a scary place,

There was a lion head toilet and a bath with lions feet,

At night we went upstairs with a candle for light,

We cuddled together to keep warm,

One night we saw fairies at the window.

Our aunty had a gramophone,

Records all scattered around,

We had to be careful where we trod,

She loved Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby,

We didn’t understand.

Our uncle slept on the top floor,

In a huge brass bed,

One day I took him a cup of tea,

We were not normally allowed up there,

He fixed broken cars they were all everywhere.

He played late in the barn with his girlfriend.

My grandmother slept downstairs,

She always was very ill,

Wrapped in bed in a pink bed shawl,

We got her water from the spring,

To cure her, but she died.
Clare j Wright
Logan Turner Oct 2021
We're all God's here
Proper nouns apparently
A fine line drawn between two definitions
I lack the definition definitely

The face of truth
A plasticine thing
Prodding at it makes me laugh desperately
Right next to
Not inside
A Plasticine suicide

Just a kid I've heard
Some things just end
Ah you'll never learn
Trying to make these things bend

I could be whatever I want to be
The human destiny
Or a fly on the wall of a brand new reality
TC Apr 2013
Scuzzy film on a scalding riptide,
Bare sinew woven like scaffolding,
Catcalling as warm-and-fuzzies
Mince by like so many exposed marble legs
Passing construction sites.
Crimped by a polaroid viewfinder,
I sit alone and click-click-click
With folded memories in my pocket.

Let me just set the record straight:
I’m still in love with our contrails,
But you can go **** yourself.
We were helter-skeltering kids
Rivulets of caustic devotion
Sweltering down our skeletons,
Fly away with me again, please
I’m seeing synonyms for you
In every ally-cat hymnal
This gutter throat can sputter out
Seeing scarecrows bound by wicker muscles
Shivering in a windfarm
Powered by all those doors you slammed
Snapping together like worn
Rubber bands warm summer hands --
Dance with me, you were
The most perfectly human
I've ever felt.

Is that Listerine rolling out of your mouth
In waves of empty bottles once meant for me?
Off of your shoulders like a cape,
A swindler, eyeing you
Like you’re trying to sell me cutlery.
Exchange glances that are
Trailmix crumbling between couch cushions,
Rubbing shoulders with waspy relief,
Tendrils of comfort had me gripped by the biceps
Spread eagle like a petrified starfish
Till I lashed out at you with bullwhip arms
Because my own back had been too hard to reach lately,  

Mirrored
Ad Infinitum.
Your tongue looks like a mirror,
Stick it out at me,
We always did look more than alright together
People stared on the subway,
Called us starry-eyed without a trace of irony.
Back in the day when you made me happier
Than something I don’t even have a metaphor for,
Just happy. Happy needs no metaphors.

I still check my reflection every once in a while
Never know if we’ll collide again anyway,
Best to be prepared but instead I
Drift aimfully towards a catacomb of eyelash wishes
And equally corny ******* I never believed in,
Still don’t,

It was getting at us, though,

Rubbing sandy fists down to the core
Instead of holding hands
Crunchy apple shell
Skin friction,
Bite the seed,
1,000 angry pomegranate teeth,
Chapped lips like crustacean shells,
Aligned like eye-freckles
Me looking like an unused punching bag,
You somewhere off in the distance,
A fading marble of plasticine light
On my wavering horizon.

Because yeah, you broke my ******* heart
You were novacane cruel and selfish
And so immature it stunned me
But you also taped it back into my chest
On the day we met so I guess we’re even.

It’s funny, already I can’t quite remember your voice,
the shape of my name in your mouth,
how you laughed,
but every word  you ever said
is still carved onto the back of my hand
like a roadmap towards all the ways
you showed me how to love myself.

Still rubbing them away with your scalding riptide,
All those words you said about forever,
Now just shackles,
So gladly did I submit to yours,
I still hate those ornery devices
Even now when,
They’re curled at my feet
Like broken wings.
howard brace Apr 2011
The fairest hair, peroxide blond
beer shampoo feeding the roots
primped and pinned with paperclips
blown and set as candyfloss sticks.

Hydro-pack cream erasing the pouches
colourful lashes, stuck to the lids
with copyright brows by electrolysis
both almond eyes are now penciled in.

Lines of life filled with putty
trowelled in layers, foundations built
delicate cheeks, powdered, pampered
rouged and shaded, giving them youth.

Clinical lips, Botox injected
tattooed outlines guiding the brush
the budding artist colours by numbers
pouting, she paints in weatherproof gloss.

Turtleneck sweater hiding the wrinkles
genuine paste, drawing the eye
both purl and knit-one inside the jumper
pulled and snagged by glued on nails.

High heel shoes, stretching the sinews
of Lycra clad legs, holding them taut
a girdle of whalebone hugging the figure
gently molding, the form to behold.

With grace we age throughout the years
a time filled life, craves respect
hairs of grey are marks of distinction
an occasional blemish, a beauty spot.

Tiny crow's feet, signs of good humour
experience of life, lines proudly worn
for with laughing eyes and glowing smile
who need wear a plasticine face.**

...   ...   ...
RMatheson Nov 2011
Pull your teeth out,
threading your lips together with twine.

Reach into your bellybutton with a finger,
hook-shaped,
and remove your intestines,
like a serpent.

Run a hook into your nose,
removing your brain
as if mummifying you.

Carve a smile with a razor,
under each breast,
******* out the fat
and replacing it with silicone.

Pull your nails off,
leaving ****** beds,
krazy-gluing plastic
over the tips of the fingers.

Fingers into ****,
pulling out the ******.

Spoon the eyeballs out,
sew the sockets shut.

My doll, broken and battered,
now fixed in perfection.
A soft suicide relapse into plasticine porcelain -
you tremble when we ****.
Adam Childs Mar 2014
The sweet scarlet lady
Condemned by the collective
Piously cursed by all
As they revel in their
contemptuous scorn
As a cocktail of lust and hate
Is dealt to her by many
With a heart crushing arrogance
In this dark hidden world
The spite of the respectable
Is poured over her with a disregard
That burns like a molten lead
While on Saturday roses are pruned
And front doors are painted
She collects the angst
And disappointments of lost youth
Of the sleepy bitter soul
As she becomes a giant dustbin
For this world

What great resilience
What amazing strength
As her ****** center dissolves
All the unhappiness of this world
As she is a hidden angel
Defiled by the world she absorbs all
For she is painted with the projections
Of the worlds forbidden fruit
But she is the rose tinted lady
Dreaming of greater times
A coffee in st Peterburgs square
Oh what a brave dare
filling her sisters needs
With all these gracious deeds

Living in this thankless world
She is the rescuer of many men
Used and abused by
The emotionally inept
She remains centered
In a hidden dignity
Only known by her
As she gives and gives
Many faces made and portrayed
As she gives herself up
She becomes a plasticine
For the childish souls to play
As she lives in a surrender
That no monk would ever know
Her surrender so complete
she disappears into her center
A holiness the devils mock
And all the angels and Jesus flock
Her submission to nature carrying
A purity that says yes to life
In the back drop of this world
The Lord can only find a relief

If we find the surface of a ******* *****
It is only because we project
The dirt of our own soul
As we defile their outside with our inside
As they are truly hidden angels
Sent to clean this world
Clayton Woolery Dec 2010
Such a shame to let loose
That I have absolutely no clue what I'm doing
But pretending seems to work so well;
You all claw at plasticine symbols
The letters deplored with a swish of the ink well.

Calligraphic self destructions mean something to somebody
Over an ocean with eyes so slight as to shine in the darkness,
Glinting in robes of black on the rooftops of rich dynastics
And the rhymes of yesterday creeping to the forefront,
Reminding me just of how hopeless hopelessness is--
The assonance of a retreating boxcar
Is steaming into the backdrops of consciousness.

Is it time to rewind somewhere?
The visages of paintings only mean so much
To the blind bats on cave walls in cavernous reaches
Of static television snow drifts.

It seems that you and I have come to the biggest of filamentous rifts:
Sifting between now and then we have mind-skips
Of epic proportion, a sickened distortion
Of all of the children left in their contortions
It's all leprosy in my eyes
Since the skies are burning down as we pinpoint abortion.

And we release that defeat, and try to find meaning in it all:

A lie of great size
Told from my lips yet it was--
You who believed me.

Together we made a chimera
A deception even worse than anything I've ever known
I said that some god had told me all the things that
that
that--

I can't begin to begin an apology
My mouth mummified by request next to Jeremy Bentham
I only wanted what's best for you--
But look at what you've done!
Oh, Crusades! Oh, Crusades!

Children don't lie with your eyes on the sunset
For Nietzsche is the ultimate navigator!

And you finally catch sight of the top of an alligator
floating in the oil, staring at you
slanted eyes smiling cruel.

It all makes sense now, what half believed lies
That explain how the darkness will come to rise
But the opposite side of our crystalline marble
Has known all along, they knew all along!

Facing the east, wasn't He?
Then even he knew
Perhaps what I said was not all untrue
And in fact
the fault lies with Him
Not me,
Not you.

Sincerely,
The Bible.
Western Philosophy / Eastern Philosophy
These are the dreams on plasticine and we can twist them and rip them, strip them to the bone and with two colours, two tones,
we make our home in them, live them and love them like some men love mother because there's no one quite like her and there won't be another,
and as each dawn breaks the plasticine makes like it's neutral which to be fair is only normal.

They have a machine to make shapes from plasticine
but to make dreams you need imagination.
What do u tell me
when the night shadows
Where does your sense go
To the end of the worlds?

I'm going round in
circles - feeling dizzy
Like an electron
round a nucleus

U say I'm sticking
like some plasticine
But as I spin hard
u r left speechless
Orlando Weaver May 2018
I am a ball of plasticine
Shaped by the palms of the world
The cracks smoothed over by loving hands

Then prodded by many fingers
Beaten and moulded

Thrown against the truth
The self is an illusion
So traceable

I am a product of the world
Ever changing
Ever changed
Yes I am a hard determinist.
Carlo C Gomez Dec 2023
~
Time is a dark feeling
—the spell of a vanishing loveliness;
in the present mist
the imperatives in the wind
move less and less.

Haul away the anchor,
this is not a safe place.

Between insufficient coasts
—a land of look behind—
science is dead,
pessimism in the remaining oar,
and flies in the eyes of the Queen.
Their graves decorate the spine
on the east bank
they call Euthanasia,
each crucifix made of plasticine.

There's a discursive quality to the sea,
I can see the pearl fishermen,
the empty dancehall,
victims of latitude and eclipse.

I can see the tattered sleeves
of Edmund Fitzgerald and the pockets
of emptiness inside,
hoping to quell the hunger
of the cruelest month.

I can see an underwater country,
colonized by the unborn children
of pregnant African women
thrown off of slave ships
during the Middle Passage.

I can see myself sinking;
farewell my sorrow,
keeping precarious time
against a backdrop
of silence less and less;
its final sound being
that of seagulls
flying away into the distance
—a force of nature that’s
both solemn and inspirational
in equal parts.

~
He/she puts together temporarily,
the broken/disntegrated parts of my plasticine self
with band aids and masking tape.
a gratuitous note to all the people who take the time and care enough to mend the broken hearted/the ones who desperately need some beacon of hope.
Laura Guzman Apr 2012
Distant It's heard
The nomads
guitar hum its trembled
arias

Its whispered strum violates
ephemerally
ragged
plasticine walls
It penetrates
stale pine
Punctured by
rust-haggard
nails

It travels
through pebbled hearts and
Nestles
in hidden cracks
Coercing
suffocated crumbs
of life
into the night.
Mirlotta Nov 2014
Stick me together with plasticine
Fill in the cracks of my broken dreams
Stitch my skin tighter and sow my heart shut
Let my hair loose and my nails uncut
Glue my eyes open and stretch out my frown
Dress up my fear in an ebony gown
Sketch in my strings and take hold of the thread
Wrap me in cling film, then leave me for dead.
gwen Oct 2014
we’re merely strangers
disguised as a family.
four cornerstones
propping up the dinner table --
a doll house
when seen through a telescope, though
the peachy porcelain pillars are tarnished by
the cracks at their corners.
“perfect family” shines in neon lettering on the threshold.
it looms over us, frantically peppering the conversation
long gone stale.
it stings my eyes,
and burns my tongue
to speak.
my teeth are plastic,
my fingers plasticine,
pieced together carelessly
a millennia ago,
when warmth still existed in the spaces between us.
now, we are cloaked in our own despondencies,
eyes staring not at each other,
but through.
we float past each other
as ghosts;
though I’m the only one
who hears the echoes.
Saturday Afternoon at the Smithy



Heart-pumped heat wall -
bellow-breathed cherry tip


Tink-tung               Tink-tung
spring-hammered hop-head rhythm
bingo-winged ripple, suet and mouth.


Square peg – round hole?  No problem.
Hot iron wrought with box-jaw tong tease.
Tight fit.  Good. Sweat-drop-splatter.
Wire teeth scrape garnet rifts,


Pig scratch back into scraped coke -
metal to plasticine.
White fizzy sparks fly and hiss


Phlopp – thirsty water stings.
Ferrous blood taste – time for tea.
TC Apr 2013
The best way to fall in love, they say, is by moonlight:
it illuminates the beautiful, masks scars and pockmarks.
As I quickly discovered, dimly lit four-hour bus rides
have a similar effect.
We didn’t fall in love, of course,
but I couldn’t swallow the chalky pill
of recent heartbreak
and you coaxed it down my throat
with your tongue, which to me is close enough.
You were 23, and whether you thought
I was 18 as is true or 20 as I claimed didn’t seem to matter.

You were beautiful, an inescapable mountain
to climb, the other passengers vibrating,
shadow-coated foothills.
We had the ethereal intimacy of two strangers who know
they will never see each other again. I kissed you.

It was to forget the taste of empty mouth,
frothing memory foam,
the way smoke whistles through toothgaps:
a caustic taste, one that I’d had no luck scraping away
like so much tongue plaque.  


What does a year of love smell like?
Sweat, mostly.

Frozen central park ramble, attic and basement musk,
my sweaters turned her perfumed pajamas
turned peace pipe turned dusty relic. Whiskey,
and shattered glass windshield,
the St. Marks hotel because it was cheap
and took cash. All colored by one perfect summer
that I can no longer remember anything
but the specifics of. All this you did not smell like,
but it was dim and you felt cozy
nuzzled into my shoulder.

I held you the way I held her,
so maybe we did fall in love
for two hours on that bus ride to Boston;
call it love by proxy. We burrowed
into one another because we had found
some eternal twilight, a midsummer night
on a Peter Pan bus in the dead of winter.
I gripping your thigh as if I only held tightly enough,
I wouldn’t be ripped back into reality
when the bus stopped. In the bright
fluorescent lights of South Station
we brushed lips awkwardly, exchanged
numbers, I grabbed my bags,
and you were gone forever.

You’d invited me to a bar,
and then your friend’s couch,
but ******* you would have made it much too real.
You and her would be differentiated,
writhing bodies are undeniably unique.
The ripped gut-wrench feeling I felt
the next day would have been unbearable.
Because intimacy informs loss, and
love by proxy only ever serves as a distraction
from the fading marble of plasticine light hovering,
indifferently, just out of frame. But it was love.
You were beautiful, and we’d found a moment
of viscous life. You numbed my pain for a while,
reminded me why I hadn’t swallowed those pills.
In that eternal twilight, it was all I needed.
Martin Narrod Feb 2017
Into the crash, imploded. Escape from light, I've known it was, the righteous and right thing to do. Where is the name? I'm listening. I hear the storm, it's growing for me, an old familiar know-it-all, with a glowing knack for mediums in the park each seventh Sunday, it takes a demon to splice my hearing, I'm in a covert closed-box first-class second-rate fairy-tale, and it is my time to start going for something transfixed, something the locals bare their graves and lapse over the journey the girls take heavily with their ****** and their men are swaying with the light. Taking their time to get to know them, until the lye takes off their fingertips and their lips cool an echo that I've cured my ears to listen closely towards.

There isn't a god. A h or even a sophomoric after-thought. This is the bed and our sheets don't know us. Is it her blood or is it the withdrawals showing, I'll sew the girls to their cotton, and make them toss their batons up, wear green and green and raise their lacrosse sticks. I've liked wearing lipstick, crossing my legs, and telling them, "you can't touch this." I take the mescaline and disrupt the contest. I carry the heads in a duffel bag, even though the lawyers don't recommend it, I carry the duffel bag in the restroom. I race 100 yards around the lunchroom, I play tag and go, I taste the subjects. Sweet, sugary, and coming onto me. She's aging denim and platinum rings.

I stop the door. I count for hours. I take all the dead-ends, all these lover's cross-eyed, pouring their pants down for supper and ecstasy, they'll take the anodyne and enter where their hearts spread disease on a dark submariner spring, where the clothes can start coming off. Lift your wings and your mantra will start rising. All of your different voices, that realize the different voices of your name, pour your light out, fill my hands with your love, and take the hour into the coastline- I'll be the one to call it enough. Even the voices can be the drug. Even her voice it could be enough.

It's the touch that knows your name. It's the governement that shears it down. It's the fibers that haunt you, while your fingertips reach slightly down along the edge of your mattress, where your sheets meet the ground. Let her be your goddess and arrange your services and coffin, the guests all wear black, and your mother raises the sun on the telephone. It might feel scripted, it might feel nostalgic, but don't let your mind turn blank. This is a stark horizon, your hands aren't here to supervise you. Your eyes can't join the rush. These are the skins that know you, they see you more than once, they call you in for the night, they tell all the people of your fame. There is really nothing to hide from, here where the desert can call you, up from the floor where they've found you, is it your face on the demons that reared you from the drug?

This is the sound and it haunts me, it takes its overture to the half-life. It takes the horror and reveals its torture to the public, where the joy-filled guitar chords pleasured me with so many gifts I always told myself they weren't enough.

Primes are around us, the people are march now. They can't keep their eyes off the madness, it's more than an hour now, they race towards their coastline, the twilight stretched mischievously passed their sons. They dig for tomorrow, the chisel at marble, until their hands undo the prisons their art dissolves. The primes are around us, it's unnerving and lifeless. New weekenders unearth these plasticine mannequin statues that ride Western through the values up the arms.

Here is a hero, no mother or father, at least not the name that they gave them, he took them out West, towards the yucca and cactus, towards the orange and stark calmness that only history could resolve the aching pains that our parents took with us through the thaw. This ice-world is melting, the seasons are ending, the shades of our evils take all of us, alone, threaded together, but stitched on the embers of some soul-less, tailored, empty null.

Here is the room, here are the stacks of dried lumber that we never thought could take us through the thaw. These are the bookends, Minnie and Mickey, white furry bonanza lost on the albicant sinews of bakelite slippers mixed into the dance routines of temporally observant minds that wouldn't dare feed themselves on the breaths of time. Here he is, like he was, not with his name tomorrow, not with her name for morning, they arc themselves inadequately, and even the doctors recommend that some soft-drinking orange-flavored omen takes their luggage and their fears, and drag them through an ocean, where no one could ever see them coming, into an aluminum jungle of preservatives where natives and islanders can sacrifice through them their judgements of a failed family history on the surplus of cities and their truths.

Here is the sound, here it strikes. Here is the room, cold and white. These are the books, here are the horrors. Here is the fashion but there's no rhythm there's no order. This is the rug, it's shaggy, it's a mess, it's distressed, it's unfolding, and it carries it's path of swine. It's a nuisance, it is caustic, it observes the unfortunate and reserves a placement for the matte sublimation of time.

And through the dirt-patterned bone-white skeleton keys basking on the rocks in some slumber of a 31st century pond, the people dancing punch their dance-cards, show their tattooes, and frollick in the great beyond. Here and in mourning, waxing on the miens of their corruption, whistling against the steel television sets from off of their 1982 television sets where they drink ***** and orange juice and laugh at Sylvester and Reboot on their regular Saturday morning routine watching Saturday morning cartoons.

Youth. In between a doctorate and mastery of language, there is nothing left to undo. A familiar feeling arriving to the airport, a tremendous evil summons the Zeppelin pilots to their terminals too. There is a horse that keeps on all of its riders, but still there's no pleasure that can keep us two.

As high as the wind and the rye, they search for the blight in our eyes, they summon our lips to a lie, tumbling and showing the time. These are the stars that we promised to give away. The legs on this pavement are slaves, half of this bad, shapes of her heaven and neverland, muffled like the secret that we have promised to tow, and the music is ahead of the shoal, out where our ocean wrote the seashore in, and the coastline carries our words on the wind. And the basement hoards our fears so we can move, away from the televisions where our parents keep their eyes' glued. Something that we promised to do, regardless of how familiarity thwarted to do, so don't break mine, don't take mine. I am the start of your pain, I wear the crown of your king, I make your bed and obey to keep the door open to our fray, where it gets us through the night. As I was told, you were supposed to know. I was tonight, I had the rights to you tonight. Your lips, their fire, the weapons for your fight, I caught myself in a lie, somewhere beyond the tremendousness of your see-through past, beyond this sea of glass where the sea creatures swim in the tales we had. Suffering past, the sea of glass, we once had.

I can see tonight, the foreman, he has told me where to go. Listen to the... I am here to help. I am going through the going, if I'm going to last, help me last, here in the thicket of the summer or the winter, this wild where we listened to the sound of snow crashing on these winter shoals where the penguins passed, and the lips froze against the icicles these icebergs flashed. The camera, suffering back, took me back, the sounds of the crash haunting back, to the weekend last summer we never had. The sleeping lasts, the winter grasps, our words have past, you're sleeping fast, eating glass, shining black. I'm suspended in liquid gas, shivering at the wicked words the women packed, the sharp synonyms that women had. I'm half of the man I was dreaming of, in the winter passed the winter doves, their heads hiding under glass. I'm just a splinter of my past, lilting as a tumbling black, simple jack, here on a card spliced I'm never to once again see my little world.

This is the sound of enough, the sound of people as they fall away. Through the windows of time, the ladder falls down inside of my mind. It's hard to live where the stars survived. In a library of dreams I once lived each day. Each of the curtains had dropped, and each of the women had left. The god of me took every need I thought I'd keep, for half of my past, was only the start of a bell I craved. Even if nothing was the sound for today. Nothing can be the sound that I gave. My muscles down, my bones breaking down, the sound of the humans buried alive underground. The choice he gave as the music played for all of these muffled thugs circling this parade on the hill.

It can be as hard to be a star. It's the cost of the heart that beats, on the coastline your readied float brings your corpse to the flood. Often lilting, often swaying, these things you pictured would be your life under this sun. If your buttons move, and you want to live free? And you claw your eyes out, just to call it off, every world you kept your lessons furtively aimed, in a match held with love, against some chanceless hope of taking the game. Each of these ends, keeping your pictures to the heavens, if his name should take your heart in need? One of these wombs where music had begun, the gnarly garden of space unkempt and calling her grave, where your name costs your fame, and the poison lifts this track up, and your train comes, it moves you backwards, even if you weren't the one, this could be the ghost you call and say, this is enough. This is the world where your friends can't go alone. Sounds and chimes and groans. Soundtracks scored into the chalk of your bones. Another, another, another, a mother.

Until this lover you chose by name, can't see. Until this lover you saw inside, can't see you very clearly tonight, you can't get by. You only just realized you're not the kindest mind, in fact yours is the weakest light.
Edward Coles Feb 2016
Shadow of two-year guilt,
Rather be erratic than static.
The world rolls its tongue
And everyone is talking
But me.

You said
Something good will come out of this.
You said
That I wanted to be unhappy.
I could reach so far
For impossible dreams
But it would not be enough.

Sleep feigns rest.
Bedsheets weather to discomfort;
Hypnotic inducement
As the sun comes up.
Alarm clock, *****. Cigarette for breakfast.
Food sits in the mouth.
Chewing on plasticine,
Sudden fear of choking.

I do not remember when I got so bad.

Lacklustre tyre swings,
A noose in the half-lit cemetery.
No amount of air
To tame the breath.
Folded, years of divorce,

Of cold toast, early mornings;
My insufferable self.
You said
That I wanted to be unhappy.
You said
That love would never be enough.
C
Helen Raymond Jun 2014
Tumbling,
Tossing,
Dawn, midnight-midmorning’s crossing.
Comatose in an arcane ether-realm, I’m watching.
Through the pastel, piercing mountains –rifting, I lay drifting.
The curtains parting, releasing two daylight captives, falling.
Tumbling,
Tossing,
Unfinished dolls of porcelain, tangled mess of hair -streaming
A girl, brunette, no eyes, no lips –smiling or screaming.
She wears dress in tones of pallid, matching his wee bow-tie -stark against jacket wafting.
Their skin, fire-cast, spare of flush, their jointed arms –like birds, flapping.
Tumbling,
Tossing,
The boy finds rest in clouds where birds lay nesting and mists –gently cresting.
He’s posed, his hand exposed, for her hand, inanimate, he’s reaching.
She’s losing ground rapidly, with but mock sense of gravity, while in clouds peaks are breeching.
Chest shattering, glass chattering,
Tumbling,
Tossing.
Skewered bodice, broken bits of her calling, giving rise to the blind though she’s not yet done falling.
All at once, his cries come with his fresh face & his babbles, nearly maddening.
Struck with the frozen bite, eyes & lips bursting –painted from her plasticine features -her tears biting and cries raging!
From her inky tears is drawn a river, running, gently cradling before suddenly she’s drowning!
Tumbling!
Tossing!
Through the waves, her ceramics washed to skin- her hollow, broken chest now heart beating & lungs pleading!
She takes her breath from the dark waters of her rift, living tattoos on her skin now flourishing, blossoming!
Her soul, wide-awake, taking root in her skin; finding wading too shallow, she seeks higher things of depth & so flies with a lofty dive into the heavenly expanse of underwater, pitching stars for her catching.
Paying one last glance at her lost mate, cowering, she leaves him sobbing after her on a path he won’t be following.

Tumbling,
Tossing,
Surviving,
to Surpassing
...
She is Rising
-monorhyme-
No, I did not write this poem about overcoming heartbreak, but you are welcome to read it in that frame if it suits you  :) Specifically it is a thinly-veiled grand metaphor for how we must go through trials & overcome our fears before we may rise to our full potential & become who we are.
L E Dow Aug 2010
There comes a point in summer when I begin to wish for winter. When I tire of sweat and lukewarm showers.

There is a day when I’d like every tree in sight to stop covering their pain, and expose the reality of grey and withered limbs.

There is a night I wish for twelve blankets on my bed, only my nose exploring the freezing atmosphere.

There is a minute I wish to replace sandals with boots, and tanlines with skin like moonlight.

There is an hour I’d rather you and I hid away, with cold toes and frigid fingertips, than go to the lake and sip beer with plasticine friends.

There is a second I spend wishing for grey clouds to cover the mocking sun, for bitter gales to replace a dancing breeze.

There is a month, I wish the grass would hide its bragging leaves, and the snow would come out and play.

There are a few hours I spend pretending, I turn on every fan, dim the lights, put on pajamas, drink coffee, and cower beneath one solitary blanket. Hoping winter spies me, takes pity, and make the hours-minutes-days-months-seconds his.
Copyright 2010 Lauren E. Dow
Jenn Gardner May 2012
1.
Let us take the world we see and construct
a relatively yellow alternative.
Apprehend ambiguous sunsets,
And sink into the pavement of the paper.

I cannot and will not be amazed. By
the glass, But become a fragment of it.
Be eaten by its watery presence.
A fragile door shutting upon a finger.

2.
Horror fails to ferment in silhouettes
Concealed by plasticine despair.

Etched upon the hands
Of detailed
Manipulations of light.

Devices driving devotion to
Fragmentation of
Scattering. Extracting
Photons of feeling.

The city screams its insolence,
At a street too small to house the
Dead eyes walking.

Remnants,
Of ambient echoes
Across a galaxy of glass.

3.
Urban spring falls upon the blanket of night.
Stability leaks from the stained glass city.

Deceased blossoms mark
A realm of unsettling perfection,

Just beyond the threshold
of an urban inferno.

Mechanical coaxation of
Rectangular prism lives within
The confines of light.

This is a false stone hell, it says.
As ancient facets of souls scatter

The waste of a low mass star.
DC raw love Feb 2015
Picture yourself in a boat on a river
With tangerine trees and marmalade skies
Somebody calls you, you answer quite slowly

Cellophane flowers of yellow and green
Towering over your head
Look for the girl with the sun in her eyes
And she's gone

Follow her down to a bridge by a fountain
Where rocking horse people eat marsh mellow pies
Everyone smiles as you drift past the flowers
That grow so incredibly high

New paper taxis appear on the shore
Waiting to take you away
Climb in the back with your head in the clouds
And you're gone

Picture yourself on a train in a station
With plasticine porters with looking glass ties
Suddenly someone is there at the turnstyle
The girl with the kaleidoscope eyes
beatles
irinia Feb 2022
yes, the tyrant is ready
to destroy with thousands of arms
with thousands of eyes
with thousands of hearts
a denied collective crime after all
and the old circle of darkness about to complete
again
the worm of history is tattooing our dreams

unbearable the recipe of pain

no real tipping point
especially
no turning point
for any tyrant

wooden tongues speak non truths
to be fed by a tyrant freezes the rivers of the mind

being a tyrant is so simple, so natural in a world we've ceased to imagine

this tyrant like any other free
to toy with history as with plasticine
cause we/you/they are as ready as ever
to support him dynamite
the horizon
of time
Mateuš Conrad Nov 2016
there are no women, to tell the men how to: womanise;
because the why is self-explanatory,
a self-styled purgatory...
why poeticise it, when you're given Dante?
   are there really women to suggest
anything more than 2 = 2 be as much as
2 = 2.2? perhaps i'm a maggot dangling
on a fishing-hook's worth of injustice...
myabe...
Freud could have Hamlet on the couch...
i'll take Macbeth estranged and standing...
or to heave! or to have! ore of the heaved have!
and have not! McCallister and Beth...
as said: epiphany and Eli bedded...
            truth of the least, unknowingly the most
trodden path... patchwork Adams,
pathwork Adams, searching stitchwork smirk
over the gloomy glen... aye; kaleigh stones
falling from the craig as one might say in
Tibet: avalanche.
                    stil... hurrah Mcbeth!
Muckbarrah Ali Happy New Years!
              proud son of frost and womanly despair!
Mcbeth son of Hillfrost and Carmickle!
                 of the forgotten shamrock heart!
svastika the shamrock and all tilt neck saying huh?!
Mcbeth my own; tear unto the land i wished
i had once owned... Mcbeth unto my own land,
and body lowned...
                 Mcbeth unto my land,
      and unto my tongue: no English said.
for was it no said, that Shakespeare was Scottish?
or at least a descending Dane?
              why then take unto exaggerating with a tear
if not so?
                  so to quote:
if it were done, when 't is done,

aye, i am but a master to a fate that does not
nod toward approval -
   for i am master to a fate of wavering,
of the nation bound, fledgling curled,
as nation proud and pride amast,
   so too the hades of nations expected omni:
            in a flicker of a candle, splinter apart
       nervousness, to take upon
a definitive shape... oft therein
St. Andrew's grotto the silencing of a barbarian
tongue's measure against the wording of a tide
                                          more to come...

could trammel up the consequence,
and catch with his surcease success;
       that but his blow
might be the be-all and the end-all here,
but here, upon this bank and shaol of time -
we'd jump the life to come - but in these
cases we, we still have judgement here;
that we but teach ****** instructions, which,
being taught, return to plague θ inventor:
this even-handed justice commends θ
     ingredients of our poison'd chalice
  to our own lips.


   within which earthbound, and Newtonian,
  assured an earthily circumference to reach unto
the closest clarity of zodiac as one might make
Galileo saintly in the forgiving canonical of the church's
decree... ode the over-wording of argument
that will never take place...
ode to the over-wording of argument that will never take
place... because such arguments will never be argued
within a framework of haggling...
such arguments are worded... but they will never descend
into the realm of haggling to reinstitute a
crass memorandum for a crown entombed on a copper
coin... let alone a golden artifice on the monarch's cranium;
                  Muhammad will know, being a merchant,
and if only Shakespeare wrote a play entitled:
the Merchant of Mecca...
              i'd deem Shylock a minstrel...
                               but my argument is no comparative measure
asserted or asserting...
        it's an antique, even though it was written
in the 21st century... i simply didn't wish for
people to merchandise it and dangle it on
their necks like crucifix jewellery; hence the vampiric
blah blah blah blah (punctuation optional);
   that's the sadness... people merchandised crucifixion
to simply dangle a suffering to no purposive ideal
   of avoiding it, or embracing it...
          it's almost like people don't avoid it,
and when being given it: deny that it was justifiable...
                 but people don't avoid it,
it's this premeditation hangman shadow:
guilty or not guilty: you're it!
             holy mother of plasticine ******* of
castratos! sing me an aria once more!
Mateuš Conrad Oct 2017
i remember these two particular catchphrases uttered from english lips in the early 90s: the burqa? satan's postbox; and the other? jesus is coming: look busy.

i have to admit it, jazz sounds so much better,
and i'm sure if i was writing this in
the 20th century, jazz would have abhorred me,
but more so the beatnik poetry-jazz fission,
like some godfather of rap of something -
still jazz sounds better, and even though i was
partially raised on classical music,
point being, when *batman forever
came out,
i didn't buy the soundtrack with U2 on it,
but instead the elliot goldenthal score -
notably for the song fledermausmarschmusik -
times were tough, we still used to play
with action figures and were the puppet-masters
in those days, rather than monochromatic
in smartphone wizardry...
                and i remember this one woman working
in our price asking me whether i was
sure i wanted the classical score of the movie,
rather than the soundtrack: and i said -
well, d'uh!
   but i can't contest for loving classical music
more than jazz, esp. not during these "detox"
weeks... jazz is just that: a cough medicine,
a paracetamol, something akin to beating
egg yokes with some sugar, until a pale canary
foam forms, and then you place it on top
of a black coffee, with some whiskey to boot...
i'll say this, these "detox" weeks are best
done during the autumnal / winter months -
just enough sunshine to make a 32+ hour days
bearable...
           what time is it? almost 3pm?
that's me crossing the 24h threshold of being
constantly awake...
            by the time i hit the whiskey this evening
i'll be heading into the 32nd hour of being
awake, straight...
            but i love these prolonged days,
the sort of days that merge into nights that then
somehow merge into the high octane morning
hours, notably looking at schoolkids pass my
house in school uniform...
         you should have seen this kid (who i was)
and his first time in regent st.'s hamleys...
  it was like a scene from big -
  once he spotted those batman action figures
his cheeks turned into bright luminescent
beetroots...
                   prior to that it was the joy of
playing outdoors, throwing marbles
into a dug hole from the distance of 2 metres,
and there was also the bet: 4 marbles a game,
5 marbles go into the hole and the winner
takes it all...
         and what about plasticine in the game
of kapsle, placed into bottle-caps,
and flicked around in a maze drawn on
       the pavement with chalk?
girls? hopscotch...
                                but we used to gang
up as if the utopian version of the lord of the flies
and head into the woods, and bake us
some tatties in charcoal of a fire...
            we used to look out after each other...
obviously some of the kids from my childhood,
last time i heard: became violent criminals...
but that's beside the point,
  when we were young, it mattered that we
had a group ethos: no one is going to be left
behind... stealing gooseberries -
  that would make these overly sweet sour-sweets
taste like honey drizzle over oats...
but that's the great thing about these "detox"
weeks, i get to experience 32h days,
   half a day, the entire night, and the entirety
of the next day, and about a third of the next night...
even if you asked me how i managed
to stay awake for so long and fail to even
powernap for a quickie 15 minutes,
       i'd probably sooner inquire:
so, what's the secret for those quickies you wild
kids have in the domain of ***...
last time i checked, she just perfected
her ******* before we were breaking up -
she tightened her lips...
        ah, i know the youtube hysteria of:
telling personal things to strangers -
    i get the argument -
  but unlike the medium of youtube - writing
still has the aura of:
as one stranger unto another -
          there's no greater sense of privacy,
as the privacy without a muzzle-guard of a dog...
it can be rather intimidating, to find that
however personal your content is,
   it actually entrenches your privacy,
paradoxically...
                    don't ask me how this happens...
i guess that: if your "privacy" is merely
an intricate web of lies... i guess you'd really
want to protect your spidery-ego as much as
possible...
                  but when you state your privacy
among internet profiles - glass people in glass houses...
(who the hell puts up these profiles,
what's there to talk about, on the date,
when you already have an a priori picture of a person
and their interests?) -
   once again, i don't know how it happened,
but by revealing my private life in "public",
i somehow managed to turn into
a right ol' hermit...
                      and unlike the youtube mentality:
i'm still a stranger among strangers,
       maybe that comes down to my ability
to talk to old men on benches, randomly,
while having a beer and a smoke;
don't mind homeless people either -
  give them a cigarette, ask how they're feeling,
and never bothering to ****** them
about the ethos of work, given that
so much of "work" these days is exactly that:
"work".
Aishwarya Dec 2011
Their waspish comments pierce my soul
Like needles injecting poison of some sort.
The girl who greets me in the mirror
Has flawed features.
Maybe people were being honest after all.
Maybe I am what they say I am - fat.
Never before have I come across a situation so abstruce.
A desire to be be made of plasticine fills my mind.
Imagine!
I could mould myself with my fingertips
Remove faults, gain perfection.
I look around for a quick remedy,
Something to divert my mind.
Now that I've found it- thin, sharp and silver,
I hold it firmly and drag it
Over the soft skin of my hand over and over again.
It smarts terribly but it feels like the pain within is fading.
From fear of death and weltering, I leave my wrists untouched.
The scar remains as a constant reminder
Of the sin I committed,
Of how weak I was,
And of how I could not handle criticism.
Two years back, I got told by people that I had put on weight. As a result of not being able to handle the criticism and comments, I found peace in self harming.
I don't self harm anymore and I'm proud to say that I can handle critisism!
Simon Soane Nov 2013
This is nothing,
no inclination of like,
no spike or turn,
no bridges burnt
no lessons learnt,
no yearn or thirst
or rivers' burst,
no magpies or butterflies,
no omens, signs,
no reading mime.

No building dreams with plasticine,
no schemes
or seams
to pick apart,
nothing to start.
Mateuš Conrad Aug 2016
one thing being concerned with
ideograms like with the Chinese defences
having preserved an offshoot from
Egyptian depiction,
but another thing to be in a sandpit
playing with orthographic changes -
by now you realise the Chinese encoding is
too complex to change, not enough
plasticine in it, nothing mandible,
you need skeletons, and even though
i'm not quick to boast, i think the matchsticks
of the affair deserves a pat on the back -
how a new aesthetic was born
from simply looking at the ß - to compete with
the Germans was necessary,
i ensured the Polish orthographic was in need
of revising, hence from sz (sh) came ß -
an ultra-diacritical suggestion of uniqueness,
but there had to be a twin to shorten the
rz into a ż of equal aesthetic concern,
hence the ʒ. in writing it's so wired, so dynamic,
no number of Mona Lisas can match up to it...
it's a ******* Frankenstein by the feel of it
with five blind-men and an elephant...
i know this will not become a standard of educating
people, i know this will take some time before
the revision takes assurance of survival,
but i will vouch on this revision via optometry
of how people read, perhaps reading more than
their current diet allows.
Jack Trainer Nov 2014
The dark season of cold, pallid vastness
Has not broken the tenacity
Of the first snow fall
Heralding the purity of the colorless
And the aroma of burning pine

This opaque mood I am in
Rejoices for the dark season
Yellow and brown ochre highlights
Burnt umber trees of plasticine
Molded by the hands of nature

In my mind, I am alone in this one-way reality
And yet, I delight for the dark season
If I could share this sensation, I would not
For it’s the prelude to a poem
About a cold and distant soul

— The End —