I have a blue blanket, it looks corduroy but it's synthetic polynesian cotton.
Considered by some to be polyester. After the ninth year of ownership I started
Telling house guests it had always been mine; but secretly knowing it came from my
Ex Kristina who left it with some of her other things in 2005 in my grand deluxe Evanston
Apartment. In like some really awesome way, I could fold the corners together to see little blocks
Of the Universe form cubes in the fourth dimension and gain a better understanding of my own
Little black shmata. Top drawer, white dresser, in the back with the leftover girlfriend underwear between
My first ever stuffed animal dog/rabbit.

Amazing how these thinned and frayed azure threads had held so many midnight conversations Together- maybe fifteen other girls had nuzzled with Kristina's blanket. Last year the guilt set in. You Watch a girlfriend, say, ratchet through your room naked for something soft to put over her to listen to
Some half-stanza from the new Yeats critical and that, do-I-tell-her feeling comes over you. Blue Polyester really had a way with women. My last serious crush, the one of six months, the one from the place that was close to where I worked six days a week, would you believe, she had not interest in that heap of thread, under my pillows spying on us sleep for twenty-four long weeks.

"Drop in the bucket" the sixty-year-olds say. I say, bring me my ******* fourth dimension blocks and cubes *******. I want to visit the existential, I want to experience the hoo-ra and Ga-Ga those kids throw around on Milwaukee waiting for $150 NBA slippers.

Wednesday is my day for telling the truth.
2:00p.m. sitting in the front of her alizarin El Dorado.
"I have something I have to tell you,"  I said, my mouth practically filled with marbles as I barely could Utter the words: it's not going to work out.

Like a psychotic docent in the wilderness,
I will not speak in perfect Ciceronian cadences.
I draw my voice from a much deeper cistern,
Preferring the jittery synaptic archive,
So sublimely unfiltered, random and profane.
And though I am sequestered now,
Confined within the walls of a gated, golf-coursed,
Over-55 lunatic asylum (for Active Seniors I am told),
I remain oddly puerile,
Remarkably refreshed and unfettered.  
My institutionalization self-imposed,
Purposed for my own serenity, and also the safety of others.
Yet I abide, surprisingly emancipated and frisky.
I may not have found the peace I seek,
But the quiet has mercifully come at last.

The nexus of inner and outer space is context for my story.
I was born either in Brooklyn, New York or Shungopavi, Arizona,
More of intervention divine than census data.
Shungopavi: a designated place for tribal statistical purposes.
Shungopavi: an ovine abbatoir and shaman’s cloister.
The Hopi: my mother’s people, a state of mind and grace,
Deftly landlocked, so cunningly circumscribed,
By both interior and outer Navajo boundaries.
The Navajo: a coyote trickster people; a nation of sheep thieves,
Hornswoggled and landlocked themselves,
Subsumed within three of the so-called Four Corners:
A 3/4ths compromise and covenant,
Pickled in firewater, swaddled in fine print,
A veritable swindle concocted back when the USA
Had Manifest Destiny & mayhem on its mind.

The United States: once a pubescent synthesis of blood and thunder,
A bold caboodle of trooper spit and polish, unwashed brawlers, Scouts and      
Pathfinders, mountain men, numb-nut ne'er-do-wells,
Buffalo Bills & big-balled individualists, infected, insane with greed.
According to the Gospel of His Holiness Saint Zinn,
A People’s’ History of the United States: essentially state-sponsored terrorism,
A LAND RUSH grabocracy, orchestrated, blessed and anointed,
By a succession of Potomac sharks, Great White Fascist Fathers,
Far-Away-on-the Bay, the Bay we call The Chesapeake.
All demented national patriarchs craving lebensraum for God and country.
The USA: a 50-state Leviathan today, a nation jury-rigged,
Out of railroad ties, steel rails and baling wire,
Forged by a litany of lies, rapaciousness and ******,
And jaw-torn chunks of terra firma,
Bites both large and small out of our well-****** Native American ***.

Or culo, as in va’a fare in culo (literally "go do it in the ***")
Which Italian Americans pronounce as fongool.
The language center of my brain,
My sub-cortical Broca’s region,
So fraught with such semantic misfires,
And autonomic linguistic seizures,
Compel acknowledgement of a father’s contribution,
To both the gene pool and the genocide.
Columbus Day:  a conspicuously absent holiday out here in Indian Country.
No festivals or Fifth Avenue parades.
No excuse for ethnic hoopla. No guinea feast. No cannoli. No tarantella.
No excuse to not get drunk and not **** your sister-in-law.
Emphatically a day for prayer and contemplation,
A day of infamy like Pearl Harbor and 9/11,
October 12, 1492: not a discovery; an invasion.

Growing up in Brooklyn, things were always different for me,
Different in some sort of redskin/****/****--
Choose Your Favorite Ethnic Slur-sort of way.
The American Way: dehumanization for fun and profit.
Melting *** anonymity and denial of complicity with evil.
But this is no time to bring up America’s sordid past,
Or, a personal pet peeve: Indian Sovereignty.
For Uncle Sam and his minions, an ever-widening, conveniently flexible concept,
Not a commandment or law,
Not really a treaty or a compact,
Or even a business deal.  Let’s get real:
It was not even much in the way of a guideline.
Just some kind of an advisory, a bulletin or newsletter,
Could it merely have been a free-floating suggestion?
Yes, that’s it exactly: a suggestion.

Over and under halcyon American skies,
Over and around those majestic purple mountain peaks,
Those trapped in poetic amber waves of wheat and oats,
Corn and barley, wheat shredded and puffed,
Corn flaked and milled, Wheat Chex and Wheaties, oats that are little Os;
Kix and Trix, Fiber One, and Kashi-Go-Lean, Lucky Charms and matso *****,
Kreplach and kishka,
Polenta and risotto.
Our cantaloupe and squash patch,
Our fruited prairie plain, our delicate ecological Eden,
In balance and harmony with nature, as Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce instructs:
“These white devils are not going to,
Stop ****** and killing, cheating and eating us,
Until they have the whole ******* enchilada.
I’m talking about ‘from sea to shining sea.’”

“I fight no more forever,” Babaloo.
So I must steer this clunky keelboat of discovery,
Back to the main channel of my sad and starry demented river.
My warpath is personal but not historical.
It is my brain’s own convoluted cognitive process I cannot saavy.
Whatever biochemical or—as I suspect more each day—
Whatever bio-mechanical protocols govern my identity,
My weltanschauung: my world-view, as sprechen by proto-Nazis;
Putz philosophers of the 17th, 18th & 19th century.
The German intelligentsia: what a cavalcade of maniacal *******!
Why is this Jew unsurprised these Zarathustra-fueled Übermenschen . . .
Be it the Kaiser--Caesar in Deutsch--Bismarck, ******, or,
Even that Euro-*****,  Angela Merkel . . . Why am I not surprised these Huns,
Get global grab-*** on the sauerbraten cabeza every few generations?
To be, or not to be the ***** bullgoose loony: GOTT.

Biomechanical protocols govern my identity and are implanted while I sleep.
My brain--my weak and weary CPU--is replenished, my discs defragmented.
A suite of magnetic and optical white rooms, cleansed free of contaminants,
Gun mounts & lifeboat stations manned and ready,
Standing at attention and saluting British snap-style,
Snap-to and heel click, ramrod straight and cheerful: “Ready for duty, Sir.”
My mind is ravenous, lusting for something, anything to process.
Any memory or image, lyric or construct,
Be they short-term dailies or deeply imprinted.
Fixations archived one and all in deep storage time and space.
Memories, some subconscious, most vaporous;
Others--the scary ones—eidetic: frighteningly detailed and extraordinarily vivid.
Precise cognitive transcripts; recollected so richly rife and fresh.
Visual, auditory, tactile, gustatory, and olfactory reloads:
Queued up and increasingly re-experienced.

The bio-data of six decades: it’s all there.
People, countless, places and things cataloged.
Every event, joy and trauma enveloped from within or,
Accessed externally from biomechanical storage devices.
The random access memory of a lifetime,
Read and recollected from cerebral repositories and vaults,
All the while the entire greedy process overseen,
Over-driven by that all-subservient British bat-man,
Rummaging through the data in batches small and large,
Internal and external drives working in seamless syncopation,
Self-referential, at times paradoxical or infinitely looped.
“Cogito ergo sum."
Descartes stripped it down to the basics but there’s more to the story:
Thinking about thinking.
A curse and minefield for the cerebral:  metacognition.

No, it is not the fact that thought exists,
Or even the thoughts themselves.
But the information technology of thought that baffles me,
As adaptive and profound as any evolution posited by Darwin,
Beyond the wetware in my skull, an entirely new operating system.
My mental and cultural landscape are becoming one.
Machines are connecting the two.
It’s what I am and what I am becoming.
Once more for emphasis:
It is the information technology of who I am.
It is the operating system of my mental and cultural landscape.
It is the machinery connecting the two.
This is the central point of this narrative:
Metacognition--your superego’s yenta Cassandra,
Screaming, screaming in your psychic ear, your good ear:

“LISTEN:  The machines are taking over, taking you over.
Your identity and train of thought are repeatedly hijacked,
Switched off the main line onto spurs and tangents,
Only marginally connected or not at all.
(Incoming TEXT from my editor: “Lighten Up, Giuseppi!”)
Reminding me again that most in my audience,
Rarely get past the comic page. All righty then: think Calvin & Hobbes.
John Calvin, a precocious and adventurous six-year old boy,
Subject to flights of 16th Century French theological fancy.
Thomas Hobbes, a sardonic anthropomorphic tiger from 17th Century England,
Mumbling about life being “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”
Taken together--their antics and shenanigans--their relationship to each other,
Remind us of our dual nature; explore for us broad issues like public education;
The economy, environmentalism & the Global ****** Thermometer;
Not to mention the numerous flaws of opinion polls.



And again my editor TEXTS me, reminds me again: “LIGHTEN UP!”
Consoling me:  “Even Shakespeare had to play to the groundlings.”
The groundlings, AKA: The Rabble.
Yes. Even the ******* Bard, even Willie the Shake,
Had to contend with a decidedly lowbrow copse of carrion.
Oh yes, the groundlings, a carrion herd, a flying flock of carrion seagulls,
Carrion crow, carrion-feeders one and all,
And let’s throw Sheryl Crow into the mix while we’re at it:
“Hit it! This ain't no disco. And it ain't no country club either, this is L.A.”  

                  Send "All I Wanna Do" Ringtone to your Cell              

Once more, I digress.
The Rabble:  an amorphous, gelatinous Jabba the Hutt of commonality.
The Rabble: drunk, debauched & lawless.
Too *****-delicious to stop Bill & Hilary from thinking about tomorrow;
Too Paul McCartney My Love Does it Good to think twice.

The Roman Saturnalia: a weeklong **** fest.
The Saturnalia: originally a pagan kink-fest in honor of the deity Saturn.
Dovetailing nicely with the advent of the Christian era,
With a project started by Il Capo di Tutti Capi,
One of the early popes, co-opting the Roman calendar between 17 and 25 December,
Putting the finishing touches on the Jesus myth.
For Brooklyn Hopi-***-Jew baby boomers like me,
Saturnalia manifested itself as Disco Fever,
Unpleasant years of electrolysis, scrunched ***** in tight polyester
For Roman plebeians, for the great unwashed citizenry of Rome,
Saturnalia was just a great big Italian wedding:
A true family blowout and once-in-a-lifetime ego-trip for Dad,
The father of the bride, Vito Corleone, Don for A Day:
“Some think the world is made for fun and frolic,
And so do I! Funicula, Funiculi!”

America: love it or leave it; my country right or wrong.
Sure, we were citizens of Rome,
But any Joe Josephus spending the night under a Tiber bridge,
Or sleeping off a three day drunk some afternoon,
Up in the Coliseum bleachers, the cheap seats, out beyond the monuments,
The original three monuments in the old stadium,
Standing out in fair territory out in center field,
Those three stone slabs honoring Gehrig, Huggins, and Babe.
Yes, in the house that Ruth built--Home of the Bronx Bombers--***?
Any Joe Josephus knows:  Roman citizenship doesn’t do too much for you,
Except get you paxed, taxed & drafted into the Legion.
For us the Roman lifestyle was HIND-*** humble.
We plebeians drew our grandeur by association with Empire.
Very few Romans and certainly only those of the patrician class lived high,
High on the hog, enjoying a worldly extravaganza, like—whom do we both know?

Okay, let’s say Laurence Olivier as Crassus in Spartacus.
Come on, you saw Spartacus fifteen ******* times.
Remember Crassus?
Crassus: that ***** twisted **** trying to get his freak on with,
Tony Curtis in a sunken marble tub?
We plebes led lives of quiet *****-scratching desperation,
A bunch of would-be legionnaires, diseased half the time,
Paid in salt tablets or baccala, salted codfish soaked yellow in olive oil.
Stiffs we used to call them on New Year’s Eve in Brooklyn.
Let’s face it: we were hyenas eating someone else’s ****,
Stage-door jackals, Juvenal-come-late-lies, a mob of moronic mook boneheads
Bought off with bread & circuses and Reality TV.
Each night, dished up a wide variety of lowbrow Elizabethan-era entertainments.  
We contemplate an evening on the town, downtown—
(cue Petula Clark/Send "Downtown" Ringtone to your Cell)

On any given London night, to wit:  mummers, jugglers, bear & bull baiters.
How about dog & **** fighters, quoits & skittles, alehouses & brothels?
In short, somewhere, anywhere else,
Anywhere other than down along the Thames,
At Bankside in Southwark, down in the Globe Theater mosh pit,
Slugging it out with the groundlings whose only interest,
In the performance is the choreography of swordplay and stale ****** puns.
Meanwhile, Hugh Fennyman--probably a fellow Jew,
An English Renaissance Bugsy Siegel or Mickey Cohen—
Meanwhile Fennyman, the local mob boss is getting his ya-yas,
Roasting the feet of my text-messaging editor, Philip Henslowe.
Poor and pathetic Henslowe, works on commission, always scrounging,
But a true patron of my craft, a gentleman of infinite jest and patience,
Spiritual subsistence, and every now and then a good meal at some,
Sawdust joint with oyster shells, and a Prufrockian silk purse of T.S. Eliot gold.

Poor, pathetic Henslowe, trussed up by Fennyman,
His editorial feet in what looks like a Japanese hibachi.
Henslowe’s feet to the fire--feet to the fire—get it?
A catchy phrase whose derivation conjures up,
A grotesque yet vivid image of torture,
An exquisite insight into how such phrases ingress the idiom,
Not to mention a scene once witnessed at a secret Romanian CIA prison,
I’d been ordered to Bucharest not long after 9/11,
Handling the rendition and torture of Habib Ghazzawy,

An entirely innocent falafel maker from Steinway Street, Astoria, Queens.
Shock the Monkey: it’s what we do. GOTO:
Peter Gabriel - Shock the Monkey/
(HQ music video) - YouTube//
www.youtube.com/
Poor, pathetic, ******-on Henslowe.


Fennyman :  (his avarice is whet by something Philly screams out about a new script)  "A play takes time. Find actors; Rehearsals. Let's say open in three weeks. That's--what--five hundred groundlings at tuppence each, in addition four hundred groundlings tuppence each, in addition four hundred backsides at three pence--a penny extra for a cushion, call it two hundred cushions, say two performances for safety how much is that Mr. Frees?"
Jacobean Tweet, John (1580-1684) Webster:  “I saw him kissing her bubbies.”

It’s Geoffrey Rush, channeling Henslowe again,
My editor, a singed smoking madman now,
Feet in an ice bucket, instructing me once more:
“Lighten things up, you know . . .
Comedy, love and a bit with a dog.”
I digress again and return to Hopi Land, back to my shaman-monastic abattoir,
That Zen Center in downtown Shungopavi.
At the Tribal Enrolment Office I make my case for a Certificate of Indian Blood,
Called a CIB by the Natives and the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs.
The BIA:  representing gold & uranium miners, cattle and sheep ranchers,
Sodbusters & homesteaders; railroaders and dam builders since 1824.
Just in time for Andrew Jackson, another false friend of Native America,
Just before Old Hickory, one of many Democratic Party hypocrites and scoundrels,
Gives the FONGOOL, up the CULO go ahead.
Hey Andy, I’ve got your Jacksonian democracy: Hanging!
The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) mission is to:   "… enhance the quality of life, to promote economic opportunity, and to carry out the responsibility to protect and improve the trust assets of American Indians, Indian tribes, and Alaska Natives. What’s that in the fine print?  Uncle Sammy holds “the trust assets of American Indians.”

Here’s a ******* tip, Geronimo: if he trusted you,
It would ALL belong to you.
To you and The People.
But it’s all fork-tongued white *******.
If true, Indian sovereignty would cease to be a sick one-liner,
Cease to be a blunt force punch line, more of,
King Leopold’s 19th Century stand-up comedy schtick,
Leo Presents: The **** of the Congo.
La Belgique mission civilisatrice—
That’s what French speakers called Uncle Leo’s imperial public policy,
Bringing the gift of civilization to central Africa.
Like Manifest Destiny in America, it had a nice colonial ring to it.
“Our manifest destiny [is] to overspread the continent,
Allotted by Providence for the free development,
Of our yearly multiplying millions.”  John L. O'Sullivan, 1845

Our civilizing mission or manifest destiny:
Either/or, a catchy turn of phrase;
Not unlike another ironic euphemism and semantic subterfuge:
The Pacification of the West; Pacification?
Hardly: decidedly not too peaceful for Cochise & Tonto.
Meanwhile, Madonna is cash rich but disrespected Evita poor,
To wit: A ****** on the Rocks (throwing in a byte or 2 of Da Vinci Code).
Meanwhile, Miss Ciccone denied her golden totem *****.
They snubbed that little guinea ****, didn’t they?
Snubbed her, robbed her rotten.
Evita, her magnum opus, right up there with . . .
Her SNL Wayne’s World skit:
“Get a load of the unit on that guy.”
Or, that infamous MTV Music Video Awards stunt,
That classic ***** Lip-Lock with Britney Spears.

How could I not see that Oscar snubola as prime evidence?
It was just another stunning case of American anti-Italian racial animus.
Anyone familiar with Noam Chomsky would see it,
Must view it in the same context as the Sacco & Vanzetti case,
Or, that arbitrary lynching of 9 Italian-Americans in New Orleans in 1891,
To cite just two instances of anti-Italian judicial reach & mob violence,
Much like what happened to my cousin Dominic,
Gang-***** by the Harlem Globetrotters, in their locker room during halftime,
While he working for Abe Saperstein back in 1952.
Dom was doing advance for Abe, supporting creation of The Washington Generals:
A permanent stable of hoop dream patsies and foils,
Named for the ever freewheeling, glad-handing, backslapping,
Supreme Commander Allied Expeditionary Force (SCAEF), himself,
Namely General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the man they liked,
And called IKE: quite possibly a crypto Jew from Abilene.

Of course, Harry Truman was my first Great White Fascist Father,
Back in 1946, when I first opened my eyes, hung up there,
High above, looking down from the adobe wall.
Surveying the entire circular kiva,
I had the best seat in the house.
Don’t let it be said my Spider Grandmother or Hopi Corn Mother,
Did not want me looking around at things,
Discovering what made me special.
Didn’t divine intervention play a significant part of my creation?
Knowing Mamma Mia and Nonna were Deities,
Gave me an edge later on the streets of Brooklyn.
The Cradleboard: was there ever a more divinely inspired gift to human curiosity? The Cradleboard: a perfect vantage point, an infant’s early grasp,
Of life harmonious, suspended between Mother Earth and Father Sky.
Simply put: the Hopi should be running our ******* public schools.

But it was IKE with whom I first associated,
Associated with the concept 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
I liked IKE. Who didn’t?
What was not to like?
He won the ******* war, didn’t he?
And he wasn’t one of those crazy **** John Birchers,
Way out there, on the far right lunatic Republican fringe,
Was he? (It seems odd and nearly impossible to believe in 2013,
That there was once a time in our Boomer lives,
When the extreme right wing of the Republican Party
Was viewed by the FBI as an actual threat to American democracy.)
Understand: it was at a time when The FBI,
Had little ideological baggage,
But a great appetite for secrets,
The insuppressible Jay Edgar doing his thang.

IKE: of whom we grew so, oh-so Fifties fond.
Good old reliable, Nathan Shaking IKE:
He’d been fixed, hadn’t he? Had had the psychic snip.
Snipped as a West Point cadet & parade ground martinet.
Which made IKE a good man to have in a pinch,
Especially when crucial policy direction was way above his pay grade.
Cousin Dom was Saperstein’s bagman, bribing out the opposition,
Which came mainly from religious and patriotic organizations,
Viewing the bogus white sports franchise as obscene.
The Washington Generals, Saperstein’s new team would have but one opponent,
And one sole mission: to serve as the **** of endless jokes and sight gags for—
Negroes.  To play the chronic fools of--
Negroes.  To be chronically humiliated and insulted by—
Negroes.  To run up and down the boards all night, being outran by—
Negroes.  Not to mention having to wear baggy silk shorts.



Meadowlark Lemon:  “Yeah, Charlie, we ***** that grease-ball Dominic; we shagged his guinea mouth and culo rotten.”  

(interviewed in his Scottsdale, AZ winter residence in 2003 by former ESPN commentator Charlie Steiner, Malverne High School, Class of ’67.)
                                                        
  ­                                                                 ­                 
IKE, briefed on the issue by higher-ups, quickly got behind the idea.
The Harlem Globetrotters were to exist, and continue to exist,
Are sustained financially by Illuminati sponsors,
For one reason and one reason only:
To serve elite interests that the ***** be kept down and subservient,
That the minstrel show be perpetuated,
A policy surviving the elaborate window dressing of the civil rights movement, Affirmative action, and our first Uncle Tom president.
Case in point:  Charles Barkley, Dennis Rodman & Metta World Peace Artest.
Cha-cha-cha changing again:  I am Robert Allen Zimmermann,
A whiny, skinny Jew, ****** and rolling in from Minnesota,
Arrested, obviously a vagrant, caught strolling around his tony Jersey enclave,
Having moved on up the list, the A-list, a special invitation-only,
Yom Kippur Passover Seder:  Next Year in Jerusalem, Babaloo!

I take ownership of all my autonomic and conditioned reflexes;
Each personal neural arc and pathway,
All shenanigans & shellackings,
Or blunt force cognitive traumas.
It’s all percolating nicely now, thank you,
In kitchen counter earthen crockery:
Random access memory: a slow-cook crockpot,
Bubbling through my psychic sieve.
My memories seem only remotely familiar,
Distant and vague, at times unreal:
An alien hybrid databank accessed accidently on purpose;
Flaky science sustains and monitors my nervous system.
And leads us to an overwhelming question:
Is it true that John Dillinger’s ******* is in the Smithsonian Museum?
Enquiring minds want to know, Kemosabe!

“Any last words, *******?” TWEETS Adam Smith.
Postmortem cyber-graffiti, an epitaph carved in space;
Last words, so singular and simple,
Across the universal great divide,
Frisbee-d, like a Pleistocene Kubrick bone,
Tossed randomly into space,
Morphing into a gyroscopic space station.
Mr. Smith, a calypso capitalist, and me,
Me, the Poet Laureate of the United States and Adam;
Who, I didn’t know from Adam.
But we tripped the light fantastic,
We boogied the Protestant Work Ethic,
To the tune of that old Scotch-Presbyterian favorite,
Variations of a 5-point Calvinist theme: Total Depravity; Election; Particular Redemption; Irresistible Grace; & Perseverance of the Saints.

Mr. Smith, the author of An Inquiry into the Nature
& Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776),
One of the best-known, intellectual rationales for:
Free trade, capitalism, and libertarianism,
The latter term a euphemism for Social Darwinism.
Prior to 1764, Calvinists in France were called Huguenots,
A persecuted religious majority . . . is that possible?
A persecuted majority of Edict of Nantes repute.
Adam Smith, likely of French Huguenot Jewish ancestry himself,
Reminds me that it is my principal plus interest giving me my daily gluten.
And don’t think the irony escapes me now,
A realization that it has taken me nearly all my life to see again,
What I once saw so vividly as a child, way back when.
Before I put away childish things, including the following sentiment:
“All I need is the air that I breathe.”

  Send "The Air That I Breathe" Ringtone to your Cell  

The Hippies were right, of course.
The Hollies had it all figured out.
With the answer, as usual, right there in the lyrics.
But you were lucky if you were listening.
There was a time before I embraced,
The other “legendary” economists:
The inexorable Marx,
The savage society of Veblen,
The heresies we know so well of Keynes.
I was a child.
And when I was a child, I spake as a child—
Grazie mille, King James—
I understood as a child; I thought as a child.
But when I became a man I jumped on the bus with the band,
Hopped on the irresistible bandwagon of Adam Smith.

Smith:  “Any last words, *******?”
Okay, you were right: man is rationally self-interested.
Grazie tanto, Scotch Enlightenment,
An intellectual movement driven by,
An alliance of Calvinists and Illuminati,
Freemasons and Johnny Walker Black.
Talk about an irresistible bandwagon:
Smith, the gloomy Malthus, and David Ricardo,
Another Jew boy born in London, England,
Third of 17 children of a Sephardic family of Portuguese origin,
Who had recently relocated from the Dutch Republic.
******* Jews!
Like everything shrewd, sane and practical in this world,
WE also invented the concept:  FOLLOW THE MONEY.

The lyrics: if you were really listening, you’d get it:
Respiration keeps one sufficiently busy,
Just breathing free can be a full-time job,
Especially when--borrowing a phrase from British cricketers—,
One contemplates the sorry state of the wicket.
Now that I am gainfully superannuated,
Pensioned off the employment radar screen.
Oft I go there into the wild ebon yonder,
Wandering the brain cloud at will.
My journey indulges curiosity, creativity and deceit.
I free range the sticky wicket,
I have no particular place to go.
Snagging some random fact or factoid,
A stop & go rural postal route,
Jumping on and off the brain cloud.

Just sampling really,
But every now and then, gorging myself,
At some information super smorgasbord,
At a Good Samaritan Rest Stop,
I ponder my own frazzled neurology,
When I was a child—
Before I learned the grim economic facts of life and Judaism,
Before I learned Hebrew,
Before my laissez-faire Bar Mitzvah lessons,
Under the rabbinical tutelage of Rebbe Kahane--
I knew what every clever child knows about life:
The surfing itself is the destination.
Accessing RAM--random access memory—
On a strictly need to know basis.
RAM:  a pretty good name for consciousness these days.

If I were an Asimov or Sir Arthur (Sri Lankabhimanya) Clarke,
I’d get freaky now, riffing on Terminators, Time Travel and Cyborgs.
But this is truth not science fiction.
Nevertheless, someone had better,
Come up with another name for cyborg.
Some other name for a critter,
Composed of both biological and artificial parts?
Parts-is-parts--be they electronic, mechanical or robotic.
But after a lifetime of science fiction media,
After a steady media diet, rife with dystopian technology nightmares,
Is anyone likely to admit to being a cyborg?
Since I always give credit where credit is due,
I acknowledge that cyborg was a term coined in 1960,
By Manfred Clynes & Nathan S. Kline and,
Used to identify a self-regulating human-machine system in outer space.

Five years later D. S. Halacy's: Cyborg: Evolution of the Superman,
Featured an introduction, which spoke of:  “… a new frontier, that was not,
Merely space, but more profoundly, the relationship between inner space,
And outer space; a bridge, i.e., between mind and matter.”
So, by definition, a cyborg defined is an organism with,
Technology-enhanced abilities: an antenna array,
Replacing what was once sentient and human.
My glands, once in control of metabolism and emotions,
Have been replaced by several servomechanisms.
I am biomechanical and gluttonous.
Soaking up and breathing out the atmosphere,
My Baby Boom experience of six decades,
Homogenized and homespun, feedback looped,
Endlessly networked through predigested mass media,
Culture as demographically targeted content.

This must have something to do with my own metamorphosis.
I think of Gregor Samsa, a Kafkaesque character if there ever was one.
And though we share common traits,
My evolutionary progress surpasses and transcends his.
Samsa--Phylum and Class--was, after all, an insect.
Nonetheless, I remain a changeling.
Have I not seen many stages of growth?
Each a painful metamorphic cycle,
From exquisite first egg,
Through caterpillar’s appetite & squirm.
To phlegmatic bliss and pupa quietude,
I unfold my wings in a rush of Van Gogh palette,
Color, texture, movement and grace, lift off, flapping in flight.
My eyes have witnessed wondrous transformations,
My experience, nouveau riche and distinctly self-referential;
For the most part unspecific & longitudinally pedestrian.

Yes, something has happened to me along the way.
I am no longer certain of my identity as a human being.
Time and technology has altered my basic wiring diagram.
I suspect the sophisticated gadgets and tools,
I’ve been using to shape & make sense of my environment,
Have reared up and turned around on me.
My tools have reshaped my brain & central nervous system.
Remaking me as something simultaneously more and less human.
The electronic toys and tools I once so lovingly embraced,
Have turned unpredictable and rabid,
Their bite penetrating my skin and septic now, a cluster of implanted sensors,
Content: currency made increasingly more valuable as time passes,
Served up by and serving the interests of a pervasively predatory 1%.
And the rest of us: the so-called 99%?
No longer human; simply put by both Howards--Beale & Zinn--

Humanoid.

In the Fall, when the temperature of the Bay would drop and the wind blew ice, frost would gather on the lawn near Henry Oldez's room. It was not a heavy frost that spread across the paralyzed lawn, but one that just covered each blade of grass with a fine, white, almost dusty coat. Most mornings, he would stumble out of the garage where he slept and tip toe past the ice speckled patch of brown and green spotted grass, so to make his way inside to relieve himself. If he was in no hurry, he would stand on the four stepped stoop and look back at the dried, dead leaves hanging from the wiry branches of three trees lined up against the neighbors fence. The picture reminded him of what the old gallows must have looked like. Henry Oldez had been living in this routine for twenty some years.

He had moved to California with his mother, father, and three brothers 35 years ago. Henry's father, born and raised in Tijuana, Mexico, had traveled across the Meixcan border on a bent, full jalopy with his wife, Betria Gonzalez and their three kids. They were all mostly babies then and none of the brothers claimed to remember anything of the ride, except one, Leo, recalled there was "A lotta dust in the car." Santiago Oldez, San for short, had fought in World War II and died of cancer ten years later. San drank most nights and smoked two packs of Marlboro Reds a day. Henry had never heard his father talk about the fighting or the war. If he was lucky to hear anything, it would have been when San was dead drunk, talking to himself mostly, not paying very much attention to anyone except his memories and his music.

"San loved two things in this world," Henry would say, "*****, Betria, and Johnny Cash."

Betria Gonzalez grew up in Tijuana, Mexico as well. She was a stout, short woman, wide but with pretty eyes and a mess of orange golden hair. Betria could talk to anyone about anything. Her nick names were the conversationalist or the old crow because she never found a reason to stop talking. Santiago had met her through a friend of a friend. After a couple of dates, they were married. There is some talk of a dispute among the two families, that they didn't agree to the marriage and that they were too young, which they probably were. Santiago being Santiago, didn't listen to anybody, only to his heart. They were married in a small church outside of town overlooking the Pacific. Betria told the kids that the waves thundered and crashed against the rocks that day and the sea looked endless. There were no pictures taken and only three people were at the ceremony: Betria, San, and the priest.

Of course, the four boys went to elementary and high school, and, of course, none of them went to college. One brother moved down to LA and eventually started working for a law firm doing their books. Another got married at 18 years old and was in and out of the house until getting under the wing of the union, doing construction and electrical work for the city. The third brother followed suit. Henry Oldez, after high school, stayed put. Nothing in school interested him. Henry only liked what he could get into after school. The people of the streets were his muse, leaving him with the tramps, the dealers, the struggling restaurateurs, the laundry mat hookers, the crooked cops and the addicts, the gang bangers, the bible humpers, the window washers, the jesus freaks, the EMT's, the old ladies pushing salvation by every bus stop, the guy on the corner and the guy in the alley, and the DOA's. Henry didn't have much time for anyone else after all of them.

Henry looked at himself in the mirror. The light was off and the room was dim. Sunlight streaked in through the dusty blinds from outside, reflecting into the mirror and onto Henry's face. He was short, 5' 2'' or 5' 3'' at most with stubby, skinny legs, and a wide, barrel shaped chest. He examined his face, which was a ravine of wrinkles and deep crows feet. His eyes were sunken and small in his head. Somehow, his pants were always one or two inches below his waistline, so the crack of his *** would constantly be peeking out. Henry's deep, chocolate colored hair was  that of an ancient Native American, long and nearly touched the tip of his belt if he stood up straight. No one knew how long he had been growing it out for. No one knew him any other way. He would comb his hair incessantly: before and after a shower, walking around the house, watching television with Betria on the couch, talking to friends when they came by, and when he drove to work, when he had it.

Normal work, nine to five work, did not work for Henry. "I need to be my own boss," he'd say. With that fact stubbornly put in place, Henry turned to being a handy man, a roofer, and a pioneer of construction. No one knew where he would get the jobs that he would get, he would just have them one day. And whenever he 'd finish a job, he'd complain about how much they'd shorted him, soon to move on to the next one. Henry never had to listen to anyone and, most of the time, he got free lunches out of it. It was a very strange routine, but it worked for him and Betria had no complaints as long as he was bringing some money in and keeping busy. After Santiago died, she became the head of the house, but really let her boys do whatever they wanted.

Henry took a quick shower and blow dried his hair, something he never did unless he was in a hurry. He had a job in the east bay at a sorority house near the Berkley campus. At the table, still in his pajamas, he ate three leftover chicken thighs, toast, and two over easy eggs. Betria was still in bed, awake and reading. Henry heard her two dogs barking and scratching on her bedroom door. He got up as he combed his damp hair, tugging and straining to get each individual knot out. When he opened the door, the smaller, thinner dog, Boy Boy, shot under his legs and to the front door where his toy was. The fat, beige, pig-like one waddled out beside Henry and went straight for its food bowl.

"Good morning," said Henry to Betria.

Betria looked at Henry over her glasses, "You eat already?"

"Yep," he announced, "Got to go to work." He tugged on a knot.

"That's good. Dondé?" Betria looked back down at her spanish TV guide booklet.

"Berkley somewhere," Henry said, bringing the comb smoothly down through his hair.

"That's good, that's good."

"OK!" Henry sighed loudly, shutting the door behind him. He walked back to the dinner table and finished his meal. Then, Betria shouted something from her room that Henry couldn't hear.

"What?" yelled Henry, so she could hear him over the television. She shouted again, but Henry still couldn't hear her. Henry got up and went back to her room, ***** dish in hand. He opened her door and looked at her without saying anything.

"Take the dogs out to ***," Betria told him, "Out the back, not the front."

"Yeah," Henry said and shut the door.

"Come on you dogs," Henry mumbled, dropping his dish in the sink. Betria always did everyones dishes. She called it "her exercise."

Henry let the two dogs out on the lawn. The sun was curling up into the sky and its heat had melted all of the frost on the lawn. Now, the grass was bright green and Henry barely noticed the dark brown dead spots. He watched as the fat beige one squatted to ***. It was too fat to lifts its own leg up. The thing was built like a tank or a sea turtle. Henry laughed to himself as it looked up at him, both of its eyes going in opposite directions, its tongue jutted out one corner of his mouth. Boy boy was on the far end of the lawn, searching for something in the bushes. After a minute, he pulled out another one of his toys and brought it to Henry. Henry picked up the neon green chew toy shaped like a bone and threw it back to where Boy boy had dug it out from. Boy boy shot after it and the fat one just watched, waddling a few feet away from it had peed and laid down. Henry threw the toy a couple more times for Boy boy, but soon he realized it was time to go.

"Alright!" said Henry, "Get inside. Gotta' go to work." He picked up the fat one and threw it inside the laundry room hallway that led to the kitchen and the rest of the house. Boy boy bounded up the stairs into the kitchen. He didn't need anyone lifting him up anywhere. Henry shut the door behind them and went to back to his room to get into his work clothes.

Henry's girlfriend was still asleep and he made sure to be quiet while he got dressed. Tia, Henry's girlfriend, didn't work, but occasionally would put up garage sales of various junk she found around town. She was strangely obsessed with beanie babies, those tiny plush toys usually made up in different costumes. Henry's favorite was the hunter. It was dressed up in camouflage and wore an eye patch. You could take off its brown, polyester hat too, if you wanted. Henry made no complaint about Tia not having a job because she usually brought some money home somehow, along with groceries and cleaning the house and their room. Betria, again, made no complain and only wanted to know if she was going to eat there or not for the day.

A boat sized bright blue GMC sat in the street. This was Henry's car. The stick shift was so mangled and bent that only Henry and his older brother could drive it. He had traded a new car stereo for it, or something like that. He believed it got ten miles to the gallon, but it really only got six or seven. The stereo was the cleanest piece of equipment inside the thing. It played CD's, had a shoddy cassette player, and a decent radio that picked up all the local stations. Henry reached under the seat and attached the radio to the front panel. He never left the radio just sitting there in plain sight. Someone walking by could just as soon as put their elbow into the window, pluck the thing out, and make a clean 200 bucks or so. Henry wasn't that stupid. He'd been living there his whole life and sure enough, done the same thing to other cars when he was low on money. He knew the tricks of every trade when it came to how to make money on the street.

On the road, Henry passed La Rosa, the Mexican food mart around the corner from the house. Two short, tanned men stood in front of a stand of CD's, talking. He usually bought pirated music or movies there. One of the guys names was Bertie, but he didn't know the other guy. He figured either a customer or a friend. There were a lot of friends in this neighborhood. Everyone knew each other somehow. From the bars, from the grocery, from the laundromat, from the taco stands or from just walking around the streets at night when you were too bored to stay inside and watch TV. It wasn't usually safe for non-locals to walk the streets at night, but if you were from around there and could prove it to someone that was going to jump you, one could usually get away from losing a wallet or an eyeball if you had the proof. Henry, to people on the street, also went as Monk. Whenever he would drive through the neighborhood, the window open with his arm hanging out the side, he would usually hear a distant yell of "Hey Monk!" or "What's up Monk!". Henry would always wave back, unsure who's voice it was or in what direction to wave, but knowing it was a friend from somewhere.

There was heavy traffic on the way to Berkley and as he waited in line, cursing his luck, he looked over at the wet swamp, sitting there beside highway like a dead frog. A few scattered egrets waded through the brown water, their long legs keeping their clean white bodies safe from the muddy water. Beyond the swamp laid the pacific and the Golden Gate bridge. San Francisco sat there too: still, majestic, and silver. Next to the city, was the Bay Bridge stretched out over the water like long gray yard stick. Henry compared the Golden Gate's beauty with the Bay Bridge. Both were beautiful in there own way, but the Bay Bridge's color was that of a gravestone, while the Golden Gate's color was a heavy red, that made it seem alive. Why they had never decided to pain the Bay Bridge, Henry had no idea. He thought it would look very nice with a nice coat of burgundy to match the Golden gate, but knew they would never spend the money. They never do.

After reeling through the downtown streets of Berkley, dodging college kids crossing the street on their cell phones and bicyclists, he finally reached the large, A-frame house. The house was lifted, four or five feet off the ground and you had to walk up five or seven stairs to get to the front door. Surrounded by tall, dark green bushes, Henry knew these kids had money coming from somewhere. In the windows hung spinning colored glass and in front of the house was an old-timey dinner bell in the shape of triangle. Potted plants lined the red brick walkway that led to the stairs. Young tomatoes and small peas hung from the tender arms of the stems leaf stalks. The lawn was manicured and clean. "Must be studying agriculture or something," Henry thought, "Or they got a really good gardener."

He parked right in front of the house and looked the building up and down, estimating how long it would take to get the old shingles off and the new one's on. Someone was up on the deck of the house, rocking back and forth in an old wooden chair. He listened to the creaking wood of the chair and the deck, judging it would take him two days for the job. Henry knew there was no scheduled rain, but with the Bay weather, one could never be sure. He had worked in rain before - even hail - and it never really bothered him. The thing was, he never strapped himself in and when it would rain and he was working roofs, he was afraid to slip and fall. He turned his truck off, got out, and locked both of the doors. He stepped heavily up the walkway and up the stairs. The someone who was rocking back and forth was a skinny beauty with loose jean shorts on and a thick looking, black and red plaid shirt. She had long, chunky dread locks and was smoking a joint, blowing the smoke out over the tips of the bushes and onto the street. Henry was no stranger to the smell. He smoked himself. This was California.

"Who're you?" the dreaded girl asked.

"I'm the roofer," Henry told her.

The girl looked puzzled and disinterested. Henry leaned back on his heels and wondered if the whole thing was lemon. She looked beyond him, down on the street, awkwardly annoying Henry's gaze. The tools in Henry's hands began to grow heavy, so he put them down on the deck with a thud. The noise seemed to startle the girl out of whatever haze her brain was in and she looked back at Henry. Her eyes were dark brown and her skin was smooth and clear like lake water. She couldn't have been more then 20 or 21 years old. Henry realized that he was staring and looked away at the various potted plants near the rocking chair. He liked them all.

"Do you know who called you?" She took a drag from her joint.

"Brett, " Henry told her, "But they didn't leave a last name."

For a moment, the girl looked like she had been struck across the chin with a brick, but then her face relaxed and she smiled.

"Oh ****," she laughed, "That's me. I called you. I'm Brett."

Henry smiled uneasily and picked up his tools, "Ok."

"Nice to meet you," she said, putting out her hand.

Henry awkwardly put out his left hand, "Nice to meet you too."

She took another drag and exhaled, the smoke rolling over her lips, "Want to see the roof?"

The two of them stood underneath a five foot by five foot hole. Henry was a little uneasy by the fact they had cleaned up none of the shattered wood and the birds pecking at the bird seed sitting in a bowl on the coffee table facing the TV. The arms of the couch were covered in bird **** and someone had draped a large, zebra printed blanket across the middle of it. Henry figured the blanket wasn't for decoration, but to hide the rest of the bird droppings. Next to the couch sat a large, antique lamp with its lamp shade missing. Underneath the dim light, was a nice portrait of the entire house. Henry looked away from the hole, leaving Brett with her head cocked back, the joint still pinched between her lips, to get a closer look. There looked to be four in total: Brett, a very large man, a woman with longer, thick dread locks than Brett, and a extremely short man with a very large, brown beard. Henry went back

Briskly moving through brisk weather
Death under each step I take.
Time is up now, minds are turning
Fear and freeze about to break.

Polyester coverings buttoned tightly around her
Similar to feelings unable to unfasten.
Bound around her neck and made of fur,
Slide it off in a fit of passion.

Building up slowly during late autumn months,
Sadness and anxiety and desire.
Desire.
Desire.

Craving, itching, lusting for more;
Locked in an apartment and confined.
Books are my company and in them I explore
All of the worlds that have made my mind blind.

The girl with polyester coverings,
Hang up your coat.
It is time for a rediscovering
Of your very first note.

Most peculiarly of most things was that I thought all of this very fishy, daudry, drab, and boresome. This is where I turn on the second table lamp...

In a muster I arrived to the home of my aunt, where at once she drew me into the back of the house, down a flight of stairs made of tusk and bone into a catacomb where she kept a alive collection of wooly mammoths. She said the upkeep wasn't awfully horrendous as she had an invisible backdrop which led to a lion, a witch, and a wardrobe sort of thing. I stood in the gangway behind 10 foot high thigh bones waiting for one of the monstrous red beasts to come greet me, but what arrived was a very large elephant with longer tusks than usual. None of the red sillyness which I had dreamt of seeing in my previous years.

She could see I was not that impressed, and so I was led to another part of her home. Around the corner walked in my uncle in is superb and luxurious dress, reminiscent of 18th century British military fatigues. He said, "I bought the E.T. ride from Universal Studios, but as bringing the whole ride to my home I had them adapt a more suitable version to fit the property. A hangar opened and inside there were four chariots of orange and blue, diamond shaped school buses with their undersides aimed at withholding a V-shaped street. Then in two and two single file order all the classmates of my K-12 years arrived and took seat into the strappings of this 'ride' we were to take. Music played, John Williams even was produced by hologram, and after the ups and downs for several minutes we arrived to what I thought would inevitably be the forest, but rather was what I perceived was a Finnish town. The chariot I was in was stuck in the street, mud, rain, and soot entrenched us. I unbuckled the polyester straps and when I stood I realized that though the seats had built in urinals and toilets they were utterly noiseome to the senses. I followed a local girl to a food mart where I asked how I could find where I was but no one spoke a drop of English.

I corraled the group and told them to wait for me. I followed this girl who seemed quite younger than I to a small apartment in the uppermost floor of a very unsturdy chapel-like home several suburban blocks from our ride. She immediately removed her pants and I saw with my very own eyes that she was hairless and nubile. She insisted that we have a ****, and after I caressed her and complained too that she was far too young, she insisted that the age of consent in Germany was actually 13 yet she was 16. I remember it clearly. The most gigantuous feelings of pleasure as I mended a studio closet for my dining room furniture inside her ripening channel. Eventually after an hour we finished, she offered me a towel and some biscuits, which I consumed joyously.

Upon leaving her home I remembered that she had said we were in Germany, and so I produced a measure of Deutsch that I had been saving in my repetoir for the right moment. As Finnish is not my strongest language I was pleased of this and became instantly popular among the other candidates of our journey. This  E.T. ride is far different than  I remember it having been. Moments later I awoke quickly, a tuft of her black hair on my eiderdown comforter and a veil of tears from the merriment of glee shrouded over my face. After I rolled and balled into the soft feathers of my bedding, I twisted myself again into a knot, and allowed myself to rejoin the soporific treatice I was aiming for.

This is now where I turn off both lamps and go on watching films of a similar style.

Wishing You The Very Best,

Sir Martin Narrod

I keep my family of conscience
I shred my folly of heir
In case of torment or fondness
I never wear underwear.

.chris rea: god's great banana skin...

/ such random thoughts are a blessing, esp. after you've been walking for over 2 miles, in the cold and in the rain, with the setting sun... continually impressed by the nature of polyester clothing, how you feel the cold, but aren't cold at all, how you go back home and: you're dripping with sweat... /

the random thought?
about a saying, here's the schematic

synthetic a priori

                    4 + 6 = 10
                    IV + VI = X

                                         analytical a posteriori

which statement is true?
within the questioning parameters?
i think it's a trick question...
how else would you be able to
teach these statements and make
replica understandings of
said, statements?

(****... quickfire shots of syrupy
*****... **** me... give me the sweats,
and i'm not even constipated,
it must be the ***** doing
the magic... yeah... sober me?
doesn't like thinking...
but oddly enough, the drunk me?
pulls out philosophy,
no, not as some pretentious
high-brow interest...
   i just looked at philosophy as
a genre in literature,
nothing more)...

numbers, like letters...
or in the case of Roman numerals
(letters are numbers)...
i'm unsure whether you can arrive
at crafting them into existence
by analytical parameters,
i don't actually think
that you can conjure up numbers
from analyzing a priori,
given the ad continuum:
but... there was a point in time,
when / where: numbers weren't used...

Kant was a theist,
sorry...
  he says it plainly at the end
of his critique of pure reason...
in the transcendental methodology...
sure... he takes a "schizophrenic"
moment to write a thesis
and an antithesis on subjects like
cosmology...
but he's inclined, as i am,
counter to an atheist...
yes... god is probably a monster...
but a ******* gorgeous monster...
kinda like a femme fatale...
so what's not to like?

    but this thought didn't arrive
randomly,
and my consciousness
didn't hone in on it...
i didn't vector this thought
to an immediate conclusion...
the thought arrived,
and then: i had to make shrapnel
out of it...
the original thought was complex,
i had to make shrapnel out of it,
in order to put it back together,
so that a cognitive 3 seconds
could be rewritten in under 30 minutes
explaining, why the thought arose...

you know... when thinking
is detached from the moral (θ)-ought
you get to experience these "things"...
here's another schematic...

I + Φ (you put a key into a lock),
   Θ (you turn the key), O (the door opens),
hey presto... a free radical iota...
detached from both phi and theta...

i am free from making
a moral ought (i) or the immoral: ought (i) not?
i'm free, hence my concern for...
abstract questions...

back to the original schematic...

synthetic a priori

                    4 + 6 = 10
                    IV + VI = X

                                         analytical a posteriori

this actually has a theological
dimension,
supposing i am god...

   if i propose an analytical a priori
with a synthetic a posteriori...
well then...
             i can't change anything,
i can't actually make changes to...
with my omnipotence,
omniscience etc.
i already analyzed, a priori
the Kantian elevation to theology
comes, via me, stating...
if i analyzed the entirety of
creation...
            a priori ex nihil
(from the prior out of nothing)
how can i make a synthesis
in the a posteriori domain,
of the already existing things,
which didn't exist a priori,
since there was nothing,
and i already analyzed the potential
of nothing, and this potential
was realized as everything i would
know to exist... and i went along
with it anyway?

i'm starting to think that
the realm of analytical a priori
doesn't exist for mortals...
the gods can muse this ****-show
of a dimension over and over again...
we're more (being mortals)
synthetic a posteriori...
oh don't get me wrong,
i believe we have the capacity
to comprehend analytical a priori
but it's an analytical a- priori...
we've reached the limits
of the microscope, the telescope,
and the hadron collider...
or on our way to exhaust that...
still being left with an intact mesh of...
the orbits... summer, winter, autumn, spring...
but this thing with this schematic:

synthetic a priori

                    4 + 6 = 10
                    IV + VI = X

                                         analytical a posteriori

how can i conjure an understanding
of IV + VI = X...
analytically a priori...
when... i have no hindsight /
prior to understanding of said rubric?
well... with Roman you could say:
analytical a priori,
given the Ancient Romans already
had the letters I, V, X...
but... if you didn't have the concept
of measurements prior,
of arithmetic...
how can you analyze something...
that doesn't exist?
so... you had to synthesize a priori,
working from the letters I, V, X...
to conjure up "numbers"...
  numerals... you had to create these
numbers by a synthetic a posteriori
method...
and the 4 + 6 = 10...
        well... you analyzed the a posteriori
synthesis, and threw I, V, X out...
and began the second wave of mathematics...
and this is where, authentically...
analytical a priori comes from...
based on I (1), V (5), X (10)...
                    came IV (4), came VI (6)...
don't mathematicians treat their language
as that of or equivalent to the gods?

now... for the cultural exchange program
that i promised...

on the great British isles...
you have a variety of languages
& dialects,
i'm so sorry that the Scottish
"forgot theirs"...

but when you have something
akin to

English: red
Cymru: coch

or right... they have their Pict
Gael?

Pict Gaelic: dearg
Irish: dearg
Cornish: rudh

we'll require a second word...
what word, what words..
life!

English: life,
Cymru: bywyd
Pict Gaelic: beatha
Irish: saol
Cornish: bewnans...

back, "home"...
we also have sub-groups
in terms of linguistics...

there are the Kashubians...
and there are the Silesians,
and, there are...
the Kurpie...
akin the Welsh, the Pict,
the Ire,

and their language looks like so...
again, borrowing from
red and life...

Polak: czerń
Kashubian: czôrny...
  but that can be disputed...
why?
     czerwień is not actually
a noun, but an adjective...
a quality of being associated with red...
czerwony? that's a male
adjective...
   and the female adjective
is czerwona...
                ****...
a color has to be something...
the noun adjective that's blood...
Polak: krwawy (czerwony)
Kashubian: czerwiony
Silesian: čerwůny
ah...
   Kurpian... high polish?
Masovian?
harder to find the words...
have to use alternatives...

Kurpian: caban
Polak: tępak
Kashubian: osoł
  Silesian: yjzel...
(idiot, imbecile)

you know how hard hard it is
to find a Kurpian to Polak
translator?
i can't find one to boil down
to the examples or either
red or life,
i'm reduced to choosing other
words...
like...

   Kurpian: chwat...
Polak: chłopak
Silesian: bajtel
Kashubian: knôp...
(boy)

Kurpian: jédło
Polak: jedzenie...
Kashubian: jedzenié
alternative to Silesian:
  jadło, i.e.: it ate...
past-participle in
the verb...
let's see what the Silesians
call it...
Silesians: well.. a variation..
chlyb
godka
mietła
masa... all things you can eat...
(edible food)

only a word, like the Kurpian
word akin to kotnå
reveals that Vikings passed via "us"...
kotnå?
  an impregnated sheep...
with young...

Kurpian: łańï truń!
Polak: nie mów!
Kashubian: ni gôdac!
Silesian: ńy godka!
(don't speak!)

mind you... Kurpian translation
is hard to find...
and you almost wonder...
at the British isles...
you think, us, Polaks...
do not have sub-linguistic groups
in our ranks,
like your Welsh, your Pict,
your Irish?!
guess again...
you had them all along...
and you thought...
the Polaks were
a homogenous culture...
all this time...
primarily because our culture
wasn't multicultural...
oh but it was... but on the subtle side
of history...
mind you...
defenders of the galaxy?
i knew gamora wasn't white...
but... **** me...
even if black or hispanic...
she looked so **** attired in green...
i was thinking:
absinthe cherub, absinthe cherub...
and forgot about glorifying
Zoe Saldana in all that choc...
what?
   a green skinned chic?
                    if i can forget about
the existence of chocolate...
i'll just anything that moves...
but i knew she wasn't white...
i hate chocolate...
          give me an absinthe girl any
day of the week...
       yeah...
only the English have complex
ethnicity encompassing
a single language...
only the English...
                 like **** they are...
at least my linguistic variation
is suited to a bundle of words...
Welsh?! Gaelic?!
  completely different languages...
at least in my part of the world
all that is deviating
is a choice of variant nouns!
but then again, the English
speaking world....
        how's the new pronoun
dictum coming along?
you keeping up with...
   appeasing the new crazies?
oh... you are?!
    well... kudos and applause!

p.s. guess what happens with appeasing
the new crazies... guess...
i'll tell you...
you **** around with grammar,
some grammatical pedant will raise
his head up from the crowd and say
something like:
               what?!
and then the old crazies rise up...
and... your, ahem, little discussion
about changing the rules of grammar
to "ensure" that the language is
kept, "intact"?
      see... mm... hmm... the old crazies?
the old crazies have their own
methods...
they're of the obligation:
let my gun do the talking...
  and then...
  you get pol *** arithmetic,
of skulls...
           being counted in an abacus
of heaping up, "debris"...
         see... these new crazies
are bugging me...
  they're bugging me...
because the old crazies didn't
attack grammar,
and whatever delusion they had...
i couldn't see it...
the new crazies?
they're attacking grammar,
and the delusion they have...
is... associated with something
i can see as being self-evidently untrue...

the new crazies...
******* spinners... fakers...
    i prefer the old crazies...
at least their delusions had ambitions
to deceive in the realm of
the unseen...
       the unproved, and never to be
proven...
these new crazies...
i am supposed to speak asylum talk?!
so... society is the new asylum
with the past asylums being
abolished?!
who gave caffeine to these news
crazies?!
******* sane people's naive pandering...
while the depressed man?
hey boy... hey, hey, hey boy...
noose!
i've lost all sympathy for
the victims of a psychotic
version of a repressed P.T.S.D. example...
the mad have hijacked language,
disorientated grammar...
and... b'a'ah, b'a'ah...
                 no...
                              i'm with the old
crazies...
                    at least they're the ones
that can inflict genuine grievance...
rather this policing of restricting
     the orthodoxy of the use of language.

p.s.
i found only two paradoxes in this
world...
    schadenfreude: feeding a pleasure
from the misery of others...
as...
  finding wisdom in others' own
forsake of an antithesis of
universal application...
  mainly that, associated:
            to a self-gratifying benefit...
the joke ends within the confines
of schadenfreude...
as does passable "wisdom" attached
to instragram novelty of the "maxim"
by your wisened sages
of the selfie...
  
                  i've been among the russians,
i know what the true uber looks like...
you hitchhike...
hitchhiking? forget that?
ponzie scheme albatross thingy
of a worth of a british mensch?
    funny... a people can so easily
forget the practice of hitchhiking...
so easily: entertaining individual rights...
and: innocent until proven
guilty until some next
               teddy bundy comes along...
and then it's all: ooh! ah! woo'ah!

   you know, i don't like the cartesian
chiral dynamic,
the whole: nietzsche take...
sum ergo cogito...
          i don't like the:

innocentes quoadusque (qua esse)
                           reus....    inversion...

an innocent man might hang...
well... if you have the death penalty:
too late to regurgitate the
original statements...

but? where's the element of redemption
for the innocent man?
why are so many people captivated
by the shawshank redemption?
there's a redemption story...
   in the inverted game?
a jimmy saville walks off scot-free...

the continental model doesn't make
sense with a death penalty...
but without one?
redemption... the atlas "paradox"...
one man usually burdens the fate
of a reciprocate of the unit of one...
but not the many...

me getting laid or not getting laid
is as important to me as:
whether i know about last year's
snowfall...
*** *** ***... all that sort of
******* in the western minds...
*** *** but no children!
recreational procreation without...
any procreation... to begin with...

         i'll admit...
english humour is funny...
but schadenfreude is a borrowed term...
hence the lost in translation
element...
           the english are terrible at
appreciating if not simply applying
the original zeppelin bomb...
after a while: the english just became
annoying toy-whips
of ***** replicas...
       the english knew elevated slap-stick...
with monty python...
with fawlty towers...
          they borrowed a term like
schadenfreude and completely lost the plot...
they once, upon a time,
chanced to play a game of linguistic
comedy...
            
                 i'm pretty ******* sure
the germans relate to schadenfreude in a different
way... i'm guessing:
the deutsche are not prone to ridicule as
the english are...
               the aunglisch are prone
to ridicule out of a sentiment of spite
than out of a repose for giggles...
        
          i don't understand the german sense
of humour,
     but understanding the english attempting
to "understand" the german sense of humour
is an enigma in an enigma in a per se...

such integrated back into
the ol' continental ways...
                       kudos to the brits...
bringing back the commonwealth to stereotype
us europeans with a negative "circumstance"...
now them: ******* up to "correct"
their integration policies... for the commonwealth
peoples of the united wordly wealth of
made in china plastic toys!

     a **** among the brits has
the audacity to tell a german he's not
supposed to feel at home on these isles...
sure... and i will never feel quiet at home
in Islamabad either!
               so? equal count of hubris!
that's the only thing that ****** me about
these isles... god i love this language...
but... when you get your afghani hounds
on me to do your ***** work?!

      even though i'm not: deutsche?!
i'll ******* pretend to be deutsche!
           i'm not here to mop up your failed
integration policies...
i settled on keeping my language...
they settled on keeping their sharia,
their **** pajamas and curry...
while adamantly rejecting their language...
in order to implement their desired changes
by subverting your language...
and you gave your language on a *******
platter...
    
    by subverting your language
to accept their cultural tattoos...
  let me tell you: if a people don't respect
their own culture,
by way of god, by way of language...
and they are "integrating": without speaking
their native mutterzunge?
they're not respecting either culture...
mongrels ahoy!
   what happened to the african-h'americans
not speaking a word of african?

what will they do, ascribe themselves
to ******* scots,
left with no gaelic and more a finnegans' wake
accent gymnastics of some irvine welsh?
nae for no: some glaswegian smart-***
excess of nouns?
      
hell... they would have never built
a colliseum if they saw:
1 + 4 + 6 + 9 = 20
   i.e. I + IV + VI + IX = **
            imagine... a society where letters
worked perfectly as sounds
and as arithmetic concepts of measure.

lucky for me the roman empire never
conquered
the lands i come from...
always with the brits being...
oh so so proud having been conquered
by the romans...
what's the prize... archeological sites?!

much respect as great britain...
but... *****... please...
don't pucnh below the waist...
importing your commonwealth dogs
to mark you out among all the other
europeans like some prized asset with
an inkling into h'american affairs...
thanks to you: i'm bored of looking up
the telescope of h'american ****
with their waning cultural export
of a worthwhile entertainment of appreciating
their music.

The Affair

I fell in love with childhood,
he wore a red cape
made of polyester plaid,
tiny stitches of lines
circulated around his palm.
He never wore a mask,
his memories wore enough of one,
a fog remnant of a dream,
his home he’d never see again
all along the river, led up to a lake.
It didn’t matter anyway,
a wedge upon two brick walls
was a plaque – or a warning –
a memorial, perhaps, but
all succumbed to his pain,
every inch crumbled to dust.  
That’s when I took his childhood away.
I fell in love with memories.

She stood up against the wooden bar lit by a stale football field that shined florescent green and highlighted polyester blue like a muse of Van Gogh or Galileo. Her hair ran down the nape of her neck like a ****** waterfall and the light of the bar highlighted her sphinx like eyes as she turned and caught his eye. He stood at a small table away from the main bar with a couple of friends who were telling stories of their old college days and he, half-listening, quickly looked away, faking to scratch his eye, for he knew he had been caught looking at the back of her and she, with her women's intuition of being observed and knowing this, kept looking and he knowing the only way not to show he had been caught was to look away quickly and very obviously; like a bad actor caught dumb and silent, clueless of their next line. They blushed and shared the heat of embarrassment in their cheeks with the sounds of worn dollar bills slapping hard against the smooth wood of the bar, the bar man eyeing it angrily as cigarette smoke surrounded them and slowly drifted up like a lost soul toward the ceiling and the piano man, eyes tight shut played for everyone there when no-one cared to listen, all underneath the dim light of the bar as they strained to look away from one another, trying to find something they could put their focus upon, but, at the same time, wanting very much to look back and have their eyes meet by mistake all over again.

He focused on the design of the bathroom placards that were in the right corner of the tiny bar where you had to turn sideways and touch shoulder's with every soul inside just to get a drink. He feigned interest in the bronze design of the men's bathroom: a tiny boy looking down at his pecker as he ****** a 1/2 inch thick stream into what the man gathered to be a sunflower ***. The boy was thrusting his hips forward, both of his hands on his side, and he showed no smile, no grin of satisfaction or victory, just a stark, blank face, as if he were thinking "I am peeing in this ***. That is all." The women's bathroom sign was of a young girl with the same kind of *** the boy had been ******* in, but it was missing the sunflower and was replaced by the *** of the girl. She stared up into the sky and into the ceiling lights and was dramatically reaching for a butterfly or bird - he couldn't make out which - something with wings and made him think of a basic metaphor that this poor little girl just wants to get off the *** and be free like the birds and butterflies and clouds in the wide blue sky.

She focused on the man's shoes. She looked at the black shine and the pristine black shoe laces, all looking like everything had just been purchased that day. "There is not a single scuff on them and the way this man cuffs his pants only a single turn," she thought to herself, "Tells me he has something of a style on him". Not so run of the mill. Something special. Something of interest.* But then, she was annoyed by the cuff of the pants because she remembered that was what all the schoolboys in her prep school would do when the day was rainy or the boys rode their bikes home from school or they were nerds. The memory immediately turned her off of the man all together, but luckily, she put her gaze back on the jet-black, seemingly un-touched leather that told her success, class, and security.

The man heard a loud Cheer's!" from his table, abruptly bringing him out of his distraction. He was forced to turn and as he did, he made sure not to look up. He kept his eyes on the table and looked for the half-full beer with the worn Budweiser coaster underneath it. He could see from the his top periphery that she was still facing him but she was looking down at something toward the floor. He fumbled with his large hands for his glass and panned his eyes up slightly. The woman, seeing the movement at the table, looked up. She stared back to where she had first caught him looking at her and waited. The man felt her looking at him and in the same instant, saw the faded Budweiser coaster and reached for his beer. He picked the glass up and as the second Cheer! was yelled, he clashed his glass against all the others, all the while keeping his head not toward his friend's faces, but turned in the direction of the bar toward the girl. He smiled at her as he lowered his glass, not taking a drink. His friend slapped him on the back and told him," You gotta' drink after the cheers or its bad luck," and so he did, still staring dumbly at her as he did. She nodded at him with a self-conscious and embarrassed grin, raised her nearly gone low-ball glass of gin and tonic and tipped it toward him and turned around to face the bar.

"I"ll stand here and wait for him to come up to me," she thought, "And if he doesn't the man is a coward and a louse and not worth my time. I have looked twice now and there is some rule in some magazine that I read somewhere, that if you look twice at a man that it is sign, not a coincidence. No, it has a purpose and though I barely know what reason I want this man to look at me other then to get a drink out of him and maybe some conversation, I am certain I have looked twice, maybe even three times. Yes. I have looked at him and I have made my interest known and now I must wait for him to either come or stay with his drunken friends. They look like frat boys cheering like that. They look like drunken, silly frat boys that wouldn't know the first thing about chivalry. Hell, they probably couldn't even spell the ****** word." She laughed under her breath and smiled maliciously to herself and caught her own reflection in the mirror and, for an moment, wanted to quickly look away. Her face did not frighten her, for she was a beautiful woman, not her skin, which was milky white with the faintest and gentlest dash of rouge on each cheek, nor her chocolate colored curls that bounded like boulder's down a hillside. She turned away from a look upon her eye she had not seen or had recognized in a very long time. Her eyes were frightened.

"Frightened?" she wondered.

The man put his beer glass on the table on top of the coaster. The foam rested at the bottom of the cup like the thin layer of ice that blows over a frozen lake, barely there at all passing with the wind. He stared at her back and liked how she leaned on her right hip and put the toe of her left high-heel to the ground, rocking the nose of the shoe back and forth like she was thinking about something playfully frivolous. Behind him, the noise of his friends became a hollow echo, drowned out by the draw of this woman. She swung her left heel back and forth like a pendulum trying to hypnotize him. Someone touched his shoulder but he shrugged the hand away as in this echo chamber he could only hear the music change tracks on the juke box. The song had changed to an old Ottis Redding song and there was nothing else in the world that he wanted to listen to in that moment. As he watched her, leaning into the bar seemingly all alone, no boyfriend or girlfriend in sight, he saw her raise her glass to the barman and knew she had something by the gentle nod of the back of her head. He then saw her point with her left finger and tap the rim of the glass. Her drink was empty. She wanted another drink. He would buy her another drink.

"There is nothing in this world that a man is more responsible for than getting a woman like this a drink," he nodded, thinking to himself and trying to pick up his courage,"One that plays with my heart like a kitten would a spool of yarn, and yet also like a vulture who would peck out the eyes of a dead man in the desert. This is nothing more then that obligation. A rule passed down from man to man, from age to age, where chivalry was not for the base reason to lay with the woman, but to honor them, praise them lightly as the rain from a heavy mist and show them to the pedestal every woman, whether they wish to admit it or not, do wish for, sincerely do at least once in there life." He readjusted his belt and realigned his shirt that had gotten crooked after the celebratory cheer and thought some more,"I'm not going to do that here, this pedestal stuff. This is more like a step toward that pedestal. Yes. A step toward the shrine she wants to trust she deserves and will one day end up on. And this shrine is all cast and painted in the blurry french film noir of dream, is it not? Aren't dreams the only thing we hope to one day come true? How often - when and if they do come true - they can sometimes disappoint and eventually turn sour like a bad orange. I hope she is drinking and that wasn't just a tonic water. If this woman doesn't drink I don't think any of this will be worth anything at all."

She stood there serene and angelic, the hand that held her drink now resting on the base of the bar. Behind the man, he heard the chatter of his friends and the drone of football scores and player updates coming from the ten or more televisions that hung from the ceiling. Someone reached out to touch his shoulder but missed him as he left the table. His name then echoed behind him but soon the sound evaporated as dew does that rests on blades of grass in a summer morning to a summer afternoon. There was only her and her smell that had drifted to his table and shrouded him with the scent of white chocolate and smoke and her delicate, porcelain hand that had held up the drink shyly but not weakly, in passing demand without that demanding quality drunk people can get like at bars sometimes. He approached her, hovered behind her, but she did not turn, and then came up to the bar to lean into. He did not turn to look at her, though he wanted to very badly, but looked down at her low-ball glass with two half-melted ice cubes and a used lime. The smell of gin came from the glass and the man smiled to himself and put his hand up to signal the bartender.

"If this man orders his drink first and walks back to that table with all of his drunken friends, I am giving up men all together," the woman thought to herself," * Tonight and forever! If he can put his hand up and not even turn to look at me, as I was doing, I thought, to be very flirtatious but gentle, then I see no reason at all to keep going with men. They are barbarians that only want to eat, drink, sleep, and fornicate with women that are easy and provide no real challenge at all in their life. If he wants it easy, he can have it as easy as he wants, but not with me. No sir. Not with me ever. Not with me for a night, an hour, a minute, or even a second."

The bartender, a stout slightly overweight man that was a little over forty with streaks of grey in his thin, short-cut hair, looking very much like he should be home reading with a nice cup of tea by his side rather than in the bar serving drinks to stranger's, approached the man and asked him what he would like.

"Two gin and tonics please," the man said, "With a slice of lime and four ice-cubes in each."

"And what kind of gin, sir?"

The man turned to the woman, "What label do you drink?" he asked.

"Pardon me?" she stuttered startled, her eyebrows raised.

"Your drinking gin, aren't you?" He nodded his head toward the woman's empty glass. The tiny lines of transparent lime skin floated on top of the water that had gathered from the melting ice-cubes.

"Yes, I am. I was just about to order."

"I'll get this round and you'll get the next one."

"Any gin is fine."

The man turned to the bartender," Tanqueray, please bartender."

He nodded and went to make the drinks.

"Your very perceptive," the woman said as she turned to face him.

"I try."

"I saw you from across the bar, but was afraid to walk up to your table for fear of getting ambushed by all of your friends. Those are your friends, right?"

"Yes," he nodded as he looked over his shoulder at them, "Old college friends all with old stories of college that, truthfully, bring me little or no joy to even hear."

"Then why come at all?" she asked, "You seem smart enough to know that if you meet up with old anything, you'll be hearing about the old times all night."

"I was forced to come."

"Someone getting divorced?"

"No," he laughed, "The opposite. Married."

"Well, I hope it's not you or this would look very bad if your fiance walked in."

"And why's that?"

She clicked her tongue and turned to look at the shelves stocked with every kind of liquor. The bottles reflected the soft orange glow of the lights that circled the bar and the colors of the television screens. The man continued to look at the woman who had turned her back on him and caught their reflection in a bottle of Jack Daniel's. He waited for a response, but she stood there silent, knowing she was playing with him. Behind him, his friends were growing louder and a tray of shots had found its way to their table. The waitress who had brought the drinks, polite and with a smile, asked them to try and keep it down. They shouted "YES'S and screamed "YEAH'S" with moronic smiles on their faces, their heads nodding up and down like a dog playing fetch. The waitress giggled a thank and walked away shaking her head with disgust when she was out of sight.

"Well," she said,"You did just order two gin and tonics and I think if your fiance walked in with you chatting with me with the same drink in both of our hands, I think she would be a little upset. I know I would be."

"Perhaps we could act like we are old grammar school friends and just happened to run into one another?"

"Well, that would be a lie."

"Yes, that would be a lie."

"Which would mean we were hiding something from said wife."

"And what would that be?"

"That you approached me after I looked at you, perhaps the look from me wasn't flirtatious, maybe I thought you looked familiar, like I had seen you somewhere, and you came up to me and ordered me a drink and started a conversation with me, much like we are doing right now."

"What's wrong with conversation?" The bartender approached them and placed the two drinks in front of the man. The man took out his wallet without losing his gaze on the woman, took out a twenty and slid it toward the bartender. The bartender took the twenty, paused for a moment to see if the man wanted any change, but left when he saw he didn't want any by not moving.

"Conversation can lead to very dangerous things," the woman said playfully and wise.

"Your here by yourself and your not stupid; someone is going to come up to talk to you."

"And your that somebody?"

"I'm sure I'm not the first one tonight."

"Your sweet."

"I try," he said as he slid the drink over to here,"Your drink."

"What should we drink too?" She asked and raised her glass, the light above them reflecting in the ice-cubes and thick glass of the high-ball.

"Conversation," he said proudly and with a smile, "And the danger that it brings."

They clinked their glasses together, their eyes never leaving one another, and they both took a long drink.

"I'm not here with anybody and I'm not expecting anybody tonight either," the woman said.

"What's your name?"

"Why?"

"I want to be able to tell my friends I met a very interesting woman, but they won't believe me if I don't give them a name."

"I'm standing right here, silly. Go and tell them you met the most interesting woman in your entire life, look over at me when they ask you what my name is, then point over to me and I'll wave."

"You'll be here?"

"I'll be here."

"Promise?"

"Go, go, go," she repeated, pushing him back toward his table, "You bought me a drink, didn't you? The least I can do is wave to your drunken college friends."

The man walked back to his table, glancing quickly over his shoulder, trying to hide it, before he reached the table. He arrived to all of them drunk, beer spilt on the table and an ashtray full of punched out cigarettes and ground up cigars. Every one of them were rocking back and forth with each other, their arms sloppily hung around their neighbor's shoulders, their eyes blood shot with their mouth half-cracked open barely breathing in the smoky, beer smelling air. The man struggled to wedge his way into the circle, and when he did, he tried to get the groups attention by screaming an

the three women in my life...
ms. amber
    Sophia Philos
and          
   marquees de bourbon -

ah...
  
    polyester is an absolutely
genius material...
just bought myself a new hoodie..

it's like... you walk out
on a cold night...
      and you can feel the cold...
but you're not actually cold...
you actually end up
coming home, *******,
and realizing that you're
sweating...

plus... when you wash it...
it literally comes out dry...
polyester is genius...
thank you w. h. caruthers...

plastic in clothing...
ha... who would have thought...
obviously there's also
35% cotton in the hoodie...
well... a hoodie that's 2 in one...
one side all polyester...
the other 35% to 65% (cotton).

i still believe that φ (phi) and θ (theta) used to be a grapheme, akin to the Trojan / Roman æ, cf. Virgil's the Æneid, then too a γraφeme in german: ß, not necessarily scharfes, but rutschig s... a slippery s... s the marijuana fiend all hippy and ****, then the z, using Beat vocabulary slang, the suited and booted for either war or the office environment □ (square)... i still believe φθ used to be a grapheme... separated at birth... as with V so too Φ and Θ have the prime incisors' touch the bottom lip to be said, honestly, the bottom lip makes more bone-interactions than the upper-lip; criticism is a type of medicine, you either take it... or bite the bullet. but hear a German utter the disparity: noticeable given Rammstein: ich v. sachen: i.e. ich (-sh) v. sashen or simply sahen - maybe learning Yiddish would help - the error, apart from the Malachi introduction of polytheism with two Elijahs? well, i helped you once, i won't help you again, one proof means no repetition, boorish Moses dragged from high status and belief in a birthright to garbage, from the right-hand of the Pharaoh that Joseph was, to the lowly pits of bricklayers - English bricklayers are 'appy, indeed the Grecian dispute over the surd Ηη (eta), on a hunch... hitch-hiking letter - Hitchens attacked mother Teresa, i attacked John Paul the soocoond... a Turk with grievances illuminated the story further... pope forgave the ****** in a prison cell, once law was enforced, the mighty confusion between sins (perversions) and outright bookmaker's testimony concerning the gambling of laws. i still believe φθ used to be a grapheme... look toward languages that instil the pressures of tongue-tying-tornadoes... if it weren't the grapheme ß, i'd say it was a dance between s und zee, in that the tango was danced, and the mantis convened its presence with alimony or other tactics for the hangman to fidget on the noose; obviously as confusing as to place Backgammon alphabetically coerced with ßimilarity.

poetry hasn't been altogether banished from
the republic - i concede that poetry is
best written in a frenzy - drunk - intoxicated
with whatever is deemed necessary,
prior to the battle of Hastings (1066), Harold's
army drank and drank and drank -
berserker alternative to *****? mushrooms -
so if no battle, no vain hope to compete
with Achilles - then in poetry too, phantoms
in white, cutting and bruising with every word
emerge - a solemn pledge to the art.
well, poetry hasn't been totally banished,
it's an undercurrent - manoeuvring tactic
of intelligent argument - so many poetic techniques
are used when one suddenly appears ridiculous,
sooner or later people fall back on metaphor,
with such sly excuses: oh, not really, metaphorically
speaking - oh but that's just imagery - etc. etc.
poetry is kept, precious in every circumstance in
the **** sapiens brain - to keep appearances -
to sober up - oddly enough - poetry as a method
to sober up from a frenzy of rhetoric - the 'not really'
of things that pass - it's the usefulness of disguise,
the ridiculous and pompous can suddenly take
on priestly demur - suddenly any traces of religiosity
disintegrate, and a cold and hardened heart emerges
with crystalline belief in the ruler, the protractor
and all manners of *the sensibility of science,
anything not humbled by science is deemed childish...
chillingly this childishness is also the childishness
waving a machete or firing a Kalashnikov - oh how
childish it becomes - the ***** to take someone's life...
great disputes in heaven, about four angels are
pop, Gabriel, Michael, Raphael and Satan -
total pop culture up there - anyway, it's not the glorification
of science is fairing well, to glorify science while
being a pauper with a limited scientific vocabulary is
already entrenched, so much so that the proof is there
regarding what's happening in western societies -
to create a universal vocabulary - a tactful one,
a vocabulary that does not impress because it does not
offend - a silk vocabulary, scientifically speaking
a smooth vocabulary, perfected to be pitched so that
the overall un-offended apathy of the listener is kept,
gay is out, homosexual is in, god forbid you mention
the word pederast or simply **** - god forbid,
bite your nails, say your mea culpa prior to jumping
into bed and all is well on the western front -
it's a revolution, didn't you hear? they say iron chains
i say liquorice tangles that can be eaten through -
apologies if your palette is not suited to the particular
Anise; but a revolution nonetheless - how did we get
to the point of trying to limit other people's vocabulary?
but of course certain words contain certain emotions,
better feel dread and disgust than an emotional flatline
with no emotion present. regarding pop culture
in heaven, ever hear the names: zehpanuryay,
abirzehyay, atarigiash, nagarniel, anpiel, naazuriel,
sastiel? you probably haven't - but it's not like you'd
keep names such as: the family of amine-boranes,
ammonia-carboxyborane, tamoxifen, paraaldehyde,
dihydropyran, polyester / dacron / mylar made from
dimethyl tereφθalate and ethylene glycol...
so what's more ridiculous? funny enough, the only
remaining aspect of the English language retaining
its roots in Saxony is expressed in chemistry,
the obvious lack of hyphen usage - chemistry is the
only revealing essence of English as having origins
in German, the excessive compounding of words,
chemical nouns that require a breathing technique
and a good optical scalpel to pronounce them -
as is well known, Germans don't believe in keeping
shrapnel, they see wordy shrapnel they get the grammatical
kiln out and melt everything together, e.g.
staatlichverantwortung (duty to the state, civic duty),
only in chemistry is the German a thick block of writing,
elsewhere it's aquatic or even gaseous - one
word jokes: Richard - ****... Mr. W. Kerr - Wayne.

I have longed for this year since fourth grade
When I learned what a val-e-dic-tor-ian was
And realized I wanted to be one.

I have longed for this year since I was fifteen
And wanted to leave home
Go out and explore the bigger world
Free of parents and noisy siblings.

I have longed for this year since my first college tour
And I saw the hubbub
The libraries, the labs, the dorms, the giant sweatshirts
And noticed how small and quiet my high school was.

We picked out caps and gowns
Red
We lead the pep rallies now
The loudest yet
We're taking physics, and calculus, and the SATs
Feeling scholarly
We picked out how our names appear on our diplomas
First M. Last
We have our licenses
Drive to school
We fill out college applications endlessly
And endlessly...
We picked our prom theme
Great Gatsby
We're getting lazy very quickly
Senioritis

Graduation keeps us going
Graduation is the goal
Graduation is the light at the end of the tunnel
Graduation in June
Graduation in red polyester
Graduation in the sun
Graduation is the end

But wait.
Hold up.
Stop.
Stop.
STOP!

Seven more months with you?
You, who I've stared at for four years?
You, whose smiles make my day?
You, whose face I look for in crowds?
You, who are the most amazing person I've ever met?
You, who I haven't even asked out?
You, who have no idea who I feel?
You, who might by some miracle possibly feel the same way?
You, who I'll regret never making a move with for the rest of my life?
You?
Seven. Months.?

HOLD UP SENIOR YEAR SLOW DOWN GRADUATION THERE'S A BOY.

Did you know that every time he searched your eyes,
While he pushed deep-
That his emotions passion and lust was equivalent to her?
For every time he traced his finger tip down your spine;
your hands grasped to cover more surface.
Cotton.
Polyester.
Satin,
as you braced for smooth impact.
He only understood the similar love language he shared with her.
With you-
craving of possessive feelings,
Proving your worth to him
asking for time via a clock whom hands couldn’t unwind
Separate.
Disintegrate.
A Minaj a trios-
unbeknownst to you existed,
Co-starring you
For every soft connection within each curve...
Your identity was a reflection of another.
For all the things you projected
Marriage.
House.
Dog.
Children.
His capability of taking you to ecstasy,
Lead you here
Had you any clue?
This little game called life,
Excluded the other woman (you).

that night, i wore a polo shirt.
i thought hey, i'm going to a friend's
dorm, no need to dress up, right?
so i wore a polo shirt, a yellow and blue and pink
thing. i'd bought it from a charity shop
only weeks earlier, when i was still exploring
a new university town
and finding not-so-hidden gems;
and sure, it was three sizes too big
but it was comfortable, and made me feel safe.

turns out, you didn't care about polo shirts
or tank tops. you cared about what was underneath
and i was drunk enough to let you - or,
well, not really let you, but i didn't need to dress up
so i wore baggy clothes and a smile
so i had half a bottle of jack daniels
and i had a nineteen year old point to prove
and i had a pill that you gave me
and i had - sorry, have - a therapist's bill.

but this isn't about you. i don't write about you.
i make a point of not writing about you,
actually. which is to say that i write about you
in a way that doesn't let you hurt me anymore.
i write about what i was wearing
(did i deserve it? in my 1970s male t-shirt?)
or what i was drinking
(it was university)
or how i tried to throw myself into a river
in the aftermath
(but i didn't, because i got thirsty, and i didn't
want to die thirsty, so i went home).
no, i'm writing about the polo shirt i was wearing.

cotton, i think. polyester, probably.
the amazing technicolour haze of am i sober enough for this?
who knows how many iterations
of the same lancaster charity shop
it circled through, old men with families
and wives and kids -
it probably saw birthdays and christmases
and, safely tucked in the back of a closet,
shielded itself from the almost-crisis of cuban missiles.

and then, me. a nineteen year old
branching out into the world for the first time;
a lover of poetry, maker of music, naïve and beautiful.
then, it was just a polo shirt, and i wore it
as long as it was laundered, for a month or so,
until december. not that i stopped wearing it
because it was cold. it just reminded me of hands
and hands and hands and
****, how many hands can a man have?
how long will i have to feel them?

i didn't shower the day after, just slept.
a hangover, right? just a hangover.
and then, when the hot water in my dorm
daily ticked on, i washed every inch of myself
to get rid of you, and your foam banana shower gel
that your mother probably told you to buy.

so, what compensation do you owe me?
what price should i put on things?
you touch it, so you pay for it.
one charity shop shirt, three pounds please.

Intently silent and skulking
Bleeding polyester paranoia
For some time I stand behind you
Creating mindless afterthoughts

However far from distance
See those solid veins
Where crimson tears rain down
Breaking the wary vase below

Shatter the lens of the polaroid joke
Taking the salty hand
And mix the unruly strands
Weaving uncertain eulogies

Dead leaves and shattered bones
Take form, opening endless eyes
To days less travelled
And nights awkwardly hidden

A simple granule changes time
Where a heart slowed- stopped
Whirring quietly- pausing- to breathe
Then nothing matters again

To say that you love me would make me an Ersatz being,
A substitute
An inferior entity woven like nylon;
Over
And
Over,
To be used as a shirt.
Nothing more than to cover another's body
To hide them in synthetic fibres,
A spurious masks.

I never get tired of the perpetual winding
Of untrue nature.
I am unsound like polyester,
No soft cotton.
Unpick my threads
Each stitch as rough as my skin.
Pull out my stuffing
And cut through my back.  
                              
                                        Throw me to the side.

Then buy a new doll.

The flower dripped red
to the crusted ground
shed its wings
and broke to death
crumbled
to not be found
while the sky howled
turned green with rage
and cast a hue so gory
that the little humans
who crawled didn't seem
all that ugly.
They lashed their whips
and clanged their chain
growled in anger and pain,
howled the wounded
like the dog they sat next to
and licked the healing
scars they sheltered
from that ball of fire
which sputtered every hour
and darts of flame swept the sky
the human roamed naked
on their claws and feet,
they shed their clothes
when they faced the heat,
their face twisted in frowns,
they'd left their polyester shoes behind
they didn't need anymore
to cast the dye

I am your denial, your Lent fast
The mania in your DNA,
the way the helix twists around itself.

I am the finger-shaped bruises on the inside
soft of the thigh, the color of ripe plums
that you can’t stop pressing

because it hurts just right—
like us, the way we crack our knuckles.

The scoliosis question mark,
bent spoon of your spine like
Scandinavian silverware, its unfunctioning beauty.  

The snow of a thousand dandelions gone to seed.

The sugar sacks of fat around my body
that I love to touch and hate to see.

I am the thrift store of your desires,
a polyester pantsuit resold.
The starch of morning arthritis.

The dark under your nails
that isn’t really dirt.

The yellow smoke smell in a jacket.
A mango eaten off the pit,
stringy mango veins that stay in your teeth.

A washing machine that doesn’t drain.

A man cursing in his native language,
foreign words that don’t translate.

some days, I wish I could peel off the plastic
the polymer god of our modern world
some days, I wish I could digest my food
or strip off polyester suit and tie
some days, I wish I could turn off the screen
constantly feeding me the thoughts I need
our consumer world moves like elastic
bouncing from product to product, and sold!
I don’t ever object; that would be rude!
rule number 1: producers never lie
I trust the market, none can be so keen
and I trust the contracts I’ve never read
the things that make the world fit comfortably
they shape the world without a knick or kink
“to ignore the trends, or buy the wrong thing
is heresy! capital terrorism!”
still all in all I can’t help but question
“progress: something one must never impede”
progress to what? life lived acceptably?
“spend! or else the economy will shrink!”
they’re egotists that forbid questioning
so they can feed off their corporatism
and valued above all is ambition
But it's always the others they make bleed

I can sing the letters and numbers of the desktop, the pictures and the album covers too. I just wanna write the emu and the llama, this pretty little song for us two. You were the cleft of my pen, in my pocket; a red and white hen made the song for us together. Patriotic poultry and poetry inverse, backwards ***** parties, in the ringing of the bells- leather fairy tales do come true.

You can rub my lamp if I can peel your onion, build your rocks and roll 'em up hills. Get Sisyphus's number and call him every Sunday, help him heal his sunburn with the Solarcaine, plus Aloe Vera from Jewel.

The grocery standard, the man standing there, Walgreen's jerks that have weaves in their hair. I can pick a postcard, write a little letter, exercise my legs in my sleep. You can cry while you're still happy, I can cheer for laughter, your backpack has this picture of Asian imported meats. My sheets they are bleeding, cotton and polyester, eiderdown goose-feathered quills. We search for the highways and take a lot of pictures, I give two rings, the second has black onyx or may be moonstone. Either way it's hard to tell who's who.

The penguins in the pantry, the wockets in your pockets, the socks with the letters and codes. Black and white paper bills, money for monkeys, colorful elephants in zoos. You can soak them in the water, but don't use more than three, because under the age is a rotten assortment of youth faulted in disease.

After we left the party, I bought a little artwork, we spoke in country voices to a drunk man with a trollop bar-hop at the movie theater in downtown suburbia, he was very *****, really such ******, at fifty he flirted with girls in black uniforms. I have just turned thirty, you are twenty-one, my phone rings, it's my mother- pause....

"The food is here. Pizza every-one."

I said, "Pizza." For E-V-E-R-Y One. It can't eat itself so we've got to be going. Coca-Cola maraschino drinks. A brownie with a sundae, even vegan almond ice cream can be considered ordering the kitchen sink. Just around the corner in the village outside of So-**, I opened a store for a gag-hag who is tall. He's a **** on one cylinder, provocative and insular, he also has a sunburn too. Each one of his cycles is hiding on an icicle, the intern we hired doesn't eat so often that he doesn't even poo.

i believe in a thing called love,

in toxic oxytocin tears and

jagged daggers of emotions

that hit hard and quick and deep

leaving lovers dazed and aroused

on kitchen tiles and sticky dance floors.

i do believe in love, i do,

in blood filled love potions

you put so much of yourself into it

that she just has to love you

she has to, she must,

and she does, she does,

ugly crying but ****,

for you, all for you,

please just hold on

she pleads -

mucus filled tears cascading down her face,

*******,

thighs,

pooling on the floor,

making the doctors both cringe with disgust and

simultaneously lean forward with interest

swaying in non-existent breeze -

and you die with your first kiss in your fist

and a piebald smile that splinters her inside forever

but i guess that isn't your fault, right?

i do believe in love, i do, i do,

in unfettered devotions

in ****-that-guy,

the quality relationship improvement show,

because you want to be a lover

but the guy ain't right

so just make him up

and use a real guy as his outside

you love him sanded, smoothed, buffed, painted

with rims and an inexplicable 48 inch lcd screen

you'll officially get hitched but don't cry

divorce is common and either way it doesn't matter

just look pretty and make sure to squint.

i do believe love, i do

i believe in

poisoning yourself for Juliet

rather than taking her pulse

to taking dear John's heart and

jumping on it happily

because you love him sooooo much

but like, the world has conspired against you,

not with guns and bombs and videotape

but with, like, freely made decisions,

peer pressure and jagermeister  

his blood makes pretty patterns on your

milk white thighs and i guess that

he sticks around for the show

oh boy, i believe in love, i do, that

6 and 9 aren't meant to be together

they just fit, that

there's no place for 'pure' in love cos it's all

pain and *** and spit

as for 'star crossed lovers'

the stars are always crossed

else eclipses would be boring and

each lost lover on a course

i do believe in love, i do,

in the sweetheart who lispes

licking earlobes and bottom lip biting

of metal snakes, happy fates

and piscean traits,

exuding high fructose glucose syrup

instead of saliva

so kiss them carefully or you'll

sugar high and sugar low

and sugar crash and burn

with every cosmic turn and

oh, i believe in love, lovers, oh i do, i do,

in the swirls of black and white that

play ying and yang

that kiss and grate and fornicate

forming a pasty grey

declaring that their grey is the

greyest, greatest, gayest grey

i do believe in love, i do,

bridezilla has destroyed new york in the

quest for the perfect dress as

otherwise her,

sorry,

their,

day will be ruined

milan and paris are shaking in their loius vuittons

praying they will be passed over

oh anna wintour,

just one more working day

please let the cake be next on it's list,

deliver us, oh lagerfeld, from

polyester blend shrouds in hideous off white,

amen.

but yeah,

i do believe in love, i do,

in philosophers that never tire

who'll be debating whether

kpattz, robsten, or my name for it,

sorry, them,

pattenwart,

really love each other

or are merely feeding off the media **** storm

to soothe their fragile bodies

and appease their shiny deities.

so yeah, i know what it involves

every ingredient labelled and shelved

sampled and sicked up and

given 5 star reviews on amazon

with words of advice

and i do believe in love.

i do.

oh, i do

so friends,

hold out your bleeding hearts

apply some anti-skeptic

your wounds will heal in 30 days

give or take a century.

I. The lifespan of a pumpkin is incredibly short. Considering the rapid pace in which a pumpkin goes from flower to fruition, it is quite literally a blink of an eye. And there is no nobility in a pumpkin death. No, it is a long and grueling process. From the beginning, the pumpkin patch is like Wall Street, 1763. Being poked and prodded, weighed, gawked at and compared to my brothers and sisters. I was chosen earlier than the rest for my robust size, even ridges, and vivid colour. I remember being severed from the vine- I know that humans don’t remember being cut from the umbilical cord, but it’s the only human experience I can compare it to. I imagine that if I had lungs I would scream or eyes I would cry, but I suppose the lack of these organs is what makes it so easy for humans to humiliate us as they do. We have no voice of our own- and who would stand up for us? Possibly vegans, but I digress.
Once inside the human home, I’m set on a “tiled countertop,” as they call it. I’m not sure what that is exactly, but it’s polished and hard and artificial. The coldness of it makes my skin stiffen. And then, as if overcome by brain fever, the smaller humans rush about their living space grabbing up “newspapers” and “paper towels” (no doubt made from abused trees) and just as I had feared, knives. More polished coldness. I know what is to come- I’ve heard the cautionary tales. When my siblings and I hung on the vine as buds, we’d swap horror stories. Of course, we didn’t think that they were real then. Though we had seen older pumpkins snatched up, we were too young to understand. And now that I know it’s all true, my fear isn’t for myself but for my kin. I know that it isn’t normal for humans to hope for their loved ones to rot, but it is for pumpkins. I hope that they will grow old, old, old until the day comes that they quietly fall off the vine and become food for the animals and the soil and their seeds impregnate the earth. And though I may be faced with this violent fate, I am not going to be afraid. I shall not sweat, nor make my skin tough to their blades. No, I will be soft as butter and dry as the sky. As the humans pick up their tools of operation and discuss what kinds of sweet treats they’ll be making with my “guts,” I yield to the steel and dare them to do their worst…

II. They’re finished now, and I’ve been gutted to within an inch of my life. My insides are piled in a white bowl beside me, my seeds rest on a tin sheet, dried of juice and covered in salt. Their skin is transparent and flaky like fish scales and the flesh underneath is toasted brown. They baked my babies! They baked my babies and now they’re popping them into their pudgy, glistening mouths like the giant who used bones to bake his bread. It occurs to me that I can see more of the room than I originally could. It makes sense… now that half my skin is gone that I should have a clearer view of the world. The oldest human walks over to the small ones.
“What did you make guys?” she asks.
“A face!” they exclaim. Was my original face not good enough?
At this point I catch a glimpse of the “face” that is being discussed. Behind the humans is a painted forest locked in by a sheet of glass. On the spotless surface I see my reflection- my smooth, rounded skin has become a hideously comical mask. Two triangles and a semicircle make up this face, the mouth being a jaunty one-toothed smile, a sweet ironical touch. A hanging man with a grin. A tiny white candle has been lowered into my hollowed out stomach and lit. The flame burns my core and scorches my skin in some places to a charcoal black.
My consciousness is sliding around now… from the kitchen to the pumpkin patch and back again… The fire in my belly has dulled to a pleasant burn… maybe because I’m so cold and now I’ve gotten colder… they’ve taken me outside… placed me on an artificial hay bale… more children appear with plastic replicas of me dangling from their polyester-draped arms… they grin and their smiles match the “pumpkins’” smiles on their arms, match mine… this is all too hilarious…
“Trick or treat!”

Tuna sandwiches on white bread
Carried in a paper bag
Josh Groban on the CD player
Season Three of 2 broke Girls
Matching shoes and purses
Vacation in the Pocanos
Subscription to People Magazine
Pennies in a piggy bank
Silver-beige 4-door Accord
A little college but no degree
Always ten pounds overweight
Celebration meal at Sizzler
Artificial Christmas tree pre-lit
A mole that wants removing
Off white walls, pale green carpet
Outfits from mail order catalogs
Paydays with no yearly bonus
Jeopardy and Wheel of fortune
Polyester perm press everything
Bic Stik ball point pen
Swanson's TV dinner
Flip phone with no camera
*** two times a week and Sunday
Writing verse nobody reads
ljm

Like modern day knights
we muster around a
table.

We don’t wear shiny armour
we wear suits that are 50% polyester
50% rayon.
Our jousting poles are have been

replaced with
nervously bitten biros,
and on a fuzzy screen the MD appears
speaking from a country where the currency is
colourful

but ultimately worthless.

His voice is delayed giving

and talks of mergers, leverage &
buy outs.

But I fade out like a ghost image in a propaganda film,

doodling hieroglyphics on a pad.

From the window I see workmen digging a
hole and I wonder will they ever reach China?

There was death and gore,

During the second world war.

Many people died in extreme violence,

Killed before they could call out to loved ones.

Young men were trained to ****,

Often against their morals and will.

So when I see your 1940s weekend -

Your 'war was fun and cosy' pretence,

Your clichéd polyester and fibre glass mockery,

Aiming to re-enact a mostly imagined happy-go-lucky camaraderie -

Forgive me for not joining in,

As I happen to feel it a cardinal sin,

To idealise and romanticise a decade,

Made up of austerity, rationing and air raids.

I've read a little social history,

The 1940s were not idyllic or crime-free,

Just as now, there were heroes and villains,

Among the soldiers and civilians.

Heroism abounded but so did black marketeering,

There were brave sacrifices but also racketeering.

City-wide black-outs were a gift,

To those who would rob and grift.

Your jolly nostalgic tribute is an annual celebration,

Celebrating your own fabrication,

Of a time when the machinations of war and a crazed ideology,

Saw the near extinction of an entire ethnic minority.

I do not wish to be a party pooper,

But don't just step into the fake shoes of a fictional trooper,

Please occasionally remove your rose-tinted glasses,

To remember that beyond your nostalgic narrative of the routines of the masses,

People lived with the daily fear,

Of the likely deaths of people they held dear.

Life is a tiny black x on the calendar,
Wedged between play dates and rescheduled doctors appointments.
2:00 floods into 4:00, until the entire day lies crumpled at the foot of the bed,
Lifeless except for the coffee stain memories of yesterday.
Nothing happens here.
Self questions self, and we all sit criss cross apple sauce on the linoleum floor;
Is this what it means to be alive?
Red and blue parachute above our tiny shoulders,
Mixing with green, yellow, and orange wedges
The same as pizza or convenience store cheesecake.
Outside, noisy blurs of grey and black whir by
Full of passengers too preoccupied with routine to venture
Into the far off world of innocence
That softly plagues everything detached enough to feel it.
Covered in paintings of a reality that's missing all of it's fingers.
Nothing lives here- beyond the faint ripple
Of three o'clock snack time:
Rosy cheeks and small, stubby fingers concealed by apple sauce,
The preservative of youth, it slowly takes on the texture
Of dad's lung cancer-
Dying pigeons rest nostalgically upon city rooftops,
As strangers stop to admire their stagnant beauty,
Crying out acclaim for the regal presence of those
Who can bear to sit still amidst the chaos of an hour:
Cigarette and polyester feathered Madonnas of the modern world-
Installation art at its finest.
Face paint and spaghetti hair
Are only tangible until replaced with something a little closer to
Reality. The American dream sinks to the bottom of a hollow mason jar, as preservatives soak the bones
Of every tiny heart, alive enough to give out at the faintest malfunction.
Dilapidated, our heavy feet tread over spare Lego pieces,
The tiny rectangles push up against our translucent flesh-
Leaving abstract indentations of a city that never was.
Images of the earth projected upon tiny marble surfaces,
Fallen from a cardboard box that was once on isle five,
Impress upon the weary feet
Of strangers, running to throw up beneath the red, green, and yellow windows
Of a Target grocery store.
Nothing grows here, yet we eagerly pluck our wilted produce
From the clammy hands of a metal machine
Programmed one, two, three
To dilute our logic with an even mist of something
Almost like water, but with more promise.
Until, we can easily swallow the bitter pill that
Holds the secrets of the world.

It all started out so innocently
A thrift store here, a garage sale there
Anyways, Lord knows how bad I needed
The chartreuse rug of that polyester bear

It goes perfect in my kitchen
Though I can barely see the floor
Just need to move a few piles that grew
From me buying trinkets by the score

Some say I'm a crazy hoarder
I've seen the show and I'm not that bad
Anyway who doesn't need
A stuffed albino Siamese cat

Then there's all the broken plates of china
That I got for a steal
If I ever do find my stove again
I'll use them for my next meal

Why ask why I save all these milk jugs
You never do know when
A herd of cattle will be passing through
The middle of my den

You may say crazy hoarder
I may say I think not
When I look at pile after pile
Of all the treasures that I've got

If you ever care to visit
Just step over this, crawl over that
Till you come to that little itty bitty empty spot
Where we can sit back and relax
And have a little chat,
over this this and that,
maybe why it is ducks quack,
is it brains that they lack,
that my friend is whack...

Crazy Hoarder?!?
Don't make me laugh...

The pills taunt me from beside my bed
as I lay here, tortured within by each
painful heartbeat burning within my
chest and weighting my back to the lumped brick
of springs and polyester fiber.
Those blue beauties sleeping silently in their
sun fire home, why can't I sleep too?

One, two, five, ten, my throat counts
my way to freedom
Ironic, how we all have different definitions of
salvation. I adopted these babies to
"save myself," so the doctors think

Tonight it's Judgement Day.

"Not like that!
Like this."

She turned over her shoulder to face me, snatched her hair, soft and strawberry blonde out of my hands and giggled as she tried to show me the French braid.

She saw my blank expression and buried her face in my neck and giggled some more.
"This isn't going to work."

She gave up on the braid and kissed me anyways,
She tasted like sweet tea,
mixed with somethin' southern and strong.

She said "thanks love".

Her porch was lit up like it was the hearth of her home
and we had stopped slapping at the mosquitoes hours ago.

with my head in her lap, I was getting the grass burs out of her skirt when my fingers crept up her thigh and picked at something polyester, it smelt like lavender.

She put her hand on top of mine and kissed me again. I watched the dimples form on her cheeks as she whispered "daddy'll be up soon."

Laying by the river, when everything is silver, and silent, just for a moment before
the sun rises, we held our breathes

and then the love birds wept
and rattled their cages.

My memory fades as she got up to go but she said something like

you're still dizzy from that southern sting
or
you're still dizzy from that southern swing

and that she was hungry
and that we were hollow.

and I just laughed anyways; I could never get her father's truck to start but my heart was always in the right place, she knew it.

*She had a way with words,
she had a way with wasted...

she had heaven on her ankles with her jeans rolled up, and I just wanted to linger there.
My first prayer, my first gray hair.

When I dreamt of my future it didn't include the cheap polyester of sterilized hospital gowns.

I didn't envision the white walls of my castle would hold brightly colored doctor's office posters.
They forget to mention the princess pale skin doesn't always come with a crown,
And cherry lips don't always result from a prince.
When you are told at age eight to be the hero of your own story,
It's forgotten to say that some find superhero strength forced upon them as the solitary option.

When I dreamt of my future it didn't include the cheap polyester of sterilized hospital gowns.
But now it's a perk of the gig,
the perpetually ill princess kid.

Mary, plain name.  Mary, mother of God
Mary, Queen of the Strip Mall
Mary, daughter of a King and a *****
Divinity in her blood, conqueror of lands,
Monarch of her body, kingdom of junkies.
Nails inlaid with pearls, mink lashes and onyx eyes
Indigo polyester wraps her 36, 30, 41,
saltwater taffy legs, ****, and ***.
Mary wasn’t a tall boy, Mary is a funnel cloud queen
Obsidian brazilian in velcro, soda can curls.
Mary has no titles, Mary is a *******, Mary is an exile.
Queen of cream stucco and neon and parking lots.
Mary has disciples, all named Judas.
She has Roy Cohn, the judge’s son, and Louis XIV on their knees in prayer.
She has **** Cheney, Little Richard, and Freud their knees in the bathroom behind the Tesco.
Mary doesn’t confess, doesn’t beg, doesn’t buy.
Mary the conqueror, Alexander reincarnate, she survives.
Body bathed in ultraviolet, cocoa butter, vaseline, and newport menthols.
Mary talks to God in the mirrors at the salvation army.
Mary is scared of dying, she knows she is no ones martyr.
Mary never kneels, left the Bible in the motel nightstand.
A graceful end, a unceremonious departure.
Trade rose petals for needles and styrofoam slurpee cups.
Mary’s mistresses, lovers, and wives, gave her a few lead rounds,
Left her in the strip mall mausoleum.
Mary, queen of the carnal, saint of suburban perversions.
Mary never asked God for forgiveness or a fix.

Jeg havde et mararidt den aften, så du hentede mig fordi jeg var bange for at sove igen. Kl 2 den onsdag kunne man se os køre langs vandet mens du kiggede på mig med glade øjne og coldplay talte til os. Vi stoppede og sad under en paraply mens vi talte stjerner, og du talte om pigen du var sammen med i lørdags, og jeg drak øl og lagde mærke til at dine øjne kunne smile tydeligere end din mund. Du fortalte at du nok udnyttede hende og jeg lyttede bare. Kiggede lidt på dit ansigt. Det regnede egentlig ikke, men vi havde det rart under den mørkeblå paraply. Vores egen lille himmel af polyester. Jeg fortalte dig at mine fregner var min yndlings fejl og du smilte til mit ansigt uden at sige noget. Jeg tror du prøvede at tælle dem. Alle mine små fejl. I bilen kyssede du min næse og sagde at jeg skulle drømme sødt denne gang, og jeg luntede op ad trapperne imens jeg så stjerner gennem opgangsvinduerne. Himlen havde jo fregner ligesom mig.

Nu er jeg stadig bange for at sove;
Men det er nok mere fordi jeg er bange for at sommerfuglene i min mave
kommer fra mere end de øl jeg drak.

.eh, the general misconception (katy b - i like you): am i "hung-up" over exes? let's just say, i could have loved the way i loved without having loved the ex... the ex isn't the problem, nor a nostalgia piece... well... it is a variant of nostalgia, but not of the opposite, the canvas of my affection... a nostalgia of the affection disused, disorientated on the wrong person... it's never about the ex, it's about you, and me, and the ex that experienced, but destroyed, and about the me i wish you could experienced without an ex... the ex is, the ugly momentum that furthers "me" to disengage with my equal, "you", and your exes... the fact that a drag effect exists in relationships, the fact that Heraclitus was right: it's a river, but hardly a sea... relationships are rivers, and the generalized social interaction as the sea... oh, i'm not keeping artifacts of my exes with me... they're the me, exhausted having had them... there is no ex... there's only me forever lodged in an inanimate past... with the animate potential future, and the animate present, which is expressed thus: i can't tell you about the person i dated, but i can & at the same time not tell you about the person i was... shrapnel psyche... the same thought then, a similar thought now... but when it comes to the complete individual? ex, what?! i hate being given over to Rubens... the ex-girlfriend is not much more than the more that is an ex-self... and, my god... isn't it such an ugly picture?!

eh... she was Russian...
   eh... she was rich...
em... this is a tricky one...
she called me kakashka
(little ****)...
and she invariably
wanted me to call her
crumpet...
   apparently i acquired
this tongue to the point
whereby
i would say the word
crumpet... and she'd giggle...
oddly enough,
for me...
i visited an Ukrainian
*******, and asked:
am i a hunchback?
to which she replied:
do you not think
women have little,
or no, confidence in
approaching you?
what?! oh right...
the Casanova bit,
has to come from me...
rather than from,
them...
well... i wasn't born
with that sort of a natural
impetus...
guess this is me not
becoming a Casanova!
but my my...
if anyone is to become
jealous...
traditional Turkish
barbers?
hair is one thing,
beard another...
and only Turks can
do a decent trim of the beard...
eyes closed...
**** me...
better than oral ***...
as i once suggested...
so... manhood is taught...
with a pair of boxing gloves...
and a punching bag?!
seriously?!
how about you begin
your lesson into the realm
of manhood,
beginning with...
a good barber?
next? if i am rich enough...
a good tailor...
but... since i have
a background in chemistry...
i'm still bewildered
by the genius of
polyester translated
into clothing...
so for the moment?
no, no...
forget boxing...
you will not lose weight
by going to the gym
expecting a non-existence
of stretch marks
as if you just gave birth
to an anorexic...
bicycle... 50+ kilometers
a day, for a month...
legs do not succumb to
stretch marks...
no major organs in the legs...
and no... forget the boxing gloves,
and the punching bag...
find yourself a traditional
Turkish barber...
you're not a real man
without a trustworthy
barber...
proof:
you walk down a darkened
street,
two girls are walking a dog...
by the body shape:
teenagers...
they turn their heads
and look at you...
what?!
           such a pithy
stance... to force men to
box... how about you teach
how to groom, prior,
or how not to groom,
extend the lack of grooming for up
to 6 months...
  and then force them to groom...

i went to martial arts classes...
the student of the teacher
who became the teacher for
the evening... kicked me in the *****...
did he apologize?
i was curled up in fetal position...
so i stopped learning martial arts...
apparently i didn't
make the HA! sound while
walking forward making chop-sticks
out of martial arts' moves...
the student of the teacher
that wasn't there who acted
as the teacher: learned jack-****!
me?
     i learned something...

she really did call me kakashka
   (little ****)...
i said the word crumpet...
but never called her that...
   turns out... she wasn't even
a muffin!

            ah... all the love's lost...
hence my favorite indie cinema...
my memory.

- ever envision yourself becoming
so bitter,
that, paradoxically,
you turn out to be, the embodiment of
being:
sickly sweet?
welcome to the club;
sinister bitter...
       like most English people...
they're sorry over the most trivial
social grievances...
but never imply the grievance
upon stressing an apology.

Her.
reeking of cheap perfume and daddy issues
polyester black cloth elegant, purposeful in its placing
“everything is free if you run fast enough”

something was going to **** her anyway
why not let it be something of her own design?

taking a drag of her pernicious cigarette
forcing careful and cultivated opinions
if only to silence the sadist inside

she had already walked in loneliness
full of satin bows and amusement
so it might as have happened now
because everyone always loves you better when you’re dead