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Frank Sterncrest Jan 2014
My family eats dinner underwater.
We bounce between the seats of our chairs
and the bottom of the table,
we pass the stuffing
as it floats off the plate,
and no one seems to blink.
My parents just talk about how safe
it is, here,
below the surface.
No gay fiances
or athiests
or postmodernists
or liberal Christians.
I am the only one with an oxygen tank.
“I have never owned a tent that kept the rain out.”

My family camps with gear from the 80s.
We cook in bare aluminum
and eat with volatile plastics,
a crusty dining cloth pinned
to the warped picnic bench.
My feet and head push
through the tent wall
and into the rain fly.
I always wake up wet.
“I have never owned a bed that was long enough.”

In house 1 and 2,
my feet hang off the end
of the bed, circulation halted
at the ankles
by the wooden frame.
In dorm 1 and 2,
I lie diagonally on the bed,
my shoulder hitting the wall.
In dorm 3,
My feet are pressed
flat against the wardrobe.
I fall asleep not knowing
who I wake up for.
“I have never loved anyone I didn't have to.”
JDK Feb 2015
The postmodernists claim that man is little more than a confluence of forces.
Metanarratives absorbed around the age of four
developed in tandem with an ever-changing world.
Old ideas replanted then growing toward the rays of a shifting sun.
Your ideas are not your own.
You're not the only one.
There is no such thing as an original thought.
But the postmodernists are wrong.
A confluence of forces,
I am not.

Existentialism states that a man's life is his to create.
We make our own meaning.
We define the stakes.
Whether a great victory or a tragic loss,
but never merely a leaf being tossed by the wind.
Everyday is a blank page in the novel of our lives,
and we hold the pen.
Let the story begin.
Mateuš Conrad Aug 2020
strapped to some unfathomable debilitating
fear -
           yet that it is: fathomable by the tinge
of it being primodial -
                                          archetypical -
a very real "god" without an organised
boasting court of a spanish inquisition -
                                        just a solitary ordeal...

new york city concrete -
            in 1970s style grit cinema -
                              something akin to:
          a veil of flimsy sandpaper covering
the eyes...
                      as i'm thinking of buying
charles olson's maximum poems -
             not that there's much of a difference
between a hardcover and a soft-,
         at forty-quid a pop...
                      that's comparable to splashing
out on a heidegger's black notebook...

some awe-inspiring punctuation -
morse and shrpanel -
                              a pinnacle of rewind
as i sit and watch: america the 1990s...
          and it's so much the same export
and it's so much what's basically new-old
if i were to keep my eyes
itchy with glue and insomnia...

i think i'll buy the book -
                                               cur non?!
it would surely make starving
              so very spectacular: spec-tac-ular...
hardly a near miss -
   because there's always that:
                         to imagine a square
is nothing when imagining a kangaroo...

   nor like this → here or therefore ↓
-                                                             c
h                                                            o
s                                                            u
i                                                             l
n                      (e)                                 d
i                                                             e
f                 (d)                                       v
n                                                            e
u                                                            r
↑                         noiɈɒbnυoʇ ɒ niϱǝd ←

                here: right - no centre -
                       here a wish: left -
                                      begins: no leftover...
someone once told me to stay away
from the postmodernists...
                                    but on a diet of acute
sensibility and teasing that old
fulfilling desperation of life told by one
against the marrow millions...
                    
to present a whole chicken for a meal...
when compared to...
   a bowl of chicken hearts that can be used
to make a broth...
you wouldn't roast a chicken
with all the tender insides: of liver,
of heart or stomach...
            headless chicken you serve...
but...
             this one chicken is...
           and a bowl of chicken hearts ready
for a broth / brew also...
                               but the tenderness
of a comparison...

   i should have bought tool's fear inoculum
when it first came out...
i should have bought tool's fear inoculum
when it first came out...
                  
an ancient fear like a shadow that can move
on its own will without
a necessary body and a projection
of the mind...
                      
for the same amount of money...
tool's fear inoculum or charles olson's
maximus poems...
           let the heaving sigh of american
originality pursue a decade longer...
         i'm not exactly supposed to find
cultural exports of russia appealing...
                   i might...

           but america comes naked...
comes certain... comes brown-nose and comes...
a lethargic stress of light:
if that could... but it's not possible!

i shouldn't have bothered reading
postmodernists... beside Olson i don't think
that i have...

                   it's not such an impossible
gesture to wish for:
              given... one's own wish is...
the sulking silence of a theatre -
                    deemed impossible with actors...
i feel so many crawling eyes
over my body when i designate myself
to a rest:
  but always prior...
                  before a dream: there's never
a dream...
there's the erotica of suicide...
a complete kenneth koch hard-on
for jumping out of the window...
there's even the added "mystery" of
jumping out of the window
with a knife...
                      to make sure...
the knife is pointing at the heart...
            because... making a pancake
of oneself...
finally having a revelation that...
yes... upon impact... there's the skeleton
with electric extensions of nerves...
that there's no exoskeleton
and that upon impact...
the pain spreads like a soothing
immediacy - that there are not days
or weeks or medical induced coma
recuperation...

                     what is the common question?
suicidal thoughts...
oh god... aren't they the best sort
of erotica... the will to death is all that can
be sometimes achieved...
when so little of life fits...
hierarchical agonies and groans...

it's not a hard-on but it's...
                a sort of goosebump hot shave
and friction stubble
of a tickled pair of ******* suddenly
dropped into a bowl of creamy ice...
with the whole guillotine spec-t'ah-cular!
it's hardly a hard-on...
it's an imitation ****...

                that death must be ****** is
so certain: inch by inch i try to escape
the monotonous anthem of pride of the elders...
the coffin the grave the hobby
of tending to a yet entombing epitaph...
death must be the best **** to come...
beyond a mere dog howling bark and dangling
whipping of dirt with hind legs
and broomstick tail...

        a pristine man to exoskeleton -
a satanic gravity of falling...
                          it's so important to imagine
falling and how time
morphs... perhaps throwing a stone
prior and then chasing it...
                 or at least pretending to chase
a laughter of the mountain
given the nibbled at nugget: guiding one's way!

because it can't like being with a woman
and debating the worth of vinyl
in the shop - how one might invest
in buying up vinyl -
i did buy a frank zappa vinyl and
there's no debate...

i think of death personified...
but unlike the personification
as a mere skeleton:
   i imagine that there's a mouth...
an ****... a stomach
and the intestines...

             of a god i find a heart at ache
and a mind with scabs...
and i can't help but acknowledge
the genius' agony of:
beside all that's perfect...
the rats and the brimming full
of imperfections...

               i wish for a thought
of luxury that's very much a death
of either a patriarch or a sowing
  shut of a glutton's passage..
                  accents of rhythm:
enough to allow a pass of bass mingling
with the drums: the drums have lost
their prized concern to be excavated...
and all feels like Sunday...

even the trees rest...
               there's no insomnia of work...
there's enough of the intricacies
that manage idiosyncracy
to manage a well conserved sigma purpose
of...
            how Σ = ◻
                    
                      these whimsical details
that are - but also leave
the contraband of gypsies unaffected...
splinter of the mind: a caution
when a word is used
contrary to the shackles of
revisionist psychopaths...
         since that's the right definition:
and psychopaths are prized
Nero bulls should the "other" N with
bigger... come giggling...
laughing because the route of
the river was... the drying of the tongue...
not because of point: ever being
made...
but because... there's the bite of the bait
of the tongue made into sacrifice...
and oh... my sanctity of the mind...
isn't...

toward a sea of drowning...
  toward a sea of night...
          toward a gorgon moon...
and the antithesis
of jumping from a height:
  that a drowning might be concentrated
upon...
             a question: regarding
a buoyancy of bones...

              the taste of warm whiskey
is always a bite...
                   i once hoped to have made myself
in an acclaim of expressing love...
i was... apparently... the great don juan
loiterer...
              the penny count st. matthew
drifter...
                an arithmetic mad count lesson x:
because... algebra is how
a large number is condensed...

               i still love the taste of
the bitten off nails...
            it's unlike... well... it isn't...
because you can't exactly fixate your teeth
on an in-between with cartilage...
come bones...
and the hair is: a fly in a champagne flute...
but nails?
nails are like target practice...
when one has to come across...
playing the flute of
a chicken drumstick...
leaving the hollow wooden piece
and some... marrow...

          a testimony of a word collage
over a wording... that's also a limbo fretting
that's a bad grammar:
the bad taste of analogy...
the missing of teeth "metaphor":
that all metaphysics, can be,
a metaphor...
that... any language spoken
these days... that isn't greek...
with that lisp imitating iberian primo...
is like... a death sentence with
time: inconsequential...

               there's a pretty poem...
there's a pretty flower...
there's a spider, there's the concept
of architect...
                  and there's...
       the great gatsby: fly in a champagne
flute to have to... "spoil the party"...
there are the postmodernists...
and there's the: vague... tongue-chasing...
modernist-revisionism...
a post-tow-too... of the post- in light
of all 'ings myriad'ern!

     the heaving dust of words:
that by a democratic majority are...
unread...
like some... fiddling genghis khan jr.
this... loiter...
  this... john adams' ripe lingering
apple of frustration...
                     to have to imagine:
heaving for applause...
then: that there's / it's necessary
to heave any or rather: no applause...
than the deserving rite
is inhibited parlay of the pickled pear...
the shadows can somehow make grief...
that the sun can spawn planets and
subsequently moons...
          
                  it's oh so impossibly true!
the fickle drama of youth
and the paint-stroking of hormonal
rogue over-powering a blatancy
of blue teasing suffocating a "purpose"
of bishopric purple...
beside the already having
arrived at... cardinal creases...
otherwise hasidic black basic...
            
     my faint! my full moon!
             me jolsting the aspiring
marathon sprinter of a oyster's worth!
the leisure of barricading stones
that's grieving for some wisdom from
a solomon & mountain.
Mateuš Conrad Nov 2017
i treat profanity as i'd shakespeare, given it's the 21st century, its mightily odd, but necessary, given the specialisation of bypassing the middle-men, and becoming engrossed in mint-fresh "print"... hell, imagine marquis de sade without profanity, all i can imagine is a calculating constipation artist.

the ego's worth of question,
given that thought is:
question perpetuated -
do the gods remain worthwhile
toward the child... or the man?
is man worth a gods' presence,
or is it, a child?
  i find that thought, being
an anti-thesis of sense -
overcomes the sensuality
of the five, that be
the sixth refining "achievement"...
if thought be not a sense,
why is it, sensed?
                 the question is
not that of morals:
why do we sense a moral question,
          when while sensing a question
there's no guarantee of a question at all!
        mere thought does not translate
into a "sense" of hearing, or of seeing,
or any other parameter akin...
to summarise beyond sense:
a moral, question.
                     cogito esse caecus sensus:
to think is to be blind to the senses,
and to think via a blindness regarding
the senses, is to be morally upright,
    and to be morally upright,
        is to have a morality cleansed from
having to make a "moral" choice...,
       the trinity that god exists,
is as measurable as whether god, does
exist, as is the sameness of the argument
whether thought exists,
   as is whether god can exist
beyond the animate or the inanimate -
or whether thought can concern
itself beside narrative, without a
desire to incorporate choice....
    whether thought can be anything
beyond the lazily invited narrative...
                  to imply a desire to express
the nadirs of either good or evil,
    or the zeniths of good, and, evil.
god is just a minor enigma in the scale
of things worth investigating,
   thought is the most recurrent phenomenon
that cannot be grasped by
schoolboy error of phenomenology -
           mere thought is more interesting than
god...
                   given that
there's no kantian antithesis for
the patriarch of existentialism:
  what can arrive from noumenonology -
given that post-modernism arrived from
the precursor of existentialism, i.e.
phenomenology?
                   i'm subject to as fascination,
regardless of the almost ancient dualism
which is actually a dichotomy, akin
to medicine and quasi-medicine (psychiatry) -
       in that there's
the notion of *cogito reflexo
-
       and the cogito cogitatio -
               thought as a leisure activity -
    to think reflectively,
but at the same time not conjuring up
narcissus...
   and then there's thought as reflex,
which is hardly a thought (an ought)
to begin with...
                 for all i seem to care,
thought believes itself to be the puritanical
narrator,
                      it is vox primo se,
per se, pro se, and nothing more,
which is just a nibble off the idea of "god" -
the freedoms we adore to exist in our
heads, we translate into a belief of
the same mirror-bound object of our
original intent,
the the child in us dies,
and the games we pleasured ourselves with
so do too.
                   imagine:
to fear madness more than death...
as they say and continue to say:
a death is the end of life,
but alzheimer's?
that's a death within a life that knows
not either the beginning or end
of its life, nor the beginning or end
of its death.
god is but an inanimate object
in the enigmatic sense, compared
to the animation of mere thought...
        human thinking overshadaows
an existence of a deity...
                       by said calculation,
to imagine an animated god,
is to make the idea of god non-existent,
which is also to imagine
an inanimate semblance of thought
consistent with a counter-inanimate body...
impossible!
  the irritability of the existence
of thought is comparable with the already
irritating answers to the pentagram "questions"...
but when it comes to by bewilderment,
the existence of thought is
   more devastating to question,
than the existence of god is to be
answered...
              after all, thought does not
implore prayer, but a god does...
             thought is self-perpetuating,
it's the only genesis ex genesis ex non genesis...
        at least: deus habeo autem genesis -
               at least god has a beginning...
thought?
                                 thinking as no
genesis...
              the mere existence of thought
is more perplexing than either the existence
or the non-existence of god,
since thought could be the balance for
a moral ought that we transgress...
                and not abide by...
               or could be much more than:
a narrator's preferential desires to
mask behind a puppeteering scheme
of wild-card antics.
to merely contest the existence of thought,
is to immediately distrust the
existence of god,
since that sort of belief is
invested in an inanimate object,
whereas the concern is to form an
inanimate narrative from a holistic animate
"subject", worth a "competence" to
be guaranteed an ego.
                 who the **** cares
if god exists, i care whether i exist!
i better not be plagiarising someone,
or running the text verbatim
of an "original" intent!
   existentialism, the bastion of saving grace
against post-existentialism,
i.e. deconstructionism -
paving the way for reconstruction -
a language once opaque -
   once this that & the other -
necessitating a revival in an interest
in poetry, and the instruction manual
simplicity, of an i.k.e.a. staccato put together;
because authoritarian rule
couldn't decide whether to call it
index, or whether to call it, thumb;
i hate stressing a "need" for an uncomplicated
use of language...
     the crude tongue for limb attempt -
even as much as the post-modernists
are worth being despised,
   an overly simplified use of language
is twice are bad as the jargon of parisian
  jeromes...
                because the antithesis of
the postmodernists is that:
there's always some impeding
   and a necessarily "to do"...
actually...
there is no "necessarily" to do...
there is, rather, necessity of
                           the necessary being...
we can do blindly,
     it's only by being enlightened
can be forthright: beyond
                   illuminated, i.e. illuminating;
and yes, i always imagined
myself being a con artists,
esp. this current vocab of mine...
a con artists, who conned people,
  writing motivational self-help books;
i wonder whether i could pull off
being a con self-help guru.
Postmodernists like Rohrschach blots
But painters prefer polka dots,  
But shaking paint just right
So dots stay round and tight
Is like tying needles in knots.

— The End —