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maggie W Aug 2015
How many is a few? According to an online forum, it means 2-3 .So here I go
Typhoon hits Taiwan today, so I can’t go anywhere but stay at home all day reading and watching movie (Wild Tales). I think should start reading Swann’s Way again. I was quite interested in Proust in my junior year, cause one time my ex said something I called ‘words of wisdom’ ,which echoed with Proust’s words about sleeping. Maybe they are completely unrelated, but while reading Proust I was unconsciously analyzing the reading in Proust’s way: comparing someone I know in real life with the characters in the book; or maybe I was just putting on airs by showing that I know the (far-fetched) relation between what ******* my ex said and Proust’s words… The wind is getting stronger and stronger now and I am wondering where you are. On this lame typhoon day I’m suffocated by the boredom and humidity. I call it poetic nothingness.
sorry not a poem.It's a series of my diaries when Josh tole me he'd"be out of touch for a few days"
Donall Dempsey Dec 2023
"... IN THE UNENDING AFTERNOON OF HER EYES..."

We drift from
Parisian museum to

Parisian museum
as if calling upon

some grand home
and the paintings deign

to see us
we the tourist class.

We are caught
in a deluge.

The unrelenting rain
tears time off

the present moment
revealing the past underneath

an older century
bleeding through.

How fragile are
les temps perdu.

I  whistle a motif
from César Franck.

"What's that ?" you say
"...the National Anthem of our love!"

I gaze up at Proust's
cork-lined room

102 boulevard Haussmann
now become a bank.

Imagine him there
glancing down at us

glancing up  at him
the slight movement of  blue satin drapes.

Or have I imagined him
as he imagines us

hurrying figures
from another time

the rain obscuring us
each from the other.

"Love..." Marcel reminds me
“...is space and time.."

his voice almost lost
in the rain's din

"...measured by the heart.”

"Allons Madeline....allons!"
A French mum scolds her sulky child.

The rain reigns
supreme.

*

By 1906, Proust’s parents had died, his brother had married, and he felt the family residence was too big. He moved to 102 Boulevard Haussmann(in the Ian Fleming novel Thunderball, it is described as "the solidest street in Paris" and the site of the headquarters of SPECTRE.) a building owned by his Uncle Louis, where he wrote the bulk of his work, mostly in bed.

Today the building belongs to the CIC bank, which has restored the bedroom, famously lined in cork for soundproofing, but the room’s contents are in the Musée Carnavalet, leaving the solitary chamber soulless..the silence listening to us not making a soundl.
.
SPECTRE in some fictional alternative world still has its headquarters on Boulevard Haussmannn...a fact of which I was totally unaware being pulverised by rain and time....the moment coming apart at the seams.

A reconstruction, with original furniture, of the room where Marcel Proust wrote In search of lost time can be seen in the  Musée Carnavalet.

Off in a cramped corner were the reassembled pieces of furniture from Proust’s bedroom, including a five-paneled Chinese screen, a velvet armchair that belonged to his father and a writing desk, used mostly for piling books. He kept his notebooks and writing materials on an old rosewood end table beside the bed. Two other tables are adrift in this cramped tableau, one of which was used for his morning coffee tray, usually served with milk and croissants.

The original Boulevard Haussmann apartment was spacious but crammed with furniture, with double windows always covered by padded blue satin drapes. The bedspread was blue satin as well and there was a chandelier, which was never lit when Proust was working. The only light was from a long-stemmed, green-shaded lamp on the bedside table.

We were headed for  the Musée Jacquemart-André, at 158 Boulevard Haussmann, the former home of banker and art collector Edouard André and his artist wife Nélie Jacquemart, recaptures the interior decor and lifestyle of respectable society. Proust was never a guest there, but he rotated in the same social circles, We were mere tourists...awed by the past.

As Beckett puts it in his essay on Proust...

"Life is habit. Or rather life is a succession of habits, since the individual is a succession of individuals; the world being a projection of the individual’s consciousness (an objectivation of the individual’s will, Schopenhauer would say), the pact must be continually renewed, the letter of safe-conduct brought up to date. The creation of the world did not take place once and for all time, but takes place every day. Habit then is the generic term for the countless treaties concluded between the countless subjects that constitute the individual and their countless correlative objects."

This poem is one of the countless treaties various individuals of me made with the moment in time that was mine being shared with Proust.

The enigma of the “little phrase” that “swept over and enveloped” Swann “like a perfume or a caress..." still lingers on as maybe Frack or as Proust admitted in a letter  Camille Saint-Saëns. I rather prefer Franck's Sonata in A major for Violin and Piano  for its perfect cyclic beauty and its gentle reflectiveness.

But it was Franck's gorgeous Symphony in D minor( and the transformations of its four-bar theme )that I was lost in that day and became for me the "...national anthem of our love."

“It is only through art that we can escape from ourselves and know how another person sees a universe which is not the same as our own and whose landscapes would otherwise have remained as unknown as any there may be on the moon.”

The title comes from a lovely phrase that has always haunted me...

"...calmly imprisoned in the unending afternoon of her eyes..."

THE GUERMANTES WAY - MARCEL PROUST.
Mateuš Conrad Sep 2017
i once owned a copy of proust's titan:
à la recherche du temps perdu -
that one book that people
make bookclubs out of...
i came from a different literary
family, invoked by ezra
pound, and culminating
in james joyce's twin titans
ulysses & finnegans wake...
this family was numerous
thought, resulting a sort of school
of thought, a scholasticism...
the other option?
  proust!
i did own a cheap 2 vol edition
of this behemoth...
i gave it away to a charity shop,
the mere weight of a 2 vol.
edition put me off...
but?
   my mother was given a 3 vol.
edition by her admirer, she never read it,
the books are small,
compact, and written in my native
language...
      **** it...
   reading heidegger's "aphorism" for
almost a year is one thing,
but attempting proust?
  i'll die a happy man,
not minding the americana of moby ****...
but at least i'll have merged the two
origins together...
  some people go for james joyce,
others the homosexual
cul de sac of proust:
   i'll be attempting for...
kinda like running 50 marathons
in 50 days...
  or swimming across the english channel,
like that mad australian woman
who wants to do it: 3, ******* times,
in an uninterrupted continuum...
but evidently i first have to finish
heidegger's book...
  then there's the comparison of tedium,
apparently reading proust isn't
adventurous, so i gather...
       i'll have to cut back on the drinking
(i guess) -
        and then change my psyche to
read in heimatspreschen...
   next to this edition of proust rests
a near complete body of work of charles dickens...
and i'm thinking:
     which is more prolific?
i can't decide...
    but i'm a dogmatic break-away from
what i stated once: joyce is the limit,
i will never, ever, touch proust.
   then again, nearing finishing ponderings
ii - vi... it was going to be a natural
progression... pick & mix...
   i wasn't exactly willing to continue
down the same genre...
       even though i could have
ventured down the path of
hegel's phenomenology of spirit...
and why did i wake up at 5 am this morning
having gone to bed at nearing 1 am?
just to think this up?
    no... just marinated some chicken
for tomorrow,
   in tamarind and rice vinegar and sesame
oil and white wine vinegar and soy sauce
ready for tomorrow to be triply
   deep-fried served with rice and some
sort of chinese salad...
  raw tamarind? don't try it...
   oh yeah... and the house chores down:
i'm waiting for the house-husband hole...
but, evidently the teachings of feminism
is giving me the *******...
  no house-husbands allowed...
       so i can cook decent food,
do all the house chores (vacuum,
steam the wooden floors), and read
a philosophy book, while prepping
myself toward the near suicidal ambition
of reading proust in the very near future?
****...
     em... can you tell the chinese to give
some of the manual labour back?
Mateuš Conrad Aug 2016
now i know why i might engage with writing obscene
poems, chauvinism included, but still there
is no burning excuse in my mind with the way
western society actively desires censorship of certain
words, i already attributed censoring obscene
words as worse than what this tactic precipitates into:
the apathetic spread of *******, and violence
in general... it crosses my mind that sparring with violent
language cushions people from violet action...
to utilise violent language with that: pardon my French
attitude does more good than evil on the users...
how many road rage incidents could have been avoided
if people were unable to watch their tongue:
somehow we're making language sterile, by actively
pursuing this sort of censorship: which is not even
remotely politically related / motivated, we're bringing
an anaemic status quo in how fluidly we speak -
we desire to not hear the sometimes funny and the sometimes
awful... but we choose to see the god-fearing horrific...
ask any blind-man about music and he'd say:
well, i can dance to it in a nucleus position, centrally
gravitational pull - but ask the deaf man about
what he has to say when seeing **** written to counter
obscenity, as in cartoon-like: f&%£! it's just plain silly,
pocket-sized expression of psychotic behaviours,
rummaging through them i find only one source of inspiration:
the fact that we're in this blind-man's garden of innocence,
somehow dressed in the camouflage of censorship such
a tiny problem, that it does indeed require 23 mattresses
for the princess to not feel the frozen *** agitating her...
this sort of censorship in its application is under
a false sense of purpose, it really doesn't change people's
behaviour for the better, it doesn't pacify them, in does
the reverse: it infuriates, it makes violence more potent...
i'm still trying to figure out why such words
will make our perceptions saintly... unless of course
that's the reason behind them, as way of invoking an
anaesthetic placebo, a placebo that's actually active rather
than passive - presuming the anaesthetic placebo gives
way to an aesthetic active apathy-inducing ingredient...
meaning we can't bare to hear swear words, but we can
gladly watch 20 hours of 20 : 1 ****... censoring **** ****
**** **** will not escape Newtonian physics...
given our current scenario, Newtonian physics is far
more important than Einstein's relativity, i'd hate to be
in denial about cause & effect... as began with Socrates,
i too abhor moral relativism... of course Newton got
the gravity bit wrong, but i like the simpler version...
plus... there was no Romance with Einstein...
no apple, no tree, no Voltaire... meaning we don't necessarily
write history collectively, with all of us starting from
the big bang or the view from the Galapagos islands...
we don't... we continue writing history not from a
collective consciousness genesis... or from the collective
unconscious genesis - that's Jung with his archetypes
(devil, god, wise man, mother, father etc.) rather than
dreams (Freud) - we can chose were to write the future...
it's not so much ignorance as arm-chair intellectualism,
it's not about the safety of understanding something,
but the comfort of choosing to understand something...
which is pretty much to my excuse for my previous poems...
Heidegger... and that concept of Dasein -
i never bothered to understand it to the point of
reacting subjectively to it, by that i mean an interest
in writing about it, an interpolation of the subject with
alternative variations... i objectified it, i also countered it
when objectifying the concept turned out to be an
everyday object, shortening my quest.
the counter? hiersein, i.e. being here, here denoting a
solipsistic classification of awareness with / in the world -
which is basically me in my room, admiring my library,
my record collection, my torn sneakers, everything that
is classified exclusive to what dasein evolves into
when all its grammatical weaving only express a verb,
i.e. concern... so i thought, given this what can hiersein
(being here / nonchalance) actually show me as
my lack of interest in: "changing the world".
it became obvious yesterday, i had a hard time when i
didn't read the day's copy of the times (more on this later),
instead i had to suffice with construction site media,
you might have heard of this newspaper: the daily star,
at 20 pence a pop, you will see what £1.20 makes to
your psyche... but that's basically it, i objectified Heidegger's
concept and made it into an everyday object, in this
case and as the only case available: a newspaper -
and the trick is? well, with a newspaper like daily star
you don't actually experience dasein - it's completely
missing in this style of media, and that's worrying given
my barbaric poetry of yesterday... it's missing, not there,
such object-for-object chirality is what gives birth to
hiersein (being here); but today i returned to my usual
media diet, a flicked through the times and the natural
balance of personal objects and a fresh impersonal object
coexisted - the newspaper is truly the most adequate
compounded expression of Heidegger's dasein -
which i attribute to the constant need to emphasise an
empathy with others... empathising is a neutral form
of sympathising, since sympathy is sourced in shared
experiences: **** victims (e.g.) - therefore empathy is
something that in the ontological structuring of dasein,
which opposes the ontological structuring of hiersein,
which is structured by apathy; there is nothing else for
me to write, apart from the compendium proof
of the disparity of sources, i.e. headlines and subheadings:

- prior compendium -

i will never understand the point of autobiographies,
the majority of autobiographies are written
on a p.s. basis, after the facts / actions,
never immediately, concerning ideas /
solidified thoughts, thoughts condensed into idea
that allow thinking / cognitive narration to
continue regardless with what's being achieved...
i haven't anything autobiographical dissimilar
with something biographical...
Plato wrote that wonderful biography like
Shakespearean theatre, but i guess his critics felt
the claustrophobic tug & pull of mermaids...
still the problem ascends heights unparalleled -
even with ghost writers doing the leg-work...
cheap-buggers never learned to write, let alone read,
and here they are writing biographies...
ah, **** it... they're only sketches... whether biographic
or autobiographic... they're still mere sketches...
if this was the art world the revenue would come
posthumously, when it comes to literacy
nothing really distinguishes poets from
those prescribing pedestrian signs...
the Olympians can moan at the vacant stadium...
that there's a hierarchy in sports,
with the favoured monochrome idealisation
of where the bunny money is in the whirlpool
of the rabbit hole investment: football, volleyball...
but the literary events are the same...
people love to lie that they read the bestseller to
its full extent... but treat books like chairs and tables...
inertia prone half finished, sat on for 2 weeks of
the entire year... the Olympians are very much
like poets, and i care to distance myself from either
demand for more interest being invoked...
i like esoteric sports, i like esoteric writing...
but that's how it stand: poets are Olympians where
novelists are footballers, who retire at 30 and
then think about what to do with their wages
that are 10x higher than the everyday labourer...
start a restaurant, buy a strip of houses in Liverpool
like Michael Owen? good guess, here's to exploiting
youth disgracefully... that's what they're getting,
and these are the dilemma points to consider...
they're the equivalent gladiators of our time,
Rome was just a sleeper before it awoke once more...
but i'll never understand why these
people decided to exploit literature for gain...
all these academics with their pristine purity of discovery
are pacified when dictating print,
what poet, has a chance in hell, to appear gladly
excavated from Plato's cave of television?
about none.
i too was focusing on 20th century literature,
before 21st literature came about...
and i thought, oh god: they're really going to create
a totalitarian democracy, every artist will be
strip-searched for adding cinnamon and chilli to their
writing to bounce away from conformist
sober and sane extraction of alter wordings...
this 21st scene will become polarised...
we'll have the extinction of One Direction over a joint,
while the Rolling Stones drank a keg of whiskey
and pulled off a show... we'll have moralisation
of the fans to subdue the artists, which will mean
no artist will ably create a zeitgeist to rebel... everyone
will suddenly experience a weird sort of communism...
the worst kind... it will mean having
all the mental freedoms without the ability to
economise a coup... basically an inertia, an immediate
fatality... we can't economise a coup...
which boils down to why so many autobiographies
aren't really biographic, but rather consolidating,
by the meaning: autobiographic i intended to relate
the everyday... the most secretive account of life:
the everyday... this is stressing Proust,
even though i preferred Joyce over Proust i keep
the everyday the prime ideal: the only detail,
so that an autobiography can make sense,
automation of writing, like breathing or sneezing...
not some monetary-spinning device 20 years after
the facts... 20 years later you're pretty much writing
fiction... i am all for the biosphere of expanding
Alveoli... but when did you ever read an autobiography
that mentioned the taste of weak coffee
from the Friday of 20th of August 2016? never;
you read autobiographies
like you read self-help books...  waiting for
all that experience regurgitating motivational talk
about reaching a plateau of comparative success...
i can understand autobiographies written by the elders,
i understand biographies written about people
posthumously - but the tragedy is, given the spinning
wheel of money? we're getting "auto" biographies
written toward their 3rd volume renditions of
people aged 30... let alone 40... so much for
western society having the upper hand on political matters...
just saying: sort your own **** before trying
to sort other people's problems...
i could understand if these autobiographies were written
as described: automaton solo... but they're not...
before the compendium it's this everlasting presence
of a desired body of power being depicted:
prior the monopoly of knowledge, there was a monopoly
of literacy... given that 99% of us are literate, it
actually doesn't mean a third donkey's *******
whether we can read, or write, we got shelved in controlling
this once priestly vanity, we got taught bureaucracy alongside...
but the monopoly of literacy is way past us,
we're being convened in the ability to monopolise knowledge,
(oh please, don't let the paranoia seep in,
remember yourself when reading me, once in a while,
i don't drag you to phantasmagorical heights, even if i could,
i'd prefer you being agile in learning how to be bored
than letting your repel the same boredom i too share,
well... but **** me if you want to be the next Lenin) -
and the easiest way to monopolise knowledge? the media...
you basically need a lot of facts, and an evolved version
of dialectics, dialectics being the prime enemy of democracy
(it's not an alternative political model like despotism as
we are held to believe, it's actually dialectics,
suppressing other forms of collectivisation is the one
sure method of suppressing the attempt at dialectics
(individualism) - by making people overly opinionated,
ergo: the inability to engage with opinions, blind-alleys
throughout all plausible attempts to do so) -
so once you have enough facts to fiddle with the Rubik's cube
of juxtaposition, you end up with the ultra-scientific
form of dialectics... the matter of opinion in relation
to truth without a relative uniformity that prescribes
the status quo stasis is a debate about how accurate
we all are: i.e., is that true to the closest centimetre,
or the closest millimetre? it's a bit like watching a Zeno
paradox:
                 10.1                           and 10.01
      which one's tortoise and which is Achilles?
well, you know; ah ****! the compendium of the two
newspapers which got me slightly depressed...

- the compendium -

a. daily star

- B. BRO SAM'S SECRET 'NERVOUS BREAKDOWN'
- Laura & Jason's baby joy
- Robbie (Williams) £1.6M a night!
- BREXIT BOOST ON JOB FRONT
- ANGE DAD BACKS TRUMP
- JR'S wife Linda set to Holly
- Edd's no Beverly Hills flop
(Lana among cow *******)
- LAURA: OUR TINY TROTTS WILL BE WORLD-BEATERS
- FURY AT BAD LOSERS' SLURS
- 'Jealous sis' jibes
- MAKE YOUR KID AN OLYMPICS ACE
- Peaty: I want to be a rapper
- TV girl really ill
- **** SAM, 'ON THE BRINK OF BREAKDOWN'
- COSTA ***** HELL
- CAGING ANJEM WILL INSPIRE NEW JIHADIS
- POG'S LOADED AGENT BUYS CAPONE'S LAIR
- I'll make Kylie a pop star
- JEZ DOESN'T KNOW ANT FROM HIS DEC
- GUILTY OF DEMONIC SAVAGERY
- Great British Rake In
- Britain is *******
- BAYWATCH U.K.
- Va Va Vroom
- JUST JANE: My lover snubs plea to get wed
- HART: I'LL DECIDE WHEN TO GO.

b. the times

- Boy victim becomes a symbol of Assad's war
- US Olympics swimmers invented robbery tale, say Rio police
- Make us sell healthy food, supermarkets implore May (P.M.)
- Lost weekend of the lying best man
- fears over free speech delay law to silence hate preacher
- Met's 'commuter cops' live in France
- Husbands happiest when they earn half as much as wives
- Socialists plot to drive Britain left
- Fake human sacrifice filmed at European high altar of physics
- Officers investigated over ex-footballer's Taser death
- Number of pupils taking languages at record low
   (Mandarin @ 2,849 - % decrease of 8.1,
    alarmingly religious studies 27,032 up by 4.9%
    and psychology of status 59,469 up by 4.3%....
    meaning the mad will soon be diagnosing the sane
   as mad, just because the curriculum said so)
- Top grades add up to 100% at the school for maths prodigies
- Deprived sixth formers thrive on competition
- European students rush to get into British universities
- DVLA earns £10m selling driver's details
- Mystery over Kenyan death of aristocrat
- Journalist who voted twice reported to police for
  'fraud'
- Tomato tax threatens European trade war
- Love story of the Pantomime
- Homeless conmen fleeced widow, 81
- Brownlee brothers at the Olympics...
- Hopeful shoppers give sales a lift after Brexit vote
- MoD guard could be stood down despite terrot threat
- Owners spit mansion after failing to sell
- The job with international appeal: saving our hedgehogs
- Finch warns unborn chicks if weather gets warm
- Migrant violence rises after decline in policing around Jungle
- Longest road tunnel promises a relaxing ride under Pennines
- Mothers step up to drive Tube trains through night
(rowdy teens ageing exponentially on a Saturday night
when not getting a lift, ******...)
-MP's deal with bookmaker to be investigated
- Ebola nurse 'hid high temperature'
- Shoesmith's ex-huspand kept child *******
- Morpurgo war tale springs into life
- Supergran fights off teenage muggers
- IVF is more successful for white women
OPINION SECTION
- Great political fiction is good for democracy
- the BBC is leaving its audiences in the dark
- airline food? just pass me the gin and tonic
- Modern Olympics began on the fields of Rugby
/ greasy polls, holding firm, tongue tied,
  call for compulsory targets to tackle obesity,
second in line, mindfulness course, cost of planning,
puffins v. ship rats.... and all future letters to the editor /
- Moscow presses Turkey for access to US airbases
- Hundreds killed each month in Assad's jails
- Putin bans celebration of defeated KGB coup
(another James Bond movie on the cards,
i'm assured, and with a moral carte blanche) -
Hollande clams Carla Bruni spied concerning his
use of diapers...
- Euthanasia tourists flock Belgian A & E from France,
  where a revival of ****** made people dress shark-fin
  sharp on the catwalk...
- Mosquito pesticide linkage application = intersex /
   East German women
- Haiti cholera linked to Nepalese **** and ***** via
  the
Mateuš Conrad Nov 2016
.i. if Kant could have his von Kleist... well... who else to juggle juggernauts if not me? as a task of redeeming that poor soul who succumbed to the terminator of all poetic ambitions, with his systematisation off-the-page, as eccentric and punctual as a sunset on a sundial at 16:11... and in case either the spring of sunrise, or the autumn of sunset... but so many hours after exacting a sunset... that gluttony of the eyes to stare at it... 16:11 is the zenith of a sunset in november the 15th... much prolonged when warmer... supersized sun when setting in summer, and all that whiskey-copper wiring for the eyes to stare at it: oh for goodness sake, who really cares for Ikea likened assembling of words... we're not putting together a coffee table, we're looking for Darwinistic entrapment, we're scared of the aeons and yawns... we're trying to create a Darwinistic entrapment saying what segregates us from apes! that's how anti-Darwinism works - if they can easily call you a poet and a technophobe... then that hardly makes you a merchant with a Quran... to encapsulate the language of our modernity we're doing everything against writing the onomatopoeia of our beginning... monkey ooo! monkey ooo ah ah! or a gorilla grunting and then snorkeling... we're encapsulating our language more and more... because beginning with ape and then looking at history, and then looking at the consensus of the contemporary: Darwinism's greatest enemy is not theology... it's history... Darwinism and history are not compatible... oddly enough Darwinism and theology are compatible, simply because they are dynamically equal for the case of furthering both arguments in debate... but Darwinism is an odd starting point to argue, given that physicists argue from the perspective of prior to dinosaurs, prior to all things formed.

how can i begin this? it will leave me having to
write it for two days,
the anti-narrative sketch first, then filling in
the gaps sober... just to get second opinions...
i might have to cook a quasi-Hungarian borscht
and fry up a few potato flattenings to a crispy
yum... first the narrator comes in to describe what's
in store, a bit like a translator comes in and says
of Joyce: that's Irish... well, yeah.
               hence the italic preface...
as some would say, the person who wrote these
sketches worked quicker that an algorithm in asking
and also quicker to copy & paste the required
atomic encoding... e.g. ч and ch
                   э and euro and epsilon...
      once upon a time there was nothing prior
to Copernicus, then the somersaults came,
    h ч y        what coordinates where?
    well of course perfecting the encoding of something,
if things weren't stated awry there would be
no optometrists either...
                  it's not hard to read, it's hard to
remember how to read, given that being literate reached
the omnipresent velocity, the new powers had to
include some new power struggle...
mingling Latin and Runes, Greek and Cyrillic...
     and the proto-Latin of additional diacritical marks...
they exposed the entirety of humanity to literacy
within the framework of post-industrial society,
after hitchhiking a ride on the 19th century donkeys
they suddenly had to reveal their power-secret of
being literate, and by the account of women:
corset bound and bored in salons...
      but something else appeared that didn't really fascinate
them: that over-complication of Latin with
punctuation marks above letters: or diacritical
distinction, crowns over letters, subatomic particularisation
of once favoured: universal applicability...
as a narrator? i have to make a complicated
introduction, the sketch lends itself to do so,
it suggests that not all writing can be as simple as
a nursery rhyme, not all writing can actually
    **** memory, not all writing desires being remembered,
not all writing can be remembered,
                in the mediation of the two chiral opposites
there's fiction, which is suspended in an armchair of
pleasurability... but on the opposite side of a nursery rhyme
or a well versed poem? writing akin to arithmetic...
  something truly painful for those competent with
lettering, but not really competent with ten digits...
      as a narrator who has already read the sketch,
i'm trying to not write a "filling in the gaps" to the sketch
like an art-critic might do to a painting deviating from:
brushstrokes were employed. well... d'uh!
variation of italics as in transcending the pause that
implies a condescending variation of taking a pause,
also excluded are: dot, comma, hyphen, semicolon
and colon.                         dot-dot-dot is not joining up
the dots: it implies a variation of how to anticipate
a punchline: drummed: tu-dum wet snare!
     i am actually a narrator who is trying to find
that other part of me that might digest this sketch properly,
     and return fully competent to pick up another
sketch... if ever there was a narrator in this sketch,
it has to be me, after the sketch has been scripted,
and i am left to suggest a need for a dot-dot-dot connectivity
of the strokes of the pen...
i warned myself: do not overdo the introduction in italics,
you know how picky people are...
whether pickled pineapple of cucumber...
i swear Turks invented pickling chillies...
         oh look! an inflatable gazebo filled with helium!
no one's laughing: only because i didn't mention vegina.
narrative puritanism? you get distracted a lot...
but this sketch is really a thesis for narration,
all i have to do is find the antithesis of narration in it:
an actual narrative!          it stretches for ~30 pages...
   well that's me turned archaeologist with a Grecian urn
with a snap of the finger... because that's how this
sketch looks like: ancient -
                         but understandably modern.
              so .  ,  - and ;
        were racing... out came the world record
             9.58(0)         the full-stop is the bracket-bound
0... i.e. it actually happened: hence the pinpoint...
or in Formula 1 a timed nonsense of ave. m/ph
     noted to three decimal points: 130.703...
                                    or chicane cha chicane cha cha!
as said, this is an actual representation of a narrator
encountering this sketch: so before you lose your head...
i've lost mine!
  look at the correlation though!
we've gone way past atoms with the atomic bomb
and encountered subatomic particles...
    we're not going to get beyond subatomic particles
because we're going to encounter the already apparent
reality of obatomic particle: namely our bodies,
   the perceived ******* (ob- is the antonym
                                                  prefixation of sub-):
             that's were the microscope adventure ends,
    and this is parallel to cutting up a second with
three decimal points, as the safetynet suggests:
                                                              π / 3.14;
yep, the obstructive - hence we can't spontaneously
combust... but then again Goethe's Werther did:
  out of love... down the spiral: you sweet little *******.

~ii. i'm actually too lazy to write the sketch and fill
in the blanks... so i'm going to fill in the blanks as i go along,
  or that's what's called the rebellious stance of narrator: mmm,
work in progress, could you see that coming?


ii. a beer in between glugs of whiskey - runes
combined in the ******* / sigma, variant of agliz or
the rune-zeta extended toward a dark shadow of the rebirth
of Ishrael: zoological enclosure; sigma *******
sigma ******* sigma *******, sigma *******...
rune-zeta... we cannot say there are ******
mathematicians and poets akin,
not then one optic encoding states
     a b c d e
         another states f u þ a r
yet another а б (ρ) в г
  α β γ δ:
for worth of gamma into a trill only because of
   a wave, that's ~ approx. on the side of the letter
   e.g. г & r.
   or rho upside down? what the ****?
did Voltaire write this? reading Candide,
i hope he ****** did!
you the problem is pixelated paper? if you know
how you enter a deciphering mode...
                    but you require a personal library to boot,
all that dos formatting,
                       well there's formatting in the humanity
outstretch of this white medium too...
after it isn't all ******* white when all the psychiatric
pills are white too... i have really found something better
than the Bermuda Δ...
       Greek, Latin, Cyrillic and Runes...
i could say neo or proto otherwise,
but i still haven't unearthed the sketch, that
is probably puzzling the Danes, with Cnut on the forefront...
                    but the arrangement of numbers is universal,
but it's not universal, given the particularity of
how language is encoded and why some people are
richer than others...
            but it's still a beer between glugs of whiskey that
makes more sense...
i said, retype the sketch and go to bed...
and i figured: that's probably the wisest of all possible
events stemming from this...
    that's ~27 pages of notes to retype... and i'm already
in a disclosure mode as to expect what's to be jargoned...


p. 1        cкεтч       /      σкεтχ
   necessity of                        (acute
a-       -the           (ism)
is that of language structure,
          only from the use of one's language does
a deity present itself: from within the noumenon
ground work, not the reverse, as in from
(pp. 2, 3)
                 a phenomenological exercise in
the use of language: Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, (etc.)...
       e.g. Islam is a phenomenon,
  it's not a noumenon: or a thing-in-itself...
  for the Islamic god to emerge from Islam's-in-itself
Islam will have to prevent itself from being-outside-itself...
or overpowering other in-itself contentions
but still: to no apparent success narrative of true intention
as satisfactory appropriation and hence lending itself
to a widespread nod of approval.
  challenging space: word compounding, or the space
between conjunctional deficiencies: nod-of-approval (e.g.).

p. 2    concussion (great film, Alec and Will, 2015, NFL)
concussion... Blitzkrieg Alzheimer's....
brain is fat.... dementia = attacking proteins...
  steroids... the noumenological use of language:
e.g. that ****** is an enigma,
therefore his views will not go viral,
and he'll not become fashion trendy...
it's not individualistic idealism, it's reality.
as will die sonne satan - orbis reach more than 5K
views... so... clap clap... clap, clap.
           what i meant about the a-     and -the
and the ism is following a sentence that sort of
does away with conjunctional fluidity,
apart from the big words, i treat all minor words as
categorically conunctional... and, the, a, is, to, too...
given the sentence: brain fatty *****,
brian organic giraffe wall... ******* hieroglyphic...
           stood above the rest, rest assured.
  dementia: invading protein cells
   (bulging prune of the opportune: purely
digestion?) no thought to eat or eat itself like,
cannibalistically. the brain is fatty...
not fat in muscle for mmm, schmile and flex
for the selfie. how about a protein inhibitor?
(by now, rewriting the sketch, i've lost the page count,
it's actually p. 5 of note paged toward 27).
how about the explanation that we're living in
times of post-industrialisation and thanksgiving
feminism? to me post-industrialisation has created
a class of meaningless white-collar workers
and no blues... it's what the Chinese blues call
the Amazonian nomads: ******* happy...
no amount of crosswords or sudoku will exert
your body to do things for others...
   no amount of mind games will actually tell your
brain to be equipped with: a bunch of hyenas... run!
dementia is a result of creating too many
white-collar jobs (thanks to feminism)
and exporting the blues to China (thanks to feminism
and: oh i broke a nail, can i get a Ching plumber to
fix my heating while i get a ****** to **** me up my
****?!) - maybe i'm just dreaming...
it's great to censor dreaming, i mean: you stop dreaming,
you get to see reality, and you don't even need to
read Proust on a ricochet.
  - so we have brain as fat, and invader cells as protein...
protein digests fat... and creates cucumbers out
of people... where do the carbohydrates come into play?
it can't be at the point of a.d.h.d., can it?
     i'm blaming post-industrialisation, the complete
disappearance of the blues (formerly known as the reds,
in the east) for the whites...
or that old chestnut of: my god you're goon'ah luv it!
   to till for worth from the sweat of yer brow -
funny funny funny... to earn your loaf of bread
you will toil...
                   and toil until you are physically assured
that not ghostly / mental life can enter your world /
books... that went well... didn't it?
   i should be tilling a potato plateau rather than
be bound to be writing this epic (by modern standards)
poem...
             but that's the curse of exporting all the blue
collar jobs to China, then importing mindless
white collar jobs to the west, what the hell do you think
would happen, not the pandemic of dementia?
if you do not exert the body, and then you do not
exert / exhaust the mind... do you think
you can secure a narrative with a post-industrial
westerner on the premise of that person simply being
able to solve a crossword? well... i believe in santa
claus too... but i don't believe in him giving out
presents... because to me, in my oh-so-called maturity
that's called an anagram of satan's clause: which is a legal
term for: i can turn civilisation into shrapnel
of what's said and what's to be said: and what's not to be
said. people can't expect to turn honest labour
for the recreational run on the treadmill in a gym...
and they can't expect photocopying in an office space
to replace Newton's curiosity, and then compensate
all this distraction with mind-games...
          can they? well... they did!

poets are gagged by writers of prose,
no wonder they write so sparingly,
      they are gagged in the sense that they write
as if asphyxiated: they need breathing room.


well sure, if he can revive the Polish steel industry
and i can go back to steel plates and pillars,
then the rust belt will get a polishing also.

or what's called: shrapnel before the waterfall of
narration: darting eyes, and poncy **** all the way through...

     muse... muse...

        well, how about we take the fluidity out of language?
declassify certain words into one grammatical broth,
say words like i and they
                              a  and the    are all conjunctions?
how about that? let's strip it bare, after all: what categories
of words exist for us to primarily speak (let alone think)?
     nouns, verbs, adjectives... adverbs?
       but all those words in between are so jungly classified
into a tangle that i'm about to sprout a handshake
          of a Japanese vine grip: and never let go...

an actual extract from the sketch:

      https that doesn't recognise UCS
                   and insists on IPA cannot be deemed
       encyclopaedic


              i need runes for this! i need runes for this idea!
i don't need transliteration right now...
                but hey! that's an idea, etymological transliteration...
bugly term, sure, but the previous night i was thinking
  of transcendental etymology, as you do, likened to
carbohydrates... so it was transliteration after all...
but a dead end when it comes to geometry and Pythagoras...
      
    three words... and they are computerised (i guess you
have to buy a decent book to decode this), a bit like
buying paint in a d.i.y. shop...
       16DE (dagaz / d) 16DC (ingwaz / ŋ / grapheme of n & j)
                  16DF (ōþala / Valhalla / o / ō = oo),
in total d'njoo / d'nyoo - even i concede the fact that this
is a ******* mind-******... it's a ****** congregation of
four optic encodings of phonos... i moved away from
the ancient greek fetish for the logos... i'm looking at
the phonos... not the logos with Heraclitus et al.
               φº θ þ фª f

ªgreek
  ºcyrillic                ever see a prettier pentagram?
                      i haven't.

(false original title:
škic / cкэтч / φº θ þ фª f: thespian pandemic - pending)

looking at the phonos is painful, actually painful,
it's like reading a book with a myopic pair of glasses:
a ******* aquarium blurry right there, befor...

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

'e'? were you: was i, looking for an 'e'?

i can say this much...
what do you get when you mix a shot
of whiskey with a shot of bourbon:
i'm moving between bottles...
it's nearing christmas eve and i'm a ripe
taoist... i.e. i better this world:
by not having the world mind me...
on the odd occasion: oh... you're still here?!

yeah... i'm still here... i have glued-to-fascination
with my shadow... i'm just waiting
for the atom bomb to relieve me of a body
but ensuring my shadow is kept intact...
as if it were a Monet signature on a wall...

but i lament... the momentum has vanished...
i don't even know why i'm so idiotic as
to presume that: from the hour 22:00GMT
to the hours 00:00 circa 00:30GMT...
something will land into my lap,
my lisp... my cranium the oyster shell
my tongue the oyster...

it will not... i can't simply **** anything into
an existence that doesn't want to exist...
perhaps lurking in a canvas of:
"lost luggage" in an airport...
perhaps "there"...
i could be excused my... lethargy...

when was this written? back in 2018?
so i was thinking about teasing cyrillic even then?
wasn't i?
sketch cкэтч or?

what do you get when you mix a shot of whiskey
with some bourbon?
a Burguandian whisker...
i am not going to sound witty...
Ron's key...

that's still a cyrillic "or"... isn't it?
шкиц: škic...

i'm... deflated... nothing "new" has come my way...
i would have thought that...
reading some Knausgård would have /
could have... invigorated me:
reading him was supposed to be my:
dialysis my transfusion!
my zombie-go-to-literature...
it has proven an exhaustive enterprise
to begin writing again:
i became too comfortable
in reading - i almost forgot
the agony of writing...

alas... a contemporary of mine...
and someone well adjusted to prose...

notably: who would have thought
that death in june - the calling (MK II)
was something to be recorded in 1985...
for one: i wouldn't...

but i did begin: back in november 2016...
begin what? to tickle the cyrillic alphabet...
which is way before i discovered my reply
to the runes... to the ancient greek...
and this... "ancient", ahem... still in use...
latin script...

that script that went into the molloch couldron
of being invested in to code...
pristine as the hebrews cited:
how many holes in it?
to write onto a canvas of 0?
q Q R O o p P A a D d g b B...
which leaves...
W E T Y U I S F H J K L
Z X C V N and M "out of the equation"...

škic / cкэтч / φº θ þ фª f: thespian pandemic (pending):
i better rename it as... circa 2016...
that's way before i even acknowledged
the cyrillic text applying diacritical markers...
i thought them too crude at the time...

beside borrowing outright from greek...
the already at hand oddities of glagolitic,
notably: Ⱎ...Ⱋ...

it's only a single word i'm using...
i have abandoned all notions of metaphysics
in favor for orthography...
i'm not going to burden myself
with: what's after the physics...
i'm after: what's now...
in the respective tongues...
2 tongue deviations from
the original latin and greek...

what came with the runes and what
came with the glagolitic scripts...
what was ****** and had to succumb
to inter-breeding...

come 2020... i will have one clarification
to base my existence on...
pronouncing the growth of my ****** hair...
i will hope to aim at a length of beard
that will forever hide the neck...
i will aim at... somewhere to the level
of my heart... when i will then manage
to turn my beard into an orchestra's
nieche of violins when i procrastinate with it...

since 2016...
i have identified russian in ******...
i've seen it... finally!
зъaрт... i.e. żart
and the "hard sign" becoming a "soft sign"
in źrenica: зьрeницa...

i still think the russian orthography
is... as... primitive as the western slavic...

after all... зъ = ż...
зь = ź...
the balkan slavs have a caron...
which is neither a hard or a soft sign / acute...

their caron is... ч (č) or cz...
CHeaper in english...
and their caron is ш (š) or sz...
SHeep...
or the two together...
and always шч (šč): szczekam...
i'm barking...

pu-shch-air... a rare example in english
of the puщair...
but then lookie lookie 'ere:

CZACHA... skull...
ЧAХA...

perhaps this is my "revenge ****" on russia?
hey! boris the kremlin mascoot...
come and 'ave a look...
with how i disect your orthography
on the / with the language that asks
too many metaphysical questions and no
orthographic curiosities!

i'll meet you in Warsaw... given that you're
probably moving from Novosibirsk...
and i'm either in Stockholm...
Edinburgh or the outskirts of London:
Warsaw will be halfway for both of us...
you don't have to like Warsaw...
i only like it when the Ukrainian smugglers
and the Mongols appear
in the West Warsaw coach station...

smart as who? i am discovering this for
the first time myself...
i was only teasing it back in 2016...
way before i found the right sort of accents
in mother russian...

i do know that that crescent oddity:
above the ja: йa... is what it is...
if you only cut off the head in english... ȷ...
again: it's я given that most russians
are pulled toward an anglophile world-view...
they all see the window to europe...
the baltic and st. petersburg is somehow...
London... and the atlantic...
like hell it is...

i guess i feel it was a waste of time to
have re(a)d Kant, simply because:
i'm not here for the schematics...
i want to know how my thought my labyrinth
building architecture is coming along...
but with no one to talk to about it?

i found the categorical imperative most
dissatisfying... i didn't want to abide by universal laws...
poetry is already shoved out of waiting room
of the republic...
if my "poetry" is not a categorical imperative...
and it's not quiet a a hypothetical imperative...
it needs to be sharpened on a thesaurus
and some grammar...

categorical (adjective)... imperative (adjective)...
well two adjectives never imply much
if there's no noun involved...
and i'm pretty sure that... if i sharpen
the next word i'll compound with categorical-
in that hyphen construct that's only
allowed in oxford dictionary english:
since it's not: propergermannonhyphenfaustian:
i.e. carboxylic (carbo-xylic) acidity...

poetry doesn't belong in either
the categorical imperative focus...
nor the hypothetical imperative focus...

i.e. i must write a poem... to feel better...
i must write a poem... to organise my thoughts...
no! a poem is not a maxim is not a categorical
imperative! a language of poetry is not
a language of morality: it's a language
of experience - or a lack / a lackey's "sentiment"...

i need a... categorical: impetus!
it's not enough to have read kant's critique of pure
reason... it must also involved
having re(a)d the: groundwork of
the metaphysics of morals...
but i'm a democratic reader...
i need to hear the other voices...
i can't be a kantian scholar...
a snippet 'ere, a snippet v'ere (funny how
THETA disappears when making the posit:
THERE - ver!)

who needs metaphysical absolutes...
when orthography (or a lack of it)
in english... spreads open its legs...
and the tongue remembers its tongue-brain-phallus
stage of co-existence in the oyster?!

i'm pretty sure that a categorical imperative
is by no means a categorical impetus...
this had to be written,
but it had to be written in order to disregard
anything a priori... prior to it...
a poem is a shady concern for action or inaction...
it's a deviation from the cartesian crux:
res cogitans (thinking thing)...
into the cartesian levy (res extensa)...
it's an action of inactivity...
as much as it's an inactive activity...
"the rest"...

impetus is not an imperative...
an impetus sources its meaning in a per se
investement... of itself - in itself - for itself...
an imperative?
in pronouns... impetus: i want... i will...
imperative? you want... you will...

an impetus is self-dictative...
an imperative is: indicative...
someone would rightly claim...
those that mourn indicatively...
will don the right garments for the process
of mourning...
which is indicative and devoid of
the per se manifestation of mourning...
it is an imperative when compared to
the impetus to mourn -
which is self-dictative...
which does now shallow itself in
grief by making a socially agreed to fiasco
of a very specific choice of wardrobe...

basically: however you like it...
an IMPERATIVE ≠ IMPETUS...
the year is almost over and i want to break-off
the dust from the thoughts that fudge-packed themselves
as worthy of occupying the minor instance
of having to count a depth of:
not dead within the year of being written.
Duncan Brown Aug 2018
Archie was smart; at least he reckoned he was, because he had what he considered to be the good things in life: dosh in his wallet, a Cat in the garage, and a detach. in the green belt; all of which he had worked hard to acquire. Worked, is not exactly the word for it. Archie did deals. He reckoned he could always turn a fiver into a tenner an’ a tenner into a pony; a pony into a ton and a ton to a grand. He was one of the cash economy’s natural alchemists.  The folding stuff was the measure of a person, he reckoned. Archie never thought about anything; he reckoned everything, and nothing on God’s good earth was beyond reckoning, he reckoned. An ever-ready reckoner; that was Archie, and he loved himself for it. Only John Wayne did more reckoning than Archie, his old dad, bless him, used to say, thought Archie. In Archie’s world a grand was currency; less than that was just spare change. He reckoned he gave superior meaning to the expression ‘it’s a grand life’. The only blemish on Archie’s horizon as far as he could see was the lack of a class bird, or ‘ream sort’, as he preferred to say; hence this evening’s extravaganza at a posh French restaurant in the company of a beautiful lady. Archie only had two serious weaknesses in his existence: a fondness for the last word in a dispute about anything you care to mention, and his infatuation with his dining companion, the beautiful Carmela.


Carmela shared a common background with Archie. They grew up on the same council estate in the inner city. They were aware of each other’s existence as kids and teenagers, but they didn’t really know each other. Carmela was a quiet child and very singular; even in company she could be by herself. None but she was wise to her sense of solitude. She had three passions in life: knitting, sewing and weaving; the blessed trinity of her existence. Carmela interpreted the world by these three gifts. Here she was, she thought, weaving her way through an evening, in the company of three strangers. One she knew, herself, another she didn’t know at all, despite proximity and semi-shared origins. Then there was the complete stranger to the trinity: the waiter in his new and very polished shiny black shoes, “You can tell a lot about a person by their shoes”, Carmela’s mum used to say, she was thinking about that as the waiter appeared to almost pirouette into vision.


The waiter was a patient soul, it goes with the territory. The waiting game wasn’t something you should rush in to, he often told himself, in one of his more existentialist moments. He appreciated the irony of the comment in a Sartresque kind of fashion. He was from a steel town in the Rhonda Valley of South Wales. Iron was in his veins if not his appearance. A creature of paradoxes, that’s what he told himself he was. He liked that assessment of himself. It complimented his passion for all things French: French food, French wine, French philosophy, literature and art. He was learning the language at night school. Alas, his accent was as lyrically refined as the landscape that bred him He shovelled the words onto a conveyor belt of sound and meaning as best he could in the general direction of the person he was talking to, more in hope than in faith that they understood what was being said .The other passion in his life was tap dancing, and as luck would have it he could wear the same outfit for work and leisure, hence the very shiny shoes which allowed him to dance around the tables of the restaurant, practising his language skills on the clientele, His life work and leisure dovetailed with his ambition and he was pleased to wake up in the morning and set about the mortal trespass with a skip in his step. The waiter imagined himself to be a cosmopolitan and enlightened soul, in a very Fred Astaire kind of way, and life was a flight of stairs which he could ascend and descend in a Morse code type of style, just like Mr Bojangles.


The fare was fine. the wine was rare, but the conversation was spare until the cheese board arrived.” Good grub”, said Archie to the waiter. “We don’t do grub, sir, we only serve the finest Gallic cuisine in this establishment,” replied the waiter, in his usual mangled French, whilst smiling that smile that only waiters can manage when registering disapproval. Archie looked blank. It was Carmela who spoke: “C’était magnifique! Mes compliments au chef.” “Streuth! You speak better French than Marcel Proust here” said Archie.” I studied Fashion and Design in Paris for five years “replied Carmela.” “An’ I joined the Common Market many moons ago. It’s good for business” said Archie. The waiter was impressed: “Food, fashion, wine, Proust and Paris. This must be Nirvana” he said. “Great band, but a very dubious heaven.” replied Carmela, knitting together the threads whilst changing the pattern of the conversation in a very subtle fashion that was more to her liking.” “It’s only rock ’n’ roll” said Archie, an’ if you’ve ever heard French rock ’n’ roll it’s enough to make you believe in Foucault” “Foucault, my hero!” said the waiter, “a philosophical genius”. “According to Foucault, a knitting pattern is the hieroglyphic of a consumerist and decadent capitalist society.” intoned Carmela.” “And ‘A recipe is a critique of a cake’, said the great Structuralist philosopher,” interjected Archie, so if you serve the gateaux we may effect the collapse of western civilisation as we all know and love it”. “Allors, Let them eat cake” said the waiter, and everybody smiled at the irony of the comment.

The waiter bojangled his way into the night, tapping and clicking the pavement as he went.  Carmela and Archie got into a black cab. “That was a night to remember,” said Carmela, “very Proustian”. “A la recherche du temps perdu”, replied Archie, pleased as punch to have the last word. Carmela just smiled as she looked at Archie’s shoes.
"Why one writes is a question I can never answer easily, having so often asked it of myself. I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live. I could not live in any of the worlds offered to me – the world of my parents, the world of war, the world of politics. I had to create a world of my own, like a climate, a country, an atmosphere in which I could breathe, reign, and recreate myself when destroyed by living. That, I believe, is the reason for every work of art.
...
"We also write to heighten our own awareness of life. We write to lure and enchant and console others. We write to serenade our lovers. We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection. We write, like Proust, to render all of it eternal, and to persuade ourselves that it is eternal. We write to be able to transcend our life, to reach beyond it. We write to teach ourselves to speak with others, to record the journey into the labyrinth. We write to expand our world when we feel strangled, or constricted, or lonely … When I don’t write, feel my world shrinking. I feel I am in prison. I feel I lose my fire and my color. It should be a necessity, as the sea needs to heave, and I call it breathing."
('The New Woman', 1974)
1970 Odysseus visits cousin Patsy in New York City she introduces him to her best friend Lauren’s older less attractive more reclusive sister Tanya Mulhaney extremely wealthy family father founded corporation manufactures pinball machines which years later develop to video games then casino empire he favors and spoils Tanya but dies suddenly her envious sisters and mother gang up on Tanya is pale skinny flat-chested copious brown bush Odysseus sits in bathtub with Tanya and he probes in a way they hits it off maybe no boy has ever touched her in that way her complexion is so fragile slightest fluster prompts pink blotches on her cheeks neck chest back he admires her book smarts he’s attracted to her refined strangeness he thinks her bush and flat-chest are **** she laughs shyly offers to take him around the world he accepts Odysseus tells his parents Mom goes crazy yells into telephone what are you a ******? you father and i work like fools to send you to the best schools so you can make something of yourself you’re going to throw everything away to be a ***? i tell you we’ll disown you you won’t have a home to come back to do you hear me? we’ll disown you! she sobs how can you just walk out after all we have done for you? you ******* kid! Odysseus takes leave of absence from art school he and Tanya take Iberia jet 12 hour flight with stopover in Iceland to Belgium Tanya sinks into one of her moods swallows several pills to help her rest sitting on other side of Odysseus is curly haired skinny talkative musician claims he has jammed with Miles Davis and other jazz greats Odysseus says yeah right and i’ve shown with Johns and Twombly where exactly are you heading in Europe? musician answers he is a scientologist on his way to visit L. Ron Hubbard in England Odysseus does not know what Dianetics are and wants explanation he asks many questions and musician talks for hours they enjoy each other’s rapport as jet descends in Brussels they exchange home addresses in the States 9 months later when Odysseus returns to America a friend notices scribbled address while skimming through his travel journals Odys! how did you get Chick Corea’s address? do you know him? do you realize how brilliant he is? he’s a keyboard virtuoso! Odysseus questions Chick Corea? who’s Chick Corea? he looks at journal page then says oh that guy i sat next to him on the jet to Europe so he really is a famous musician huh? wow!

in October 1970 Brussels is damp chilly Tanya wears hip-hugger jeans black turtle-neck top North Face shell she huddles her arms around her chest smokes cigarettes looks through hotel room window out into gray overcast sky speaks in defeatist voice i didn’t bring clothes for this weather she picks at her plate in hotel restaurant glumly vacillates later in bed after refusing *** decides they leave tomorrow fly to Canary Islands for several weeks to get tan before traveling through Morocco during winter months Canary Islands are laden with Swedish tourists including bikini clad young girls many not wearing tops Odysseus is thinking about how to swing some of that Swedish free love once Tanya gets drunk succumbs to Odysseus’s ****** overtures it is good  one day while returning to hotel from beach 2 Spanish police stop and question Tanya and Odysseus police order to see their passports then command them into squad car police bark in Spanish rifle through their daypacks point a finger Odysseus can smell alcohol on their breaths Tanya and Odysseus are terrified police drive off main road to remote location abandoned ruins no one is around police order them to step out police drive off laughing Tanya’s complexion is crimson she sobs they could have murdered us no one would know who we are or where to find us we’re lost where are we? Odysseus looks around replies don’t worry we’ll be all right i watched where the driver was going we’ll retrace their trail

they fly to Tangier travel south by train Tanya is irritable insisting Odysseus carry her backpack Casablanca is ***** 3 men peer from sunglasses act suspicious wear tattered trench coats Tanya and Odysseus snack at cafe which provides hookahs for smoking hashish Odysseus scores several grams Tanya laughs suggests they rent car drive south travel to sandy beaches of Diabet for 6 weeks in the morning she paces around French hotel room with cigarette in one hand ashtray in other like she is sultry 1940’s Hollywood actress she stays in room and devours Penguin Classics Tolstoy Stendhal Proust Huysmans Zola turns out Tanya is sexually frigid she buys Odysseus anything he wants but does not put out they take train Marrakech it is sun drenched with blue skies mountains in distance Odysseus wants to go out explore get ***** with the natives he visits Medina daily witnessing many bizarre scenes he does not understand a woman squatting over an egg a man with no legs dragging himself through marketplace holding up cigarette butts in his hand he meets a professor who is out of work because king of Morocco has closed the universities due to teachers’ strike professor explains woman squatting over egg is fortuneteller and man dragging himself has been offered crutches many times yet makes more money playing off pity of tourists cigarette butts are for sale the professor invites Odysseus to visit Berbers in mountains Odysseus persuades Tanya she reluctantly agrees the 3 travel by bus in first-class front row seats vehicle filled with lively families chickens pig bus driver has assistant who lugs people onto bus or shoves them out door at a midpoint bus stops in little town everyone exits bus then men women children urinate in street local venders sell trinkets snacks Odysseus buys nibbles shish-kabob that later professor informs is roasted cat and dog they reenter bus wait suddenly butchered lamb flank is flung onto Odysseus’s lap a man climbs aboard bus stairs then grabs large carcass and heedlessly walks to back seat Odysseus wipes blood and slime off his jeans Tanya demurely giggles bus climbs mountains arrives at small Berber village professor leads them along narrow winding street of shanty huts sheltering merchants open kitchens professor tastes from various steaming iron kettles finally decides on one they are directed to rickety roof where they sit wait a boy comes up with plastic bowl filled with water and small box of Tide following professor they wash their hands then minutes later proprietor brings up simmering *** of couscous serves it with scratched raw plastic bowls no eating utensils they eat with their fingers Tanya seems bothered declines to partake she withdraws into silence after meal she becomes irritable complains of headache says she needs to return to Marrakech she remains standoffish on bus all the way to French hotel

after Marrakech they take boat trip to Italy while onboard Odysseus meets Italian Count who has an eye for him Odysseus wears Jim Morrison beat-up leather jeans Bruce Lee t-shirt scraggly whiskers Count wears thin manicured beard tiny red Speedo swim trunks Tanya grins amused Count offers Odysseus and Tanya to be guests at his villa in Milan city flourishes with stylish clothes loud lively restaurants classical sculptures covered in car pollution following several weeks of aristocratic wining and dining amazing 11 course elegant soiree Odysseus botches compliance with Count’s desires they are asked to leave Tanya laughs hysterically they board train to Germany based on Tanya’s tour book they find historic hotel with wind rattling windows coin operated hot water bath in Munich Tanya stays in room Odysseus goes to dance club meets brown-hared pale skinned German girl neither speak the other’s language he pays for hourly rated room they play German girl in animated gesturing warns him as he is going down on her but he does not understand until several days later scratching beard finds ***** seeks A-200 lice treatment German version leather pants disposed Tanya knows but says nothing she buys Volkswagen they drive through Black Forest Tanya wants to visit King Ludwig’s castles Odysseus does the driving mostly they listen to the Who’s “Who’s Next” and Joni Mitchell’s “Blue” he follows Tanya’s instructions not knowing who King Ludwig was eventually he learns Ludwig was colorful character built extravagant Disney like castles and friends Richard Wagner Bavaria is cold gray brown deep forest green scenic Swiss Alps visible in southern view they drive from Neuschwanstein to Linderhof to Herrenchiemsee then Freiburg lodge in bed and breakfasts Tanya grows restless by all the driving decides to ditch car along road in northern France as Odysseus unscrews car license by road side several cars stop French people concerned they need help Tanya is anxious hoping for clean get away from abandoning vehicle they board train to Paris Tanya speaks a little French in spring of 1971 they are backpacking in search of hotel on Left Bank it rains all morning sky is overcast Tanya reads “Pride and Prejudice” Odysseus draws in sketchbook at sidewalk café sitting next to them are older Parisian couple man detects they are Americans he turns to them expresses in English his contempt why can’t you Americans learn from France’s lessons in Vietnam? Tanya and Odysseus don’t look up they feel like dumb ugly Americans within days they leave Paris

cross English Channel by boat they find temporary apartment in Earl’s Court in London it is overcast almost every day within a month they move to larger place in Chelsea with backyard with run down English garden Odysseus weeds garden plants tomatoes lettuce carrots radishes flowers Tanya stays in her room smokes reads at night they go out to ethnic restaurants one night they visit Indian restaurant a very proper English woman sitting at next table orders exotic fruit for dessert Odysseus asks waiter what kind of fruit waiter answers mango Odysseus has never seen or tasted mango English woman delicately eats the fruit with fork and knife Odysseus orders mango for dessert he attempts to imitate how English lady proceeded fruit slips around on plate finally out of frustration he picks it up in his hands bites into it he is aroused by how luscious mango is sniffing with nose scraping fruit’s skin with front teeth then ******* the seed Tanya makes a face suddenly the seed slides from his grasp shoots across table Tanya’s cheeks neck turn scarlet voice raises stop it Odys! you’re disgusting! are you intentionally trying to embarrass me? why are you doing this? he replies i’m not doing anything to you i’m enjoying the most delicious fruit i’ve ever tasted who cares what it looks like? later she laughs about incident offers to buy more mangos promises to take him shopping at Harrods tomorrow he goes along with their arrangement until it all seems like pretty background scenery to an empty intimacy missing all his friends back at art school he writes about his loneliness he feels trapped in Tanya’s web several times he sneaks English girls into his room when Tanya jealously confronts him he admits he has had enough and wants to go back to Hartford she suggests at the least they fly to Bermuda for several weeks to get tan before returning he declines on June 30 1971 Odysseus returns to Hartford and Tanya moves to San Francisco on July 3 Jim Morrison overdoses in Paris
Mateuš Conrad Apr 2016
only in england, where so few philosophical
works are actually read,
it's apparently enough to cite Locke,
the famous island isolation -
after watching a program on bipolar disorders /
manic depression and what not
started watching a rekindling of
the premier league from the years 2002 / 3...
with the years' music in the background -
great memories Wayne Rooney was still
at Everton, and David ****** had a moustache
and a ponytail standing in goal at Arsenal,
Ole "babyface" Solskjær was playing at
Manchester United - the white stripes came out
teasing a breakthrough just before
their elephant album - well, that's that,
but this programme about the manics -
you'd think that england was really accommodating
to eccentrics as once Vladimir expressed -
he's half-informed, 'hey Vlad... you have half
the picture, honest to god...'
but i want to deviate from any sort of scrutiny
on the subject - the "sane" people think
doctors are holy - what's with this notion that
some surgeons don't leave surgical equipment
in bodies, and that misdiagnosis doesn't happen?
well... so much for deviation:
does it begin with questioning your thinking
rather than questioning existence?
half-baked activists - no "change the world"
prompt? i guess you could say that -
no qualification credentials and you're just
a street-cleaner, apparently - a street-cleaner
in the sense of shuffling tripping up on
banana skins (chris rea - god's great banana skin -
https://goo.gl/3JYJYV - great song) or waltzing
on autumn leaves - suddenly there's a new
zoology department at the London zoo -
changed sphynxes on two legs rattling piggies
of savings they never made other than what they
picked up from the street - besides that -
well, you can resort to the Koran -
or at least i find a way to mediate it - back to
descartes: an example of good through doubt,
meaning i'm a quasi-believer, but not, as sartre
would claim: an unbeliever - since doubt equates
itself with good faith, sartre's doctrine teaches
bad faith... and if the opposite of bad is good,
then the opposite of doubt is denial (the un- prefix
summary when coupled to belief);
so this one manic depressive was describing
a moment of solipsism in terms of annie lennox
singing to him - well, she was, the man just
experienced a moment of solipsism, a thought
experiment in subconsciously, and he simply didn't
realise it - like i told you - so few works of
philosophy are read in england, most of these books
try to follow the route nietzsche attempted:
to write very little when others wrote a great deal...
and then what? sit on a poet's laurels and ****
and smile that all too deceptive smile of some sort
of accomplishment? that'll hardly work -
imagine thirst, and hunger, and put that into writing -
and here we have the telegraphic technique -
as suggested by the author of slaughterhouse 5 -
m. kurt vonnegut - well obviously you will not find
any comparisons - but then at Yale the professor of
"creative" writing or whatever they call it
just cited the first line of the first canto - so i ask you:
why would you want to write something as if
it's an instruction manual for a television set?
oddly enough too, the Florence school of art technique
wasn't passed on - while Albrecht Dürer kept his
a secret, unto himself - lucky man, a sad man,
but a lucky man - i actually like his selfishness.
no, they don't read philosophy in england,
and i can testify with the usual saying they have:
'he's lost touch with reality', what the hell is that?
no, i don't have the stamina for any secret society
crap - i get the comedy of life,
a comfortable positioning on the ****** laze -
limit all of life's temptations and live out
a slightly impoverished life - premonition i'd say
now, had enough money back when i was making
investments in a music & book library -
now i'm full - now my turn to give -
oh look: a bunch of gnat memory readers
easily distracted by traffic lights - we've all been
there - two years and a few books in between
it took me to read Heidegger's being and time -
TWO YEARS! and how much came in between?
sunset upon glee of the sea - Ezra's
broken token to the conjunctions
        and
                and
                        and and and and
i don't mind - man lived to be poetry's prefect of
the 20th century - see, a whole group of them, not a solitary
macaroon fetishist that Proust was -
and moby **** will have his days counted,
but not by me - there's no point being a Samson
keeping all the pillars - actually, that's the point,
to be Samson, take a few literary pillars
and then the whole **** temple collapses -
so with two or three of them taken by you
the rest you leave a rubble - turning over to the leisure
of poetry - Vladimir, haven't you heard?
people in england think all poetry is depressing,
depressing? 'what's normal?' is another maxim
in england - singing on the train is forbidden, also -
hey, social criticism is better than running around
with a kalashnikov - turn words into bullets
and mown the strata - and mown the strata -
                 and mown the strata -
give up on preplanned expeditions - only gymnasts
and tightrope walkers do pre-planning -
patience and constant innovative practice - ****'s jazz,
there was no classical composer in their midst with
a silencer of the music, music scores -
how they crammed an entire orchestra in those
little heads of theirs, i'll never know -
so this manic depressive man cited solipsism without
knowing it, and it made him very, very uncomfortable...
i wouldn't have sent him to a psychiatrist,
i wouldn't even want to go to one voluntarily -
i'd have sent him to the library -
but oh, oh, more and more libraries are closing -
while the zenith in my local library was
Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus - everything else
was toilet paper.
In the rain in the rain in the rain in the rain in Spain.
Does it rain in Spain?
Oh yes my dear on the contrary and there are no bull fights.
The dancers dance in long white pants
It isn't right to yence your aunts
Come Uncle, let's go home.
Home is where the heart is, home is where the **** is.
Come let us **** in the home.
There is no art in a ****.
Still a **** may not be artless.
Let us **** an artless **** in the home.
Democracy.
Democracy.
Bill says democracy must go.
Go democracy.
Go
Go
Go

Bill's father would never knowingly sit down at table with a Democrat.
Now Bill says democracy must go.
Go on democracy.
Democracy is the ****.
Relativity is the ****.

Dictators are the ****.
Menken is the ****.
Waldo Frank is the ****.
The Broom is the ****.
Dada is the ****.
Dempsey is the ****.
This is not a complete list.
They say Ezra is the ****.
But Ezra is nice.
Come let us build a monument to Ezra.
Good a very nice monument.
You did that nicely
Can you do another?
Let me try and do one.
Let us all try and do one.
Let the little girl over there on the corner try and do one.
Come on little girl.
Do one for Ezra.
Good.
You have all been successful children.
Now let us clean the mess up.
The Dial does a monument to Proust.
We have done a monument to Ezra.
A monument is a monument.
After all it is the spirit of the thing that counts.
Mateuš Conrad Apr 2016
perchance an epic was necessary, to consolidate the scattered thinking, and indeed, once a certain life, and was lived with a cherishing heart, the heart broke, and life turned from adventures to a more studious approach, and in here, a comfort was found, never before imagined explorations - of course sometime a tourist in the arts does come, but such tourists quickly fade, and the pursuit becomes more enshrined - to levitated towards epics is perhaps the sole reason for the cherished memory of some - and how quickly all can revolve around a searched for theme, after many incorporations were minded - as one to have travelled the Mediterranean, another to have been eaten by the great mandarin silkworm of the library of Kangxi - heading along the silk route with spices - indeed the great mandarin silkworm of the library of emperor Kangxi; as i too needed a bearing - to inspect the trickster of lore and the godly blacksmith of the north.

by instruction - an accumulation of the the zephyrs
into a vector, headed north,
toward the gluttonous murk of ice, jesting
with aches to the bulging and mesmerised crescendo
of adrift stars captured in the tilting away -
to think of an epic, to keep out-of-time of
spontaneity and thistle like swiftness in the last
days of summer, that Mercury brings the new
tides of the tetravivaldis -
   brought by the λoγος of a γoλας -
for reasons that satisfy the suntan copper of
the ***** - the λoγος of a γoλας - yet not toward
Monte Carlo or any hideout of money well invested
and greedily spent for a charm -
no, north bids me welcome from afar -
this norðri fløkja, this    ᚾᛟᚱᛞᚱᛁ       ᚠᛚᚢᚲᛃᚨ -
by my estimate, i could not take the nonsense
of numerology of a certain specialisation,
i took what was necessary, i pillaged the temple
of Solomon, perhaps that the dome of the rock
might stand - with its glistening dome and
its sapphire mosaics - i don't belong among
palm trees and date trees - hence i turned to
deciphering and subsequently encrypting -
as i have already with *ᚱᚨᛒᛖ
:
the journey of an Æsir through a birch forest
on a horse.
                    with this method in mind:
(a) ᚾᛟᚱᛞᚱᛁ       (b) ᚠᛚᚢᚲᛃᚨ:

(a)
the need to acquire possessions accumulating
into an estate, is a journey encountered
day by day, although a journey on ice

(b)
cattle only thrive near water,
auruchs did not, and hence illuminated
their way to extinction,
         by way of the Æsirs' harvest
(to eat up diversity of life, and create
a godless world of man).

my escape route came from ᚠ - mirroring שִׂ
although the former standing, the latter sitting
down, although the former fathomable
to my pleasure, the latter unfathomable
to ascribe numbers to letters for patterns -
i seek no patterns, hence my sight turned to
the northern sights, and meanings amplified.
                
the greeks were intended to explore abstracts,
having stated a triangle
they invented the ² symbol and what not,
it was because
they didn't bother extracting a phonetic unit
from something definite,
they classified such endeavours barbarian,
what reasonable greek of 13% reason and
87% reality would extract alpha from
the sound you made when
saying ansur (ᚨᚾᛋᚢᚱ) - i.e. attention -
i.e. deriving a definite sound differentiation
for alphabetical rubrics from a definite thing
(in whatever classification that might be)?
the greeks used the alphabetical rubric of
crafting a definite sound from an indefinite thing,
so they said: acronym, aardvark, assumption,
                       α                 α      α     α,
then they said α² - there are no antonyms -
but indeed there were, hence the Trojan nation
settling in the boot, that's Italy,
the Romans escalated the greek theory
beyond taking out a definite sound distinguished
from other distinguishable sounds,
abstracting what the alphabetic sound assured
a list under alpha: assumption, advantage,
acorn, etc. -
the latins were the first atomist after the greeks,
the greeks believed in atoms, but had no
microscopes to prove atoms existed,
such scientific faith found no parallel;
the latins ensured this was true,
ending with castrato sing-along -
the latins furthered abstracting sounds from
definite orientation which the greeks did
working from ice into iota,
the latins just sang i, i, i -
of course chiral behaviourism of such dissection
emerged - hatch a plan, plan a chisel -
it's very piquant i mind to let you know -
the greeks abstracted nouns in order to create
the alphabet, the barbarians still used
proper nouns to speak proper, the greeks
thus created synonyms and antonyms to add
to the spice of life - after all,
not deriving definite alphas from
cursors that acknowledged points of origins
created diacritical stressing like comma and
semis of colon and macron, not deriving them
from definite things, shunning a helpful
vocabulary bank to an unhelpful vocabulary
banked: synonyms and antonyms the Gemini's
birth of rhetoric;
but the latins were rejected with their atomic theory
of pronunciation, since they became laden
with diacritics - punctuation marks of a different sort,
you can measure a man sprint one hundred metres,
but is that also measuring a man to say
mān or män or mán? i know that the slavic ó = u
given the scalpel opening the ensō to craft a parabola -
but it's not necessarily an accent debate
but a punctuation debate... the emergence of
the diacritic symbols above the letters is due
partly to their joy of the popes listening to
castrato operas and the fact that the romans
went too far... hence the chiral nature of certain
symbols when dittoing - the barbarians used
definite things to assert definite sounds -
the greeks used indefinite things to assert definite
sounds - mind you, if the romans became too
abstract with their little units that became engraved
with punctual accenting, then the greek letters
became laden with scientific constants as necessarily
fathered, unchanging in the pursuit of Heraclitus' flux -
for example... Pythagoras and the hypotenuse:
                            σ / κ² = α² + β² -
           or?
                             c² (ć) = a² (ą) + b² / š (bubble beep
                                                           bop barman backup hop
                                                           of shackled kakah
                                                           or systematic oscillation
                                                           for bzz via burp);
πρ² is still more stable
                                 than what the latin alphabet allows -
hence why greek phonetic encoding was used in
science, and latin phonetic encoding was used in music,
can't be one or the other - added to the fact that
latin encoding had too many spare holes with
the evolution of numbers, and greek didn't have them,
hence β-reduction in lambda calculus and F-dur and A#

the one variant of the grapheme (æ) they didn't include
among expressions: graphite and grapheme
was the variant - gravitating to an entombing
of the excess aesthetic - geresh stress -
somehow the twins match-up to a single womb:
àé vs. áè: V vs. Λ - Copernicus wrote over all
of this with the flat earth uselessness
in terms of navigation - flat earth is useless...
huh? flat earth is the only system that gave
Columbus the chance to explore the new world -
no flat earth no Columbus -
that satellite named Luna was no tool
in navigating across the Atlantic - believe me
i'm sure -
                  or that grapheme (æ) varied like statistics
or like the characters in the book of genesis
that famous adam und eve (kim and kanye):
chances came, chances went:
it was still a draw on the tongue tied decipher:
àè and áé proved another notation for plurality
was necessary, not at the beginning of the word,
but after, hence the possessive article 's,
we could have parallelism, there was a crux,
how once the chiselling of letters came about,
more economic to chisel in a V than a U,
both the same, much easier though...
almost barbaric i might say...
sigma (Σ) enigma rune e (ᛖ) - this compass
is a ******* berserker, god knows if it's
mount Everest or the Bermuda Δ

but one thing is for certain, never you mind how
a language is taught unless you mind it,
not that conversational athenian is really what
i'm aiming at - but a lesson is a lesson nonetheless,
out of interest something new,
richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi,
and what preceded him, namely pan-slavism,
just when the polish-lithuanian commonwealth
did a little Judaic trick of its own,
although snorkelling in the waters of not writing
history for less a time than israel -
you can't beat ~2000 under water - although
you could if your little tribe had an einstein
among them, or proust or spinoza, then
you could effectively become a whale, popping
an individual out from the rubble to say a polite
'hello' and 'when will the dessert be served?'
but indeed, learning a language on your own,
how to learn from scratch, the greek orthography,
and why omicron and not omega,
the give-away? sigma - purely aesthetic reason,
                             νoμισματων

                             nomismaton

omicron                                                 omega

                 you write omicron at the front
                 and omega at the back
                 pivot letter? two: σ     μ &
                 νoμι-                                -ατων
                      ­                     |
                 anything here  
                 will use o            and anything
                                              here uses ω

alike to sigma:
                          χωρας (choras, i.e. country)

sigma (ς) not sigma (σ), i.e. digitalising languages
without a clear connectivity of letters,
block-a-brick-block-a-brick-digit-digit-digit
you learn that handwriting is gone,
two options, your own aesthetic reasons now,
remember, some paired for the ease of handwritten
flow - digitalised language changes the aesthetics,
you make your own rules (considering exceptions
of oh mega mega, ergo revision -

                                       χoρας,

but still the sigma rule, others esp. o mega
you stamp on them like βλαττια, i.e. cockroaches -
κατσαρίδα                 not         κατςαρίδα

all perfectly clear when you explore plato's
dialogue from the book Θηαετητυς (as you might
have noticed, the epsilon-eta project is still
in the storage room of my imagination) -
but indeed in the dialogue, between socrates
and the "hero" of the book theaetetus -
a sample, without an essay on the theory
of knowledge -
socrates: ...'tell me theaetesus, what is Σ O?'
theaetetus: yes, my reply would be that it is
                    Σ and O.
socrates: so there's your account of the syllable,
                isn't it?
theaetetus: yes.
socrates: all right, then: tell me also what your
                  account of Σ is.
                                                             ­   (etc.
or as some might say, a shrug of the shoulders,
a hmmpf huff puff of hot air, impractical interests
and concerns - well, better the impractical
problems than practical problems, less feet
shuffling and nail-biting moments with your
tail between your legs and an army of
intellectuals working out what went wrong
and how history will solve everything by
the practical problems repeating themselves) -
you know that inane reaction - others would just say
Humphrey Bogart and nonetheless get on with it.

some would claim i was begot a second time,
not in the sixth month period of the aqua-flesh,
how did i actually related to the life aquatic,
for nine months i was taught to hold my breath,
however did this happen?
a miracle of birth? ah indeed the miracle of
a crutch for a woman - spinal deformities -
9 months, sort to speak, in water or some other
fluid - merman - a beastly innovation -
next you'll be telling me beyond this life
we turn into centaurs, given the Koran's promise -
you'd need the appetite of a breeding horse
to satiate the 72 - or thereabouts - martyr or
no martyr - 72? that's pushing it -
or as they say among children - a chance playground
without swings or sandpits, but very careless
gravitational pulling toward a certain direction;
nonetheless, they might have that i did indeed
settle of a sáttmáli                  ᛋᚨᛏᛏᛗᚨᛚᛁ
                  við         ­                  Vᛁᛞ
                  tann                         ᛏᚨᚾᚾ
                  djevul                      ᛞᛃᛖVᚢᛚ -
the hands you see, fidgety -
     hond handa grammur burtur    úr   steðgur
     ᚻᛟᚾᛞ  ᚻᚨᚾᛞᚨ  ᚷᚱᚨᛗᛗᚢᚱ   ᛒᚢᚱᛏᚢᚱ  ᚢᚱ   ᛋᛏᛖᛞᚷᚢᚱ
         the hands give an ardent pursuit
                                                 away from rest -
well not that my poems will ever reach
the islands in question - and indeed an
uneducated guess propels me - what does it matter,
λαλος babbler meant anything, indeed λαλος,
language as my own, is a language that i can
understand - and should anyone omit
disparities - a welcome revision would never tease
nor burn my eyes - but the phonetic omission
peeved me off: woad in water, ventricles in a
variety of entanglements - it's just not there -
and indeed, orthographically, if there are no more
optometric involvements of omicron's twin -
then the stance is with you to use whichever pleases,
i can't tell the difference, unless i was a pedantic
student, aged 70, with a granddaughter i wanted
to be wed teasing a millimetre's worth of
phonetic differentiation between the two -
POTATO PA'H'TAYTOE TOMATO TA'H'MAYTOE -
linguistically one's american and the other
is british, which looks like greek and latin
upside-down and in a mirror: pəˈteɪtəʊ, təˈmɑːtəʊ;
or as the spaghetti gobblers would put it:
the tetragrammaton is working on their
texan drawl (dwah! ripples in china) -
or the high-society new england ******* *******
coo with a cuckoo's load of clocks -
before being sent off to england for a respectable
education, something en route Sylvia Plath -
but not to ol' wee scoot land - ah nay - well
perhaps for a year and then talk of north european
barbarism of a deep friend pizza and mars bar.

and when descartes finished with christina
queen of sweden, she became an animate portrait
of feminine attempts at philosophising,
she was basically ostracised from society,
well, not society per se, she didn't become a stray
dog, but she forgot certain functions of
the upper tier - lazily modern man decides
to hide phenomena from understanding
individual instances, with the kantian guise
of a noumenon, hence cutting his efforts short -
indeed queen christina of sweden was ostracised
by society - only after descartes finished educating her;
and indeed to most people a little bit of sloth
equates to an amputation of some sort -
yet only with the x-files' season 2 episode 2
i've learned of the effects of prolonged alcohol
"misuse", that little boxing match in my liver?
it's not a pain as such, it's actually a hardening
of soft tissue - with prolonged alcohol exposure
soft tissue organs harden, notably the liver -
and it's not a pain, it's a hardening.
but indeed queen christina of sweden was ostracised
by her tier of socialites - i'm glad diogenes
didn't get to her, but then again a bit of cloth
goes a long way this far north -
yet unlike the encounter with napoleon by hegel
diogenes' encounter with alexander lasted longer -
which tells you the old method does no service
to a little bit of material accumulation -
but perhaps the acumen was briefer when you were
ably living in a barrel - and to think, as only
that being the sole expression, not so much
a body without organs as stated in the thesis
of anti-oedipus by deleuze and guattari -
a consideration for a body without limbs - prior
to a footprint an imprint on the mind -
carelessly now, a diarrhoea of narration -
how rare to find it - perhaps this idea of epic
poetry is a default of writing per se -
with this my whatever numbered entry i seize
to find escape in it - a lack of ambition -
a loss of spontaneity that's a demanded mechanisation -
by volume, by inaneness - to reach a single
technique accumulative zenith, and then back
into the ploughing, rustic scenery and the
never-bored animals - i rather forget such escapades -
and there i was dreaming of a grand
runic exploration - some imitable game -
some scenic routes - yet again -
Proust kept a log of his  untidy mind
inviting readers in to sink, or swim
some find their thoughts are much of the same kind
some feel it's all particular to him
great literature ought to resonate
but still meets a diversity of taste
those hawthorn blossoms of his endless prate
some readers find a shapeless verbose waste
a shorter form fits my attention span
of seventy iambs in rhyming verse
within a reader's mind I dare hope can
evoke a self-consistent universe
a monument to years spent pent in bed
Marcel's rich life was mostly in his head
Jean Cocteau es un ruiseñor mecánico a quien le ha dado cuerda Ronsard.

Los únicos brazos entre los cuales nos resignaríamos a pasar la vida, son los brazos de las Venus que han perdido los brazos.

Si los pintores necesitaran, como Delacroix, asistir al degüello de 400 odaliscas para decidirse a tomar los pinceles... Si, por lo menos, sólo fuesen capaces de empuñarlos antes de asesinar a su idolatrada Mamá...

Musicalmente, el clarinete es un instrumento muchísimo más rico que el diccionario.

Aunque se alteren todas nuestras concepciones sobre la Vida y la Muerte, ha llegado el momento de denunciar la enorme superchería de las "Meninas" que -siendo las propias "Meninas" de carne y hueso- colgaron un letrerito donde se lee Velázquez, para que nadie descubra el auténtico y secular milagro de su inmortalidad.

Nadie escuchó con mayor provecho que Debussy, los arpegios que las manos traslúcidas de la lluvia improvisan contra el teclado de las persianas.

Las frases, las ideas de Proust, se desarrollan y se enroscan, como las anguilas que nadan en los acuarios; a veces deformadas por un efecto de refracción, otras anudadas en acoplamientos viscosos, siempre envueltas en esa atmósfera que tan solo se encuentra en los acuarios y en el estilo de Proust.

¡La "Olimpia" de Manet está enferma de "mal de Pott"! ¡Necesita aire de mar!... ¡Urge que Goya la examine!...

En ninguna historia se revive, como en las irisaciones de los vidrios antiguos, la fugaz y emocionante historia de setecientos mil crepúsculos y auroras.

¡Las lágrimas lo corrompen todo! Partidarios insospechables de un "régimen mejorado", ¿tenemos derecho a reclamar una "ley seca" para la poesía... para una poesía "extra dry", gusto americano?

Todo el talento del "douannier" Rousseau estribó en la convicción con que, a los sesenta años, fue capaz de prenderse a un biberón.

La disección de los ojos de Monet hubiera demostrado que Monet poseía ojos de mosca; ojos forzados por innumerables ojitos que distinguen con nitidez los más sutiles matices de un color pero que, siendo ojos autónomos, perciben esos matices independientemente, sin alcanzar una visión sintética de conjunto.

Las frases de Oscar Wilde no necesitan red. ¡Lástima que al realizar sus más arriesgadas acrobacias, nos dejen la incertidumbre de su ****!

El cúmulo de atorrantismo y de burdel, de uso y abuso de limpiabotas, de sensiblería engominada, de ojo en compota, de retobe y de tristeza sin razón -allí está la pampa... más allá el indio... la quena... el tamboril -que se espereza y canta en los acordes del tango que improvisa cualquier lunfardo.

Es necesario procurarse una vestimenta de radiógrafo (que nos proteja del contacto demasiado brusco con lo sobrenatural), antes de aproximarnos a los rayos ultravioletas que iluminan los paisajes de Patinir.

No hay crítico comparable al cajón de nuestro escritorio.

Entre otras... ¡la más irreductible disidencia ortográfica! Ellos: Padecen todavía la superstición de las Mayúsculas.

Nosotros: Hace tiempo que escribimos: cultura, arte, ciencia, moral y, sobre todo y ante todo, poesía.

Los cubistas cometieron el error de creer que una manzana era un tema menos literario y frugal que las nalgas de madame Recamier.

¡Sin pie, no hay poesía! -exclaman algunos. Como si necesitásemos de esa confidencia para reconocerlos.

Esos tinteros con un busto de Voltaire, ¿no tendrán un significado profundo? ¿No habrá sido Voltaire una especie de Papa (*****) de la tinta?

En música, al pleonasmo se le denomina: variación.

Seurat compuso los más admirables escaparates de juguetería.

La prosa de Flaubert destila un sudor tan frío que nos obliga a cambiarnos de camiseta, si no podemos recurrir a su correspondencia.

El silencio de los cuadros del Greco es un silencio ascético, maeterlinckiano, que alucina a los personajes del Greco, les desequilibra la boca, les extravía las pupilas, les diafaniza la nariz.

Los bustos romanos serían incapaces de pensar si el tiempo no les hubiera destrozado la nariz.

No hay que admirar a Wagner porque nos aburra alguna vez, sino a pesar de que nos aburra alguna vez.

Europa comienza a interesarse por nosotros. ¡Disfrazados con las plumas o el chiripá que nos atribuye, alcanzaríamos un éxito clamoroso! ¡Lástima que nuestra sinceridad nos obligue a desilusionarla... a presentarnos como somos; aunque sea incapaz de diferenciarnos... aunque estemos seguros de la rechifla!

Aunque la estilográfica tenga reminiscencias de lagrimatorio, ni los cocodrilos tienen derecho a confundir las lágrimas con la tinta.

Renán es un hombre tan bien educado que hasta cuando cree tener razón, pretende demostrarnos que no la tiene.

Las Venus griegas tienen cuarenta y siete pulsaciones. Las Vírgenes españolas, ciento tres.

¡Sepamos consolarnos! Si las mujeres de Rubens pesaran 27 kilos menos, ya no podríamos extasiarnos ante los reflejos nacarados de sus carnes desnudas.

Llega un momento en que aspiramos a escribir algo peor.

El ombligo no es un órgano tan importante como imaginan ustedes... ¡Señores poetas!

¿Estupidez? ¿Ingenuidad? ¿Política?... "Seamos argentinos", gritan algunos... sin advertir que la nacionalidad es algo tan fatal como la conformación de nuestro esqueleto.

Delatemos un onanismo más: el de izar la bandera cada cinco minutos.

Lo primero que nos enseñan las telas de Chardin es que, para llegar a la pulcritud, al reposo, a la sensatez que alcanzó Chardin, no hay más remedio que resignarnos a pasar la vida en zapatillas.

Facilísimo haber previsto la muerte de Apollinaire, dado que el cerebro de Apollinaire era una fábrica de pirotecnia que constantemente inventaba los más bellos juegos de artificio, los cohetes de más lindo color, y era fatal que al primero que se le escapara entre el fango de la trinchera, una granada le rebanara el cráneo.

Los esclavos miguelangelescos poseen un olor tan iodado, tan acre que, por menos paladar que tengamos basta gustarlo alguna vez para convencerse de que fueron esculpidos por la rompiente. (No me refiero a los del Louvre; modelados por el mar, un día de esos en que fabrica merengues sobre la arena).

¡La opinión que se tendrá de nosotros cuando sólo quede de nosotros lo que perdura de la vieja China o del viejo Egipto!

¡Impongámosnos ciertas normas para volver a experimentar la complacencia ingenua de violarlas! La rehabilitación de la infidelidad reclama de nosotros un candor semejante. ¡Ruboricémonos de no poder ruborizarnos y reinventemos las prohibiciones que nos convengan, antes de que la libertad alcance a esclavizarnos completamente!

El cemento armado nos proporciona una satisfacción semejante a la de pasarnos la mano por la cara, después de habernos afeitado.

¡Los vidrios catalanes y las estalactitas de Mallorca con que Anglada prepara su paleta!

Los cubistas salvaron a la pintura de las corrientes de aire, de los rayos de sol que amenazaban derretirla pero -al cerrar herméticamente las ventanas, que los impresionistas habían abierto en un exceso de entusiasmo- le suministraron tal cúmulo de recetas, una cantidad tan grande de ventosas que poco faltó para que la asfixiaran y la dejasen descarnada, como un esqueleto.

Hay poetas demasiado inflamables. ¿Pasan unos senos recién inaugurados? El cerebro se les incendia. ¡Comienza a salirles humo de la cabeza!

"La Maja Vestida" está más desnuda que la "maja desnuda".

Las telas de Velázquez respiran a pleno pulmón; tienen una buena tensión arterial, una temperatura normal y una reacción Wasserman negativa.

¡Quién hubiera previsto que las Venus griegas fuesen capaces de perder la cabeza!

Hay acordes, hay frases, hay entonaciones en D'Annunzio que nos obligan a perdonarle su "fiatto", su "bella voce", sus actitudes de tenor.

Azorín ve la vida en diminutivo y la expresa repitiendo lo diminutivo, hasta darnos la sensación de la eternidad.

¡El Arte es el peor enemigo del arte!... un fetiche ante el que ofician, arrodillados, quienes no son artistas.

Lo que molesta más en Cézanne es la testarudez con que, delante de un queso, se empeña en repetir: "esto es un queso".

El espesor de las nalgas de Rabelais explica su optimismo. Una visión como la suya, requiere estar muellemente sentada para impedir que el esqueleto nos proporcione un pregusto de muerte.

La arquitectura árabe consiguió proporcionarle a la luz, la dulzura y la voluptuosidad que adquiere la luz, en una boca entreabierta de mujer.

Hasta el advenimiento de Hugo, nadie sospechó el esplendor, la amplitud, el desarrollo, la suntuosidad a que alcanzaría el genio del "camelo".

Es tanta la mala educación de Pió Baroja, y es tan ingenua la voluptuosidad que siente Pío Baroja en ser mal educado, que somos capaces de perdonarle la falta de educación que significa llamarse: Pío Baroja.

No hay que confundir poesía con vaselina; vigor, con camiseta sucia.

El estilo de Barres es un estilo de onda, un estilo que acaba de salir de la peluquería.

Lo único que nos impide creer que Saint Saens haya sido un gran músico, es haber escuchado la música de Saint Sáéns.

¿Las Vírgenes de Murillo?

Como vírgenes, demasiado mujeres.

Como mujeres, demasiado vírgenes.

Todas las razones que tendríamos para querer a Velázquez, si la única razón del amor no consistiera en no tener ninguna.

Los surtidores del Alhambra conservan la versión más auténtica de "Las mil y una noches", y la murmuran con la fresca monotonía que merecen.

Si Rubén no hubiera poseído unas manos tan finas!... ¡Si no se las hubiese mirado tanto al escribir!...

La variedad de cicuta con que Sócrates se envenenó se llamaba "Conócete a ti mismo".

¡Cuidado con las nuevas recetas y con los nuevos boticarios! ¡Cuidado con las decoraciones y "la couleur lócale"! ¡Cuidado con los anacronismos que se disfrazan de aviador! ¡Cuidado con el excesivo dandysmo de la indumentaria londinense! ¡Cuidado -sobre todo- con los que gritan: "¡Cuidado!" cada cinco minutos!

Ningún aterrizaje más emocionante que el "aterrizaje" forzoso de la Victoria de Samotracia.

Goya grababa, como si "entrara a matar".

El estilo de Renán se resiente de la flaccidez y olor a sacristía de sus manos... demasiado aficionadas "a lavarse las manos".

La Gioconda es la única mujer viviente que sonríe como algunas mujeres después de muertas.

Nada puede darnos una certidumbre más sensual y un convencimiento tan palpable del origen divino de la vida, como el vientre recién fecundado de la Venus de Milo.

El problema más grave que Goya resolvió al pintar sus tapices, fue el dosaje de azúcar; un terrón más y sólo hubieran podido usarse como tapas de bomboneras.

Los rizos, las ondulaciones, los temas "imperdibles" y, sobre todo, el olor a "vera violetta" de las melodías italianas.

Así como un estiló maduro nos instruye -a través de una descripción de Jerusalén- del gesto con que el autor se anuda la corbata, no existirá un arte nacional mientras no sepamos pintar un paisaje noruego con un inconfundible sabor a carbonada.

¿Por qué no admitir que una gallina ponga un trasatlántico, si creemos en la existencia de Rimbaud, sabio, vidente y poeta a los 12 años?

¡El encarnizamiento con que hundió sus pitones, el toro aquél, que mató a todos los Cristos españoles!

Rodin confundió caricia con modelado; espasmo con inspiración; "atelier" con alcoba.

Jamás existirán caballos capaces de tirar un par de patadas que violenten, más rotundamente, las leyes de la perspectiva y posean, al mismo tiempo, un concepto más equilibrado de la composición, que el par de patadas que tiran los heroicos percherones de Paolo Uccello.

Nos aproximamos a los retratos del Greco, con el propósito de sorprender las sanguijuelas que se ocultan en los repliegues de sus golillas.

Un libro debe construirse como un reloj, y venderse como un salchichón.

Con la poesía sucede lo mismo que con las mujeres: llega un momento en que la única actitud respetuosa consiste en levantarles la pollera.

Los críticos olvidan, con demasiada frecuencia, que una cosa es cacarear, otra, poner el huevo.

Trasladar al plano de la creación la fervorosa voluptuosidad con que, durante nuestra infancia, rompimos a pedradas todos los faroles del vecindario.

¡Si buena parte de nuestros poetas se convenciera de que la tartamudez es preferible al plagio!

Tanto en arte, como en ciencia, hay que buscarle las siete patas al gato.

El barroco necesitó cruzar el Atlántico en busca del trópico y de la selva para adquirir la ingenuidad candorosa y llena de fasto que ostenta en América.

¿Cómo dejar de admirarla prodigalidad y la perfección con que la mayoría de nuestros poetas logra el prestigio de realizar el vacío absoluto?

A fuerza de gritar socorro se corre el riesgo de perder la voz.

En los mapas incunables, África es una serie de islas aisladas, pero los vientos hinchan sus cachetes en todas direcciones.

Los paréntesis de Faulkner son cárceles de negros.

Estamos tan pervertidos que la inhabilidad de lo ingenuo nos parece el "sumun" del arte.

La experiencia es la enfermedad que ofrece el menor peligro de contagio.

En vez de recurrir al whisky, Turner se emborracha de crepúsculo.

Las mujeres modernas olvidan que para desvestirse y desvestirlas se requiere un mínimo de indumentaria.

La vida es un largo embrutecimiento. La costumbre nos teje, diariamente, una telaraña en las pupilas; poco a poco nos aprisiona la sintaxis, el diccionario; los mosquitos pueden volar tocando la corneta, carecemos del coraje de llamarlos arcángeles, y cuando deseamos viajar nos dirigimos a una agencia de vapores en vez de metamorfosear una silla en un trasatlántico.

Ningún Stradivarius comparable en forma, ni en resonancia, a las caderas de ciertas colegialas.

¿Existe un llamado tan musicalmente emocionante como el de la llamarada de la enorme gasa que agita Isolda, reclamando desesperadamente la presencia de Tristán?

Aunque ellos mismos lo ignoren, ningún creador escribe para los otros, ni para sí mismo, ni mucho menos, para satisfacer un anhelo de creación, sino porque no puede dejar de escribir.

Ante la exquisitez del idioma francés, es comprensible la atracción que ejerce la palabra "merde".

El adulterio se ha generalizado tanto que urge rehabilitarlo o, por lo menos, cambiarle de nombre.

Las distancias se han acortado tanto que la ausencia y la nostalgia han perdido su sentido.

Tras todo cuadro español se presiente una danza macabra.

Lo prodigioso no es que Van Gogh se haya cortado una oreja, sino que conservara la otra.

La poesía siempre es lo otro, aquello que todos ignoran hasta que lo descubre un verdadero poeta.

Hasta Darío no existía un idioma tan rudo y maloliente como el español.

Segura de saber donde se hospeda la poesía, existe siempre una multitud impaciente y apresurada que corre en su busca pero, al llegar donde le han dicho que se aloja y preguntar por ella, invariablemente se le contesta: Se ha mudado.

Sólo después de arrojarlo todo por la borda somos capaces de ascender hacia nuestra propia nada.

La serie de sarcófagos que encerraban a las momias egipcias, son el desafío más perecedero y vano de la vida ante el poder de la muerte.

Los pintores chinos no pintan la naturaleza, la sueñan.

Hasta la aparición de Rembrandt nadie sospechó que la luz alcanzaría la dramaticidad e inagotable variedad de conflictos de las tragedias shakespearianas.

Aspiramos a ser lo que auténticamente somos, pero a medida que creemos lograrlo, nos invade el hartazgo de lo que realmente somos.

Ambicionamos no plagiarnos ni a nosotros mismos, a ser siempre distintos, a renovarnos en cada poema, pero a medida que se acumulan y forman nuestra escueta o frondosa producción, debemos reconocer que a lo largo de nuestra existencia hemos escrito un solo y único poema.
Each lover has some theory of his own
About the difference between the ache
Of being with his love, and being alone:

Why what, when dreaming, is dear flesh and bone
That really stirs the senses, when awake,
Appears a simulacrum of his own.

Narcissus disbelieves in the unknown;
He cannot join his image in the lake
So long as he assumes he is alone.

The child, the waterfall, the fire, the stone,
Are always up to mischief, though, and take
The universe for granted as their own.

The elderly, like Proust, are always prone
To think of love as a subjective fake;
The more they love, the more they feel alone.

Whatever view we hold, it must be shown
Why every lover has a wish to make
Some kind of otherness his own:
Perhaps, in fact, we never are alone.
Mateuš Conrad Mar 2017
oh god, oh god! that dump felt: just about as good as a zeppelin droping bombs over london... i managed to feel a vindaloo up my **** at the end of it! magic.

ever heard of huskies?
                                                                             no?
        my godmother is a huskie...
she's a doctor, she sometimes didn't shave
her legs: or that was my initial bewilderment
when i was playing video games
i.e. *porsche challenge
on PS1...
and that's donkey's years ago...
        but she was a huskie...
                       she was a woman with a deep
voice...
                  but this is in another culture
and i'm sitting here, watching western culture
and thinking: well **** me! no problem
with the genital removals...
   but who the **** is going to reconstruct your
jaw-line?
                you can't fake a femenine jaw
from a man's jaw... nor the hands...
     that's why i sometimes think my **** is
tiny... but then i can hold a basketball in one hand,
that means: pick it up with one hand...
   that's why i always said... the sexiest part
of a woman's body? her hand(s).
           i can't believe i'm going to name these
people, but given my godmother's husky voice
i think i should... on a matter of principle:
and yeah, i sometimes speak like i've been castrated,
even though i smoke tobacco my voice should
be deep... all the time... i sometimes resonate:
like an angel... when i'm being pretty pretty, nice;
   how the **** are you going to reconstruct
the jaw so that i don't think you are?
                      self-conscious about your larynx?
that's not even sad, that's prompt for: me being
inquisitive... given my godmother (the doctor)
who spoke like she spoke...
                                 em... chloe arden?
    what the **** is this huskie playing at?
               blaire white... oh 'ere we go, another huskie...
i'm not laughing... you look into those eyes
and you know something is a "tad" bit iffy...
            i get it... you think you sound like a "man"
sometimes... and i get it: i sometimes sound like
i've been licked in the ***** by a karate kick...
    and that has happened to me one...
            i was doing this course in some specific
interest area... and i was signalled out
  because i wasn't shouting when i was moving forward
doing kick! chop! kick! chop! ha! ya(h)!
                    sensai was away, and this white geek
took over the class... he said: you have to shout
while moving! i was like: no...
           what the hell does he do? kicks me in the *****...
clap clap... well done you ******* ******.
          you don't do that sort of thing in boxing
for ****'s sake... that's a no go zone...
             if he even gained a black belt in the art...
he'd be excomunnicated there and then...
                             you a ******* woman or something?
*****.
                 yeah, i realised that, i have this delay
button... something happened to me 15 years ago
and i'm only writing about it now... it's a bit like Proust
on stereoids... i'm not gay enough to remember
eating: that "special" macaroon.
   like i said:
         these girls are huskies...
                         i know because my godmother
is a husky...
                               it's self-consciousness in the extreme...
get kicked in the ***** and you'll start wearing
post- / anti- transgender spectacles...
        no matter what you tell me... that jaw line and
those plump cheeks with the missing cheek bones
that's characteristic of women... mmm...
             you have a better magic trick? 'cos'
this one isn't working on me (ref. the two stated examples);
o.k., and my godmother.
Ken Pepiton Oct 2021
Rich old man, knowing much
of nothing others value,
by virtue
of early alienation, wound
early
sense, first sense, early mind to matter process,
each thought forms from ache to know
some
source charged, as it were, wound up, set to spring
forth
in time thought lost
in Proust, and rightly so, if
now you read this that I wrote, without doubting
Proust could not imagine the access to knowns I own,
the access, I own, not the knowns, the stores of stories,
whole lives lived in accordance with visions
recorded in annals and journals and liturgical redoables,
walk this way,
rock was rolling, say again
scream what? Walk this way, with a wiggle? Nah, this way,
aim at ever after now,
think next is better until the other shoe drops,
and this
is real, as real as any message to you, from a dead prophet.
Just thinking if words lived in stories and stories live in tellers....
Robert Ronnow Aug 2015
Prose is unpretentious, that's its attraction. Avoids bombast of line breaks but forgoes -- what -- perfect rest. Anyway today, a November day in February, no chance getting rest with the poor clay I'm made from.

With my mother this weekend, her dementia proceeding according to what plan. Saturday the kind of day I never have. Actually read three stories by Updike. One extraordinary -- Tomorrow and Tomorrow and So Forth -- which I chose from his Complete through 1975 for the reference to Macbeth and in it he so humanely, sympathetically explains through the high school English teacher's thoughts Shakespeare's mid-life bitterness or disappointment realizing few men achieve their potential in the face of history, society and their personal flaws. Making for tragedy. Hard to be humorous about that although Updike finds in Shakespeare's late plays, especially The Tempest, a resolution amounting to wisdom that there can be contentment with imperfection and partial achievement. Updike took some of the starch out of my contention that all Shakespeare's plays are comedies, impossible to take Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth and Othello seriously. Certainly not Romeo and Juliet. It is a consolation that Updike's and even Shakespeare's achievements are imperfect although it would be wringing blood from a rock for me to achieve as much. The other two stories by Updike assured me that prose story-telling is as hit or miss as poetry. Bulgarian Poetess and How to Love America and Leave It At the Same Time made me think how fortunate I had been to find Tomorrow on the first try.

Not so much luck. I was attracted like a bee to a blossom to Shakespeare's lines in my personal anthology. No anthology and the poetry dependency it has created and I might have passed over the story. But now there is this conversation between me and all other writers. The anthology helps me know what I like but now I am tempted to try to articulate why I like what I like. Like the calendar, time and all else man lays his mind to it is a matter of bringing order from chaos by naming things according to our observations.

First, I like to understand what's going on in the poem. Not paraphrase it but describe the action. In Yeats' Lapis Lazuli, in the first paragraph, strophe or stanza, he talks about a community, a city or country, in which people, the women especially, high-toned maybe?, are upset about a political or wartime situation and are too hysterical for art or grace. Then he talks about actors playing Hamlet and Lear holding it together even though their characters die at the end of the play. No shouting, no crying. Then a paragraph or stanza about how whole civilizations are transitory too. Finally, in a reference to one of our oldest civilizations, two old Chinamen and their retainer are in the mountains. From their perspective, calm acceptance and longevity, perhaps some sadness, they look on all of history and non-history with something like gladness.

From there we can appreciate the artistry -- in Yeats' case the interesting rhymes and variable line lengths -- recognizing, however, that the artistry is not so much a demonstration of skill or a performance as the particular vehicle or discipline by which this artist discovered the content of his mind. It little matters whether verse is free, rhymed, blank, or formed as long as it is understandable and meaningful. Understandable to anyone, meaningful to someone.

The oldest formulation I have is Pound's -- the great themes of literature can be written on the back of a postage stamp. Until recently, I thought you could do it but you'd have to write very small. Now I know you can do it in your normal handwriting. I think they are Love (how we come into the world), Death (how we leave the world) and Governance (how we live in the world together). It may be possible to group Love and Death together, coming into and going out of life being similarly unknowable mysteries. The ways of talking about this one same mystery are apparently endless and endlessly fascinating. We cannot leave it alone. Almost all the greatest poems are about this mystery. Life is but a dream.

Then there is Governance -- how we live in the world together -- about which there are far fewer great poems. And usually they are about how our failure to live together leads back into the unknowable mystery through premature and sometimes mass death. Siamanto's The Dance comes to mind. I think the best poems of this type are written by so-called oppressed people.

Many poems treat both themes. But on the question of content, Pound is where I begin. My anthology -- Whole Wide World -- has a section which I'll call Double & Triple Features: Poems to Read Together, which pairs and groups poems according to my feeling that they share something -- theme, voice, structure -- in common. Subject matter is, I think, the commonest sharing. If I tried to name each pairing or grouping I might then have a hundred or more themes. Naming them adequately would be difficult to impossible. But why? And why not try? It would be a necessary start to talking about the poems: I read these poems together because....

Prose doesn't have to be beautiful, sometimes it's best when it's flat as Hemingway conclusively proved and one of its attractions is you can run on and on as long as the mind goes on following a thought without a stop sign for a whole page of books like Proust or Faulkner or Joyce.

Auden's is the second useful formulation that comes to mind (besides his chummy reverence for Shakespeare in naming him Top Bard). He classifies poems five ways:

            1. A good poem that's meaningful to him;
            2. A good poem that's not meaningful to him;
            3. A good poem that may someday become meaningful to him;
            4. A bad poem that's meaningful to him;
            5. A bad poem that's not meaningful to him.

I find I do about the same. But I discard all poems, good and bad, that are not meaningful to me. I have little taste for artistry for art's sake. The poem must speak to me or awaken me. Dickinson's formulation -- takes the top of your head off -- is the same as We can't define ******* but we know it when we see it.

A short aside: it feels inappropriate to answer the question What do you do? by saying I'm a poet. It would be like saying I'm a leader or I'm a prophet. You cannot anoint yourself a poet, a leader or a prophet -- others must do it for you. I wonder if I would be more comfortable if I had a larger audience (following) like Billy Collins for example. I think not. It would be like being a rock star, not a composer.

It's much more acceptable to say I'm a writer. Then when you answer the question Oh, what do you write? with Poetry, you are not self-aggrandizing, merely irrelevant, effete. Being a poet is viewed as being a flasher or nudist, exposing parts of yourself others would rather not see, at least not up close and personal, providing more information than others need or want to have. Maybe that's a good definition of a bad poet. Self-revelation dressed in verbal prowess is acceptable but naked, abject confession is unpardonable, tedious.

Although content is requisite for a poem to be meaningful, a poem is not really a communication like fiction or essay. It is more like an object, like a painting or sculpture, and perhaps like a musical score, sheet music. Yet I would still instruct students of poetry to first read each poem by the sentence, not the line, to derive its meaning, understand its argument, visualize its action. Then one might ask how and why is it sculpted, structured, with line breaks and strophes. Ultimately, the form of the poem is nothing more or less than the method by which the poet discovered his meaning. Although it is arbitrary -- it could have been said another way -- it is the only way it could be said by this person in this time and place. I have always liked the idea of a sculptor carving away stone or wood to reveal the form inside the block.

The poem lives on as an object, recognized by many or few or none. Like art or furniture, most are briefly useful then are moved to the attic or shed where they gather dust and mouse turds then break, dry and decay and find their way to the dump, the dust heap of history, only not even human history, just your personal history.

The anthology has made me an antiquarian -- one who cares as much for objects made by others as if I had made them myself.

So how can one talk about poems? The argument that any attempt to discuss or describe a poem is better served by simply reading the poem, perhaps memorizing it, has merit. Except in one respect -- the process can take you to undiscovered and half-discovered country within yourself. Always, first, you must understand the action otherwise we are just re-reading ourselves in our own tried and untrue ways. We must not mistake an old dog dying for a puppy being born. Misunderstanding the words is like constructing a science experiment with a flawed methodology and then using the results to shape or live in the world. It can be dangerous. Therefore reading poetry is a mental discipline worthy as the scientific method itself. It takes you out of yourself.

The fun of criticism comes in examining why and how the poem made you feel or think as you did. You can read closely for the chosen words, rhythms, lines and stanzas. You may admire the skill or wit of the poet. And you can refer to your own experience to understand your reaction. You can even disagree with the poet's thought or perception, or reject the sentiment. You can say that's him, not me.

Then there are Bloom's formulations of which I am wary, he being a critic not a poet. Yet here they are. Three sources of healthy complexity or difficulty in poems: 1) Sustained allusiveness -- cultural references that require the reader to be educated beyond the poem's content, for which he cites Milton as an example and could have Dante; 2) Cognitive originality -- leaps of perception and depths of understanding that startle, enlighten and take off the top of your head, for which he cites Shakespeare and Dickinson as examples and to which I would add much of what is memorable in modern poetry; and 3) Personal mythmaking -- whereby the poet constructs over time a system of images and personal (more than cultural) references that with familiarity become understandable and meaningful, citing Yeats and Blake as examples. How to make this formulation useful.

A second formulation by Bloom discusses poetic figures or the indirect means by which poetry uncovers truth, dancing with and romancing language rather than wrestling and pinning it down like philosophy tries. There are four: 1) Irony or saying one thing and meaning another, usually the opposite; 2) Symbol (synecdoche) or making one thing stand for another; 3) Contiguity (metonymy) or using an aspect or quality of something to represent the whole; and 4) Metaphor or transferring the qualities or associations of one thing to another.

Meanwhile, here's my **** poetica:

1) Poetry is an acquired taste, like golf or wine, with no obligation to appreciate it.

2) Poetry is divination; prose explains what we think we know but poetry discovers what we didn't know we thought.

3) Poetry is one of many man-made systems, like baseball or the scientific method, for producing knowledge, meaning and pleasure. Or are they all natural as ***?

4) Of all the other arts, poetry is most like sculpture; the word "poem" comes from the Indo- European root meaning "to make, to build."

5) It is impossible to write exactly what you mean or be accurately understood; poetry uses this to its advantage.

6) Line length -- enjambment -- is the single most important feature of poetry.

7) Poems are made from ideas; poetry is philosophy but where philosophy wrestles language down, poetry romances language.

8) Meaning is the most important product of poetry but it's completely personal; poems almost always say one thing and mean another but the poet often doesn't know what he meant.

9) It is almost impossible not to rhyme or write rhythmically in English or any other language.

10) The forms poets use are how the poet gets to his truth and are basically arbitrary choices.

11) Poems may be difficult and complex and irrational but they must be comprehensible.

12) Just describing the action of the poem will take you where you need to go.
www.ronnowpoetry.com
eph you see kay etouffee if you see Kay tell her a catawampus catahoula hound hog dog crossed bayou levee last night all right what did you say if you see Kay tell her a catawampus catahoula hog dog crossed the levee last night all right i heard what you said the first time why you got to repeat eph you see kay you ******* ****** **** what? what did you say you ******* ****** **** heard you the first time you **** a **** a ***** a ***** hello stop end begin believe conceive create no thank you i already ate what? what did you say begin believe conceive create no thank you i already ate quit ******* repeating yourself  you ******* ******* hello stop end begin believe conceive create eph you see kay etouffee if you see Kay tell her a catawampus catahoula hog dog crossed the levee last night all right

the renown physicist dressed in brown wool suit brown leather laced shoes white shirt burgundy knitted tie wild curly graying hair climbed the stairs walked across the stage stood at the lectern adjusted narrow support pole height reached down into brown leather briefcase retrieved his thesis concerning the relative theory of everything tapped microphone composed his posture made a guttural sound clearing his throat looked out at packed full auditorium it became evident to the distinguished audience the renown physicist’s fly was open and his ***** hanging out it was unanimously dismissed as a case of professorial absent-mindedness

all the creatures of the earth (excluding humans) convened for an emergency session the bigger creatures talked first grizzly bears stood upright explaining demand for gallbladders bile paws make us more valuable dead than alive sharks testified Asian fisherman cut off our fins for soup then throw us back into the sea to die elephants thumping heavy feet stepped forward yeah poachers **** us for our tusks rhinos concurred yes they **** us for our horns wild Mustang horses neighed about violent round-ups then slaughtered processed for cat food whales complained of going deaf from submarine sonar tests then sold for meat many dolphins sea turtles tuna swordfish sea bass smaller fish swam forward pleading about getting caught in long line nets barbed baited hooks over-fished colonies chimpanzees described nightmares of being stolen from their mom’s when they are very young then used in research labs for horrible tests song birds chirped about loss of their habitats land tortoises spoke in gentle voices about being wiped out for housing developments saguaro cactuses dropped their arms in discouragement masses of penguins solemnly marched in suicidal unison to edge of melting icebergs polar bears and seals wept honey bees buzzed colony collapse disorder bats flapped about white nose syndrome coyotes and wolves howled lonesome prairie laments the session grew gloomy with heart-wrenching unbearable sadness sobbing crying then a black mutt dog spoke up my greyhound brothers and sisters and all my family of creatures i sympathize with your hurt but it is important to realize there are people who care love us want to protect us not all humans are ravenous carnivores or heartless profiteers a calico cat crept alongside black dog and rubbed her head against his chest an old gray mare admitted her love for a race horse jockey who died years ago a bluebird sang a song suddenly lots more creatures advanced with stories of human kindness Captain Paul Watson Madeleine Pickens Jane Goodall a redwood tree named Luna testified about Julia Butterfly Hill the winds clouds sky discussed concerns by Al Gore lots and lots of other names were mentioned and the whole tone of the meeting changed every one agreed they needed to wait and see what the next generation of people would do whether humans would acknowledge the cruelties threats of extinction and learn grow figure out ways to sustain mother earth father sky then the meeting let out just as the sun was rising on a new day

there is a cemetery in Paris named Père Lachaise buried there are the remains of Jim Morrison Oscar Wilde Richard Wright Karl Appel Guillaume Apollinaire Honoré de Balzac Sarah Bernhardt the empty urn of Maria Callas Frédéric Chopin Colette Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot Nancy Clara Cunard Honoré Daumier Jacques-Louis David Eugène Delacroix Isadora Duncan Paul Éluard Max Ernst Suzanne Flon Loie Fuller Théodore Géricault Yvette Guilbert Jean Ingres Clarence Laughlin Pierre Levegh Jean-François Lyotard Marcel Marceau Amedeo Modigliani Molière Yves Montand Pascale Ogier Christine Pascal Édith Piaf Marcel Proust Georges Seurat Simone Signoret Gertrude Stein Louis Visconti Maria Countess Walewska and many other extraordinary souls it is rumored at late dusk their ghosts climb from graves gather drink fine brandy from costly crystal glasses smoke fragrant cigars and once a year on November 2 party hard all night culminating in deliriously promiscuous ****** **** it’s difficult to know what the truth is since the dead don’t talk or do they
Blueberry Ice Apr 2021
...

Olfactory is the strongest memory.
Take care of your nose
that you may never forget me.


•rb
Proust's madeleine:

a particular scent that triggers a memory.
oscarlevi Feb 2015
Those yellow teeth have always been with you, he asked?
I try Blanch them, but nothing said.

Still and all  his heart and his emotions were more.

And happened when they met, the earth also turned to find them.

Somewhere in his memory, that distant question:
what  may I do with those dreams that you brought into my life?

Maybe continue with you, and maybe you should find your own answers, he said.

It is best to think, I come from the other side of your door, perhaps a new opportunity, to live your life from another evening and their stars.


Everything seems to indicate that he never caresses his hair.
Of course, he would like  to keep that detail in his memory and evoke it.
Like Proust, when dipped in his cup of tea the cupcake, and the indelible memory emerged from him.

Yes, the hours of the winter were insufficient.

Texts traveled from side to side of the city, although was snowing.

Any excuse was used to see each other. Every morning, afternoon or night, as  whole  existed for them.

And at dawn, when nearly frozen returning home, his wife read those messages while he was sleeping, and though comes from a girlfriend.

Everything seems to indicate that it was, what something else may think? Never in her mind  the idea that his husband were loved by a man.

Every minute that passed, each one lived and dreamed, the planet inhabited by two.

But as the day passes, it also drains the time, and is incessant understand, that  was the man with yellow teeth, who gave him the courage to open the doors of his life to the unstoppable force of love.

His wife and himself never wanted that it had happened and the man of yellow teeth either.
February 2015
Lawrence Hall Nov 2018
…These men are worth your tears:
You are not worth their merriment.

-Wilfred Owen, “Apologia Pro Poemate Meo”

When that loudmouth on the wireless machine
Alludes to Western Civilization
What does he mean? Paradise Lost? Probably not
Nor Saint Paul speaking on the Field of Mars

The Kalevala, Hagia Sophia
With its pendentives lifting up our prayers
Horatius fighting to defend his bridge
And Wilfred Owen dying bravely on his

Lord Tennyson and Idylls of the King
Chapultepec, Henry V, Becket
The paratroops at Arnhem, Saint Thomas More,
His King’s loyal servant, but God’s first

The Stray Dog poets of Saint Petersburg
The brave last stand of Roland at Roncesvalles
Lewis and Tolkien and glasses of beer
Montcalm and Wolfe on the Plains of Abraham

Hildegard von Bingen, Siegfried and the Rhine
Magna Carta, HMS Hood, the Thames
The Grove of Daphne, “The Old Rugged Cross”
Beatrix Potter and her little pet rabbit

El Cid, Anne Frank, John Keats, Saint Benedict
“I Have a Dream,” Dostoyevsky, and Greene
Viktor Frankl, Dag Hammarkskjold, and Proust
Good Chaucer’s naughty pilgrims telling tales

The Gettysburg Address, Willie and Joe
Stern Saint Augustine of North Africa
Wodehouse writing a jolly bit of fun
Saint Corbinian and Bavaria

The ancient glories of Byzantium
Pius XII contra the bombs and lies
The 602nd TD Battalion
Saint Joan, the Prado, and Robert Frost

And far, far more.

When that loudmouth on the wireless machine
Alludes to Western Civilization
What does he mean?
Of your mercy please pray for the repose of the soul of Wilfred Owen who was killed in action on 4 November 1918, one week before the Armistice.
Donall Dempsey Nov 2016
USES OF GREAT LITERATURE

Bluebottle & I
share the same moment

. . .the same hour.

It keeps divebombing me
like some crazy kamikaze.

It is a beautiful flying jewel
but I can't appreciate that

just now and enraged I
throw Proust at it.

The full weight of A LA RECHERCHE
DE TEMPS PERDU

thrown halfway across the room
brings it down with a bang and

it is no more.

"Heavy!" I praise the Proust.

Ten minutes later its brother
or its ghost

has returned with a vengeance.

"Don't look at me!" says the Proust
"I done my bit!"

I raise the book and
the bluebottle bolts.

Just the threat of the Proust
works just fine...this time.
Mateuš Conrad Jan 2016
the proust edition of la recherche i had, which i gave away to a charity shop; if you could stitch or strap the edition to my hands clenched into a fist (it was, after all a cheap 2 vol. edition), i could have knocked you out. no, i didn't read it, which is why many people never bother to use the dictionary, because it's always a one volume edition.

it became so haunting to have sang with david
with the lyre the lyrics:

             i'm happy, hope you're happy too...
             ashes to ashes, funk to funky
             we know major tom's a *****
             strung out in heaven's high
             hitting an all time low

it was so eerie i felt goose bump hoofs on my
cheeks adding for extra five o'clock shadow
that i never knew i had.

that's the thing about having european editors,
the ****** day, the whole theatrical approach,
it's just a ****** book of poetry,
it's not exactly an atom bomb,
but they sent the draft which i'm hoping to add
to with my *hoc erat in votis
to armenia,
Armenia, yes, once an incorporation of
the soviet rather than tsar's empire:
so jui-seph shtalin involved himself with the russians
from georgia, and my first idea sparklers will
come from armenia - good place to ask napoleon
to escape elba, i say, ol' chap.

and after the teenage girl hype period of an artist,
ziggy, you know what i'm talking about,
you get a process where an artist matures,
becomes prone to criticism, has no hype factor,
has no real monetary appeal to the less
hyped-up juice-of-genitalia army,
has to become a sensible economist -
there! catch him! that's where an artist
translates to other mediums his actual worth,
i feel privileged to have lived at a time
when david bowie released his heathen album,
one critic pointed that it was his best album
since the 1980 release of scary monsters,
so then i bought scary monsters...
i worked backwards...
i didn't feed the ziggy & space spiders from mars
gimmick / egoism, or even the rebel, rebel choir
of cult followers, and you know what?

              i'm happy, hope you're happy too...

it worked, now i can listen to the music like a distraction
tool, refrigerator buzz, ambiance, the freelance
artistry of it all, less care for kids, more care for
the insolent kids that aged and donned their employment
qualifications as 'art critics.'

but what i listen to isn't exactly what i write with,
it would plagiarise the thought process
so much that it would destroy it - the moment's gone,
the ingrained concept of time has allowed
for the same space of the origin of the narrative
to look different, even though nothing was moved.

so with this anglo renaissance circa 1950s -
1990s (nietzsche was critical of the reformation
when martin luther attacked the renaissance creativity,
no great composer in the counter-reformation,
just ignatius layola and the jesuits),
with the beat generation poets (preceding them,
the spirit of influence that was ezra pound
and no other i dare to admit, a seal-off point,
built a hydroelectric dam in nevada f. d. r. did)
you then had the explosion, and i mean it,
the EXPLOSION! 1960s psychedelia,
1970s ******* infused black sabbath etc.,
depressive 1980s with depeche mode iconoclasm
and the cure's slit your lips if not wrists,
the great digging of ***** duran duran,
scandinavian love hopes of a-ha, etc.,
then the shift back to the geographic place of origin,
seattle, grunge, rekindling of thinking man's
rock amiss the ******* fuel of the decade
with prog rock bands, i.e. tool;
and then of course the brit pop decade
(oasis, blur, the stone roses, the la's among many,
bands that still invoked a sing-along even
in such odd places like taizé in burgundy
for the wonderwall chorus)
and then... the death of it all...
artists getting rich, flamboyant, eccentric,
and the people seeing how they were "duped"
deciding enough was enough...
came napster, came pirate - ye har me mateys! -
and the death of the anglo renaissance
with kareoke culture - indeed if
the germans never conquered england,
and that book man in the high castle
by philip k. **** isn't true...
why did we allow the japanese to conquer
our culture? huh?!

p.s. when you realise all those 5.5K reads,
all those so called morale boosters... on websites
such as these, don't have a £ / $ in front of them;
and as i learned, after being reported to a website
similar to this accused of being a troll
for simply asking the long-ago standard
a.s.l. (age, ***, location) but only sticking to location,
losing some of the haul i'd liked to keep,
i realised i can lose that, no problem,
i rather lose that than lose what i have inside of me.
Emma Blaha Mar 2012
Proust turned to Hemingway as her feet dangled off the ledge, playing hide and seek with the setting sun

What shall we do tonight?
Wander the streets as vagabonds,
Cursing the bottle as it makes love to the tongue?

                        Or shall we be a reckless symphony?
                        Truest tones found only in short breaths,
                        Tainted with sinless pleasure?

One in the same as smoke curls the lip.
                      
                        Shall we always be friends as this?

While you smell of ***, yes,
Or until I finish this paragraph.
Would you like me to read it to you?

                            Must you always speak in riddles?

If only to keep the thieves at bay,
For doctors know nothing of riddles.
  
                        You are no doctor, my friend,
                        For though I worship no idol,
                        Religion binds me to you.

As I am your god, you are my teacher,
For no one understands me quite like you.

                    Is that not what the alligator said to the turtle?

I think you’ve read the wrong version, my dear.
The alligator safely takes the turtle to shore,
And they grow old together in the humid afternoon sun.

        Your mind is filled with the optimism your privileges have allowed;
        Whereas the turtle never stood a chance.

Your doubt is lost on me,
But just as Proust has made me ironic,
Words will bring me back to you.

                            Shall I follow you, then, if you stray?

And ruin the cat’s game before its begun?
                      
                        I heard the mouse goes blind in the end.

Then lets never find the hole in the decaying wall,
Until youth betrays our mind and perjury is revealed.

                        Is it truly perjury if we always knew it,
                           Both halves of the mind working tirelessly to keep it?
                        To reserve each word for tomorrow,
                        If only to keep eternity from death?

Must you always speak in riddles?

And he turned back to his book, as her thoughts lit the streetlights one by one.
Akemi Nov 2018
never wanted to feel a thing
blunt my skin on the door frame
sink through my sheets

an open mouth for candescence
friends you lose touch with
acid and lost time
because it hurts to feel anything
so wear yourself detached
lose everyone
Nat Lipstadt Mar 2014
http://hellopoetry.com/search/poems/?q=Betterdays



as is my wanton wont,
when stumbling
upon a new voice,
the passed baton
is herein handed off


am old man.
my poetic voice is just
memories that are
repetitive lies and lines.

speak in simple sentences declarative.
this is nature's way.

darkness approaching is indeed my
au courant poem, mon actuellement.

I have seen better days.

I have read betterdays.

now I am upset, distraught.

here come another young
hot bright votive voice,
and I am being asked to believe that there are
still words that raise hopes of
betterdays.

her bed chip crumbs, delighting,
leave crumbs of pleasure in my soul.

l like her big word poems,
that leave me, fill me by:
siphoning all in a parched gluttony
leaving behind a viscous residue
and few glassine portals
into a reflective world


better yet I love her
mothering little god poems,
letting me remember little boys
who once loved a father

little god love
radiant is thy smile,
smallboy love, exudes from you,
like a flower god's nectar,
bestowed, with negligent love,
upon a mother's world.
i will drink my fill,
everyday, whilst i can,
for far to soon will you
grow up.


don't speak eastern Australian,
tackers and doona's, no clue,
blue cats are a foreign breed,
but the cat of this starfish mother,
shares my literary tastes:

him, nestled,
on the second, to
uppermost stay,
of the third
bookshelf,
in the study.
he has filed
himself,
between,
ogden nash
and proust
and it is there,
he plans to stay.


let me not go on and in deeper, lest
I delay you from her pleasuring
thy tasted untested senses.

so here I am all grumpified
(at my age, you can make up your own words)
unsure if un or satisfied,
knowing that a woman,
word whips me into a
soothing frenzy of creamy
morning coffee verbosity,
a captive taker of life's
ungrandest moments,
poems of them,
make to glory come.

somewhere in the world,
a woman writes of plain goodness
of simple strife and simple lives,
makes methinks that there could be
betterdays still ahead,
better poets surely, than me,
and the day starts well
http://hellopoetry.com/search/poems/?q=Betterdays

Read her please, follow her if you love life.
I keep collecting books I know
I'll never, never read;
My wife and daughter tell me so,
And yet I never head.
"Please make me," says some wistful tome,
"A wee bit of yourself."
And so I take my treasure home,
And tuck it in a shelf.

And now my very shelves complain;
They jam and over-spill.
They say: "Why don't you ease our strain?"
"some day," I say, "I will."
So book by book they plead and sigh;
I pick and dip and scan;
Then put them back, distrest that I
Am such a busy man.

Now, there's my Boswell and my Sterne,
my Gibbon and Defoe;
To savour Swift I'll never learn,
Montaigne I may not know.
On Bacon I will never sup,
For Shakespeare I've no time;
Because I'm busy making up
These jingly bits of rhyme.

Chekov is caviare to me,
While Stendhal makes me snore;
Poor Proust is not my cup of tea,
And Balzac is a bore.
I have their books, I love their names,
And yet alas! they head,
With Lawrence, Joyce and Henry James,
My Roster of Unread.

I think it would be very well
If I commit a crime,
And get put in a prison cell
And not allowed to rhyme;
Yet given all these worthy books
According to my need,
I now caress with loving looks,
But never, never read.
Mateuš Conrad Sep 2015
once rastafarianism entered language ploys with wittgenstein's language games in mind it misplaced pronouns, existentialists just dittoed the signifying moral singular with the un-signifying immoral plural; like i was partly holocaust bound, ha ha (example); cherub and a scotch bonnet of my opinion tingling a contest of: chilli v. pepper v. horseradish. let's just say i'm a plasterer rather than i.q. me as a drinker. slaps in chequers on a bench to sober up momentarily.*

trust the saxon, trust the saxon to speak worse german
than the bavarian, and entrust german to the turk
above the saxon; trust the audacious saxon to leave the alphabet's
diacritic out, to spell like a roman would, from the celtic netherlands of gloom
in scotch egg on a couch, the potato of them all,
trust them with audacity and vocabulary  to conquer the world:  
relieving us norse with ****** never mind
the geese of brazil; exact roman care for all dwindles and fibrous excesses,
conquer the world what have you,
at least you have black skin and opera sunsets
while i have white skin and grey clots of 7pm in september,
or as the censors announced:
rather my vanity than the proof of god,
rather me than you in the minotaur's prison of winding zigzag vocabulary;
you're left politico correct i have three thousand
longboats waiting, you're right i have the same number
awaiting wind and sail. trust the saxons among bavarians to do the following:
but you have the caribbean and that's worth more than kenya
in a 100m sprint. you have the caribbean and i'm african,
nuance the scandinavian proust waging war with
a burnt toothpick not giving enough warmth. each me of the lost tribe walks asking:
blondish in the sea i dare you to walk and reason
the heraclitean suburbia of the river of emptied housed-in arsons worth a life.
come alaskan winters come!
trust the saxons to conquer the world without a holy implied for empires
and lost tracts in order that the romans might utilise proper a and proper o
while the saxons in **** with normans and celts said:
we'll roman-speak about the amazon girlies while our girls party out
a craft of whitened cotton for champagne ship-sailed virginity!
trust the saxons to speak worse german thank turks in order to bind by migration
an island as a ship, and sail away sail away wondering
why the roots of other european nations used the goggles to speak
as much microscope as microphone when accenting
and, in so doing accepted dialectics rather than a pompous excess of fibrous ginger plastic
known as dialects: in england dialectics is known as dialects - caged owls elsewhere
didn't coo coo but mooed with gags in nostrils sneezing when snorkelling:
we say error in sussex and say wok cumin seed sizzle in essex;
close enough to be a cockney in hackney rhymes up a mango.
Mateuš Conrad Feb 2016
i still get two alumni magazines
shoved through my mailbox,
edinburgh's edit, and u.c.l.'s portico,
they're alike, they're asking for money:
which is a bit like that mystery of lawlessness,
one word... money!*

i love poetry, i really do,
i think it respects readers more
than those glutton chatterers of off-the-page prose,
there's no need to create characters,
prose readers have an easy way out,
they have all the hidden architecture
keeping them involved with time-wasting
effectively-exploitative narration,
and then the characters, off the page
nothing like the readers with mundane jobs,
with menial tasks better augmenting
the cartesian thought and being,
ego and something that represents a passing,
meaning the unit, re-, of something the same
that changes each day...
readers of poetry are not readers of prose,
in comparing poetry to prose
poetry is naked... there is no elaborate
scaffolding... to concrete character study...
a poet can't conjure characters...
he can't even conjure rivers or readers...
when prose has characters, poetry has readers;
how many memorable characters emerge
from a prosaic narrative? one, two... fifty?
you see the pawn legion fall on the first
shot shadow of mongolian arrows...
you see their slain bodies hit the mud without
a word... so you see:
poetry is too naked, it's a mud-hut compared
to prose's glass spiral...
poetry will leave you an architect, rather than
a labourer... you will build your own you...
i wish i too could build from scratch
a horizon of distractions...
i rather you build that... you can't be a character
for me... you have to be a reader... not necessarily
an orator of what i wrote... just a reader...
and more than all the summations of characters
can be moulded into... hence the loss of tightly packed
paragraphs... hence the scarcity of composition...
if prose be a Chopin or a Liszt... then poetry be a Debussy or
a Satie... and i prefer the latter...
plus poetry is written so there's less eye-strain
bothering you... no loss of post-interlude starting point...
when poetry is read standing up...
prose is a style taken to bed and falling asleep to,
or that easy armchair: when i was converting my
grandmother to read poetry (zbigniew herbert's)
and forget the cheap romance novels... she was quietly
amused... i told her we write scarce words, once in a while,
rather than attempting to procrastinate
as most work is these days with the lost scythe and plough
on the pseudo-faustian bargain of Proust
(if it has no direct meaning, remember
there's a direct and an indirect article dualism,
just let it resound... don't treat it like a comet...
but more like rainfall... i treat ezra pound's like that...
like a hundred people could say the same,
even though only one did)...
the proustian bargain fabble? babble babble blah blah
babylon... the israelites sung about the babylonian
captivity... thought about the egyptian one...
i once said architectural necrophilia, and i'm true to it
like an expected tide...
but let us return to the title...
poetics explains economics the best...
new notation in post-existentialism, the ditto-encapsulation
will be replaced with a non-literary notation,
with the approx. mark, so a word is referred to
as approximately rather than within the skeleton
of ambiguity, loose the question mark, that way you will,
no longer "haiku" as referring to syllables, but rather
referring to length, hence the notation ~haiku, e.g.:
poet strip yourself of priceless / worthless subject matters,
the mechanics of the moon and the sun are too much,
you write of beauty for beauty be only a grandeur,
and indeed you take pick of the celestial bodies,
but you leave the two-pence coin on the pavement
when you pass it, and by not picking it up
not blowing on it for good luck (come one moment
come the next moment, gone),
so that the pennies can be increased...
write a thousand moons into a single poem
and still the thousand moons will not translate
into a thousand pounds: you speak of the nocturnal
moisture with a mouth of a desert, and a tongue
like a sidewinder... always missing the topic
you care for because you have never took step
on the object stressed, used...
don't make this a barren art-form.
Mateuš Conrad Jun 2020
for all i care to remember...
        looking into the mirror was more or less...
something akin to:
"squirting"... **** me! SQUINTING...
      well... the contortion of the eyes...
"worrying" about a double-chin...
and of course... enough stealth acne
to make me... the bride of beelzebub
how i'd joke to myself...
         beelzebub sat on my face and *******
a tonne of... dead maggots...

           i never knew i was athletic standing
before a mirror...
i probably know that i am less athletic now...
but... looking into mirror made
sense... once...
   this russian girl...
    in st. petersburg...
   we were in "love"...
       and there was this great aventurine bed...
and... a closet with two mirrors...
and... we'd be at it...
i was looking into the mirror...
and she was looking into the mirror...
it was like: the opposite of *** on l.s.d. -
because it was like...
beyond the missionary -
the "******" of the mirror...
   as in ***... it leaves you wanting
to ******* to the *******...
because... hell...
without a mirror...
could you capture the face moaning
contorting like an experiment out
of the gehenna harem?

     for all the *** toys sold...
all those exceses of... woman's lingerie...
outfits... nurses...
   blah blah... it really takes a mirror
to spice things up...
this dead-eyed mirror canvas...
the dire-dead-necessary...
    tooth-fairy: ref. the red dragon...
i needed to see that she needed to see
that i was ******* her... and that she...
was being ******...

           mirror mirror on the wall...
**** the fair and the fairest and the fairies...
i have come to understand that mirrors...
work best...
when... not stressed to exemplify...
a concern for beauty...
   or... something that is worn...
clothes look... terribly important in a mirror...
esp. by someone wearing them
when allowed to be digested / investigated
by a mirror...

but... a mirror during ***?
when you're not performing inverted missionary...
doggy... and she's lying with clenched ****-cheeks...
i was in love once...
which also implies:
i ****** like a race-champ pony!
the mirror always helps...
i wouldn't know: whether s&m leather
and straps would... and whips...
made much of a difference...
when... the mirror... the ghost ******...
the: satan you could get away with...
if you didn't utter a comprehensive word...
but ensure a strict rigidity to...
onomatopoeias and syllables...
and... exfoliating nouns...

        upon memory being summoned...
i'm getting a bigger hard-on thinking
about all the encounters i've had with the police...
there's always at least two memorable
encounters...
getting poisoned in a nightclub...
getting on the bus...
getting off the bus... dropping like a pancake
onto the cement...
     being roused... asked by the police officer
whether i was o.k.:
making a slurred and lengthy apology...
giving my address...
and being... taken in a police van... in a cage
for a sinner... like a taxi...
back home...

    losing my virginity to a pair of handcuffs...
for ******* in an alleyway...
getting screamed at...
one officer cuffed me...
the female officer had a pen and pad ready...
in an alleyway where it was discussed:
and who's alleyway is it?
i'm too drunk already...
if i walked into a pub on friday come
10pm i'd be asked to buy a pint
in order to use their toilet...

         it's one sort of luck... gambling...
betting on a horse...
but another... being hand-cuffed...
  and then... having the hand-cuffs...
taken away...
              as this dialogue happened in the...
"invisible" shadow of the alley...
i can't exactly imagine what the onlookers
saw...
           a teasing of authority...
drinking a beer on a bench outside
a pub on a friday night...
which is... basically... taking away
the revenue... of being sardine packed...
and pyramid schemed... for failure...
but my... what a glorious night...

so i asked: and where am i... permitted...
and blah blah...
that ******* mirror... and that aventurine bed...
the same thrill during ***...
like... the thrill of stepping into a brothel...
without a need to ***...
the 9 of them: all nazgul attired in scrutiny...
before "the pick"...

   *** toys... can i please get a mirror in here?!
it has to become a standard for a healthy
sexed up relationship...
    a mirror can overpower any...
frivolity of during-***: attire...
  the imitation ******...
a mirror is... just that...
                 *** with: in third person narrative...
but... smirk-giggle:
you catching her eyes getting ******...
and she catching your eyes: ******* her...

so tame tame... unlike reading...
  the tame blushes of marquis the sade...
never to mention... this philosophical adventure
of ******... which it really is...
impeccable... trouble with: thought put into
practice...
                yes... that horrid... Fritzl case...
but unlike the idealist scenario...
the mother was notably pushed away from
the grandiosity of the sin...
and it was done... in public... with...
a purview of... shaking established social norms!
it wasn't... a rabbit-hole of horror...

              which is why i'm glad i do not
have children of my own...
   i once spent an afternoon with...
my... grand-aunts son... my uncle...
don't ask...
         and i looked like him and thought...
well... i have most certainly had more
fun with cats and dogs...
i was a complete mute...
i didn't feel like cuddling this piece
of cubism... it looked human and even
contorted like one...
perhaps if it was mine...
i could have... somehow...
            "relegated my inhibitions"?
                 n'est ce pas?
         to have children and begin with...
that ******* of differentiating vowels from
consonants... and then... building consonants...
what... 5 vowels... 21 consonants...
5 x 21 = 105 variations...
       prefix: ab, ac, ad, af, ag...
                     eb, ec, ed, ef, eg...
                           IF only! oof!
                 the suffix - ba, ca, da, fa, go...
                                 bat cat dad fat god...
and then... the 21 x 21 consonant variables...
squared to the power of 5...
because... chinese is... frankly...
so simple...

   - it's summer and...
            since i would otherwise... require ink...
to write... and the paper would somehow
be always readily available...
no need for ink...
the summer months are terrible...
for no requirement of ink...
what is ink?  ink is...
                         i need october...
i need november... december... january...
february... half of march...
i need to borrow ink from the night!
i can't scribble in these arab / kenyan months...
these sun-seeker months
of idle by the dream-pool... load of...
overtly-talked... less thought...
therefore... no need to scribble...

    i need the night for my ink...
                           "punctuation marks are in
the constellations": oh yes... honey sweet...
what's it called? cliche? we've all been there...
i too would sacrifice Hector before the altar
of Achilles if i were Priam...
                   only because: he was called Hector...
and the other was Achilles...
and i was called Priam...
       in such times... what were...
the trully... common-place names...
of stunt-men and extras?
   i'd like to know the equivalent of a john smith
from ancient greece...
what would one call: him?
            
        perhaps: i tend to think about *** when
i... most probably had a dream...
jerking off is a bit like...
checking one's blood pressure...
or as a diabetic might... ***** his index
to check the sugar levels...
i write about "***" when i've had a dream...
the dream...

i was talking to a man about cars...
notably... cars from...
america and germany...
circa the years... 1920s through to...
                the 1970s...
          and... then... the talk of... a motorcycle...
a specific motorcycle...
   a triump street cup...
                 a BMW R18... but not quiet...
whatever it was...
                    for the love of a double-decker
bus and a pair of legs...
                which is not...
to have emotionally invested
in *** was something a much younger
version of me would have done...
i thank the prostitutes of curing me of this...
debilitating disease / dream...
              which, i, prescribed... myself...
so no... i hardly think...
there were any... mummy or daddy issues...
i would skip several scenarios:
as much as i love riding a double-decker
bus... i abhor... taking a taxi...
       even if it requires me to walk...
2 miles... i'd rather walk:
for the love of legs and... voodoo dolls hanging
like corks... bend the knee: they might say...
bullet to the knee-cap... if you ask me...
again...

     perhaps i wasn't born english...
but... after... 26 years among them...
                          it "sort of" grows on you...

- man can perform a thousand:
dodo project genocides in one sitting:
on the throne of thrones...
before jumping under a baptism:
fully attired in the ganjes pyjamas
in one sitting: on the throne of thrones...
to "squat" while *******...
*******... *******...
"scented candles" of taking a shower...

i write about *** every time i have a dream...
it's to succumb to the lesser...
escapade of me...
i can stomach subjectivity...
but having to stomach idealism...
is another matter: altogether...
i would like to worship the men who
have had their fill...
and settled for the swan blockade
of the widower romance...
the widow swan...
the black widow: a ******* spider...

none of it... i ****** good i ******
well... come the prime of the age 21...
she was a gamer side-kick bedded...
she prescribed me...
                        Bulgakov...
              reading a ****** to a prussian...
or reading a ****** to a RUŚ: example: ditto...
                  i have heard of how
love supposedly closed and opened borders...
we are so antithesis "different"...
we aren't... some western "communist"
zoo study:
the people who say and then...
lucky us paupers...
who have to "loot" the infrastructure
of the vacating ****-tunnels...
because... someone has to ****-off...
their tongue and... gerbil fidgety!

albino chimpanzee and...
boxer gorilla fed on...
the promise of bulk... with nothing
but... the promise of fruits of your
labour... and nothing relating
to protein... or fat... of complex sugars
known as bread... none of that!
still: that fudge-packing bulk of
gorilla bicep protein: amass!

   - as ever... the murk: before the deep-water...
the... inverted demigods
of h. p. lovecraft...
because... cthulhu is... "somehow"...
not the ******* son of Poseidon?

acid-quasi-monkey asks...
   placid-didgeridoo...
                a constipated: not funny...
attempts! at solving a crossword!
-frankenstein-myrhh:
                        ******* dangling...
                                    (-) - Fatima...
is this... "Syria" yet?
  concerning the second coming...
concerning...
Syrian civil war... something...
*******... miraculous...
has happened...
or was about to happen...
and that it didn't happen...
better that it did:
but since it... didn't...
best we cover it up...
                corpse bride:
               Khadija **** Khuwaylid...
if ever: Stephen Vizinczey...
was a (prophet) Muhammad...
in praise of older women...

    ...a Fatima... fleeing the Syrian
civil war... because... Ramses II
was... telling apart the 7 good years
from... the 7 ******* years...

tell you what... it's no fun...
when you've been given the need
to bend the knee before the altar
of phantom power...
if i were 16 and she was 14...
if i was 18 and she was 16...
if i was 60! and she was... 20!
would it matter?
               if i was jerking off aged 8...
you want to know...
what... the last prize is...
the last... difference between...
"consent" of two adult adult...
with their *******-riddle
of a theatre of ***?
     you want to know?
the thought of ******* someone...
under-age...
no! no barbie! no ken!
the theatre of thought...
of ******* someone... underage...
who is... displaying...
teasing ***... in that primodial seance
of grief to ward of mother from
the ******...
and father from the parentage of
school!

               you ever want to see...
what... a kick in the jaw looks like...
omnipresent onlooker...
of some... unpardonable crime...
that it has to be ***-related...
              i wish i performed some
unpardonable crime on a *******...
i guess a kiss is a kiss is an unpardonable
crime against a *******...
i need this heart to shelter itself
in stone! i need: a heart!
of hard-earned: rock!
               with each sentence:
i find it impossible to not....growl!
to howl! to spew a bickering of...
wolves... of hyenas...
a wake of crows!
            
              i want toi write an echo!
hye! anoooooooooooooooooooooooooo!
i want to hear...
the microscope itching
of a marrow...
of maggots working toward
a closure of expressing: scotch fudge!
i want! maggot marrow!
i want! the lost sounds of...
what the fox already minded...
in...                       χαoς! ρει(γ)νς!
yes... the gamma is a surd...
                 in this... english... equation...

last time i checked:
the cognitive theatre of the forbidden...
****** "lax"...
it's enough to tease the affair with
mere thought...
to have... people "bothered"
that one thinks... such "things"!
while the girl... prime... aged... 14...
teases you with...
exfoliations of...
                      script and... censure...
like a skirt...
but of course...
you're the dodo-project genocidal maniac
about to sport a new: cushioning
extreme...
of an ******* like...
you're minding teasing...
a high-blood pressure!

          can i allow myself a giggle?
a crown of: a dozen demons laughing
as relevant: to the 12 strong cohort of...
cognitive lapses of reason?
          
  ******* before a mirror is my...
my memory and my last concern for...
"adventure"...
a ****** ******* a russian girl so freely...
she fed off of us as...
     spinning a willow to confine itself to:
those rhubarbs in... "retro"...
no... i'm pretty sure... "they"...
the western communists would have minded
it coming across as...
  rhubarb... dreads... stiff 12" drizzle /
drool bits of a tight-knit white sporting ***!
my... oh... wait...
not exactly 16... so... no...

my... what?!
    this has to become one of those...
most... "unspectacularbly": "a least"
in what's to be digested... "fogiven"...
when... there's that teasing-**** of a per-se
readied for her rite of horror to be
met with ******* the...
upper... echelons...
to the queue! to the loiter!
to the...                cue: no dry martini equipped...
sort of... joke as... a variation
of... escapism: to excuse...
fixations... of social hierarchy...

    i am hardly a misogynist...
            it's almost... fake...
how feminists point out... death-pull...
the misogynists...
clinging to philanthropists... i suppose...
it's like...
"someone" forgot...
to... mention...
the benevolent in misanthrophy...
the happily allied to the ivory tower...
whether you're a man or a woman...
or a man pretending to be a woman...
or a woman pretending to be a man...

who is... the misanthrope?
            the solipsist...
the atheist: should you be god?
the altruist... the... fiddly-bit... extreme...
the... autist?
         who is... your... claim for...
******-****** ruleZ the world?
mother of all perfected children...
a bit like jerking off to...
those gravure beijing models...

ava lauren? she is... an aged looking
*******... closure: madame...
she earned it...
her skin is like leather...
you dare to: wear it...
   but... oops: the ubermensch...
these chinese "brides" are not...
photoshopped...
they're genetically edited...
it was apparent that china
didn't have a soul...
in its summa summarum...
or in its christ redeemer...
when... india has its rich
polytheism... pedagogy:
shiva the antithesis of vishnu:
the thesis...

    i can feel... at least!
i can feel abbreviated with the raj master...
sport...
sending a few "*******" to beijing!
let's hear a story...
no... i'm fuming mad:
i'm dying! to hear that coin-flip
of a tail: of bending the... fuckning knee:
capping... as one might!

there's a <100million of "me"...
there's... a >1billion of "them"...

   while:
            i ****** off to...
          genetically edited creatures...
the western world can hide
behind its setting sun: metaphor...
photo-editing... while...
the hot-**** beijing is...
gene-editing...
west-world 1972 bronze age:
"staging a coup"..

             yeah: gurran-gu-dag...
the arabs and their bangladeshi...
queen-bee sorted...
           elizabeth II...
royal ascot...
  i.e. lamborghinis raced on knightbridge...
because: arab playboys are to be...
minded...

write long... to ensure...
people read short... little chance
of censor-loved-up-pseudo-i.q.-heroes!
100 years later: you become a pseudo-Proust /
a Joyce... but... that also implies:
you're stiff up at the neck...
in death and sand... and worms...
in a grave! so? no turkish kebab:
no malmuk / no janissary resurrection!
Third Mate Third Aug 2014
A lot of people think they can write or paint or draw or sing or make movies or what-have-you, but having an artistic temperament doth not make one an artist.


Even the great writers of our time have tried and failed and failed some more. Vladimir Nabokov received a harsh rejection letter from Knopf upon submitting ******, which would later go on to sell fifty million copies. Sylvia Plath’s first rejection letter for The Bell Jar read, “There certainly isn’t enough genuine talent for us to take notice.” Gertrude Stein received a cruel rejection letter that mocked her style. Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way earned him a sprawling rejection letter regarding the reasons he should simply give up writing all together. Tim Burton’s first illustrated book, The Giant Zlig, got the thumbs down from Walt Disney Productions, and even Jack Kerouac’s perennial On the Road received a particularly blunt rejection letter that simply read, “I don’t dig this one at all.”

So even if you’re an utterly fantastic writer who will be remembered for decades forthcoming, you’ll still most likely receive a large dollop of criticism, rejection, and perhaps even mockery before you get there. Having been through it all these great writers offer some writing tips without pulling punches. After all, if a publishing house is going to tear into your manuscript you might as well be prepared.

1. The first draft of everything is ****. -Ernest Hemingway
2. Never use jargon words like reconceptualize, demassification, attitudinally, judgmentally. They are hallmarks of a pretentious ***. -David Ogilvy
3. If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy. – Dorothy Parker
4. Notice how many of the Olympic athletes effusively thanked their mothers for their success? “She drove me to my practice at four in the morning,” etc. Writing is not figure skating or skiing. Your mother will not make you a writer. My advice to any young person who wants to write is: leave home. -Paul Theroux
5. I would advise anyone who aspires to a writing career that before developing his talent he would be wise to develop a thick hide. — Harper Lee
6. You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club. ― Jack London
7. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. — George Orwell
8. There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are. ― W. Somerset Maugham
9. If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time — or the tools — to write. Simple as that. – Stephen King
10. Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong. – Neil Gaiman
11. Imagine that you are dying. If you had a terminal disease would you finish this book? Why not? The thing that annoys this 10-weeks-to-live self is the thing that is wrong with the book. So change it. Stop arguing with yourself. Change it. See? Easy. And no one had to die. – Anne Enright
12. If writing seems hard, it’s because it is hard. It’s one of the hardest things people do. – William Zinsser
13. Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college. – Kurt Vonnegut
14. Prose is architecture, not interior decoration. – Ernest Hemingway
15. Write drunk, edit sober. – Ernest Hemingway
16. Get through a draft as quickly as possible. Hard to know the shape of the thing until you have a draft. Literally, when I wrote the last page of my first draft of Lincoln’s Melancholy I thought, Oh, ****, now I get the shape of this. But I had wasted years, literally years, writing and re-writing the first third to first half. The old writer’s rule applies: Have the courage to write badly. – Joshua Wolf Shenk
17. Substitute ‘****’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very;’ your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be. – Mark Twain
18. Start telling the stories that only you can tell, because there’ll always be better writers than you and there’ll always be smarter writers than you. There will always be people who are much better at doing this or doing that — but you are the only you. ― Neil Gaiman
19. Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative. – Oscar Wilde
20. You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you. ― Ray Bradbury
21. Don’t take anyone’s writing advice too seriously. – Lev Grossman
image – christine zenino
Taken from the Internet
A L Davies Sep 2012
i've got me a ***** black cadillac,
stretched out—front windows rolled right down—on the curb.
with a French girl waiting inside, legs long as sin, sitting against the wide dark window
legs extended 'cross the backseat.
hiding her eyes behind big round sunglasses, smoking oily moroccan cigarettes
—writing about the way i talk.

there's a whole lotta crisp, cold money in the trunk,
waitin' to be spent on the furs she wants;
old books for me.                                                 and why not??
old books on art,
and i can't even paint!
just sit around not talking—read about Brughel or som'thin,
wishing my over-large, complacent hands knew to render the face
a fifth so well.
a fifth of whisky's 's close 's i get,
i get drunk and further away,
out now in that devil of a car, parked presently out
by the shed where i go most nights to sit in musty chairs 'n scratch ink lazily
on pages nobody ever reads..
            —but it feels ******
                       g  o  o  d  .

my frenchwoman would like to know what i think of old Proust...

REPLY: he took too ****** long! // (a sigh can be a story)
—one could write a novel in the time it takes to
toss your load on a pair of trembling *******, held up in offering—oh i can't help but be uncouth!!
—i mean just the other day fr christ's sake i moved a friend in Waterloo
to her new apartment and when carrying up the stairs two bags of clothes and a toaster
saw wonderful little second year heading up as well so i
let her go first (at first glance you may think me chivalrous) and while climbing up behind her
composed in my head the following pome, which i dashed off later on a post-it
and dedicated to her exquisite ***:

“all legs blonde climbin' the stairs, lamp in hand, yoga pants
hot & clinging like wee-ooo / hot enough in this cramped old stairwell as is,
carrying all these bags & boxes & couches up for a friend.
—hey when you're all moved in / you could come sit that thing on my lap.
share a cigarette while i carve slices of apple & offer them to you,
impaled on the end of the knife.”
rough/first sketch of a dream and then some thoughts and then some truth.
(dear upstanding: sorry about that last bit.)
Mateuš Conrad Dec 2016
allowing for a two part volume
of Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu...
is unforgiving... it's asking a meat-head
to read such a body like exploring a woman's...
a gay-man's psyche is pretty much a woman...
or what a woman thinks in secret,
gay men merely vocalise what a woman does
not say... and yes, that a with a diacritical
mark... that grave above the a? the à?
it works like a comma... à! a surprise kindred
an eureka that's not really original,
an: ah! and then you say the rest of the title...
iconic pause: in search of lost time...
          it took me about five minutes to figure
that one out... lost time, but occupied a space...
  and so much political vanity is consecrated
upon the reverse.. ineffective space:
thus gained time... for all that protests are worth.

i know i go on about this a lot, surprise surprise,
i'm actually engaging in systematisation...
once you enjoy writing as much as walking
you get to reach a systematisation,
     it's a painful process, i'd never do the editing process
of a Hemingway... write something: shoot some
camels and reindeer and go back and revise a piece
of writing: drink a *death in the afternoon
-
a shot of absinthe inside a champagne glug
or the modern: shot of Jägermeister inside a glass
of red bull... (yay-gay-mr.) -
                       or how do you make snakebite?
half a láger half a çíder - and a head of blackcurrant
squash... scoot meine good look.
  but diacritical marks are what punctuation marks
are... it's only that they've become elevated,
and unlike punctuation marks governing paragraphs
and sentences... they govern the words,
         they are syllable incision indicators...
  i mean: i don't revise something i've already written,
unless it's a spelling mistake... i just write
something new... it's sadistic in my mind's eye to
revise and revise a single effort of writing...
                i'd rather centralise a theme of the paradox
of re-, in the year 2018 i will still experience
the tetratempus - containing four seasons -
         and i will never return toward making a piece
of writing become a morbidly corrected statue...
     what's done is done, let us move toward another
circumstance of being able to acquire a new kind
of observation... i can't be a sadist in terms of also
being a perfectionist... i break a leg, i break a leg...
if i write a ****** poem, i'll write a ****** poem...
but i won't be bothered like human history has been
by preoccupying itself in forwarding the drama
on Golgotha Street...
    the newest addition to the vogue scene is a corset
paired with a waistcoat...
   the snooker championships are taking place,
and i says to my father: 'a bit like chess, ain't it?'
   'sure is', he replies, 'you have to think 3 moves ahead.'
and it is... a smart sport, actually the most intelligent
sport there is... ****** boring obviously,
unless you fake the boredom and think about angles
and triangles and Newton...
   and cover the game with such congestions of
pretending to hallucinate it all...
                or take to thinking about rebellious
Saturn spinning out of orbit and doing a Mike Tyson
to Jupiter...
          but it's very much like chess...
                   it's sporty chess... snooker is chess...
  and it definitely ain't pool...
         you could actually have a ******* on a snooker table...
while either doggy or missionary positioning on
the snooker table... so what are the odds?!
         but i'll tell you one thing... snooker beats golf...
i don't know why... but once colour televisions came into
existence: it made much more sense for both
spectator and commentator... and how dare you
not cling to the 20th century if you were born in it
to translate to the 21st androids how we experienced
an evolution of technology, that made much more sense
after what i just heard...
      so there's this woman in the U.S., and this is before
president-elect and whatnot...
  and she's 22, and it's all over vice news,
and she's scared, and she's a mother of a 1 year old...
    and then this picture emerges
(don't worry, it's not anything like playing the Sims
   and moving your Sim to play computer games
and seeing a wormhole, or the infinity mirror effect)...
and there's a scene when she's talking Donald Duck
to the child... there are no meaningful words being
said... merely sounds... onomatopoeias...
and yes... this makes perfectly good sense when
stressed as a cut-off capsule...
because Darwinism doesn't really provide much
history... Darwinism is a historical erasure:
the past 2000 years could have happened,
but not really...
  but it just fascinated me...
         when did we learn or who did we learn it from
given we were placed at so many different
plots of the globe and became convergent -
anyway - the woman is teaching the child
words via the onomatopoeia of a hoarse quacking
of a duck! i probably will not find an answer
(primarily because i'm not supposed to,
if i am to perpetuate what Aristotle taught, i.e.:
be wrong and continually circumstance being in awe,
given the mundanity that nonetheless
everything keeps repeating itself over and over again,
for sustenance, and you are not sustenance bound
as corrected by your language deficiency to
ever merge into an unconsciously organised module
that might also argue an ego) -
    but i wonder how difficult it must have been
to extract something beyond the minimalism of animals
that identifies a duck with a quack, a cow with a moo,
an serpent with a sss... a cat with a meow, a dog with a bark...
    i cannot conceive how difficult this explanation
will be... but given the timeframe, i'm more awe-stricken
by this than merely being awe-bound by the time-scale...
which becomes the least affordable option of being
struck by awe, because one becomes merely awe-bound
by it, and therefore apathetic towards such a time-scale.
       how did we suddenly extract an understanding
of an onomatopoeia to distinguish our own ontological
basis for making a sound by infusing a sound that
doesn't resemble us? when did the first ape bark like
a dog? but then again, looking at the canvas already
apparent to us... what was the point of such an adventure?
hippy culture says: monkey accidently ate a mushroom,
monkey suddenly was blown away and reasoned of
a higher purpose other than a tree and a coconut...
     mudvayne quotes the guy on l.d. 50...
what's the guys name... uggh! not Timothy Leary...
ah ****! Terence McKenna! that's it!
        am i high? nope... my respectability of argument
comes from the mystical properties of... whiskey.
hmm...      that rarely happens to people.
                   it's what's called being earthbound, or gravity
prone... sink like a skipping pebble across the lake...
          and like a tonne of lard.
             tomorrow i'll wake once more and still
think about how we encouraged the discovery of
onomatopoeia to teach our children the multiplicity of
sounds, and later deconstruct such a multiplicity to
create meaningful words that go beyond knock knock! jokes
and grunts and barking...
                     but i will never know the man who
created the fermentation process from potatoes to make
*****...
                or the guy who brewed the first pint...
or the guy that smoked the first marijuana bush ensemble
while clearing the land for a place to harvest wheat...
   all the fame that exists is simply scholastic...
  schoolboy fame... which is why so much attention
goes into becoming famous in school...
                        but still that woman teaching her child how
to speak by going down into the blobby-gurgling
  tongue of the toddler, stiffening it,
      and tightening the **** and bladder too...
  by talking Donald Duck to it...
                        i probably could have had a family myself...
but can you imagine someone writing this load of
******* and having a family? there wouldn't be any time!
           still (god, what a need to repeat!)
         how did we progress from saying ape-****?
surely if we started to imitate other animals they'd join us
in our need to usurp those ******* lions!
  lo and behold... we managed to pet dogs (so they were
in on it all along)... and cats (who came from Japan,
if **** sapiens came from Africa... cats came from Japan...
bonsai frocked and all) -
                            but you have to admit...
from what is written history, to what is history and
a gap in history going back to a similitude of form -
      you can write as much historical fiction as you want...
    and you'll never have to write a bestseller about
some centurion in the Roman Empire...
   or a quo vadis by Sienkiewicz (nobel prize winner)
for the depiction of emperor Nero...
                               ******* Sesame St. giggles...
still, the question beckons... if animals can behave in
an ultra-intuitive way as if fashioned by a telepathy...
then telepathy can only exist upon a very simple,
atomic, terse vocalisation of an identity...
   a dog barks... a man can bark too...
                                but we have completely lost our
intuitive talent (if it can be called that)...
          to have sacrificed intuition is to have created
cults or counter-intuitive hierarchies...
  so a 1000 blah blahs later i still prefer to write what
i like... than write what people "might" understand
and talk to a girl about...
                                     a bit like a woman discovering
you faked writing a poem 20 years into a marriage...
                  obviously the setbacks to boot...
                            dyslexia is an optical dimension...
no one dyslexic says a word they don't understand
a meaning of... dyslexia seemingly came from
finally having enshrined the "secret" to the monopoly
of writing sounds...
                          nonetheless... at the end of the day...
it's just too much history... there's too much of it...
            there was never going to be a world
where carpe diem ruled it...
                               it was a question how we clung to
certain things, within a framework of
                                             salmon dye omni:
sure sure... piglet pink and innocent for the rest
of our lives... once Darwinism pointed at the ape,
and once physicists dropped the bomb and the bang...
no day has had any significance at all...
   + the 24h news channels...           snuggle up to a hog
             and say: fog over Heathrow... all flights are grounded.
Terry Collett Dec 2014
Ariel
sits across
opposite
from myself

looking plump
and balding

we're talking
of Tolstoy
(Ariel's
favourite
novelist)

he creates
the largest
fictional
canvases
Ariel
informs me

his large eyes
focusing
on his class
of real ale

now and then
looking at
a table
quite near us
where young girls
talk and laugh

their laughter
echoing
in the warm
evening
summer air

I prefer
Marcel Proust
I tell him

watching how
his eyes scan
the young girls

less manly
Ariel
says to me
don't like Proust
no substance
just gossip
from parties
he went to
you know he
was a queer

yes I know

wrote in bed

yes I know

he gazes
at the girls
taking in
their laughter
their bodies
their brightness

all his thoughts
of Tolstoy
put aside

I sip beer
wondering
what Tolstoy
would say here
seeing this
this canvas

intellect
dissolved in
human lust
words silent

write again
another
War and Peace
in English
now I trust.
ON TALK WITH A FRIEND.
Thanks thespis for another muse anew,
Filliping my soul with the spirit of a song,
To chant for the young world in these pepperish letters,
before my callous  eyes on the skull of  historical future
on my pykitonic   torso of I another African pykin,
as I finish my coffin for the cadaver of poetry
that the law of poetry is a distorting neurosis,
neurotic abnormality its baseboard of time
giving classical  balance for wondrous poetry.

Compensatory motivation a charm of its seed,
Taking dear eyes from the skull of Demodocos
Leaving songfull mouth his legacy for humanity,
Warped physique not short of history,
Teaching the world to drink in full pyrene spring
As hunchbacked dwarfism of Alexander Pope
was not in any sense  dwarfism  of his poetry,
nor club foot of Byron in ******* to Maugham
Byronic heroism to Europe of yester times,
That sired Proust, the Jewish neurotic
And Keats the most dwarfish and Wolfe the tallest
Of man and woman to the cultural matrix
Of Europe, the mother of art, poetry and synaethesia,

From which was born Pushkin that took poetry
Out of his nymphomaniac heart, to the solace of czars,
And Shakespeare the dear thief, luckily converted
Childhood kleptomania into royal theatre of King Lear,
The parallel of four brothers from the house of Karamazov,
Their father; impecunious penny penchant muzhik
In the name of Fydor epileptic Dostoyevsky.

A lull of the time to escape from world of rent and tax,
Gripped nerves of the duo to a new realm of art
wherein sensuous glory from ***** and Indian hemp
propelled the souls of  Coleridge and De Quincey
to grandiose highness of poetry in the dreams of *****,
bordering on the  teutonic greatness of  ritualistic breed,
poetry that transcended from rotten apples  in the writing desk
of Fredriech von schiller the begotten son of Germany,
writing under the arms of Balzac dressed in monkey clobus,
that along with Milton in the lost paradise, gave him swaddles
only when the poetic vein of Milton flowed happily from nothing,
but from the ritualized autumnal equinox to the spiritual vernal,
as Coleridge was in full recondite  of marquetry,mosaic and miracles,
the miraculous white male sheep, the white ram of Wole Soyinka,
that he gave as a gift to Achebe at the last anniversary, evil decoy
that become a car which deathly crushed Chinua Achebe
down to demise in the catacombs for the law of poetry
as abnormal human  neurosis an equation of perfect art.
Emma-Leigh Ivy Aug 2015
Once I sat,
unaware & unassuming,
on an unaware & unassuming Tuesday
in the far corner of a coffee shop
full of commotion.  
I sleepily sauntered
behind the dusty public bookshelves
where if one were to peruse
they may find philosophical gems
- such as Proust or Voltaire.
I sat enveloped in the
warm vanilla air,
clutching at a cup of caffeine
& hoping to gain some
mild morning enlightenment
or gentle mental stimulation.  
I tucked myself between
the covers of a bent & well-read book,
content to remain unaware & unassuming
& uninterrupted
as I wandered through its printed prose.
How I prefer to spend most lazy Tuesdays.

— The End —