The fish bowl is yet to make sense.
I’m that little red fish
at the bottom of the glass aquarium
you barely remember
from that childhood cartoon
that maybe never existed.

I’m not a pretty fish,
let’s at least admit that.
I’m not a goldfish,
or a rainbow mermaid,
or a toad the prince could kiss
to turn into a princess.
I’m a red pufferfish.

I’m puffing up and I poison these waters.
Like all scared pufferfish,
I dread facing up to my insecurities.
I never trusted my mind was whimsical enough,
that my skin was pretty enough,
that my spikes were safe enough,
for anyone to love them.

And what is a scared pufferfish to do
but to retrieve to the comfort
of painting the pictures of who they want to be?
What am I to do but to lie?

So, I, the pufferfish, lie.
I lie like my life depends on it,
I turn trickery into art.
I become such a good liar that soon,
no one, not even me,
can tell the difference between
the real situation,
and the fantastic tales I tell myself.
Isn’t it a tiny bit ironic?
Being so afraid of the sting,
that the pufferfish resources to clouding the water
with poison so much
that she poisons herself and doesn’t know
which way in the bowl is up.

The trap of the lying pufferfish
is that not even in lies may she succeed.
Even in lies she loses the game she tries
so desperately to cheat.
You see, it’s a little bit like this,
if you are a pufferfish,
and you don’t believe they’re interesting enough,
and you paint them to look like dolphins,
because everyone loves dolphins,
the pufferfish ends up feeling like an impostor.
No matter what lies she tells herself or others,
she’s smart enough to know in her gills
that she is, in fact, a pufferfish.

However,
should you hold up
the fishbowl
to the light
you’ll see that
underneath the layers of paint
and red skin
my little lying pufferfish heart
is transparent,
in a way,
clean.
I swear,
in all the honesty
you shouldn’t trust,
that I mean no harm
and never had.
And please,
little,
transparent
pumping,
scared heart,
believe yourself,
when you say,
that you are trying
as hard as you can,
at having a fresh start
in the poisoned waters.

Last night,
I dreamt that the friend of a friend had died.

His body floated lifeless on the surface of the Pacific,
tossed about between the Bering Sea whitecaps

like an orca’s seal-pup plaything
while the Arctic wind whipped

and beat the freezing cold water
across his pallid face and through his chestnut hair.

Then his body
began to sink,

its silhouette appearing
against various monotone

canvases of blue
on its trip downward:

a vivid cornflower,
a pelagic cerulean,

a chasm of cold cobalt,
a starless twilight,

a forest of indigo,
a velvet curtain of navy.

Finally,
as it reached the deepest possible shade of midnight—

only a quantum away from black—
it stopped sinking.

There, in that void,
where daylight and color are considered but outlandish theories,

strange fish of all and shapes and sizes
began to surround the decomposing corpse:

Greenland sharks hailing from the frozen arctic,
mantis shrimp from the mangrove labyrinths,

eyeless electric eels from undersea caves near the Galápagos,
vampire squid rising cautiously up out of their World War One trenches,

scores of spindly ***** and pale worms that had ventured far beyond
the safe familiarity of their alien geothermal worlds.

At first, they approached the corpse gingerly,
nibbling only the tips of its hair and fingernails,

and then suddenly, voraciously,
they consumed it—until not even a skeleton remained.

Now, only a single point of light was left
there floating in the void.

And from this single point of light,
where just a moment before the corpse had floated,

a brilliant white lattice structure emerged,
unfurling as would a fern across a forest floor.

It fanned out onto the seabed
and then swept upward, upward

back toward those reaches of sea
where color is known

and fresh air gleefully permeates
that foamy outer membrane that skirts the base of the sky.

Scores of familiar fish began to lift up the crystalline structure—
schools of shimmering sardines,

stately, dignified manta rays,
skipjacks, bluefins, and white-tips,

brilliant cuttlefish, humble pufferfish,
shifty barracuda, gargantuan whale sharks,

all of them
beating their tails in concert

to carry this lattice away,
this measure of a life,

this husk of a soul
at last freed from its earthly bindings.

The fish were carrying it somewhere deeper,
somewhere darker,

to a place that I understood—
even from the inky depths

of my dreaming mind—
that I could not enter.

But then again,
I knew that someday

I would.

pop a balloon will you, they think i'm a Jehovah's witness not wanting to celebrate this ******* farce... last time i popped a balloon was on Guy Fawkes' night, i went into fireworks shop and asked for a firework, got turned away, walked into another shop that sold balloons, bought a packed, went back to the fireworks shop with the balloon pufferfish... the ****** didn't pop with a smack of the hand, it had some additive in it to strengthen the membrane... a clown parade came after.

i'm 30 today, got a call from my grandparents
wishing me a: hoo ha what not, encore encore,
health and more health -
conversation with grandmother was fine,
but then my grandfather got me depressed,
the lecture about how he'd have been
working 15 years to date my year in passing,
post-war veteran, he was the one asking
for candy from the ᛋᛋ men - *herr, bite bonbon,
i spent many years with him, walking, talking,
the graveyard was our oyster, our pearl,
we became hyenas of the graves -
but on this day i got hit by a steam-train knuckle,
started thinking about getting ****** right away:
'look, i live in a society where poetry is
under-appreciated, even un-, there are no
rewards in this field, what was the point of educating
myself if all this poetry is, quiet literally state
sponsored? it's pathetic! i would love to come and
see you but i will not use your money to get over
there, i have an addiction to pursue, including
a quasi-career. poetry has been hijacked by
oompa-loompas, the kids they own the internet,
i guess because that's the easiest way to describe
any germination, in poetry you can't be a Mozart
boasting about your genius aged 8...
Mozart was a trained monkey, poetry requires
experience, heartbreak, the gritty bits & bobs,
sure, you can learn all the techniques, write
technical poetry, but from such poetry i'll be
reduced to an english student, spotting poetic
techniques like a statistician spotting trends,
ball-breaking expressions.'
and with that i realised, i wanted to be a bohemian,
but bohemian also means urban, means
other people's company... i can't do that,
i'm purposively lodged in outer suburbia,
there's too much Wordsworth in me to claim
bohemian blue / cool; leave me with deer foxes
hedgehogs and a Noah's ark array of birds...
i can't do the stink, the claustrophobic coagulation
of human sweat... or as i once suggested:
better celibate than mere piston and ******
                                                        "i­mmaturity"...
i **** like crossing the street, look two times each
way and mind the heart...
i can drink a 70cl bottle of whiskey a day...
only because i'm alone, in company the mood is
quiet different, you're not suggesting alcohol as having
calories, you use it as an inhibitor of social insecurities,
medically speaking from my perspective?
sedative... sedative... sedative... i don't know
any barbiturates pharmacist Nietzsche didn't leave
any clues in his writing, what a shame, back
when writing had to be printed and had to have all
kinds of mannerisms of respectability - what ponce.
by the way... you're not actually getting fooled
for those illiterate scraps of the Nag Hammadi library?
word of goat more like... look around you!
the large majority of us are literate, you don't actually
think the Nag Hammadi library is sacred?
even Bruce... ah ****, Caitlyn is having second thoughts
about the "wisdom" implied by St. Thomas' Gospel...
but yeah... 30... ooh... time to bite my nails...
career not off the ground... ooh... what to do what to do...
have a drink and reiterate:
                                               can't do bohemian,
can only do rustic (suits me)...             civilising wieśniactwo -
bo jestem z miasta... ah... bo jestem z miasta...
to widać i słychać i czuć...
                                                alter! hey **, dawaj alter!
bo jestem ze wsi...                         niby widać
i            słychać              i czuć (na grzbiecie mam a pigglet)!
            ah then piękny mish-mash duo-baritone, sz,
                   no no, prawie Tuwim Opera!
hey! don't come running to me, a 12 year old immigrant
said that the majority of polish migrants in england
create a village atmosphere... now that's masochistic
racism - last night i was laughing during a televised
geography lesson... doesn't get better than that in terms
of birthday presents.

or that worth of gimp, the hotted sauced out
cradle of predatory amusement              banked on,
                        i have the notes,
mind you, you're clearly laden
with khaki material,
to mind the blackshirts of the SS,
a Vandal epiphany -
                 less khaki juice
and more blackcurrants -
                  or so the motto stands,
asserting brief and all that thought
of tomorrow.
                   all i'll add with this
vague blunt alcohol ridden self?
the vampirism of the abandoned trill
of the R...
                   that's the Vlad-blatant
abandonment of the trilling of the R -
and the competent disregard for
linguistic laws...
                 until tomorrow,
until i find my sobering-up manicure
and in rewrite the notes i've made
when inspired...
                      and i have made them...
it's all about me being nicknamed
a Viking for my tolerance to drink
you under the table, and dabble with nods,
or the blatant hiding of the tetragrammaton
with ghee (said gee) and otherwise,
                  (Indian butter) -
or dhal - or quiet simply daal / dāl:
against the aesthetics, ouch.
     again in French: je t'aime: ř - adding zero
hour to the said: sharpening the shrapnel -
                       jaded temp. / jay temp. /
                  j-j ****** or the rue flu.
oh it's there, in the notes,
as i benign the thought: unfit today,
payday tomorrow.
wait... i might have a sober moment tonight...
         encapsulate that with a question
about Iran, and a quasi-stop in conversation...
        or counting the strokes in a handwritten
variation:
              Yen ( ¥‎) = 4
                      pound (£) = 2
    matchsticks...
                             elsewhere also matchsticks:
º (red)
                = R E D (3, 4, 2) matchsticks,
                 º (
writing is termed another variant of arithmetic,
the total is 7, for one ideogram) -
             the sigma for red
   is 9, but divided by three means
        the European model falls 4 short
of optical indigestion.
     ř (caron) - caron of the missing z -
         not the variant of caron s and c with z:
czekam (i'm waiting), or szukam (i'm looking),
English has this pronoun priority
                   to be included in every phrase,
or what provides the British Empire fabric:
            how a-  (indefinite)
     and the-    (definite) articulation secures
pronouns with excess modifications
  as already apparent conjunction modifications
worthy of exegesis into the exotic / excess.
there are 7 pages worth of notes,
   but i have three quarters worth of whiskey to
drink... give me an Andy Warhol moment
suggesting: in the future, people
will have only 15 minutes worth of rechargeable
         infrastructure; hence the pending /
ongoing / will return to in a minute.
reintroducing the trilled R vogue:
    is a bit like incubating a vampiric
in English,
                    rzekomo (apparently so)
       řekomo -
                         variant of: as already stratified.
               still, the trilling of the R
is so out of fashion in English it's necessarily
a vampirism qualm -
                   never nearer the French hark
when the R summarises a rolling effect -
      by imperial standards charred.
howe then to resemble a trill?
           r̭ ?
                   or wave akin to wavering
                       (ñ) that's necessary above an r?
i need the trill represented!
    for thrill a better word -
                  or 0 and the minded gambit.
as said caron the missing H...
       twins in
                 Y or three-dimensional space,
and W
              of trigonometric absorption...
waves hunny, waves...
                          and three dimensional space
and rabbis... honey cluedo pooh bear...
i still need to find the trilled r!
**** me, the trilled r! virgulilla:
or thus said, a patent otherwise.
        yet again a ******* Yeti,
    counting matchsticks in Japan
   rather than in Iowa...
             cos it really ******* mattered
given the knots -
       and other reminders...
         yen, or Jenny,
      v. p o u n d
            (2 1 2 2 2);
          ś (acute) half-missing caron
      inc. grave v. š (caron)
             or the Sean Connery effect -
e.g. środa (wednesday) or škodaª
             (insert a H or a Z)
           for pronunciation
                        of the Czech car manufacturer,
already the Tetragrammaton descends:
   ªwhat a shame, it's such a shame.
       Mishter Bondè:
                                tequila sunrise?
ney - ney shaken nor shackled to a shtir (
šush it, and wise up, mš. moneypenny).
    just say Sharon and write Šaron:
dimples!
                         or how to paint a Kabbalistic
anatomy of the mouth to slow variation
between ś (acute) / no consonants will ever
acquire a gràve - necessary: the e isn't said
accenting / syllable scalpelling cutting up...
but still the coran s (š - to mention
ch in cheap, and šiš kebabs too).
variation of cutting up the caron into
acute and grave?
      ś: the tongue is primarily squeezed by the psyche /
breath and the mouth rekindles eating a lemon
tightening it's juiced up and juices the tongue
to sting with missing saliva -
š? primarily a serpent's hush -
  the mouth hollows out -
         the breath enters a so does a pufferfish:
antics of hollowed out mouth follow suite,
the diamond or double L

       bone                                    soul
               L muscle                            L teeth
  tendon                               tongue

synonyms and Γ apart -
                                 of the LL, or ΓL
                    or LΓ or ΓΓ.
                      the diamond diadem -
assertion of bone: whether caprais or
   cousin in the mandible family...
    is a tongue a muscle?
            still the Kabbalistic anatomy dynamic...
  the kinned appearance of H or the
variant of bone...
     or?
              a-
                     (+)
                              -theism,
it doesn't mean that God doesn't exist,
it just means that God has no logical attachment
to man's sprechen,
            the omni- can be rightfully disregarded
in that rubric consolidated within
categorisation of: lazy...
      a- (i.e. without)  
                            theology,
              ­       or our abhorrent freedoms of will,
nurtured by a universal lack:
       atheism contemplates talk of god
without a contradictory circumstance of the
human endeavour to find itself a *******
     lacklustre of comparative Raphaelite
                 illustration...
                           always the favourite,
aren't they, the crucified ones, rather than
those enthroned? aren't they? so why are the
Japanese asking about their ****** culture?
over-sexualised west?
let's ask Yokote,
   let's ask Takeshi,
let's ask Masahiro,
             sure... you can ask me:
  i prefered prostitutes because i actually
knew i was using my phallus rather than representing
a ******* identity of some egocentrism
regarding the skyscraper -
                     and the last girlfriend i had?
i wouldn't wish her to be a companion of
any kind of a Mongolian invader as part
of a horde... i had an argument with her
and was so unhappy i actually wished i was dead...
          jerking off never seemed so holy
as when encountering this woman who
stood by the motto: life is ****...
           but i guess money does that to you.
**** me! i never expected to be so Japanese in
my outlook;
tragic, i know, but what can you do,
    you unlock the floodgates of feminism
and you think that lions will start to provide for
the household? then you aren't lionesses; obviously;
or reluctantly so:
           i find the 21st century is withstanding
  any kind of revision, given the 20th century's
revisions aren't working
        for any worthy necessitation of reciprocated
stipend.

Schooled in crass vanity,
Pointed scales of pufferfish,
Blowing up themselves.

most poisonous fish
shark are immune from poison
of the pufferfish

We stood alone in the lowest point of an empty pool
the same one that used to be filled with cool, restorative waters
I still carried the lacking waters within me daily like a pufferfish
thinking I could restore the oasis that once kept us from drying out.

The words used to taste so sweet when they passed across my tongue
in the days when they traveled to your ears by the silver cord that bound us
and flowed through them to the mirrored soul that awaited them longingly
but now they taste of carrion baking during countless summer days.

As soon as my lips parted to refill the pool so that we could reach the ladder
I dropped to my knees and the corrupted sentiment started pouring out
the vile and viscous remnants were colored a sickly shade of green
and they escaped with such a force that they pushed us both backwards.

When the words first started spewing I felt each one fully
with the same vibrations as when they were first taken captive
but their ******* coated my tongue so that I could taste nothing
except for the desire to find the ladder and leave all of this where it fell.

I searched for the beauty I remembered for as long as any mortal could
and I glanced back one last time to make sure you did not linger in it
I took each step towards the hill I swore I would die on
and the oozing corruption left a trail of footprints that would never be followed.

The hill that I sat on for countless summer days was no longer there
and I remembered the fire lanterns that were carried on the wind
what we were had disappeared beyond the clouds and fallen
sinking to the bottom of the depths to never be sought or found again.

I used to fear the emptiness that might replace this when I let it go
but it is as calm and soothing as the waters we used to swim in
and I had almost forgotten the whispers of the soul of the world
until I heard “you loved her as much as you could for as long as you could,

it is done”.

try not to ignore.

you have been right

so many times before.



sbm.



{talking to the bear}



daily post – qualm



#itrhymes!

#pufferfish

#warhat

no spine?
that's what replays
through your mind?
let me give you
more ammo
for sleepless nights
anyone can see through you
when you walk around
and act dead
wake the **** up
nothing is working out for me!
oh-uh, yea, i guess i did spend
all my money
i know the radiator is broke
but look! corset, boots, smoke
at least i can pretend
everything is okay
even if no one believes me
even if everything is falling
apart

In January there is a glow so gold that the bleak post-summer sky turns white
The Sun squints through stretches of clouds that hang over the Indian oceans
The Atlantic seas where the carp shiver and the trout bloat like flattened pufferfish
They sit between the edges of costal towns, like a hanging curtain pinned down by old wooden sea ports
Splintered and bruised by the ocean’s fierce love
By the fisherman’s tools
By the many boats of history, present and future
By the weary ropes that curl, like snakes, into spirals on the deck.
In January there is a glow so familiar and unchanging, like
Water finding the foot of the sandbank
Over and over and over.

i was born when the nothingness had grown weary of my absence called upon to blunder through mortality's purpose
swollen like a pufferfish in a pond of mercury
so gorgeous everything’s okay.
after that, i was born again but not from love’s Freudian vendetta with eternity.
but from an organic siege of my previous incarnation,
born from a wound in the guitar buried in the garden.
i never leave anywhere the same as not being there actually.
i absolutely almost there
at all..