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Windows glassy before me,
As the beat behind them slowly comes to a resolve,
This shell before me shall dissolve.
Go onward to place I shall not reach,
Not now at least

The darkness flees the flashing badges,
Something I will not be granted

You are in a better place, or so I assume
By my own hand, I am doomed

These hands I know so well,
That is yours
Mine,

Wrenched behind me as you are stared at in terror
They think my work is over

But I have just began, I really am new to this
I don’t mean to offend but you were simply practice
Ma Jalouse, Mon Unique, Mon Ultime
Sais-tu ce que Lord Invader, Sam Manning
Cyril Monrose, Charlie Parker, Louis Armstrong
Jack Sneed et Ernest Rangling
Sans oublier Blue Glaze Mento Band et Phil Madison ?
Et je m'arrête là pour l'instant,
Sais-tu ce qu'ils ont en commun ?
Eh bien vois-tu, ce sont tous mes ombres.
Tu ne pourras jamais me comprendre
Si tu ne les comprends pas
Et si tu ne sais pas ce que représentent pour moi
La mangouste et le raccoon.
De même que pour te comprendre il faut avoir lu tout Dostoievski
Pour me comprendre il faut avoir écouté tout Sly Mongoose
Car peut être n'as-tu vu en moi qu'aria et boléro, symphonie et concerto
Alors je t'explique : pour comprendre, n'essaie pas de philosopher
Lève-toi et bouge tout simplement et tu toucheras l 'essence
C'est du folklore, c'est du reggae, c 'est du mento, c'est du calypso, c'est du jazz,
C'est instrumental ou c'est vocal
C'est moi, mes ascendances et descendances.
Sly Mongoose c'est mes Frères Karamasov
Smerdiakov, Aliocha, Ivan et Dmitri
C'est mon Idiot, mon prince Lev Mychkine
C'est mon Joueur, mon Alexei Ivanovitch

Mon Rêve d'un Homme Ridicule
Et Raskolnikov errant dans la nuit dans Crime et Châtiment.
Sly Mongoose c'est l'histoire d'une mangouste maline
Qui a baptisé la fille du pasteur
De son eau sainte
Et qui fuit la Jamaïque
Et part à l'étranger
Après son forfait.
C'est l'histoire d'une mangouste qui vole les poules les plus grasses de la cuisine
Et qui les met dans la poche de son veston
C'est l'histoire d'une mangouste qui entre dans la cuisine d'un prédicateur
Et qui repart avec une des poules les plus grasses
Et tous les chiens savent son nom.
il s'appelle Sly Mangoose
Il est malin, il est vicieux, le compère
C'est mon ombre, que veux-tu
Et parfois pour échapper aux prédateurs
Il prend l'apparence de l'ombre d'un raccoon.
Terry Collett Jun 2012
That year
in Paris

you took
Dostoyevsky’s novel

Crime and Punishment
to read when

you weren’t touring
the sites

and you became
so immersed in the book

that you became
Raskolnikov

and killed
the old woman

and her half sister
and looked about the streets

you looked for the detective
Porfiry whom you suspected

was following you about
and as you sat

in the Champs-Elysées
or stood by

the Arc de Triomphe
you thought of all

the famous
who had stayed here

in this fine city
Henry Miller

Ezra Pound
Hemmingway

Debussy
Van Gogh

and that fanatical
conqueror ******

with his sick smile
under that

silly moustache
and that evening

your brother
in the hotel room

puked in the bidet
after sour wine

or too rich food
as you looked out

the window on
the Parisian street

to see if Porfiry
was out there

waiting for you
to charge you

with the murderous crime
you didn’t do.
glassea Jan 2016
sometimes i find myself confused
knowing that however much we speak
(however much i say i love you)
i will never know you as well as i do
raskolnikov, darl, hamlet, thoreau.

because i cannot read your thoughts
but i can read theirs.
oh, i can read theirs.
Mateuš Conrad Feb 2016
the nausea of wine is to say: one cannot drink it without eating, even after a meal, and a few slices of watermelon, the nausea from drinking it alone and not in the celebrated way with food... beer and whiskey are better compatriots to fuse a feeling upon feeling on an empty stomach, that spawn no nausea, but only reward at the limits an irresistible hunger that ends the ritual, unlike wine.*

sober composition is oh so unsatisfying,
so predictable, so afraid of the world so un-daring,
not patted by subtle sarcasm or some other Dionysian
muse: so rigid so accountable for strictness and base
facts...
      almost nothing heartfelt...
and so long winding it would seem,
without a clever feel for impromptu...
so time consuming and space
filling...
                           ...never again,
for this face it too recognisable,
to analogous to everything
else, so "with the times" or
by whatever definition
                        undemanding,
strained by the expectable,
never the unexpected even
in form of a nonsensical whim,
this sober use of language for
me the opposite of the poets
of the 20th century...
who invested in composition
in tiers higher even than drinking
beer...
          to me soberness is like
the higher tier of writing with
and within a certain intoxication
no intoxication at all...
a hefty sum of all elements,
all organs... where abstracting
the brain in the mind and allowing
a dis-joining of it:
to feed a placebo question
of fear relieved by actual fear
rather than its appreciation is no more,
or if nothing more, a bit like
awaiting caveman hunts reduced to shopping
in aisles of markets... deadened and therefore
predictable... afraid twice over with the loss
of familial tribalism of closet connectivity...
reducing us to a monetary interchange
or: broken roof, someone fixes it,
broken toilet, someone fixes it...
banking failure... suddenly we all congregate?!
i hate writing sober... it means i get to notice
i don't like my poetry, and poetry per se,
because i just don't want to voice it,
i just want to narrate, pure and simple...
a narration without characters akin to fiction,
or characters without third person narration
to ascribe a narcotic feeling of presence...
it's a drug that's hardly one worthy an ascription
of a psychoactive ingredient, it's a platonic cave drug,
a shadow you can touch and disappear...
i'm not like a writer of fiction,
i'm trying to reconcile poetry with philosophy,
i spend most of my times thinking, losing thought,
trailing with the unthinkable or simply thinking,
but i never see the book, that's why i'm sad
in terms of composition,
like the last wish of bukowski, to have written
a semi-pure fiction of the novel pulp,
to discard semi if not full autobiography...
true psychiatry is of the living
to read nuances into the once lived out leaving
notations... more to take care of the dead
than just through mantra or prayer...
if analysis leaves us without third party acquisitions
of thought away from the dualism of egos
as one sick and the other ascribing a status of healthy;
you see, it's a harsh case of not having
a narrators' complexity, not spending time
typing to excess, but the time spent
thinking about other people's units of thought:
also known as ideas... and with so many
decimals of measure a lifetime of individuals,
it is hard to narrate...
since the productive side aligns to dis-joined
expression of productivity,
and the economic side aligns to a linear fluid
expression of non-productivity....
it's hard to create a narrator let alone a narrative
of one's self without a loss of one's self to
the existential notation of a "self",
the inverse reminder of what writing fiction was
about: a concrete narrator...
there's no concrete narrator here,
no craft of character formulation...
instead we have an unstable narrator
that cannot truly narrate,
and the only character formulation
from the unease of the once eased narration
of existential fiction is a self lost among selves /
existential notation of a self as a "self" /
with loss of an anti-chiral hegelian approach
i.e. i am i... forgot the unearthing of a pluralism
of narrator that could not fathom a required
imagination for a raskolnikov,
                               marmeladov,
                               petrovich,
                               razumihkin... etc.
Lawrence Hall Mar 2018
I read lots of Russian lit (in translation, of course) while in Viet-Nam

I understood poor, young Raskolnikov
And read all I found by Anton Chekhov
Remembered nothing about Bulgakhov
Heard naughty whispers about Nabokov
Thrilled to the Cossacks in old Sholokov
And then I learned about Kalashnikov –
This, I decided, is where I get off!



Moc Hoa (pronounced something like “mock wah”) is a now-prosperous town on the Song Vam Co Tay near the border with Cambodia.  In 1970 it was rather down at the heels and was a center of military activity, including mercenaries presumably controlled by the C.I.A*.
Well, golly-gosh, I see the italics are all over the place again.  I meant for the body of the poem to stand tall, and the notes to be in italics.  The Machine does not agree.
Ian Hammond Feb 2018
The sprawling corporate tool, the false pretense destroys the inner sanctity. In his own personal palace crumbling with the rest of it. Not good enough. Slicked back afraid no one can comprehend the magnitude and pure scale of ból. Incessant staring, incessant staring, incessant staring. In the name of god, gravity over death, nothing is sacred, everything is broken. I am broken, for he is broken. Torn apart. Almost dead. Worth is less. No one can comprehend the magnitude and pure scale of verletzt. Stranded by the wrists, hanging. Dwindling. Imagine a man with his wrists attached to a ceiling fan, with cement shoes. Activating the ceiling fan is despicable and abhorrent, but the beauty shines through. Beauty knows no pain. Beauty covers the pain of the moment. Encompass Dancing Shiva through and through, Dancing Shiva is guidance. Encephalic dissociation at the route. What the hell is wrong. Omit me. Chasing the glorification, what he wants is not healthy he knows. Self gratification taking a non existent approach. Back seat. Take the back ******* seat. It’s for others. Its all for ******* others. He is broken where it is impossible to fix. Supplement a camera, feed the anxiety and take away the comfort. Supplement the ******* camera, take away the innocence. ADD THE INNOCENCE. Where is this where am I. What am I. How am I. Incoherent rambling to focus on a main theme. Incoherent rambling to focus on a main theme? Provide reason for disinterest; the enormous mouth roaring into his ear, roaring, flaring, decomposing any sense of worth. It’s alright. Raskolnikov would be jealous of his malcontentedness.

— The End —