Here is a primer on the history of poetry

Features of Modernism

To varying extents, writing of the Modernist period exhibits these features:

1. experimentation

belief that previous writing was stereotyped and inadequate
ceaseless technical innovation, sometimes for its own sake
originality: deviation from the norm, or from usual reader expectations
ruthless rejection of the past, even iconoclasm

2. anti-realism

sacralisation of art, which must represent itself, not something beyond preference for allusion (often private) rather than description
world seen through the artist's inner feelings and mental states
themes and vantage points chosen to question the conventional view
use of myth and unconscious forces rather than motivations of conventional plot

3. individualism

promotion of the artist's viewpoint, at the expense of the communal
cultivation of an individual consciousness, which alone is the final arbiter
estrangement from religion, nature, science, economy or social mechanisms
maintenance of a wary intellectual independence
artists and not society should judge the arts: extreme self-consciousness
search for the primary image, devoid of comment: stream of consciousness
exclusiveness, an aristocracy of the avant-garde

4. intellectualism

writing more cerebral than emotional
work is tentative, analytical and fragmentary, more posing questions more than answering them
cool observation: viewpoints and characters detached and depersonalized
open-ended work, not finished, nor aiming at formal perfection
involuted: the subject is often act of writing itself and not the ostensible referent

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Expressionism

Expressionism was a phase of twentieth-century writing that rejected naturalism and romanticism to express important inner truths. The style was generally declamatory or even apocalyptic, endeavoring to awaken the fears and aspirations that belong to all men, and which European civilization had rendered effete or inauthentic. The movement drew on Rimbaud and Nietzsche, and was best represented by German poetry of the 1910-20 period. Benn, Becher, Heym, Lasker-Schüler, Stadler, Stramm, Schnack and Werfel are its characteristic proponents, {1} though Trakl is the best known to English readers. {2} {3}

Like most movements, there was little of a manifesto, or consensus of beliefs and programmes. Many German poets were distrustful of contemporary society — particularly its commercial and capitalist attitudes — though others again saw technology as the escape from a perceived "crisis in the old order". Expressionism was very heterogeneous, touching base with Imagism, Vorticism, Futurism, Dadaism and early Surrealism, many of which crop up in English, French, Russian and Italian poetry of the period. Political attitudes tended to the revolutionary, and technique was overtly experimental. Nonetheless, for all the images of death and destruction, sometimes mixed with messianic utopianism, there was also a tone of resignation, a sadness of "the evening lands" as Spengler called them.

Expressionism also applies to painting, and here the characteristics are more illuminating. The label refers to painting that uses visual gestures to transmit emotions and emotionally charged messages. In the expressive work of Michelangelo and El Greco, for example, the content remains of first importance, but content is overshadowed by technique in such later artists as van Gogh, Ensor and Munch. By the mid twentieth-century even this attenuated content had been replaced by abstract painterly qualities — by the sheer scale and dimensions of the work, by colour and shape, by the verve of the brushwork and other effects.

Expressionism often coincided with rapid social change. Germany, after suffering the horrors of the First World War, and ineffectual governments afterwards, fragmented into violently opposed political movements, each with their antagonistic coteries and milieu. The painting of these groups was very variable, but often showed a mixture of aggression and naivety. Understandably unpopular with the establishment  — denounced as degenerate by the Nazis — the style also met with mixed reactions from the picture-buying public. It seemed to question what the middle classes stood for: convention, decency, professional expertise. A great sobbing child had been let loose in the artist's studio, and the results seemed elementally challenging. Perhaps German painting was returning to its Nordic roots, to small communities, apocalyptic visions, monotone starkness and anguished introspection.

What could poetry achieve in its turn? Could it use some equivalent to visual gestures, i.e. concentrate on aspects of the craft of poetry, and to the exclusion of content? Poetry can never be wholly abstract, a pure poetry bereft of content. But clearly there would be a rejection of naturalism. To represent anything faithfully requires considerable skill, and such skill was what the Expressionists were determined to avoid. That would call on traditions that were not Nordic, and that were not sufficiently opposed to bourgeois values for the writer's individuality to escape subversion. Raw power had to tap something deeper and more universal.

Hence the turn inward to private torments. Poets became the judges of poetry, since only they knew the value of originating emotions. Intensity was essential.  Artists had to believe passionately in their responses, and find ways of purifying and deepening those responses — through working practices, lifestyles, and philosophies. Freud was becoming popular, and his investigations into dreams, hallucinations and paranoia offered a rich field of exploration. Artists would have to glory in their isolation, moreover, and turn their anger and frustration at being overlooked into a belief in their own genius. Finally, there would be a need to pull down and start afresh, even though that contributed to a gradual breakdown in the social fabric and the apocalypse of the Second World War.

Expressionism is still with us. Commerce has invaded bohemia, and created an elaborate body of theory to justify, support and overtake what might otherwise appear infantile and irrational. And if traditional art cannot be pure emotional expression, then a new art would have to be forged. Such poetry would not be an intoxication of life (Nietzsche's phrase) and still less its sanctification.  Great strains on the creative process were inevitable, moreover, as they were in Georg Trakl's case, who committed suicide shortly after writing the haunting and beautiful piece given below

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SYMBOLIST POETS
symbolism in poetry

Symbolism in literature was a complex movement that deliberately extended the evocative power of words to express the feelings, sensations and states of mind that lie beyond everyday awareness. The open-ended symbols created by Charles Baudelaire (1821-67) brought the invisible into being through the visible, and linked the invisible through other sensory perceptions, notably smell and sound. Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-98), the high priest of the French movement, theorized that symbols were of two types. One was created by the projection of inner feelings onto the world outside. The other existed as nascent words that slowly permeated the consciousness and expressed a state of mind initially unknown to their originator.

None of this came about without cultivation, and indeed dedication. Poets focused on the inner life. They explored strange cults and countries. They wrote in allusive, enigmatic, musical and ambiguous styles. Rimbaud deranged his senses and declared "Je est un autre". Von Hofmannstahl created his own language. Valéry retired from the world as a private secretary, before returning to a mastery of traditional French verse. Rilke renounced wife and human society to be attentive to the message when it came.

Not all were great theoreticians or technicians, but the two interests tended to go together, in Mallarmé most of all. He painstakingly developed his art of suggestion, what he called his "fictions". Rare words were introduced, syntactical intricacies, private associations and baffling images. Metonymy replaced metaphor as symbol, and was in turn replaced by single words which opened in imagination to multiple levels of signification. Time was suspended, and the usual supports of plot and narrative removed. Even the implied poet faded away, and there were then only objects, enigmatically introduced but somehow made right and necessary by verse skill. Music indeed was the condition to which poetry aspired, and Verlaine, Jimenez and Valéry were among many who concentrated efforts to that end.

So appeared a dichotomy between the inner and outer lives. In actuality, poets led humdrum existences, but what they described was rich and often illicit: the festering beauties of courtesans and dance-hall entertainers; far away countries and their native peoples; a world-weariness that came with drugs, isolation, alcohol and bought ***. Much was mixed up in this movement — decadence, aestheticism, romanticism, and the occult — but its isms had a rational purpose, which is still pertinent. In what way are these poets different from our own sixties generation? Or from the young today: clubbing, experimenting with relationships and drugs, backpacking to distant parts? And was the mixing of sensory perceptions so very novel or irrational? Synaesthesia was used by the Greek poets, and indeed has a properly documented basis in brain physiology.

What of the intellectual bases, which are not commonly presented as matters that should engage the contemporary mind, still less the writing poet? Symbolism was built on nebulous and somewhat dubious notions: it inspired beautiful and historically important work: it is now dead: that might be the blunt summary. But Symbolist poetry was not empty of content, indeed expressed matters of great interest to continental philosophers, then and now. The contents of consciousness were the concern of Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), and he developed a terminology later employed by Heidegger (1889-1976), the Existentialists and hermeneutics. Current theories on metaphor and brain functioning extend these concepts, and offer a rapprochement between impersonal science and irrational literary theory.

So why has the Symbolism legacy dwindled into its current narrow concepts? Denied influence in the everyday world, poets turned inward, to private thoughts, associations and the unconscious. Like good Marxist intellectuals they policed the area they arrogated to themselves, and sought to correct and purify the language that would evoke its powers. Syntax was rearranged by Mallarmé. Rhythm, rhyme and stanza patterning were loosened or rejected. Words were purged of past associations (Modernism), of non-visual associations (Imagism), of histories of usage (Futurism), of social restraint (Dadaism) and of practical purpose (Surrealism). By a sort of belated Romanticism, poetry was returned to the exploration of the inner lands of the irrational. Even Postmodernism, with its bric-a-brac of received media images and current vulgarisms, ensures that gaps are left for the emerging unconscious to engage our interest

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IMAGIST POETRY
imagist poetry

Even by twentieth-century standards, Imagism was soon over. In 1912 Ezra Pound published the Complete Poetical Works of its founder, T.E. Hulme (five short poems) and by 1917 the movement, then overseen by Amy Lowell, had run its course. {1} {2} {3} {4} {5} The output in all amounted to a few score poems, and none of these captured the public's heart. Why the importance?

First there are the personalities involved — notably Ezra Pound, James Joyce, William Carlos Williams {6} {7} {8} {9} — who became famous later. If ever the (continuing) importance to poets of networking, of being involved in movements from their inception, is attested, it is in these early days of post-Victorian revolt.

Then there are the manifestos of the movement, which became the cornerstones of Modernism, responsible for a much taught in universities until recently, and for the difficulties poets still find themselves in. The Imagists stressed clarity, exactness and concreteness of detail. Their aims, briefly set out, were that:

1. Content should be presented directly, through specific images where possible.
2. Every word should be functional, with nothing included that was not essential to the effect intended.
3. Rhythm should be composed by the musical phrase rather than the metronome.

Also understood — if not spelled out, or perhaps fully recognized at the time — was the hope that poems could intensify a sense of objective reality through the immediacy of images.

Imagism itself gave rise to fairly negligible lines like:

You crash over the trees,
You crack the live branch…  (Storm by H.D.)

Nonetheless, the reliance on images provided poets with these types of freedom:

1. Poems could dispense with classical rhetoric, emotion being generated much more directly through what Eliot called an objective correlate: "The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an 'objective correlative'; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked." {10}

2. By being shorn of context or supporting argument, images could appear with fresh interest and power.

3. Thoughts could be treated as images, i.e. as non-discursive elements that added emotional colouring without issues of truth or relevance intruding too mu
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PROSE BASED POETRY
prose based poetry

When free verse lacks rhythmic patterning, appearing as a lineated prose stripped of unnecessary ornament and rhetoric, it becomes the staple of much contemporary work. The focus is on what the words are being used to say, and their authenticity. The language is not heightened, and the poem differs from prose only by being more self-aware, innovative and/or cogent in its exposition.

Nonetheless, what looks normal at first becomes challenging on closer reading — thwarting expectations, and turning back on itself to make us think more deeply about the seemingly innocuous words used. And from there we are compelled to look at the world with sharper eyes, unprotected by commonplace phrases or easy assumptions. Often an awkward and fighting poetry, therefore, not indulging in ceremony or outmoded traditions.
What is Prose?

If we say that contemporary free verse is often built from what was once regarded as mere prose, then we shall have to distinguish prose from poetry, which is not so easy now. Prose was once the lesser vehicle, the medium of everyday thought and conversation, what we used to express facts, opinions, humour, arguments, feelings and the like. And while the better writers developed individual styles, and styles varied according to their purpose and social occasion, prose of some sort could be written by anyone. Beauty was not a requirement, and prose articles could be rephrased without great loss in meaning or effectiveness.

Poetry, though, had grander aims. William Lyon Phelps on Thomas Hardy's work: {1}

"The greatest poetry always transports us, and although I read and reread the Wessex poet with never-lagging attention — I find even the drawings in "Wessex Poems" so fascinating that I wish he had illustrated all his books — I am always conscious of the time and the place. I never get the unmistakable spinal chill. He has too thorough a command of his thoughts; they never possess him, and they never soar away with him. Prose may be controlled, but poetry is a possession. Mr. Hardy is too keenly aware of what he is about. In spite of the fact that he has written verse all his life, he seldom writes unwrinkled song. He is, in the last analysis, a master of prose who has learned the technique of verse, and who now chooses to express his thoughts and his observations in rime and rhythm."

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OPEN FORMS IN POETRY
open forms in poetry

Poets who write in open forms usually insist on the form growing out of the writing process, i.e. the poems follow what the words and phrase suggest during the composition

it’s not everyday you get to end a 7 year psychosis
when redecorating your room to it’s “original” crimson,
having had such a simple symptom as
brain cell membranes breaking and oozing blood out,
to be misdiagnosed as mentally insane,
and when in need of help from the haemorrhage
not driven to the hospital due to the lack of *******
of having proceeded with the deed but forgetting the onslaught of law
in favour of the hurt party... well...what can you do?
move on, as i’m trying, had it been naturally based
on genetic chronology / genealogy i would have suffered in vain...
but i’m brimming with a hate for islam, and there’s nothing
to do but calm the quasi-communist protestors
in the western lands... ******* calm down... you’ll get
your freedom of speech... once you stop trying to censor vocabulary...
there’s no point learning a language if it becomes
politicised and you tell me to block vowels or consonants
in a non-kabbalistic way (which i’ll come to):
so yeah, a 7 year psychosis over a needle in a haystack...
gives me the shivers...
the many times i thought about killing someone
and feeding the emotions with not doing the act...
so many times i was almost skeletally biased to churn the
marrow haemoglobin into tendon stressor action of taking
the knife and doing halal or kosher with someone...
many a times...as many a times i saw crucifixions in edinburgh
not knowing it was going to happen in syria,
and that night when a muslim tried to mug me
in brick lane breaking down in the street of revellers
kneeling in tears screaming a prayer with tears in my eyes
of only one word: allah.
so i started redecorating my room, crimson is back from
hospital white... my bookshelf is rearranged...
on the left on the top shelf fictional books i either read
or didn’t bother to read because of the movies...
to the right on the shelf psychiatric and philosophical books...
the next shelf is a poetry “corner,” well it elongates beyond the corner...
and it’s split by a dictionary with the right bit of the shelf filled
with english poetry and some literature that’s poetic, and french,
the dictionary is planted to segregate the poetry books,
to the left of the dictionary is a book of greek myths
(did you know all greek theology is derived from the new testament
and not from the testament of orpheus or hercules or Perseus?),
then a book on meditative kabblah... then polish books of poetry.
so i rearranged the room, but i also lodged
an essayist’s book on melancholia, a book on depression
a book on an intro. to jung and a book on
schizophrenia lodged between these massive collections:
to the left all the art books... to the right all the books concerning chemistry...
so the books in between can’t really be seen.
as of today i woke with a p.s. from dreams, or a p.s. in dreams,
i woke and imagined myself talking to my mother
about the identity of al-dajjal... the false messiah,
within the conscious realm i just said the words out of the window:
fool you fool me, when mecca / medina become west of paris / london,
i’ll accept riyadh to be east of tehran / new delhi...
then we'll marginalise plateau east with copernican east
via the stars, and wander aimlessly trying to copper-fill
the sun at sunset...
he (muhammad) said the man would be of his nation,
and he said so with a warning...
but ibn saud got away weighing in at 160kg, diabetic and a brawler
with the stomach, the decadent of all that choose either sugary decadence
or some other form of mental instability in the chosen trade of stolen organs.
me? i keep my sanity with the tetragrammaton, cipher this:
this numerology *******, and it is ******* will not do...
enter platonic forms:
y is so so much more than just 25...
what will you see through y with the number 25?
what? nothing, dry brute that i am...
Y represent 3 dimensional space...
the first h is not important given the second h... which is deja vu,
which is less than what malachi insisted with the fractioned god of
the fractioned “elijah” reincarnated...
deja vu can be explained with science as one of the brain’s tricks
to sense this familiarity of seeing an elephant and acknowledging
the five blind men touching it up for comparative jokes,
the W... well... at least it’s not M... given that the trigonometric cosine continuum
begins at 1.... god is one... ring a bell? well better that than
beginning with the trigonometric sine continuum, which begins with 0...
forget numerology... numbers and letters aren’t related...
forget the dogmatism of rabbis - it makes no sense to say a = 1, b = 2 etc.
and then take a word like ape, and say: ‘ah, a = 1, p = 16 and e = 5; by god!
that’s a kabbalistic synonymity of the word... pea!’
where’s the jolly green giant when you need him, eh?
just look at what a phonetic symbol represents...
like secondary darwinism of a primate hissing to alert the presence
of a snake... past darwinism... past drawing antelopes
in french caves... in the realm of abstract phoneticism that
gave us the cognitive genesis... and made as... dare i say... a bit myopic
in a solipsistic sense.
p.s. ah... what are the newspapers saying?
slapstick humour is one of the prime causes of dementia? huh?!
yes, prime minister... is satire comedy?
how the hell can yes, prime minister be categorised as satire
if it uses canned laughter?
see that bloke over there... doing the omnivore pelican dance?
he joked so readily and active that he created authentic laughter...
don’t know where your satire is going... but it certainly left me gagging
for a springroll.
now now... absurdist comedy is too oxbridge for me...
kings and gentlemen get educated in either st. andrew’s or edinburgh...
we laugh at ourselves.
alt. to canned laughter, given that "canned laughter"
is reserved for the authentic laughter of the crowd
at a live show? what's the antonym of canned laughter
in televised satire? picky laughter... i.e. only one person
in an schoolroom of 30 gets the joke, apart from the comedian...
that lonely everest ha ha... ooh chills, frozen prawns in gravy.

E Enter In Out EIO
E-IE-I-O  the O- the outcome
Playing some Banjo giggly
Words are getting wiggly
Like everlasting Jello
The Old/ New Heaven?Hell

Meet the best
transformation
Absolutely
It's in our duty
Takes effort modern-times
Instagram pictures of Mcdonald
Don't bend yourself
out of shape over hot buns
Hunters bite of the hamburger
Amazing shapes of the Planet
to enter

Don't live like the pretender
Your the pilot absolutely laughing
to the end of the wing
Catching fresh air telling some dirt
Not everything is a
*Pink champagne Riot
EIEIO Airplane he raised this pilot
Blue sky absolutely
looking too hard
People are starting to look strange
B-S Be Sweet I know what
you thought words get rearranged
What bull one boy to
have a coke with a smoke with
Is this the way it should be
Bye Bye Birdie Ann Margarita
Is this what life is about

He salutes to  my absolutely
knock out dress
Inside of his head, he's
looking mighty fine
Drinking Absolute *****
When its truly mine
Silk ties or Paisley Ties
Crazy love absolutely
Time traveler talker
Who is your caretaker
The burden to carry on
Girls want to have fun
Homemaker proud baker
Be on time yes absolutely
After I know what
happen before
One day I will find out
what this is all about
All ones or against none
Mr. Sexter in the City
The forever not to marry one

She's the absolute solitaire player
He's the homebody head ringer
Cut face band-aid
The band's and singers
Newsstands Jazz step swingers

American Bandstand
The time is hand full  such corruption
No freedom what happen for the
*Love of God Kingdom

Absolute insane asylum of maids
Absolutely I agree its hard
enough for one
E for entering I- I Phone OH!
Out of your mind
Get out I absolutely don't
need you in
the best time of my life
Chose your words wisely
Absolutely solemnly swear
Something is not
Kosher my Dear
We love to carry on
Not to carry someone over the
threshold do what you're told
Get up sleepy head you will
be late for school

Old Mcdonald EIEIO
E Exception I want that
E-Everything I Immaculate
O- Out of money
What *******
He's banging his drumsticks
You're the Oz good witch
Making more room with
your broomstick
She is absolutely the
spitting image of
her "Mom Mega babe'
clicker

So many Odd Moms
On speed racing for time
Coffee moms Business Moms
She is absolutely the prettiest
Mom I came across
Absolutely rarely do you see
Hollywood Housewife acting
like Moms
Her skirt got the heat like
A-Absolute what a cute "City Cat"
meeting the cat________??
"From Hell ringing the Liberty Bell"
A haystack don't turn your back
You absolutely got into his heat

Rekindled by the barn cat
How dogs and cats may
be disobedient
But we love them for
who they are
Even if they look
like their masters  
We are born like that
The artist absolutely
Graphically lined
Of the absolutely cool
deviant defined
She had lines of a lifetime
in her pleats
He didn't make his bed
wrinkled sheets
French bulldog has
more manners
Then his master
Hey Buster

Board signs on your body
But we all have to
make a living
So it's fading like an
Antique Queen malevolent
jewels
Too bright hurting
my eyes shining
Do you trust her or him
Expectations are getting slim
Losing time your gold trim
The double-breasted dress you
hear a Robin bird symphony
You're the absolute epiphany
Going and tumbling back to
be single eating a triple
decker sandwich
Hey Mate?
Absolute Divine Date*

She is absolutely beyond herself
Never known a love to
be absolutely right
Were human or our beliefs fire out
Evidentially taking a flight
Make it the best fight you ever had
Writing an article we hours
of the morning smile and
tell the world
What you need to say
is as real as your heart will ever feel
We learn from the best the
spiritual journey
here's to a healthy meal
The Newsweek more moments
to remember absolutely our best times
TheBird's eyeabsolutely so precisely
the eye for E-I-E-I let's catch up to O
Any mystery making history
Jane Eyre  
Life leads us on the "Empty
"Sad Doorway"
Make it a "Jumpy Glad on a Clear Day"
It's absolutely lovely to see forever
  Moreover, the rainbow don't worry

Make it heavenly birds
Absolutely our time is precious
have it your way
Absolute genius the
best cattle
Hot Moon lady from Venus

Deranged and rearrange
Obsessed and repressed
You skim the surface,
Proudly believing you know the inbetween
*** is a flame,
Still tamed
Perfect doll patiently coaxing
It's a hoax,
Attention you spent
A rotted scarred, heart
Depiction of the girl who giggles and says yes
She died when she was thirteen
Along with her virginity

this will make sense in the end, or at least along the way... a modern version of the Ruben's judgement of Paris, although if you watch the debate, the mediator already insinuates the "confusion": to my left or to my right, ha ha, left to right, right to left, 1st 3rd 2nd... that's putting it mildly, if i were Paris i'd have given the apple of knowing to Hera, queen of the goddesses... naomi wolf... beauty is in the eye of the beholder... and your phallus in the hand of... mhmm... softer than the flesh of an oyster at the end of the day... they did say once in times just after Pericles: make my inner as beautiful as my outer, and my outer as beautiful as my inner... then take art as not representing images: or the "shallow" arguments... any man would have given the apple to the intellectual Aphrodite (karen straughan)... we all know that antigone darling is Athena: who speaks so little you start to equate wisdom to be a distant synonym of needing courage to engage with a plebiscite crowd... oh don't give that prize to her: she'll probably tongue-tie herself and will never be able to speak into a microphone, the intellectual Aphrodite knows all too well the conundrum... it's the cougar attired in crimson that fuels the whole debate... she doesn't need to have inner beauty, you phallus is already shouting 'sir! yes sir!' at the drill sergeant anyways... you take Aphrodite as a paradoxical beauty, namely that of long conversations and not long interludes of ******* and baking cookies... you'll leave Aphrodite confused... i once heard an English motto: don't take for a wife a woman that's too attractive... that wasn't intended to be within the bias of intellect, i mean a beautiful woman within the bias of being able to manage a harem of 72 male virgins... well **** yeah, artists leave clues, whether knowing or unknowing... they're working from triangles, poets end up writing from Δ, they obscure textures and antonyms of what appears to be monochromatic, we say: red, crimson, burgundy in x-ray confines... the point being: there's no intellectual debate to be had with someone representative metaphorically or not of Hera... you can't have a Parisian fashion week catwalk where you find dehydrated beauty on the outside and an anorexic ego on the inside... what you find in Hera is a volume (voluptuousness) on the inside, within which there's a leech libido that transgresses all demands for intellect... unless it's pistons-well-oiled orientated... please, read some Marquis... if you get an ******* having read a few of his works: you're qualified - or as i like to call it: neo-classical *******... ever masturbated over Bronzino's Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time? well, if you haven't i guess **** ******* and gang-banging is your outlet: mine are pictures of Aria Giovanni and Chloe Vevraire (googlewhack no. 3!): Chloe Vevrier... but if you're never done the Odysseus pokes fun at Polyphemus... yep: the ghost hand: nobody!


you know, you can cram a lot into a 30 hour "day",
which results in the complete erosion
for the capacity to dream afterwards,
to actually work from the unconscious and create
a subconscious medium vector that connects
to points of consciousness: 30+ hours awake,
however many hours asleep, and then awake again
for another 30+ "day" to digest...
the classical definition of the subconscious, in theory,
is that you get plenty of sleep,
and it's a bit like that schematic A x B (algebraic)
A knows x     and B knows x...
   something mutual acknowledgment
via the same schematic but
A knows x, B knows x,
A knows that B knows x,
A knows that B knows that A knows x,
   which is all very Aristotelian to be frank,
it's this hyperlogic of having to acquire
great technological feats and reduce such
complexities to cat-videos on the internet as
the Egyptian partake in the genius that actually
made it possible... the slogan goes
Moses, you fool! said Nefertiti...
    so B knows x and knows that A knows x
and knows that A knows that B knows x
and B knows it's not necessarily anywhere
alphabetically less, even though the French said
a, b, c... which was very imperial of them,
that's the imperial version of what the mathematical
imperialism proved with the English inches, miles
and furlongs... but in this French case of imperialism
it wasn't a e i o u, b c d f g h j...
            that's what 30 hours awake does to you,
you wouldn't think of alcohol as a party drink,
a social barrier deconstruct... after 30 hours
you're hoping to meet Vladimir Klitschko on your
way to bed... aye pleasing Cossack, give us a
smacker goodnight... one glove it filled with
whiskey, the other with naproxen and amitriptyline...
boom! k.o. snooze, baby:
you gotta love buddhist honesty...
at least you get to see the bright side of life...
  and if people start thinking that Kant was the harbinger
of ill fate... you obviously haven't met a necromancer...
it was only von Kleist for ****'s sake!
       and he had the American option of a suicide
pact with a terminally ill woman and a bullet from
a pistol in a ditch... you can't get more romantic than that...
and there i was, mid-afternoon, having done a few of
the household chores: the washing, the ironing and
cooking a two-course meal while my mother did
the taxes (seems only mothers understand their sons
these days... women my age?
   ever see David Attenborough describe Emperor
penguins? money was invented for women,
because it brokered the end of the brotherhood of man,
we became famished by feminine needs
and have reduced inherent sports in us (hunting)
to sledgehammer bashing entertainment...
i'm the "drunk" that would rather watch ten hours
worth of ping-pong that tennis...
    i don't know why they resurrect the Olympics
every four years, have a **** coverage of it anyway
and then go back to that Glaswegian diet
of deep-fried pizza and haggis... and i hope to never know,
maybe Sepp Blatter knows...
but that's 30 hours of being awake, and only not
able to relax, by writing...
                 you wouldn't see this sort of "abuse" of
alcohol anywhere in the world...
the Soviet sleep experiment is actually not that silly...
too much sleep can also make you feel the minutes
upon your wake as if you've been stung by a bee...
three of my all time favourite songs?
the stone roses'* i wanna be adored,
    chromatics' cherry,
and finally: i can be forgiven for having missed this,
i got into them seriously with the album aufheben
and didn't really move anywhere else,
the dandy warhol effect got me...
but this song out of obscurity, 20th century technology
translated into mp3 and then onto c.d. and then
back into mp3... a song from an album that doesn't
even appear on their discography...
the brian jonestown massacre's pol ***'s pleasure penthouse,
the song in question? fingertips.
so there's that three...
      but **** on me, i half expected android (2015)
to be like ex_machina (whatever year that was)...
same topic... what the difference between android
cyborg and robot?
                                  aren't robots the proper a.i.?
as in: in production, the thing that's not hand-crafted
is artificially crafted, because it is crafted to a large yield
of a product? isn't that so? i can't distinguish (as of yet)
the difference between android and cyborg, i guess
as a Latin man (a - z user) i have to condescend the Grecian
pompousness of demeaning Hebrews (original anti-semitism
originated in Greece, not Rome, the Romans gave
the Jews not elaborate architectural schemes to abide by
in honour of Octavian, but the supposed pride in Greek
thought, undermined what later science would provide
a Latin man with, given the translation of יחֵוָחֵ,
indeed variables... i once wrote a piece about
the two Adams... namely how אָ (alef)
and עַ (ayin) are prominent letters among consonants,
but no vowel kindred of Eve is equal...
or how Eve is covered in both mainstream Islam
and orthodox Judaism... and Christianity is
a Rastafarian dream for more jerky reggae reggae...
they never sing down with Rome, judgement upon
Rome... they always sing about Babylon...
well, polytheistic or poly-schismatic,
it's all Hindu from hereon in - apart from that
here's a very tiny heresy... is that yod he vav he
or is it yod he vav het?
         there is a difference, afterall:
he (ה)        and het (חֵ) obviously differ... oh!
xet!                   god this garden is a mess,
               i guess the fruit of knowing good from evil
was intended to say: till the land, deforest,
learn agriculture... that's good, the **** you do to each
other... well: that's hardly a tonne of grain...
but they so alike though, even when you apply a noun
to these two symbols!
  could have said he xet but instead it's known as he het:
no wonder the Hittites came along for a curious look...
mind you, had not a prominent Roman, a centurion,
asked for help... we'd be prudish in runic from the northern
invaders... so thankfully no one within the Roman confines
of encoding sounds didn't have the bright spark idea
of looking at the very tiny little island of Israel and that
four lettered word and how it became known
to say o = omicron, ε = epsilon and γ = gamma,
   and cutting those things apart leaving only letter
having done plastic surgery on the noun that denotes the
letter that's denoted by the symbol, rearranged it
and got the idea of εγo: ****** marvellous!
- this is not brian pallenberg's story about the pleasure
penthouse album...
but you know what really got me in those 30 hours:
day, night, day, night: a NHLF debate between
naomi wolf, karen straughan & antigone darling,
the part where karen makes the point that
once upon a time men who beat their wives
in Scotland were publicly whipped (dhaal,
straugan), and if they were beaten-up instead by
their wives, a plebiscite of good-wishers would turn up
at the house and apply the Freudian theory of
a castration to the man, bang pots and pans,
and then in public display him having to ride on a
donkey backwards, having to hold the donkey's tail
for stability...
     see that woman in red in that debate? a true political
man-eating beast of ***** readied in atom bomb
explosions... the one next to her isn't wearing any tights...
unconsciously you're thinking: i like her french freestyle
of not having shaved her legs... the smart one is wearing
jeans and she looks oh so desperate to get out...
    the discussion doesn't even enter the realm of ideas...
hen-picking is discussed... all poetry ascribed to language
is gone... is it politically correct to ascribe the sexuality
of female chickens with the word hen to women?
behind me in Blackpool stag-dos (dos? no does...
there isn't even a ******* spelling for that phrase...
hen-nights and the inflatable Juan)...
well obviously your mind is working out why you'd
**** the middle 'un right away... she doesn't say divorcee
which is so "unsexy" but say she's a mum twice,
a mum, a single mum... polly wants a *******...
her address is new york city? ******! i'm heading there,
right now! can a white guy use urban colloquial
in the suburbs on a piece of pixel paper, which he claims
is mere the cartesian extension of his thought
and disinterest in rhetorical skills? i hope so...
it's not like herr adolf wrote a disclaimer saying:
read this or a thousand volts up your ****!
that really was a constipated debate, plus the red was all
provocateur and peppered with "you know",
   and "i know absolutely nothing": there were no ideas
in the debate! whenever there was a chance to debate
ideas, the debate turned into a debated about words,
and what words to use: to simply brush aside any clinching
to a idea-debate... perhaps because feminism is
an ideology without any coherency of ideas, as stated
from the debate: a coherency of wording: and that better
be hen = an asexual chicken, rooster = an asexual chicken...
it's still a chicken kiev at the end of the day.
now? i might squeeze in another poem...
     but it would still be great to get any kind of analysis
comparing the movie android and ex_machina...
the only problem would be: both creators are men...
so that's gender-stereotyping already...
but hell! she gets to build a buggie that she directs with
a laser pen... so that's nice...
but i'd love a discussion on these two films,
given that the music in both films is very oomph!
thriller genre always had better music than horror...
horror music is too romantic... thriller music?
***** back-stabbing you whenever you think you're
going to get a comfortable 10 minute slot...
but it's there... aside from both robotic creators being male...
woman: ex_machina - out of the machinery of man
          ergo? deus, or woman as...
i actually have a problem with the word android...
the woman is a factor of playing the two men against
each other... the android actually find a mechanical
part of himself in the way the "human" talks to the woman,
while the "android" is prejudiced against the rigidity
of his ****** movement: unlike the "human" having
an intellectual rigidity... the woman plays the two against
each other... well, 30 hours no sleep...
  i'm doing the helter-skelter trying to throw ideas
by way of remembering the actual plot of the film...
this obviously adds nothing to the discussion:
meaning i probably gave away a "spoiler" -
but more the point, i need a refill and some fresh air
to breath, having farted into a leather chair for the past
hour.

Do you remember what you said that day
How terrible you felt inside
When all those clouds of disappointment
Blew into your lovely skies

Your life could not get any worse
To yourself you sadly said
Because your glorious sun no longer shone
While lightning crashed ahead

Your teardrops fell like rain that day
Unnoticed in the downpour
Torrential streams from the blackest skies
One had ever seen before

One day your sun returned to shine again
Winds of disappointment changed
Your flowing tears glowed into a radiant smile
As your life’s direction rearranged

Now here you stand, downcast once again
Black cloudy skies moving in
Never give up looking for that sun of yours
To shine through those clouds again

Mashup

Part I (and there is a Part II & III)

I mashup me, myself, and perhaps thee too.


Excerpts from my poems about poets, poetry and the process of compositions. In chronological order, earliest to latest.
---------------------------------------------------------­------------------

With words we paint,
With syllables we embrace,
Tasked and ennobled,
We are forever fully employed,
Missionaries to all,
You too, are one as well,
Your fate can't be renounced,

when the rusted unborn poem notion is almost done,
but remains unpublished,
for no beginning, no title, can be found,

Then I recall the cornucopia days,
when poems spilled forth like
there would never be a when they wouldn't,

I revisit my old friends, couplets, twins and triplets,
seeded inside every tear, happy or sad,
sweetly and freely,

my old friends, reread,
words rearranged in new combinations,
old poems, plants bearing new fruits,
re-titled all of them, one name,
a collection entitled,
My Solace.

My eyes, my eyes, see only the
Totality of this moment.
When mastery of multi-tasking
Is the single best poem this man ever
Penned with his entirety,
Of which not word survived
For its unspoken silence was its glory.

My compact with you is to
remind us all, through
music, dance, words (poetry) and love,
This is the only compact
with the power of human law.

Color me flesh ****,
Color me blue bottled,
Red ripped asunder,
The sweetness ascribed to my love poetry,
A subtraction of the bitterness of a failed life.
Colorist of my seams, my woven words,
I am white now, my canvas completed,
Waiting for another poet to write over it,
And chaining new words to what was prior writ.

Al,  what you did not ask was this:
With each passing poem,
I am lessened within, expurgated,
In a sense part of me, expunged,
Part of me, passing too,
Every poems birth diminishes me.

You ask me how I find the time,
(To write)
But time is not the issue,
For they, are all prepared, needing only recognition,
For they, are all in readiness, needing only composition.

For who's who in poetry
is all of us!
saviors and failures,
recorders and decoders,
night writers of the oohs and aahs
of dreams and nightmares.

When this poet cannot,
no longer, anymore,
tastes his poems upon your lips,
keep your poems within his heart,
then he breathes no more,
and becomes one who was, yet is,
because of you, in poetry.

Awful poetry, some good, you will write.
But write and write till your heart be calmed,
For even ancient kings felt the anguish  of the soul,
And we profit even today by King David's psalms.

This wizened fool has his hands full,
Mouths to feed, bread to earn and bake,
As midnight is almost nigh,
He rests prone and adds a verse to this old poem
He long ago scribbled down, grimace-smiles now,
Realizing there is little difference tween him and the
Sad Eyed Teenagers of the Lowland.

For poetry salves his wounds still, even now,
Unashamedly, he thinks, hallelujah!

The poem is the afterbirth,
A conflicts resolution, an outcome,
Battlefield debris, the residue of
An exacting vision, a sentiment surging,
And your army of words, inadequate to the task,
Fighting to capture that insight flashed,
Each word a soldier, disheveled,
Crying, let me live, let me be saved,
Let me make a poem,
Let it be inscribed upon my victorious flag.

The poem is the sweat left upon the brow,
Having exercised the five senses,
The salt of struggle and debate,
It's completion, each word,
Both a victory and a defeat.

To write but a single line,
That uplifts the heart,
Eases pain, gives delight to strangers,
And makes you laugh out loud
With shivery pleasure,
That usurps a whole day and night,
That is a poet's true measure.

Mastery of the poetic,
Measured not in quantity,
But in tears of satisfaction
When others love the taste
Of newly born stanzas
Upon their lips,
couplets born and transcribed
In the wee hours of the morn.

You can have my love, my soul,
But leave to me the labor of poetry.
Loving you with words is my domain,
The speciality of my terrain,
So no more hasta la pasta if you please,
And by the bye, I would love some
Tonight, say around eight,
At a restaurant where the moon is
The only light illuminating our faces.

Until you have bent your ear to Shakespeare's sonnets,
Till you have laughed with Ogden Nash,
Wept with Frost, visited Byron's ghost,
Read the songs of King Solomon,
And once you
Despair of being their equal,
Shed your winter coat of worry,
***** your courage to the sticking point,
Begin to write then with reckless courage,
Unfettered abandon, make a fool of yourself!

Scout the competition.
Weep, for you and I will never surpass
The giants who preceeded us, and yet,
Laugh, cause they thought the same thing as well...

All I can say is
En Garde!
I will be coming back soon enough.
because you are my best poem,
and the there will always be another stanza needed...

I am no Houdini, it's quite simple,
After 5 years, I read her like a book,
A book of my poems that she has inspired,
Entitled the Mysteries of True Love.

Each letter, a morsel in your mouth,
Each phrase, a fork full of pleasure,
Each stanza, a full fledged member in a tasting menu,
Perfect only in conjunction with the preceding flavor,
and the one that follows,  and the one that follows.

Taste each poem upon thy tongue and then pass it on,
you know how....

Each word, whether chewed thoroughly,
or lightly placed upon a bud for flavor,
needs the careful consideration of your mouth.

When I hear Shakespeare
My own voice is stilled, it's poverty exposed,
I am ashamed of every word I ever wrote.
Hush me not, for t'is true,
Yet I write on for an audience of one, on but one subject,
A subject, a life, mine,
yet, still unmastered, even after decades of trying.

My poverty exposed, unmasked
for what it is worth, or not.

Lest you think this is paean to men
Another grand male boast,
Be advised this ditty be writty
By a man who, while no longer gritty,
Just put jelly on his scrambled eggs
And ketchup on his toast!

Mmmmmmm there might be a poem
Lurking in that too...

So baby,
shut it down,
turn me on,
make me warm for real,
glide your now practiced fingertips on my grizzled cheek,
whisper a phony "ugh,"
cause I know, you will read
this iPad love poem
and cherish us for evermore.

Soul of brevity, poetically,
I'll never be, this insightful critique,
("Your poems are too long")
I've received in multiplicity, from sources internationally,
perhaps, lucky me, you've read this far?

Surely still a chance that an angel will touch my lips,
my internal parts sign a final treaty, inside an armistice,
night sweats sighs a thing fully forgot,
poetry writing can now be dispatched,
maybe that will be my Act III,
if I can stay awake for it.

Walk a Single Word.
To write a poem, a single word select,
embrace it with a fullness that lovers, family and friends
and the *** who cut you off in the middle lane
do daily provide

Grasp said word, walk it onto a yellow, blue lined, legal pad,
touch said word with the whisper of a single tear, a single curse,
like a pebble in a pond,
said word will miracle expand
hugging you with concentric circles of lines of poetry,
visionary words and stanzas that almost complete themselves
and you

The rhymes you will require, the meter you will select,
no need to struggle, hug your child and as Abraham told Isaac,
God and Google will provide

The simple trickster, a wordsmiths, even your average poet laureate,
got nothing on you that you don't already possess, to offer them
Plenty stiff competition.

Therefore,
My life is mine to take,
Should I wish to choose the
Place, date, the time
To let the poetry cease,
I will announce it mostly gladly
with a blessing of
Shehecheyanu* and a
Smiling "by your leave."

Sometimes the pen, unnecessary.
The poem, fully formed, in his mouth, born.

Silent back labor, unbeknownst the existence
Of such a thing, yet knowing now
His contractions, coming fast and furious,
Eyes many centimeters dilated,
The sac's fluid breaks upon the poet's tongue,
He pronounces in a single breath his
Immaculate Completion

When his hand to mouth, goes,
Like Moses, when he touched the burning coals,
The words are signaled, freedom!
The words announce:
We are now created, conceived and
This new oxgenated atmosphere is now our
final resting place.

This child, the poem, this exhalation,
Once freed, is lost to him,
It's been renamed, retitled,
by hundreds of newly adopted parents as
Ours.

Words needed to create another love poem for my beloved,
Nose and toes, ******* and eyes all regularly poetically,
Cherished,
Now I have knuckled under
And competed a full poetic body scan
And have paid tribute to each n'every part of you,
Even your knuckles...which I am busy kissing
While writing this poem in my distracted mind.

The next time it be for the morning meal,
I will eat it in bed,
far from their kitchen hiding places,
And celebrate my heroics with original
Frosted Flakes and milk,
And extra sugar just for spite!
The bedroom fairies, living under the pillow,
Emerge to beg in iambic pentameter,
Won't get nary a bite,
Until they they return the poems they stole
From my midnight dreams.

I am exhausted. So many gems to decorate
My body, my soul. I must stop here,
So many of you have reached out, none of you overlooked.

Overwhelmed, let us sit together now
And celebrate the silence that comes after the
Gasp, the sigh, that the words have taken from
Our selves, from within.


On and on thru the night,
Riffing, rapping, rambling, and spitting,
Ditties and darts, couplets and barbs,
Single words and elegies,
Free verse and a lot of fking curse words,
It was a moment, a time
that deserved
to be preserved,
and so this poem got writ

You may think this story apocryphal
Which is another way of saying untrue,
But I got his boarding pass and it is signed,
To this crazy poetry dude, long may you rasp,
And it is signed by Mr. P. Simon, a big fan,
And it has never since that day,
Left my grasp

Some poems never end,
Nor meant too.
Alliterative phrases, invitations,
Add a verse, a word, even a sound,
An exclamation of delight,
A stanza in its own right.

Unfinished work, forever additive, collaborative.
Modify mine, pass it on.

Read somewhere some poems never end,
Now I understand that better,
Cause there are no bandages, stitches that can close,
Cause there are no pills, switches that can shut off,
The ripping sound, the cutting noise, the raging inside
Heard blocks away, almost reaching a house where you live,
And dying in the same **** place that
Poems come from after midnight.

And even if I am stranger now,
I'll prove useful to have around,
Giving you poetry precisely couture designed by command,
So I fully expect to be hugging you happy
Soon enough.
You'll see.

No matter combo or organized, a good nights sleep
Elusive
So poetry is my default rest position,
My screen savior.

**So when I warn,
All my poems are copywrighted,
My meaning simple, words crystal,
They belong to us, but mostly to you
Who are reading these words

The process of becoming other than,
  the shedding of the old by way of time
  the hands upon the clock traverse their span,
  the ever fleeting moment reigns, sublime.

The emptiness of all objective forms,
  the rushing river, never stepped in twice,
  the reconfiguration of all norms,
  the virtues of lost ages seen as vice,

The elements converge and then react,
  the caterpillars weave themselves cocoons,
  the world amends its stock of gathered facts,
  the moths emerge, in flight to greet the moon,
  
   The firmament, destroyed and rearranged,
     the universal essence, found in change.

Silence
inside a train
is the only sound
of life outside.

Along a road
a melody grows
flirting
with the countryside.

The river
wide and turgid
flows
to a relentless rhythm.

Sometimes
a flute plays
between rays of sunshine
and whispering winds.

Clouds swell
in a darkening sky
to the groans
of a sombre trombone.

Inside
listen to the rain
watch it slash
at the window panes.

I never suspected I had OCD
Until I replayed your voicemail
On the answering machine
A total of twelve times
Every evening
Just to hear your voice again
Or until I opened your dresser drawer
Thirty times
Before I went to bed
Just so I could smell
Your leftover scent
Wafting into the air
Or until I rearranged my shoes
In the closet four times
Before I left the house
Because you hated tripping over them
On your way out
But I knew I didn't have OCD
When I finally locked the door
And turned off the light
And made the bed on your side
For the very last time.

We are each born
A box full of pieces
But as the years pass
We are faultily rearranged
Jammed into wrong spaces
Lost under the couch
And as the years pass
We look less of what we were
And now more of who we are

Luckily, unlike puzzles
Our pieces can be replaced
Our cut outs can be reshaped
And even if we are misplaced
Someone will put you back together

Our private bungalow
Leading to the private beach
On the Saronic Gulf
Turquoise water
The smell of pine trees
Chilled Champagne
No one else just us
Totally alone for five days
Mesmerised by the Sunio Sunset
The vibrancy of the Plaka
Danced to the early hours
Under the Island stars
Ate Moussaka and Baklava
We talked and talked
No phones
No net
Nothing, no one just us
We held hands
Like young lovers
We shared intimacies  
Never done before
I believed your words
Your intimacy
Your need for me
Your desire
Your love
And then
In the darkness
Of our room
A Stranger
And the struggle began

I gave you my love
You took that trust
You tore me apart
Filled my head with all your lies
Abused my passion
To suit what you wanted
My life rearranged
You manipulated how I saw myself
How I saw others
You played with my feelings
You abused my anxieties
Made it hard to be with anyone else
You took my faith in life
A Stranger in the room

“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.”
   —The Serenity Prayer

I. Heron

I was born arrow-straight, built for flying,
Three skipping stones past Otter Creek, hollow
Bones blanketed by slate gray, blue stones slight
And callused by well-worn prayers and shallow
Swells of minnows — subterranean aches —
And water cold on yellow scales, hardened
By the calamity of sunsets, lakes —
The drowning weight of too many pardons.
Dip low, tend this broken shoreline sweetly,
Spread shadowed wings and break honeyed silence.
Forgiveness take flight at dusk, discreetly
Written in psalms. Tepid soul find balance
Between the calm, a resting river space
This old trembling mind cannot displace.

II. Quetzal

After the storm, the chaos and quiet
Meet like dew poised on timid fingertips
And shallow grasses to quell the riot
Stirring inside. Fix fragments of this ship
Made of broken parts. My soul’s petrichor:
Inhale failure with a benediction
That fills tired lungs with bravery, before
Nature proposed expectations — fiction
Taut and mended by truth. The earth exhales
In breaths refreshed by rain, accompanied
By loudening trills and harmonious tales —
The tremor of circumstance, and the need
To continue existence like the weeds
That grow in sidewalks despite human greed.

III. The Pelican and the Gull

American Magicicadas choose
To surface seventeen years after birth
For the purpose of recreation. The Blue
Pelican cannot quietly unearth
The patterns of the tide without the gull,
But she does so with tireless trials
And the moon at her back — the lunar pull
Shaping stray shells for a little while.
Twenty-one years of tawny solitude
Shattered by innate desires, buried
Deep by stubborn aches, and kindly allude
To breathing for the first time. Weight carried
And lifted by rekindled hope, reaching
Sands like a button shell kissing the beach.

IV. Kingfisher

I pondered self-acceptance before diving
Into seas uncharted, with the patience
Of Tibetan monks softly harvesting
Grains of sand on an abandoned shore. Since
Emptiness is impermanence, we change
Like shifting seas suspended in nature,
Born from the crease of God’s hand — rearranged
Flaws bound by circumstance. Come close. Nurture
This silent heart into awakening.
Beyond these gray waters surges the sun,
Hopeful in the wake of a newfound spring,
Ochre and alizarin. We become —
Aware that no one saves us but ourselves,
With self-worth rising in tremendous swells.

You were the pomegranate nail polish
I wore yesterday but have wiped off today.
I'm ready for everything to finally change
without you I'll be rearranged; in a better
state of mind, with you I was wasting my time.

Wrote this while my best friend since childhood and I drove 1300 miles to South Florida on a whim for Spring Break. It's epic, so get comfortable.

"Approachable but you wouldn't know it.  Proclamations of the Romantically Challenged"

Day one.

We meet, old friends...watch old friends...become old friends again.
We find our lost grins, ones only shared with our closer than kin.
Thin shagrins of lasting cynicism and sinister pasts are masks to the blasts we got away with and lived to tell the tale.
Alas, we are sons and friends first, not last.
We cling to our good old glory stories past,
But at last the time is new, our trip begins.
Wheels burn, stomachs churn.
Our aspired souls yearn,
to fire the liars and unconcerned.
We head for the East coast.
With temperatures rising,
approaching unseen horizons,
rejecting the superficially tantalizing,
we begin to feel our tattered souls wisen.
Talking a new talk, calculating the steps to walk a new walk.
Testifying our pains, devilishly dodging heavenly rains, the bitter bites but invites change.
Watching yourself in a friend, a cynical kidder gone bitter.
Your mirror becomes your babysitter.
We search our hearts and back again down I-10.
We find strength and talk about things friends for life can only talk about on a walk about.
We lift some Spirits to lift our spirits.
Night falls,
we arrive alive… our walk about calls 1,365 miles in 18 hours.

Day two begins.

Meet and greet with the beach.
Get a handle on some handy sandals,
some nicotine candy and butane candles.
A fifth of Daniels.
Jack and Jose will duel this day.
"You know it's know your fault, pass the lime and salt," ends most answers before noon.
Let's take some dares with the local fare, shadowing the glare of our wear and tear.
The sun fries,
windy sands fly,
waves pacify,
dropped bikini tops glimpsed from the corner of our eye, testify.
The Sun sets.

Shuffing off the nightlife status-quo of Clematis Row, we turn our walkabout into a Palm Beach Safari...Club.
Whoa! Rows and rows of walking, talking shows barely clothed from head to tanned toes.
Making funnies about hunting honies preying on money.
The unattainable passes. We tap our glasses.
"Point in case, what a waste, such tragedies as these, a lot of money and a little cheese meets a little ****** in high cut sleeves, low-cut cleaves & cuts way above the knees.
Our cuts are deep. Bartender, two Yagers please."

Low and behold…on those stools sit no fools.
Breaking all rules.
with Coronas as fuel,
we inflate our jewels.
As we coach our approach, mentioning "I-10 and back again" prompts grins,
hides our cynicism and sins,
then, moving in to win friends.
Names and places put to faces, careful glancing, winks and dancing.
Alright, the trips to the bathroom are getting old.
Warm smiles once cold, honest questions and truths told…no souls sold…we fold? Hmmmm.
We leave and arrive alive.
Caffine and nicotine stay the scene until the wee hours overpower us.

Day three unfolds

The sun rises and the ocean calls.
Old molds broken
No lies spoken.
No need to peddle your life away settling on the day-to-day following peers falsely content and full of contempt.
Eyes turn bright,
the Sun pours over night,
dolphin, lime and salt,
golfing talk,
day approaches night.
Less tense and more pensive,
more apprehensive and less expensive,
even so we head out to even the evening,
to end our grieving and start achieving....something.
Latitude changes have rearranged our attitude gauges.
So we choose West Palm's Clematis Row to show us how a little rude,
lude and tattooed could clue us in on the anew.
Fools with jewels.
Girls with rules.
Uncool tools abound.
We walk this street of sleekish freaks,
the falsely meek,
lions that squeak.
"Club Respectables" is dubbed rejectables as the objectionable scene is seen as a scheme by vampires with recessive genes.
Next is Spanky's…Best described as "A frat boy fishing pole contest to tackle box in bait shack." One bucket of beer away from "I got your back Jack in case of attack."
We move along.
Colombia Supreme brewed proceeding it's fine grind and American Online becomes the sign of the times swaying us to stay and play at an Internet Cafe.

"I could live here," proclaims a cynical kidder once bitter now soothed by the sea spray and salty air.

Enlightenment heightened by a magic man,
near night's end, inspires an O'Shea's Black and Tan.
The crowd mocks and baulks the sidewalk scene from the patio Pub Dubbed Irish.
We greet the ground,
not the masses' frown,
seat our ***** down,
toast our glasses of black and brown,
our bitters with bite wash down the bitter frowns we normally wear out in our hometown.
"That's a sharp Harp's and sinister Guinness; can I get a witness?"

We head back down our beaten path, writing our epitaphs and usual eulogies...But you know that the "place" or your "space" will change your face, one makes the case."If you sound bitter and you look bitter, chances are you are bitter."
I begin to smile during our final mile of token jokes,
Corona smokes,
shiny Harley spokes.
We leave and arrive alive at the realization,
we have things to strive for in our lives.  
We smoke and joke and poke fun at the run down broken blokes we were before our fun in the sun had begun.
  
Day four begins.
  
We embark for the Ozarks. Our souls at ease.
Save the scene...the last palm tree's waving leaves,  
we wave our palms and leave.
1300 miles more,  
Pushing the morning hour of four,  
empty coffee cups galore,  
moonings a score,  
pedal to the floor,  
memories and more,  
we knew we would be back for more.  
Suddenly learning how insane our inane claims of waning fame should hold no shame,
we reframe our game.
Upon our return…
the strength to strive, take back our broken banks and breaking backs.
Less taxing, more relaxing..."it could happen"... eliquinent waxing.
As we search our hearts and back again, down I-10,we find the strength in things you can only talk about on a walk about,
but that's what it was all about.
By R.Craig David-copyrighted 1995

everything is all right now
it's okay
everything is the way it's supposed to be

go to sleep
you're good enough
close your eyes

close your eyes
take off your clothes
you're good enough

take off your clothes
i'm thinking of ending things
yesterday i woke up on the phone

buildings rearranged

all the scarecrows
and everything
everything's ending.

Fold you up like unwanted fat
cook you into a rocky stew
placed beneath a mantle of ice
far enough away to be misconstrued

You are old laminated time
And pillowed rock of incomprehensible
Earlier than any lime
Or sand, or sediment, or any kind
You are the grandfather rock
of mine

When I step with my inconsequential feet
living but transiently
I cannot help but be erased
that even you hath but one resting place

All the plants
and sands
and ever since the very first
we have always been ******
to this earth
walking upon your bones
I am sorry we cannot do more
but you know your creator
Speak in the same language
in amalgamators
of which we have forgot
and for that I can say
we are envious; are we naught?

Build softly, and carry us upon your thick
crust like pizza dough, cooking
and you let it sit
Let us win, set us up
drift us apart, leave us crushed
build us,
make us,
break us,
fill us

I want to be restored into your
stony belt and be redeemed
I want to become my own atomic fossil
to connect with the universe through long-lost
plotholes
and once again
hear the story
as a young lad
the way it was meant to be told

I want to eat dinner with my grandfather again
my real sweet stony-chiseled cheeked
father again
to be loved a boy
and a girl
and the whole world
a soul touched back into the deep
left unshackled
by a ***** or a queen
please,
take me back soon
rather than let me turn into

Laurentia
or Baltica
or Gondwana
alack
smacked into new rock to form
Urals
and Tetons
and Moher
back

Carbonate or Silicate,
and the end its the same
It won't be the end
for that fate rearranged

I think it's time to do an update
Of The Seven Deadly Sins
Most people do not know them all
Sit down and let's begin
I'm not really religious
But, I think they're a bit stale
So, I think I'll spruce them up a bit
In this my sinly tale
Gluttony, a sin of course
I think it should be changed
With an asterick, obesity
There, that's one sin rearranged
With dinner plates much larger now
And fast food all around
I don't think God prepared the world
For the obese people we've found
Hyper-obese children
Fed from chemically laden food
I think that gluttony can be renamed
To Obesity....don't you?
Greed...there's not much to say
Unless you're not in the one per cent
You know, the ones who have the cash
While we're still making rent
Unless things are all equal
This will never go away
Someone always wants all that you've got
There's not much more for me to say
Envy....not a really bad one
To me, it should not be on the list
Although some might seem envious
Of that bracelet on your wrist
I mean, really, how is envy
Something that should condemn your soul to hell
I mean I like my friends TV
But, I know he likes mine as well
Condemning both our mortal souls
For being envious of our tellies
That just does not hold water
Exactly like my wellies
Lust...I know, a good one
It gets confused a lot with love
To me the only difference is
With lust, you wear a glove
Lust and envy...make them one
A piggyback sin, if you will
It's like combining two commandments
Thinking evil thoughts before you ****
I lust for things I can not have
And for some, that would do me in
But, I can't see how lusting for a big tv
Can be a mortal sin
I think that  additions should be made
now, while I'm here writing
I think that reality tv is one
To be a sin it is inviting
Hoarding, that should make the list
I mean, most of them are lazy
I think how one defines celebrity
Has gotten rather hazy
Now, sloth...can be removed I think,
Or at the least, re-defined
Today, they're abusers of the system
It's the avoidance of work they say
So, here's what's in my mind
One who's known as sloth like
Avoids spiritual work as well
I say, cut them off of welfare
It's not worth sending them to hell
They'd be getting a free trip there
Again, avoiding doing stuff
Just cut their payments off and then
They'll work and quit their guff
Anger, keep it on the list
Because, it's a good one, I admit
Of all the ones upon the list
I think Anger's a good fit
Finally, we get to Pride
And I'm confused
I think the sin is blurry
And the word is overused
Pride of Man, it is a sin
but, aren't you proud of your young child?
when they go and score a winning goal
This as a sin, I think is wild
I am proud of my home country
And I hope that you are too
But, pride itself, it's not a sin
Aren't you proud of what you do?
Gay people have their pride parade
They are proud of who they are
But, pride itself....come on now...let's
Draw the line, not go so far
Combine the list of deadly sins
With commandments, make an app
Change punishments around a bit
Instead of limbo, give a slap
I think that things are sinful
And I know you won't agree
But, this is how I look at things
It's just me being me

in an attempt to fit a square
into a circle
she shed her skin
rearranged her face
into something you'd look at
she chose her words carefully
saying things you want to hear
she colored her hair white
but her soul remained
as black as the night

Sleeping someone somewhere
Dreams of drinking daises
Laying lucid loving lavender
Adapting admiration of the ages
Koala kites, kaleidoscope cries
Bubbles blowing bare beauty
Riding radiance rapidly realizing
Forsaken focus freeing form
Soaring sensation seeps synchronicity
Dripping differences deranged
Rearranged ripples randomly react
Enacting endorphins equally engaging
Induced ignition infinitely intact
Pulsating precision purpose full pact

The Syrian process is a serial problem
When the disenfranchised
Cause a landslide
Of historical hatred
The key that ignites
Business and commerce
Wildfire hearts
And boiling skin

The harsh outbreak of deadly cholera
The blockade of the forceful armada
The coalition forces
Run wild like horses
The bombs keep falling
The people cry
The engine keeps stalling
The car dies

The white phosphorus
Brought by the white prosperous
Can burn to the bone
And wounds can ignite up to three days later
But the people of Raqqa
Are used to reigniting scars
They're used to searing flesh
That melts like tar
Where this will go
No one knows how far
Machines must be sustained
Hearts will be untamed
Lives constantly rearranged

A human rights activist attempts to send a report
What he's witnessed in Raqqa
Injustices; perceived and objective
But Hellfire
Turns the Internet cafe
Into a senseless violence display
The dirt, blood, and bodies
Mixed and spread like the art
That was ignored to lead to this quagmire

Whether this calamity started
At the Melian dialogue
Or a market diagram
Or a martyr's diatribe
What we need now is an m.d. to suture the wounds
But who will save us?
When noble protectors are blown up
And the reigniting scars scorch the hands that heal

These words...
They traverse the fine line between earth and sky.
They dwell not, surface-deep in the dirt.
They be haloed not, as the chorus of heaven.

They're just murmurs that swim intangible.
Like reticulated wisps of smoke.
Incapable of materialising...
Or take definite forms on their own.

They only await to be carefully selected,
rearranged and harnessed into a jar...
Before being sealed infinite with a title.

Be quiet and still...
For you will hear them.
Milling and floating in the silence
that exists between your heartbeats.

Listen close...
For they are fragments of you
and the universe.
They're thoughts and feelings that come awake
as you slumber.

Awaiting to be selected...
Awaiting to be rearranged...
Awaiting to be harnessed...

By you,
the conduit with a pen.

Since my breakup 
I realized the importance 
of threats from debt 
wieghing down 
a relationship 
Since my breakup
I have made a promise 
to not have one 
monthly obligation
regardless the sacrifice 
Since my breakup 
I moved in with family 
in order to save money 
and paid cash for a camper 
so I could live, rent free 
Since my breakup 
I paid cash for a pickup 
that easily could last me 
the next 20 years to come, not paying one penny to interest 
Since my breakup 
I have been saving 
as much as possible 
versus financing 
MY AMERICAN DREAM 
Since my breakup 
I bought a sports car 
that was the one to have 
when I was in highschool 
another goal Im proud of 
Since my breakup 
I have divided and conquered 
all the debts and threats 
of monthly obligations 
and rearranged my desires 
Since my breakup 
I have realized what i want 
and Im proud to say 
I finally purchased 
my own piece of land 
Since my  breakup
I have discovered 
my desire to live simple 
and my next mission
is to build a home on my land 
BUY DIRT

My Solace

when every aperture is a tunnel narrowing,
a light pin diminishing when nearing,

when the desk drawer yields up unused theater tickets,
for performances concluded yesterday,

when the denouement is nothing new but worse,
revealed in the coming attractions trailer,

when the rusted unborn poem notion is almost done,
but remains unpublished,
for no beginning, no title, can be found,

Then I recall the cornucopia days,
when poems spilled forth like
there would never be a when they wouldn't,

I revisit my old friends, couplets, twins and triplets,
seeded inside every tear, happy or sad,
sweetly and freely,

my old friends, reread,
words rearranged in new combinations,
old poems, plants bearing new fruits,
re-titled all of them, one name,
a collection entitled,
My Solace.

i am seaglass
collect me along the shore
i am once jagged edges
now dulled by time and salt
wounds full of salt
i have forgotten what sweet is
foggy clouded
clarity lost for the sake of beauty
i am discarded
collect me along the shore
i am scattered in pieces
that no longer fit together
curves and waves
i am tough i am smooth
i have lived my life in rough waters
water and rock
have rearranged my shape
i am under your feet
collect me along the shore

SECRETS OF THE STONEHENGE IN VERSE
Dear Readers, I present a simplified version of the true story of the Stonehenge, on the Salisbury plains of Southern England, with over a million visitors every year. Declared as a World Heritage Site since 1986.Left out many technical details to curb the Length!
Hope you find this interesting to read.  Thanks, - Raj

SECRETS OF THE STONEHENGE IN VERSE
                     BY RAJ NANDY
                
                     INTRODUCTION
Shrouded in ancient legend, rituals and mystery,
Forming a part of ancient History, in the County of
Wiltshire on the rolling Salisbury plains,
Thirty miles north of the English Channel, stands the
megalithic structure  - The Stonehenge.
Dating back to some 3000 BC during the Neolithic Age,
Long before the Egyptian pyramids got made!
Some of its secrets have finally been unraveled by
Archeologists of our time and age.
It was a period when early humans changed over
from being nomadic hunter- gatherers,
To cultivate land and domesticate animals, to
become settled farmers.
This ushered in a new social change in the history
of Human progression,
Which got reflected in huge stone structures to
mark this advancement and occasion.
For these megalithic structures were bigger than
the tribes of men or the community;
Marked burial mounds and places for performing
sacred rites and magical healing rituals, for the
entire community.
Stonehenge was aligned to the mid-Summer and
mid-Winter Solstice, with the rising and the setting
Sun.
Served as an astronomical calendar for the turning
of Seasons, when crop cycles also begun.
Some scholars opine that it was used as a Lunar
Calendar as well,
Since Moon worship predates Sun worship by
Pre-historic men!
It was long before the invention of the wheel,
written script, and even metal implements.
This monumental structure speak of Stone Age
Briton’s greatest achievement!
(Period covered is from Late Stone Age to the brink of
Bronze Age.)

BRIEF LAYOUT OF THE STONEHENGE
Cutting across myths and legends archeologists
and geologists have tried to piece together the
Stonehenge Story,
Which stood like an enigmatic puzzle for the
last Five Thousand Centuries!
Scholars say construction commenced around
3000 BC, but progressed only in stages spread
over the next fifteen centuries.
Initially, a large earthwork or a ‘Henge’ with a
circular ditch and a bank was made,
With 56 timber posts around the inner perimeter
on the windy Salisbury plains.
Used by primitive man as a burial place, but for
rituals later got linked to other smaller sites.
With processional avenues leading to River Avon,
to honor dead ancestors with sacred rites!
Entrance to the ‘Henge’ was marked by a pair of
upright Slaughter Stones weighing 28 tones, and
6.6 meters tall.
But only one remains today lying flat on the ground
after its fall!
Some 256 feet from center of the ‘Henge’ on the NE
Avenue once stood the Heel Stones 7.6 meters high!
As a marker for the Summer Solstice showing the
position of the rising Sun in the Midsummer sky!

          BLUE STONES FROM WALES:
Some 1000 years later, 82 Blue Stones were brought
from the Prescelli Mountains of Southern Wales;
And the earlier timber posts with these Blue stones
was replaced.
Each stone weighing around 4 tones, was brought
over a distance of some 250 miles to the plains of
Salisbury,
Loaded on hollowed out log boats fashioned like a
mini barge, to sail during high tide into the Bristol
Estuary!
Pulled over land on greased wooden rollers, and
loaded again on mini barges down the River Avon.
Since Avon flowed closer to the ‘Henge’ site in those
ancient days, which is now known!
(Some Scholars feel that the Blue Stones were swept down
closer to the Salisbury plain, during the close of the last Ice
Age! These Stones were believed to have powers of magical
cure too!)

              THE SARSAN STONES
During its final phase of development came the larger
23 ft tall Sarsan Stones, weighing some 44 tones.
From 20 miles north of the ‘Henge’ area dragged on
sledges and rollers from Marlborough Downs.
These stones now formed the outer ring capped with
stone lintels, replacing the Blue Stones;
And the Blues Stones were moved inwards and
rearranged in the horseshoe and circle shape, as
presently seen and known!
(NOTE: Sheer muscle power used to drag the stones with ropes
made from plant fiber of the indigenous lime bark soaked in
water for weeks. Stone lintels were sculpted in the shape of an
arc to cap the SARSAN Stones to form the outer circle. Wooden
scaffolding & ramps were used to hoist and position the heavy
stone lintels horizontally on top of upright stones! Sarsan Stones
were hard sandstones tougher than granite! However many of the
stones of this Ancient Ruin are missing, leaving some unanswered
questions behind.)

        CONCLUDING THIS TRUE STORY
Archeologists and scholars using radiocarbon dating
have tried to recreate the Stonehenge Story.
This ancient ruin with many unanswered questions,
now remain protected as an Iconic Monument of
British History!
It stands as an astronomical time clock and is also of
spiritual significance;
It also symbolizes the ingenuity of Human Mind, its
power, and endurance.
I conclude with a an extract from a poem by TS Salmon
about the STONEHENGE here below:-
“Warpt in veils of time’s unbroken gloom,
Obscure as death and silent as the tomb.
Where cold oblivion holds her dusky reign,
Frowns the dark pile on Sarum’s lonely plain.
Yet think not here with classic eye to trace,
Corinthian beauty or Ionian grace.
No pillored lines with sculptured foliage crowned,
No fluted remnants deck the hallowed ground.
Firm, as implanted by some Titan’s might,
Each rugged stone up rears its giant height.
Whence the poised fragment tottering seems to throw,
A trembling shadow on the plain below.”
(*Sarum = old name for Salisbury.)
Thanks dear Readers for your kind attention span ,
I have simplified by cutting short many details the
best as I can!
ALL COPYRIGHTS WITH RAJ NANDY OF NEW DELHI
E-mail: rajnandy21@yahoo.in

C'mon out to the rattled caves
the deep-sea malaise
rested in the grey metamorphs
of an ancient coastal chain

Where Sisyphean slips of tectonic rifts
pull the molding clay
like play-dough
and old rock that turns anew
churned into
great catacomb stele
Babylonian towers far away
from the great
Mesopotamic
interstate

Surrounded by the immumerous trees
the military sharpness of their pine
quills writing their mark in the dirt
for a hundred turns or so
only to be rearranged
into the great intercontinental soil
Truly
multisolipsistual

And on the aggregate
held open the mists
of the vast expanse of ocean
beyond L.A
and stole the fruits of the tiny parceled condominium rainwater
from distance far away
angry men shouting--
"Give us back our life blood, ******* YOU!"

Filling the tanks of their fleshomobiles
running around and sweating it out
trading it for cloth and wiping their brow on
brown shirts
perturbed and disobeyed

But that great man with the chin muscatche
brought the rough riders out of their dome
into the frontier, riding trains
Off they go!
Seeking paradise in the sands
and the trees
and the coastal breeze
dreaming
of a world owned and seen
by the world
by man
and by all these things

It would be grand

But that rock has been seen before
in Luarentian islands long ago
or perhaps a great FUJI-SAN of the west coast
worshiped by critters and dinosaurs
You are late to the game, sweet dreamers, you!
These monuments give to honor due
not you,
no sir did you build these things?
did you mold these things
with the patience of a father
with the consequentiality
of the womb
and a motherly affection
for all things true?
the gift is for you,
remember your father's gifts
sweet princes of the earth
because they will outlive you.





And I walk along the stream
stepping upon these little bits of Yosemite
Pulverized mountain rocks
Renal Stones of the diseased
to which the water flushed out deeply
and cured the grey things from all that left them
displeased
hoping for more than just selfies
and sticking it to god's face
laughing at half-dome
climbing it and getting the better of ourselves
Believing we have achieved bliss

When in reality,
there is nothing to this which we can reach.

"Look Up" by Gary Turk is a poem I've recently watched / read
& it's message was SO powerful, it's now forever in my head
So deep, well spoken & extremely true....
I hope you'll share it, I know it'll be a lasting impression on you
This video poem & it's message has inspired me to write....
.....guess I'm not sleeping tonight....

Kids nowadays
Entertain themselves differently from my childhood ways
This is what we've become to be
Can't go too long 100% electronically free
Fresh air & drinking from the hose
Have been lost & forgotten I suppose
Of course fresh air & hoses still exist
It's their simplicity that's being overlooked & missed
Kids imagination is becoming rare & isn't creative anymore
Far, far less than all the kids in years before
Glued to some form of a screen
Hours in a line they'd rather wait, the newest game they feel
The parks are all much too quiet now
Their fascination no longer fascinates somehow
playground equipment empty & bare
& it's seems like everyone really doesn't care
The weekends are slowly turning into just another day
With marathons of endless video game play
Not even one foot stepped outside
Instead, like a hermit,just staying inside
Sunshine wasted daily & ignored easily
My opinion...it should be enjoyed worry free & regularly
Go play a game of hide-and-go-seek
& try to start a winning streak
Or how about some good old Red Rover, Red Rover
...Who will you decide to "Send Over"
Maybe it'll be on your secret crush
Just be careful not to blush
Another game I loved to play
Cartoon tag, HURRY & SQUAT what character will you say?!
There's so many games of tag you could choose
& fun & laughter you'll never lose
Like freeze tag or how about tunnel tag
NONE of them at all are dull or close to being a drag
Just one rule I think should always apply
Count to ten after tagged so instant "tag backs" won't cause a cry
Or you could play mother may I?
.....also I recommend giving Red Light, Green Light a try
NOW if sports are more your thing
A glove, bats, ***** & bases are something you should bring
Basketball more your style
Then bring a ball & shoot hoops for a while
If you'd rather just enjoy the day & sunshine
That too, is perfectly fine
Take your dog for a little walk
& bring a friend a long & just talk
Outdoors has so much to offer you
There is endless amounts of options for things to do
Maybe enjoy a scenic little bike ride
Or a new adventure you've always wished you've tried
A park isn't the only outdoor place you can enjoy
Your own swimming pool is a great too with an old tire tube toy
There you can play hours of "Marco Polo"
Or see how your splashes go
Just don't forget to wear sunscreen
Or your results will be red & burn, if you get what I mean
& always , always drink lots of water
Especially when the weather gets hotter
Staying hydrated is without a doubt the best
No need for you body's limits to be put to the test
Back when I was young & carefree
Inside was the last place I wanted to be
Sunrise to sunset outdoors running around
There were times where I even rolled on the ground
As day turned to dusk & the sun was almost gone
That's when the street lights came on
Ending my day covered from head to toe in dirt
& a grass stained T-Shirt
I had an abundant amount of fun
& hated having that day already be done
I was one of the boys for a long time
But smart enough to let them commit any crime
No girls lived on my street at first
& I thought that was just the worst
But I could easily keep up with the boys & their plans
Daily, I'd quickly throw on & tie tight my vans
Riding through all the empty fields & dirt mounds used to jump
Houses being newly built & just a wood frame
Look back now, we had so many adventures & no one of them the same
FINALLY a girl moved in, just my age too
I was excited to the max, more than she ever knew
Barbies was mostly our pick for entertainment
Even outside we'd play them, so many hours we spent
Lego forts we're sleep over fun, that's for sure
So many memories & good times I created with her

2014 is the current year
Children's idea for "fun" is something I fear
Technology is always evolving & growing
& its dependency is definitely showing
Instead of coming home when the street lights come on
Sending a text is the new tradition
Actual words are becoming eliminated
& ridiculously being abbreviated
Which is causing normal speaking to sound absurd
Sometimes it's too horrible & unable to decipher what you've heard
Thanks electronics for advancing & inventing a new language
Now we talk like we have severe brain damage
"Dats Cray, Cray she's my bae"
Uuuuuhhhh WHAT THE **** DID YOU SAY?
Translation: "That's crazy, she's my babe" is what they said
Seriously, they are sounding more & more uneducated
Everyone now has a phone glued to their hand
It's a new trend that I'll never understand
Electronically we're being defeated
Not realizing it's not always needed
Like on a beautiful day & the weather is just perfect
Don't close your blinds because the sunshine you're trying to reject
Instead shut off that power ******* device
Fresh air is waiting & the breeze is nice
Computer games & all those gaming console
Are just disguised as good clean fun but actually they're slowly killing souls
One by one
Until the last one is done
We're just slaves to our electronics
No longer needing hooked on phonics
Dictionaries were quickly replaced
"Just google it" is now popularly phrased
As the years continue to progress
Electronics will advance & more will just obsess
It is kind of like when you're scrolling through a social media board
Reading the latest status your friend posted & beautifully poured
& trying to put down your phone for a bit
But it only managed to last a minute
Not a single change, how lame
So you hit refresh over & over but still nothing changed
All the while hoping some things would've rearranged
Desperate for some kind of excitement or some entertainment
Staring at the screen
Which displays nothing new to be seen
You're wasting your day
You don't want to forever live this way
Missing adventures you could've had, but gave them no chances
A screen brightly glowing hypnotized you, not allowing any reality glances
It puts you secretly in a trance that will mesmerized
Forgetting to blink, helpless they become are your eyes
Don't let it get to that part of no return
& remember what, a long the way you did happen to learn
Control your mind & don't let technology completely drain you...
Electronically free let's you experience all the possibilities you can do
All the new things you can try
...As long as you occasionally disconnect from WIFI

When gravity has shifted & everything has changed,
and the hopes and the lives and the dreams  rearranged.
I push ink into paper & draw visions with words,
so the hopes and the lives and the dreams will be heard.

The truth is, I’m not really sure who I am.  She told us to draw ourselves and then to draw our souls; so I drew my face scratched and uneven, just as I’ve always seen it, and frowned at the result both in the mirror and on the paper.  The only soul I’ve ever really known was the one that shone through the strokes of the keys I punched, the scrawling of ink on paper in mismatched arrays of awkward thoughts, disorientated and unorganized, shaded different spews of emotion and rearranged through the lens of ever last viewer’s eye.  Even so, this soul that is composed of words that defined me painted a picture vivid in its contrast, though blurry from both afar and close enough to squint, no details able to be made out.  These words that have wrapped around my soul rubbed raw from the time my skin first flinched at the cool March air cannot be deciphered by their author, though I know somehow that their letters flowing into one another say more than any curve of my face ever could.  These words are black and white, two extremes crafted in the pallet of the Universe’s toolshed, and perhaps that’s exactly what I am.  Black or white.  I’m dark and lost and scrounging for some rusting wall or tree branch to cling to as to ensure the shimmering waves, onyx and charcoal in their nature with the flow of blood in its spine, do not flood into my mouth at a rate in which is too quick to balance myself upon them, or, I’m white, drifting snow from a cloud scraping the vast expanse of brilliant blue gazing as a sky above all the world, pure, innocent, unscathed with the potential for creation in vibrancies yet unknown, or to be ripped to bits, scattered amongst piles of cream and autumn leaves drained of their color beneath months of shivering frost.  And so, perhaps any physical representation of my being would be all wrong, because that’s not what I am.  Myself, my soul, it resides in the murky depths of heights I’ve yet to discover, tethered endlessly and uncertain among the caverns of my inners, pink and mushy, stirred and ******, untouched from the harsh light of a world encased in brevity.

The Amazing Grace
Face
Place
Glance-dance

"Her Pleasure" Eiffel Kiss France
The lost place trance-spell-
You should see the look
on your face
*        *        
It wasn't her wishful thinking
Bringing her deep love the wishing well
  fuller up guilt tells the trips
Feeling lost but it turns Global
somehow it follows rose stem rural
Hard pillow but painful
The glow her words felt like a burn
His wicked candlelight so stern
smile concert rearranged

Too many heavy metals
Iron Clad Civil war deeply hanged
Something changed all deranged

Change of weather
England his hands are happy
needing more water to sprinkle
The happiest  time in London
Pub cheerful Lad star twinkle

I saw her standing there

Her friend was reminiscing
but lost some memories
Until an image appeared of him
she found herself

Pleasurable oneself she was
Wondering feeling the thunder
now as two cockpit rambler
Being lost on the shabby
chic shelf
The Greyhound those
Siberian Huskies with her
plaid hankies

The race is on those bookies
Growing and howling I was lost in his
Skydiving but I didn't see him
going down bits and pieces
The picture shows what a blow
falling for Autumny leaves
High price got low
Lost his smile that was my pleasure
Reaching
Stretching
The praying Mantis Rosary

How do I resume soup consume
Sipping his alphabet words
Always lost it said
Innocuous
Delicious Dove flight
Details of the lover wings
then there split in two lost
Like an experiment pleasurable host
They are strangers in the night-star
Or the economy of life went too far
Like the mosaic artsy wife

Being loved its drawn to you
The intense side
Sunnyside he's up ******
The contrast comes closer
To their bodies hot
streaming intensity
Eyes lost with fragility
Lost in each other what hotties
Procreation

Lifted to the heights seduction
The lost pleasures images rounded
On the edge of
Ecstacy she is lost
but he was found
The mighty cool way of thinking in her
pleasurable fun wedges less
said without a sound
Not about apples and oranges
Sweeter and hotter but her lips got dryer
The lost painter the splash on her cheeks
Her sheer face lost inside the curtain
Her wetness arise on her lips
What high waves she had and
he the showstopper

Pleasurable but hot wilderness
her wildflower caves happy camper
So demure with an allure
The lost pleasure when you find
it the whipped cream she became the
Debutante what Suzette
Meeting her it was her pleasure
The hard teeth bite that ****** apple
crushed  it came
rolling down
the hill
She caught his jelly roll
His little bite burst her dream soul
Moving on with pain
how can we
meet our pleasure

Whats lost can be found freely
The taste is always there
The pleasure we try different
methods not always nutritious

Someone lost inside her delicious
Like the lost lobotomy

Of the Rite
This wasn't *** education of the
Deans list pleasurable digest
How it leaps up every year
Leap Year, not the frog to kiss
Finding love constitution
Follow me we are on our
next mission * my pleasure what
are you waiting for?

It was the running wind
more than touched me
not so gently
slapping my face
pulling the hair over my face
making a wild disarray
dumping the shawl around my neck
to a muddy puddle nearby .
Like everything else it just passed
not even looking back at the mess it made on me
I ran my fingers though my hair
rearranged myself
moved on.
the wind did not seep in
through my skin.

©Malintha Perera 2014

Amadou awakened with a start, it was Omar one of the guardians(security guards) of Yaldagou (the largest Hospital in the capital of Burkina Faso) knocking on the window of his taxi, Amadou had just settled down for the night after a long day in the heat and fumes that was Ouagadougou it was just after midnight on Sunday, he struggled to wake up rubbing the sleep from his eyes as Omar explained in Mori(local language), that there were two white people in need of his special service.

After a quick explanation that someone had died in a private clinic nearby and the body needed to be transported to the morgue at Yaldagou,  he snapped out of his sleepiness and thought for a moment how much he could charge the rich white people, it was two days after Eid and as a strict Muslim he had been celebrating the holidays and now he had been offered an opportunity to supplement his taxi income, someone had to do it and it was an unsavory job and anyway on the few occasions he had done it, it had been lucrative, it might as well be him!

Amadou thought to himself, if you had the misfortune to die in the day time there was a private service but in the night dignity went out the window and it was up to people like Amadou and a select bunch of taxi drivers with seats that could be configured to accommodate the corpses of the recently deceased to perform this service, so taxi 87 driven by Amadou would take this lady who had died from kidney and other ***** failures, after struggling for some days she eventually lost her battle and slipped into unconsciousness and finally died.

Amadou finally settled on 10000 CFA(local currency) a fair price, after all the so-called professionals would charge 30000 CFA three times more and it was around Eid "Allah Akbar".  

A quick "Thank you" to Omar for helping them and the two white people left with him for the short journey to the clinic, after the usual discussions the body was released and  transported to the morgue to join the other recently deceased waiting for burial in the morning,

Amadou, rearranged the seating in his taxi after parking up in his favourite place under the trees of Yaldago it was just after one thirty, a good ninety mins work he thought to himself, yawned, and settled down to sleep a few more hours before dawn prayers.

This was Africa and "someone had to do it" was his last thought.

Words are always
Rearranged and rearranged
Scrambling
Manipulating words
Stating with conviction, firm
Purpose esteemed from my own heart
With no promise of anything to be earned
Sometimes my words are just for me
Unless others can similarly see
What I am trying to convey
For you to come with me
And stay

To portray alternate meanings
To explain our feelings
Words just come and go
As long as they make sense,
I suppose
Poems that could make sense to
No one else
Give meaning to myself
I shape the sentences in my own way
The things I can never actually say
Writing the words of my desires
Or just simply writing because I am tired
Sometimes I feel alone,
Just me, here,
One
Or my mind just wants to run,
Away without time to think
And my heart begins to sink
But these poems are a definition
Of me
Words that I have crafted
Within all the letters scattered
Upon the sea
At times I write with no clear direction
Or I choose carefully with painstaking
Selection

It is beyond me
How letters can transform
Into words, so free
Scrambling
I find it like some sort of game
How can I force my words without sounding
Lame
Sometimes I feel so loved
You, me, we
And I write to confess
That with you
I never feel anything less
And I state my fears
That one day I wake up
And you won’t be here

Poetry is my cries
The way I question all the whys
In life I perceive
All it takes is for you to
Believe
In the words that you read
And your soul can be freed
Scrambling
Like the rearrangement of words
Till you find some sort of meaning
Poetry makes life so less
Absurd
With simple rearrangement of
Words