you want the good first, and the bad second?
never mind, you're going to get
the bad first...

so there i was,
sitting in the street, outside a pub,
sipping a cool drench
of heineken pint, probably
the best beer in the world
(i'd agree with the carlsberg ad.,
but then it's featherweight
at 3.8%... so dear dane?
probably no... stick with
shakespeare... you *******
umlaut wannabe (ø) diphtong)...
so i was sitting there
with some dutch-bewilderment,
a local...
  out pops a skinny kenyan
and starts ******* in front of us...
sure, he's ******* against
the dumpster,
  but the dutch-bewilderment
glaces at me and his eyes
are already saying to me:
worth a knife or a stick,
to clobber the ******* down,
i've lost the desire to drink
my beer...
         centre of amsterdam,
i was wackoed out of the pub
by sheer: huh?!
     i admit, not all stories are bad,
the other time, i was sharing
a hostel room with two germans,
who decided to waste
a mushroom experience while
watching *american dad...
while me and this egyptian
architecture student hit the town...
i was drinking, he was
smoking,
   then i took a **** at one of his
"special moment" rollies...
and then he said,
   put these on (headphones),
listen to this music...
the music? le trio joubran,
the song? masar...
     i was drinking throughout
the day... but one **** of
the rollie, and the music?
            **** me, the dam bursts...
i was sitting there,
in one of the cafes,
  mouth open, eyes closed,
one or two dutch girls looking,
my egyptian companion said...
     it must have been akin
to someone shooting up ******...
with my eyes closed i must have
been looking at god,
  or a diamond, or into a kaleidoscope;
gravity fused itself with my genitals...
i was dragged into my seat...
  and couldn't move,
eyes closed, mouth agape,
      monged out of my nuts,
which by this moment in chronological
order, was beyond the chance to orbit
saturn and take a selfie...
  the holy trinity of an excess
of *****, some marijuana,
   and music you've never heard
before, suggested by a stranger...
last thing i remember was walking
through the streets of amsterdam,
laughing my head off...

when i consider reviving memories
of cities i usually have several
version to mind...
the first amsterdam i went to was so:
.............................
........................
...............................
a boring trip, i bought two pipes,
a classical pipe, and this asian pipe...
the second amsterdam?
         was this the amsterdam where
i visited a *****?
can't remember...
  amsterdam no. 3?
             i think that's the amsterdam
account i just gave...
    never mind the minor thrill
of "smuggling" a few grams of hash
through the airport,
  in a biscuit can...
                a bit like plagiarising
that sociology essay, just inviting
the thesaurus to change the sentence
structure at university...
for the thrill, not for the grade...
  evidently a.i. isn't familiar with
the thesaurus cheat mode...
  **** me...got a first in that essay,
and managed to beat the computers;
oh yeah, smuggled the hash in...
it wasn't a lot, barely an 8th of an ounce,
fact of the matter is, i did it;
that being said,
  i have no romance with amsterdam,
i just miss paris...
      i'm never going back,
the memories are too precious...
              that hostel... duck something,
drowning duck? drunk duck?
    i can't remember...
   i'm never going back to paris,
the memories are too precious,
and the current affairs are too painful
to make that city a beacon of light
once more...
   we showered in the outside,
and we made courgette pasta with onions
garlic, bacon and cream...
    but that was 2005 or so.
       for some reason, i never had the sort
of affection for amsterdam,
            great for smoking,
great for drinking,
   great for not feeling guilty about
window-shopping prostitutes:
   with that victorian-feminism attitude
of the brits...
     hey! you're cutting the chivalry costs
of paying for the meal: back to basics...
  stochholm? over-priced...
      you'd probably become intoxicated
quicker, having downed a bottle of *****
you bought at the airport,
  and then drinking your own ****,
than you would, while drinking at the swedes'
americana experiment with pseudo-prohibition
tactics...
    how are you going to keep warm?
fat ain't furr... but sure as ****,
alcohol numbs the biting cold,
    no matter how you think about it
in describing it as a placebo effect...
                    it still warms the poles
in the outdoors, esp. when a person dies
in winter, and they have their stypa /
   wake drinking session in the graveyard.

i just can't forget that look of disgust
from the dutch guy sitting next to me,
drinking his beer,
   without our shared canvas, of an african
******* in the street, against
a dust-bin;

as borat would have said...
                     *mmm das nnnnnnniiiiiiice.

an octagon tent
wide enough that chucking rollies
to the sand made impossible
sprawled layers
you turned to quote Dali
told me how pale blue washed with lucy
shimmered skyline into dimension
acryllic-smeared sass drips canvas
into murmurs circling dilation
dimethyltryptamine stains
painting dreams on my eyelids
with flowerbrushes and silk,
mushroom dust gathers in discarded hues
on your pallet, where the colors of your irises
dry into a nebula of night-blooming jasmine
the scent of how you move when you sleep
and sleeping is never so sweet
as dancing through lucidity
with you as my sheets.
and i've traced your thumbprint so often
i'm sure if it were stretched around a marble
like buffalo skin on spirit-caller drums,
a globe would be seen
in which Greenland is finally proportionate--
the map on my wall always bothers you,
but I do too, and everyone does,
urging me under the geography
etched into the sea of your surface
by the crucible of your purpose
and working me into
empty behind your right
below the 22
between i'ching
and the forty two names of god
clasping your fore in silver
copper wound around my finger
hamstrings woven like wire
kambaba jasper, two to share
you hang Tibetan tektites
to elevate space
meteorite fragments
lodged in your helix,
stardust blood,
mandala sand from your mother,
and our tendons wrappe
by dexterous carpals
make such a pretty pendant
of my heart,
for synesthesia mistakes not
and my addiction to the pen has eased
for you breathe murals
and syllables never could
match brushtrokes of carbon dioxide.

finally you came back to me;
for good we thought.

we'd walk out in the dark, and sprawling streets in
the empty mornings
and smoke packs of our favorite kinds, we had thought.

and there was one glorious weekend when we wore
long skirts and smoked
rollies on
the white painted balcony.
we stole six bottles of wine from
an unlocked cellar,
fully clothed in our
indian dresses,
underneath were our lacy bras
and silky underwear.

we walked the path barefoot
to the Nest, and we tattooed the dead and dying branches
with the sharp art of our burn marks,
and under the bridge where we
jumped into the frigid creek,
and let the sun shine through our hair while
a blond boy played his guitar.

we stayed up late,
jumping on the soft pink carpet of my room,
making small earthquakes in the quiet town,
screaming the songs
that beat to our own heart.

we crawled onto the red shingled roof
and inhaled the
thorn filled
atmosphere of
November,
smoking newports and marlboros faster than
Olympic champions.

we were naked but for our limp hair, hanging at our sides and
shivering skin,
“smoke me like a cigarette”
we softly sang, with the light of my room
slowly slinking into the night.

we took a drunken shower afterwards,
a bottle of chardonnay
reflecting the red light overhead,
the water rolling off our bodies,
ash falling from our hair.

we woke up in the light of one another's
morning eyes,
with splitting heads and cracked grins,
we had more plans.

we laughed on the secret
flower hotel porch,
bringing out more of our wine bottles,
playing our music loudly,
unfiltered spirits
was slowly writing their tragedy on our
wilting lungs.

that night we stuffed our beds
and created sleeping bodies out of ***** clothing and
small pillows.
we ran into the fresh night,
trouble as a steel edge on our
summer filled laughter.

we danced to the music that filled our
murky brain,
stumbled into a smoke filled room and burned
our throats
*****.

we walked in the deserted hours
of four in the morning,
and stamped on the counters,
of some boys house,
voice hoarse from
singing Neutral Milk Hotel at the top of our
brimming lungs
and banging on guitars.

we broke ashtrays,
and hearts,
and we snuck back in
with orange-chai hookah fresh on our
dry lips,
when the sun was threatening to
rise.

we wandered around the sunken down
town
the next day,
unfilters again.

we smoked three packs in two days.
sixty cigarettes,
for the sixty days we've been apart.

my mother told me later that she could smell it on me
riding on my breath,
she could tell by our dry eyes
and bed made hair,
we were hungover.
we smelled like ashtrays,

Hydrocodone is no excuse for you to be
torn so violently apart from me,
everything is falling out of
place.

Half asleep, driving for hours
with Budweiser bottles,
warm from the heating.
The windows were all down,
we were smoking rollies,
all sharing one lighter because the driver
dropped his in a can of fanta.

Next thing,
the roar of an army of twincams.
VTECs, something insanely beautiful,
and incredibly ridiculous,
a convention of petrol heads—
Gardaí everywhere, searching for tax
and insurance. My God, I was in it.
Hundreds of thousands of them,
all excited like children,
the screaming of a million voices,
no exhaustion in the exhaust fumes.

The hills rose around us, the traffic
packed backwards,
expensive cars all sardined in a roundabout.
How loud can you get it?
Can she sing like a canary?
Can she find herself at the Letterkenny rally?

There's a poem hidden on my tongue
but I just can't find it,
my mouth is numb.

I've been sipping on winter for way too long,
this city is colder than your bubbler ****;

but I like the way it's one way streets all seem to lead from you to me,
and I like how you take them at full throttle
playing marco polo with the bottom of the bottle-

-As if you don't find it every night;
like the last few drops aren't your lullaby.

And it's an alibi that lulls you out of lucidity,
because your favourite superpower is anonymity.

And you don't mind if I show up when I'm ******* high,
because I'm a ******* child who can't handle life.

I'm the peak of the mountain all covered in white,
I'm the age old dragon,
I'm the youthful sprite

I'm the bowl that you smoke when you come down slowly,
I'm the pipe that you **** when you got no rollies.

I'm your vice, I'm your habit, I'm your bad addiction
I'm your fight, I'm your project, I'm your real life fiction.

I'm the cut on your tongue that you won't let heal,
I'm the poem in your mouth that you cannot feel.

Now I'm the lover of your discontent,
I'm the jar in your cupboard that's labelled 'rent'.

It's the 26th and the jar's still empty,
but we've got a two-six and your pouring hand's heavy.

Using whisky and water as lubrication-
it numbs and smooths through our expectations.

And I don't know when we made the agreement to feed our ***** and starve our feelings,
But my belly feels full like the waxing moon,
and my chest holds as much as a fractured spoon.

*Naked and hungry-
we share your bed
-searching for the words, in each other's heads.

I miss my old hair clippers
I had them since before I got sober.
at the rehab near Philly, I would trade rollies for head shaves
until I learned that I could shave my own head without a mirror.
that was ok with me,
I saved on tobacco but I still had my cup and bowl out.
like an anchorite begging for alms by the road side.
some 3000 shaves of the head later and I don’t need a mirror
for much anymore.
I set the old clippers aside and I don't know where they went to.

When I wake up the sun is going down.
I do my shopping beneath the cold chalice of the moonlight,
cold glistening, somehow still reflecting of the Sun
even though
I said goodbye from
my window to the early evening dawn
9 hours before the burning
of the midnight oil.
I chant and ring my bells
so I don’t drift back to sleep.
but I can still smell sulfur so I
Aum and pray and ring the bells a little louder.

I found God on the carpet once.
It only took me 14 hours to pick through
every crystalline crumb that glistened in the kitchen light.
the next morning I had a half soup spoon full of the Almighty
but the hook and the plunger swallowed Him whole
and with haste turned me back to dust.

sometimes I’ll make a to-do list
with every strike of the pen another performance for
the bushels and the bones,
I like grocery shopping at night.
normally there are only a few souls and
old drifters wandering about and
they usually keep their eyes pointed down.
sometimes I practice small talk
with the clerk,
endeavoring to exchange appropriate
amounts of eye contact throughout.
personalities and performances and
I am so tired of caring.

when I’m waking up the sun is going down
but monica gave me a hand full of vitamin D and
a fire in the hearth and
sometimes the world
Is like a seven pointed centrifuge.
the heavy particles are all hitting the
chalice walls and I’m spinning so fast
all I can do is look up and breathe.

The swallows are singing swooping for the
Black Madonna and the Popes of the white smoke.  

God jumps from the sky to the spoon to the corkscrew
and L/L research put up a new tweet:
more from Hatonn about the bitter wine, and
this being quite a dense illusion for the thickness of the veiling,
and the chakras being tuned like strings on a harp
to be plucked by the Hands of the Creator.

This isn’t the density of knowing
as faith is the evidence for things unseen.
I’m still half blind but I can hear them chanting and
I’m just this side of single pointed thought but
facebook keeps breaking my ****** attention.
so I stand here
awoken to  the sun going down over the highway
and the snakes winding up my spine
and a mouth full of Vitamin D.

I live for these days,
cold, wet and rainy,
overcast and hazy,
smoke-filled, getting wasted
in cars with the boys
ripped jeans soaked to the waist
in motor oil, cow **** and meal.

Flat tyres, rollies,
tar stained fingers, and buying
his girlfriend's morning after pill,
my best friend beside me
and it's not
impressive, it's not my degree,
it's not the big city
but it lives in me.
In the deepest part of me.

It’s like biting into a lemon,
Or choosing the wrong pill
Offered to you by a bald man in dark glasses
In some wonderland fantasy exalting a looking glass,
When you choose to chase down memories…
Like a white rabbit bolting down a black hole.


I reconstruct you necessarily…
It hurts – I shouldn’t do it,
But inevitably.
And I compare you to everything;
To everything in it’s right place,
Clinging on to what was,
Or what should have been.


Whoever you are
You were the root of a root,
The sky of a sky of a tree called What If
At the bottom of my glass,
In the first place that didn’t know my name.


You controlled me for a second
With your eyes.
With your hands.
But now you handle me remotely
From somewhere I don’t know
And will never be.


You would say things like
“Don’t you think
That just for one evening
The stars should be
Multi-coloured.” And you
Smile sheepishly
Wishfully,
Then stare at the bottom of your own glass
And then say “Anyway
There’s a thin line between love and hate
It’s so easy to have feelings of hate
For someone you love -
You end up caring too much,
And then they do the slightest thing wrong to hurt you
And you hate them for it.
That’s how I see it anyway.”
Or something like that.

As for me, I intend to sit and read.
Then I will smoke and dance.
Because the way I see it,
I live in a city with no memory,
The way money is between good friends…
And my days shall be lazy without end.
Cos the way I see it,
Love makes you solitary,
And all at sea.

Contemplate universal facts that can’t be helped, like –
Straights smoke quicker than rollies.
And yes you can say “this happens to everyone”
No doubt it regularly does –
Probably because you can go anywhere
Dress as someone else.
You’ve don’t that, I can tell.

I guess what I really want to know is who are you?

Here I am.
Reeling at the very idea of remembrance.
In my own historic battle,
Perpetually considering you.
Y.O.U
You owe ME.
As I crash land,
Heavily injured,
Into a room you might call “Square One”,
Questioning just how it is exactly
I’m here again.

What's the smallest living being on earth?
a graduate of music school
First class degree won with some leeway
but that can't pay for my MOT, no way
four hundred and thirty seven quid and 26p to pay
for new suspension ball joints and wishbone, wiper blades and an emission test pass grade
and now my car has scraped a "pass with defects"
I hope someone made a wish as the old bone cracked
as they took it to the tip with the entire contents of my bank account
I wish I was back home again, scared to answer the phone again
but now every phone call I'm praying for a gig.  

For nine grand a year I wonder how well she would do in the next few tests
if she'd have a long career ahead after a short rest or if she would still be run into the ground,
one day kicking the bucket at 90 miles an hour on the M4 back to Cardiff; I recently found
she won't quite make it to one hundred.
One hundred miles an hour!
Such power, so close, but no cigars for me any more - I can't even afford to smoke rollies.
When I'm seventy I'll start again
whether I want to or not, I need that one lifetime guarantee.
If I make it to seventy.
Hopefully boredom, rejection and ******* aren't causes of early mortality.

Febian, Rizky, Aisyah Aziz. 2018. Indah Pada Waktunya. Kanal
       Yutubnya NET Talent Management.

Matterhalo, Nadin Amizah. 2017. Teralih. Kanal Yutubnya
       Matterhalo.

Nelwan, Christofer. 2012. Jari-jari Cantik. Kanal Yutubnya
       Argonycus.

Pusakata. 2018. Kehabisan Kata. Kanal Yutubnya MyMusic
       Records.

Ranti, Jason, Ari Malibu (The Rollies). 2016. Kau Yang Kusayang.
       Kanal Yutubnya Ruang Putih.

Rock, One OK. 2011. Pierce. Kanal Yutubnya Pratama Aji.

Stahl, Fredrika. 2011. Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. Kanal Yutubnya
        Oresund Bleu.

Teduh, Payung. 2017. Puan Bermain Hujan. Kanal Yutubnya
       Anggit Setyo.

Work night rumbles in the Dublin 4 palace
Laughing in the stale smell of too much freedom
Whiskey, beer, prosecco make up
A rainbow of mischievous golden hues
Corona that smells like drifting **** clouds
No limes, browning in the red net
In the fridge between pockets of pizza space
No Topshop dresses, flannel shirts, uniforms
But greasy repeal jumpers, palazzo pants, huffing
Rollies on the porch under generous back light
Beside rabbit ornament with human head, crouched
In grass below the shroud of full moon fever.
An ex-rugby lad in a Chance the Rapper cap
Stands in the sunroom eating Chinese
He ordered when he was bored of girls
Changing the song one too many times
Masking the gurgling moka, hidden
To serve coffee at midnight and write bad verse
Before morning dips potato waffles into relish
"Which is just posh ketchup", breakfast
Before leaving dry chunks in the bath for work.

and when you hear: watcha 'tinking? your reply? mostly concerning a ****, & a fudge factory, & a few brownies, topped with some custard goo, what's that to you?, you skivvy missus?

yes, we alcoholics sometimes get the jerks,
what the junkies call the nods,
notably via unconscious irritation
when solving sudoku puzzles -
you know, those japanese blindspots,
waiting for a wet ***** entry re-entry into
the garden of eden -
and without diacritic indicators
you will state *shania -
                     i have lactose in my brain,
and the killer proteins are coming...
         alzheimer's:
     proteins       eating          fat;
i swear i swear i swear i was ready
with the dutch cheese sponge!
       holes? oh, nibbled through,
the blue cheese mouse trap didn't work...
oops...
           put the mice off,
as it would put off any known living thing...
**** making ice-cream with it to boogie
on the palette.
   a bit like mikey mouse replacing ol'
jack, in the box...
        hardly the ****** surprise;
what did you expect in the mousetrap,
a ******* cockroach?!
  wasabi irony... probably a bigger statement
of english than shakespeare,
added to the tongues of humanity.
now, the entry point of unessential aphorisms:

1. drinking does what ****** doesn't:
  keeps you focused,
and if you master the craft,
you get to sport a mid-day sun
with a lot of housewives...

2. **** it, whatever...

3. the led zeppelin vs. black sabbath debate
always misses the ****** of black purple...
  never learned to say the big o...

4. what a waste, being so lucky...

5. i might only make an incremental difference
in this world, but at least i still do not
disrupt the status quo totalis of humanity,
id est: at least people around me end up
living the boring reality of:
      the people around me...
kinda autistic, i admit, nonetheless true.

6. post scriptum of point V -
    a bit like a butterfly watching a tornado's
whirl, and then, unlike a fly incubated
in a spiderweb, watching the ballerina's twirl...

7. what's so poetic about philosophy in
english... i.e. the metaphor...
i.e. the " " membrane, the inverted
commas... commas?
    aren't they supposed to sit down
below, rather than be saintly halos of
the above? i'm guessing that's the source
of why the english tongue doesn't bother
diacritical indicators, inverted what?!
    commas? oh, so that's one citation
mark in a sentence?
      i'm getting really copernican confused...
smacker on the face for attempting
to be "smart": i know... never did anyone
any good...
                let's just call the " " encapsulation
of a word the poetic way...
that's called a metaphor...
   or it's really rather an ambiguity per se...
then again: i guess, no.

8. chinese, eh? as a language, everyone admires
it...

9. my grandfather always admired how
i rolled my tobacco,
making perfect rollies, and pretending
to be needle in hand,
  perfecting the rollie even further,
by warming up the tobacco in the roll-up,
my ex-gf always took the **** out of me
for not being able to roll the perfect
spliff, and then i did,
  and then, for some reason, she stopped
talking.

10. the chinese tongue in translation,
is the most unspectacular language in existence,
no wonder the origin of the haiku -
that's chinese for simple math (syllable
arithmetic) -
the chinese can only count up to a haiku -
and even though their phonetic encoding
is twice the spectacular endeavour of any man,
chinese in translation?
        about as spectacular as a cow's ****...
choo chow mein...
  chew chin mane?
                  i wouldn't even bother
trying to untangle that asiatic bowl of noodles...
rice crispy fortune cookies,
   a bowl of regurgitated maggots;
              cf. mongol!
    and what, arabic with its fiddly-squiddly
attempt at coherent, is not less an octopus
waving to imply hello?
  yeah, and i'm the next mary ******* poppins!
shim shimminy me away...
   oh right, forgot to mention,
you really wouldn't say the name shania twain
like that...
     you'd need syllable indicators,
hellfire / punctuation marks from above...
    hmm, how to cut up a lovely...
    sháníā -
       sha-nigh-ah:
   oh look, seems i'm an american linguist
after all...
   keeping the hyphen handy... turning into
a linguistic chemist...
  ever watchful of the electron migration diagrams...
pompous & sarcastic ****-wit i was
always supposed to be...
           which bring me to the final
observation:

11. i kinda figured that there's a law of prefix,
suffix & affix...
  but with tongues that prescribe their
phonetic units (i.e. letters) the status of names,
i figured it ought to be ease to understand
how they cut these names and leave the indicative
remaining stressor...
  akin to the hebrew, notably?
    via
yes yes, we know the caron on s (š) and the caron
on c (č) implies the english sh - and ch:
**** via cheap respectively -
  this amount of god is a sneaky ******:
loves to hide in punctuation marks,
whether from the godly diacritical perspective,
or the devilish rhetorically classical
punctuative.
point being... ehyeh...
                   yes, but how does the aleph
make it to be invoked in the word?
         א... aleph...
                      יה‎ה‎א -
and these names are burnt tattoos on my
psyche - i have enough raw bile to
do the opposite of dispersing the hebrews:
i have enough of the *******:
to make them congregate;
but tell me, how do you actually write
ehyeh (יה‎ה‎א) - by asking the prefix / suffix /
affix question? how do you cut upen
aleph, to extract the epsilon,
   disregarding the alpha the lambda or
the phi (φ)?
these ancient people are all the same...
the greeks are gay with their φ & θ -
   ε & η or o & ω...
         just like the hebrews with their gemini
zodiac orientation of ayin (ע) & aleph (א‎)...
sure, these languages are classic,
but they're also primitive,
which is why the "barbarians" brought
diacritical distinctions to rome,
                       enforcing it, stabilising it (it being
the latin, you can't even begin to imagine
how thankful they were to have
ditched the runic).

- i'm still fascinated by the geometry of language,
R actually does look like rolling...
   O is always going to be a wheel,
and Y will always remain a yew tree,
or the beginning of satan's entry into
the world of talk.