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Joshua Martin May 2013
Turns out the King of the Projects
couldn’t even tie his shoes.
Couldn’t draw or make love.
Hell could barely even read
and definitely didn’t know how to sing the blues.

Turns out the King got his crown
after two and half games of basketball
on the weedy court at sundown
the day before his tenth birthday.

Turns out the King was the roughest,
toughest, scabbiest fourth grader
in the whole **** grade, raised
from good Somalian stock and
willing to sucker punch kids
darker than he.

Turns out the 4 ft 5 King of the Projects
stood mighty tall over the
class pet ferret, ephemeral
creature of habit,
watched the
rodent with eyes peeled as if the two
shared the same beating
heart boombox.

As it turns out,
every day at noon we had music
but the drums were always
taken by the King who
pounded a steady beat to the
shake shake shake of
the music teacher's 'script
of benzos, eyes still glued
to the ferret, seeking a ritualized dance.

Turns out the class pet escaped last week.

Turns out the King stopped coming too.

Shame really. As the teacher, I felt I had
to have something to say to him.

Turns out I was just as scared as he.
Mateuš Conrad May 2018
a citrus *****, sveedish,
   citrus, absolut,
    straight,
      with ice...
       some might call it
a sewer lemon squinting
pinch, without a first
of a month...

        but it's certainly
a ***** *****,
   given that all the impurities
from the "apparently"
filtered frozen water
start to appear,
   like dissolved tofu flakes...

***** *****:
    ***** and ice...
     i agree: an ugly cocktail
but right on the mark...

because what on earth could
have possibly happened in
england when i was away from
it for two months,
in an asylum of my grandparent's
abode of:
      oh sure, sure...
   marry...
    hell knows no wrath,
  as a woman belittled...

      a long trip from a sleepy
town once tipped to be the next
metallurgy capital,
overgrown with weeds...
   busy Warsaw with a faint
tickling of German...
         more German than English:
and at that moment:
tourism seemed, refreshing...

     back in sleepy England?
even the most populated snippets
of Warsaw didn't seem that
appealing as, as *****,
as welcoming as:
the shadiest, scabbiest postcards
from the Eastern Avenue
   moving from the A406 into
the mini Raj of a certain
part of Essex...
    the part not allocated to
the Cockney migration...

        shady as ****...
but if you asked me to get out
of the car and walk these streets?
hell, i know a few Bulgarian
prostitutes not too far away
and... oddly enough...
half an hour... half an hour without
an *******...
    just to tattoo an invisible
mark of my fingertip on
her buttocks...
    
               at one point she collapsed
and said no more,
   so we just lay there,
while i kissed her eyelids...
        
           what did i leave reading?
the times magazine, 17.03.18,
main articles read the following:

   if you're not broody and you can
pay your own bills,
   why settle?
          is that all?
    back in Edinburgh i did that
for 3 years, and god, if that's
an achievement?
     hell... might as well move into
making pancakes territory...

because the other option is:
   and if you can't?
   why give a *******' worth
of jingle for these curtain-people?
    3 years isn't much,
but in those 3 years it wasn't
a hot topic...
      
             2 months away and what
do i return to?
   by neighbours think i'm dead...
my feet gave odours of french blue,
and the cat that made my room
her high tower was chased away
from the socks up...
   i took a shower...
          which also included
saving a moth who attempted
suicide...
    
         flew right into the shower
cubicle...
   stopped soaping myself
and picked the poor ****** up,
breathed on it,
   unrolled one of its wet
antennas hidden beneath its
wet wing using a cotton bud on
a plastic matchstick
   no technical name to
usurp this description)...

   and watched it vibrate its wings...
trill: RRRRRRRRR
     its wings dry...
              while puckering up
a mouth to my finger for balance
and retrospect...
  
    yes, cats, really are,
the gatekeepers of finding a tier
of affection in insects,
    butterflies are too shy,
   and never mistake a room lit
by a candle or lightbulb
     for the ******* day,
go figure...
        
     in the past two months though,
this is the sort of tabloid
dynamic of "news" missing in
these parts of the world,
because, to be honest,
if i didn't write this:
   **** all would have apparently
happened...

            but yes...
cats are gatekeepers to experiencing
affection from an
individuation *** ****
        (with man) -
                the mirror of man,
or how man escaped the collective
unconscious of humanity,
solomon took to the ant...
    
    i? the moth.
        bee too...
   i remember feeding a dying
bee honey,
  watching it pitifully extend
its tongue into a dollop
    of honey and die from
an overdose...
       but it was dying anyway...

somehow eating chicken
isn't so accommodating a concern
in all honesty...
  given that chickens live
like aristocracts before
the French revolution... chop chop...
what's the problem?

      and we are not industrialised
creatures to suddenly
lament the industrialised
;production of cockley-doodle-do?
     it's like attempting to
hear a grand historical laugh
worth an aeon,
   while instead merely listening
to a second's worth of
a constipated giggle: a snigger...
af if these current zeitgeisters
          are robbing us of a past...

becauase if Orwell is the current
curriculum in the west...
   and the east used to ban in...
   why is Orwell suddenly
   dogma in the west,
  when it was prohobited in the east?
ah... right... overshot the Huxley
bit... the, real nightmare
of aesthetic eugenics,
         or whatever compound you'd
want to use...

     so Orwell used to be forbidden
in East Germany...
    because?
   becauase it is now West German
dogma or rather:
  since capitalism is cannibalising
itself...
      it requires to project
     a jumping caterpillar
to jump over, with an antithesis?

  which is Huxley...
     but that has no ideological
frameworks,
      too bad Dolly...
  i'm sure Mr. Hyde can teach
his clone the debauchery once
upon reserved from the dynamic
orthodoxy of time
and a father, and a son...
   the rich are not evil...
     they are merely not
as oppurtunistic as the poor...
   so go figure...
  its hardly a deep receding
archetype waiting to bud
in my mind, which nonetheless,
perpetually slips into
the back of my tongue
boxed with the tonsil to shut up...

how does a moth dry its wings?
vibrates them, standing still,
but i still had to unfold
one of its sodden antennas
     from beneath its wet wings...
and see...
   cats as gatekeepers to
the metaphor of man in insect...
and the godlessness
       of man: without insects...

just the casual disinterest
          of concern for an insect
becomes 100x more than
a formal interest of discocern
for a man...

                  that's a quadratic
maxim:

     i will casually treat an
insect with more concern
            than i might a man...
because i am not obliged
to any collectivism,
       no hierarchy,
   no: formality...
                   trans-gender
is as the **** talking
mouth of the odd instance
of being transcendent within
the nonetheless unifyng
branches leading
to the stalk, and...
    ****... roots...
    ******* rubber:
extends on boths sides:

   8  ------- 1 ------- ∞

        1 = undeniable,
   given 0 = negatation
    (counter-thesis of Kantian
atoms, words,
   since letters already
consist of bigger than
atoms elements: Na: sodium)...

     even if there is a void,
i still fill that "void"
with the purpose of denying
it...
        atheism is bonkers, ergo...
oh the void of catholicism
i'd prefer to watch
magpies cackling over
which of them is going
to steal the silver spoon...

     ***** *****...
   saving a moth while taking
a shower...
        as much of england
in the past 4 hours as in
the 2 months i was away.

— The End —