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Vicki Kralapp Aug 2012
The scarceness of truth and beauty of this life
has ****** me dry of breath
Its ugliness has risen to try our hearts,
filling us with a blackness too awful to utter.

Love and goodness have been banned along with God,
blown away like chaff in the wind.
How many cheeks to turn?
How many cheeks to turn?

Into my soul their blackness creeps
giving voice to the cry within.  
Pack wolves wait for signs of weakness as scarlet billows
cloud the waters of small town America.

Have we forgotten kindness and humanity?  
They’ve been flushed down the toilet of
public education.
All poems are copy written and sole property of Vicki Kralapp.
Mateuš Conrad Jan 2016
i think i chose the wrong artistic medium
to express myself,
i'm expressing, that's undoubted,
but as we all know success in the marketplace
needs you to be tacky, cheap,
ready for the tourist memorabilia,
too many professions attacked poetry,
first the philosophers, then the psychiatrists,
it became a beehive of femininity and teaching;
no, i definitely chose the wrong medium,
there's no raw product, the un-popularity
of poetry is due to the memory-market of
vocabulary, there are no raw materials used,
no paints or brushes, just backward experiences
used for the banking of investment,
poetry is either cheap or priceless,
a poet can confuse someone like a tarantula
what a philosopher must do in dialogue or paragraph.
my father was never taught german,
i rekindle the strangeness of germany on the autobahns,
eerie feelings feed the warmth of former home;
and they do, every winter i remember travelling east
from west germany always appealed to me for its
melancholia unforced where rome's light never shone,
britain is the perfect historical satellite,
it's moaning like a ***** when rome ***** her
and she becomes nostalgic... the ideal ***** i say,
she wishes rome's return like a boomerang.
'killed the wallaby?'
'aye and koala too.'
'**** the Tasmanian devil?'
'if only there was an angel to counter
freckled ****-in-boots readied dodo.'
capitalism is really heavy on poetic shoulders,
given that poetry doesn't sell, it's a near-identity of
dodo, near extinction, what will remain of poetry
in terms of language expressing poetic technique is rhyme,
the other rhetoric, rhyme the other rhetoric, sounds good,
nothing like couplets making you speak more, or more
persuasively: and all will be song, and no volatile
singled-out voice in the wilderness speaking,
whether actual with honey and locust diet
or homed wilderness of click click pixel algorithm.
poetry is almost like classical music these days,
with bach's wedding cake layering: there's a difference
concerning poetry and classical music:
classical music is almost non-vox, whereas poetry
is almost pure vox,
polyphony must be translated - the layering,
poetry must listen to bach, instead of sounds it
must be a poly- of subject matters, after all polyphony
is impossible given symbiotic otherwise chiral
resemblance: cat, kettle, knife (silent k),
                        psychology (silent p), gnostic (silent g)
                        pseudo (silent p), wrath (silent w), etc.
πολoιθεμα (many subjects, rather than sounds if poetry
was music, but it isn't): anecdote,
in england your ability to engage many subjects in
a conversation (the only antidote to engage with dialectics)
is summarised and thanked for by: you need a girlfriend;
good to be appreciated.
poetry has to change, it can't be as monochromatic and scarce
as it allowed itself to be, it has become akin to atlas
holding up the globe of the monochromatic theme of love,
modern poetry idealises too much, itself not the ideal medium,
after all, poets don't invest in oil paint, canvases,
brushes, studios, these compact artists need to escape
the sheered sheep laziness when engaging with the world,
first of all, they need the shield of honesty,
and a sword cutting through their comfort zone of scarceness
duping them into an adequacy of expected productivity.
and what will keep πολoιθεμα sustained?
the once famous enemy and murderer of poets, kant,
and the concept that fuels this poetic project:
per se, poetry has to become a relief, tentacles of an octopus,
range beyond the vector of safe coordination,
the only subject of relevance of poets is poetry in itself,
make poetry scarce in terms of aesthetics... but make
it distracting, distracting enough to be engaging.
what i mean by the poetic aesthetic is that
it's written with scarceness in my - but so much
blank space is left for so little wording,
it's almost like a telescope enlarging a needle-head,
of course you can keep it terse, keep it neat,
but will you vouch to keep it remotely relevant?
prose is far more economically sound in terms
of ink use and two-dimensional wood compressed,
it's economic to write prose, and less economic
to write poetry, and due to a forced interaction
with poetry, many more songs are heard
by impasse of laziness than poems are uvula coupled
for a sunday feast: where sabbath laziness was replaced
with a need for prayer; odd.
see these gesticulating lunatics before a non-existent
subject they poured so much attention at,
so many subjects appear so the non-existent object
can be gratified in the mimic or mute fluency:
not a sound mind among them, yet still the need to
assert some direction worthy of both prayer and
sacrifice... their salah is like a whirlwind of
cognitive contraception: put a ****** on your head
and be safeguarded against the thought of
refrigerators / frozen meats... and with prayer
all hope withstanding cancer; ******* lunatics;
islam is the best example of prayer, i could handle
the christian need for ******* at the stump of the crucifix,
but muslims mumble when raising their *****
to be ****** by shadow satans, and it's peculiar
to see them in their psychiatric asylum known as the mosque
freely going about their daily business
(personal reasons for criticism - given the pervasive
spirit of a few that tried to convert me, one that
almost killed me - and this need to be literate from
only one book, rather than many - this inherent
perception of a superiority of any monotheism,
which evidently implodes and provides schisms,
a bit like a w. b. yeats poem: things fall apart;
                                            the centre cannot hold).

                                                         *θ = φ.
Nihl Nov 2013
A strange recipe,
There seems a certain scarceness of plan to it all.
A summarized unfairness found to this madness,
Two parts chaos to each one part life and matter in equal balance.
A slight dose of loss and grievance, coupled with a dash of unpleasant discourse
and equal parts discouragement.
Break two hearts and empty them into the emulsion.
They'll be buried in there,
to be forgotten as individuals
and rendered part of the whole.
Dust with the sweetness of love,
loyalty
and fulfilled longing.
And present it all to someone special,
Only to find they don't like the bitter taste.
-
If each mans life was a dessert,
mine would be a dark cake, dry as the desert.

N.H.
Mateuš Conrad Oct 2015
i. the lost necessity of narration in philosophical books
it might be worth pointing out how the practice of philosophy
crumbled with the old debate rekindled,
i never understood why so much narrative was injected
into what defines philosophy, and why no poet dared
to comment on this, rather choosing to engage with the ideas
like a tennis ball against a brick wall,
by way of showing some sort of respect for the study,
but surely this is a rickety chair approach,
if it isn’t then why would such a prominent 20th century example
cite a universal malady, although not so universal,
in that the citation: we’re still not thinking
by heidegger is a direct result of the philosophical narrative,
the fact that there’s narrative in philosophy automates itself
in the above citation - for how can thought be utilised to claim
autonomy from not thinking if it cannot begin in the realm of
philosophy by loosing the plot... quiet literally although
the joyous connotation of the phrase’s everyday usage is also there,
i.e. not being content with the need for a philosophical narrative?
it is sometimes the scarceness of poetry that prevents narration
thus allowing much thought to enter and fill the void.

ii. sartre v. the cartesian dialectic
on a technical note though, what i noticed most prominently from
sartre’s being and nothingness is this:
to usurp the faculty of doubt within thought into a dialectical translation of being.
what does sartre attempt to usurp this cartesian dialectic with?
denial.
he purposively uses denial (negation) to take doubt out from the cartesian dialectic,
this sort of change of faculty is perfectly translatable in modern times,
there is either complete denial or complete affirmation of life,
although a stumbling block emerges - what of all natural obstructions, like
the negation of ease, in the many diseases that plague people?
surely due to the negation (dis-) of ease there is no affirmation of the one
prominent aspect of ease, the ease of thinking, then doesn’t sartre’s attempt
stumble against this? i am am denied ease i am denied thinking,
therefore the need to usurp doubt from the cartesian dialectic is lost
in such instances as necessary.
in summary the concept does extend into the proposed bad faith,
for denial that usurps doubt in the cartesian dialectic that precipitates
into being enters the realm of non-being, and here too provides
what sartre deemed damnable in descartes, for nothingness is also a substance,
it isn’t a quality-based assumption, because there is no thing
in existence that has qualities of nothingness, ergo nothingness is also
a substance.

iii. systematisation in philosophy
it’s not quiet as nietzsche contended, that systematisation in philosophy
is a sign of being dishonest; to me it’s more about the effective use
of a constrained vocabulary, or rather an effective use of a desirable vocabulary.

iv. a necessary revision*
perhaps the only reason why i’d revise the cartesian dialectic,
and not do it like sartre is by simply stating - solipsism:
a doubt that that the self is all that can be known to exist -
hence the lost need to theorise solipsism, whether in the cartesian
dialectic or an existential dialectic - or to use solipsism as a crutch,
a safe haven for a narrative to cling to.
Mateuš Conrad Dec 2015
and not from above, from such meteor or comet descending with precious life droplets, indeed i believe from below, from the depths, from the mariana trench, the kaleidoscopic amoebaes rose with raging spasms for each shape known to man and man himself in vain attempts contorting in the anti-narcissistic mirror of the monkey for care of close semblance gratification, but not in origin off the amoebae; so why then place us in the genesis from the realm of zodiac and pegasus constellations?*

they never bring it to the fore,
not the the river's banks, right on the edge,
they barely allow narcissus a peak
into the swelling mirror -
they obstruct the process of myths
revising with their own immediacy
and logic, never ever 'a long time ago,'
never ever 'a very long time ago,'
never never ever 'beyond the seven
seas and the seven mountains,'
no, they want everything in their garden,
in their attic, right under their fingernails,
as if they could scratch it into themselves:
their poems like amnesia tattoos
scaling scaling up the arms and onto
their foreheads, where the ocotopii
eye looks to sign petitions inc. third
party representatives in small print;
they obstruct vulgarity made eloquent
on the page, but then mouth-off everyone
and everything when the pen has used up
all its ink and the imagination no longer
cares for phonetic symbols: because
it's just a strain, just such a strain to use them,
look at them, read them, these symbols
akin to boron red in liquid, or chlorine green
in swimming pool blue: where blurry
images of cut-in-half bodies froth in movement;
oh but did i tell you about their group therapy
sessions in the medium of poetry?
the young ones stopped playing marbles,
stopped playing caps (bottle caps filled with
play dough, moving along a chalk-drawn
labyrinth on the pavement, dice rolled to
see how many moves were allowed),
stopped climbing trees, stopped playing
hide & seek, stopped playing bulldog,
the politicians are debating whether to
change 16 year olds into political old farts,
to pledge allegience before losing their
virginity, they want to turn them into strict
adherents of a type of animal that man
is allowed to be degraded into, a political
animal of sorts... fresh off the boat...
so they congregate in their group therapies,
miserable un-naturally... back when
age-old ripe melancholia was understood
as 'when everything is completed, and
there is nothing else to do, then the sadness
of all things completed,' this strange
new breed of negated ease, the 19th century
understood something of this sort,
but in the category of dementia, dementia
praecox (schizophrenia), but it seems
the mediator that was the 20th century,
the lax on experiments in poetry
fusion with jazz and hallucinogenic potions
now under government property rights
to synthesise food additives,
exponential sugar rush, once the gold mines
now the new crystal ****: the sycrose of
sycaruse, by the tyrants orders -
'keep 'em buzzing, buzzing buzzing buzzing,
we need an eager workforce.'
thus the anglo-saxon renaissance midway
through the 20th century culminating
in a devouring implosion as the generation
shift approached; but who indeed could
have predicted the emergence of premature
depression, when nothing and i mean nothing
has been accomplished in life?
o the great woes on the wheel of fortunes,
oh the great barrenness of still nothing,
where then the outlet for the young?
the digital version or the scarceness of public
places? everything in mobile form,
attached technological tentacles - perhaps
as the octopus begins painting a spiderweb
underwater with its stress ink - gently
fathoming fish gills and their skin slimy slither.
oh sure the immediacy of shouting from the roof,
from the mountain, the illusion of it all,
you'd think we'd be saving as many trees
as was made possible with the digital white
pixel paper, but alas the secrets of the amazon
have been harvested, all that was deemed
useful, and with all the microscopic versions
of all things natural, the chemical formulae,
forestry can begin... begin to patchwork
the forest for grain and indebtness to the glory
of man's prime clandestine nature: as in myth
the approach to genitalia and goosebumps -
later approached as the need to make ******,
not as ****** as a cow's ****** bulge,
but nonetheless news on page 3 in the olden days.
or as it now apparent in the zeitgeist (spirit of the times)
of the unknowable zeitreich (empire of the times),
from where then this utopian dream -
that students in england provide the witch hunts
as if papa stalin or papa mccarthy?
you see dr. and prof. losing their posts because
a few student activists and union leaders
can't enjoy the spirit of a dualistic argument,
where would star wars be without the sith?
in a jedi's paradise... repress one side, and that
side's far deeper shadow... in the mariana trench...
repress the moderate shallow opinions of
the opposite side, and the mariana trench
will release into the shallows a malignant cancer
that might as well spread as if the nazis
became resurrected.
Mateuš Conrad Nov 2015
with the internet the fictional characters rebelled, added to the  stealing of shadows by hollywood, now comes the true time of who the  narrators are... if no narrator relieve character studying and keeping  narration in a state of ~necessary placebo we’ll only get alien  invasions and bomb blasts to succor the anaemic characters... we need  charisma from narrators who are characters as if imbued by the  surrounding... we hardly need mythologies of ghosts that replaced  mythologies of gods... we need narrators ready to forget fictive  chronology and engage in the life of what their characters live; nothing  else, nothing more; show us a weak narrator overcome by a strong  character... stop shoving us so much imagery of contentment resembling  ~strength  of characters... when the narration is weakened by cloning  termed sequal / prequel / sequal no. 2 / no. 3 / 4 / 5 / 6 etc.  how can  a weakened narrator ever provide a strength of character? never mind,  the punctuation in philosophy is stressed by the question mark - meaning  a question will provide offshoot narrations in whatever arrangement the  comma, the full-stop semi and colon will allow... the question mark is  an entry point of punctuation, it’s the full-stop with something being  added in relation to another person... so if a poem is given alliance to  parallels, i always italicise in a method of anti p.s., although  strickly p.s. as pre scriptum: what made me think after i have written  something as easily disposable in comparison with tolstoy’s war &  peace on the basis of what denotes civilised people?*

when i do something that’s not too excessively adjectively biased
like the book of genesis: ‘ah ****... it’s good,’ said god
concerning the world that gave us
the infestation of diseases and statues of david...
good thing he didn’t say: it’s amazing! it’s psychedelic!
that would be untrue... he chose neutrality...
like me... i thought i lost a poem, i saved it with ctrl c...
and i get pavlov’s reward with a memory:
i’m buying beer in a turkish shop,
i start chatting to a boy ~10...
i tell him my childhood secret
about how i thought animals couldn’t see in the realm of 2d...
given that no cat or dog ever watches the t.v.,
mindful of sleep / mindful of the owner...
cat: i missed an hour in the sloths physiology, go away!
dog: i really need to ****! i really need to ****! get me
a tree quick or it’s going to be your leg getting soaked! soppy miu miu **.
god... adele’s hello single... if i had to mine for salt
i'd check the dog’s ******* first.
boy from the turkish shop - when you grow up
and are still interested in my game from youth:
about how animals don’t see in 2d -
i hope... i hope... i hope they still don’t.

poets’ ~sadness is what feeds people’s apathy,
people feel the lack of pathology in apathy
that they sense something must be wrong,
and poets provide this ~something-is-wrong
pathology - modern computers hibernate like bears -
it’s still very basic... we’ll need more than poets
to feel like ****...
i said once: apathy creates no pathologies...
but people desire pathology to craft drama...
they despair at the celestial ingenuity of orbits...
they despair at the leo’s strenght and cancer’s recycling
to endear their characters with zodiacs...
the west is too individualistic that it divides...
take the year of the tiger in the chinese shadow of belief...
it’s hardly specifying samuel tollbridge with a confirmation
name to gimmick the tetragrammaton as the catholics do...
i don’t feel like feeding people’s apathy...
i rather enjoy my own ~sadness than feed it...
if anything i want to oppose philosophy’s testimony
that scarceness of words in poetry... unsung...
unsung with guitars pianos and harps is sad...
and the simplicity of words in songs
sung with guitars pianos and harps is profitably ‘appy...
poetry is merely what the composer wrote
in silence in that complexity of
what poetry isn’t:
what the violin had to say,
what the piano had to say,
what the concerto d-minor sounded like
in the life of john smith disillusioned with living idealism
necessarily lived...
poetry the silent background...
fruitfull in automating the lives of others... the crackling wood
of the woodwinds necessarily lived to the score /
or off the pavement of dialogue expected...
poetry not sung is less akin to music it’s true cousin...
poetry not sung becomes philosophy.
Mateuš Conrad Dec 2015
i love how with poetry you can begin at reading backwards,
not that there's an actual epilogue,
but that you can attach yourself to the winding serpent
of narration at any time, on any if not at each verse,
that in poetry there's no newton to mind: no causality
of pre- or post-, but the mediation of the ultimate
relativism, where time is discarded as what is itemised
for division, and where space is discarded likewise:
but in addition given the multiplier of heaven above
this earth, and hell... beneath it.

i love the nights in winter,
the trees look like skeletons,
or like lung alveoli,
or like brain synapses,
which is why i love cats,
you can simply ignore them,
leave them be,
with dogs there's too much attachment,
the walks, the leash, the play dead bits,
i ignore cats, until they wake and
stop ignoring me... waiting for food...
i like that, perfected petting i dare say...
indeed me alone in the park, how loved up
i became...
it was like the end of the world...
the shadows, the night, the moon, the loneliness
that became full testifying
the type of genius that acknowledges the active
ingredient of solipsism...
of course i'd life a wife... of course i would...
but i'd be bored with all the talk
and no canine proof of silence...
there i go again... watching a cat abstract
meow into momentum and meaning...
with man's inability to abstract...
indeed although i did argue with sartre
i agree with him about existence pre dating
essence, for example love...
the existence is an institutionalised coercion,
the essence if fiction via cinderella,
essentially our existence if biased rather than based
on fiction, the cold winters defeat our biases and base
us on the ridiculous need to wear fur coats
and become vegetarian out of consideration.
indeed... existence does prevail first,
but its per se seeks an essence under the bingo
structure of buckled under *what if
,
and as such it's clearly avoiding the pressing matters
of what defines continuum:
but alongside the modern woman i feel abashed
to think this: it's not worth it...
the law is in her favour... the social expectations are in mine,
she can forge a forgetfulness equal to my disengagement,
and we can proceed into modernity, critical
of islamic nostalgia reminiscent of the medieval period
of our cared for 10,000 years... when
the vanity of thinking was reduced to a paper aeroplane
thrown across a classroom, which you would never
deem necessary in papyrus form due to scarceness.
Breanna Riddle Dec 2016
No light to be seen
No shimmer or gleam
No sun and no shine
We left it all behind

All alone no love or hope
No more warmth just dark smoke
And no more friends
This must be the end!

No more laughing
Only darkness cracking you
Breaking you down
So you fall to the ground

No more happiness
No more forgiveness
Just the same old quiet scarceness
Just the same old judging silence

Alone and afraid
Dark and unwanted
Never to be loved
But always to be silenced

This is the must...
The things that just happen
For a reason or not
We will all be forgotten
SpiritHeart67 May 18
There is Abundance in Solidarity
And Scarceness in
Isolation
avery Dec 2023
To crave death as I do
To step on glass
To not look both ways
To wonder what lies

A forbidden realm
I see it so clearly,
Waterfalls and light
Elation and love

I wish to be the most at peace
To have what others cannot
To be where I want to without doing what I have to
The journey is what gets me

The exhaustion
The unknown
The versatility of the future
The scarceness of certainty

If not today
Tomorrow
If not then

— The End —