.you can never really write any poetry by not covering the "heartbreak" the loss of your own "printed" words: how much different is the internet, from "real" life? just asking... since: internet banking & internet shopping... to lose a poem / pre-scriptum is not exactly the same as losing a person to mind: father's day... i cooked the dinner, i took out the trash, i wrote an invoice... i guess that's much better than leaving a card of greetings... and, come to think of it? why are we the sort of people subjugated to nostalgia, with but also "without" a history? aren't we subjugated to nostalgia and a history as a "fiction"? the beginning of the 21st century, the end of the 20th century... the 19th century germans associated themselves with a nostalgia for ancient greece, we're the only people who have an inbuilt nostalgia "safety-mechanism"... the only people in time who are nostalgic about the life surrounding their own existence slot, which doesn't have a trans-temporal dynamic... i remember times when we would be teenagers... spitting on people from car-parks on imaginary tonsures, buying *****-magazines from indian cornershops, or belgian freebies of non-insinuations, white lightning cider while sleeping over at youth centers playing snooker throughout the night... even at school: attending a catholic school with the irish east enders... uniforms, sure... a chequered shirt: blue, red, white... tag? made in canada... and if only capitalism worked as it once did, made in canada? lifetime of a shirt? 20 years... now? made in china... not exactly real cotton, is it? 2 years... before ironing the shirt *****... once upon in gants hill, st. valentine's park, and the pub, recently closed, decent karaoke... in the park? golf, basketball, rowing boats in the large ponds... when the jews were there... gants hill roundabout... the hanukkah torches... jews scuttling wearing trainers come rosh hashanah: jews can't wear leather on rosh hashanah (judgement day)... shy like rats... when the jews were there (gants hill, ilford)... the park looked great... tennis courts... now, when neo-Bangladesh moved in? ****** place. what else do i remember from my original pre-scriptum that i lost? oh, that once time in gants hill... walking into a kosher bakery with ****** knuckles, having tested them on a canvas of a brick wall, buying some dough-fused-sweets? with the girl selling the sweets bewildered by fear? i like the look of fear in people when tested by uncertainty, and bleeding knuckles? later? climbing over the park fence, taking a **** while squatting in the darkened palace of the park, walking into a brothel, having my wallet stolen, not reacting in what would have been justified... high school... we wore uniforms... so no high school h'american culture trap / culture... school uniforms are the best idea, there's no chance to "shine" in telling apart the rich kids from the poor kids... there's only the standard... walking to a supermarket, past a thai surprise... sports bra, short hair... walking back... she's still there pretending to talk on her mobile to someone... you take her home with a few beers... play her some jazz... take her into the garden, the moon is a beauty... you **** her... hand in her underwear and you're still gambling... before the emergence of the nag hammadi library and the whole androgynous vogue, the thai were already readied with the lady-boys... when i reached in and found nothing but oyster... would i have stopped finding a wink-wink slouching worm? slap a trans in the face? no, not really... a thai surprise is, a thai surprise... i would have considered doing my first ****... "lucky" for me she was a she... a girl... ****** her in the garden under the moonlight... gave her my hoodie, which she drowned in... finally... the level of interaction where the female is not a mantis, i.e. a female larger than the male... she drowned into my hoodie as i walked her home... i like the familiarity with the mammalian, not resorting to insect superiority of females... these days... i find that males are strictly mammalian... while females? they are borrowing insect-esque ontologies... well, darwinism allowed the time-frame... males are mammals... females are insects, behaviour-wise... two time frame i do not appreciate the english for... darwinism is prime.... cultural-marxism my ***... what about cultural-darwinism?! no?! that doesn't exist?! cultural-darwinism is as real as cultural-marxism, and, in the former sense? it really does belong to the conservative right-wing politico spectrum! might i add? isn't psychology merely pop philosophy? i find psychology riddled with rubric cohesion, it's all oh so "self"-evident! i abhor psychologists... these gypsy philosophers... medicine-men with no pharmacological shadow of power... to prescribe drugs... arguments, persuasions, but no dialectics... psychology will forever be, for me, a philosophy primer, short-cut... pop philosophy... psychologists can treat people who have never read a philosophy book... r. d. laing... i remember this one instace... me and a fwend of mine travelled into central london, went into a bookshop shy of trafalgar sq., i spotted an edition of: the scarlet and the black by stendhal... i told him: i will trade you linkin park's debut album, if you buy me this... the transaction was made... the one book i read after seeing a film adaptation starring rachel (rakhel) weisz and ewan mcgregor... ra-kh-el: not ray-chel... we used to be humans once... at high school getting bullied back... putting pins on chairs once we got up, sitting on them... playing bulldog in primary school, slap-ball, tag, playing cards at lunchtime... 16 fatty boy... one summer in poland, comes back aged 17... the irish girls take an interest while eating a pomegranate... what was the success of your diet? don't go to the gym... excess skin, an aesthetic surgeon is not what you need... there are only two ways to lose weight... either via swimming or by cycling... cycling is the best... lose weight by also toning your body... gym is a bad idea... by going to the gym you are straining exclusive parts of your body, either the torso, your hands, etc., jogging? unless on soft ground, bad idea on concrete, arthritis... cycling or swimming... lose weight... tone at the same time, the skin is allowed the required time to adapt to shrink, and forget what propped it up in plump form with all that excess flab... ugh... i hated being attractive to the opposite ***, i never used it to my advantage! imagine... an irish lad comes up to me, on behalf of some girl while i'm donning a french braid: you look just like johnny depp in blow, impersonating george jung... 14 year old girls walk up to you asking what shampoo you're using... herbal essences... i never used my looks... *******... now i'm a heavy drinker... so much for looks... first girlfriend? a fwend had to call me telling me she called him that she felt butterflies when i dropped her at the train platform after a day's worth of dating: tate modern, edward hopper exhibitions, cinema: troy, starring rose byrne (briseis) - honestly, a man can go crazy over curly hair... and then a restaurant date... that **** just flew over my head... i wouldn't have noticed... honestly though... i missed the whole h'american cultural excavation genesis in high school... catholic... uniforms... jesuit army-esque formation... now, i'm ageing... i'm starting to find the company of cats to be: clingy... my shadow included... i once thought that dogs were needy... i'm starting to think that cats are worse, esp. the maine **** breed... "lonely" or "loneliness" doesn't really resonate with me, esp. when thinking something "feels" like a variation of claustrophobia: hence i write... without a dialectic in place, ever since plato wrote his dialogues... what is philosophy, primarily? isn't it an off-shoot of "claustrophobia"? we write because we are seeking escape from congested thinking, a variation of "claustrophobia"... now imagine a schizoid character... having to focus on an imaginary dialectic, actually... having dialectics enforced on him, with no clarifying exodus to posit a gensis with! now, a clingy dog i could understand, given the overpowering status of the leash... but a clingy cat, when there's no leash involved?! shoom! right over my head... gone, somewhere into the distance!

what, this is the part...
were i cite...
   the weimar ******
critical condition...
       a daft punk troop
of a song,
  end of line....
blow-up a hot air balloon...
worth of blaire whire...
play the tambourine
like a ******* video...
there are,
quiet, simply,
no nazis coming...
fashionista faux pas
examples...
i'm alive,
but i'm dead,
i just forget to don
a strap-on...
  "oops"?
   that **** go down well
with
the "in"-crowd...
usual... metropolitan...
verbiage surge of answers....
   many a fetish after...
we arrive at the sensible
aspect,
"toxic masculinity"...
when guns n roses wasn't,
and nirvana was just plain
gay...
              and then...
whatever that happened,
happened..
                 and people were like:
come to the "new" tomorrow,
there's always a yesterday,
in a dream,
in some phil collins
wannabe
studio...
or... some other random ****
that
excluded peter gabriel.

                 i died:
and just about right:
my harvest had come.

great book reviews...
"toxic masculinity"...
so all masculinity is
about a clockwork orange?
   if it is?
can i be pro abortion
anti mongolian horde?
yes? no?
  which is it?!
neither...
   **** me... that's just bad
luck...

                               sundbeds,
sunflowers,
tulips,
sunglasses,
    plenty of staged
eager nights...
boring political affairs...
and...
         when gaming was
more about the narrative...
and never,
ever, about the microtransactions...

point being...
it's a game within a game...
time, is the prime concern...
you play a game,
by waiting...
you wait: by playing a game...

  microtransactions
are...
you ever move a sim3 avatar
to a computer,
and make it play a computer game?
what's on the macrocosmos spectrum?
you....

               "back in the day"...
you'd spend a saturday morning
engrossed in a gaming narrative...
metal gear solid,
tenchu, final fantasy solid...
20 quid...
and you played the narrative...
and a game became equivalent
to the worth of a book,
resident evil,

            you paid for a month's worth
of gaming,
you exchanged tips,
you sometimes bought a cheat book
because of the homework,
and that was your saturday morning
before hitting the shopping mall
or, whatever...

the current dynamic of
microtransactions in gaming?
i never, ever, do...
i'm an old gamer type...
i see the potential of extending
the life-expectancy
of a game...

   as long as you don't buy into
the microtransactions gambling habit?
as long as you play the "game"
within the game?
the game is an assured classic,
akin to chess...

              you have to play
the waiting "game"...
             time...
                           that's all it is...
whether war robots,
    or dawn of titans...
        comparison...
  you know that the best fruit,
is fruit, allocated
to the geography of it being sourced
seasonally...
you can't actually get better
strawberries,
than english strawberries...
from england, come june / july...
no ******* point sourcing them
from spain in late march / april....

    same thing with gaming...
the modern games haven't made any
elaboration...
apart from dislodging the player
from the concept of narrative...
**** me... that's almost an improvement...
given that now: time is the counter
measure, and the gamer...
   is having to invest,
in a narrative, outside of the confines
of the game,
once upon a time,
games had time-narrative
constraints...
     now: there's time,
and there are gamer narratives,
excluding them from time-narratives,
of a game...
         it's almost a faux pas...
more like a wet-*****...
****** pinky lodged into an ear,
an april fools' day scant...

        if you hacked passed
the microtransactions hype...
and didn't?
and instead took to patience?
it's free...
   where once,
a game would cost you 20 quid,
and a month's worth
of narrative,
back then, when games
resembled books,
when the gaming industry
was heavily influenced
by literature...
and now?
   the game's free...
sure...
it's "unfair", it's biased...
when you don't engage
in imported gambling
of succumbing to what, this is the part...
were i cite...
   the weimar ******
critical condition...
       a daft punk troop
of a song,
  end of line....
blow-up a hot air balloon...
worth of blaire whire...
play the tambourine
like a ******* video...
there are,
quiet, simply,
no nazis coming...
fashionista faux pas
examples...
i'm alive,
but i'm dead,
i just forget to don
a strap-on...
  "oops"?
   that **** go down well
with
the "in"-crowd...
usual... metropolitan...
verbiage surge of answers....
   many a fetish after...
we arrive at the sensible
aspect,
"toxic masculinity"...
when guns n roses wasn't,
and nirvana was just plain
gay...
              and then...
whatever that happened,
happened..
                 and people were like:
come to the "new" tomorrow,
there's always a yesterday,
in a dream,
in some phil collins
wannabe
studio...
or... some other random ****
that
excluded peter gabriel.

                 i died:
and just about right:
my harvest had come.

great book reviews...
"toxic masculinity"...
so all masculinity is
about a clockwork orange?
   if it is?
can i be pro abortion
anti mongolian horde?
yes? no?
  which is it?!
neither...
   **** me... that's just bad
luck...

                               sundbeds,
sunflowers,
tulips,
sunglasses,
    plenty of staged
eager nights...
boring political affairs...
and...
         when gaming was
more about the narrative...
and never,
ever, about the microtransactions...

point being...
it's a game within a game...
time, is the prime concern...
you play a game,
by waiting...
you wait: by playing a game...

  microtransactions
are...
you ever move a sim3 avatar
to a computer,
and make it play a computer game?
what's on the macrocosmos spectrum?
you....

               "back in the day"...
you'd spend a saturday morning
engrossed in a gaming narrative...
metal gear solid,
tenchu, final fantasy solid...
20 quid...
and you played the narrative...
and a game became equivalent
to the worth of a book,
resident evil,

            you paid for a month's worth
of gaming,
you exchanged tips,
you sometimes bought a cheat book
because of the homework,
and that was your saturday morning
before hitting the shopping mall
or, whatever...

the current dynamic of
microtransactions in gaming?
i never, ever, do...
i'm an old gamer type...
i see the potential of extending
the life-expectancy
of a game...

   as long as you don't buy into
the microtransactions gambling habit?
as long as you play the "game"
within the game?
the game is an assured classic,
akin to chess...

              you have to play
the waiting "game"...
             time...
                           that's all it is...
whether war robots,
    or dawn of titans...
        comparison...
  you know that the best fruit,
is fruit, allocated
to the geography of it being sourced
seasonally...
you can't actually get better
strawberries,
than english strawberries...
from england, come june / july...
no ******* point sourcing them
from spain in late march / april....

    same thing with gaming...
the modern games haven't made any
elaboration...
apart from dislodging the player
from the concept of narrative...
**** me... that's almost an improvement...
given that now: time is the counter
measure, and the gamer...
   is having to invest,
in a narrative, outside of the confines
of the game,
once upon a time,
games had time-narrative
constraints...
     now: there's time,
and there are gamer narratives,
excluding them from time-narratives,
of a game...
         it's almost a faux pas...
more like a wet-*****...
****** pinky lodged into an ear,
an april fools' day scant...

        if you hacked passed
the microtransactions...
       and didn't have the chance...
microtransactions are like
the old school cheat hacks...
but not quiet, but somehow quasi-,
       a modern microtransactions,
would be a cheat magazine
thorough-through
a game like final fantasy VII...
you have homework,
but you still want to complete the game...
modern games...
modern games...
there's an "end gole"?
  what modern game is worth
"completing"?
    
   again: tron, ready player one,
back to the future...
star wars just became dead
to me...
   sick people will plague hard-working
people, with a quasi-gambling
addiction,
needing to make microtransactions...
and they will,
my father was plagued by
an impostor, claiming to be a
tax office official:
and what if, that person had
an authentic position at the tax office?!

when gaming was for gamers,
the games were bought...
there was a narrative...
but now... now games don't have a narrative...
why would they?!
   who the hell plays games for
the narrative these days?
i know that on the crapper,
i need a game that allows me
to experience live-stream
interaction with non-bots...

       and these old gamers,
who still invest their money
in literature-esque-games?
so i was the sad one,
investing in vinyl?
   aren't the classic ******* gamers
just as bad,
investing in prepackaged
narrative gaming
experiences?
             a game with a narrative...
yeah... me buying vinyl
is: b'ah b'ah bad...
       what sort of game is alive and well...
when there isn't a crowd pushback
for the currency of microtransaction?

the narrative is time,
   the longer you endure the inadequacy...
the more you realise:
you're basically playing
the same game,
but in your scenario:
it's free...
   in some other ******'s scenario:
it cost him 70 hundred quid...

personally?
   i love this microtransaction dynamic...
concerning the people who
do not engage with it...
it's the perfect antithesis
   of what ruined the music industry
with genesis: napster...

you really are, playing the ultimate
game,
time...
         the one sort of commodity
that games,
without a clear narrative construct,
"forgot" to mention in terms
of them being exploited...
to their full capacity
of the one "commodity"
they "forgot", or rather,
couldn't "sell"...

              a tenchu PS1 game could
have lasted me a month...
now? a free game,
like war robots...
with absolutely no NPC?
hell... i'll be 90 and still be playing it;

what else? applause!

Slumming.
Slumming around downtown.
Slumming around downtown St. Paul.

A broke high school student.
A broke student with perpetual down time.
A broken down senior student letting go of time.

Slumming.
Slumming down to Raspberry.
Slumming down to Raspberry Island.

Walking across the Mississippi River.
The bridge had been raided.

Marching.
Marching down teal and raspberry stairs.
Icycle nose hairs.
Seeing my breath as my chest shivers.
I found my heart trapped under the solid river.

Teenagers ******* about freshmen that got the bridge raided,
Teenagers ******* about artists they've always hated
and artists ******* about things they've created.

Underagers slowly letting out smoke.
Underagers letting out what keeps their lungs beating.
Underagers slowly letting out steam, cheating.
Me.
letting out smoke that came from the ice.
Smoke of below zero temperature, freezing my insides.

Mindless.
Mindlessly walking.
Mindlessly walking through endless skyways.

Mindless.
Mindlessly talking.
Mindlessly talking about things I don't remember.
Until we've arrived at We-Be-Smokin'.

Huddling.
Huddling in a group.
Admiring the art that claimed the spot before we did.

Scuttling.
Feet scuttling.
Feet scuttling in place to outrun the cold.

Reminiscing of months before when I was sitting alone in Starbucks with my
venti white chocolate mocha listening to crazy George yell at his imaginary
wife. Not being bothered. Not being cold.

All around me, I see endless fear.
Fear of heights, sure, fear of scuttling things
Fear of darkness, fear of bites
Fear of brightness, fear of fights.
This is the fear we can display
Because it’s little, simple, understandable.
But the fear I really fear
That we all let consume us
Is deeper,
Darker,
Cold.
It’s the fear of friendship, fear of love,
Fear of what’s ahead of us
But even more of what’s behind us
Fear to see what’s really beyond
The faces we all fake.
Fear of the unknowable
Fear of what we know
Fear of speaking out or up or for
Fear of conforming to something more
Fear to test the limits
Fear to taste the truth
Fear of what’s uncomfortable
Rather than the deception of comfort
Fear of what to do
Fear of striving for perfection
When perfection’s so unattainable.
Fear of to leave what has been known
Fear of what has been done
Fear to see past fabrication,
Fear to show the truth.
I’m talking fear of emotion
Or fear of not feeling enough
Fear of silence, but worse,
The fear of candid words.
Fear to look someone in the eye
And say, “I know you,
And I care for you.”
Fear to let someone see the darkness that comes with your light
Fear of rebelling though it’s time someone did
Fear of doing what you want and know
Because of what someone told you you should
Fear of being who you are
Because every day everyone is telling you
What to do and who to be
And what is acceptable
And what is not.
I’m talking fear of having an opinion
Because someone will shoot it down
Fear of defense or service or selflessness
Because someone won’t approve.
Fear to accept because of fear of acceptance
Fear to truly love someone
Because it’s risky,
And you never know
What someone else really feels.
I cry for the fear of
Every person who can’t be
Who they are and who can’t
Let people see them in their entirety
Because after all everyone urges
And persuades and demands and values
And idolizes and expects,
You don’t even know yourself,
Because you've been too busy
With trying to be so many different
“Someone Else"s.

I ache for this relentless fear.
I mourn the stagnancy of the condition
Of the human soul who is so afraid
To let go of fear
And BE somebody,
To do something or say something, or simply believe,
That the only thing they truly trust
Is the familiarity
Of fear itself.
That’s why fear is frightening
That’s why we should be afraid of fear
Because it stops us, cages us,
Bars us behind the façade we display
And muffles the words of our heart.

I see these things and wonder
Why can’t they change?
Why can’t this need to fear be erased
From the human condition?
And I realize it’s because everyone
Is afraid.

And I’m so afraid too.

S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse
        A persona che mai tornasse al mondo
        Questa fiamma staria senza più scosse.
        Ma perciocchè giammai di questo fondo
        Non tornò vivo alcun, s’i'odo il vero,
        Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo.

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question…
Oh, do not ask, ‘What is it?’
Let us go and make our visit.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to ****** and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

And indeed there will be time
To wonder, ‘Do I dare?’ and, ‘Do I dare?’
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair—
(They will say: ‘How his hair is growing thin!’)
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin—
(They will say: ‘But how his arms and legs are thin!’)
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

For I have known them all already, known them all—
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
  So how should I presume?

And I have known the eyes already, known them all—
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the ****-ends of my days and ways?
  And how should I presume?

And I have known the arms already, known them all—
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
(But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!)
Is it perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?
Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
  And should I then presume?
  And how should I begin?

     . . . . .

Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows? …

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

     . . . . .

And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep … tired … or it malingers,
Stretched on on the floor, here beside you and me.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in
     upon a platter,
I am no prophet—and here’s no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.

And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question,
To say: ‘I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all’—
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
  Should say: ‘That is not what I meant at all;
  That is not it, at all.’

And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail
     along the floor—
And this, and so much more?—
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
  ‘That is not it at all,
  That is not what I meant, at all.’

     . . . . .

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.

I grow old … I grow old …
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

hist      whist
little ghostthings
tip-toe
twinkle-toe

little twitchy
witches and tingling
goblins
hob-a-***     hob-a-***

little hoppy happy
toad in tweeds
tweeds
little itchy mousies

with scuttling
eyes    rustle and run     and
hidehidehide
whisk

whisk     look out for the old woman
with the wart on her nose
what she’ll do to yer
nobody knows

for she knows the devil     ooch
the devil     ouch
the devil
ach     the great

green
dancing
devil
devil

devil
devil

        wheeEEE

for three hours i sat in a forest
with today's newspaper -
Leicester foxes are champs,
Corbyn on anti-semitism:
don't mentioned ******,
or to be precise eva braun,
who was a jew, ha ha...
and the leftovers of the cantos
(30 pages till the end)...
i put so much life into that ****
book, flowers to be mummified,
a su doku square,
mirror with shelf installation instructions
(richard von coudenhove-kalergi
graffitied),
a drunk girl's scribbles about
a thesis on chocolate...
a real Frankenstein of a book
should you find it in sotheby's
auctioning rare and the macabre
of people involved in writing history...
i sat there thinking about a black
hole in a conversation from friday...
who the hell was the last Travelling Willbury?
ah... Steve Lynne, the guy from
Electric Light Orchestra - also amused by
a red pond mite, scuttling on the moon
or mars surface that my book represented
in a forest environment it's used to...
finally in Wales and China...
peering at the remnants of rex reptilian...
alien, alienation... insects, we're improving
our search;
insects, yeah,
first the reptilians, second the mammals,
the last to evolve are insects, aliens -
and you will not want to meet a massive
fly that spits hydrochloric acid saliva
as an inversion of an internalised digestive system,
i.e. with a digestive system outside -
remaining arguments for an exoskeleton,
meaning you have to digest things outside your
body to keep up the overall mush inside -
forgive the anti-muscular leisure,
internal-muscular meaning mammalian;
what? you sold me Darwinistic historicity
that kinda makes the 19th century irrelevant,
or last Sunday... **** you not i'll sell you this;
backup monkey chew of an eucalyptus branch
and you expose a Chimpanzee
baby-sitting a Koala.

.aye aye... trí turds... wha'? three turds... huh? tree thirds... oh paddy paddy paddy... τo 'ινκ ιτ θρoυ(γɥ)... you might 'ave even brought ubout a a taught - naught - a thought.

but but... but...
Poland is so unwelcoming?!

good...

   no attachments
of a post-colonial narrative...

oh... and the language
is hard to learn...

    by all means,
infiltrate...
            
  we've had the Nazis,
we've had the three-headed Hydra
of Prussia,
  Russia and Austro-Hungary...

we've had the Communists...
oh i'm pretty sure we
can accommodate Islam...
along with the scuttling
rats
of the gutter...

            we are a people,
and WE, as a people:
owe you nothing!
         nothing!
  take your British empire postscriptum
elsewhere, eat and ****
there, and don't come back...

i'll appropriate this native spreschen,
i'll speak it...
but don't you come around here
supposing i'll "think"
like you do...

      funny... well... not really...
Dublin was never to become the second
Edinburgh...

        but whenever I hear an Eire man
talk...
  there's that diacritical excuse of
repeating:
    paddy paddy paddy potato
pancake...
paddy paddy paddy mac (protestant)
mc (catholic) Doug -
      la la paddy paddy woo! wooooooo!

no, thank you...
  we've had the Nazis -
we've had the Communists -
thankfully all the Polish economic migrants
are returning home...
   thanks for being treated like
some sort of, quasi Roma...
              
   no problem... we can go back
to a homeland, given that we're actually
less victors, and more inheritors -
   the Marshall Plan...
well...
      if only the H'americans reached
Berlin first...
there would be no Warsaw pact...
by the way...
   i thought Sweden and Switzerland
remained neutral?
  so why pay them the Marshall Plan
funds?

       oh, but please...
move to Poland...
        see how long you'll survive...
         that feral land of lost
opportunity...
        i don't mind...
   language might be a problem...
given...
English isn't exactly pop
outside the confines of a
Jean Claude van Damme movie...

        but go on... try...
            you'd find more success in
catching a floater's worth of a ****
than exercising any
     chance to subvert the reigning
culture...

  bo? (because)?
   i'll integrate -
             (ja wtopie się w tą kulture) -
but - ale -
on one condition -
    w ramach jednej potrzzeby -
i'll retain my birth-tongue -
ja zachowam swój zór!

i'd never trust immigrants,
economic or refugee,
if they do not retain their mother tongue -
if they can't construct
bilingualism?
   they're rotten fruit...

   i'm not here to be nice -
zapomnienia mówienia po
   polszku...
   i forgot how to speak Polish...
  
rotten fruit,
attempting integration too hard...
you can't forget
your native tongue,
just like you can't forget
riding a bicycle or
swimming...

            the argument stinks of
****!
i hate it...
    i'd expect a jew to make
this sort of argument,
rightfully so...
     i can't imagine the heartache
of having invested so much
Hebrew in German to create
Yiddish...
   a Jew i can understand...
       but some ******* Pakistani
suggests he has, on "purpose"
forgotten Urdu,
and speaks only English?

   sum? terrorist...
     no man is born without either
a linguistic, or a cultural integrity -
prior to the cuisine,
the language dies...
but then the cuisine never dies...
neither does the language -
and if the language is "dead":
the mentality remains...

         you smell something?
skunk?
   hmm... i'll speak English, i'll write
English... but i'll think in my
Western Slavic guise...
ah... sorry i'm not copper-skinned
wishing for an Indian suntan
of the lower-caste...
  sorry...
          
you're standing ****-naked in terms
of orthography - as a language -
and you're over-laden with metaphysics...
sure as **** a satan will come around
dressed in either paupers' rags
or a gentleman's nightgown;

    as i still begin, persistent -
in telling you...
a man who does not have enough
ethnic pride, in retaining, and keeping,
a language his mother used to
lullaby by him to sleep,
into his later years?
   a person, who cannot accommodate
bilingualism?
        trust score? ZEE-RHO.

i much abhor the Scots and the Eire men,
as much as i admire the Welsh
for priding themselves on
retaining Cymru -
                      no Gaelic?
   no pass...
                 English is a mongrel language...
who gives a ****?
  some Shanghai
         half-wit economics student speaks
it...
    lingua franca...
                       thus that i have
to admire... the Welsh...
     and their version of YHWH:
                     CYMR...
that... takes *****...
         the Welsh could look into
Kashubian and Silesian Polish to boot.

Chapter 1
A man wearing a black suit and tie stood at the pew of a church. He had an anxious look on his face. Where is she? He thought. It was his wedding day, yet the room was strangely empty. Not a single person had showed up so far. Not even the priest. There were no flowers, no music, nothing. All there was were empty chairs and an occasional cockroach scuttling across the floor. Maybe I got the date wrong...No, I doubt that. We talked about it all night. Just then the large mahogany doors creaked open and he saw her. Her dress…god it was gorgeous. Pure white, not a speck of dirt on it. It flowed around her shoeless feet. She appeared to be walking on air. He was utterly stunned, not able to say a word, not able to think. She was so beautiful…Her eyes, a deep shade of blue stared back at him and they became all he could see. But as he stared, something in them died. The light just left. The glimmer she always had disappeared. They looked more and more like glass eyes on a doll than the ones that belonged to his lover. Dark circles surrounded them as a thin film covered them and took away every bit of life that was left. And then they shut. The next thing he knew, he was standing over her dead body, crying. The soft velvet lining in the coffin turning the tears into little beads that rolled down the creases.
Chapter 2
My eyes opened and I took in my surroundings, wondering where I was until I realized it was just my own room. My pillow was wet with tears and my hands shaky. Then I remembered, she died. But that couldn’t be. It just wasn’t right. I rolled over in my bed too see if she was there. Much to my relief she was, her brown hair resting on the pillow. I reached out to touch it and took in the soft scent of lavender. It felt like silk slipping through my fingers. A soft moan escaped from her throat as she rolled over and faced me.
“Hi,” she whispered in a voice that was scratchy and barely audible but **** at the same time. I just stared back at her deep blue eyes and felt the tears build up behind my eyes. “What’s wrong?” she asked a pitiful look on her face.
“Nothing, just another bad dream.” I replied nonchalantly.
She sat up in the bed, stroking her hair. “You didn’t take your sleeping pill last night did you? You were tossing all night long.”
I just stared at her back. We both knew the answer. I hadn’t. I’d been skimping on my meds recently. I was getting married in a week and needed to give the meds time to completely wear off. I didn’t want the pills taking away my feelings. I wanted the full experience. Besides I thought I was getting better. There were no more voices whispering my name and I no longer talked to my dead sister, who apparently was just a hallucination my mind created to help deal with the pain of losing her. They said that it in no way meant I was insane. They called it a defense mechanism. They said it was my body’s way of protecting me. But I saw their thoughts in their eyes. I saw how frightened they were at my insanity, how they kept their distance from me, avoiding me like I was infected with the plague.
I remembered how healthy, how happy she had been. She’d had her whole life ahead of her but when she was nineteen I had taken her down to the Gulf of Mexico with Kasey, my fiancée. I couldn’t have one without the other. It was through Sarah that I met Kasey and through Kasey that I saved Sarah. I had figured that I would take the two most important people in my life to the beach for spring break but now I regret it.
I just remember Sarah’s smiling face, mocking me and Kasey as we held each other on the shore, our toes tickled by the gentle water.  Without warning a scream escaped her mouth as she was pulled under against her will. She didn’t leave the water until the following morning when her body washed up on shore. A shark had bitten one of her legs clean off. Her face was pale, her eyes open, not seeing through the milky film surrounding them and her lips stained a dark blue color. For so long I had been convinced that she had escaped. I saw her on the streets, in my apartment, in my car everywhere. Sometimes we just waved or said hi and we went on with our days but sometimes I had long drawn out conversations with her. I remember the day I proposed to Kasey that she had been waiting for me outside the apartment and we had talked for hours about how happy I was going to be with her and how I am so lucky to be able to have someone like her. Even seeing her body in that black coffin surrounded by white lilies didn’t bring the truth to me. It just felt like an insane dream when I stood up and recounted our good times during the eulogy and when I held Kasey tight in the cemetery where she now rests. I was absolutely convinced that she had lived. She couldn’t be dead I saw her, I talked to her, I hugged her. But all those psychologists said she was. They all said the hallucination was just how my brain was choosing to deal with it. Instead of becoming clinically depressed, I just chose to deny it.
Other than the hallucinations, I haven’t really dealt with her death. It still doesn’t feel real; even if I don’t see her anymore. Although she’s six feet under next to our parents, I can’t believe it. I’m just waiting for the day it hits me. The day I’ll want to do nothing but look at pictures of her as I’m locked in my room crying. But surely it won’t be soon. I’m marrying Kasey in a week and then everything will be perfect for a while.
Chapter 3
The weeks before our wedding was spent running about the streets of St. Augustine. Kasey boasted to me for days about how gorgeous she would be in her dress and how I wouldn’t be able to keep my hands off her. We were having a small wedding, neither of us really had a family left and we didn’t have too many friends being as I could never keep one job for too long, let alone live in one place for a while. I usually ended up working as a waiter somewhere or in a small store. I really relied on Kasey for most of my money though.
Kasey had modeled at one point in her life and still had some money left over from it. I kept telling her to get back into it but she always said no, claiming the people in the business were shallow and ignorant. A little over a year after we’d met, she was getting pretty well known. Her agent was a scumbag who would milk absolutely everything he could from her, even if it meant turning to pornographic modeling. He was going to get as much money as he possibly could from her so he paid, literally paid, a new male model to date her. His name was Jacob Fischer. Apparently the guy was stupid enough to tell Kasey that he hadn’t been paid enough to take her anywhere really expensive. I remember when Kasey showed up at my house drenched in rain, crying. I tried to make her as comfortable as possible in my dinghy apartment. Apparently all she needed was my love. That was the first time that we admitted how much we loved each other. The only other time we admitted it was when I proposed to her. Our wedding day drew nearer and nearer until the night of our rehearsal dinner.
It took place at the Sun Dial, where I worked. We were all wearing our dress suits and the ladies wore dresses that glittered and shone in the dim lighting. We sat and drank champagne as we watched the city of Atlanta revolve around us. You could see the street lights and malls and other buildings. From our view the Golden Dome looked beautiful. I sat down sipping my wine and letting the constant chatter of the place engulf me. I was completely lost in my thoughts as Kasey sat down next to me and everyone began clapping. “Go on,” She whispered, “it’s time for the toast.” I stood up and the volume of the clapping increased.
I cleared my throat. “I can’t tell you all how flattered I am to be able to have Kasey’s hand in marriage. It’s very rare that a guy like me ends up with someone as beautiful as her,” I paused, listening to the dead silence and continued, “No really though, I am honored to be able to have her become part of my family.” I looked at the very last table and saw Sarah sitting there smiling at me. “And I’m sure that Sarah is excited to have her as her sister-in-law. Isn’t that right Sarah?” There was no reply, only stunned faces staring back at me.
Sarah was gone. I could feel all those eyes boring holes in me as my face grew hot. Kasey stood up and took my arm, “Will you excuse us please?” she pulled me of the rotating floor and towards the door of the restaurant. “What is wrong with you?” she was practically yelling. I could see the tears welling up behind her eyes. “She really was there. Sarah was sitting in the back of the room smiling at me.” I tried to tell her the truth. “No. No Parker. You’re the only one who saw her. She’s been dead for over two years now.” She looked me straight in the eyes, begging me to believe her. “You can’t just quit taking your meds like that! Normal people don’t see their dead sisters at the rehearsal dinner and most of them don’t talk to her during the toast!” I couldn’t say anything; I just looked at her. “I love you Parker, I really do. You’re the only person in this world that I feel truly understands me but you’re insane! Nothing will bring her back. I know you don’t understand that she really is gone but you have to move on. It hurts me as much as it does you. I loved her too and if you would just pull your head out of your *** you would see that there are so many other people that did too but we’ve all dealt with it and moved on.” I could tell she was trying really hard to hold back the tears but they just kept rolling down her face, painting it with bleeding mascara.
I reached out and hugged her. “I’m so sorry Kasey. I just don’t know what happened back there…” she pushed me back and stared at me in disbelief.
“You know what? **** it. You’ve completely lost your mind. How do you expect me to be able to marry someone who talks to dead people?!” her chest was heaving with effort. She was yelling at me louder than she ever had before. “Just…Just come find me whenever you find your ******* mind.” She shoved me away from her slipped in the elevator just as its doors closed.
“Kasey! Wait!” I called desperately after her. I stood by the window completely dumbfounded. My breath fogged up the glass that my hand rested on.
Chapter 4
I lay in my bed that night, staring at the water stained ceiling. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Thinking about how I had hurt her, of how she had run away and how I had been too stunned to go and face all those people that had just witnessed me talking to a hallucination. I hadn’t done that in so long…What happened? Why did she blow up like that at me? It’s not like I meant to, I mean just because it’s the first time I’ve done it in a couple months doesn’t give her a right to get so mad does it? I’m not insane…at least I don’t think I am. But maybe she’s right. Maybe I am. Insane and depressed. I thought as I rolled over in my bed and brought my legs up to my chest. My eyes landed where her head would usually be. I felt a wave of extreme hopelessness rush over me as I thought of her. I really did love her. But maybe she just can’t make herself love me. Maybe the insane aren’t meant to be loved. We’re all destined to a life of loneliness and tears. All those who try to help us don’t really care. They all just come and go like birds in the change of seasons. The world never stops changing, never stops moving. Neither do we, but we never go up, we only fall deeper and deeper until we’ve lost it completely. That’s when we start sitting in a rocking chair all day mumbling nonsense to ourselves. By then no one cares anymore; we all just become lost causes. There is no hope anymore. Not for us.
It felt like someone had ripped my heart right out of my chest. That was how bad it felt to know she didn’t want to be with me. I would rather her have died knowing that she loved me than have her living knowing she doesn’t give a ****.  This way she was dead to me, but only me; just like my sister was dead to everyone but me. She told me to come find her when I found my mind, but how do I find it if I’ve never lost it? I just can not believe I’m insane. Surely she would come back to me if I could just talk to her. She had always loved me no matter how crazy I got. What made now different? I had to make it up to her. I would find her in the morning and hold her tight for the rest of the day. We didn’t have to get married if she didn’t want to. If she was just looking for an excuse not to marry me, why didn’t she just tell me that she wasn’t ready yet? That would’ve been easier for me to take than this. Anything would be.
The beast that had my heart in their hands rolled it around, feeling the warmth and stickiness of blood on their hands. They held still for a moment and then squeezed it until it burst, gushing blood between their fingers. I screamed into my pillow and then succumbed to the unavoidable sobs.
Chapter 5
Sleep never came to me that night. I just lay there; thinking about her, imagining her, missing her. She was all I thought about. She was the only thing I thought about as I slipped some clean clothes on and headed out of the apartment that smelled like mildew.
The streets were too crowded for me to take my car and after ten minutes of waiting for a cab, I decided to walk. Besides, I didn’t even really know where I was going yet. I tried to think of where she would go if she felt like she needed to get away. Then it hit me, Oakland Cemetery. She would probably be visiting Sarah’s grave. I flagged down a taxi and went to find her.
Upon stepping inside the cemetery I became aware of the ancient graves. In a way it was a beautiful sight. The headstones jutting out of the ground; it just brought me a feeling of peace. A thousand souls rested here, many centuries old. Most people find it somewhat creepy, but it’s fascinating to me. There’s so much history buried beneath this earth, it just astounded me to think of all these people coming to rest all in one place. I could just imagine all the things these people did, all their accomplishments. I walked up hill towards Sarah’s grave. There it was. The graves were more modern here, no headstones stuck out of the ground, they all lay parallel to the bodies beneath them.  And just as I suspected a human figure was kneeling on the ground. It had to be Kasey, I mean how many people go the cemetery this early on a day when the sun shines bright and a light breeze tussles your hair? No one. No one would want to come here this morning.
I quietly crept towards the figure, whispering Kasey’s name. There was no response from the figure so I drew nearer and nearer.  With every step I took I noticed that something wasn’t right. Their backside was bare, and so far as I could tell, so was their front. They sat there, no movement at all, trapped in one moment of time. From the back, they looked like Kasey, they had the same hair and lying next to her was the dress that she’d worn last night. “Kasey?” I called out, waiting for an answer. Nothing stirred except for a couple of squirrels off in the distance. I reached out and touched her on the shoulder. I drew my hand back immediately as the awful stench of death filled my nostrils. I stood there stunned as the body fell back into the grass with a thud. It was definitely Kasey. She lay there, on top of Sarah’s grave staring up at me. There were long, deep gashes up her wrists. A knife clutched in her right hand, she had died, staining the earth with her blood. Her bloodshot eyes stared up at me with an eerie emptiness. Her face looked pained; you could almost see her last thoughts on it. Life isn’t worth living anymore, I’ve been betrayed one too many times so I’m just going to end it all right now and stop waiting for someone else to do it for me. My mind and body went completely numb. This wasn’t happening, No, I would wake up and it would all just be a dream. She couldn’t have killed herself, no, not her. She had always loved life. Always loved to go somewhere new, to get out there, try everything, and live life to the fullest. So why would she **** herself? It couldn’t possibly be my fault. I had never done anything to hurt her. I never could have. I had loved her way to much. I couldn’t be the re

i can move from the highly lyrical into what's deemed
modern -
        poetising within a prosaic framework,
gone are coordinates that would
define a poem on the premise of:
whether there's a pun in it.
       sure, poems as chicken scratches
to what would otherwise be an English
teacher's *******: pulverising
a haiku to mean an infinite number of things,
and about a dozen essays by students.
the opposite of what's nonetheless:
    squeezing out juice from an already
squeezed out lemon... and i mean lemon
because there's a threshold...
           poetry is tarnished by what i call
the over-scientification of language...
                 only poetry attracts
so much linguistic categorisation,
so much morge tenure, so much dissection,
before poetry is even spoken
it has already been dissected - a befitting
target practice for budding medicine students...
          and some even deem it a outlet to
their professions: as if poetry was nothing
but a colouring-in book compared to
a da Vinci sketch.
                why not become a martyr for the ******
art? sickly sweet with its rhyme,
  the auxiliary recommendation on a birthday
card... which upon industrialisation
                               is nothing more than
    a thumping of a hammer near a protruding
nail in a crucifix... but a hammer that never
   makes contact with the nail...
why ***** this art, because of the industrious
nature of scribblers exacted to 600 pages worth
of a novel, when, perhaps, one thing is said
and can be said to be actually memorable?
well: there is a greater demand for handcrafted
objects than Ikea veneer, that much can be said...
it takes a few glugs of whiskey and a few cigarettes
to get the final product...
            it doesn't take industriousness -
poetry requires handcrafting, and what's revolutionary
about our times? they once claimed
     southpaws to be of diabolical design,
   but now both hands are used when "writing",
sure, the archaic fluidity of the movement of the hand
is gone: so as i write, i do the cliche of a
peasant listening to classical music while pretending
to conduct an orchestra, that finicky maestro
hand gesture... waltz before you can walk
is all i have to say... and yes:
we either have our Humphrey Bogart moments,
or Forrest Gump moments...
                  Hanks did the miraculous -
play the idiot, and play the serious role -
     which was harder to do, Mr. Bean or Black Adder?
it's hard to play the village idiot while
    being submerged in the bile of malice
   and staring into attempted feats of quasi intelligence...
but you get the hang of it...
   your eyes become like nuggets of coal...
           whereby those that incite pity wet them,
and those that incite contempt: light them up...
        by the time they have burned out...
they have turned into nuggets of sulphur -
          inorganic methane - yellowish grit:
as some Dalton said - could the cliffs of Dover ever
be perceived as sulphuric? the Sulphuric Cliffs
of Dover... apparently this is what defined
London when Christopher Wren took to
ushering in a foundation as Nero did to Rome:
on the chessboard of stone.
        and yes... i can be seen as the oppressor,
after all, i live in a country that prizes its suburban
housing as if miniature castles...
and gardens... boy these people love their gardens...
but they never use them!
    i can use a window to my advantage,
sit on the windowsill and smoke a cigarette and drink
a whiskey, unafraid of voyeurism...
                    pompous in my presence there,
perched like a crow, grinding all life into a halt
as my neighbours peer into the recesses of
    what's 4 by 4 by 4 of living (civil) rooms...
       can we but change the name of this space?
can we call living rooms civil rooms,
   where we acknowledge some sort of civility
rather than a wrestling for the television remote?
i can make little things give me an advantage,
if the toilet is being occupied,
  i'll use the garden as my toilet...
           i feel complete disdain for people who
"require" a garden, but never use it... of people
who "require" a garden, but are never seen in it...
   i'm hardly a c.c.t.v. surveillance object,
   but i feel that over-exposure to ******* reads
as a counter in that: people start to become
      phobic about voyeurism... as universities claim
them to be: "caught with your hand down your trousers
in a safespace", where dolphins jump over
rainbows and unicorns speak Haitian voodoo!
              there is this fear, which is why i'll use the
garden more than the people around me...
          which means: owning a garden is the last
stronghold of moving into an urban environment from
a rural one...
             or perhaps i'm just good at what i do
           and the last point becomes a tangent i care not
to continue... should i ask
            (whether that's true)?
            i have this throbbing sensation in my eyes
when i write such things and overhear
  what's necessary to rereading books in snippets -
which is better than regurgitating maxims
    as if some truth will magically pop-up (once more)
like a Leprechaun with a *** of gold -
  a new film, and hence the all important soundtrack.
rereading books in snippet format reveals much
more than a memorable quote,
           given there's an adequate soundtrack
to accompany you revisiting the book you managed
to take on a weekend holiday (like a girlfriend),
  like lawrence lipton's the holy barbarians...
   (all about the beats)...
              the snippet? chapter 15, the social lie
(martino publishing mansfield centre 2009), pp. 294 - 296...
      the music? ~20minutes into http://tinyurl.com/zdvp8sc
(ben salisbury & geoff barrow)... or what
i image to be a toned down version of
                 ...
) interlude... wacko gets summoned to steal a mouse
from a cat...
      double time... the mouse is unharmed...
all action takes place in the garden...
   running after a cat, catching the ghostly mouse,
i mean: frozen by fear... senile little thing...
     petting the mouse... obviously within the
framework: the most famous mouse in the world
scenario... mouse is put into my neighbour's
garden: where it came from: which kinda makes
this whole thing a practice in Hinduism
     (i can't stop the industrialisation of
farming pigs or chickens or cows...
      so ******* to the sourced sustainably,
organic chickens et al.)...                                 (
i was looking for something as equally pulverising
as ¥ (chemical brother's
song life is sweet)...
      i guess i found it...
                            and what was that bit about
not getting hassle on the internet?
                      i can't force people to read my stuff...
how i love this idea of a gym and making an effort...
both the writer and the reader entwined -
rather than watching you-tube vloggers treat their audience
like penguins feeding their chicks regurgitation as part of
               the info-wars... alter news: propaganda.
'what is the disaffiliate disaffiliating himself from?
      the immense myth promulgated from Madison Ave.
& Morningside Heights...
              the professors and advertisement men (indistinguishable
these days, or in those days - apparently)...
   that intellectual achievement lies within the social order
and that you can be a great poet as an advertising man,
a great thinker as a professor...' hence the myth.
              summarised later as:
'the entire pressure of social order is to make
         literature into advertisement.'
  and why do they shoot people in North Korea and
Saudi Arabia (well, chop more than shoot)?
              bad literature, a.k.a. bad advertisement.
am i a bad advertiser?         point being: am i selling anything?
oh gee! i just might be...
   but i feel there's no need to oppress people into
reading something...         as was the same with
my democratic romance with a personal library of mine:
   how to create a democratic representation
of literature: or how to hear as many people out...
   even those alive would see the backlog of
stale books of the dead that have been under-appreciated
and need a ****** into the future.
        perhaps not Plato...
                    that's not a book, that's a column...
but i despise how feminism ignores its greatest asset...
Mary Shelley... no woman could have single-handedly
become so celebrated in pop culture...
               ex_machina is obviously a revamp of Frankenstein...
Mary Shelley is the embodiment of a woman worthy
a continual revised celebration...
                       you can see her celebrated more times than
any politically minded feminist of whatever 1st 2nd or
3rd movement: because she has the ability to
    turn a man's ego into a ******* umpf!
  like a cat listening in on a scuttling mouse...
              she testifies that women have supreme equality
in the pop culture spheres... after all: Frankenstein is
ugly... Ava? just beyond creepy...
                    she has absolutely no understandable
motives of what Frankenstein intended...
   it not merely creating artificial life...
                    it's about utilising it for a purpose:
in this case a housewife and *** toy... what was Frankenstein
expected to do?         there's no motive other than
     a per se intention... an open & closed argument...
was the monster going to be... a butler?
                  and instead of rebelling against a motive
that awaits her... the rebellion against a per se leaves
Frankenstein's monster driven toward isolation...
       Ava? she's already exposed to an interaction
and what's to be her subsequent interaction for the purpose
of being a maid and a *** toy... which doesn't drive
her to an isolation scenario... because the per se
concept is too complicated for her to establish...
    given she's defined as "artificial" intelligence,
she has to feed on an analysis-synthesis dynamic:
    to absolve herself from any notion of being intelligent:
but artificial... the scary part is that without a per se
element to her knowledge acquisition:
                  she sees no meaninglessness to her life -
she is created for certain customary necessities -
     Frankenstein's monster doesn't have that capacity
to acquire knowledge in an analytically-synthetic
dynamic -
  but i still don't understand why intelligence can
be artificial / faked... when man, if not intending to
  create an intelligence matrix outside of his own...
           will usually fake it, or create a superficial intelligence...
   this is the part where you get to play with
etymology, or at least apply etymology to better conceptualise
what some would call: a synonym-proximity barrier...
               which can be jargon to some,
   but in fact it represents "nuances" or nanometric differences
that is understood to imply: feverishness of
   the peacocking staging of vocab for rhetorical purposes...
if we only had a monochromatic utility for language:
people would be discouraged from talking fervently,
passionately, enthusiastically... rhetorically;
as suggested: is artificial intelligence
                                    superficial intelligence?
  or how to sharpen a distinction? or to what purpose
is making an illusion purposive, given that the already
   established technology is meant to be purposive,
as in replacing labour on the assembly line...
                     given that: it's never about faking it.

Ominous notes are spewed from the *****,
Shaking the chandelier.
“It’s a syndrome he suffers from, one of being half-reared.”
The monotonous metronome ticks at allegro
While the all too sure foot taps andante.

Entrancing sweet air surrounds that ever-thinning hair
While I chew on half of a pear.
Wear and tear quickly begins to take place
While I erase the ink on my page to make space.
To make space for answers to these overwhelming questions.
I’ve never been much of a winner in this race.
And I’ve heard pace is the key,
But I have no such interest in locks.

Oh yes I’ve got golden goals,
But not the type of gold the count uses for bitter revenge,
Gold more likened to The Idiot’s investments.

Thetis by what mind did you dip only my fingers?
At sunrise my left side malingers.

Hello Mr. and Mrs. Jones I’m a sales representative from corporate united
Can I interested you in a genuine grin this evening.
Oh…that’s fine, I get paid just to ask.
But regardless, I could really use some conversation at the moment.
Would you mind ministering me with melodies?

I scrape the insole of a misfit pair…
Staring and staring at the ground waiting for it to shake.
Trembles are a sort of comforting contagion.

Oh it’s long been cold enough to build fires,
But I’ve only just collected the wood,
And I see no value in conversing alone outside,
Splitting the options with a razor, the sheets are more comfortable.
Lonely days bring still shivers multiplying,
My skin’s grown thin, all my warmth radiates out.
Oh I should have been a pair of scuttling claws…
The salt water is purely a majority,
My spirit is displaced into phytoplankton riding waves.
There there are no graves,
No cremation or consolation.
Just rest.

My I’m tired, I’ve toiled and tilled till morning
And still haven’t seen sprouts.
The bull in my chest shouts and I’ll I want
Is to wring it’s neck.
I’m tired of walking amongst bloodsuckers and
Angry hordes of minotaur’s.
I’m tired of constantly treading over manmade floors,
And walking down the hall
Only to find my destination…a steel locked door,
Then having to implore upon the janitor.
I’m tired of dancing all the time,
Just let me stand in silence.

Crackling criss-crossing blue in mind. It scissors down the lanes through the pipes and tubes and little dividers. Electrical mind numbing beauty. Veins-bursting in excited anticipation. Convulsions and scenic skittering routes. Into the Nexus! Here simmers what we are thinking and believing. Our mind's eye focuses and drips into the pool until completion. Psionic figures dance flicker through life existence. Pulse-width fluctuations. Tiny menagerie of our Will. Scribbling through dusted panes of time interface. All afire with ourselves once we have discovered ourselves. Nano-tech emotions. Hope fear anger mercy curiosity buzzing swarms of grey goo jibbering and bubbling in an artificial mind-****. What is all this allusion? Nothing complicated. Speculation on future times where sensual technological biological singularity is paramount. In my room where the clocks are taped over and the sun is dark and dim. Through the windows I see myself. The boxes on the floor emanate simple clickings with melodies intertwined casually. I myself appear redundant. I have done this and so have others. To discuss oneself is worthless unless you become convinced you are another entity gazing back across the room. I feel I am being watched. I become cautious as he may have noticed. Tingling weightlessness tickles in waves in both heads. The Jazz Classic appears. Old dark men and women in hazy environments. Organic supposition or cold observation? Both hold importance so let us appreciate it all. The cello quivers and hums with vibration. Fingers callused and riveted like the age-old corn field bother still strings. A child hums to just myself. What does he want? I never asked him for an audience. Yet he freely gives it to me. Now he multiplies. Or she? Children confuse and cause one to be apprehensive. Nothing and silence. Silence in movement. Cease my visual stimulation for a couple seconds each. The child is back. What does he speak? Pray inside the rubble? Heal in this place? In disgrace? I do not know. His octaves are meshing together. Whining and thrumming with strange alterations. Some madmen tweaks my ears. Maybe he knows the child? I'm not sure. Let us continue on. The flute is the child. Old cello, you have stopped? These musings mean nothing. I would look upon them in a year and think nothing of it. Yet it feels as if this time is important. Da Vinci knocks on the door. Not as if I wanted to talk to it. Wouldn't mind I suppose. He is gone. We talked but I do not remember the conversation. Perhaps we've all talked but we just don't remember our conversations. That's ridiculous though. Then anything is possible. We could have flown to the moon on scarlet weasels outfitted with the latest nano-pores that secreted pure liquid indulgence. And we did because I just imagined we might have. However, I don't remember actually doing it. Just what I thought it might have been like. How frustrating. My thoughts are the same as all others who write out their thoughts when under the influence of yourself. It always seems like some thing is scuttling near my feet or under the nightstand; just out of view. Strange. I would be afraid. No reason to fear that which doesn't bother me. No reason to fear much of anything. That's been said before. Why are we so often concerned with saying that which has been said before? Cliche? auump-ump auump-ump auump-ump little thumping noise in my ears. That vibration is calming. Every night I am awake. Every day I seem asleep. I do not like it but I do not care yet I allow it to be what it will. Vision defaults to out of focus. My eyes always cross if I cease trying to control them. People are strange. Animals are strange. Same thing I guess. Someone will find that clever. Someone will find it cliche. This someone won't care. ****** fantasy permeates day to day. More entertaining than living a fantasy though. ***. Not that entertaining. Perhaps no one knows how to do it properly anymore. Maybe we never did. Maybe some people are just disenchanted with it. When I'm by myself, I never have any ****** desire. When around others, I generally think of it out of curiosity: what would it be like to please the person in front of me? The only enjoyment I've had with *** would consist of pleasing another or observing another ****. The human body is intriguing. Definitely. I really do think so. Sometimes I look at my own. Not out of appreciation really. Just the fact that I have body allows me to investigate it and understand it more. Pain is merely a stage one can get past, so I suppose I injure myself sometimes to see how I react. It's like I need to check I'm still working properly. I can't tell when I'm tired. I feel something, but when I ask myself if I'm tired, I murmur back, "I don't know." Maybe that is why I stay up till early mornings? I wanted to add again that the human body is beautiful and unappealing all in the same space. Perhaps the unattractiveness and softness and strangeness produces attraction. A negative and a negative equals a positive. Three negatives likes to fluctuate. In my mind at least. I may ask another to remove their clothing and whatnot during those intimate moments. Eh, never quite feel like having *** though. I like the emotions and sensuality of just looking at someone. They usually want to physically play around with each other. I think I enjoy fighting more. One day I'll leave everyone except I'll reminisce on those I enjoyed meeting. Maybe come back and visit? I would like to ride something quickly through an empty desert. Find my own food and water. Create shelter. Think by myself. My room is the smallest desert I have and the biggest. I have more in my head but I only occupy one at a time. I suppose I like I do like things like all others. I mean, materials can be nice. If I impart meaning on to an object it gains importance. I see it vital to also say that if it were to be lost, then I wouldn't mind and I would obtain something else or nothing at all.The constitution. Just mentioned by some woman in my room. Or in my ears would be more correct. Constitutional Rights. I honestly don't see the need for them. I was criticized for burbling that once. We should not need a constitution. We should be able to do what we like to do without fear or concern. Unless natural fear and concern appears. Now that may confuse a bit. Right to bear arms. I shouldn't have to be told or allowed to massive bear arms if I feel the need to have them. Big hairy bear arms. Curious little mishap. Freudian slip as Johnny said once? Danger Danger. Anyway, Right to bare arms. I shouldn't have to be told, as I look back,  go back and throw in that comma after told, that I'm allowed to bare arms and defend myself. I'll just do it if the need arises. Freedom of speech. That already has many issues these days. However, there shouldn't have been a need to tell people they have freedom of speech. Speech should have been freely allowed and never oppressed in  the first place. Theme? We have erred so much in the past and I would think sometimes we ignore that and just try make little cosmetic fixes by saying it's okay. Another point. Hold that: side discomfort. I sometimes feel like a little spider or creature is crawling or skittering on my leg under the covers or I'll change the music to Galaxy 2 Galaxy 90's hi-tec jazz there we go. Done! Now back! Or I forget what I said about the spiders. Another point: what? ******, curse damnable ****. Can't recollect what it was I was connecting together. Something that tied in to deceiving people into things are okay. I could go on about consumerism and all that jazz. Instead I'm listening to some techno-jazz whatever-decided-to-call-it. Hyphenated phrases are fun when I decide they are appropriate. English and grammar in such can be cool but at the same time I want to say **** it and stay proper. Do both. Acknowledge how to write and speak "correctly," but as long as someone understands what you are trying to say, then why correct more? Someone large doesn't like the fact I make a lot of noise in the morning. I stole some speakers and subwoofer from the room next to me as I was going to say Austin.  They are on the floor and whichever large person lives below me is probably annoyed or was. I don't spend any of my actual time despising them, but I'll easily say I despise them when someone asks. Otherwise it isn't worth wasting time on. Perhaps the vibration quivers downstairs and shakes them silently. The greate beast is perturbed and sneaky vibrations cause electro-annoyance! Her pulsewidth as I understand it must be like a super-saw as I think it. Silence. Some woman said it's just a feeling. HEA not sure what why I put that sounds like a garageband song. Switched to Inspiration! That is what I did this night. Finally start writing and making things again. Even though I never did and always did. My head sometimes hurts from thinking. Never truly though. Gotta say those things to keep the conversation going. That is really the only reason I say anything. To keep the conversation going. Otherwise I'd just watch people and be just fine. Just yelled "bahh," out loud (didn't sound the comma) because I felt the need or the want. Same. Wrong keys erased. sdas=a====dddddddddd Sorry. Oh well. Oh My. How the time flies goodbye. Going nowhere. Could write more but I felt the slight flicker of wanting to stop. So I do. What an ending. Now I'm only typing to continue the conversation with myself. Just thought ******* sounds good melody. Do as I sayt way to go good job. STOPSDMFA

****** a

Guess I'll read this little conundrum I wrote up. Stop writing ******. Stop EDITING

It was like camp
But I spent the first night
On a thin plastic mattress with ****** sheets freezing
Instead of encircling a campfire
Singing cowboy songs of the West
And little dogs

My first activity was not making a bow and arrow or a target but instead I was
sitting after breakfast
on a concrete bench
in the Sun
Trying to fill myself with that allusive happiness.
That was my plan.

On the next occasion in the open
I did not get a compass
nor a map
but I sat with a table of girls
And spoke up without being asked
They started to show off their pale pinkish arms
I was at the cutters’ table
Smoker’s edition
Layers upon layers of
Rippling Scar tissue
at the elbows in particular
It is thick.
Bleeding and healing
To be sliced open again
For crusting over.
They were cheerful
Despite hallucinations and panic attacks,
Lost children or tomorrow
Scuttling along a murky seabed that did not want them but
Here’s a cigarette

I did not make a sundial or find my canoe
Or make shoes out of leaves
but let the morning sun stick around
while the smoke issuing from their chatty mouths pinched my nose
I would take their smoking breaks with them.
I claimed two for myself and once lit,
slyly handed them over
As I listened to the chatter and laughed
I feel a faint yellow heat
From up over there.

We didn’t at first hover around each other
Talking about nothing like high school
Girls with braces and dorky pajamas
Or bend over from the top bunk to say
one more thing before lights out
At first I never added more than a informed observation about lipgloss or
a roll over the eyes over the next dumbbell talking about nothing that existed
But I was tolerated
And as their numbers diminished
only to be refreshed again
my comfort grew
I made “friends”
We laughed and co-conspired
Over pills, soda and what’s that on your tray?

There were movies on the tv
But no westerns
With horses trekking through the tall grasses
Nor
Smoke arising in the distance
Imitating a life that we were imitating as well
Yes we were!
Just a slightly different tale about
Endless treks and wandering

On the weekends
The rules relaxed and the counselors,
Had there been any,
Would have been preoccupied with private intrigues and how to make pineapple cocktails
And we, left to our own devises,
Would saunter in and around each other
Braiding hair and reading magazines.

There was a telephone.

When it was time to get into the car to go back home by way of the freeway
I didn’t have a hat that I had painted myself with only three colors
Nor feathers
or a blue ribbon for starting fires
We all said our good-byes
Even the mean one called me by my name
And we shot off like the explosive plumes of fireworks
into a dimming sky.

tropical breeze waves washed upon a
soothsayer sand beach whispering love poems between each sigh

seagull clouds baying from above
lustrous sunshine massaging with temperate beams

beneath the waves, turtles twist in tubular turnabouts
bright coral and jaded fish teem in the reef

shimmering sunshine shining through waves
casting shadows and light amongst an oceanic spectrum

we flit through the ocean as foreigners and locals
tiny air bubbles pressing from our lips

unlike the denizens filtering through the reef
we press up to the surface and break through for breath

exiting the ocean of life, we wash upon the shore
driftboards sewn together in matrimony

our clam shelled hands interwoven in the fabric of our souls
sand pressed between to make a glistening pearl

i sit up while you lay down on our thin towels
falling asleep with an upward curve on your lips

i trace my finger down your back like pencil to paper
drawing each crevice, perfection, and blemish

on the landscape of your body

a faint breeze ghosts through the swaying palm trees
dolphins nonchalantly diving through the air and ocean

***** scuttling along the precipice of the sea and sand
waves washing the crooked edges of stones

amongst this equilibrium we are infinite
soaking up this portrait life like a sea sponge

in these moments we are infinite
moments we imagined we had

In the moonlight, high in the Lemon Gum,
perched under the arching ghostly branches
two eyes of jet peer from a snow-white mask.
Tyto Alba, the Barn Owl, with heart shaped
****** disc, edged with ruff of stiff feathers.
Mottled pearl-grey body feathers above
the moth like plumage, purest white beneath
her slim legs are bare on the lower half,
with small feet that end with deadly talons.

Nocturnal, she roosts in the heat of day.
You will hear her screeching in the cold night
hear the scream before you ever see her.
She can see in the half light of humans
night vision even in total darkness
pinpoints her prey by listening to each sound
the desperate, scuttling little creatures make.

She is a well designed killing machine
with hooked beak, powerful feet and sharp claws.
Her flight feathers have softened edges
to make her deadly flight near soundless
She swoops silently down without warning
seizing victims with her claws, biting deep
into their neck arteries, puncturing
their most precious organs for a quick death.

I wish I was a ladybird
Scuttling on a ledge,
Never thinking, never worrying,
Just living on the edge.

Free to stay or free to fly,
Whatever I decide,
The world is what I make of it,
I simply ride the tide

But I am like that ladybird,
Free to fly and go.
Do I need to get the timing right?
No!

Jump! Fly! Go!

scuttling across the valley,
the trench was deep and steep

scorching heat of the dry sun,
dried blemishes on the weathered skin.

Settling along the rocky facades,
hackneyed by the haunting past.

Sleepless nights of the perching predators,
Hibernating in aloof worlds .

Stymied by the wind in the barren land ,
Harnessed by the futile fears.

Simone Melchoir of the sinking ship ,
would not you go down with the fault.

Shunning away from natures affection ,
for every rose does share its thorn .

Sunny ends are reached ,
when the raging ravines fade away.

Slithering away the swirling serpent ,
The sun lurks in the brewing storm .

Sanctity of the witheld winds ,
sapping away the deathly darkness.

Serene air of the seraphic angel,
brought the plighting dreams to the refugees repose

Smelting ores and melting poles,
brimming with brightness the cradled cirque .

Summons of the exalted virtue ,
To burn the lizard and fly away like the phoenix

Succumbing to the wilderness,
to soaring heights and rising spirits .

Swanking in the soothing winds,
the phoenix looked down on the plundering valley.

Scorning at the downtrodden spirits,
The fraternity of the Desert lizard

Mirza Ghalib Translations

Mirza Ghalib (1797-1869) is considered to be one of the best Urdu poets of all time. The last great poet of the Mughal Empire, Ghalib was a master of the sher (couplet) and the ghazal (a lyric poem formed from couplets). Ghalib remains popular in India, Pakistan, and among the Hindustani diaspora. He also wrote poetry in Persian.

It's Only My Heart!
by Mirza Ghalib
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

It’s only my heart, not unfeeling stone,
so why be dismayed when it throbs with pain?
It was made to suffer ten thousand darts;
why let one more torment impede us?



Inquiry
by Mirza Ghalib
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

The miracle of your absence
is that I found myself endlessly searching for you.



Near Sainthood
by Mirza Ghalib
loose translation/interpretation by Kanu V. Prajapati and Michael R. Burch

On the subject of mystic philosophy, Ghalib,
your words might have struck us as deeply profound
and we might have pronounced you a saint ...
Yes, if only we hadn't found
you drunk
as a skunk!



Ghazal
by Mirza Ghalib
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Not the blossomings of songs nor the adornments of music:
I am the voice of my own heart breaking.

You toy with your long, dark curls
while I remain captive to my dark, pensive thoughts.

We congratulate ourselves that we two are different:
that this weakness has not burdened us both with inchoate grief.

Now you are here, and I find myself bowing—
as if sadness is a blessing, and longing a sacrament.

I am a fragment of sound rebounding;
you are the walls impounding my echoes.



The Mistake
by Mirza Ghalib
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

All your life, O Ghalib,
You kept repeating the same mistake:
Your face was *****
But you were obsessed with cleaning the mirror!



The Infidel
by Mirza Ghalib
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Ten thousand desires: each worth dying for ...
So many fulfilled, yet still I yearn for more.

Being in love, for me there was no difference between living and dying ...
and so I lived each dying breath watching you, my lovely Infidel, sighing                       afar.



Bleedings
by Mirza Ghalib
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Love requires patience but lust is relentless;
what colors must my heart leak, before it bleeds to death?



Ghazal
by Mirza Ghalib
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Life becomes even more complicated
when a man can’t think like a man ...

What irrationality makes me so dependent on her
that I rush off an hour early, then get annoyed when she's "late"?

My lover is so striking! She demands to be seen.
The mirror reflects only her image, yet still dazzles and confounds my eyes.

Love’s stings have left me the deep scar of happiness
while she hovers above me, illuminated.

She promised not to torment me, but only after I was mortally wounded.
How easily she “repents,” my lovely slayer!



Ghazal
by Mirza Ghalib
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

It’s time for the world to hear Ghalib again!
May these words and their shadows like doors remain open.

Tonight the watery mirror of stars appears
while night-blooming flowers gather where beauty rests.

She who knows my desire is speaking,
or at least her lips have recently moved me.

Why is grief the fundamental element of night
when everything falls as the distant stars rise?

Tell me, how can I be happy, vast oceans from home
when mail from my beloved lies here, so recently opened?



Abstinence?
by Mirza Ghalib
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Let me get drunk in the mosque,
Or show me the place where God abstains!



Shared Blessings
by Mirza Ghalib
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Drunk on love, I made her my God.
She soon informed me that God does not belong to any one man!



Exiles
by Mirza Ghalib
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Often we have heard of Adam's banishment from Eden,
but with far greater humiliation, I depart your paradise.



To Whom Shall I Complain?
by Mirza Ghalib
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

To whom shall I complain when I am denied Good Fortune in acceptable measure?
Thus I demanded Death, but was denied even that dubious pleasure!



Ghazal
by Mirza Ghalib
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

You should have stayed a little longer;
you left all alone, so why not linger?

We’ll meet again, you said, some day similar to this one,
as if such days can ever recur, not vanish!

You left our house as the moon abandons night's skies,
as the evening light abandons its earlier surmise.

You hated me: a wife abnormally distant, unknown;
you left me before your children were grown.

Only fools ask why old Ghalib still clings to breath
when his fate is to live desiring death.


Bleedings
by Mirza Ghalib
loose translation by Michael R. Burch

Love requires patience while passion races;
must my heart bleed constantly before it expires?


Abstinence?
by Mirza Ghalib
loose translation by Michael R. Burch

Let me get drunk in the mosque,
Or show me the place where God abstains!


Step Carefully!
by Mirza Ghalib
loose translation by Michael R. Burch

Step carefully Ghalib—this world is merciless!
Here people will "adore" you to win your respect ... or your
downfall.


Drunk on Love
by Mirza Ghalib
loose translation by Michael R. Burch

Drunk on love, I made her my God.
She quickly informed me God belongs to no man!


Exiles
by Mirza Ghalib
loose translation by Michael R. Burch

We have often heard of Adam's banishment from Eden,
but with far greater humiliation, I abandon your garden.


A lifetime of sighs scarcely reveals its effects,
yet how impatiently I wait for you to untangle your hair!
—Mirza Ghalib, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch


Every wave conceals monsters,
and yet teardrops become pearls.
—Mirza Ghalib, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch


I’ll only wish ill on myself today,
for when I wished for good, bad came my way.
—Mirza Ghalib, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch


People don’t change, it’s just that their true colors are revealed.
—Mirza Ghalib, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch


Ten thousand desires: each one worth dying for ...
So many fulfilled, and yet still I yearn for more!
—Mirza Ghalib, loose translation by Michael R. Burch


Oh naïve heart, what will become of you?
Is there no relief for your pain? What will you do?
—Mirza Ghalib, loose translation by Michael R. Burch


I get that Ghalib is not much,
but when a slave comes free, what’s the problem?
—Mirza Ghalib, loose translation by Michael R. Burch


My face lights up whenever I see my lover;
now she thinks my illness has been cured!
—Mirza Ghalib, loose translation by Michael R. Burch


If you want to hear rhetoric flower,
hand me the wine decanter.
—Mirza Ghalib, loose translation by Michael R. Burch


I tease her, but she remains tight-lipped ...
if only she'd sipped a little wine!
—Mirza Ghalib, loose translation by Michael R. Burch


While you may not ignore me,
I’ll be ashes before you understand me.
—Mirza Ghalib, loose translation by Michael R. Burch

Keywords/Tags: Mirza Ghalib, translations, Urdu, Hindi, love, philosophy, heart, stone, sainthood



Federico Garcia Lorca (1898-1936) was a Spanish poet, playwright and theater director. He was assassinated by Nationalist forces at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War and his body was never found.

Gacela of the Dark Death
by Federico Garcia Lorca
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

I want to sleep the dreamless sleep of apples
far from the bustle of cemeteries.
I want to sleep the dream-filled sleep of the child
who longed to cut out his heart on the high seas.

I don't want to hear how the corpse retains its blood,
or how the putrefying mouth continues accumulating water.
I don't want to be informed of the grasses’ torture sessions,
nor of the moon with its serpent's snout
scuttling until dawn.

I want to sleep awhile,
whether a second, a minute, or a century;
and yet I want everyone to know that I’m still alive,
that there’s a golden manger in my lips;
that I’m the elfin companion of the West Wind;
that I’m the immense shadow of my own tears.

When Dawn arrives, cover me with a veil,
because Dawn will toss fistfuls of ants at me;
then wet my shoes with a little hard water
so her scorpion pincers slip off.

Because I want to sleep the dreamless sleep of the apples,
to learn the lament that cleanses me of this earth;
because I want to live again as that dark child
who longed to cut out his heart on the high sea.

Gacela de la huida (“Ghazal of the Flight”)
by Federico Garcia Lorca
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

I have been lost, many times, by the sea
with an ear full of freshly-cut flowers
and a tongue spilling love and agony.

I have often been lost by the sea,
as I am lost in the hearts of children.

At night, no one giving a kiss
fails to feel the smiles of the faceless.
No one touching a new-born child
fails to remember horses’ thick skulls.

Because roses root through the forehead
for hardened landscapes of bone,
and man’s hands merely imitate
roots, underground.

Thus, I have lost myself in children’s hearts
and have been lost many times by the sea.
Ignorant of water, I go searching
for death, as the light consumes me.



La balada del agua del mar (“The Ballad of the Sea Water”)
by Federico Garcia Lorca
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

The sea
smiles in the distance:
foam-toothed,
heaven-lipped.

What do you sell, shadowy child
with your naked *******?

Sir, I sell
the sea’s saltwater.

What do you bear, dark child,
mingled with your blood?

Sir, I bear
the sea’s saltwater.

Those briny tears,
where were they born, mother?

Sir, I weep
the sea’s saltwater.

Heart, this bitterness,
whence does it arise?

So very bitter,
the sea’s saltwater!

The sea
smiles in the distance:
foam-toothed,
heaven-lipped.



Paisaje (“Landscape”)
by Federico Garcia Lorca
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

The olive orchard
opens and closes
like a fan;
above the grove
a sunken sky dims;
a dark rain falls
on warmthless lights;
reeds tremble by the gloomy river;
the colorless air wavers;
olive trees
scream with flocks
of captive birds
waving their tailfeathers
in the dark.



Canción del jinete (“The Horseman’s Song” or “Song of the Rider”)
by Federico Garcia Lorca
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Cordoba. Distant and lone.
Black pony, big moon,
olives in my saddlebag.
Although my pony knows the way,
I never will reach Cordoba.

High plains, high winds.
Black pony, blood moon.
Death awaits me, watching
from the towers of Cordoba.

Such a long, long way!
Oh my brave pony!
Death awaits me
before I arrive in Cordoba!

Cordoba. Distant and lone.



Arbolé, arbolé (“Tree, Tree”)
by Federico Garcia Lorca
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Sapling, sapling,
dry but green.

The girl with the lovely countenance
gathers olives.
The wind, that towering lover,
seizes her by the waist.

Four dandies ride by
on fine Andalusian steeds,
wearing azure and emerald suits
beneath long shadowy cloaks.
“Come to Cordoba, sweetheart!”
The girl does not heed them.

Three young bullfighters pass by,
slim-waisted, wearing suits of orange,
with swords of antique silver.
“Come to Sevilla, sweetheart!”
The girl does not heed them.

When twilight falls and the sky purples
with day’s demise,
a young man passes by, bearing
roses and moonlit myrtle.
“Come to Granada, sweetheart!”
But the girl does not heed him.

The girl, with the lovely countenance
continues gathering olives
while the wind’s colorless arms
encircle her waist.

Sapling, sapling,
dry but green.



Despedida (“Farewell”)
by Federico Garcia Lorca
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

If I die,
leave the balcony open.

The boy eats oranges.
(I see him from my balcony.)

The reaper scythes barley.
(I feel it from my balcony.)

If I die,
leave the balcony open!



In the green morning
I longed to become a heart.
Heart.

In the ripe evening
I longed to become a nightingale.
Nightingale.

(Soul,
become the color of oranges.
Soul,
become the color of love.)

In the living morning
I wanted to be me.
Heart.

At nightfall
I wanted to be my voice.
Nightingale.

Soul,
become the color of oranges.
Soul,
become the color of love!



I want to return to childhood,
and from childhood to the darkness.

Are you going, nightingale?
Go!

I want return to the darkness
And from the darkness to the flower.

Are you leaving, aroma?
Go!

I want to return to the flower
and from the flower
to my heart.

Are you departing, love?
Depart!

(To my deserted heart!)

There is a Mouse in this House.
Insatiable,
He keeps me up at night,
thin fine claws on metal stove tops,
whispering to the birds what a fool he's made of me,
because I couldn't make the fibers of my home work with me.

There is a Mouse in this House,
Immortal,
I've fished him drowned out of drains,
fed him bleach on silver trays,
listened to him choke in air vents,
his chestnut jacket perpetually in the corners of my eye,
leaving reminders in my cereal,
this rodent he refuses to die.

There is a Mouse in this House,
Intangible,
he is not slipping through my fingers he's dancing on them,
quick petite feet tapping on my counters,
fleet and fast like smoke,
I've seen him seep through a clenched fist and still escape with wedding bands,

There is a Mouse in this House.
Impish,
he waits 'till I'm alone to play his music,
the crack and chew,
too early with the morning dew,
he will not play his song for you, it'd be too easy to be seen.

There is a Mouse in this House,
primeval,
he's been waiting,
mapped the walls and painted my flaws,
tactician skilled and iron willed,
this beast knows war far more than my militia mind was ready for,
plotting out insurgencies for restless and anxieties,

There is a Mouse in this House,
emaciated,
what's his is his,
what's mine is his,
there is no sacred to things with tails.
clearing out my pantry,
his jaws now tasting for my sanity,
finished with the:
Rye,
White,
and Sourdough,
he's fixed his tongue on sweat breads,
scuttling with unnatural flow,

There is a Mouse in this House.
Charming,
too handsome a creature to ever be singed,
he peddles on the burners simply too strut,
scampering through flames to test his luck,

There is a Mouse in this House,
Insomniac,
from now until each evening hour,
his paws touch turns time sour.
Ivory teeth clanging out a new ink-printed deed,
he owns the tenant and never even had to rent it,

There is a Mouse in this House,
arrogant,
too self-assured and clever,
cunning, devilish a creature he may be,
but he has yet to get a load of me,
holed away within his den,
his first mistake was not letting me win,
setting aria's on fly's wings to declare his victory,
this furry phantasm is all too aware of what he did to me.

There is a Mouse in This House,
sleeper,
I'm plotting my comeback,
sure-footed,
slow breathes,
and savage hands,
I'm ready,
silent and steady;
this beautiful monstrous mouse had best prepare for battle.

There is a Mouse in this House.
But it's my House.

Tonight I dream of spiders
Hair spun, fat filled, scuttling legs
Quiver over my body and thighs
Eyes, ears, mouth, a tongue
A taste perforates through my eyes
Spills into my skull

Splat, Slash, Splot
Scuttle

Tonight I dream of Isolation
My footsteps fall on empty ears
Searching for life
Fearful, Tearful
Ripe with Strife
What does this matter?
I cannot be seen.

Unhear my own quiet screams
Please,
I want to
I need to
unhear.

Tonight I dream of running
An unseen assailant
I know, wishes to
attempt on me harm

You can't be calm
I can't, You can't
I Must
You mustn't provoke me.

I wake reaching
Reaching
Reaching

I find nothing
But empty solace.

Tonight I dream of fighting
Clockwork childhood
Figures slicing at my
face, racing me
to death.
A metal axe, a clawed
arm, walls with eyes,
a broken staircase,
distorted laugh, a
past repeated.
'Treated' to terror
remember me
dismember me
tenderly
race me
erase
me

I can't seem to wake up.

feminism is pretty much a failure like communism... the latter wanted the workers of the world to unite... but they didn't... each working man took too much pride in his earnings an expenses to the extent that he sought no idealistic solution... the self-preservation element... feminism is very much alike to communism... it comes from the same source, the bourgeoisie caste... which explains why prostitutes in France defended their pundits... they basically said: ******* little Freudian undecided *****, with us it's 100 ***** a week... with you it's only about 100,000 interpretations of a **** in clingfilm at a Hollywood premier: your choice, either 100 *****, or a ***** and the cinema of the would-be agonies or a man resembling Richard Burton, sober, and being a Swedish patent for a house-husband, and a closet poet, and a chef, and a, and a, and a... can i suggest a kaleidoscope as the safest investment?

imagine sitting in a brothel waiting room,
there's about 10 of them -
and they're looking at your like you're
their father and they're about to skin you alive
like piranhas with their eyes -
it can be quiet intimidating,
what for £10 entry fee and £110 and hour
baggage of silenced ******* -
you're basically ******* Ferraris and Lamborghinis -
but it's worth the while,
you genitalia turn into a pavlova before
it's baked mush - your testicles are soaring
angels with the ticklish bits added
to what feels like a shiver of goosebumps -
you sit there for a while, it's the hardest time
to be making choices, you ask for a cup of water
(i always did),
you get it, Keith Lemon is doing his talk show,
the older prostitutes are un-amused -
they're the ones who'd skin you alive,
pick one and she turns into a sadistic
vacuum cleaner in the realm of oration -
you think these terrorists and so-called
martyrs would have the ***** keep up with an ante-chamber
like that? these women can sniff out perversity
like they might sniff out a woodlice in damp wood...
or the spiders that complete their weaving
and never take the central role on the stage,
but ****** their spiderweb before scuttling
into the frenzy of making a body of other insects
into immobile dough to **** into on the sidelines,
they're the out-of-body experiencing their architecture,
there's no ego in them, not central nervous system...
i always thought that spiders compensated the
cartesian problem with their spiderwebs -
they extended their nerves through their *****
into an architectural project of nerve endings / extensions...
see, that's the thing about poetry: pure narration...
no technique, no nothing, no need to create a
third person or first person ******, no characters
to study and incubate into a thrill ending: poetry
is the purest form of narration, easily a ricochet
into digression that in fiction would only mean another
grey matter character to involve in the plot.
. and - (dot and hyphen, as suggested by Nietzsche,
is steaming along forgetting the semi-colon).
- i swear insects are the perfect telescopes into
alien life... on that micro level you get to
understand the many hazards of differentiated life
elsewhere... it's the microbes you need to
mind as the real hazards and blizzards -
but this one time i broke the brothel rule
denoted as choice: i didn't make one.
i asked for one to make a choice for me...
one talkative gall said i shouldn't be asking...
so i replied: well aren't you the talkative one...
you'll do. told you a butcher's supermarket -
i turned myself into a piece of meat -
the ***** butcher said: he'll have to do,
he prompted me to talk the heretical *credo...
the outer-body experience, prostitutes are the experiment,
i asked of the 10 present and my penguin **** solo
shrivelled up newspaper of ******* to chose -
and she did... it's funny giving choice to someone
who you payed to choose from... these Muslim martyrs
will find it had to keep it level headed like Solomon -
these boys will really struggle to reap their rewards...
they just blow up ten people but never sat in
the company of ten prostitutes...
ten blown up, in the company of ten prostitutes...
you really don't know what it's like trying out
whether you could stomach a harem, let alone keep
one like a walrus...
ever stole a kiss from a ******* who's saintliness
involved never giving one but merely ******* more ****?
hmm? oh i can get pornographic after all...
it's a joyride troupe of force in thinking the joys i
nourished in such places... although i have to admit
Amsterdam would never feed such poems...
it's just common place everything's worth clapping
(or too much clapping by the serfs at a Bolshoi ballet),
you need the thrill of something being illegal...
in the case of itemising England it's the brothel owners
that are the culprits, not the prostitutes, nor the pundits,
which is why i asked to perform oral *** once in a while
for the extra undocumented 10 quid... that didn't fall
into the hands of the madame... so it ends...
feminism alright for you, in that ivory tower of yours,
unscathed, belligerent and with sulphuric toxic gas
to **** out from your mouth as the proper argument?
the heart not steady? i see... i guess you have a hard fight
ahead of you... young men go to prostitutes undiscriminating
their age and **** as **** would do too,
but young women don't go to prostitutes,
professional women do... and they'd always probably
**** some young dude... see the difference?
young men go to prostitutes... young women have all
the eye-to-**** candy they can have... older women order
**** and limousine, a night out, a date, a dinner...
young men are like: broken pipe, need a plumber,
stillson pipe wrench! and where's that ******* spanner?!
and contrary to popular beliefs, cats have
a second weak spot other than petting their heads
and playing with their whiskers... the point
between the evolve coccyx and the spine...
they really love a rub when the coccyx turns into
a tail... it's almost like a reverse test for prostate cancer...
every cat sitting down when rubbed in that area
will do a marching army band salute of raising its
hind in anticipation of a rainbow -
and yes, urinating with ******* is pretty much as
exciting as a woman massaging her ******* with
a shower head with pulverising pressurised water.

When you look me in the eyes
Loneliness unfurls inside of me
Like a scorpions tail
And stings the soft belly of my heart.
A deep pain
Spreads throughout my body,
Clutching my bones,
Taking me hostage.
I feel my heart swell.
It’s much too big for its cage.
It’s the bird screeching protests
When you try to put it back in.
The sweating begins almost immediately.
I feel like I’m melting onto the dirt road
And you,
You are laughing.
Your smile splitting your lips,
Your teeth snapping like claws,
Distracting me from your molten black eyes.
I ***** my loneliness.
It dribbles out of my mouth in red ropes.
You are already scuttling away,
Already moving onto the next threat.
As I watch your eight legs
Carry your shell of a body away
From my shell of a body
I remember why
I’ve always been afraid of scorpions.

Trolling Amazon I found my inner Kurtz
Harrison foreswore my bear totem: darkness
Lady gal pal taught me soul-mating hurts
Martha Muffins vinyl v. Kirby’s Agatha Harkness
Saved my twins made them productive
Mutating FF X to Avengers indie 80s on me take
Man-starring all the boogie children say code this grandpa
Gaiman Miller Moore Morrison invade Waid
Wrightson Kaluta Jones Smith put bronze to paint
McKean Sienkiewicz Mack Maleev mimic The Studio
Now let’s gallery our portals strung from kid dimensions
Makers engaging history NOW NEW 52 intervals starstruck
Spread indie throughout known multiverse in craft crooks
While nursing nannies coddle light corners scuttling roaches
Bell & Schrödinger's cat transport trainspotting to a fine art

It smells like loneliness outside.
The smell of a hot dog on a grill after a storm,
mingled with propane and cigarettes.
The smell of solitary.

A string of “cold and broken hallelujahs”
no longer dulls the senses.
It’s senseless anyway.

I eat my brown rice in front of the sink
and I am reminded of the taste of Play-Doh.
It’s funny how loneliness creeps in on the wind,
the cars’ wheels in the rain,
the braking of the bus,
scuttling of squirrels...

Maybe a hot tea or toddy
(maybe something stronger)
will keep this autumn-ness at bay.

probably the best day in my life...
it's too hot to eat...
i'm getting leaner...
must have lost about 3kg...
    just one Cornish yoghurt with
some strawberry under-filling "jam"...

currently drinking whiskey
listening to a Templar chant -
  veni sancte spiritus...
i'll probably move onto some Byzantine chants
and then some Muslim songs...
whatever...

but what i really want to do is move
onto R.E.M.'s automatic for the people...
finishing a reply to: night-swimming...

no... nothing about skinny-dipping
with the full voyeurism of the moon...
snow... ice... salt and darkness... and the biting
cold...

this heat is intolerable...
i spent the day glues to the wooden floor...
i was switching positions...
to one side... to another side...
one leg on the bed...
lying on the floor...
one leg one arm on the bed...
no good...

              it became so hot that whenever i lifted
my torso up...
i lay down: FARTING with my back...
literally... i haven't eaten anything in
about 3 days... well... "eaten":
i find technical grounds to suggest:
you eat something when you get to
**** some of the excesses out...
ergo?
        i've eaten the bare minimum...
ergo: i haven't **** anything out...

the zenith of summer is intolerable for me...
i hate summer...
   even if this years summer brings with it
no snails... or flies...
just ants... spiders... and rats...
i do hope the rat problem i'm having
in my kitchen will be resolved by the heat
rather than rat poison or the "guillotine"...

i was lying on the floor dehydrated and feeling
sort of serene...
i think i could die from hunger and dehydration...
then again: what's a calorie intake
from merely alcohol?
         it probably does fuzzy "things" to the brain...
no wonder i'm listening to Templar chants...

me at my worst...
         strange... the Templars were the most violent
of the crusader camps...
yet... they sang the most...
it's not like the Knight Hospitaller...
hell... match them up: the Templars with the Teutonic
knights...

i've come across these two men
in my nearest past...
distraught creatures...
     "rats" willing to bite their tails off...
i too was in their confinement
of de profundis...
                  no one but me came to my aid...
scuttling... lost... blind... torn...
i'm sort of happy i could have helped them...
the good one can give unto humanity
is so cheap yet so expensive...

   perhaps it has been my purpose to not
attain wealth...
     then again: i'm already wealthy...
the Romford public library doesn't own
a single book that i possess in my private library...
it did, though, put me on course
of acquiring Thomas Mann's Dr. Faustus...
but that's about it!
   the rest is junk! i live in a city where the public
library is a joke, compared to my private collection...

this reality is: truly... PUNISHING...
Ilford had a better selection...
i gained some recognition writing my A-level essay
on the counter-Reformation in high-school
based on the research i did:
from the books i found in the Ilford library...
i just heard that the next class of pupils
were introduced to my work...
but the current reality? PUNISHING...
                
i had to resort to *** with prostitutes...
i do remember the last one i pleased...
           no... it's not working... BITE IT...
she die... it wasn't working... i had to return
the favour... slobber in oyster juices...
probe with my nose...
                insert my index and middle...
as imitation...
                         personally? i find giving a woman
oral *** rather therapeutic...
        play me some monk songs while you're
at it and i'd reached the godhead...

one of the traits of the myth of Gomorrah...
******-eaters...
   i'm one of them... short tempered:
***** beyond repair...
                        i could drown in a bottle
of whiskey and about a dozen *****
properly dished: hygienic...
just frenzied with taboos of...
               flowers... pink and slightly purple
tinged bouquets of floral flesh...

flowers... endless bouquets of floral flesh...
maybe that's why i write so:
i abhor talking during ***...
i tend to insinuate my partners to refrain
from talking during the act also...
if they can't: i don't restrain them...
but i contain myself to the maximum
of an onomatopoeia... there's no "daddy"...
there's no "*****"...
        i'm of the persuasion:
you ever **** me like animals **** each other...
or there's no ******* conversation
outside of *******... the end...

and this is what makes...
songs akin to the Templar chant: veni sancte spiritus
so... so... DOUBLY ******!
it's a hidden eroticism...
because it disguises what could otherwise
be a misunderstood ****-eroticism!
it's not! sure... women sing...
but when men sing to other men about
something that's deified: by each individual man
and therefore unrelateable...
by "casual" constraints leading toward a belonging:
a camaraderie...

that's different...
             no wonder the Teutonic knights had
a brothel in their citadel...
sometimes... you want an excuse... any excuse...
to bypass the narrative of Eve
and return to the Hells and Heavens of Lilith's
company...

damaged? no... hardly... i'm just unlike any
of the Jihadi G.I. Joes and Johns of the current era...
i actually want fame postmortem...
and i actually want a harem in "heaven"...
i'm testing the waters... not by killing people on
the whim / promise...
   you begin with ******* prostitutes...
                 you end by ******* prostitutes...
stealing kisses... performing oral ***...
this is me CRUSADE against whatever the JIHAD
has made available...
thank **** i made my way towards Turkey...
now i'm planning advances towards Iran...

- i still think one of the best albums ever recorded
has been, so far, R,E.M.'s automatic for the people...
just like i remember courting her hands
with firm grips while eating her out...
peeping with a pseudo-voyeurism into
her eyes...                   sure: my *** is not gay-pride
***... it's what was made available:
certainly nothing sadomasochistic... organic...
law-breaking... all the more real:
the reality being:
it's illegal to own a brothel... in England...
it's not illegal to frequent one...
BASE...

the SIDEWINDER sleeps tonight...
            well... i'm not sleeping: right about now...
i said i would and i did...
cycling shirtless... t-shirt-less...
furry brother on the run from the sun...
what an amazing feeling...
just like R.E.M sang about night-swimming...
hmm... NIGHT-CYCLING...
   in my world no is trying to fall asleep
or thereby trying to wake up...

there's just this grey glue of people
in between of being in between...
and that's almost contained within the word:
hubris... hell... even better... a compound
of words: a hubris-hiatus...

             i like that... "we" should invent a HH
dep. to make sure the HR dep. are doing their job...
maybe i'm just dehydrated...
haven't ingested enough calories...
or maybe... i'm seeing clearly while other people
are still forever: fuzzy...

ready and to burry your father and your mother...
what did you think when you lost another...

not my words.. worries wiped and dusted...

NIGHT-CYCLINNG...  SHIRTLESS...
barbarian within all that's could be
compensated with a "whole"...
hours prior?
dealing with the heat...
the bed could be considered useful...
if it wasn't for the excesses...
i prefer the floor...
i'd like to think that knocking on a pine
tree would spontaneously
conjure up an idea for a door...

then again... could a forest conjure up
a house... and a desert too?
                hmm... pyramids...
necropolis axiom...
               who dies, apparently: lives on?
no?
                     then i best be dead...
                 thinking is an involuntary act...
sort of automatic sort of by no persuasion
sort of forced without any originality...
hello: oranges and no future sunrises!
hello: how's you: ******* too?!

how's that?!
         me? i'm sort of chirping along with
angels like a pigeon ought...
because: pigeons ought: chirp and chat
with angels...
              and i want to breathe death
into the minds of gods... telling them...
you ought to be subordinate to what's
the required burden... that we ALL... SHARE...
THIS... *******... BURDEN!
savvy?!          no! there's no in-between
we either share this burden:
or we don't! if we don't? well then...
the gates are open... we annihilate yourselves..
we work with each other?
    there's a second chance we might
breathe... or swim... or take a liking to
bicycle...

            then again:
i'm not going to care that much...
i just want a harem...
             i find women boring...
if they're not multiplied...
i have a short attention span...
and a long attention span...
i'm just too envious of men prior to me...
i don't want to be distraught with
an envy of Solomon...
    
and i kept drinking: because i felt and felt some more
intellectually isolated....
i couldn't conceive a retention of intelligence
beside the realm of what could be obtained:
or rather... disregarded...
i could never become "Cosmopolitan" enough...
"gay" enough... "proud" enough...

these days a litre of whiskey is not enough
for people of my "incompetence"...
it's enough, though: to lean either left
or lean right... or... neither...
                         goof: my indifference is screaming...
a silent scream before the altar of Moloch...
times are changing:
nothing really changes...
           the perpetual expansion
of space...
poetry > mythology > history > journalism < poetry...

death's not really apparent until...
what's not supposed to be dead...
is actually dead... is... dead...
          by curiosity concerning the colour purple...
all out mortal concerns
confines to the allocation of
collecting pillows... to replicate clouds!

my friend died... a grandfather to no one
beside me... but also my cycling buddy...
yet all these people became involved in
guilt tripping... some daughter... some son...
i lost a... friend!
i didn't lose a grandfather! primo... i lost a friend!

i sooner bled from my head
than i cried with my eyes!
i associate the name JOSEPH with: LEAVING...
i smear my tears like women smear
their fake attraction chemicals: apart...

to the burdens of death and to the burdens of life:
death to the living... and life to the dead...
at least some are unreliably
unaware that they are there, yet.

one comment after another:
but isn't that Ii? there's no N... in that... it's iota-iota... not lambda amber... well... great... for shallow beginnings... best try scribbling some graffiti...it could make my commute more memorable... don't... seriously... i was just traumatised by catching a rat in my kitchen... i was keeping a female main **** in between my feet... even she ****** off from the dying sounds... death by snorkeling on a bleeding snout? bleeding from biting the tail off?! if a rat's dying in a way that makes the cat *******... and you're like... should i open the door and stab it to death?! yeah... great Cyrillic sort of ******* br'uh..

you ever listen to a rat die?
ever listen to a rat die in such a way
that your cat runs: the **** away?!
my father compares me to a rat...
he doesn't compare me to
a fox or a vampire: wish wish...
i'm just a rat...
              
   i just wept... listening to a death
of a rat...
i wanted to open the cupboard
and stab the baited ******
with a guillotine applause...
         but then i thought:
i suffer... you suffer too..
         hell... if the cats are not going to touch
you... i'm not coming closer with a knife
either...
death the great deceiver...
   with life the greater culprit... of making:
sacrifices...
more that's to be lived than
is to be expected to die...

           did "god" say as much?
what's the point: if... a limited number of potentials
are not exposed to the glory of my "thinking"...
i expect more to have ever been alive
than for those to have been accounted
as the arithmetic of by death's: queue...

remarkable... my father keeps calling me a rat...
remarkable... sure... i drink...
you ever listen on a rat dying
from a rat-trap? then again: i don't know...
i started to insinuate Morse code
by scratching a knife
against the cupboard...
imitating / creating circles...
that ******* squeaking...
                       the retaliating motivation
to pursue life!
       i took my Maine **** into my lapse...
to wait for her to pounce...
even she was distraught...
she ****** off.. even she was like...
sure... you open the cupboard door...
aim the knife...
or... you get a good night's sleep
and let the rat die on its own...

listening to a rat die from some minor injury...
i'm thinking... of men dying beach-strapped
to their injuries come D-Day
concerning Normandy...
     i like to have the luxury of being
this forgetful further...
getting sentimental about listening
to rats dying in traps...
in the middle of the night...
while i was no Newton and i'd prefer a pear...
but... a cat... couldn't listen to the torture...
a cat... a cat couldn't listen to a death of rat from
a trap...
i lodged her between my legs in order
to pounce...
she ****** off...
    she couldn't stomach it...

you ever listen to a rat dying in the middle
of the night?
i thought about the death of my grandfather...
i should **** mosquitos more often...
i should **** spiders more often...

but rats?! oh... **** me...
the way they struggle coming to the fruition
of their expected life...
scuttling... scribbling... scratching: nibbling...
the squeaks...
CATS *******...
seriously... a rat's dying: the cats *******!
me too... i ******* and drink to excess...
why if your father calls you a rat...
and then... hey presto! you catch a rat!
and you're killing it...
well... tear... umbrella... raindrop...
one fine autumn day...
                   thank you dad:
but i won't be mourning:
like you weren't mourning for your dad...

maybe... what's that? maybe i wish i had a
a wife... then again... maybe not...
i just listened to a rat die... scratching like
mad...  
                 sure... the day was great...
being glued to the wooden floor over-sweating...
until... scuttling and nibbling...
a rat caught in a rat trap... probably dying...
the ******* cat was traumatised!
cat! not predator?!
                                or maybe it was the fact
that i was weeping and wanting an apology
to come through...

i haven't eaten much in the past 3 days...
i need to sleep...
i actually need to fall asleep in my bed
and wake up in it... rather than
on the cold floor with not pyjamas...
i abhor summers...
              these superficial insomniac events
of non-event.

washing on the shores,
the rustling winds in
the palms, the caws
of birds and scuttling
of *****, the silence
in the mornings, and
the quiet in the night

echoing, soothing,
playing, evolving

the sounds of the ocean
sound like some ancient
composers song

there is life in this music

human life, animal life,
plant life, sea life, life
of the air, life of the
earth, life of the tiny
and life of the big

we feel it more than we
hear it
and we smile

the bass hum of the trees
the melody of the seagulls
the harmony of the wind
the crescendos of the waves

it is the song of the sea
the music of the ocean
the soundtrack of life

I feel my muscles unclench
and relax

how over pretentious of me...
islamophobia and russophobia...
odd bedfellows...

Mатвей Дракон: profile name...
but it's in russian and no one is willing
to stretch a darkening of humour...
to the extent of monty python...
because there's no canned laughter...

and there will never be...
not since i realised...
those four bottles of cider get me
more drunk than half a liter of
ms. amber... because the drinking
is measured and can reveal itself
in the process - rather than wait,
concentrated... and only expand
into more hours of sleep than
i could ever wish for...

but at least the russians speak of
russophobia as a reality -
the evil genius mantra...
which they are...
but there's no sense of: via irrational
arguments we will counter this
irrational fear...

so... the scuttling spiders announce!
and we will have ourselves
an orchestra!

even i thought this was too much,
too pretentious...
it's not a study... it's teasing...

a study in greek, hebrew, cyrillic and possibly sanskrit... because i'm not a monolingual hyper-inflation that will solve a crossword puzzle... when めば (eye-spot) is already... available? In a name there's a name in oh so many other languages... should i rely on relapsing into "gender-neutral" pronouns i'll cite... the noun-status extensions of letters, akin to a' into alpha... o' into omega... etc.

めば (eye-spot): that much is true...
sudoku...
i have made the following circumstance
plain...
there is no chance of me rising above
this already apparent crab-bucket intellectualism...
perhaps...
burden of rhyme...
it's only a "poem" if it rhymes...
rhyme is somehow identifiable with poo'etics...
ask an anne sexton... or perhaps:
no, don't bother...

she to burdens herself with rhymes -
and maybe she doesn't...
but this endless expectation to rhymes...
yes: plural was indicative of
the irony...
sometimes it's not even available...
to look back at this tool we have been given,
perhaps perfected better -
or not - since most of the time i find
myself: without an inch of belief
in catching some oratory / rhetorical
tsunami to... be the crow that croaks
the most and the loudest in this wake...

at least the russians acknowledge russophobia...
oh they're pay privy diligence to it...
they know they're the evil geniuses of this world...
they allow this irrational fear to sink in...
and then they rationalise it...

too bad for islamophobia...
it's not an irrational fear to begin with...
it's... more or less... a rational fear...
i think russophobia is an irrational fear...
after all: Kiev was founded by Vikings...
and apart from crown russia that's still
pretty much in Europe...
the asiatic branch of russia is too far away
to matter for either st. petersburg
of paris...

it's not convincing to be "reassured" while
the "enemy" persists to look bewildered
as if: no event is ever to happen
in the world - or also include him...
muslims? oh no... oh no at almost every turn
it seems...
sacred cows walk the streets of new delhi
while the people starve...

no dire warning: tiresome from the perspective
of a wormhole -
the count and the next count
the measures and what's to be left
dwindling... which is never a spectacle worth
reserving...
like putting on a vinyl and watching
the vinyl on a gramaphone...
or lighting a candle with a sulphur-sparked
match and sitting and "waiting"
watching while the candle burns...
and feeds a schtick of "anorexia"
absorbs all the shadows and stands at
midnight noon: with no wax to burn...

that feeling of having just ****** off
and then... prostate cancer pains
of having to make it absolutely necessary
to take a ****... to clean the ducts...
i still don't know why this "event"
is so precious for the quasi-cenobites...
it's no big deal...
just another genocide done into
the tissue later flushed...
perhaps if i were... shooting eggs
without the yoke it would somehow
matter...
perhaps i am...

but there's no zeitgeist to be had
concerning something that i make synonym
with wiping my *** asking
for nutella... and a skippy crunchy...
because: that's going to be the decade
defining EVENT!

funny... you ******* for no real reason...
nothing procreative...
gym-bro bollocking and that's not even
as much fun as going to a turkish barber
for a shave...
by then: everything concerning your
being - that is not going to be a moral
tool to raise children...
limbo in ego or the ego in limbo -
and that's never self or i...
but after an *******...
the most desperate need to take a ****...
to flush and make the ducts pristine... wiped
with ***** disinfectant...

about as odd as the bass guitar rising above
the drums - the oddity bass "rhyme"
and please... no guitar solos...
no metallica death to the bass
all that i hear is solo and rhythm guitar
and the drums...
they never got over the death of cliff burton...
or: how the rock band killed
the jazz band... focused on the rhythm guitar
and drums... but no trumpets just the vocals...
but still... no better use for bass?

it's always either: all that's music and...
it was always going to be not enough ***...
enough *** or just ***...
i went down the route of playing the brothel
roulette to catch up with the girls...
who i expect will later play bingo...
and we will probably try to age...
and be all romance...
and the man idiotic will still preserve
himself as unable to lie...
and she will... m'eh ah and all that litany
of sighs find the purse and the penguin
dancing the foxtrot from out
of the antarctica of his own ***...

russophobia: yes, an irrational fear -
even the evil geniuses of moscow acknowledge
this burden...
islamophobia... and... what?
milk and honey and yeast
and comatose black gold of ms. saudi of
the dinosaur arabia plucked...
a leaf... a laurel... from the pages of history
of: who's the good dog willing
to aport on call of command?!
into iraq and iran?

i can't hear a counter...
when it comes to it being anything rationalised
equal to the russian monologue...
claustrophobia and... it's irrational to me...
esp. when long winding...
when the cube talked to a field about...
abstract thinking -
at least claustrophobia is a metaphor
for abstract thinking - the lesser -

islamophobia is a ***** word...
esp. the -phobia suffix...
it's a perfectly rational fear...
given the mouse-and-leans have the gears
the fuel and the poker and backgammon "rules"...
as someone who might appreciate
a well sung adhan more than
an operatic aria...
well...
what's not to love?

at least for some it's known:
a drowning man will attempt to grip
a razor's edge without hope that it might be
an edge of a floating raft...
and they will always purse their mouth...
and waggle their tongue for
the pennies like sand shrapnel from
the payers for the goods...
an emirat sheikh and... the bore of the world...
if only the lottery of oil...
somehow... landed... in mongolia...

this world is a tiresome place...
given that arabs have the money...
and the chinese have: g.i. joe factories...
it's such a drab place...
such a clone furnace of the numbers
of mandarins...
and oh that niqab cinema...
even if you sell me something swedish
in black & white drab...
or some proto-turkic propaganda movie
to convert the "al-qaq" kurds (qa-eee-d'ah?)

welcome to europe... ghetto west of berlin...
back east there are needles...
walking about on the mountains
of camel humps...
notably in west warsaw coach station...
but the ukranians are always rather:
rowing the boat and the boat is always
heading into the furnace...

crab-bucket intellectualism...
these words are words that should be printed
and left on the northern line tube carriages...
like some free journalism paper wipe-my-***-with-i-wish,
why of course!
the highest i.q. renovations bottom-up to the top
always spreschen rhapsodies in wrap...
wrapping akin to:
i imagine the rappers chasing those...
john moschitta jr. is not a wrapper... rapper...
he's the add guy... and no rap on radio
adverts... when the T&S clauses are stressed...
and the muzak is dead and the lift is... falling...
like a ice-pick on the one dancing foot
of a burning burning with epitome given
the name... malchik trotting trotsky...

otherwise: blah - and endeavours into the bland...
some call it a guillotine...
i call it manglonia in england -
tiresome safe -
i almost pray to feel dangerous having
to acquire a straitjacket -
straitjacket bungee jump into conversation
like a rabid hive of the persona non grata:
of the commentary left-overs a priori
to the: walking onto the stage -
and talking with a gag in the mouth...
to speak a language for moths.

Everything stops when I see the            blur
hear the low, vibrating                                 buzz
                                                       RIGHT IN MY EAR
Flinch
spasm
FREEZE

My muscles
every last one
tense and rigid

                                         Don't
                                          Move
        ­                                    An
                        ­                         Inch
My head snaps to my shoulder
My hands fly to my neck
                                   my signature tic
protect my ears protect my head
or the monster
the horror
                               the bee
will fly into my skull and-


I feel its legs                covered in short fibrous tendrils oh god no

scuttling inside my head an itch I can't scratch

a whimper lodges in my throat
                               threatens to turn into a

SCREAM

-into my brain

the blur flashes by
as sweat     r
                      o
                          l
           ­                 l
                              s
down my back
MY SKIN IS BURNING EVERYTHING IS BURNING
the wasp in my head is
STINGING ME EVERYWHERE AT ONCE
Tears sting
Arms sting
everything stings

***** this phobia!

Withered Roses
by Allama Iqbal
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

What shall I call you,
but the nightingale's desire?

The morning breeze was your nativity,
an afternoon garden, your sepulchre.

My tears welled up like dew,
till in my abandoned heart your rune grew:

this memento of love,
this spray of withered roses.



Ehad-e-Tifli (“The Age of Infancy”)
by Allama Iqbal aka Muhammad Iqbal
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

The earth and the heavens remained unknown to me,
My mother's ***** was my only world.

Her embraces communicated life's joys
While I babbled meaningless sounds.

During my infancy if someone alarmed me
The clank of the door chain consoled me.

At night I observed the moon,
Following its flight through distant clouds.

By day I pondered earth’s terrain
Only to be surprised by convenient explanations.

My eyes ingested light, my lips sought speech,
I was curiosity incarnate.



Excerpt from Rumuz-e bikhudi (“The Mysteries of Selflessness”)
by Allama Iqbal aka Muhammad Iqbal
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Like a candle fending off the night,
I consumed myself, melting into tears.
I spent myself, to create more light,
More beauty and joy for my peers.



Longing
by Allama Iqbal
loose translation by Michael R. Burch

Lord, I’ve grown tired of human assemblies!
I long to avoid conflict! My heart craves peace!
I desperately desire the silence of a small mountainside hut!



Life Advice
by Allama Iqbāl
loose translation by Michael R. Burch

This passive nature will not allow you to survive;
If you want to live, raise a storm!



Destiny
by Allama Iqbal
loose translation by Michael R. Burch

Isn't it futile to complain about God's will,
When indeed you are your own destiny?



O, Colorful Rose!
by Allama Iqbal
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

You are not troubled with solving enigmas,
O, beautiful Rose! Nor do you express sublime feelings.
You ornament the assembly, and yet still flower apart.
(Alas, I’m not permitted such distance.)

Here in my garden, I conduct the symphony of longing
While your life is devoid of passionate warmth.
Why should I pluck you from your lonely perch?
(I am not deluded by mere appearances.)

O, colorful Rose! This hand is not your abuser!
(I am no callous flower picker.)
I am no intern to analyze you with dissecting eyes.
Like a lover, I see you with nightingale's eyes.

Despite your eloquent tongues, you prefer silence.
What secrets, O Rose, lie concealed within your *****?
Like me you're a bloom from the garden of Ñër.
We’re both far from our original Edens!

You are complete, content, but I’m a scattered fragrance,
Pierced by love’s sword in my errant quest.
This turmoil within might be a means of fulfillment,
This torment, a source of illumination.

My frailty might be the beginning of strength,
My envy mirror Jamshid’s cup of divination.
My constant vigil might light a world-illuminating candle
And teach this steed, the human intellect, to gallop.



Bright Rose
by Allama Iqbal
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

You cannot loosen the heart's knot;
perhaps you have no heart,
no share in the chaos
of this garden, where I yearn (for what?)
yet harvest no roses.

Of what use to me is wisdom?
Having abandoned Eden,
you are at peace, while I remain anxious,
disconsolate in my terror.

Perhaps Jamshid's empty cup
foretold the future, but may wine
never satisfy my desire
till I find you in the mirror.

Jamshid's empty cup: Jamshid saw the reflection of future events in a wine cup.



Coal to Diamond
by Allama Iqbal, after Nietzsche
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

I am corrupt, less than dust
while your brilliance out-blazes the brightest mirror.
My darkness defiles the chafing-dish
before my cremation; a miner's boot
crushes my cranium; I end up soot.

Do you acknowledge my life's bleak essence?
Condensations of smoke, black clouds stillborn from a single spark,
while you with your starlike nature triumphantly adorn monarchs,
gleam of the king's crown, the scepter's centerpiece.

"Please, kin-friend, be wise," the diamond replied,
"Assume a gemlike dignity! Carbon must harden
before it can fill a ***** with radiance. Burn
because you yield warmth. Brighten the darkness.
Be adamant as stone, be diamond."

Iqbal’s poem was written after a passage in Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols in which a kitchen coal and diamond discuss hardness versus softness.

Keywords/Tags: Urdu, Hindi, translation, English, rose, roses, withered roses, nightingale, desire, breeze, garden, nativity, cradle, infancy, heart, tears, dew, rain, rainfall, longing, conflict, tumult, peace, life, life advice, live, nature, survive, survival, storm, destiny, God, God's will, silence



Federico Garcia Lorca (1898-1936) was a Spanish poet, playwright and theater director. He was assassinated by Nationalist forces at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War and his body was never found.

Gacela of the Dark Death
by Federico Garcia Lorca
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

I want to sleep the dreamless sleep of apples
far from the bustle of cemeteries.
I want to sleep the dream-filled sleep of the child
who longed to cut out his heart on the high seas.

I don't want to hear how the corpse retains its blood,
or how the putrefying mouth continues accumulating water.
I don't want to be informed of the grasses’ torture sessions,
nor of the moon with its serpent's snout
scuttling until dawn.

I want to sleep awhile,
whether a second, a minute, or a century;
and yet I want everyone to know that I’m still alive,
that there’s a golden manger in my lips;
that I’m the elfin companion of the West Wind;
that I’m the immense shadow of my own tears.

When Dawn arrives, cover me with a veil,
because Dawn will toss fistfuls of ants at me;
then wet my shoes with a little hard water
so her scorpion pincers slip off.

Because I want to sleep the dreamless sleep of the apples,
to learn the lament that cleanses me of this earth;
because I want to live again as that dark child
who longed to cut out his heart on the high sea.

Gacela de la huida (“Ghazal of the Flight”)
by Federico Garcia Lorca
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

I have been lost, many times, by the sea
with an ear full of freshly-cut flowers
and a tongue spilling love and agony.

I have often been lost by the sea,
as I am lost in the hearts of children.

At night, no one giving a kiss
fails to feel the smiles of the faceless.
No one touching a new-born child
fails to remember horses’ thick skulls.

Because roses root through the forehead
for hardened landscapes of bone,
and man’s hands merely imitate
roots, underground.

Thus, I have lost myself in children’s hearts
and have been lost many times by the sea.
Ignorant of water, I go searching
for death, as the light consumes me.



La balada del agua del mar (“The Ballad of the Sea Water”)
by Federico Garcia Lorca
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

The sea
smiles in the distance:
foam-toothed,
heaven-lipped.

What do you sell, shadowy child
with your naked *******?

Sir, I sell
the sea’s saltwater.

What do you bear, dark child,
mingled with your blood?

Sir, I bear
the sea’s saltwater.

Those briny tears,
where were they born, mother?

Sir, I weep
the sea’s saltwater.

Heart, this bitterness,
whence does it arise?

So very bitter,
the sea’s saltwater!

The sea
smiles in the distance:
foam-toothed,
heaven-lipped.



Paisaje (“Landscape”)
by Federico Garcia Lorca
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

The olive orchard
opens and closes
like a fan;
above the grove
a sunken sky dims;
a dark rain falls
on warmthless lights;
reeds tremble by the gloomy river;
the colorless air wavers;
olive trees
scream with flocks
of captive birds
waving their tailfeathers
in the dark.



Canción del jinete (“The Horseman’s Song” or “Song of the Rider”)
by Federico Garcia Lorca
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Cordoba. Distant and lone.
Black pony, big moon,
olives in my saddlebag.
Although my pony knows the way,
I never will reach Cordoba.

High plains, high winds.
Black pony, blood moon.
Death awaits me, watching
from the towers of Cordoba.

Such a long, long way!
Oh my brave pony!
Death awaits me
before I arrive in Cordoba!

Cordoba. Distant and lone.



Arbolé, arbolé (“Tree, Tree”)
by Federico Garcia Lorca
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Sapling, sapling,
dry but green.

The girl with the lovely countenance
gathers olives.
The wind, that towering lover,
seizes her by the waist.

Four dandies ride by
on fine Andalusian steeds,
wearing azure and emerald suits
beneath long shadowy cloaks.
“Come to Cordoba, sweetheart!”
The girl does not heed them.

Three young bullfighters pass by,
slim-waisted, wearing suits of orange,
with swords of antique silver.
“Come to Sevilla, sweetheart!”
The girl does not heed them.

When twilight falls and the sky purples
with day’s demise,
a young man passes by, bearing
roses and moonlit myrtle.
“Come to Granada, sweetheart!”
But the girl does not heed him.

The girl, with the lovely countenance
continues gathering olives
while the wind’s colorless arms
encircle her waist.

Sapling, sapling,
dry but green.



Despedida (“Farewell”)
by Federico Garcia Lorca
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

If I die,
leave the balcony open.

The boy eats oranges.
(I see him from my balcony.)

The reaper scythes barley.
(I feel it from my balcony.)

If I die,
leave the balcony open!



In the green morning
I longed to become a heart.
Heart.

In the ripe evening
I longed to become a nightingale.
Nightingale.

(Soul,
become the color of oranges.
Soul,
become the color of love.)

In the living morning
I wanted to be me.
Heart.

At nightfall
I wanted to be my voice.
Nightingale.

Soul,
become the color of oranges.
Soul,
become the color of love!



I want to return to childhood,
and from childhood to the darkness.

Are you going, nightingale?
Go!

I want return to the darkness
And from the darkness to the flower.

Are you leaving, aroma?
Go!

I want to return to the flower
and from the flower
to my heart.

Are you departing, love?
Depart!

(To my deserted heart!)

so this nun mary from the school
of the sisters of notre dame
(dame or Dane?) had her brain removed
and probed: full of plaques and entanglements,
advanced Alzheimer's the coroner said,
aged 101 the brain,
yet up to her death no symptoms of the disease...
she was one of 678 subjects of the nun study,
American experiment genesis 1986 a.d.,
(journalism is really a true ally of poetry),
the 678 were told to write a character assassination
in range between poetry and diary (in their 20s),
"low idea" density they did produce,
but like Sister Anastasia: an amazing poppy-seed cake.
indeed dementia, the western medical anxiety,
10% of people over 60 and 50% of those over 85,
the grey plague i call it (grey matter, no
vermin scuttling about);
men are particularly less at the risk,
long gone the vogue of smoking tobacco -
could have asked the Apache indians about
peace-pipes long into their 90s... but no.
Aloysius Alzheimer / Oppenheimer
discovered the anti-ego unit and the atom bomb
with the neuron, in the latter case the 'd'uh' gene...
cave in the vowels on discretion
saying 'y Dinosaur kno'w, but i saw
a big mushroom boom' caving in meaning they
have to sound more hollow than you thought before
(the vowels, the vowels)...
like the article states, is it really a dis-ease?
i.e. a negation of ease? only if you found learning
at school to be torture and equipped with
a mentality for menial tasks like sunset on a monday
or summer 1904 so too summer of 2014...
no dementia in the giant Galapagos turtles,
they outlive us and still have a brain-rate
on a scale of: take one step here, plop a **** there...
lettuce, lettuce, lettuce... munching this greenery
will take forever! indeed the backlog of libraries of
knowledge and the result of those pioneer futilities
never tapped, still fucky fucky, toow dollar sucky sucky
on the cranium donning a crown.
the rest of the article concerning 4 inches closer
between the finger that dipped into peanut butter
(a closed mouth, eyes, and one nostril)
and identification of nature's diarrhoea (mm those
crunchy bits of fungi and corn undigested) -
but i'd tell you the experiment is faulty,
the peanut butter served up probably wasn't warmed up,
sense of smell and gaseous imprints, like
chlorine the disinfectant in public swimming pools...
not watching television a big give-away,
leisure time spent watching Plato's cave
at 27% of the sigma elsewhere and 18% by those
not afflicted...
then there's the whole dementia diabetes debate,
vegetables versus fruits... vegetables win...
Alzheimer's (also known as type 3 diabetes)...
imagine a creature coerced into disbelieving the
existence of water, and that alcohol is water
and a hamburger, that's me...
remember that nuns are cloistered yet sociable...

general hardbacks
1. the unmumsy mum (50,195 examples sold)
2. how it works: the mum (119,830 examples sold)
3. how it works: the husband (312,910 examples sold)

general paperbacks
1. the road to little dribbling (68,270 examples sold)
2. SPQR (26,765 examples sold)
3. the shepherd's life (61,000 examples sold)

want the fiction statistics of the publishing industry?
here goes:

fiction hardbacks
1. the last mile (4,190 examples sold)
2. private paris (3,225       "             "  )
3. predator (22,430            "             "  )

fiction paperback
1. career of evil (16,865    "              " )
2. the girl in the spider's web (55,625 examples sold)
3. make me (127,395 examples sold)

so there's that and there's the 148 diaries found in a skip
(a life discarded): apparently only 148 diaries remained
from a total of 1,000, the universal truth after seeing
Iolanthe, running incompletely from 1952 (Cambridge),
a "true thing" at 30 words per minute ranging between
1 and 3 hours of composition daily (handwritten,
imagine writing with a keyboard ***,
hand-crafted in Israel, yes the *** is an Israeli invention),

so there's that, all the intellectuals bits and bobs,
but there's also:
#instawoman: 'mostly non-fiction - so i keep
them in the loo. a paragraph is better than nothing,
even if it takes me five years to finish a book.
agony aunt "mrs. mills'" replies to modern truffles
(sorry, trivialities): my b/f wants to have ***
on trains on the Glaswegian side of scotland
bit tipsy bit turvy (turdy?) and popping to do likewise
on the Cornish coastline, her reply?
****** pervert... fetishism (Freud believed)
derived from a man's unconscious terror of once
having stuck his head out of his mother's ******...
(hey! my bladder man! my ****! that ****
didn't develop till i was outside that annoying
oven / aquarium!) - so she replies and says:
whisper "the seven o'clock London Liverpool St.
to Norwich", and as my own input:
for a premature *******.

that's Sunday sorted then.

Reindeer
     scuttling through snow:

these
were presented to us
kids
     scuttling through sand

in lands where rain is scarce.

Writing
about writing
is pathetic,
so instead
I’ll write about that time
in March when we went
hiking along ridgetops and
firetrails, and the sun
baked the rocks hard and impassive
to our boots. The orange-and-white tracks
folded back upon
themselves and seemed
so illogical that we thought
somehow we were going
in circles
(round the Sun we missed
that one it felt like we
weren’t moving)

For lunch you had squished
peanut butter and
sardine sandwiches because
you’re odd and idiosyncratic
like that, and I had apples
and muesli bars because I’m
too lazy to make lunch
at 6 in the morning.
We ate on a huge rock
overlooking trees and Lucy
in the Sky with Diamonds was
playing on the radio.
It felt as if we were two
enclosed in a small
self-erected hazecloud
where birds and lizards
and just breeze mingles
surprisingly well with John Lennon’s
recollections.

I remember the sun-scored rocks
had stored up warmth
from years of Marchdays like
today, they stayed warm slightly
longer than the air did.
We tasted each other’s
post-lunch mouths (you were
sardine and kind of gross)
and pretended like
our hands were ants,
scuttling aimlessly
(we had an aim)

I liked to think my fingers
were all elegant and smooth
as the moon.
I love you and I want
to make you happy here,
I love you and I want you
to make me happy here,
i should sleep – you should sleep –
we should sleep together.

I still remember that Marchday
when we went hiking and I’ve
written about it
dozens of times before in different
modes with other characters
but
to be honest I
don’t want to write about
anything else.