You are my night shaman,
you lead me deep
into primal chambers
where life's mysteries are manifold.

Somewhere along the line
it feels like I lost my poetry.

But I've always had a deep affinity of childhood curious-gaze with the light of a passing car slicing through a slumped drapery in the dead of a powerless October night
like a fumbling mouse with night-vision, glassy eyed, walk, walk, walk
run, run, run
scurry-rubber like an imperial humvee of red-carpet glamor.

Somewhere along the line
the freeze of a less-than-bourgeoise temperature never felt close to Antarctic
until the ring of a cell-phone became my national anthem
and the complacent all-eternity-and-everything-we-are-and-more reflective one-eye of a laptop became my national flag
I waived it with surrender calling to all nation states that 'I don't give a sweet ****,
entertain me.'

watching politics like sports and sports like politics I couldn't help but hear the old Native inside of me scream in suffocated final breaths so I turned up the volume to drown him out
and when I wished to return to his comforting embrace, I found he had drown to death
so all I could do was stand over his wading body in the river of my mind and lax my shoulders in defeat.

I rang the midnight church bell of 'send new message' to tell the world that didn't care
the shaman is dead.

all they said was
'finally, the shaman is dead.'
I nodded, laughed, locked the bathroom door
and cried until the river ran dry
the shamans body so far down creek I could pretend to forget he had ever existed

the ache inside became a masked anonymity with the glare of Dorian Gray
I shrugged and said, 'I could never make time anyways'
and fell right back into my sleepy routine with another cup of coffee.

Jester, come
end the game which never started
and the cat curls, entirely oblivious to the sword
now is the time to make all right.

Hey, what was the word?
The weekend bled a million horrors
till next month. Why shift my feet more?
Oh shaman of great power
how is your **** feeling?

Can't make it tonight, baby
just woke now
and I'll keep you a beautiful book
not quite bound, but tight enough
to keep your pages sane.

phenomenal! vibrant light-helixes of vortexical sound
bivolving sorrow-joy cascades
into motional peace & silent selfhood surrounded.

Threads are coming together
              I celebrate the infinite beyond
              I know I do not know,
              and question-knowing I discern my choice
encompassed ---
      live and know the life inside
as what it is and can be;
to live and explore unknown chords
of heartsong cloudscapes; to be sound,
to be consciousness of light; to be
light itself and voidness all potential;
to be love and to love&be-loved;
in a timeless stillness forgotten in its thinking of;
to spiral quietly before an ever-emergent soundfulness--
to be deafened with a clarity of hearing! to drown
in colors blooming
in the dark; to feel the breath of things and taste contentment
pure as quartz in spring water, white sage and myrr.

grounded in a vastness spilling symmetry
this is witnessed by a newly discovered self
now swept away with verdant effulgence
---dispersing unity here,
bringing light to this Whole Now that is,
now... here, is an integral clarity,
a clear laying down of that union--
that metaspeech of truth-dwelling seen,
a resident teaching echoed in every breeze
healing into wholeness giving birth to itself forever:
just now noted.

There is beneath us the progenitor and we call it “Mother”. Above us is the progenitor and we call it “Net” for it takes us and tosses us into the known and the unknown.

Our home star is not as bright as yours. We prefer your temperate lands when we visit, where the vegetation is lush and green. Those of us who remain inhabit your deserts and open spaces.

We are your brothers and sisters. Our development has been to grow in awareness and the development of our power. You have the potential to develop as we have, but your instincts are of a social group who need dominant members. You develop your material reality and your physical world. Your anchor is fixed and you grip the familiar and reject the unknown. There is a comfortable point where you feel the fullness, that is the anchor. In order to maintain this as a static point you develop belief systems to support it. This is your weakness, you are innocent children.

We grew and developed along another pathway, our anchor is not  rigid. We use Net for our anchor and so are able to change our perceptual reality. We move in ways that you do not understand and in any direction. We draw the fibers of Net around us and jump and fly. You see us only from your anchor point so that you see us change shape, appear and disappear.

Our voices and languages are barely accessible to you. You hear deep sounds and high pitched chirruping and whistling. Very few among you have remnants of language incorporating any of these. Those remaining are as clicks and whistles. We prefer direct communication.

We are masters of illusion. Our survival has depended on it and it is our instinct.
Our power developed so that when we pull around us the fibers of Net we create a shield and throw an illusion before those who depend on vision. It is one of our protections and also our hunting technique. We are hidden from your material probes and instruments of increased sight in this way.

Although we have been close neighbours for aeons, you have hardly seen us, except for the Few. Your interpretations have created problems for you. Your reliance on the anchor is so great that some among you do go to great lengths to maintain it. There are those among you who will silence the Few rather than lose the fixed anchor.

You are infants only, a seeding coming to fruition, and you play with dangerous toys. Your anchor is geocentric. You are in danger as is any youngster who plays with fire. If we showed you ourselves openly your rulers would not be gentle in their curiosity. We have technology and use material tools but we have had less to restrict us. We held back your development as much as we were able to enable you to develop power of the mind and independent thought.

Your grasp of Net is strong but you are rigid and anchored. You have learned to stand up and hold on. Now is the time to let go and walk, let go and run, let go and fly.

Around what you name “body” and believe to be “All” is more that you do not perceive with your restricted vision sense. You are aware of this. If you will learn acceptance and filter less from your senses, you will find the beauty of the universe of energy around you and available. A small perceptual shift would show you how you appear to those of us outside your narrow sphere.

Your body has filaments, which when translated to sight, appear as small moving threads which shine with rainbows. They move and ripple inside an energy body of light. This is your true body. It has abilities and senses that are dormant as you do not access them. They are accessible but as your anchor renders you blind to this you do not use them without intense effort or instinctively in extremity. The filaments are drawn together and pass through the anchor. Depending upon your ability to select filaments of the Net, your habitual plane and reality is selected and determined.
Those among you with abilities in your energy senses you ostracise and even ******. You succumb to misinformation to treat them as fools or freaks. This may be instinctive but it is a control mechanism to perpetuate the anchor and maintain the hive of your artificial society. So due to this, you have even less sense of true reality as it could be to you, by breeding out and suppressing your gifts. We have attempted to rectify this with limited effect in successive seedings.

You may notice that our words to you have reference to sight. Your terminology is geared to vision. You rely on visual information  so much that you have neglected physical senses of taste and smell, hearing, touch and proximity. Compared with our perceptions you are as blind as a mole is compared to to your visual abilities.

Your construction of reality is so anchored that your dangerous inclination to gather around you artifacts gives to you a sense of permanence. You are anchoring yourselves in time, yet to you it is dead because your senses are dead. There is an opportunity for your predators to use this to enforce your perception of, and control you within, your anchor's limitations. In this way, producing written or pictorial and symbolic records in permanent form is beneficial only so far as understanding continues to exist of the conditions under which these records were left. By changing current understanding and language to suit their purposes, your enforcers are able to manipulate your branch of humanity on a large scale.

You seal yourselves into the rejuvenation plane of the Mother progenitor where you feed and breed. It is so pleasurable to you to stay within this cocoon of reality that you fail to open your cast and therefore fail to fly into the spaces of Net outside where your true inheritance lies. The end result of this is greed and unrest. Your greed is paramount to you as you seek ever more pleasurable gratification. You enslave one another, buy and sell time and forget what you are. You are allowing the destruction of your home world. Without the home world you will have no place of rejuvenation, and worse neither will the myriads of others who share this progenitor.

There is a song from each mother progenitor within Net. It is a combined song and made up of the host progenitor together with silent voices of each and every life form. Together from each home world, the inhabitants send out a pulse. This is not a song from one species of a world but rather it is a song from all species, in fact every particle of every organism that lives.

To our developed senses the song of a world is brighter than the star it orbits. They are filaments of Net. The varied forms of life all send out their unique song. Many of us interact, harmonise, visit, commune and combine. You feel isolation only because you fail to harmonise and join your own song.

In your past and present we have felt the song of your world. Those of us belonging are part of that song. It is the song of being from the many. It does not end at the perimeters which you imagine. You have a problem in that, for the majority, you do not join your voices to the song. Mainly it is in dreaming, in childhood and in old age that we hear you.

We attempted to observe and commune and found many of you receptive to us. We have taught to you methods of development and given you gifts and tools. You have kept and preserved some of this knowledge only for a select few. Fears and distrust among others has caused destruction of a great proportion of the gifts that we have given to you. We found many lines of breeding where potential for development was possible. Your greed and your predator class destroyed many of them due to the competitive desire to have power over others.

In past seedings upon your progenitor and in the oldest times of your present incarnation, we have been known well and respected. Acknowledged for our seniority and loved as cousins. You did call us gods to distinguish our abilities. Then what did you do? Your control mechanisms changed the meanings of your language, whole languages were lost in wars over territory. You developed power structures and religions. Powerful rulers accumulated and isolated your shared knowledge.

You reduced your development by selective education in the Way. Territorial disputes and greed over resources divided you. You ceased to listen to the Mother. Instead of harmonious living which you had managed in agreement with each other already, you were divided by hormonal impulses, insecurity, violence and greed. The natural openness of the female within it's central domain became enclosed, imprisoned and the natural desire of the male to outwardly discover and interact was turned inwards until it became a sedentary desire for dominance within the female domain. You lost the harmonics of the song. Your religions underestimate the power of borrowed tools. Your ruling classes made deals that they didn't understand, with predators they didn't recognise, in order to save themselves.

We stood on ground over ground and were called Immortals. We gave you wisdom and were called Kings. We moved and played among you and were called Jinn. We moved among the small folk and were called Faerie. We appeared in light and were called Angels. We wandered in places where you too did once wander and were called Ghosts and Demons. Those who spoke to us and attempted to impart to your hive our knowledge, you raised as prophets or slandered and ridiculed. You stole their words to make them your own words of power, changing them to your own ends or you murdered the messengers because you feared the changes that increased understanding brings.

You incorporated the experiences of your murdered victims into a celebration of your own power structures, twisted and out of synchronisation with the song. There are some among you who are in communion with the Great Spirit of life. We seek to heal your song, your complete home world song for the benefit of the myriad sentient beings who rejuvenate here, including yourselves. We seek to set you free to wander the threads of Net. It is within your reach but not in the ways that you  are taught.

Your world is about to change and you must change with it as you are a small part of it. Holding the threads into your own anchor point will break them. You have reached inertia, entropy. The movement has to come, it is inevitable. Imagine one of your large machines of cogs and wheels and bars. Your insistence upon a rigid anchor is like a bar within the machine that doesn't move. A point of inertia in a moving system will be removed. This has happened over and over among your kind and our kind in many places and worlds. You do not remember when worlds underwent cataclysm, forgetful of trauma you have followed a similar path.

We travel along pathways of energy, both upon worlds and in the Net. Moving bodies follow these paths. We follow comets and small bodies able to move freely within Net. Net permeates your mother progenitor.

Survivors mapped the movements of Net after the slate was wiped clean and you were reseeded. There is a secret that your rulers are aware of and you are not. The secret is that there are no rulers within Net. You all have the freedom and capability to access true harmony of the song. You allow a faction, to call themselves an elite class. You fear this as a hidden power, a predator. It's aim is to amass Time: a power based on material wealth. They take this power easily as they have taken and twisted truth and history. The gifts are shared among you equally and these few know this. Resources are plentiful and yet you succumb to their restrictions. A predator cannot survive without it's prey. We are not your predators although we move among you. Your predator is within and feeds upon your fear.

You are not in the tribes now, you have no shaman, no guide to take you in and out of the gate and this role cannot be allocated to parasitic Blind Time Hoarders. These whip up your passions and lead you into war and destruction to further their material wealth. It leads you away from the song, as these think to enhance their own survival which it may do but never can as they understand it. They seek to steal your dreams and make them their own, they are helpless without you. They care nothing for the song because they are aware of successive seedings.

Net is a dream reality, changing, immeasurable, boundless, filled with infinite possibilities and you are creators. Blind time hoarders drive you by combining the minds and dreams and belief systems of many to focus onto what they themselves desire, in order to bring it to fruition. They employ dream stealers to prevent your development. They believe that their own song can exist independently and they guide you only to anchor yourselves into your own prison.

All is a dream, all is ephemeral, changing, dynamic. There is no death after death, no damnation on any particular plane. Reality is how you construct your song. Your rulers create inertia for you the many and profit for themselves using you as the tools of your own entrapment. There is no death and no damnation, they are constructs of your reality made by material anchor points and you are controlled by fear of the inevitable. It is a statecraft to use belief systems to control perceptions of reality in order to fix the anchor point to a rigid point of convenience. In this way you are farmed, you are a crop in each seeding. Who seeds you? You seed yourselves. Sentient beings are all naturally regenerated by the mechanisms of Net when conditions exist that are compatible, world after world, in each growth cycle of every celestial body. In the regeneration, holding to your rigid anchor point, you seed into your prison after each cataclysm, each breaking of the inertia.

If you would be open to the mechanisms of the place you inhabit with it's creative forces, it's sentience and it's dynamics you will learn to fly the progenitor Net's pathways and return home for rejuvenation to your progenitor Mother of the tribes.

Never sits still unless
he's passed out on the floor,
playful smile hides wise eyes
as his beard talks to us
after communion with a bottle of Jack
and rolling down the rabbit hole:

*We have been going before the beginning
It's not what you know but how you apply it
Ancient knowledge is knowledge now
We follow what is right for us

Everything was a miracle once

When **** is happening, it's ****
it's only not **** once it's happened already.

Everything is general,
what we do is specific.

We're fighting to get past so many archetypes and realities:
nature vs. nurture
fight vs. flight
yin vs. yang
Right vs. left
male vs. female
analytical vs. emotional
visual vs. verbal  
majority vs. minority
experience vs. innocence

What's the point of distance
when you can see yourself on another plane of existence
and not simply see yourself consciously?

When you see yourself, who are you?
You know who you are because when you ask the universe
it will arrive in time!

Daddy takes me to the greenhouse,
behind our rotted trailer, deep in sovereign backwoods.
Marsh voices, thick like tupelo honey.

The coo of a loon, hiss of a cottonmouth, shiver of a snapping turtle.

The silver of swamp lilies lip the land in wild haze,
a veil of ochre moss tickles my nose like gauzey ginger ale
and soil clings to my ankles like a lonesome hound.

Daddy’s greenhouse is a shed, a haven.
A milieu of magic and fleur-de-cannabis
where pixies pull my curls and gnomes dance
under mushroom parasols.

My hands dip into a hollow of muddy earthworms.
I feel akin to the yellow blood of a butterfly
or pale jade of perplexing geckos.  

Daddy is a shaman.

He trims holy blooms that come from spirits
who sing in the wind like the whippoorwill at dusk.
Snipping sticky bushels, he pads tufts into his pipe,
carved in the shape of a sullen armadillo.

I watch him inhale.

                          His breath
                                               stiff
                            as a braid of mangroves.

                      He exhales a ligneous cough.

                              I don’t mind,
                                                   much.

The Lonely Earth
by Kajal Ahmad, a Kurdish poet
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

The pale celestial bodies
never bid her “Good morning!”
nor do the creative stars
kiss her.
Earth, where so many tender persuasions and roses lie interred,
might expire for the lack of a glance, or an odor.
She’s a lonely dusty orb,
so very lonely!, as she observes the moon's patchwork attire
knowing the sun's an imposter
who sears with rays he has stolen for himself
and who looks down on the moon and earth like lodgers.

Keywords/Tags: Kajal Ahmad, Kurd, Kurdish, lonely, Earth, stars, moon, sun, rays, lodgers, tenants, boarders, renters, mrbch



Mirror
by Kajal Ahmad, a Kurdish poet
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

My era’s obscuring mirror  
shattered
because it magnified the small
and made the great seem insignificant.
Dictators and monsters filled its contours.            
Now when I breathe
its jagged shards pierce my heart
and instead of sweat
I exude glass.



Kurds are Birds
by Kajal Ahmad, a Kurdish poet
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Per the latest scientific classification, Kurds
now belong to a species of bird!
This is why,
traveling across the torn, fraying pages of history,
they are nomads recognized by their caravans.
Yes, Kurds are birds! And,
even worse, when
there’s nowhere left to nest, no refuge for their pain,
they turn to the illusion of traveling again
between the warm and arctic sectors of their homeland.
So I don’t think it strange Kurds can fly but not land.
They wander from region to region
never realizing their dreams
of settling,
of forming a colony, of nesting.
No, they never settle down long enough
to visit Rumi and inquire about his health,
or to bow down deeply in the gust-
stirred dust,
like Nali.



Bi Havre (“Together”)
possibly the oldest Kurdish poem
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

I want us to be together:
we would eat together,

climb the mountain together,
sing songs together, songs of love,

songs from the heart, sung from above.
I want us to have one heart, together.

Many words in this ancient poem are in doubt, so I have excerpted what I grok to be the central meaning.



Birdsong
by Rumi
loose translation by Michael R. Burch

Birdsong relieves
my deepest griefs:
now I'm just as ecstatic as they,
but with nothing to say!
Please universe,
rehearse
your poetry
through me!



First They Came for the Muslims
by Michael R. Burch

after Martin Niemoller

First they came for the Muslims
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Muslim.

Then they came for the homosexuals
and I did not speak out
because I was not a homosexual.

Then they came for the feminists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a feminist.

Now when will they come for me
because I was too busy and too apathetic
to defend my sisters and brothers?

Published in Amnesty International’s Words That Burn anthology, and by Borderless Journal (India), The Hindu (India), Matters India, New Age Bangladesh, Convivium Journal, PressReader (India) and Kracktivist (India). It is indeed an honor to have one of my poems published by an outstanding organization like Amnesty International. A stated goal for the anthology is to teach students about human rights through poetry.



Uyghur Poetry Translations

With my translations I am trying to build awareness of the plight of Uyghur poets and their people, who are being sent in large numbers to Chinese "reeducation" concentration camps.

Perhat Tursun (1969-????) is one of the foremost living Uyghur language poets, if he is still alive. Unfortunately, Tursun was "disappeared" into a Chinese "reeducation" concentration camp where extreme psychological torture is the norm. According to a disturbing report he was later "hospitalized." Apparently no one knows his present whereabouts or condition, if he has one. According to John Bolton, when Donald Trump learned of these "reeducation" concentration camps, he told Chinese President Xi Jinping it was "exactly the right thing to do." Trump’s excuse? "Well, we were in the middle of a major trade deal."

Elegy
by Perhat Tursun
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

"Your soul is the entire world."
―Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

Asylum seekers, will you recognize me among the mountain passes' frozen corpses?
Can you identify me here among our Exodus's exiled brothers?
We begged for shelter but they lashed us bare; consider our naked corpses.
When they compel us to accept their massacres, do you know that I am with you?

Three centuries later they resurrect, not recognizing each other,
Their former greatness forgotten.
I happily ingested poison, like a fine wine.
When they search the streets and cannot locate our corpses, do you know that I am with you?

In that tower constructed of skulls you will find my dome as well:
They removed my head to more accurately test their swords' temper.
When before their swords our relationship flees like a flighty lover,
Do you know that I am with you?

When men in fur hats are used for target practice in the marketplace
Where a dying man's face expresses his agony as a bullet cleaves his brain
While the executioner's eyes fail to comprehend why his victim vanishes, ...
Seeing my form reflected in that bullet-pierced brain's erratic thoughts,
Do you know that I am with you?

In those days when drinking wine was considered worse than drinking blood,
did you taste the flour ground out in that blood-turned churning mill?
Now, when you sip the wine Ali-Shir Nava'i imagined to be my blood
In that mystical tavern's dark abyssal chambers,
Do you know that I am with you?

TRANSLATOR NOTES: This is my interpretation (not necessarily correct) of the poem's frozen corpses left 300 years in the past. For the Uyghur people the Mongol period ended around 1760 when the Qing dynasty invaded their homeland, then called Dzungaria. Around a million people were slaughtered during the Qing takeover, and the Dzungaria territory was renamed Xinjiang. I imagine many Uyghurs fleeing the slaughters would have attempted to navigate treacherous mountain passes. Many of them may have died from starvation and/or exposure, while others may have been caught and murdered by their pursuers. If anyone has a better explanation, they are welcome to email me at mikerburch@gmail.com (there is an "r" between my first and last names).



The Fog and the Shadows
adapted from a novel by Perhat Tursun
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

“I began to realize the fog was similar to the shadows.”

I began to realize that, just as the exact shape of darkness is a shadow,
even so the exact shape of fog is disappearance
and the exact shape of a human being is also disappearance.
At this moment it seemed my body was vanishing into the human form’s final state.

After I arrived here,
it was as if the danger of getting lost
and the desire to lose myself
were merging strangely inside me.

While everything in that distant, gargantuan city where I spent my five college years felt strange to me; and even though the skyscrapers, highways, ditches and canals were built according to a single standard and shape, so that it wasn’t easy to differentiate them, still I never had the feeling of being lost. Everyone there felt like one person and they were all folded into each other. It was as if their faces, voices and figures had been gathered together like a shaman’s jumbled-up hair.

Even the men and women seemed identical.
You could only tell them apart by stripping off their clothes and examining them.
The men’s faces were beardless like women’s and their skin was very delicate and unadorned.
I was always surprised that they could tell each other apart.
Later I realized it wasn’t just me: many others were also confused.

For instance, when we went to watch the campus’s only TV in a corridor of a building where the seniors stayed when they came to improve their knowledge. Those elderly Uyghurs always argued about whether someone who had done something unusual in an earlier episode was the same person they were seeing now. They would argue from the beginning of the show to the end. Other people, who couldn’t stand such endless nonsense, would leave the TV to us and stalk off.

Then, when the classes began, we couldn’t tell the teachers apart.
Gradually we became able to tell the men from the women
and eventually we able to recognize individuals.
But other people remained identical for us.

The most surprising thing for me was that the natives couldn’t differentiate us either.
For instance, two police came looking for someone who had broken windows during a fight at a restaurant and had then run away.
They ordered us line up, then asked the restaurant owner to identify the culprit.
He couldn’t tell us apart even though he inspected us very carefully.
He said we all looked so much alike that it was impossible to tell us apart.
Sighing heavily, he left.



The Encounter
by Abdurehim Otkur
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

I asked her, why aren’t you afraid? She said her God.
I asked her, anything else? She said her People.
I asked her, anything more? She said her Soul.
I asked her if she was content? She said, I am Not.



The Distance
by Tahir Hamut
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

We can’t exclude the cicadas’ serenades.
Behind the convex glass of the distant hospital building
the nurses watch our outlandish party
with their absurdly distorted faces.

Drinking watered-down liquor,
half-****, descanting through the open window,
we speak sneeringly of life, love, girls.
The cicadas’ serenades keep breaking in,
wrecking critical parts of our dissertations.

The others dream up excuses to ditch me
and I’m left here alone.

The cosmopolitan pyramid
of drained bottles
makes me feel
like I’m in a Turkish bath.

I lock the door:
Time to get back to work!

I feel like doing cartwheels.
I feel like self-annihilation.



Refuge of a Refugee
by Ablet Abdurishit Berqi aka Tarim
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

I lack a passport,
so I can’t leave legally.
All that’s left is for me to smuggle myself to safety,
but I’m afraid I’ll be beaten black and blue at the border
and I can’t afford the trafficker.

I’m a smuggler of love,
though love has no national identity.
Poetry is my refuge,
where a refugee is most free.

The following excerpts, translated by Anne Henochowicz, come from an essay written by Tang Danhong about her final meeting with Dr. Ablet Abdurishit Berqi, aka Tarim. Tarim is a reference to the Tarim Basin and its Uyghur inhabitants...

I’m convinced that the poet Tarim Ablet Berqi the associate professor at the Xinjiang Education Institute, has been sent to a “concentration camp for educational transformation.” This scholar of Uyghur literature who conducted postdoctoral research at Israel’s top university, what kind of “educational transformation” is he being put through?

Chen Quanguo, the Communist Party secretary of Xinjiang, has said it’s “like the instruction at school, the order of the military, and the security of prison. We have to break their blood relations, their networks, and their roots.”

On a scorching summer day, Tarim came to Tel Aviv from Haifa. In a few days he would go back to Urumqi. I invited him to come say goodbye and once again prepared Sichuan cold noodles for him. He had already unfriended me on Facebook. He said he couldn’t eat, he was busy, and had to hurry back to Haifa. He didn’t even stay for twenty minutes. I can’t even remember, did he sit down? Did he have a glass of water? Yet this farewell shook me to my bones.

He said, “Maybe when I get off the plane, before I enter the airport, they’ll take me to a separate room and beat me up, and I’ll disappear.”

Looking at my shocked face, he then said, “And maybe nothing will happen …”

His expression was sincere. To be honest, the Tarim I saw rarely smiled. Still, layer upon layer blocked my powers of comprehension: he’s a poet, a writer, and a scholar. He’s an associate professor at the Xinjiang Education Institute. He can get a passport and come to Israel for advanced studies. When he goes back he’ll have an offer from Sichuan University to be a professor of literature … I asked, “Beat you up at the airport? Disappear? On what grounds?”

“That’s how Xinjiang is,” he said without any surprise in his voice. “When a Uyghur comes back from being abroad, that can happen.”…



This poem helps us understand the nomadic lifestyle of many Uyghurs, the hardships they endure, and the character it builds...

Iz (“Traces”)
by Abdurehim Otkur
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

We were children when we set out on this journey;
Now our grandchildren ride horses.

We were just a few when we set out on this arduous journey;
Now we're a large caravan leaving traces in the desert.

We leave our traces scattered in desert dunes' valleys
Where many of our heroes lie buried in sandy graves.

But don't say they were abandoned: amid the cedars
their resting places are decorated by springtime flowers!

We left the tracks, the station... the crowds recede in the distance;
The wind blows, the sand swirls, but here our indelible trace remains.

The caravan continues, we and our horses become thin,
But our great-grand-children will one day rediscover those traces.



My Feelings
by Dolqun Yasin
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

The light sinking through the ice and snow,
The hollyhock blossoms reddening the hills like blood,
The proud peaks revealing their ******* to the stars,
The morning-glories embroidering the earth’s greenery,
Are not light,
Not hollyhocks,
Not peaks,
Not morning-glories;
They are my feelings.

The tears washing the mothers’ wizened faces,
The flower-like smiles suddenly brightening the girls’ visages,
The hair turning white before age thirty,
The night which longs for light despite the sun’s laughter,
Are not tears,
Not smiles,
Not hair,
Not night;
They are my nomadic feelings.

Now turning all my sorrow to passion,
Bequeathing to my people all my griefs and joys,
Scattering my excitement like flowers festooning fields,
I harvest all these, then tenderly glean my poem.

Therefore the world is this poem of mine,
And my poem is the world itself.



To My Brother the Warrior
by Téyipjan Éliyow
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

When I accompanied you,
the commissioners called me a child.
If only I had been a bit taller
I might have proved myself in battle!

The commission could not have known
my commitment, despite my youth.
If only they had overlooked my age and enlisted me,
I'd have given that enemy rabble hell!

Now, brother, I’m an adult.
Doubtless, I’ll join the service soon.
Soon enough, I’ll be by your side,
battling the enemy: I’ll never surrender!

Keywords/Tags: Uyghur, translation, Uighur, Xinjiang, elegy, Kafka, China, Chinese, reeducation, prison, concentration camp, desert, nomad, nomadic, race, racism, discrimination, Islam, Islamic, Muslim, mrbuyghur



Mehmet Akif Ersoy: Modern English Translations of Turkish Poems

Mehmet Âkif Ersoy (1873-1936) was a Turkish poet, author, writer, academic, member of parliament, and the composer of the Turkish National Anthem.



Snapshot
by Mehmet Akif Ersoy
loose English translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Earth’s least trace of life cannot be erased;
even when you lie underground, it encompasses you.
So, those of you who anticipate the shadows,
how long will the darkness remember you?



Zulmü Alkislayamam
"I Can’t Applaud Tyranny"
by Mehmet Akif Ersoy
loose English translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

I can't condone cruelty; I will never applaud the oppressor;
Yet I can't renounce the past for the sake of deluded newcomers.
When someone curses my ancestors, I want to strangle them,
Even if you don’t.
But while I harbor my elders,
I refuse to praise their injustices.
Above all, I will never glorify evil, by calling injustice “justice.”
From the day of my birth, I've loved freedom;
The golden tulip never deceived me.
If I am nonviolent, does that make me a docile sheep?
The blade may slice, but my neck resists!
When I see someone else's wound, I suffer a great hardship;
To end it, I'll be whipped, I'll be beaten.
I can't say, “Never mind, just forget it!” I'll mind,
I'll crush, I'll be crushed, I'll uphold justice.
I'm the foe of the oppressor, the friend of the oppressed.
What the hell do you mean, with your backwardness?



Çanakkale Sehitlerine
"For the Çanakkale Martyrs"
by Mehmet Akif Ersoy
loose English translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Was there ever anything like the Bosphorus war?―
The earth’s mightiest armies pressing Marmara,
Forcing entry between her mountain passes
To a triangle of land besieged by countless vessels.
Oh, what dishonorable assemblages!
Who are these Europeans, come as rapists?
Who, these braying hyenas, released from their reeking cages?
Why do the Old World, the New World, and all the nations of men
now storm her beaches? Is it Armageddon? Truly, the whole world rages!
Seven nations marching in unison!
Australia goose-stepping with Canada!
Different faces, languages, skin tones!
Everything so different, but the mindless bludgeons!
Some warriors Hindu, some African, some nameless, unknown!
This disgraceful invasion, baser than the Black Death!
Ah, the 20th century, so noble in its own estimation,
But all its favored ones nothing but a parade of worthless wretches!
For months now Turkish soldiers have been vomited up
Like stomachs’ retched contents regarded with shame.
If the masks had not been torn away, the faces would still be admired,
But the ***** called civilization is far from blameless.
Now the ****** demand the destruction of the doomed
And thus bring destruction down on their own heads.
Lightning severs horizons!
Earthquakes regurgitate the bodies of the dead!
Bombs’ thunderbolts explode brains,
rupture the ******* of brave soldiers.
Underground tunnels writhe like hell
Full of the bodies of burn victims.
The sky rains down death, the earth swallows the living.
A terrible blizzard heaves men violently into the air.
Heads, eyes, torsos, legs, arms, chins, fingers, hands, feet...
Body parts rain down everywhere.
Coward hands encased in armor callously scatter
Floods of thunderbolts, torrents of fire.
Men’s chests gape open,
Beneath the high, circling vulture-like packs of the air.
Cannonballs fly as frequently as bullets
Yet the heroic army laughs at the hail.
Who needs steel fortresses? Who fears the enemy?
How can the shield of faith not prevail?
What power can make religious men bow down to their oppressors
When their stronghold is established by God?
The mountains and the rocks are the bodies of martyrs!...
For the sake of a crescent, oh God, many suns set, undone!
Dear soldier, who fell for the sake of this land,
How great you are, your blood saves the Muslims!
Only the lions of Bedr rival your glory!
Who then can dig the grave wide enough to hold you. and your story?
If we try to consign you to history, you will not fit!
No book can contain the eras you shook!
Only eternities can encompass you!...
Oh martyr, son of the martyr, do not ask me about the grave:
The prophet awaits you now, his arms flung wide open, to save!



W. S. Rendra translations

Willibrordus Surendra Broto Rendra (1935-2009), better known as W. S. Rendra or simply Rendra, was an Indonesian dramatist and poet. He said, “I learned meditation and the disciplines of the traditional Javanese poet from my mother, who was a palace dancer. The idea of the Javanese poet is to be a guardian of the spirit of the nation.” The press gave him the nickname Burung Merak (“The Peacock”) for his flamboyant poetry readings and stage performances.

SONNET
by W. S. Rendra
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Best wishes for an impending deflowering.

Yes, I understand: you will never be mine.
I am resigned to my undeserved fate.
I contemplate
irrational numbers―complex & undefined.

And yet I wish love might ... ameliorate ...
such negative numbers, dark and unsigned.
But at least I can’t be held responsible
for disappointing you. No cause to elate.
Still, I am resigned to my undeserved fate.
The gods have spoken. I can relate.

How can this be, when all it makes no sense?
I was born too soon―such was my fate.
You must choose another, not half of who I AM.
Be happy with him when you consummate.

THE WORLD'S FIRST FACE
by W. S. Rendra
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Illuminated by the pale moonlight
the groom carries his bride
up the hill―
both of them naked,
both consisting of nothing but themselves.

As in all beginnings
the world is naked,
empty, free of deception,
dark with unspoken explanations―
a silence that extends
to the limits of time.

Then comes light,
life, the animals and man.

As in all beginnings
everything is naked,
empty, open.

They're both young,
yet both have already come a long way,
passing through the illusions of brilliant dawns,
of skies illuminated by hope,
of rivers intimating contentment.

They have experienced the sun's warmth,
drenched in each other's sweat.

Here, standing by barren reefs,
they watch evening fall
bringing strange dreams
to a bed arrayed with resplendent coral necklaces.

They lift their heads to view
trillions of stars arrayed in the sky.
The universe is their inheritance:
stars upon stars upon stars,
more than could ever be extinguished.

Illuminated by the pale moonlight
the groom carries his bride
up the hill―
both of them naked,
to recreate the world's first face.

Keywords/Tags: Rendra, Indonesian, Javanese, translation, love, fate, god, gods, goddess, groom, bride, world, time, life, sun, hill, hills, moon, moonlight, stars, life, animals?, international, travel, voyage, wedding, relationship, mrbtran



Death Fugue
by Paul Celan
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Black milk of daybreak, we drink you come dusk;
we drink you come midday, come morning, come night;
we drink you and drink you.
We’re digging a grave like a hole in the sky;
there’s sufficient room to lie there.
The man of the house plays with vipers; he writes
in the Teutonic darkness, “Your golden hair Margarete...”
He composes by starlight, whistles hounds to stand by,
whistles Jews to dig graves, where together they’ll lie.
He commands us to strike up bright tunes for the dance!

Black milk of daybreak, we drink you come dusk;
we drink you come dawn, come midday, come night;
we drink you and drink you.
The man of the house plays with serpents; he writes...
he writes as the night falls, “Your golden hair Margarete...
Your ashen hair Shulamith...”
We are digging dark graves where there’s more room, on high.
His screams, “Hey you, dig there!” and “Hey you, sing and dance!”
He grabs his black nightstick, his eyes pallid blue,
screaming, “Hey you―dig deeper! You others―sing, dance!”

Black milk of daybreak, we drink you come dusk;
we drink you come midday, come morning, come night;
we drink you and drink you.
The man of the house writes, “Your golden hair Margarete...
Your ashen hair Shulamith...” as he cultivates snakes.
He screams, “Play Death more sweetly! Death’s the master of Germany!”
He cries, “Scrape those dark strings, soon like black smoke you’ll rise
to your graves in the skies; there’s sufficient room for Jews there!”

Black milk of daybreak, we drink you come midnight;
we drink you come midday; Death’s the master of Germany!
We drink you come dusk; we drink you and drink you...
He’s a master of Death, his pale eyes deathly blue.
He fires leaden slugs, his aim level and true.
He writes as the night falls, “Your golden hair Margarete...”
He unleashes his hounds, grants us graves in the skies.
He plays with his serpents; Death’s the master of Germany...

“Your golden hair Margarete...
your ashen hair Shulamith...”



O, Little Root of a Dream
by Paul Celan
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

O, little root of a dream
you enmire me here;
I’m undermined by blood―
made invisible,
death's possession.

Touch the curve of my face,
that there may yet be an earthly language of ardor,
that someone else’s eyes
may somehow still see me,
though I’m blind,

here where you
deny me voice.



You Were My Death
by Paul Celan
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

You were my death;
I could hold you
when everything abandoned me―
even breath.



Wulf and Eadwacer
ancient Anglo-Saxon poem, circa 960 AD
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

My clan's curs pursue him like crippled game;
they'll rip him apart if he approaches their pack.
It is otherwise with us.

Wulf's on one island; we're on another.
His island's a fortress, fastened by fens.
Here, bloodthirsty curs howl for carnage.
They'll rip him apart if he approaches their pack.
It is otherwise with us.

My heart pursued Wulf like a panting hound,
but whenever it rained—how I wept! —
the boldest cur grasped me in its paws:
good feelings for him, but for me loathsome!

Wulf, O, my Wulf, my ache for you
has made me sick; your seldom-comings
have left me famished, deprived of real meat.

Have you heard, Eadwacer? Watchdog!
A wolf has borne our wretched whelp to the woods!
One can easily sever what never was one:
our song together.

Keywords/Tags: Anglo-Saxon, Old English, England, translation, scop, female, women, ****, ******, ***, ****** abuse, ******, lament, complaint, tribalism, tribe, clan, pack, chauvinism, war, wolf, wolves, dog, dogs, hound, hounds, cur, curs, whelp, baby, offspring, island



I Have Labored Sore
anonymous medieval lyric (circa the fifteenth century)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

I have labored sore / and suffered death,
so now I rest / and catch my breath.
But I shall come / and call right soon
heaven and earth / and hell to doom.
Then all shall know / both devil and man
just who I was / and what I am.

NOTE: This poem has a pronounced caesura (pause) in the middle of each line: a hallmark of Old English poetry. While this poem is closer to Middle English, it preserves the older tradition. I have represented the caesura with a slash.



A Lyke-Wake Dirge
anonymous medieval lyric (circa the sixteenth century)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

The Lie-Awake Dirge is "the night watch kept over a corpse."

This one night, this one night,
every night and all;
fire and sleet and candlelight,
and Christ receive thy soul.

When from this earthly life you pass
every night and all,
to confront your past you must come at last,
and Christ receive thy soul.

If you ever donated socks and shoes,
every night and all,
sit right down and put pull yours on,
and Christ receive thy soul.

But if you never helped your brother,
every night and all,
walk barefoot through the flames of hell,
and Christ receive thy soul.

If ever you shared your food and drink,
every night and all,
the fire will never make you shrink,
and Christ receive thy soul.

But if you never helped your brother,
every night and all,
walk starving through the black abyss,
and Christ receive thy soul.

This one night, this one night,
every night and all;
fire and sleet and candlelight,
and Christ receive thy soul.



This World's Joy
(anonymous Middle English lyric, circa early 14th century AD)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Winter awakens all my care
as leafless trees grow bare.
For now my sighs are fraught
whenever it enters my thought:
regarding this world's joy,
how everything comes to naught.



How Long the Night
(anonymous Middle English lyric, circa early 13th century AD)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

It is pleasant, indeed, while the summer lasts
with the mild pheasants' song...
but now I feel the northern wind's blast:
its severe weather strong.
Alas! Alas! This night seems so long!
And I, because of my momentous wrong
now grieve, mourn and fast.



Adam Lay Ybounden
(anonymous Medieval English lyric, circa early 15th century AD)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Adam lay bound, bound in a bond;
Four thousand winters, he thought, were not too long.
And all was for an apple, an apple that he took,
As clerics now find written in their book.
But had the apple not been taken, or had it never been,
We'd never have had our Lady, heaven's queen and matron.
So blesséd be the time the apple was taken thus;
Therefore we sing, "God is gracious! "

The poem has also been rendered as "Adam lay i-bounden" and "Adam lay i-bowndyn."



Excerpt from "Ubi Sunt Qui Ante Nos Fuerunt? "
anonymous Middle English poem, circa 1275
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Where are the men who came before us,
who led hounds and hawks to the hunt,
who commanded fields and woods?
Where are the elegant ladies in their boudoirs
who braided gold through their hair
and had such fair complexions?

Once eating and drinking made their hearts glad;
they enjoyed their games;
men bowed before them;
they bore themselves loftily...
But then, in an eye's twinkling,
their hearts were forlorn.

Where are their laughter and their songs,
the trains of their dresses,
the arrogance of their entrances and exits,
their hawks and their hounds?
All their joy is departed;
their "well" has come to "oh, well"
and to many dark days...



Westron Wynde
(anonymous Middle English lyric, found in a partbook circa 1530 AD, but perhaps written much earlier)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Western wind, when will you blow,
bringing the drizzling rain?
Christ, that my love were in my arms,
and I in my bed again!

NOTE: The original poem has "the smalle rayne down can rayne" which suggests a drizzle or mist, either of which would suggest a dismal day.



Pity Mary
(anonymous Middle English lyric, circa early 13th century AD)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Now the sun passes under the wood:
I rue, Mary, thy face: fair, good.
Now the sun passes under the tree:
I rue, Mary, thy son and thee.

In the poem above, note how "wood" and "tree" invoke the cross while "sun" and "son" seem to invoke each other. Sun-day is also Son-day, to Christians. The anonymous poet who wrote the poem above may have been been punning the words "sun" and "son." The poem is also known as "Now Goeth Sun Under Wood" and "Now Go'th Sun Under Wood."



Fowles in the Frith
(anonymous Middle English lyric, circa 13th-14th century AD)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

The fowls in the forest,
the fishes in the flood
and I must go mad:
such sorrow I've had
for beasts of bone and blood!

Sounds like an early animal rights activist! The use of "and" is intriguing... is the poet saying that his walks in the wood drive him mad because he is also a "beast of bone and blood, " facing a similar fate?



I am of Ireland
(anonymous Medieval Irish lyric, circa 13th-14th century AD)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

I am of Ireland,
and of the holy realm of Ireland.
Gentlefolk, I pray thee:
for the sake of saintly charity,
come dance with me
in Ireland!



The Love Song Of Shu-Sin
(the earth's oldest love poem, Sumerian, circa 2,000 BC)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Darling of my heart, my belovéd,
your enticements are sweet, far sweeter than honey.
Darling of my heart, my belovéd,
your enticements are sweet, far sweeter than honey.

You have captivated me; I stand trembling before you.
Darling, lead me swiftly into the bedroom!
You have captivated me; I stand trembling before you.
Darling, lead me swiftly into the bedroom!

Sweetheart, let me do the sweetest things to you!
My precocious caress is far sweeter than honey!
In the bedchamber, dripping love's honey,
let us enjoy life's sweetest thing.
Sweetheart, let me do the sweetest things to you!
My precocious caress is far sweeter than honey!

Bridegroom, you will have your pleasure with me!
Speak to my mother and she will reward you;
speak to my father and he will award you gifts.
I know how to give your body pleasure—
then sleep, my darling, till the sun rises.

To prove that you love me,
give me your caresses,
my Lord God, my guardian Angel and protector,
my Shu-Sin, who gladdens Enlil's heart,
give me your caresses!
My place like sticky honey, touch it with your hand!
Place your hand over it like a honey-*** lid!
Cup your hand over it like a honey cup!

This is a balbale-song of Inanna.

This may be earth's oldest love poem. It may have been written around 2000 BC, long before the Bible's "Song of Solomon, " which had been considered to be the oldest extant love poem by some experts. Shu-Sin was a Mesopotamian king who ruled over the land of Sumer close to four thousand years ago. The poem seems to be part of a rite, probably performed each year, known as the "sacred marriage" or "divine marriage, " in which the king would symbolically marry the goddess Inanna, mate with her, and so ensure fertility and prosperity for the coming year. The king would accomplish this amazing feat by marrying and/or having *** with a priestess or votary of Inanna, the Sumerian goddess of love, fertility and war. Her Akkadian name was Istar/Ishtar, and she was also known as Astarte.



War is Obsolete
by Michael R. Burch

Trump’s war is on children and their mothers.
"An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind." ― Gandhi

War is obsolete;
even the strange machinery of dread
weeps for the child in the street
who cannot lift her head
to reprimand the Man
who failed to countermand
her soft defeat.

But war is obsolete;
even the cold robotic drone
that flies far overhead
has sense enough to moan
and shudder at her plight
(only men bereft of Light
with hearts indurate stone
embrace war’s Siberian night.)

For war is obsolete;
man’s tribal “gods,” long dead,
have fled his awakening sight
while the true Sun, overhead,
has pity on her plight.
O sweet, precipitate Light!―
embrace her, reject the night
that leaves gentle fledglings dead.

For each brute ancestor lies
with his totems and his “gods”
in the slavehold of premature night
that awaited him in his tomb;
while Love, the ancestral womb,
still longs to give birth to the Light.
So which child shall we ****** tonight,
or which Ares condemn to the gloom?

Originally published by The Flea. While campaigning for president in 2016, Donald Trump said that, as commander-in-chief of the American military, he would order American soldiers to track down and ****** women and children as "retribution" for acts of terrorism. When aghast journalists asked Trump if he could possibly have meant what he said, he verified more than once that he did. Keywords/Tags: war, terrorism, retribution, violence, ******, children, Gandhi, Trump, drones



In My House
by Michael R. Burch

When you were in my house
you were not free―
in chains bound.

Manifest Destiny?

I was wrong;
my plantation burned to the ground.
I was wrong.
This is my song,
this is my plea:
I was wrong.

When you are in my house,
now, I am not free.
I feel the song
hurling itself back at me.
We were wrong.
This is my history.

I feel my tongue
stilting accordingly.

We were wrong;
brother, forgive me.

Published by Black Medina



Elegy for a little girl, lost
by Michael R. Burch

. . . qui laetificat juventutem meam . . .
She was the joy of my youth,
and now she is gone.
. . . requiescat in pace . . .
May she rest in peace.
. . . amen . . .

I was touched by this Latin prayer, which I discovered in a novel I read as a teenager. I later decided to incorporate it into a poem. From what I now understand, “ad deum qui laetificat juventutem meam” means “to the God who gives joy to my youth,” but I am sticking with my original interpretation: a lament for a little girl at her funeral. The phrase can be traced back to Saint Jerome's translation of Psalm 42 in the Vulgate Latin Bible (circa 385 AD).



The Children of Gaza

Nine of my poems have been set to music by the composer Eduard de Boer and have been performed in Europe by the Palestinian soprano Dima Bawab. My poems that became “The Children of Gaza” were written from the perspective of Palestinian children and their mothers. On this page the poems come first, followed by the song lyrics, which have been adapted in places to fit the music …



Epitaph for a Child of Gaza
by Michael R. Burch

I lived as best I could, and then I died.
Be careful where you step: the grave is wide.



Frail Envelope of Flesh
by Michael R. Burch

for the mothers and children of Gaza

Frail envelope of flesh,
lying cold on the surgeon’s table
with anguished eyes
like your mother’s eyes
and a heartbeat weak, unstable ...

Frail crucible of dust,
brief flower come to this―
your tiny hand
in your mother’s hand
for a last bewildered kiss ...

Brief mayfly of a child,
to live two artless years!
Now your mother’s lips
seal up your lips
from the Deluge of her tears ...



For a Child of Gaza, with Butterflies
by Michael R. Burch

Where does the butterfly go
when lightning rails
when thunder howls
when hailstones scream
while winter scowls
and nights compound dark frosts with snow?

Where does the butterfly go?

Where does the rose hide its bloom
when night descends oblique and chill
beyond the capacity of moonlight to fill?
When the only relief's a banked fire's glow,
where does the butterfly go?

And where shall the spirit flee
when life is harsh, too harsh to face,
and hope is lost without a trace?
Oh, when the light of life runs low,
where does the butterfly go?



I Pray Tonight
by Michael R. Burch

for the children of Gaza and their mothers

I pray tonight
the starry Light
might
surround you.

I pray
by day
that, come what may,
no dark thing confound you.

I pray ere tomorrow
an end to your sorrow.
May angels' white chorales
sing, and astound you.



Something
by Michael R. Burch

for the mothers and children of Gaza

Something inescapable is lost―
lost like a pale vapor curling up into shafts of moonlight,
vanishing in a gust of wind toward an expanse of stars
immeasurable and void.

Something uncapturable is gone―
gone with the spent leaves and illuminations of autumn,
scattered into a haze with the faint rustle of parched grass
and remembrance.

Something unforgettable is past―
blown from a glimmer into nothingness, or less,
and finality has swept into a corner where it lies
in dust and cobwebs and silence.



Mother’s Smile
by Michael R. Burch

for the mothers of Gaza and their children

There never was a fonder smile
than mother’s smile, no softer touch
than mother’s touch. So sleep awhile
and know she loves you more than “much.”

So more than “much,” much more than “all.”
Though tender words, these do not speak
of love at all, nor how we fall
and mother’s there, nor how we reach
from nightmares in the ticking night
and she is there to hold us tight.

There never was a stronger back
than father’s back, that held our weight
and lifted us, when we were small,
and bore us till we reached the gate,

then held our hands that first bright mile
till we could run, and did, and flew.
But, oh, a mother’s tender smile
will leap and follow after you!



Such Tenderness
by Michael R. Burch

for the mothers of Gaza

There was, in your touch, such tenderness―as
only the dove on her mildest day has,
when she shelters downed fledglings beneath a warm wing
and coos to them softly, unable to sing.

What songs long forgotten occur to you now―
a babe at each breast? What terrible vow
ripped from your throat like the thunder that day
can never hold severing lightnings at bay?

Time taught you tenderness―time, oh, and love.
But love in the end is seldom enough ...
and time?―insufficient to life’s brief task.
I can only admire, unable to ask―

what is the source, whence comes the desire
of a woman to love as no God may require?



who, US?
by Michael R. Burch

jesus was born
a palestinian child
where there’s no Room
for the meek and the mild

... and in bethlehem still
to this day, lambs are born
to cries of “no Room!”
and Puritanical scorn ...

under Herod, Trump, Bibi
their fates are the same―
the slouching Beast mauls them
and WE have no shame:

“who’s to blame?”



My nightmare ...

I had a dream of Jesus!
Mama, his eyes were so kind!
But behind him I saw a billion Christians
hissing "You're nothing!," so blind.
―The Child Poets of Gaza (written by Michael R. Burch for the children of Gaza)



I, too, have a dream ...

I, too, have a dream ...
that one day Jews and Christians
will see me as I am:
a small child, lonely and afraid,
staring down the barrels of their big bazookas,
knowing I did nothing
to deserve their enmity.
―The Child Poets of Gaza (written by Michael R. Burch for the children of Gaza)



Suffer the Little Children
by Nakba

I saw the carnage . . . saw girls' dreaming heads
blown to red atoms, and their dreams with them . . .

saw babies liquefied in burning beds
as, horrified, I heard their murderers’ phlegm . . .

I saw my mother stitch my shroud’s black hem,
for in that moment I was one of them . . .

I saw our Father’s eyes grow hard and bleak
to see frail roses severed at the stem . . .

How could I fail to speak?
―Nakba is an alias of Michael R. Burch



Here We Shall Remain
by Tawfiq Zayyad
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Like twenty impossibilities
in Lydda, Ramla and Galilee ...
here we shall remain.

Like brick walls braced against your chests;
lodged in your throats
like shards of glass
or prickly cactus thorns;
clouding your eyes
like sandstorms.

Here we shall remain,
like brick walls obstructing your chests,
washing dishes in your boisterous bars,
serving drinks to our overlords,
scouring your kitchens' filthy floors
in order to ****** morsels for our children
from between your poisonous fangs.

Here we shall remain,
like brick walls deflating your chests
as we face our deprivation clad in rags,
singing our defiant songs,
chanting our rebellious poems,
then swarming out into your unjust streets
to fill dungeons with our dignity.

Like twenty impossibilities
in Lydda, Ramla and Galilee,
here we shall remain,
guarding the shade of the fig and olive trees,
fermenting rebellion in our children
like yeast in dough.

Here we wring the rocks to relieve our thirst;
here we stave off starvation with dust;
but here we remain and shall not depart;
here we spill our expensive blood
and do not hoard it.

For here we have both a past and a future;
here we remain, the Unconquerable;
so strike fast, penetrate deep,
O, my roots!



Enough for Me
by Fadwa Tuqan
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Enough for me to lie in the earth,
to be buried in her,
to sink meltingly into her fecund soil, to vanish ...
only to spring forth like a flower
brightening the play of my countrymen's children.

Enough for me to remain
in my native soil's embrace,
to be as close as a handful of dirt,
a sprig of grass,
a wildflower.



Palestine
by Mahmoud Darwish
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

This land gives us
all that makes life worthwhile:
April's blushing advances,
the aroma of bread warming at dawn,
a woman haranguing men,
the poetry of Aeschylus,
love's trembling beginnings,
a boulder covered with moss,
mothers who dance to the flute's sighs,
and the invaders' fear of memories.

This land gives us
all that makes life worthwhile:
September's rustling end,
a woman leaving forty behind, still full of grace, still blossoming,
an hour of sunlight in prison,
clouds taking the shapes of unusual creatures,
the people's applause for those who mock their assassins,
and the tyrant's fear of songs.

This land gives us
all that makes life worthwhile:
Lady Earth, mother of all beginnings and endings!
In the past she was called Palestine
and tomorrow she will still be called Palestine.
My Lady, because you are my Lady, I deserve life!



Distant light
by Walid Khazindar
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Bitterly cold,
winter clings to the naked trees.
If only you would free
the bright sparrows
from the tips of your fingers
and release a smile—that shy, tentative smile—
from the imprisoned anguish I see.
Sing! Can we not sing
as if we were warm, hand-in-hand,
shielded by shade from a glaring sun?
Can you not always remain this way,
stoking the fire, more beautiful than necessary, and silent?
Darkness increases; we must remain vigilant
and this distant light is our only consolation—
this imperiled flame, which from the beginning
has been flickering,
in danger of going out.
Come to me, closer and closer.
I don't want to be able to tell my hand from yours.
And let's stay awake, lest the snow smother us.

Walid Khazindar was born in 1950 in Gaza City. He is considered one of the best Palestinian poets; his poetry has been said to be "characterized by metaphoric originality and a novel thematic approach unprecedented in Arabic poetry." He was awarded the first Palestine Prize for Poetry in 1997.



Excerpt from “Speech of the Red Indian”
by Mahmoud Darwish
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Let's give the earth sufficient time to recite
the whole truth ...
The whole truth about us.
The whole truth about you.

In tombs you build
the dead lie sleeping.
Over bridges you *****
file the newly slain.

There are spirits who light up the night like fireflies.
There are spirits who come at dawn to sip tea with you,
as peaceful as the day your guns mowed them down.

O, you who are guests in our land,
please leave a few chairs empty
for your hosts to sit and ponder
the conditions for peace
in your treaty with the dead.



Existence
by Fadwa Tuqan
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

In my solitary life, I was a lost question;
in the encompassing darkness,
my answer lay concealed.

You were a bright new star
revealed by fate,
radiating light from the fathomless darkness.

The other stars rotated around you
—once, twice —
until I perceived
your unique radiance.

Then the bleak blackness broke
and in the twin tremors
of our entwined hands
I had found my missing answer.

Oh you! Oh you intimate, yet distant!
Don't you remember the coalescence
Of our spirits in the flames?
Of my universe with yours?
Of the two poets?
Despite our great distance,
Existence unites us.



Nothing Remains
by Fadwa Tuqan
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Tonight, we’re together,
but tomorrow you'll be hidden from me again,
thanks to life’s cruelty.

The seas will separate us ...
Oh!—Oh!—If I could only see you!
But I'll never know ...
where your steps led you,
which routes you took,
or to what unknown destinations
your feet were compelled.

You will depart and the thief of hearts,
the denier of beauty,
will rob us of all that's dear to us,
will steal our happiness,
leaving our hands empty.

Tomorrow at dawn you'll vanish like a phantom,
dissipating into a delicate mist
dissolving quickly in the summer sun.

Your scent—your scent!—contains the essence of life,
filling my heart
as the earth absorbs the lifegiving rain.

I will miss you like the fragrance of trees
when you leave tomorrow,
and nothing remains.

Just as everything beautiful and all that's dear to us
is lost—lost!—when nothing remains.



Identity Card
by Mahmoud Darwish
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Record!
I am an Arab!
And my identity card is number fifty thousand.
I have eight children;
the ninth arrives this autumn.
Will you be furious?

Record!
I am an Arab!
Employed at the quarry,
I have eight children.
I provide them with bread,
clothes and books
from the bare rocks.
I do not supplicate charity at your gates,
nor do I demean myself at your chambers' doors.
Will you be furious?

Record!
I am an Arab!
I have a name without a title.
I am patient in a country
where people are easily enraged.
My roots
were established long before the onset of time,
before the unfolding of the flora and fauna,
before the pines and the olive trees,
before the first grass grew.
My father descended from plowmen,
not from the privileged classes.
My grandfather was a lowly farmer
neither well-bred, nor well-born!
Still, they taught me the pride of the sun
before teaching me how to read;
now my house is a watchman's hut
made of branches and cane.
Are you satisfied with my status?
I have a name, but no title!

Record!
I am an Arab!
You have stolen my ancestors' orchards
and the land I cultivated
along with my children.
You left us nothing
but these bare rocks.
Now will the State claim them
as it has been declared?

Therefore!
Record on the first page:
I do not hate people
nor do I encroach,
but if I become hungry
I will feast on the usurper's flesh!
Beware!
Beware my hunger
and my anger!

NOTE: Darwish was married twice, but had no children. In the poem above, he is apparently speaking for his people, not for himself personally.



Passport
by Mahmoud Darwish
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

They left me unrecognizable in the shadows
that bled all colors from this passport.
To them, my wounds were novelties—
curious photos for tourists to collect.
They failed to recognize me. No, don't leave
the palm of my hand bereft of sun
when all the trees recognize me
and every song of the rain honors me.
Don't set a wan moon over me!

All the birds that flocked to my welcoming wave
as far as the distant airport gates,
all the wheatfields,
all the prisons,
all the albescent tombstones,
all the barbwired boundaries,
all the fluttering handkerchiefs,
all the eyes—
they all accompanied me.
But they were stricken from my passport
shredding my identity!

How was I stripped of my name and identity
on soil I tended with my own hands?
Today, Job's lamentations
re-filled the heavens:
Don't make an example of me, not again!
Prophets! Gentlemen!—
Don't require the trees to name themselves!
Don't ask the valleys who mothered them!
My forehead glistens with lancing light.
From my hand the riverwater springs.
My identity can be found in my people's hearts,
so invalidate this passport!



Fadwa Tuqan has been called the Grand Dame of Palestinian letters and The Poet of Palestine. These are my translations of Fadwa Tuqan poems originally written in Arabic.



Labor Pains
by Fadwa Tuqan
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Tonight the wind wafts pollen through ruined fields and homes.
The earth shivers with love, with the agony of giving birth,
while the Invader spreads stories of submission and surrender.

O, Arab Aurora!

Tell the Usurper: childbirth’s a force beyond his ken
because a mother’s wracked body reveals a rent that inaugurates life,
a crack through which light dawns in an instant
as the blood’s rose blooms in the wound.



Hamza
by Fadwa Tuqan
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Hamza was one of my hometown’s ordinary men
who did manual labor for bread.

When I saw him recently,
the land still wore its mourning dress in the solemn windless silence
and I felt defeated.

But Hamza-the-unextraordinary said:
“Sister, our land’s throbbing heart never ceases to pound,
and it perseveres, enduring the unendurable, keeping the secrets of mounds and wombs.
This land sprouting cactus spikes and palms also births freedom-fighters.
Thus our land, my sister, is our mother!”

Days passed and Hamza was nowhere to be seen,
but I felt the land’s belly heaving in pain.
At sixty-five Hamza’s a heavy burden on her back.

“Burn down his house!”
some commandant screamed,
“and slap his son in a prison cell!”

As our town’s military ruler later explained
this was necessary for law and order,
that is, an act of love, for peace!

Armed soldiers surrounded Hamza’s house;
the coiled serpent completed its circle.

The bang at his door came with an ultimatum:
“Evacuate, **** it!'
So generous with their time, they said:
“You can have an hour, yes!”

Hamza threw open a window.
Face-to-face with the blazing sun, he yelled defiantly:
“Here in this house I and my children will live and die, for Palestine!”
Hamza's voice echoed over the hemorrhaging silence.

An hour later, with impeccable timing, Hanza’s house came crashing down
as its rooms were blown sky-high and its bricks and mortar burst,
till everything settled, burying a lifetime’s memories of labor, tears, and happier times.

Yesterday I saw Hamza
walking down one of our town’s streets ...
Hamza-the-unextraordinary man who remained as he always was:
unshakable in his determination.

My translation follows one by Azfar Hussain and borrows a word here, a phrase there.



Autumn Conundrum
by Michael R. Burch

for the mothers and children of Gaza

It's not that every leaf must finally fall,
it's just that we can never catch them all.



Piercing the Shell

for the mothers and children of Gaza

If we strip away all the accouterments of war,
perhaps we'll discover what the heart is for.



Sunset
by Michael R. Burch

for my grandfather, George Edwin Hurt Sr.

Between the prophecies of morning
and twilight’s revelations of wonder,
the sky is ripped asunder.

The moon lurks in the clouds,
waiting, as if to plunder
the dusk of its lilac iridescence,

and in the bright-tentacled sunset
we imagine a presence
full of the fury of lost innocence.

What we find within strange whorls of drifting flame,
brief patterns mauling winds deform and maim,
we recognize at once, but cannot name.



Water and Gold
by Michael R. Burch

You came to me as rain breaks on the desert
when every flower springs to life at once,
but joy's a wan illusion to the expert:
the Bedouin has learned how not to want.

You came to me as riches to a miser
when all is gold, or so his heart believes,
until he dies much thinner and much wiser,
his gleaming bones hauled off by chortling thieves.

You gave your heart too soon, too dear, too vastly;
I could not take it in; it was too much.
I pledged to meet your price, but promised rashly.
I died of thirst, of your bright Midas touch.

I dreamed you gave me water of your lips,
then sealed my tomb with golden hieroglyphs.

Published by The Lyric, Black Medina, The Eclectic Muse, Kritya (India), Shabestaneh (Iran), Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry, Captivating Poetry (Anthology), Strange Road, Freshet, Shot Glass Journal, Better Than Starbucks, Famous Poets and Poems, Sonnetto Poesia, Poetry Life & Times



Winter Thoughts of Ann Rutledge

Ann Rutledge was apparently Abraham Lincoln’s first love interest. Unfortunately, she was engaged to another man when they met, then died with typhoid fever at age 22. According to a friend, Isaac Cogdal, when asked if he had loved her, Lincoln replied: “It is true―true indeed, I did. I loved the woman dearly and soundly: She was a handsome girl―would have made a good, loving wife … I did honestly and truly love the girl and think often, often of her now.”

Winter Thoughts of Ann Rutledge
by Michael R. Burch

Winter was not easy,
nor would the spring return.
I knew you by your absence,
as men are wont to burn
with strange indwelling fire―
such longings you inspire!

But winter was not easy,
nor would the sun relent
from sculpting ****** images
and how could I repent?
I left quaint offerings in the snow,
more maiden than I care to know.



Ann Rutledge’s Irregular Quilt
by Michael R. Burch

based on “Lincoln the Unknown” by Dale Carnegie

I.
Her fingers “plied the needle” with “unusual swiftness and art”
till Abe knelt down beside her: then her demoralized heart
set Eros’s dart a-quiver; thus a crazy quilt emerged:
strange stitches all a-kilter, all patterns lost. (Her host
kept her vicarious laughter barely submerged.)

II.
Years later she’d show off the quilt with its uncertain stitches
as evidence love undermines men’s plans and unevens women’s strictures
(and a plethora of scriptures.)

III.
But O the sacred tenderness Ann’s reckless stitch contains
and all the world’s felicities: rich cloth, for love’s fine gains,
for sweethearts’ tremulous fingers and their bright, uncertain vows
and all love’s blithe, erratic hopes (like now’s).

IV.
Years later on a pilgrimage, by tenderness obsessed,
Dale Carnegie, drawn to her grave, found weeds in her place of rest
and mowed them back, revealing the spot of Lincoln’s joy and grief
(and his hope and his disbelief).

V.
Yes, such is the tenderness of love, and such are its disappointments.
Love is a book of rhapsodic poems. Love is an grab bag of ointments.
Love is the finger poised, the smile, the Question ― perhaps ― and the Answer?

Love is the pain of betrayal, the two left feet of the dancer.

VI.
There were ladies of ill repute in his past. Or so he thought. Was it true?
And yet he loved them, Ann (sweet Ann!), as tenderly as he loved you.

Keywords/Tags: Abraham Lincoln, Ann Rutledge, history, president, love, lover, mistress, paramour, romance, romantic, quilt, Dale Carnegie



evol-u-shun
by Michael R. Burch

does GOD adore the Tyger
while it’s ripping ur lamb apart?

does GOD applaud the Plague
while it’s eating u à la carte?

does GOD admire ur intelligence
while u pray that IT has a heart?

does GOD endorse the Bible
you blue-lighted at k-mart?



Stay With Me Tonight
by Michael R. Burch

Stay with me tonight;
be gentle with me as the leaves are gentle
falling to the earth.
And whisper, O my love,
how that every bright thing, though scattered afar,
retains yet its worth.

Stay with me tonight;
be as a petal long-awaited blooming in my hand.
Lift your face to mine
and touch me with your lips
till I feel the warm benevolence of your breath’s
heady fragrance like wine.

That which we had
when pale and waning as the dying moon at dawn,
outshone the sun.
And so lead me back tonight
through bright waterfalls of light
to where we shine as one.

Originally published by The Lyric



For All That I Remembered
by Michael R. Burch

For all that I remembered, I forgot
her name, her face, the reason that we loved ...
and yet I hold her close within my thought.
I feel the burnished weight of auburn hair
that fell across her face, the apricot
clean scent of her shampoo, the way she glowed
so palely in the moonlight, angel-wan.

The memory of her gathers like a flood
and bears me to that night, that only night,
when she and I were one, and if I could ...
I'd reach to her this time and, smiling, brush
the hair out of her eyes, and hold intact
each feature, each impression. Love is such
a threadbare sort of magic, it is gone
before we recognize it. I would crush
my lips to hers to hold their memory,
if not more tightly, less elusively.

Originally published by The Raintown Review



What the Poet Sees
by Michael R. Burch

What the poet sees,
he sees as a swimmer
~~~underwater~~~
watching the shoreline blur
sees through his breath’s weightless bubbles ...
Both worlds grow obscure.

Published by ByLine, Mandrake Poetry Review, Poetically Speaking, E Mobius Pi, Underground Poets, Little Brown Poetry, Little Brown Poetry, Triplopia, Poetic Ponderings, Poem Kingdom, PW Review, Neovictorian/Cochlea, Muse Apprentice Guild, Mindful of Poetry, Poetry on Demand, Poet’s Haven, Famous Poets and Poems, and Bewildering Stories



The Octopi Jars
by Michael R. Burch

Long-vacant eyes
now lodged in clear glass,
a-swim with pale arms
as delicate as angels'...

you are beyond all hope
of salvage now...
and yet I would pause,
no fear!,
to once touch
your arcane beaks...

I, more alien than you
to this imprismed world,
notice, most of all,
the scratches on the inside surfaces
of your hermetic cells ...

and I remember documentaries
of albino Houdinis
slipping like wraiths
over the walls of shipboard aquariums,
slipping down decks'
brine-lubricated planks,
spilling jubilantly into the dark sea,
parachuting through clouds of pallid ammonia...

and I know now in life you were unlike me:
your imprisonment was never voluntary.



escape!
by michael r. burch

to live among the daffodil folk . . .
slip down the rainslickened drainpipe . . .
suddenly pop out
the GARGANTUAN SPOUT . . .
minuscule as alice, shout
yippee-yi-yee!
in wee exultant glee
to be leaving behind the
LARGE
THREE-DENALI GARAGE.



Escape!!
by Michael R. Burch

You are too beautiful,
too innocent,
too inherently lovely
to merely reflect the sun’s splendor ...

too full of irresistible candor
to remain silent,
too delicately fawnlike
for a world so violent ...

Come, my beautiful Bambi
and I will protect you ...
but of course you have already been lured away
by the dew-laden roses ...



In Praise of Meter
by Michael R. Burch

The earth is full of rhythms so precise
the octave of the crystal can produce
a trillion oscillations, yet not lose
a second's beat. The ear needs no device
to hear the unsprung rhythms of the couch
drown out the mouth's; the lips can be debauched
by kisses, should the heart put back its watch
and find the pulse of love, and sing, devout.
If moons and tides in interlocking dance
obey their numbers, what's been left to chance?
Should poets be more lax―their circumstance
as humble as it is?―or readers wince
to see their ragged numbers thin, to hear
the moans of drones drown out the Chanticleer?

Originally published by The Eclectic Muse, then in The Best of the Eclectic Muse 1989-2003



Finally to Burn
(the Fall and Resurrection of Icarus)
by Michael R. Burch

Athena takes me
sometimes by the hand

and we go levitating
through strange Dreamlands

where Apollo sleeps
in his dark forgetting

and Passion seems
like a wise bloodletting

and all I remember
,upon awaking,

is: to Love sometimes
is like forsaking

one’s Being―to glide
heroically beyond thought,

forsaking the here
for the There and the Not.



O, finally to Burn,
gravity beyond escaping!

To plummet is Bliss
when the blisters breaking

rain down red scabs
on the earth’s mudpuddle ...

Feathers and wax
and the watchers huddle ...

Flocculent sheep,
O, and innocent lambs!,

I will rock me to sleep
on the waves’ iambs.



To sleep's sweet relief
from Love’s exhausting Dream,

for the Night has Wings
gentler than moonbeams―

they will flit me to Life
like a huge-eyed Phoenix

fluttering off
to quarry the Sphinx.



Riddlemethis,
riddlemethat,

Rynosseross,
throw out the Welcome Mat.

Quixotic, I seek Love
amid the tarnished

rusted-out steel
when to live is varnish.

To Dream―that’s the thing!
Aye, that Genie I’ll rub,

soak by the candle,
aflame in the tub.



Riddlemethis,
riddlemethat,

Rynosseross,
throw out the Welcome Mat.

Somewhither, somewhither
aglitter and strange,

we must moult off all knowledge
or perish caged.

*

I am reconciled to Life
somewhere beyond thought―

I’ll Live the Elsewhere,
I’ll Dream of the Naught.

Methinks it no journey;
to tarry’s a waste,

so fatten the oxen;
make a nice baste.

I’m coming, Fool Tom,
we have Somewhere to Go,

though we injure noone,
ourselves wildaglow.

Published by The Lyric and The Ekphrastic Review



Chit Chat: In the Poetry Chat Room
by Michael R. Burch

WHY SHULD I LERN TO SPELL?
HELL,
NO ONE REEDS WHAT I SAY
ANYWAY!!! :(

Sing for the cool night,
whispers of constellations.
Sing for the supple grass,
the tall grass, gently whispering.
Sing of infinities, multitudes,
of all that lies beyond us now,
whispers begetting whispers.
And i am glad to also whisper . . .

I WUS HURT IN LUV I’M DYIN’
FER TH’ TEARS I BEEN A-CRYIN’!!!

i abide beyond serenities
and realms of grace,
above love’s misdirected earth,
i lift my face.
i am beyond finding now . . .

I WAS IN, LOVE, AND HE ******* ME!!!
THE ****!!! TOTALLY!!!

i loved her once, before, when i
was mortal too, and sometimes i
would listen and distinctly hear
her laughter from the juniper,
but did not go . . .

I JUST DON’T GET POETRY, SOMETIMES.
IT’S OKAY, I GUESS.
I REALLY DON’T READ THAT MUCH AT ALL,
I MUST CONFESS!!! ;-)

Travail, inherent to all flesh,
i do not know, nor how to feel.
Although i sing them nighttimes still:
the bitter woes, that do not heal . . .

POETRY IS BORING.
SEE, IT *****!!!, I’M SNORING!!! ZZZZZZZ!!!

The words like breath, i find them here,
among the fragrant juniper,
and conifers amid the snow,
old loves imagined long ago . . .

WHY DON’T YOU LIKE MY PERFICKT WORDS
YOU USELESS UN-AMERIC’N TURDS?!!!

What use is love, to me, or Thou?
O Words, my awe, to fly so smooth
above the anguished hearts of men
to heights unknown, Thy bare remove . . .



Habeas Corpus
by Michael R. Burch

from “Songs of the Antinatalist”

I have the results of your DNA analysis.
If you want to have children, this may induce paralysis.
I wish I had good news, but how can I lie?
Any offspring you have are guaranteed to die.
It wouldn’t be fair—I’m sure you’ll agree—
to sentence kids to death, so I’ll waive my fee.



faith(less)
by Michael R. Burch

Those who believed
and Those who misled
lie together at last
in the same narrow bed

and if god loved Them more
for Their strange lack of doubt,
he kept it well hidden
till he snuffed Them out.

ah-men!



honeybee
by michael r. burch

love was a little treble thing—
prone to sing
and (sometimes) to sting



honeydew
by michael r. burch

i sampled honeysuckle
and it made my taste buds buckle!



Kissin’ ’n’ buzzin’
by Michael R. Burch

Kissin’ ’n’ buzzin’
the bees rise
in a dizzy circle of two.
Oh, when I’m with you,
I feel like kissin’ ’n’ buzzin’ too.



Huntress
Michael R. Burch

Lynx-eyed cat-like and cruel you creep
across a crevice dropping deep
into a dark and doomed domain
Your claws are sheathed. You smile, insane
Rain falls upon your path and pain
pours down. Your paws are pierced. You pause
and heed the oft-lamented laws
which bid you not begin again
till night returns. You wail like wind,
the sighing of a soul for sin,
and give up hunting for a heart.
Till sunset falls again, depart,
though hate and hunger urge you—"On!"
Heed, hearts, your hope—the break of dawn.



Ibykos Fragment 286 (III)
loose translation by Michael R. Burch

Come spring, the grand
apple trees stand
watered by a gushing river
where the maidens’ uncut flowers shiver
and the blossoming grape vine swells
in the gathering shadows.

Unfortunately
for me
Eros never rests
but like a Thracian tempest
ablaze with lightning
emanates from Aphrodite;

the results are frightening—
black,
bleak,
astonishing,
violently jolting me from my soles
to my soul.

Originally published by The Chained Muse



Ince St. Child
by Michael R. Burch

When she was a child
in a dark forest of fear,
imagination cast its strange light
into secret places,
scattering traces
of illumination so bright,
years later, she could still find them there,
their light undefiled.

When she was young,
the shafted light of her dreams
shone on her uplifted face
as she prayed ...
though she strayed
into a night fallen like woven lace
shrouding the forest of screams,
her faith led her home.

Now she is old
and the light that was flame
is a slow-dying ember ...
what she felt then
she would explain;
she would if she could only remember
that forest of shame,
faith beaten like gold.

This was an unusual poem, and it took me some time to figure out who the old woman was. She was a victim of childhood ******, hence the title I eventually came up with.



Lullaby
by Michael R. Burch

for Jeremy

Cherubic laugh; sly, impish grin;
Angelic face; wild chimp within.

It does not matter; sleep awhile
As soft mirth tickles forth a smile.

Gray moths will hum a lullaby
Of feathery wings, then you and I

Will wake together, by and by.

Life’s not long; those days are best
Spent snuggled to a loving breast.

The earth will wait; a sun-filled sky
Will bronze lean muscle, by and by.

Soon you will sing, and I will sigh,
But sleep here, now, for you and I

Know nothing but this lullaby.



Remembrance
by Michael R. Burch

Remembrance like a river rises;
the rain of recollection falls;
frail memories, like vines, entangled,
cling to Time's collapsing walls.

The past is like a distant mist,
the future like a far-off haze,
the present half-distinct an hour
before it blurs with unseen days.



Righteous
by Michael R. Burch

Come to me tonight
in the twilight, O, and the full moon rising,
spectral and ancient, will mutter a prayer.

Gather your hair
and pin it up, knowing
that I will release it a moment anon.

We are not one,
nor is there a scripture
to sanctify nights you might spend in my arms,

but the swarms
of bright stars revolving above us
revel tonight, the most ardent of lovers.

Published by Writer’s Gazette, Tucumcari Literary Review and The Chained Muse



R.I.P.
by Michael R. Burch

When I am lain to rest
and my soul is no longer intact,
but dissolving, like a sunset
diminishing to the west ...

and when at last
before His throne my past
is put to test
and the demons and the Beast

await to feast
on any morsel downward cast,
while the vapors of impermanence
cling, smelling of damask ...

then let me go, and do not weep
if I am left to sleep,
to sleep and never dream, or dream, perhaps,
only a little longer and more deep.

Originally published by Romantics Quarterly



The Shape of Mourning
by Michael R. Burch

The shape of mourning
is an oiled creel
shining with unuse,

the bolt of cold steel
on a locker
shielding memory,

the monthly penance
of flowers,
the annual wake,

the face in the photograph
no longer dissolving under scrutiny,
becoming a keepsake,

the useless mower
lying forgotten
in weeds,

rings and crosses and
all the paraphernalia
the soul no longer needs.



I Know The Truth
by Marina Tsvetaeva
loose translation by Michael R. Burch

I know the truth―abandon lesser truths!

There's no need for anyone living to struggle!
See? Evening falls, night quickly descends!
So why the useless disputes―generals, poets, lovers?

The wind is calming now; the earth is bathed in dew;
the stars' infernos will soon freeze in the heavens.
And soon we'll sleep together, under the earth,
we who never gave each other a moment's rest above it.



I Know The Truth (Alternate Ending)
by Marina Tsvetaeva
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

I know the truth―abandon lesser truths!

There's no need for anyone living to struggle!
See? Evening falls, night quickly descends!
So why the useless disputes―generals, poets, lovers?

The wind caresses the grasses; the earth gleams, damp with dew;
the stars' infernos will soon freeze in the heavens.
And soon we'll lie together under the earth,
we who were never united above it.



Poems about Moscow
by Marina Tsvetaeva
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

5
Above the city Saint Peter once remanded to hell
now rolls the delirious thunder of the bells.

As the thundering high tide eventually reverses,
so, too, the woman who once bore your curses.

To you, O Great Peter, and you, O Great Tsar, I kneel!
And yet the bells above me continually peal.

And while they keep ringing out of the pure blue sky,
Moscow's eminence is something I can't deny ...

though sixteen hundred churches, nearby and afar,
all gaily laugh at the hubris of the Tsars.

8
Moscow, what a vast
uncouth hostel of a home!
In Russia all are homeless
so all to you must come.

A knife stuck in each boot-top,
each back with its shameful brand,
we heard you from far away.
You called us: here we stand.

Because you branded us criminals
for every known kind of ill,
we seek the all-compassionate Saint,
the haloed one who heals.

And there behind that narrow door
where the uncouth rabble pour,
we seek the red-gold radiant heart
of Iver, who loved the poor.

Now, as "Halleluiah" floods
bright fields that blaze to the west,
O sacred Russian soil,
I kneel here to kiss your breast!



Insomnia
by Marina Tsvetaeva
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

2
In my enormous city it is night
as from my house I step beyond the light;
some people think I'm daughter, mistress, wife ...
but I am like the blackest thought of night.

July's wind sweeps a way for me to stray
toward soft music faintly blowing, somewhere.
The wind may blow until bright dawn, new day,
but will my heart in its rib-cage really care?

Black poplars brushing windows filled with light ...
strange leaves in hand ... faint music from distant towers ...
retracing my steps, there's nobody lagging behind ...
This shadow called me? There's nobody here to find.

The lights are like golden beads on invisible threads ...
the taste of dark night in my mouth is a bitter leaf ...
O, free me from shackles of being myself by day!
Friends, please understand: I'm only a dreamlike belief.



Poems for Akhmatova
by Marina Tsvetaeva
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

4
You outshine everything, even the sun
at its zenith. The stars are yours!
If only I could sweep like the wind
through some unbarred door,
gratefully, to where you are ...

to hesitantly stammer, suddenly shy,
lowering my eyes before you, my lovely mistress,
petulant, chastened, overcome by tears,
as a child sobs to receive forgiveness ...



This gypsy passion of parting!
by Marina Tsvetaeva
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

This gypsy passion of parting!
We meet, and are ready for flight!
I rest my dazed head in my hands,
and think, staring into the night ...

that no one, perusing our letters,
will ever understand the real depth
of just how sacrilegious we were,
which is to say we had faith,

in ourselves.



The Appointment
by Marina Tsvetaeva
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

I will be late for the appointed meeting.
When I arrive, my hair will be gray,
because I abused spring.
And your expectations were much too high!

I shall feel the effects of the bitter mercury for years.
(Ophelia tasted, but didn't spit out, the rue.)
I will trudge across mountains and deserts,
trampling souls and hands without flinching,

living on, as the earth continues
with blood in every thicket and creek.
But always Ophelia's pallid face will peer out
from between the grasses bordering each stream.

She took a swig of passion, only to fill her mouth
with silt. Like a shaft of light on metal,
I set my sights on you, highly. Much too high
in the sky, where I have appointed my dust its burial.



Rails
by Marina Tsvetaeva
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

The railway bed's steel-blue parallel tracks
are ruled out, neatly as musical staves.

Over them, people are transported
like possessed Pushkin creatures
whose song has been silenced.
See them: arriving, departing?

And yet they still linger,
the note of their pain remaining ...
always rising higher than love, as the poles freeze
to the embankment, like Lot's wife transformed to salt, forever.

Despair has arranged my fate
as someone arranges a wedding;
then, like a voiceless Sappho
I must weep like a pain-wracked seamstress

with the mute lament of a marsh heron!
Then the departing train
will hoot above the sleepers
as its wheels slice them to ribbons.

In my eye the colors blur
to a glowing but meaningless red.
All young women, at times,
are tempted by such a bed!



Every Poem is a Child of Love
by Marina Tsvetaeva
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Every poem is a child of love,
A destitute ******* chick
A fledgling blown down from the heights above―
Left of its nest? Not a stick.
Each heart has its gulf and its bridge.
Each heart has its blessings and griefs.
Who is the father? A liege?
Maybe a liege, or a thief.



To the boy Elis
by Georg Trakl
translation by Michael R. Burch

Elis, when the blackbird cries from the black forest,
it announces your downfall.
Your lips sip the rock-spring's blue coolness.

Your brow sweats blood
recalling ancient myths
and dark interpretations of birds' flight.

Yet you enter the night with soft footfalls;
the ripe purple grapes hang suspended
as you wave your arms more beautifully in the blueness.

A thornbush crackles;
where now are your moonlike eyes?
How long, oh Elis, have you been dead?

A monk dips waxed fingers
into your body's hyacinth;
Our silence is a black abyss

from which sometimes a docile animal emerges
slowly lowering its heavy lids.
A black dew drips from your temples:

the lost gold of vanished stars.

TRANSLATOR'S NOTE: I believe that in the second stanza the blood on Elis's forehead may be a reference to the apprehensive ****** sweat of Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane. If my interpretation is correct, Elis hears the blackbird's cries, anticipates the danger represented by a harbinger of death, but elects to continue rather than turn back. From what I have been able to gather, the color blue had a special significance for Georg Trakl: it symbolized longing and perhaps a longing for death. The colors blue, purple and black may represent a progression toward death in the poem.



Hearthside
by Michael R. Burch

“When you are old and grey and full of sleep...” ― W. B. Yeats

For all that we professed of love, we knew
this night would come, that we would bend alone
to tend wan fires’ dimming bars―the moan
of wind cruel as the Trumpet, gelid dew
an eerie presence on encrusted logs
we hoard like jewels, embrittled so ourselves.

The books that line these close, familiar shelves
loom down like dreary chaperones. Wild dogs,
too old for mates, cringe furtive in the park,
as, toothless now, I frame this parchment kiss.

I do not know the words for easy bliss
and so my shriveled fingers clutch this stark,
long-unenamored pen and will it: Move.
I loved you more than words, so let words prove.

This sonnet is written from the perspective of the great Irish poet William Butler Yeats in his loose translation or interpretation of the Pierre de Ronsard sonnet “When You Are Old.” The aging Yeats thinks of his Muse and the love of his life, the fiery Irish revolutionary Maude Gonne. As he seeks to warm himself by a fire conjured from ice-encrusted logs, he imagines her doing the same. Although Yeats had insisted that he wasn’t happy without Gonne, she said otherwise: “Oh yes, you are, because you make beautiful poetry out of what you call your unhappiness and are happy in that. Marriage would be such a dull affair. Poets should never marry. The world should thank me for not marrying you!”



Yahya Kemal Beyatli translations

Yahya Kemal Beyatli (1884-1958) was a Turkish poet, editor, columnist and historian, as well as a politician and diplomat. Born born Ahmet Âgâh, he wrote under the pen names Agâh Kemal, Esrar, Mehmet Agâh, and Süleyman Sadi. He served as Turkey’s ambassador to Poland, Portugal and Pakistan.



Sessiz Gemi (“Silent Ship”)
by Yahya Kemal Beyatli
loose translation by Nurgül Yayman and Michael R. Burch

for the refugees

The time to weigh anchor has come;
a ship departing harbor slips quietly out into the unknown,
cruising noiselessly, its occupants already ghosts.
No flourished handkerchiefs acknowledge their departure;
the landlocked mourners stand nurturing their grief,
scanning the bleak horizon, their eyes blurring...
Poor souls! Desperate hearts! But this is hardly the last ship departing!
There is always more pain to unload in this sorrowful life!
The hesitations of lovers and their belovèds are futile,
for they cannot know where the vanished are bound.
Many hopes must be quenched by the distant waves,
since years must pass, and no one returns from this journey.



Full Moon
by Yahya Kemal Beyatli
loose translation by Nurgül Yayman and Michael R. Burch

You are so lovely
the full moon just might
delight
in your rising,
as curious
and bright,
to vanquish night.

But what can a mortal man do,
dear,
but hope?
I’ll ponder your mysteries
and (hmmmm) try to
cope.

We both know
you have every right to say no.



The Music of the Snow
by Yahya Kemal Beyatli
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

This melody of a night lasting longer than a thousand years!
This music of the snow supposed to last for thousand years!

Sorrowful as the prayers of a secluded monastery,
It rises from a choir of a hundred voices!

As the *****’s harmonies resound profoundly,
I share the sufferings of Slavic grief.

Then my mind drifts far from this city, this era,
To the old records of Tanburi Cemil Bey.

Now I’m suddenly overjoyed as once again I hear,
With the ears of my heart, the purest sounds of Istanbul!

Thoughts of the snow and darkness depart me;
I keep them at bay all night with my dreams!

Translator’s notes: “Slavic grief” because Beyatli wrote this poem while in Warsaw, serving as Turkey’s ambassador to Poland, in 1927. Tanburi Cemil Bey was a Turkish composer. Keywords/Tags: Beyatli, Agah, Kemal, Esrar, Turkish, translation, Turkey, silent, ship, anchor, harbor, ghosts, grief, Istanbul, moon, music, snow



Shadows
by Michael R. Burch

Alone again as evening falls,
I join gaunt shadows and we crawl
up and down my room's dark walls.

Up and down and up and down,
against starlight―strange, mirthless clowns―
we merge, emerge, submerge . . . then drown.

We drown in shadows starker still,
shadows of the somber hills,
shadows of sad selves we spill,

tumbling, to the ground below.
There, caked in grimy, clinging snow,
we flutter feebly, moaning low

for days dreamed once an age ago
when we weren't shadows, but were men . . .
when we were men, or almost so.



Recursion
by Michael R. Burch

In a dream I saw boys lying
under banners gaily flying
and I heard their mothers sighing
from some dark distant shore.

For I saw their sons essaying
into fields—gleeful, braying—
their bright armaments displaying;
such manly oaths they swore!

From their playfields, boys returning
full of honor’s white-hot burning
and desire’s restless yearning
sired new kids for the corps.

In a dream I saw boys dying
under banners gaily lying
and I heard their mothers crying
from some dark distant shore.



To Have Loved
by Michael R. Burch

"The face that launched a thousand ships ..."

Helen, bright accompaniment,
accouterment of war as sure as all
the polished swords of princes groomed to lie
in mausoleums all eternity ...

The price of love is not so high
as never to have loved once in the dark
beyond foreseeing. Now, as dawn gleams pale
upon small wind-fanned waves, amid white sails, ...

now all that war entails becomes as small,
as though receding. Paris in your arms
was never yours, nor were you his at all.
And should gods call

in numberless strange voices, should you hear,
still what would be the difference? Men must die
to be remembered. Fame, the shrillest cry,
leaves all the world dismembered.

Hold him, lie,
tell many pleasant tales of lips and thighs;
enthrall him with your sweetness, till the pall
and ash lie cold upon him.

Is this all? You saw fear in his eyes, and now they dim
with fear’s remembrance. Love, the fiercest cry,
becomes gasped sighs in his once-gallant hymn
of dreamed “salvation.” Still, you do not care

because you have this moment, and no man
can touch you as he can ... and when he’s gone
there will be other men to look upon
your beauty, and have done.

Smile―woebegone, pale, haggard. Will the tales
paint this―your final portrait? Can the stars
find any strange alignments, Zodiacs,
to spell, or unspell, what held beauty lacks?

Published by The Raintown Review, Triplopia, The Electic Muse, The Chained Muse, The Pennsylvania Review, and in a YouTube recital by David B. Gosselin. This is, of course, a poem about the famous Helen of Troy, whose face "launched a thousand ships."



Lines for My Ascension
by Michael R. Burch

I.
If I should die,
there will come a Doom,
and the sky will darken
to the deepest Gloom.

But if my body
should not be found,
never think of me
in the cold ground.

II.
If I should die,
let no mortal say,
“Here was a man,
with feet of clay,

or a timid sparrow
God’s hand let fall.”
But watch the sky darken
to an eerie pall

and know that my Spirit,
unvanquished, broods,
and cares naught for graves,
prayers, coffins, or roods.

And if my body
should not be found,
never think of me
in the cold ground.

III.
If I should die,
let no man adore
his incompetent Maker:
Zeus, Jehovah, or Thor.

Think of Me as One
who never died―
the unvanquished Immortal
with the unriven side.

And if my body
should not be found,
never think of me
in the cold ground.

IV.
And if I should “die,”
though the clouds grow dark
as fierce lightnings rend
this bleak asteroid, stark ...

If you look above,
you will see a bright Sign―
the sun with the moon
in its arms, Divine.

So divine, if you can,
my bright meaning, and know―
my Spirit is mine.
I will go where I go.

And if my body
should not be found,
never think of me
in the cold ground.



The Quickening
by Michael R. Burch

for Beth

I never meant to love you
when I held you in my arms
promising you sagely
wise, noncommittal charms.

And I never meant to need you
when I touched your tender lips
with kisses that intrigued my own—
such kisses I had never known,
nor a heartbeat in my fingertips!



Ah! Sunflower
by Michael R. Burch

after William Blake

O little yellow flower
like a star...
how beautiful,
how wonderful
we are!



Published as the collection "Kajal Ahmad, Kurdish Poet"

Exquisite..Unique become what you seek
What is complete? How deep is the deep?
Experience the moment..It's you..Own it!
Fractals..Vibrations I'm just one component
These words of love shoot from my soul
Penetrates..fills all hatreds holes
Power in my rhymes Shaman twisting time
Read you by sign put you in these lines
I can see all the mental smoke
Instigator here to stab and poke
Give my all till I'm broke
All my passion hits in one big stroke
My vibe comes alive in every word it survives
If we elevate each other we all will thrive
You there asleep come alive
Far too long we have all been denied
Vibrate till I turn to dust
Never taste the center eat my crust
In rhymes I trust..so full I bust
Flow so fluid I'll never rust
Now I can be flashy..tell a tale
Not a one hundred percent sometimes I fail
Pierce my heart with a rusty nail
Darkness takes over but love prevails
Imagination stretch..memorize every turn  
Set fire to your mind feel the burn
Knowledge from pain is how we learn
Balance will reward you with what you earn
Wisdom doesn't flow from all that speak
Truths are hidden which is why we seek
We all must climb to reach your peak
Creates who we are..Exquisite...Unique!!

In a war of arrows
Her heart was found.
Flaccid were the stem attached to the pointed tips.
Soaring the height of love.
Crashing down in a turbulent ******.
Flung from tight strings, bended wood.
The ground lay covered in the aftermath of thrill seeking
Underneath the shadow.
A shaman hung his head in such complex circumstances
An addiction to abuse

:::: Originally woman's role
was two;   queen & mother;
that is,   until the shaman
  realized it was the same
woman; even then,        the
midwife had to wake him
to tell him so, as he fainted
at the sight of placenta, not
having had breakfast ::::::::

I've given poetry readings where less than a handful of people were present. It's a humbling experience. It’s also a deeply familiar experience.

"Poetry is useless," poet Geoffrey ****** said in a 2013 interview, "but it is useless the way the soul is useless—it is unnecessary, but we would not be what we are without it."

I was raised a Roman Catholic, and though I don’t go to Mass regularly anymore, I still remember early mornings during Advent when I went to liturgies at my parochial school. It was part of my offering—the sacrifice I made to honor the impending birth of the Savior—along with giving up candy at Lent. So few people attended at that hour that the priest turned on only a few lights near the altar. Approaching the front of the church, my plastic book bag rustling against my winter coat, I felt as if I were nearing the seashore at sunrise: the silhouettes of old widows on their kneelers at low tide, waiting for the priest to come in, starting the ritual in plain, unsung vernacular. No organist to blast us into reverence. No procession.

Every day, all over the world, these sparsely attended ceremonies still happen. Masses are said. Poetry is read. Poems are written on screens and scraps of paper. When I retire for the day, I move into a meditative, solitary, poetic space. These are the central filaments burning through my life, and the longer I live, the more they seem to be fused together.

Poetry is marginal, thankless, untethered from fame and fortune; it's also gut level, urgent, private yet yearning for connection. In all these ways, it's like prayer for me. I’m a not-quite-lapsed Catholic with Zen leanings, but I’ll always pray—and I’ll always write poems. Writing hasn’t brought me the Poetry Jackpot I once pursued, but it draws on the same inner wiring that flickers when I pray.        

• • •

In the 2012 collection A God in the House: Poets Talk About Faith, nineteen contemporary American poets, from Buddhist to Wiccan to Christian, discuss how their artistic and spiritual lives inform one another. Kazim Ali, who was raised a Shia Muslim, observes in his essay “Doubt and Seeking”:

[Prayer is] speaking to someone you know is not going to be able to speak back, so you're allowed to be the most honest that you can be. In prayer you're allowed to be as purely selfish as you like. You can ask for something completely irrational. I have written that prayer is a form of panic, because in prayer you don't really think you're going to be answered. You'll either get what you want or you won't.

You could replace the word "prayer" with "poetry" with little or no loss of meaning. I'd even go so far as to say that submitting my work to a journal often feels like this, too. Sometimes, when I get an answer in the form of an acceptance, I'm stunned.

"I never think of a possible God reading my poems, although the gods used to love the arts,” writes ***** Howe in her essay "Footsteps over Ground." She adds:

Poetry could be spoken into a well, of course, and drop like a penny into the black water. Sometimes I think that there is a heaven for poems and novels and music and dance and paintings, but they might only be hard-worked sparks off a great mill, which may add up to a whole-cloth in the infinite.

And here, you could easily replace the word "poetry" with "prayer." The penny falling to the bottom of a well is more often what we experience. But both poetry and prayer are things humans have learned to do in order to go on. Doubt is a given, but we do get to choose what it is we doubt.

A God in the House Book Cover
Quite a few authors in A God in the House (Howe, Gerald Stern, Jane Hirschfield, Christian Wiman) invoke the spiritual writing of Simone Weil, including her assertion that "absolutely unmixed attention is prayer." This sounds like the Zen concept of mindfulness. And it broadens the possibility for poetry as prayer, regardless of content, since writing poetry is an act of acute mindfulness. We mostly use words in the practical world to persuade or communicate, but prayers in various religious traditions can be lamentations of great sorrow. Help me, save me, take this pain away—I am in agony. In a church or a temple or a mosque, such prayerful lamentation is viewed as a form of expression for its own good, even when it doesn't lead immediately to a change of emotional state.

Perhaps the unmixed attention Weil wrote of is a unity of intention and utterance that’s far too rare in our own lives. We seldom match what we think or feel with what we actually say. When it happens spontaneously in poetry or prayer—Allen Ginsberg's "First thought, best thought" ideal —it feels like a miracle, as do all the moments when I manage to get out of my own way as a poet.

Many people who pray don’t envision a clear image of whom or what they’re praying to. But poets often have some sense of their potential readers. There are authorities whose approval I've tried to win or simply people I've tried to please: teachers, fellow writers, editors, contest judges—even my uncle, who actually reads my poems when they appear in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, where he used to work.

And yet, my most immersed writing is not done with those real faces in mind. I write to the same general entity to which I pray. It's as if the dome of my skull extends to the ceiling of the room I'm in, then to the dome of the sky and outward. It’s like the musings I had as a child lying awake at night, when my imagination took me to the farthest reaches of the galaxy. But then I emerge from this wide-open state and begin thinking about possible readers—and the faces appear.

This might also be where the magic ends.

• • •

I write poetry because it’s what I do, just as frogs croak and mathematicians ponder numbers. Poetry draws on something in me that has persisted over time, even as I’ve distracted myself with other goals, demands, and purposes; even as I’ve been forced by circumstance to strip writing poetry of certain expectations.

"Life on a Lily Pad" © Michelle Tribe
"Life on a Lily Pad"
© Michelle Tribe
At 21, I was sure I’d publish my first book before I was 25. I’m past my forties now and have yet to find a publisher for a book-length collection, though I've published more than a hundred individual poems and two chapbooks. So, if a “real” book is the equivalent of receiving indisputable evidence that your prayers are being answered, I’m still waiting.

It hasn’t been easy to shed the bitter urgency I’ve felt on learning that one of my manuscripts was a finalist in this or that contest, but was not the winner. Writing in order to attain external success can be as tainted and brittle as saying a prayer that, in truth, is more like a command: (Please), God, let me get through this difficulty (or else)—

Or else what? It’s a false threat, if there’s little else left to do but pray. When my partner is in the ICU, his lungs full of fluid backed up from a defective aortic valve; when my nephew is deployed to Afghanistan; when an ex is drowning in his addiction; when I hit a dead end in my job and don’t think I can do it one more day—every effort to imagine that these things might be gotten through is a kind of prayer that helps me weather a life over which I have little control.

Repeated disappointment in my quest to hit the Poetry Jackpot has taught me to recast the jackpot in the lowercase—locating it not in the outcome but in the act of writing itself, sorting out the healthy from the unhealthy intentions for doing it. Of course, this shift in perspective was not as neat as the preceding sentence makes it seem. There were years of thrashing about, of turning over stones and even throwing them, then moments of exhaustion when I just barely heard the message from within:

This is too fragile and fraught to be something that guides your whole life.

I didn't hear those words, exactly—and this is important. For decades, I’ve made my living as a writer. But I can't manipulate or edit total gut realizations. I can throw words at them, but it would be like shaking a water bottle at a forest fire; at best, I can chase the feeling with metaphors: It's like this—no, like this—or like this.

So, odd as this sounds for a poet, I now seek wordlessness. When I meditate, I intercept hundreds of times the impulse to shape a perception into words. Reduced to basics, the challenge facing any writer is knowing what to say—and what not to.

• • •

To read or listen to poetry requires unmixed attention just as writing it does. And when a poem is read aloud, there's a communal, at times ritualistic, element that can make a reading feel like collective prayer, even if there are only a few listeners in the audience or I’m listening by myself.

"Allen Ginsberg" © MDCArchives
Allen Ginsberg
© MDCArchives
When I want to feel moved and enlarged, all I have to do is play Patti Smith's rendition of Ginsberg's "Footnote to Howl." His long list poem from 1955 gathers people, places, objects, and abstractions onto a single exuberant altar. It’s certainly a prayer, one that opens this way:

Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy!

The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy! The nose is holy! The tongue and **** and hand and ******* holy!

Everything is holy! everybody’s holy! everywhere is holy! everyday is in eternity! Everyman’s an angel!

Some parts of Ginsberg's list ("forgiveness! charity! faith! bodies! suffering! magnanimity!") belong in any conventional catalogue of what a prayer celebrates as sacred. Other profane elements ("the ***** of the grandfathers of Kansas!") gain admission because they are swept up into his ritualistic roll call.

I can easily parody Ginsberg's litany: Holy the Dairy Queen, holy the barns of the Amish where cheese is releasing its ambitious stench, holy the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Internet. But reading the poem aloud feels to me the way putting on ritual garments must to a shaman or rabbi or priest. Watching Patti Smith perform the poem (various versions are available on YouTube), I get shivers seeing how it transforms her, and it's clear why she titled her treatment of the poem "Spell."

A parody can't do that. It can't manifest as the palpable unity of intention and utterance. It can't do what Emily Dickinson famously said that poetry did to her:

If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only [ways] I know it. Is there any other way.

Like the process of prayer—to God, to a better and bigger self, to the atmosphere—writing can be a step toward unifying heart, mind, body, universe. Ginsberg's frenzied catalogue ends on "brilliant intelligent kindness of the soul"; Eliot's The Waste Land on "shantih," or "the peace that surpasseth understanding." Neither bang nor whimper, endings like these are at once humble and tenacious. They say "Amen" and step aside so that a greater wordlessness can work its magic.

Martin Luther had a dream
Geronimo had visions
People use all sorts of ways
To come to their decisions

Tea leaf readers in a cup
A Psychic with some cards
Looking at a twirling disc
And dancing in the yard

Decision making's easy
If you have the correct tool
You may get the right answer
Or you may end up a fool

Shaman in a sweat lodge
Chew peyote just to see
What the others can not visualize
But what comes easy to folks like me

Some roll dice, and others bones
To get the answer that they need
Others ask the dead to help
To get their answer freed

I myself use none of these
None of these at all
I sit down with a bourbon
And my old Magic Black 8-ball

I switched the little answer ball
It has answers....only two
One is just the one word "dude"
And "what would Keith Richards do?"

"Dude" is universal
It has helped me win not lose
Because it's meaning changes
Depending on the "u"'s

Say it with one U...dude
it means don't even think it
But add eight more and make it duuuuuuuuude
And there's no question you should drink it

The other answer's simple
What would good old Keefy do?
If it didn't **** old Keefy
It won't **** me and you

So, use your magic mushrooms
Dance with spirits in the hall
But I'll make my decisions
With my plastic, black eight ball

Shindig Shaman he do say
Swinging and swaying
Swaying and swinging
Debbil in de prayer closet all **** day
Cursing and moaning
Moaning and cursing
Boss man lookin' for a man of the cloth
Never seen a witch doctor
Never in his life
From the look in Bill Morris' eyes
He's let it in
Deep. Deep, Deep so **** deep
Like a splinter cut off well under de nail
A thorn in his pride turned into something dangerous
Hidin' in de prayer closet, up in dere
Got up in de prayer closet safe and snug
()()()()()()()()()()()()
White collar black crow slipped around the corner
Said, "I heard you had a job for me"
Big Bill Morris lobbed a *** o' spit towards his face
Wiped off what was left of his smile
Turned to meet the shaking Shaman
Who was there to greet the  fakin' man o' God
()()()()()()()()()()()
They turned their attention to the devil in Bill
With Bibles and crosses and charms and powders
They shook it all in da poor boys face
He started coughing and sure enuff
He coughed that demon right on out
Nobody had said a word
He turned around and walked out
Not even speaking to the priest or the Shaman
Who looked at each other expecting
A moral
Or
A punch line
Sensing none they quit each other's company
And returned to their respective homes
The only places they felt comfortable
In their own skin
And though their prayer closets had no demons
Neither had they anything else
And so they felt sorry for Bill Morris
Lonely tonight
And wondered if God dwelled with the other

Staccato beats pulsate; contrast deep lines, extended exposure.
The stars carve bright tracers across a sky so far past midnight,
it may as well be mourning again.
I can see the city from here, but my eyes do not truly see
us in the backseat holding hands.
Your eyes are endless even in still frame photos,
the fire in your hands can't compare to the fire in your heart.
Desire; I look down on a sea of stars, and the atmosphere so foreign to me,
so alien.
I can't even begin to describe what's really real to me,
it's so different from what they taught us to see.
My eyes are open.
Footsteps silent and ghostly, across miles in seconds just to see your smile.
It rings across dimensions, the demands of the commander
to protect and love.
We run miles upon miles to settle this fury, to wrap you in the warmth of spirit.
I can't see the forest for these concrete trees.
If there was ever a horizon it settles only upon this city with the sunset,
If there was ever a moon, there it hides among our clouds.
Crown me king... this kingdom unseen, its citizens anonymous,
and unaware.
Can I comfort all who run for these outstretched arms?
I will never be sure, but I can be sure there will always be room
in this weather-worn heart for another smile,
another try.
We run together, like rivulets into one tear drop
complete apart and together.

As I am exiting the Abandoned Castle to retrieve what Aziel asked me to get for him a thought comes to mind.. - I wonder what he is going reward me with- I follow a short trail that quickly leads me to the Forest of Whispers suddenly I hear Aziel's voice echo in my head. Aziel: "Frank follow the Trail of Tears Northwest about 12 miles from where you stand there you will find yourself in front of a small creek follow it to the end and to your left there will be a small cave and to your immediate right there will be a huge stone that's been there for thousands of years it's practically impenetrable. However, I will land you my power to pass thru it but first you must enter the small cave and retrieve a sacred relic from it. Good luck my Mortal friend." Frank: Aziel what if I get lost? What about this relic and what do you mean you'll lend me your power?" Aziel: "Don't worry I will explain everything in full detail once your at the site and don't worry about getting lost...A raven will follow you from now on and if you get lost just whistle as loud as you can it will fly ahead of you to show you what route to take" Frank: " Thank you Aziel I will keep all that in mind." As I press on deeper and deeper into the Forest I am fascinated with its Beautiful scenery.

It's 11pm and I class start to get weary so I sit down in the midst of the woods in the Forest. Suddenly I hear a weak gallop like some sort of horse coming closer and closer to where am sitting...so I get up hesitant and finally I see a figure come out of the wilderness and to my surprise it's a creature half man half horse and I whisper to myself "Whoa it's a centaur...." The centaur gets closer to me and it speaks to me in a cold voice....
"What are you doing here in the middle of the Forest almost at midnight human...don't you know it's dangerous to be out here?" I look at the mighty centaur his lower part of the body is indeed a horse with furs at it's feet and the color of his full fur is golden yellowish. I examine his human half and he is covered by battle scars and he seems quite strong in his upper body. I also notice he has green eyes the color of emerald and what seems like 3 claw like scars in his face. I sit quietly for a moment then reply ... Frank: " I made a promise to retrieve something for someone and I am here to fulfill my task." He smiles at me and proceeds to talk. Centaur: " My name is Neur Blackthorn I am the Leader of the Golden Centaurs protectors of the Forest of Whispers. You see am looking for a sacred relic known as Ghruthemtox it's a breast plate made out of the skull of a Cyclop known as Mathalam who lived 3000 years ago here in this very forest and was the Creator and protector of this very place known now as The Forest Of Whispers. Legend tells that whoever finds all the pieces of the breast plate and wears it will be granted 1000 years added to his life span and tremendous magical power. I want this relic in my possession. I heard there are 5 pieces to the breastplate all scattered in this very Forest. If you are able to come across the relic itself it will guide you to all five remaining pieces so legend foretold. It's some sort of magical map the relic itself...but I heard it can only be touched by human hands because if it's touched by anything else the creature or being itself will perish immediately." -Neur looks at me attentively- Frank: - " So let me get this straight...you want me to get this relic for you? Am I right?" Neur: " That's right...in return I shall grant you what you seek from the forest. So tell me what is it that you want to retrieve?" Frank: " I want a vial of her blood from the Goddess of the Forest...Nabyah." Neur: " I will talk to her in your behalf...but I cannot guarantee the blood itself." -I look at Neur with some disgust and disappointment- Neur: " Fine Mortal I will do my very best to retrieve this for you as long as you can find me the relic..." -All the sudden I hear Aziel telepathically communicates to me and he says "Frank what are you doing meddling with Centaurs you cannot trust them...It's a dangerous task he asks of you plus he might **** you after retrieving this relic I advice you play it safe and tell him you will do what he says but with your own mission." Frank: -I speak to Aziel telepathically and I can do this due to the fact he lands me his power to do so...in order for both to speak to each other without no one else knowing...- "Right don't worry I am going to pretend to aid him then do my own thing..." Aziel: " Smart young lad ...don't worry he won't know nothing and by the way I advice you try to stay away from this Centaurs I think they might be linked to the Goddess herself...somewhat." Frank: " Right...now I will proceed..."

All the sudden Neur looks at me with curiosity...Neur: " You look like you where day dreaming for a while...fine I will leave you alone, but please find this I will reward you with what you seek I promise. Now get some rest I will come back to you at midnight" -He dashes towards the darkness of the Forest and disappears in the wilderness...-

--->TO BE CONTINUED

KEY


Trail Of Tears the path where many knights from the Order have shed blood sweat and tears. Many of them have never made it out alive.  Golden Centaurs Protectors of the Forest of Whispers who settled in the Forest 1000's of years ago. Accursed by a Powerful Witch they where once human but no longer have retained their humanity. Now creatures of the forest some of them seek to lift up the curse.
Ghruthemtox An ancient relic worn by a Cyclop Shaman Creator/Protector of the Forest Of Whispers that gave him strong magical prowess.

Since I had returned from the missing,
In life from family and loved ones.

Loss of Dearly Beloved Partners,
Whereby certain words had been,
Unnecessary with those of very deep bonds.

Sure I understand, understood then,
What I dared not spoke of truly with embodied beings.

It was a true joy Easter 1978,
To get together with your family.
Mom , Dad and Steven had been there.

We had a chance to talk as young adults,
Perhaps get to know each other in such a new way.

Sure you 16, said 'you were woman',
I have long since found the words of;

'I once loved a woman, a child I'm told
I give her my heart but she wanted my soul
Don't think twice, it's all right.'

Chillingly haunting still!!
For better and or worse still!!

But there we were young enough adults,
You were so receptive and I spoke in your earnest attention.
While too I picked up many subtle things by you,
Few words came back.

But you listened so well my friend whom I saw.
Surely I was open and in dire need to tell my story to a soul alive.
I refer to such as 'my little sermon on the mount' still at any price.
And so I believed in you as some partner then there indeed.

Not necessarily as unfolded, but such all did.
'We never did to much talking anyway';

Well not so true at all really on the contrary.
But 'Jeremiah was a Bull Frog';

Apparently,

I'm not sure if either understood a word said to this very day.

'What was it you wanted';
Can you say?

You tell me I can't,
Never could.

Claims of 'Christ Discipleship' in differing ways!!

Joy To The World

And I can take all detail like a wild man, savant,
Roll around the 'wheel of spectrum disorders' I know.

Still know just One thing!!!
We have been here before in oh so many ways!!

On one hand I understand 'All Complications',
Oh so simply of All Gods Children!!
On the other hand none at all.

So hard to understand and accept all at once!!

I always knew you,
By Eve of Halloween's Eve later same year;
Or more acutely so very soon thereafter that;

You were somehow my 'nemesis';
That was would produce my 'dark night of soul';

I was once again conquered,
By just one moment of doubt

Dark Knight
Loving Brightly

I was even joyed by that!!

Still I would believe in things,
I was already assured of in this my life;

'The World'
We live in

Here
Hear

In these now's.

I sum up 'The Word' Bible in just one Word,
By that 'Red Letter Word' at the Last Supper.

About LOVE sure,
But just two letters;

'AS'

As in;
'Just love one another 'AS' I have loved you'!!

Which was with Gods;
  
Gifts of 100% Judgement on with Zero Judgmentalness!!

That is my friend and partner most true I only understand!!

Good News Being Good!!!

Christians say 'well hey look Moses had 10 then expounded 5 books beyond as Torah.

Well,
See!!!

Shaman Master J

Got's that down to just 2 !!;

'Love God with all your heart and your neighbor as yourself'!!!

Ya and in front of the corrupt politicized,
Blasphemed powers of the Hebrew leaders that day!!!

Reciting the Torah
Standing on one foot!!

~8~~~
Days a Week

Wow!!!
Huh!!!

Well truth be he was just reciting,
The living word near verbatim of the last minor prophets in those last days!!!

Otherwise he would and did say like the Greeks,
In marble on their temple and as I know,
Easier otherwise to say;

'Know Thyself';

All creation is within all things,
So therefor on this path of inner self honesty,
With the message we all inwardly receive,
It all lines up and all mystery ceases to be!!!

So no I do not understand,
Certain types of complications,
No I don't.

All so overly simple to me!!

You have always overly impressed me,
In oh so many ways, such inherent 'gifts';

But they must breathe or what are they.

We may be off charts at different ends;
Yet I still know how close to very fine are these lines between!!

Yet,

'Liteheart5'

'Lite125'
~8~~
Fly Free!!!!

~3~~
Be yet between!!!

Even
AS Shaman Master J;

/ so much typical association with one letter / ...
http://hellopoetry.com/poem/just-love-one-another-as/

Happy Birthday,
Always, All Ways!!!

From a text you might recall,
I poemalized by whom in your contact list,
By phone I have been,
Dubbed 'Ron the Lord'!!!!

Garlic Really??? or !!!
Sure I can understand your heart / that just assume chop garlic really / ...
http://hellopoetry.com/poem/garlic-really-or/

Yes 'hued partner,
We too ~2~ can,
Be family!!!

Still
~3~~ between!!!
Us Two!!

~~5~~~
Too
Must Breathe

<3<3:):):)!!! R
Not so complicated!!!!

Illegally Separate
You some other me / some how wherefore / way; / X'YZleeeping; / I ...
http://hellopoetry.com/poem/illegally-seperate/

The New Dew Due, 'Double Triple Two Steps' Forward!!!
Believe as 'The Heavenly Father" speaks life living within you!! / Than cast continually ...
http://hellopoetry.com/poem/the-new-dew-due-double-triple-two-steps-forward/

eYe
Will Always
Love You!!! Ra, Ra Ron!!!

I have written some beautiful things about you!!
Some in paper hoards somewhere like;

"30 Trillion Light Year Journey"
'08 that date I am certain of!!

'Stitched without a trace',
A beaut,
I'd love to dig up,
Idk where but paper,
It is somewhere here!!!

'Worlds Most Wanted Woman',
Stuck on my old phone will be retrieved at some point,
Stored in it's memory viable I know,
Was a long text or series,
I know you so love!!!

Yes by 'Ron the Lord'!!!!
<3<3:):):)!!!

LOVE!!!R

Ty Josephine!!!!

*~Sa Sa, Ra!!!~~

The weather plots his journey
Town to town in dead of night
Fields dead and on a gurney
He comes in to make it right

A rainmaker, people call him
A psuedo-scammer others say
He sells himself as godlike
He comes quick and does not stay

He tells people what they wish for
He beats the storm in to their town
He seeds their minds with his tall stories
He promises more green than brown

Like an evangelistic angel
He beats the weather to the ground
He's a salesman like no other
He picks their pockets with no sound

A rainmaker, just a scammer
He works the towns where nothing lives
He is an alchemist non-gratta
He always takes and never gives

He sells snake oil and concoctions
He is a shaman in disguise
He promises rain where none has fallen
There is more moisture in the farmers eyes

He takes credit for a rainfall
He promises gold where once was straw
He's a rumplestiltskin with their feelings
He sells them only what they wish they saw

He may believe in what he tells them
He always puts his name out on a stake
But, can he truly make the skies open
That is a choice the desperate make

when my bike breaks
a shirtless boy offers to fix it
and we kneel bare-kneed on
old sidewalk peering through
grease and stuck gears
until I turn away
as if he is a night-time
I might stub my toe on.

You, saying love
You, shaman's road
You, a bird
You, a yellow sun
You, Emperor
You, lovely door
You, my Walt Whitman
You, Neal
You, Sal Paradise
You, Pancho Villa
You, La Revolución Mexicana
You, navajo
You, the border
You, the river
You, chicana
You, Mafia
You, redemption
You, poetry
You, Salvador Dalí
You, Picasso
You, stereo
You, love
You, ***
You, youth
You, America
You, América
You, español
You, english
You, country side
You, cat
You, fire
You, books
You, E. E. Cummings
You, Bukowski
You, Octavio Paz
You, Coca-Cola
You, Coke
You, India
You, Mississippi
You, jazz
You, Miles
You, Davis
You, water
You, rain
You, lagoon
You, chest
You, car
You, road
You, reading
You, lines
You, Paris
You, Baudelaire
You, Poe
You, japanese
You, katana
You, Mishima
You, gun
You, rifle
You, cam
You, can
You, can't
You, Durango
You, Arizona
You, desert
You, gonzo
You, mezcal
You, alcohol
You, drive
You, crush
You, alive
You, again

I see the rabbits feeding on the grass
My heart is filled with joy
Their life is precious
I see the vultures feeding on the rabbits
My heart is filled with joy
Their life is precious

That's what I never understood about coffins
Life is about expanding your prison cell as much as you can
There's no requirement to be contained once it's over
Our nutriance to the Earth
Is our nutrients into Earth
All creatures that die on this planet
Become a part of it
The Debt they paid to the future
The Debt that is always collected on
We travel nonchalantly on their corpses
Wishing they could appreciate
That each and every one of them
Was one step closer to sentience
This planet's passion project

Could the first single-celled organism
Comprehend my humiliation?
When the first creature walked on land
Was it anticipating my shame?
Did it sprout wings
To give me nightmares of dying in an airplane?
Did ancient Neanderthals dance around a fire
To reenact my adolescence?
Could mystic voodoo shaman
Cure my lack of agency?
Or did lost American tribesmen
Prophesize the complexities of my love?
I can feel all these ******* looking up at me from the ground
And it's just me
As I accidentally burn my notebook with a cigarette

Did you find me, did you find me
In those silver-wrapped dreams of yours?
Did you hear sound of angels
Knocking on your door?

Or constant storms of invasion
Screaming through the glass
And I'll be there waiting
With my widows en masse.

She took your hand and went down
To the crowds of crows wailing
And you weeped like never before
As your tender eyes froze.

So beat me up and turn me down
Dunk me in the river and turn around
As your fate lines up your face
And wraps you in lace-
Black lace.

You walked out of the steam
And saw your reflection in the blood
Did you forget that this is a stupid dream and that your new life was a dud.

You devils better beat me up and turn me down
Dunk me in the river and turn around
As my fate lines up to my face
And wraps me in...
Black lace.

Hell-bent widow.
Black magic woman.
Haunted shaman.
Disturbed angel.

She'll wrap you up and wreck your world with black lace.
Black lace.

Kaiser's hiccups
/are/
   and \were\
   legendary
and probably
  |will be|

having a little break cleaning the house, after having taken out the garbage, the dustmen always come later than the postman, around 2am, i'm guessing my street is their last point of call... which suits me just fine... the house was almost entirely cleaned, vacuumed, floors wiped with detergent... ugh... **** it... lazy fingers... i opened up my guitar case, the PIECYK (amp) is ******, i still have my first ever acoustic guitar but i'm missing three strings, my electric still has all 6 strings... i'll get some jam out... i haven't practiced in years... i figured: if i can't find a drummer... if i can't find a bass player... try the mandolin outside a girls window once, give up the dream, put a poster of a rock band on my wall... do some art when i'm completely "out of it": drunk... poetry: not a most spectacular art... well: it would be spectacular without all the ******* puritans of form, rhyme and: meter? they call it a meter but not a metre? that's a bit like telling someone you weigh... that's mass in kg multiplied by "X" is... 999.6N... ah... i know... science shoved it's pickled brain into casual talk: the distinction between weight and mass... mass came after weight... weight is still commonly expressed foundation akin to height... but it was a welcome break with my seemingly dead electric guitar... dangled a few jangles and jingles of remembering when i used to play... Silverchair's Shade, Red Hot Chilli Pepper's Under the Bridge... Eric Clapton's Layla... Link Wray's Rumble... Grieg's in the House of the Mountain King...

only today i realised that people are truly lonely...
odd... when i was in my utter depths of despair:
no one came... but who did come? me!
i picked myself up, no one was willing...
but then... coming across a descending /
an ascending choir of song in an empty church
then hearing a great wind disperse the singing:
i did have my technological asset with me...
the hallucination, the, "hallucination" was so potent
that... regardless of putting in my headphones
or not... the singing continued...
it was only when i scuttled and hid beneath
the altar and took the altar cloth off the altar
and covered myself momentarily with it
then starting running around the church like
a headless chicken... i know! i know! i know with
a BURNING I KNOW... if i uttered a word
i would hear the wrong reply!
either a god descending or a devil ascending...
after all... either side has a singing choir...

people are truly lonely...
i'm alone... loneliness is something that
attracts people to me...
i can't stomach loneliness...
for me that's like... the cul de sac of former
extroverts having an orange with no
orange juice to trickle down into a glass:
half full? regardless the optical misnomer of
calling the same glass: same... half empty...
i am more than willing to do this security
job because i get to do some decent work...
like being a chemistry teacher...
it's a great narrative canvas...
i write over what was already talked (over)...
that's how you get to paint by writing...
you're not some Tolstoy's...
no... not some Pavlov's dog trying to wet his appetite
but also sweat... via drooling saliva...
before my shift i had that random conversation
with mother...
she was watching the t.v. adaptation
of Leo Tolstoy's War & Peace and i said to her:
i don't recall having ever read Tolstoy...
he's not like Dostoyevsky, is he?

so we compared: Tolstoy is the writer
of the macro-cosmos... of events that shake nations
and the individuals: "individuals" are sort of:
chess-pieces...
it's the sort of literature of the salon...
Dostoyevsky is a psychologist...
a world war II might be taking place...
but... but... some Heinrich *******is getting dealt
a terrible hand of both luck and fortune...
like i said to my ailing mother:
she half-jokes aligned with giving birth to me
being her crucifixion...
i joke back: maybe if i wasn't born
i would have both my hinds...
i was once called a: hunchback angel by a guy
advocating the advent of the DUB-STEP musical
genre... way before DUB-STEP became bust
and only associated with SKRILLEX
"drop the button buster, beat, blah blah"...

reimagine drunk conversations in a pub...
in a PLOOB... Scouse? i don't know... maybe somehow
someday, maybe...
    ich sehen rot.. ergo: ich aufladung,
i.e. go! i.e. gehen!

people are so lonely, not having read anything of
philosophy...
if i were to learn anything from the sage-father
that my father isn't....
read philosophy when i'm old and clinging ton sanity
with a chance: oops...
*******... death end clue...
what?                        before you're dead...
please leave your nappies alongside the rest
of the remains of you...

i was having a: drinking session with
newly married couple... Irish traveller...
i downed his, my, his, my: whichever pint
long before the closing hours were done...
Frankie... Francesca...
**** me... Matthew Conrad "m.d."

it's called: tunneling!
me what?! a **** was asking me to g back
to her flat to sniff some *******...
smoke some ****....
i'd love to...
        but i need to make my mother
a coffee come 9am...

i never realised people could become so lonely
and when drinking enough become so blatantly obvious
about it...
it took me one night trip to find a fox's corpse
by the side of the street
to subsequently find a skip and some black bin bags
wrap the road-****... walk with it for almost five miles,
stopping off at the house to weigh myself
then me and the carcass...
amassed to about 7kg... a big, healthy *******
of a fox...
when i was picking him up from the pavement
at 5am a man and a woman were eying me up
like: no... not a ******... a shaman...
they should i might be pretending to chop the fox up...
i just didn't want such a beautiful creature,
beautifully dead, serene, lying on the side of the street...
the only burial i gave him was throwing him
into some thorny bushes by a stream...
another time i was playing i-see-you-but-you-don't-see-me
with another fox... sat on a curve and just eyed it...
until a woman passed the fox and me sitting across
the street drinking a beer... WE'RE MEDITATING!
did the fox flinch? nope... the woman walked about a metre
from the fox... ****** didn't flinch...
i was working up to the TOTEM...
it took one afternoon of the door being opened to
my kitchen and me cooking up two curries...
hey presto: BRODY...
that ****** came for leftovers from meals for over a month...
until, he stopped coming...
i'm guessing he was hit by a car...
but... i'm guessing my care for one fox being
somewhat properly buried and another fox coming
to inquire about: what smells so good
is the reason why i have captured such great photographs
of a fox in my garden...

- hmm... date? or after work coworker drinks?
i know that i scribbled in my little notepad
when she went on her Nth visit to the toilet...
my guess is that males have weaker bladder
of the sexes... a SPRINKLE OF SOME MARIJUANA..
i'm waiting for VOLTAGE...
i'm about to hallucinate in ink... burgundy mixing itself
with Bishop Purple...
those first 30 minutes after a sunset...
cycling down the A12 with heavy traffic... reaching the Green
Belt between Romford and Mark's Gate...
breathing through the nose...
Spring is teasing... Spring is teasing with her
oncoming stealth of scents...
the earth is yet again starting to breathe...
first comes the botanical kingdom,
soon after will come the kingdom of the insects...
wait! i have not heard of an angel or a demon
associated with botany! in charge of, say... roses...
too good of a mark for a Saint George with...
or was that St. Stephen...

write like an imitation of ice-skating...
pretend to fall... gain momentum...
think out a thinking of shadow, curb,
night and walking Ninja hey-presto! feline...
think a loudness: think the loudness...
the ***** of a 4 x 4 pedestrian cross
section of Tokyo...
leave your cycling attire on the bed, stinking of you...
watch a female cuddle and curl up to your Lycra
long-shanks for the specific reason: been cycling...
acid on a bicycle... the 1st and the only ever tRIP...

i always wanted to travel to India...
and walk back to England...
i always wanted to do that...
second: if? aha... QUESTION "question" questing onion
quest of an onion... ANSWER:
i swear, i: as it were... as it is... i: as it were:
i of i, i off i, i vs. no-i...
not i vs. not-i: schizoid broo... Brrrrr... BWOOM(B)
***** a-plenty with witches...

fly fly away my little star...
fly fly away my little st'ah... st'ah...
Stachurski! da da da... ditch Z-Detusche:
na minute, na chwile! na jedno
i drugie dingo dingo!

Lord of the Mushroom!
and mushy peas... and... dhal...
Lord... Bel
              פִּטרִיָה               (Be-EL)

i'm shocked that the gnostics didn't...
to be honest? what was missing in Hinduism?!
what was missing in Hinduism?!
AH HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA
AH HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA
AH HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA
AH HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA
AH HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA
AH HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA
AH HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA
AH HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA
AH HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!

oh yeah... that's a Satanic laugh that is...
a laugh that makes the existence of soul viable...
it is a glowing...
when one internalizes laughter with eureka
and mixes it up with stage-fright and a "hate"
for the sound of one's voice...
but then from time to time...
one is caught singing while doing chores and finds
one's voice appealing to be given song
rather than words to speak or write...

but not even in Egyptian mythology...
it was coming! it was ******* coming home!
the botanical godhead...
in the pantheon was missing!
was missing in the pantheon!
the

פ
P / PH / F (greek sidelined, referee: TH)eta
ט
T
ר
R(esh)
י
    YOD: first son of Yiddish: YON... by a boy named
YON...                  a

      e                                               i
                            Λ
                            Y                                  (LY)HH
    
                  o                       y

ה
hello friend: vowel catcher and laughter generator ...
ה not Π... that one connecting letter: ח

hmm: older than capitalism and communism,
but to simply the problem up:
capitalism is the lion
and everything English...
capitalism is the bear
and everything Russian...
vice versa for communism...
the English bred their mythos on the superiority
of a lion and... a unicorn... more a Celtic, Scottish... thing...
the Russians on... a union with the bear...
the bear and the two headed eagle: ergo:
another unicorn...
like the Srbs... serbs... two headed eagle?
the Soviet downfall with the two-headed eagles
of Chernobyl?
       ******: moi... i seriously sometimes forget
my own ethnicity i'm so caught up in English
metropolitan... cosmopolitanism...
      the Global City-Free-States... CITIES AS STATES...
very imaginable...

not City-States... rather... on the global connectivity
project?
what Dinosaur what meteor?
what super-volcano what Yellowstone
what man?
  it's a bit like Pompeii...
give the worlds greatest party and then the volcano
explodes...
better than a meteor: a volcano killed us...
Yella Big Yella...
            the greatest, supposedly no OB-EASE:
into obese...
          ah ah... tongue out... speak! the prolonged A
of neither ah not āh...
                      -
                        2

                                      ****... that's chemistry's notations...
                     2
                  -                                 (huh?!)

the macron over the A... for AAH...
i.e. not an:                                                      ah!

                        á!
                                               A
    
                                   H                        H

           á                                   'ey?!
                                ha ha: key?    hey?!

the burial ground of...
    hmm...
               BEE-EL...
      
PHTRYH: the godhead is that of a mushroom...
people partied to the music of: infected mushroom...
a god is making himself known...
like the false god of H. P. Lovecraft
horror-imago: Nyarlathotep...

precisely! what vowels!
PH or P or F?
   two H's emerged... a good sign that it's PH
for aesthetic reasons...
scribbling this down...
i feel like i'm actually left-handed...
a diametrical opposition to the stasis-enforced
gravity of nothing falling: everything sitting...

ph(aeiou)t(aioue)r(aouei)y(aueio)h(aeiou)

if insects can be allowed the dimension of godly
creatures: thousand blessings on the head!
the lion's head the eagle...
emblem of the Volk of the Volcano:
a Mushroom-Head...
                    
toilet... ah... welcome relief... the water is running...
running...
hmm... from a top... otherwise flowing...
if...
lake: mirror imitation, Lake Narcissus and
his brother Sea Samael: Death...
     like absinthe before adding water like it
was milk...
the water is in tide: with tide: use the FORCE...
tide...
   like water found the force... the force:
with force water found gravity via tide...
earth found gravity with the quake
fire found gravity with the sparkle of the stars...
fire... charcoal peered at night at the already
lighted... as he admired the lightning with fear...
no lightning ever warmed...
comforts of a distant home... fire found gravity
envying the stars... Prometheus who?
and the brothers of Gaia?
Fero...
                fire...
                              AQ... the water brother...
ah... forgot about the younger sister:
AIA...              air...

what a weird ******* date, coworker after shift drinking...
i've never been on a date with a lesbian...
i felt... TESTED... we watched almost the entire match
Chelsea women vs. Tottenham Women Hotbras...
coming close to the end of the shift she asked
if i wanted to go drinking...
sure... why not...

            hmm... it became a date... after she bought the two
rounds i paid for on our previous encounter
when we actually went ice-skating and i became
a local internet sensation for teaching seagulls how to fly:
wearing ice-skates, frozen lake: fly fly!

so we start... the pub is getting busy...
it feels worse than a strip-club...
at least in a strip-club most people are naked
and people get to wear imaginary masks...
in a pub? **** me...
people are dressed up and are made to wear
imaginary clothing! ha ha!
masks?! what masks... a LIE is 10 masks... one lie equals
10 masks... because a lie concerning
the body of soul... is accented with more than
a physical imprint...
LIE MASK AS IF PRETEND SUPPOSE SO
AS IF AS SO CALL IT QUITS
ACTING

it felt like a date... she was getting all nervy...
going to the toilet... checking her phone all the time...
i was patient, smart girl, while i was pretending to
opt out from her OCD... check the phone...
check the fridge-freezer... check your opt out
capacity for a TV license...

how do you go out on a date with a lesbian?
neither you nor her are advocating for woke talking points...
about pronouns or... Furry? listen...
she talks to me about getting FIFA '22...
i finished gaming off at PS1 and reliving the golden days
by re-watching the walkthroughs of
MGS2 (metal gear solid 2)...

because? movies are ****...
i don't want to want these women...
i want... a ******* canoe and a ******* paddle!
and a grizzly bear cub to cuddle and a birch tree to cuddle!

MUFFA!
YEROYI... AHMADI-DEM-BASHAI
YAMSH'EH GIBYT!
VAZOL: OCH TIBI IM PEO-OM-KATA
ES O I TOBOM.

no language suddenly praise with the rigidity of
continuation...
i'll be honest... what do i need a woman for?
to get old, get a haircut... buy food...
not watch the sunrise or the sunset...
instead watch the news on t.v. watch the t.v.
not watch the aquarium?
don't own an aquarium?

own a car but don't own a bicycle?!
in London...
it was 2: so nie to know you: snooze:
represented by letter Z or 2...
if 5 is S and 6 is b...

                     the marriage of letters
to numbers... numbers? meaningless...
absolutely... meaningless...
199 KILOGRAMS
200 CENIMETRES
X contra "x"...

        dead-weight marrying
      1 + 1 + 1 = 3
when marrying
o + n + e = one...
              ah! but 3 and one are different!
former? the forever unit...
latter? the splinter, E3...
forever question...

               turn 3 into omega...
when sharpen it up for a SH... hide the H...
wake up the Z... hide the Z
emerge with a v above an
                           S

call it crown....

     - so Francesca asked me to go drinking again:
again a date doesn't feel like a date...
am i supposed to know about the plethora of female
sexuality?
         **** McDonald one day...
   straight out of Orange is the New Black the next?
just for drinks... i thought we would equal out the tab
on who paid for what previously...
went into the pub at around 20:30 came out around
00:15... we watched the females' football league...
her team, Chelsea beat Tottenham at the Leyton Orient
ground: no plague of parakeets...
honestly: hand on my heart and one on my ear
standing naked before four mirrors:
i did not hear about wild parakeets... parakeets
in general since: only since i worked the Craven Cottage
shifts... Bishop's Park was full of them!
there were no wild parakeets in Essex... not that i know of...
i once listed down all the birds
i could see from my garden...
seagulls, kestrels, two hawks battling in the air,
woodland pigeons, urban pigeons,
crows, magpies, sparrows, swallows,
robins, blackbirds, Canadian geese (migrating),
mallard ducks (also migrating), swans (migrating ditto)...
but sure as **** no parakeets!

in that session i bought only 1 round...
she was hungry so she ordered food...
three plates of food...
fried wings with two sauces...
a bowl of cheesy fries with strips of bacon
and a bowl of popcorn chicken which
i first thought was: battered and deep-friend
mozzarella nuggets...
i had three things... showing off my eating skills...
my grandparents never used to eat
the cartilage and the best meaty bits
off of the chicken legs, drumsticks or wings...
i went a step further...
a bit like eating a whole apple... including the core...
aa magic trick of eating:
you begin with holding something in your hand...
then it disappears completely...
holding an apple, whole, and eating it whole...
subsequently is a bit like playing with a top hat
imagining red eyed albino bunnies, from Albania
(albino >< Albania).. clash of borrowed letters
but two completely different meanings...

etymologically: Albania: land of the Albinos:
Albanios? more like a he, noun...
a mountain, a he...
                 a lake: he and she... neither, always:
if reading English like a native
of the tongue...
                        Albatross from Albanions...
poetry borrowed from a dictionary, rigid function:
hiding the rhyme
exposing the etymological "rhyme".
Alba-
                                      white...
a dyslexic meets a Daltonist in Dover..
the dyslexic arguments are along the lines of:
Dawid Bovie... dead... pish-poor shapes to be be
before huddling out the grave
for a Madame Tussauds pose and a quick nap
and not asking for
a Doppelganger like Sisyphus without a stone
but the equivalent worth of the stone
in pebbles...

    i would be a fair god...
if i'm willing to give birth to an angel of the Botanical realm
since there's the Lord of the Flies... Beelzebub..
and there's the Lord of the Mosquitos: Jesus "sacred heart"
reincarnated by Jungian inspection
a literal: MOTHER... ******...
Chirst...
                      it's not enough to play the pig's blanket
and pretend a crucifix is a ***** and in dire need of being
used by a ******* according
to Marquis de Sade...
Phateroyah...
                     obviously the vowels will change...
with vowels like water and consonants like earth...
punctuation is like air... punctuation and a physical
representation of writing: nothing ethereal,
nothing metaphysical... writing with expression
on our faces... writing as something less and less
a claustrophobic or its implosion: to an effect...
writing less about an extension of thinking...
in the Cartesian dynamic:
res extensa: via writing, alternatively:
if one were to be prone to smoking enough marijuana:
auditory hallucinations... writing is
by definition the same variant of the EXTENDED classification
as a schizophrenic's auditory hallucination...
the former just forces it upon others...
the latter is unwarranted access to a corrupted ego...
a hurt ego...
an ego without the capacity to imagine,
to dream, to digress...

i showed her how to eat chicken proper...
i ate three wings, two chips avoiding the bacon and cheese,
and about three popcorn nuggets...
i forgot myself: once all the cartilage on the bones
was cleaned off... i went in to bite into the bones...
the ends are sort of soft and marshmallow-almost...
not in texture... in my reimagining:

reimagining - hmm... Kant...
         remembering...
a prior... remembering...
   a posteriori: reimagining...

if a crime happens we don't have an a priori remembering
tactic... ingesting the realm of a prior
with memory... remembering...
that's what we do...
what came before 5? S? or !!!!! five exclamation marks?
or? >>>>> five more-than signs?
did 5 come before five?
did words spawn numbers
or did numbers spawn words?
clearly they're not identical...
and they operate two different realms...

we have words for numbers...
as we have numbers that are also letters...
but numbers are not words...
even 3.14159....
                   is not a word, but a letter: Pi i.e. P...
it's not a word... it's at best a letter...
i'm thinking the gods are words and the angels
are letters...
  while the anti-gods are constants
and their "angels" are numbers...

constants?
                         3.14159..... is not a constant... it's a freak of O...
a circle... and a whole mythology of the Wheel...
O... ****** VENUS...
  phallus... the egg... Oh and 0ero         Z: zed extended
via snooze: zzzzz... harps and snoring... terrible music...
constants? in numbers as if creating a word?

6.02214076 × 10²³ mol⁻¹

                     Avogardo's: the equilibrium dynamic if
i remember correctly...
today i learned about...
     Jakob Fugger... back in his day worth around
400 billions "x"... who financed the construction
of St. Peter's in Rome...
i now wish i visited Rome instead of Venice...
          i would have had more fun in Rome...
  
(algebra is the reply, letters imitating
numbers... should the inclusion of MOL be a problem)...

i bit off the chicken legs marrow...
she was in the toilet about fifty ******* times, each time,
ordering more drinks...
we came in at 20:30 and left at around 00:30
at one point she was in the toilet and
i just remembered something...
they have this "thing" in Japan... where you pay a stranger
to pretend to be your friend...
i'm not pretending... but conversation is dry...
i try to ask questions: i ask questions,
i hear replies... but i don't hear reciprocating
questions... Mr. Familiar has or had no problems?
people confide in me and yet
whenever i try to confide in them
i'm told to shut up...
oh... i get it... i do...
before i knew it i was this heaven-sent ideal...
i was the strength and they were the weakness...
i see it now more than even...
she can tell me about her abusive past...
her drunk father who kissed her mother with knuckles
instead of lips... how she's a lesbian but also
a butch ******* **** with hands almost as large as mine
and how her daughter was put into care
because "X"...
but my shizophrenia is a "schizophrenia" is...
i wasted my 20s on anti-psychotic drugs and psychiatrists
that i bundled up and threw into a hornets' nest of
******* *****, threesomes (just the one, but one is
the threshold)... prostitutes: you talk more with your
eyes and your hands and your other endings
and your nose than you care to ******* lasso a string
of coherent words together...

my problem? what problems?! exactly...
there's nothing wrong with me: i have no regrets...
i don't need to speak to someone with an endearing
sake of self definition... i can just scribble notes down
and leave them for some yet to be born
****** of petty things...
i can do just that... no wonder i can't open up...
talk about... "me"? that's still packaged goods...
i'm waiting for the morbid call of a biography
postmortem...

it's strange going on a date with a lesbian...
it's not a date it's me going for after-work drinks
with a colleague...
it's me and her eyeing up the same behind the counter:
tight ***, fake eyelashes she can pull off...
her unwashed pink-fading dyed fair:
feminist... it's me telling her a little about my past:
i had long hair before,
i couldn't pull off a Jesus...
i would only grow a beard if i cut my hair...
short...
she's still trying to find me on social media...
god: i love keeping a girl in suspense whether or not
i have any social media presence...
best try it out with a lesbian first...
we talk about dating apps:
i have a knowledge of their existence...
but hardly a knowledge that might demand
the pressures of: USAGE...

i end up drinking the night away with a revelation...
i was eyeing these two pairs of love birds for some time...

when i was at the Ol' "John's" taking
a whizz... this Greek version of Freak... o.k. o.k.,
ETHAN ROARK type... balding on the top
of the cranium, allows his hair to grow long...
didn't you know...
Garry Glitter was released... he's already
been harangued by the ******* "police"....

what like Batman did a "forever"?
          
   i get paedophiles doing a second jester runner
with meeting up with underage:
sorry... not boring enough?
it's like pretending to be a mandible,
aerobic classed agility with
a prosthetic... that's what ******* a teenage girl
might feel like:
i rather run with deer....
or charm a fox into becoming my totem...
should i be reincarnated what might i come back as?
i'm not banking: i'm saying: fuchs!
fox! LIS!
if i were to freely roam the prance-lands of Essex
as a fox... that's me, done and dusted...

but i wouldn't inhibit a man willing to repent...
after all: if no forgiveness?
the Muslims were right: no crucifixion took place...
did it?
a 78 year old can be given a heave's sake....
life's fruition and that's done...
sorry for the hurt parties... living their:
adamantly purposive lives
with the weight of: Abel not dead...
sorry... the story goes... Cain murders you....
you're still live yet:
you're supposed to be dead...

i'm only making excuses for Gary Glitter...
i wouldn't be for...
Ralph Heimans...
                                 it's music and i can't stop
listening to Rock & Roll parts I & II...

**** me: i ended up the night...
she hated ***** accents.. Liverpool-day-john-ion...
part Eirish: skirmish: scoot!
a Swabian swap... an "oops": Ludwig... or was
that Lufthansa...
this girl, a ***** bridge,,. i'd love to add hired
bride...
                  but instead?

Traveller Irish... i was talking to a bridge...
bride...
you want a drinking race?
ejecting the two pairs...
i snuggled down my pint: his pint...
in 3x glugs... i saw a phantom of an opera...
what?she told me she never used social
media before marrying?
why do i need to Afghanistan to find
datable brides? i squeak and wriggle myself
into the CAMPER VAN culture...
Irish travellers... so? i'll drink with them...
i'd drink with a repentant ******* asking:
was it anything like Nabokov prescribed?!

£30 for 3.5grams of ****...
time excavated? 30+ hours...
£120 + £10 for entry for an hour with a *******...
well... i'd love to prove my masculinity
with having a competing:
hopeless: always alive sort of battery life:
kept up: *******...
but even i think *** is primarily a dosage of
insect desires...
mammals like us sometimes
tend to play games to escape the pressures
of ***...
requested: what? getting my beard trimmed
or getting my underwear "lost" or my ******* "trimmed"?

i get it... ******* are people who are not afforded
a chance to compensate...
relieve themselves through the shared
antics of (shared) grief...
just like Jesus Christ once crucified can't be
resurrected! n'est ce pas?!
what if... the ******* can be left alone...
in his freedom and a freedom-sickly-cage...
what if?!

a bit like saying:
but i can't be anti-racist...
i can be a non-racist...
but i can't be: anti-racist...
                    there are humans either side of
the "argument"...

one mighty argument of goo after another...
inverting the whole dynamic of dates...
seen your face for over a year...
now i heard your voice: your soul...
you heard me laughter...

a naked table, a naked chair...
a dressed table, a dressed chair,
a lightbulb with a cloche...
rigid Slavic KLOSZ...
walls: brick or slab...
naked... wallpaper slapped on...

   how did that "date" end up?
i was speaking to Irish Travellers...
the ****** types... caravan dwellers...
with the girl... snogging before
ordering a pint....
how she was Lady Margaret all pristine
didn't drink or use social media
before getting married...
i was chasing pints...
race: 3x glugs down...
  i out-chased him...

the pub was closing, we wanted the people out...
strange so, talking to this Irish Traveller Lassie,
most settled people with mortgages or
council houses, flats... avoid speaking to Irish Travellers...
but the revelations she uttered...
i might as well been talking to a Muslim girl...
by her account...
she didn't start drinking before she was married...
she didn't use social media,
she said that in the travellers' community having
a social media account is a bit like *******...
hell: i think it's much worse...
fair play to the capitalistic system...
but social media is what it is...
         it has marketed our private-lives...
not written as a complaint...
                        i allowed for that to happen...
willingly...
now i can't simply walk away from the gallery...
i still don't know what to do with it
instead of making if a reference point akin to:
the red and the amber and the green
of traffic lights...
the "system" wasn't going to capitalise on the market
of my dating preferences and ****** encounters...
sure... i don't mind a public "dear diary"...
a place to store links to music videos when i forget
to add them to my browser's bookmarks:
because i've probably added the same song twice...

but Kant has been bothering me...
ever since i wrote:
a priori remembering
    and a posteriori reimagining...
why do i think that it's impossible
to a priori reimagine?
              
i need to go back to the rubric
and try to burn it into my head like the alphabet
was burned into my mind once...
one of the following four
is impossible:
    with the simplest expression for each:

(analytical) a priori                             (analytical) a posteriori
1 + 1 =2                                                   not every man is a ******
wrong!                                                   some men are
that's synthetic a priori!
+, /, £

(synthetic) a priori                               (synthetic) a posteriori
1 + 1 = 2                                                   £: money makes monkey
i synthesised these                                either that shaman
numbers...                                              mushroom on an ant's
analysed what prior?                            buttocks or:
the increasing number                          the botanical "anomaly"
the added, subtracted,                        money is: asexuality it's
multiplied,                                              what if Adam gave Eve
by god sq. rooted?!                              her first un-earned banknote...
1, 2, 3, 4...                                              spend freely! not having
                                                                earned it!
                                                               what if Eden and the apple
                                                                are wholly outdated
                                                                metaphors?

hmm...

the first £10 she got? was that money earned or money freely
given? was she handed down an allowance or
her first earnings? the trickling down idea follows suit:
if her father gave her money for free... for completing "chores"...
if he gave her an allowance: worse still...
without chores...
why wouldn't expect the sane fir passable:
future partners: daddy day-care "hoes"...
                           my daddy this, my daddy that...
HUBBY no. 2... give give...
i drink less... i smoke some marijuana
and i remember that i read some philosophy...
no new grounding since Wittgenstein
gobbled down Spinoza in a ferocious
of homosexual madness of jealousy...
misunderstood by at least 4 parties...

*** and women unplugged...
some of us boys are playing a game of Alchemy...
solid silver, liquid silver...
i guess plastics are gassy silver...
***... can i please assume there might be
two mouths breathing?

I ate your breath before you ate the apple...
i ate your breath while you gauged
my eyes and saw milk in your *******...

in the labyrinth of: i sigh...
i'm to your bidding bound, sire...
i ate your breath long before you might have ate...
that fruit of autumn, fallen, rotten...
fermenting.... this rotten fruit...
no, not plucked from three... ripe and sweet...
rather picked up attired in autumn's clothes:
auburn, over-ripe cinnaamon-brown,
orange and yellow...

you gave me a drunkard's bear or ilk!
male deer! you gave me a drunkard's apple!
i might be stumbling:
but i'm still chiming with the blues!
what Mosad Mandarin faction of
the intelligence community?

   ching-fang-*******-wall'ah-CHANG
wrote a similar (liar) armistice peace-war:
if we can't use this military equipment...
let's, make... ******* movies!
woo yee HA!

Baron astronaut, ergonomic... a house ought
to have two doors: H... a house
ought to have rooms focused upon the dynamic
of Y...
oh **** your woo! woo! glue my ***
of the Tetragrammaton:
i heard it once before:
the Arabs got their pearly and Kentucky bound
Timothy....
while the Hebrews got the paranoia...
windmills in Chelsea, London,
not Kansas... New Lit Bits of Jersey....

i was left aghast... um... i laughed...
i couldn't say the words ****... pairing it up with her voice...

well... according to sources all knowledge a piori
is ANYLYTICAL... but what was i "analysing"
when i was conjuring the letter R or the number Z?
i borrowed the circle from the sun
and the house from the cave?
i must have done so...
i probably conjured the game of rugby from
the sea's tides and yoyo from an egg of a dodo...
and the goal posts from the letter H...
ripples in the water ZigZag and M and W...
cosine as the refined W
and sine as the refined M...

   a parabola confined in a W...
D in do and devil...
God with Dog and: all?! ah!

    i'm not dumb: i just want to extract more from Kant
than people, ever had, toyed with a jihad of had the Hadiths
in a puddle of paper: equaling the refined weight:
of the organic worth of bark? timber: temples of stone
have turned the gods all cold:
about 5 kilograms for a stash of a week's worth of newspapers...

please please don't let me understand myself:
please oh please don't let me understand myself:
when i'm sober and especially when i'm slightly drink...
drunk... drunk... and smoking a bit of ****...
and...

grass is green: after having established that
not everything is grass
and not everything that's grass is green
wheat? grows like grass...
but it's not green...
and it grows taller than grass
and cows and horses don't eat it...

i could watch a thousand movie and listen to a million
songs... i could even manage to love a woman
and her tell me in the cravat adorning mammal skin
caravans... but i'd still go to bed with Kant...


   it's not that difficult but i need to ask myself to burn
this rubric into my mind...
under each the easiest expression: an abstract...
i just can't word it differently:
a priori remembering...
true...
a posteriori reimagining...
also true:
after the fact of seeing a tree...
can i see a tree prior?
ergo? i can't be capable of a priori reimagining...
first i have to see a tree...
but upon seeing the tree i can't reimagine it...
therefore i can only reimagine what comes after seeing it...
how do i practice a priori remembering?
on the most practical level...
i remember 1 + 1 = 2...
history and memory...
sure... but what of history as epistemology?
as a child i'm not really taught that 1 + 1 = 2...
knowledge and 1 + 1 = 11... not "somehow" just by
"coincidence" of the missed meaning of the cipher +,

epistemology and etymology are the only
two branches that should be given access to the study
of history...

reimagining a tree is impossible in that it's a realm
of geometric abstractions that borrow from
geometric orthodoxy and render them useful:
a tree is a home, i can, reimagine a tree...
if i reimagine myself as a bird or a monkey
perched in a tree... reimagining the roof...
via the sky... but that's hardly likely,
mountain and cave dwelling: home...
a prior reimagining is in its own right something...
but reimagining resulted in the dimension
of a posteriori...
i reimagine a tree and make it: a talking tree...
i apply pareidolia...
or like with clouds... those favourites...
why would i reimagine clouds a priori?
i can... but then that would imply reimagining
cauliflowers... or rather: clouds remind me of
cauliflowers: but that's not reimagining either
clouds or cauliflowers: it's remembering what each
looks like and why, subjectively i remember:
that i think they're alike...

hmm... proof: no pudding....
clearest blue...
          or solid green... the Jade from China...
XINY X= CH
we can apply the letter X in our tongue...
that's what marijuana morphs:
the perception of time... 10 minutes already
feel like an hour....
xolera... cholera H! hhhh...
                 xorwat - croat...
                   xemia - chemistry....
chmiel: xmiel:
                              toad breath!
the stuff i sniff up before going to bed!
you ******* DYSLEXIC...

choroba: xoroba...
sickness...

  DYSLEHIC...
                   i'm asking for upgrades...
i hope my upgrades are not too: demanding...
i'm asking... i'm asking...
i'm getting **** all...
well then... best not become a priest
and conjure up what i might need...
i may need this that and the other...
Hebrew...
i'll need the vowel hiding prerogative
to be minded... i'll need Kant..
punctuation marks and numbers....
most certainly letters...
plus akin to comma....

                                 if still alive: i'll lso require death...

chwila: xwila: a fleeting moment...
lapsed timing...
           c H-A
arecz: samo-H-ah...
                  nie na xixota.... śpiew
raptem: tak! ha! ha! aha!

daj znać gdy ty i ja,
tak nagle żyją... i nie... o tak!
i mihght have a Frenchman's heart
to want: Romance after news of
a hereafter..
the moon is blue
the sun is bronze...
the air is milky in the morning...
the water is traffic and there's no
traffic... i'd like death before the explaining mantra:
what's worth a life: squid parody on... ******* skates?!

the love of the gods is doubly insulating...
first they try to demolish you: one ******* fatal claim after another...
the they employ women... they too... *******.. fail...
what are you rounding up against, you?!
sails without winds and no boats to sail with,
the supposed... great artefacts of claiming
the winds!

i once sat alone in a park... hair growing freely....
i had no addition of a face with the addition of hair...
i had no beard, not stubble...
the wind was and my long hair was
and there was, no war, no famine...
there was only dancing and twice reading
into a Charles Dickens...

twice: a rereading a text not available
for journalistic imprints of:
that satisficed mantra of derailing:
expectations of the meddling-ground....

oh well: oh nothing...
oh riddle me some more: nothing...
life is cheap: buy it bought!
sell it sold!
       earn it not living (it); earning it!
ergo: "living"... and (existentialism)...

   a king's frown is a beggar's stomach...
money makes money:
onions grow on trees!

giving birth to the son of Mammon
was... not... hard?
seriously?!
                          thank god i'm twisted in my own
sort of superstitious way...
when there's talk of a birth of an angel...
my ****** demands become joke...
i forget something, and within the confines
of something: almost: everything...

save180:

p'oh tay t'oh
but not
toe-may-toe
that's not
t'oh may t'oh
but...
t'oh m'ah t'oh

         if only it was a p'oh t'ah toe t'oh.

Even as Shaman Master J;
so much typical association with one letter
and the other rock I am crushed between as blasphemous
for the Shaman though I suppose the Master is not too far off that way;
once when I knew I was not on my own but of a word I dare not say, perhaps
I was better off on some loners guided tour or spell but twas it you or me whom I knew
and then just called as better thee unknown Lord that way!!! I know you Vine Divine and Seven Billion here now branches like I can be no more but a twig but together does this not end some debate and be the greater things you'd say we'd do...and Hebrew say coming still...all together now this emergence so urges midwife wooing best of outcome both of Mother, Child and the Loving Bridegroom's Loving Heart, Eyes, Arms and Gentle Hands!!!!

Altered states of Consciousness can be very auspicious,
and such a practice may well have ensured survival, so,
perhaps genetic predisposition towards entheogenic study,
or, otherwise, the psychological drive to try such substances,
is a manifestation of worthwhile ancestral exploration of Consciousness
via intervallic use of natural psychoactive substances in groups
in our not-so-distant genetic past.

Coming from the shadows a six armed samurai,
Followed closely by glowstick wielding neon ninji,
Grips of *** swigging pirates swing from the rafters,
Swallowed alive by blacklight monsters,
Gangs of ***** smoking gurus,
Armed to the teeth with translucent didgeridoos,
Monks parade in swirling vestments,
Whilst the shaman trip in lotus testament,
Gods transfixed by blood tear beauty,,
As humanity’s heroes slay bejeweled dragons,
The king with two faces is beheaded,
By his charlatans, harlequins, fools and jesters,
Chaotic, prophetic killers run amok,
The order of lunatics chant as the time is struck,
A battle royale then follows,
As robots and aliens envelope,
Brilliant beams and whirring mechanics,
Clash with steel, rock, bone and sticks,
Screams from the heads of the thieves,
As their brains are devoured by zombies

All hail the Lizard King,
whose esoteric words crawl like sirens
over hungry rocks
baring teeth to the hypnotized sailor
steering his ship into the jagged maw.

All hail the Lizard King,
perched upon his Dionysian throne,
ambrosial ecstasies fill his cup
while jongleurs dance to psychedelic chansons.

At his feet
prey the nubile maidens of yore
flower-eyed and pearly-teethed.

His eyes, mighty azure pools of madness
within which Byzantine kings were murdered--
blood darts through the mysterious waters
into the hysterical white void.

Alexander the Great
sits poised like a statue
where his libido crouches like a panther
'til the aural adonis
leaps from his confines
an amorous figure of tantalizing flesh and blood
with supple lips pouting, naked muscles taut,
mad eyes gleaming.

All hail the Lizard King,
from lush lips poetic decrees
sing forth into the endless night
penetrating taverns and bedrooms and radios
and stadiums.

The electric shaman leaps from his throne
to cast his wicked incantation,
a spark from his eyes shoots to the pyre
where a lustful blue flame erupts from
the bones of the prophets.

HIs voice soothing, haunting,
the sonic alchemist
sings his siren song into the cataclysm
where we are cast in abeyance--

We follow him,
but is he only leading us deeper
into the darkness,
or does he truly see the light?

The endless night.

All hail the Lizard King.

In the deep of time indigenous tribes
surfaced a red earth with protruding plateaus
and burnt canyons along the Cimarron River.
The ancient Anasazi settled
at the core of this mesa.
Scattered ponderosa pine.
Yet, their sudden demise echoed curiosity.

Navajo sensed a struggle of two infinite worlds,
a quivering inundation.
Circling its haunted ominous shape,
a skull with one eye, the apparition of light
rose into a blue desert sky.

Violent storms crackle hot lightning
strikes in a sulfurous summer-
an oracular hothouse.
Navajo talk of spirits or the gateway
to fire. Heaps of iron and lodestone
lodged in the cap. Only two
brazen, cat totem poles guarding its passage.

Standing among the mesa
to feel the verve of the earth.
A New Mexico sun beats down
burning the drowsed terrain.
To see the legendary shaman glow
in his ephemeral blue nimbus.
Bathed in gaudy turquoise.

Sensing the dark encroachment
of a ghost. Near the bony hills, soared
a turbulent black bird in full flight,
upward.

You told me somewhere yesterday and somewhere else the day before that what we're really waiting for
is an omen from some shaman who lives in Battersea or was it Tooting, but I'm counting on the abacus
there's three beads for the two of us and one bead for the shaman if he's a man at all,
there is word out on the corner stone, a marker, come home alkadry or don't dry out just stay out where the termites hone their skills on autocue pro forma wills and will you dine with god tonight or will it be the devils light you see?

The omen comes and with a codicil, old ladies, laughing gums upon the white washed window sill, I still admire the old girls with desire, with that tiny bit of fire that won't let go,
I know I do go on a bit and most of what I write is gold haha, (**** would've rhymed there, why didn't I think of it)

I'm too old to give a monkeys ***,
gold or **** is just the same to me
each one has its poetry,
the shaman doesn't see it
I'm not surprised
at all.

~

The king now nary cast a breath
in weakened state and fallen frown
Within his mind a door to death
an empty stairway heading down

The healer sent a worried look,
a nervous sweat upon his brow
No words so clear his opened book
“Great Shaman, please do something now”

The sorcerer seemed un-amused,
a glance upon the poison’s urn
and sensed that something had infused
Yon windows, orange glow did burn

The sun had fallen in the west,
barely but a light did shine
Running out, this challenged quest,
clinging tight to borrowed time

The shaman, to his nose, inhale
then raised his hand, now all was clear
His potion short, yet not to fail
required now a king’s sad tear  

The monarch sighed, eyes drew back,
pale his skin was white a snow
Minutes move as seconds track,
the setting sun was ever low

“We need a tear drop from his pain,
complete this antidote on trial”
The wizard spoke in dark refrain
“To place within this waiting vial”

The king, his pulse did disappear,
so limp his body now it fell
When then one glistened streaming tear,
*the token needed for this spell

i actually like the way slavoj žižek understands fascism, given the fourth movement of Beethoven's ninth symphony... as it stands: i really had to take pleasure in my suffering... i once called it: an exquisite pain... it's not that acknowledging pain is difficult, what's difficult is taking pleasure in it... on a whim... nothing as flamboyant as baron sacher-masoch's take on it, transcending toward the ****** thesis... i am the grey matter, the everyday comparison to a factotum sort of analogue of what pain constitutes... and i'm actually free from depressive apathy... i am sometimes prone to laugh like i might be experiencing what the Fore women experienced... the kuru "disease", otherwise known as the creutzfeldt-jakob "disease"... yes... mm... uncontrollable laugher... akin to St. Vitus' dance... sydenham's chorea.. it's hard to see why there should be any cure to the experience... given that the experience is so liberating and has no materialistic mono-mania of a well tended to economy... cannibalism really has a great array of noun-arsenal... a bit like the poetry of Christianity it's akin to... to really believe this *******: you have to take it to the extremes and make every word: utterly isolated, and in a sentence utterly meaningless... it's like a swarm of wasps honing in on a body of a bear that mistook its ash-phlegm nest for a beehive feast... sometimes it happens... but sure as all else concerning: why not take pleasure in an anti-cross crucifixion, i.e. a sick-bed? sure, it's less theatre and many less marble statues worthy of a church... but, if according to žižek / rzirzek / really? ź ż vs. ž... a fascists takes pleasure from suffering... i must be in this club, since i do, the pain in my brain with its sizzling quiz of blood emeshed in synapses has moved to my *******... ******* ahoy! i sit in a chair, and when drink (esp. when drinking): they are goosebump prone, titilating me... amusing me... all the pain concerning my brain has moved into a pleasure reaction bound to the testicles... i couldn't have foreseen this waterfall if i didn't explore the word fascist beyond the communal horror of spotting an orthodox practitioner in either street or cyber-space...

e.g. the fore of papua new guinea
(ghee-knee... later the debated about
quinoa... apparently it's not qui-
       or french agree, we-noah...
  but something else... oh, it's related to a quiz
asking me whether i could possibly be a 5% liberal
elitist... well, if you were reading
the sunday times magazine: it would ask you
that... i did cut it apart as qui- -noa...
  but apparently it's pronounced:
kin-wah...                 once again my point:
you don't use highly concentrated phonetic
units, i.e. diacritical marks...
you're bound to leisure in this linguistic hell
of constantly "correcting" people....
just saying... what's the matter, toad stole
your burp?)

   and i really wanted to write a neat poem...
poems like this emerge,
you go to a shop, by the cheapest whiskey
two cans of beer and a bottle of cola...
it's early February... the cars parked
have the eerie circumstance of jack o'fogfrost
breathing onto the windows...
    your fingers itch from the cold...
you start to really see a skeleton walking
rather than something resembling protein
fat and carbohydrate...
    thankful for winter: to naturally imagine
a skeleton walk in the cold
   smoking a cigarette and drinking the beer
while the whiskey cools in your rucksack...
all you end up needing is
   a square mile, and outer English suburbia...
and a look into that forest you once frequented
walking as if with gauged eyes into
the custard darkness...
   then sitting on a stump, taking all the clothing
items from your torso and listening in
as something neared, cracked a branch
and you uttered into the forest:
  no animal would dare come so near...
      
... (man has to drink, take a break...
         sneaky ******* get to see
a work in progress... lucky them...
           too much of a sober me)...
hey! i'm warming the stove, it's not going to
shoot out firecrackers made from words
into a
     hoghmony celebration.... oh look...
another googlewhack!
      http://tinyurl.com/z8xeqpsn
(billionth of another! this is how i play the "lottery")
ah freckle feckle ****... scoot for new years...
hogmaney...  hogmoney...
  hagmanny...
                 ­  ****! Hogmanay!
    what was i "saying"?
                            
ah wait... i know... i know...
i was watching this film goat (2016)....
with james francko doing cameo but mainly producing...
if anything could put you off going to
university, well, notably an american university
it's this film... now i drink, i really do, heavily...
but what went on in that film was nothing short
of happens when people lack any respect for liquor...
i could watch the roman empire in a zoo...
what i witnessed in this film was:
well... can't see a point of caging a lion,
but i can see all the reason for caging man...
but the problem arises with:
you can take children to a zoo...
          you couldn't even want a child
to experience this sort of Iraqi **** made in
America...
                       i drink, i really do...
i slurped on a prostitutes ****** when drunk...
hell... i even wrote this...
          and i am really starting to believe
that going to university was the worst mistake of my life...
i left it, educated as a chemist,
without a clear move toward a career as a chemist...
    would i care to learn the use of language
to university level? i.e. get an english degree?
      not if i were a middle-class woman
   who's daddy was a doctor or a dentist...
                            people from my background,
double that up with a father who works in construction
and me being of immigrant stock (when will i get
to say expat?) -
  it was the biggest mistake of my life...
you see... other immigrants start to get jealous...
     they say you have to die: for raising for head
above the water...
         a bit like they kicked the hell out of
Jamie Redknapp's career in football...
now he's a pundit... but not a football player...
they smacked him about...
good thing my grandfather was a Silesian miner
for some time... i decided to dig trenches...
yes, metaphor: write poems...
   because i still can't see what nature ordained me
to possess... and why these little hitlers decided wasn't
fair for their "sense of worth"... oh i can name them...
one of them, a childhood sweatheart of a friend,
egyptian / persian, used to call me during
weekdays and sing to me over the phone...
   apparently he could ******* 20 times a day...
i tried 4 times in one day... nothing came out...
      the other was an add on to being in school from
the age of 16 to 18... a paddy-sikh...
   loved barrington levy and driving a car while
******... loved the whole gansta gimmick...
a complete *******...
                           and to think i was fooled into their
little of jealousy... this will make absolutely no sense
to you... given we (a) never spoke outside the realm
of my tornado... and (b) had a coffee?
               well... let's just say: one stupid move on
my behalf while intoxicated on marijuana
aged 21 taught me all i needed to know...
  from the age of 21 through to the age i am now:
some could consider me a monk...
                 or that infamous word: cenobite -
oh i'm just obsessing about how i want to
put my top 3 picks into classic.fm's hall of fame,
and write 3. christopher young's something to think about,
2. christopher young's something to think about...
1. christopher young's something to think about...
as i realised the past two days...
  collecting a personal library of classical music
makes no sense... unless it's Händel... (æ, i.e. :)...
and classical music only makes sense
with a d.j., and yes: a radio...
            there's no point being poncy about classical
music when you collect it...
        unless it might be something by Hans Zimmer
or any other movie soundtrack...
      and you can just sit back, listen to the radio,
and the classics just come and come...
i spent today lying in bed, because classic.fm
was playing from about 6am to about 1pm...
  and then i extended it to 3pm because
of aled jones and the voice so necessary as
that of alexander armstrong... in between?
                     bill turnbull... a news anchor
if i'm not mistaken... couldn't handle it...
  no, not the voice: the choice of music...
but even such people are absolutely necessary...
and would anyone care to remember
the ****** megastore on oxford street?
  the classical music department?
does anyone remember is being sealed off by
   glass like an aquarium from all the other music
genre departments in the store?
   a bit like walking into a lunatic asylum:
everything had to be cork-lined waiting for a Proustian
novel... first you had to appreciate
and build up a palette for silence... before
some concerto could be "ate" like refined sushi...
    radio and classical music does work,
i might have made a mistake collective obscure tastes,
i.e. proto-folk examples in Polish and compositions
of German industrial music...
   i might have done that... yeah, so true with the jazz...
but you have to have a Houdini weak-spot...
so in bed... rummaging through the radio and
television listings and reviews...
   after doing a bit of a crossword (which i can't
for the love of god) and a 6 x 6 su doku...
        now that's definitely sunday activity...
looking through the radio and tv listings...
   esp. noting the day's programme of bbc radio 4...
well, it's not that i'm a convert, with a house
in south-west london...
                i just heard that england is famous
for its eccentrics... i wanted to experience
    the most eccentric practice on these isles...
      tending to a garden would have made sense...
if it wasn't February...
   so reading the listings and reviews was the next
best thing...
    what with confusing Aled Jones with Alex Jones...
that famous britpop bassist turned cheese-maker.

then how do you begin taking fatal
mortal steps, simply motivated by biological
dynamics? i could have ended that
servitude to the waterfall, or should
i correct myself: required it to continue...
      but then interludes in the case of opera
leave me peasant-like, most ignoble...
      there's the 15 minutes were no fame is mentioned,
and no one forces art to become advert...
   since we're talking of the thin-red-line,
i can't but help myself reading more book reviews
in English, than actual books in Polish...
because i care for the cognitive labourers,
i really do... i think they are needed
to bypass actual books, meaning they do all
the work... or should i say arbeiten?
well.. enough critics about, you get to
dissociate yourself from the actual origin...
     a bit like waving your hand at god
and embracing the "awe" inspiring profusion
of the human tongue becoming over-bearing...
not even bearing grudges...
  but no gratitudes either...
                it just is what you care to make of
germans the sole originators of
   the proto "bayeux" tapestry given a.i. -
but then you treat the germans as they
are currently given the sway,
and you awake a humanity in them:
a humanity only germans know how
to acknowledge: a collectivisation -
germans know no concept of individualism
akin to the late-removed isle Saxons...
i.e. the English... the English are always
blitzkrieg specific about the individual,
the fact that so many individuals get a chance to vote
leasves me with blisters of what i can best
estimate as noted to being conscience...
          the germans are best appropriate to
express the volk... the english are like stuffed
animals worshiping the name Byron... Milton...
Blake... Newton...
         and let's leave them there, because if they
finally manage a homogeny of an ethnic
accord to give a momentum unto it via their lack
cohesion... i am assured a passage to
the houses of parliament to laugh,
as a test of my carve to veto, rather than vote.
mainland europe calls them: the islanders!
you can't help but see a care to blow up
the tunnel la mange... the channel tunnel...
because if a 2nd ****** arose...
the tanks would flod that serene countryside...
     i come across foxes all the time...
once i picked a dead fox near the bus station
in romford using two bin bags from the nearby skip...
and walked with it home, weighed it,
just under 10 kilograms... i weighted myself first,
then with the dead fox enclosed in the bin bags...
then i walked with the fox and threw it into
a meadow... i was thinking along the lines:
at least the sanitation officer will have a day off..
  obviously i was tattooed with the idea that
i was some sort of shaman, given two people witnessed
me picking up the corpse...

900 gull herrings eating their own...
      chimanzees also take to a nibble...
        banana slug females are fond of eating
"******", when the mating gets heavy...
not ever, as ever, but with Darwinism had i ever
managed to see a woman like a mantis...
  sorry... looking at the ***-hole of nature like that
will eventually leave you paralysed and
not even awe-struck but fear-woken...
             because it really can't be so much a desire
to look at it as if it was necessarily needing
incorporation, but was necessarily incorporated
nonetheless...
         the ogasawara incident... 1945...
       yoshio had a fine fine palette...
                          cannibalism was never suggested
as equivalent of a war crime...
  and one said: human thighs tasted like chicken,
another said: a bit like raw tuna...
          judeo-christian food prohibitions...
    well... once the prohibitions come along with
the poetry... left can mean right...
and right will evidently mean left...
                 during the yuan dynasty...
         pedohpiles were more or less reductive in
their transgressions... they ate more: than they ******.
two freedoms then, china prone to omnivore status
and hindustan prone to vegetarianism...
               both examples lead to a success rate of
a billion examples...
                       it's only these pest-like infections of
mono-this omni-that are keen to always give their
i love yous as politico dictates...
  maxims even... so very fond they are: of their maxims...
they even infected their youth in the 21st century
stating that: no one is akin to us,
if not in his youth, having been ***** by abou10
10 favourite maxims... most kept, hardly any employed...
1261 edict: when children were asked to stop
plucking out their eyeballs...
   horror films are therefore, equivalent to soft-core
******... history is thrice over the real horror movie...
    but given our faculty of memory is so
(putting it mildly) "biased"... i think we're over-sensitive
in giving imagination the scenes from both
horror and Disney... we've already gave the former
and the latter we have just sold...
           but hey! a placentta fry-up like a setting sun,
illuminates with more choice of hue than
noon and the "dehydrated" shadow (yes,
i know, a better word would be suited, but i have
no time to ascribe it to a tailor-fitting, a neat and tidy
resonance... treat dehydrated as a dwarf shadow,
mingle that with photon and phonetic -
that light illuminates, and traps things into bites,
like H or He denote hydrogen and helium
respectively... and qui- and -noa denote
necessary argument of what sound goes where,
rightly)...

evidently i did take the quiestionnaire about
whether i am a liberal elite...
it had to be done... why would i otherwise read a sunday
newspaper?
            end result? 0-50 (norm), 51-100 (aspiring),
    101-150 (not quiet there), >150 (elitist snob)...
(ref. the 5%, charles murray, coming apart,
   the bell curve... superzips)
q1: what is the top prize in the thunderball and when
is it drawn?
   a1: i play the googlewhack lottery.
      alt. a1: 0 (alright), 5 (days rights), 10 (what is thunderball?)
             talk of chav tax...
q2: how many people in your vicinity voted for
    Brexit?
    a2: i just had an opinion... voting is cheap
when you can't express a ballot veto.
   alt. a2: 0 (all of them), 5 (one or two)... 10 (aghast at the question)
              a bit ******* obvious, no point explaining....
q3: what is your favourite dish on th