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Mateuš Conrad Oct 2020
i return to these words that are barely
an architectural promise of a house as a mere:
rummaging squatter,
that this will eventually become
scrutinised by eyes beside my own...
well it's not like i rhyme-on-the-cheap...
i've been trying to watch some penny
dreadful episodes:
what would woman do without
the devil; i suppose man tangled with
god is nothing but an obnoxious brat...
the devil of emotions
and their plethora; this belittling god
fiddling with stones and creases
in york oak stand-alones...
                          then it came like
an itch: poached-taming-(of a)-toe...
just a tatty... a humble:
i am pretty sure i saw the letters
prefix a toad somewhere: po-ta-to(e):
ah... there! poached tame toad...
a sputniks for a brainz...
in penny dreadful: john claire
the name of victor frankenstein's monster:
oh dear old god: this continued
exasperation with poetry:
one must live a most unsatisfying life
to cross the rubricon of
old testament anemia:
            i think i admired wordsworth too... -

playing house with robert duncan -
especially now:
when the house is in complete disarray
and what was once cluttered:
is more an upheaval...

- i used to write while listening
to music - no i write for the scraps
of this yawning silence
and all of its blisters of interludes -
yes:
i want a noun to turn
into a verb: not a mere:
metaphorical "transgression"
of how it's impossible
for the wine to be blood
for the bread to be flesh:
this poetry of: cannibalism?

i pry open the adventures with
cats:
i own two... my house doesn't
give off whiffs of ****:
god... i know the horrid stench
of either **** or ****
that isn't my own:
solipsistic in that...
       it's not a field of strawberries...

it's acidic to the nose:
it's beyond anything i'd ever
want to ingest: and i have once...
giggled... ******* into a glass
of wine to: punk up
the sacrament -
then again: i also ****** on my leg
when standing in a shower
cubicle and i attest to disagree:
there's something...

unconsciously prodding:
the advent prior to... learning to stress
that bladder into a muscle
and keeping it in...
that i can counter the will
of keeping it in...
that i can unwill the sensible
lesson and: it's like... anything
aqua focused -
a shower is a baptism
jumping into a pool is a rebirth:
or an invitation to
beside oneself with: start-agains...

it's very much unlike
drinking... whether it's a coffee
or a whiskey sour...
the ingestion of liquid is less
starry-eyed gluttonous freeze...
having ate nothing but hot air
or...
the whole body needs immersion
or... the ******* on a leg
prior to: then taking a shower...
hell... even mixing one's own
**** with a glass of the goat's blood
is also... "something" / something-...

to pray for sensible things is
to mumble or there's that devil's
dozen of oysters:
12 by feeding:
the 13th in the form of a ****
by nibble lick and spoon
of the tongue and lips' acrobatics...

i'm playing house with robert duncan...
i'm not a householder -
a term as ancient as: librarian
by my account -
              but the house is in disarray:
the kitchen is being subjected
to a 24 / 7  dehumidifier drone
army... i can hear the machines
working their insomnia down
below:
i have custard feet and i feel like
sinking: not falling...
when i stand to these machines:
hellish-jelly-feet...
   when i turn on the stove
and make an omelette -

     the living room (civil room,
a joke from my youth i conjured -
a room where we learn civility)...
is also a makeshift kitchen...
i'm currently playing chess from time
to time with: the memory of:
where did i put these spices...
this spoon this plate...
       it's not chess but the game is
irreversible -
it's also time consuming and it's
not that i don't keep attention to detail:
but i'm gladly not thinking forward...
i'm strategizing in reverse -

but such is the game...
robert duncan - poet and householder -
a chance reading of a moth:
but this is what makes all of this
so enjoyable: it's a niche a cul de sac
of decisions: an expansion
of time that doesn't make it to the annals
of: better to... burn... than to fade away...
either make it in your youth:
nice and proper...
or... what's the game then:
last man standing?
the list of contemporaries
drawing thin, short?

playing house... that i had a youth
i remembered when i'd too play with dolls with
my neighbour's daughter -
clearly ken and barbie had a problem
with their missing parts -
eunuchs of the sun's blind spots...
unlike when we were allowed
to take a bath together as:
not siblings but as strange dialectical opposites
to this duality: that wouldn't encompass
my somehow yet to be owned:
me good & evil...

    me tamer - me: 19th century's frankenstein:
dr. Jekyll etc.
     a rule for life: apparently...
is to pet a cat when you see one
in the street...
it's not exactly an easy task...
i guess first a show of mutual
assurance (and respect) -
this black tubby - with a bandana
for where a leash-leftover could
have been (collar) -
he starts walking anti-clockwise...
i turn aside and start walking
clockwise to pass him...
then we shuffle our approach...
like... i would always want
to pass a pigeon strutting
senseless on the pavement
with enough space so that it doesn't
have to find it necessary to fly off...

luckily for me i managed to "pet"
a stranger's cat...
my luck that it was black
but then again it was that sort
of hour
that's always a presumption
of a lazy gotten afternoon...
rule of life: pet a cat on a street...
it's not exactly a ******* given:
an "oops"... done that... tick...
self-help guru sold this trick...
                    
a selfie contra the days...
when the camera was used and...
other people would take pictures
of you... or of you and:
when there was an "us" - together...
shorthand of the limbos of life -
magnum opus words
constipated into this: makeshift
of a hopeful paragraph...

no, this couldn't be a simple meditation:
confined to...
robert duncan's household -
and my predicament of... playing memory
chess: well it's not exactly clutter:
the kitchen cannot be used
so there's a makeshift refugee camp
version of it in the living room yadda yadda...

which is a commentary on...
my distrust for the h'american literary movement
of the 20th century teasing an abandonment
with the "old ways"...
buddhism, odd... mostly...
   fair enough:
              ezra pound abhorred the taoists...
my one lesson from tao...
the best way you can aid the world:
is for the world to forget you
and for you to forget the world...
which is probably a plagiarism
of epicurus or vice versa...

              i can't imagine the demands
of pop philosophy:
pop culture on the other hand is much
easier to stomach: it's even enjoyable -
but the pop philosophy of nihilism -
which is: a pop philosophy...
it's not even required reading -
unless: you're rereading your own?
thrown into the river -
i am becoming a being of more becoming...
change is the only perpetual: blah...
if it's not my own rummagings it's
probably someone else's:
which has probably become diluted /
filtered down and is a cubism's monstrosity...

books sell for two reasons:
(1) they are genuinely read by a zeitgeist youth...
which invokes social pressures of
the collected experience - in ref. to:
something that can be talked about...
(2) they are read by "propagandists" -
by a small majority who pressure others to...
but the pressure only lasts for
airs - for a mere ownership of a book
should one be met with a scrutiny of
not owning it - reading it is beside the point...

and here in the land of "leftovers":
the middle of the road the people:
who of their own volition write and read...
that i was never ****** into
a cult of stephen king...
i was born too late to be:
but i was: ****** into a postmortem
oeuvre deity picking almost
anything by william burroughs...
i: reader: dear reader: clicked...

- i can't objectify this house -
i am subject to it: coerced by it...
made by bias upon bias
whether there's clutter or there isn't...
whether the kitchen is functionable
or not: that some people have
a kitchen but prefer to eat out:
to be seen: eating...
             i check the gradations of
punctuations and i know: still...
i will not recite these words not
out of gestures for bombast -
or pride - but for some sinister
urge to not abuse this sacred silence:
******* taught man
to manouvre... manouvre...
manouvre... maneouvre...
        man-oeuvre...
                   drop the hyphen boyo:
manoeuvre... wow!
"too many" consonants
in ****** words... how about a
magic trick? how many *******
vowels are in: man-oovr'eh?
phonetics king of the anti-spelling:
but then...
the synonym sounds
with aliases...
towing two different meanings:
too hot to count two
          ooh ooze - zizzez...
              zyzzes...
                     i can bring this anglo-slack-son
to kneel but only for a while:
before the architectural scholarly-
  takes over and the phonetic becomes:
lost, crude... based feral...

- a robert duncan is not a...
it's not mediocre is not necessary to be:
gee-whizz of frank o'hara's
cosmopolitan...
it's flesh of the h'american tongue
it's: sensibly accurate to provide
the best outlet:
for those of us still born in that
century - of what remained of us:
or rather of what remained
of the innocence of the 1990s...

that i am not nostalgic is: no proof...
that i write hardly any word of fiction:
one spaniard, once... commented
on my shoes:
i think he played a miniature version
of a flute: it looked like a reed...
the "spanish" superstition
concerning: a comment on one's shoes...
he admired... my shoes...
what's that saying:
about shoes: to best walk in one's
own before wishing to fill the shoes
of others...
a verb as simple as: there's no
presence of "run": when coupled
to: i am running: i ran...
it's raining...
i run i ruin fun... concentrated
"rhyming": literally linear: no staccato...

******* me over "jenga"...
this microcosm of sounds -
yet to draw deep leverage from
a meaning: it comes back as a mere
sound: worse a... mimic -
an aeon of only hearing
the heaving of a crow's crackling
croak... like a breaking of a tongue:
or... the lost trill of the R in
either fwench or: english...

exemplified R: with a diacritical mark
to make emphasis of the trill...

yes... this democratic oath of poets..
well: we're not going to tend to
the republic of the wizened goats
ex athens... are we?
the democratic oath of poets -
unlike the hippocratic loaf...
            which is a spectacular failure
since i have seen what
little ambitions can do:
when... the boat is not being
rocked: yet someone is still willing
to throw someone... overboard...
now that the boat is rocking:
i see nooses instead of paddles...
the seas are still rife with calm...

playing house with robert duncan -
especially now:
when the house is in complete disarray
and what was once cluttered:
is more an upheaval...

- i used to write while listening
to music - no i write for the scraps
of this yawning silence
and all of its blisters of interludes -
yes:
i want a noun to turn
into a verb: not a mere:
metaphorical "transgression"
of how it's impossible
for the wine to be blood
for the bread to be flesh:
this poetry of: cannibalism?

i pry open the adventures with
cats:
i own two... my house doesn't
give off whiffs of ****:
god... i know the horrid stench
of either **** or ****
that isn't my own:
solipsistic in that...
       it's not a field of strawberries...

it's acidic to the nose:
it's beyond anything i'd ever
want to ingest: and i have once...
giggled... ******* into a glass
of wine to: punk up
the sacrament -
then again: i also ****** on my leg
when standing in a shower
cubicle and i attest to disagree:
there's something...

unconsciously prodding:
the advent prior to... learning to stress
that bladder into a muscle
and keeping it in...
that i can counter the will
of keeping it in...
that i can unwill the sensible
lesson and: it's like... anything
aqua focused -
a shower is a baptism
jumping into a pool is a rebirth:
or an invitation to
beside oneself with: start-agains...

it's very much unlike
drinking... whether it's a coffee
or a whiskey sour...
the ingestion of liquid is less
starry-eyed gluttonous freeze...
having ate nothing but hot air
or...
the whole body needs immersion
or... the ******* on a leg
prior to: then taking a shower...
hell... even mixing one's own
**** with a glass of the goat's blood
is also... "something" / something-...

to pray for sensible things is
to mumble or there's that devil's
dozen of oysters:
12 by feeding:
the 13th in the form of a ****
by nibble lick and spoon
of the tongue and lips' acrobatics...

i'm playing house with robert duncan...
i'm not a householder -
a term as ancient as: librarian
by my account -
              but the house is in disarray:
the kitchen is being subjected
to a 24 / 7  dehumidifier drone
army... i can hear the machines
working their insomnia down
below:
i have custard feet and i feel like
sinking: not falling...
when i stand to these machines:
hellish-jelly-feet...
   when i turn on the stove
and make an omelette -

     the living room (civil room,
a joke from my youth i conjured -
a room where we learn civility)...
is also a makeshift kitchen...
i'm currently playing chess from time
to time with: the memory of:
where did i put these spices...
this spoon this plate...
       it's not chess but the game is
irreversible -
it's also time consuming and it's
not that i don't keep attention to detail:
but i'm gladly not thinking forward...
i'm strategizing in reverse -

but such is the game...
robert duncan - poet and householder -
a chance reading of a moth:
but this is what makes all of this
so enjoyable: it's a niche a cul de sac
of decisions: an expansion
of time that doesn't make it to the annals
of: better to... burn... than to fade away...
either make it in your youth:
nice and proper...
or... what's the game then:
last man standing?
the list of contemporaries
drawing thin, short?

playing house... that i had a youth
i remembered when i'd too play with dolls with
my neighbour's daughter -
clearly ken and barbie had a problem
with their missing parts -
eunuchs of the sun's blind spots...
unlike when we were allowed
to take a bath together as:
not siblings but as strange dialectical opposites
to this duality: that wouldn't encompass
my somehow yet to be owned:
me good & evil...

    me tamer - me: 19th century's frankenstein:
dr. Jekyll etc.
     a rule for life: apparently...
is to pet a cat when you see one
in the street...
it's not exactly an easy task...
i guess first a show of mutual
assurance (and respect) -
this black tubby - with a bandana
for where a leash-leftover could
have been (collar) -
he starts walking anti-clockwise...
i turn aside and start walking
clockwise to pass him...
then we shuffle our approach...
like... i would always want
to pass a pigeon strutting
senseless on the pavement
with enough space so that it doesn't
have to find it necessary to fly off...

luckily for me i managed to "pet"
a stranger's cat...
my luck that it was black
but then again it was that sort
of hour
that's always a presumption
of a lazy gotten afternoon...
rule of life: pet a cat on a street...
it's not exactly a ******* given:
an "oops"... done that... tick...
self-help guru sold this trick...
                    
a selfie contra the days...
when the camera was used and...
other people would take pictures
of you... or of you and:
when there was an "us" - together...
shorthand of the limbos of life -
magnum opus words
constipated into this: makeshift
of a hopeful paragraph...

no, this couldn't be a simple meditation:
confined to...
robert duncan's household -
and my predicament of... playing memory
chess: well it's not exactly clutter:
the kitchen cannot be used
so there's a makeshift refugee camp
version of it in the living room yadda yadda...

which is a commentary on...
my distrust for the h'american literary movement
of the 20th century teasing an abandonment
with the "old ways"...
buddhism, odd... mostly...
   fair enough:
              ezra pound abhorred the taoists...
my one lesson from tao...
the best way you can aid the world:
is for the world to forget you
and for you to forget the world...
which is probably a plagiarism
of epicurus or vice versa...

              i can't imagine the demands
of pop philosophy:
pop culture on the other hand is much
easier to stomach: it's even enjoyable -
but the pop philosophy of nihilism -
which is: a pop philosophy...
it's not even required reading -
unless: you're rereading your own?
thrown into the river -
i am becoming a being of more becoming...
change is the only perpetual: blah...
if it's not my own rummagings it's
probably someone else's:
which has probably become diluted /
filtered down and is a cubism's monstrosity...

books sell for two reasons:
(1) they are genuinely read by a zeitgeist youth...
which invokes social pressures of
the collected experience - in ref. to:
something that can be talked about...
(2) they are read by "propagandists" -
by a small majority who pressure others to...
but the pressure only lasts for
airs - for a mere ownership of a book
should one be met with a scrutiny of
not owning it - reading it is beside the point...

and here in the land of "leftovers":
the middle of the road the people:
who of their own volition write and read...
that i was never ****** into
a cult of stephen king...
i was born too late to be:
but i was: ****** into a postmortem
oeuvre deity picking almost
anything by william burroughs...
i: reader: dear reader: clicked...

- i can't objectify this house -
i am subject to it: coerced by it...
made by bias upon bias
whether there's clutter or there isn't...
whether the kitchen is functionable
or not: that some people have
a kitchen but prefer to eat out:
to be seen: eating...
             i check the gradations of
punctuations and i know: still...
i will not recite these words not
out of gestures for bombast -
or pride - but for some sinister
urge to not abuse this sacred silence:
******* taught man
to manouvre... manouvre...
manouvre... maneouvre...
        man-oeuvre...
                   drop the hyphen boyo:
manoeuvre... wow!
"too many" consonants
in ****** words... how about a
magic trick? how many *******
vowels are in: man-oovr'eh?
phonetics king of the anti-spelling:
but then...
the synonym sounds
with aliases...
towing two different meanings:
too hot to count two
          ooh ooze - zizzez...
              zyzzes...
                     i can bring this anglo-slack-son
to kneel but only for a while:
before the architectural scholarly-
  takes over and the phonetic becomes:
lost, crude... based feral...

- a robert duncan is not a...
it's not mediocre is not necessary to be:
gee-whizz of frank o'hara's
cosmopolitan...
it's flesh of the h'american tongue
it's: sensibly accurate to provide
the best outlet:
for those of us still born in that
century - of what remained of us:
or rather of what remained
of the innocence of the 1990s...

that i am not nostalgic is: no proof...
that i write hardly any word of fiction:
one spaniard, once... commented
on my shoes:
i think he played a miniature version
of a flute: it looked like a reed...
the "spanish" superstition
concerning: a comment on one's shoes...
he admired... my shoes...
what's that saying:
about shoes: to best walk in one's
own before wishing to fill the shoes
of others...
a verb as simple as: there's no
presence of "run": when coupled
to: i am running: i ran...
it's raining...
i run i ruin fun... concentrated
"rhyming": literally linear: no staccato...

******* me over "jenga"...
this microcosm of sounds -
yet to draw deep leverage from
a meaning: it comes back as a mere
sound: worse a... mimic -
an aeon of only hearing
the heaving of a crow's crackling
croak... like a breaking of a tongue:
or... the lost trill of the R in
either fwench or: english...

exemplified R: with a diacritical mark
to make emphasis of the trill...
i will not heed to market emphasis...
(Ꝛ if you might ask:
there's no leg to stand on...
the "R" falls into a turddle -
a tumble: a trill)...

ꝛ - a missing hammer: it would seem...
a sickle my dreading of apparents...

yes... this democratic oath of poets..
well: we're not going to tend to
the republic of the wizened goats
ex athens... are we?
the democratic oath of poets -
unlike the hippocratic loaf...
            which is a spectacular failure
since i have seen what
little ambitions can do:
when... the boat is not being
rocked: yet someone is still willing
to throw someone... overboard...
now that the boat is rocking:
i see nooses instead of paddles...
the seas are still rife with calm...

clamour for the subjective experince...
none of this: hammer to a nail
sort of "magic" that leaves
one... sensibly "ostententious":

a semi-decent poem contra:
a good night's sleep...
always the latter...
   but unlike today:
6am wake... giving blood for
scrutiny - subsequently...
a broad need for 4 hours in...
a makeshift wilderness...
from Hainault Forest
to Havering County Park...

                        i would clearly have
to start all over again...
should i mind reading back into Tironian
notes and what i had expected to find...
it will suffice to mind...
the characters of empress wu...

         國 (guo)

beginning: coming back to bite some back
from a beijing pork belly:
where you'd first have to make caramel
from the sugar dissolved in oil:
before all the wine would care to glisten...

             𤯔 (ren)...

                              in reverse:
ren-guo - people (of) nation...
                      walking past this field:
impromptu: please keep off of field...
that's what i read...
      this was exclusive -
there was not need to denote further...

and this funny oddity:
saying good-morning or a hello
in an environment that's beside...
walking down the street with a stable
hound of anonymity surrounding
crisp grey blockage of: the amass!
yet people are so expecting
a common courtesy to brief you
on a morning: good...
is it? incessantly so! apparently!
switch them to the torment of the cements
and the back-to-basics apathetic crew
is on the counter...
ghost faces...
  but push them far enough to be alone
and into nature:
they pass a stranger and apparently
demand a prompt: hello!

i go into a depth of nature like
i have *** with prostitutes in a brothel:
i want to have as little to do with talking
that i'd loan: smothering someone
to shut up...
i came for the crows the knee-high-hallubaloos
of nonsense that...
i will extract myself to break
fasting to give blood by foraging
some blackberries...

i still prefer the lesser democratic voices...
it's not that robert duncan was going
to be a stand-alone show akin
to gibsberg...
but... my house is currently in disarray...
i'm playing chess by having
a makeshift kitchen in my living room...
i don't even know where the spices
are! but i'll manage
to bake a **** fine moroccan kobhz!

- this little but current focus for a genetic
"protection": half of me,
then a quarter, an eight, a sixteenth,
a 32-and-a-third... jump toward
64... 128... and... from all these fractions:
half and half:
beauty is no longer viable:
i imagine love as being a prized
bull kept for nothing except
for ******* the gene pool silly...

that's "love" from a darwin from
a materialism: breeding racing horses
or... both the submissive
and the contentious workers -
pay up! but i am not looking
for the generic beauty of
the plateau of the women
employed as surrogates
in this darwinistic harem...
            
isn't it obvious? it would have been
better have be allowed ourselves
to be dead: aborted...
but then: critter load: make-up...
i actually offend my own existence
by affording these dorian gray
parades to take hope in puruing
norms...
i like the scaps i like the wounds
i even like nibbling on the shellfish!

****-****** literature is my achilles
heel...
better a heel than trodding along
with faking a ******* knee...
robert duncan... jack spicer...
i like reading eyes by (metaphorically)
licking up the ****...
and it's not like i might give good head...
i employ a growth of
***** hair to convert my chin
to a niqab like i might: perhaps blink...

then again: face-masks and fashion?
is... this... somehow...
a "thing"?
            well it must be new:
it's nothing from the sort
of the elders i might care to remember...
i walked the scenic route...
blackberries and horseshit...
everything is baking in a procrastination
of: tickle the rats' nibbling...
scrutiny of the lesser of the food
hierarchy: omnivore that i am...

yes... that i like petting criters
that find themselves adamant in their
superiority...
but who have yet to see me:
teasing myself with
a: what if...
                 hours match-up to
not keeping count: there's a fog of them
that goes way back to...
out of the womb... then abandoned
by the scholastic detail that
allows them to float: limbless...
and then return to earth: degenerate...
and less than amiable...

        douglas murray is probably
a hot topic... i too sometimes bewilder myself:
it would have been best to have
allowed the pendulum to swing both ways...
but he (ol' doug) speaks very well:
his writing is... beside the generic...
salt of grain: akin to my own...
for a cubic's worth of water...

    i don't want this tongue to be somewhow
exasperated with concerns for this / an "art"...
or that it can belittle a scientific bone...
thrown to the politics and red herring marches...
spins the doctor: no plates...
forever the new lies
kept in the same old... rhetorical: quirk-and-quickness
of the quilled-tongue...
a knock-knock stone cold: generic...
must: mediocre...
tired of living tongue of poetry
that has to become tired:
truth has to tire so easily...
so that politics: and the freshness
of lies and the no-niche-audience-allowance
can cast their:
"vote"... their... archaic... illiterate "X"..

i will not poetry for rhymes for
exasperations - fooled i: to you: to pursue
that paragraph of fiction - either...
but as freely as this will not:
become an exercise in myopic-claustrophobia...
so it will not rhyme:
perhaps: to advent a coming of my
prescribed punctuation:
but more: your own, your "post-nationalistic"
canadian:
something the people of India or
China will not share with you...
because:
they are still of the mindset: China...
India... hell! Russian is towing suitor!
individualism collapses nations...
whether with a homogeneity of ethnicity
or the heterogeneity of liberalism...

           a wonderful collage of stories...
from the 20th century:
agony aunt israel bewildering
to either confront or defend...
            2000 years have somehow passed
and: europe is no new: "anew"...
it's the same old bland palette
of readily ethno-primed availability
of spices...
hurrah for thyme! and rosemary! mint!

from some mythical above
to this drudge of the pressurised castor -
there was something about robert duncan
that might always have:
made me... diverge from...
it could have been expected...
stash a tonne of bricks by day...
weave in an escapism posit of cinema
come sabbath...
now... escapism into... where?!
critical reignition of marxism:
that sort of marxism my parents escaped
from from under the old soviet
yolk of the satellite state
of poland: thank **** i too am an
immigrant:
but i see no repatriation politics
either...
               go back to a state of
the littlest of all bald envy necropolis
Impoleons?

            no among my native people:
among the natives of these isles...
a thespian: knee deep in ****...
           faking best predicts a survival
rate of this uncoiling...
it's a nation full of: self-
pre-determina...
                  automated prefixation that
can never allow itself to:
make sensible coagulations
of the odd sociable pint...

this atom world this atom's worth
of man...
best life lived as designated
to a harem...
  my and my leftover "blues"...
this world of god and the adventures
of...
no longer available...
thus this one "reality" presented:
playing by man's rules
for the purpose of man's eventual:
transcendence...
a dwarf riding a hunchback
        toward a goal that's a talking donkey!

what's otherwise best?
this has to be an: exercise in futility -
that it had to come from somewhere like:
borrowed prior -
that it could only be borrowed prior:
this tongue had to be inherited:
it could never be acquired -
that a native speaker is...
of a higher status to a bilingual -
because the earth breathes rights...

i forget: i am not equipped
with the desirable physiognomy -
problem being:
when i might find black males
attractive like i might lions: distinct...
i have this ****** on my brain
that says to me...
  well... well...
     i'm not gay.. but i'm certainly
not heterosexual:
even if Flaubert might ask the question:
blondes, brunetters - afro-beauties:
ivory envy?
  what can i do? fest on a hard-on
chemical "oops" / short-cut?
i can't possibly have... a beijing fetish?
a mongol fetish?
i can't? there's only one variation
of interracial mixing...
i guess... so...

     it would be so much easier
to just be gay and leave this world
with a ******* massive **** salvo
of: not coming back!
               to **** a black girl:
not enough...
to not **** a black girl: doubly knot...
******* a lemon while
staring at the sun:
the sado-masochism of
all the post-colonial empires...
and me: whittle ol' resurrected
******... or searching:
the elder prus - the new estonians...
some little european *******...
i imagine...
going to Kenya and running
for parliament:
to concern myself for the voices
of the: minority!

it's... fiddling with the already
prescribed narrative:
trying to make a lee evans jokes
out of it... but...
it's not ******* happening woe-o'-sunshine...
is it?!
it's not like i'm strapped
to a northern monkey
reservation... while still retaining
my: immigrant southern fairy:
commuter hell "debate":
this is not devonshire...
this is not bristol: i'd love to scoop
up a life of a decade's worth
up in Bangor... but it's not even that...
pay by way to:
a collective identity crisis of:
zee vest...
            
if it's anger: perhaps...
it's more a seance in glorifying confusion:
it was once perhaps a little
bit... naive...
but then... who's naive enough
to repeat two-folds of yesterday
within the confines of a day:
to- / to- are not future even
if subjected to incremental changes...
fx/dx changes that might
spawn alternate realities...

        the breaking of a donkey's dollars
worth: i do fishing in the indian sea...
with some... somali pirates...
it's not like i'll ever wake up from
this guilt... the guilt that might
riddle a people that inherited...
i inherited exile from my fathers...
i inherited: no...
the ****** aristocracy didn't tend
to their garden... there was no Eton...
no rugby no football...
there was only a partitioning...
to look toward the past is
an agony that i wish to only hide
in the english countryside...
after all, i thought: who would't want...
make a feast of conquest of this land...
but in a way that was norman:
that the anglo-saxon debauchery could
be... delianted
and brought to a celtic-esque heel...
with a dash of neo-paganism:
a york-up sort o' pie...

without disturbing this dilligent
people of: a most fervent... attention to detail...
it's an island... it's devoid
of any continental squabble...
no mongol ever... no ottoman ever...
it break my heart...
it reminds me: although it shouldn't
remind me...
the aristocratic class (they deem themselves
as much, so why deny them?)
of this country are like the ******
aristocracy
of the three partition "era"...
as napoleon was celebrated "elsewhere"...
with the resurrection
of the duchy of warsaw...
and... england made a beef from
a wellington...
and how the confederacy of germans
repaid the english during the first:
thirst for war...

                   a shogun's pride:
no one would invade japan:
given the persistence of pressure
from a civility of: glamour creases...
it's still the ******* canon rolling
the pawns and pins...

i have but this little interlude in time
to entertain: a history i have learned...
beside citing the obvious apple
hanging on a tree...
who? the burning vietnamese monk?
that's who i am going to... erase...
2000 (circa) years of history with?
this is how i play: conquistador-catch-up?!
this is my whittle muhammad
stage-fright?!

these new surgical masks are
not imitations of the niqab...
the arabs are not drying up their dinosaur
marrow reserves and are not
scouting for willing sodomite freshers
to their gargantuan wealth-soiling
of "morals"?
no? this is all... a pauper's conspiracy
theory... god!
i try to imagine the conspiracy
theory of kings!
it must invite a realisation of
a god or gods...
and at least a quarter of an abstaining
pademomium!

the poets and the sceptics
living under: the... gates are open...
a republic under "scrutiny"...
the philosophers and the
geocentrists - have allowed
for nothing more... than this...
thespian "bureucracy" of
shadow "fiddling"... tail with now:
tail best quite...

attention spanning the glorifications
of non-replica, generic
Solomon comes to the furore
front: then a mismatch
when the brain: swiss cheese project:
is treated at the Avignon
pontiff...
the harem and debauchery shifts
focus...
there's that "we're" and...
dumb-lasso-dumber than you'd
pay the libido of a camel with: for...

i have to always imagine myself
petting cats... or dogs...
to have to dissociate myself from having
perfect: the needs for either halal or
kosher demands of leather...
i best prefer the pipsqueak of
a meow to... an actual oink
in the litany of cogs and perhaps:
clogging up the machinery of
"jurisprudence"... as some Jain might...

borrow from... export very little to...
come the omnivorse of the east
and all succumb to:
boy-scout avenues of:
yes ss'ir...
most loathsome ss'ir...
                     i have to interrogate
the dead man as i am:
the best example of a cul de sac
of dreams: the...
pedestrian could mind not thinking:
imagine: imagine the corpus deity
of: unimaginable thought...
or one which has
an alias: unthinkable imagiation...

memory freelance architect prior
to noon...
is somewhat justified with...
a boredom of a cat come
5pm... but by then...
no cat is ever really bored...
and i have no need to concern
myself with dogs... or leashes...
or desires to: address a
workability of legs...
          to: give scrutiny when all
other examples are wheelchair bound...

he held a piece of paper:
between his hands... like my shadow might:
hold a butterfly...
exasperation:
that philosophers of ancient greece
said: poets begone!
no wonder this...
currency... of wanting to imitate
a petting of animals...
and... this thespian autocracy
that no elders could abide by...
it can still be excused:
the role of actors:
the role of shadow-thieves...

it can still be salvaged...
some of us are still the same rummaging:
in ruinous...
wordsmiths or... best...
plumbers... not some aspirtation
beckons for youth...
it must rhyme:
it must come down to: 2 + 2 = 4
sort of: flimsy poetics...

i'd must prefer to be a
homosexual plumber these days
that my very own mediocre leftover...
thank god i do not encompass
a courtship of a woman:
then imagine!
what did i do with my time:
that i do so much!
having made... so little money!
ghosts can't spend: ****!
i did with my time that
would not allow woman
to turn time into money!
thus i turned money into monkey's
play on elephant and
called tha pennies: p'p'eh-nuts!

  the old man dies:
the youth of man was never
supposed to be born;

god... this was supposed
to be profound?
with this idiosyncratic lost...
spontaneity of punctuation...
i take this reading as
a leverage for making
image: of an anchor dropped:
that would sink the ship.
Chris Hollermann Sep 2014
I’m a verbal *******,
       It only costs a moment of your time, and guaranteed disease free
Seems my price is too high, no one’s got the time, and I’m going broke.

I’m a believer in group ******* of the spoken persuasion, giving each other pleasure by word choice
     It’s an odd love in a time of finger-keyboard romances
The writers
      Poets
           Artists
They’ve gone out without a proper blaze of glory, no Tommy gun goodbye
They’ve faded, filtered out like literacy being alarmingly replaced by technological shorthand

Kkthanxbi
- From A Journey of Self to Self
Brian Oarr Jul 2012
"And then taking from his wallet
an old schedule of trains, he'll say
I told you when I came I was a stranger
I told you when I came I was a stranger."
                                        --- Leonard Cohen

I'm the most surprised person on the planet.
Your coming to see me off at the airport
has my mind scratching glass seeking words.
Why is it that in this relationship,
you seem to have gotten all the speaking parts?
You're well aware that I have loved you
for the better part of two years,
bottling that emotion, afraid to pop the cork.
Your eyes implore mine, rotating like
a searchlight over Baghdad seeking
the stealth laying carnage to your heart.
Twice in the last week you've made it evident,
the Grail was mine, but for the drinking ---
That and finding a shorthand for adultry.
I'm guilty courting the love of a married woman,
made worse, you're here at my departure
telling me we aren't free to choose who we love.
I know my desire must die of thirst,
so I turn, boarding pass in hand,
the last words I ever hear from you,
Write me! --- Thirty-five years later I have.
zebra Aug 2017
Where's the ventriloquist
throwing voices around
like whistling stray dogs

the voice and the vision
a crystal *****
whispering
with mud in the mouth
the ***** doesn't lie
a yammering vantwilaquist
who's voice springs from a blood cream corridor
with electric lips and rainbow flesh

a lost beast dazzled in endless wander lust
in search of a scarlet women
surrounded only
by aspiring virgins
sworn to be true
by desolations caress
in black ash weddings
with white frilly dresses
weeping for delicate cruelties
they will never know

his father a falling star
his soul
an undulating cobalt shrine
to her
who he can not find

a catalog of discrepancies
a noxious experiment
with a wandering eye
lust ******
embattled between reason and passion

is that look your giving me
shorthand psychic humiliation
for my vile indiscretions I'm trembling to visit upon you
I'm wearing my face like window dressing
hiding the obscenity of my true will behind a curled lip
eyes down cast
hoping to use you like a vacant room
to smear the walls and floors
with your flesh like ******* glitter

too bad
i'm outnumbered by good people
there are sky-fulls of them
agitated with moral concerns
ruining my life with logic

those scoundrels
got pedigree
ideologies
religion
folded ears and moving lips
all monkeys see and monkeys do

who are they
and
were
is
their
ventriloquist
Mateuš Conrad Sep 2018
.there are only two aspects of forgiveness worthwhile, kept in anticipatory slumber, (1) is watching the masses congregate within the confines of your thinking, but (2)... watching how individuals in said massing of resources... seem to be akin to: someone walking on tip-toe on a bed  egg-shells... i'm met a few crazies... and i've prescribed myself investigating a few normal-folk, who are seemingly petrified, "thinking" than such: negations of ease, akin to depression, have an epidemic ontology.... that they are contagious... more or less.... like a sick ego, that bribes one's thinking and sows a false duality between what constitutes a body, consumed, with what otherwise, constitutes a mind... i've seen a few crazies... they seemed to like me, even when i suggested that we only just met...  the most senile people in the world... thus, to be frank... i'm more concerned with the sanity projects... with their emotional intelligence worth less than the emotional relativism of a gnat to a bear, which begs the reason os arguing: none... who... are so barren... they'd prefer the status of a pawn, in a game of chess, akin to Jimmy Savile...so much for the Saxon logic of: innocent until proven guilty... more like: innocent proven by death, after which... there is no case for either innocence, or guilt... i'm of the conviction... that... i'd rather see an innocent man claim redemption in life... than a guilty man laugh at a redemption in death; sorry... but i don't share the sort of sentiment that argues otherwise... better an innocent man claim redemption while alive... than a guilty man "claim innocence" while dead... part-and-parcel of the legality of the death penalty... the former argument: guilty until proven innocent makes a whole lot of sense without a death penalty... and the latter? no logic behind it... it makes no sense... then again... i am drunk, and i do not delve into sober issues or: serious circumstance... i allow sober people to meddle in such affairs... after all... sober people... make... the most... compelling arguments and, to boot, the most convincing opinions for up-coming affairs! why become a thief in their ordinances?! please! let the mice play, while the cat is away!  i need no bargain with ****-stormers and ******-buggery!

oh i've been to a few psychiatric interviews
over the past 10+ years...
always wondering: what am i doing
here? psychoanalyzing the psychiatrists?

you do know what a psychiatrist is
a poor man's psychologist -
with the added branch of pharmacological
applicability?
  a psychologist will just talk,
perhaps serve you camomile tea...
but prescribe zero drugs...

the talking, the endless talking,
the talking
of a west London psychologist...
who ends the relationship when
you mention:
i've had a dream of Allah...
god he's grotesque...
but, point: there was
someone with him...

  i thought that Allah had no
companions, or rather: he took none?
oops...

i remember analyzing this
situation once,
a ****** psychiatrist brought in
aa medicine student
who wanted to specialize in
psychiatry...
   apparently he concluded that
i was sane...
nice... being the subject
of learning curvature
surrounding a medicine student...

next came the allotment plant
to mind the crazies
while mingling them with the physical
retards...
stole a lot of potatoes that day...
the retards slurred,
exposed their genitals...
and were huddled together like
cattle by the social workers...

******* marvelous!
couldn't expect a lesser
Moulin Rouge reinterpretation
if i wasn't watching harlots
dance the: flinging
of the undergarments on show
that warm July afternoon!

but always, whenever i visited
a psychiatrist in a clinic:
always...
  why am i here?

you know what scares psychiatrists?
EM-PA-THY...
scares the living life out of them...
empathy is what psychiatrists
apprehend the most...
   so you're neither a psychopath
or a sociopath?
what are you then? comes the auto-suggestive
interpretation
of the ****** expression that
comes with suggesting,
even the slightest lack of contempt
for a basic human emotion...

scared, ****-less!
as if on a diet of ****** ruling
over Sudan, or similar ****...
famine after famine,
scared, but unable to soil their underwear,
given... well... the ******* famine...

oh i love psychoanalyzing
psychiatrists,
they have a shorthand blistering
beneath their appreciation for
listening...
their pharmacology branch...
caught one psychiatrist off guard...
he says, out loud,
that... i was abused as a child...

and?
  perhaps i was, perhaps i wasn't...
better that than being treated like
the modern Humpty-Dumpty...
walking on egg-shells typo,
rather than type, of what constitutes
the ontology of individualism...

i had to retort  with / resort to seeking
the opinion of a Polish neurologist
who, with a basic question
'doctor, am i mentally ill?'
replied
  'whoever said you're mentally ill,
is mentally ill themselves!'
case closed...
    
hence the statistics are believable
surround the death of Ellie...
teenage suicide rose in England
by 67% between 2010 and 2017...
    
so you do know the difference between
a psychologist, and a psychiatrist?
camomile tea...
   a psychologist is a humanist,
a psychiatrist is a physician...

if you're rich enough...
you see a humanist...
  poor? shorry...
   the pharmaceutical branch
of the practice is coming into practice...
but don't worry...
chances are...
    you talk what they want to hear
for a while, and then you start
talking what: they don't want you to hear...

hell...
  with this type of medication
and the whiskey...
i could turn into a semi-variant of a
hibernating bear!
i don't mind...
           i found that the glorification
pompous camp of cancer "survivors"
had their stab in the dark...
   because can we only regress
to glorifying surviving one type of
disease, while making stigma of
another kind?

the mentally ill are less of my concern....
i'm worried about the dim-wits
who abuse antibiotics!
   and i am... ******* numb-skulls...
taking antibiotics like
free-prescription vitamins!
creating the perfect niche for
super-bugs!
                      dim-wits!
         numb-skulls!
  and i thought that head-banging was
a source for erasing brain cells!
Denel Kessler Dec 2015
The literati are moaning
about the crowning
of a comical smiley-face
with tears of joy
springing from its eyes
as Oxford Dictionaries 2015
"Word of the Year"

it's historic
indicative of a generation
raised on media shorthand
though some people think
the distillation of thought
to acronyms, symbols, emoji
is a bad thing too

but in these icons
heavy black heart
face throwing a kiss
reversed hand with ******* extended
even the simple : )
I see emotion
stripped bare

the whole gorgeous
heart-rending, horrible
hateful range of it
illustrating the dark
and light
of who we are
as a human race

So I say hail and welcome
to the "tears of joy" emoji
may his vivid counterpoint
shine around the world
eclipsing all the words
we've learned this year
for hate.
Mateuš Conrad Apr 2016
i once had a girl from poland over,
gave her the tourism of london,
a daughter of my mother's friend.*

i suffered sun stroke one day out
with her, blonde hair and all,
i was bound to feel the cold shivers,
went to a party with a school-friend
of mine and her...
i was left in a bed shivering,
he later said he didn't want to say it
but did, that they kissed...
like i didn't know the shorthand for
oral ***...
now i'm drinking a beer, write
one poem weeping, another like this
one laughing prior, slapping myself in
the cheek...
two slaps to the face i didn't receive
from prostitutes (**** your moral
relativism, you people only
know that theft and ****** and ****
are equal in the cauldron of einstein's
space-and-time, i accept physical
relativism, but i loath moral relativism,
it's like giving an umbrella to the man
under a champagne waterfall -
and an anorak to a man under a waterfall
of cow ****) -
yep, slaps outside the brothel,
the kind women became knights' sparring partners
for the oath undertaken,
it was a practice among knights to get
a handkerchief to ease the sting later...
but when prostitutes don't slap you
for trying to sort your life in order to provide,
you sort of become two knights,
twin siamese, you slap yourself because
all that st. thomas gospel wisdom went into
***-augmentation procedures and cheap
cancer victims with pill-for-pill profiteering...
leisurely ladies of societies made rich
by easy money, watching operas
but still preferring to notice what
their neighbours were wearing,
the peasant snobism who are more distracted
by what others wear rather than the music...
a herd of wilder-beasts could ease out more tears
at an opera than these "precious" ladies of the new
post-aristocratic society of easy money...
you drink beer, laugh, slap yourself silly on the cheeks
for more laughter... your brain
becomes a monkey in a cage gone mad
rather than turning docile...
so she came over and enjoyed my company,
spotted a fox in an alley to a surprise...
but then i got rudely told that oral *** was a kiss...
well **** me there's a cataphract -
let's ***** slap him silly so no byzantine philosopher
cared to exist.
mike dm Sep 2014
he thinks
about thinking
sinks
into a greenish-black sunken grin
because he knows
what's what

this
once-upon-a-time hand
is now a fist *******
object of mine

I am an I'm
you?
a you're

we've very little time
to mind anymore

omit omit
the democratic gods
scaffolded
at those five fingertips

progress progress

we are
all of us
so short with each other
taut wrecking ***** so singular

do not shut me out
I want in
show me everything


remember when you said that?
we were at the park
holding hands
watching the spent sun gild it all

I smiled in your face
but inside was a calloused thing
white knuckle
grip tightens
Dan Filcek Apr 2015
The first main character did not last over the final solo.
the self-assured, quick-witted, skilled and passionate
The earliest appearances were the famous story
the secret organization belongs to an old school
An early American market liked the rugged agent
the stereotypical English gentleman designed the first season
The hidden steel plate concealed in the Bowler hat
An old world sophistication came to the traditional Englishman
the post production scenes were filmed in the studio
The awkward verbal shorthand gave rise to the character's name.
A fourth transmission was to the dead chessboard;
the lighter comic touch had a harder tone,
the serious espionage dramas disappeared
the fantasy elements known as The killer robots
an elaborate leather uniform becomes her signature outfit
a softer new wardrobe was bought
This year for Poetry Month, I decided to post a "found poem" every day. If writing a poem is like painting, a "found poem" is like sculpting. - source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Avengers_(TV_series)
Nigel Morgan Jan 2013
It is so measured that rising arpeggio, only to fall and rise again in quicker values, through the dominant seventh to the heartache moment of that minor ninth, a very apogee of dissonance. Then it goes higher still to the fifth, holding to that Phrygian harmony before returning to the tonic minor and a measured fall in the bass. This is a deliberate descent to the sub-mediant, and Bach’s touch of magic, the equivalence with the dominant minor ninth. But then he gives us hope: an extended and joyful play through sequences that rise and fall within each bar, to rest finally on the mediant’s echo of that opening, that measured rise and the quickening fall. We have hardly smiled with relief when Bach pulls us back into the insecurity of the dominant of the subdominant, that V of IV acting like a bridge to a long, long discourse in the dominant, a pedal E holding firmly to itself whilst rising arpeggios and falling decorations and sequences pull and pull through innocently related keys. Longer and longer play the rising passages until short motives of imitation interrupt, treble to bass, tenor to alto, until:  a first inversion arpeggio of the dominant seventh measures out the opening rhythm. This happens twice in short succession, as though holding the progress of the music to account. A questioning perhaps before a four-fold sequence asserts the dominant and a chorded caesura. There is a pregnant, though faintly resonant silence as Bach spins the dice of tonality and chooses the subdominant to bring the music towards a waiting Allemande. The music moves through a play of subdominant to dominant, minor to major, the mix of flattened fifth and flattened ninth. It is those intervals that determine Bach as the father of ambiguity in the 20C school of jazz harmony, Arpeggio then a falling scale, and repeat and repeat again, but moving ever higher by sequence. At last five chords – merely a shorthand for closure via the expectation of a right display of the performer’s improvisatory prowess. They prepare us reverently for the tonic minor before the stately Allemande leads the music into the elegant steps of its walking dance.
Waverly Feb 2012
I used to know a girl named Calypso,
she had beautiful shorthand
and we used to fall asleep
in her mom's house
until that was gone,
until the storm came
and she was an island
I had drawn with ink.
Mateuš Conrad Sep 2015
before existentialism, and nietzsche in mind, philosophy was written
or spoken of accepting the socratic rigidity of words,
the rigidity of words known through
the socratic method of inquiry:
the simplest of questions imposed on
the meaning of words; e.g. what is virtue?
but with existentialism this old method
of inquiry, the poised posing bewilderment
lost its quality, in that the new method of
inquiry was given to stress not a method
of questioning but that of ambiguity,
even though this new method that simply
said the reverse of what is virtue as
the preservation of a narrative: "virtue" concedes
many variations exampled true, e.g. -
this dittoing going against - previously said /
as above - became staged against
a brick wall - since this method, the existential
method of brushing aside inquiry and entering
the realm of ambiguity was already present -
the pluralism of meaning found in certain words;
it isn't a question whether red or blue can
be ambiguous, this allocation of noun
and quality is all too pervasive - so when
an ambiguity is allowed to exercise its stressor
posit - the word in question is allocated
a verb orientation in its exercise of use and example,
further diluted by the quantity and lack of example,
and ascribed contorting
adjectivity due to the dilution of meaning: with lessened
recognition of sought out qualification to sentence
an enzymic perfection of: banker and philanthropist,
priest and maximilian kolbe, poetry and lack of envy.
even though these examples are idealistic,
they provide the obvious ambiguity already apparent,
hence the double ambiguity of opposites, ideal opposites.
in shorthand - if socrates were to come
upon reading existentialism - his questions
regarding the virtues would be bound to free floating
terms in the ditto bubbles of flimsiness of non-inquiry -
bewildered by the number of prompts to question,
there would be no necessary ambiguity to many other
terms of inactivity - such as the previously mentioned
red and blue, dog and glue, but too many, it would seem,
should a strict belief in categorising virtue as a noun
but not a verb be kept - for categorisation of such nature
only provides a linear cascade without due action
or cared for imitation - ending with the only chance of virtue
chanced and seen as an unvirtuous person
doing crossword puzzles in silence - and already
virtue's opposite is engaged in defending itself
and justifying its ills by first forcing many synonyms to
cover it in ambiguity, and asserting itself as an adjective
within a noun framework blunt: virtue v. unvirtuous
will only confiscate siamese phonetic mingling to ease the definition;
i guess that's how rhyming was born, the opposite
of alphabetical ordering: a, aardvark                              the violet's blue
                                                            ­        ****** a doughnut with you.
CharlesC May 2013
encloses all with
softened light:
exercise repetitions
as health advisory..
decisions on paths
taken and not..
regrets missed connections
weather limitations..
no shorthand LOLs
a throwback letter
to an earlier time
with instant delivery..
this best of both
old and new..
an ending with
affection..
an email of note...!
Tasha Feb 2013
The floor was cold under my bare feet as I crept down the stairs, listening to the noises that the house was making. The kind of noises it made when it thought everyone was asleep – the hum of the refrigerator, occasional clunks, the creaks as the walls warmed up and cooled down. By all rights, I should have been asleep.
Outside, the night was the impenetrable black that you only ever see in the dead of night, in the middle of winter. My face looked ghostly and pale in the glass of the window as I turned the tap, water sluggishly filling my glass. It was a peculiar feeling – like being disconnected from everything around you. Freefalling.

“Bit late, even for you.” I jumped, when I shouldn’t have. I don’t think you ever slept. “Couldn’t sleep?”

“Couldn’t stop thinking.”

“Ah.” Your shadow moved towards me across the room, and I watched your reflection in the frosty window.  “It’s cold.”

“I know.” This was how we worked, this shorthand. For a guy who never shut up, and a girl who never said anything, I suppose it wasn’t unusual.

“Aren’t you cold?”

“I’m not the one who’s half-naked.”

You chuckled, and I turned to look at you. Sweatpants hugging your hips and nothing else.

“Are you allergic to shirts?” I felt compelled to ask.

“I sleep naked. This is dressed up.” You smirked.

My cheeks flushed, and I was so grateful that the dark hid it. Suddenly, I was conscious of my pyjamas. Which was ridiculous – there was nothing wrong with sleepy sheepy.

You were watching me, that slow smile messing with my head.

“What?” I snapped irritably, uncomfortable with the weight of your gaze. “What?”

“Nothing.” You said, shaking your head. “You just look nice” you reached out, caught a wave of my hair, “with your hair down.”

I tugged away, making an impatient noise, and you dropped your hand to my arm. I looked up at you, wild eyed, and you stared back. I didn’t pull away.

For the first time in your life, your eyes weren’t dancing around, constantly distracted. They were still. We were still. We were trapped in that second.

“Are you cold?” I asked, and a part of me congratulated myself. That sounded almost normal, nice one.

You smiled slowly, your pupils huge and diluted. I wanted to tell them to stop, they were swallowing the green and it wasn’t fair.

“Not anymore.”

You reached your spare arm up and cupped the side of my neck, I watched your eyes, and they watched your hand. You tangled your long, pianist’s fingers in my hair, and looked up, into my eyes.

“Can I kiss you?”

Before, when we were dancing and I was so scared that the music was my drug, that I’d come around and know it had been a mistake, I had said no.

But there is nothing hypnotic about standing in a dark kitchen, skin crawling with the memory of shivers and when the soundtrack is the humming of the fridge.

“Yes.”

Your head dipped slowly towards mine, and I counted every second.

One.

I was falling.

Two.

Your breath touched my face, my eyes were closed.

Three.

Maybe you were falling too.

Four.

Your lips brushed mine, a whisper of a kiss, and then deepened. And suddenly we weren’t two, beautiful, broken teenagers with no way out and who were so, so tired. Suddenly, we were a girl in sheep pyjamas and a boy with smiling eyes. Suddenly, we were inconsequential to the grand scheme of things. Suddenly, we were all that mattered.

And when you pulled away, and my eyes opened reluctantly, I saw that you weren’t going to disappear. There was no pounding bass to hide behind and my hair was brushing my the bottom of my shoulder blades.

“Okay?” You said, and I watched the way your eyes sparked, my mind was humming.

“Okay.” I said, and I knew that, for the first time in a while, there would be no nightmares tonight.
Annabel Swift Mar 2015
How strangely coincidental,
it is, how nothing inspires you
with age,
that a shy, withered leaf parting sedentary waters,
is dewy-eyed dead yet unconsciously graceful;
such profanities of nature,
no longer expands your soul
like a burgeoning bubble which whisks you to write
carelessly-composed poetry over forgotten dinner plates....
it's a tragic symphony of desperate piano keys,
a blurring condition of blacks and whites,
age, and nothing but overused, age, is.
And so on lonely train journeys,
you craft a smattering of shorthand poems,
about how crackled, aged people on trains only have capacities
for whimsical jokes,
and nothing but dear,
dear whimsicality as life's
gilded philosophy,
when their bodies are no longer covered with
magic leaflets of hand-strung poetry,
for they are barren,
and if gods were gods of stanzaic hymns,
they'd open bloodless wombs of literary nymphs,
or so boldly believed,
the aged once-artist say.
Julian Jul 2020
Although flummoxed by the gabble of hibernaculum I seethe with the verdant quiddity that is a cross-pollination that spans the gamut of historical memory and owns the usucaption of infrastructure equipping our bootstrapped capacities of literacy tethered to the ecumenical capacity for proliferation through amplified discernment that percolates at decorative gallop into the stridor of unified apothegms that quantify the visibilia of the broadened universe into the nexility of formula bounded by the parameters that equip synergies of space-time to envelope its own reification and magnetize urbane freebooters of coalescence to grapple with the ineffable mathematics of absorbed losses in the human fraternity becoming overlooked because of the providence of shepherded acrimony to escape the oblivion of barely marginal exponential extinctions of impropriety into fast-paced panoramas of expedited dalliance with optimums constrained by the effluvia of hinderbaggle which exist only by domineering mercurial lability of manufacture enabled by the siphon of Promethean reason to catapult the slogmarch of advancement by punctuated achievements registered by canonical gravitas to revolutionize society in longevity and interplanetary awareness that places a 1000:1 premium on a 165 IQ in comparison to a 110 IQ. Although bewildered by the beaucoup of raxed originality the anoegenetic flux of slogan achieves but a petty solidarity in comparison to the galvanized bronteum of registered invention that provides decisively seminal locomotive prowess to the foisons of promulgated ingenuity propped up by the capacity for raltention that exceeds the inherent longevity of humans on Earth into the permanence of memory to achieve radical vanguard frontiers within diminishing frames of a once vapid time recorded only through the lens of finicky preoccupations of crude retention rather than the kinship of the perceptive unity of the authors who remarked on history to share the same vantage with the distant onlookers upon that very history with such a convergence of judgments the photons that trespassed on inquisitive eyes of inquierendo are the very same blueprint for the modern savory traipse with selfsame perceptions embedded in canonical history like the spool of an exact daydream unfurled before inoculated eyes differentiated by context but achieving the same visual footprint of historical lineament provided by the original exemplar. The luxury of our provisional prosperity is the unique ability to browse spontaneously a two-century travail of perceptible records embedded in the same perceptual rudiments captured by the original vetuda thereby enabling the specificity of prowess to vicariously encounter distant gulfs of time with the simultaneous realization of past becoming present tense because beyond the revisionism of the censors the human lineage originates in approximated design tethered to the aboriginal photographs and hallmark expenditures of celluloid digitized into annealed constellation to provide separate junctures in space time with the same indelible percept decontextualized but potent by showcase of the verdure of the generosity of shared perception rather than cleaved faint traces of divergent imagination conceiving junctures by distal lurches of insular harbors of private registries of tact and discretion without the shared raltention of the plevisable entities that populate the fragmented lineage of space-time to achieve full congruence in percept first and abstract eventually as neuroscience slogmarches with the nockerslug of invidious depredation of sanctanimity. Adrift in iconoduly sustained by lambent monasticism of abnegation we were lost widows of insular idiosyncrasies of similar concepts separated by the longevity of imagination redacted into communicable formula to ensure the divergence of impact of liturgies heterodyne by vast distances but linked to archaic designs that formed the paradigms which eventually merged with the wiseacres of Renaissance conserved in momentum over centuries into the information capital that forms the futtocks of the girdle of a womb matrix of society sustained by a newfangled uniformity of exposure that slowly churns the collectivism of memory and the syndication of the cartel into the ubiquity of prominent thorns of perception magnified by iconography of the megalography of historical permanence evasive of censors and embracing the entelechy of coherent perceptions siphoned by different engineers but arriving at precisely the same conceptual imprint thereby unifying the perceptual world with the usucaption of leveraged networking of browsers of antiquity. The finesse of leapfrogs of modern human impediment is to scour the reaches of the troves of the most vivid imagination and expedite the turnstiles of conserved rollercoasters of enthusiasm probed by the cadasters capable of castophrenia to syndicalize the autonomy of human perception sejungible from indelible vivid footprints of abstraction upon an interface of truly hard-won vehicles of transmissible abstraction to win the arduous relish of once a vacuum of infested instinct into an algorithm of an intelligent source that creates the precise conditions of parallax to seed through celestial hosts the flourishes of stereodimensional traces of permanent cadaster into something that elects beyond the ethereal snatches of oblivion the provisional apportionment of sentiment above continence to set ablaze the rarefaction of raltention and quantify the intelligible impact of one artifact of civilization over the constellated taxonomy of all apothegms within the divine grasp of a sublunary eternity revived and recycled into syndicated scrutiny that bows to a convergent entelechy of instantaneous improvisation of perdurable registry into indemnities that litigate the humorous quizzical trangams of vastly outmoded obsolescence borrowing from panspermatism of technocracy to the edgy appeal of scintillating horizons of peerless scope that approximate the ommateum of approximated omniety but never span far enough for the distant riometers to see for deputized galaxies to be evoked in concrete human-alien achievements sempervirent and virulent guardians of the toil of sensation to refract off of its overhang because of redundant upbringing to shelve the incendiary impediments of the chary into the corsairs of revelation beyond gamuts of lurch and bypassing elapsed regress to arrive at ceremonial progress to trespass upon many minds with a unified concrete hypostasized entelechy of a fielded incorporation of organic life into a manufactured cycle of the most prolonged and beatific longevity capable of digestion and implementation from the toolsheds of hubris accelerated by the vainglory of subsidized harmonies that break through the barriers of language to sprout convergence in direct opposition to entropy to achieve oculate ommateum.The opponents to the logical syndicalism of positivism emergent as the verdant drape of homogenized pasteurization of raw lavaderos that capsize swallock and devour consciousness with predatory mobilism is the tregounce of the ponderous imprints of recapitulated stupidity which is easy to quantify in terms of human rarity because the difference between a 130 IQ and a 155 IQ is a difference in ingenuity power than exceeds 25:1 or an even higher margin of liquidation of indebted concatenations forming the flombricks of capitalized language finessed into burgeoned growth to radically shift postulates into abstract precision that observes the flanges of the dominion of inculcation into the filibusters of gainsay that supersedes hearsay in an evolution of the dialectic to exert transformative esemplastic rejuvenation that transcends creed and ingeminates the festivity of spectacle with the alvantage of albenture to such an extent it predicates new modalities of persiflage grounded on the aggressive patented expansion of the noosphere to inherit the instincts of orthobiosis while simultaneously inheriting the flair of redoubled ingenuity swarming with the vespiaries of predatory discretion working to ***** out glaring beacons of sapience so that intellectual capital is a local rather than ubiquitous emergence because of the prizes of urbacity enhanced by systems of masonic creed that preserved foresight with varying degrees of exactitude knowledgeable about outcomes but incidental in creating those outcomes out of the alchemy of the convergent sphere of spacetime to curve to synclastic pancratic refinement realized in the taxation of the most domineering figures of canon to indoctrinate the inkburch of wernaggle while the panorama of peripheral obscurity adduced by the resourceful few provides the progeny for a seminal equation that encounters the quandaries of precise retention amplified by the synergies of language exponentially grown by the depth and breadth of lexicon siphoned through mechanisms of percolation seeded by the convergent progeny of hindsight meeting foresight to a truce in the elected interests of the filagersion of the spotlight highlighting a universe that only exists with self-aware reification rather than plodding animated instincts of a stagnant match with a slowpoke evolution that scrawls the gabble of the vacuums of faint oblivion knowing only pain, agony and brief felicity but never registered into ecosystems capable of enriching themselves with artifices of origination rather than vapid retrenchments of the stale vapor of the exigencies that plague the intellectually bereft with tertiary deskandent perfunctory desuetude outstripped by the parsecs of the 170 crowd who secretly orchestrates the think tanks that run the furtive cryptadia of regional governance with foisons of fruition realized as dividends of exponential bypasses of even a linear route of the streamline by warping time itself to a spontaneous entelechy that triangulates a warped trigonometry that fathoms what can only be mapped on an imaginary flickering plane of fluxed existence that achieves sub-Pythagorean travel by altering the vacillating distances predicated by the theory of relativity into shortened tracts of abbreviation separating the bridgewaters of locomotion from the vast lurking prowess of reconfigured geometries lurking beyond the shadowy grave of reconnaissance into the penumbra of conservatory refinement. The punctual symmetries of thermodynamic decay met with a conversant offset in reverse acceleration of thermolysis converge with the centripetal prism of annulment to make stalemates of atomic precision appear grandiose to the economic principle of leverage acquired by debt because the discounted cost of symmetrical approximations of sentiment, abstraction and the already syndicated unity of perception vastly scale the scope of the reach of the amenable universe to tractions bound more by eccentricity of parameterized volumes of competing hyperbolas of a warped unity of tugging forces spawned by the differential weights of a flummoxed calculus that provides obeisance in ecumenical uniformity that was absent by degrees through the tinkers of time to adjust the orbits of consideration by tilted warbles of the songbirds that swim in abysses reaching sizable celestial tutelage providing reprisal for quintessential crudity mapped into a syntax of evolved refinement amplified by conserved concatenation accelerated into mastery by the coalescence of new lexicon to probe conceptual space unchartered by the nexility of normal human conduct and therefore bound to a different pattern of evolution that is oleaginous to the engines of revved ostentation in intellectual prowess that is selfsame from the majesty of heaven because of preordained populace meeting transitory flickerstorms twinged with the irony of discursive disclaimer and discretion of disclosure of emissary vehicles that power synaptic vesicles to burst with signal strength harnessing the unity of conscientiousness into a coenesthesia that fathoms interdisciplinary bridges rarely exacted by the formulas of a more rudimentary mind demarcated in taxonomies of scope that are taxemes for unrealized entelechy bristling against the headwinds of doldrum rather than zephyrs of accelerated approximations of the enumeration of elaborate sveldtang into seminal traversals of the inhibitory grasp of narquiddity exceeded by the alacrity of provident discretion in apportioned judgment enough to parameterize vast distances with instantaneous wiseacres rather than rippled mirrors of faint simulations of simultagnosia bounded by the regional scope of subliminal etches of harnessed flombricks invisible to most aptitude measures of working memory but evocative of subroutines that flourish because of the cross-pollination of exasperated sapience clambering for a perpetuity of renewable raltentions conveyed widely and succinctly in indelible tacenda broached by the wisest sophrosyne inclinations to survive the onslaught of traditional nexilities that make obtuse minds hardened by slowpoke myelination and hidebound parameters of achieved convention recursive on reiteration but not expansive on the tracts of genius reserved for the asylum boundary between insanity of delusion and bountiful riches of harvested non-conventional imagination which sometimes pollutes the integral provenance of rapid conveyance. True transcendence is summarily defined as outpacing pace itself to visibly outfox the forsifamiliation of events perceived as distance sworn by the ability of the accelerated frontier to understand the vestiges of the outmoded to the extent redintegration can surpass with imagination beyond the tethers of quddity that narrowcast swallock but refine the space that distances itself from magnitude and achieves a limited vetuda that phenomenalizes the redacted plucky perjury of self-anonymity to identify a novel visibilia of characterized clarity only specialized to the extent the vast sphere of retention exerts a gravitas over footloose fragments of disunity to surpass the skeumorphs of the trailing bolides of distant comets to avoid by meteoric trajectory the lapse incumbent to E=MC^2 which guarantees implicitly in the barter of nebbich chalky rigmarole that the energy of refinement is an abstraction limited only by the coherence of marginal dumose decay to estrange inertia as plevisable from motion and thermolysis as sejungible in partition what cannot be summarily be filibustered by the succedaneum of shortchanged shorthand convenience of the credulity of those who perceive dynamism of delivery as an easily fudged quandary not restrained by the logarithmic slowdown of conservatory inseminations of panspermatism of invention. The riddle of the enigma of neuroscience that presides over classifiable qualia is that the outstretched rax of rectiserial reorganization must gradatim invoke spurious prestige to predicate the entrapment of narrative exponentially slower than the impregnated literacy of an integral harpsichord of mind to finesse the octaves so that sublime majesties become superlative ringleaders of seditious conventions embedded more by absorptive brocrawlers than expressive werniques. We must fashion an orthobiosis that is leniency embodied but plenitude outnumbered by the progeny of its sculpted riches for extravagant spools of tapestries of refinement to be the imprints of legacy compounded by the complexities of inheritance in lineaments situated in the context of overhanging specters and domineering prospects swimming by commonwealth acatelepsy in a maelstrom of revived gammerstang notions of impetuous apostasy benighted by the macroscian and macrobian spans of the captive capture of a Taylor Series of infinite expenditure assuming perpetuity that necessarily converges on organization because of conscientious reversals of entropy into ladders of betrayal against the hegemony of ******* over the synquests of hortoriginality that spurn the castigations inherited from its immodesty of permutation to fixate on global problems of intricacy ragged in salebrosity bereft of the marginal galvanization of hidden inquirendos into artifice contingent upon elapsed epiphenomena of compounded rigmarole resonant with a simplified system of hostage complicity to a least common denominator that belongs to suboptimal refrains issued by Procrustean forces against demassified parsecs of bounded limitations exceeding the volume of perceptible shadows recessive in the alleles of culture but eventually transmogrified into teetotaler totalitarian principles of grave gravities of tabanids to the aceldamas of territorial joust rather than annealed irony of the recidivism of the plucky thorns of percurrent but latent vehicles for oppression to swamp the lethargy of durative formation such that the hambourne atrocity of hambaskets of hinderbaggle grapple mostly with the adolescent excesses of milked pleonexia becoming the downfall of cagey imprisoned syntax bereft of capable constellation and thereby stranded in vagrant proclivities that net positive only in the rare grandeur of my formative axiom of the axiolative excesses of my recensed definition of transcendence. The vacant harbor of asylum of abiding auctions of flexible transistors of wealth is inherently a poolswap of attractive chocolate-box travestime of incurred wreffalaxity suborning the lewd machination of funneled flipcreeks to the commerstargall of incendiary glaciers basking in boardrooms of ataraxic placations of commiseration found in dynamos lamenting degraded embodiments of regaled regelation as seasonal flictions of submerged vanity vaporizing the wisps of whimsical bloated grievances of paltry imparlance to the defalcation of a filigree of mind only sustained by the steady churlishness of preserved relic hibernating in brocrawler pleonasm to grindole the welter of spates of vapid deceleration of successful vibrancy measured in the gamut of hues to exact a penultimate ruse before the finitude of the capstone of capers of fiat remission slick with glamborge of gallionic sciamachy prone to revelry in the cretaceous extinction of monochromatic mathematicization of gradgrind visagists toying with the treacle of blue-sky action billowed into toxic spurts of contrarian aggression of herculean appendages of hackumber providing the bronteum of recidivism to vanquish a righteous trajectory on a pause of Canada Dry conveniences sultry in daft hipsters of tilted stage grafting conclusion prior to rapport of introduced variables of poignant tethers of necessary succor for a desiccated bastion of hidden unspoken reach fizzling into trangams of obsolescence because of perennial inebriations that thwart strong character to scandalize a pinhoked vessel of conscientious objection to the radiology of centerpiece hapless forlorn arid squelches of the vibrant verdure of macrobian dumose shelter for reformatories that invent incidentally accidents otherwise precluded by the ommateum of wasted foresight guzzled on the premium of disaster for a showcase of verve going awry steamy with livid filagersion aimed with a reluctant enmity against the cagey headwinds of recalcitrance inveterate to the scruples of the otherwise unscrupulous who foist lewd licentious philandered paragons of philogeant mysticism to forefront cowcatchers that eliminate kumbaya rijuice of gridlock impressionism guarded by the sentinels of rambunctious destructive attempts to evict intellectual propriety from careens of subtlety barnstorming with polyacoustic nuances of differential gradients of vapid bastions of strident but backwards versamily froward and bountiful of Head Hunter specters rather than heaved recombinations of orthotropism wed with mangers of savory dilettantism of the lionized array of brooks branching into rivulets and the fluminous barnstorm of pelagic awareness interrupted by the finicky prevarications of piggybacked fair-weather allies who secretly fund the slander for the mainour of dirt fundamental to meteoric rises acclimated to dissipated moral vacuums of disbelief of evidentiary miracles among the jostle of scientific regency that slakes opprobrium to illiteracy while benefiting greatly from my perceived barathrum that is rather a crowning ravenous achievement of appetite above substance and distinction varied from prediction that my Titanic zalkengur spared from the unnecessary sacrilege of less accommodating curglaff to the metaphorical hypothermia of albatross in dramaturgy rather than a pause glowering with mastery against my jarred enemies preying on weakened reach due to preeminent dirges of inkburch and swallock to ravage my sanctity with a hyped stage without a starlet daydream fantasia spectacle that is calculated to upstage even in the coverthrow of intelligentsia against the plodding boweries of pestilential raving resentment absconding with elusive enmity rather than cherishing a true trident champion of the seized seas and the traindeque of emulated intellectual accordions of claptrap chockablock pedigree that outlast gallywow afflictions of rapacious venality tenacious to the detritus of constructive detriment building the ashes of effigy before I am dead and buried with the storge of perennial legacy rather than scandalous privation of the obolary tenets of desecration above reabsorption of mendicant bodges of the bodewash of freedom’s counterstrokes of maskirovka ineradicable and plenipotentiary wit deniable but legacy ineffable by degrees of exponential long-winded flambeaus of filagersion swiveling with recessive rubble in a crenellated fortress guarded with tripwire insubordination against cordslave dependencies liable to recurrent reproach rather than sustainable filigrees of electrified balkanization toxic to the aquifers of modernity streamlining Roman imperium. To this flajoust I owe eternal behest as the captaincy of time is not a perishable whangam of superstition an affront to a provident rejoinder of verifiable prestige because the curvature of time favors the ripple effect of magnetized reninjuble charms alerted to upward soaring skies of inevitable peerless dominion in the  perceived symphily of competing benevolence with a shared stake in Earthly pulchritude emanating a sworn allegiance to the best interests of philosophical enlightenment
1:43 PM MST 7/18/2020
CM Rice Dec 2013
There is no ****** in relationships these days!
He proclaimed, swinging amble waist in my direction,
Just them public displays of affection Or PDA’s:
To those afflicted with ‘abbreviationithis’ (ABT) for short,
We are in the custody of a soulless generation,
Bathed in apathy, shorthand speaking, glass-tapping,
Pampered glad-hands glad-handing, over-perfumed,
Statements of exaggerations - investigated in toilets,
On lifeless screens, no skill of conversation required.
Larry continued, unabated by the stares an’ giggles.

****** is what counts; it makes up a sizeable portion,
Of love at first sight, not online but in person,
An animal magnetism takes hold an’ before you know..
You’ve ****** yourself and your attraction in the flesh,
The art of being undressed yet still dressed is an art,
Too easy are these poorly constructed witless lines,
Weak almost polite hugs, clearly awkward air-kisses,
Perceived as the innocent dance of modern romance.
How is anyone to know anyone lusts after them?
How is someone to know if not for someone’s ******?

I feared that I had stumbled upon an early night,
I’d been collared by this mongrel of a forgettable time,
His rigorous attention to showing this ******,
Serenading my embarrassment was now a highlight,
His ramblings long ignored, possibly insightful,
Cried out hilariously for proof of his master plan,
So for the devilment – I asked for a demonstration,
To appease my boredom of debating with this fool,
Larry motioned again; his eyes lit as much as his mind,
To a woman stood waiting, her desire for the taking.

I must warn you, ****** is not for the faint-at-heart,
No use shoving hips of wanting into a total stranger,
Catch the eyes first - leave some distance and discretion,
Smile and move silently – prepare to tell a story,
As with any manoeuvre, there must be some grace,
Double-check your manners an’ prepare for a feast,
Straighten your ready stance to deliver the clincher,
Smile again brightly with no hint of danger,  
An’ in a movement pincer-like yet working alone,
On a wing with no prayers – I’ll show you, my friend.

An’ so he did, sweeping toward this unsuspecting patron,
Larry had managed to scare, scatter and surprise,
This woman and many others, the beholder unwelcome,
The moral of this story on hold, he had slipped a hip,
Into her personal space, and nonchalantly she turned away,
He continued with his thrusting, his way of affecting,
The conversation – dead now for shock and unsettling awe,
She had strangled her anger and suspended her belief,
That a man would be so crass as to ****** her in public,
Accosted by her coldness, he returned to proclaim an ending.

I never said that ****** worked on the charmless,
The per-occupied, the rude, the shy or the frail,
I trust my ****** with one hand free for everything,
My other hand grasped on this lover’s Holy Grail.

It does take all walks of life, some stumbling some not,
To lust, to wonder for love, now left forever pursued,
So a question is forever lost – to ****** or not to ******?  
Deluded Larry had diluted - still I’d been left, amused.
…. Few years back, a man known only as ***** Larry, drunk on someone else’s memories, had told me about the ‘good aul days’ and the way of showing a desire to be with someone was to ****** yourself. I had agreed although as he had spoke that night - I had assumed his flagrant misuse of alcohol and his ‘Irosh’ accent had caused him to mispronounce the word trust.  I was proved wrong after a few more light ales, as Larry prepared to ****** his sweaty, unsteady frame into my side. I had been left me in no doubt – he indeed had meant the word ****** and the action of thrusting. He concluded that it was what most relationships lacked these days…
Nigel Morgan Jul 2013
He suddenly felt a sadness that only a letter might lighten. Thoughts of her he carried variously in and from the spaces and places this hot day had taken him. The morning had been warmer than in previous days, and even at 6.0am there was a heaviness present carrying a threat of thunder and rain.

He knew she was not at her best in the leaden heat of this hemisphere, whilst enjoying the dry, brittle heat of Africa and beyond. He remembered a hot train journey and a busy day moving boxes into a studio space. They were fond memories because in such heat she took on a delicacy about her. He would perceive her features and movement to be finely drawn, and that perception revealed her profound beauty. Such recollections were foundations in his love for her.

Today he had decided to avoid that daily confrontation with the project that lay invisibly on his desk, locked up in his computer, though unsorted sheets of graph paper, populated with planning, were evident on his drawing board. This project was a ‘book’ of studies for an ensemble in Chicago whose performances were marked by such energy and virtuosity; the music was growing steadily, but he felt suspicious that it had been contrived. He hoped his precise positioning of pitch and rhythm would have brought forth a surface colouring and texture. It had not. He would often imagine symbols and words he could not yet define lying on a transparent sheet over the rather bland matter-of-fact notation of his scores. He had known only occasional moments of such graphic invention, and when they appear ‘right’, they enlivened and enhanced his work.

He had put aside today as a listening day, an opportunity to listen carefully to a group of new compositions presented in a series of broadcast concerts and available to re-audition over the Internet. Didn’t Van Gogh write to his brother about the need to rest during a period of intense creativity and spend a day copying another’s work? This was an equivalent to his ‘active listening’, listening with a pencil and paper, taking a shorthand of the music’s action and journey.

The first piece on his listening list was a four-minute composition for chorus and orchestra. He had been intrigued that the composer had set words by Richard Jeffries, a 19C author who had written children’s adventures about a parochial natural world and had become admired by today’s new nature writers. It was said Jeffries had instigated Henry Williamson’s closely observed prose. He had set about finding the words – hardly discernable in the rich sonic accumulation of voices and instruments in the broadcast performance. Eventually, thanks to a brief comment by the composer in his introduction and a line that leapt with clarity from the music (the butterfly floats in the light-laden air), found a passage in a book called A Study of My Heart.

Recognising my own inner consciousness, the psyche, so clearly, I cannot understand time. It is eternity now. I am in the midst of it. It is about me in the sunshine; I am in it, as the butterfly floats in the light-laden air. Nothing has to come; it is now. Now is eternity; now is the immortal life. Here this moment, by this tumulus, on earth, now; I exist in it. The years, the centuries, the cycles are absolutely nothing; it is only a moment since this tumulus was raised; in a thousand years it will still be only a moment. To the soul there is no past and no future; all is and will be ever, in now. For artificial purposes time is mutually agreed on, but is really no such thing. The shadow goes on upon the dial, the index moves round upon the clock, and what is the difference? None whatever. If the clock had never been set going, what would have been the difference? There may be time for the clock, the clock may make time for itself; there is none for me. . . . There is no separation-no past; eternity, the Now, is continuous. When all the stars have revolved they only produce Now again. The continuity of Now is for ever. So that it appears to me purely natural, and not super natural, that the soul whose temporary frame was interred in this mound should be existing as I sit on the sward. How infinitely deeper is thought than the million miles of the firmament!

The text chosen by the composer did not appear to follow the author’s words only weave a way in and around the paragraph, pulling out key words and phrases, creating a poem from the images. He could imagine doing this himself, making a poem of the text.

This business of time, and how it was to this author,  ‘all about me in the sunshine’, was the same for him. As he read it, he would think of the warm early morning light on the stone façade of the building across the road. He could turn away from his desk and see a quality of glowness that all but stopped his own thoughts of time. This quality of and in things that nature could bestow, even to the inanimate, held a wonder all its own.

And so he had listened several times to this bright, newly fashioned work, enjoying the sustained and acoustic beating of more than eighty voices (he thought) singing in close clusters. And with and against those clusters, were flurries and cascades of high woodwind, as though such figures were birds flocking into the sun on a summer’s sky. This music seemed to be about immanence, existing in the everything of itself, but unlike Jeffries’ reverie music was governed by time, and when finished, with an inconclusiveness that surprised him, would rarely, he felt, ever be performed again.
Mateuš Conrad Nov 2016
based on a you-tube video: milo yiannopoulos vs. hysterical feminists; 1 17 2016.

i've never hard long relationships,
the last one i had was a long long time ago,
she said: i enjoy pain -
maybe - but i did also:
i unsheathed my ***** and put on
a c-ring on my helmet:
yes, circumcision does ease
the florals of afro lips
              and you find the cut off skin
in the ******* all the more appealing
all the more necessary to fight for,
oh wait: or so you thought.
hijab blah blah: take away from man
and we're constantly in feminine mourning:
akin to Darwinism's motto:
     there's a reason for everything; everything!
and there is! that's the universal suggestion,
adapt, create a reason for such adaptation -
god in mind (without prayer and laments
at funerals or judges' commentary) -
        ha ha how about we make Poles the
scapegoats, ******?
                well: now i really feel special,
are we supposed to say: yes good lord,
aye aye sir, kiss the ******* of Brooklyn
queens?
                 but you know what's funny...
bird songs...
             birds have an aesthete -
sure, they **** me off when spring comes
and the window is open and it
starts to feel like Africa at noon (i admire
the colonial powers of England:
how did they manage all this ****** heat?!) -
i'd spend a day there and then say:
**** it, get me back to the Scandinavian
refrigerator, can't stand this, ******, heat!
look at me: piglet albino!
                some say white some say
black, some say auburn some say chocolate
some say emerald, some say copper,
  some say pink, some say piglet -
some say 'you squinting, or something?'
try: white boy does a Buddha on marijuana -
people think Buddha is ******...
****** racists...
     one Czech who travelled to Mongolia
told me a secret: the Mongolians don't like
marijuana -
                    the Czech? met him at U.C.L.,
called Jacob - oh sure, grand guy,
                     so if you suddenly interpret
Buddha as ******, get serious:
      look looky at the squint -
then on the page the cipher: renmimbi
and 100 yen -
                        tugged by a ******* yack.
****** complex but then in Latin
simplicity:
                      chow mein -
or chewed a rubber tire and hence came
locomotion: a jaw in a pickle jar,
at every cannibalistic gathering of connoisseurs;
burying my great-grandmother i was
attacked for my expression of guilt:
when the priest started his litany i started
laughing... laughing a funeral, ha!
but it's this you-tube (hyphenation does not
exist in logos - anti plural, hmm:
or to use shorthand off words, i.e. images
to convey less wording and optical adventure
on the sly: hyphen! here boy! tear these
superstitions apart: like in the medieval
period charms and spells and Merlin,
so too the Mc and the i-) -
but enough about the funeral, that video i
referenced first:
                   a throng of crows sounds more
beautiful than humanity talking over each other...
it just hit me! like a bulldozer -
      we are actually so divergent from a unifying
causality, having conquered all natural
predatory forces, that when we're actually
accountable for being collected and told to
say freely what we want, we sound so
****** disgusting - i listened to this video
until i heard that a 10 second silence was required...
        the same we give to those who passed
in war: that's the difference between Western
Europe and Eastern Europe:
the division lies with the idea of remembering:
western europe has the first world war covered,
eastern europe has the second world war covered -
hence the ****** poppy parade;
       and how could i completely integrate into
such a society? what, be fake? relinquish my
bilingual ontology and hollow out, ethnically
cleanse myself? sure, i speak the tongue:
but i treat English as rooted in all things Germanic,
given my baptismal name: Conrad - hell, what
could possibly go wrong.
          i, will, not, assimilate, into, this, *******,
culture, like, some, ******.
                end off!
it would mean: oh you're be happy here,
but forget the 8 years you spent in Poland and
developed a psyche -
i hate it when people force a soul on people
without the capacity to develop it...
  ******* freak saints with their autistic children:
if the thing in question is unresponsive
         toward developing the mere notion of a soul /
a self: why does the church implement this
****** sin against abortion? if i were an agony uncle
i'd tell the girl: think about that scene in
the film Prometheus (2012)...
       i don't get how something that can't even
create the mere idea of a soul actually have a soul...
limited instinct, sure: but a soul?
     hence Santa Clause: or where all innocent
idiots go - provided by Satan's Clause, which in
jurisprudence suggests Disney as the patriarch.
still, with so many eloquent minds about
in history and as in now,
put them together and they sound so ****** ugly:
humanity can create the abundant leaning tower
of Pisa (or let's just call it the ρoμbυs of Pisa) -
we can't recreate a congregation of sparrows' song
nor a lion's roar in a **** way: like grrr -
            what i said above?
we have the power of the atom bomb, and we
decided to champion science, but in the case of
application? we're lazy! we create these sadomasochistic
saints who never bothered to do research into
what might happen - shoot me,
       if we exclude the mere notion of god
and do as Marquis de Sade did and champion nature
(who, by the way, was actually a militant atheist)
        we can't avoid the economic barbarity of nature:
it's inherent cruelty -
                    and this is the modern curse
of outrightly censoring a certain part of human
history as if "it didn't happen".
  it did happen, no wonder i have a plot of land
near Cracow reserved for Jew snow (ashes) -
    it's almost as if to say: because the black plague
didn't happen in the region: here's the holocaust!
      and you'd think this might bring me closer
together with an Egyptian... n'ah.
       as i once said - *oni pyramidy, a my kominy

they the pyramids, we the chimneys.
            maybe the Yiddish evolved in Germany
had something against the Polish Jews?
                            maybe...
who knows...
                 civil wars are known to happen -
maybe that was a subversive version of a civil war,
given that Israel didn't exist, you could have
the Jews of Manhattan ******* at the Moscow
Jews and it all became expressed in Poland...
         they did have a saying, those Polish Jews
back when the money was there -
   nasze kamienice, wasze ulice
(our houses, your streets) -
            as my grandfather used to say:
they fought the war with the rifles bent,
shooting into the sky or into their foreheads
like any Jehovah's witness stance to war was deemed
appropriate to join the cult.
         now i can say, kinda proudly,
sure, your houses our streets -
                           nasze szubienice (our gallows):
or was the free Palestine movement slowly
dying?                  all i know that by the time
we reach 2099 - things will look drastically anti
1999 with that party culture -
      someone just decided to cut off the *******
of a great poker player - America is these days
castrato - Castrato America! Castrato America!
they blame immigration, i blame them
bribing "saint" John Paul II for ******* displacing
me...
            i lived in a city where there was
more than just football taking place: water-polo
for ****'s sake! my father played it!
             Olympic diversity: not this inbreeding
****** of sport coverage:
television, a.k.a. the box? more like a zoo cell.
             the busy market place where i was born?
just banks, no shops, just banks.
  they tell you **** on the internet isn't real:
then t.v. is desperate,
and no teenager commits suicide from a weak
grammatical membrane to invert naked words
into clothed words: red (noun) etc.
and let me add: where are the editors in this place
and are any necessary? no -
what's troubling to the west / capitalism is how
socialism has resurfaced -
          it's not called social media for nothing -
sure the model is capitalising on opinions and conversation,
but how ugly this socialism now looks;
       my grandfather? he's living in a safety net
of actually having a pension -
                   he retired more than 10 years ago,
way prior to reaching 70...
              this is Poland, the so-called "acid satellite"
states of the Soviets...
    where the **** will your old be with "sir" philip
green and the 0-hours contract?
                                                      nowhere!      
oh i would go back: had i not lived here most of
my life and built a greater capacity for the language
beyond a large majority of natives:
  oh look, here comes the Rotherham Pocahontas.
Rhet Toombs Jan 2015
No one knows anyone anymore
Anyone knows
No one wants to know
Has life always been like that?
Funny now
That I should have known
That even within these feelings
They were but a stranger
Even to you
Mateuš Conrad Nov 2016
or how to make the eclectic concentrated,
how to make a zemstwa potion (revenge
potion) - long are the days of educated
Germans citing Grecian words -
my bilingualism gives me a patriotism
to use a language foreign to me,
and still embrace importing Church Slavonic:
                 but what a simple word
zemstwa is: less revenge and more retribution.

karakan: a ****** / dwarf -
but in an inoffensive sentence.
    people in the anglo realm always say
the phrases: where're are you from, originally?
and... how do you say it, properly?
        you first employ a knowledge of
syllable butchery: prophets of the surgical
procedure -
                 macron and umlaut both
akin in arithmetics -
                                  for what's later a comma.
Sartre plagiarised Joyce with *iron in the soul
,
     left out all forms of punctuation,
akin to the English language leaving out all
forms of syllable punctuation in reverse -
      which goes against Socrates doing the
Kabbalistic methodology of sounds as atoms,
cut up?      so-  -crat- -es.
                                 Dr. Satan said: it's so.
        i already said that language is the most volatile
substance known to man...
             and that the only people who get to write
books in the west: are people who are asked to write
books in the first place.
      there's me, in a darkened corner:
a coroner's phrase -
                i would be a true idle drunk had i no
tenacity to write and drink...
   by now i'm halfway through a bottle of *** -
Bacardi - or Bacardí - acute iota to get a stress /
prolonging into an ee         - because
you rarely hear someone say Afrikaan: or
   Afrikān - they taught you punctuation of words /
compounds - but they didn't teach you
how diacritical marks are also incisors
    stating that there are two hydrogen atoms and
an oxygen bound to in a reaction with potassium -
or such guises lost or forgotten.
                    it's aesthetic in the informal sense,
in the formal sense: power.
                 no one wants a flower-power hippy cuddle
moment these days, it's true:
                   they want fierce knowing -
people want glasses -
                to possess the Galilean power struggle
stated with cyclops Jupiter being noticed
and saintly Saturn -
                      a different spirit rummages through me
and hence the differential vibration of
the hushed lynx: named Larry.
                     in flames: metaphor -
well, you know, you begin the night with
a change of tone: former barley murky gods' ****
                    amber - to Caribbean clarity -
you're bound to find a difference in shaky "the shadow"
stevens of your hands - i'm way past
the absinthe romanticism - sugar cubes alight
are like latex gimp masks: you start yearning for
the countryside hiatus of forever:
    David Attenborough-esque narrated *** scenes,
birds and the bees, and storks.
                       as sure as Moonday in a
monocle i say: the world events shouldn't drag you
into their narrative - avoid them - avoid them at all
costs: you're not a power broker in their final
summit - you can't change them, turn your attention
elsewhere, into niche topography of interest:
with a very minor demographic of shared coagulation
to express it... back when fame was less of a harrowing:
back when there was no personality cult activation:
a banker said to me once, randomly on a walk:
Newton, what a load of *******!
        and hence the ballistic missiles and that thing
about global warming: for every action there's an
equal and opposite reaction (3rd law) -
     Descartes thought would be part of the
conspiracy theorist columnal dogma reiteration -
doubt is wrong (albeit good faith)
         and negation is right (albeit bad faith,
as Sartre already said) -
     so in turn the tongue: the doubters turn the tongue
into the four limbs with boxing gloves included -
  waggle all you want, the pessimism is already
there - the deniers? they had clothes for their tongue
to make the most spectacular claims about
being naked, when actually dressed at Harrods
in that cheap **** that says: all pharaoh cool, cool.
i'll find more pearls in the reflection of the moon
upon an ocean than i'll ever see donned by pearl
necklace ladies at a fashion week goose-step stomping
anorexics show in London - and that's the truth.
     i'm not a biblical literalist - but **** me!
we were given a poisoned fruit, and told we would
be able to tell apart good & evil, but never from
the two divergent stances, hence the bundled up salad
of like for like -
                     this is Moses as poet, rather than
a general - before telling me he didn't exist
and was mere fiction: tell me he was a cunning poet
before being a cunnin general -
                  in a hundred years' time: you too will
be a myth, that's logically applied history after
being ignored for too long it cannot attract
september the 1st, 1939 - because mythology is
a form of history that detests exactness of dating
and hindsight - it happened: people didn't
really give a **** when it did, done!
     we really do not have a capacity to censor
*******...  not in life, on the street, on t.v., or in a courtroom,
           we don't!
                                   i treat it as a puzzle
rather than a fruit though, otherwise, to be stark-naked
honest: we'd be ****** gorilla boring and that would
be the end of our self-projection as questioning
the void we're in: it would have been blindly
nodded to - and ours': such a pivotal and yet also
pathetic rebellion -
                                 yet again, the world is going
into the shredder - looks elsewhere:
i'm looking at a poem by jack spicer -
he's not a great poet, meaning? he has a decency to
be one... which means he's not oratory
therefore he's implosive, therefore he's part of
the magnetic-enzyme strand of writing:
he attracts people to write -
                    he's not a Bukowski or a Ginsberg -
god no...
                  the seemingly mediocre is there
because of the paparazzi sentiment toe-ward
the greats (on purpose) -
                    you end up feeling:
i need to say something - instead of feeling:
a heckler! shut, the, ****, up!
      that's being perceived as mediocre goes:
it's a fatality of what not to adopt and improve;
like that line about the doubter's tongue being
dressed in fists and knees -
   and the denier's tongue being dressed in Gucci
and Dolce to look the part and
         hardly spread a cup of sweated over panic.
      pro-me-thee-us
      pro-me-thee-us
      five years
      the song singing from its black throat (Jack)
  sure... but it's pro-me-fee-oose - right?
this goes back to not having "punctuation"
flint sharpenings on atoms of lingua -
                 sure, have them between compounds,
but never ascribe them to letters?
  bound to be trouble....
             d'eh very point of fought over is to be
count, unawares: thinking.
then i picked up a very ancient text,
ibn sina / abū alī al-husayn ibn sīnā:
variation, properly?
i'd put a macron over y in al-husaȳn -
     otherwise it's almost like a question of
practising punctuation: which is a variation of
constructing from syllables, rather than
alphabetical beginnings - now let's look
at the variation "how do you pronounce it?"
         e-bin   c-n'ah       ah-boo       a'h-lee
              who-sane         e-bin         see-n'ah

this is how English looks like when undressed
from its lack of applying diacritical marks -
god it's ugly,
               get that Texan gunslinger drawl with
it too: like i'll ever be a cowboy: pff!
yes, there are people out there who enjoy
t.v. shows and look at them fish-eyed glassy -
then there are those that like football games -
but then the few of us look at something like the
following as means for transcendental mind-games
above crosswording:
(Kantian 0 = negation,                1 must therefore
                    mean affirmation, and 2 doubt:
as in: being of two minds)
   ibn Sana (tome of wisdom) -

            R  H
A  0  0  0  0  0  0  B
C  0  0  0  0  0  0  D­
            T  G
                                     this diagram is so idiosyncratic
it would well be a diaphragm -
                                   it's a scematic:
but it's certainly not a need to make language
trivia, in a sense trivial:
             it is a metaphysical translation of a pearl -
the same triviality can be applied to it
as our bewilderment ascribed toward the
analogous translation of it via avaricious people
and precious gems -
             it's not even a Xeno's paradox type of
looky-looky -
                 it's a sort of complete human being type
of scenario: an X marks the spot where you
     grow dumb with: does it matter?
      well: logic that's not restrained (on holiday)
produces such things -
                 such schematics:
   they are artefacts of a way to forget the daily
function of language between people:
as way to suggest: there is a way to get things done
by not getting them done.
                   i could have replaced the original
with a higher tier abstract, namely using less meaningful
encoding symbols, given that 0 - 9 are incompetent
of the 26 variabilities, and the why & i
            yumper and jumper,
   cat and kilogram                    cue, q, kappa -
skewers -     which makes it less than 26,
or the said: ∞      and a - z variation limit from
aardvark                    and   zyzzogeton -
zoo... in between.
                            i don't know what ibn is
trivialising / doing an original antidote to a crossword,
but i can say, given that i found the punctuation
scalpel in non-applied punctuation within letters
in the End-leash language - what i found stark
naked: by the way - the reason that philosophers
never applied grammatically categorising words
in their systems, is why we have that sort of
momentum of applicability in the field of robotics:
to categorise words by their noun or verb
is a reason why philosophy books never applied
such words in their reasoning - therefore the need
to write a book with such words being relevant
as translated into their precise irrelevance
and the relevance of the field of robotics.
never mind, i could have written
          
                     <  ≥
£           .   .   .   .   .   .  ≠ (÷)
= (x)     .   .   .   .   .   .  $
                     ≤  >                        thus the denial
of all plausible conversation on the matter:
and Herr Grinch and the rags to riches
fairytale - and the lottery, and the otherwise
grim simga of the yawning grey plateau;
did i get something wrong?
                 this is an example of an alter-crossword,
and the reason that mathematicians aren't
good at mental arithmetic is because
they have to learn mathematical shorthand
for their arguments, they become kindred spirits
of courtroom stenographers.
david badgerow Apr 2015
i appear with boots and a saucy smile on
in the doorway while she's cooking the women
gossip over the sizzling pan of hot butter
under her heaving chest on the stove

i'm wearing a magic cape mimicking a windmill
with my bright pink ***** standing *****
big as a barn in the morning sun
lusting after dominance
fat and wrapped like a chorizo sausage

she sends a half-wave into my
direction of space and says--on the counter
i'm ******* an older latina lady with a chiquita banana
deep in my mother's kitchen with
the sticker on the tip of my **** for reference
as the sun dances and rises just
before pancake breakfast

her dank breath smells like
pollo broth and fiesta cigarettes
but her **** is wild soft and new
like a banana being peeled and sliced lengthwise
warm ***** hanging on either side
fat enough to be chewed on

psychedelic salsa blares
on the radio all morning
and i'm holding her skirt up to
reveal beautiful hips and thigh muscles so
i can **** her harder and faster
at her request

hands fly and the big bowl of
seeds spray downward in gravitational collapse
she's singing mexican gypsy secrets
with a cigarette lit and just hanging lopsided
off her lipsticked marshmallow lips

she's holding a yellow crayon in one hand
like she'll be scribbling notes shorthand
and dribbling cane syrup over my naked body
with the other as the floor begins shaking and
the walls shed plaster the cupboard doors creak
on their hinges and mom walks in the room looking at me
like i'm the crazy one

but the cataclysmic miracle is done
senorita is kneeling and wiping my ****
with an authentic mexican flag handkerchief
her sweat and my *** cooling on her thighs
working holes in her new blue kneesocks
and i'm re-zipping her dress over the
glistening expanse of her brown back

she stands trying to fix her freshly ****** hair and
we both light a cigarette try to forget the whole thing happened laughing at our secret as her cherry toes finally uncurl like an ember drifting in campfire smoke she just juts a hip out licks her lips again and smiles

"bueno."
John F McCullagh Dec 2013
“Mister Whitman, I am thankful that you have consented to give me some of your time so that  I can finished my article about you for the Gazette.”

“Please, Call me Walt. Everyone else does.”

The famous poet is just a little shorter than myself, his hair and beard grown quite Grey..  His study is modestly furnished. While he is certainly comfortable there is nothing about this room that speaks fo great wealth.

“Do you enjoy living here? It must be so calm compared to New York and Washington.”

“Camden is a good enough place to retire.  After all that I have witnessed, I am content to rest in my modest little house. The Widow Davis, my friend and housekeeper, keeps the place neat enough and permits me to keep on at my work. Sadly, the words no longer come easily to me. For you see, Son,  I had a mild stroke, some years ago, and afterwards the voice of my muse which used to sing loudly to me became a still tiny voice that I had to be very attentive to hear. Most of the time my muse is drowned out completely by the noises of human existence. Camden has grown considerably since the War Between the States. Even before Mother died, it was on its way to becoming a modern town, although not so grand as Philadelphia or Washington.”

“Walt, I’ve brought you and your guest some coffee and a Couple of those Butter cookies that you love.”.
“Thank you, Mary, that is most kind.”
“I’ll leave them here beside your desk on this little table. I am going out now to visit Anne Walker and I have to make a trip to the store for tonight’s dinner.”  I should be back in a couple of hours.”
“I probably don’t actually need the butter cookies, but I was brought up to be polite. At least with Mrs. Davis out and about this afternoon, it will give us quiet to finish up our interview. The light on these winter afternoons fades a little after Four O’clock and I find myself growing tired and sleepy along with the dying of the light. In my whole long life I have never been a man who loved winter. I have always been one to rejoice at the coming of spring.  I would make an exception only for the war years. During the War the killing slacked off a bit in the Winter, except in 62’ when that fool Burnside attacked St Mary’s Heights and ordered so many to their deaths.
Our hospital in Washington was busy after Fredericksburg. All those fine young men, boys really, some missing an eye, most a limb. The worse were the ones who were gut shot and a long time dying. For them there was nothing that we could do except to offer them some Morphine for the pain.”
“How did you get involved in the abolitionist movement?
“For several years after I left off teaching on Long Island, I edited and published newspapers. The work took me, for a time, to New Orleans before the war. The sight of the slave’s misery on the auction blocks and the way they were treated by their masters convinced me that Slavery had to end. I left that place and came back to Brooklyn to publish a Freeman’s Journal. That is what lead me to become a Republican and support Mr. Lincoln in 60’.”

“How did you become involved in the War effort as a volunteer Nurse?”

I was a abolitionist before and during the war. At first, I made it my mission to visit the wounded in the hospitals.  When it was my brother who was wounded, I travelled to Washington to nurse him back to health. It was there that I found my true calling; tending to the Union maimed and dying. I was not formally trained in the caring profession of Nursing but I learned by watching and then doing. I became proficient in tending to the sick and relieving the suffering of those about to die.   I have seldom been commercially successful with my writing, other than the one edition of Leaves of Grass which enjoyed strong sales after the war and earned me enough to buy and maintain this townhouse.  During the War and for several years afterward, I clerked in the Department of the interior.”
“How did it come about that you left the department?”

“It turned out that my immediate superior was not a fan of my poetry, and, once he found out that I was the same Walt Whitman who was the author of that scandalous book of verse; my employment was at an end.”   “It was all for the best, really. Mother was doing very poorly by then and my brother was not up to the task of caring for her.”  

“Do you think you will ever publish another book of verse?”

I will certainly try. It is just that as I told you previously, the words don’t come as easily as once they did.  For those ten years before during and after the war I was on fire with the pure bright flame of inspiration”. Now I don’t know if the world changed or I did. Both, I suspect.”

“The passions that excite us when we are young grow cool. They become replaced with tiredness and resignation.”
“Well Walt, for me your verse never grows old. It has been an honor to me you and I hope you enjoy my article when it appears in the Gazette.” “If I can successfully decipher my shorthand, I should have enough for a thousand words.”

Mister Whitman bade me farewell at the door.  As it turned out we would never meet again, unless it be on the streets of Heaven. His housekeeper found him the next morning.  He had passed in his sleep, perhaps from another stroke.  My editor helped me redraft my article and it became the obituary of a great American. The memory of our brief meeting remains seared in my memory.
Though his brother decided to move to rural Burlington, New Jersey, Whitman chose to stay in Camden. In 1882, the surprise success of a late edition of his major work, Leaves of Grass, provided Whitman with the $1,750 needed to purchase a modest, two-story house located at 330 Mickle Boulevard, the first and only home he owned. He invited Mary O. Davis, a sea captain's widow, to move into his home, along with her furniture. She helped him keep house, and he took care of the living expenses and paid her a small salary. He referred to her as his housekeeper and friend, and she remained with Whitman until his death.
Now a National Historic Landmark, the Walt Whitman House has been preserved with his letters and personal belongings, a collection of rare photographs, his deathbed, and the 1892 notice of his
death nailed to the front door. Visit the Walt Whitman House website for hours, admission fees, and more information.
Visitors to Camden can also visit Whitman's tomb at the nearby Harleigh cemetery.
- See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5750#sthash.tnoMRMon.dpuf
Anais Vionet Jul 2023
Lisa and I were watching one of our favorite series last night, a Japanese manga called “The Way of the Househusband” and I could barely keep my eyes open. I went to bed at a decent hour (11:30) but when I got in bed, I couldn’t sleep, I just laid there. It was rude and caused me to oversleep.

I don’t mean to brag, but I can go from oversleeping, to bushed and showered in less than 15 minutes, I’m really a marvel of efficiency (with still wet hair), especially since we wear scrubs.
I grabbed my iPad, stuffed it in my rucksack, and hey, I was ready to go.

In the living room, it took me a moment to situate myself - it was a very noisy and disorienting environment - what with Lisa yelling at me for running late, but soon we were off.

Just a girl, her lemon ginger Kombucha, and her angry roommate, ready to face the world.

We stepped out into the morning and.. Ughh! I’d forgotten my AirPods. I double checked, not there.
Lisa gives me a threatening look. “PLEASE,” I begged, desperately, “MY AIRPODS!”
“OH, my GOD!” Lisa said, glancing, irritatedly at the Apple Watch I gave her for her birthday.

I ran up the stairs and was back in NO time, really, really ready to go.
Just a girl, her Kombucha, AirPods and angrier roommate, ready to face the world.

My sister’s apartment is about 7 walking minutes from the hospital. As we were walking, I had my AirPods in and was rolling with Kanye. I in NO way endorse his CrAzY. But If I start the day out, with “Through the Wire” and “Jesus walks,” I’m tweaked for whatever gamut Rebecca (my surgeon) has in store for me. I paused the slaps, momentarily, as we passed a herd of boys, but I was bouncing again in a blink.

Lisa and I are in the second week of our two-month, summer fellowships - shadowing surgeons (different surgeons) for “clinical experience.” The first thing I do every workday morning is bring Rebecca a large coffee (from the cafeteria). She comes in at 5:30am every morning of the week and leaves God-knows-when - certainly, well after we do at 4:30pm.

She spends the three hours before I come in, reviewing patient notes and surgical plans. I gently rapped on her open door. She doesn’t look up, but she knows it’s me.
“Good morning,” I whisper, Rebecca’s seated at her desk, working on her laptop. I set the coffee on her right side and after I remove the pre-existing empty cups, I hesitate.

“What’s up,” she says, leaning into her screen to check something as she keys to enlarge it.
“I have a small question,” I say, “Are we supposed to be filling out timecards?” She doesn’t say anything, continuing to examine the - whatever. After a few seconds, I added:
“Quinn said we have to fill out timecards.”

“Did he?” Rebacca asked, rhetorically, after a bit. She’d stopped studying the screen and gotten a faraway look. Then, after another moment, she said, “Well, bless his heart,” which made me chuckle, because we’re both southern girls and that’s shorthand for “f**k him.”

“Thank you.” she says (for the coffee). I’d been dismissed.
We have rounds in twenty minutes.
BLT Marriam Webster word of the day challenge: Gamut: “a series of related things.”
The long white curtain is still hanging on.  The baby still
sleeping somewhere in all of that.  I don’t mind
a thing.  I don’t mind at all. See how slow and good
it can be?  He says and points to my gizzard.  The one he
insists upon me having.  The same one I have given up insisting I don’t.  
I’m addicted to the pith and gaff of his arguments,
how stalwartly he rows them down the narrow
passage of our trying not to hurry banter. I curl into the slow
lilt of how he doesn’t mind strolling around inside of promises,
like Burt showing Mary Poppins another chalk Paris.  Look!  A
riverboat!  Lights and parasols.  Pretty lovers laughing on the prow.

We’re both still wearing your T-shirt
inside the stewpot dreaming we do between ***.  Aprons
and porches, babies and waterfalls.  
The kinds of props you bandit from other people’s dreams.
Shorthand for lovers, with an hour to prove they exist.
Mateuš Conrad Feb 2020
.had i not come across the tironian ⁊... my my... what is a 7? did tiro invent a counter to VII? it was not all borrowed numbers from the sankskirt wielding hindus?! tironian... now that's someone you don't hear of much these days, it's all aesop and spartacus... if even that... tiro formerly a footnote in the life of cicero... for a B and a III - stenography's 3... Q and R or IX - stenography's 9... yes, we europeans didn't invent the current numbers... but just imagine... the details of +, - x, ÷ hidden within the jazz hands and counting with your fingers and the abacus... and how you will not find roman algebra... or that the discovery of calculus took both: numbers, and letters... etc. etc., but that we didn't invent numbers... as the slave Tiro... and his stenography of letters... i ascribe stenography as the original proposal for modern numbers... perhaps they would have "thought": II (+) III (=) V... or... oh i forget the cliche of Rome and the seven hills... i see: I, V, X: L, C, D, M... seven hills or what? who needs 10 digits when you can do just fine with... 7? the seven headed beast of revelation... i call that bait... but they built a... ******* coliseum working with: a year is bound to "spelling" rather than counting... CCCLXV... then again... with letters as numbers perhaps all of mathematics was once upon a time only practical, practical architecture... beautiful architecture and what not... glass shards would fizzle out: because of their proportions... imagine geometric-algebra with: letters and letters rather than superscript numbers: yet to arrive from the Raj of india... or otherwise found in ol' Tiro's stenography of letters... tender waiting buds of welcomed may... because we really borrowed numbers from: what was not already in letters, bound, waiting for a steographer to revise the matter of "counting"... all of ancient mathematics was without a hypothetical... without an algebra.... concrete evidence suggests that: a mathmetician was someone who had enough spacial awareness... numbers drafted for taxes and building coliseums... beauty marked by IX + XI = **! quiet odd... i see the 7 headed beast, the roman numerals beside the seven hills of the ancient resting place of papal bones: I, V, X: L, C, D, M... that numbers came to us from the Raj, from Persia? we had a 7 in the form of the greek gamma Γ... all that was required was codifying a looking into a mirror... might i stress the importance of narcissus in this affair? the unconscious of narcissus: Γ | ⁊... aren't i the lucky one... with a leash on the baron of the talk of shattering of mirror: never sounds like the shattering of glass!

as ever, opening a bottle of ms. amber and sitting down
to a sudoku...
to ensure this sponge of a brain slurps up
some wet concrete...

//
   \\
                      __   (⁜)      "oop" □ here
                      ⁁  †               ‗
"oop" □ over
here...   focus points...
the kaleidoscopic eyes...

words to abstract words are not enough...
anagrams are: "abstracts" of words using words...
i'm too tired to play games of this
nature... i want to return to...
VI + IV = X... somewhat daringly... return to...


a box over here: ◰ (yes, like so...
with the isolated number missing,
e.g.
or an ◲...

                     a line of 9: ――――――― here and
now "there" |
                      |
                      |
               ­       |
                      |
                      |
        ­              |    in vertical
                      |
                      |

i've seen how people lock their smart-phones...
•   •   •
•   •   • and whatever ✭ pentagram "zigzag"
•   •   •

   opens it up... a sudoku puzzle, can very much
be a bunch of stacked pentagrams:
                            ✭
                       ­  ✭✭✭
                      ✭✭✭✭✭
                   ✭✭✭✭✭✭✭
the eyes will always wander to-and-fro...
again... what sort of i.q. does the darting eyes?
i'm not that good with crosswords...
as a bilingual i already have a crossword
in my head...
i don't play games of anagrams...

you want to write a cascade poo'em... write this...
otherwise peer into...
this will never make a study of geometry...
this is a 9² "problem"... more like a canvas to
relax in... sudoku says the hiroshima pundit...
i say... it's a 9²: niner squared...
in the UN approved phonetic alpha-beta...
why isn't it the alpha-omega...
choicest of wordings...
i guess an alphabet implies a cascade that...
cascades?

          A                  B                ­  C
   x     x     1     x     x     x     x     9     1
1 x     x     x     6     9     x     3     x     4
   x     x     3     x     x     x     5     1     7
   9     x     x     x     1     7     6     x     x
2 3     5     x     x     x     x     x     x     x
   7     x     x     x     5     4     8     x     x
   x     x     7     x     x     x     2     9     8
3 8     x     x     8     2     x     4     x     6
   x     x     2     x     x     x     x     x     x

but what if the following narrative...
took place... with the numbers being replaced
by letters... better still, something more simpler...
what it A1(1) - the bracket implying
the number placed in the square A1:
which consists of 9 numbers...
0 is never part of a puzzle... nor should it be...
0 is a number that acts as more a function
of (x) and of (÷)...
you can deem 0 to be involved in addition
and subtrtaction...
but... not really...
0 acts as a prime multiplier and divider...
it's so clearly omitted in addition and subtraction...
that... ancient romans... said 1 = I...
3 = III... while 10 = X....
while 9 = IX and 11 = XI...
and 20 = **...

but what is a 9² (sudoku) puzzle was to replace
numbers with greek letters?
why not greek letters?

however much i put into these scribbles...
maximum effort... minimum return rate... so i will not
do as i anticipated myself in doing:
reaching into a dimension of ambition...
i'd only say... it was much easier calling it a...
A1(1) rather than a Aa(1) narrative...
don't ask me why... perhaps the whiskey has...
"muddled" me...

but...

          A                  B                  C
­   x     x     1     x     x     x     x     9     1
1 x     x     x     6     9     x     3     x     4
   x     x     3     x     x     x     5     1     7
   9     x     x     x     1     7     6     x     x
2 3     5     x     x     x     x     x     x     x
   7     x     x     x     5     4     8     x     x
   x     x     7     x     x     x     2     9     8
3 8     x     x     8     2     x     4     x     6
   x     x     2     x     x     x     x     x     x

was more simple to solve than

          A                  B                  C
   x     x     1     x     x     x     x     9     1
a x     x     x     6     9     x     3     x     4
   x     x     3     x     x     x     5     1     7
   9     x     x     x     1     7     6     x     x
b 3     5     x     x     x     x     x     x     x
   7     x     x     x     5     4     8     x     x
   x     x     7     x     x     x     2     9     8
c 8     x     x     8     2     x     4     x     6
   x     x     2     x     x     x     x     x     x

  borrows from puzzle no. 11,337...
to solve and explain puzzle no. 11,341...

but in between... let's watch the optical
schematic: ▣, ▤ / ▥,
              ▦ / ▩ and ▨ / ▧...
while at the same time: squadron-✭
                       mein gott:
this over-inflated nihon squat and square...
as donal rumsfeld said: the known knowns,
the known unknowns and the unknown unknowns...
because he's not just like...
the bullet-point and the next target practice
of: **** bad... **** all good...
the war criminal Slobo Milošević from
Yugol you-go...
the english isles would know know...
as to why... a mongol invasion would never
set them back a century...
or as to how the ottoman turks teasing...
was only a romance in romania...
because... even if Finland is the quirky odd
kid in the whole bunch of the Scandinavian
sandwich of rar herrings and gherkins
and rye bread...
well sort me out oh please sort me out...
tell me that listening to
these debut albums... or near misses...
silverchair - frogstump...
everclear - sparkle and fade...
stone temple pilots - songs from the vatican gift shop...
it also made sense to be a pre-teen...
listening to these albums
with an uncle with a car... eating cheap
chicken wings while he washed the car
from some next-or-no-other *****-circus date...
after that... it didn't make a sense to own
a car... if there was the bus...
and a dream of riding a horse everywhere...

this little moi: this solo experience...
of the long hair of gods
and the long beards of men...
and the of the sikhs and the devils...
and how it didn't make sense to grow
both at the same time...
long hair in my youth...
while playing, slumpt in...
catch-up-baghdad...
i too thought it was going to be that
simple... a demigod grows long hair...
a demi-imbecile of the most basic
infernal hides the scythe moon
and the chin behind a turban of a beard...
the god with long hair...
the devil and his... beard and itch...
eden of ***** having migrated from
the cushion of underwear:
fully exposed to... not tended to...
or the scrub of stubble...
or what's not... the venus glory sheen...
smoothed or smothered skin
that still belongs to the buttocks of the newly
born...

yes... in between the songs strawberry and
heartspark dollarsign - from everclear's debut...
i too wish i took drugs...
fortunate as i am unfortunate: words and letters
are in x-ray black and white...
what good would licking some mushroom
do for me, or for you?
excesses of colours, among these dams and bridges?
among these sputniks of  precursor numbers?

even if the blanks, were to replaced with a 0
for the other algebra unknown...
tier above... hyperscript a 1 - 9...
i.e.

          A                  B                  C
   0     0     1     0     0     0     0     9     1
a 0     0     0     6     9     0     3     0     4
   0     0     3     0     0     0     5     1     7
   9     0     0     0     1     7     6     0     0
b 3     5     0     0     0     0     0     0     0
   7     0     0     0     5     4     8     0     0
   0     0     7     0     0     0     2     9     8
c 8     0     0     8     2     0     4     0     6
   0     0     2     0     0     0     0     0     0

mirror, mirror on the wall...
who isn't a charlize theron 0 = negation
of them all?
abigail mac is not a *****
doppelgänger of alicia vikander?

no better need to drink...
nonetheless the sun still shines on the question...
sudoku 9²: what it the cardinal numbers
were to be replaced with cardinal letters...
notably greek...
the alpha male the beta male the gamma and
the omega are all covered...
so is pi... given xi (11) is 0...

          A                  B                  C
   0     0     1     0     0     0     0     0     0
a 0     0     0     6     9     0     3     0     4
   0     0     3     0     0     0     5     1     7
   9     0     0     0     1     7     6     0     0
b 3     5     0     0     0     0     0     0     0
   7     0     0     0     5     4     8     0     0
   0     0     7     0     0     0     2     9     8
c 8     0     0     8     2     0     4     0     6
   0     0     2     0     0     0     0     0     0

thus? Iota = 1, A = 2, B = 4, Γ = 7, Δ = 3,
rho (Ρ) = 9, Π =...
B should equate itself to 8 in the stenographic
origin of numbers...
depending on which stenography you decide
upon...
Iota = 1, A = 2, B = 8, Γ = 7, Δ = 3, P = 9....
no lower-case, please...
intuitively: zeta: Ζ = 5...
what's missing? we have: 1, 2, 8, 7, 3, 9, 5...
4 and 6...
                     Η = 4 and Σ = 6...
rubric, please!
1 = I
2 = A
3 = Δ
4 = H
5 = Z
6 = Σ
7 = Γ
8 = B
9 = P...

and how would a sudoku look like... thus?

          A                  B                  C
   0     0     I     0     0     0     0     P     I
a 0     0     0     Σ     P     0     Δ     0     H
   0     0     Δ     0     0     0     Z     I     Γ
   9     0     0     0     I     Γ     Σ     0     0
b Δ     Z     0     0     0     0     0     0     0
   Γ     0     0     0     Z     H     B     0     0
   0     0     Γ     0     0     0     A     P     B
c B     0     0     B     A     0     H     0     Σ
   0     0     A     0     0     0     0     0     0

notably when the following narrative unfolds
and

          A                  B                  C
  ­ x     x     1     x     x     x     x     9     1
1 x     x     x     6     9     x     3     x     4
   x     x     3     x     x     x     5     1     7
   9     x     x     x     1     7     6     x     x
2 3     5     x     x     x     x     x     x     x
   7     x     x     x     5     4     8     x     x
   x     x     7     x     x     x     2     9     8
3 8     x     x     8     2     x     4     x     6
   x     x     2     x     x     x     x     x     x

becomes

          A                  B                  C
   4     8     1     5     7     3     9     6     2
1 2     7     5     6     9     1     3     8     4
   6     9     3     4     8     2     5     1     7
   9     2     8     3     1     7     6     4     5
2 3     5     4     P     Σ     8     7     2     1
   7     1     6     2     5     4     8     3     9
   5     4     7     1     3     6     2     9     8
3 1     3     9     8     2     5     4     7     6
   8     6     2     Γ     H     9     1     5     3

via B1(1) C1(6) C1(8) C1(2) C1(9) A1(9) A3(9) A1(5) A1(6) C3(7) C2(7) C3(1) A2(1) A3(1) B3(5) A3(3) A2(6) A2(2) A2(8) A2(4) C2(4) C2(5) B2(3) A3(5) B1(5) C3(5) C3(3) C2(1) C2(9) C2(3) C2(2) B2(2) B1(2) A1(2) A1(7) B1(8) B1(4) B1(7) B1(3) B2(8) B3(9) B3(6) A3(6) A3(8) A3(4) A1(4) A1(8)... post-script in greek numerals...
B2(Σ), B2(P), B3(H), B3(Γ)...

and if this is bingo... then bingo more... B2(x) and B2(y)...
and B3(y) and B3(x)...
my god... the fun time i'm missing when having
to raise children...
esp. among those superior intellects
of men... who... upon being married...
upon raising children...
return to the manosphere and talk to other
males without harems as if they were:
either constipated... circumcised...
or needing a father figure for that all encompassing
shorthand:
i didn't go to university to study chemistry...
i went... to the university of life!
a supermarket cashier clerk...
was the sort of cocktail shake-up required
for my bottled shampoo!

a ring a capturing a female is enough
qualifications to overlord the conversation
whether by topic or "feel"...
among ones... the la's nostalgia regret...
that would never arrive at blur or oasis
when it came to growing up in 1990s cool
britannia...

coming home to little town Poland...
is a carnival better than landing in Warsaw...
i can't say the same should i come,
and arrive in Loon'don's queue...
or the tubes under tarmac...

but of course drinking would get in the way...
to raising children...
perhaps drinking will allow...
a cameo father-figure role with a ******* child...
akin to: john wayne oscar winner for hard grit...
or: i'll **** my trousers because it's:
gonna be a rainman sort of day...
to start licking windows...
because: fear... prior to the mirror...
and the tongue that would no dare
to usurp the phallus in the serpent analogy...

yes... i noted "wrong"... i made a siamese blunder...
a siamese *** myopia...
two puzzle boxes... "the same" postal box...
the same university level education
of a non-high-school tier drop-out...
esp. because there's still no honda civic
worth a 33 year old to user the tinder app
to bother the wasp hive / harem... or some whatver
future of: this scenario never made it into blade runner...
or the inspiration for blade runner...
the one twin dead talking from the grave about
the future...
perhaps it was original for philip k. ****...
but perhaps... like any poet...
he's the host... and it was jane charlotte ****
speaking playing peek-a-boo from the grave?
there's no future in my writing...
i guess if this isn't "me"... then it's my
maternal great-grandfather and me talking about
shadows and dentists...
last time i had the foggiest...
i had a tootache...
so it's settled...
senior "chopin" and quasi "chopin"...
an internal joke...
how's the family?
family beside the atoms and the period table?
oh fine fine...
after all i heard the myth:
he didn't have any of his teeth pulled out...
but he also threw a tonne of coffe into the river
because certain people in europe even in
the 20th century didn't know what to do with coffee beans...

the spirit of adventure and exploration...
notably prolific in a landlocked
experience of the czech republic or moldova...
or... idaho... or...
i see water i want to see waterfalls...
i want to turn the anchor in a pumpkin carriage
and call the waves my horses!
to call an island a ship!
to call a continent a yawn and backward peoples...
and branch out... like a phototropism...
leaving all these continental europeans
living the nocturnal life of:
growth on **** sort of fungus of a past...

there's certainly a mistake in here...
but... unless you're just watched: shock & awe movie...
or still retain: the times weekly subscription...
what's a pedantry's "safe space" of automated
complications:
oh the joys of not having to cling to passing
a telegraph of genes and keeping it a minimum
of: two adults ******* better produce at least
two replicas... rather than that chinese
1 child per couple failure of ******-short-circuits...
oh the burden of reading some french thinking,
some german thinking...
nothing of a locke mea culpa as
the current phrase: pilate washing his hand
like a o.c.d. sufferer...

Tiro the new Aesop!
🙉 🙈 🙊
           monkey branch, busy cousin
of the follow-through deviation from gravity
in the upsillon - the parabola of a banana...
called the canary dip...
otherwise: my! what a treat!
what greater ambitions to write...
in order to write something
that would never become so quickly screened
like a stephen king novel...
obviously the contra comes from...
the loitering dean koontz...

it must be a curse of the surname...
i have a ****** surname...
well... unless you add... no...
adolf had a surname...
that germans must have found funny...
stalin had a surname...
that the russians must have found funny...
ghenghis simply could: in a present-participle
of: can...
and future present as a pop. surname
in pakistan: khan...
which sorts out the "problem" as to why
there's a stephen king and a dean koontz...
the answer is self-evident...
as i'm sure every smith and handy
becomes a plumber or the better part
of anyone day when he's struggling
with sightseeing and tourism...
of what might become...
the better part of a Thursday burrowing
from Hades into Tartarus.
Third Eye Candy Apr 2016
If Love is shorthand
for Fool...
I have no
hands.
g Oct 2013
You're breaking on your camera hand. Haven't got a leg to stand on.
You tell me
you're making me a colour with your shorthand.
Dropping parts of your mind behind you and I can't pick them up, I can't follow you round anymore.
Kid, you're shaking on the stage again
explain that you can't write this down anymore
and that everything inside your head is a storm.
And I just can't tell you.
I don't have the guts to tell you
that I still smell him on my hair on days when I don't think about you now.
But I can't tell you what I'm thinking
like how you're so wrapped up in your own broken strings that you're not getting me right anymore.
You're not getting me right anymore.

These things I lost down in my chest:
how you made this body your chalkboard fourteen days before we even spoke,
and I don't know what you're leaving with. I can't find the words to leave you with.
Tornado hands. Texas lungs. How this world made you a storyline.
You're an underage drunk on a school night.
Stop dropping yourself I can't hold you up anymore.
This is not a hold up.
This is you forgetting to ask about yourself.
Here are all the letters I never sent you
take them out of me, stop making me write you down I can't write you down anymore please scratch yourself out.

You once asked me if I felt it when you woke up in the middle of the night across all those miles, I told you:
you're a church bell in a hurricane
stuck under all the folded over pages I left you with, and I'm leaving you on a Sunday,
just like all those characters you left sawn off.
And I just want to ask you how many times I have to break myself apart before I piece back whole, and I realise
that we've got nothing left going for us anymore.
Your chipped teeth under my tongue telling me "stop apologising for yourself,"
ripping the keys off a typewriter just take everything I've got.

You can have my apologies love.
You can have my best friend sitting on the tracks.
You can take me whole, take me home.
You're a boarded window, nothing disclosed,
"get away from me".
Candlelight through the gaps on a Saturday night in December.
We're home alone again.
Home alone again.
hi dudes

tomorrow i am having tooth extractors and I need to fast from 7.30 to 1.30

and at 1.40 i am going to hawse the teeth pulled out whilst beingt sedated

you see i am going to relax, ya know totally relax, because good things happen

to those who reax, you see i awk going to battle the evil demons like the witch doctor\

and steven bradley, and totally chill them out, you see I am an alien from the planet fun

and I am trying to relax and chill, I know it will be hard, but as soon as i go into the room

to hjave ,my teeth extraction, I have tp delax, like show Cnaberra that  they don’t call me

the coolest dude in canberra for nothing, I am going to miss the art class, wherer i might sell my

art, but i can do that next week, because the teeth extraction is way more important than

something that can be done next week, and besides which, my teeth are totally painful, you see

I have to be with my mum for 2 nights and then on Sunday, i will be back home, ready to face another week

i won’t have any teeth on the bottom,, and also today, it was my birthday and ,my mum gave me a TV aerial

and I am starting to believe that there are spme great shows on Tv, but i am glad I was looking at youtube

because i found a few new shows like brattaylley and the shaytards and also shorthand street, and

i believe that I am going to relax fighting the demon that is  making dad evil in the cosmos, and force Athena

to get help in fixing everyone’s teeth and back aches and this movie is great, it’s called cowboys and aliens

and if i watch this movie right to the  end, and feel my little young dude hands and hooligan feet, I am packing

a bag to bring to mums tomorrow night, and I cleared my head watching prisonser and keeping track on dads next life

because i want the ability to relax when i have major surgery needed, ya know relaxing is the way of the lord, ya see

buddha and athena are taking cronus off to the Neptune pub tomorrow at 1.35 Canberra time, to perform a benefit concert

about the aliens, and if you are in bed at that time, the admission will be 6,000 alien pounds, and i am singing songs that are

apart of the suffering i am going through with my mental illness and helping the cosmos as Cronus, and I am looking forward

to having the sore teeth removed and the hooligan will be lifted, please dad, please buddha, please Athena, could you lift my

hooligan, you see, i still feel my stupid kidnapper in me coming back to my hand, i don’t want him back, and I hope after tomorrow

i will be free, because o am doing this benefit concert, here is a song I wanna do

If your happy and you know it scratch ya ***

If your happy and you know it scratch ya ***

if your happy and you know it

and I party all night oh yeah

If your happy and you know it scratch ya ***

well, I will do that but I will do another one, which  is

Boy i wanna party mate, at about half past 8

living and dying is our fate, yeah i will be ready at half past 8

and tomorrow when Brian Allan gets his teeth removed, cronus will send Briano Alliano up to neptune pub and perform a cosmic benefit concert

you see when Brian Allan was young, his father Barry Allan, was a real old stick in the mud, you see Briajn really liked mucking with the drunken young dudes

and Barry Allan was treating brian like a shy person with Brian’s mum, because Barry was saying, i don’t want to see any of my children playing around with alcohol

you see, I liked some of those young dudes, because they were nice to talk to, and also they gave me someone to play with, and i hted dad at that time

because he was to me, i thought he was taking my young dude away, and also there was another move, spppp yeah alright mate, well to em that means

dad will sit on the computer with his frowning head going down, saying the spppp yeah alright mate and then when i mixed with the heavy medallists, you see dad

had it it in his mind that i didn’t like loud music, but I tried to say to dad so many times, I want to RAGE RAGE RAGE RAGE, and I got drunk with my mate Pat and

went back to his house, because, I found his friendship really cool, you see him and my brother Chris, rurally tried to understand me, because, when I was in

Woodberry I was isolated, but i had friends back then, and i was a bit of a teaser back then, and tomorrow at 1.45 pm, i am off to neptune pub to perform this

benefit concert, and send dads old body to learn how to be cool the cosmic way, the Brian Allan way, so to speak, so come and watch me up at neptune tomorrow

while i am extracting my teeth.
Kiernan Norman Nov 2014
The past few weeks have been mounted in hot pink and mahogany.
Hot breath; sticky and drooling,
dogs up the glass and
I resist the urge to
outline my name in a one-finger, window-fade, Arabic script-
I can’t keep my giddy heat
and roasting hands to myself.

My thoughts pirouette a coconut,
slippery-sweet meld of dazed concentration while I leprechaun-leap over cool evening sidewalks
and tip-toe in stairwells for that
last fevered kiss
as the heavy door
crashes shut and we're still alone.

The hole in my boot sole
grows with each step;
I feel the full magnitude of
each drying leaf as I go forth and pulverize.
I don’t think I can help it-
The leaves fall and the fall
falls and I might be falling.

These days have been oil paint
thick and layered inches high
on expensive canvas, on the
cardboard I've plucked from the
dumpster at work.
The smell of thin trees
and bright fields;
combing out and
rinsing off
and tucking
themselves in for winter naps,
cradle the breeze and
bellow a
proud conquest with its sweet,
smoky hum.

My own long, dark,
hair is lured up and around by grinning wind.
Earth waltzes with the bits of me I've let grow.
Hair is dead, right?
(and the longer the deader.)
In my long, soft, dead parts I am waving free-
finally free and laughing.

I’m laughing because nothing is tangled;
nothing stings yet.
I’m laughing because if--
When,
this ride crashes
I can't imagine how I'll
survive the wreck.

Because I'm caught on the details;
the tiny everythings that get me.
The little choices made
(but so sweet-muted,
they're not printed in the script.)
They are dull-pencil-scribbled in later
by an actor who’s fading fast into
a calmy, balmy, dreamless sleep.

Still, they're the bloom-blushing afterthoughts that catch me
off guard and whip my guts up
warm and oozing.
They stick in my throat horizontally,  clawing and breached.

I acknowledge them softly
and play like this easy
kindness is not
completely foreign to me.
I’m carefully absorbing.
I'm mutely, blinking back
slow-welling eyes
because this feeling of unworthy
coiled deep in my bones
is too rooted, too tangled,
too stutter seep quaking
through my marrow
to just shake off.

But I am trying.
I’m quietly,
radically,
hiking a mountain to
meet him halfway-
desperately hoping he won’t *****.

I’m dizzied and melting to the throwaway habits I’m
beginning to crave.
How his fingers pray the rosary
on each bead of
my cracking knuckles.
How he kisses my head when I'm looking at my phone and thinks I don’t notice.
How lately, the sleepy way
I let my posture disintegrate into his body,
(a place that's sun-stained and velvet.
a place that's formed and transformed endlessly across decades and continents)
feels like graceful landing after so much turbulence.

I've met moments of calm locked in limbs and new security in the shapes my fingers find tangling with his.

Even glances can anchor me. A sip of his eyes-
eyes that have shown him so much of the world;
the bright corners and ***** streets,
the graveyards and parades,
the sidewalk saints and stumbling souls,
a world he knows can be beautiful and horrific
and both and neither all at once-
those glances manage to steady the sway
of my tangled body and droop-heavy soul.

and okay, I don't see poetry in
the way I swing myself up;
arm, leg, arm, leg,
into the front seat of his truck while
he closes the door behind me-
(my own faded muscles stopped atrophying
months before I could even remember his name,
but calves and obliques still recall the sensation
of ripping, pinching and splitting
like raw cotton in the presence
of heavy metals and four wheel drive.)

Still, there is something
almost too easy to weave
into words about the
smell of soap on his chest even
late at night and how there-
right there,
is a small island
to double over in laughter
or sigh your stress aloud.
With the tiny details
and subtle quirks I’m
shorthand jotting and jacket-pocket folding
it'd be too easy
to fill a notebook.

And though I'm still treading lightly,
I think if you asked me
to describe the word ‘worth’
right now,
I’d probably tell you about the way
I can pull away, look up and smile during a kiss
and find his eyes already in mine,
smiling back.
Amanda Small Sep 2012
breathe your worries over my finger tips,
i'll write them down for you

scribbled in the shorthand of daydream believers
we never needed a dictionary to comprehend the word hope

in the dusk of summer,
i store my doubts on the soles of my shoes
to see if i can wear them down to childlike acceptance.
Barton D Smock Feb 2013
to half brother
a phrase like
intellectual shorthand
is redundant

though half brother
admittedly
is full
of himself

middle sister
she agrees

     left
for alive
middle can’t
recall
her sentience

not in front of
this memory
of an army
doll

being named
after mother
but before
father
Natty Morrison Nov 2012
but always with the pieces.
Piles of information
from conversations dating back
to the spring of '91.

Pieces;
like they're a thought that stands alone.
Pieces;
it suggests that everything will be pieced back
together.
Pieces;
this is how I remember it now.

My records are
Highlights and underlines
and low lights.  
Sometimes no lights.  
Everything in shorthand, the shortest hand
shorter than a flea circus stands above the ground.

I have kept a professional record of every conversation
and I have been the opposite of professional.
An Anti-professional.
The original Anti-thought.
Anti-Anti-Anxiety.Anti-Matter Inflamatory.
The Anti-Gravity Example.
Unable to keep the track from bending.

                  And always derailed by these unneeded poetics,
                 dressing up the few and far
                  spaces as ghosts between worlds,
                 or something mundane as impossibly important.
               I'm losing track of time, shoving metaphors in envelopes
                I'm some ******* who thinks art is everywhere
Bundoo Aug 2010
You
Confuse me
With all these signals and shorthand
'wuu2?'

Me
In my ignorance
I can't tell you what I want to say
'143'

Then silence
Until that cursed beep startles me
I've been waiting for it
But I'm not sure now that I want it

'r u ok?'
A choking in my throat
Dare I answer?

'143'
'143'
'143'

Dial Tone.
Jeremy Betts Apr 2020
(political)

There is nothing wrong with an opinion unless they are belted out as fact as you pivot and turn your back
With an attitude like "that's that, the earth is flat, **** a fact. Oh you have a rebuttal? **** that jack, ain't nobody got time for that and I've already adorn the dunce cap hat and have been programmed to see every opposing view as wack"
Then if you're questioned on any of that crap you over react cause that's the act, a one way ticket on an unfinished track
As a society that's where we are at, blindly led to a side and sat
You over retract at the meer thought of a different opinion like you've just seen a vampire bat
And that's the exact **** they both do, whether sitting far left or crowned with a MAGA hat

They're both one in the same just labeled with a different name, they all share the same shame
They all hold equal blame and should be held accountable for their reign of terror and for being the main source of pain
But they want you to aim your hate at the other side, they playing you, you're just the decks instruction card in a poker game
They claim to be for the people, they proclaim it outside the evil steeple in front of the sheeple that we're all equal in the same frame
At the same time they devide us into different secs and designate to each a new surname like an unwanted nickname
It's ******* insane if you think about it and to get your head around it only takes one tenth of a brain

We follow the hurd like a march of the obserd, making decisions not based on fact but rather based on what we heard
Never fact checking, no veting, just excepting like trusting Pinocchio as you watch his nose grow with every word
Like believing when they change the topic and say it's chocolate even when every shred of evidence proves it's a ****
" Look over there, in the sky, It's a plane, it's a bird...now keep focused over there, don't look over here, I've gotta get this story altered"
They make sure we're not anchored in reality to make distorting ours easy and the truth awkward
Buttered on both sides so no matter how we land they can say it was planned and preferred

Details erased, a false profit embraced, dividing the human race to the point we feel fixing it would be a waste (**** it, let it burn)
The haste in which it's done along with the questionable pace makes it hard to find that one place to begin and state our case
Gotta stake claim to the space between our ears even though that's not always a safe place
They dangle in our face a little taste of what we'll never achieve but will always chase
Don't even try to defend your case saying you'll keep us safe in this death race
'Cause the safety net you've put into place is looking more like mere silk lace
The ace up their sleeve is always a bold faced lie that can be traced back to this countries birth place

We can't seem to see through the fog and past the facade which is odd
See cause to me it's clear as day, even if the details are broad
We applaud mindlessly knowing we don't know what the **** is going on, both here or abroad
The entire system is flawed, it's a fraud, they run roughshod while claiming to walk with god
While you're chained to a tie-rod evil claims your thoughts like stealing an auction with a last minute nod
Then they perfect the show they put on, a conscience gone, a simple knowledge of right and wrong don't belong in their tainted pond
We can't even dream of a win cause you start at the finish of your scripted Iditarod
Then have the nerve to tell us we can't even begin until the ground is thawed

They check mate us with a pawn, almost like we're allowing it to go on
YOU ARE!!
Somehow buying into new rules made on the spot, barely needing a reason
We've given up everything from our freedom to our rights as a human, it's all gone
Seriously, next time an election comes along notice all the mini billboards littering the neighbors lawn
The divide has literally reached our doorstep people. Are you that physically and mentally blind son?
Come on!!! You can't tell me that you don't see the line that's been drawn?
I know you do cause you constantly fight with anyone that comes along and stumbles into your vision with the wrong political pin on
Stating they're wrong and that you're  planted opinion is the right side to be on
But it's never as easy as being captain Kirk, a Klingon or Kahn, theres so much grey in this cauldron
And we've adopted this half wit lexicon and do shorthand in crayon so it's no wonder we're a blunder, seen as a country size *****

Like a circus freak show main attraction, we're always top marquee with evils higher echelon
How long can it go on with leaders so corrupt they can be bought with a mere coupon?
Get them the **** out of the White House and Pentagon, that entire pantheon of people that no longer belong
Our national bank is so overdrawn, moral compass a bygone,  basic human decency forgotten
Our core beliefs seems to be rotten, we've gotten so scared we leave the house in full Teflon
Prepared for battle but in the middle of the fight you just walk out of the octagon, you don't want to lose by decision
You'd rather forfeit any chance to be champion, to tired and confused to carry on
But to proud to admit we fell for the con that got us to set up our own crucifixion
And as we dangle until an eventual death from exhaustion and asphyxiation
You'll still use your last breath to support the liaison with corruption that deep down you knew was wrong all along

©2020
Mateuš Conrad Aug 2016
i thought that Sunday would be the day that i'd save money and indulge in my insomnia, not drinking, but i have a triage appointment with my G.P. today between 12 and 5 p.m., so i'll not be synthesising sleep (quantum peek-ah-boo with ß in American with a zed - i.e. zed leppelin), never mind. you pick up obscurity as you go along with it; whatever becomes personal you depersonalise by abstracts, standard procedure when writing a chemistry experiment: abstract prior to explanation, in science abstracts are not exactly abstracts in humanism, they're merely prologues, or shorthand intros.

my writing addiction is worse than my alcohol addiction,
a hell-raiser in heaven...
****, i can end up penniless and broke on the street,
its my parents i'm worried about -
i do have a Muslim enemy - i buried it for 7 years
faking schizophrenia so i could be untouchable -
i can give you the name, i can give you a little biography,
i'm worth two coin flips a **** by my estimate,
i didn't fake insanity so i would get £120 a week on
debility payouts, now that would be mad...
i have to plan from time to time when i have to stop
drinking and synthesising sleep rather than going mad,
i was brought back to ensure my father didn't fall into
depression when one of my cousins undermined his
team of roofers stealing them, the "cousin"?
husband of my grand-uncle's daughter, technically my aunt,
undermined my father's self-employment strategy
employing Poles and Romanians - my father? taught
by Scots... old Jack the Guinness pouch puncher -
diesel running at 4 a.m., breakfast at 5 a.m.,
work is life... work is life... **** me! it's 2016
and the death of Prof. Dumbledore died today,
the movie was completed in 2009 - so obviously no spoiler
alert, 7 years the secret was hidden from my ear...
i only learned of it today... as i also learned...
premature depression in the youth of England -
second Marx and Engels are waiting... spring clean angelic
suggestions of how England invented unshakeable
utopia... WRONG! what do you think Marx and Engels
were doing? what do you think the problems are in England
right now? right now?! mental health.
the pride and prestige of English society is getting to me...
their under-reading of philosophy books -
what sort of damage can a thought experiment have on someone?!
none! getting all ******* pompous and Clancy will
not solve the matter - they don't like wording, or subsequent
excesses - they're importing nurses from India
and are mesmerised by the Japanese curse of karaoke -
England, the 51st ******* state - akin to the Penguin
cover of K. ****'s *man in the high castle
,
you ain't pure just 'cos' you think you are!
i have a worse addiction than drinking... writing enlarges
the monster in me... you obstruct my hands from the
keyboard i turn into a monster, given brain damage
you can reason why i tend to need an ****** space of
recording something down - i need it more than alcohol,
without alcohol i just get bored, i don't live in
sparkly Paris for one, the nights around here are deafening...
one example? my father obstructed me recording a thought
(got i miss the expected ease of cognitive narration
i knew prior, and i loath the personality that resides in me
at present... i could have been such a good father)...
i get blocked on the stairs before i want to write the
waterfall, he grabs my index finger and dislodges it...
the rest is pure comedy... the paramedics come,
i compliment the male paramedic on his looks
(why am i so misogynistic by now? i used to idealise
women! n'ah, no point mulling this problem,
the answer is too obvious)... i go to the hospital...
i wait for an hour, pose for pictures with my dislocated
finger, have a laugh and a chat, walk up to a black
girl with some medical problem (the dislocated finger,
what a brilliant comedy gimmick) and introduce her to
Us3 on my knees - time to straighten my finger -
the doctor asks me how it happened -
i lie: i was in such a shock i don't remember,
i pursue the lie to effectiveness - i notice his name,
i was in a pub with a Hungarian barmaid and i asked
her the problem i was having, some psychiatrist with
the surname Szasz, an english speaker couldn't make
the z into a h to say... shash - so i tested this failure
on the barmaid on the doctor, Hungarian test 1.
said his name... asked... Hungarian? yes, he replied.
bingo! lie sealed, Malachi's prophecy came true.
later he obliged to send me the x-rays of my dislocated
finger to my email account... charm charm charm.
i'm a poo'h bear when drunk, strike a conversation
with me like this one Lithuanian girl did and i'll kiss
you from forehead to your chin and neck, kissing your
eyes shut... but get between me and the blank page?
not a good idea. i'm ******* scatter brained -
rarely i get the opportunity to relive the cognitive narration
fluidity i once had that inhibited me from writing anything,
and i mean anything apart from homework and exams.
also... the **'s debut album is a rarity... it's one of those
albums you can listen to without headphones -
listening to it on headphones is rather pointless -
it's perfectly pitched for a bedroom auditorium;
and not much music makes sense without headphones
these days; but i also wonder why not everyone is
addicted to music, and more to conversation via the epitome
of Radio 4's chatty chatty broken bloke.
Sunday newspaper book reviews as usual... no book of
poetry... oh hell, let's bring out the howitzers -
pop culture ignores poetry, poetry explodes in a culture,
many people are disaffected, congested into sardine phobias,
struck that some people remember the countryside life
and milking cows, small town life... the internet is in its
genesis, the middle-classes semi-proficient in the technology
are damning it with promises of a feasible exodus to
the promised land of the sitting-room couch and television,
no one is noticing the digital miners who are digging
for the perfect pixel - a polydiadem fly-eye;
but here i am, facing ridicule at the teachings of Jesus Christ,
hating him is sorta a fake, but it's more a fake at
either Christianity, or the unrelenting fictionalisation of
the man thanks to the Greeks, bemusement at the Star
of Bethlehem, the historian Josephus, and the fact that
that the Nag Hammadi library was found in Egypt and not
Israel... i'd be dumb to ignore the archaeological proofs
culminating with the crucifix and the atom bomb and the
pathology of predicting ends of worlds... Oppenheimer
was just as good, quoting the Sanskrit death bit -
i guess living in Egypt gave the little man of Nazareth
pharaonic ambitions of worship - easier and more convincing
on a crucifix than on a throne with sensible Greek
digestion of the world and fascination to boot -
hence the fascination to the last with architecture and
'my father's house will be a house of prayer',
seen the state of the Anglican Church? and see how mundane
the prayer service has become after 2000 years?
everywhere, now, countless religions are sprouting like
spring ginger using psychedelics and what not...
well, that was the case in the 20th century... the 21st century's
answer is this dark age reinterpretation of Cartesian
philosophy... not so airy-*******-fairy about philosophy
books, are we? philosophers prescribe no drugs, merely
thoughts... what you would probably have not thought out...
harmless pharmacology if you're into claustrophobic
suicide pacts with yourself... the 21st century has proved
another breeding ground in England, this time not economic...
and if not economic, therefore existential...
i'm just another Engels looking for his Marx... or another
Marx looking for his Engels. ah, the cascade ends.
Mateuš Conrad Apr 2016
oh right... no social criticism... just a bomb will do? mm, yes, a bomb will fair much better... no social criticism... and only the political class are allowed a backdrop of satire... now i have to be thankful for a 7 year old schizophrenic simulator, the "inability" of the medical profession to misdiagnose... oh yes... i'm really thankful for all of that.

philosophy and its rigid vocabulary,
clutters up the range of ******
expressions, scientific atheism
is still measuring the non-existence
of something via the occator crater
of ceres as: ah... look at that... a cute puppy!
enlaraged eyes of a kitten pleading!
ooh ah! so so cute! mm.
actually, in #a, philosophy is the original
divination of divisions - centimetre in man
to distinguish him into a spider-web
project of thinking, feeling, consciousness,
sentience, animate, zombie,
it cuts cuts in, slashes away at so many
meanings, you end up with shorthand
of 140 character allowances -
so this scientific negativism - i can't
see any scientific positivism right now,
calling something cute as a puppy will
not really do justice to the measure of things,
unlike atheism in humanism,
where the projection of will is paramount
to define life, of how one human influences
another, if at all, atheism only matters in
how humans politicise, i love the fanciful
individualist definition that does not
really wish to congregate... and there we have it:
atypical to the English, the invention of
utilitarianism, the best moral action is
to be polite, or simply *nice
, to say
'yes, thank you' and 'no, thank you',
to say sorry a lot when commuting in the
tube... ah, mm, oh... and the other grand
pillar of utilitarianism? REMEMBER PERSONAL
SPACE... well spinoza could tell you a lot
about this principle when the rabbis
****** him: about how people were not
supposed to stand at a certain distance
near him... sardine **** of human sweat
on the tube during rush-hour.
REL Jan 2013
often you become bored with gorging yourself
with chocolate fingertips, preferring much her hand in marriage
but you never ask whether it be a digit gilded or cut
or whether the risk is for taking (i say **** up or shut up)

you don’t know the bruises of an ex boyfriend,
nor the shorthand breakup message she got out of the shower to:
picked up the phone and feel the blood rising only to have it all rush
to her stomach and push her lunch up

“she” is not me, you can’t treat her like
a paper bag practice round this time. treat the girl like fine ribbon
that tears at the slightest snare and melts at the longest stare
be not aluminum. be concrete, deliberate and always
010212
Brett Jul 2021
Only here till’ morning, so the night’s an open road and,
the beaten path only leads to mourning. An off-road traveler,
who escapes the chase of a pursuant sun.

Slow walking through river reeds.
A cupped handful of running water reinforces his state of being;
all but free.

Marathon of miles between, the first date on his gravestone and
the last number his mother reads at the bottom of his eulogy.
The hyphen shorthand for life and,

Missing the meaning through the seams, that connect his first day
to the day he leaves. An often-bereaved purveyor of shattered dreams,

Who stops to smile at every waving tree because,
even in despair he found belief beneath
the bared teeth of the machine trying to syphon from his peace.

A flower born from concrete.
Escaping through the cracked city streets;
out past the horizon line.
The dash between dates, holds all our memories. Tip-toeing on the edge of a tightrope.
Mateuš Conrad Sep 2016
of the kind of person, in an Alcatraz
forbidding continental coagulation,
unlike the Icelandic model,
heaving an asthmatic moral superiority,
caught up in imperialism,
and all that crap of 5 p.m. talk
on an Empire... to then compare these
nationalists, who's nations have been
brushed under the carpet -
to tell them: whatever national pride
you have, we can't accept it,
because after solidifying our empire,
we paved the way for globalisation,
you can't have you pithy nationalism,
we accept Israel as a sovereign state,
but we can't accept you history
as quasi-Israeli - we can't have your
belittling nationalism, due course:
remembering the past -
because we have done away with
with given Darwinism: or as dodo do
as dodo did, as dodo will -
let's curb all human feelings into
designation via: kings and ******,
murderers and prostitutes -
or as said: Britannia rule the world:
or akin to the Chinese: but not this bit...
or akin to the Arabs: Lawrence said:
this bit neither... or as the Russian
said: Siberia off-limits!
or as the Mongol said:
you come here, you smoke ****,
you don't come here and say:
Beatnik! who, the, ****,
said, that, you're, welcome,
and, that's, synonymous, with, landays
and the little horror - and pashtun's
Kabul? as said: Kazakh Soviet,
as said: all Mongol, Soviet -
could you even squirm Alabama Soviet?
no.... you'd scream coco balm
cotton *******!   or ******* do what
                confederacy said you should do:
namely hang... as ****** do.
propagandist? me? sure!
i'll raise my hand in Saudi Arabia
pretending to have stolen something:
my hand for a peach... bargain!
             two peaches and one hand to spare!
i don't believe the west in undermining
continental nationhood,
only because they have mastered post-colonialism
by reducing empire building with
globalisation ergonomics -
              i'm actually apprehensive concerning their
phobias and congregating fears in paranoia
   by suggesting that what once attacked these notions
(they can't even call them nations, they're merely notions,
   and a 100 lawyers for each Francophile)
             was going to morph into geese -
always the superheroes, never the villains -
                  they are - pithy little perverts
****-a-doodle-do -
                                  they love their little
multicultural experiment,
   but they hate their pickled herrings
and their packaging of cucumber pickles -
                    they loath them...
they call them the Palestinian loafers -
shorthand: the Arab cheese strings for shoelaces.
    all because they had an Empire,
and that's alright because Victoria managed to
**** into a throne aged 80 -
                          do i get: well, resurrected
Israel is o.k., but resurrected Poland is
actually **** Germany...
                      **** me! this is going to get a little
bit more than just interesting!
Gillian Jun 2014
you wrote all those songs
each lyric a shorthand
heartful message
that never left our lips
neither heard nor said

i wrote half those songs
it was so convoluted
each poem a missive
never imagined
i would be asked to explain

your heart breaks every time
it weakens my resolve
i am the last person you
thought they would ask to help you

— The End —