we have everything and we have nothing
and some men do it in churches
and some men do it by tearing butterflies
in half
and some men do it in Palm Springs
laying it into butterblondes
with Cadillac souls
Cadillacs and butterflies
nothing and everything,
the face melting down to the last puff
in a cellar in Corpus Christi.
there's something for the touts, the nuns,
the grocery clerks and you . . .
something at 8 a.m., something in the library
something in the river,
everything and nothing.
in the slaughterhouse it comes running along
the ceiling on a hook, and you swing it --
one
two
three
and then you've got it, $200 worth of dead
meat, its bones against your bones
something and nothing.
it's always early enough to die and
it's always too late,
and the drill of blood in the basin white
it tells you nothing at all
and the gravediggers playing poker over
5 a.m. coffee, waiting for the grass
to dismiss the frost . . .
they tell you nothing at all.

we have everything and we have nothing --
days with glass edges and the impossible stink
of river moss -- worse than ****;
checkerboard days of moves and countermoves,
****** interest, with as much sense in defeat as
in victory; slow days like mules
******* it slagged and sullen and sun-glazed
up a road where a madman sits waiting among
bluejays and wrens netted in and ****** a flakey
grey.
good days too of wine and shouting, fights
in alleys, fat legs of women striving around
your bowels buried in moans,
the signs in bullrings like diamonds hollering
Mother Capri, violets coming out of the ground
telling you to forget the dead armies and the loves
that robbed you.
days when children say funny and brilliant things
like savages trying to send you a message through
their bodies while their bodies are still
alive enough to transmit and feel and run up
and down without locks and paychecks and
ideals and possessions and beetle-like
opinions.
days when you can cry all day long in
a green room with the door locked, days
when you can laugh at the breadman
because his legs are too long, days
of looking at hedges . . .

and nothing, and nothing, the days of
the bosses, yellow men
with bad breath and big feet, men
who look like frogs, hyenas, men who walk
as if melody had never been invented, men
who think it is intelligent to hire and fire and
profit, men with expensive wives they possess
like 60 acres of ground to be drilled
or shown-off or to be walled away from
the incompetent, men who'd **** you
because they're crazy and justify it because
it's the law, men who stand in front of
windows 30 feet wide and see nothing,
men with luxury yachts who can sail around
the world and yet never get out of their vest
pockets, men like snails, men like eels, men
like slugs, and not as good . . .
and nothing, getting your last paycheck
at a harbor, at a factory, at a hospital, at an
aircraft plant, at a penny arcade, at a
barbershop, at a job you didn't want
anyway.
income tax, sickness, servility, broken
arms, broken heads -- all the stuffing
come out like an old pillow.

we have everything and we have nothing.
some do it well enough for a while and
then give way. fame gets them or disgust
or age or lack of proper diet or ink
across the eyes or children in college
or new cars or broken backs while skiing
in Switzerland or new politics or new wives
or just natural change and decay --
the man you knew yesterday hooking
for ten rounds or drinking for three days and
three nights by the Sawtooth mountains now
just something under a sheet or a cross
or a stone or under an easy delusion,
or packing a bible or a golf bag or a
briefcase: how they go, how they go! -- all
the ones you thought would never go.

days like this. like your day today.
maybe the rain on the window trying to
get through to you. what do you see today?
what is it? where are you? the best
days are sometimes the first, sometimes
the middle and even sometimes the last.
the vacant lots are not bad, churches in
Europe on postcards are not bad. people in
wax museums frozen into their best sterility
are not bad, horrible but not bad. the
cannon, think of the cannon, and toast for
breakfast the coffee hot enough you
know your tongue is still there, three
geraniums outside a window, trying to be
red and trying to be pink and trying to be
geraniums, no wonder sometimes the women
cry, no wonder the mules don't want
to go up the hill. are you in a hotel room
in Detroit looking for a cigarette? one more
good day. a little bit of it. and as
the nurses come out of the building after
their shift, having had enough, eight nurses
with different names and different places
to go -- walking across the lawn, some of them
want cocoa and a paper, some of them want a
hot bath, some of them want a man, some
of them are hardly thinking at all. enough
and not enough. arcs and pilgrims, oranges
gutters, ferns, antibodies, boxes of
tissue paper.

in the most decent sometimes sun
there is the softsmoke feeling from urns
and the canned sound of old battleplanes
and if you go inside and run your finger
along the window ledge you'll find
dirt, maybe even earth.
and if you look out the window
there will be the day, and as you
get older you'll keep looking
keep looking
******* your ******* little
ah ah   no no   maybe

some do it naturally
some obscenely
everywhere.

Within these walls I feel so comforted
The familiar routine fills me with contentment.
Homemade brown bread and a cup of tea,
Guaranteed banter from the moment I arrive
Not to mention your hearty laugh which fills me with delight.

So many memories are kept safely in this house
From when I was young until now.
It is the anchor.

You gave us sweets for the journey home when we were little,
You and Papa planted trees for us in the garden,
You slagged Dad's turned up shoes,
You told me about your love of dance.
Your never failing cheerful disposition is admirable,
A lesson for which I am eternally grateful.

When I come home the smell of your house lingers on my clothes,
The familiar scent.
I have a quarter of your treasure, your delicious bread.
Your unending generosity means my pocket is lined with a crisp note.

Despite all this, the thing I value the most is you,
And that you are in my life.
You are more valuable than treasure.
Everyone loves and respects you,
Higher praise I cannot imagine.
Everyone loves my Nana.

Shadows follow me into my dreaming
mind. My love, with his face ever beaming
is turned in my dreams to a skeletal
curse, His spirit slagged as hot metal
looks. The sunlight glows black streaked with red
And falls like cold ash, covering my bed.
Chasing me, haunting me the shadows prey
on my subconscious, driving me away
From the comfort of day, the world of light.
Deep into darkness, their world is the night.
Struggling, racing, like swimming through tar
I pull myself up and see from afar
Light in the tunnel, but in fear I quake,
For I realize, I'll never fully wake

Before the UK Election
Those Tory Trolls slagged off
The Labour Leader
Jeremy Corbyn
Unmercifully –
Dredging up his distant past,
Turning his heroic quest for Peace in Northern Ireland
Into an act of alleged “treason”
And much more.
They painted a grim grey scene.

But like King Arthur and his gallant knights,
Corbyn unsheathed his own Excalibur:
That mighty thing called “Hope”.
He offered us all a brighter future,
Except perhaps for the greedy rich,
To sweep through the enemy ranks
Upon his horse, “Momentum”.
Once more to the breach…

And as the opinion polls swing
More and more in his favour,
Victory for Labour
Is only a matter of time.

Paul Butters

the ethos of arbeit has overpowered the english speaking people, with a sarcastic notion of liebe, and made both work, and love, arbitrary, nay, nasally said: homophilic: too many phobias are spoken off, spiders in the guise of arachnophobia don't suddenly become islam! you see any gigantus aranea roaming the streets?! for the most part, i'm closer to see popes walk naked in a francis bacon sketch of the affairs... let's be honest, the holy ghost has become run over by the other spirit, the other phrase of sophia, the zeitgeist, not this church infested cockroach colony of the platzgeist with a few crimson cardinals numbed into mumbling their mea culpas ave marias... the senile old ******* just died, with: a few more thousand young men, born into a world without having to succumb to the "tender" female noir of a bambi (transgender times, live with it) harem ******* occupiers in the form of: zee heff! i'll be crying as much when, some other public personage dies... although i did grit my teeth when my great-grandmother died, managed to bite off a scalpel of tooth with my other tooth... funny, i can still tongue the canyon proof.

and it's the antithesis of the # (hashtag) generation,
namely? the súdokū...
   plus the english ******* explanation of
needing the hyphen, as a diacritical mark
to ease, sorry, forget the poncy ***** ******
talk of "proper": lubricate the dissection
of cutting a word open into alphabet street...
   it would otherwise look more like su-dough-coup
with the p in bracket form ( ), since the french
over the antithesis of dyslexia compared
to the english, they just add letters that do not,
require attendance / mention.
          but that's the case, every time i solve
this *** sushi riddle i can't but compare it to
the zeitgeist of the hashtag...
              so i perch on a windowsill like a
wake of vultures of a lion reaching gluttony scene,
and start thinking: hey, how about we pair up
and pecker off that sod of a robert plant?
give him the curly wurly momentum,
start to peck at his ***,
  and then give him a vulture's barber effect
of trichotillomania?
there's bound to be a lesson in that,
    what with ol' hef gone, we only 'ave to
worry aboot the hoff...
             ha ha... when hef met hoff,
           and the **** never stopped,
even leaving king solomon a tad bit jealous.

i sit on a pile of rubble, and call it a castle -
time ref. to counter the darwinist -
and yes, the saharan desert was once a
mountain range akin to the alpes - or the himalayas -
as any chemist would, side with the geologists
than than the biologists: mushy mushy doesn't
buy my effort, the biologists just expanded
history, we might as well make the *other
connection, between desert and mountain,
ergo: time,
       takes a lot of it,
          pretty much as much as space,
             apes have become debased genesis foci...
too many variations of it,
you'd have to start with eskimo and say:
  well: the orangutans seemed pleased with
a down syndrome replica...
                so just the chimps? no gorillas?
i still like my counter darwinism argument,
the counter biology, the lost mushy mushy
cushioning of certainty -
    like any chemist, i live for the hard stuff,
comes no harder than siding with geology,
saying: the epitome of times comes in
the form of the saharan mountain range,
that, given enough time (and we have a lot of
that now) - eroded into a sand-dial...
    irony, or divine intuition?
          and didn't the bible give off a whiff of:
and then a dinosaur went into eden:
   hey, be gods, try to, even,
  watch out, a ******* meteor might just come;
there's no fundamentalism contained
in a book that was written by an egyptian
prince...
    just a lack of poetic integrity in the interpretation...
i still don't see how poetry is slagged,
but the basic tenet of poetic writing is
taken, without a pinch of metaphor,
or counter-metaphor, in that it can be expanded
and be applied like a philosopher's stone,
to turn any known material into gold!

which brings me to another point, well, two,
how do you gain respect from the cats
you're petting?
             you sleep longer than they do.

point 2...

why has reading become such a "tedium" /
"accomplishment" -
   i'll tell you why, i don't like a language
of thinkers, i live a language realm of babblers...
the right to say blah is worth more than
the right to think oh...
                speaking has become too easy,
solidified by that fact that (if not even est.)
when someone writes a book, it becomes,
oh, the most glorious accomplishment!
     wow... these people really managed to
shut their gobs, and write a book?!
         wow... it's like seeing the fruition of
the event that didn't take place, that would have
been the out-doing of the hebrew architectural
tenure on the pyramids, that would have been
the hanging gardens of babylon,
that was, eventually, the poor nebuchadnezzar
crawling and snorting like a pig for seven years...
if you thought the pyramids were
a mad idea,  
    the jews finally solved the riddle exclaiming:
o.k., you know what, that's just
bonkers... you're about as mad as your hyena
grandfather, or father, or whatever he was
for asking to the seas to obey him by whipping
them (xerxes)...
  it's that unamazing to write a book these days...
or it really is, given that you have ghosts
writing them...
       ****, and they said the paranormal
didn't exist... really? ghost writers?
       maybe that's one of the reasons that when
don juan wrote his memoir,
  after bouts of not getting any, he invited
himself to a better pastime than jerking off...
well, might as well die a boring sod since
i'm not getting any, any more...
       me? i always thought of jerking off as
performing ****...
     i can't imagine the hand to be anyhow
different to the muscular ****...
    and for some reason,
i always end up thinking of the queen of england
waving: to add the seasoning of lacklustre
to the whole affair:
  like i'm there, but not really, there -
the roy orbison effort to make that:
strenuous effort at opera -
     and he was hardly the modern comparison
of a pop star with neck arteries protruding;
and he's still better than elvis.

word of wisdom:
  in the medium of poetry?
write by one technique, and one technique
alone...
          digression...
well, that's how i was taught english,
by a pict.

The travelling President called Trump
showed he's a twittering insensitive lump:
though visiting as an all-American dude
about the Mayor of London he was rude.
Soon the Trump tour lost its sparkle
when he slagged-off Meghan Markle
And showed he’s no gent - just a chump.


Tobias

you know why i smashed my martin (& co.) 00015M solid mahogany vintage acoustic guitar? for one, my ex-girlfriend's father ****** her up, after i "apparently" broke her heart: i don't remember breaking any of his property - guess a sad dole daughter's worth of heartbreak turns it into a right to break private property... my, what generous excuses! but that's beside the point... i finally smashed the guitar, why? because i couldn't play the blues man, because i couldn't play the blues... it's one thing jerking off an ac/dc solo, but another to sip the blues rhythm... you ain't got the blues rhythm: you got jack-****! so off she went, to the guillotine on the pavement... i mean: standard blues riffs is one thing, but to actually master the blues? talk about black privilege.

and it was always like that:
  the beatles vs. the rolling stones "debate" -
i gave up on the blues,
i am pretty sure i had a phase where
i listened to nothing but blues -
   but then i amounted to more patience
as an admirer of jazz -
    kept the brain ticking -
      a nice unorthodoxy from classical whitey
music -
   really? can we talk about black
privilege? god, i hate myself for this
political language within the current zeitgeist
of:
     it's not about being offended -
let me clarify: there's a grand canyon's worth
of disparity being being rude &
being polite when working the "offended"
by free speech gimmick...
    being rude & being polite is plainly
dialectical: **** me, bring in thesaurus rex
and call it: courteous vs. being a polish farmer
who just moved into the city,
and doesn't comprehend the idea of
a supermarket queue -
and there is a ****** well ruling difference,
like ****** and the jurisprudent notion
of attempt / intent...
  both receive a charge in the court -
        by being rude means you were
****** in your familial antics for far too long
and you're a clean slate,
but purposive rudeness, i.e. crafting offence?
that's a problem, i'm sorry to say -
there's no dialectical approach to unraveling
this "per se" of stature -
i'm actually more bereaved by the death
of dialectics than that of god...
       there's no way you can actually invite
dialectical investigation in most of today's
arguments...
        dialectics in shorthand?
   play stupid, until the opposite party
showcases a higher tier of stupidity -
   but just this competing over the most crass
and shortened argument, being said
& subsequently being left unchallenged -
i remember at school: the gift of the gab was
synonymous with: don't let the other person
speak, or make a question...
someone ought to compensate this vocab
black hole as to what the technique actually is -
just a name would do,
     since, as i already said:
there's a stark difference between being rude
and being offensive -
     since what compensates being polite
       if rude becomes *to offend?
seems like such a dumb question to ask -
          point being, i don't might being offended:
i get an adrenaline rush -
   i can't afford the sort of adrenaline rush
that a bungee jump could invite -
so i guess, the poor man's choice of adrenaline
is to become "offended";
i love it though: it's like a get the chance to
overpower a troll by turning into an orc -
      and a mean ******* i can become.
ah, enough of the current "trend" of topic...
so me comes along this article in a sunday
supplement of a newspaper (sunday,
given the additions, and the news review section,
probably the only day a newspaper
makes sense) -
and i come across... generation xanax...
hmm... now that's mighty interesting...
god, i hate using the words "they" use!
so first off they slagged off millennials -
loafers, stoners, parasites, loners -
     boomerangs ****-brain scums -
     i love these "journalists": they've woken up,
finally!
     there was something odd that
the post-millennial generation zzz (snore) would
or could ever be so squeaky clean!
  unimaginable!
       well, apparently, they've been - bee-zee...
busy bees these rodger steiners have been...
stay of the ***** they said,
model citizens they said:
  don't drink, don't smoke, **** is so lame-oh...
hmm... too good to be true i thought
at first... when i was 14 we used to hit the cheap
strong cider (white lightning) at our
local youth club, bought **** magazines
and felt ashamed with an apu looking at as
stoically - and then played pool...
    we used to go to the top of parking lots
and spit at strangers from the top...
   throw stones at passing trains...
             and **** in phone-boxes if not
public trash-cans, and every party we went
to? we called it frankfurt -
      otherwise known as a sausage fest...
someone of us settled, someone of us said:
i've got a load of blank pieces of paper -
i'd like to see them filled...
          for posterity;
but **** me i knew something was wrong...
so now the current generation of "rebels"
has taken a liking to anti-anxiety medication,
under the umbrella (slang, for protection)
shield of "prescriptive medication"?
   wow... totally blew my mind -
  while i was making my own anti-insomnia
cocktail of *****, 25mg of amitriptyline,
and on the somewhat rare occasion 250mg
of naproxen (which creates a longer sleeping
session); and in today's front page article?
a good night's sleep does more good than
a 50% pay-rise;
but me and *****? i guess i must have
brought with me a stone heart -
      and have subsequently ended up being
the only person within a mile:
who can still laugh out loud without
faking it... how? because the laugh emerges
from the vacuous presence of:
me... and me alone.
   i know why these younglings took to prescription
drugs...
    they never learned how to drink,
and probably, never will...
        alcohol has long been mishandled,
and esp. stronger liquor -
            it's no longer seen as a sedative -
someone people "think" alcohol is imbued
with caffeine, that it's a party drug -
    and if it is a "party" drug - no one everyone
looks plain: dumb;
and since i have no hold on barbiturates
like nietzsche, i guess i'm his answer when he
implored to be taught by dionysus -
  he so desperately wanted to change his
barbiturates habit for alcohol...
         but i'm in a sense a pseudo-"sage" -
i don't look toward the harvest of grapes -
but wheat, or potatoes -
       given the latter: as i'm currently drinking
russian standard.